Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. A film-frame analogy sits at the heart of this 12-minute session: Geshe Pema Tsering explains how the mind’s rapid succession of individual moments creates the illusion of one continuous experience, just as separate frames produce seamless motion on screen. He first establishes that what feels like a single unified mind is actually a stream of distinct mental events — sixty-four can arise in a finger-snap. He then introduces emptiness through the image of objects as reflections: things appear real, but realized beings (aryas) recognize appearances as reflections lacking inherent existence, while ordinary beings mistake them for solid reality. The session closes by pointing toward practice — not slowing one’s body but stilling the conceptualizing mind until individual moments of awareness can be clearly perceived.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 18 OCR 2005 04 28.mp3
UUID: 4581b6e0-f2bc-498f-9775-0e53fc5cc9a8
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: Ornament for Clear Realisations (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2005-04-28
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 11.9 minutes
Words: ~1,075
Uh-huh. Uh-huh. So Okay. So so Geshe-la said there’s many different types of minds. Yeah?
It’s plural in Tibetan, and it’s defined as being a subject that has an object. Yeah? And you experience at least sixty four minds in the click of a finger. Alright? So he said for example, there’s like minds that focus on visual objects, minds that have physical tactile experiences, minds that have are accompanying minds.
Yeah? All sorts of different minds. Minds, minds, minds, minds all the time. So Geshe-la said, if you are looking ahead at something and you’re focused on it and then you squeeze your arm, you can feel the squeezing of the arm. So that’s one mind feeling the squeezing of the arm, but you don’t even notice that your your vision doesn’t seem like it’s interrupted because there’s so many minds happening so close together that you don’t even notice that you’re flicking from one to the other because it’s so fast.
So every single instance of mind has an object. Yeah. Yeah. I I do. I think that this odd idea of minds is a bit confusing.
Hang on. They are like reflections. His guess is that they are like reflections. But Like Yeah. Uh-huh.
Uh-huh. Okay. So guess to say we have all sorts of different experiences. Right? We see things.
We hear things. We experience suffering. We experience happiness. And that feels as if there’s one person or one mind experiencing that. There’s one mind.
We only have one mind. Yeah? But if we start investigating and we start chopping up the continuum continuum? You know that one? Continuum of our mind?
Continuum. Keeps going, going, going, going, going, going. Yeah? Then we start seeing that in as smaller we get, the smaller we get that there’s like in less than a moment, there is just one experience followed by another experience followed by another experience. So each of those individual very, very, small experiences in time are said to be a mind.
No. Ramification. No. No. Ramification is an English word.
But not that. No. Can try continuum. Yeah. Yeah.
Continuum. Make a Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So one moment of mind gives rise to another moment of mind.
So we experience all sorts of things. Object Uh-huh. Yes. In this whole world has a wow. This object has a wow.
This object has a wow. This object In Tibetan, it does not in English. You’d in in in Tibetan, it does, but there’s oh, no. It doesn’t oh, god. Do you know what I’m talking about?
Kind of, I think. I said subject, but, you know, but object is a Yes. That’s why I use That’s what Geshe-la said. Okay. Yeah.
So it’s a reflection. Yeah. Yes. Geshe-la said yes. More objects are reflections of the subject.
Okay. Okay. Geshe-la said the reason that he said it was like a reflection, yeah, is because reflections aren’t real. Alright? They look like they’re there, but they’re not.
Yeah? So what we experience is our mind, yeah, perceiving something as being real when it’s not. So the things that we see are like a reflection because our mind is labeling them as something, but they don’t actually exist. So we can actually see reflections as not having inherent existence. We if we see a reflection, then we understand that’s not totally real.
But when we experience our environments, we don’t see it as being not real. We see it as being real, and we’re mistaking something that is a reflection for something that isn’t. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. So we the way that we perceive things is said to be seeming reality or conventional reality.
Yeah? It’s not the way it is. It’s the way we perceive it. But hang on. We mistake that for being real.
Right? Aryas, this appears to them, yeah, but they recognize that it’s not real. So there’s a difference between the way we perceive things and the way beings who realize emptiness have. For us, things arise and we think it’s real. For them, things arise and they recognize they’re not being real.
Level of understanding. But you there’s the mind thing’s tricky. Uh-uh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.
Uh-huh. Of course. So we because we have this mistake. There’s all these things happening, like, in a constant continuum, one after another after another. And there’s things that come together, causes and conditions come together, and then we label those as something.
Because we have this thing that’s called mistake of ignorance. Yeah? And so we miss we’ve made a mistake. Our mind doesn’t recognize things properly. So we perceive things as being real when they’re all just like a continuum of things.
It’s not there’s nothing real there. And so we can we can remedy that mistake, you know, but the way that they appear to us now is as actually a mistake. Okay. So, Here, you know how a movie works. Yeah?
And you have lots of different little frames, and you play it and it looks like it’s just continually happening. That’s the same as our mind. Right? So we experience one moment of mind, the next moment of mind, like this. But because it’s so fast, we don’t recognize that there’s all individual moments of mind, we see it all as being, as as being continuous just like a movie.
Right? So one moment of mind gives rise to the next moment of mind, like one frame gives rise to the next moment of frame, but it all looks the same. It looks as if it’s one continuous thing to us, but it’s actually many, many different pictures. Uh-uh. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Uh-huh. But we have to it’s not so much I Geshe-la said not walking slowly, not talking slowly, but having a very slow mind, not thinking.
Not conceptualizing. First of all, have to conceptualize because we have to develop an understanding of this idea of there being a a continuation of moments of mind after another after another. Yeah? And if we keep analyzing that and we meditate on that a lot. Yeah?
Then we develop a clear realization. Oh, one of these dudes of that, and then we can actually perceive each moment of mind. So it would be like the film. Mhmm. So we can achieve that understanding.
Great. No. Very difficult, but it’s possible. Now are you okay? He said.