PACIFIC WORLD - The Institute of Buddhist Studies

324Pacific Worldsubstance-based ontological presuppositions, self-image, conditions ofworth and belonging, and linguistically-constructed conceptual categories;(5) the mediation of experience according to such concepts and beliefs;and (6) defense mechanisms to preserve and protect the self-image. Thesevariables themselves represent fluctuating and mutually reinforcing processes,all constrained within a critical range in order to maintain theintegrity of the system as a whole.Since a state of consciousness is generated by a particular cognitivesystem (or mind), the cognitive system and its corresponding state arefunctionally interdependent. In other words, a change in state necessarilyimplies a change in the cognitive system, and vice versa. Furthermore, therelation between system and state is not one way. The cognitive systemconstrains awareness (generating a state), but a state in turn reinforces thesystem of variables that created it. For example, the underlying presuppositionsof an emotion like anger tend to depend on, as well as support, adualistic perspective on life (feeling “one” with others would tend topromote empathy and so undermine getting angry at them). As will bediscussed below, Dzogchen doctrine and practice initiates a transformationof consciousness as both system and state in the specific sense describedhere.This cybernetic model of mind entails a normative claim about statesof consciousness: particular states of consciousness constitute more or lessveridical attunements to Reality 16 as such. In other words, some states aremore transparent “windows” on Reality than others. The state of consciousnessassociated with ordinary experience constitutes a particularlyopaque or obscured “window.” This obscured or deluded quality is reflectedin the intuitive ontology of ordinary experience, where “substance”is taken for granted as an object of experience when in fact “substance” isnever experienced at all (an insight of Kantian epistemology). Rather, weexperience an ongoing stream of sensations (color patches, tactile resistance,etc.) that, because of certain patterns of regularity in their occurrence,support the formation of a perceptual construct of “substance.”“Substance” is a mental construction or interpretation.The fact that ordinary experience is so fundamentally linked with thepresupposition of substance confirms Herbert Guenther’s observation(inspired, it would seem, primarily by Heidegger and Dzogchen) thathuman beings have radically strayed from any sensitive appreciation fortheir own experience. The ongoing “mind-body” problem of philosophicaland cognitive discourse is a good illustration of this experiential andexistential insensitivity. The only incontrovertible fact of our predicamentis experience itself. Yet many philosophers of mind and cognitive scientistsconsider “matter” to be the basic given of our experience and see “consciousness”as a problem to be explained in relation to matter. The extreme,almost perverse outcome of this view is the claim that consciousness is an