ON TENDENCIES INHERENT FROM BIRTH

Pre-natal tendencies - mostly not directly observable - were long entirely denied by orthodox psychology, largely because the whole philosophy of sense empiricism itself built upon the unproven assumption that 'the mind is a blank tablet at birth'. However, this assumption is not warranted, even by what relevant experience there is. Studies in child psychology have at last confirmed that the mind is not a blank sheet at birth, for it is already affected in the womb. The senses of taste, smell and movement are already developed. For example, Jaques Mailer (Paris) found that the baby reacts to speech sounds when still in the womb and the amount of sucking activity correlates with speech heard, most especially with speech in the foetus' 'own' native tongue! So Rousseau's famous assumption that 'all men are born equal', taken literally, is not supported by facts.

Obviously, neither are bodily, material, social or other circumstances equal at birth. At best, men may be equal in having no worldly experience or knowledge. Yet even this is cast into doubt by a growing body of research evidence concerning reincarnational memories. It should be added that Rousseau's famous dictum was intended mainly to proclaim that all human beings are of equal value, which among other things implies that they should be treated as equals in society and before the law. The validity of this, however, rests primarily on the universal human values.

Comparative observation of children from early childhood is quite sufficient to show otherwise inexplicable and very considerable differences between them. Such differences of inherent temperament and latent capacities arise that explanation by genetic factors alone is still not possible and seems very unlikely to become so.

Perfect psychic health is evidently not naturally available to all, for not only may mental unbalances have hereditary causes but also be the effect of other karmic accretions carried over from one or more past lives. The Vedantic doctrine of reincarnation alone recognises and explains these karmic tendencies (vasanas) that are carried over from previous existence by non-observable processes unknown to science.²

The term 'karma' also represents a set of processes, some of which are manifested outwardly, and some more inwardly, in the life of the individual. Note that karma in this sense does not operate collectively. This is because groups and societies are in reality made up only of individuals. Though karma may appear to be 'shared' (say, in that a race or a society suffers very similar common fates for good or ill), this is only apparent, according to Vedantic sources. The birth of many individuals into the same situation or into lives that eventually share some striking similar aspect of fate is caused by each their individual pasts. Of course, they may also have had equally similar past lives in similar groups. Only in this derived sense can one speak of 'collective karma', because the theory of the doctrine requires that the causes are always individual acts.

The sets of processes or energies that manifest in the life of an individual may be described and grouped in many ways, such as in Eastern scriptures and in yogic and similar mystical traditions. For present purposes only most general manifestations of karmic processes are outlined.

One group of factors allegedly determined by the karma of previous existences are physique, status, feeling (pleasurable and/or painful) and the era of birth. The second group of karmas operate more on the desires and the mind and are those factors which tend to obscure the true nature of selfhood. These affect the person's ability to perceive objectively and without hindrances, to obtain knowledge of various sorts, to be free from worldly delusion (i.e. to have faith and easily recognise good conduct), to exercise autonomous will power and the non-selfish aspects of self. This second group of factors, when 'bad', tend to lead the self in wrong directions... i.e. those counter to spiritual development. When 'good', they tend towards right living, fulfilment and eventual self-realisation.

From the general nature of these inherent tendencies (vasanas) one can see how difficult it is for science to approach the matter methodically. The time scales, the number of events and phenomena to take into account, the objective non-observability of subjective phenomena involved and so forth put the undertaking well beyond the pale of what science has hitherto achieved. This does not mean that research on karma hypotheses cannot be done at all, nor does it invalidate the doctrine.

Only the Vedantic view of universal law - as karma - provides a rational account of early influences operative in the foetus and the new born child through the transmigration of souls, whereby certain features of the soul are conveyed from one life to another. This alone explains why, say, great musical and mathematical prodigies, who develop their own powers even before puberty, are born to persons having no such talents at all. Likewise, children who are of a low nature from the earliest times and develop into terrible evil-doers are observed sometimes to be born into families which are quite the opposite. The genetic explanation simply does not explain this. This is because the mind-identity is carried over from a previous lifetime, is already present in latent form in the womb and is in no way genetically influenced by the mind-qualities of the parents. The mind that 'contains' the particular tendencies of the soul at birth (vasanas) cannot be an amalgam of parts 'designed' by a brew of parental genes, because it is the integral unit of identity that is always experienced as such, one undivided mind-ego. It is not inherited, either in part from both parents or in full from either of them, nor is it a result of diverse physical inputs, because it pre-existed.

ON THE MIND'S CAPACITIES

Theories of mental capacities are mostly quite narrow in scope and have often worked like the fabled Procrustean bed3 when confronted with the vast multiplicity of qualitatively-different ways in which the mind operates and structures its materials or reality. A sketch of a few of the mind's prodigious abilities should indicate this:-

The mind's faculty of self-direction: The mind is autonomous, which is to say, it is 'self-monitoring' and also 'self-programming'. It monitors itself by reviewing its contents in any way we choose for it to do - such as isolating any nexus of events or cluster of facts or figments to combine them with any other. It becomes 'self-programming' in so far as the will directs it to set new aims, make new types of comparison or evaluation, which it achieves by some effortless mental fiat that is recognised as such by all who have any conceptually-active mentality. This autonomous self-reflexive faculty is actively used both in the practicalities of daily life as well as in concentrated, reflective thought. It can of course also be developed by individuals so inclined well beyond normal requirements by use of a range of techniques to produce sublime reaches of imagination and intellectual systems of great accuracy and applicability.

Memory and forgetting: The normal adult mind - say that of anyone who has accumulated about twenty years of experience - virtually has access to a truly enormous field of phenomena. The number of events, major and minor, experienced in conscious attention must run into millions even within the space of a year. The mind stores amazing amounts of visual data of places one has been, faces one has seen and so forth. Add to these all that has been acquired vicariously such as through conversations, reading, the visual media and so on. Though we 'forget' the mass of trivial experiences, it is sometimes demonstrated how the brain stores far more than we appreciate. Much that is not recallable explicitly is implicitly remembered, as is the skill involved in riding a bicycle. The same applies to many perceptions which are integrated into the workings of the mind without themselves being distinctly recallable.

To illustrate this, 'forgotten' trivia can reappear in a dream years after the event; rediscovery of some paper from one's youth 'reminds' of details which one had 'entirely forgotten' and yet which one nevertheless can again recall. The so-called 'engrammata' of the brain have been re-enlivened by the stimulation of an electrode during open-brain operations under hypnosis, whereupon tiny details of 'forgotten' past events occur to the patient as clearly as they had just occurred.

Forgetting is a necessary condition of the functioning of conscious attention and concentration of the mind in the present. Forgetting and recollection are themselves complex functions which work in a huge variety of ways and to all manner of degree. How the mind automatically regulates forgetting so that masses of trivia are removed from available memory is itself a marvel far beyond the grasp of neurological or similar researches.

The particular form of organisation or individual method of mental structuring of a mind and its manner of 'storing' experience can doubtless influence these functions greatly too. Though we do not normally notice it during its operation, the mind's ordering of memories is very involved. The processes, which are described by the phenomenological method and its essences extracted, can be illustrated by analogy.

For example, we may compare the mental operation of 'filing' and storing memories to that of a sorting machine with a series of filtering grills of successively smaller shapes and sizes. The 'largest' impression are held straight away at the top filter, so they are closest and most readily accessible to conscious recall. Less striking or relevant impressions fall through to be collected at the next filter and so on. At the deepest levels, the mind collects the residue of perceptions and thoughts which were discarded by our self-directing consciousness, perhaps as unpleasant or as not meriting our further attention. These may be sheer trivia from our perspective, but even the trivial can suddenly assume great importance under other conditions. Gradual increments of certain kinds of perception or idea can in time add up to a sum that rises more and more firmly towards awareness. This can also occur when, for whatever cause or reason, we redirect our attention and re-order our conscious interests, so that memories that previously were peripheral or seemed irrelevant assume new importance for us.

The analogy can be extended, without reasoning from analogy itself, to aid description of how a major mental 'shake-up' restructures perceived experience and our interpretation of its meaning etc. When we turn attention inwards to the layers of the mind in the interests of some degree of self-examination or of a deeper self-inquiry, the materials may be 're-filtered' using other shapes and sizes. A major restructuring of our 'mental apparatus' probably occurs relatively seldom in most people, though the rapidly changing nature of modern life and its new uncertainties, including social and cultural ruptures, must tend to increase such developments. Many external circumstances can trigger or effect changes, such as in cases of permanent job-loss, imprisonment, warfare, torture. Reorientation of the mind occurs in breakthroughs in thought, theraupeutic self-healing processes, conversion to new belief systems and/or religious faiths, achieving a lifetime aim, decisive emotional changes like falling in love and likewise upsets in personal relationships, major accidents, serious illnesses or bereavements.

Memory stores our experiences for us in such ways that we can later make the most unexpected leaps of association and comparative connections of all types of events. So many different 'chains of ideas' can be construed by the free-wheeling mind as to make comparison with even the most advance computers seem slow-witted.

There are many different stages in experience separating the extremes on the continuum of human personalities. The mind of the young and the old can be separated by many steps indeed, these 'stages' being impossible to identify at once both clearly and comprehensively. The variety of individual backgrounds, of community and of culture make valid empirically-based generalisations about such stages in human activities fraught with great uncertainties. Awareness of this fact, so often allowed to degenerate, should be kept firmly to the forefront when any partial psychological theory is being considered, and most particularly in the case of pathological theories.

Beyond what can be observed in outward behaviour too are the inward workings of the soul, where imagination, faith, intuition and revelation can vary very greatly from person to person. These inward factors have the latent force to transform experience radically, and to do so time and again. The evidence of this is available in the serious historical-biographical literature of world figures and in major psychological literature generally. This must be a main empirical source, particularly for students who are unable to meet a very wide variety of persons or to travel widely and live in cultures differing basically from their own.

Perception of Manifold Wholes (Gestalts): Consider how in a performance of an orchestral work a close listener with musical training can discern not only the separate notes of each chords, which instruments are playing which voices, which melodies, harmonic progressions and rhythms are being used, what quality the dynamics, relative accuracy of pitch, tonal qualities and individual performances have... and many another purely audible elements. One may also notice the acoustical properties of the locality, the influence of the conductor on the musicians and even how the performance compares with other performances or recordings one recalls at the time. Add to these all that is visible during such a performance too and one begins to appreciate how truly multi-faceted are the workings of the mind. In short, the perceptive materials that the mind can grasp as a whole is extremely rich. To abstract from these a handful of categories purporting to outline the limits of all the mind's possible operations is to obscure its great flexibility and variety.

THE PROGRAMMED MIND VS. DIRECTING AWARENESS

Many functions of the mind can be said to be 'programmed'. This means that the mind holds patterns of memory, of perception (ways of seeing, hearing or sensing things), of ways of relating things to each other or 'associating ideas'. When such patterns are learned thoroughly or at an early age, they may become largely 'pre-set', being habitual so that the mind can rely on such 'programs' 'unreflectingly', i.e. without re-analysing or reflecting over them. The person concerned may no longer be fully aware of such pre-set behavioural responses and they may be so ingrained that they cannot be altered or reconfigured without considerable difficulties.

That the human mind only competes with the speed of high-speed computers in very exceptional cases, yet no computer has or apparently can have access to the simultaneous array of methods of filing and cross-filing memory for relations of both the most obscure and most obvious sort that our minds can generate autonomously in accord with problems it itself poses on the basis of experience.

It has been said that the mind does not work 'digitally', in the laborious and strictly logical manner of a computer, but 'analogously'. That can be taken to mean that it can organise itself, file and find its memories and perceptions and evaluate them in any relationship, by manifold symbolic comparisons (eg. such as in analogies, parables, so-called 'lateral thinking' etc.). Further, the mind can make both subliminal-impulsive and consciously-intended decisions that are effected through bodily activity. No computer so far constructed or planned can approach a duplication of these aspects of mind.

It has been widely demonstrated that the mind (or more likely the brain) is perfected through training to react at the subliminal level. Subliminal responses are those that are achieved without reflecting over them. Examples of subliminal reaction patterns (even flexible or 'self-adjusting' patterns) that can be activated are the movements of the fingers - unperceived by the absorbed player - in playing on an instrument what one 'hears within', a completely new improvisation. Similarly, the flash reaction of a table-tennis player who 'unthinkingly' reaches a shot never before attempted, and so forth.

The computer can reproduce and employ any judgement with which it is properly programmed, but cannot itself make its own, new, entirely unprecedented judgements. Neither therefore can it 'evaluate' in the basic or original sense of intuitively choosing between right and wrong according to conscience. The mind, in its subliminal functioning, has been equated with a computer. If the mind is 'fed' with the appropriate picture (say, of oneself reaching for a ping-pong ball to return it) it will strive to produce what is envisaged for it. If, on the contrary, one feels 'I'm going to miss this ball', it will attempt to produce what was envisaged too. Therefore, by feeding it 'positive signals' it will tend to produce the imagined (and positively-desired result) and by giving it 'negative input' it will tend to produce the imagined (and feared) result. This has been shown to be a very effective insight in improving many types of performance involving a psychical element.

However, the above computer model of the mind - as a mere 'brain' that cannot distinguish of itself between 'positive' and 'negative' - or for that matter between 'good' and 'bad', 'virtue' and 'vice' - is highly misleading where the conscious mind itself is concerned. The capacity of moral discrimination is a function of the human mind. It evaluates. Not only does it, unlike the computer, distinguish physical pleasure from pain, but also supra-physical qualities such as positive and negative 'values'. The essential character of the human mind here becomes apparent.

The cardinal difference between the human mind and computers lies in motivation. Computers are non-self motivated for they have neither desires nor human purpose in seeking being, enlightenment and joy .

PURPOSE OF AND CONTROL OF THE MIND

The life of the mind and the experiences to which it gives rise may be seen as having some sort of value in itself. Many people live 'the life of the mind' as if it were merely for the continuous production of new ideas and the various cultural artefacts. The mind becomes an end in itself. Yet the intellect, however well-developed, does not give full inner satisfaction of the need to know and experience bliss. The mind is insatiable and cannot fully and satisfyingly enter into anything in its continuous playing with its ideas and memories.

So the question raises itself: 'what is the mind really for?' Scientific biologism sees it as an instrument of adjustment to a hostile environment where survival is easiest for the best mind. If this is true, then it is illogical to conceive of anything more sublime for civilisation than a working agreement to enable the strongest egos to rise to the top and have the best of life, and then that hopeless vision becomes the end of it.

As the mind develops through language, experience and generalisation, it generates various notions of happiness and how to attain it and constructs plans accordingly. The network of desires and mental-emotional attachments which make up and motivate the mind, if left to run free, only extend their range until we are lost amid a confusion of illusory aims of worldly fulfilments. This is the cause of its unsteadiness, curbing it being all-important in the further development of the psyche.

As we increasingly try to understand our environment - the world - through the mind, we usually get distracted by the great diversity of tastes and wants that the mind spins out. It attaches itself to objects of all kinds, physical and mental. Thus the mind tends repeatedly to run away with itself, like a maddened monkey, and to ride the all-consuming tiger of worldliness. For this reason, society has instituted many ways of attempting to subject the mind to discipline and control by such means as education, work and religion.

These are socialising influences and socialisation is brought about in some manner in every kind of group and organisation, from the family and other educative institutions to the institutions of society and government, whatever the prevailing culture or religion.

From the viewpoint of the acting individual, the inherently wavering and wandering mind is checked or changed gradually when we exercise the powers of discrimination of our intelligence and so practice self-control. This means increasing detachment, or rather non-attachment, which is a loosening of worldly bonds and preoccupation with the ego-feeling, including one's own possessions, body, needs and even one' own precious ideas etc. In this description of mind it can be seen that it will usually be irrelevant to single out one factor as 'the cause' of any mental phenomenon. The one-dimensional model of physical scientific causality - and the hypothetical-deductive method of isolating causes - are too narrow and inadequate before the mind-manifold.

Discussing the causes of the mind's health and morality, Aldous Huxley wrote, "We want to think that there is only one cause for every given phenomenon, therefore there is only one cure, there is not! This is the trouble: no phenomenon on the human level, which is a level of immense complexity, can ever have a single cause - we must always take at least half a dozen conspiring causal factors into consideration... The trouble with the Freudians is that they took only one set of factors into account, and of course their system doesn't work at all well." He also said, "...This is the sort of intellectual and scientific correlate to my feeling that the highest forms of art are those which impose harmony and order upon the greatest number of factors."⁴