We have the very strong habit, to cling to the conditioned world. Therefore, it is necessary to gain clarity on the characteristics of the material world and on those of the mind. Only then, we can understand that mind is no thing and how mind and matter are related to each other. At first, this is a logical analysis which should be transformed into an experience through meditation.

Things or matter have the characteristics of being inanimate and substantial. Mind on the other hand has the characteristics of being aware and clear. Mind can know, experience, and realize without mixing the individual moments of experiencing. It has neither colour, nor weight, nor measures, nor anything substantial. On the general level of conventions, we have to distinguish clearly between the animate and the inanimate world. All living beings, as e.g. humans and animals, are part of the animate world. Plants or stones, which have no consciousness, no experiencing of their own, belong to the inanimate world. Actually, plants react to physical, chemical, or magnetic stimuli, but they are not aware of this. Otherwise, you would kill lots of living beings, every time you plucked a bunch of flowers. This is not the case.

According to Buddha’s explanations on the dependent occurrence of phenomena, there are always direct causes that lead to the respective effects. In addition, influencing or concurring conditions participate indirectly. In the outside world e.g. a sprout grows from a seed, and the concurring conditions in this process are the five elements of earth, water,  fire or heat, air or wind, and space. The same is true for our personality: The direct causes are the individual moments of consciousness in our mind. They form an unending chain (stream of mind) throughout the day, the whole life, the intermediate state (between death and rebirth) as well as through all following lifetimes. The concurring conditions are the elements, from which our body is composed. Our body’s solidity is the earth element, the liquids are the water element, the heat is the fire element, our breath is the wind element, and the place for the organs is the element of space.

Consciousness permeates the body, whereby name and form (cf. The Five Aggregates) or mind and body come together. If you now examine any material part of a human, you work in the area of concurrent conditions. Whether you look at the genetic material of our parents, mind joins with at the moment of conception, or at the brain as the instrument of mind, they are all conditions for our existence. They are in fact important, but you must not confuse them with the true cause, which is the stream of aware and clear experiencing, our mind.

This division into an inanimate and an animate world, into mind and body, though, is only valid on a general level, as long as you have not realized the nature of mind and therefore also the nature of all phenomena. Buddha teaches, that there is no objective world, i.e. independently existing just by itself, for nobody would know about it. You can only talk of an object in relation to  a subject. What is experienced, always depends on the one who experiences it, the perceiving mind.

The characteristics of matter and mind are completely opposite. Therefore, they cannot form any cause-effect-relationship with each other, for cause and effect always have to be of the same kind. From a rice seed can only grow rice, not barley. This means, that either everything has to be matter or everything has to be mind, to enable any connection between them. If everything was matter (as materialists believe), mind’s characteristics, especially experiencing and cognition, would not occur. Since we experience things, though, only the second possibility is left: Mind has to be the basis for everything.

Due to our habits, matter appears to us as different from mind. In fact, though, matter is only a projection of our mind. We believe something independent existed, where we actually only experience the free play of our mind. Right now, we think the projection of our day is real, and at night we ascribe the same reality to our dreams. The impressions in the mirror of our mind are constantly changing. Since they are changing, they have no independent existence. In opposition to this, mind as the basis of our world is not impermanent, what experiences behind the pictures is no thing and therefore can never be lost or harmed.
You can be perfectly fearless, for its nature is like space.