The Mind is a Tool

In a recorded satsang by Adyashanti entitled Immesurable Value, someone asked him what to do with a busy mind. Adyashanti responded:

Take it to work with you. That’s what minds are for. They get things done … They’re like tools. They’re like a hammer. You take it out of the box, you pound nails, and before you know it you’ve got a nice room like this. A mind is a tool. But we’re so insane. We look at a tool, and we go, “who am I?” You don’t go home and ask your hammer, “who am I?” You know what would be worse is if it actually talked back to you… like the mind does… ‘Cause then you’d listen to it for a while… The mind is a beautiful tool. It does some wonderful things. Very powerful tool. But the tool’s not the thing to ask, “what’s reality?” You ask reality “what’s reality?” It’s like a painting. You don’t ask the painting about the painter. You don’t ask the mind about where the mind arises from.

At first this seemed like it had to be a bad analogy, but the more I considered it, the more it reminded me similar ideas that came up in the philosophy of mind classes I took in university. Philosophers can get their heads around most consciousness related problems, but one that persists is the question of how and why subjective experience (consciousness) arises from the physical brain (coined the Hard Problem of Consciousness). No one has yet come up with a theory that satisfactorily explains this phenomenon. In fact, there are philosophers who agree with Adyashanti that the human mind may not have the cognitive ability to understand the full nature of reality. Colin McGinn argues that although we can observe consciousness through introspection, and we can observe the physical brain, and we may even be able to draw some correlations between what’s happening in consciousness and what’s happening in the brain, we have no way of clearly observing how consciousness mysteriously arises from the brain. Just as one could not expect a mouse to attain many of the sophisticated cognitive capacities of a human, humans may not have the cognitive capacity required to understand how or why consciousness arises.  This train of reasoning leads to the same conclusion as Adyashanti’s: you shouldn’t bother to ask the mind about where it arises from.

So, how do you find out “who am I?”? I will leave Adyashanti’s suggestion to directly ask reality, “what’s reality?” to your own interpretation and meditation.

(A brief, accessible summary of Colin McGinn’s argument for those interested).

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