I'm numbing myself silly these days with YouTube, DVDs, iTunes, South Park, movie reviews and blogs to avoid facing myself and my past and studying Mandarin.

If I spent more time in meditative and reflective mode, action might more likely be forthcoming. I know that since whenever I do encounter my own truths in meditative and reflective mode, my course of action is not only obvious, but inviting. It's the proverbial right thing to do.

I definitely think I have become one of those people who have more worth in dying than in staying alive. And it's not a bad thing. Unless you make it into a self-pity party, that is. With only one person at the party.

Time in meditative mode recently is spent separating the different types of mind we have. Central to Tibetan Buddhist philosophy is the idea that the upper, conscious layers of mind, what we perceive as reality, is superficial and constructed, and distinct from subtler, subconscious layers of mind, which constitute the actual ground of our being and what actually is reality, maybe even a divine reality, but at least beyond what we think of as reality, which is constantly changing and whatever we try to grasp onto eventually disappears.

Even the concept of the human species will one day be gone. To me that's a simple, pure fact and to think otherwise is arrogance at the most unabashed and deluded level.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead has a wonderful section on how elusive the subtle mind is by pointing out all the different names various sects have given to it – clear light, ground of being, nature of reality, true unadulterated reality, etc., but they are all inadequate.

Tibetan Buddhism, according to Sogyal Rinpoche, whose "Tibetan Book of Living and Dying" I'm currently re-reading, has separate terms for the outer mind and inner mind. Sem refers to the conscious mind, and rigpa refers to the universal ground of reality mind. All Buddhists of all sects, no matter what they call it – they all have their own set of words to try to impart it – strive to understand or encounter and recognize rigpa. To do so is enlightenment.

Just that description was very helpful to me to focus on the aggregate of my senses combining to form my thoughts and perception of reality.

Visual information is given to our mind in a cone in front of us, and I read somewhere our field of vision is about 60 degrees in all directions (I personally think my peripheral vision is better than that – it helps me from getting hit by buses while riding). Vision establishes what physical reality looks like. Whatever light bounces off of. And there's so much information our brains automatically distinguish between what is important information and what is not.

Aural information comes from 360 degrees around us, and isn't necessarily limited by physical structures such as walls. We can hear a source of sound behind us or out on the street. Various sounds may be superseded by louder sounds or may be dampened by physical structures.

Olfactory information is limited by distance and the strength of the odor given off. It has to suffuse the air around us. And interestingly, smells are strongly associated with memory and pleasure/displeasure. Whenever we notice a smell, there is at least a slight judgment of pleasure or displeasure, rarely is it neutral.

Taste information requires direct contact with the sense organ. Even an inch away from our mouth and we don't have the actual information to contribute to our perception of reality. And aside from special taste stimulation, i.e. food, we are constantly tasting . . . spit.

Likewise, tactile information also requires direct contact, and is in a way most profound because it provides a sense of our being. A physical manifestation of our otherwise elusive identity. Mentally we can concentrate on all parts of the skin sense organ – from our elbows to the soles of our feet to our balls or the tips of our boobs – and feel we are here.

And all this aggregate information combines to form a basis for our thoughts or our mind. And yet there still is the inner mind.

I think of the inner mind as like the unseen latticework for everything – our minds, perception, reality. It's the water that surrounds the fish if the fish were unaware of what water is. I don't know if a fish is unaware of water, I'm not a fish, it's just an analogy, geez.

It can be analogized by dark matter and dark energy, which current theory suggests comprise the vast majority of the universe, but we can't detect it nor do we have any direct evidence of its existence. I'm actually wary of the state of cosmology these days, mind you.

The things scientists are claiming as knowledge, I don't know, I think in 500 years, it will all be overturned – including possibly dark matter and dark energy. They make observations which make 100% of what they know and then make a conclusion and create a theory to support it, but that 100% of what they know ignores the unknown percentage of what they don't know, what they haven't or can't observe, which theoretically could dilute that "knowledge" to less than 1%. Yo'm sayin'?

Sogyal Rinpoche gave a description of rigpa that I liked, saying it is too close to us to detect. Like our faces are too close to us for our eyes to see. It's the ground of all reality, it is all around us, recognizing it equates to attaining enlightenment, so much so that enlightened ones have recognized that we are all already enlightened, but because of the dominance of sem, our perceptual mind that we insist is reality, we miss it.