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Abhidhamma Post 2
The mind is singular and digital without mixing.
The Theravada Abhidhamma says that no two minds can occurs at the same time. Before, I had related the sense doors not occurring at the same time. This is because consciousness happens in a singular approach. Each mind with a sense door is a single consciousness moment. If you love tasting a chocolate flavor, that is one moment. If you love looking at it, it is another and so forth with smelling and feeling it melt in your mouth, etc. They are all separate mind moments in serial.
Likewise the craving that occurs in the mind as a result.
In our modern society, we believe we have two forms of perception; analog and digital. As far as Abhidhamma is concerned, we could say that mind is somewhat digital. That is to say, it is there and then it is not there. According to Abhidhamma movement of perceived objects does not happen in the mind. A video relies on the same principle and is "Digital" as I am explaining it here.
These days, many people have seen a video editor and know that it is just a bunch of serial pictures to simulate movement. Previously, this was only seen in Science Museums. As you can see in your video editor, each picture is there for a brief moment and then it is not there, replaced by a new one. This is what I mean by digital. Analog is the opposite which shows continuous movement or continuous change. A cassette recording is analog.
When you draw a circle, this is analog. A computer does not draw a smoother circle on the screen. If you zoom in, you will only see dots.
So there is no mixing of mind. It is singular and digital. There is no anger mixed with giving. "Giving" is one thing and "Anger" is another. Below is a diagram of what happens when you give your ex-wife a Christmas gift who takes you to court all the time. Anger is represented by 'A' and Giving is represented by 'W' for wholesome consciousness. The same diagram could be made by giving with "Conceit," substituting 'A' with 'C'
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWWWWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
CCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCWWWWCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCC
The opposite can be said about compassionate killing. there is no such thing as compassionate killing. "Killing" is one mind moment and "Compassion" is another. Taking mind moments in this example we will use "Killing" as 'K' and "Compassion" as 'C'.
CCCCCCCCCCCCCCKKKKCCCCCCCCCCCCCCC
Here we can see that killing is surrounded by Compassion although you might only believe it is pure "Compassion."
In In Abhidhamma, there is no such thing as killing consciousness. It is categorized as generic, "Anger"
In Abhidhamma, compassion is usually associated with a samadhi consciousness and otherwise grouped into wholesome consciousness.
So really the chart would look like this:
WWWWWWWWWWAAAAWWWWWWWWWWWW
Mental Exercise
You can try to remember an event where you gave a gift to someone when you were not happy, or "Proud" of giving. Try to run this through your mind an replay it back in slow motion. If you do, you will start to see the difference of mind during the time of giving. If you do not see, you need to slow it down further. You should see each sub-movement happen in your mind's eye. As you see this, pay attention to the quality of your mind.
Hopefully you do not have experience with compassionate killing. However, you can imagine it in the same way as above. Imagine killing you pet dog because he has a really bad infection and will die etc. Do it with an axe. Play it out normal speed. Then take you mind and do an instant replay in slow motion. It is possible to do this. You will see that the mind changes the moment you intend to kill it and do so versus the "Why" or compassion that surrounds it.
This is only a mental exercise. Pease do not do the real thing!
A Note on Kamma
Kamma is similar to the word karma as you know it. Theravada uses this word exclusively to represent the energy created from thinking, speaking and actions. We have a separate word for the results of this energy (which can come back to us at a later time). If one were to look at the diagrams, one might say that compassionate killing will yield "good" kamma and giving surrounded by anger is a net loss. This would be somewhat true if you gave each mind a value of one. We learn this in basic seventh grade math, if not earlier. However, they are not equally weighted. Mind can be considered like putting your finger through the air filled with smoke. Speech can considered like running your finger through the water or sand in a desert. Lastly, action is considered like an engraving.
(modified by "S.N. Goenka"). So if we were to put together weighted averages for giving surrounded by anger, giving would yield an infinitely larger good kamma than that of the surrounding angry mind. Likewise, the mind effects the action as a preceding cause which would make it less valuable than a pure wholesome mind accompanied with knowledge. The same is true with Mercy killing. The Doer, will yield infinitely more bad kamma than the mind of compassion. However it will be less bad kamma than cold blooded murder or an angry action preceded by an angry mind. Never the less, mercy killing is still a big problem and should not be done. A bigger problem is when mercy killing is your livelihood. After so many times, you will not be any better off than a murderer.
It Is All An Illusion
As I have said before, I love optical illusions. The best ones are right in front of you right now. No, not the picture in this post, but your computer screen. There are only Pixels or dots on your screen. Red Green and Blue.
(Some are, CMK, all the same point to be made)
Open up your favorite photo in your favorite editor and zoom in to "Ridiculous Zoom" or "Ludicrous Zoon". Either one will show you that your photo is just a bunch of dots.
The purpose is to show you that although we see a big picture, there is no mixing, under the hood. and the same happens with the mind according to Abhidhamma.
The picture and the following quote was taken from:
http://designer-info.com/Writing/understanding_halftones.htm
"So why would you want to overlay halftone screens? The answer of course is colour. So far I've only talked about simulating grayscales but the real beauty of halftones is that they can easily be adapted to produce colour. The system is analogous to the screen pixel where 256 levels of red, green and blue lead to 16 million possible colours (256 x 256 x 256). With print the primaries are cyan, magenta and yellow. By overlaying angled halftone screens printed in these inks the offset halftone spots create a tiny rosette pattern that the eye again averages to produce the impression of a colour. This is the secret behind colour separation and all colour print."
Conclusion
So, I hope this makes some things clear for you about what happens in the mind According to Abhidhamma. It is actually more complicated than what I just told you because each sense door that is working all of the time (in succession), are doing work. For instance you need to "See" the dog, "Feel" the axe, move the axe etc. Likewise, these letters will occur billions if not trillions of times in a split second. But in general, this is what happens with the emotional mind.
And what is the coolest thing about all of this? It was taught in Ancient Buddhist Scriptures long long ago!
No animals were harmed during the making of this post, please be careful and do the same when you do the imagination experiment.
