Day of the Zenith, 18th of Spring, 526 M,E, (Aldebaran): There are six five-day events in the original Universal Solar Calendar, scattered more-or-less randomly throughout the year. When I set up my latest New Revised USC, I divided the year into six seasons instead of the original five, and moved some of the five-day events so that one occurred during each season. 

The five Days of the Zenith were originally the 21st to the 25th days of Spring (April 3 through 7) in Angus MacLise's five-season USC. Those days became the 33rd to 37th days of Spring in my six-season revision. However, I moved them up by a couple weeks to the 18th through 22nd days of Spring so that tomorrow, the Vernal Equinox, falls during a Day of Zenith. Seemed astronomically befitting. 

Just so you know. Let's move on. 

Yesterday, I noted South African psychoanalyst and neuropsychologist Mark Solms maintains that uncertainty creates feelings, and feelings give rise to consciousness, or at least that's how Michael Pollan explains it. The Buddha taught that ignorance (which we can correlate with "uncertainty," right?) is the necessary precondition, or substrate, for mental models, and mental models are the necessary precondition, or substrate, for consciousness. Feelings don't come up in the Buddha's 12-Fold Chain of Dependent Origination until four more steps after, not before, consciousness.

Everyone loves a controversy and everyone queues up to watch a fight, but I don't think there's necessarily a disagreement between Solms and Buddhism. First, as I pointed out yesterday, the Buddha had a different definition of consciousness than what Solms was talking about. The "hard-problem" consciousness discussed nowadays is closer to what Buddhists call "mind," which is considered the deepest, most basic, essential manifestation of the mind - the metaphorical heart of the mind, the mind before thoughts arise. On the other hand, "consciousness," in Buddhism is considered just the perception, or "feeling," of sensations impinging on the six sense organs. 

Not to make it more complicated, but to give some more perspective, in Buddhism there are actually 18 forms of consciousness, each associated with the six senses, including the mind. There's consciousness associated with the sense organ itself ("eye consciousness" through "mind consciousness"), there's consciousness associated with the sensation ("sight consciousness" through "thought consciousness"), and then there's the realm of each different sense ("realm of sight" through "realm of mind consciousness").         

Introducing a foreign language usually just complicates things, but since the Budhist concepts are so different and the English words so slippery, let's use some Sanskrit terms. Ignorance, in Sanskrit, is avidyā, which I think is essentially the same as Solms' "uncertainty," although I could be wrong (it happens). 

The Buddha's "mental models" are samskāra, which I believe we can all agree is something completely different from Solms' "feeling" (vedanā).   

Finally, the very different concept of consciousness in Buddhism is called vijñāna (not to be confused with vedanā), while the more analogous "mind" is hsin (okay, that one's Chinese - I don't know the Sanskrit equivalent).

So to put it all together, Solms says avidyā gives rise to vedanā, which gives rise to hsin (avidyā > vedanā > hsin). The Buddha's teaching has avidyā existing before samskāra, which exists before vijñāna (avidyā > samskāra > vijñāna), with vedanā appearing only much later and hsin not even mentioned at all. And before there's any more confusion, the >'s above are meant as directional arrows, not "greater than" signs. 

My point is that two statements that may appear to be in opposition are, on closer examination, talking about separate things and therefore not is disagreement. Solms' theory is about avidyā, vedanā, and hsin, and the Buddha's teaching is about avidyā, samskāra, and vijñāna. Also, while Solms has one thing creating or causing the next, the Buddha merely has each as a necessary precondition or substrate of the following, but causation is not necessarily the link between them.

I don't know if all this is illuminating or confusing to others, but I needed to go through the exercise to clarify my own thoughts. This is my blog, and these are the thoughts in my head today, so I'm going to write about what I'm thinking.

Enjoy your Vernal Equinox tomorrow!