Except in obvious cases of mental illness, we normally proceed as if the mind is reasonably faithful representation of reality. Our habitual thought patterns of logic, cause-and-effect, linear time, personal identity, continuity of spatial location, etc., can use only information available to our minds (in their structure or as sensory data), but with that (presumably limited) information, we generally get on pretty well. We can even predict states of affairs about which we have no direct information, and, when more information becomes available, find that our predictions are correct. So we observe that the world often proceeds as our minds proceed, and this is confirmed pretty much every moment of our conscious lives. So why not say that the mind is a reasonably faithful representation of reality? If the mind had evolved some other way, we'd be poorly equipped to cope.
But based on this view, all we can really say is that our minds are a faithful representation of the aspects of reality with which we've had to cope for life to have brought us to this point. The rest is not really relevant to the adaptation of our minds, so why should it have participated in the processes that have shaped our minds? To say that mind is a reasonably faithful representation of reality requires restricting "reality" to those aspects of the universe that our minds might have occasion to represent. We don't know what the limits are on those aspects -- how could we? So mind faithfully representing reality is not at all obvious. Indeed, if mind were a faithful representation of reality, that would be a situation marvelous beyond our conception.
Or suppose instead that mind is
not a faithful representation of reality. In that case, we must accept that there's a great deal beyond mind, of which mind cannot even begin to conceive. Again, the situation is beyond our conception.
Indeed, even a mind that represents a tiny piece or a few gross aspects of reality might be more than we can conceptualize -- who can say what any conscious mind really is, or how it "serves up" a version of reality our experience of awareness, or in what that most intimate, immediate awareness consists?
I don't want to suggest what I believed for years: that consciousness must be in a class by itself as a special thing, leaving other things as ordinary. Just because we don't have a scientific description of consciousness doesn't necessarily make it more marvelous than the things we take for granted (usually with the assumption that we or somebody else has them under control). Every apparently ordinary thing appears to us as an aspect of awareness, and so participates in the same wonderful nature of mind and cannot ultimately be separated from it. What is that greenness when you see green? It arises when light of a certain wavelength reaches the eye, but what
is that vivid awareness of green?
On a related topic: unless you've seen things I can't conceive of, you've not seen consciousness without a brain involved. I used to think it would be a disappointing thing for consciousness to be dependent on the physical structure of the brain. Of course that's just a thought, and on a good day I could give it up to go take a bath. But really, what's wrong with the brain? Not pretty enough for the miracle? Too easily prone to damage, death, manipulation by electrodes and drugs? Linking precious consciousness to the body in that way may seem awkward, but why should consciousness be more precious than the body? Why should the two be separable? Where did this idea come from that what we think we understand is commonplace, and what we think we can't understand is miraculous? The Buddhist Heart Sutra says that consciousness is no different from emptiness; that is, consciousness has no special independent being of its own outside of the causes and conditions that give rise to it. I'm inclined to believe that. Why shouldn't those causes and conditions involve the body, as our experience on an ongoing basis reflects?
Indeed, what the Heart Sutra says about consciousness, it says about everything: "All dharmas are marked by emptiness." Buddhism has its own 12-part causal model of how consciousness arises, but I think evolution through natural selection would be a prime example of how everything that exists reflects the causes and conditions that give rise to it, and can't ultimately be separated from them, except as a convenient but ultimately pain-causing simplification (pain-causing because it is only convenient for a brief period before the flux supervenes). If you've ever lost anyone, even an earlier version of yourself, you've seen how consciousness passes. The wondrous aspect doesn't arise from where our mind came from or where it goes, but how it is right now, situated front and center in the world it reflects. The mind and the world as neither appreciably distinct nor demonstrably identical -- is that really a problem?
So I'd say that, whether you want to see mind as limited or not, there is no comprehensible, determined version of our life that is ultimately adequate to describe our experience of it.
That we know whatever we know seems rather wonderful, and is just one place to notice the wonder. There is no obvious limit to the occasions on which wonder can arise. Which is not to say that, from time to time, things can't get very difficult for a while.
