Yin and Non-Conceptual Cognition

For hundreds of years, the mainstream (read: financially and socio-politically privileged) of modern science has assumed that "the mind" and its cognates – cognition, thought, mental activity, consciousness, etc. – is inside the head. That the mind, in short, is the brain. So, if we understand neural activity in the brain, we understand mind. There is no good evidence for this. There is plenty of bad evidence for this almost entirely unsupported hypothesis, but there is no good evidence for this idea. (If you're the academic, scholarly, or otherwise critical intellectual scientist type and want to review said evidence, you can download a PDF of the 2,500+ books and articles I studied in the process of coming to this conclusion; just click the button on the "Resources" page. It's all there! Check it out…if that's your sort of thing.)

This is not to say that the brain isn't involved in mind at all. Of course it is. But so is the rest of the nervous system. So is the gut. So is the heart. So are the feet, hands, ears, eyes, skin, lungs, stomach, reproductive organs, esophagus, and, well, you get the idea. Quite literally everything in the human body constitutes "the mind" and contributes significant influence on all manner of cognitive functions.

A massive amount of rapidly accumulating evidence from hundreds of scientific disciplines confirms what indigenous and traditional peoples have known for millennia: mind is not inside the head; we are inside mind. To reduce mind to the brain's neural activity is like reducing the act/event/phenomenon of driving to the chemical properties of a vehicle's fuel. It is impossible to understand driving – which involves the entire vehicle, plus laws of physics and aerodynamics, the road or surface driven upon, the weather, the driver, the particular engineering of any given vehicle, its speed, its purpose, traffic laws, the sociocultural, political, and legal dynamics of driving as a common, meaningful social activity, etc. – by looking only at the chemical components and function of gasoline. In like manner, it is impossible to understand mind/cognition by looking only at the brain. In fact, in this analogy to driving, the act/behavior/event/phenomenon of minding/cognizing is vastly more complex than driving a vehicle. Incalculably more complex. So, if it's absurd to feign understanding of driving by analyzing the fuel of a vehicle, it is a billion times more absurd to claim to understand mind/cognition by analyzing brain activity.

Here is a dictum to remember: anyone who claims to straightforwardly "understand" mind, cognition or consciousness obviously does not understand mind, cognition, or consciousness. Be wary of social media experts and influencers who pose as modern, scientistic, new age gurus, seemingly explaining anything and everything in human existence because they have some "objective" data on hand, developed by…who? Where? Why? What were their methods of data gathering? The theoretical framework of their study? Their funding source? Their methods of analysis, and interpretation of the data? Who reviewed the study? What is their history in research? Who taught them? What are the assumptions embedded in all these people's perspectives on what's right, wrong, valuable, and to be expected when studying mind/cognition/consciousness?

There's a peculiar paradox pervading the pursuit of "understanding" mind, cognition, and consciousness. Namely, the modern ideal of a purely "objective" description of a phenomenon by a detached, neutral observer is irrelevant because incompatible with a scientific study of mind. The modern sciences themselves have provided the evidence of this! The more linear, materialistic, physicalist, objective, and quantitative studies are conducted to investigate mind/cognition, the more evidence is generated that mind/cognition cannot be fully explained through those forms of analysis, description, and symbolism. In other words, our linear, objective study of mind has shown that mind is characteristically non-linear, subjective (and "objective," in a way), anomalous, and all the other qualities chided by the dogma of positivism.

Hence, the vital importance of experiences like yin. In yin, we're exploring these vast realms of expansive, qualitative cognition through/as an experience of somatic sensation. We intentionally forego conceptual cognition and allow ourselves to feel, slowly, whatever we're experiencing in the present moment. This actually gives us the most direct, unadulterated experience of mind/cognition. There is no abstract, symbolic, conceptual, moral, or analytic interpretation of the somatic sensing; there is only the experience of continually feeling the multidimensional unfolding of somatic sensation as it flows through the living, sentient body in a state of expansiveness and sensitivity engendered by relative stillness and slowness. This is where, and how, we become more familiar with the 99% of cognition that's non-conceptual. It's all the other stuff. "Well, what is that stuff, Dave?" Oh gosh, I wish I could tell you. But that would all be conceptual, and thus not the thing at all! You'll have to experience it for yourself. Yin is one of many, many ways to do so. Just find what works for you; there's no one-size-fits-all approach.