Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 100-minute seminar, Pamela Lyon teaches the second link of dependent origination—volitional dispositions or karma—building on the previous week’s discussion of ignorance. She opens with a guided grounding meditation, then introduces the Tibetan wheel iconography as a teaching aid, explaining how each of the twelve links connects in visual form. The core of her teaching roots volitional dispositions in biological self-reference: all organisms are conditioned to preserve, enhance, and extend themselves, giving rise to habits and habitual responses. Lyon walks through how evolutionary pressure, homeostasis, emotion, and cultural conditioning shape these habits, using neuroscience (dendritic pruning in adolescence) and animal behavior (guppies, fish pain responses, bacterial gene-sharing) as examples. She then frames the eight worldly concerns—gain and loss, pleasure and pain, praise and blame, fame and notoriety—as the deep scaffolding beneath all motivation, arguing that because we act from mistaken self-referential ignorance, our actions produce unintended suffering. Throughout, she emphasizes that our perceptual slice of reality is vanishingly thin compared to both the quantum scale and cosmic scale, leading to systematic misapprehension about how things truly exist. The teaching balances Buddhist philosophy with contemporary biology and neuroscience, pitched at practitioners with some familiarity with Buddhist teachings.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2008 05 29 Pamala Lyon 12 Links 29-05-08.mp3
UUID: 66d7560b-849e-4868-aea3-158877cbc2d2
Teacher: Pamela Lyon
Collection: Pamela Lyon (Pamela Lyon)
Date: 2008-05-29
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 100.8 minutes
Words: ~10,637
My name is Pamela Lyon, and we’re on the second link of dependent origination. Now I think most of us here are people who identify as Buddhist, but I I’m assuming that some of you are not. So we’ll start with just a short meditation and an adjustment of our motivation, but without prayers. Normally, if this was being done as a traditional teaching, and it certainly is not a traditional teaching, I am not a qualified teacher in that respect. We would be starting with prayers and that sort of stuff.
But because this is what it is, we’re starting this way. Okay. Now if you’ll take a a firm comfortable posture, just see if you can get your back straight so that all the tension in your body sort of drains from the top of your head to the bottom of your feet. Take some deep breaths to sort of bring yourself into your body. And bring yourself into the present moment in this room, in that chair or on that mat, in the clothes that you’re wearing, in the life that you’re living.
Just bring yourself to the present. And sort of say hello to your body. It might have been running around all day, doing this and that. Just sort of reacquaint yourself with it by running your awareness through it and relaxing any points of the body where you’re holding tension. When you finish that scan, bring your mind to the breath.
Sort of let your mind rest on the flow of breath, the tickle beneath your nose or the rise and fall of your belly. Just let it rest. And think how wonderful it is that we have this opportunity to expand our minds, to contemplate our existence in a place that’s designed for that purpose. We have nothing else to do and nowhere else to go for the next little while. Everything that’s happened in the day and the week is behind us.
Everything that’s coming up in the weekend is in the future, and we don’t have to be anywhere else but here, right now. Try to generate a feeling of gratitude for that space that’s opened in your life. There’s so many people the world over don’t have that space, don’t have that luxury. And try to generate a sense of determination on some level that you’ll try to make the most of what is offered here this evening to incorporate whatever appeals to you, whatever strikes a chord into your own life so that you can be happier. And by becoming happier, you can make others happier.
Because if we all did that, the world would be a much better place. Just as a question, is that too long, too short, just right? Just right. Okay. All right.
Okay. Last week, we talked about origination. And Richard kindly pointed out that I keep waving my hand in the direction of this. And I actually haven’t specified anything that’s on this thing. How many of you brought your thing from last week?
Okay. If you didn’t, sort of share it, if you can. But on the iconography here, which I believe is distinctively Tibetan. I don’t think that this was something that was part of the Indian tradition. One might say it’s a teaching aid, but you find it outside of a fresco of it outside of many monasteries.
Maybe all monasteries, I don’t know. And it’s kind of a visual reminder of how we got here. And the first link that we discussed last week and we will be discussing all the way through is ignorance. And the graphic for that is a blind man. Frequently it’s got somebody with an arrow stuck in his arrow stuck in his eye is a different one, isn’t it?
Yeah, never mind. I didn’t say that. Blind person. The second one tonight is is a potter making a pot. And and that is a volitional dis what I’m calling volitional dispositions for reasons that you’ll you’ll that will become pretty clear soon.
But it’s often called karma. The third one is a monkey in a tree, and that’s consciousness for reasons that will become clear when we get there. And the fourth one, I’m not going to describe what these are, just what they are. The fourth one is, some men in a boat. And that is name and form.
And the next picture is a building with many windows. Sometimes it’s just a door with four windows. And those are the senses. And then the next one is in this iconography, it looks like two people. Yeah, two people.
And that is contact. And the next one is is that the guy with the arrow in his eye? Yeah, I can barely see it here. And that one’s feeling. And the next one after that, after feeling, is a woman pouring a man either some tea or some beer, depending upon your view.
And that is desire or craving. And the next one is, in this case, a person reaching up into a tree, although I have seen these with monkeys also, grasping for something in the tree. And that’s grasping or attachment. And then from this comes existence or becoming. And that’s a couple in a very discreet little tent coupling.
And from that comes birth. And that’s a woman giving birth, fairly graphic picture there. And then the last link is sickness, old age, and death. Death particularly. It’s a it’s a body being carried on the back of a of a man to a a stupa and a place where there are large birds of prey that in Tibet would have performed sky burial, which is basically cutting up the body feeding it to the birds.
In the middle here, these are the realms of existence. Where are we? This is the human realm. This is the Asuras, which are often called the jealous gods. And these are the gods.
They’re celestial beings. They have a pretty good time up there. And down around here are animals, hungry ghosts, and the hell realms. Now we’re really not going to be talking much. And you’re right.
There is a big bubble there. We’re not going to be talking about much about the six realms of existence. We’re going to concentrate on the outer ring and the inner ring, which is the three poisons, which is ignorance, attachment, and aversion. So that’s the iconography in a nutshell. And it’s all in the clause of impermanence.
And last week, we talked about ignorance. Now, I suppose I should say also, before I get much further, is that this wheel is something that iterates. It doesn’t really have a beginning and it doesn’t have an end. It kind of goes like that. You know?
So the presentation of these links can be done in many different ways. Sometimes consciousness comes before ignorance. There are other ways that can because this is an iterative process and not necessarily linear, once up to the point of contact in these, mainly these earlier links, those can be done in the first three particularly. No, the first four particularly can be done in different ways. So if you find a text with a different rendering of the order, that’s not surprising.
Which is not to say that I’m not mistaken in what I say, but just not on particular thing necessarily. Okay. So when we were talking about ignorance, we were talking about a mistaken way of seeing. Or if we want to get highfalutin about it, a mistaken mode of apprehension. And we went through a number of things last week that explained why this was mistaken from a biological standpoint.
And the first first one was that self reference, that in a biological creature, in an organism, everything they experience is reference to themselves. And because we are biological creatures, that’s true of us as well. But it’s as true of a bacterium as it is of a nematode as it is of a housefly as it is of a dog or a cat or a giraffe. Because we are beings that have to maintain ourselves, that we’re constantly having to import energy and use it so that we can construct ourselves while we do things, our point of reference is necessarily what’s inside our skin. But this kind of self is quite imperialistic, actually.
Because we incorporate our family into that. We incorporate our possessions into that. And if you are a male fish of a particular kind that builds a nest that tries to attract a female, you very jealously guard your nest. If you’re a bird, you do the same. If you’re a mammal of a particular type, you defend your territory.
But it’s all in relation to this because this is the thing, the self, which has to be preserved, enhanced, and extended. Now we can put that in biological language and we can call that survival, growth or well-being, and reproduction. So whenever I use these words, preserve, enhance, and extend, basically there’s biological reading underneath. Okay? But I’m going to remove this for now.
I just wanted to make sure that you knew that it was there. Okay. So one of the reasons why we have a mistaken mode of apprehension is because most of what we apprehend is self referenced. Is also first of all, cosmos doesn’t revolve around me. I may think it does, but I’m pretty sure that every person in this room would disabuse me of that because it revolves around you or around you and yours and that sort of thing.
So self reference has an inbuilt mistake. And that is that everything isn’t referenced by us. It isn’t. That’s not the way the world works. But also it’s a mistake at a level of scale, Okay?
Because there are many things that are vastly smaller than us. Many things that are vastly smaller than us. Physicists work with something called the Planck scale. And that is basically ten to the negative thirty-seven. That’s sort of like the bottom, the basement that they’re willing to work with mathematically.
And that is so small. It’s inconceivably small, inconceivably small. A virus, which is smaller than a bacterium, is smaller than the cells in your body, would be bigger than the sun compared to that. I mean, it’s inconceivably small. But there’s an awful lot going on below the level of our awareness in the micro cosm.
And we don’t sense any of that. We don’t see any of that. We have to have instruments to detect any of it. Similarly, there are many things, as many more things, that are gigantic compared to our scale. And I’m not just talking about the solar system.
I’m talking about the galaxies and the billions and billions and billions and billions billions of galaxies that make up the universe. The universe is a very, very big place, very big place. So what we actually apprehend is a very thin, really tiny slice. Maybe it’s even less than the width of that line. Tiny, tiny slice of what actually exists.
Okay? And on one side, you’ve got atoms. You’ve got atoms smeared out clouds of probability that are electrons that can be anywhere at any time. And on the other side you’ve got galaxies and galaxies and galaxies and galaxies and black holes, so they tell us, and all sorts of stuff like that. So we don’t see most of what is there.
And so that is also a mistake because we regard things that are mesoscale as being the way things are. And it is, but it isn’t. And the third thing is that we don’t even see everything that’s here. We don’t see ultraviolet light like bees do. We don’t apprehend magnetic field lines like certain reptiles do and amphibians do and birds do.
We don’t detect detect electric fields unless, of course, that’s what people are doing when they see auras. I have no idea. But that’s, you know, that’s what sharks do. Sharks are now believed to apprehend the electric field from bodies. Not just movement and that sort of stuff, but the electric field.
And there are fish, all kinds of fish, that just detect electric fields. So we’re mistaken on a whole range of issues here. Because all of what we perceive, all of our senses, are geared toward keeping this particular vanguard of the lineage of Homo sapiens, which have evolved over time, self referencing like crazy. And that’s not the way things are to start with. So once you’ve got that going, you’re kind of in a bind right from the start.
I mean, of the questions I always kept asking myself when I was doing my thesis was, well, if everything’s so mistaken, if this view is so mistaken, why does it work? But it does. And that’s because there is something about valuing things in relation to the self, viewing things within this scale, getting along without seeing ultraviolet radiation, etcetera, that it’s Okay. I mean, is a reality of a kind. But it’s just not what it seems, which we’ll get into a little bit more as we go along.
But one the other things that we found was that is implied in self maintenance is value or valuing. And that’s because, we have to maintain our bodies in a certain level of balance called homeostasis. We have to make sure that we don’t go to complete equilibrium or we’d be dead. But we have to keep our bodies within certain parameters. Salt.
We can’t have too much calcium. We can’t have too much heat. We can’t have too much cold. We can’t have too much pressure. We can’t have too little oxygen.
There are all kinds of things that we have to keep within a very, actually relatively narrow range in order to maintain the self and keep the body rolling. So once you’ve got homeostasis, you have values within a range for a whole lot of parameters. That means to begin with, if something is going to damage this, it’s going to be yucky. Disgust is one of those natural emotions that every culture has that generally is related to things that are inside being outside. Things that are supposed to be inside or outside, like blood, like tissue, like gaping wounds, that sort of stuff.
And also the emotion of disgust arises when we encounter putrefaction because we’re not supposed to eat that thing. So there are values built into this already that are going to be positive or negative based on the history of evolution that we’ve followed. human beings want to move away from their feces just as fast as they can. Flies are drawn to it. They have the same basic needs for maintaining homeostasis, but they do it in really, really radically different ways.
So values are built in to self maintenance. And other thing comment, question? It’s all right. Please, if you have any questions, please stop me at any time. If there’s a word I’m using that you don’t follow or there’s something you’re not following.
Another way that valuing happens is through emotion. Now there are all kinds of theories of what emotions are. At their most basic, they’re feelings, which doesn’t actually tell you much. But they’re states of the body and mind that signals something is not Okay or is really Okay, one or the other. So it’s sort of Okay or not Okay.
I don’t like calling it positive negative because sometimes positive things, really negative things, can be okay. It’s just that they’re not as bad as they might be. Example, if you want to use a case from child abuse, for example. A child who has been abused by a member of the family is not Okay if they’re in their bed at night and they’re frightened. But they are Okay if they’re not visited that night.
It’s still bad, but it’s better than it would have been otherwise. So Okay can be quite negative. It’s just what the degree evaluation is running along. Emotion is one of those things that really stamps things. It’s kind of a charge.
Neuroscientists don’t like to talk in those terms anymore. Basically, emotion does give a valence either Okay or not Okay to anything. It kind of marks it. And the stronger the emotion, the stronger the valence. If you’ve ever stopped to recognize that your mind is going and and around on something that somebody said that was negative or really positive, your mind just replays it and replays it and replays it and replays it.
And it’s because anything that’s really good or really bad gets stamped in really well so that you remember it quickly. You respond to that situation again either with flight attraction quite quickly. And you can see that if you’re doing all this, that having a quick and dirty way of doing this is very, very useful. And that’s what we call habits. A habit is a response that’s been made automatic.
Now some habits become I don’t like using the word innate, but I will because it’s used a lot. And generally speaking, we have a tendency to think of these things as genetic. The picture is a whole lot more complicated than that. Nothing is quite as innate as we think it is. But habits that further preservation enhancement extension are the kinds of things that get encoded in our DNA.
They don’t actually get encoded. It’s a bad word, but that’s the way we talk. And so a baby duck will imprint to a mother. And a baby rat with some practice will be able to learn how to nurture. A baby bird, songbird will learn how to sing with some instruction.
So the propensity is there. And it gets developed by experience. But habits are what make the whole thing go. Because if it’s fast, if it’s frugal, if it happens automatically, it may save you. It may enhance you.
It may extend you. So habit making is really, really, really important in creatures that have to do this. Can you see that? Okay. Now let me show you a bit about how the brain does that.
When we start out as as infants, have, let’s say, you have a very, very, very small, not even like that, very, very small number of connections in your brain. And as you grow, you get all kinds of them like this. It’s very, very, very bushy with neurons and their connections to very various things. And by the time kids are hitting just before puberty, they’re like a I don’t know like a really fat Christmas tree. So in adolescence, basically the brain has got more to work with than it really needs.
It’s got less than it needs and more than it needs because it’s got a lot of extraneous stuff. What starts happening is things start getting pruned. They get pruned back. Some things become stronger. The things that allow you to control yourself better, those things get stronger.
Some of the other things start atrophying because of the way our culture makes us be conditioned so that we can be members of this society. By the time you’re in middle adulthood, this starts pushing out again. And every single one of those connections is like a habit. It’s a way of responding to the world. It’s a way of perceiving the world.
It’s a way of smelling the world. It’s a way of making sense of the world. And then when you get older, these things start pruning back really radically until you basically end up with dendritic trees that look very much like when you started out. So the idea is that now this isn’t such a bad thing if you can make sure ones that are really functional are the ones that stay. We don’t have much choice over that.
But one way to keep it bushy is through novelty. That’s one of the things that keeps the things bushing. Also fish oil, apparently. Seriously, the evidence for it is fairly overwhelming. But the idea is to have habits so that things become automatic.
And think about it. Talking, walking, I mean these are the two most important things and working with our hands. Two most important things we do. Three most important things we do. Good question.
And we’ll talk about that in just one second. I realized I Okay. Just one second. Do you have to are you Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, just one second. So walking, talking, that sort of stuff, right, has to become is a learned behavior that then becomes automatic. Expert performance, if you’re a really good pianist, it becomes automatic. Right? So there are some neuroscientists think that the only thing that their version of consciousness is for is basically bringing to salience a mistake that you’ve made or something that you’ve missed.
It’s like we become conscious conscious of things when we’ve made a mistake. We’re driving along, but we become conscious of the fact that we’re driving along when something happens in our peripheral vision or immediately in front of us that is something we didn’t anticipate. So then your consciousness comes to you and it’s like, right, what am I doing? Where am I? That sort of stuff.
Things don’t look familiar. Where did I turn? That sort of stuff. So you’ve got all this physical stuff that conditions you and encourages habit making. But there are some other factors too.
One of the main ones is familiarity and novelty, Which if it’s put that way, might tell you a bit about what novelty means. If you’ve experienced something before, if you have a habit that relates to it, if you have a response kit that relates to a particular circumstance, that’s familiar. If you run across something you’ve encountered before, that’s novel. It doesn’t matter even if some of the elements are things that you don’t recognize at first. Something that is novel is something that’s unexpected or unknown.
Right? And we love novelty. We love novelty. Because every time something that’s actually very survival oriented too. Because if you love novelty, you seek novelty.
And if you examine something that is novel, that thing then becomes incorporated into your world picture, right? It becomes familiar, right? So the things that are familiar to you get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And more of your options within the world are covered. So other factors that affect habits are your degree of familiarity with things in your world already and the degree of unfamiliarity or unexpectedness, the things you are that you encounter.
Does that answer your question more or less? The next one factors are convention. Whether your habits how your habits form are going to be determined by culture, by language, language, by the taste of the day. For example, if you’re looking at chairs, a Louis XIV chair is going to be worth more, although highly impractical, really, than something that was built during the Bauhaus period or something that was constructed by Maoris. It’s going to command it has a higher valence within particular cultures because of convention, not because of what it intrinsically is, but because of convention.
Do you follow that example? Yeah. Because Bauhaus is just functional. And a Moray chair might have all sorts of wonderful carvings and things like that and mythical motifs in it. And the last one is personal personal taste.
And that is whatever your conditioning is, whatever your kit of habits are that have been given to you by family, your extended family, your schooling, your popular culture, that sort of stuff. So these are the things that go into making habits. And the whole kit of habits are what are volitional dispositions. And this is link number two. You see that?
How that arises? How that arises from this? How that arises from accentuated self reference, and how you get something like that out of it. Do you have any questions? Jump up?
Do you have any issues with that yet? Stop me before I kill again. No. Anything? Okay.
Don’t believe it. Anthony? Okay. Good question. Can we get rid of most of this stuff?
Let me see. Where am I? I don’t want to we’re going to take a break in about fifteen minutes. So I’m hoping that I’ll get through most of this. Okay.
Okay. Okay. We’re looking at volitional dispositions, also called karma, a karma of a particular type. First of all, you have a disposition. And you can’t have a disposition except except in relation to an object, right?
You have an attitude or a feeling or something that is toward a certain state of affairs that leads to action, Okay? That you’ve got a disposition toward a state of affairs that leads to action. Okay? This state of affairs can be a situation. It can be an object.
It can be any sorts of thing. It’s phenomena. It could be all kinds of things. It could be the weather. It could be food.
It could be an item of clothing. It could be anything. But the point is that this leads to this. And in Sanskrit, action is called karma. That’s all it means.
It doesn’t mean anything more than that. That’s what the word means. Okay. So you have a disposition. You have a disposition to action.
And so where volition comes in is that’s the motivation. This is the thing that is the driver. So the motivation is also what leads to the action. And the action leads to an effect. Not because there’s justice in the world, not because somebody’s somewhere doling out punishments and rewards.
It just a simple fact of nature. All of science is based on it. Buddhist philosophy is based on it too. When you have a confluence of events, a confluence of causes, or a cause, you get an effect. If you stick your hand in the fire, it will burn you.
It’s not because the fire doesn’t like you or because the fire thinks that you’ve been bad. It just burns because it is the nature of fire to burn the stuff of which our flesh is made when it comes in contact. Given our nerve structure, given our desire to preserve the self, that’s what pain is for. It’s basically to make sure that you don’t do it again. You avoid it if you can the next time.
Okay? You’ve got dispositions that lead to actions, dispositions that create motivations and vice versa. This is also an iterative process. Motivation and disposition really can’t be pulled apart. And all of it leads to action, which is karma.
But the effect is the thing that’s important because the effect is suffering, right? The effect is something that we aim for with our action, which is usually something that’s good for our preservation, our enhancement, or our extension. But because we’re acting from ignorance and we’re not really in touch with the way things really are, it frequently comes a cropper. And when it comes a cropper, we don’t feel so great. And things go up and down and up and down.
And we’ve got no sense of control over that up and down and up and downness. Does that make sense? Right? Okay. Okay.
So What’s the difference? What’s the difference between a bad effect and a good effect? Yeah. And it’s intrinsically beneficial? It’s intrinsically good or bad?
That’s where you start getting into the problems of self reference. And well set up for what we’re going to do right after the break. Thank you, Richard. Not just another pretty faith and, in fact, razor sharp. Yeah, yeah.
So yeah, anything else? Any other questions at this point? So if you want to change the effect, you want to reverse that, you’ve got to do something about the action. And if you want to do something about that, you have to do something about the motivation disposition, right? Which leads back to ignorance, right?
Something to do there’s something not quite right about this, right? There’s something not quite accurate about this. And that’s fed by ignorance. Okay, shall we have a cup of tea? Don’t you have any questions at all?
Do you have any idea how unnerving find this? Sorry. Well, it’s because the world is not referenced by us. The scale on which we perceive things is not all there is to perceive. Right.
I take it only as a slice of reality. Why is that mistaken? That wouldn’t be mistaken. But that’s not the way we generally take it. Okay.
We’ll get back to self reference. Yeah. Okay. Why is that? Well, if you only get a slide, you haven’t got the big picture.
No. We don’t self reference. No. Self reference. Okay.
Okay. About, for the moment, the attitude toward what goes on inside our skin. Okay? Me and mine. Okay.
Okay. The thing if you want to cut to the chase, the mere I that eats, sleeps, and shits is absolutely true self reference. There is a conglomerate of causes and conditions of parts and a whole that eats, thinks, goes to the bathroom, and all that sort of stuff. And there’s nothing mistaken about that. But it is self reference that requires survive, that survival is important above all things, that that actually is the main game.
Do you mean by intentionality? Intentionality? You can say it’s intending to maintain itself, but it just does. It does. So it’s just a mechanical process?
No. It is and it isn’t. There’s all sorts of things in human beings that are just a mechanical process, just a mechanical process. It’s what you are capable of doing, what degrees of freedom you have to actually alter the mechanisms that make you run that makes us different. But self reference is basically just survive, enhance, extend.
And there is no basis outside that. There is nothing in the world as it is that says that that is an appropriate way of behaving. Okay. Good point. Inappropriate.
What? Did somebody? No? Maintaining the organism it appropriate. I have to eat if I want to live.
But responding to the things that make me survive as being somehow more important than they are, having a kind of reality that they have beyond basically just feeding me. If I think of the food that I’m eating besides, yes, it’s delicious and we’re supposed to enjoy that in tantra and all that sort of stuff. But basically if I look at my food and I see more than amino acids, fats, carbohydrates and that sort of stuff that’s keeping the machine going- that keeps the machine of my body going, because it does work automatically, then that is a reification. That’s an imputation of a value that there’s nothing in the general picture that would sustain that other than self reference. And then when you start looking at No.
Not. Forget a human being. Let’s talk about a bacterium. Candle? Candle flame.
Yeah. Candle flame. Burns, burns, burns, burns, burns, burns. So the wax is finished. Finished.
No. No. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it.
That’s It makes no move like, oh geez, I’m just about to run out of wax here. I think I’d better go over here. I’d better sort of extend my flame over here because there might be a deposit of wax over here. So I’ll sort of like It’s called life. It’s the difference between the organic and the inorganic.
That’s what it is. And there is a difference. I know that you were raised with a particular I mean, like and I know that it’s been drummed into us forever about there’s no difference between it’s all just chemical and they’re all just basically the same. But in the last fifteen, twenty years, biologists have come completely around to thinking that there is actually a really big difference. Because ever since they’ve started trying to penetrate the origin of life, ever since they’ve been trying to look at systems I mean, when was all just a little machine and we could say, well, this one gene makes this one protein and everything works in a nice sort of like little compartmentalized linear way, that we maintain that illusion that there was nothing difference between us and a candle flame.
But it is not maintained by anyone anyone anymore who works in biology. There’s nothing privileged about the chemicals that make up the human body. There’s nothing special about the kinds of chemicals that are in our bodies. It’s the way they’re organized and the way they behave that is totally different from the candle flame, not anywhere close. And the more we look, the weirder and more complex it gets all the way down.
It’s bizarre. It is like it’s turtles all the way down. Does everybody know that story? I don’t know who the speaker was, but some Nobel laureate was waxing brilliantly about what we know about the universe and the Big Bang and all this and that sort of stuff. And afterward, a little old lady came up to him and says, you think you’re very, very clever, young man.
I can see that you think you’re very clever. But in the Hindu cosmology, they know that the world rides on the back of an elephant which stands on a turtle. And he says, and what does the turtle stand on? And she said, ah, it’s turtles all the way down. So I mean, the more we look, that is not an answer that actually is very satisfying.
Satisfying. But the more we look, the more complex it gets. It doesn’t get any simpler. It gets more and more and more complex. And actually, the behavior of the mechanisms within the self, even they seem to be acting like they’re making decisions.
It’s bizarre. It’s bizarre. So the difference between this and a cell, like the difference between a mote of dust on my finger and a galaxy made of the same stuff, totally different organization, totally different behavior. I know I’m not going to convince you, basically when I first came into this game too, said, oh, but there’s no difference between the organic and inorganic. And in fact chemistry departments, the world over, once they became convinced that there was no difference between the organic and inorganic, the organic and inorganic departments merged into chemistry departments.
Now they’re all sort of breaking apart again. Because there are real differences in the kinds of products and processes relative to this. You cannot turn biology into physics. You can’t even turn chemistry into physics entirely. But that’s the closest you’re going to get.
It’s a real mystery. It’s a real problem. How it started, I have no idea. But that there is a difference, yes. And that this flame will do no more to preserve itself than sort of bob around in the wind.
That’s all it does. That’s all it does. That’s all it can do. But a cell, a plant, you know, even viruses do better than that. And whether they’re alive or not is still a big, big, big question.
Can we have tea now? I know what you’re getting at. Yeah? Watch for stories on the Mimi mimivirus. The mimivirus is very interesting.
Probably. M I M I virus. Yeah. All one word. Yeah.
Okay. So we’re looking at volitional dispositions. And if we want to change the Reify. Reify. Okay.
Thank you. Thank you, Anthony. Okay. Reify means to make divine. Yeah, deify as well.
But reify means to make concrete and concrete. No, deify means to make somebody a god. Well, that’s it it but it in first instance, it means to make something divine. Concrete. Yeah.
But we you but we use it as to make something concrete. And actually, to impart qualities that it doesn’t have. Okay, for example, I feel like my name is Pamela and I’m an eBay addict. I’ll admit that here. But on eBay, there’s a store called Reify Clothing.
Right? And what they mean is to make it divine, not to make it concrete. It’s like to give it the kind of je ne sais quoi that it wouldn’t ordinarily have just as a piece of fabric done in a particular way. Its root is not anything to do with divine. Yes, darling.
And? Okay. All right. We actually have have a modern classic scholar. So what is the root?
Well, it’s res. It just means To be. No, it’s thing. As it’s concrete. As it’s concrete, just To make it a thing.
But we generally mean that we’re imbuing something with more than its But you’re right. It’s a case of solidifying it to make it a All right. To make a thing. Means. So from ignorance, and particularly the self reference kind of ignorance, self referencing kind of ignorance, which can make into a thing almost anything that’s good for it, or make into a thing anything that it perceives as bad for it.
You get a disposition that elides very nicely into motivation, that gives rise, that impels or compels an action, which has an effect. So it would seem like this would be really quite easy, almost a no brainer, to kind of wheel this back from this point. Does anybody think that that’s the case? Good. Because of the scaffolding that we have is really, really deeply ingrained in every single cell of our body.
And the kind of scaffolding for volitional dispositions, now this is my reading of it. This is something that my own contemplation came of it. So I don’t think it’s necessarily consistent with a I hope it’s consistent with a traditional teaching, but I don’t know if it comes out of one. If it does, if I if I lucked out and actually, you know, got something that was consistent, that would be great. But, what it seems to me is the scaffolding for this is basically what is called the eight worldly dharmas.
Okay. Now these are four pairs of of value judgments, really. Okay. One is gain and loss. The other one is pleasure and pain.
One is praise and blame. The last one is fame and notoriety. Now, it’s fairly easy to see from biological standpoint how these things operate in every single organism. Okay? If it’s like, you gaining food?
Are you gaining an environment in which you can exist or thrive? Are you gaining mates so that you can reproduce? Are you losing oxygen? Are you losing a food source? Are you losing flagella?
Is there a paramecium actually nibbling on you? These kinds of gains and losses are really, really clear in the biological realm. And there is a theory by an American neuroscientist by the name of Antonio Damasio, that pleasure and pain are basically the feeling components of gain and loss. It’s like pleasure is something that comes from the satisfaction of a seeking behavior. If you are hungry, you seek food, you get food.
Generally speaking, you have an experience of pleasure. So this pleasure makes you seek for gain. And pain is a signal of this or damage. Pain basically says, gotta do something now. Something really wrong here.
Not okay. Not okay. Which is frequently you know, it could be the loss of a limb if you’re a nematode. It could be not a nematode, but a newt. It could be tissue damage.
It could be anything. But it’s basically do something now. We’re in trouble. So actually these things are quite closely related. These pairs are quite closely related according to some of the leading thinking on emotion today.
Now, I think that you could probably say that praise and blame now, if you examine your own experience, you’ll see that a lot of the things that we do, a lot of the things that we think are oriented toward this. And generally the pleasure end of the spectrum. We don’t generally have a tendency to think of it as gain. We have a tendency at least I have a tendency to think that, well, when this happens, I’ll feel great. Happens, or something like that.
And so it’s got a pleasure sense to it, not gain. Or oh, I want that to happen because I wouldn’t feel very good, or something like that. And so I like to think of praise and blame as basically being an internalized sense of these things based on an external stimuli. Something in the world signals you’ve got a gain or a loss here or pleasure and pain. And you respond to that.
If it’s praise, it’s like it’s an expansion. It’s a gain. It’s a pleasurable thing. And if it’s blame, it’s like pain and it’s a loss. And it’s an internalized version of an external cue.
Does that make sense? And this is basically the externalized version of the cue. Because this is all about reputation, what other people are going to think, right? But it all revolves pretty much around this. This is basically an internal I mean, can pump these things up until they’re huge so praise becomes pride and all that sort of stuff.
But I think that these things are the drivers in a biological sense. And these are the elaborations. And if you think that the external ized stuff, the fame and notoriety, is something that’s only true for humans, it is not. Because there is such a thing called audience effects. And that means an animal will only engage in a particular behavior if there are others around to witness it.
And this includes guppies, fish, the little fish in your fish bowl, little tiny things that have a little streak of blue on them and that sort of stuff, Siamese fighting fish, stuff like that, won’t do a thing unless somebody’s watching. Or if they’re in a group, if they’re in a social situation, they wait until either somebody is watching or not watching apparently based on an estimation of whether they think they’re going to win or not. So there are audience effects. Very, very low down on the tree of life, as it were. And we have a tendency to think that fish aren’t very intelligent, but they actually really are.
And one of the things that on the issue of pleasure and pain, there’s this whole debate about whether fish can feel pain, right? Because if fish feel pain, sports fishing is a bummer, right? Theoretically. I mean, we cause pain to other things all the time, including ourselves. So mean, fish are maybe down there on the scale of things that we hurt because we’re already hurting so many other things anyway.
But if you think you’re getting off scot free because fish don’t feel pain, it’s apparently not true. The Roslyn Institute in Scotland, which are the same people who brought us Dolly the sheep. So who knows what they’re up to up there. But one thing they did get up to was testing trout, rainbow trout, for signs of pain and distress. And they injected different groups with bee venom.
They injected another group with saline solution. And they compared the behavior of the two. They had to inject the other one with saline so that was both a handling and an invasive technique. Both of them were equally exposed to the invasive technique. Now the fish that were injected with the bee venom went off their food immediately.
They started rocking side to side. They went up to the side of the glass. And they rubbed their lip against where they’d been, injected. They rubbed it up against the glass. They went down onto the bottom and tried to rub their And basically their hatred went massively up.
And their behavior was very much described as what chimpanzees do when they’re in distress. They rock. They go off their food. You know, their heart rates go really up and they become quite limp and listless. And they recovered in about three hours, you know, and they were fine again.
So the evidence suggests that they would know when they’re being hooked. So all this stuff about gain and loss, pleasure pain, where this cuts out, like on a really dramatic level, in the living world, who knows. But almost everything can tell that it’s seeking something that’s good for it and trying to avoid something that’s bad for it. Everything can do that, even plants. Okay.
So the scaffolding’s pretty, pretty deeply ingrained. Oh, I put it over here so I didn’t have to walk that far. Okay. So the eight worldly dharmas arise from the conditions of existence. But they also arise really clearly from ignorance.
And when we’re talking about ignorance in this context, talking about a mistaken mode of apprehension. And it doesn’t take much searching analysis of our ordinary experience to find out how mistaken some of our attitudes toward things are on on how little they on how little they rest, really. And one of the is it okay if I remove this? You’re pretty why don’t I I’ll do this one instead. An analogy I heard recently that I really quite liked was that of a fire ring.
You know when you’re watching somebody spin a torch? When it gets going really fast, it just looks a ring of fire. They manipulate that ring of fire. They can do all kinds of things with it. In a reified sense, this were the proper mode of reference.
The proper point of reference is like walking into a performance of a fire twirler without seeing the performer come on the stage, without seeing them pull out the torch, without seeing them light the torch, and without seeing them start to spin. All you see is the ring. That’s the thing. And it’s looking so wonderful, especially in the dark. And things in the world are like that.
There are moments and moments and moments and moments of things happening that happen on a time scale such that we see this whiteboard, or we see that chair, or we see that table. Even though in reality at the Planck scale or much greater than the pliancyk scale, all of these things are basically space. They’re space. How they hang together quite the way they do at our scale, physicists still don’t know. But the fact that we made these things to function at our scale says something about us, not about the nature of this thing existing forever and always.
These are functioning things for us. They’re artifacts for us, for our particular scale, for our particular needs, that sort of thing. And it’s that constant mistaking other people’s behavior, objects of beauty or ugliness, favorable circumstances at work or not, even the horrific circumstances in the world like the tsunami in Burma and the earthquake in China. On the level of us and our level of concern, and its appropriate concern, certain things are happening. But on the level of the microbes that are inhabiting every single one of the people who are dying and who are trying to get by, there’s a completely different dynamic going on.
And those are living things too. And according to the Buddhist teaching, each and every single one of them has Buddha nature, just like us. And for them, it’s not a tragedy. For us, it’s a tragedy. And it is a real tragedy.
So these things are really quite relative. And once you have relativity I don’t mean Einsteinian relativity, mean that kind of depends on the level you’re looking at it, relativity. Once you’ve got that going, you’ve got something that has a little bit of a flaw in its reality. It has a certain reality, but it’s not quite the way it seems. It functions, yes, but it’s not quite the way we take it to be.
Any questions? She pleaded. So it’s all totally crystal clear? I kind of find myself going, why did they need to undertake a study to determine whether a fish was in pain when it was hooked? Mean, you were speaking about it like it was in the near recent past.
Oh, recent past like the last two years, last three years. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, for me, a lot of this I’m sort of going, Oh, duh. Yeah. Duh.
But whoops, sorry. Yeah. For these incredibly intelligent scientists, But Alica, it’s incredibly controversial. As soon as this report came out and was published, as soon as it was published, were biologists who were working for fish and wildlife services, especially in the United States, who said this can’t be possibly right because fish don’t have the same kinds of brain regions in a human being where pain is registered aren’t the same in fish. Therefore, they can’t feel pain the way we do.
This is just behavior. Jampa was talking about, he’s not talking about at the level of fish. He’s talking about it at a much, much, much lower level. But it’s that whole business of at what point is it just a machine. And there are a whole lot of people who will say that just a machine actually begins right at below great apes.
And I know that sounds insane. Anybody who’s ever seen a David Attenborough special knows it’s not the case. Scientists who believe that. There are scientists who believe that only human beings have consciousness because we have language. I mean, this is a travesty.
This is a travesty, which is how I ended up here. It seems incredible, but it’s true. Yeah, it does seem like, well, duh. But you’d be surprised at what is not well, duh. You know?
It’s amazing, really. Be gobsmacked. Oh, have. Yeah. As a child, I knew that.
But what certain people would say? Well, that’s folk biology. Animals making our way across the across the savannah, we needed to have a kind of a module in our heads. I don’t buy any of this, by the way. You know, we had to have a kind of a module in our heads that would make a distinction between things that were living that moved and other things that moved so that we would only be really paying attention to things that were moved.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean that doesn’t say anything about the nature of the thing that’s moving. It says everything about our minds and how it works. That’s what they say. Heather? On that basis, you’d never pick a lotus because lotuses actually thermoregulate.
They can change their body temperature in ways that fish can’t. So where we go from here is to consciousness. And I don’t want to go there yet. So I’m I’m sort of I’m sort of played out unless you’ve got something else on your minds. I’ll if you’ve got any question, no matter how anything, I’m I’m willing to take a stab at it.
Something has consciousness, does it mean it’s the same thing? Within Tibetan Buddhism, yes. Within Buddhism, yes. So a virus, for example, doesn’t have consciousness? Well, we can’t know for certain, but it doesn’t seem to have attachment and aversion or anything like that.
It doesn’t seem there’s no Yeah. Okay. Yeah. It doesn’t it cannot marshal a response against any threat. Its protein coat either holds or it doesn’t.
Do you know what I mean? Whereas a bacterium will change what it does to try and shore itself up. A bacterium will exchange genes with another bacterium. I can’t say in order to because I think that’s going too far. But they do exchange genes, in something that looks very much like sex.
And the genes that they exchange exchange are generally functional. Like there’s a plasmid that has about eight different antibiotic resistances on it that’s been passed around like a compilation tape of hits of the ’70s rampantly through the bacterial world, which is one of the reasons why bacterial resistance to antibiotics is so widespread. Everybody thought it was all mutation. There was a mutation. And then so many of them, they reproduced in such large numbers that the mutations accumulated.
But that apparently isn’t the way that it is at all. Somebody got a mutation somewhere. Somehow a plasmid got put together. Together and they’re still not sure how this happens. And it gets past and past and past and past until everybody’s got one, which is why it’s so tough for us to meet the challenge of bacteria.
Because They have got so many tricks for outsmarting us that it is really quite frightening. And would you say Yep. No. No. No.
It’s an important question. Chris you’ve got reference, which becomes in a kind self centeredness, which is, we usually say, selfish. Right? Okay. Well, if this is the baseline state, how on earth do we ever get cooperative behavior?
How do we ever get altruistic behavior? And let’s be clear about altruistic behavior. Altruism means sacrifice. That means you sacrifice a good for yourself for someone else. Right?
And in biology, this is generally put in terms of survival, but most often as reproductive potential or fitness. I hate that term, but I’ll use it anyway. Okay. So when Myxococcus xanthus, which fantastic kind of bacterium, really quite spooky, lives in the soil. When Myxococcus xanthus comes together to form fruiting bodies to make long lived spores because they’re running out of food, right, major way.
And this is basically a last ditch effort for the future. A large proportion of them lies. They break open their cell wall so that there’s food there. There will be some food to keep the process going until they’ve completed to sporulation. And there will also be some food when conditions improve.
But there are also some cells that stay on the perimeter because they’re extraordinarily territorial. And they’re nasty. They exude toxins to kill others and that sort of stuff. I mean, they’re very, very talk about selfish. But they’re selfish and they’re altruistic.
And the reason why selfishness can end up as being cooperative and altruistic is because cooperation and altruism works. If within a group a selfish individual may free ride and take advantage of cooperators, right? But the more cooperators there are in a group, that group will outcompete a group of selfish individuals any day of the week. Doesn’t say the individual just gave up his life. That’s right.
Way they, biologists, argue that is that they gave up their reproductive fitness for the fitness of their kin. Well, if you’re doing it for your kin and you’re not doing it for non kin, that is doing it for someone like me. Someone who shares about ninety nine point nine nine nine nine nine percent of my genes. My genome’s pretty much gonna live, even if I don’t. That’s the argument.
I think this is a lot more elastic than it’s generally thought. But it is not that’s a very, very, very unpopular view, especially within biology. In fact, I wrote an article about cooperation and altruism in bacteria. And if bacteria are the most numerous species on the planet and they’re social and altruistic, that must mean that there’s got to be something wrong in our assumptions about Darwinism, which is triumph of it’s all competition, red and tooth and claw. And it’s all about me, me, me, me, me.
And I got an email from this incredibly famous guy in evolutionary theory about the evolution of cooperation saying, very nice article, dear, but it’s all about kin selection. It’s me and my kin. And if you don’t see that, you don’t see see anything. I think he’s wrong. But I can argue it very well.
You still got a problem with self reference and how you get to altruism. No, you’re thinking of being self referential. Self reference is just basically gauging responses in relation to the self, which is usually bounded by a membrane of some kind. If you’re talking about something being self referential It’s not always just their kin, though. So that’s the problem.
Yeah. That would be self referential, not self reference. No, when I say self reference, it’s basically to keep the word self before our minds instead of survival, preservation, and enhancement. If you’re self referential, like I can think of myself, I can think of myself in a particular circumstance, which is like metacognition. That’s something to what am I not getting?
What am I not getting? Will you play with it and hit me with it next week? Thanks. Good. Because I, you know, I I want to think through this really clearly as much as you do because, you know, because things ride on it.
Yep. Talking about the empirical self. We’re talking about all the bells and whistles, all the technicolor, everything, the courtship rituals, the, you know, all that sort of stuff, all the stuff that’s larded on. We’re not talking about the empirical self. Okay.
I think the empirical self is only something that people like us can get to, really. Understanding it’s just the eye that eats, it’s just I that sleeps, that sort of stuff. Most organisms Isn’t that I self references? I just simply walk. Simply walk.
Try to get by in life? Yeah, but if we start asking questions like that, end up with how did ignorance start? And that is a question that, you know, the Buddha wouldn’t even go there. I mean, why would I? You know?
Yeah. Richard? Because that’s actually the really natural way to behave. That’s the argument. To be selfish.
Yeah, to be selfish is the natural way to behave. Yeah. I mean, in ant there’s something called worker policing. All the workers, they sacrifice their reproductive potential to serve the colony. It’s only the queen that’s knocking offspring, right?
Just one after another after another. Eggs, eggs, eggs, all the time eggs. And there are workers. They’re all capable of reproducing. They’re all capable.
It’s not that they’re infertile. And workers will decide, nope, I’m going to have eggs. I want my own lineage. I want my own lineage. I mean, what are they thinking?
I mean, isn’t a Disney film, right? I mean, I don’t know what they’re thinking. And they decide they’re going to lay eggs. And they start getting territorial. And they start keeping the other ones away.
And they stop going out and getting food for the hive. And the other ants come in and basically slap them around, eat their eggs, and say, get to work. You’re not going to do this. That’s what they do. It’s called worker policing.
It’s like they stop them from reproducing on their own so there are mechanisms to keep them in line. That’s right. The Buddha was right. What can I say? Anything else?
Sum up in layman’s terms. Yep. Yep. Because we are ignorant, and ignorance is is built into our conditions of existence, like the kind of bodies we have and everything else like that, we develop habits. And those habits lead us to act in particular ways.
And because it all goes back to a misapprehension about how things are, it will lead us into error. It leads us into error. And as a result of that error, our fortunes rise and fall and rise and fall and rise and fall. We keep making the same mistakes. And we’re there’s even if there isn’t overt suffering in our lives, there’s a sort of perpetual uneasiness that things aren’t quite the way they could be.
You know, things are you know, if if if we’re happy, it’s like this is great. This is the way it should be. But mostly it’s like things are gonna get better. Things are gonna get better. Things are gonna get better.
They’re gonna improve somehow. But, as was pointed out to me when I went with Natalie to those teachings in Byron Bay, let’s face it, saṃsāra really doesn’t work. I mean, like, things look good, but they’re always falling apart. It’s like the electricity is great, but you get a power failure right when you’re cooking a roast. Things are always not quite working.
And if everything goes so perfectly, it’s so unusual that you say, wow, wow, everything went really great. Whereas usually it’s hitting every red light or maybe three quarters of the red lights or maybe getting in, you know, trying to get somewhere and you’re in, you know, they’re tearing up the street or you go to the grocery store and there’s lines down into the bread section. It’s all really a bit difficult. Nothing goes quite that smoothly. That makes sense?
That’s my experience of life. Maybe you’re all Bodhisattvas. Yeah? But within Hinduism, there’s also moksha. Mokśa is always there.
And as long as you’ve got moksha, it’s like you can accept things as they are now. I mean, you know, like in Bhagavad Gita, I mean, like, you know, the idea is that, you know, you accept your role and you do it immaculately and let go of the result of it. And that’s a very wise teaching. But there is still moksha. Maybe in another life Arjuna is going to be an ascetic.
And he won’t be a warrior anymore given the way he thinks about the battle. Well, I suppose if you completely accepted everything, you would be free. You’d be completely free. If you accepted everything, you’d be totally free. You would have moksha, you’d be liberated.
This is not good, this is not bad, I accept. You’d be free. So maybe they’re not so different on one level. But the difference is that in Buddhism there is a is a school that says even if you are capable achieving moksha yourself, you should hang around until everybody else has achieved it too. And that’s quite different.
That’s quite different. Thank you all very much. Thanks. Oh, don’t take that water away. I need I need water desperately.
Oh, oh, oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. One thing. I’ve forgotten this for two weeks now. I brought an article about functional neuroimaging of the vegetative state. Apparently, there are new rules that are going to have to be written.
Because even though all of the signs of the body are that it’s finished, that it’s kept alive, there are subtle signs that something is going on, even in deep, deep, deep coma and vegetative states. So watch this space. You can’t rely on anything. Do you have any more of the papers you printed out last week? Yeah, I can make some more.
Oh, I can give you the Oh, this is in this is in Nature Reviews Neuroscience. I can make a copy of it. Oh, yeah. Do you wanna do you want me to make a copy of it? Yeah.
Okay. I’ll make some copies for next week. Yes. Okay. Yeah?
On the soil funky, wasn’t it? Yeah? What’s the external, fungi that survive? Because