Various Qualities of Perception Are Within Existence - 27th October 2017

In this place of initially the feeling was that the mind is the space in which this processing is happening. Now it's like it's also another independent object in the space of... do you mean the mind? Yes, it's just another like these you say, it's another random... yes, thank you. And it has its rounded boundaries of what is, but they have nothing to do with me.

It is the question of how we define it. Let me take a minute on that so it becomes clear. In this existence there are these various, various qualities of perception that seem to exist. Hearing is there, or memory, imagination, emotion. Not only that, but sensations which we call the body. Then the leg sensation is different from the arm sensation. All these various flavors of sensations are there. Suppose we had no buckets. We haven't defined any of the sensations. We don't say pain or pleasure is in the body sensation. We don't have any bucket. We don't say body, mind, nothing. It's just a set of sensations in our experience. Now, whatever attention goes to is the sensation, is the perception.

Now for ease of communication, we have made these buckets called body, mind, and so on. Suppose we had those boundaries and everything experienced is a sensation. What is undeniable is that I am within this being. All this perception is happening. All these sensations are tasting. Now for ease of communication, you can say, okay, let's take a quick... we call energy concepts called thoughts. That which we call these sensations of imagination, let's call that mind. Some might say let's even put emotion. See, emotion results. Some might see... now some might see, okay, everything which is phenomenal is mind. I'm going to say it like that to define a boundary. It is what it is, which is also... so that's why I don't want to call it stimulus and response, because I want to say that everything which is phenomenal, both the stimulus and the response, let's call it a perception or a sensation or, you know, basically, you know... so let's say phenomenal.

So I cannot define the response as by default identified as me.

Exactly. This is the thing. So same way as we have got these theoretical constructs now, and there are various, various millions of sensations, but we use some theoretical constructs for the body or the mind and we have defined them as buckets. We have one theoretical construct called the 'me' which we have taken to be the superset of these two other theoretical concepts of body and mind. So everything which is contained in this bucket, this my name, we have taken that to be me. But all three are theoretical concepts. There is no such thing. There is no such thing as the mind. There is no such thing as the body. Even physically, it's just a set of atoms seemingly hanging together for some unknown reason which a scientist also can't tell you why they have to be so.