Yogācāra Depth Psychology and Philosophy of Mind

A Vijñāpti-Mātra Origin Story

In the beginning the unconscious created the mind and the body. 1 2

And the body was without form or function; and darkness was upon the face of the mind.

And the forces of life welled up from the depths of the waters.

And life thought: let us eat light, and it ate light.

And life tasted the light, that it was good: and the life followed the light out of the darkness.

And life grew in the day and withered in the night. And there was evening and morning for many days.

And life began to build a membrane in the midst of the waters, to let the membrane divide the cell from the waters.

1 By unconscious, I am referring to the ālaya-vijñāna, which, according to Waldron (2003), was first used in the ​Yogācārabh ū ​ mi ​ to describe a base level of consciousness which “persists uninterruptedly within the material sense-faculties during the absorption of cessation (​nirodha-samāpatti ),” (Waldron, 92, 2003).

2 Concerning the use of the term “creation” Lusthaus points out that “no Indian Yogācāra text ever claims that the world is created by mind. What they do claim is that we mistake our projected interpretations of the world for the world itself, i.e., we take our own mental constructions to be the world,” (Lusthaus, 7).

Therefore, as a literary and thereby conceptual device, I acknowledge that the ​heavens ​ and the ​earth ​ could not be created by the unconscious on a Yogācāra view, and substitute respectively mind ​ and ​body ​ because of the historical metaphorical alignment in the West of ​heaven ​ with ​mind ​ and ​earth ​ with ​body ​ . Moreover, the ālaya-vijñāna contains “seeds” which are “the causal conditions for manifest forms of cognitive awareness to reappear upon emerging from that absorption,” and therefore, in a story about the emergence of consciousness from the primordial unconscious, it makes sense to think of the ālaya-vijñāna as “creating” the mind and body . And life made the membrane and defined the ​self which was within the membrane, from 3 the ​world ​ which was without the membrane: and it was so. And life called the membrane order, and the waters were called chaos. And there was

evening and morning for many days.

And life searched through the waters for light to be gathered into a body, and the body

emerged from the light: and it was so.

And the body could touch the Earth; and the gathering together of the body called forth

consciousness ; and life had created order from chaos.

And consciousness divided its body into ancestors and descendents, mothers from 5 fathers and fathers from mothers, containing in each the seed of itself; and it was so.

And the ancestors brought forth descendents through the body, whose seed is contained in itself, each according to its ancestry: and consciousness had created order out of chaos.

And there was evening and there was morning for many days.

3 Lusthaus points out that “in Indian philosophy, ‘epistemology’ (pramāṇavāda) is primary, both in the sense that it must be engaged in prior to attempting any other philosophical endeavor, and that the limits of one's metaphysical claims are always inviolably set by the parameters established by one's epistemology,” (Lusthaus, 6). In “cellular-membrane epistemology” the ​self ​ is therefore defined in reference to the observable cognitive object of the membrane, whose nature we do not know in itself, but which is grown from the inside (and is thus epistemologically accessible) as the seeds of the ālaya-vijñāna mature into a manifest form of membrane awareness.

4 This is ​prav ​ ṛ itti-vijñāna , the emergence of which depends upon the ​ālaya-vijñāna which is in turn conditioned by the ​upādānas ​ (fuels) of materiality and disposition (Waldron, 98, 2003). In this metaphorical space: ​prav ​ ṛ itti-vijñāna = consciousness (though it’s most aptly cognitive awareness), ​ālaya-vijñāna = cellular mechanisms supporting and sustaining life, and ​upādānas ​ = photosynthesis (light is the energy of life ​and ​ it tastes good).

5 Vijñāna contains the prefix vi- ( ​व ) meaning diverse or distinct (according to Wiktionary, but we’ve also discussed this). When cognitive awareness arises and begins to divide and categorize things, the emergence of separate individuals in the continual stream of life can be found. There’s no meaningful separation between parents and children until the child has individuated from its parents. While the world is operating unconsciously, it is, in that sense undifferentiated.

And life read patterns from the light which fell upon its membrane, to measure itself by

the day and the night; and the patterns were signs for seasons, for days, and years. 6

And the patterns in the membrane gave rise to meaning upon the face of the mind: and it 7

was so.

And there were two great lights; the sunlight would mean consciousness, and the

moonlight would mean the unconscious: the stars had meanings also.

And life set their meanings into the patterns of its membrane, and all that was within, And the meaning of light was ​day ​ and ​order ​ and ​consciousness ​ . And to divide the light of consciousness from the darkness of unconsciousness, life created meaning out of pattern. 8 And there was evening and there was morning for many days.

6 This isn’t a form of determinism; as an account of the origin of semiotics, I’m gesturing here toward something much closer to Barrett’s theory of constructed emotion, which “explains how you experience and perceive emotion in the absence of any consistent, biological fingerprints in the face, body,

or brain. Your brain continually predicts and simulates all the sensory inputs from inside and outside your body, so it understands what they mean and what to do about them. These predictions travel through your cortex, cascading from the body-budgeting circuitry in your interceptive network to your primary

sensory corticies, to create distributed, brain-wide simulations, each of which is an instance of a concept,” (Barrett, 151, 2017). At a far more basic level, the cellular beings I’m describing here construct certain predictions about the world based on their internal constitutions, their ālaya-vijñāna, and their sense-data.

7 As Lusthaus notes: “When Yogācārins discuss ‘objects,’ they are talking about cognitive objects, not metaphysical entities. Cognitive objects (viṣaya) are real, integral parts of cognition, and thus occur within acts of consciousness,” (Lusthaus, 7). The patterns in the membrane, given membrane epistemology outlined above, are cognitive objects.

8 These predictions (from the previous footnote) are then mapped based on structural similarity in other domains, so, this is an attempt to account for the fact that “light” “day” “order” and “consciousness” could be semantically intertwined. Pattern and the division of pattern with vi-jñāna into constructions

are useful in a world of regularity, such as ours. Were it the case that our planet didn’t revolve, we may not use words like “revolution” to explain things like great changes. Our cognitive constructs have some basis in our embodiment, but also metaphorical extensions which can’t (perhaps in principle)

be teased apart. In the case of emotions, Barrett asks “Instead of asking, ‘Are emotions real?’ the better question is, ‘How do emotions become real?’ Ideally, the answer lies in building a bridge from the perceiver-independent biology of the brain and body, like interception, to the everyday folk

concepts that we live our lives around like fear and happiness,” (Barrett, 134, 2017). And life prepared to arise into every moving creature that has life, and every fowl that 9 flies above the earth, and into every kind of being.

And life became great whales, and every living creature that moves, emerging from the waters, into every kind of being, the kingdoms of life were formed this way: and life had created order out of chaos.

And life was fruitful and multiplied, and filled the waters of the seas and the fields of the

Earth.

And there was evening and morning for many, many days. And life prepared to arise into every living creature and culture, as descendents dependent upon their origination: and it was so.

And life was incarnate in the beings of the earth, every living creature with body and mind. And life proliferated in forms, each according to their kind: and it was so.

And life was incarnate in humankind, who took dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

In the image of life, humankind made meaning: order and chaos we made it. Symbol and speech made we it. 10

10 Ong (1985) makes a number of interesting points about the evanescence of orality as opposed to the eternalism of literacy. Here, I’ve chosen to symbolize these two competing aspects of meaning with chaos (change, transience, speech) and order (eternity, structure, symbolism) respectively. Ong

writes, “if functionally literate persons are asked to think of the word ‘nevertheless’, they will all have present in imagination the letters of the word… if they are asked to think of the word ‘nevertheless’ for two minutes, 120 seconds, without ever allowing any letters at all to enter their imaginations, they cannot comply. A person from a completely oral background of course has no such problem. He or she will think only of the real word, a sequence of sounds, ‘ne-ver-the-less’. For the real word ‘nevertheless’, the sounded word,

And humanity said, let us be fruitful, and multiply, and remember our culture, and its 11

meanings: and this will give dominion over the forms of the mind, and over the patterns of

nature, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. 12

And humanity wrote, Behold, I can depict the world of mind from within the world of

cannot ever be present all at once, as written words deceptively seem to be,” (Ong, 24, 1985).

In a similar way, the chaotic aspects of being can never be accounted for; they fall outside the nomos, or order, of things. Waldron makes a similar point about the symbolization of the ​self ​ : “if our life itself has no apparent permanency, then at least the abstract symbol of ‘self’ that stands for it does.

We live, that is, as in a symbolic world constructed by our own imaginative powers. We are always actively, albeit unconsciously, ignoring the radically interdependent nature of our existence and setting up in its place the “false idol” of a self, the undying and therefore unliving symbol that represents

our unrequited desires for permanent, personal autonomous existence,” (Waldron, 4, 2003). The proliferation of conceptual technologies such as writing, art, and music, make this eternalism pronounced in our culture, as the definite form of the letters in a script, or the definite form of an art piece gives the experiential a time-transcending diachronic existence.

11 In evolutionary psychology, one of the deepest problems is the puzzle of time. Tomasello writes that there simply hasn’t been enough time for natural selection to work its organic mechanism enough to shape our cultural and social selves, given that we diverged from our common ancestors with other apes at

the most 6 million years ago (Tomasello, 2, 1999). Tomasello argues that the only possible solution to this puzzle is the “biological mechanism” of “social or cultural transmission, which works on time scales many orders of magnitude faster than those of organic evolution,” (Tomasello, 4, 1999). This is a form of what David Chalmers, Andy Clark, and others call “extended cognition,” the offloading of neurocomputational resources into the environment (natural

or social). An important form of extended cognition is ​writing ​ , which Ong argues has fundamentally restructured thought in literate societies. An interesting and open question is the degree to which writing was involved in the social cognition revolution which produced modern human beings, but, as Ong notes, “the oldest script, Mesopotamian cuneiform, is less than 6,000 years old,” so given the archaeological evidence such an involvement of writing in the social-cognition transformation process is unlikely (Ong, 26, 1985).

12 Barrett asks, “Which comes first, a concept or a word?” (Barrett, 135, 2017). While she acknowledges that some concepts, such as the concept of a face, must be learned prior to words, there are many emotion concepts which require words. These words help us gain the appropriate concepts, which then

construct our experiences of emotions. She writes, “I realize I’m saying something provocative: that each of us needs an emotion concept before we can experience or perceive that emotion… but if emotions are constructed by prediction, and you can predict only with the concepts you possess, well… there you

have it,” (Barrett, 142, 2017). The reason I note this here is that in establishing dominion over the world, humanity is enlisting language in service of a ​telos ​ , and that telos is structuring the relationship of language to humanity, and thereby constructing the experience of human cognition in relation to the world. In this way, goals, as concepts, could be necessary conditions for certain experiences.

Forms

For all the mind can be written, and writing is eternal, and thus the mind is eternal. 13

And humanity wrote of word and essence, of self and non-self, of process and reality, of 14

the void and the dark.

And we saw every thing that we had made, and, behold, it was beyond good and evil.

And the evening and the morning were the eighth day of May, 2018.

13 Ong notes, “Platonic form was form conceived of by analogy precisely with visible form,” to illustrate the fact that writing, as a visual system for conceptualizing meaning, co-opted our strongest sensory modality (Ong, 29, 1985). Lakoff and Johnson also point out the proliferation of sight-to-thinking

metaphors (e.g., “I see what you mean” “seeing is believing” “Watch your language” etc.) in Lakoff and Johnson (1980). Note the use of the term “Cartesian Theatre” (e.g. by Blackmore) to refer to the multimodal sensory representation that denotes the phenomenal content of the ego. In a theatre, there is a primary sensory modality: vision. A bat may have a Cartesian Echo Chamber.

14 Three final thoughts on writing and reification: first, and this resonated deeply given my own introspection, Ong writes, “the fact that we do not commonly feel the influence of writing on our thoughts shows that we have interiorized the technology of writing so deeply that without tremendous effort

we cannot separate it from ourselves or even recognize its presence and influence,” (On, 24, 1985). Given the definite, determinate form of written letters and sentences (and thereby grammar), it is not a huge conceptual leap to the idea that this system influences how we relate to the meanings of those words.

I’m sympathetic with Noam Chomsky’s idea that syntax and semantics are separable disciplines, and the syntax of pre-literate people may or may not have carried meaningful content, but, the fact that the structures have a determinate ​visual ​ form may contribute to the use of language in reification.

Waldron writes, “these parallel processes of the reification of object and subject constitute the main target of the Buddhist (and particularly the Yogācāra) critique of ordinary, worldly consciousness. On the one hand, we impute the actual existence of apparently external objects, transforming them

from immediate experiences into abstract objects which putatively possess inherent power and worth, constituting them within our culturally mediated, symbolic universe,” (Waldron, 2, 2003). If a transformation of consciousness into ​“worldly consciousness” ​ happened within the last 6000 years in virtue of

the invention of writing, the Genesis 1 narrative (which, as I read it, is about the emergence of self-consciousness) may be read symbolically not as a standard reification story, where God speaks the world into nominal existence, but rather, as emphasizing that only the ​spoken ​ truth can express the real.

“By distancing the word from the plenum of existence, from a holistic context made up of mostly non-verbal elements, writing enforces verbal precision of a sort unavailable in oral cultures. Context always controls the meaning of a word. In oral utterance, the context always includes much more than words, so that less of the total, precise meaning conveyed by words need rest in the words themselves,” (Ong, 39, 1985).

References

Barrett, ​Emotions as Social Reality Lusthaus, ​What is and Isn’t Yogācāra Ong, ​Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought Tomasello, ​Cultural Origins of Human Cognition Waldron, ​Buddhist Unconscious

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