[Excerpts from an interview with Anthony Morgan, originally published as “Finding Refuge” in the Spring 2023 edition of THE PHILOSOPHER]

Anthony Morgan (AM): Working with the body is central to your teachings, so I was hoping you could start by saying a few things about how a material body interacts with a seemingly immaterial mind, also known as the mind-body problem

Ajahn Sucitto (AS): This would depend on what we mean by “mind” and what we mean by “body”! Since Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am,” we have tended to take the mind to be the thinker, but in Buddhism thinking is only an aspect of mind and does not encompass all that mind is. For a start, thinking is not the experience that gets liberated, and, frustratingly for intellectuals, nibbana is non-conceivable so the final goal of Buddhism is not something you can get a satisfactory idea or a theory around. In fact, many of the Buddha’s teachings are conceptually rather paradoxical, something that we find especially emphasised in the Zen tradition. The Buddha himself frequently points to the dangers of conceiving, highlighting how the world is in a trap of nama (naming and conceiving), and sees release from concepts as central to the liberation that he was teaching. If we pause to think about what this may mean not to conceive, it is pretty mind-blowing! It can be very difficult to even imagine what this may be like.

So, the thinking mind certainly has its relevance, but is by no means the total sum of mind or even the aspect of mind that could be liberated. Thinking is an activity of mind, and the organ of this is called mano, but the broader (and in my opinion much more useful) word used to describe mind is citta which can be translated as “mind” or “heart” or “awareness”. Citta is that which is liberated, although it is worth looking at what exactly this might mean. For there is not an entity that is liberated but the very configuration of citta is freed from all configurations! It’s rather like the question of what a fist is like when you open your hand. It’s not that it’s not a fist – its just that you never even knew what an open hand was.

Another way I like to think of citta is as the experience of “I” before “am”, an “I” that has no predicate or object: a sense of complete subjectivity with no object or image. I think that many people with even basic meditation experience will momentarily touch into this sense that there is somebody or something here that is behind the thinking, something that knows it is thinking. We can say what it feels like or what it does, but we can’t find it. We could say, then, that citta is the subject behind any of the adjectives or descriptions that happen. But as a result of avijjā (or ignorance), this is generally not what is seen. What is more clearly seen are all the activities into which citta gets organized or configured, and these activities are of two fundamental qualities.

The first quality is receptive activity through which citta feels, perceives, is affected, is touched, shivers, spins, sinks, and so on. And the other quality of citta is responsive activity: it reacts and responds, either carefully or carelessly, either with mindfulness or without. So citta is both affective and responsive, and both of these elements result from the citta being activated. We might say that one of the results, even the final result, of Buddhist mind training is the ceasing of this activity. To the uninitiated, this may sound like death or numbness, but it is actually acute (even unimaginable) sensitivity and exquisite peacefulness. Within this, the citta has no object and is not conceiving or formulating anything. Another way of trying to explain this is that the ear hears sounds but by itself does not like or dislike the sound: this is what the mind does. What, then, is the quality of hearing as distinct from the heard? Is it acute? Is it attentive? Mind training is a process of developing citta to the point at which one is aware of the “mindingness” of things rather than the objects, to the point at which the objects themselves fade in significance, and all that is left is a supreme “minding” which is no activity other than to be awake.

Turning to body, we can look at it from two perspectives. Firstly, it is a big hunk of meat and bones and hair that can be perceived as old or young, attractive or unattractive, and so on. This body can be studied externally or can be cut open and inspected from the inside. It grows old, falls ill, and it dies. But there is another way of experiencing the body other than as an object, and this is revealed when we consider the vitality of the body. It feels alive, numb, tense, relaxed, and so on. What are these sensations? We can hardly just reduce them to activation of body tissues, so, broadly speaking, we could call it nervous energy. Or we might call it bodily intelligence: this is not a conceptual intelligence, but a capacity to be affected and respond just as the mind does. Consider a toddler learning to balance itself. This is not something that can be figured out as an idea in the head; rather, the body learns how to balance itself. In this way, it is very similar to citta: it is both affective and responsive, and has an intelligence to it.

There are plenty of everyday examples that show how these two aspects – body and mind – are correlative. If we feel angry in our minds, we feel heated and aroused in our bodies. If we feel grief or depression, our chest can feel hollow, and the body can feel very heavy and sluggish. So, we can all acknowledge that our emotions register in our body, and that in this sense body is not distinct from mental activation. The problem for the average person, however, is that they do not know how to disengage the body from mental signals. Because of the compulsive activation of the thinking mind with its correlative effect upon the body, there is a cumulative impact upon the body which takes the form of stress, agitation, pressure, and so on. One central element of meditation is to work on this intimate relationship between mind and body, and it aims to reverse the often deeply entrenched negative feedback loops between the thinking mind and the feeling body. Meditation especially enhances the parasympathetic system as we are attuning wisely with the aim of understanding how stress in this system can be alleviated

[…] Meditation allows us to contemplate the responses that are coming up in our minds in relation to a set of events. Cultivation of mindfulness (sati) allows us to bring things to mind in a sustained way such that we can investigate everything from the thinking process to the quality of attention and intention itself. This is refined kamma, the kamma of meditation, and is certainly not something we see in the animal kingdom, nor is it something that we can assume we as humans will possess simply by virtue of being human; rather it is an ability that must be cultivated and trained.

For an untrained person, a thought arises and they feel that they have to do something about it: either they have to work it out and resolve it or try and push it away and distract themselves from it. There are strong driven energies that push them towards a rather limited range of chosen options. Through meditation, we develop the ability simply to hold a thought in mind, which then allows us to investigate it or to take it apart or to quieten it down. There is no requirement to agree with or disagree with the thought, to block it or follow it; rather we can look into it and deconstruct it. This process frees us from a lot of personal bias which so often determines our actions, and opens up greater freedom of action simply because we are no longer acting as a result of panic or drives or compulsions or habits or assumptions.

But this is not the end of the story. For while this training allows for a far greater choice of action because the mind is acquiring greater skills in how to respond, it also allows us to lessen the kinds of intentions that lead to action as we learn how to remain quiet and take our time. Through this the mind can learn to open up new dimensions that we could not access or even conceive of when it was being busy and active. This is the deactivated citta that is experienced as sublimely peaceful and pleasant. Through accessing this, we begin to cultivate freedom from kamma itself as the mind is no longer rehashing old stuff, regurgitating its old assumptions and programs, and generating new comments and tactics. Meditation involves recognizing that a thought or feeling has arisen, and neither suppressing it nor following it but deconstructing it. How can I open to this? How can I relax around it? How can I let it arise and pass through without snagging on it? Through this process, it will begin to deconstruct itself, and this is like a long-running conversation in our mind that is finally allowed to come to an end. This is the cessation of kamma and a glimpse of nibbana, which is the ultimate goal of Buddhist practice.

Link: https://ajahnsucitto.org/articles/embodied-awareness/