A single undated unsigned page in Ven. Ñāṇamoli's writing.
The trouble about discussing mind, I find (I here refer to discussions on this subject fra me e me) is that (a) they always ramify fantastically and (b) one always finds that one has not been talking about mind (either mano or viññāṇa) but only about nāmarūpa. The Committe called (?) Buddhaghosa Thera make (Fowler allows a pl. vb. with a collective n.) a parallel most grave error in their Vis. Mag. 14th Chapter when they set out to describe the viññāṇakkhandha second, and next to the rūpakkhandha and before vedanā, saññā and saṅkhārā—that is why the last two are so thin there, because it is these two that B. describes under viññāṇa. This is quite contrary to the Suttas, which never change the order for the very reason that it is only after you have exhausted everything positive by the first four that viññāṇa remains (M. 140) (simply, perhaps, because one finds that when everything has been exhausted something seems still to remain and nothing can be found) and that is indescribable except on the basis of that due to which it arises (M. 38) or on the basis of nāmarūpa (M. 109) which it is not and, unlike the other four, it is the only infiniteness (ānañca—se the four āruppas) among them and so phenomenologically it is the pure negative (the four āruppas are four Absolute Negations). From this you may safely infer that I quite agree with your earlier "glass-shelves" theory with the reservation that an infinitely extensive (or an infinite series or hierarchy of infinitely extensive) glass shelve(s) is (are) indistinguishable from nothing except dialectically. This latter I regard as important. If the pañcakkhandhā are assumed (upādiṇṇā) then the assumption must, by its nature, be a dialectic assumption, but since fundamentally, dialectic (d. = indecision = fear = pain) is unpleasant, one side is compulsively closed by tanhā and avijjā, and the other side left open becomes the object of faith. Here a thought occurs to me: you know my view of the necessary organic relation of faith-ignorance (saddhā-avijjā) in the puthujjana, where faith supplements the deficiency of knowledge truncated by ignorance and makes action (kamma) not only possible but inescapable: well, my point here is this, that, given faith's intimacy with ignorance (take this in the worst sense if you like), it only functions well (as bonne foi) when ignored (what the psychologists would in their mythological jargon perhaps call "in the subconscious", which, translated, means "in behaviour patterns normally overlooked in the other" but subjectivelly it means "in pure unreflective action", I think). But in proportion as faith is brought up by reflexion into full ignorance-governed cognizance (knowledge of the limited kind that always must accompany the broken-up faith-ignorance ménage) it either dies and turns into honest doubt or lives on as mauvaise foi. I say "it dies and becomes doubt" because it is an easily verifiable fact that if one knows one is acting on faith alone one becomes inhibited and the action collapses (e.g. miracles, or Ogden and Richards' centipede). This, I take it, is because action is only an aspect—or a function—of faith and ignorance (when analyzed, it appears as paṭiccasamuppāda and nirodha and then vanish in themselves). The first three paths are necessarily paradoxical, and represent the opening of fundamental dialectics (of which the basic ones are consciousness/non-consciousness and being/non-being). It is these that indicate nirodha, I take it. The sotāpanna's aveccapasāda as "confidence due to undergoing" is properly faith which is no more than faith (M. 47 [97?]) and, owing to loss of a measure of ignorance, his knowledge (ñāna) is no more knowledge as the simple opposite of ignorance. Confidence and paññā are now both one and two until the arahat's resolution terminates the absurdity (see also M. 95).
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