Ocean for Two

It is important to remember that this phenomenal world is the appearance of a reality that we can never quite grasp. As humans we need to live with distinctions to bring order to otherwise chaotic lives. So we personalize the concept of “mind” and attempt to frame it within our conceptual boundaries/notions. In other fields of participation in this cosmic game we call life, quite foreign modes of activity might be the order of the day. Activity that we would call mental. In the case of plant life, what might be appearing in the phenomenal world may just be the surface appearance, like seaweed appearing on the top of the ocean. While a deeper reality of the host may hold the greater part of its wisdom and knowledge.

I remember a story I heard once about highly evolved spiritual beings who were well past the need of human manifestation. But occasionally they wished to take a vacation from their exalted realms and so they would take on a life as a tree. This wasn’t your garden-variety street tree, but perhaps a hundred year plus type of tree. No wonder that some ancient trees were thought to be sacred. The columns in temples of ancient Greece and Egypt were stylized trees, and the first places where rites were carried out were in groves of scared trees.

I think that the human mind is a good development of the intellectual thinking mind. But beyond this one type of mind manifestation it would not surprise me to find many more possible verities.

On a more personal note, I find the common philosophical approach to the reality of the physical world to be at variance with what my own experience has indicated to me. In other words the philosophy that there is this one great solid physical world that is the reality our self is experiencing is rather simplistic and stifled.

My own experience has shown “me” that this so-called physical world is more like a projection that each person is making for themselves (a cooperative endeavor undertaken by all the participants “here”). Each of us projects for ourselves our own world, along with a body of senses to perceive this data, which we then earnestly take to be a solid physical world. And the relevant data is shared by all (“intuitively”) so that each of our versions of the projection agrees with another. The projections have no more actuality than a movie projected at the cinema.

The personality projecting this environment is far greater than the ego, which it develops within the projection as a “version” of itself in the physical embodiment. Ergo: since I do not believe that it is the physical body which “has the mind”, but the greater “mind” which has the physical body; then it is not quite correct to say that plants have a mind, because it is the greater reality manifesting itself as a plant.

However, the plant lacks the physical envelop which focuses the functions of the mind into an easily recognized form. And, as to whether this greater reality has what we could call mind, it is in this greater reality that that, which we would call the mind of the plant, has its abode.

All this should be taken in the context that I am not implying that these so called greater personalities are of the nature of permanent eternal souls. And please bear in mind that this is just a brief thumbnail sketch of what is taking place.

I would not be surprised if most of this sketch does not agree with accepted Buddhist philosophy. And it is not my purpose to convince anyone that my findings are the truth since I am far more interested in seeing others discover the truth for themselves.