The One You Feed - Culadasa on How the Mind Works

Episode Date: July 11, 2018

Culadasa is a meditation master with over 4 decades of experience in the Tibetan and Theravadan Buddhist traditions. He taught classes in neuroscience and psychology at the Universities of Calgary and Brittish Columbia. He now lives in the Arizona wilderness and leads the Dharma Treasure Buddhist Sanga. His book on meditation, The Mind Illuminated, is the book Eric calls the best book on meditation he's ever read. This is a two-part interview. In this episode, part one, Eric and Culadasa talk about how the mind and brain works - knowledge that is essential to understand before one can successfully implement the meditation techniques that will be discussed in part two. These techniques have the very real potential of transforming your meditation experience. So listen up in this episode and get ready to radically re-understand this thing we call the mind.Visit oneyoufeed.net/transform to learn more about our personal transformation program.New science and research has changed the formula of improving hair and stopping hair loss 1st months supply with a subscription for $10 www.nutrafol.com promo code WOLF Read or listen to thousands of nonfiction book summaries all on your phone in under 15 minutes www.blinkist.com/wolf to start your free trial or get 3 months off your yearly plan In This Interview, Culadasa and I Discuss...His book, The Mind IlluminatedHow the mind and the brain worksThe basic distinction between attention and awarenessHow when we give labels to something we can know and understand it betterThe moments of consciousness modelNon-perceiving moments of consciousnessThe dullness of meditationSleepiness in meditationThe goal of vipassana is to increase the total power of our cognitive abilitiesThe mind system model (how the mind works)The conscious and unconscious mindSensory sub-mind (taking in info through senses)Discriminating sub-mind (cognitive thinking/feeling)These sub-minds are competing for attentionThe conscious mind is a place that the sub-minds project intoThe power of setting intentions on the sub-mindsThe role of the narrating sub-mindWe are a collection of the processes of the sub-mindsMaking intellectual sense of the experience of not-selfSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You sit down there to meditate and it becomes really clear that there are different parts to your mind that have different ideas about what you should be doing while you're sitting there. And some of them don't even think you should be sitting there. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do.

We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really No Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you?

We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Chuladasa, a meditation master with over four decades of experience in the Tibetan and Theravadan Buddhist traditions. He taught psychology and neuroscience at the universities of Calgary and

British Columbia. Chuladasa lives in Arizona's wilderness and leads the Dharma Treasure Buddhist Sangha. On this episode, Eric and Chuladasa talk about many things, including the book, The Mind Illuminated. Hi, Chuladasa. Welcome to the show. Pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. I am so excited to have you on. As I told you before, your book, The Mind Illuminated, is one of the best books on meditation and how the mind works that I have ever read. I've told so many people about it. And so I think a bunch of listeners are waiting to hear this one. So I'm really looking forward to getting into this. But before we do, let's start like we always do with

the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear, and the other is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. The grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second and looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well, you know, it's very interesting, Eric. I would say that that parable is an extremely good description of what the Dharma practice is all about. We have these two sides to our nature, which that parable describes.

And yeah, it's which one we feed. If we go around succumbing to greed and hatred and basically acting out of self-centeredness and selfishness, then that grows stronger, and that comes to characterize the kind of person we are. And as a matter of fact, when it spreads culture-wide, we end up with the kind of world we have. Yeah. On the other hand, if we can learn to feed the other wolf, if we can practice loving kindness and understanding and compassion, we can learn to maximize the cooperativity aspect of ourselves rather than the competitive aspect. Then that's the wolf that wins. And quite frankly, up until now in the history of Buddhism, it's been all about feeding the right wolf largely for your own sake,

although the Mahayana school has recognized that you need to go beyond that. But we're at a place where the survival of humanity, or at the very least, the survival of the incredible cultural heritage that we have developed, is at very, very serious risk. And the only solution that I can see is to feed the right wolf. I agree. I'm actually one of those people that believes the world is getting better in a lot of ways. But I also think at the same time that it's getting better, our challenges are growing in magnitude. The impact that our screw-ups can have are so much worse. The impact greed and hatred and fear can have in the world is magnified by just the nature of our technology and our tools. I totally agree. It's a race between these two sides of our nature and which one wins on a

collective basis is going to determine the future. That's why this dharma has to spread beyond individuals. Yep. So I mentioned to you before and for the listeners, we're going to do this as a two-part interview. And we're going to do it in two sections. The first section we're going to do is we're going to talk about your understanding of how the mind and the brain works based on different Buddhist teachings and your own experience in neuroscience. And then in the second part, we'll talk about applying that stuff and get very specific about meditation guidance, which is really one of the strengths of the book.

But the other strength is this whole section about understanding how the mind works. And I wanted to make sure we got that. And it's a little bit dense at points. And I've been fretting a little bit about like, am I going to be able to get this, you know, into a podcast and, you know, make it digestible. So we'll see how we go. But I think it's worth trying. I thought we'd start with the basic distinction between attention and awareness, because that is fundamental to basically everything that you teach, particularly the meditation stuff is understanding the difference between those two things and being able to recognize them. I agree with you.

It is totally fundamental. And when I realized the distinction between those two, it made all of the difference in the world, not just to my own practice, but to my ability to understand what people had been trying to say in all of these classic meditation texts over the centuries and also helped to make sense of what was going on in the world with people. The key to it initially, maybe this isn't the key, this was the discovery of the keyhole. Like so many people, my initial meditation training led me to believe that what I was trying to do was to make my meditation object, the breath, the only thing that was present in my consciousness and to eliminate everything else. And this was such a struggle and frustration, you know, dullness and

drowsiness and falling asleep and all the usual kinds of things, extensive mind wandering and everything. I find myself lost in mind wandering and then I go back to this really narrow focus perspective. And I don't know why exactly, but one day it occurred to me to just well why don't you just let all that other stuff be there and as long as i'm focused on my meditation object let's see what happens and everything not only became easier but i could recognize the problems and in my practice before they became problems. And then, so that was the discovery of, like I say, the keyhole. Then I found the key, which was when I read the descriptions that there were two different

networks by which we became conscious of things in our day-to-day, moment-to-moment knowing of the world. One was this aspect of our mind, which focused on things, analyzed those things, allowed us to manipulate our experience, solve problems, do all these great things. But there was this other aspect, this other brain network that functioned in a different way. And it took in information in a much more global or holistic way and was actually providing a completely different kind of information, a different perspective, and that the two were intended to work together. And so these were being described by neuroscientists as the dorsal attentional network and the ventral attentional network. They were most often being described as two kinds of

attention, but it was so obvious that these were inappropriate terms. And then, of course, in cognitive science, you begin to see people using terms like focused attention and open attention or broad attention or distributed attention. And I thought about this, and I thought about the way we use language. And I said, this is an extremely important discovery and concept, how to talk about this in a way that is meaningful. And it occurred to me that people use the terms attention and awareness interchangeably very often. There was a lot of conflation of these two as just being two different ways of referring to the same thing. But at a little deeper level, there was a distinction

there that was part of our common language, part of our common understanding. People would selectively use the word attention or paying attention in association with words like concentration and focus and things like that. But people would also often use the word awareness, not just in a broad sense to include everything, which was actually quite appropriate, but also that kind of knowing that didn't involve this highly focused analytical approach to things. And so what I realized is within the language itself, there was already an intuitive understanding of these two ways of knowing, these two ways of perceiving experience. ways of perceiving experience. And that all that was really necessary was tease them apart so that we could use these words and the kind of understanding people already had in order to be able to talk about these two ways of knowing. And it is an interesting thing about the way our minds work that when we can give labels to something, then we can understand them and we can use

them better. So it's a very interesting thing. I think it goes back to some biblical references that to give a name to something is to know it or to understand it. And if you think about it, you know, I could say, of course, you know, a dog can pay attention to things but if you take a worm it's kind of hard to imagine an earthworm paying attention to something but you'd certainly say an earthworm was aware yep and uh where i live i'm surrounded by wildlife and i watch the deer and i

see that deer dwell in a state of awareness and attention is something that they invoke periodically. So as a result of all of this, this particular distinction, both on a neurological, neurophysiological basis and the experiential basis, just became really clear. And at that point, I could look at what had previously been confusing discussions by modern meditation teachers trying to describe what mindfulness was, by the writers of traditional texts going back to the early commentaries on the Buddhist teaching. on the Buddhist teaching. And this particular key unlocked the meaning of what they had sensed intuitively and were trying to put into words, but without the specific language to distinguish between these two different things.

Yep. And so, in your specific definition, and that's one of the things I love about the book, is you define things very, very clearly so that we all know what we're talking about. And attention, in your definition, is the process of giving attention to one thing to sort of analyze it and, You know, so I'm sitting here talking to you, I'm, my attention is on you and your conversation and your face here. My awareness knows, though, that, you know, there's a room behind me and there's light coming in and that somebody knocked on the door, you know, next door. You know, my awareness is sort of, is picking all that up, but it's my attention that is what I focus. And one of the things I thought was so interesting about this approach, and we'll cover it more as we get into meditation in the next section, but this leads us into the idea of moments

of consciousness. I don't know if you called it the moments of consciousness model, but there's a whole chapter on that idea. Do you think you could walk us through what you mean by moments of consciousness and what that model is? Yes. To begin with, the origins of this were very early meditators. Now, this is something that many meditators will experience at some point that they will begin to perceive their experience in the form of the rapid arising and passing away of moments of consciousness and interestingly enough this seems to happen

at several different frequencies that seem to be fairly characteristic. Well, this had been noticed by early meditators who constructed the part of the polycanon that's called the Abhidhamma. And they used it as a basis for taking all of the various things that the Buddha had taught about consciousness and putting it into a framework. That consciousness consisted of individual moments of consciousness that arose and passed away. And each moment of consciousness had specific characteristics to it.

Of course, it had the object of consciousness, which is the one that we most easily become aware of. Dhamma recognized and enumerated a very, very long list of characteristics which could be present or absence in each moment of consciousness, and which basically determined the qualities of that moment of consciousness. Now, like I say, this is something that many meditators experience, this arising and passing away of experience in these discrete moments. And this is something that had been analyzed in great detail. One of the interesting things about this from the point of view of neurophysiology is what is going on in the brain are all of these different complex waves of electrochemical activity that are going through the brain. I think most people have enough knowledge of brain function to realize that there are

all these neurons. They're connected to each other at junctions called synapses. And an electrical current runs along a fiber that's part of one neuron. And at the end, it releases a chemical neurotransmitter that stimulates the next neuron in a chain and initiates a wave of electric change that passes to the end of that neuron and to the next. Well, it actually turns out that individual neurons can have anywhere from dozens to literally thousands of these connections to other neurons. And when you do a classic electroencephalogram, you know, EEG, you put the electrodes on the scalp, what you're really doing

is you're tapping into the electrical part of those electrochemical waves passing through the brain. So this is the form that information is taking in the brain. And if you have information in the form of a wave, what you have to do to extract the information is you have to take a chunk of that wave and you have to break it down and then you can extract its information content. This gets down to basic physics and mathematics and something that people have been doing for going on 150, 200 years, learning to analyze the information content of waves. And we do this, I mean, the information that's being passed between you and I in all of its different forms is really in a form of a wave. And it becomes digitized. But what do we mean by digitization? We mean you take chunks of that wave and you extract the information content.

Do you see how that understanding of that physical process of how you extract information from waves translates into the subjective experience of information in pulses or chunks or moments of consciousness. Yeah. Yeah. So this all comes together to offer a model, and it's a model that has a lot of utility. Now, every model is just an approximation. Some models are closer representation of what they attempt to model than others. But the whole purpose of a model is to help us to understand something. that historically goes back to shortly after the time of the Buddha, that is common to my own meditation experience and that of many others,

and that has its counterpart in understanding how the brain works to extract information. And I've applied it to the experience of every meditator. Because every meditator who sits down to meditate, to learn to meditate, there's two things that they experience. And there are a variety of different kinds of information. And we can distinguish some of those as the information that we are interested in. If you're meditating, it's your meditation object. If you're a student focusing on your homework, it's your homework. And then there's all that other information that keeps appearing in the mind that is not related to that. So we have the phenomenon of distractions that can lead to forgetting what your primary focus is.

And the other thing we have is dullness. And both of these things are actually inherent in the Abhidhamma description of moments of consciousness. I just developed them for the purpose of helping the meditator have a model that's relatively easy to understand that they can apply to what it is they're trying to do in their practice. that they can apply to what it is they're trying to do in their practice. Well, I'm trying to increase the number of moments of consciousness that are on my meditation object in order to develop this other aspect of how I know, so that I can use it in my meditation. And where are these additional moments of consciousness coming from? Well, there's this whole supply of non-perceiving potential moments of consciousness. moments of consciousness. And of course, this can explain dullness, and this can explain that really high level of consciousness, that powerful conscious perception that we all experience under certain circumstances. So there's a continuous stream of moments of consciousness. Ordinarily,

many of them are non-perceiving, and those that contain information content can take a variety of forms so now we have a model by which we can talk about how we go from a mind that's full of distractions that can lead us to forget what we're doing and end up in the chain of mind, how it is that we can descend from the level of consciousness that we first sat down with into a state of sleepiness or even actual sleep, and likewise, how we can sit down to meditate and ascend to a very high level of conscious clarity. And so, in essence, what you're saying is that what appears to us to be a continuous stream of consciousness are really individual moments of consciousness, kind of the way if you think about a movie, right? It's a bunch of still frames that you just

process really fast. And that those come from in a variety of sources, start from our senses. So there's the five senses. So those are a certain moment of consciousness. And then the other one is that, and I've heard this from Buddhism before about the idea of the mind or the thinking itself being a sort of a sixth sense that you watch. And then the piece that you put in that I thought was so interesting, I'd never really thought about or understood or read is the idea of binding moments of consciousness, how these individual moments are happening, they're these these things that are coming up. And then there's another type of consciousness that is the piece that makes it look seamless. That's right. It's a piece that helps make it

look seamless. Yes. Yes. And your point is in meditation, if people get to a deep enough level, they begin to see the frames, in a sense, to use the movie analogy. Yes, they begin to be able to see the frames. And the other thing is that they develop the ability to see frames of different levels of complexity. Your mind is taking in information in a very basic fundamental form and then combining it so that by the time it comes to consciousness, it's been highly processed, highly conceptualized. can train your mind to be able to actually see how the process takes place of building up a meaningful perception from many discrete bits of information that are arriving through different senses and coming from stored information from past experience and so on and so forth even combining emotion with intellectual information. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden.

And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts?

His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all.

Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead.

It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The pictures in the book are really great for this, because they sort of show moment-by-moment consciousness. And it really lays out what meditation can be like, where, you know, it's bird, bird, meditation object, meditation object, headache, bird, bird, meditate. But the idea of the non-perceiving moments of consciousness was a real eye-opener for me. Because what you're basically saying is that there are moments where we're not really perceiving anything. It's the dullness. It's, you know, you're not asleep, but your brain's not doing anything. And when I heard that, it A, helped me understand why I got so sleepy when I meditated and some of the challenges, but it also just made me realize moment to moment,

day to day, that that is there at a level that I had not seen or understood. And it was a really helpful way for me to think about it. And you talk in the book a couple points about the goal of concentration and, you know, mindfulness or Vipassana together is to increase the total power of our cognitive abilities or of our consciousness, right? And so one of the ways that that happens is we fill in more of those non-perceiving moments. And you made the example of the really heightened states of consciousness where, for example, if somebody's in great danger, they say that everything slowed down and they saw every little thing and they were aware of every moment,

everything that happened. And that's what this is. In that moment, you have essentially no non-perceiving moments of consciousness or very few. That's right. And another example of that, of course, is the zone that athletes, you know, professional athletes, the top people talk about, you know, entering into the zone, the same thing happens with them. Yeah. So it allows them to perform at the level that they do. So the next level of detail that you go to, and these are kind of different chapters, the next one is sort of we've gone from the moments of consciousness model to more of the mind system model and how the mind works. And this ends in a really fascinating place. So that's why we're going to take the time to go through it, because I think where it ends is a real eye opener.

you to then add a little commentary and then we'll kind of move through it. But basically, we all know we've got a conscious and an unconscious mind, right? So there's that piece. And then you break up the unconscious mind into a couple of major parts. One is the sensory mind. The other is the discriminating mind. The sensory mind is, as you would say, it's the part of our mind that perceives what's coming in through our senses. And it actually does a variety of things to the raw signal. And I don't think we've got enough time to go into all that. But it's basically going through and processing what comes in through our senses. And then there's the discriminating sub-mind, which is the one that's doing the more cognitive thinking, feeling type of analysis. Am I on target so far?

Right on, yes. And then ultimately what you get to, and this is the part that gets so fascinating, is that we've got all these sub-minds that are all doing these different things. And again, this is a model. This isn't like you've got, you know, 100 little teeny minds in your brain, right? It's the model of how the processing works. minds in your brain, right? It's the model of how the processing works. But the fascinating part to me is where you describe how these sub-minds are, in essence, competing for conscious attention. And the one that is deemed most relevant is what actually pops up into consciousness.

And this is fascinating because if you've meditated, which a lot, you know, I'm sure a lot, a lot of people on this show are one of the real initial things that we get from meditation. If we follow it the right way is that I'm not controlling these thoughts. There is no conscious me. Whatever I think of is the conscious me is not deciding to think about this or to think about that. All of a sudden I'm thinking about this. And the next thing I know I'm thinking about that. And so your model of these various sub-minds projecting these things into consciousness is really fascinating. Yes, it is.

And it helps so much to understand what's going on. You sit down there to meditate, and it becomes really clear that there are different parts to your mind that have different ideas about what you should be doing while you're sitting there. And some of them don't even think you should be sitting there. This extends to every dimension of our lives and we can see reflections of it in so much of our behavior. What we absolutely love is when we are able to enter into that wonderful state of clarity where we no longer have these different parts of our mind competing with each other. And whether it takes the form of just being totally present, standing on the beach, watching a sunset, and just the fullness, the wonderfulness of the experience.

Or if we're engaged in a specific task and we enter into that flow state where we're just, everything is going perfectly and there's not these other parts of our mind interrupting the process making us lose that flow and have to recapture it and so forth what this leads to is the idea that the conscious mind is not the source of its content it's actually a space or a place that the various unconscious sub minds project into and you go one step beyond that, and this is an area that I'd love to talk a little bit more, because you say that the conscious mind isn't really doing anything. It's not like it's projecting it into consciousness, and then there is one particular mind that is there that says,

okay, this is what I'm going to do with that. You're saying that these things all project into consciousness, the most important ones, and they're vying for that. And that they almost, you use an analogy of a boardroom, right? And the consciousness being sort of the boardroom or the PowerPoint presentation that people are looking at in the boardroom and the various people in there that are going to vote are these sub minds. There isn't one master. And that's a fascinating idea because we're so used to thinking of, I do X, I do Y. And so that statement that the conscious mind doesn't do anything is really a challenging one. to ask you was if it's the various sub minds that are doing this process, you talk a lot about intention, you know, how setting intentions is the way that we sort of train our sub minds. And we're going to talk about that more in the meditation section. But if setting intention

is the way that you train the sub minds, what is setting the intention? Who, where, what, where is that something is making a priority judgment that I want to intend to do X? Yes. Well, here, if we go back to the moments of consciousness model, every moment of consciousness has an intention. Every one of these sub minds, which is producing some aspect of our experience that it wants to project into consciousness, has an intention. Now, when we tell the story of what happens over a given period of time, what we're really doing is describing what has happened as a result of the interaction of these different

sub-minds, each with its own intention. And when we have that feeling, that clear feeling of, well, I intend to do such and such, or past tense, I intended to do such and such, what we're really doing is saying enough of these sub-minds came into agreement and shared an intention. It was the one that was ultimately expressed as a part of our conscious experience. So this is what your intention is or my intention. When I have the subjective experience of forming an intention to do such and such, it began with different sub-minds with different intentions. And what became my intention was when enough of those shared the same intention that it

determined what took place. And the others kind of got pushed to the background. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal?

The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by.

Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging.

Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really. Yeah, Really. No Really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This, at first glance, sounds crazy. Or it's revolutionary to think that the conscious mind isn't the decider, right? We talk about executive function. That's the great human endowment, right? Is that we've got this prefrontal cortex that can make good decisions. And recognizing that that's more of a committee than it is a person. But the truth is this, everything you're saying, A, besides being backed up by a bunch of meditators for thousands of years, aligns completely with what a lot of the newer neuroscience is saying also. You know, we are a collection of mind processes.

So I think that's a really amazing idea. And I think what that leads to then is we all would say, but wait a minute, there's a very clear me here that's doing this stuff, right? There's a, it's me. And what you're saying, and you're not alone in saying this, is that there's a narrating mind. We've talked about these other sub-minds, ones that process the sound that's coming in, ones that are discriminating. Again, we can't go into everything that's in the model, but one of the sub-minds is a narrating mind. And that narrating mind is the one that ties all this stuff together and makes it seem as if there is one thing that is making these decisions. Yes, that's right. In order to make sense of our experience as it unfolds over time, we need to link all these individual experiences together in a meaningful way. We need to create the story of who we are.

And we do that at many different levels. Over the period of a few minutes while we're performing a particular task, there are a lot of different things that arise in consciousness during in the course of a day or a week or a month. In order to give those meaning and power and utility in the future, they need to be linked together to create a meaningful story of me. And as a matter of fact, this is what your whole life is. And it's the narrating mind that does that. It kind of does that on a continuous basis, creating the story of you, you know, step by step as it occurs. What happens though, depending on how deep we want to go into this, but at the level that everybody can relate to, how do you take a sequence of events and make sense of it? Every story, to make any sense at all, needs to have a narrative center of gravity that links everything together. And that's what the sense of I, me, mine does.

That's the purpose it serves. And then the rest of it consists of taking those experiences and collecting them into a variety of objects. So you take my teacup, for example. I look at one side of it. It's got another side that I can't see, and I have no direct experience of. So what needs to happen is that all kinds of information

has to be gathered together about these things that we're experiencing. We experience them in different ways moment to moment. So what the narrating mind does is object. So we have the experience now of I, the narrative center of gravity, and this number of objects or people or whatever it is, each of which has its own discrete identity that I'm interacting with. And now it can create the story of that interaction. And I was going to say, what is so amazing about this, although disorienting, right?

It is a disorienting concept, is that, you know, we've talked on this show multiple times, we've had guests on, we've covered the Buddhist idea of not-self, or we aren't the self we think we are. And this is the clearest description of that that I've ever found, because that self that seems so real is the narrating mind. And the idea that there's not a self, again, doesn't mean that there's nothing here, right? It's this idea that there's not a self, again, doesn't mean that there's nothing here, right? It's this idea that there isn't this one overriding governing thing that is me. I am a collection of all of these different processes. And that's what I find to be the end result of understanding that mind system model, is

it gives me a way to think about and discuss the not-self. And that's not all there is to it. I know there are deeper levels of insight that come, but it's a place to start to, because I think the experience of not-self is a completely different thing, right? And you can't have it till you have it. But understanding what people mean when they say that to some extent is so helpful. And that's what I love about this model. That is one of its greatest virtues, is it makes intellectual sense of something that otherwise is a very rarefied experience that up to this point in time, not too many people have had. I do want to point out something, though, and that is that the narrating mind, in performing its function, is what generates the eye and the world of objects that we perceive.

And it does that out of necessity, but it's a relatively simple functional component of our minds. It's just assembling information, and it's the I-other construct that allows it to do this. Really, where the notion of self comes from is the rest of the discriminating mind hears this story and takes it as an accurate description of reality so the funny thing is now all these different sub minds none of which is the self but in different combinations at different times constitute what gets labeled the self, have come to believe that there is a self. Yeah, that's exactly it. Yeah, that's fascinating.

And that's what changes with the realization of not-self or no-self, is that all of those different parts of the discriminating mind that are the origins of the totality of your perception and behavior as you navigate through the world, they're all operating on this assumption that there is a self and there's a world consisting of separate discrete objects and then they further take the narrative and add to it this third component that, well, when I'm happy or when I suffer, it's because of the interaction between the self and this other and so there's this fiction that we live in and uh the notion of self i mean you can't have a self without an other right and so there's a boundary says here's where self ends and here's where other begins that boundary becomes a war zone and and this is

where all of our suffering arises so here you have a mind mechanism that's serving an extremely valuable important, the narrating mind, that is allowing us to function and navigate through the world. And the rest of the mind, each individual part of it, developing an assumption that that view of the world that's being described is an accurate view of the world. And then out of that arises all of our problems. It's fascinating. Well, I think this is a great place to wrap up part one of the podcast. So listeners, you'll have to wait till next week, but Chuladas and I will keep talking here in a moment. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast. Head over to oneyoufeed.net slash support. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show.

I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.