At the Zen Center this evening, we talked about consciousness and the mind-body problem. How can the conscious mind distinguish itself from the brain?

As Larissa MacFarquhar put it in a recent issue of The New Yorker, "Are they different stuffs: the mind a kind of spirit, the brain, flesh? Or are they the same stuff, their seeming difference just a peculiarly intractable illusion? And if they are the same stuff, if the mind is the brain, how can we comprehend that fact? What can it possibly mean to say that my experience of seeing blue is the same thing as a clump of tissue and membrane and salty liquid?"

"Think of some evanescent emotion," she writes, "apprehension mixed with conceit, say. Then think, That feeling and that mass of wet tissue--same thing. Or think of the way a door shutting sounds to you, which is private, inaccessible to anyone else, and couldn't exist without you conscious and listening; that and the firing of cells in your brain, which any neuroscientist can readily detect without your cooperation--same thing."

An ancient insight into this problem can be found in the Sanskrit word for consciousness, vijnana. The vi in vijnana means "to divide," the "jnana" means "to know." Thus, vijnana emphasizes knowledge that results from separation, separation of subject from object and one object from another. Vijnana is therefore sometimes translated as "discrimination." To be conscious of the self, one has to discriminate the self from everything else. "I am this, I am not that." This separation also gives rise to the discrimination between the mind and the body.

Vijnana has come to refer to the faculty of the mind in general, the ability to be aware, aware of anything, but always something - form, sensation, perceptions, memories, and of course, a "self." The Buddha taught that there are many forms of consciousness, all related to different modes of perception. There is sight consciousness, there is sound consciousness, and so on. But in Eastern thought, the perception of thought is also a sense, the "sixth sense," so we also have thought, or mind, consciousness. But to discuss or analyze consciousness much further would be like the hand trying to grasp itself.

Now this becomes a curious thing, for if we have a sense organ for the perception of thoughts, it is fundamentally different than the sense organs for sight or for hearing, in that the organ of thought-perception, the brain, is both the receiver and the transmitter of the perceptions. Thoughts are created by the brain, but are also perceived and sensed by the brain. And as we receive these messages, we generate new thoughts, which are then received (thoughts about thinking) and analyzed, creating still more thoughts. Is that all that consciousness is, I asked, the squeal of feedback from this continuous loop?

"In the past," MacFarquhar continued, "it seemed obvious that mind and matter were not the same stuff; the only question was whether they were connected. Everyone was a dualist. Nowadays, few people doubt that the mind somehow is the brain, but although that might seem like the end of the matter, all that's necessary to be clear on the subject, it is not. It is not enough to imagine that the brain houses the mind (in some obscure cavity, perhaps tiny intracellular pockets), or gives rise to the mind (the way a television produces an image), or generates the mind (a generator producing current): to imagine any of those things is to retain the idea that the mind and the brain are distinct from each other. The trick is to remove the verb that separates them."

To put it another way, the trick is to remove the vi, the dividing, from the jnana, the knowledge. When there is no separation of self and other, no discrimination between subject and object, mind and body are then realized to be one, which they always were all along, despite all this division.