Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 96-minute teaching, Pamela Lyon continues her examination of the twelve links of dependent origination through practical, contemporary examples. She focuses on links five through nine—the six sense powers, contact, feeling, attachment, and clinging—showing how perception is never neutral but is continuously filtered through biology, evolution, personal development, and cultural-linguistic frameworks that operate automatically outside our awareness. Lyon demonstrates how these filters create bias in what we perceive as objective reality, drawing on cognitive science findings about the mere exposure effect, epigenetics, and stress response. She then pivots to a searingly honest personal narrative from a conference in Melbourne, illustrating all five links in real time: how a moment of frustration triggered automatic response patterns rooted in her family history and cultural conditioning, and how Buddhist practice—particularly meditation and the application of antidotes—gradually allows us to interrupt those patterns. The talk closes with discussion of how the wheel can be “undone” at any point and how repetition is essential for rewiring neural pathways. Pitched at practitioners with some familiarity with Buddhist psychology and the twelve links framework.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2008 07 26 Pamela Lyon The Twelve Links 26-07-08.mp3
UUID: b424d9d8-8675-4c76-bb30-d0b5bee0512c
Teacher: Pamela Lyon
Collection: Pamela Lyon (Pamela Lyon)
Date: 2008-07-26
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 95.9 minutes
Words: ~11,076
And the wheel of life, and, I’m really grateful that you’ve seen it through to the end. It’s wonderful. You’ve just come. Yeah, just come. Alright.
It’s alright. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. No, that’s good. That’s good.
That’s good. And we’ll start as we usually do with just bringing ourselves into the present moment bodies and into our situations at the moment. Okay. Okay. Taking a firm comfortable posture with the back straight.
Checking the body for any tension. Scanning through from the top of the head to the bottom of the feet. Perhaps taking a couple of deep breaths to just let all the tension out from the day, the week. Becoming aware of the internal environment, The easy in and out flow of the breath. The chest rising and falling.
The belly expanding and contracting. Just get in touch with all the little sensations going on in your body. And having checked, then bringing the attention to the breath. Thinking of how incredibly fortunate we are. Whatever ‘s been happening to us this week, this month, this year, we have the incredibly good fortune, the incredible good fortune and the leisure to stop and think about the nature of our experience and how the mind works.
There’s so many people in this world that have absolutely no leisure, who have to work so very hard all the time, or perhaps live in a place where there are restrictions on what you can do and what you can think and how you can behave. But we don’t experience any of those here within limits. So think for a moment, try to generate a feeling of how lucky we are. I’m so fortunate to have this opportunity to contemplate my existence. May this experience be a benefit to me.
And by being a benefit to me, may its good effects, whatever they might be, may they flow on to others as well. Okay. Well, it’s been two weeks since the last class. Some of you weren’t here. And the last class was pretty chock full.
It a bit of forced march through a lot of psychological material. And so today, we’re going to look at that again in a different way and try to get some appreciation of at least how the wheel of life operates in our day to day life. In the last class, we’ll talk a bit about rebirth and how the wheel of life works on a sort of a longer time scale. But because not everybody believes in rebirth, we haven’t spent as much time on that. And that is it’s not as if there’s no evidence for it.
There actually is quite a bit of evidence for it. But how strongly you think that this is evidence depends upon your own propensities and your own belief system. So, that’s why we didn’t concentrate on that that much, and we’ll mainly deal with that at the very end. So, to recap, Right. Okay, we’ve got up to the eighth link.
I think it is the eighth link. Is it the ninth? No, it is the ninth. Hang on. Okay, which leaves three still to go.
And I’ll just write these out quickly. The first one is ignorance, which involves a mistaken apprehension, mistaken view of the world and the self. The second one are oh, I can’t spell it all. Whoops. I got that completely backwards.
Volitional dispositions. As I said in an earlier session, if the twelve links of dependent origination are the Buddhist answer to why do we experience things the way that we do, or in the sort of vernacular Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, why are we born to suffer and die? These two, I think, are like the short answer. We experience what we do because our perceptions are experience what we do because our perceptions are clouded in a particular way, our conceptions are clouded in a particular way, and those misapprehensions lead to habits of action that keep us locked in this dance. So that’s just the background.
We’re not going to deal with these. We’ve dealt with those at length. And the long answer is we have consciousness, which is the mind, which in certain practices, it’s the mind which is the source of everything. It’s whatever experience, it has to be processed through the mind. We may see things.
We may hear things. We may smell things. We may taste things. We may touch things. But without the mind, we don’t experience them.
I’m not even sure that you can see without mental consciousness. I’m not even sure you can hear without mental consciousness. You can perceive things without awareness, without attention, but you can’t do it without a mind. So the fourth link is name and form, which is basically the this is sort of like the basis. If this is the short answer, this is the basis.
This is the basis of how we are constituted. Okay. So the next five, which is what we’ll concentrate again on tonight, is basically how we connect to the world. Okay? And that is through the six sense powers.
That’s the five. It’s six quotation marks because in the traditional account, it is six, but they’re actually more than that. They can be enumerated much more extensively than that. And that’s vision, hearing, vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch, and the mental power. Consciousness is the sixth organ because none of the others work without it.
Okay. And then there’s contact. That’s the coming together of a sense power with an object of perception. And then there’s feeling. And that’s generally cashed out as attractive, aversive, or neutral.
And The idea that we introduced last time was instead of being positive or negative, because that seems in some respects, in some instances that seems a bit strong, We introduce the idea of Okay or not Okay. That it might be really positive, like a piece of music you absolutely adore. Or it might be a piece of music that is playing in a taxi and it’s just okay. You can tolerate it. Or maybe it’s music and maybe you can’t stand it and really can’t stand it.
Or maybe it’s neutral or something like that. But it’s okay and not okay says it’s whether you’re open to it or closed to it. So the idea of okay or positivity in current psychological language is that you open to it. And if it’s not okay, you close to it. Alright?
So from feeling, we get attachment, desire, which is a which the reverse of which is aversion. And then based on this and a sense of ours and and its relation to ourselves, we get a a stronger feeling of clinging or grasping. Now, what we were looking at last week or at the last time was that is how none of these things happen freshly. That all of these things are incredibly loaded. They’re just incredibly biased.
We may think that our eyes are seeing things as they are. Like that this rug is pink. It’s mauve. It’s got this particular pattern on it. And there really is no question about this rug being exactly the way it is.
We have a tendency to walk around and experience the world as though in Buddhist terms it’s that things exist from their own sides, but in Western psychological terms it’s more that things are the way we perceive them. See X number of people in this room. Could describe what each one of you is wearing and that sort of stuff. And I have a reason to believe that these things are reliable. I go around believing that those perceptions are reliable.
But we have and subsequently that these feelings are reliable. And what we found was that they’re just massively loaded in number of ways. They’re loaded by biology. You know, you can only sense things things that you’re capable of sensing, that physical constitution Jampa, are you alright? You hiding or you’re just trying not to spread some disease or what are you doing?
You Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you for doing that. Everyone should be watching this man. This is the way to behave when you have a cold. Thank you, Leslie.
Good, good, good. We have our basic physical set up. And that provides us with certain things that influence this conditioning. And we have our evolution. This is often called EVO.
And this is DEVO, like EVO devo. Evolution relates to our lineage of development. It’s like all the things that have been packed into our biology by a long line of organisms that have interacted with their environment in a particular way. And then we have our personal development, which includes the state our mother was in when we were being carried in the womb. It includes early childhood experience.
It includes adolescent experience. Experience, and it includes everything you’ve experienced right up to the moment that you’re perceiving anything right now. Okay. And the last one is culture and language. But what we don’t appreciate okay.
So so culture and language will tell us that this is a rug. It will tell us that this color is called mauve or pink or something like that. It will tell us that the material in this is wool. If you took this to someone who lived in the Amazonian rainforest, who’d never had any contact with anybody before, you laid this thing down, they would not think rug. They would see something on the ground that has, you know, that they bring concepts from their own culture, their own experience, their own language to bear on this to make some meaning out of what this thing is.
But they would not go, oh, it’s a woven rug. That’s not what they would do. It’s like if you show a cathode ray tube to a scientist or an engineer. They know it as a cathode ray tube. If you showed it to an Inuit who’d never had experience of that sort of thing, they wouldn’t know what to make of it.
They might say, well, it’s a cylinder of some sort. It’s sort of shiny. It’s very smooth. Oh, it breaks very easily, but it wouldn’t be a cathode ray tube. The cumulative framework of the culture and language of those people would make sense of what that object was first before they went, well, no, that’s actually a cathode ray tube.
The thing that’s so devastating about this and how it impacts on this is that it’s totally and completely automatic. You don’t see it happening at all. It’s like they’re the lenses through which we experience and see the world. We don’t notice they’re happening. So for example, terms, you can’t tell when you’re coming in contact with, let’s say it’s a foodstuff made of refined carbohydrates with lots of sugar and fat in it.
If you are experiencing a particular hormonal state, your reaction to it might be one thing. If you’re experiencing something else, it might be something completely different. But the fact that it has sugar in it is universally attractive. Even fruit flies can tell the difference between sugar and saccharin and that sort of stuff. They have a real attraction to sugar receptors.
Of course, they’re fruit flies. But apparently they operate very, very similar to ours. From an evolutionary standpoint, what you don’t notice is that if you see something that you’re familiar with, you are more likely to like it. That if you’ve seen something before, you are more likely to be well disposed toward it. We discussed this in detail last time, but this is called the mere exposure effect.
They noticed this when they showed particular pictures to people I mean, they don’t have to be particularly emotionally loaded or anything like that that if somebody goes through the pack of cards and then they go through another pack pictures, the ones that they’ve seen before, they will have a positive response to rather than a neutral or a negative response. Anything that’s familiar is more likely to be considered okay. Like one of the classic examples is you meet somebody and they’re very much like somebody you know. And if they’re like the person that you know, you’re more likely to be well disposed to that person. Like, oh, haven’t I met you somewhere before?
Or something like that. And this is all happening completely automatically when we come into contact with any kind of an object. In fact, so automatic is it, so reflexive is it, that it’s only when something really goes wrong that we stop and go, oh, yeah, right. And we actually pay attention to it. Okay, and on the developmental side, for example, in studies of rats and mice and also now increasingly with humans different kinds of tests, of course they’re finding that the offspring of mothers who are seriously stressed when they’re carrying their children, their pups in the case of rodents, they have a tendency to be much jumpier in their lives.
They’re much more apprehensive about things. They get frightened easily. They don’t seek novelty quite as much as others. So they have a particular profile that can crystallize if you take those types of developmental influences in conjunction with personal history, you can develop a response profile that is behaviorally active, or behaviorally inhibited. So as a result of all this, can be sensitive to reward or you can be sensitive to punishment.
You can be more willing to take on challenges or more withdrawn and reticent to take on challenges. So all of these things in conjunction come up with a general response profile that can be changed, of course, but we don’t even see that these things are acting in our lives. Does anybody have any questions about that? Understand is that when you’re talking about genes, it’s context, context, context. A gene by itself does nothing.
A gene is is expressed in a context. And that’s a developmental context or a behavioral context. So you can’t just say, oh, they’ve got genes for this. Yes, you may have a propensity to breast cancer, say. You may have a higher than normal chance of having breast cancer, but whether or not that gets expressed depends a whole lot on what you come in contact with in your life.
For example, in my own case, I come from a family on my father’s side that has a genetic propensity. I don’t know what the gene is. I don’t think any of us have had the test. But it’s just pervasive on everybody on my father’s side of the family. Males, females, everybody.
It’s like whatever it is, it’s a really dominant trait. Do you know what I mean? Unless you’ve got two copies of the gene where it becomes recessive, it gets expressed. And that is it’s a gene that relates to high reactivity, high impulsivity, and a tendency. And that tendency is also toward alcoholism, drug use, that sort of stuff.
A lot of them went mad, too. But just because you’ve got it doesn’t necessarily mean that gets expressed in the worst possible way or the lightest possible way or even really at all. It’s a propensity that depends really largely on context. Everybody’s got it. I mean, because my father had it, his brother had it, his sister had it, all of her children.
No. No. Because it starts too young and all and the behavior, there’s too much variation in the raising behaviors of the kids. I mean, you couldn’t say that there were necessarily in the way the children were raised. But they all have, you know, we’ve all got this glitch.
So if it’s such a strong gene, how do the developmental factors come in? How can you prevent all those problems? Well, the problem is you don’t know it until it’s expressed, right? So I would think that knowing what we do now, I would say that you have to ensure that there’s a certain developmental conditions where the child is taught almost from the get go to sit and breathe before responding. Do you know what I mean?
Because that sort of impulsivity is something that’s physical. It’s biochemical, but at the same time it can be unlearned. You can be trained out of it actually fairly handily. See, have an extreme fear of speed and height. And when you talk about this development thing, my mother, just before she had me, spent hours on the Big Dipper, you know, this now it might be I might have got it from rather than if it was a genetic thing, you know, when you’ve got vertigo or Who knows?
Yeah. Who knows. Mothers always get the blame for everything. It’s not fair. They get the blame for everything.
But one of the things that is an innate biological fear, and there are not very many of them, is fear of falling. It’s the feeling that you’re falling. And on the Big Dipper you would have experiencing falling. Yeah. And without any control.
And the other things are loud noises and spiders, things that move really fast. And snakes. You can learn to love a snake. You can learn to love snakes. You can learn to love spiders, actually.
But initially, apparently, the hardwired, whatever that means, it’s like genes in conjunction with your background, we have a tendency to go, jump. Like, see a snake, jump. Even if you’ve never seen a snake before in your life, you jump. You don’t just go, oh gee, I’m about to step on a you know, you just jump back. Yeah, it doesn’t have to be taught.
How is the stress from the mother transmitted to the hospital? Okay. That’s done is not entirely clear. I mean, like why it happens is not entirely clear. You’ve got DNA, right?
And sort of splits down the middle, alright? When chromosomes are dividing and that sort of stuff, it splits here. And when genes are being expressed, little bits of it, you know, maybe here and here, this makes one gene. Maybe this, this, and this together makes one gene. Reads this half.
So during stress response, during certain experiences in the life of the organism, let’s say, there are little chemical groups that are sort of hum on bits of DNA. And this is a protein called chromatin. DNA doesn’t even work by itself. It has all these little helpers that change the nature of the thing. And so stress, when females are under stress, then they’ve been able to locate the particular things in rats because they kill them and check their DNA.
The chromatin gets remodeled. The way that it normally is, normal, which is between in a range of variation, is remodeled in a different way. That pattern of chromatin modification changes. The gene doesn’t doesn’t get changed at all. The gene doesn’t change at all.
But how it interacts, how it’s expressed in relation to its environment, that gets changed. And apparently, this small change has monumental effects. Monumental effects. Really, really, really small change. Big, big, big effect.
Which is why you can never tell a book by its cover. Something really small can bring about a really big result. And something that seems really big can actually be quite small. Learned recently was in evolution. I mean, any female and males for that matter, who have reached a certain age know that you pack on weight a lot easier and it’s a lot harder to take it off.
Apparently, we become much more efficient about processing our calories, and we lay down fat. And that’s because the elder people in the clan and the whatever don’t get as much food because they’re not active out there hunting and that sort of stuff, especially in chimpanzee primate troops and that sort of stuff. So basically they have to get a whole lot better at laying down fat for famine times. And so we’re really efficient at it, dammit. But metabolic rate doesn’t slow down just because you’re getting older, Because there are some animals where it doesn’t slow down.
It just goes till the end, until there’s no more DNA repair and there’s no more replication. But in our case, we increase our metabolic efficiency by about three percent every decade. So we get better and better at using less and less food for about three percent every decade. Lucky us. Yep.
With the chromatin, why does this remodeling take effect? It takes effect because the female whether it’s a human, whether it’s a rodent this is all being proven out in rodents. And it’s being extrapolated to humans. And then there’s a lot of studies that are going on with underprivileged children to see if there are correlations. It’s like if they’re deprived of food, so it’s like famine conditions.
If they’re subjected a lot to foot shock, like they shock them on their feet so they sort of jump like that. If they find they’re living in a really, really uncertain environment in which they’re shocked by events that are beyond their control, particularly events that are beyond their control. Some of them move into learned helplessness, where basically instead of in an open field a mouse will freeze and then run, because that’s what you do if there’s a predator around. But sometimes they’ll just freeze and they’ll just sort of like, they won’t ever unfreeze because it’s like a learned helplessness. So it’s the mother experiencing those kinds of things, and that’s what makes the change.
And these effects can last for a couple of generations. How does karma fit into that? Well, I reckon that basically the biological stuff and the evolutionary stuff is basically frozen karma. It’s like these are the frozen propensities, dispositions developed over a long period of time. I think you can see those things as your lineage of behavior.
Well, that part, well, it’s based on your actions. If you’re looking at a rebirth scenario, they’re based on your actions. I’m sure you’ve heard in teachings where if you behave like a dog, you’ll be reborn as a dog. If you behave like a human, you practice virtue and all that sort of stuff, you make the best of perfect human rebirth, you’ll be reborn as a human. Well, one way of looking at that is that your collective profile of this, this thing that goes around and around and around and around and around.
Sense, contact, feeling, attachment. This cassette right here basically really influences the basis your response to the world will be. Okay? This is how you connect to the world. And the pattern of that connection and the dynamism of that connection basically informs these.
That’s my view. I think that’s what happens. That’s how you cash it out in biological and evolutionary terms. And then karma becomes this. Do you know what I mean?
How you perceive things and how you act on them, that becomes the karma in this life. Jampa? Just to finish my question. Oh, I’m sorry. Yep.
With the remodeling, it’s not actually just in a single mental continuum. It’s actually in the mother, mother and it’s passed on. So It’s not passed on to the mental continuum. It’s the mental continuum. Yeah.
Yeah. But the mental continuum has to cope cope with that endowment, that physical endowment. It’s like insofar as you have the karma to be born to that mother, and whatever is happening to that mother, you share in that experience. That’s what shapes the I hate using the word machine, but sometimes it’s kind of yeah, yeah, yeah. It shapes the machine you get around in.
And that’s a maternal endowment based on chromatin remodeling. And it hangs around for a couple of generations. It does. Yeah, yeah, yeah, It’s like the Queen Mary, you can’t just turn on a dime. Once it’s happened, it takes a while to work through.
Yeah. Yeah. Jampa, is any of that is this discussion, what I’ve said so far, or in in opposition to anything you’ve learned? I’m sorry to make you function. You have got a cold.
But, I mean, is there anything that’s that’s sort of like, you know, radically in opposition to anything that you’ve you’ve been taught or read? Okay. Anything sort of in opposition? Yep. Predisposition.
Yes. Yep. Yeah. Apparently not in the original Sanskrit. Yeah, I have a source actually happening.
Vedana, apparently, which is a feeling, its original root was to know or to perceive. It’s basically to make a differentiation. Contact has had yep. I would say the difference between oh, okay. This is a tough one.
It’s like trying to tease out cognition and emotion in neuroscience. You almost can’t do it. If you’ve got sense powers, that’s the sensory apparatus, right? If it wasn’t for conceptuality, they’d be pretty clean. But we’re muddied with conceptuality.
We’re muddied with the infection of our contaminated karma. But this is this is like, I would think this is like perception. This is the perception part of it. This is this is the discriminating this from that. Or just discriminating that there is an object.
And feeling would be the affective charge, whether it’s positive, negative, or neutral. That’s what I would say. But you can’t really have them without them. You can’t really tease them apart. These are labels that are mainly heuristics to help us get a handle on them.
Once you start looking at them closely, you can analyze this is again my view you can analyze them. But if you say, Well, this is really separate from this, it’s not. But think that it is probably possible to sense something without this. Not when you’re dealing with ignorance. When you’re sensing through the prism of ignorance, you can’t do that.
But if you get rid of this, I think this is possible. Is possible without the feeling and the desire and the clinging that goes with it. I think so. Does that make sense? Yep.
Now he was saying that in the Abhidharma, and this would interest you, in the Abhidharma that feeling is one of the omnipresent mental factors. That you can’t a moment of consciousness without feeling. But is that true for a Buddha? Really? There’s feeling and it’s just bliss.
Yeah. Full on bliss all the way. Yeah. Okay. Alright.
Yeah. Okay. On top of the sex? Okay. Judgment, that’s interesting way of putting it, because probably most currently most influential theory about emotion is called appraisal theory.
Now technically, this isn’t a theory of emotion. But basically, it says that you don’t get any emotional charge to anything without an appraisal of its value to you. That there’s is an intrinsic appraisal of what is being discriminated that leads to this feeling, which would be consistent with that as well, I guess. Does that answer your question? Does that even come within cooee of addressing it?
Say it again. Out with it. I don’t think I’m going to get it in one session, so I’m going to think about it. Okay. Are all sort of words from the same kind of Yep.
Process that’s going on. Which is a kind of discrimination. Yep. Yep. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Should we have should we have chai and revive ourselves? Like, get a bit of a sugar hit?
Is that alright? Good. Okay. We were talking about when we sense the world, we don’t sense things really as they are. We sense sense them according to what sensory apparatus we have.
We sense them like, for example, a bee sees ultraviolet light, we don’t. We don’t see things that are really, really small. We don’t see things that are really, really large. We see a very, very limited part of reality. And in addition to the properties of reality, we are loaded with concepts, projections of value, and our own response profile, which makes us prone to error.
We don’t see things really as they are because we’re seeing through the lens of these things. Okay? And those things are really, really deeply ingrained. They’re automatic, and we don’t see them unless something really goes wrong. But the thing that’s really wonderful about the Buddhist account of how the mind works and how subjective experience is generated and how this whole realm the realm of existence that we inhabit is generated is that it can be undone.
Because if you don’t have ignorance, you don’t have these kinds of habits, and it doesn’t give rise to everything else. Whatever your basis of interacting with the world is, you can stop at any point here, really. You can change the response pattern at any of these points. And to give you an idea of how these habits work, I’m going to take advantage of something that I have heard from Jampa over and over and over again. And it is still the best summation, I think, of how the system works.
And it’s called An Autobiography in Five Parts. And I’m sure many of you have heard it, but it’s always worth hearing it again. I walk down the street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I fall in.
I am lost. I am helpless. It isn’t my fault. It takes me forever to find a way out. Two.
I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the same deep hole in the sidewalk. I pretend I don’t see it. I fall in again. I can’t believe I’m in the same place, but it isn’t my fault.
It still takes a long time to get out. Three. I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I see it is there.
I still fall in. It’s a habit. My eyes are open. I know where I am. It is my fault.
I get out immediately. Four, I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I walk around it. Five, I walk down another street.
I really love that. And that came screaming back to me this past two weeks. And to give you an idea of how I think you you can start to roll this stuff back, I will engage in another bout of self confession. I’m at the Australasian Association for Philosophy conference in Melbourne. My presentation is on Monday.
It was supposed to be at four o’clock, but suddenly without notifying me at all, it’s been changed to eleven. So I roll with the punches. This is not a problem. This is not a problem. This is not a problem.
I have everything ready. I’m ready to go. But for every single conference, there’s always a difficulty with IT support. It’s like, I’m a Mac user. You’ve got to interface with a PC and all that sort of stuff.
And some large conferences will take everybody’s presentations and load them so that there’s none of this problem. So I go up and I register. And I ask the people who are at the desk, I say, well, is it possible for me to this is just before nine o’clock in the first presentation, because I wanted to hear that. And I said, well, is it possible for me to load my presentation so that I can work out any bugs because I’m first up after this talk? And they said, well, the rooms aren’t open yet.
I said, Okay. When will the rooms be open? We’re not sure, but it’ll be before the presentations. So I said, Oh, so is there a protocol for handling the IT? What do you mean?
Well, are you loading them onto a CD, or is somebody loading them? They said, well, have you got a memory stick? Yeah, I’ve got a memory stick. Well, you just stick it in the machine and that’s all there is to it. And I went, but frequently so you’re saying that there’s no IT support?
Oh, we’re not saying that. We’re not saying that there’s no IT support. And I said, well, but when does it come into play? And the co organizer of the conference says, look, students at La Trobe consider this kind of operation as easy as wiping your ass. You’re going to be fine.
I don’t respond well to this sort of thing. Yeah, funny about that. And unfortunately, I come from a family, this is part of my background, right? I’m an American if you hadn’t noticed, right? We’re very polite to a point, but it doesn’t take far before we start getting out the guns.
We’re violent people. The second thing is that I was raised in a family in which anger was the dominant emotion. Was like this, right? And the way you got around that was cleverly being extraordinarily sarcastic, because my father was extraordinarily sarcastic. So, it’s as easy as wiping your ass.
So I go, oh, no raised voice, no nothing like that. Oh. So, the international conferences that I’ve been at where they’ve made a huge effort to deal with IT problems, they were basically wasting their time and their money. And he said, well, I don’t know about other conferences, but here you’ve got your memory stick. And I said, oh, so there is no IT support.
He says, no, there’s IT support. I said, well, when is the IT support? Is it at the point when you’re starting to give the presentation and haven’t got and the thing’s not working? Is it five minutes before? Is it ten minutes before?
He said, look, if your presentation doesn’t go well, then you’ll be entitled to angry. I went, entitled to be angry? That sounds like a very American kind of thing to say. Who’s the American here? And I shook my head and walked away.
Okay, very clever, right? No. Okay. At any rate, I go up there. I get somebody from the audience.
They help me load the thing. It is not straightforward. It takes about seven minutes to get the thing together. And about three minutes before the presentation, this young woman sticks her head in and says, is everything okay? And I say, everything’s fine, not to worry.
She leaves. Two days later, I’m sitting in conversation with professor of the philosophy of science from Cornell University. Major guy, right? He’s interested in my work. It’s just so, you know, me, me, me.
It’s wonderful, wonderful, right? And this bolshie young man comes up and without apologizing to me and with no reference to Richard Boyd says, so how did your presentation go? Okay, the last thing he said to me was, if your presentation goes well, it doesn’t go well, then you’ll be entitled to be angry. So I think, okay, this is point scoring, right? And I decided at this point I’m not going to let him do it.
I think this behavior is not good. I’m not going to reinforce it. There. So he says, how did it go? And I said, well, it’s over.
I learned how to wipe my ass by myself. Thanks. Yeah. Bad Buddhist. Bad Buddhist.
Okay, he asks again. I say the same thing. He asks a third time. I say the same thing. And he says, well, there’s a plenary discussion going on inside.
You’re not supposed to be having conversations out here. So he basically breaks up our conversation. Right? Okay. The next day, this whole conference is being run by students and recent PhDs in the Latrobe philosophy department.
The next day, I walk in. This is a very expensive conference, too. Everybody was complaining about it. There’s coffee and tea, no water. Every day there’s been pitchers water there.
First day there was San Pellegrino, which was too expensive for anybody’s days, really. But there’s nothing there that day. So I see this guy lugging an urn, and he comes in and he puts the urn down. And I go up to him. I have been a waitstaff.
I have waited on tables and that sort of stuff. I’m never rude to people like that because I know how lousy their jobs can be. So I went up to him and I said, excuse me, but is there going to be water? And he looks over there and he goes, I don’t know. And I said, well, on the first day there was water and yesterday there were some pictures there.
What do I do if I want a glass of water? And he said, Well, if it rains, you can stick your cup outside. Yeah. And I go, Does it rain much in Melbourne?? And he says, no, not lately.
Turns around and walks away. And I go, right. And I look at him and I say, you’re a philosopher, aren’t you? You’re not a catering person. And he said, yeah, thanks for noticing.
And I just went, right. So I went over and I said, listen, basically my experience at this conference is that young philosophy students are lacking in social skills. So I wouldn’t say that that’s a great compliment. And he turns around and he says, well, if that’s true of me, it goes double for you. Right.
So I say, so there’s going to be no water, right? There’s going to be no water. And he says, well, I don’t know. And I said, so if I want a glass of water, I’m going to have to go to the women’s toilet. And he said, frankly, I don’t care what you do.
He walked away away, and went into the kitchen. Okay, I’m fuming at this point, right? But I think this is a cultural problem, right? It’s either a cultural problem within the Latrobe philosophy department, or it’s within philosophy in Australia generally. And it turns out it’s actually in philosophy in Australia generally.
It’s apparently an extraordinarily sexist profession. And I now find that this happens all the time. And this has been the source of complaint for a very long time. So I’m mulling over whether I actually should complain about this, like to women in philosophy or something like that. Like, he would never have done this if I had been male.
He would have never done this if I, so I thought, I was a young babe. But apparently they would. So I get back to Adelaide on a Monday, and the head of the humanities department calls me aside and said, I have had a complaint about your behavior at the conference. Yep. I understand you’re extremely aggressive.
And I just said, You’re joking. And he said, No. Somebody complained to Garrett Cullity, who’s the leading philosopher in the department, and they said that you were really out of line. And I said, You’re joking. This is what happened.
When I told him, easy as wiping your ass. He just said, say no more. He said, I had an experience of rudeness at the conference. It was a problem. He said, don’t even worry about it.
But the person to whom the complaint was made is still really very upset with me. And so for the first couple of days after this, this is on our way to Canberra, right? For this great moment with my medal and our twenty first anniversary and all this sort of stuff. And I’m thinking, I’ve got to write. Got to get this all on the record.
I’ve got to get this down and all this sort of stuff. And, you know, going around and around, I start typing things up. You know? And, like and then I think, oh, should I do it? Should I not do it?
Yes. I should do it. Know? Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. And so we go to I I don’t get it done.
And I we go to Canberra, and we have this wonderful time. But as soon as we’re on the plane going back, oh, the worst part about this is that I knew, I knew, this is an agitated state of mind, it is a negative state of mind. There is an antidote to this. If you meditate on, basically on dependent arising, if you meditate on that sort of thing, this stuff goes away. This stuff goes away.
I know this. I know this. But I didn’t want it to go away. I didn’t want it to go away because I was right. I’d been abused twice, once at the conference and once when I got back.
Response, and so after we had this wonderful weekend in Canberra, all of a sudden they’re on the plane. It’s like, and I’m bringing it back to my life. And the bottom lying is that response was as comfortable as an old shoe. I know that response. It’s this.
Do you know what I mean? It’s this. It’s the response profile that comes from my biology. It’s the response profile that comes from my upbringing. And it’s more than that.
It is response profile that I myself have perpetuated by enacting this behavior over and over and over again. I can say, I can justify, I can make reasons to beat the band about why this young man was out of line. Do you know what I mean? But I was the one who ended suffering for it. And it was my karma that had somebody complain about me.
Do you know what I mean? So what I’m having to do now is just let go of the unfairness of it, because life isn’t fair. You don’t know what all the causes and conditions are that lead up to it. I still get angry when I think about it. But now I can begin to laugh a little bit about it because I can see this working really, really clearly.
And when I start getting that sort of like tense feeling, what I start trying to do is remember this, and remember that there are causes and conditions that gave rise to this. And that young man, for better or worse, is of a generation that was raised in a different way than we were. He is in a profession where this kind of behavior is actually encouraged. It’s never admonished. He’s a product of his conditioning as well.
Why is that though? Why is it acceptable? How is he going to be able do medical society? It is the society, and it is the culture of the profession. Isn’t your previous response sort of to teach him?
Well, it was initially. And I might have got away with it if I hadn’t behaved in such a dogmatically inflexible way when he came and asked me how my presentation was. What I should have said, if I had to do it over again, I should have said was, it went fine, thank you, but I had to do it all myself and it wasn’t that straightforward. And if I had waited for your IT person, it would have taken up my presentation time. And I think that you’re coming over here to score points rather than to actually ask me how my presentation really went.
So if I wanted to teach him, something along that line probably would have been better. What I wasn’t going to do, and I think it would have been wrong actually, was go, Oh, everything went fine, thanks. I wasn’t going to do that. Because I, frankly, I wanted him never to behave to a woman of my age or a woman, period, without thinking that he might be basically touching a snake. Do you know what I mean?
Like that he could get such an unpredictable response, he wouldn’t know how to deal with it. He didn’t, that’s why he complained. That’s And apparently, I’ve learned subsequently that this is really common, that whenever women try and fight back, like assert themselves, they’re generally considered hysterical. And basically, one of the words that was used to describe me was that I was unhinged. And I thought, hang on, I know what I’m like when I’m unhinged, baby, and this was not it.
You know? This was not it. That’s how you know what I mean? That’s one way of bringing your awareness. The point is you have to be aware of what you’re doing.
You have to be aware of what you’re doing. And I would never have become aware if I hadn’t started taking teachings. I think this quotation from Goenka is really great, so I’ll read it in full. A sensation appears, then liking or disliking begins. This fleeting moment, if we are unaware of it, is repeated and intensified into craving and aversion, becoming a strong emotion eventually overpowers the conscious mind.
We become caught up in the emotion, and all our better judgment is swept aside. The result is that we find ourselves engaged in unwholesome speech and action, harming ourselves and others. We create misery for ourselves, suffering now and in the future, because of one moment of blind reaction. But if we are aware at the point where the process of reaction begins, that is if we are aware of the sensation, we can choose not to allow any reaction to occur or to intensify, having occurred to stop it from intensifying. In those moments, the mind is free.
Not necessarily. Not necessarily. But to choose not to allow a reaction to occur or to intensify that’s negative is never it can be construed by somebody certainly Dick Cheney and George Bush would consider it rolling over. But actually it takes a whole lot more courage and power and control and energy to stop yourself from lunging at somebody’s throat than it does to go for them. Is that your problem?
Is that your problem? Your problem is you. Your problem is you and your mind. Where that young man, that bulge young man is today, I don’t know. I suspect he doesn’t have a whole lot of friends.
Because there are a lot of socially awkward young men in philosophy, frankly. What he thinks of me is not my problem. What I think of me is my problem. How I experience the results of my mental states, that is my problem. In retrospect, have you been comfortable not reacting enough now that you’ve still been through?
No, I think that I was not wrong in the beginning. I think that not rolling over to his when he said it was as easy as wiping your ass. I mean, I could have just laughed. If I had had the presence of mind, I could have just laughed and went, I mean, this is really not even worth discussing, and walk away. That probably would have been much far more skillful, and I would have not had such a bad And in fact, the effect would have been better.
Do you know what I mean? Because people hate being laughed at. They hate being laughed at. So maybe that would have been better. But I would not have let him get away with that behavior because it was unacceptable.
His job is to facilitate people’s good experience and to solve problems. That’s all you’re there for. It wasn’t about him. But his entire profile of response is all about me. So what can you do?
And the guy that he works for, it’s all about him. Do you know what I mean? It’s like he lives in a culture. He works in a culture. He studies in a culture where, you know, narcissism is rampant and people behave badly.
You know, can’t do anything about that. Does that make sense? Okay, so the first thing is awareness. The second thing is recognizing that there are things called antidotes. There are corrective measures.
And that requires the willingness to apply them. It was like the part of me that was going, just sit down and meditate. Just get past this, get past this. And I was, no, no. I am not going to do that.
It’s like giving into that little jerk. Sorry. He was in Melbourne. Where was I? I was sitting there stewing.
I was driving myself crazy. Driving myself crazy. So you have to recognize there’s a corrective measure. You have to be willing to take it. It’s like in the classic Buddhist view, the Buddha is a physician.
The Dharma is the medicine. You have to take the medicine, or you won’t get well. And the last one is, I think, repetition. You have to do it over and over and over again. And the reason why you have to do that is because that is the way the brain works.
That’s how you work with the gross stuff of the mind, the basis, the name and form that we’re stuck with. The way we get to this point of response profiles is through exposure, doing stuff over and over and over and over and over again. And that’s the only way you undo it. You make those neural connections really, really strong in another direction than the way they are. So you’ve just got to keep doing it.
Just got to keep doing it. Correcting, correcting, correcting, correcting. And slowly but surely, things change. Richard and I had an experience with his family in England in nineteen ninety. It took me four years to get over it.
Four years. That was really before I was working with Buddhism and that sort of stuff. Four years of just like every time I’d think of it, it was like, all over again, why did that happen? It was so unfair. Blah blah blah.
Four years. Four years of just ridiculously expended energy. So this time it was a week and a bit. That’s not bad. Actually, wasn’t that well, it was about a week.
That’s not too bad. That’s a huge improvement. Huge improvement. Next time, next time, I will laugh it off. No.
Hopefully. Yeah, what? No, it’s different because he’s not family. Family is different again. No, but it’s not.
It’s not. It’s still the same thing. Still the same thing. No, no, no. Katrin, it’s a lens through which you are projecting.
We are projecting all the time. We’re projecting our concepts. We’re projecting our values. We’re projecting our expectations. It’s like nothing is ever unvarnished.
And with family, it’s even worse. Our projections are even more massive in Technicolor. No, I know, but the point is that sort of thing needs even more work than the little bolshie one at the conference. Isn’t it trouble with time? I mean, you don’t have time to sort of be aware, do everything in that moment.
That’s where automaticity comes in. Through repetition, things become automatic. Things become automatic. You know, through repetition, through and this is where mind training, this is where meditation are you listening to this Pamela? This is where meditation becomes really, really important, because that is the laboratory where you really get in touch with the way your mind works.
And you can see the way it spins out certain stories. And you can work to counteract that so that when you do that over a period of time, your responses become less reactive and more considered. Doesn’t it make sense? Does anybody else want to share, or is it just me? Your responses also change.
Yeah. They do. No. Keep no. Keep keep use yeah.
I I mean, the object of meditation is one to recognize, putting it into the powers, you know, your values about it do change because you see that normally when you feel really strongly about it, it’s because the ego is so involved. I was in a very similar situation for years the old place. Just felt I was forever being labeled with stuff that just wasn’t mine. And, you know, there was a response of throwing it back at them, hurling it back at them, and so much anger about it, ignoring them, letting it all hang out at them and putting it back, but also trying to meditate on it, trying to find the antidotes. But until I actually, it really no longer mattered to me.
You know, like something happened with application of the antidotes or that eventually, you know, sometimes these things do arise. For me, it just simply does not matter. I see those people of, Ah, that’s how not to be. Thank you for that. Well, that’s one way of looking at it.
Or it’s you can, as you know from your many years of teachings, you can think of them as your teacher. Absolutely. Well, you have to as well because otherwise, you are coming from an an egocentric point of Absolutely. Know, that treating me like this, then I shouldn’t be treated like that as And certainly, know, Lojong, exchanging self for others and stuff, but eventually, you know, it passes away because it is no longer of value to But if you hold something, if you’re like a dog with a bone and you hold it and you just worrying it, it never goes away. You just keep giving it energy, keep giving it energy.
But don’t have meditators. Yeah, yeah. That’s what I realized with this, is that every time I return to it, every time that little loop that was running in my head, I sort of caught a glimpse of it and then went, let me follow this for a while. Let me just play with this for a while. I was giving it energy and I was giving it life, and I could feel my heart beating faster, and I could feel all the physiological changes that go with emotion, strong emotion.
So, you know, yep, don’t I? You look like you’re about to say something. Was. And this other part of once what what the other part of one that is What other part of one? The more you get worked up well, it’s when you’re getting worked up or in response to to something, and there is something going on in your mind, you’re watching yourself getting progressively know, you’re getting into an agitated and there’s something that is constantly saying yes or can be if moderator, the one that the part of you that is aware of what is going on, if it is able to get control, is then able to to to stop you from from intensifying.
This you know, the aware one that’s there. There’s no two that’s they’re not bits of yourself. I mean, it’s whether you’re willing it’s whether you’re willing to go with that part of your nature or the other one. I appreciate this. Yeah.
But this is this is not a dualist construction, but you you have you can have that sense that there is part of the mind which is Oh, yes. Commenting. It’s the watcher. Yeah. The watcher.
Yeah. The the aware one, the one that’s going to if it can gain control, will bring you back to your senses. I know. But when but but with Lauren, I mean, Lauren Lauren will say that, you know, she’s living her normal life, but, you know, there’s this little there’s a little this little devil sitting on her shoulder that goes, go ahead. Do that.
Do that. Do that. You know? It’s like, which one are you listening to? It’s like whether you’re willing to practice in a way that reduces your own suffering and the suffering around you or whether you’re not.
That’s going on? Well, because we very, very strong egos. You know, we have really strong senses of self. And there are parts of us that want to be defended, there are parts of us that want to be enhanced. There are parts of us that don’t feel good enough.
There’s all this mishmash of stuff that’s coming to that’s pregnant in the moment every time we experience something. What happens to actualize at that moment depends on a whole lot of causes and conditions. Because it could be one thing, it could be another. Are things happening physiologically? I mean, there are different parts of the brain that are not where this is all happening?
Well, but see, if you’ve got low blood sugar, you’re going to react in a different way. If you’ve just had a really heavy meal, you’re going to react in a completely different way. If you’re menopausal, you’re going to act a completely different way. Depending upon what your hormonal profile is, whether you’re thirsty, whether you’re hungry, whether you’re tired, how you respond has a lot to do with your body. And being aware of that is really useful.
You can see yourself, if you can feel that feeling of agitation rising and just go, Okay, right. You know, where am I at right at this moment? You know, it’s hard to do. It’s really hard for me to do, but I can do it a whole lot better than I could fifteen years ago. Due to the repetition.
Absolutely. Absolutely. If it wasn’t for repetition, nothing would happen. Yeah. Yeah.
And then it’s just the awareness to observe. Yeah. Because you can get into a state and sometimes not control the way you’re acting Yeah. But you’re aware of what you’re doing. Yeah.
And it’s bringing that control back Yeah. And and having that awareness, do I choose that way or another way? Yeah, that’s good. That’s good. It’s like becoming a scientific observer of yourself.
It’s like, how is the organism behaving at this moment? Explanation of this? What is the functional explanation of this? There are all sorts of ways you can take a more clinical view of what you’re doing. Thanks for that.
We have seven minutes. We don’t know, oh, everything’s filtered through perceptions, conceptions and values and so forth. And we really know what’s happening. And I was curious if just from your studies in cognitive science, whether they say there is really something out there and that everybody’s interpreting it differently. That depends on the cognitive science.
Did everybody hear that question? Okay. If perceiving things, there’s an assumption that there’s something out there. Does contemporary cognitive science assume that there’s actually a real thing out there? Or is it just a matter of inner subjective agreement?
The answer to that is it varies from scientist to scientist. That is whether you’re a realist and you believe that there are real things that have intrinsic properties separate from your perceptions of them. Or whether you’re a total idealist, a solipsist that basically says that everything we experience is our mind. That’s all we experience. Or whether you have some middle position.
Is a philosophical framework. It’s a philosophical belief. And I don’t know that in order to determine what scientists actually think, you’d probably have to take a survey. No, no. That is argued amongst physicists.
It is a legitimate philosophical question to which there is no answer. There are different forms of evidence that you can marshal for your belief. But there isn’t any. Know, I’ve spoken to physicists that are absolute dyed in the wool realists. I’ve spoken to other physicists who are just an idealist who say, you know, look, I don’t think that we’re actually piercing what actually is reality.
There are instruments that we’ve constructed to answer certain questions, and we are the one who’s asking the questions. The answers we get are related to our interests, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So, yeah, there’s no lay down answer on that one. Does that answer your question? The answer is related to the fact that we are asking the and the nature of the question we’re asking.
Yeah. But there are others. And most of the philosophers at Adelaide Uni, for example, pretty damn close to being realists if they’re not dyed in the wool realists. Like, of course, there’s a mind independent reality and all that sort of stuff. My answer to that is how would we know?
You know, I mean, would we know? We can infer it, but we can’t know it because the only way we’d know it is through our minds, so therefore it’s not independent. You know, it’s like, it seems pretty simple to me. But, So the answer to that is: So you’re telling me that the Big Bang didn’t happen unless there was a mind there. Well, I don’t know if that’s what I’m actually telling you, but I suspect there was a mind there.
So you’re talking about God? No, I’m not talking about God. It’s the wheel. Yeah. It’s a wheel, yeah.
Ah, and interestingly, the professor of logic at the University of Melbourne gave a plenary address, which is a major address, on Indra’s net. Unlike the interdependence of everything and all that, figure. Know? It’s like, I mean, there are some, there is some movement, but it’s all still pretty materialistic and reductionist. You have to be aware of ignorance in the Buddhist sense because you don’t know anything.
The whole world is sort of unknowable. Oh, there are many scientists who would disagree with that. They do think the world is knowable or they wouldn’t be doing what they’re doing. It’s Well, in in a way, as Buddhists, we’re trying to know things, but it’s not a literal knowing. It’s I don’t know.
Because that’s what you’re trying to rise above. You know? This is where, Wittgenstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein was a famous philosopher in the early part of it, in the first half of the twentieth century. And he said, using words to describe how things really are is like trying to disentangle spiders’ webs with your fingers. If I were that young philosophy student carrying that urn of coffee, I could jump on half a dozen words and the way you use them in those sentences.
Because our way of communicating is really flawed. There’s a huge gap between what’s happening in here and what comes out here. So can you try that again? Can you say that again one more time? The thing that you’re really trying to get at?
Well, I think you’re trying to make a link between what we can know physically in the world or scientifically and how we can understand things in a Buddhist way. But it’s not neither of them, the physical world and the Buddhist way of looking at the world, can be understood through words. They’re they’re not a It’s not a literal sort of thing that you can finally say yes or no, or this is it, or this is not it. Okay, let me try to come at that. First of all, let’s take science.
Science is a very different enterprise than the Buddhist way of analyzing reality. It’s an attempt to understand reality so that we can control it, that we can predict it, and we can have a sort of an aesthetic sense of understanding. But controlled prediction are really, really strong motives in people who are in science, like making things, changing things, that sort of stuff. When Nāgārjuna, for example, says first understand the nature of things, he is talking about understand the nature of things so that you can change your mind. It is understand nature of things so that you can do this thing.
Can engage in this transformation so that you yourself and hopefully others by that action will be free. It is not understanding the world just to understand it. That’s why they say that Buddhism is so soteriological. It means tricky word, but it basically means you’re looking to transform yourself, redeem yourself, reach some kind of salvation. Those are all really bad terms because they’re Christian and Muslim and they have to do with God.
But the underlying idea is that it’s a transformative experience so that you align your experience in your mind more with reality. Very different program. Very different program. The fact that philosophy and religion is in dialogue the way it is with contemporary science is almost a miracle. And the fact that they actually have something to say to one another is just, to me, just goes to show how the Buddha really knew what he was talking about.
By understanding the nature of things, he really got so much right. So much right. Does that make sense? Okay, good. All right.
And that’s all. Thanks. Okay, next week is the last one. And I now realize, thanks to this class, that this is a whole lot bigger than even ten weeks, if we had got all ten weeks. There’s so much packed into this idea, this wheel.
So perhaps you might consider sometime next year that you may actually do a further three week teaching on this? Well, we’ll have to see. I mean, I have to be asked. Next year is kind of my hell year. Next year, I’ve got so much organizing to do.
I’m not gonna be teaching at the University of the Third Age for one thing. But if by by next year, I will have been through this probably about three times. So I might actually have something more to say. So that would be great. Okay.
Thank you. Yep. Thanks. I’m going to. And I will give it to you on the last night, but I I just have not had the time.
But I will do it. I will do it. No. It was it was on my mind when I was doing this this evening. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. No. I I realize it’s not pressure, but you you’re right in asking. Yeah.
Because I will do it. And I think I need to turn this off because I can still hear my