| The Innocent Perception Newsletter | Thursday 20th June 2024 | The Mice in Our Mind – Introducing Jerry Dear all, One of our biggest problems is expressing thoughts through language, the most essential form of communication. Children and even adults, find it difficult to express the issues they carry in their heads and hearts. Before we can solve any problem, we must first identify the nature of the situation and the cause. Human issues range from the individual to the societal, economic, governmental, environmental, global, and galactic levels. Buddha came up with an ingenious idea of rounding up those problems and their causes under the heading of the five components that make up human life known as the ‘Five Khandas’, as shown in this image.  |
| The five components comprise one part solid: the physical body, and four parts energetic: thoughts, memories, feelings and consciousness. I group these five components into the language familiar to the Western mind: body, mind and spirit. Under this topic, Buddha rounds up every single problem humans face from domestic to galactic, into mere sights, sounds, smells, tastes and textures, scientific terminologies we know as perceptions. I like to imagine each of these components as little mice which I call ‘Jerry’. So, Jerry, are the perceptions of all the problems we face daily in the form of sights, sounds, smells, tastes and textures. Upon perception, the external Jerry sprint through our sensory organs, our eyes, ears, nose, tongue and skin and then dematerialise into thoughts, memories and feelings or energetic Jerry. Jerry is the cause of the ‘monkey mind’, a familiar term to Western Buddhists; the difficulty of focusing during meditation due to the mind jumping from one thought to another. Human consciousness is an abstract concept so it helps personify it as our mental self. Our mental self is also our true self. If we observe closely, we can see that every problem we face is embedded in the form of thoughts, memories, and feelings. In other words, Jerry is the carrier of all our problems. With this analogy, it’s easy to visualise our mental self being bombarded by a whole army of Jerry.  Now, it’s easy to understand the first Noble Truth of Suffering or mental pain, and that Jerry is the root cause of all suffering, the second Noble Truth. These are the universal truths; they are not religious beliefs or dogma but rather simple logic. Buddha’s strategy is to identify the nature of humans’ problems and mental pain and delve right into the cause of all mental suffering: Jerry. So what’s the solution? That is to remove Jerry as best we can to gain mental and spiritual freedom which leads you to experience the Truth, Nirvana, God or Innocent Perception. The way to get rid of Jerry is meditation or bring your mental self back home practice (BMSBH). Best wishes, Supawan |