Buddhism Part 2

A friend of a friend says ...

I am a Buddhist and follow the teachings of the Buddha who has said the following:

"We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make our world.  What we think, we become.  Words have the power to both destroy and heal. When words are both true and kind, they can change our world. Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment."

Placing ultimate importance on "subjective" world is a fundamental mistake that all mystics make.  It is a mistake that is elevated to central dogma in Buddhism. Gurus who pretend to guide us to ultimate reality don't even admit the reality of their own noses.

Buddhist writers go to great lengths to point out the obvious fact that everything that seems to be going on in the world outside is actually happening in the "mind". Therefore, study of the "mind" is supremely important, mastery of mental processes is fundamental, great changes can be made in well-being by knowing the mind etc.

This is bunk. It's only barely plausible when we imagine that there is only one person in the Universe. Who exactly would that be?

The "world" is vastly more rich and complicated than any mind, or even all minds working together can comprehend. The "world" as discovered and investigated by Science does not somehow live in the "minds" of Scientists. It is an external thing. At best, one might picture the subjective world as the vastly overlapping, conflicting visualizations of the world in all the Scientists of the world. But even that would be wrong. The world of the Scientists is in the data, which chains all of Science to the Cosmos. The Cosmos is what the data tell us about and the data would exist even if there were no minds to theorized and interpret. We can be certain that the sun would keep shining even if all the Buddhist monks dropped dead tomorrow or even if every "mind" in the Universe suddenly winked out.

The brain is an observing, controlling machine. It makes no sense to think of this organ existing without something to observe and control. To be sure, our brains observe and control more of the world than those of trout, but it's a matter of degree. The fact that there is more "going on out there" than we imagine is not a philosophical idea, it's a matter of daily experience.

Yes, the "mind" is wonderful and interesting and yes it's very important to understand the workings of our own personal mind and the minds of others. But the mind is only one of a staggering number of important and fascinating phenomena that merit our attention.

To escape the idea that all we learn about the world is somehow "mental", it's best to think of the Scientific idea of a "model". A model, even a mathematical one, is an real, external "thing" in the world. Models, such as weather models, are based on observations that go beyond what we can directly perceive and often calculations that no un-aided human mind can perform. It's fruitful to think of them as "ideas" that have escaped from our skulls and now have a life of their own. We can explore a world more complex than our brains and in fact we do it every day.