Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 74-minute discussion, Pamela Lyon continues the sixth session of her course on the Wheel of Life (the Twelve Links of Dependent Origination), focusing on how consciousness, contact, and feeling generate the cycle of suffering. She uses concrete examples—a whiteboard marker perceived differently by a bacterium, a dinosaur, and a human; a Buddhist refuge tree image that carries cultural weight—to illustrate how minds tailor their perceptions to their evolved dispositions, conditioning, and cultural knowledge. She then walks through the psychological mechanism of valuation: how the moment we make contact with something, we instantly evaluate it (pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral), which triggers feeling, attachment, and craving. Using a detailed personal anecdote about arriving late to a taxi and her emotional spiral from contact to grasping, she explores how recognition of projection and running counter-scenarios can interrupt the clinging process. The talk is pitched at practitioners already familiar with Buddhist frameworks, and concludes with discussion of how anger and fervor differ, and whether recognition of these mind patterns itself constitutes progress on the path.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2008 07 04 Pamela Lyon The Wheel of Life 04-07-08.mp3
UUID: 4e2481bf-dc9b-41d3-a85f-cee2039ba9b8
Teacher: Pamela Lyon
Collection: Pamela Lyon (Pamela Lyon)
Date: 2008-07-04
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 74.5 minutes
Words: ~7,569
I’ve got my usual large pocketed thing on, so I’m having to put it into my trousers. Welcome everybody to the sixth session of the course on the Wheel of Life, the twelve Links of Dependent Origination. We’re just over halfway. And I understand that because I was ill, the course may end up being nine weeks instead of ten, sorry, because the next course is lined up right afterwards. So we’ll go a little bit quicker, I’m afraid.
So we’ll go through it once tonight, and then we’ll go through it again in some depth next week. Okay, now if we can just sort of adjust our motivation for the teaching this evening or the lecture this evening, hesitate to call it a teaching. So take a firm, comfortable posture. Take a deep breath, and let the tension from the day, from the week, maybe even just the last couple of hours, drain away. Breathe into your body and feel relax.
Anything that you’ve had to do this week is finished. And if it’s not finished, it won’t be done in the next two hours. So for right now, we have nowhere to go and nothing to do except for explore the nature of our minds and our subjective experience. How wonderful that is to have that opportunity, to have the leisure to do that, to not be caught in the web of grinding labor from dawn to dusk or even before dawn and after dusk, to be falling down in utter exhaustion. But you have the opportunity and the space and the time to contemplate contemplate your existence within the context of these precious ancient teachings.
So make a bit of a resolution to take what you can from these from these this discussion to make your life happier for yourself. Yourself, and by doing that, having an impact on others in a beneficial way. Just think about that for a few moments. Now the twelve links of dependent origination are not an account of how everything came to be the way it is. It’s not an account of the evolution of the world or the universe or matter or anything like that.
It’s an account of how mind possessors, those of us who have minds, sentient beings, come to have experiences that we do. And each of the links is both a cause and an effect. They are listed sequentially, but they can happen sequentially or simultaneously, but always mutually in dependence upon one another. So the presentation beginning with ignorance is signaling how important that is to the account, but it isn’t necessarily that was the beginning point and it keeps running around like that. While it’s considered the root cause of the wheel of life, it’s it’s been happening since beginning less time, and it will keep rolling into the future limitlessly unless it is stopped.
And so because causality is at the heart of the Buddha’s teachings, this is sort of both the bad news and the good news. Because the bad news is that we’re in this and we keep cycling and cycling and cycling. But the good news is that because this is dependently originated, it is a dependent arising, it can be altered. It can be changed. It can be stopped.
Okay, so far we’ve mainly been concentrating on how these links arise. And we haven’t been concentrating much on how the Buddhist path that aims to bring this to an end. Because we want to bring it to an end because it’s a suffering realm. It’s a suffering domain. And so in the remaining lectures, there’ll be more emphasis on remedial action in the context of the lecture.
Okay. So this week we’re up to we’re up to links seven and eight. Yeah, seven and eight. But it’s really important that we go through all of them every time. So refresh our minds with how we got to the link that we’re on.
And the first one is ignorance. And ignorance is a state of mind. And it’s a mistaken apprehension about two things, about how things exist and how the self exists. And when we’re talking about a mind, we’re talking about an entity that has sort of three gradations or aspects. Not aspects.
How would you call it? They’re not even levels. Gross, subtle, very subtle. How you characterize that, Jampa? Three states.
Good. Thanks. Gross, subtle, and very subtle. So because these are states, it’s the same basic entity insofar as you can describe it as an entity. But like water has the states of vapor and ice and liquid water, and yet is all water.
Mind has gross manifestations, which are tied very much to our body as we’ve already seen, subtle manifestations, and very subtle manifestations. And concerned with here are the gross manifestations. But underneath it all is this very subtle mind. Because if all we had was the gross mind, we’d be in trouble. Basically, it would be eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die.
And we just keep going around and around and around and around. So to say that we are mistaken about how things exist and how self exists is a fairly subtle business actually. And in tonight’s lecture, I’ll use the example of this pen, this whiteboard marker. To me, this has whiteboard marker intrinsic tool made for human interaction, human functioning written all over. It intrinsic properties.
It’s smooth. It’s made of plastic. It has a particular smell. It has a felt tip marker tip that makes it possible to write. And so there are all these intrinsic qualities about this.
You can take it apart, but when I go to the whiteboard and I pick up the marker, I’m picking up a whiteboard marker. I mean, that’s what it is, It’s intrinsically a whiteboard marker. But if I were an unlucky bacterium living on the surface of this, and no doubt there are at least hundreds of them, if not thousands, I would be on an incredibly pitted surface, not smooth at all. Instead of being a very useful thing, it would be probably a fairly hostile environment because there’s not a whole lot on the surface of this marker except perhaps the oil from my fingerprints to eat. So this is a sort of a recipe for starvation, this whiteboard marker.
Maybe in the crevices in here there might be a little bit more living, but there’s not a whole lot here. So it’s not intrinsically smooth. It’s not intrinsically useful. And if you get anywhere close to the tip, I would say that it’s probably toxic, that they’d probably die. Okay, so to the bacterium, there are very, very different intrinsic properties to this thing.
Now, if I were a dinosaur, because I have to aim for something that no longer exists because they don’t walk the earth anymore, which is ten meters high, fifteen meters long, stumping around eating grass and trees and that sort of stuff. This whiteboard marker would have absolutely no valence whatsoever. It would be as important to that creature as dust mites in this rug are to us. Don’t even notice them. Know, perfectly capable of, know, they have, unless I’m highly allergic to dust mites, they’re neither here nor there to me, to you, right?
And so this whiteboard marker is to this now extinct dinosaur. So the point of this is that the mind that we have, the minds that other creatures have, all tailor made to the niches that we inhabit. And these arise in the second link of dependent origination is volitional dispositions, sometimes called karma, but definitely habits. And they’re habits of body, speech and mind, and of physical actions, verbal or in the case of things that don’t have voices, communication, other modes of communication, and mental actions. And those habits can be sort of hardwired or evolved.
So for example, there’s a lot about the way my eyes work, the way our hearing operates, the way our olfactory system operates, that has nothing to do with volition or intention. It’s sort of built in. It’s built into the creature as it were. But some of them are sort of individually conditioned. And that might be personal history.
You know, that’s culture, personal family history, like what are the practices of your particular family going back generations. If I showed this whiteboard marker to a member of a recently studied Amazonian Amazonian tribe that has no term for God, no term for any number higher than four, and apparently are really, really happy, they wouldn’t have a concept for this at all. It would be something novel, something interesting. What meaning it would have for them, I have no idea. And neither do you.
And probably neither does the anthropologists who been studying them and the linguists that have been studying them. So our minds are really, really narrow in what they can perceive. We can’t see far off galaxies with the naked eye, Even with the machinery that we have to see far off galaxies, we can’t begin to penetrate how large I mean, they’re inconceivably large. So the universe is a very much bigger place than our minds will generally grant. Okay, so out of ignorance we develop habits.
And this is in some presentations of the twelve links, and since we’re moving toward a discussion of rebirth, but we’re not really there yet, this is generally considered the past. I also like to think of it as the short answer to the question, why are we born to suffer and die? Ignorance and karma, there you go. That’s basically the story. The long answer and the detailed explanation of what’s happening in the present is the third link is consciousness.
And once again, we’re talking about a phenomenon that has three states, but here we’re talking about the gross consciousness. We’re talking about the thing that perceives, that recognizes, that draws distinctions. And this gives rise to the fourth, which is name and form. And that’s what is classically called the five aggregates. That’s the one mental one, and four relating to No, wrong one.
Sorry. Naming form. Five aggregates. That’s four mental and one material. But this is basically the incarnated body.
That’s that’s the the material aspect of our lives plus the the mental the mental fact factors of feeling, perception, feeling, perception, karmic formations, and consciousness. And form on this side. Okay, so this is the basic stuff on how the picture gets going. These can be in terms of moments within the womb or stages within the womb. This is, name and form, is classically the moment of the moment of the last moment of the last incarnation and the first moment of this one.
But this is thing that provides us with all the evolved dispositions that we have. Okay, so the fifth one are the six sense powers. And those are generally eye, ear, nose, let’s see, taste, touch, touch, and again, the mentality. The sixth sense powers are the means by which we know the world. In actuality, actuality, there are rather more than those.
If you count this as just body, that would include the kinesthetic sense. It’s not just touch. It’s the feeling of motion and proprioception, which is the feeling of where your body parts are in space. For example, you can shut your eyes and you can locate where your feet are. You can locate where your hands are just Just probing your body.
That’s proprioception. And also interoception. That’s the internal sense that says, I’m hungry. I’m thirsty. I’m hanging upside down and feel really, really destabilized.
And then there are means of feeling pressure as you go deeper and deeper and deeper into the ocean, or as you go higher and higher into the atmosphere, you start feeling pressure that you don’t normally feel in everyday life. And then there’s temperature, feeling temperature isn’t exactly touch. So there are some lists of human senses put them as high as twenty two. But these are all the avenues by which this consciousness and the aggregate of name and form interacts with the world. Okay?
Can we get rid of this? Okay, so this is where the fun part starts. This is the stuff in my case where I think, gee, it’s so clear. It makes so much sense. Why can’t I just stop it?
And it doesn’t seem to be that easy. Okay, so we have the sixth sense powers. And then we have contact. And last week, we had a bit of a debate about this. And I did a bit more reading, you’re absolutely right, Jampa.
It can be very easily considered a mental factor because of this, because of ignorance. Once you’re in the grip of this contact, even though it’s technically the meeting of whoops, sorry. Hello. Even though it’s technically the meeting of three things, the object, the sense power, and the consciousness altogether. It is a mental propensity to judge things like this.
It’s a mental propensity to judge things in particular ways, things and to judge states of self in particular ways. So even though this should be neutral, theoretically, it is not because of this. It’s always got this bias. Okay, so contact then leads to feeling. Okay, and I find this interesting because some accounts don’t use the word feeling because it’s quite fuzzy and has all those connotations of, you know, I feel good or I feel bad or I feel the touch of this finger on my arm.
Whereas basically this is a kind of a knowing or perceiving in the original Sanskrit, which is Vedana, which means nothing, of course, to us, unless there are Sanskrit scholars in the audience. And so it can mean a phenomenal experience, but it’s the capacity to experience. And in that sense, because it takes into consideration all these other things, it is its contact is a profoundly psychological experience, however neutral that might seem. Okay. So, where do we go from here?
Can anybody tell me? Where do you think we go from here? Not you. Come on. Come on.
Close. It’s the basis of the formations, which is it can it’s sometimes called attachment. Sometimes called desire. Sometimes called craving. Okay.
So if your entire reference set is you, how am I traveling? Am I getting the food, water, shelter, clothing, strokes that I need to survive and enhance? If we’re talking about basic survival enhancement and reproduction, I mean, that is an urge. That’s a very important thing in biology. Then whatever you feel, whatever you know, perceive, or experience has to be experienced through this, doesn’t it?
Do you see that? There is no other way for knowing, perceiving, experiencing to occur except through this. This is the lens through which everything is experienced. And so the properties that are given to the world are things like, in Tibetan Buddhism, are properties like inherent existence. Like this is a whiteboard marker.
It was born to be a whiteboard marker. It will be a whiteboard marker even though it’s in landfill for the next ten thousand years. It’s that notion of things having particular properties that are calibrated in one way or another against the self or the conventional knowledge the society, which because we’re creatures that are concerned with praise and blame and gain and loss and that sort of stuff, we accord our perceptions and our understandings with this. I mean, the world looks flat. It looks really flat.
When people said the earth was flat, they had a valid basis for saying that. It took some really specialized figuring out to ascertain the fact that the world wasn’t flat. Earth moves around the sun rather than the other way around. You could say with a perfect experiential basis, an empirical basis, you could say the sun moves around the earth. You’d be wrong, but you’d have good reasons for saying that.
So because even though you don’t know for absolute certain that the earth moves around the sun, you’re taking that on trust by people who are knowledgeable and have authority. You’re taking it on trust that the people who taught you in school knew what they were talking about. And the people who taught you in school didn’t demonstrate these things for themselves. They took it on trust that scientists knew what they were talking about. So there’s a whole world that’s contained in conventional knowledge that influences this and this.
But at root, so how things exist, I mean, even though you can say I mean, problem is that we take them to be like this is a whiteboard marker from its own side. I mean, like, look at it. It would have been a whiteboard marker no matter where it was, you know. Was felt tip. Removable.
Perfect for the whiteboard. Intrinsically, marker. What else could it have been? Else could it have been? These are pictures.
That’s the refuge tree. It’s always been the refuge tree. It will always be the refuge tree. That picture is absolutely inherently from its own side a sacred sacred image, and it’s the refuge tree. It’s not necessarily ink and paper and all those other things.
When I look at that picture, it has an absolutely culturally conditioned charge for me. Before I came into that body of knowledge, it was just a picture, right? Once I had access to that knowledge, it became something else, but it’s still inherently that thing. Is anybody snoozing out at this point? Needing chai?
Needing water? Not yet? Okay. Sorry. No, no, no.
We’ve got ten minutes. Haven’t they? Do you think that living in an environment that you’re new and being familiar would help in your, you know, staying alive? Or is now that you can move any part of the world and move into environments that might be hostile, a bit like, you know, the pen has a has a specific purpose. So survival skills change because people are no longer used to the environment.
They’re living to other environments and not properly prepared. If technology has caused problems, know, he said the world is flat. We accept it. I think with survival But everywhere you go, you’re still taking these two things. You know, it’s like wherever you go, there you are, you know?
But you may not be prepared for that environment. I know, but are we prepared for this environment? You know, I woke up this morning, I woke up this morning and there were workmen in my street and I had no water. You know, I had no water. Suddenly saw, like something out of a television comedy.
Water bottle there and it was like, there’s only a quarter in there. It’s like went to the refrigerator. The bottles are empty on the sideboard, right? I go to look at the glass of water on Richard’s side of the bed that he shares with the cat. It’s just enough to brush my teeth.
It was like I wasn’t prepared. I wasn’t prepared. If you go to Ayers Rock or you go to Kata Tjuta, the Olga’s. If you’re German tourist in the middle of summer, it means almost by definition that you’re not going to make it back. Sorry, Catherine.
But they always seem to be Germans. They wander in, not enough water, and they cark it What were they not prepared for? They were looking for a desert experience. No. No.
Once upon a time, you’re talking about back when we were hunter gatherers. Once upon a time when we lived in very small family groupings and tilled the ground. But that once upon a time has been gone for about what? Eight thousand years? Ever since we started building monumental architecture and living in cities, we’ve started losing that.
Survival then. Do you think monumental than now or monumental? No, I think I think you’re dreaming. I think you’re dreaming. Much better.
They’re much better now. Too many tourists. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, no. They’re much better now.
Oh, they’re much better now. Are you kidding? There’s more of us. We’re fatter. We’re taller.
We’re everything. You know, we’ve got more food. We’ve got more everything. I mean, it’s just in developing nations where a lot of this stuff comes from that we, you know, that we don’t. We live in the safest times that have ever been in the history of the world, unless of course you live on a slum on the outside of a mega city, you know, like Rio or something like that.
So the point is that no matter where you are, you take this with you. Whatever your skill set is, you take this with you. And how you view things is in part your evolved dispositions. Part of it is your conditioning. Part of it is the conventional knowledge you have.
But this is what we’re all aiming for. We want to keep going. We want to be. You know, we really want to be. I mean, step out in front of a car, you know, accidentally and just see how badly you want to be, You know?
No matter how comme ci, comme ça, you feel about the whole thing. Like, yeah, sure. Know, if I die in the next moment, it’d be okay because I’m taking the wrong view and I know I’m going to be reborn. Yeah, right. In that moment, it’s self preservation.
In that moment, if it’s not self preservation, it’s enhancement. How am I traveling right at this moment? Am I getting the things that make me feel okay about myself? Am I getting the things that make me feel okay about myself in company? Am I not being criticized or blamed or anything like that?
That’s what all comes under enhancement. Yes, I suppose the change from just surviving and warding off tigers and crocodiles But it’s still survival and enhancement. But it hasn’t. Only the trappings have changed. Yeah, all that stuff.
Yeah. Aren’t we surviving every minute that we’re existing until we die? I think so. But yeah, yeah. But it’s only the circumstances that have changed.
The basic mechanisms are still rolling. I don’t think any of that’s changed at all. I mean, the fact that we have to alter, we had to change clothing sizes between the beginning of the twentieth century and the middle of the twentieth century and now is a function of the luxury of our life and the way we eat and that sort of stuff. But the people who were buying the clothes were still buying clothes. And they were fascinated by things that had trims and had nice fabrics and stuff like that.
So, okay. Move on? Okay. So, when you perceive something, that’s sort of like a Yeah, they were still perceiving five thousand years ago. Yeah.
Yeah. Have you seen the grave goods? Have you seen the grave goods that come with them? Old timey fossils? You know, they’ve got they’ve got they’ve got these little shell necklaces, and they’ve got little thingamies that go around the waist and stuff like that.
We were ornamenting ourselves almost from the get go. As soon as we could string some beads together, we were doing something. You know, look at bowerbirds. You know, is it so unusual? You know, look at peacocks.
You know, the male comes up and going like that. I mean, you know, the equivalent of eBay, right? You know, it’s just adornment. It’s fascination because we like novelty and we like things moving and we’re fascinated. We’re fascinated.
And so in the first instance you have feeling, first you have contact. This is the first step toward damnation. This, of course, is the real first step. But this is the first inkling where you’ve got possibly trouble in River City. And Okay, so you have some sensual contact with the object.
And that arises some perception. And it’s almost never an unvarnished perception of that is a blue patch against a pink patch against a green patch. That is a Tibetan rug. These are larger Chinese rugs that might have cost blah, blah, blah. It was made by refugees.
It has a certain cultural cache. It has all that sort of stuff. The moment you see it, that whole cascade is starting. And the moment that you start drawing a distinction about something, you’ve either got a movement of mind toward it or away from it. It’s like, oh yes, I really, really love that dark blue.
It reminds me of this. It reminds me of the sea when it’s in the really deep parts of the water. Or oh, I don’t like navy blue. It reminds me of the kind of clothing that they had to wear in Mao’s China, or something like that. But a push me, pull you kind of experience.
And so when it said attachment, desire, or craving, that can be towards something, or it can be away from something, or it can be neutral. It’s like, Tibetan carpets seen a million of them. Neither here nor there. So this movement of mind is something that is making a value judgment on whatever it is. So this is evaluation.
Valuing, by the way, in modern psychology is the basis of all emotion. You have feelings, but they’re generally positive or negative. You know, I feel really happy or I feel a bit depressed or I feel a bit anxious, but, you know, I don’t know what for. You know, that sort of It’s always sort of a seesaw experience and emotion. Whereas you can say, Oh yeah, I am having a feeling.
Yeah, that’s a cognition. You know, just a straight thought. Without making an evaluation of what it is. Okay. And then this moves into the stronger clinging clinging or grasping.
If this is ah, a bell. Ah, that’s a really nice meditation bell. Ah, I’m going to make that meditation bell mine. I’m going to buy it, and it’s going to be mine. So this is sort of a three stage process that we’ll go into in more detail after the tea break.
Okay? It is. Good. Another reviving cup of tea. Okay.
What we’re going to do now is just run through and run through and run through some examples of this contact feeling attachment clinging. Okay? Alright. And Michelle very generously has given us our first example. Okay.
Michelle observes Jamyang, and she observes her with one arm exposed and one arm covered in her robe. So we have the first moment of contact of seeing Jamyang in her robes with one arm exposed and one covered. So there’s the perception of the object. And then immediately there’s evaluation of, she must be cold.
You know, she’s cold on one side, and on the other side she’s warm. And then she starts thinking, intensifies, she starts thinking, oh gee, wouldn’t it be great if she could move her robe to the other side and sort of switch it over every once in a while so that when this got cold you could warm this up and then that one would get cold and you could warm that up. So that there was this whole, from contact to perception to an evaluation of her condition to an intensified feeling, even though it wasn’t me, mine, I. It was an intensified feeling based on her perception of her own experience of what it feels like to be cold. And to be uncomfortable when you’re cold.
And that was projected onto this situation. And these are both projections. Okay? They don’t have any intrinsic anything. If you scratch them, it’s like the whiteboard marker, you know?
It’s all a matter of interpretation. It’s a matter of your interests and what your conventional knowledge is and what your evolved predispositions are and what your conditioned, your personal conditioning are. Okay? So how this value gets cashed out depends on all these things. Right?
But it’s still a valuation. It’s still a projection of something that theoretically isn’t there. Jyamyang may be cold. Maybe she’s not. She’s from the Netherlands.
Maybe she’s used to it. Who knows? Maybe she used to go ice skating in her singlet. Could have been anything. But do you see how this arises?
Okay. Another example. I’m trying to think of something a little more complicated. Okay. My afternoon.
Afternoon. Okay, I’m working on a presentation. Going to a conference in Melbourne. Giving a talk on Monday. But I’m also putting putting together this.
So I have two competing things that are vying for my time. So I have to catch a cab to the city. And normally it takes five minutes, fifteen minutes for the cab to get there. The guy’s late. He’s twenty minutes.
And he’s twenty five minutes. And he’s thirty minutes. And he’s thirty five minutes, by which time I’m ropeable. By which time I’m just so anxious. The moment I see this guy, it’s not going to be pretty.
It’s not going to be pretty. And it wasn’t. And you know, it’s in moments like that that you really need to deconstruct this stuff, and I didn’t. I did it on the way in, and I didn’t make things worse when I left the cab. But in the first few minutes.
So the moment I saw the cab, I didn’t just see a white car with a thing on the top that said taxi. I saw this asshole. And even the car was sort of surly and slothful and late. It’s coming slowly up the street. It’s like, excuse me, where have you been?
And so I hit the door practically loaded for bear. So I said, I’m not going to say anything. I’m not going to yell at this guy. I’m just going to sit down and sort of like this. Do you want go?
North Terrace. He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t say, sorry, I’m late. He doesn’t say anything. And so I say, you shouldn’t take a job unless you think you’re going to get there on time.
What were you thinking? All this sort of. And he kept saying, it’s not my fault. It’s not my fault. And I realized he can only say, it’s not my fault.
What hotel do you want to go to? He really doesn’t know very much English, you know. And besides the fact he’s, you know, he’s like a Muslim man and I’m a female behaving like a banshee. So, but the point is, I went from the moment of contact, I went to a feeling of knowing, to attachment to just clinging, grasping, how could you possibly destroy my life like this, make things difficult for me like this, in just like that. It happened just bang, bang, right?
Can somebody else give me another example? Come on. Come on, you can do it. Here. Right here.
Yeah. Yeah. It’s at the point of: you don’t know where this guy’s been. You don’t know what his day’s been like. You don’t know what kind of traffic he’s been in.
He’s probably trying to make a living. This is what I was doing on the way into town, you know. It’s like this guy’s making, you know, trying to make a living with God knows how many kids he’s got. And he doesn’t get paid very much. And no doubt he gets abused by a lot of people, you know, because probably can’t read the road directory.
It was like ten minutes away. He said, he’s on Paynham Road. Ten minutes later, he’s still not there. It’s like, Paynham Road isn’t that long. But he probably didn’t know where he was.
How long had he been driving? When did he train? All of that sort of stuff. Yeah, did he train? You know, but that’s, you know, you kind of stop it here.
You know, and the moment you recognize these feelings arising, valuations arising, these judgments, these projections, that’s where you stop it, I think. Because I can’t stop it here. And sometimes I can stop it here, and sometimes I can’t stop it at all. How do you stop it? In my case, I start running alternative scenarios.
Like, know, what’s the worst that’s going to happen tonight? I don’t have time to write up my notes. I crib from other things. You know, what’s the worst that could happen there? You know, I don’t get to try out the presentation that I’m doing with my clicker.
Know, because I just bought this new clicker so I could do that. And the person who was supposed to be meeting me to help me do that wasn’t there. And then I went down and I loaded the thing up on presentation. And the clicker won’t work. It’s like not only that, when I put it on a different machine, suddenly all the formatting was gone.
It was like all these beautiful colors on my presentation are suddenly black, black and white. It’s like, you know. So at that point, but thanks to this taxi driver. No, I had another blow up after that, when I realized that the person who was supposed to be there wasn’t there. And I just paid for a taxi to come into town to meet this very person.
Wasn’t there. Yeah, I had a bit of a sort of like, ah, experience there. But it’s generally running counter claims. It’s like the claim my mind is making is taxis shouldn’t be late. How unreasonable is that?
On what basis am I assured that this is a regularity of the world that I should count on like the sun coming up tomorrow? You know, I mean, there isn’t any. There’s no basis for that. This guy’s having his own life. You know, the person who didn’t show up also is having a hell of a time.
Unfortunately, is a hell of a time that’s been going on for nearly nine months now. And I’m tired of it. At the same time, he is caught in this in a major way and hasn’t got a clue as to this. Can’t begin to deconstruct experience at all. Poor bugger.
You know? He’s in it up to his eyeballs. He is trapped like a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay. And he’s got no way of conceiving his experience other than how he’s experiencing it. So sometimes that’s, you know It’s just a matter of accepting what’s going on.
That would be great. That would be great. But I generally can’t get to acceptance until I start running counter scenarios. And then the counter scenarios then, become stronger than the feeling. Yeah.
Yeah. Yep. So once I got rid of that, then I had to think of what’s the worst that could happen. I’d have to run into school. You know?
So what Yeah. But it’s it’s a case of what I’m being judged on was That’s a really great point, because part of my response to this person not being there and being angry, really angry about that Well, it was also part of it was my expectation that all of the attempts that I’ve made to try and help him weren’t working somehow. I had no control for what was happening and somehow I was blameworthy because I wasn’t making a positive what I considered to be a positive change in this person’s life. But I have to just let go of that. Recognizing my ego’s role in that was just really, really valuable.
No. No. And no amount of saying it should be like this because I would like it to be like this is going to do it. That’s a self sabotage. Yeah.
What do you mean by that? Well, the more you get upset about it, a, you can’t change it because you’re not behind the wheel of the car. Car’s gonna turn up, and the car turns up regardless. But if you get yourself flustered and upset, who’s who’s losing? I lost left, right, and center.
Yeah. Self sabotage. Yeah. Are you? So it’s if nothing else, if only that you promote your own interest by not sabotaging yourself?
Oh, yes. That’s what, His Holiness calls, sort of like enlightened self interest. Like that? Yeah. Enlightened self interest.
It’s like, it’s like, it’s like, if your self interest actually is not to get really upset and waste your energies on something like that. So, if you were wisely selfish, you’d recognize that you don’t have any control and you wouldn’t get upset because you don’t to get upset yourself because you don’t want to screw up the rest of your day. So, it’s being wisely selfish. Yeah. That’s That’s right.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, good. I hope all that’s picking up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, think knowing, is the interesting thing.
It’s something that I wanted to elaborate on more next week. But it has something to do with karma. I didn’t bring any notes in relation to this, but it was something that I read just before I came that made sense. It’s like how deeply ingrained the habit is depends upon repetition. Repetition.
There’s a second one, and then there’s no regret for whatever happened. It’s repetition. There’s something here that has something to do with will, but I’m not sure. I’ll bring this next week. But it’s if you do something over and over and over again, and you don’t have any regret about it, like if this had been fifteen, twenty years ago, I would have stomped off to Adelaide uni just saying, what a jerk.
Not me, him, for being late. How dare he? And felt not just no regret, but totally justified in my attachments and my clinging. Totally justified. But now, because I’ve received some teachings and I’ve made some pathetic efforts to put them into practice, I feel quite contaminated when I get angry.
I feel like there should be a sign on me that says, you know, hazard. Yellow with black. Just hazard, hazard, hazard. Radioactive. Everybody clear off within a one hundred meter radius until I calm down.
Feel totally toxic. Whereas before, anger was like, yes! Know? Damn straight! I don’t think, in my case, I don’t think that I could actually continue to try and minimize that angry response if I didn’t feel toxic.
That was the first sign to me that mind training was actually working. It’s a good route towards better mental health. Yes. But it feels terrible in the process. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, the first time I ever experienced that was a lesson from His Holiness. I had gone, nineteen ninety had gone to the entertainment center and listened to his wonderful talk on compassion. We roll out onto the street. Suddenly it’s the law of the jungle trying to get a taxi, right? People are trying to line up with their people, sort of like, trying to jump the queue and that sort of stuff.
And I found myself getting really huffy. It’s like those people, those people. I just saw anger arising in my mind. We’ve just been in a talk on compassion and look at those people. And I just thought, yeah, look at you.
Look at you. And it was like I could see the anger arising in my mind, and I just went, oh, yuck. That’s really yucky. So, yeah? There’s still this feeling, though, that there’s justifiable anger, isn’t there?
A lot of people think that if you don’t show anger when you should, that you’re a wimp or there’s So? Don’t know if it’s in all society, but definitely in Western society. So? Change society or change way No, just change yourself. There’s all sorts of stories about whether being accused of making a woman pregnant and never saying a thing.
And finally, everybody came around and said, oh, well, it wasn’t you after all. And that sort of stuff. But he wasn’t even turning the other cheek. It was not really responding. Somebody thinks you’re a wimp, so what?
Do you think it’s possible to be assertive without becoming angry? I do it all the time, but people always think I’m angry. Yeah, no, no. Sometimes I’m just too intense for my own good. Don’t know.
I think it’s possible to be fervent about something. I hate to use the word passionate, because passion basically means suffering. You know, people think they love to talk about, we love people who have passions for this and passions for that. But basically, the passion means you are willing to suffer for the object of your passion. That’s why it’s called the passion of the Christ.
Passion has element of suffering in it. So, fervor is like you can fervently do something without necessarily being flailing yourself over it. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah.
I don’t know what else to say. I’m really tired. I’m really sorry, but I’ve just had a I’ve had a really emotionally taxing day. Hasn’t right? He’s still waiting for me.
I forgot to pay him. No. No, no, no, no. Kidding. And ask somebody to take me, a neighbor to take me where I had to go.
I’ve had to do that before, ask a neighbor to take me. Yeah. But you live in the city. No, no. That was my Oh, yeah.
Yeah, no. Yes. If one could only, if I could only surrender to my circumstance, what come what may, may. That would be a wonderful thing. So next week we’ll pick up on this.
We’ll elaborate on this. Okay? Because this is where, you know, you can’t You know, we’re stuck with all this. Right? And we’re stuck with this.
But where we can do some work is here. What I’ll try and do is use examples from the world of animals as well as other things. All right? Does that sound all right? I’m terribly sorry.
Perhaps you should get a five dollars rebate. Yeah, pay ten dollars next time. But it might be worth twenty dollars next time. I don’t know. Does anybody else have any other questions?
I’m willing to go with questions all night long, practically, but I just haven’t got an original thought in my head at this point. It’s the present moment. Another way of looking at the the lateness of the cab is that we don’t know what might have happened on the road had the cab been on time. Oh my. You’ve got That’s right.
My my heavens, my life might have been saved. That’s right. By the late this Oh, thank heaven. You should have been thanking him. I should have been thanking him.
Thank you. We don’t know. Don’t know. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Richard? Yeah.
It’s got a bit of oomph. Very good. Very good. Hopelessness of passion, we don’t want that. We want fervor.
If you’re going to be doing a hundred prostrations, you’d better have a day. You’d better have some fervor for doing it. Or you’ll give up after about five or six. Right? You can call that perseverance, you can call that determination, but I think fervor has a little bit of juice in it.
Yeah, we don’t want to be fanatic, yeah. Fervor’s getting there, isn’t it? It’s kind of getting there, yeah, without going to zealotry. Fervor without the zealotry. Yes?
How much meaning? Medium meaning. Yes. Question of: Why are we born to suffer and die? How did we get here?
Why do we experience the things that we experience? That’s the overarching question that this is the answer to. In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, it’s put in terms of why are we born to suffer and die? But you can elaborate that into why do we experience the things we do? Why do we suffer the way we do?
Why do we experience joy the way we do? Why do we experience what we experience? Hopefully. It’s basically telling you links of causes and effects that aren’t necessarily linear. They can be linear.
Or some of them can be simultaneous. Dependent. These links can be set out in different ways. So in another way of putting it, these two are the path. These are the present, and becoming is the present, and then the last two are the future, as it were.
What’s the potential that’s generated in present for Yeah. We’ll wait till we get there. No. Nietzsche, no. No.
What do you mean by the Nietzschean eternal recurrence? It’s the only moment we have. That’s right. That’s right. That’s right.
And he talks of becoming. Yeah. And then all that abolishment of the future is occurring in a time. Well, he might mean something like that. That’s a very tricky link.
And we’ll And a tricky guy. And a tricky guy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Very tricky guy. Listen, thank you, and thank you for your forbearance. Thank you. Okay.