Mind and Mental Events

Our FBA Podcast this week is called Mind and Mental Events by Subhuti.

These five omnipresent mental events (sarvatragas) constitute the basic mechanics of the mind; if you are conscious, they are present.

1. Feeling-tone (vedana)

2. Recognition (or conceptualisation) (samjna)

3. Directionality of mind (cetana)

4. Contact (sparsa)

5. Egocentric demanding (manaskara)

From this we can conclude that:

1. All our experience is feeling-toned. The more conscious we are of this, the less we will react and be driven by our likes and dislikes.

2. We are always interpreting our experience with varying degrees of accuracy and depth. We can make an ongoing effort to raise the level of our experience.

3. The mind is always moving towards things. We can use cetana skilfully to move in the direction of Going for Refuge by practising the precepts etc. But we need to want to go in that direction.

This talk is part of the series Mind and Mental Events (Subhuti 2001).