His Holiness the Dalai Lama, like a wise teacher, explains this inner connection very figuratively:
"Knowing nature, or knowing agent… is called the mind, and it is immaterial… Cognitive acts have the nature of knowledge because of the basic nature of clarity, which underlies all cognitive acts. This is… the basic nature of the mind, clear light."
Imagine a pure, transparent crystal. It has clarity – you can see through it, as if through an unclouded spring. And at the same time, he is able to reflect light and images like a mirror – he has the ability to know. Our mind is like this crystal. It is clear in nature, which allows us to be aware of and perceive the world around us, like a window open to reality. And he has the ability to know – to see, to hear, to feel, to think, like a sensitive instrument that registers all impressions.
The Dalai Lama, like a poet, calls this basic nature of the mind "clear light." This is a very beautiful metaphor. Imagine a cloudless night sky strewn with stars. The sky itself is clear, and the stars are the objects of our cognition. The light emanating from the stars becomes visible through this clarity.
In the Buddhist tradition, different terms are used to refer to the mind, like different facets of the same gem. In Sanskrit, the word is citta, and in Tibetan, it is sems. These words encompass a wide range of mental activities, from the simplest sensations to the most complex intellectual processes.
In order to better understand how our minds work, Buddhist psychology, like a skilled cartographer, offers different classifications of mental activities. One of the main ones is the sevenfold division of types of perception, which is as if we divide all the ways in which our minds interact with the world into seven main categories.
Imagine how we perceive the world through our five senses: sight, like a window through which we see the colors of the world; hearing is like an instrument that catches the sounds of life; the sense of smell, like an invisible thread that connects us with aromas; Taste, like the palette of sensations on the tongue; and touch, like touching reality. These are five of the seven parts. The sixth part is our mental perception, like the inner voice that generates thoughts and ideas. The seventh part is our consciousness, like the conductor of an orchestra, combining all these types of perceptions into a single stream of experience.