I recently had a the pleasure to spend some time with Rob Nairn where he explained a little bit of the tibetan buddhist theory of mind. This set me thinking and I've come up with an interesting speculation on how this maps to some recent theories on how our brains work.My understanding from what Rob explained is that our consciousness consists of 8 parts. Part 1 to 5 is our senses, vision, hearing, touch (and its internal variants), smell and taste. Part 6 is our pattern matching mind, the part capable of logical thoughts, planning and modeling. Part 8 is a constant random thought/idea generator, a fire pool made from memories, reflections of the inputs from part 1 to 6, habitual patterns and even genetic pre-dispositions. Part 7 is the self, the seat of identity, the little part that controls focus and decides what is "me" and what isn't "me".To complete the picture, there is an element, a critical element, that isn't part of normal mind consciousness at all: awareness. Awareness is non-local, non personalized and has the potential to be present, almost as if looking on from a different plane of reference, during all the interactions of the conscious parts.

A typical thought in the mind of the experienced meditator will arise from part 8, be reflected, sliced and diced in part 6 and fade away, unharassed by part 7. What happens in the normal tussle of life is that part 7 latches on to a thought on its way from 8 to 6 and identifies with it, makes it its own or rejects it and with that pulls in all the available resources and manage to drown out awareness very quickly.

Meditation trains the mind to let the toughts go their way and not attach to them in a positive or negative way with the result that awareness flourishes. Long term awareness brings with it insight, balance and a link to higher purposes (in NLP terms, think outcomes).

In "The Quantum Brain" Jeffrey Satinover made a beautiful case for different, connected, similar levels of computation in the brain. Drawing on the work of Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff he lays out the possibility of our neural brain being intrinsically linked to another layer of computation at the microtubule level that has a direct interaction with quantum level events.

My wild speculation is that most of the elements of our neural brain maps to the buddhist levels 1 to 6, level 8 to the microtubule level. Level 7 is a tricky one. In some ways it is the core of our human state of being. Where is level 7? Looking at the work of James Austin in "Zen and the Brain" a significant part of the role must be spread amongst various parts of the mid brain yet looking at the buddhist explanations the (currently undescribed) interface between the microtubule level and the neural level is integrally linked.

That leaves awareness, non-local, all pervasive, valuable yet possible to drown out by the other activity, to map to the quantum events that can be amplified through the system. Taking cue from the buddhist model, awareness is not per-se part of consciousness. It is the background against which the play of consciousness is performed.