“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Friday, October 7, 2011

Mind as Object

Buddha nature inheres in the mind, according to my tradition of Buddhism. More precisely it's the nature of mind.

Mind is not blah, which is some people's view of emptiness. Nor is mind outside the universe of things. Mind is an object and that object sparkles with qualities: clarity and compassion are a rather hasty sketch of these qualities.

Pure mind as meditators eventually find out has the qualities of bliss, clarity and nonthought. It's surprisingly nice considering what we use it for most of the time.

The only entity Kant allows to be object-like in my sense is space, which for him is a reflex of what he calls pure understanding. It's interesting that the "Space" section of the Dzogchen teachings says the same kind of thing, albeit in a highly polished upgraded way.

For Kant space is a quantum, a unit, not further divisible. In the Space section mind is like that and a little bit more: suffused with clarity and bliss.

It's slightly unspeakable all this, which is why it's secret: self secret, like an open secret. You will not trust me when I say that what mind does is not manipulation all the way down.



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