Essay #36:  The Conditioning of Mind

To push, to pull, to cleave, to hate,–
To wrestle with the streams
Of life and find me coming late
To strange contorted dreams

Of what was not but might have been,–
Of what’s not yet appeared
That threatens though it be unseen–
Is this, then, what I feared?

In the previous essay we read that “straying from, and awakening to, enlightenment are not two different frames of mind.”  We spent some time exploring the conditioning of individuality which fixes these two as bookends to the single framework of encapsulated mind.  We also read that “suffering and happiness are not two different moods.”  Rather, they occur in the context of straying from and awakening to enlightenment.  Just as the latter define a single framework across which the mind moves, it would seem that suffering and happiness define the internal mood of the mind in its traversal.  But how can this mood be one and the same whether it is suffering or happiness?  This is something we have yet to explore.

The short answer is that conditioned mind is what it is:  conditioned.  As long as it is driven and in play among the fires that condition it, these internal moods will be one and the same—differentiated perhaps as poles of a single process—but one and the same in comparison to the unconditioned nature of Universal Mind.  Now it must be said at once, as we stated earlier, that we cannot directly know the nature of Universal Mind.  We have to back into it, as it were, unable to face it and grasp it directly from within our conditioned framework.  To say the least, this makes our exploration tricky.  You could say it is like trying to scale a mountain backwards.  In doing so, everything that we fear and desire lies before us exerting an immense gravitational pull.  Every step backwards up the mountain feels like a death-defying event.  We can only vaguely sense the summit at our back.  Every conditioned fiber of our being wants to descend as quickly as possible back into the sea of familiar preferences and choices.  Nevertheless, there is something compelling about seeing it all from above, and the higher we climb the greater becomes our sense that it is all the same down there.  Likes, dislikes; loves, hatreds; joys, sorrows; expectations, disappointments; accomplishments, failures; acquisitions, losses; even birth and death seem to merge into an alchemical soup in which everything changes into everything else and nothing stays the same for long.

One might think that such a vision would lead to a callous disregard.  But this is not so.  Although it does lead to a kind of impassivity, it does not inspire callousness but cherishing.  This is highly paradoxical.  As one’s attachments and aversions to individual parts of the alchemy below become “stretched and thinned,” as it were, by the very distance of the view, there begins to emerge the new flavor of the rarefied air, as if one were to become aware of the ether for the very first time.  It is like the fresh cold air of the summit pouring down upon one’s neck and back and drawing all sensations upward into a quickening thread.  Or we could say it is like the golden light of the summit shining down and bathing everything before one in newfound clarity.  In any case, this ether is not bland.  It has a flavor, a taste, and that taste is what keeps us backing up the mountain one unlikely step at a time.  And when we do, we encompass the sweeping vista below with even more appreciation.  Our distance creates intimacy with it in the same way as a faraway star becomes the bearer and keeper of a great and secret heartfelt wish.  The one on Earth who wishes is surely tossed and buffeted by the waves of her own passion.  But in the lap of her star her wish is transformed into something beautiful and harmonious with all of creation.  When it reaches the star, her wish becomes fulfilled just for being fully known and quite irrespective of its outcome on Earth.¹  This is the flavor of Unconditioned Universal Awareness, that it leaves nothing unfulfilled.  As Jesus described it, it is the drink that leaves no thirst in its wake.²

In comparison with this, then, the wake of the alchemical soup of earthly qualities churns and spins, and we can fixate temporarily on some we collectively call “happiness” and others we call “suffering.”  They move back and forth, one becoming another faster than we can grasp, but we continue to pursue the futile attempt to separate the gold from the dross and keep them apart long enough for us to build fences around them.  Back down on Earth, that really is our chief occupation:  we are fence builders, or we would like to be.  Our minds build fences to try and keep certain things in, and they build fences to try and keep other things out.

In Essay #30, we compared the mind to a pond whose banks both collect some elements and drive others away.  We noted that “the same bank that encloses and focuses its awareness prevents the mind from easily seeing beyond its own field of attention.”  We observed that this is to some degree intentional insofar as the mind limits its contents in order to achieve a kind of universality of perspective and control.  The mind attempts to admit some elements and limit others in order to maintain an orientation of total awareness and complete control over its contents.  However, as we said, “as soon as the mind becomes an emphasis in the global field of attention—in the universal mind, we could say—it drops out of complete awareness.”  Thus it achieves at best a pseudo universality.  We compared the mind to a magician who presses a certain orientation of viewpoint upon his audience in order to appear all-knowing and in complete control.  The audience members are not allowed to come onto the stage and examine the mechanisms of artifice by which their restricted viewpoint is maintained.  Or their examination itself is carefully controlled to foster only the impression of universal clarity and completeness.  The mind, of course, is its own audience, and it is deluding itself in order to keep its own show going.  The false universality of its tricks is exposed once we reveal who or what they exclude and what they are not in control of, as we were able to do earlier.

However, to fully understand the mind it is not enough to expose its tricks.  We have to step behind the curtain, as it were, meet the magician and come to understand his mood.  For it is the mood of the magician, after all, that leads him to choose the particular tricks he performs.  It is his internal mood that contains the “hidden action” that gives rise to the action we see in his tricks.  Here the guise of the mind changes from that of mere magician to that of alchemist, to the hidden chemist whose cauldron is brewing a soup of elements on the fires we have so frequently encountered.  In that cauldron is brewing the mood of the mind.  Here is the chamber hidden deep in the heart of man where desires arise and revulsions are stoked, where individuality is spawned and difference is cast like a shadow weathered against the light from the mountaintop by a dense vapor that rises from the pot.  What can we see as we peer over the lip of this vessel?  Can we see, for example, the elements gathering here as “happiness” and there as “suffering?”

Perhaps the first thing we may notice is that the brew bubbles incessantly.  Here on Earth conditioning does not stop.  It has no beginning and no end.  This is not a bad thing.  It is just what’s so.  To call it “bad” would be condemn all life on Earth as a misfortune, which it certainly is not, or is only from a viewpoint that is itself highly conditioned.  Yes, we are all fence builders.  But we can also be farmers.  We can build fences knowing that we have to in order to farm our land, tend our animals, and feed our families.  Yet we can also keep the abiding sense—cherished by the best farmers starting with the indigenous in every land—that the land is not ours in any abiding sense.   We can keep an awareness of the light from above upon which the growth of crops depends and the feeding of our flocks depends and the feeding of our family depends.  Thus we can grasp—but not too tightly—what is given us and make sure that enough slips through our fingers to replenish the land for future generations.  Even at the outset, then, as we look into the cauldron, we are just able to catch sight of a little bit of suffering that is about to change into happiness for those coming after us.

This, however, is the thinner broth at the top where a fair amount of light still reaches.  Swirling and sputtering beneath we catch sight of the thicker stew where the mood of the mind is not so liquid and generous.  Closer to the flames down under we find a mood more agitated with greed and desire and also with hatred and distaste.  Whereas the surface broth still flowed with relative ease in response to the fires beneath, the darker thickened stew fights against itself trapping heat everywhere, cleaving and pulling, wrestling with the streams of qualities in desperate attempts to separate and control them, and venting angry bursts of steam as its layers hopelessly fray and collapse against one another.   Here we see a very different way that happiness and suffering come together.  Unlike the relatively gentle and willing way they conjoined above, here there are more violent transformations. The deeper the mind submerges into the alchemy of its own conditioning, the more densely warped and layered become the very dimensions of its universe.  The more occluded Universal Awareness is by this stew, the more opaque mind becomes to its own nature.  “Dense” has a very literal meaning when used to describe mind that has congealed through the process of conditioning so as to block out light or “lightness of being.”

In that process, we can imagine happiness growing up into dense walls of substances propped high by monstrous pressures from below.  We can envision huge concretions of desire pushing up to form sometimes elaborate terraces and all manner of expressions of the mind’s fancy from grottoes to caverns, and from treasure chests to fully-formed castles.   The denser these are, the less they can stand.  The sheer weight of all these concretions paradoxically does nothing to stabilize them but makes them all the more susceptible to fissuring and collapse.  We can see them arise like massive buildings over earthquake faults that are constantly seething and pulling them down.

The mood of such a dense mind may be one of almost constant desperation.  The larger grow the objects of its desire, the more desperate the mind becomes to defend and protect them until the very pressure from below unseats the quality of so-called “happiness” which it perceives in them.  This is like the gold or brass buckle that holds them all together.  Once it bursts it sends everything plunging to ruin in a mammoth collapse.  The process of conditioning wins out and sooner or later sends all qualities plummeting toward their opposites.  The mind realizes that its once happy land has become a sea of suffering.  Dark with ignorance it cannot discern the causes of its predicament.  It only dives deep into tortuous dreams of what was not that might have been.  Or perhaps it conjures in its downward spiral dreams of the future, imagining threats that have not yet appeared, finding there its dread and its fear.

Occasionally, however, a ray of light may penetrate from above into the dense and tumultuous lower layers of the mind’s brewing.  Released from the darkest fire of ignorance by this ray of awareness, the mind’s mood may lighten and thin upwards for a time.  The churning and heaving of the bottoms may be relieved by this release towards the surface.  Here the mood of the mind may be more fully determined by this release from suffering—as paradoxical as the loss of happiness.  The mind may realize that its sea of suffering has through awareness become a land of happiness.  Here the mind does not take its desires or aversions quite so seriously.  Its mood is not so pressurized by either of them.  It enjoys a bit more of the taste of the ether we alluded to above and with that a subtle change in the dimensions of its universe.  The feeling of paradox attending the transformation of suffering into happiness is the felt expression of this change in dimensions.  It is an almost ineffable sense of the lightness of being.

Nevertheless, the mood of the mind caught in this stew is not stable, and the happiness that has risen to the top now will surely descend again, just as the suffering in the bowels of the cauldron will sometime find release in its escape to the surface.  The mind’s mood is formed and shaped in the cauldron of its conditioning.  Within that cauldron, happiness and suffering are tied together as different phases of the mind’s ever shifting mood.  They represent between them a kind of oscillation of density within the same substances or qualities of conditioning.  Since they are anchored within the same substances or stew, they are not two different and separately sustainable moods. Rather, they reflect and are phases of the oscillation of the mind’s conditioning qualities.  This oscillation itself is driven by the primal forces or fires of attraction, aversion, and ignorance.

If the mind could pull itself entirely away from the cauldron and leave its chamber for the mountaintop, then it would have a very different reference point from which to view its mood.  It would not disown it or discard it, but it would not be captive to it either.  It would be individual but not tied or wedded to any individual traits.  It would perceive differences in detail and yet hold all such differences to be distinctions that create no separation.  The state we are attempting to describe represents more than just a different vantage point within the world.  It represents a real change in dimensionality whereby the mind literally transcends the world while still in it.  The higher dimension inhabited by such a mind subsumes and includes the lower dimension of Earth, but not the other way around. Therefore, we can correctly say that such a mind is “in this world but not of it.”³

This is a dimension that we are not likely to attain fully in this lifetime but one we can aspire towards nonetheless.  As we have said, it is one that we can sense backing up the mountain, and sensing, put into practice in some imperfect way.  We used the metaphor of the farmer above.  It is apt to apply it once again.  Conditioning is not something whose effects we can escape; not easily at all.  However, we can practice tending our conditioned lives down on Earth with the limpid view of the climber above.  The farmer who tends his single plot of land does not forget about the weather, the seasons, or the needs his grandchildren will have many years after he is gone.  He works his soil a clod at a time but sees it through a much bigger perspective.  The good farmer, we could say, looks closely at his land with the eyes of an eagle.  We, all of us, can be good farmers of our conditioned lives.  As we said above, conditioning does not cease on Earth, and earthly life is not a misfortune.  For both to be true there must indeed be a way for us to tend our conditioning that is fortunate and there must be at least a taste of that Beneficent Higher Awareness that is nascent in us and is us.⁴