Conceptual Minds and Mind Training

We were talking before about conceptual and nonconceptual mind, and I thought I’d relate this a little bit to thought training and other aspects of our communication with others. Often in our relationships with people what we get is from our senses: we hear their voice, we see the color and shape of their face. In Non-violent Communication (NVC) language, that is what you would describe as the bare sensory perception. But as we’ve seen in our Dharma practice and also as we’ve seen in our NVC study, we don’t leave it with the bare perception; we create a story about what all that sensory data means. That story creating gets us into a lot of trouble, and all that story creating is our conceptualizations. 

It’s conceptual consciousness and then it’s conceptualizations, which really has a kind of a negative implication. Because we hear the voice in a certain way and then we think, “That means they are mad at me,” “That means they don’t like me,” “That means they think I’m stupid.” Is any of that information in the sound of somebody’s voice? No. The raw sense data is just the sound of the voice. That’s what our auditory consciousness is hearing. All that other stuff is conception going on in our mental consciousness. It is not present there in the person’s voice. But often we can’t discriminate between our sense consciousness and our mental consciousness. They’re actually quite obviously different when you stop and think about it, but in our day-to-day interactions we aren’t aware of that, and we think their voice is saying, “I can’t stand you,” and “You’re stupid,” and “What you’re saying is ridiculous,” and “Go away.” None of that is there.

In NVC, what we’re trying to do when we are just describing the sense data of the experience, is to go back to what our eyes were seeing, what our ears were hearing, and take the mental conceptual consciousness out of the picture. We’ve seen in our NVC studies how hard that is to do. It’s so hard, because we’re so convinced that our concepts are externally existent inside the object, and they aren’t. This is one thing we have to be really aware of and practice with. 

This is also what we’re working with when we practice thought training. Let’s take an example of somebody criticizing us. Again, it’s just the sound of the voice and whatever, but we get angry in response to it because we’ve made up this story: “They think I’m stupid, and it’s unfair that they say this to me. And I didn’t make this mistake. They made it, and now they’re blaming me,” and dada, dada, dada. And then we get really carried away with our story which we use to rationalize our anger.

When we’re doing thought training practice, we’re replacing that false conceptualization with an accurate Dharma concept, or Dharma understanding, of what’s actually happening. In other words: Why did I get criticized?  It’s because in the past I’ve criticized others, so I’ve created some kind of negative karma. So, this event that’s happening to me is nothing more than a ripening of my own karma. That understating is a conceptual understanding, but it’s a correct conception. When we practice it in thought training it alleviates our anger because we see that that’s a correct understanding of the situation. Whereas when we think,  “They think I’m this,” and “They’re taking advantage,” and “Therefore, I should act this way and that way” it’s totally a misconception. 

In some of our Buddhist practice what we are doing is replacing an incorrect conception with a correct one. In doing so, it really helps us emotionally—to relieve our emotional involvement in the thing. It’s similar to thinking about the ugly aspect of an object to help with sexual attachment. It’s because our mind usually conceptualizes the raw data of the color and shape of someone’s body and makes this whole story about it, which is not there in the raw visual data that we’re getting. 

That beauty, that attraction, that desirability—nothing of that is there in the color and shape. That’s all coming from our conceptual mental consciousness. So then to remedy that, we replace it with a different understanding—looking at the same object and seeing that actually it’s not so attractive after all. It’s basically a pee and poop factory, with a little bit of sweat and earwax and eye stuff coming out as well. It’s nothing that attractive that we have to get so turned on about and crazy about. So, there, too, we’re replacing an incorrect conceptualization with a correct conceptual understanding of the conventional nature of the object. 

I just thought I would relate some of this to what we’re doing in our practice and also what we’re doing in NVC.