PACIFIC WORLD - The Institute of Buddhist Studies

Rosch: Meditation and Basic Cognitive Processes 37affect the self are the source of the basic emotions. Economic theories,increasingly the form of psychology which influences public policy, arebased on the assumption that choice behavior, all of it, is rooted in selfinterest.Yet the mark of religious and meditative experience (or at leastdoctrine) is the capacity to give up or go beyond one’s limited ego and thesubsequent ability to perform genuinely compassionate acts. Such possibilitieshave scarcely entered psychological theory. The Buddhist sensibilitywould seem to provide a bridge.Before we argue about whether self-interest reigns supreme, what ismeant by self? The argument of this paper is that we are not limited to whatour “daylight consciousness” might imagine us to be. In Buddhist psychologythat consciousness is described as follows: in each moment of consciousnessthere is a sense of a perceiver, an object of perception, and arelationship between the perceiver and the object. Look at the wall in frontof you right now—is this not true? The perceiver seems inherently separatefrom the object. That object, that world, is seen as either desirable orthreatening or boring to the perceiver who then has the impulse to acttowards the world on the basis of his/her conceptions and past habits,grasping after the desirable, rejecting the undesirable, and ignoring theirrelevant. Such cognitions and actions only breed further habits. Desirescan never be satisfied because to obtain a desired object only strengthensfuture habits for either grasping-greed-passion or, in the negative case,fear-aversion-aggression, or in the neutral case, indifference-stupidityignorance.Relationships with other people can only be governed by selfinterestsince they are based on desire, aggression, or ignorance. A beingoperating from consciousness is trapped in systems, or realms of the selfperpetuatinglogic of these three basic impulses; for example, the presentescalation of world conflict can be seen as a classic example of the way inwhich aggression feeds back upon and perpetuates itself. The name for thiswhole system in Buddhism is samsara, the wheel of existence, to whichsentient beings are bound by their habits and in which they will remainuntil, through training in meditation, they become aware, rather thanmindless, of their mental processes and actions in everyday life. Analogousdescriptions of lower levels of consciousness abound in Hinduism andTaoism. And in Western religions such a state might be called sin or theexperience of separation, or apparent separation from God.Is there any alternative? The listening meditation with which thissection began was perhaps designed to give a quick glimpse of an alternativeway of using the mind in relation to the world, a glimpse of a mode ofknowing which simply allows and is not thrown off balance by experiences.Beginning Buddhist meditation techniques, such as focusing on thebreath, typically have similar goals but also involve an element of concentrationwhich generally requires more time to develop.