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I've been looking for a good one.

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I just updated, so I have a lot.

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What about Miss Claudia has one?

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I'll ask, because I'm next, right?

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What is the difference between brain and mind?

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Yes.

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I've answered this before, but I don't think I've ever answered it on Ask a Monk.

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Maybe I did in the very beginning, because it's been so long since I answered this one.

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But I know I've answered it somewhere.

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I've answered it for people before.

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Well, the brain and the mind...

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There's a few things we have to understand.

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The first thing we have to understand is in regards to levels of reality.

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In Buddhism, in the tradition that I follow, there are understood to be two levels of reality.

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Conventional reality and ultimate reality.

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Yeah, now this is really the only thing we need to understand.

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If you understand the difference between conventional and ultimate reality, then you can understand quite easily the difference between the brain and the mind.

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The brain is a concept.

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It doesn't really exist in ultimate reality.

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So how does this work?

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Conventional reality is referring to concepts that arise in the mind.

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When you think of a brain, the brain arises in your mind.

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When you experience the brain,

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What you're actually experiencing is not a brain at all.

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What you're experiencing is light touching the eye, sound at the ear if you squish a brain and hear it squishing, smell if it's rotting, taste if you're eating brains.

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Monkey brains people eat, I think.

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If you squish it and you feel it squishy, that's a feeling.

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And if you think about a brain, that's a thought.

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It's not possible to experience brain.

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What you're experiencing is sight, sound, smell, taste, feeling or thought.

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That's all you can experience.

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That's ultimate reality.

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What is ultimately real is six things.

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So,

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This is as far as the brain goes.

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The brain is something that doesn't exist in ultimate reality.

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It's a concept.

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Ultimate reality is made up of experiences.

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Experiences have a maximum of two aspects to them.

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Or let's say they have two aspects to them.

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The observer and the observed.

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That which does the observing and that which is observed.

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So

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For example, in watching the stomach, when you sit in meditation and you say, rising, falling, there are two aspects to the experience of it.

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There's the rising sensation and there's the mind which is aware of it, or there's the awareness of it, I can say.

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How do we know that there's two things?

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Well, the rising and the falling occurs always, occurs at all times.

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Sometimes we're aware of it, sometimes we're not.

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At the times when we're not aware of it, there's no experience of it.

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So without the mind, the experience cannot arise.

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But if the mind goes to the stomach and the stomach is not rising, then there is also no experience of the rising.

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It takes both things to occur at once for the experience of rising to occur.

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Okay?

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So, if by mind you mean a momentary awareness which arises and ceases with the object, then mind is something that exists in ultimate reality.

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If by mind you mean the mind in terms of something that exists from moment to moment and knows this or that, knows this and then that, knows one thing after another and is responsible for all of our knowledge as an entity,

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then again you're dealing with a concept.

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Why?

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Because it's nothing to do with experience.

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It is not experienceable in ultimate reality.

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Our experiences are things that arise and cease moment after moment after moment.

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That part of the explanation is a little bit hard to see because ordinary experience seems to be, it's so fast that it seems to be a continuous moment.

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It seems that the same mind is aware of one thing after another.

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If you don't

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undertake intensive meditation, it's very difficult to break it up into pieces.

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If you do undertake intensive meditation for any length of time, you, even after a few days, will begin to see the arising and ceasing.

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You'll begin to be able to break it up into pieces.

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and actually see that what we call mind is actually just a series of awarenesses, none of which last from one moment to the next.

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So, either there are two different concepts, one referring to a physical entity that is experienced as seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling or thinking.

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The other is an entity that experiences and is aware of all of our experiences.

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Or one is a concept, the brain, and the other one is the name that we give to the awareness that arises in any given experience.

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Either way, they're two very different things.

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The difficulty with this question, and the reason why people will ask this question,

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is a misunderstanding or a different understanding of what is meant by reality.

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So if you start not from first principles, but you start by projecting a three-dimensional space external from our experiences, which, as far as I understand, has totally been thrown out the window by theoretical physicists in general.

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I'm not sure about that.

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But if you start from that point of view, then yeah, you're looking at everything in terms of brain first, right?

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And so you say things like which many scientists say, mind is just a product of the brain, right?

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Mind is just the synapses firing in the brain.

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And people have even told me that the best scientific theory or science has come very far in proving or has pretty much proven the

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the state of the truth or the theory that the mind is just an epiphenomenon created by the brain and actually doesn't have any active role to play in experience.

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That it's just something like harmony that arises based on sound or sound that arises based on vibrations.

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which is totally false there is no substantial body of evidence to prove such a theory even though again and again scientists and non-scientists alike will tend to claim that there is and you know any investigation into the subject whatsoever will tell you otherwise in fact many many

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studies and research papers show otherwise, show that actually the mind is something very different from the brain, and show actually, for example, this study that was done on psilocybin, there was this Dutch group, and you know, it's just one study, so it may be refuted by the next study,

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But this study, they injected psilocybin, which is the active narcotic element in mushrooms, magic mushrooms.

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They injected this into their subjects and then studied their brain waves.

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And what they expected to find was an increased brain activity.

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Of course, that's what you'd expect.

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What do mushrooms do?

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Anyone who's taken them, they give you all sorts of wild experiences.

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You start laughing uncontrollably.

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You have hallucinations of angels and gods and all sorts of fun stuff.

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So you'd think, well, gee, it must mean that there's something crazy going on in the brain, right?

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It's a chemical.

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And so it's stimulating the brain in some way.

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What they found, true or not, this is what they found, was exactly the opposite, that psilocybin actually inhibits the brain's ability to function.

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So the question is, well, if it inhibits the brain's ability to function, how is it that you actually have enhanced experiences when you're on this drug?

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Now, if you go back about 100 years or more,

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you have some idea of a theory that may explain this sort of thing.

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And that's actually been followed by groups of people who are a little more open-minded than your average materialist scientist.

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who explained the mind in terms of the only in the only terms that they could explain it based on their clinical data which is quite impressive if it's all you know real data that the brain is a filter for the mind it's not the creator of the mind but it squeezes and shapes the mind into all sorts contorts the mind and all sorts of weird shapes giving us all these crazy

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all these crazy neuroses and psychoses and so on, and how people can... It allows scientists to tell you what chemical is causing you what crazy activity and what brain problem, what mind problem is being caused by what part of the brain.

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Makes them think that somehow the brain is the product of the mind, which is actually not supported by the evidence.

103
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So what they found is it's a filter in this way.

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Why?

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Because when the brain shuts off,

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There are cases where people have out-of-body experiences, where it's not possible for the experience that they were having to have been caused by the brain.

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The brain was not in a functional state.

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It was not producing enough current to give rise to any, even the weakest thought, let alone the clear, vivid images that people experience.

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there's this Jill Taylor video I think it's a PhD who had a stroke and she gives a vivid example of this of course I think in her point of view half of her brain was cut off and that's just what happens when only half of your brain works that your mind works based on the other half totally which you know is I guess what was happening

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But it could be used to support the filter argument, the filter theory that once you cut off half of the filtering, the filtration, then the mind becomes so much more free and alive and non-judgmental and so on.

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But there certainly is no consensus on the question in the scientific community.

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And from a Buddhist point of view, it's all silly anyway, because the brain doesn't exist.

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So what are you doing worrying about where... How can you say that the brain creates experience when you have to use experience to even think about the brain?

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Which is a neat twist that...

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is echoed by this PhD that I always refer to, Henry Stapp, who's a theoretical physicist.

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And he explains it much this way.

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He says, he explains quantum physics in terms of requiring the experience.

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Which is the basic premise of quantum physics was that you couldn't begin to talk about three-dimensional space or any dimensional space.

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You couldn't begin to talk about physics until you took into account the experiencer.

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So science became reduced to a description of observations as opposed to a set of impersonal entities existing outside of experience.

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Very interesting, if you're interested in that kind of stuff.

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The point being that experience is first principles.

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You have to start from experience.

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When you understand this, it becomes kind of a meaningless question, or very easy to answer question anyway, or easy to see the answer to the question.

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Well, they're very, very different.

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Mind is a part of experience.

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Brain is not a part of experience.