Tao mental factors

© Igor Morski

The proposal of the authors of the codependent arising Selfless model for the analysis of consciousness is further deepen through the discussion of the basic mental elements:

Basic Element Analysis

We have already seen how a moment of consciousness is analyzed into subject, object, and mental factors that bind them together. This schematization was present in the earliest Abhidharma but was greatly elaborated in a technique called basic element (dharma) analysis, which reached its peak of eloquence in the Abhidharmakosa of Vasubandhu. (It is from this work that we have taken the classification of mental factors.)

The term for basic element in Sanskrit is dharma. Its most general meaning in a psychological context is "phenomenon" - not in the Kantian sense where phenomena are opposed to noumena but simply in the ordinary sense of something that occurs, arises, or is found in experience. In its more technical sense, it refers to an ultimate particular, particle, or element that is reached in an analytic examination. In basic element analysis, moments of experience (the dharmas) were considered analytically irreducible units; they were, in fact, called ultimate realities, whereas the coherences of daily life that were composed of these elements - a person, a house - were called conventional realities.

This idea that experience, or what the phenomenologist would call the life-world, can be analyzed into a more fundamental set of constituents was also a central element in Husserl's phenomenological project. This project broke down because it was, among other things, purely abstract and theoretical. Basic element analysis, on the other hand, was much more successful because it was generated from an open-ended, embodied reflection: it arose as a way of codifying and interpreting the results of the mindfulness/awareness examination of experience. Therefore, even when basic element analysis received certain kinds of devastating criticism from philosophers such as Nagarjuna, it could nonetheless survive as a valuable practice, though seen in a different light.

On a more theoretical level, philosophers might recognize some parallels between basic element analysis and the analytic, rationalist tradition in the West as exemplified by Leibniz, Frege, Russell, and the early Wittgenstein. In both traditions there is a concern with analyzing complex aggregates of societies-whether these be things in the world, linguistic or logical descriptions, mental representations, or direct experience-into their simple and ultimate constituents. Minsky, for example, upholds this analytic tradition when he writes that his "agents of the mind could be the long-sought 'particles' that ... theories [of mind] need." Such reductionism is almost always accompanied by realism: one adopts a realist istance toward whatever one claims as one's privileged basis, one's ultimate ground.

Here, however, we come upon an interesting difference between Western rationalism and the rationalism embodied in the Abhidharma. In the latter, the designation of basic elements as ultimate reality, we are told, was not an assertion that the basic elements were ontological entities in the sense of being substantially existent. Surely this is an interesting case study-we have here a philosophical system, a reductive system, in which reductive basic elements are postulated as ultimate realities but in which those ultimate realities are not given ontological status in the usual sense. How can that be? Emergents, of course, do not have the status of ontological entities (substances). Might we have a system here in which the basic elements are themselves emergents?

This question is all the more interesting because basic element analysis was not simply an abstract, theoretical exercise. It had both a descriptive and a pragmatic motivation. The concern of the meditator is to break the wheel of conditioned origination and become aware, wise, and free. She is told that she can actually experientially catch herself (within this emergent society of the wheel of the twelve links) at the moment of craving and can begin to undo her conditioning. Will a basic element analysis provide clarity that will help in this task?

We may remember that in basic element analysis each element, each moment of consciousness, consists of the consciousness itself (called, in this system, the primary mind) and its mental factors. The (momentary) mental factors are what bind the (momentary) object (which is, of course, always in one of the six sense fields). The specific quality of each moment of consciousness and its karmic effects on future moments depend upon which mental factors are present.

The relationship between consciousness and the mental factors seems remarkably similar to the relation between Minskian agencies and agents. The contemporary Tibetan scholar Geshe Rabten puts it thus: "The term 'primary mind' denotes the totality of a sensory or mental state composed of a variety of mental factors. A primary mind is like a hand whereas the mental factors are like the individual fingers, the palm, and so forth. The character of a primary mind is thus determined by its constituent mental factors." A hand is an agency of which the fingers, palm, etc., are agents; it is also an agent of the body. These are different levels of description; neither agent nor agency would exist without the other. Like the hand, we could call the primary mind an emergent.

We would do well to look once again at the five omnipresent mental factors: contact, feeling, discernment, intention, and attention.

1 Contact

Contact is a form of rapport between the senses and their objects, a matching of sensitivity between a sense and an object in the sense field. It is a relational property involving three terms: one of the six senses, a material or mental object, and the consciousness based upon these two. There is evidence to suggest that this sensitivity was conceived as a dynamic process giving rise to emergence: the evidence is that contact, as a process, is described as being both a cause and an effect. As a cause, contact is the coming together of three distinct items--a sense, an object, and the potential for awareness. As an effect, contact is that which results from this process of coming together-a condition of harmony or rapport among the three items. This rapport is not the property of either a sense, an object, or an awareness per se. It is a property of the processes by which they interact, in other words, an emergent property. Because of one's conditioning, one thinks that contact-sense organ, sense field, and sense consciousness--implies a self; in this analysis it may be seen in a neutral, "scientific" light as an emergence.

This conception of contact strikes us as quite remarkable. It could be applied almost word-for-word to our discussion of vision as a unitary phenomenon. In a culture that did not have access to scientific notions of circular causality, feedback/feedforward, and emergent properties, nor to logical formalisms for handling self-reference, the only recourse for expressing an emergent may have been to say that a process is both cause and effect. Early Buddhism developed the idea of an emergent both at the (relatively) global level of codependent origination and the (relatively) local level of contact; this development was of central importance to the analysis of the arising of experience without a self. This suggests that our current formulations of emergence are not simply logical tricks soon to be replaced by some other way of conceptualizing phenomena; rather, our modem forms may be the rediscovery of a basic aspect of human experience.

2 Feeling

We have already discussed feeling as the second aggregate and the seventh link in the circle of codependent arising . Normally feelings lead instantly to reactions that perpetuate karmic conditioning. Bare feelings, however, are neutral; it is one's response that is, in the language of mental factor analysis, either wholesome or unwholesome. Normally we never actually experience our feelings because the mind jumps so quickly to the reaction. Even a neutral feeling (often even more threatening to the sense of self than a displeasurable feeling because a neutral feeling seems less self-relevant) leads quickly to boredom and to the finding of any possible physical or mental occupation . Meditators often report that they discover for the first time, in mindfulness practice, what it is like actually to experience a feeling.

3 Discernment

Perception (discernment)/impulse was discussed as the third aggregate. It normally arises inseparably with feeling. Through mindfulness, however, the meditator may recognize impulses of passion, aggression, and ignoring for what they are - impulses that need not automatically lead to action. In terms of mental factor analysis, one may thus be able to choose wholesome rather than unwholesome actions. (Eventually , when sufficient freedom from habitual patterns has been obtained, perception/ discernements can - according to some later formulations - automatically give rise not to self-based impulses of passion, aggression, and ignoring but to impulses of wisdom and compassionate action.)

4 Intention

Intention is an extremely important process, which functions to arouse and sustain the activities of consciousness (with its mental factors) from moment to moment . Intention is the manner in which the tendency to volitional action (the second link ) manifests itself in the mind at any given moment . There are no volitional actions without intention . Thus, karma is sometimes said to be the process of intention itself- that which leaves traces on which future habits will be based. Normally we act so rapidly and compulsively that we do not see intentions. Some schools of mindfulness training encourage meditators to spend periods of time in which they slow down activities so that they may become aware of the intentions that precede even very trivial volitional actions such as changing position when one becomes uncomfortable. Awareness of intention is thus a direct aid to cutting the chain of conditioned origination at the craving link.

5 Attention

Attention, the final factor of the five omnipresent mental factors, arises in interaction with intention. Intention directs consciousness and the other mental factors toward some general area, at which point attention moves them toward specific features. (Remember the interaction of agents in Minsky's description of the agency Builder.) Attention focuses and holds consciousness on some object. When accompanied by apperception, attention serves as the basis for the object-ascertaining factors of recollection and mindfulness, as well as the positive mental factor of alertness.

These five factors, when joined with various of the object-ascertaining and variable factors, produce the character of each moment of consciousness. The mental factors present at a given moment interact with each other such that the quality of each factor as well as the resultant consciousness is an emergent.

Ego-self, then, is the historical pattern among moment-to-moment emergent formations. To make use of a scientific metaphor, we could say that such traces (karma) are one's experiential ontogeny (including but not restricted to learning). Here ontogeny is understood not as a series of transitions from one state to another but as a process of becoming that is conditioned by past structures, while maintaining structural integrity from moment to moment. On an even larger scale, karma also expresses phylogeny, for it conditions experience through the accumulated and collective history of our species.

The precise nature of the lists and definitions of mental factors should not be taken too compulsively. Different schools produced different lists of factors. Different schools also disagreed (and disagree to this day) about how important it is for practitioners to study such lists (they were traditionally burned in Zen), about the stage of development at which the individual should study the Abhidharma in general and such lists in particular (given that he should study them at all) and about whether and how such lists should be used in meditative contemplation. All schools of mindfulness/awareness meditation, however, agree that intense mindfulness of what arises from moment to moment in the mind is necessary if one is to start to undo karmic conditioning.

We have achieved two main goals by this analysis: First, we have seen how both a single moment of consciousness and the causal coherence of moments of consciousness over time can be formulated in the language of emergence without the postulation of a self or any other ontological entity. Second, we have seen how such formulations can be both experientially descriptive and pragmatically oriented. This latter point bears further discussion since the notion of pragmatics may take an unfamiliar cast in a system that aims to undercut volitional (egocentric) action.