fiRST REFLECTIONS
Introduction to the Nature of the Mind
Three kinds of mentally projected phenomena are constantly experienced by sentient beings because they believe that these projections are real. One projection is quite familiar. It is called the fully ripened body, or fully ripened corporeal existence, referring not only to· the physical form, but also to the whole world in which sentient beings take rebirth. This world of corporeal existence, which is experienced as a whole environment (with landscape, mountains, etc.), is called fully ripened because it is the ripening of karmic accumulation that gives rise to such an experience. Another projection is that which is perceived as the dreamer within the dream. During the dream, one believes one has a body that actually experiences the various episodes conceptualized while in the dream state. This dream body is the result of the constant and endless tendency of believing in a self. In believing, "I am," and in constantly clinging to external appearance as being something other than self, one clings to duality. The dream body, or the body of habitual tendency, is but a second type of mental manifestation. Third, there is the mental body that arises after death. One's familiar form, or body of karmic fruition, is composed of five elements which, at the time of death, dissolve into one another. Finally, the residue of this dissolution again dissolves into a base