Chapter 6: Inside our minds – our dreams

 

The sum and substance of our lives is that we live inside our minds and are essentially trapped inside our own creation. Since our lives are defined by our experiences and because our experiences are played inside our minds, let us now turn our attention inwards.

Dreams are possibly the most powerful tools to understand our minds and hence it is but natural that we investigate this phenomenon first in our quest to understanding the working of our minds.

We all know that dream is a process that happens only in the sleeping state. We also know that in the sleeping state, all our sensory systems are shut down. Hence, we can safely assume that in the dream state none of our sensory organs are working. We don’t interact with any of the external objects, yet we are able to feel many of the experiences associated with the waking state while dreaming.

The dream process involves activating some of the stored experiences (codes) without any external stimuli pouring in through the sensory organs. The process invokes many of the experience producing circuits without any external stimuli. If it happens during the waking state, then we call the phenomenon as hallucination but if it happens during the sleeping state then the word reserved for it is dream. Hallucinations happen due to the automatic triggering of the experience producing circuits in the waking state while dreams happen due to automatic triggering of the same circuits in the sleeping state.

The important point to note here is that it is the same experience producing circuits in our brains that gives us the experience associated with external objects in the waking state, the experience of hallucination without any interactions with external objects also in the waking state and the experience of dreams, where we don’t interact with any external objects. One will therefore not be wrong to club all the three scenarios under one heading. Modern neuroscience likes to club it into the heading of hallucination while Vedantic philosophy clubs it under the heading of dream. This is a shocking perspective and hence needs some pondering over in the next two paragraphs.

Let us conceive of a scenario wherein we can create an advanced virtual reality environment where one can not only visualise the 3D perspectives but also associate the sensations of smell, sound and touch to those perspectives through new age electronic interfaces. Such an environment is possible to create with today’s technology. If we immerse ourselves into such a virtual reality environment, it will be impossible to say whether we are in a real world interacting with real objects or in a VR world interacting with controlled stimuli. We will be both awake and dreaming simultaneously.

One can also induce hallucinations by injecting synthetic drugs or by consuming natural hallucinogens. The hallucinogens create an altered state of the mind where one may be awake but experience a dream like reality.

Thus, we see that the states of waking and sleeping can be clubbed into a single state called dream. Our lives are one continuous dream, interspersed with deep sleep which is also known as the dreamless sleep.

Now that we have a grip on our dream state, let us analyse the dreamless sleep. Let us start with the question of what we feel in our dreamless sleep.

We feel nothing during our dreamless sleep, no sensations, and no experiences, absolutely nothing. It is as if the world vanishes in front of our eyes. In the dreamless sleep, the experience producing circuits are not triggered, the stored codes of experiences are not invoked, and we settle down into a state of nothingness. Once we wake up from the dreamless sleep, we somehow seem to know that we had a dreamless sleep. We can remember the last set of experiences (while awake or dreaming) that we had before we drifted into the dreamless sleep and then after waking up, we record the fresh set of experiences felt again. Our minds can understand this gap in time when there was no experience, from the two sets of experience data separated over time. Whatever maybe the underlying mechanism, our brains have evolved a way to understand this state of no-experience. We experience this state of no-experience, every time we fall into a dreamless sleep. Deep sleep is not a void of experiences, but it is an experience of the void. It is also an experience in our arsenal of experiences.

Using the analogy of set theory, if we think of all our experiences as elements of a universal set, then what we experience in the dreamless sleep of no-experience is the null element of this set.

To conclude, our lives are a constant stream of experiences played in our minds. Our waking and dreaming states can be clubbed into a single state of dream, while the dreamless sleep is one where we get the experience of no-experience.

Chapter 5: What about our bodies

 

Our interactions with the external world are identified and stored as a collection of experiences (codes). The experiences do not show the true nature of the reality of the universe. Our sensory perceptions, which do not capture the true reality of the external objects are however, good enough for us to navigate in the world that we live in, survive and procreate. This is all that is there as far as the external world is concerned. But what about our bodies?

Like external objects the cells, tissues and organs in our bodies send stimulus to our brains which are also stored as specific experiences. Though we cannot experience vision, smell or taste for entities inside our bodies, yet we have other types of sensations that our peculiar to our bodies. The sensation of hunger is unique for our bodies. Same is true with the experience of thirst. The sensation of pain, however, is a common experience between the external universe and the internal world of our bodies. Though we could categorise the sensations and the corresponding experiences as that associated with external objects or those internal to our bodies, yet they all fall under the larger universe of our experiences. The process by which sensations gets created may differ between the outside world and our internal bodies but there is no difference in the structure of the sensory experiences whether originating outside our bodies or inside it. The same principal that holds true for external objects, also holds true for the sensory experiences originating from within our bodies, i.e., drive towards the good experiences (eat when feeling hungry) and avoid the bad experiences e.g., pain.

From the perspective of these experiences therefore there is no difference between our bodies and the external universe. Our brain perceives them as same though we have been able to identify and label each of the experiences and know whether they originate from within or outside our bodies. We can label different experiences based on their points of origin and the objects associated with them.

What about our brains? Surely the brain is a more complex piece of our biological system, but it too is same as any other parts of our bodies in the sense that it too sends sensory stimulus which are then stored as an experience in our memories. Don’t believe me … think of headaches. Hence, from the realm of our universe of experience, the body with all its parts, including the brain, together with every relevant object in the universe that our bodies interact with is one continuous entity. The definition of our outside world does not start from our skins outwards but from our internal organs outwards.

The pertinent question to ask now is where the external world starts and our internal world ends. A property of this demarcation would be the boundary that demarcates the place where our experiences are played with the place that sends sensations and stimulus for creating the experiences.

All our experiences are created and played in our minds. Hence, the boundary that we are thinking off will be between our minds and our bodies. Thus, our minds are a separate entity which hosts our world of experiences while the rest of our bodies and objects outside it forms a separate group.

It is quite heretical to think that there is no difference between our bodies and the objects in the external world. One obvious objection would be that our experience universe takes actions to preserve our bodies but not of external objects. How is it then that we don’t do anything to preserve our nails or hair. To the contrary we spend a lot of time getting our hair trimmed and our nails cut. We happily do the above activities because we don’t get any bad experience in letting go of unwanted body parts. Try doing that with some other part of the body and the associated pain will not allow us to do so. Our experience universe does not always take actions to preserve our bodies, in fact, many a times our experience universe takes actions contrary to preserving our bodies. Think of the scenario wherein a person has developed a tumour in his body which will be fatal. The person’s experience universe fights tooth and nail with the doctor to avoid surgery that will cure the disease. The fear of pain associated with surgery is so intense that as part of the medical procedure, one must be anaesthetised before the life saving surgery can be performed. In this example our experience universe was trying to avoid the bad experience of pain at the cost of our lives !

Our bodies move away from pain whether created internally or externally. The process of moving away from the pain producing experience may differ, taking us to a doctor for an internal injury or simply moving away from a path of a moving stone thrown at us. Our experience universe is only interested in avoiding the bad experience of pain.

Also, if we think deeper then we will realise that it is quite appropriate to think this way. The entities that create the external objects (like molecules, atoms, subatomic particles and so on) also creates our own bodies. They are subjected to the same laws of nature and behave the same way as any other material object in the universe. It is the mind, however, that is a strange place. It is here where the dance of experience is played out.

To conclude, from the point of view of our world of experiences, our bodies, through appearing to be a part of us (and often the only thing that we think as us) are a part of the external universe.