Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 31-minute teaching, Pamela Lyon explores the sixth link of Dependent Arising—contact—through both traditional Buddhist philosophy and contemporary cognitive science. She begins with the iconography of contact (a couple kissing) and then unpacks its definition: the moment when an object, a sense power, and consciousness meet. Lyon challenges the traditional classification of contact as a mental factor, arguing instead for viewing it as the first fresh, uncontaminated moment of perception before conceptual overlay kicks in. She walks through the relationship between cognitive scientists like Gerald Edelman and classical Buddhist accounts of how mental representations arise, then uses a personal story—her transformation from childhood spider phobia to appreciation for Huntsman spiders through intensive practice—to demonstrate that perception can be purified and reappraisal is possible at each moment. The session concludes with audience questions about whether contact without evaluation is possible, and Lyon argues it is theoretically possible through mind training, though she qualifies this from authority rather than direct experience.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2008 06 27 Pamela Lyon – 27 june 2008 Track 3.mp3
UUID: 1ce2a3c2-25fe-4314-bb43-f38aa759b50c
Teacher: Pamela Lyon
Collection: Pamela Lyon (Pamela Lyon)
Date: 2008-06-27
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 30.9 minutes
Words: ~3,163
Fears on how the self connects with the world or how the consciousness connects with the world. And now we have the sixth link, in this one, which is contact. And the charming iconography for contact is a couple kissing. Because the sense power and this is one of my favorite things. This happens very, very quickly temporally.
But this is one of my favorite things because as I was telling a couple of people out during the break, just before I came to Buddha House tonight, I was typing out some notes. The of philosophy, actually the head of humanities at Adelaide Uni, came in and asked me what I was doing. And I said, well, I’m preparing a lecture. I give a lecture tonight. And he said, where do you give a lecture?
I said, Buddha House. And he said, really? And I said, yeah. And he said, what are you lecturing on? And I said, well, remember that paper I gave like in two thousand that basically led to the thesis that I’m doing?
Because I didn’t say to him, but because you said, that sounds very interesting in and of itself, but I don’t think it has anything to do with cognitive science. I didn’t tell him that, but that’s what he said. And so I immediately started looking at cognitive science to see, is it right? Is it true? Does it really have nothing to say to it?
And so I used this example. And he said, after all the years you’ve been working on your PhD, hasn’t it sort of basically, do you still believe that stuff? And I said, on the contrary, it’s made my faith in this, my conviction in this so much stronger than it ever was. And I said, rebirth aside. And I used this example, which I will outline for you you right now, which is exactly the basis of his original theory of how mental representations come to be.
And he said, oh, you mean so it’s not original? And I said: No, the Buddha did get there first. And it’s things like this that have made me just so excited about reading science and getting involved with science and that sort of stuff. Because Katrin asked at the beginning of the class, you see any conflicts? The conflicts are in the detail of how a little thing works.
But in the general picture, I haven’t seen any conflict at all. And in fact, have seen nothing but science really underscoring, making it stronger, really, really shoring up this basic picture. And which is what makes it so exhilarating, you know, to be doing that. Sorry, Leslie. God, I know.
It’s your face. You’re like, no, no, can go. I’ll take off the back. No, no, no. Hold your face.
Hold your face. But it’s like, but you know, somebody’s sitting there on a board roll going like this. And it’s like, oy vey. Please. Yeah, it’s all right.
It’s Okay. It’s Okay. Contact is both a moment and a mental factor. Now, because it’s a moment of mind, I agree with this traditional rendering of it as a mental factor. But I think that this is jumping the gun, in my view.
I think it’s jumping the gun, and I’ll tell you why. Okay. First, contact as a moment in a moment of mind requires an object. It requires a sense power. And it requires an immediately preceding moment of consciousness.
Because consciousness is momentary. Moment, moment, moment, moment. It needs a preceding moment of consciousness. Okay? And contact is when these three happen.
When those three come together, you have contact. Now, that’s why this is a moment of mind. Now, contact as a mental factor is traditionally explained as that moment of mind that comes into being when these three meet, which also makes a distinction about the pleasantness or unpleasantness of the object. I don’t think that that is true in all in all readings readings of Buddhist philosophy because in it’s, isn’t it, valid cognition? Abhidharma?
No, I think it’s Dharmakīrti, I think. That would be, wouldn’t it? Yeah. The mental factor is not just the contact, the coming together of these three, but making a judgment about the object. In the Pramānavārttika, in the treatise on valid cognition, Valid cognition is just the first moment when these three things come together.
The very first moment, fresh. Is that where the concept comes in? In the moment of contact, I think there is no concept. It comes the moment after. It comes the moment after.
Yeah. Now the mind that comes together with the sense power and the mind that arises out of this is already predisposed by the basis. Right? And the short answer, ignorance, disposition, to respond in a particular way. So I think to that extent you can say that it’s a mental factor.
But because we still have feeling to go, I I don’t like considering this as being the place where positive or negative starts. It’s just the first moment of contact in which you say, perceive you wouldn’t even say it, but it would be something that you would apprehend, I see a patch of green. And then your mind says, that is a patch of green. But just simply the bare awareness, sense perception of something isn’t I mean it’s impossible to disentangle all of our concepts. I mean, I’m looking at a room.
Right? Know, fact that this is a room is a linguistic convention based on agreement about a particular configuration of things. Right? Yeah. And I think this is the step, which is just a very, very quick meeting of object, sense, power, and consciousness.
Now, Gerald Edelman, who I was speaking to this evening, would say that this is and this is that the way our minds work this is a cognitive scientist speaking, not a Buddhist. There’s the object. There is the representation of the object through the sense power. Right? Now in traditional way of talking, says where is it?
It The object is the cause for consciousness to be generated in its aspect. Now, in its aspect is the whole issue of how are objects represented in our minds. Short answer is we don’t know. We don’t know. There doesn’t appear to be grandmother don’t grandmother neurons, like neurons that are dedicated grandmothers.
There don’t appear to be apple neurons, that are a neuron that’s dedicated to an apple. We see contours, we see shapes, shapes. We see colors. We see depth. And our conceptual minds fill in everything else.
We’re filling in all the time. When the traditional philosophy Tibetan Buddhism says that the object is the cause for a consciousness to arise in its aspect, this is the area of representation in cognitive science and we still don’t know what that means. Now if you hold up an eyeball, like a bull’s eyeball, to the light and shine it on an object, you can see that object inverted on the back of the eye, which is how we first came to realize in Descartes’ time that everything is inverted. Everything that we see is upside down in our eyes. Right?
And it has to be made right side up and everything else when it’s processed in our brain. But just because a tree or a chair or person can appear in the jelly like substance of the eye doesn’t mean that there is something in our mind that is actually making that object just like that object. Even our experience of our mind is of a kind of a movie that’s running. You know, we’ve got this story that’s going. Right?
And it’s got sounds and it’s got smells and it’s got sights and it’s got memories and it’s got all this stuff. It doesn’t mean that they’re, you know, I am literally, you know, I literally have Mr. Darcy arising out of the pond in my head, you know, that sort of thing. Yeah, lucky me. Or Richard arising out of the pond.
I can have him in real life. I don’t need him in my mind. So how this works, we’re not really sure. We’re not really sure. This whole notion that can’t theoretically you could have a sense, power, and an object, but without this, there’s nothing.
There is no perception. Because unless you have an interpretant, in this case we’ll call it CC because it’s contaminated consciousness, it’s still clear and knowing, but it’s larded over with all these conceptions we have. That’s the thing that interprets. So that’s one of the reasons why I love contact, because it plays out really nicely in a modern way. You could give a paper on this, for example, and cognitive scientists would know what you were talking about.
And they’d go: Oh, really? You know? Yes, but if you’ve got a mind contaminated, it is fresh and unmistaken. But how do you pick out these fresh and unmistaken moments from all the ones that are conceptually larded over and stuff like that? I yeah, I have It has to do with generic images.
Generic images? No. Okay, never mind. Let’s not go there all right. Alright. Thanks.
Does anybody have any questions about this? Go ahead. Oh, I don’t want it to be a mental factor. Yeah, no, I don’t want it to be a mental factor. I took that out of His Holiness book.
Yeah, sorry. Yeah, that’s where it comes from this. And so I’m saying that I would prefer not to think of it in those terms because I think I would rather go with the sort of valid cognition view. That whole notion of a first moment of perception is clear and uncontaminated. It’s uncontaminated and fresh and valid and unmistaken.
Do we mean by by that? Come on. You’ve studied this for years. You know. Yeah, but I don’t know which.
I know it has to do with apprehension, but saying the first moment of mind doesn’t necessarily tell you anything. What? No, I feel what it is, but I can’t say it in words. It’s before we actually put any thought onto it. Actually Yes.
Yeah. The valid cognition would be the first moment, hot or sensation. Sensation. No good, no bad, no nothing. Sensation.
Sensation. Which is why this is where this is the turning point. From here, all of this can be experienced as sense experience, contact, blah. Right? Or even feeling.
Even feeling you can turn back from there. This is sensation. But once you start plussing and minusing, the whole catastrophe happens. It is possible to have these without any of this. Positive, negative..
Attachment aversion. You can even haveI think you can probably have feeling. Feeling is the let’s see. I didn’t put it on here, but I think it is probably the part of this. Feeling link seven is feeling and at its basis it is just the sensation.
In Antonio Damasio’s term, it would be the feeling of what has happened. The feeling of what happens. Something is happening. I feel it. It’s registered as a feeling before any of this kicks in.
So you can turn back at any point from here. You know, at the point of can acknowledge that you’re hearing something. You can acknowledge that you’re tasting something. You can acknowledge that you’re smelling something without going into the rest of the catastrophe. You know, you can have these bare experiences without larding on it, you know, it’s not just a sound, it’s the ice cream truck.
You know, it’s not just a sound, it’s a bloody miner that won’t shut up. You know, it’s not just a smell, Oh my god, the cat shat. You know, and it’s now filling the filling the house. Know, it’s you know, before this happens, which is from this point on, All this can be stopped. Not in a rebirth sense, but in an every moment of our day sense, every moment of our experience sense.
That’s the turning point. On the chart that I gave you previously, I had the turning point I think here. Wrong. So wrong. Yep.
Was that a just thinking. Yep. If you have aI meanwell, if you have a okay, let’s say I’ve got a problem with eBay. I can avoid eBay by not turning on my computer and going to my eBay site. I can avoid contact in that respect.
But I can’t avoid seeing things, I can’t avoid smelling things, I can’t avoid experience, full stop. And it’s not the gross things like alcohol or gossip or something like that. You’ve got to start with the gross stuff, right? But it’s the really subtle moment to moment grasping that keeps the whole show going. You know, you can start withI mean, you’ve got to start.
Where else can you start? But on the gross stuff. But it’s the really fine grained cascade of this happening every single nanosecond, you know, that is just the mostI mean this is why we’re trapped. This is why work has to be done. This is why the mere fact that it’s possible to stop this stuff is just a miracle, really.
Thank heaven for Dependent Arising because if it wasn’t for Dependent Arising we’d be stuck. But we’re not. No matter what my bank balance is. Kidding, darling. Anybody else?
On this basis I would have to say that I’m relying on authority. Mean, well, I mean the I no. Well, the whole notion that you can have pure perception, that you can purify your perception. You can roll back ignorance. You can purify all of your volitional dispositions, you can burn up all that karma so that basically if you are reentering or even being like a bodhisattva, contact is whatever arises as attractive, unattractive, or neutral. That’s inherent in the actual perception.
It is There’s no contact without that evaluation. It’s inherent in the process. And that’s Buddhist. Think that’s Buddhist. Within the context of the problem.
It’s always in terms of the objective relationship, how the object is relating to the subject as being attractive or unattractive. Okay. I’m not trying to be clever by answering a question with a question. I’m just trying to explore this a little bit further. Okay, so it would never be possible to experience experience somebody saying something to you or about you as neither attractive nor aversive.
Something that normally Or neutral. Or neutral. Right. I would say that in terms of biology, that’s exactly right. There is no such thing.
There is no such thing as contact without that kind of evaluation in the context of biology. But in the context of human beings and what they can do with their minds to purify their perception and to change the way they conceptualize almost everything, I think it is possible. I can’t say it from my experience, but what I can tell you isand I mean, thing that keeps me going on this, you know, even though I don’t work as hard at it as I need to, is the utter, you know, the absolute change in my relationship to Huntsman spiders. Yeah. Oh, oh, oh, oh.
Since childhood I have been petrified of spiders. Petrified of spiders. You know, just like, you know, and until I became a Buddhist it was a real problem for me because I mean it was like, spider kill it. Now. Couldn’t have it in the house.
Didn’t want it taken out in the yard. I want it dead now. You know? I don’t want it anywhere within my purview because I couldn’t go to sleep knowing that there a spider in the house. It was just horrible.
And I ended up doing a four day retreat on Kangaroo Island in a little shack that was crawling with them. And I ended up developing through analytical mind training over a really short and intense period of time a relationship with them. And I now find them quite beautiful. And when I see them, you know, I may startle just because that’s what human beings do, they startle. But I don’t have that don’t have that got to take it outside because I can’t have it near me’ kind of thing.
I can sleep with them in the house. I can sleep with them in my room. I think they are quite beautiful, you know. And I have great respect for them. And that kind of experience of contact is radically different than what it used to be.
And if that’s possible, I think that it is possible to get to a point where you can see your response arising and say, I see this response arising. I am not going to buy into this. I’m going to let it go and let something else arise in its place. And so you still may be having plus, minus, or neutral, but little by little it becomes much more- it’s much more of an equilibrium. There might be subtle appraisals going on still because now when I see a Huntsman I think: Oh, know, aren’t you lovely?
Aren’t you adorable? Aren’t you scared stiff of me? Know, mean, aren’t I frightening to you? No, we haven’t. No, but the question is: can you peel back at this point where register something but you have no appraisal?
Yeah, that cascade. Yeah, the full catastrophe comes after that one. No, no. At contact, you’re not even registering that it’s Huntsman necessarily. What you’ve got is you’ve got an object, you’ve got a sense, and you’ve got Not even that.
No, because you can have a sensation of, you know, like, you can put your finger in boiling water and you have a sensation of heat before you go, Yeah! You know, it is simply a sensation. Yeah, see something. I see something. That’s all.
Yeah. And the next link is going to tell us, Yikes, it’s horrible. No, well, no. We’ll do that next week. This is as far as I’ve got.
Yeah, but so where are we? It’s nine thirty. Anybody else got any questions, comments, anything? Yeah, what do I do? fish flopping on dry land.
Because of ignorance. Yeah. So that’s why you don’t confuse it with other teachings. Good point. Good point.
Yes. Good point. And, you know, His Holiness mentioned that a couple of times during the teachings. This time he said, you know, well, that’s a different teaching. It’s like in a different system.
Yeah. These are coherent systems, coherent within their bounds. The wish we have is that we can embrace the entire universe and we’ll all be able to put it into a tidy, worthy equation. Ain’t gonna happen unless this it. Consciousness is.
You know? That might be it. Okay, so see you next week. Thank you.