Microcosmographia lxxv: Pristine Substrate
In meditation and mindfulness practice, we’re asked in a multitude of ways to stop identifying with our thoughts, at least for a moment. This is a pretty abstract thing to try to do, but I have found some metaphors that seem to help quite a bit.
Tangible examples are coming up, but here’s the nerdy academic take first. The thing is: when we talk about thoughts in the mind, we’re talking about some sort of event happening in a context that enables that event. A phenomenon occurring on some sort of substrate. Crucially, the substrate is hierarchically superordinate, and is thus never affected by the phenomena occuring atop it. There’s a one-way relationship between your thoughts (including emotions) and you, which should be a hint that while you have thoughts, they don’t define you.
One classic way to convey this is to invite people to see their thoughts as clouds passing through a sky. No cloud ever lasts; they invariably evolve, pass by, and eventually dissipate. That’s helpful, I suppose. But I want to emphasize: you’re the sky, buddy. That has some implications you should recognize. The sky is pretty dang boundless, and notably isn’t really a thing nor a place per se. Any quantity and manner of positively ludicrous and barbaric clouds can make their way through a particular chunk of sky. Anything at all could pass through that sky — a bird, a rocket, an extraterrestrial flotilla come to make first contact — and the sky is never going to be one iota less the sky it was to begin with.
Try looking at a specific section of the sky. Imagine that you’re focusing on the infinite-seeming yet invisible interactions of all the elementary particles in a given cubic liter of empty sky several thousand kilometers up. That cube is behaving according to the same fundamental laws of the universe as you and everything you’ve ever done or ever will do. It has been doing so forever and will continue doing so forever. The cube remains, and the cube is unbothered.
The one that really gets me, though, is the idea of software running on a computer architecture. A CPU is not harmed by running sub-optimal programs on it. Nor are the principles of computer science, physics, and mathematics that make the processing possible. The hardware has no opinion of the program running on it and when the program is gone from memory, the hardware has no memory of it. This is the relationship between your thoughts and your consciousness.
Zen makes a big deal out of “original nature” — what are you before all those stressful moment-to-moment human perceptions and concepts get ahold of you? For me, being able to see original nature seems pretty close to being able to see an empty cube of sky, or an idle CPU. Anything that appears on that substrate, then, is bonus: temporary, and fascinating, and worthy of gratitude.