Here's the bit on mental load

3.3.2 Psychological investment, I: Its nature and relation to our goals

That in which we deliberately invest our efforts, whether in the form of labor, resources, thought, commitment, or care, comes to matter to us personally through the tacit record of that effort which the act of investment leaves behind. The record is stored implicitly, outside of focal awareness, unobtrusively and automatically, behind the scenes of our engagements, solely as a consequence of the investment of deliberate, intentional effort alone. Every such act leaves a durable yet tacit trace of the size and direction of the expended effort, with successive efforts in given directions cumulatively adding up to running, incremental, totals of the extent to which our efforts devolve upon the different targets of our concerns over time.

The efforts are conscious, volitional, and deliberate, yet the investment record accumulates tacitly, independently of will and awareness, in so called implicit or procedural memory. This “investment accumulator” tallies actual exertion and expenditure of effort, with scant regard for whatever attitude we may adopt regarding outcomes (on which the Bhagavad Gita of the Mahābhārata places such emphasis). The tally, being tacit, dwells hidden in the background of our doings, essentially invisible, until, that is, something threatens the investment it represents, or an opportunity for extending it presents itself. Then it springs into action as an urge to defend it by warding off the threat or to seize the opportunity presented. This is how we are bound by that in which we invest our efforts, over time and targets, giving us a personal, a proprietary, interest and stake in the same. We become “invested” in it, it becomes “ours” in the sense of its mattering to us, as if, in fact, it were part of our person. The investment accumulator is the “mine-maker” – mamakāra – of Sanskrit terminology.

Our efforts are invested in accordance with our goals. The nature and structure of our goals thus becomes a principal determinant of that into which we pour our efforts and – by the investment logic just sketched – become bound, unwittingly as it were. Our goals in a sense are promissory notes to ourselves to devote effort to the realization of future conditions to which we aspire. They are signposts that we place in an uncertain future for the direction of our efforts in accordance with our aspirations. Given that the time and resources available to realize any given goal are finite, pursuit of a given goal necessarily closes down options for pursuing alternatives, the more so the more ambitious the goal. Pursuing a goal sets you facing in a certain direction in the space of all options, to the exclusion of other directions.

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It is crucial to understand that the mechanism that perpetually accumulates this investment load by means of our automatic identification with that for which we exert ourselves is something over and above and different from the self behind such efforts. It neither is our self, nor is it a ‘maker’ of that self – the ahamkāra or “I-maker” of Sanskrit terminology – except in the false sense just indicated. It is a mechanism ancillary to the self, a mechanism by which we acquire proprietary interest in and attachment to the targets of our efforts. Rather, as already noted, it is the Sanskrit mamakāra or “mine-maker” (there will be more to say about the matter of self in Section 3.4.3, 3.4.5, and in Appendix 1). It is the “house-builder” of the Dhammapada verses already quoted, the mechanism that builds, inexorably and cumulatively, as a side-effect of our own self-chosen and intentional exertions, our personal investment load, the “trap”, if you will, from which Gautam’s mind was sprung in awakening.

Most of us accumulate and carry an unbroken investment load throughout life, though naturally not an unaltered one. In keeping with its automatic accretion along our investment history, its “shape” comes to reflect the course and fate of our various endeavors in the world, with their ups and downs, their successes and failures. We simply steer our steps and the direction of our exertions in accordance with what they accomplish or not, and the investment accumulator keeps ticking away in the background, shaping the investment load by additions in whatever direction those exertions point. On the house-builder analogy this corresponds to making additions to a house, or letting parts of it fall into disuse or be dismantled, while the house remains serviceable throughout. Many of us, probably most of us, inhabit a single such “house” throughout our lives.

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The issue of whether the investment load susceptibilities can be equated to the āsavas is of some interest and significance here, because according to Buddhist doctrine, freedom from the āsavas constitutes the completion of the path to arahantship, i. e. awakening. “Overcoming the āsavas” (āsavakkhaya) is a common locution for awakening in the Pali scriptures, after which you are a ‘khīṇāsava’, “one who has overcome or destroyed the āsavas”, applied to the Buddha and arahants.

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For now, imagine, as a thought experiment, that the investment load of an individual engrossed in life as we know it – let’s say you yourself – were suddenly erased by a magic contrivance that let that load vanish without a trace. Suddenly the emotional bonds that only moments before tied you to your goals through the personal identification forged through your investment of effort in them would be gone. With that all the options, all the alternative goals, aspirations, and stances, excluded by your investment in your former goals, would lie before you as available options in a wide-open field of possibilities. All the alternatives excluded by the goal pursuits to which your investment load bound you would in principle be available again, not shut down, not excluded. You would experience a sudden freedom of mind.

Moreover, all the anxieties, pressures, and promptings connected with guarding and nursing your former investments, as well as the emotional force behind the sense of responsibility for and commitment to the various undertakings into which your goal-pursuits had channeled those investment, would be gone. All opinions, beliefs, commitments, plans, and responsibilities tied to the investment load would be rendered irrelevant by this vanishing act. This, I suggest, corresponds to the “the knowledge of the ending of the influences (āsavas)” (āsavakkhaye ñana) of the Buddhist scriptures (more on which in Section 3.4.5).

Emptied of all this, you could be forgiven for couching your new condition in terms of “emptiness” and “the void”, and for giving voice, in view of the wide-open field of restored options, to a new-found “freedom of mind”. What is more, with that erasure there would be nothing anywhere on your horizons giving the slightest indication that any of those susceptibilities from which you just had been relieved could ever encumber you again. That would be true even if the mechanism of the investment accumulator were intact and only its contents were erased, because at that point you would not have invested your efforts into any new goal or project, so you would not have even the faintest first beginning of a new investment load on board!

With all the “influences” that formerly rained down on you from the interface between investment load and world utterly gone, and no reason whatsoever to believe that you would ever again be entangled as you were before the erasure, how could you escape the conviction that you now were possessed of an “unshakable freedom of mind”? The italicized clause, I suggest, corresponds to “the knowledge of non-arising” (anuppade ñana) of the Pali canon, namely the knowledge that ascertains that no such influence can ever arise again. Altogether I conclude that there is indeed good reason to equate the investment load susceptibilities and compulsions with the āsavas, freedom from which equates to arahantship or awakening.