Humans eagerly travel all over the galaxy, now just as in ancient times, conquering worlds but never setting out to conquer themselves. They inquire without as if that would lead them within. But the Wise Investigator travels inward to get in and thereby discovers the entire world system out there as well. "Know thyself," the maxim implores. The path is available to every reader. But the lure of other earths, other green worlds is too alluring. "Ground Control to 'Major Dum Dum,' commencing countdown, engines on."The path is enumerated in lists are nearly useless without guidance and utterly pointless without practice. Astronauts, have a seat on the launchpad. Psychonauts, we're going in. There are 51 things to examine on the way.
51 Mental Events
Know Your Mind: No list of mental events can be exhaustive; nor are the boundary lines between them always fixed. Any classification of them is solely to provide a tool for spiritual practice, allowing one to give provisional labels to one's experience, thereby enabling one to transform one's life. This needs constantly to be borne in mind. As we have seen, the [defunct Hinayana Buddhist school of the] Sarvastivadins enumerate 46 mental events, while the Theravadins distinguish 52. But the Yogacarins, whose classification we will be following here, identify 51 different mental events, divided into six categories:- 5 omnipresent mental events;
- 5 object-determining mental events;
- 11 positive mental events;
- 6 basic emotions [primary negative mental events];
- 20 proximate emotions [secondary negative mental events];
- 4 variable mental events. More
Click for Red Ice Creations' Interactive Solar System; NASA art shows concepts for the Terrestrial Planet Finder, including a visible-light coronagraph that would have sought planets around distant stars, at left; and a formation-flying infrared interferometer for studying extrasolar planets in depth, at right (msnbc.com). Link-ShareExplainer: Six frontiers for alien life
