The brain, just like the body and the rest of the outer landscape, evolved to perceive, just like the rest of the senses, the qualia that clothes the world. The brain’s world, however, is not the same world as the world of the five, outward-facing senses. The brain, like any organ, sits in a landscape of familiar landmarks and pathways – cells, neurons, neurochemicals – and they are clothed in their own qualia which lead the brain to do whatever it needs to do in order to survive.
Still, the brain is part of the outer landscape – the material landscape. The mind, on the other hand, is the inner landscape. It is something else, something apart from the brain. It is totally qualiadelic.
Thoughts and ideas develop qualiadelic relationships too, with matter (with the brain, the body, and the rest of the outer landscape). But thoughts and ideas also develop qualiadelic relationships with other qualia. And so, just as the material world evolves as an interdependent web of qualiadelic relationships, so it is too with ideas and thoughts.
But here is the rub: the inner landscape – the mind – is just as much an illusion as the outer landscape. When we check up on reality, the mind doesn’t exist any more than the body.
It is hard enough to accept that the material world doesn’t exist, but a little logic will convince us (even if our common sense refutes this, as did Samuel Johnson, by kicking a rock). Alas, we are far more attached to our thoughts than we are to the matter around us. We can’t help wanting to maintain our relationship with our thoughts and ideas. If we look at out thoughts honestly, aesthetically, we have to acknowledge that the vast majority of what goes on in the mind is neither sublime nor beautiful, but simply reactive habit and endless chatter. Delusional BS that isn’t real.
Hard as it is to short circuit all that wasted energy, if we can, we have emptied ourselves of 75% of the noise that plagues us. That is delightful. The rest – the beautiful and the sublime to which we are so sentimentally attached – requires a little more effort.
The key, however, lies in figuring out – discerning and distinguishing – the sublime from the beautiful. That takes some conscious ritualing, but what we will find is that we can (and will) disregard the sublime, which is merely a reflection of the niche-less, warped and disconnected human landscape.
This leaves us with ecosystems the beautiful. This is the nature of mind; ecosystems and mind are one and the same – they are simply compassion, providing what is needed to the beings around us. Spreading contentment. A niche of happiness.
The mind is quite divine, but even this is an illusion too. Once we are in this god realm though, we can see through it – for even it does not exist!
Ah, emptiness! Yes, the nameless!
In the end, though, the taste for compassion brings us back to reality. It is a decision we all make, at the end of one lifetime or another.