The Mind Illuminated: A Complete Meditation Guide Integrating Buddhist Wisdom and Brain Science

by Culadasa (John Yates)

The Discriminating Mind The sensory minds don’t project every sense-percept they generate into consciousness, but those they do become available to the discriminating mind. It assimilates that information, further processing these sense-percepts and transforming them into more complex mental representations—in other words, into perceptions.14 For example the visual mind will project a collection of sense-percepts into consciousness as, say, an image of a rapidly moving, black-and-red thing, or an even more specific image, such as a black-and-red bird flying by. The discriminating mind takes that and creates more elaborate representations of this simple concept by combining it with memories, previous sense-percepts and other stored information, and even things from our imagination. The image of a black and red bird thus becomes transformed into the specific conceptual object: “red-winged blackbird.” The original sense-percepts may have been accompanied by a hedonic feeling of pleasure at the gracefulness of the shape and the combination of black and red. The discriminating mind might then add its own emotional overtones, such as an experience of “happiness” at seeing and correctly identifying such a beautiful bird.