Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 44-minute talk from a two-week retreat at Camp Cedar Glen near Julian, California in April 1977, Joseph Goldstein explores how conceptual conditioning obscures direct experience and creates unnecessary suffering. Opening with a Krishnamurti quote—that truth liberates rather than striving—he walks through how deeply ingrained mental constructs veil reality: the concept of national borders, the illusion of past and future as separate from the present moment, attachment to ownership and territorial space, fixed roles and identities. His central argument concerns the concept of self, the root ignorance underlying all conflict and separation. He then distinguishes what can be experienced directly without conceptual overlay: the physical elements (earth, air, fire, water as hardness, movement, heat, fluidity), consciousness as a rapidly arising and passing knowing faculty, mental factors like greed and hatred as impersonal mind-qualities, and freedom beyond the mind-body process. Throughout, Goldstein emphasizes settling back into direct perception rather than reaching for attainment, supported by stories from his time in India and a closing exchange on effort, love, and the relationship between concepts and lived experience. Pitched at serious meditation practitioners.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 06 CCG.mp3
UUID: 3ab5230c-e893-4047-bbfe-641a390cb743
Teacher: Joseph Goldstein
Collection: Camp Cedar Glen (Joseph Goldstein)
Date: 1977 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~4,931
This recording of Joseph Goldstein was made at a two week meditation retreat near Julian, California on April sixth nineteen seventy seven. There is a statement by Krishnamurti which has far reaching implications for an understanding of the Dharma in our practice. He said that it is the truth which liberates, not our efforts to be free. It is the truth which liberates, not our efforts to be free. The implications of that for what we’re doing, The understanding that freedom or liberation comes from seeing clearly rather than getting something.
It’s from a clear vision of how things are rather than working with a gaining idea or ambition. Liberation is not something out there that we have to strive for, rather it’s here that we have to see and understand. So when we can bring that kind of understanding to the practice, there’s a much greater sense of settling back into the moment rather than reaching out to gain or to get. Settling back into the moment in a simple and easy way. Might be difficult to understand why this settling back into the moment is so hard.
It’s such a simple thing. It’s being with what’s going on in the moment in the most natural way and yet as we’ve all experienced in our practice, for some reason the simplest thing of all is so difficult to do. Our minds have become so complicated and so complex. The simple act of seeing something or hearing or moving or attending to what’s going on in our bodies becomes a difficulty rather than being the natural way of our life. One of the reasons for the difficulty in seeing things simply and easily is the enormous amount of conceptual conditioning with which we’ve been burdened.
We’ve been conditioned by parents and teachers and school and friends and movies and newspapers and books, language itself. We carry this burden of an enormous conditioning of concept which makes seeing things simply rather difficult. Tonight, I’d like to talk about some of the concepts with which we’ve been very strongly conditioned and which present a veil or create a veil to which we see the world. First of these concepts, concept of place. The idea that on this earth, this planet, there are actually some kind of divisions, divisions of city, of state, of province, of country and that these borders, these boundaries have some reality other than as a mental construct in our minds.
People become so attached to the concept of my country or my nation. So much of the conflict in the world comes from attachment to that concept. As an illustration of how very much a concept it is. The story told to me by a Greek woman who was traveling from Greece to India. She was crossing a border between Iran and Russia.
She described this border crossing as being in a very open desert like country, nothing around for miles. There was a dry riverbed, no water in it at the time. And over the riverbed was this great iron bridge, half of which was painted green, half of which was painted red, and in the middle of the bridge was a great iron gate locked on both sides. Try to picture this in your mind. A vast area of empty land, very barren, in the middle of this stage set, there’s this big bridge, two colored locked in the middle.
She wanted to cross the border. Right? So the guards on one side had to call to the guards on the other side. At the same time they come to the middle, they put in their keys, they unlock the gates, she crossed the border. It’s like a Fellini movie.
And yet, if she hadn’t gone through that procedure and had not gotten the stamp in her passport, there would have been a lot of problems, a lot of troubles. The earth itself doesn’t create those boundaries, those divisions. In our minds, we’ve constructed a concept, invested a tremendous amount of reality into it, and have become very often quite attached. Another concept which influences to a great extent how we’re living our lives and that’s the concept of time, the concept of past, of future. Stop to consider for a moment what the past means.
Sitting and you have certain thoughts of memories, remembrances, recollections, we lump all of these thoughts together, this class of thoughts. We create the concept past to describe this particular class of thoughts and then somehow with some mental gymnastics throw that concept outside of us behind us someplace as if the past actually exists back there someplace. And yet how in fact do we actually experience past Only as a certain kind of thought in the present moment. But we become so attached to the concept and invest so much reality into it that we start dwelling in past thoughts, having regrets, worries, anxieties. What is the future?
Often we live our lives so future oriented. What is it? Again, we have a certain kind of thought, a certain class of thought of planning or imagining or fantasizing something, we label that class of thoughts which is happening in the moment, we label that future, and then again throw the concept out there someplace as if the future is some reality out there instead of seeing that what future is are thoughts just in the moment. There’s no way out of the present. To try and get a different sense of how you can understand time, imagine the present moment expanded infinitely.
But because of our attachment to the concept of past and future, we live our lives with this burden we carry around on our heads. We have a lot of anxiety about future, what we’re going to do, how we’re going to make money, all sorts of things. Forgetting for the most part that they’re just thoughts going through the mind right now. When you can see the conceptual nature of time and how it’s a construct which we’ve created, you can free yourself of this heavy burden, living much more fully in the moment, dealing with all those different kinds of thoughts, dealing with thoughts, memories, and reflections, and planning, and imagining, but being grounded in the present rather than being lost in the concept of future or past. Marcel Proust wrote a magnificent book called The Remembrance of Things Past, and in it he had a kind of satori, a kind of enlightenment about the nature of time.
And he saw that the past is included, is encompassed, exists just in the present. It’s likewise true of the future. We’re living past and future now. Concepts of place, of time. Another concept which we are conditioned into believing is true and it causes a lot of tension and conflict is the concept of ownership.
The idea that we can own something and we apply that concept of ownership to all sorts of things, to possessions, material things, to territory and space, to people, my wife, my husband, my children. The Buddha commented in one of his discourses that we don’t even own our own minds and bodies much less anything else. We’re in certain relationship to things. We’re in relationship to possessions. We’re in relationship to people, certain sense of proximity or nearness.
But to have the idea that we own it or possess it can be a problem. Mark Twain wrote an amusing and insightful story about a group of horse owners in Russia. They told the whole story from the point of view of the horses. And the horses didn’t know they were owned by anybody. They didn’t have that concept.
They just were going through their lives in relationship to men and women, some of whom were kind, some of whom were cruel, but never did they have the idea that they were owned. That’s that’s the idea of our own minds. Ownership of space, sometimes we become possessive of our space, our territory, tell a story of how that can be the cause of unnecessary suffering. When I came back from India the last time and I went to teach at Naropa Institute in Colorado and Naropa gave me this small one bedroom apartment in which to live. I was doing a lot of work then.
I was teaching the meditation part of Ram Dass’ class the first session. About like a thousand students, I was teaching many classes a day, working quite hard. Over that summer a lot of my friends from India started coming home. Didn’t quite know what to do with themselves, they didn’t want to get go to work yet. Let’s go visit Joseph in Boulder.
It’s a nice place to be in the summertime. So one by one, my friends started moving into my apartment. And before too long, there were about ten people living in this one bedroom apartment. And I was getting more and more uptight about it. But it was a problem for me because they were all very close friends.
I had a lot of love for them. I was really glad to be with them on the one hand and on the other I was working hard and I needed some space. What to do? One day in sitting practice, something just clicked in my mind about the situation And I gave up the idea that it was my apartment. And then it just became an apartment where all my friends and these people were crashing, myself included.
You know, like we had done for years before in India where it was no problem. The problem had been my idea that it was my apartment and my space. And as soon as I could give up that concept, it was fine. There was no problem at all. That’s an example of how our mind constructs often create problems which have nothing to do with the reality of the situation but rather with our idea of the reality.
Concepts of place, of time, of ownership, of space, another good one is the concept of role. We have certain images of ourselves as fulfilling a certain role. It can be the role of husband or wife, the role of lover, of teacher, of student, innumerable kinds of roles that we take upon ourselves and they’re all little boxes that we put ourselves into preventing a very easy and open relationship. The supreme example of attachment to the concept of role is another India story. Before leaving India you need a if you have been there a certain length of time, you need a tax clearance to prove that you haven’t been working and you don’t owe the government any money.
So I went to the government office to get my tax paper and there’s a man behind the desk and he says, as is very typical in India, please wait a little bit. Okay. I sit down. I was prepared for a day long wait at the office. I’m waiting and waiting.
Nothing’s happening. He’s sitting there. I’m sitting there. After about an hour of waiting, I said, what are we waiting for? He said, well, the tax forms are in the cabinet behind the desk, and the person who can get them is out.
Okay. Sit back, wait another hour or two. Now I ask them, where’s the key? Oh, it’s in the desk here. Why don’t you open the cabinet and take out the tax form?
It’s not my job. It wasn’t his job to open the cabinet. Attachment to role, attachment to concept. We do that to varying degrees very often. We get locked into a certain image, certain role.
And it causes tension, it causes difficulty. Concepts of place, of time, of ownership, of space, of role. There are so many. There’s an endless list of the concepts which we’ve created and through which we view the world. The biggest, the most central one in our lives, and the one that is the cause of our not being able to see things clearly.
It’s the root cause of ignorance, is our attachment to the concept of self. We’ve created the idea in our minds that there’s someone, some unchanging entity, some self behind this process of mind and body. Now when you look, when you observe, it’s pretty clear that things are changing. The body is born and it gets old and it dies, it doesn’t last And yet we have an attachment to the body as being self. This is who I am.
Just a little observation will indicate that this is not me. It’s just physical elements in a certain configuration which are going through their changes. It’s quite out of control. Can you tell your body not to get old? If it was you, if it was self, if you owned it, don’t get old.
Me, don’t hurt. It doesn’t follow your command that way because it’s the playing of elements following their own natural laws. Even more so than the body, the mind is not self. Thoughts come and go and feelings and emotions and moods and it’s a constant play of changing energies. There’s nothing there which lasts even for a moment.
And yet because of a very deep conditioning, we’ve created a concept that there’s someone behind it all to whom it’s all happening. And it’s that attachment to the concept of self, of I, of ego, that creates all the separation, all the division, all the conflict. To read something written by Kalu Rinpoche, It’s a very famous and respected Tibetan meditation master. You live in illusion and the appearance of things. There is a reality.
You are that reality. When you understand this, you will see that you are nothing, and being nothing, you are everything. That is all. We live in illusion and the appearance of things. We live in the world of concepts.
We take the concepts to be real. But there is a reality. That is, there is what we can experience directly free of concepts, free of ideas. We are that reality. When you understand this, you will see that you are nothing, that there is no one, no entity, no changeless self behind it all.
Being nothing, you are everything. We are the fullness and richness and wonder of all the changing experience. We’re not something apart from it to whom it’s happening. When you understand this, will see that you are nothing, and being nothing, you are everything. That is all.
There are the realities of our experience which can be seen and felt and heard directly free of concept, free of idea. Things that are not a construct of mind but the food, the matter of our experience. What are they? The first thing that can be experienced with direct perception, without the veil of ideas about it, are the material elements of our body in the physical world. You you can feel this whether you know the word for it or not, the sensation of hardness or softness can be experienced.
The words describing the physical elements are many different systems. You can describe it in terms of physics, of chemistry, in the traditional Buddhist and many of the ancient traditions, the Greeks, the physical elements were described as the four great elements earth, air, fire and water. There’s a certain use in that simplicity in that you can experience the body in the physical world. Earth elements means hardness or softness, that direct experience. Fire means heat or cold.
Air element means movement or vibration. Water means fluidity, cohesion. When you go outside, it’s very beautiful here, and you look around and you think that you see trees and hills and grass. You don’t see hills and trees and grass at all. What the eye sees is color.
Color in a certain form, light and dark. But we lay upon that direct experience of seeing color, we lay upon it a name. First, the name of the color and then the form. Oh, mountain. A tree.
You think you’re sitting on your cushion. You’re not sitting on your cushion at all. That’s an idea in your mind. Feel right now the experience of it. You don’t experience cushion.
You experience a certain firmness or a certain softness. To begin to bring the mind back to the level of experience, freeing it from the bondage of our words about it. Even more startling perhaps, looking about this room, you don’t see men and women. That’s another concept we’ve created. You see different forms and different shapes and different colors.
It’s extremely illuminating when the mind can settle into actually what’s happening in the moment. That’s the simplicity Krishnamurti talks about so often seeing things simply, seeing things as they are. The physical elements, that’s the first of the realities which can be experienced. The second one, and it’s one of the most subtle, is consciousness. Somebody asked the other night, what is the mind?
Talk so much about the mind. Consciousness means the knowing faculty, that which knows the object. There’s the knowing of color, knowing of sound, knowing of smell, knowing of taste, knowing of sensation in the body, knowing of ideas. That which knows, we call consciousness. It’s so subtle because until the mind is stilled, we can become attached to the idea that consciousness or knowing, that’s who I am.
You can see that everything is changing, the body’s changing, things outside, but that there’s someone, the knower, who’s seeing it all. When your mind becomes still and penetrating, you begin to experience that consciousness itself is arising and passing each moment. The consciousness which sees is totally different than the consciousness which hears or smells or tastes. A very rapid succession of knowing an object, knowing an object, knowing an object, coming and going each moment. It’s instantaneous birth and death for all of us.
Physical elements, consciousness. The third class of realities which in understanding helps to illuminate so clearly how the mind is working. Group of things called mental factors, that is all the different qualities of mind which arise in every moment of consciousness. As an example, in a moment of seeing, we see something very beautiful. The knowing itself is pure.
This is just a simple act of knowing the color. But the mind is then influenced by a whole range of mental factors such as greed. When greed is present in the mind, it grasps at the object. The nature of greed is stickiness. It sticks to the object.
It wants to hold on to it. Greed is not I and it’s not self and it’s not mine. It’s simply a mental factor which may arise in a moment, influence the mind in that moment, and it passes away. Hatred, anger, what’s the nature of that factor of mind? Has the nature to condemn, to strike against the object, doesn’t like it, wants to get rid of it.
Again, or hatred is not self and it’s not I and it’s not mine. It’s this factor of mind which in certain moments arises, influences the mind in that moment, passes away. Impersonal factors coming and going. Greed, hatred, delusion is a factor of mind. It’s like fog.
When you don’t know what’s happening, when there’s this heaviness, can’t see things clearly. Non greed, generosity, non hatred, love, non delusion, wisdom are also mental factors. You know, people as they become more loving and more generous, have deeper insight, the danger of taking pride in that. I’m such a loving person. I’m so generous.
I’m so wise. Again, that’s to misunderstand the nature of these factors. You cultivate a certain path, wisdom arises. You practice generosity, that mental factor comes more often. It’s an impersonal factor of mind arising, passing away.
There’s no one behind it. Mindfulness, concentration are also mental factors. They each fulfill a certain function. Concentration fulfills the function of keeping the mind steady on an object. Mindfulness has the function to notice what the object is.
What our mind is is this play of mental elements coming and going. People often ask then, if all we are is this play of physical elements and mental elements and the flow of consciousness, how come we got stuck with the idea of self in the first place? Where did it come from? Why are we so caught up with it? There’s one mental factor which is the villain, so to speak, which is the cause of this concept of self to arise.
And that’s the mental factor which is called wrong view. Wrong view has a very specific function in the mind. When wrong view is present, it identifies with the object as being self. You feel a sensation in the knee or in some place in your body. If mindfulness is present, you simply notice it, oh, pain or heat, whatever it is.
If wrong view is present, oh, my knee hurts, my pain, my thought, my feeling, the addition of the word my whether spoken or not in the mind, that’s the working of your own view. And it’s just a laying on of the concept of self to experience. Our whole path of practice is to cultivate to a greater and greater extent the factor of mindfulness so that we can experience things directly without adding that extraneous concept. Seeing things as they are settling back, becoming the flow of experience rather than creating the idea in our minds that it’s happening to someone, that it’s my experience. Physical elements, consciousness, mental factors, all impersonal, arising and passing away.
The fourth reality which can be experienced has been called by many names, called freedom or nirvana or enlightenment. And it’s that state beyond this mind body process altogether, free of the conditioning of impermanence and suffering and unsatisfactoriness. And it’s something which independent of the name can be experienced by people. It’s the possibility of freedom of peace. And what we’re doing in our practice is moment after moment learning to free ourselves from the bondage of concepts, learning to settle back into the moment in the most simple, the most direct way to be with experience as it presents itself without judging, without comparing, without clinging, without condemning, simply being there.
And in that kind of balance of mind, freedom and peace become possible. Any questions? I’ll bet you do. It depends. Some minds tune into this kind of talk easily.
This is what what I was talking about tonight is like a blueprint of what our experience is. Some people read blueprints very well. For others, blueprints are really difficult to understand. Right? The word that will answer that question can only come from your own experience.
There’s no other way. I’ll give you an example of that. Jack talked last night about the teachings of Don Juan. In those teachings, Don Juan used the idea of personal power. What personal power means is a certain power of mind to understand, to penetrate.
In the beginning, Don Juan was rather Carlos was pressing Don Juan to explain the mysteries of the world. You know, please tell me so I can write it down in my notebook. And Don Juan said, even if I could and I told you the most absolute truth that can be experienced, the words would mean nothing because you don’t have the personal power to understand them. And his whole training was the accumulation of that power. And when we have accumulated that power of mind, which comes through cultivating awareness and concentration, then anything will serve.
The dropping of a leaf, the breaking of a twig, an in breath, a pain. Any experience at all when the power of mind, meaning the balance and strength and evenness, when all of that is brought to maturity, any single experience at all will answer your question. So knowing that, and I know that, I am looking towards the goal. Okay, that’s a good point. Insofar as understanding what the effort, what right effort means, it is not the effort to get something, rather it’s the effort to be present.
It’s the effort to settle back into the moment because it’s only that settling back into the moment which will reveal how things are. People are motivated to do that for many reasons. We should not confuse motivation with that kind of gaining ambitious idea. We’re motivated by a desire to be happy or peaceful, more loving or compassionate, whatever. We come with many different motivations.
But the path itself is not one of reaching out for enlightenment or freedom or compassion. It’s one of us settling back into the moment because that’s the only place that those qualities can flower. Is that clear? Yeah. No.
This is a Korean Zen master who came to visit the three month retreat at the center in Massachusetts last fall and I wasn’t there at the time but saying that his parting words to everyone there is that you must attain no attainment. That’s the paradox if you like of making an effort for effortless awareness And you will see that as you continue, as you practice, as the momentum of mindfulness builds up, the practice, the awareness, settles back into an effortless, rhythmic awareness. You know, it’s sort of like the old cars that you had to crank up. You go out front and you crank and you crank and you crank and you’re making all this effort and all of sudden the engine turns over and starts going by itself. What you’re doing is cranking up mindfulness And in the beginning it is an effort because the mind has been so conditioned by concepts and by grasping and by condemning, it is an effort to decondition those habits.
But when a certain momentum of awareness has been reached, it’s like a takeoff point. You’re settled back into your body, into your mind, into your experience, and it’s just going on and the awareness is there automatically. It gets easier. Yes. It gets easier in that respect.
Why is love more a part of the teachings consciously when I’m walking or something in a place of consciousness and awareness as subtle and as quick as it may pass. Consciousness to me as well, is that only my reality? Is that only my awareness? No. I think that in in the very highest regard, the understanding of emptiness of self, The understanding of emptiness is the understanding of love.
Because what love is at that highest level of of insight, when there’s no separation, as long as there’s the idea of self, there’s there’s separation and duality. And that kind of love, I love you or I love all beings, it’s a nice feeling. It’s not based on the highest truth. The love that comes from understanding that there is no separation, When the when the insight into the selfless nature of phenomena you experience the oneness of all things, that very insight into the oneness is the expression of love. Right?
It does not have to be formulated in words at that time because the understanding of oneness, that’s what love is. It’s not based any longer on a separation of being. So the whole path of insight you could also call the path of developing love. I was just wondering why it wasn’t not that it has to be or anything, but why it wasn’t more a part of the Buddhist teaching of what I’ve just been hearing these past years. Well, is love in terms of developing the metta or loving kindness is an important part of the teaching and the understanding of it as coming to the experience of that oneness.
It’s essential, it’s the core of what we’re doing. The words about it, of course, are concepts. What it points to, what all those words point to, are the experiences that we can have moment after moment. The experiences free of the words about them. You know, the implications of that question are important in that I did not mean to imply that you throw concepts out.
In dealing with the world and communicating and living your life, it’s an important part of how we live. But it’s to understand the difference between the concept of a thing and the experience itself. I’ll give you another story of how important it is to use concepts. I was I look for any opportunity to tell this story. I just wait for the right question.
When I was practicing in India, staying at a Burmese monastery, it was about a quarter of a mile outside of the the village of Bodh Gaya. And in a town There was an elephant in the town. Right? And the elephant used to walk up and down the street. Sometimes when I’d be walking into the bazaar, and I’d be I’d be walking very mindfully and very carefully, lifting, moving, placing.
I’d be walking with my eyes downcast, and then I’d hear the elephant coming the other way. I didn’t just say hearing, hearing. I got out of the way. You know, it was like a quick shift to the conceptual level. Elephant, move.
So you have to use them when appropriate, right? But also understand that there’s a whole range of experience which is free of words and free of concepts.