Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 89-minute talk, Pamela Lyon presents the seventh session of a teaching series on the Buddhist Wheel of Life, focusing on how experience actually arises through layers of psychological conditioning. Rather than a linear treatment, she starts with links five through nine—sense powers, contact, and feeling—and explores how the initial quality of an experience, the concept labels we acquire culturally, and the mere exposure effect (familiarity breeds liking) all shape subsequent perception. She draws on Western psychology to unpack ignorance, showing how our concepts evolve over time, how valence becomes attached to everything we perceive, and how behavioral activation and inhibition systems (shaped by prenatal stress and early nurture) create distinct personality profiles that filter our responses. Using the example of encountering a rose, she traces how a child’s first experience, the cultural symbolic overlay of love, biological predispositions toward reward or punishment sensitivity, and constant error detection in service of survival all compound to create a sense of a solid, independent self where none truly exists. The talk weaves neurobiology, developmental psychology, and Buddhist philosophy to show how the deluded perception of self is woven into every cell and every moment. Pitched at engaged students familiar with Buddhist terminology.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2008 07 11 Pamela Lyon The Wheel of Life 11-07-08.mp3
UUID: 50543bbd-9de7-41bc-bb70-d6ab2b9d78e7
Teacher: Pamela Lyon
Collection: Pamela Lyon (Pamela Lyon)
Date: 2008-07-11
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 89.1 minutes
Words: ~8,569
Seventh session on the Wheel of Life. And as we have before past lectures, we’ll just settle our minds and bring ourselves into the present moment for just a few minutes before we start. Okay. Taking a firm, comfortable posture. Straightening the spine, and feeling the tension drain out of the body.
Maybe take a couple of deep breaths to help it along. Whatever work you’ve had to do this week, this day, even perhaps in the last few hours, that’s finished for now. Whatever work you have to do tomorrow or wait. You’ve made yourself available and cleared some space around yourself for the next two hours to contemplate how your own experience arises. Think of how wonderful that is, what an opportunity that is.
In fact, what a luxury it is in this world where most of the human beings that inhabit the planet live lives of toil, and so many live lives of deprivation without education and without this opportunity just to contemplate their minds and their lives. So incredibly fortunate we are. Try to generate from that sense of gratitude, a determination to make this period of time useful somehow. To make yourself a more balanced person, more able to cope with your cope with your world, to make your life a little bit happier. And by doing that, have positive effects on other people.
So that they too might benefit from your experience. Just think about that for a few moments. Okay. We are on that sort of cascade of links that we discussed last week that are sense powers, contact, feeling, attachment, or craving. Also called craving, and clinging or grasping.
Now, tonight we’re going to see how these function in our lives. Because this is experience. This is experience fueled fueled by ignorance. The number one link. Ignorance.
Yeah. Whoops. Ignorance of spelling too. Let’s see. And instead of going through for the last few weeks, I’ve been going through sort of one through where we are.
And tonight, I’m not gonna do that. Tonight, I’m gonna start here, and then I’m going to relate that back to the ones we’ve already seen, we’ve already been through. If you have a question at any time, if you’re totally lost and you don’t understand, just raise your hand and ask a question. The main thing you need to know, do you have any experience with this before at all? Little bit.
Okay. The main thing to keep in mind is that the twelve links of dependent origination are essentially the uniquely Buddhist account of how we experience what we experience, why we experience what we experience. It’s sort of like the Buddhist answer to the hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy. Why are we born to suffer and die? You know?
And it’s actually an extraordinarily sophisticated response. And each of these links, while they’re presented in a linear fashion, they can be sequential. But frequently, they occur simultaneously. And they are both cause and effect. They can be a cause and and an effect.
Right. So tonight, we are going to delve deeply into psychological science. Most of tonight’s session is going to be using Western psychological information to unpack this. Try and use the classic example of seeing a flower. Flower.
Anybody who’s been through teachings before knows that flowers get a big workout in a lot of these examples. So we’re going to be using this example. Okay. We already know from the previous sessions experience is conditioned. And we know that it’s conditioned by ignorance, which has two aspects.
It’s ignorance about the world, things, and it’s ignorance about the self. Okay? And we’ve been harping on how ignorance is conditioned by how our biology reinforces this. Now what we’re going to cover tonight is how this is conditioned by things that you can’t I mean, you can’t it’s it’s even if it’s it’s worse than we know. You know?
If we thought this was bad, it’s even worse than we know. Okay? It’s going to show us how the lenses through which we see have layers and layers and layers with which we are not familiar and with which we need to become intimate if we are going to peel this back so that we can first be happy and second be effective in the world. Okay. Now, what we were looking at last week is this.
So this is five, six, seven, eight, and nine of the links. The sense powers are in within the Buddhist account. It’s eye, eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind. In modern scientific parlance, we recognize that there are many more sense powers than were recognized back when this was first posited, that we sense pressure, we sense temperature, we sense the internal state of the body. Temperature was probably covered in touch, although, yeah.
But we sense the internal state of the body. We also are aware of the position of our body in space and that sort of thing. And also our middle ear is extremely important in giving us a feeling of equilibrium. So that doesn’t actually come under touch, but it’s part of how organism that we are maintains its orientation in space. Okay.
So these sense powers, let’s say its sight in this case, comes in contact with an object. And contact is the bringing together of three things. The object, the sense, and the consciousness that powers that sense. There’s a consciousness that attends every sense experience. So there’s an eye consciousness and an ear consciousness and a taste consciousness, tongue consciousness, a body consciousness.
And that generates intrinsic in that contact because it’s done under the power of ignorance. Intrinsic in that contact is the capacity to make a distinction. And once you’re making a distinction, you’re making a distinction in terms of sort of positive, negative, or neutral. All right? And that is registered in feeling.
It’s an attractiveness towards something, which or it’s withdrawal from something. But although it’s called attachment, aversion is kind of an inverted attachment. So you get this is where that happens. And if you take whatever this object is, you know, sort of if you identify with it in some way, that is clinging or grasping. It’s a stronger version of this.
And it has a tendency to be accompanied by the idea of mine. And say for example, see that flower and you go, my rose, my rose. Not just pretty, but mine. Okay, now there are all kinds of ways that these things act. And the first thing you have to recognize in looking at this cascade of things analyzing your own experience is that a naive experience is very, very different from a subsequent one.
Okay? Can you think of some ways in which that might be the case? Okay, like a child. A baby. Right?
Baby has never never seen a rose before. This is a red rose. Okay? So baby probably sees red flower. Red.
Just a patch of red. Right? Child. Now, that flower, let’s say it’s a child rather than a baby, how how that thing is regarded subsequently depends on the quality of the experience. It depends on many things.
But in the first instance, it relates to the quality of the experience. Okay. Child looks at red flower. Red attracts. Okay.
Child goes to flower. Child sticks nose in flower, gets really nice scent, likes the package. Child goes to flower, grasps the stem, and there are thorns all over it. Right? It hurts, draws blood.
How do you think the child is going to regard a rose the next time you see it? They see it. Right? Quite different. Nothing intrinsic to the rose has everything to do with the way the thing is experienced.
Child goes to flower, attracted by red, manages to grab the stem but misses the thorns, is allergic to flower, starts sneezing uncontrollably. Right? How do you think the quality of that experience is going to influence that the next time around? Okay? So you can see that the quality of the experience really, really affects how the subsequent experience is experienced.
What happens? The nature of this feeling. And whether it’s a positive or a negative, mostly neutral. Most of the stuff we come across, we’re completely neutral to. So basically what you need here above everything else is attention.
Right? Let’s say in this garden there was nothing but grassy things in this red flower. If there had been yellow flowers and white flowers and pink flowers, this red might not have been so attractive. Might have gone to the yellow first. Know?
Might have but but this whole okay. So the first thing that conditions the subsequent experience is the quality of the first experience. The second thing that Okay. And this quality of experience has valence. What I mean by valence is basically this positive, negative, or neutral.
And it means that this has a value. This experience has a value. This is not just a patch of red and a patch patch of green against a background. Once experienced with attention, it has a value. So the next time it is experienced, experienced, it is experienced with a projection of value.
Okay? Right. Okay. This value is not just bear. It’s not just, you know, did I get you know, did I hit the thorn?
Did it smell really nice? Did I start sneezing? It is also conditioned by conceptual conceptuality of a particular kind. Now you’ve already got a concept. You’ve already got a concept of good or bad, depending upon the quality experience.
But what you also will probably get if a child is taken up to a flower, the mother will say, see the flower. See the flower. You know? And so this becomes associated with a label. Associated with a label in a culture.
Alright? We used to think psychologists up until about the 1970s, psychologists actually thought that concepts were sort of the deployment of definitions. It’s like every concept has a definition. And it’s deployed either correctly or incorrectly within the framework of a language, depending upon what language it is. So they were thought of as kind of definition.
All concepts had definitions. But in the 1970s, we learned that through the work of Eleanor Roche at Berkeley who was one of the earliest people to meet with His Holiness the Dalai Lama on mind and life issues. And it changed her entire life, really. Many of her colleagues just think of her as having gone off the deep end. But she became a Buddhist.
And she started really, really looking into the nature of Buddhist notions of mind and that sort of stuff. But she’s fabulously famous for her prototype view of concepts. Concepts. And the way we learn concepts are by their common and uncommon features. And those can differ from culture to culture.
For example, a bird, prototypical bird, a magpie in our culture is more of a prototypical bird. It has two wings. It flies. It perches. It has a song.
It makes a sound. Right? It is more prototypical than an ostrich or an emu. An emu runs, it doesn’t fly, it’s flightless, it has long legs, has a long neck, doesn’t share the common features that are prototypical of the word bird. Right?
A rose is a prototype of a flower. A broccoli is not. A cauliflower cauliflower is not. A cabbage is not. But they are also they’re flowers.
They’re types of flowers. So we also learn what is typical and what is not typical. In a farming community, a chicken is a typical bird. But to city dwellers who haven’t seen a chicken, it might be quite surprising that a chicken is a bird. It has a beak, but it’s not seen flying.
It might be quite surprising that a peacock is a bird. Because we learn via science how to classify things. And that is the other way that culture affects what our concepts are. They’re really culturally bound to the knowledge system. So when we think of Earth, we think of a round planet that’s part of a solar system that travels around the sun.
You had to be taught that in school because that’s not what the earth looks like. You can’t. You can see the sun. You can see the moon, but you can’t see Jupiter. Well, except without somebody pointing it out to you.
And it’s very faint. You can’t see Mercury. You know? You can’t see the whole system unless you look through specialized implements. So our conceptuality of the flower is that it’s something that’s very, very different from an animal.
It’s very, very different from a stone. It has a lot of different properties than other things. And a lot of those properties that we know about are things that we learn in school. Okay? So conceptuality, I think that covers that.
Conceptuality is another way that this this is sort of tainted. Okay? Because our concepts aren’t necessarily accurate. Initially, you know, when we were hunters and gatherers, when we were first gesturing, and we were first, you know, making making words, which might well have been songs first. You know, the words related to something, but the concept of what that was or is is very different from the one that we have today.
You know, the concept of the atom has gone through huge changes from the time of the Greeks when it was just considered the absolute minimal amount of stuff. If divided everything in the world down to its absolutely smallest bit, that’s what an atom is. But now know that an atom is a system that involves a nucleus that’s made of particular things and that electrons live in a sort of a haze around this central nucleus. And they relate to one another in particular and defined ways. They have particular weights and they have, depending upon the number of protons in their nucleus.
An atom of gold or an atom of iron has a very They have different atomic numbers. They have different weights. But when the Greeks were talking about atoms, they weren’t talking about that sort of stuff. They were talking about just minimal, minimal, minimal stuff. So our concepts evolve substantially over time.
And those all go into this experience of the flower. I actually put this out of order. And I’m sorry for that. Okay. I’ll try and put this over here.
Okay. So that’s one. That’s two. And a third way that our subsequent experiences of something conditions us is just by the fact that it is a second experience of something. If you have one experience of something, unless it is devastatingly negative, unless it’s like a stovetop that you put your finger on and it’s hot, or it’s a dog that you put your finger in its mouth and it bites or something like that.
Unless it’s demonstrably negative, anything experienced once is registered by your system as positive. This is called the mere exposure effect. And the thing that’s really interesting, the sort of slogan that goes on along with this is familiarity breeds liking. And it works in humans and in other animals, like rats, in lizards, in birds. It works in a lot of different phyla.
And it works in different modalities. It doesn’t have to be just something that you’ve seen, if you’ve smelled it, or you’ve heard it, or something like that. But if you have had an exposure with attention to something, unless it registers as negative, you will like it. Your body will marshal a response that is liking to it. It’ll be open to it.
Have you ever had the experience of meeting someone for the first time and saying, you look just like so and so. And unless you hated so and so, and if you did, you’d probably look at the person like that, generally you’re well disposed toward them. There’s no reason for you to be well disposed to this person. But you’ll be well disposed to them just because they look like somebody else. Somebody that you know.
And the idea behind this and and and the thing is is that in psychological tests, this works both on conscious level and a subliminal level. And of the two, the subliminal is the more powerful. If you have, and when when I say subliminal, it’s like you’re being you’re being shown a series of pictures. Right? They’re flipping through.
And they’ll flash something really, really fast so that your consciousness doesn’t register it. But you’re shown it again. And you’re wired up for galvanic skin response and all that sort of stuff plus verbal report, and whether you’re well disposed towards something. And things are more powerfully branded as positive because they’re familiar than even the stuff that’s conscious. Yep.
You said that required familiarity plus attention. No, but you’re attending to something. Your attention is focused. It’s like it’s like I’m looking at this chair. If something’s happening over there in my periphery, that’s not attention.
You can still you can still get you can still be conditioned by stuff that’s on the periphery that you’re not attending to. But it’s not as strong as if you’re attending like this and something comes up at a subliminal speed. Yeah. Yeah. It’s because your attention is focused on this object and something’s being flashed like that.
But if in the fringe of your consciousness, if it’s on the boundaries, its effect is much attenuated. But it’s still there. You can still be conditioned by things that are on the periphery, but not as strongly as something that’s kind of right in your face, even if you don’t see it. Even if you don’t see it, you see it. Because ordinary life, our consciousness, our awareness, like our ability to attend, is really a very, very thin sliver of what’s going on, what sort of processing is going on in the brain for the gross mind.
Yep. There’s somebody. They say that, but that’s mainly, relatives that hang around a long time or people that stay in your house a long time. They do say familiarity breeds contempt. That’s why they use that slogan because it’s precisely the opposite of what the folk wisdom is.
But it’s if but if you’re look if you’re talking about developing an idea about something, if you’ve seen it once, you’re more well disposed to it the second time. That there’s a really good biological reason for this, I think. And that is, you’re an organism making your way in the world. Right? There are, you know, there is a huge world of potential stimuli that you could interact with.
But in order to survive, in order to thrive, in order to reproduce, which are the three main things that organisms do, organisms like us, you can interact with only a very limited set, right? Profitably, right? There’s a whole lot that you don’t see. We don’t see ultraviolet light. Bees We, you know, we can’t see beyond, you know, we can’t see into the solar system, for example.
We can’t see bacteria without, you know, without a microscope, that sort of thing. There’s a whole world that’s interacting with us that we can’t see. And because of that, because of uncertainty, uncertainty is potentially dangerous. Right? What you don’t know can hurt you theoretically, in an evolutionary sense.
If you don’t know, there are certain things that human beings respond instinctively to. One of them is snakes. One of them are spiders. And another is falling. You get an automatic sort of response to that.
But there are very few things that we respond that knee jerk like to. And because of the amount of uncertainty in the world, whatever is familiar is positive because it’s not going to kill you. It’s not going to hurt you. So that actually makes a certain amount of sense. Does anybody have any question about that?
Right? Okay. And because we are valuing everything, you know, if you are talking about a plus or a negative, we won’t even talk about neutrality because that’s the incapacity to relate to a lot of stuff in the world. If you’re talking about something positive, you’re talking about opening up to that. That.
If something’s positive, you open to it. Right? You’re not just drawn to it, but you open to it. Right? In appetitive terms, if you need to eat or if you need water, you seek that.
It’s a seeking behavior, right? Opening up or seeking. And something that’s negative, shut down. You close-up or withdraw. This is all really, really basic psychology and neuroscience and neurobiology.
So anything that you open up to is, in my terminology, that’s Okay. It might not be great. It might not be wonderful. It might actually be even mildly painful. If it’s something you need, if it’s something that you’re open to or seeking, it’s alright.
And something that you shut down to, close, or withdraw from, it’s not okay. So in psychological terms, in psychological terms, okay, let’s take an extreme example. If you are, let’s say you’re a child in a house who’s being abused. Okay? Let’s say it’s the worst possible, sexual abuse.
Okay? A night in a house with an abuser is dangerous situation. Right? But if the abuser doesn’t visit, that is okay. Right?
If the abuser visits, it’s not okay. So a night when nothing happens might be full of fear and anxiety, but it’s still registered as okay. So anxiety and fear, certain types, can actually become reinforcers because of that, just because they’re not not okay. Do you understand that? Can you sort of follow that?
There’s, you know, there is some, you know, the idea of how somebody becomes a masochist, for example, which is really, you know, an extreme behavior, is basically opening up to situations that normally are not okay. But because this somehow gets reinforced, valued in some way that’s okay, you can get really tricky psychological responses to the world. Because this is a movable feast. Because this has nothing to do with the way things are really. They have everything to do with the quality of your experience, with the kind of concepts that you make in respect of it, and to the level of familiarity that you have with it, whether you can cope with it or not because it’s known.
Right? So there’s nothing intrinsic about the flower that makes it what it is in your experience. It’s a patch of living red. Gives off particular volatile chemicals that are intended to attract bees, right, so that it can pollinate. But this flower, this rose, this red rose becomes in our culture a symbol of love.
What on earth about this is a symbol of love? You have to have a whole lot of overlay in order to get that. Now, generally speaking, I think we would be stopping shortly. But I’m going to keep going because there’s one more thing I want to cover before we have a break. Okay?
Because when we come back, after we have a break and we have the chai and everything like that, I want us to basically work with this. Okay? Because this is a lot of stuff. It’s a lot of stuff. But can you see that it’s all happening here?
That basically this is what this is the kind of overlay that can get on this, that it’s not even just as bad as seeing that all compounded phenomena are impermanent and stuff like that, that the compounding of phenomena is like all this stuff as well. Right? Because the fourth thing you’ve got happening with this are the patterns of response that develop that develop on the basis of this, this, and this, right? Especially this opening up or closing down. And there was a I’ll just give you the shorthand here because it’s a bit of a mouthful.
There was a psychologist, a biological psychologist in New Zealand who introduced this distinction, which is really quite amazing. And the more experimental psychology is done, the truer this becomes. I mean, this is not just a popular view, a popular theory in psychology. It’s one that is increasingly supported by experimental evidence. And Gray’s notion his name was Gray, Russell Gray.
Gray’s notion was that we have behavioral inhibition systems and we have behavioral activation systems. That’s behavioral inhibition system and behavioral activation system. Think of it as basically behavioral opening up or behavioral shutting down. Okay? And based on two things I haven’t got much room left, have I?
Okay. We’ll say exposure and development. Now you can see that exposure that based on exposure and development, you can develop a a pattern of response that is a conglomerate of something like this or something like that. For example, if you are there are certain personalities of which I am one that are they’re reward sensitive. They’re impulsive.
And they’re novelty seeking. That’s a BAS personality. That’s a BAS dominated personality, activation. These are extremes. These These are sort of like cartoon versions.
Right? I mean, not strictly BAS. I’ve got lots of BIS in me as well. A BIS profile would be something like someone who is punishment sensitive, worried about getting criticized for something, are anxious, and are risk averse. That’s a kind of a profile that can develop as a result of this.
Exposure only accounts for part of it. The developmental aspects of patterns of response like BIS and BAS have everything to do with nurture, both in the womb and in the world. Okay? Now I’ll give you a couple of examples of rodent example and human example of in the womb and in the world, but particularly in the womb. Okay?
Let’s talk about in the womb because once you’re in the world, I mean, it’s a bit of a grab bag whether, you know, what what what what what what patterns the nurturer provides is, you know, is good, bad, indifferent, whatever. I mean, like, it seems like our views on these things change every five to ten years quite radically. It’s like it’s like the idea that, you know, they took down all the trees on the Wallunga Hills because it was improving the land. Well, it didn’t improve the land. It really messed things up.
You know? But they thought they were doing the right thing at the time. They thought they were creating land that would be agriculturally useful, but it didn’t prove to be that way. Because apparently sheep don’t like no trees either, any less than we do. Okay.
So in the womb, if a female rat, a mother rat, is exposed to stressors in the environment, She will give birth to pups who are less likely to explore their world. They are much more risk averse. They will be a lot less social. They have a tendency to cardiac problems. They respond as well on psychological tests.
They don’t learn as fast. They don’t do that sort of stuff, which is why they do these tests on rodents too, because people are interested in the in utero effects of disadvantage and stress on mothers. Now, during World War II and immediately post World War II, there was a huge famine in the Netherlands. Food was really, really, really scarce. It was called the Hongerwinter.
And the mothers who gave birth to children during that period, which was about as stressy as you can possibly get, the kids were more anxious. They had a greater tendency to obesity because it’s believed their systems became so calorie conserving that anything they ate just went, you know, if it wasn’t used immediately, was like pack it on, pack it on, pack it on because conditions aren’t so great out here. You know, they can go bad really fast. They had cardiac difficulties. And this lasted for two or three generations.
Yeah. Because the mothers of rats you know, the mothers of rats who are stressed, that give birth to, let’s call them, bis focused pups, they’re that to the next generation. Because the only thing they know is what they’ve been taught from their pattern of upbringing. And for example, male rats don’t develop proficiently reproductively unless their mothers at birth lick them quite a lot in anogenital area. It’s very salty.
So she licks that area and that is basically what develops the receptors on the neurons that allow him to function properly. And if they don’t get that licking, if they get insufficient licking, they’re not going to be as proficient. So there’s not going to be so many pups. They’re not as reproductively fit. It is believed that we have a lot of developmental stuff going on with us that predisposes people, predisposes children to a BIS profile or a BAS profile.
And the biggest worry is chronic stressors and the chronic stressors of deprivation. I personally am more interested in the chronic stressors of time poverty. It’s like people are constantly living under time poverty. Even though they’re materially well off, their bodies register that they’re under continual stress. That’s what their bodies experience.
And so you’ve got a lot of since World War II, you’ve got this massive upsurge. And since the ’60s and ’70s, massive upsurge of autism, kids along the autism spectrum, kids with bipolar disorder, that sort of stuff. Now some of that is probably medicalizing normal childhood behavior. But the bipolar stuff is really interesting. And some of the extremities on the autism.
I mean, we’ve just never had a generation where this was so common, never, in the history of the world. And why is that? If The fact that these babies have been bathed in glucocortico steroids for most of their gestation period, that would explain a lot. They come out really twitchy. Bottom line, this thing here, we’ll relate it back when we come back from chai.
Okay? I told you it’s going to be heavily psychological. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry, Leslie.
Okay, just to recap for the tape. Feeling attachment and clinging are really highly conditioned by valence, conceptuality, familiarity, and response profile, which amplify the type of ignorance, our individual type of ignorance, and create the habits and volitional dispositions that lead to actions which are our karma. Okay, can we pick it up from there? So you can also say that these kind of feeling, attachment, or grasping we have conditions our consciousness, consciousness, which in turn conditions our aggregates, name and form. Questions?
Discussion? Does anybody have any? You’re going to leave me hanging here again, aren’t you? Okay. That’s the second link.
Yep. Nope. This is number one. This is number two. This is number three.
Name and form is number four. And then this is five, six, seven, eight, nine. Let me see if there’s anything here that I’ve left out. Well, no, I think we’ve already covered that actually. What I’ve got here is that the information content of any sense experience also includes a projection from our side, projection of value.
So error is always a possibility. And so we create, we also evolve systems to correct our errors. And whether you’re coming up against error all the is an unexpected outcome. And if the unexpected outcome is bad, is not Okay, that general kind of action then carries a bit of a negative charge. But generally speaking, error correction can be either neutral or can be quite positive.
It’s like, oh, okay. Yeah. All right. No, that didn’t work. Yeah, I’ll try this.
Rather than that didn’t work. Oh my god. You can have two different kinds of response. And if you’re BIS or BIS, highly inhibited or highly activated, you know some people who can just go through obstacle after obstacle after obstacle. And it’s like, oh, okay.
Yeah, yeah, all right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I can do that. Blah, blah, blah. And other people just get devastated by some obstacle to their plans or hopes. So your response profile affects how you respond to detection of error.
How you get up? Yeah. I would think so. That’s the kind of a saying that would be trying to it’s like the same it’s got the same flavor of you’ve just got to get back on the horse. You know, if you fall off the horse, you just get back on the horse.
What you learn from the fall is one thing. But you know, those who say that sort of thing. English people of a particular generation will say, well, just carry on. You don’t move on, but you carry on. You just have to keep going.
Whereas, there are other people who are devastated by life’s terrors and mistakes and obstacles. Why error? What do you mean why error? An organism making mean, it’s due No. Because we have a projection of value on that, you know, no state of affairs is is value free for, of being acting under the influence of ignorance, really.
It may be neutral, but it’s not value free. And so we, you know, the organism acts out of habits, volitional dispositions, and engages in actions with a kind of a blind faith that what has happened before is behavior that happened situation before will have an outcome in this situation. Again, situations are always slightly different, sometimes they’re a whole lot different, but because as we saw with conceptuality, the development of concepts, we have a tendency to prototype things. So you may see a rose, you may see a red rose, and you form a view about redness and flowers. Or maybe you form something about scent and flowers.
But we have a tendency to generalize to almost everything. You take a particular, that’s a chair. I know what chairs are. Even though you’ve never seen, you know, if you’ve seen another instance, oh, yes, that’s a chair. You know, that’s a chair.
We’re projecting immediately from our experience all the time because we’re trying to make the world a familiar place, because we’re trying to reduce uncertainty. But because there is uncertainty and because we’re constantly projecting our values on a value of some kind that’s self referenced onto the information content of our perceptual experiences, error is always a possibility because we’re actually not seeing things. We’re not really experiencing things the way they are. We’re seeing them as yep? Have you just said that unexpected outcome is necessarily error?
It can be registered as an error, but it can be really good. Yeah. It can be really good. I’m actually involved in a situation here Yep. Where on a daily basis Yep.
I’m disappointed. Yep. Daily daily basis, I’m disappointed. But the unexpected outcome is that from that disappointment is actually extraordinarily illuminating into my own mental continuum and and and how and so I I don’t really find that it’s an error detection I think thing. A that actually allows me to have, and this is probably quite a delusion, some control over to whether I make it positive or negative.
Well, now I speak for your experience. I can’t speak for your experience. But what I would what I would say, how I would read what you just said within this context would be, okay. You have the volitional disposition to continue with this action. You take the action.
The action The action does not yield the desired result. Okay? So that’s a disappointment. That’s, in fact, that may not even be a detection of error at all. That may just be, know, this is what you know, I’ve you know, the sun the sun has risen every day for the x number.
I’m expecting it to rise tomorrow. There may be an expectation actually sub subliminally that it might not work. Do you know what I mean? So that may or may not be error detection. But what you make of that is the result of your own conceptual the fact that you’re mindful of your mental states, the fact that you’re working with your mind, the fact that you have a conceptual framework in which to analyze your experience, all those things are iterations of volitional dispositions that has already gone on to something else.
You know what I mean? So this is feeding into another iteration of something. And you may be thinking, think that my mental state is X, my feeling state is Y, I think the lesson out of this is Z. And then your analytical mind may go, no, actually I don’t think it’s that. I think it’s this.
And that’s error correction. We’re constantly thinking something, tweaking with it, going off in another direction, tweaking with that, having some response. That’s right. No, that’s wrong. Maybe there’s an ambiguity here.
Maybe it’s this. We’re doing this constantly. It’s just reflexive all the time. All the time. Oh, and in fact, you would.
Yeah. Sometimes your error is actually not an error, but it feels like one, or it looks like one. And that has to do with your expected outcome, your expectation that’s in your consciousness or your attention at any given time. And because all of this is affected by your internal state, all of this is affected by the state of the organism at any given moment, whether you’ve got low blood sugar, whether you’ve got high blood pressure, whether you’re hungry, angry, tired, whatever, what the state of the system is. You may have thought that your expected outcome was x, but in fact it was w.
Do you know what I mean? So that even when x shows up, it’s not the right one. So it’s an error. It’s still registered as an error. So all this, we are every moment laying down a path and walking.
We’re laying down a path and walking. And this whole thing is a completely movable feast. You know? We may think we know what our goals are. But when we’re right up against it, that’s not what they are.
You know? We may actually have other goals that supersede those. All of this is changing all the time because everything everywhere is changing all the time. And in biological systems, it’s like really changing every nanosecond. Mean, cells are being synthesized.
This is not a cause for alarm, so please don’t be alarmed. But I had an echocardiogram today. You know, I had a heart test, you know, an ultrasound on my heart, and it was just fabulous. It was like, you know, this, you know, this thing that’s just, you know, beating, beating, beating, these little valves going like this. You know?
It’s like every single moment of my existence and yours too. From before birth, this little thing’s just been going, going, going, going, making the same sort of movements movements like this. And if you look at it from here, it looks like this. And if you look at it from there, it looks like this. And if you look at it from the bottom, it’s sort of like this.
Makes a different sound no matter where you look at it, no matter what chamber of the heart you’re in and the different valves are all doing their thing and the thing’s just going, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. No matter what you do, no matter what you’re thinking, you know, no matter whether you’re sleeping, no matter whether you’re running, whether no matter what you’re doing, it’s just going, going, going, going, going. And it depends on oxygen, and it depends on nutrients, and it depends on, you know, blood flow, and it depends and the whole magical thing is just rolling right along and that valve is just going toot, toot, toot, toot. It’s just amazing. You know?
So, no wonder, you know, no wonder the heart thinks it’s the only thing in the world. You know? No wonder the liver, you know, thinks it’s the only thing in the world. It’s not thinking, but it works within an environment in which each cell in the liver talks to other cells within the liver and knows nothing of the heart. You know?
It’s connected to the heart, but its business, its its livelihood, its activity is liver ish. The stomach is all stomach ish. Everything is in its own little niche, connected with one another, but all doing their own thing. And it’s like us. We are all doing our own thing.
We’re all connected in mysterious ways, but we’re all just each one of us is laying down our own path and walking. You know, it’s just and doing this over and over and over and again. You know, just moving your feet like that. It’s like, you know, how comfortable am I? What is the disposition of my feet?
You know? Even if you don’t think about it, your attention is on something completely different. That part of your body is doing that. It’s adjusting its situation so that it is as okay as it can possibly be. We’re constantly trying to find okay.
And we can never find it because everything’s changing all the time. You know, if we’re there, it’s like seconds, you know, if we’re lucky. You know, usually it’s fractions of a second and then we’re already moving on. Always operating. In every cell.
In fact, they think that cancer is basically when error detection goes bad. You know, it’s like a cell goes bad. And the reason why it goes bad is it says: Bugger you guys. I’m finding my own way. You know?
It’s like: I don’t care about you. I’ve got to be me. So any error detection you’ve got is not going to affect me. It’s all about me. Cancer is sort of like the ultimate existential disease.
It’s all about a cell just going, I’ve got to be me. Give me this blood vessel. Give me this. I just want to making more of myself and being as immortal as I can be. And, you know, bugger the rest of you.
Error correction: zip. None. Zero. Because basically the air correction in your body would say: gone haywire, kill it. It’s called apoptosis, cell death.
And it’s supposed to if a cell starts going nuts like that, it gets signals signals from the cells around it to, you know, time to go. Your time is up. And chemical cascades are initiated to make it stop and die. But in cancer, they believe that that entire pathway just gets bypassed or something. But it doesn’t correct the the environmental sources and everything else.
We have an entire machinery that’s just dedicated to fixing errors in DNA. And it’s so good. It keeps the truth of the replication to ninety nine point nine nine nine percent of correction. It’s just amazing how few mutations actually get through. Because there’s this elaborate machinery that’s constantly correcting things that go wrong.
And in every single system we have in biology, there’s error detection built in. But the error detection is all to protect this. What it’s protecting is this. It’s protecting a particular stance toward the world of I must survive. I must be well.
I must reproduce. I must be because I am the locus of the center of the world, basically. So in a sense, all this error correction and detection is kind of protecting a delusion, which is interesting. It’s protecting a delusion. It’s based on a delusion.
Yeah, it’s based on a delusion. What? There’s a delusion that there is a self? Well, the delusion is that the world and things in it are a particular way that’s based on things that in the early lessons associated with this, we went through biological systems are built on particular projections of the world. They evolve in accordance with a particular way of apprehending the world, which is mistaken.
But it does protect them within the narrow parameters in which we’re capable of surviving. Does that make sense? Yeah. So this is the delusion. I mean, delusion is that this rug is it is a rug.
It’s always been a rug. It’s a rug by itself. It wasn’t made from the wool of sheep and the weaver’s art and the dyer’s art and the trucks that trucked it here and, you know, fluid here and everything else. I mean, every single thing within our you know, even the air that we breathe, you know, the oxygen in our atmosphere would not have been here if microbes hadn’t expelled it as and continue to expel it as a waste product. Biology on this planet had to change entirely because anaerobic bacteria had to become aerobic bacteria.
The bacteria completely changed the profile of the atmosphere. And so life had to evolve from basically having a non oxygenated atmosphere to having an oxygenated atmosphere. You know, I mean, this was a monumental shift. It took millions of years, maybe even a billion years. But, you know, we’re breathing waste products.
But now they’re really good for us. Do you know what I mean? So it’s all quite wonderful and horrible. Anything else? So when you can get past six, seven, eight, and nine.
Or actually, this. This is it. This This is the package here. By getting away from the eye, you can make this looser. You can make this looser.
And if you keep training yourself and training yourself and training yourself to recognizing you know, the the the delusory I. And just recognize that there is an I that’s based on the parts of this body and, you know, that eats and sleeps and shits and that sort of stuff. But not, you know. That’s all it is, though, isn’t it? There’s no that’s just it.
It’s just all these Anything else is an overlay. Yeah. But, I mean, that sounds really boring and horrible. But apparently, if you get to that point, everything is really blissful. Yeah, I’ve read it.
I’ve read it too. I’ve read it too. And I have to admit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I have to admit.
But you’ve experienced it. You’ve experienced it. Have you ever lost, completely lost yourself in a task? Yes. Completely lost yourself in a task such that you’re not thinking about yourself.
You’re not. You’re just doing. You’re just you’re just it is just the doing. I think that’s sort of like a gross level flavor of what that is like, where you’re not doing all this sort of, you know, all this sort of like, you know, number crunching. It’s sort of like based on, you know, am I doing the right thing?
Am I doing the wrong thing? Do they like me? Do they not like me? Do they, you know, like, All this sort of gain, loss, pleasure, pain, praise, blame, fame, notoriety. You don’t care about your reputation.
It’s not that you want people to think that your heart, well, you wouldn’t care. It’s just that you’re walking or you’re eating or you’re sleeping or you’re doing. You’re just there. All the rest of it is kind of fantasy in a way that we really, really, really buy into in a major way. But there are good there are good biological reasons for that.
But the biological reasons are part of the delusion. You know, it’s built right into every cell of our bodies, which is the scary part. You know, it’s like, how do I get past all this? So would you say that the error detection and correction ceases at the level of flow? I have no idea.
I have no idea. I suspect that my DNA repair would keep going. But yeah, yeah, I think that everything that you came in with just keeps chugging away. But you’re grasping at things. You know, that’s extinguished.
Yeah. I think, but I don’t know. That’s what I’d guess. Yeah. Yeah.
Things still appear to be truly existent, but you’re not grasping at the appearance. Yeah. But if you’re not grasping at the appearance, then error detection and correction wouldn’t be necessary if you weren’t grasping. Well, not necessarily. Yeah, it depends upon what your goal is.
Yeah. If your goal is what? Individual liberation. Because you still have knowledge, obscurations, right? Yeah.
Still sounds pretty good to me. Mean, like for a lifetime achievement, I’d be happy, really. Anybody else? Are we willing to go forward and contemplate? I thinkokay, it’s a good question.
We’ve got two more left because I’m one down because I got sick. That’s what we’re yeah. Next week. Geshe-la. It’s a big day.
It is a big day. It is a big day. The day before is a big day, and the eighteenth is a big day. The eighteenth is a big Yes. Yes.
Yes. The seventeenth of July, I’m getting university medal from the Australian National University for my PhD thesis. On the eighteenth of July, we will be will have been married for twenty two years. Yeah. Twenty one?
Oh, did I? Okay. It’s only twenty one. It’s our twenty first. At any rate, Seems like fifty.
No. Seems like lifetimes, dear. So I won’t be here next week. But okay, they’re two weeks after that. We have two left.
So what I think I’d like to do isand I will be guided by your feelings on thiswhat I’d like to do is take this again and see what rolling something back might entail, okay? How to roll it back. How to undo it. Oh, Oh, yay. Well, you can work with where you are.
You can work with where you are. That’s all you can do. I’d like to run a notion of how to start rolling some of that stuff back and then spend the last class on discussing rebirth and birth, know, birth, aging and death, and rebirth. That’s I don’t want to spend more than one on it because there’s only so much you can say from a scientific standpoint. Does that make sense?
Does that sound like a reasonable course to take for the last two? Henry, would you be happy with that? All right. Good. Because I’ve left rebirth out of this almost so comprehensively.
I’ve got to have one. You know, there’s got to be one on it. But at the end of the day, everybody makes their own decisions about whether they think they believe it or not. I mean, I’ve got no problem with it at all. I believe it absolutely down to the ground.
But a lot of Westerners don’t. But I apparently came in with this belief because I believed it very young, which might be indication of rebirth, but I’m not sure. Yeah. Okay. Well, so I won’t see you next week, but I’ll see you the week after.
That’s right.