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Dharmette: The Bundles (5 of 5) Cognition not Consciousness

Hello, and welcome to this fifth talk on the five bundles. Today's fifth bundle is called viññāṇa in Pali^[4], and though usually translated as the word consciousness, my proposal is that translating it as consciousness is unhelpful. It actually confuses what the Buddha taught and lends itself to all kinds of abstract, metaphysical, even transcendent ideas of what consciousness is as an entity, as a thing, as something that is ultimate.

It's not necessary to translate the word viññāṇa as consciousness, and it doesn't go along with how the Buddha discusses this word or the verb that's associated with it. The verb is usually translated into English as cognizing, and the noun is more likely, or should better be, translated as cognition rather than consciousness. The word consciousness in English is obscure in what it really means. Many people think they know, but when people dig into what consciousness is, there's almost so much disagreement, so many different theories and ideas, that it's probably safe to say we don't really know what it is. After all, it's only been used in the English language for a couple hundred years in the way that we kind of use it in modern English. English speakers managed to get along quite well without this word for centuries.

So I'm going to talk about this fifth bundle. But to do that, I want to review the four bundles before it. The bundles are bundles of attachments we have, clinging. We hold onto things, and we collect them. We have big collections of them. And the Buddha talks about five collections.

The first is appearances. The simile for appearances is foam on top of a river. Here we have the analogy of a river as representing human life—the river of all the changing sensations and experiences. We are more change than solid as human beings. It's a river, for the Buddha, as a metaphor. But what we do is, there's foam on top of the river, and the foam is very insubstantial and almost doesn't exist. You can put your hand through it and shape it in all kinds of ways, and the foam changes. When the river goes over a waterfall, the foam just flies and scatters and maybe gets destroyed. It easily gets stuck in eddies, and boats go through it and divide it in half.

But if we focus only on the foam and think the foam is who we are or the foam is who other people are, we don't really see the depth and the fluidity and the beauty of human beings which is found in the river-like qualities of who they are.

The big lesson for me in this regard I've talked about before is when I was 19, I went to Morocco long ago, in 1973. I noticed after being there for about two weeks, that there was a place in my mind that felt more at ease, more free, more spacious. It was kind of strange to be walking around and feel this location in my mind. It was nice to have; it wasn't dramatic but it was recognizable.

At some point, I associated that with when I saw grown men in Morocco. Most of them back then were wearing djellabas, kind of striped robes. They were clothes that I had no association with. Whereas back in the United States and in Europe, I had a lot of associations with what professions people were, what activities they were most involved with, what political parties they were, all kinds of things that I recognized through how people appeared.

So I was focusing on how people appeared to me. And how they appeared to me came along with other recognitions, like whether they were good or bad people, whether they were problematic or not, or if I liked them or approved of them or not. And then there were sensations of pleasure and discomfort depending on that recognition and what I saw. Then there were stories I made up about them, or I saw them through the filter of more complicated social stories and places in life. And then I thought that I was right, or this is how things are, and things are not going to be any different, in a very subconscious, unreflective way.

But in Morocco, I had no context for judging or understanding the men wearing robes. And so I didn't have all those extra layers that happen almost automatically, subconsciously, without even me knowing it, because the appearances I focused on that I built a whole universe on weren't there. If I stayed in Morocco for a long time, maybe I would have built something like that. But it was really eye-opening how much extra I added on top, whereas Morocco just let these men be as they are.

So appearances are like foam. Sensations are like the momentary splash of drops of rain on top of the water that disappear as soon as they appear. As soon as a drop touches the water, it already disappears. So that's the world of sensations—momentary sensations from the different nerve endings we have that take in touch and hearing and smell and eyesight.

And then we have recognition. The simile that the Buddha gives is a mirage. The representative of that is a regular mirage that I see on my walks when I go hiking in the mountains here in the hills. Probably three times a year or something I see a stick, a long thin, curvy stick, or a root that's just poking above the ground a little bit, that's long and curvy along the surface. And the first thing I see is a snake. But it's not a snake. The next moment I see it's actually a piece of a tree, a root or a branch.

So my initial recognition is a mirage. It's not really what's there. It isn't that all appearances are foam. It isn't that all things that we see are foam. Sensations are more like drops. It isn't that recognition is necessarily wrong or off, but it can be. Especially if the fourth bundle, the fourth activity of the mind, story-making and associations, come along. We're not just seeing something and recognizing it for what it is; we see it through the stories we build up around it. And it's the stories we get attached to, the ideas we get attached to, the meanings we apply to it that we attach to.

Those the Buddha called plantains. The simile is a plantain tree that has very tightly wound leaves that are so tight that it looks like a solid trunk of a tree. But you can peel these individual leaves away, and at the core of it, there's no core. It's empty, and you don't find anything.

So this world of stories we live in—stories are important, but stories can be dangerous when we cling to them, and we can collect bundles of clinging stories.

And then we come to the fifth bundle. The simile for that is a magic show. The magic show is that we have these momentary cognitions, like a magician who conjures up something. We see something that's not there. How this works is that we have momentary moments of cognition, of very rudimentary, simple taking in of the experience, what's here.

Like when I see the curvy, thin branch on the trails. It's a moment of seeing, the cognition is just seeing a curvy, narrow, thin, round object. Just that, that's what it is. The mind then takes that shape, and that's the basic cognition, the most basic kind of momentary little taking in of the sensations and recognizing it. It cognizes it or recognizes it as a snake when it's not a snake. It might be a snake! There was once in Thailand where there was a big branch going across a dirt road in the forest, just big enough for a car to go through. There was a branch on the road, and that's what I saw, so I stepped on it—and that was a snake. So again, this recognition... but the moments of cognition are just momentary.

But what the mind does is it constructs continuity. That's the magic show. If I say today is Friday, there's no Friday. It's just a mental concept that human beings do use to get along and to find our way and to organize our social and work life. The magic show is that we believe that there is a continuous thing called Friday. All there is are moments of cognition and creations and stories that we make around that lend themselves to the idea that there's something here that continues.

There are two primary things that the Buddha pointed to as the magic show of cognition. One is the creation of the idea of something like a continuous consciousness, an entity, a thing which is consciousness itself. It's kind of like the old movies that are just still frames, but the mind constructs continuity of movement. Because of how the mind is built, the mind constructs experience. As much as it takes it in, it reconstructs it in there. So this magic show is the reconstruction of things into continuous and solid entities and things. One of those is the idea of consciousness. From the Buddhist point of view, it's just a magic show. It's an idea that's been conjured up by the mind. What we actually have are these momentary cognitions.

The second one that is part of the magic show is the creation of a continuous self. It's very valuable to have the idea of Fridays; it's very valuable to have the idea of you and yourself and what's going on, but it's one of those places with that magic show of creating this entity self. You're doing the same thing that I did as a 19-year-old when I saw people and created selves for them based on their clothes and how they appeared to me, which I didn't do in Morocco. We do this for ourselves.

We create something that... whereas the idea of self is a little bit closer to the idea of just a Friday, almost as empty as Friday, but more likely more like a river. A river that flows and moves and goes around things and just keeps flowing and flowing. We live our life sometimes as a person who goes down to the river and takes a bucket of water out and walks back to civilization and says, "Look, here's the river. This is the river." It's just a bucket of water that is no longer being a river, no longer free to flow. So many times the magic show that we create around self is something like that. It is just a bucket of water, and to be liberated is to return to the river, the river of flow that eventually makes it to the ocean.

So the focus here is on clinging. The bundles are not meant to be the five things that a human being is. They are just the bundles we cling to, and it's an added fantasy, an added story to say, "There's no self, but what we are are five bundles of things." That's taking what the Buddha was freeing ourselves from and turning it into one more thing to get attached to.

I hope this week was interesting and meaningful, important to understand this teaching on the bundles, the aggregates, and made it come alive for you in a way that is useful for you in your practice. Next week we will do the teachings on the seven factors of awakening, which are the core, positive core that comes when there's no clinging. It's the good news.

So, thank you very much.