The Conversation Continues... (Agnosticism)

by David Turell , Wednesday, December 14, 2022, 05:12 (708 days ago) @ xeno6696

M att: Actually I plan on writing a book titled "Where did our Mind go?" which is an exploration attempting to locate precisely when "The West" stopped treating the mind as one of the senses I mean short answer is probably the Scottish Enlightenment and David Hume, but it was taken for granted by the Greeks.

That is a great point. The mind is one of our senses.

The inspiration from that book came directly from Ajahn Brahm. About a year ago I listened to a seminar where he pointed that fact out: The Greeks and the Buddha both had access to some very similar ideas about the world, and Aristotle explicitly talked about the mind as a sense object. There's a really good tiny lecture book called "Aristotle's Divine Intellect" that goes into a bit more detail on this topic. At any rate, we lose something important in the west by not treating the mind as a sense. How else can you try and think about the process of imagination or worldbuilding without exploring the fact that we can use our mind to feed inputs to the five senses? Reading a novel is mind-to-mind communication, sensory experience from person to person. If an author can make you smell and taste the air of a place then we have to consider the mind as a sense object that can feed all the others.

From what you have told us, the teachings you have studied have finally given you a path to sorting out the reasons for your personal reactions and ego defense mechanisms. Your teacher is your therapist, an anser for a question I raised earlier. I appreciate having you point out to me the use of the mind as a sense organ. Without question.