Body, Mind & Language

Body and mind are different words, but are they different things? The problem is not about determining the right answer—it’s the question itself. How much sense does it make? Can it be answered definitively? What difference does it make? This important contemplation leads to the heart of the Buddha's concerns.

Transcript

Hello,

Everybody,

And welcome to mindfulness live.

This week,

We're talking about body mind.

And as you know,

I'm interested in Buddhism.

And I have a long training in Buddhism and Buddhism has a lot to say about body mind.

So I'm going to talk about that today.

And not certainly in a religious way,

But in terms of how we can explore connection or disconnection,

Depends how you look at it.

First of all,

Make yourselves comfortable.

Take a nice breath.

And let go.

So the breath touches your body on the inside,

Inside of your nostrils,

Your chest.

And you feel the working of the body as you breathe,

The movement of your muscles,

Of your ribcage,

Your lungs,

Your throat.

So you have the sense of touch of the air passing through you in and out.

You have another sense of touch,

The movement of your muscles.

And you also have an idea in your mind attached to the word breath or breathing.

And there's a certain amount of thoughts that runs around everything we experience.

Mind is just popping up ideas all the time.

It's what it does.

So the breath is not just a thing.

It's not something you can isolate.

Your whole body at work.

And not by itself,

It's working with the air around you,

With your environment.

And we constantly feed off the environment.

That's where we get our air from,

And our food,

Water,

Nourishment.

And also from other people,

We get our support,

Love,

Interactions of all sorts,

Which we need.

We're all connected.

So when you breathe,

When you take a single breath,

Remember that it connects you to everything and everyone.

And that it's too big to fully describe.

And that's just the breath.

Now,

Instead of thinking all this,

All these ideas,

You just notice the breath coming in,

Breath going out.

And it doesn't matter how you perceive the breath.

You're just following it.

And that perception may change.

And still,

You follow it.

Breath coming in,

Breath going out.

And the breath is in your body.

And your body is right here.

Large,

Strong,

While gravity pulls you down,

Your body keeps you up.

Your body is sensitive,

Aware of light and sound and taste and smell and touch.

Somehow it's aware of the passage of time and the movement of things.

And as we become aware of this,

As you pay attention to the feeling,

The touch of your body,

You know your body,

You're conscious of it,

This strength,

This solidity,

This weight.

But what happens when you separate the knowing of your body from your body?

Which part of you is your mind?

Which part of you is the physical sensation?

Staying with the breath,

Staying with your mind,

Knowing very plainly,

Without any confusion,

That you're conscious and yet unable to separate the consciousness from the things you're conscious of,

Like your breath,

Like your body.

And staying with the breath,

Taking three more and open your eyes.

So in Western philosophy,

We have this idea of dualism,

Mind and the body are separate.

And that came about,

Well,

It's a natural inheritance from the Christian,

Which is inheritance from the Jewish idea that the soul and the body are separate.

That there is something that is me,

That does not die when I die.

So if you really want to look at the origin of that,

You have to look at the sociology of it rather than the philosophy.

Why do people need to believe?

And the purpose of that belief was to make people feel comforted,

Consoled,

Because if death is just a big emptiness,

Then that's sort of terrifying to a lot of people.

And religion,

One of the functions of religion is to keep society together and help people feel better about their suffering and help people feel better if possible.

So it's a very prevalent idea.

And it's prevalent in Asia as well.

It was at the time of Buddha and it's an idea that he confronted many times.

And in fact,

Buddhism,

After the Buddha died,

Also suggested that mind or the person or something,

Depending on which school of Buddhism you talk to,

Something is left over after death and it migrates.

It finds a new body and enters the body.

So this is the idea of body and mind being separate.

Now what the Buddha taught is quite different.

And what he taught was that the idea of separating consciousness and the object of consciousness,

As we just did,

In other words,

Body and mind,

It's futile.

You cannot draw a fine line.

So why do we do it at all?

It's because of language.

We have different names for different things and it makes them sound isolated.

So body is one thing and mind is something else.

Each one has to be defined.

Ideally,

They shouldn't overlap because when you have separate definitions for every term,

You have a nice,

Tidy,

Well-organized philosophy.

But that's not what the Buddha taught.

And that's not what our experience tells us either.

Our experience is very clear.

This distinction is very blurred.

And reality is chaotic.

Consciousness is chaotic.

And while we do draw clarity from it,

And we do put ideas together in very logical ways,

Such that they make sense,

And we develop great systems of thought,

Like science,

Philosophy,

All these things,

And we can make sense of them.

Still,

These are abstractions.

They're all based on the categorization of things into words and terms.

What the Buddha taught,

And what he argued with many people,

Especially the Brahmins,

With whom he had a very special sort of ongoing debate,

Was that you can't distinguish body and mind.

And why would you?

That's not what matters.

What matters is the experience of this moment and your ability to recognize it.

So the other day we talked about the metaphor of the elephants and the blind men,

Where different blind men standing around an elephant touch a different part of them and see,

In parenthesis,

Different things.

And this is exactly how we deal with thoughts and ideas.

And everything in life.

We see different things in different circumstances because we're all standing in a different angle.

You know,

Two siblings who grow in the same family from the same parents can have completely different experiences of their parents.

Maybe one's a couple of years younger than the other,

Or maybe many years younger than the other.

And what the parents are going through,

The dynamic in the house,

The role that the child plays,

It all changes.

Everything is on the move.

So when the two siblings talk to each other about mom and dad,

They assume they're talking about the same thing,

But they're really not.

They've had completely separate experiences.

So when we keep this in mind,

This really helps to reduce the confusion by explaining and showing where the confusion comes from.

It comes from language.

Confusion comes from trying to tie down things that can't be tied down.

That's the worst of it.

Coming up with opinions which are nice and solid and convenient,

But which may not be tested,

Which may not even be realistic,

But their opinions.

And generally speaking,

We don't look to the world around us to confirm our beliefs.

We look to the people around us to see if they agree.

And that's why propaganda works so well.

If everyone else in your town believes one thing,

Then for you to believe the opposite is very,

Very hard.

Especially if you have business relationships and personal relationships,

You don't want to stand out.

So the natural cause is to agree.

This is all of this,

The Buddha railed against this.

This was the problem for him.

And the solution is to become self-reliant in your own perceptions.

And a part of that self-reliance is understanding what questions are worthwhile and which ones are not.

And to him,

The idea of whether the body and mind are identical or separate is a question that he wouldn't answer.

He wouldn't address it.

He wasn't saying yes,

And he wasn't saying no.

He was basically saying this argument is redundant.

It's irrelevant.

Worse than that,

It actually causes confusion because it leads you to make opinions that aren't well founded,

Because you cannot have a final opinion about whether the body and mind are identical or separate.

It's been debated for thousands of years and still there's no complete agreement.

Everyone's got a different opinion.

And there are arguments on both sides and none of them are conclusive.

So what the Buddha was saying,

To bring it all down to the bottom line,

Is that arguing,

Abstracting,

Explaining in these theoretical ways has nothing to do with Dharma.

In other words,

The practice of life.

So with that in mind,

We're talking about body-mind,

And you can hyphenate them,

Or you can even take out the space between them,

Make it one word,

Which many people do.

Body-mind is what you are,

What we all are.

And thinking of yourself in that way as a singular thing,

And especially remembering that language imposes limitations on your perception.

By separating these two words,

Body and mind,

It gives the impression that they're different things.

But when we examine them,

And the Buddha was all for examination,

When we examine them,

Then it doesn't hold up.

You can't prove that they're separate any more than you can prove that they're identical.

All I know is that when I look at the breath,

I know it.

And if I try and separate the consciousness from the actual breath,

I get confused,

I get lost,

I don't know what to do next.

It's nonsensical.

So the idea is to contemplate this,

To think about it in different situations,

And gradually break down that dependence that we have on language to explain everything.

Language is useful,

Don't get me wrong.

Science is useful.

All of these things,

Categorizing things,

Putting names on them,

And putting them in categories,

Defining them,

It's all useful stuff,

But it's abstraction.

It's a means to an end,

But it is not the way things are.

Yeah,

So that's it.

So make yourselves comfortable.

Take a breath and let go.

And there is no doubt that you're breathing.

There's no doubt that you know the breath.

Body,

Mind,

They're real.

They are your experience.

And to see them,

To experience the whole,

The knowing of the breath,

And to let go of questions about that,

Whether it's real,

Whether it's properly described,

Defined,

Whether you can explain it.

Letting go of that is letting go of baggage,

Of opinions,

Which can't be proven,

Only compared,

Which don't lead anywhere in particular,

Even though they may for a short time have a function to help me convey ideas to you.

So you stay with the breath and you know the breath.

And you even know that you know the breath.

It starts to become absurd.

And yet it's true.

Existence is sometimes absurd,

Just as it's chaotic.

And one of the skills we've developed is to put it all in order.

And that's why the human brain is so complex so that we can put everything in order.

Or at least we can try.

But there comes a point where we're just adding baggage,

Adding opinions,

Adding views,

And forgetting the mystery of life,

Which is that we don't know why we're here.

We don't know where we're going.

We can have beliefs.

I believe I'm going to heaven,

Or perhaps to hell.

But it's just a belief.

It's not knowledge.

It's not certainty.

But I am certain of this breath.

I'm certain that I know it.

I'm certain that I'm here and now,

Because all my senses tell me,

My experience tells me,

Stephen,

You're here and now.

How does it feel?

And it does feel like something.

Every experience feels like something,

Something good or something bad or something indifferent.

But there is always a judgment,

An emotional judgment.

Is this good for me?

Is this bad for me?

Should I stay or should I go?

Is this safe or should I run?

This is our basic judgment.

And once we've made the judgment and we've responded to it,

It's over.

You let go of the idea.

You let go of the judgment.

You move on to the next moment.

You stay with the breath.

Stay with the body.

You stay with the experience.

And you know that your abstract mind is calling to you with ideas,

Explanations,

Excuses.

And you just let those thoughts be.

You don't follow them.

You stay with the breath.

You accept the thoughts for being there,

But you don't accept them as true and you don't make the effort to disprove them as false.

You just let them be.

Those are thoughts.

This is experience.

This has weight.

This is real.

And while thoughts themselves are real,

What they represent is abstract.

It's very different.

And you stay with the breath,

Knowing that you breathe in and knowing,

I'm breathing out.

I'm breathing in,

In this moment.

And now I'm breathing out.

And as I breathe,

There are sensations.

There are feelings.

There are thoughts.

I know,

But I stay with the breath,

Come back from abstraction,

Accept the chaos.

Understand what language can do and what it can't.

And staying with the breath,

You know,

This is your anchor.

Whenever the thoughts become too rapid,

Too confusing,

Too many,

Come back to the breath,

Back to reality.

And you sit and you are complete in mind.

And now taking three more breaths,

Open your eyes.