AH thesis: Section 4.11, pp.76-77

The mental factors, the relations that bind consciousness to its object, were introduced in section 4.7. Like the aggregates, the mental factors provide a lens through which to consider conscious experience. The first of the omnipresent mental factors, contact, is a process which has two dimensions: cause and effect. As a cause, contact represents the coming together of an object, a sense and the potential for awareness. As an effect, it represents the harmony that arises between these three components. Contact, therefore, does not require any property of sense, object or awareness as cause or as effect, rather, “it is a property of the processes by which they interact, in other words, an emergent property” (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991, p.119). Varela, Thompson and Rosch (1991, p.119) argue that by understanding contact to be both cause and effect, early Buddhism was describing in different terms the logic of self-reference and the notion of circular causality, or feedback and feedforward, that form the basis of the scientific concept of emergence. Contact is an example of emergence applied at a relatively local level whereas, in the concept of codependent origination, emergence is applied at a more global level. This conceptual equivalence alone lends considerable merit to the scientific enterprise of understanding experience through the logic of emergence. As both cause and effect, contact is also always part of action within the chain of causality.

The second mental factor, feeling, was discussed in section 4.7 as the second aggregate and as one of the links in the chain of causality. Feelings have no independent ontological status and are considered separately from reactions to them. The karma the reactions to feelings perpetuate is considered neutral. Through mindful awareness practice, feelings can be observed and experienced as such. Discernment, the third mental factor, was discussed as the third aggregate in section 4.7. It usually emerges simultaneously with feeling. Through mindfulness, the practitioner can perceive passion, aggression and ignoring (discernment) as no more than emergent impulses which need not necessitate action. These impulses can be transformed into wisdom and compassion.

The fourth mental factor, intention, was discussed in section 4.7 as the means by which volitional actions continue to manifest in later links of the chain of co-arising. By becoming aware of intentions, however, the practitioner can break the links of the chain at craving and recreate intentions. The last mental factor, attention, creates focus for the direction of intention, it holds consciousness to its object. All five of the mental factors, then, are forms of emergent relation.

The five omnipresent mental factors in tandem with alternatively present mental factors combine within consciousness to create the character of any moment of experience (see section 4.7).

The mental factors present at a given moment interact with each other such that the quality of each factor as well as the resultant consciousness is an emergent. Ego-self, then, is the historical pattern among moment-to-moment emergent formations. To make use of a scientific metaphor, we could say that such traces (karma) are one’s experiential ontogeny (including but not restricted to learning) … On an even larger scale, karma also expresses phylogeny, for it conditions experience through the accumulated and collective history of our species. (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991, p.121)

This analysis suggests that, at the level of a single moment, consciousness can be seen as emergent. Similarly, the analysis of causality suggests that the experience of coherence is emergent. Both consciousness and coherence can be explained without an ego-self or any independent ontological entity.