11 papers in the library · publishing 2018
July 27, 2018 Henry M. Vyner
Chapter 11 enlists the science of the stream of consciousness to describe the egoless state of mind that is generated by egoless self-awareness, and it also explains why it is a healthy state of mind. It establishes that one sense in which the egoless mind is a healthy mind is that it does not create the normal pathologies of the ego. More importantly though, the egoless mind is healthy because...
July 27, 2018 Henry M. Vyner
Lopon Tegchoke is a Bhutanese lama who lives and teaches in both Bhutan and Gangtok, the capital of Sikkim. This chapter presents a lengthy passage from one of our many interviews, and in this passage the Lopon describes one aspect of the egoless mind: the phenomenon that the Tibetans call suchness primordial wisdom. Lopon describes primordial wisdom as being a moment in which a person lets go...
July 27, 2018 Henry M. Vyner
One of the tenets of the prevailing paradigm of modern science is the belief that it is not possible to empirically study the phenomena that appear in the stream of consciousness. Chapter 5 shows that not only is it possible, but that it is already being done. The chapter begins by bringing into focus the inescapable truth that the events that occur in the stream of consciousness—our thoughts,...
July 27, 2018 Henry M. Vyner
Chapter 8 presents the sequence of discoveries that led to our understanding of how the egocentric mind works. It opens with a brief sketch of the century-long sequence of research findings that brought science to the understanding that genetic information is transmitted from one generation to the next by the macromolecule that we now call DNA. It then explains that an analogous sequence of...
July 27, 2018 Henry M. Vyner
There is much that we do not know about the stream of consciousness. We have no idea of whether or not the people who painted animals on the walls of the caves at Lascaux seventeen thousand years ago had a stream of consciousness. Or if the poet who wrote the Gilgamesh had a stream of consciousness. Contemporary philosophers of mind allege that we cannot even tell if another human being has a...
July 27, 2018 Henry M. Vyner
Chapter 2 introduces several of the subjects that will be covered by The Healthy Mind . It opens by reflecting on the fact that we have, as a species, long organized our individual lives and societies around the unexamined and mistaken assumption that the egocentric mind is a healthy mind. This is the healthy mind assumption. It then introduces the science of the phenomena that appear in the...
July 27, 2018 Henry M. Vyner
Chapter 10 begins with a Zen legend that explains that the human mind has two modes of self-awareness. It then describes egoless self-awareness and establishes that two modes of self-awareness create and define the differences between the egoless and egocentric states of mind. Chapter 10 also explains that one way to understand the difference between these two modes of awareness is that they...
July 27, 2018 Henry M. Vyner
The research presented in The Healthy Mind establishes that (1) the egoless mind is a healthy mind, (2) the egocentric mind is an unhealthy mind and (3) it is possible to empirically study the phenomena that appear in the stream of consciousness. Yet, given the prevailing scientific paradigm of the last century, our findings must be seen as the preliminary findings of a pilot study. Chapter 13...
July 27, 2018 Henry M. Vyner
Chapter 9 demonstrates that the egocentric mind is an unhealthy mind because the workings of the ego create a group of “normal pathologies” that cause anyone that has an ego to lead unhappy and inauthentic lives. The normal pathologies of the ego are (1) internal conflict, (2) moods, (3) loss of one’s true self and (4) the mind films and the existential ruts they create. The ubiquity of the...
July 27, 2018 Henry M. Vyner
Chapter 7 opens with a narrative description of the predation tactics of wolves as they hunt caribou, and establishes that the wolves and caribou are an example of the self-regulatory systems of which nature is composed. It then moves on to a broader exploration of how nature is a cascade of systems within systems, like Russian dolls. This analysis culminates in the insight that the human mind...
July 27, 2018 Henry M. Vyner
This chapter explains why and how this research on the healthy mind is being done with Tibetan lamas. It begins with a narrative account of a moment in the summer of 1994, when I was wondering alone through the Chang Tang—a virtually uninhabited and mountainous plateau in northern Tibet. One day, as I was trekking through the Chang Tang, a single lama on horseback materialized out of nowhere,...