WHAT MIND IS MADE OF
RECENTLY I’VE BEEN REREADING one of the oldest and most famous collections of wise sayings of the Buddha, the Dhammapada. These elegant verses begin by urging us to pay close attention to mind because, as the opening lines tell us: “All that we are is a product of our minds.”
The Buddha then explains neurotic suffering as following inevitably from confused thinking, just as an oxcart follows the steps of the ox pulling it. Even in our time—when talk of the brain’s neuroplasticity and cognitive stress reduction is heard more frequently than oxcart metaphors—this short statement of karmic cause and effect sounds plausible. As another old spiritual text says, “As you sow, so shall you reap.”
Yet, when we pause to consider these ancient words more closely, we wonder: how does this karmic patterning of mind and world actually work?
According to Buddhist teachings, all our experiences—of ourselves and others, of our bodies and minds—are profoundly shaped by our consciousness. Sometimes this tradition of Buddhist teachings and practices is called “consciousness matters,” since our state of consciousness is central to all our experiences. As writer Anaïs Nin said: “We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are.”
In our quest to delve
