Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 104-minute session, Pamela Lyon sets the stage for a multi-week course on the Twelve Links of Dependent Origination by establishing how Buddhist philosophy approaches mind and causation differently from Western science. She opens with an extended comparison: Buddhism and science both rely on systematic observation and empirical method, but differ fundamentally in their primary method of investigation (introspection versus external measurement), their ultimate goal (liberation versus knowledge accumulation), and how they establish truth. Lyon then introduces the Buddhist account of mind as a multifaceted matrix of events—non-obstructive, luminous, and knowing—rather than a thing, before contrasting this with the Western scientific view’s unresolved mind-body problem. She explores the three gradations of consciousness (gross, subtle, and very subtle), discusses sentience and the five aggregates, and closes by acknowledging the gaps between Buddhist and scientific frameworks while arguing that the Buddha’s insights into dependent origination align remarkably with contemporary evidence across molecular biology and cognitive science. The material is pitched at both beginners and committed Buddhist practitioners.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2008 05 16 Pamela Lyons 12 Links 16-05-08.mp3
UUID: 0cbceab3-fb3c-4377-81a1-9a57df29f65e
Teacher: Pamela Lyon
Collection: Pamela Lyon (Pamela Lyon)
Date: 2008-05-16
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 104.9 minutes
Words: ~11,552
It’s on now! When I teach, I walk around a lot. This is probably the only time I will be in this chair, So that will be another thing that’s unusual for those of you who are used to being at Buddha House. Okay. If we can just sort of take a comfortable posture, just relaxing body.
Taking a deep breath. Blowing it out. Taking another deep breath. Just feel for a minute what it’s like to be inside your body. Maybe your head’s still, your mind’s still racing from the week, the drive through the rain, something that has to be done tomorrow, something that didn’t get done today.
So just take a quick sort of inventory of how your body feels, whether you’ve got tension in your head or your shoulders, in your chest or stomach or in your rectum. And just try and feel yourself dissolve a bit. And think of all the things that you could be doing right now, going out to a movie, edging out in front of the television set, having an early night after a hard week, that you chose to come here to expand your awareness a bit, hopefully about yourselves and about the world you live in within a Buddhist context. And just feel, try to feel some happiness or at least some contentment or satisfaction at being here now, because you have nowhere to go for the next hour and a half to two hours. Nothing to do.
Before we start, just think, it would be great if something I hear tonight, whether it’s in the lecture or whether it’s in the questions, whether it’s around tea afterward, if I take away one thing that helps me to live my life better so that that effect can ripple to the people around me. If I can take away one thing, I will be happy. I am here so that I can hear that one thing that will help me live a better life, and that by my living a better life, I have enough of that. Have I already lost this? No, I haven’t.
Okay, I want to start with is what I want to tell you a little bit about how I see this course. And maybe at the end, when having some discussion and we’re taking questions and that sort of stuff, you can tell me if this doesn’t actually suit your particular purpose for being here. Because everybody who’s here this evening has got a different reason for being here. And I am certainly not omniscient. I don’t know what’s going on in your heads.
I barely know what’s going in mine most of the time. So if this doesn’t feel satisfying to you on some level, please let me know, Okay? And I’ll try and build something in. Because right now, things are very fluid. With every lecture evening, things will get a little bit narrower and narrower.
But right now, everything’s sort of wide open. Okay? All right. What this course is about about is the twelve links oh, dear, it makes a lot of noise. This is going to be really irritating for you because I live at the whiteboard.
I will give you a handout next week about what these are. But the wheel of life is a particular presentation. It’s a presentation by the Buddha of how our mental experience is formed. It’s an analysis of how our subjective experience comes to be, why we experience the things we do, and basically on a certain level how we got here. It’s the closest that Buddhist philosophy has to an overarching theoretical framework.
Before you is Tibetan visualization of this. And it’s got each of the twelve links going around the outside. These enclose six realms of existence. And on the inside, there is an iconic representation of the things that ultimately keep the whole show going, going, which is ignorance, attachment, and aversion. And this wheel is held in the clutches of a representation of impermanence.
I had said it was death. It’s not, although death is the way that we mostly experience impermanence, the thing we’re most afraid of. But this is time. I heard a teacher recently refer to this monster as time as well as impermanence. Because when you’re living in the realm of the impermanent, you’re living in things that have beginnings, middles, ends, beginnings, middles, ends.
They’re constantly arising and falling away. Now what I’m hoping to do with this course is set out this presentation in the context of a Western scientific and philosophical milieu. Because when I started my PhD and I’ll explain a little bit more about what I’ve done and why I was even asked to do this about eight years ago, I had taken some teachings on the wheel of life, and I gained a really, really strong feeling was true, that it was actually true. It would have been true whether the Buddha had said it or not. It was true when the Buddha said it.
It is true right now. It was true one thousand years ago. It was true four billion years ago when single celled creatures first populated this earth. It will be true as long as there are minded creatures. Now there’s one thing in this picture that is really hard to cash out scientifically.
And it’s going to lurk behind everything like a ghost, and that’s rebirth. I can’t prove rebirth. And that’s one of those things that you really just have to you either go with it or you don’t. And you don’t have to go with it because this picture will basically tell you how your own mind is conditioned and is conditioned based on this body and what you’ve done with it, both now and in previous lives, you can say. And I think that there’s quite a bit of evidence for that.
But just even within this lifetime, what you’ve done with how this body has influenced your experience and what you’ve done with it. And body also obviously includes mind. So for those of you who are beginners, those of you who have no intention of becoming Buddhist necessarily, but you’re coming along out of curiosity, what I hope this course will give you is that it will stimulate some thought about how you live your own life, what your own experience is like. And for those of you who identify as Buddhists, I hope that you will come away with a much greater appreciation of just how truly great the insights of the Buddha were and are. I am continually amazed at how an individual person, one human man two thousand five hundred years ago managed to discover, because he didn’t invent it, to discover this incredibly profound picture that almost everything I read in science science just verifies and verifies and verifies and verifies.
And it doesn’t matter if you’re looking at molecular biology or cognitive psychology or signaling in the biological context and stuff like that, all of it, as far as I can see. And of course, to she who is in possession of a hammer, all the world may well look like a nail. But everything I read just reaffirms this picture more and more and more. So the reason why I’m here and not somebody else is because Jampa asked me he conceived of this project. And you’re not going to get out of it.
And the reason why he asked me, I think, is because I’ve been a student of Buddhism for sixteen years. And I say student because I’m not a great practitioner. I’m a really lousy practitioner. But I have been taking teachings, most of which I’ve forgotten. But I have been taking teachings for sixteen years.
I have devoted myself extremely and perfectly to a teacher, Kyabje Khensur Losang Thubten Rinpoche. But I’ve also taken teachings from Lama Zopa Rinpoche. And I did this really sort of originally harebrained thesis, PhD thesis, which started out as an exploration of causation in Buddhist philosophy. I wanted to take the Buddha at his word and examine the established conclusions within Buddhism to see if they held water in a Western philosophical and scientific context, which was an incredibly arrogant thing for me to even think I could accomplish. But being a mature age student, I really wasn’t too worried about that initially at any rate.
And in the course of that, I had occasion to take some teachings from a young Geshe from Drepung Monastery, which is one of the Tibetan Buddhist monasteries exile in India, who suggested we read a commentary by Pänchen Sonam Drakpa on the wheel of life. And my first reaction was, oh, is not going to work. This is not going to be particularly useful because rebirth is all through it. And how Western philosophers and Western scientists come at something like this? What hope do we have of intersection given the kinds of presuppositions in this.
But it worked on me and worked on me and worked on me and wouldn’t let me go. And ultimately, when my thesis changed, that was the thing that was in the background of it. My thesis wasn’t actually on the wheel of life. It was about a proposition that you have to come at before you can even conceive of this, except in a human context. And that is the idea that all sentient beings have minds.
Which raises the question, of course, what this is because that’s a very tricky proposition. Okay. So tonight, we’re basically going to clear some ground in preparation for discussing the twelve links. We’re not going to discuss the twelve links as the twelve links tonight. We’ll start those next Friday because there are certain things that we kind of have to get clear before we can even start with that.
Because the twelve links of dependent origination are acutely about mind. They’re about mentality. They’re about subjectivity. And so there are certain things we have. And because I’m going to be bringing some science into this, we have to look at a couple of things relating to Buddhism and science.
It would be useful to have a little bit of background about what this account is and where it comes from and what I’m working from here. And then we’ll go and we’ll discuss a bit about the Buddhist account, a quick and dirty contrast between the Buddhist view of mind and that’s the Buddhist view of mind, which is there is no single one. There are many different ones, but sort of the general characteristics of it and the way Western science approaches mind. Because as soon as you see the differences between those, you will see what the limits are on how they can inform one another and that sort of thing. So are you happy with that?
Okay, so we’re not actually going to do any of the links tonight. Okay. When we’re talking about Buddhism and science, people today like to say that Buddhism is the most scientific of philosophies and the religions. And that may well be true. That may well be true.
And people go even further and they say, oh, well, science is proving out many of the things that the Buddha said and Buddhist scholars have said. And part of that is true, but it’s a massive overstatement because Buddhism and science are really quite different. And the only similarity they really have the similarity they have is that they’re systematic and they’re based on observation. So in that sense, they’re both empirical. They’re based on experience.
All right? Oh, by the way, if you have any question about anything that I’m saying as I go, please, please interrupt me and ask if there’s any point of clarification that you want to make. If it’s something that’s arising in your mind that sort of relates to it but isn’t directly on point, I would ask you please to wait until the end. Okay. So they’re similar in these ways.
But they have huge differences, huge differences, which is not to say that Buddhism isn’t a mind science. It certainly is. But it is not science in the way that we generally mean science. And the differences are first in method. In Buddhism, the primary method is introspection.
People make observations about the world around them. But the real content of the Buddha’s insight is about the nature of the mind and what gives rise to the mind. The Buddha was not a speculative philosopher. He did not say what the universe was made of. He did not say he didn’t make statements, at least in the earliest writings of the Buddha.
He didn’t make a whole lot of pronouncements about how the universe existed. In beginning, we’re talking about the Pali Canon here. And this is where what I am saying is going to come a bit of a cropper with stuff that you hear in Dharma teachings. Because as a Western scholar, I have to work with what Western scholarship says. I have to work with what science says.
I have to work with philosophical arguments that hold water. I cannot and that was the first thing that I had to do when I was doing my thesis I could not rely on any authority. I couldn’t frequently I have no reason to think that they’re not correct. I have no reason as a Buddhist, I have no reason to believe that the writings of the great Buddhist commentators and that sort of stuff are absolutely spot on. I cannot stand up here and say, well, Tsongkhapa says this.
Therefore, law. I can’t do that as a Westerner. I may look at a body of evidence and then say, oh my heavens, it’s completely consistent with what Tsongkhapa says here. But I have to go with some evidence first. And that’s the difference also between science and Buddhism.
In the first place, Buddhism uses introspection. Science is mostly external observation. And this is actually one of the things that is so thrilling, frankly, this difference, is so thrilling to so many cognitive scientists today. Because Buddhism has a method for introspecting and getting real data from introspection. Science, generally speaking, has a real problem with first person reports.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, late nineteenth century, early twentieth century, psychologists there was a whole school of psychology called structuralism that were trying to map out the geography of the mind, as it were. And they were trying to do this through introspection and first person method. And they absolutely came a cropper. It was a total failure, mainly because they didn’t have agreed methods on how to do this. Everybody was constantly arguing about how to do it and what you were looking for and that sort of stuff.
Buddhism is brilliant, absolutely brilliant, in the way that it has developed a really consistent technology for introspecting and getting remarkably consistent data out of it. And so that you follow instructions for meditation. And then you can go to your teacher and say, this is what I’m experiencing. And your teacher, depending upon the level of accomplishment of the teacher, can say, well, that sounds really good. Or you’re heading off into a bit of a blind out there’s a pitfall here that you haven’t quite seen yet.
You’re getting really carried away with some ecstatic feeling that you’ve got. And so one of the reasons why cognitive science today is really interested in Buddhism is because of these introspective methods. The second difference is majorly the goal. And in Buddhism, the goal is really clear. The goal of philosophy, the goal of systematic investigation is to bring about the transformation of the mind in an individual.
And that transformation is monumental. It’s really, really huge. It is going from a state of being prone to suffering, prone to confusion, benighted to a kind of mind that sees things clearly and is not disturbed by anything. And that, for most of us, unless most of you are bodhisattvas I, basically, I’m the only one here who isn’t that is something that most of us can’t even conceive of, can’t even conceive of. So that’s the goal of Buddhism, which is in Sanskrit moksha, which is liberation.
And in the Mahāyāna tradition becomes enlightenment. But I’m not going to talk about that at all. First of all, I don’t know anything about it. And second of all, it really doesn’t come into this at all. Enlightenment doesn’t.
In later interpretations of and usages of the twelve links, enlightenment comes into the picture. But in original formulation, it was a vehicle for liberation. Okay. And so the last way that they’re different is how they come to a sense of agreement about stuff. And in Buddhism, it’s basically pragmatic.
Does it work? Does it work? Does it get to the goal? Does it get to the goal? So for example, within the tradition, they’ll say that the writings of Nāgārjuna and other scholars like that, the seeds of that were there in the beginning in the original sutras.
Contemporary Western scholars are skeptical of that, whether or not they’re right. Who’s right? I don’t know. But contemporary Western scholars are skeptical of that. And they have a tendency to regard the works by Nāgārjuna and the Mahāyāna Sutras and that sort of stuff as being serious progressions in Buddhist thought, that they were real contributions to this general picture leading to liberation and enlightenment.
And so when Nāgārjuna’s work don’t know if you’re I know some of you are familiar with this not the Heart Sūtra, but the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, which is his great treatise on emptiness. Nāgārjuna brings a series of arguments to bear that are really quite revolutionary. And they lead to this state in a way that modern scholars would say was not there at this stage in the very beginning. Because in the very beginning, what the Buddha was concerned with was sickness, old age, and death. In the classical story, the Buddha was a prince who lived a very privileged life.
And at his birth, upon which all sorts of miracles were attendant, Upon his birth, it was prophesied that he would either be a great king or could also be a sage, a great prophet. Not a prophet, but a sage, a wise man. And his father was very, very keen that he carry on the family business. And so Siddhartha lived great luxury and had all kinds of diversions and learned how to play instruments from the greatest musicians and had a really, really great life. But he wanted to get outside the castle walls, the palace walls.
And on a couple is it two or three trips that he saw these people? One was sick. One was ravaged by illness. The other one was very, very old. And the last one was a corpse.
And he had never seen anything like this before. And so he became let’s not put too fine a point on it obsessed with coming up with a remedy for these things, finding out why we are born to become sick, to grow old, and to die. Why do we do that? And he left. He abandoned his position, his wife, his young child, and with really just an incredible audacity decided that he was going to find the answer to these things.
He was going to find the remedy to these things. So in first instance, no matter what else he discovered, these were the primary things he was concerned with, which are the things that all human beings are concerned with. So in coming up with any subsequent teachings that may or may not be part of this original grouping that was written down in originally Sanskrit, but was translated into Pali and then retained in Pali as the earliest examples of Buddhist philosophy we have. The determining factor for anything that was subsequently considered the word of the Buddha, which in Sanskrit is Buddha Vachana, is basically, does it work? Does it get us here?
Does it get us here? So that’s how it works in Buddhist philosophy. In science, on the other hand, it’s what is the evidence? Now that sounds really objective. That sounds really objective.
But it’s not. It’s basically a bunch of people, mostly men, more and more females, deciding what basic story do we find most believable? What sorts of evidence are we going to accept for now? And basically, who of my friends and everything else believes the same thing? Because they’re human beings just like everybody else.
And they’re concerned about what their colleagues will say. They’re concerned what their mentors will say. They’re concerned that their students will get through their course and graduate and get postdoctoral fellowships and get jobs. And so there are all these other factors that march under intersubjective agreement that becomes what’s considered objective. There are very few what I call bankable facts in science.
By bankable fact, I mean we know that the Earth travels around the sun. It is highly unlikely that that is going to be disproved anytime soon. It’s highly unlikely. We’ve seen it from space, right? That’s a bankable fact.
There’s so much else that is not bankable in science. Science is really provisional. And it’s constantly moving. And things are constantly changing. And the stories that we learned in science class when we were in school, most of them really have changed beyond all recognition by now.
So another thing that’s very, very different here is that whereas science is highly provisional, Buddhism tends to be a system with well defined terms or reasonably well defined terms within which certain moves can be made philosophically and logically that will lead you to this. It’s a system for leading to this. It’s not a provisional enterprise in which careers are made and lost and where getting to the outer solar system is a real priority because we want to know what’s beyond Pluto and that sort of stuff. They’re very, very different. Do you see that?
Because a lot is said these days about how similar Buddhism and science are. And they’re actually not. They’re not. Thank you very much. I’m glad you asked that question.
The goals of science are almost as numerous as there are scientists. Yeah. Some of them will tell you, well, it’s pushing back the bounds of knowledge, right? Others will tell you, well, I’m searching for the truth. Others will tell you, look, I’m just interested in how stem cells become neurons.
I mean, it’s fascinating. That’s why I do it. Other people just do science as a job. It’s like being a parking attendant, only a little bit more technical. It’s a job.
And others are in it for the money, patents and stuff like that. There’s a lot of money in science these days, especially in the pharmaceutical industry. So there are as many goals of science as there are. And of course, there is ameliorating suffering. There are scientists who really seriously want to ameliorate suffering.
But that isn’t everybody’s goal. Everybody who works on breast cancer doesn’t necessarily go home thinking, I’ve really got to solve this problem because there are women dying or there are men dying too. It’s how do I solve this particular problem that fits in with this puzzle that may or may not end up ever saving anybody’s life, but will tell us how this particular system works. It’s just knowing how things work that is one of the main goals of science. Okay.
So that’s Buddhism and science. I can see that I’m doing this for me, Does this help or hurt? Do you it disturbing or what? No, I mean the whiteboard. Okay, all right.
I’m beginning to think it’s just my way of organizing my thinking. Okay. So that’s Buddhism and science. So where does this particular idea sit within Buddhism itself? Okay.
Buddhism itself. Understanding, of course, that Buddhism is constructed and elaborated within cultures that are really quite different from one another. There’s Thai Buddhism. There’s Burmese Buddhism. There’s Korean Buddhism.
There’s Chinese Buddhism. There’s Japanese Buddhism. There’s Tibetan Buddhism. There’s Sri Lankan Buddhism. They’re all different kinds of Buddhisms.
And there is a Western Buddhism coming. What shape it’s going to take, nobody knows yet. But we’re making Buddhism too within our culture. And the real important part is to make sure that what is essential about the teachings are preserved and not distorted. And one thing I’d like to share with you before I forget, but I’ll probably say it again at some later time, is that I heard a teacher say recently that it would be a real tragedy if Westerners construe Buddhism as only as a kind of a therapy for becoming happy.
That that’s basically what its purpose is. That’s not its basic purpose, although that happens in the course of this transformation. I mean, the purpose of Buddhism and Buddhist philosophy is to utterly transform an individual’s experience of their lives, of their being, of their being. And it’s not just to become happy and to be able to not fly off the handle in traffic and stuff like that, and to be more understanding with people. Although that’s a side that happens along the way.
It’s actually to do something quite radical and revolutionary with the mind. Okay. And this is the way one comes to understand the mode of that transformation. Okay. So people know about the Four Noble Truths.
That was the first teaching that the Buddha gave after he became enlightened. But the twelve links of dependent origination are considered by modern scholars, and I think Indian scholars as well, at least by the early scholars who put together the Abhidharma. This is sort of like the sort of a foundational account. It’s a foundation of doctrine. I am not going to give you a very doctrinal account of any of this stuff.
I don’t know enough about the differences between the various schools and the arguments they make and that sort of stuff because I’m not a Buddhist scholar. I mean, there are people who know the minutiae of the differences between this account of ignorance, that account of ignorance, this account of the nature of the mind, that account of the nature of the mind. I can’t do that. That’s not what I do. But within the body of what the Buddha taught and understand that this was compiled at least one hundred years after he passed away But those texts that are considered authoritative and nobody questions them.
Everybody agrees they’re authoritative. The twelve links of dependent origination are sort of like a bottom floor. This is the basis. You have to understand before you can ever get to an idea of what the view might be, the proper view. If you can’t the view is built into this.
And by view, that is how we perceive the world, how we respond to reality, that sort of stuff. Has anybody gone, what does she mean by that? Everybody’s all right with this? Okay, good, good. What?
You just shook your face. Yeah. I’ll explain it a bit more. Okay. Okay.
We’ll go into this in much more detail, obviously, in the twelve links. But suffice for now, suffice to say the view are the spectacles through which we look at the world. Any animal looks at the world. Frog’s view is let’s take a honeybee. A honeybee’s view is conditioned by its body, the fact that it can see ultraviolet color.
We can’t detect ultraviolet rays. It apparently can navigate according to magnetism and that sort of stuff, the magnetic field lines, that sort of stuff. So the view of a honeybee is conditioned by its body and its pattern of interacting with the world. And that’s its view. Our view is conditioned by our bodies and how we interact with the world.
And we interact with the world in a particular way. Now, this has a much more sophisticated cashing out. And we’ll get to that pretty quickly, actually. But for now, that’s what that means. Is that all right?
Okay. This is frequently it’s an account of causation. And we have a tendency to forget that there was a context in which the Buddha taught. There were heaps and heaps and heaps of philosophical schools. There were all kinds of people who were putting forth methods for liberating the self, for achieving moksha.
There were all kinds of different accounts of how causation happens and that sort of stuff. And so this was the Buddha’s account of it. And there’s sort of like a general reading. It’s like Einstein’s sort of. There’s a general theory and there’s a special theory.
The general theory is let’s see. It’s a general principle of causation. And that is because that is this arises. And that’s a general principle of dependent origination. That would be because there’s a seed, the plant the sprout appears.
Because there’s a sprout, the plant appears, that sort of thing. Because that is, this arises. And that’s sort of the general theory. And the special theory is basically how subjective experience is caused. And that is, I am here.
I am in this particular circumstance. I feel this particular way. Why is that? I keep getting back into the same old situations. Why is that?
If you’re looking things on a more cosmological scale, I keep coming back into incarnation. Why is that? Why is that? Why is that? And the twelve links deal directly with this.
There are some scholars who say that the general theory came much later, that even though this is used as the basis of it, that this is actually a later elaboration. And there’s some recent scholarship that says that wherever the twelve links are mentioned, this is also mentioned. But this is only mentioned once in the four major nikayas separate from this, only once. And in every other case, they’re absolutely joined. So I’m not sure that that’s particularly useful for a soteriological point of view.
But that’s part of the general thinking now. So if this is I think that that’s reasonably plausible simply because if the Buddha was mainly concerned with stopping sickness, old age, and death, and these are things that come about through conditioned mentality, then it does make sense that the twelve links relate mainly to subjective experience and not to the general theory. How is everybody traveling? Does anybody need a cup of tea? We’ve been at this for almost an hour.
How are you traveling? Some of you are falling asleep. I can see it. Would you like to have just a brief break and come back? Yep.
Okay, let’s have a glass of water, and then let’s come back. Because the next half is about the mind. Okay? So at the back of this account is and indeed, all of the established conclusions in Buddhist philosophy, are frequently called the Four Seals, and which I highly recommend you take a look at this book. I’m going to encourage the library to get some copies.
It’s a very, very nice treatment of those four. Behind all of it is an account of mind. And when I first started studying causation, I realized that there were all these assumptions behind those four seals that had to do with mind, that if that wasn’t first cashed out this way, that almost nothing else could happen. You really couldn’t get anywhere interesting until this was sort of sorted out. Now, I’m going to read you what I think is a fantastic quote from His Holiness, the Dalai Lama.
It’s in a book called Consciousness at the Crossroads: Conversations with the Dalai Lama on Brain Science and Buddhism. And it’s part of a series called Mind and Life, the Mind and Life meetings that I believe started at Harvard, but I’m not entirely sure. But they’re meetings that His Holiness holds with cognitive scientists. I don’t think it’s every year. I think it might be every other year, every three years, or something like that.
But he’s talked to some really, really first rate people. And some interesting books have come out of that. I think that the books have shown just how much the cognitive scientists aren’t getting what he’s saying as much as actually entering into conversation. But this is a particularly interesting one. And I’ve got this under the title of what mind is and is not.
And this is one of the quotes that I kept before myself when I was doing my thesis so that I would remember what I was aiming for, what was the target. And after I finish this, you’re going go, what? Is that a target? And the answer is no, and yes. According to Buddhist theory, there are some things that belong to the subtle consciousness or subtle mind that are in dependence upon the body or from the brain.
There is no assertion in Buddhism that there is a thing called the soul or a thing called consciousness, some thing that exists independently of the brain. There is no such thing existing independently of the brain or being dependent upon the brain, but rather consciousness is understood as a multifaceted matrix matrix of events. Some of them are utterly dependent on the brain. And at the other end of the spectrum, some of them are completely independent of the brain. There is no thing that is the mind.
Okay? Yeah. Okay, so we’re talking about no thing, but yet it functions, right? And we’re talking about a multifaceted matrix of events, but what on earth is that? I quite like this because the multifaceted matrix of events.
Because I if you can describe what mind is, that’s about as close as you’re going to get to it. Now there are a couple of elements that are agreed across the Buddhist schools on what are the properties of this no thing called consciousness or mind. There’s general agreement on these, but how that’s actually cashed out, that’s where the subtle differences in the presentations come. And the first one is it’s clear and it’s knowing. This, of course, is the really loaded one.
And please stop me at any point if I veer into wrong territory. You will, won’t you? For the record, I’m speaking to Jampa. Okay. So the clarity aspect is that it’s non obstructive.
The mind is not obstructed by anything physical. I can think of Paris and a particular bakery in Paris on a particular street right now. It’s in my head. I am not in Paris. You’re not in Paris either, where’s the pity?
I can think of an event when I was five right now. So my mind is not obstructed by time. Is not obstructed, It has a capacity to illuminate. So it illuminates. It’s not obstructed.
And its capacity to illuminate is what awareness is more or less. I mean, realizing that when we’re using language to describe things that are beyond description really, that we are it’s like trying to untangle a spider’s web with your fingers. Not really going to get there. You’re going to get goop all over your fingers. And you’re not going to penetrate to the thing that you’re trying to get at.
And the knowing is the capacity to grasp, not in a grasping kind of way, but in a twelve links kind of way, but to hold and thereby comprehend. Okay. Is this Okay so far? Is that all right? Okay.
Now this word has a hugely troubled history in Western philosophy, hugely troubled history. We will not go there. We will not go there. We will be here for the next three hundred years, and it’ll never be settled. Okay?
So just trust me on that. Okay, so these are two properties of mind in Buddhist philosophy. And so the other two major divisions that are strictly heuristic rules of thumb for behaving they’re not bankable facts in the sense that they’re true ever and always is that an object is something that performs a function. And a subject is an object perceiver. So these two things don’t actually exist independent of one another.
So there is no object unless it’s perceived. There is no object perceiver unless there’s an object. So these things are generally this is a kind of a dualistic rendering of something that is fundamentally non dual. And that’s pretty tricky to come at. And I’m not going to be really good on that sort of stuff because what the twelve links are intrinsically involved with is how our dualistic minds construct this entire reality.
Okay. So where am I? Object, subject. All right. So a sentient being is a mind possessor or a cognizer, where a cognizer is one who knows, one capable of knowing.
So these are the properties, clear and knowing. An a sentient being is a mind possessor or a cognizer, one who is capable of knowing. All right? Okay, now in English, sentient beings feeling. That what is meant here.
Sorts of arguments get thrown around in the sciences and in philosophical ethics about what sorts of creatures feel and what sorts of creatures don’t. In Descartes’ time, who was the great sixteenth century sixteenth, I hope, sixteenth century French philosopher, he believed that the only sentient beings were human beings. human beings. You could operate on a live dog, an anesthetized dog, and they did. And he would say, look, isn’t it interesting that they have all this behavior that looks like sentience, but they can’t feel a thing?
Because his account of where mind resides did not allow for that, Because everything else was a machine. We had mind and everything else in the living world was a machine, and therefore not sentient. Now people will say, well, honey bees look like they’re sentient. Ants look like they’re sentient. But then you get people off to the side who will say, but how do you know they’re feeling anything?
Well, you poke them here, you take their leg off, they behave in a distressed manner. But they’ll say, well, but that’s just behavior. Seriously. So the whole notion of sentience and whether something can feel is hugely vexed in the sciences. My tendency is if it looks like it’s in distress, it is in distress.
It’s like if it walks like a duck, if it quacks like a duck, chances are you should probably, as a rule of thumb, assume that it is a duck at any rate. But that is not the assumption that is made over here. Now, in addition to this Can I add something? Yep. Sentient beings, what you’re talking about is what Buddhism calls sentient beings.
Yes. Yes. So if you say it’s mind possessor, feeling is an omnipresent It is indeed. Which means that according to Buddhism, sentient beings Are feeling creatures. Yes.
Yes. But in Western and that’s a very, very good point, and thanks for making it. In Western science, in cognitive science, feeling is the feeling of knowing that my finger is going across my arm right now and it has a particular feeling. There’s a feeling it is like to be when I stroke my finger across my arm. And what they can’t be sure of is that there is anything it is like to be a bacterium.
Or there is anything it is like to be a nematode worm or an ant. Because they can’t be sure. And of course, they’re not feeling it like us. Of course, they’re not doing that. But there’s this monumental debate about whether they’re capable of feeling at all.
And that’s one of the things that’s really nice about the Buddhist account. So why don’t we talk a little bit about this? Okay. So the other part Okay, so do you think I should do five aggregates really? Five aggregates add something to that picture, doesn’t it?
Not a lot. A lot, yes. Okay. We’ll talk about the five aggregates because that’s also very, very mind based. And in that, you’ve got form, which let’s say is the body, your type of embodiment.
And this is all about embodiment, by the way. We’re going to get so in touch with our bodies, you wouldn’t believe it, really in touch with our bodies. Okay. I won’t put feeling next. I’ll put perception next.
And feeling, We’ll call them mental formations, which is kind of a garbage can category. And consciousness. So consciousness here means this, the thing that is clear and knowing. That’s the mind part. And this account comes from this, basically.
Consciousness is embodied. Based on that embodiment, there is a particular way that the being perceives the world, okay? So that’s the perception part. And when that perception occurs, there’s a particular type of feeling. There’s a registration or it’s like a registration.
It’s like this registers on me in some way. This registers on me in some way. And that is called feeling. And we generally consider that positive, negative, or neutral. And based on these things, mental formations basically covers that’s the whole box and dice of our conceptual framework.
That’s the kind of mental biases we have, concepts that we have for ordering, for carving up the reality or our particular version of it. And so this is kind of like a it’s like a everything leftover kind of category. Is that reasonable? Okay. So within this, let’s say the important one, nothing happens without consciousness.
But actually, nothing happens without form either. Because none of this can get going without the body. None of it can get going without the form. So even though I’m going to be talking about consciousness separately here, always remember that there’s this shadow. There’s this shadow that travels with it.
And consciousness in the Buddhist terminology or maybe it’s just the Tibetan terminology, I’m not sure. I don’t know enough about other traditions to say. It has sort of three gradations. One is gross, one is subtle, and one is very subtle. And the gross consciousness is this is all really approximate, right?
The gross consciousness is definitely the brain and the knowers and all the stuff that makes us when hormones get released and we have cognitive effects from that, that’s part of the gross consciousness. That’s the body and the mind working sort of like clunking along in its everyday way to just sort of get us around the place. And this would include gross conceptuality and that sort of stuff. The subtle consciousness, I’ve heard it described in terms of things like electrical impulses and neurochemicals and stuff. Actually don’t think that’s right.
I think that that is really gross consciousness. I don’t want to throw meridians and that sort of stuff into this picture really, because I don’t know much about them. But I suspect suspect that meridians, chi, is a manifestation of this. That’s what I suppose. And the very subtle mind is that which transmigrates.
This is the thing that goes from life to life. So this is Pamela. And Pamela does not transmigrate. This is the named person. And this is the thing that is associated with most gross thoughts, producing my PhD, falling in love with fabrics knowing that they’re impermanent and they are forms of suffering.
That’s where all this lives. The subtle consciousness that’s associated with my body, I don’t even know if I’ve ever made its acquaintance, really. I’ve been blinded by moments like little scintillas of experience in meditation so long ago I can barely remember. That might have been manifestations of a subtle consciousness. But I couldn’t take that to the bank.
I just couldn’t, I couldn’t. And the very subtle consciousness never met it, much too obscured by what’s gross here. And one thing I found really interesting in a book by Christof Koch, who’s a neuroscientist at the University of California in San Francisco, He was quoting a lama whose name I can’t remember, unfortunately. And he kept saying, at the very small level, the subtle. He said, very small.
He small level, the subtle. He said very small. He kept saying very small, very small. And I don’t know if that’s accurate descriptor, But you’d think it’d have to be pretty small, wouldn’t it, to get around in a more subtle way than molecules do. But he kept referring to it as at the level of the very small.
And so this might be very small. Not sure. Okay, but there is this three gradations of mind. And this is the thing that you’re aiming in certain Buddhist practices. This is the thing that you’re aiming to uncover, to contact within yourself, uncover within yourself.
And then work to control or influence its migration so that you can be migration that benefit to others and that sort of thing. Because I’m not sure whether in the Pali presentation I can check that out. But I’m not sure where. But I’m not sure in the Pali presentation whether this even there might be something transmigrating, but I’m not sure that it’s described as a very, very subtle mind. This might be something that was developed with the elaboration and the enrichment of the tradition with later practitioners and scholars.
I mean, there’s only so much that the Buddha could say, right? I mean, like he was he had forty five years, but he had pretty rough material to work with. But then again, we’re we’re still here. So it can’t have been all that rough. Okay, so this is a rough look at the Buddhist view of mind.
And at every point, point, everything is really quite clearly set out. Things are defined, and people agree on them. They might not agree on their ultimate metaphysical metaphysical reality like whether the mind basis of all is something that is really something that exists no matter what or whether it’s momentary or that sort of stuff, then you’re looking at the difference between Yogacāra and Madhyamaka. And you start getting into heavy, heavy, heavy philosophical arguments. Everybody agrees on these sorts of things, and at least this, a two part, if not a three part view of consciousness.
Now here we have Western science. And what Western science will tell us is the mind has something to do with the brain. The brain operates the entire body. Nobody can tell you what part of the brain is the mental part and which part of the brain is the physical part, is the body part. The language area obviously is not going to move your legs, right?
But generally speaking, this is not very easily parsable into something that’s the mind and something that’s the body because it’s all mixed up together, all mixed up together. Okay. So the next point to understand is that when you say cognition let’s not even talk about mind because nobody’s even sure that mind can be a scientific term. If you’re talking about cognition, roughly speaking, that’s based on the old the etymology of this word. Nobody can tell you what this means.
That sounds shocking. Nobody can tell you what this means. You take twelve different neuroscientists, take twelve different cognitive scientists, and besides saying it takes place in the brain, they cannot tell you what this is. They’ll say, well, it has something to do with memory. Well, it has something to do with perception.
Well, it has something to do with problem solving, making, has something to do maybe with language, has something to do with if they’re looking quite broadly, they’ll say maybe it has to do with emotion, maybe, if we’re lucky. Some people will say, well, you can’t have cognition without motivation. This was the original trilogy of mind. And these were considered quite separate. But now everybody’s not so sure because it looks like when they start looking at brain processes and they’re trying to test out these different variables, it all gets quite mixed up with one another.
So nobody can tell you what this is. Nobody can tell you what this is. And nobody can tell you what this is. In nineteen eighty four, nineteen eighty eight, two psychologists did a literature review on the definitions of emotion and the definitions of motivation. It was supposed to be the start of their work, right?
Well, they ended up with something like one hundred and nine. I think the one hundred and nine was for motivation. And it was like ninety eight or something like that for emotion, different definitions. And they were in nine categories and eleven categories separately, depending upon how the word was used, depending upon how it was used in a particular field, in a particular context, in a particular whatever. And nobody’s ever tried it with cognition.
Nobody’s ever tried it with cognition. So this view is all over the shop. This is really quite clear relative to that. Now that’s not to say that we can’t perform brain surgery. This is not to say that we can’t say this part of the brain is connected to this part of the brain and that language comes from here and that generally speaking in the prefrontal cortex, that has to do with executive function and decision making and that sort of stuff.
We’ve got a really nice rough and ready view of the topography of the brain. But how this relates to this, nobody’s got a clue. Nobody’s got a clue. And the only thing they will say on this side and when they say it about mind is that, well, it’s all physical. And even on this side, they’ll say, well, mind is not physical.
And this creates no end of problem, because nobody can also tell you what physical means. Nobody can tell you what physical means. Nobody can tell you what physical means. Classic example happened in our lifetime, just in the last few years. Turns out that the standard model of physics, which is the entire kit and caboodle of all our laws that relate to how the world works at the subatomic level and at the macrocosmic level, at the mesoscopic level of ordinary tables and chairs and that sort of stuff.
You’ve got everything in this kit and caboodle. And they projected mathematically how much matter was in the universe. And when they actually got instruments out into space to start measuring things like the cosmic microwave background microwave radiation and looking at various stars and doing various calculations, what they realized was that the standard model accounted for five percent of the matter of the universe. Five percent. That’s really low.
Any other theory, you would have said you got a real problem with your theory. Not a bar of it. What we then get is dark matter. Anybody here heard of dark matter? Everybody’s talking about it now.
Everybody’s talking about it now. And dark energy this apparently accounts for about twenty five percent, up to twenty five percent. And this accounts for up to about seventy plus percent. But the point is nobody’s seen it. Nobody knows what its properties are.
Everybody’s studying it. What makes it physical? What makes it physical? Because physicists decided it was necessary to have these things? We don’t even know what accounts for mass.
Mass. We can’t even account for mass. We don’t even know why this is obstructive. We don’t know how the atoms fit together in such a way that I can’t put my hand through this. We cannot explain that.
Is anybody in your mind going, she can’t possibly be right? It’s true. It’s true. So my view is that physical doesn’t mean a whole lot. So to say that the mind is not physical also doesn’t mean a whole lot.
Nonobstructed? Fine. Fine. But you can say that it has different properties. The mind has different properties from whatever is physical.
Fine. But nobody can tell you what this is. So when they start talking about dualism, like, well, I think that the mind is actually separate from the body, or I think that Descartes was right and that sort of stuff. But what does it mean? It doesn’t mean anything.
This is one of my hobby horses, if you hadn’t guessed. Because I was constantly going up against philosophers. But the Buddhists, they’re dualists. They’re dualists. But it’s not that we’ve got a mind body problem.
We’ve got a body problem because we don’t know what the physical is. And so as much as this wants to take something from this, it’s generally limited by this notion of there’s this problem about the mental and the physical. Yep? Mind and Buddhism, you say it’s no thing. And thing is very clearly defined in Buddhism.
As a functioning thing. As something that is produced. And it feels And it has a function. And functions And a thing is related to matter. Yes.
So matter is produced, which means it has a beginning and an end. But mind doesn’t have a beginning and doesn’t have an end. But it is produced. Mind itself is not produced. It Moments of mind.
Moments of mind are produced. But mind itself, no. Those kinds of that kind of ontological discussion, I can’t even go there because I don’t know enough about it. As long as it says no thing, the mind is no thing, that means it is not produced. That’s what I Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think that that might whoops. I think that that may well be right. But I think that because the people that he’s speaking to are also speaking in English, and our language English is an extraordinarily thing language. It reifies everything. Carves up generally we have no appreciation of how much our language infects our thinking all the time.
And our thing language infects everything. There are languages that are more process based, that talk more in terms of there are no exact translations for terms because they’re not things. They’re processes. But in English so I think he was as much talking to these people and saying, this is not a thing. I don’t think that he was necessarily using classical definitions to these neuroscientists because because they don’t know anything.
I mean, don’t know nothing about Buddhism. But you’re right. But if he did Yeah. Then it’s quite interesting. Yeah.
Yes. They do not know what he meant by that. Yeah, yeah. Oh, I’m sure they didn’t know what he meant by that. The interesting thing, is what is mass?
I mean, we know what mass is. And I’m perfectly happy about accepting an account, like the Buddhist account, that says that mind and the potential for form travel always together. They’re always together. And that they’re like horse and rider. No problem with that at all because you don’t actually have to say which is mental and which is physical and what are the properties of it.
It’s like two aspects of the same coin, of one coin. But what do you do about the formless realm? They have a wind. They do have a wind body. Okay.
Yeah. Isn’t it? They have a wind. A wind body. Energy winds.
Does anybody have any questions at this point? Please. I’m just thinking about the brain. You know, people that, in accidents, have either had brain damage in their mind. Yeah.
Well, do we know if their mind’s functioning? And the other way, having a physical accident there and their mind and brain. Do you know what I mean? Then there’s definitely a difference between the body and the Can be quite big difference. But people are sort of thinking people that in a car accident, their brain is damaged.
How do we know if their mind, if they can’t communicate, whether their mind is functioning? You’re talking about somebody who’s like in a coma or something like that? Somebody that has to learn how to talk again, how to walk again. But if they can do that, their mind is functioning. The mind is functioning.
It’s just not the full box and dice. You want to make an observation there? You’re sort of nodding and yeah. Mind is still there. Operating.
Yeah. Well, this guy woke up the other day in Oklahoma, for heaven’s sake. I mean, he’d been in coma for how many years? Eighteen? Something ridiculous.
And he woke up and it was like, where am I? I mean, seriously, it was a motorcycle. And so we don’t know about what’s happening in the consciousness. The gross consciousness, you can say it’s not functioning. The subtle consciousness, the very subtle consciousness, who’s to say?
I mean, what is it that wakes up after how many years? Maybe he was eighteen and he’d been asleep seven. But he’d been asleep a long time. He was young. Eight?
GREGORY Of course. Yeah. Of course. Because the whole show is still ticking over. They’ve got the artificial feeding.
They’ve got the respirator. They’ve got everything happening. And so everything is still ticking over. His limbs are being moved so he doesn’t get bedsores, all that sort of stuff. But it’s interesting about what the nature of the mind is.
And I think this says a lot about the gross mind is that one of the most famous cases of the nineteenth century was a guy named Phineas Gage. And he got an iron bar right through his brain. I mean, like it was like that. And he survived. You know, he survived.
They took it out. He survived, but his personality was profoundly altered. He he had no control over his emotions anymore. He made really bad decisions. He had a very, you know, he had a very he he became really, really, really, highly reactive and angry.
And everybody who knew him before and said he was a really lovely guy said he was pretty much of a jerk afterward, unfortunately. And so he’s used as a case of the effect of emotion on cognition, like decision making and rationality. And the other thing that that case shows is that the way science proceeds is also by looking at damaged cases. Phineas Gage told us a lot about the relationship of emotion and cognition. People with brain lesions in particular places, like ablations in Broca’s area for language tells us a lot about what language centers hook up with other things.
So people who are injured, diseased, that sort of stuff are that’s the bread and butter of science. Although now we have some pretty amazing machines to look at people as they’re functioning now. Any other questions? I think I’m getting tired. Come on.
Please. Is nothing going in? Is everything going in? And there are physicists who say they don’t believe in it. Because there are physicists who are studying dark matter who say, well, we may never see it.
We may never see it. We may never see it, yet it accompany and is it here with us right now? Or is it just out there? But at the same time, the stuff that makes up five percent of the universe includes particles that are streaming through our bodies at this very second. Billions of them are streaming, according to theory, streaming through our bodies at this moment solar neutrinos, cosmic rays, things like that.
Our bodies won’t stop them. The only place that you can detect them is in massive vats of detergent, basically, in small lake sizes of detergent kilometers under the earth, like under Japan. And they hope to get like one or two or three a year or something like that. I mean, it’s a paltry number. And they say, there’s no evidence for rebirth.
I mean, really? If we were spending that amount of money trying to find a transmigrated mind, I think we’d probably find one a whole lot quicker than we would the Higgs Boson, for example. Well, level, everything is of one taste. I mean, it’s all of one taste. It’s not all one, but it’s all kind of the same.
But at the gross level, we’re highly individual. And culture has a lot to do with how we perceive things and how we frame things and stuff like that. I mean, for example, there have been some recent experiments done on the perception of the color blue, for example. And in Russian, there are multiple terms for particular subtle shades of difference in blue. And when Russian speakers are tested for these gradations, they see them.
When English speakers are tested on the gradations, they don’t see them. Same thing. Same hue, don’t see them. So language does have a huge shaping effect on what we see and what we don’t see. Sameness.
The thing, the no thing that transmigrates. Yes, just using the terminology. You said that it’s very small and that it’s a separate. No, I said that this Lama described it as very small. So I was trying to link that together as that it is very much alike, the transmigration.
I was just wondering how the karmic aspect came into influencing this very subtle mind to choose the different rebirths. Yeah, don’t use the word choose. No, no, no, no. That’s a good question. I wouldn’t use the word choose for rebirth.
I think I said influence. Influence. Okay. Basically, when I’m saying yeah, you did. And when I said they are all of one taste, they’re of one taste, but they’re carrying a whole lot of baggage that’s adventitious, it is not in the nature of the very subtle mind.
But there are all sorts of propensities that propensities get carried on Buddha-nature? I don’t know. I don’t know. Haven’t got a clue.
And maybe there’s some esoteric teaching somewhere that actually lays this out in the Buddhist context. I don’t know. But I would think that it would be very hard to come to an understanding of that mechanism strictly from the first person, from viewing the system from the inside. You mean gross consciousness? No.
Meditating mind that can apprehend the very subtle mind and can work with it, that is still a first person perspective. I mean, there’s no getting out of it and sort of like poking it and doing that sort of stuff because there’s a whole different there’s a whole different in a sense of different value system operating at that point. I mean, what would be the it’s non dual anyway. So how could you do anything with it? But Did I just make any sense at all there?
I don’t think I did. Just so I won’t go on, but there’s just quite a lot of stuff. I sort of go, but what about the mind that’s actually residing in emptiness? Can’t help you there. I’ve never experienced it.
And that would take us into the area doctrine. And I can’t do that. Yeah. Yeah. I’m really, really short on that.
And just a small thing. And if excuse me, everyone. No, no, no, no, no. The mind that is the gross mind It is thinking about the cafe in Paris. Yeah.
Is that mind actually here or there? I believe it’s here. I believe it’s here. That that mind, that no thing can go to Paris, I am told is possible. I have not experienced it myself.
So the mind that is here apprehending Paris, and someone sees you in Paris at that instant of you visualizing the cafe in Paris in the great latte? I would be a whole lot more realized than I realized. I mean, I understand. I mean, I understand that these things happen. There are heaps and heaps and heaps of stories about Lama Yeshe.
Subtle mind, is that a gross mind, or is it a very It’s definitely not gross mind. Very subtle mind. No. It’s definitely not gross mind. I wouldn’t have thought I wouldn’t have thought yeah.
What? Yeah, but there has to be an object that they’re perceiving. Well, are stories about Yeah. There are stories about Lama Yeshe. Yeah, not just him, But there’s stories about Lama Yeshe appearing to people in moments of great need.
And manifestation? If it’s a manifestation, what does that mean? The mechanics of that, I couldn’t begin to even guess. Yeah. I’ve got a whole lot of other stuff, but I don’t think this is the phrase.
Yeah. No. No. No. Oh, excuse me.
No. You’re right. No. It came out No. It came out completely appropriately.
Not taking too time. No. I didn’t No. And I can’t answer those questions, honey. This is a PhD.
This isn’t like major realization. Actually meditating in England. And actually, the person someone in India and they they the person in England was meditating on the person in in India. Yeah. And the person in India started freaking out and said, I can’t pretended.
And the person in England actually started freaking out, thinking, oh god, I. I don’t have a passport to get back. How impractical. No, I’ve also heard stories from Australian anthropologists who experienced similar things with Aboriginal people. So it’s not just No, it’s a good question.
But an entirely inappropriate venue for asking it, may I say. Anything else? Go ahead. Okay. Now, just for my own benefit, is there anything that is this going in a direction is there anything that you’d like to take issue with now while everything’s still fairly open?
Don’t be embarrassed. I can take it. My skin is thick. I’ve written multiple drafts of deathless prose that I felt was absolutely essential to my functioning and the world’s functioning. And it turned out not to be true.
So I can take almost anything. AUDIENCE: You asked me if I believe that? No. Except wait a minute. What am I saying?
What am I saying? Okay. Right. No, no. Okay.
The thing that is Buddha-nature gross mind has no effect on it at all. The very subtle mind that transmigrates, the gross mind has a hell of a lot to do with the freight. That’s what they say.
That’s what I believe. But how much evidence I have for that belief I don’t think would stand up in almost any department of anything in a university anywhere. Yeah. Yeah. Anything else?
Kind of let go back to this dark matter, dark energy. No, we can. We can. No, I can riff on this for a long time. And perhaps I’m a bit hum up on it.
But I just kind of find it an interesting term to call something matter that is not apprehendable. Yeah. I find it pretty weird too. Oh, Okay. What does energy mean?
Mean, none of them make much sense, except they fill a monumental hole in the None of this is measurable yet. They don’t even know what it is. The theoreticians are just going mad and getting grants to speculate. Mean, this is a small growth industry. Lots of our tax dollars what, mainly in mainly in other countries but tax dollars are going on this.
It’s a real boondoggle, my view, at any rate. Would you just say that the gross mind is not clear and knowing? It is clear and knowing. I mean, it illuminates things and it grasps at things. It holds things.
But it’s I mean, it’s the thing that makes it go. But it isn’t I guess I’m trying to keep in mind the idea that it is possible to peel back these adventitious layers. It is possible to stop this. And when this is stopped, then there is no thing that still abide I mean, it doesn’t abide, but it’s the basis for any kind kind of experience at all. And that’s untouched, ultimately untouched.
But at the moment, it’s traveling around with a whole lot of freight. I mean But they still call this clear and knowing. Yes. I guess there’s a lot of pollution in it, and it might not seem to be Yeah, yeah, Yeah. Those are the properties of mind, generally, consciousness, eye consciousness.
It’s clear and knowing. Tongue consciousness, it’s clear and knowing. Touch, it’s clear and knowing. It’s unobstructed, and it apprehends its object. But when we’re talking about this, we’re talking about where the freight comes from, how it comes.
And theoretically, once you understand that, you can stop it at some point. Yeah. Is that all right? Can we call it a night? Please don’t