Discursive Mind

(First Published 11 Mar 12)

If you think life is a journey then you have to make it your voyage of discovery. The thing is to do this you have to first discover yourself, you see. And, you have to do that yourself, neither anyone else nor I can. 


If you don’t whatever you do – learning, teachers, endless hours of meditation and practice is not really going to help. You can sit for hours and practice for years but other than becoming pious and knowledgeable you would not have actualized wisdom. We can see evidence of this everywhere, when those who meditate are demoralized by their inability to concentrate, when those who have enrobed disrobe out of doubt and frustration, when most of us complain of our minds being out of control - all due to discursive thoughts.   


A discursive mind is one that jumps from one thought to another incessantly, ceaselessly, and just as would a monkey that jumps from one branch to another, therefore the term monkey mind, which originates from a simile. This mind occurs from mental agitation resulting from perception of thoughts relating to the future, influenced by the state of mind at that moment. 


A discursive mind could also be a wild horse mind – one that runs away with fantasy, a wandering mind – the day dreaming mind that is brought about by our contemplation of the past and past thoughts, influenced by the state of mind at that moment. 


Such minds are usually referred to as minds of delusion. Delusion includes great many things - from a confused mind to a mind of stupidity, fear, worry, doubt, envy, infatuation, hope and expectation. It is characterized by the mind spinning around its object - something you will encounter all the time and most obvious when meditating - when you find you just cannot pin down the object to the subject.


Now, as I said I couldn’t discover you for you and neither can anyone else such as your friends, spouse, children, father, mother, brothers, sisters, neighbors and colleagues. I mention the whole kit and caboodle because all of us at sometime will figure in your mind as objects of contemplation and can be your source of pleasure and pain and your object of aversion or attachment and the cause of your fear and anxiety or provocation.  So we can be great teaching aids and that’s exactly how you should treat us, at least in your mind. You and everyone else is my teacher and I am yours. We could also try use all events that transpire in our lives as events that help us to understand who we are. 

We can watch the mind's reaction to what troubles us and really find what and how it causes us anxiety - we will find it is fear of something known or imagined. It is not an easy thing to do because our ego will get in the way but when we approach anything without getting our emotions and fears mixed up in it we will see better. The greater the adversity the greater the opportunity to test ourselves. 

There are methods to fix this discursive mind and we usually try to fix it without knowledge and wisdom, in ignorance. The methods usually used are object or concentration meditation, chanting a mantra that will help one bring the mind back home, and breathing - watching one’s breadth. Now if we understand the process that takes place, the mind process - the mentation, then we can see why and what gives us the discursive mind. To see this, requires a mind of great clarity, which some of us may have at various times when we are able to better see how all things appear at least to fit together.


In order to talk more about the discursive mind we have to talk about the mind, objects, attachment, and self. 


The mind is intangible, cannot be found except in thought. Its nature must be luminous if it is to create images.  

It must have a reflexive nature if it is able to illuminate objects that are turned in to the images that result in thought. This is the reflexive nature of consciousness. It can be lucid at times and have great clarity.
It can be unimpeded if we don’t go blocking it with various objects of thought - by attaching ourselves to these illuminated images attracted by their nature, delighted by it (and crave), asserting its existence (with conceit) and clinging to it (with views). We attach our self to these objects as we misapprehend them as real and existing by itself without our aid (atta bhava, the opposite of anatta) when in fact what we see is our own image of it - which is delusion (moha). It lasts no longer than we are able to illuminate it and reflect its image - which is impermanence (anicca), something that is always misunderstood as a physical property of the object - something that is external to us. It is only able to delight us as long as we can illuminate it and the ephemeral nature of illumination result in our inability to derive permanent satisfaction, thus a disappointment (dukka). 

These objects have no self of its own (anatta) because of its nature, an image, one created just like a rainbow in the Western or Eastern sky (not in the north or south as you know) for which must have just the right balance of light, water and heat. So are all manifestations of the mind - from various causes and conditions. 


Usually when you try to have an open mind you try to have your eyes open. And by doing that you try to see all that you can see around you but nothing or no one single thing in particular. You give equal weight to all you see, until of course something catches your attention and you are attracted to it when your mind focuses on the particular, until your interest wanes after investigation, after which it moves perhaps to another object and yet another. Manifestation of images in the mind undergo the same process, and move from one object to another in the same way, attracted and distracted as I have explained in the previous paragraph. So here is certain discursiveness, yes, but not complete until we examine the self. If you have not realized it already, what you saw with the open mind was in fact in your mind. There were never two things happening here, it was one and the same, only that I used one to illustrate the other

When mindful, one uses the radiance of the mind - its luminous nature to focus on an object, one at a time always, and illuminate it. This illumination can be done with a light of wisdom or a light of ignorance. A light of wisdom arises if the mind is unimpeded, unblocked by fetters, if I were to use an innocuous word for better emphasis it would be prejudice, a mind without prejudice. The saying - to shine the light of mindfulness on any object - would then really mean to use the radiance of the mind - its luminous nature to focus on an object and to illuminate it. 


Now the mind also has the quality of reflecting itself when it sees itself, which is when the mind sees the mind. When this happens we have the creation of a self, and also the creation of self-consciousness. A simple test to observe self-consciousness is to stand in front of a mirror and observe one self, how conscious one is. We all know that in front of the mirror we do things that we normally would not be doing, due to our being self-conscious. When we treat people as our mirror we become self-conscious in public. 


The self-consciousness that the mind experiences must therefore have a self, someone who must hear, see, feel by touch, smell, taste and think. But if you try to find yourself you become disappointed, as you are unable you find yourself other than in thought - in consciousness, in body, in feelings, in perceptions and in emotions. So this self is a conceptual expression - the conceptual expression of the "ego self". And by mistaking, that the body or feeling or emotions is self or belongs to self or is inside of self the notion of I, mine, or myself arises.


The luminous reflective nature of the mind reflects upon the objects that it perceives. These objects are what causes impediment to its luminosity and shining. The greater the number of objects the greater the impediment, and greater the impediments the duller the mind and more closed the mind becomes. These objects can be caused by perception of things through the five senses. They can also be caused by events that we can see by thought. Upon making contact the mind derives information from the great experience stored in the mind from which an object is identified leading to positive, negative or neutral feelings. 


We like to pursue everything that gives us pleasant feelings - to all things sensual and everything that satisfies the self, its views and beliefs. We crave and form attachments to these. We fear and flee everything that gives us bad feelings. We fear aging, illness and death. We fear pain, sorrow, sadness and despair. We fear losing things we like and facing things we don't. We are sad when expectations do not materialize and hopes fail. The mind thus undergoes a process of conditioning all the time with what we have already experienced and the new information we receive. The mind also may experience hindrances that will influence the state of mind at any given moment. They are multitude from sloth, torpor, doubt, anger, and so on that can be onset by anything from over eating or the lack of food, over sleeping or the lack of it, excesses - drugs, alcohol, medication, sensual satiation - too much song, dance and video to name a few, and much more, all of which determines the state of mind at any given moment. Over a hundred states of mind have been identified. 
  

All things inimical to self manifest as negative feelings due to one’s craving for self or life. The self is then immediately alerted to any threat that it would pose to its very existence. This threat result in the formation of an object of mind, say a new object, which is the perceived result of the threat.

A sound heard in the night is identified as the opening of a window, an event that leads to the perception of a thief and a bad feeling of theft - the possible loss of personal property being the resulting object, which is the effect.  Once this happens we must take steps to eliminate the threat to preserve our self, our life, our way of life and everyone we love, for we have an attachment to all these. If we read a news report of the next town being inundated by flood and property being destroyed we will not perceive it as a threat to us, even if there is loss of property as we have none there and so no attachment. 


So then it's very simple, if we do not have craving and attachment to self, and craving and attachment to all things we normally do then we have no resulting effects or objects of mind. This includes our craving for and attachment to all things sensual, our views, and our beliefs. If we do not have hindrances that interfere with the radiance, the luminescence of the mind, the mind will be clear and unobstructed.  A monkey mind is one that jumps from one object to another arising from all these. It can jump from what is considered important to what is most trivial, associated feelings arising from the former manifesting the latter. 


Now let's isolate a certain aspect of mind to see how a monkey mind arises. Let us examine how bad feelings condition the mind's discursiveness. 


Since the nature of self is to preserve one self we will begin to speculate on the effects, on the future. We will try to come up with various ways to eliminate the threat - the thinking mind finding solutions and options and calculating the results, pros and cons. 
We will be ruminating on these ever so often, every five ten minutes and  every moment. When we look at the threats once again, we will imagine various future scenes, scenarios of good and bad and of doom. If good we will relax for a moment until we re visit our object and come up with a “what if” and start reexamining our problem. 


We always have a lot running at the same time. Even if we don’t have anything that really bothers us we will imagine it and try to identify threats – which some of us who seem to have it all - perfect lives we'd say, do. For example we will be thinking what the financial gloom in the world would bring tomorrow - will I lose my job, will my business go under, will I lose my house, what of my children’s education. Or for instance did I do well enough at the exam or at my job, will I be overlooked for promotion, so and so is against my views, my status in the community is being threatened, will I fail, am I good enough, and so on. We may also be agitated by the "what am I missing" mind where we have an excited state of mind caused by our inability to experience it, esp. in relation to the sensual - easily seen when one is forced to skip a social function. So we begin to live in a constant state of agitation, in a state of flux. In this backdrop of mind we try to concentrate on one object and then find it impossible as our mind keeps jumping from one to another. 

Heraclitus
c.575-435

Now, if we have prefect concentration at all times we will not have a discursive mind. Concentration requires our mind consciousness to be fully employed on the object of our perception. But whilst our self tells our mind to concentrate on an object our self also has many other objects it gives equal priority to at the same time which it has before in its periphery, which it considers important as it affects the self and which requires our constant attention. Once we have given our attention and is attracted by its quality and we know exactly what we are concentrating on - that is our initial thought (vitakka) our energy for sustained thought (vicara) begins to wane as our object loses its luster. Our mind then runs to the next as we have already given attention to the last. Likewise our mind beings to run to all the irons in the fire. Thought conception or initial thought (vittaka) is like the striking of a bell, after which what follows is the resonance, the sustained thought (vicara). And the series of thoughts that follow similarly that our mind runs to and fro are discursive thought. Some things can lie in us dormant only to manifest when some thought, either a feeling or object sets it off. It is like a whirlwind of mind - one in a constant state of flux conditioned by thought - by mind and sense consciousness.


Below I give a simple illustration of the workings of a monkey mind. It has no particular form  - no order, no cycle, no pattern, no sequence. You will observe that it takes the appearance of a tunnel created by the self and mind's objects. You will find it an interesting perspective on the discursive mind because of the tunneling effect shown creating the notion of time - a time tunnel - yes, something to think about.  


EVENTS             THREAT    FEELINGS   FEARS          ATTACHMENTS   SOLUTIONS            FEELINGS
E1 Econ is bad   T1 Job      Pain         F1 Lose Job    A1 Self            S1 Start a business Good
E2 Swine Flue    T2 Child    Pain         F2 Death         A2 Self+child   S2 Skip School       Good
E3 Trip by Air     T3 Traffic Bad          F3 Lose Flight  A2 Self              S3 Go early         Good
E4  Lose Flight    T3 Job     Bad          F4 Lose Job    A4 Self              S4 Try postpone  Good 
                                                                                                          meeting