Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 57-minute talk, Pamela Lyon explores the first two links of the twelve links of dependent origination: ignorance and volitional dispositions. She opens with a biological grounding, explaining how ignorance arises from the self-maintenance imperative built into all organisms, and how our narrow sensory window and homeostatic constraints cause us to see objects only in terms of their utility to us, missing the vast interdependence of all things. She then moves to the second link, tracing how ignorance crystallizes into habits and dispositions—patterns of mind and behavior strengthened by repetition and emotional charge until they become automatic. Lyon distinguishes between innate and acquired habits, draws on cross-cultural psychology (Japanese versus American pen-choice studies), and explains why meditation matters: through familiarization (gom in Tibetan), we can gradually reshape these ingrained dispositions. She concludes by showing how ignorance-based habits generate the texture of suffering—the endless yo-yo of hope and disappointment that keeps us projecting into the future and unable to rest in the present moment. Suited for practitioners new to dependent origination and serious meditators seeking a grounded, secular-friendly entry into Buddhist psychology.
File metadata (for organising)
File: Pamela Lyon – Track 2.mp3
UUID: f7e5159c-9336-4233-9893-0e02af492a29
Teacher: Pamela Lyon
Collection: Pamela Lyon (Pamela Lyon)
Date: 2008 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 57.4 minutes
Words: ~5,913
Hello. Turn it down. It turn it down. Here we are at the Friday night rock concert at Buddha House. No.
Is that alright? Is that alright? Okay. Good. Boy, that that that woke me up.
I don’t know about the rest of you. Okay. So tonight we are on the third and fourth links of the twelve links of dependent origination. And we have the- to recap what the twelve links of dependent origination are. They are- can anyone tell me?
Do I dare ask if anyone can tell me this? Does anybody want to chance it? Come on. All right. What are the twelve links of dependent origination?
What do they explain? Give it a try. Yes, yes. cyclic existence. And in this life, it is an explanation of how we have the subjective experience that we have.
Every day, every moment, week to week, month to month, year to year. And in a larger sense, in a more sort of cosmic sense, from life to life. But the twelve links of dependent origination, while a presentation about rebirth, you don’t have to believe in rebirth to appreciate how that works in your life. I do believe in rebirth, so I am going to be talking fairly positively about that in some senses. But there’s all sorts of reasons why you should be skeptical about that.
And actually coming to an understanding and a conviction about it is, for some people, quite difficult. It’s a kind of an optional extra. For Westerners, you can consider it an optional extra. In reality, is probably not in a doctrinal sense, from a Buddhist doctrinal sense. It is definitely not an optional extra, but from a secular viewing of it, it probably is.
And so we’re looking at the links again are ignorance, volitional dispositions, which we’ll go through here. And the next one is consciousness, and then name and form. Does everybody have their piece of paper with all twelve on them? But you know them, so it doesn’t matter.
Okay. Do have yours, Henry? Okay. Good. Good.
Good. Good. Okay. So we were talking about first talking about the first link, ignorance. We were talking about, ignorance being a mistaken state of mind.
And can anybody tell me some of the elements that go into that mistake? This is not what you bargained for, is it? This helps to me this this helps me know what’s going in and what’s not. Nothing is going in. Absolutely nothing is going in.
Not having been here previously, but are you meaning, like, our notion that, you know, we are a sort of entity in its own right, like that we have an existence that we call soul. Very good. She’s here for the first time tonight, folks. Okay. All right.
That’s roughly the territory we’re Okay. So it’s a mistaken state of mind that has something to do with the self. Right? Are you talking about self reference? Yes.
We’re we’re gonna get there right now. From via okay. So we were talking about how biological systems, such as ourselves, like fruit flies, like bacteria, like cheetahs, they have to maintain themselves in a peculiar way. A biological system is unlike a candle or a rock and I’m not going to draw it again. No, please.
Unlike a candle or a rock in the sense that, when the conditions that maintain it are threatened, it will reach out into its environment one way or another to extract, energy and matter and turn that into fuel to, produce its body and engage in activity. So a lot of the activity is centered on getting things in the environment that will shore up this, that will keep this show on the road. So this show being the self. So you have in a biological sense, you’ve got ignorance arising out of the need for self maintenance. Forgetting about how we construct imaginative worlds in our head, more importantly from our survival, we construct our bodies every moment, every single second.
Our cells are teeming, teeming metropolises of manufacture and turnover and activity. Every cell in our bodies, except perhaps red blood cells. They just basically float around and distribute oxygen. But everything else pretty much does something. I mean, like really actively does something.
So self maintenance and the emphasis on the self, in which the self is the measure of basically all things. Things that are good and things that are bad and things that are indifferent. That leads us to a kind of mistake right from the start because that’s not how reality is. Reality isn’t focused on ourselves. The kind of scale that we live at, this medium scale, is much, much larger than how small things can get.
And it’s much, much smaller than how large things can get. So we live a kind of a middle existence. It’s a little tiny slice of reality. And in order maintain ourselves, we also maintain our bodies homeostatically within really, really narrow ranges ranges of value. Like we can’t have too much salt in our bodies or we die.
We have too little salt in our bodies, we die. If we don’t have enough water, we die. If we have too much water, we die. If we don’t have enough oxygen, we die. If we have too much oxygen, we die.
If we don’t have enough food, we die. I don’t know if we can die immediately from too much food, but I suppose it is theoretically possible. I mean, if you ate something that then expanded in your stomach, I think you probably could strain this, system to a breaking point. But the point is that we live at a really narrow scale And we exist in a really, really narrow range of values. We can’t be too hot.
We can’t be too cold. We can’t have too much pressure on us, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. There are all kinds of parameters in which we have to maintain ourselves. And they’re actually really, really narrow relative to what they could be. So this whole, the fact that we evaluate the state of the world relative to ourselves means that we’re missing a lot.
We’re missing a lot. And not only that, so we also have a tendency to see things in terms of their absolute value to us. So when we make a rug, or when we make a table or a chair, or when we go after a hoofed creature that can be clubbed and eaten, or something like that as a hunter and gatherer. What we see is the object that is of use to us. So we see the comfortable thing that we walk upon that has aesthetic value in one way or another.
We see the animal that is intrinsically food. We see the table and chair that were made and were intrinsically have the function of putting things upon and sitting so that we don’t have to bend our legs. There are many thrones really, if you think about it. But what we don’t see is all the work of looming of this thing that went into it. We don’t see the design work that went into it.
We don’t see if this is cotton, not sure. If it’s cotton or wool, we don’t see the growing of the cotton. We don’t see the shearing of the sheep. We don’t see the feeding of the sheep. We don’t see the pesticides laid onto the cotton.
We don’t see the picking of the cotton. We don’t see- there’s a whole world of things in this that we don’t see. Because it doesn’t serve our interests, frankly, to be aware of any of that. Because the thing that’s important is this. That’s the bottom line.
Because it is possible to start seeing those things. You know, to see the world in your breakfast bowl. You know? It is possible to train yourself to do that. But ordinarily, we don’t see it.
Because we’re not evolved to see it and there’s no reason to see it that way. Because if the main thing is this, then all that, what’s real, doesn’t necessarily help us in any way, in in terms of our evolved lineage. Or we think it doesn’t help us in any way. And moreover, we don’t even see what’s actually there. We don’t see ultraviolet light.
Bees can sense ultraviolet light. We don’t see magnetic field lines. Other pigeons and newts and things like that can navigate by magnetic field lines. Although it frankly would come in very, very handy if we could. You know, anybody who’s ever been lost in the outback without GPS or water or a compass, it would be really, really useful if they could navigate magnetic field lines.
But we can’t. So just because it’s useful doesn’t mean it evolves. It’s because in a lineage of evolution like the human lineage, there are particular things that we have patterns of exploiting and ways of behaving. And that sort of gets built into us. So, and finally, under ignorance, self maintenance and homeostasis involves valuing.
You have to make If you’re maintaining yourself within particular values, then everything isn’t relevant to your needs. Some things are good, some things are bad, and some things are indifferent. No. All organisms only respond to certain things in their environment, but not most things. We respond to certain things in our environment, but not most things.
Okay. And emotion is the main way that we register value in the first place. And emotion is something that is, a combination of the mind and the body. It is something that’s registered as a feeling, but it is something that can be examined cognitively. Does anybody have any questions?
How are you traveling? Yeah, good. All right. Anybody have any questions to this point? Is it?
So why are you saying it’s a combination of mind and body? Okay. Because? Just because it apprehends the body sense. Yeah.
Yeah. It apprehends the body sense. Last week, we talked about Damasio’s theory of emotion. And his it’s called the somatic theory based on the body. And his view is that the most basic emotions, pleasure and pain, are actually two different states of the body that activate two different types of behavior.
They’re not actually on a continuum of pleasure to pain. They’ve got different functions within the body and mind. And pleasure is something that develops a seeking behavior. Like there’s something I’m missing. I’m hungry.
Therefore I go looking for food. When I find food, it is something that I register as pleasure. Because if I didn’t, I wouldn’t go looking for it again. And pain is registered as damage, and that’s withdrawal. So it’s not actually seeking an avoidance.
It’s more like seeking and going down, resting, shutting down. Anybody who’s ever had a cold or flu knows that one of the first things that goes are your cognitive capacities. Your ability to think really clearly, your ability to remember things. And that’s because your body is fighting off something else. It has bigger fish to fry, so it is withdrawing resources basically from non essential functions.
So that’s one of the reasons why physical illness has that kind of complex of sentient beings that goes with it. There’s even a particular protein called cytokines that are released into the body. Like if you work on a keyboard and you’re just about to get RSI, like within weeks of getting RSI, Your body will start releasing these saying, Warning, warning, warning. You’re about to get really damaged. You’re about to get really damaged.
So you start feeling fatigued. And you start feeling like you’ve got to sleep a lot. And sort of stuff. And people will say, look I’m feeling kind of depressed and I don’t know why. And all that sort of stuff.
But in this day and age you basically keep on typing, right? Because we don’t know. It’s the cytokine saying, warning, warning, you’re just about to get damaged. And it happens weeks before the thing just goes, can’t do it anymore. So the body deals in very, very subtle ways with these two things.
We’re really aware of thirst and hunger. But there are really, really subtle ways that these things operate, that get registered as a state of mind but are actually a state of body. And in the case of a masochist? In the case of a masochist, the Oh, it was the other class. Very well done.
Somebody asked me the same question this week. Completely different subject. Yeah, sorry. I was thinking, didn’t we answer that last week? Answer, no.
Okay, in the case of a Okay, I know nothing about psychopathology psychopathology and psychosexual pathology. My guess is that pain gets conditioned as a result of something that is desired or makes one, feel safe in some way. So for example, if someone inflicts if, let’s say a child has a really, really, really strong attraction to a, might be a parent, might be a sibling, might be another relative, might be a friend that they really think is cool or something like that. But they’ve projected a lot of really positive qualities onto this person. And that person hurts them.
Causes pain. In a sense, if that child has never felt really like the attention of this person they projected all sorts of wonderful qualities over. The fact that they inflict pain on them is attention. And it is kind of desire. It’s not desired, but it is desired.
Because the object is something that is desired or revered or really liked, then pain comes to be associated with something that is really desired. That’s one way that could happen. Because we can get conditioned to an awful lot of things. And just because something is bad for us doesn’t mean we don’t want it. Like, for example, rats will bar press for cocaine unto death.
You know, they’ll die. Rats can also be conditioned I mean, it’s terrible what we do to animals, actually. Rats can be conditioned to a lesser of two shocks such that the lesser shock is actually desirable. Right? So it’s still a shock, it’s still damage, but they’re still seeking behavior around it.
Does that make sense? Yeah. Makes sense. Yeah. Anything else?
Okay. So that’s basically what we’ve been looking at under ignorance. Sort of like the biological basis of this, of how we might be so mistaken. Yep. I just have a question.
It might be a big question in terms of evolution. What actually happened to humans in terms of how we got so out of touch with all the senses that we used to have? I’m just seeing of indigenous people, you know, who’s so much more in tune with the environment, with nature, and everything. The short answer is agriculture. Right.
Yeah. Seriously. The short answer is agriculture. From agriculture flowed permanent settlements, money, religion, organized religion, not ritual practices, but organized religion, like institutional religion, you know, human sacrifices, that kind of stuff. Once settled down and were reliant on the seasons and we had to propitiate, we started feeling for whatever reason, we anthropomorphized anthropomorphized aspects of the environment such that we felt as though because your clansmen might have to be propitiated when they’re in a stroppy mood.
Well, maybe anthropomorphic manifestation of rain might be stroppy because it’s not showing up. So maybe you have to propitiate them in the same way that you have to propitiate your clansmen over here. So what do you do? You give them things that are attractive. And so you’ve got religion.
You’ve ‘ve got the beginning of cities. You’ve got the beginning of large monumental architecture. And once you start talking about monumental architecture in large cities and trade, That kind of, because hunters and gatherers traded things. But once you start talking about getting in boats and going places and trekking over thousands of kilometers to move one thing to another, move something from one place to another, you’re starting to talk about major investment in cities and towns, people moving from the country and food production the cities. And we have finally reached this year, two thousand and eight, will live in history as the first time in human history that human beings, more human beings live in cities than live in the country.
Yeah. So the short answer is agriculture. Which doesn’t mean that we would have been we would have been more in touch with the seasons and the land and that sort of stuff. But it doesn’t mean we would have been any less mistaken. Because we’ve still got self maintenance based on a self, based on a self that is built into something that has to be fed in every single possible way.
It has to be fed to survive. It has to be fed to thrive. It has to be fed to enhance itself, to extend itself, and to reproduce. Once you’ve got this kind of a thing this going. But would you think that we are more ignorant now than in our thousands of years ago?
No. No. No. But we we are certainly exploiting everything everything around us. Oh, we’re stupider than we were.
We’re stupider. You know? Is that a word? More stupid. We’re more stupid.
Yeah. We’re more we’re stupider, frankly. George Bush. Were saying before is that, or as I understood it, checking this, that in terms of ignorance being the basis of all this, that the fact that you refer to evolution, it’s like going back in time, whatever that means. At some point in the human race, some of these practices were necessary in order to survive, as living This is true for a bacterium.
Yeah. Yeah. So that’s where the evolution comes from. Yeah. Yeah.
This whole thing, this whole scenario, goes back three point eight five billion years. Years. That’s a lot of time. And this kind of living organization, this sort of thing, this got started on this planet just as soon as it could. Just Whereas going back through many of those billions of years, there were times when it was essential for survival of living beings to behave in certain ways and to do certain things.
And it still is. And it still is. The point is that even though, even this really good, this is really good. Even though we recognize survival as being necessary, okay? Whether you’re a bacterium or a human being or a cheetah or a nematode or whatever.
It’s the very necessity to survive that’s kind of the mistake. Do you know what I mean? It’s a movement of mind toward an object based on a misapprehension. How we came to value our own persistence, came persistence, no one knows. It’s unfortunate that John is not here tonight because this is the thing that he really hammers.
Is that the dividing line between I will do everything to persist and I don’t care because I can’t care is huge. Rocks are on this side, right? Don’t care. Can’t care. Don’t have to persist.
Have no agenda. A rock has no agenda. A candle has no agenda. An organism has a big agenda, and it’s this. So I’d like to think of ignorance as the fundamental mistake that was made by mind how I don’t.
I mean, I don’t know how. But it was a change in orientation such that persistence became really important. A change of mind, what do you say? I mean, like, the basis it doesn’t make I mean, there’s a certain okay. Let me declare my biases here.
Okay? I don’t understand how. I can’t begin to say I understand how mind can be pure from the beginning and ignorant from the beginning. My linear Western consciousness has real problems with that. In the same way, you know, I have a tendency my personal feeling is is is something something about there was something about the play of the pure mind that got mirrored or became a source of fascination somehow and that was it.
It was like everything rolled from that. But that’s my view. According to the teachings, ignorance is beginningless and mind is pure from beginning. Go figure. You know?
Yeah. Because I was just about to say, well, when you say the beginning, what do you mean? Okay. It’s all cyclical. In fact, the thing that’s interesting about the whole Big Bang scenario is it seemed like it was nicely linear for our mathematics, right?
That it seemed like it was a beginning point. And it was okay for physicists to say, well, we actually don’t have to talk about it. We really can’t say anything about the moment before the Big Bang because nothing really existed before the Big Bang. There was no time before the Big Bang. There was nothing before the Big Bang.
And then suddenly, this whole shebang came into existence. Hey, presto, talk about about magic. And they’ve got problem with ghosts. Really? I mean, it’s amazing.
But now there are more and more theories about the nature of the universe that are becoming more cyclical. Like this is sort of boom and bust, boom and bust, boom and bust. Or budding universes, like that there are multi verses that sort of bud off from one another and that sort of stuff. How this happens, who knows? But there is, in the Hindu picture, is cyclical.
Go cycles. You go through cycles of genesis, development, stasis, and then degeneration, destruction, and then genesis again. It’s continuous and you can’t really stop the circle at any point and say this is where it all starts. Just in the same way, you can provisionally say this is where it starts. But it’s all going all the time.
It’s like the whole business of which came first, DNA or metabolism. We can’t really say. Because DNA does nothing. You put it on the table, it does nothing. You put it even on tissue, it does nothing.
It has to be in the context of something that can metabolize energy from the outside, turn it into fuel, make it do something. metabolism first. But if it was just metabolism, how did it replicate? So how did evolution work? These are serious chicken and eggs problems.
And I think the Buddha was quite right in saying, if your plan, if your concern right now is to liberate your mind, you don’t need to know anything about any of that. And I think that’s pretty good advice, actually. Although I think it’s also good to know where the gaps are in the scientific story, because they certainly get papered over. I mean, we frequently get, you know, like you watch a documentary on television or you listen to a lecture or something like that. And scientists will give you the impression that they’ve got it all under control.
Do you know what I mean? Like we’ve more or less got this story. We’ve more or less got that story, but we don’t. Which actually is an example of the delusion and the illusion. Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. This is what- this is basically how I’m cashing out ignorance. Which is the basis of the wheel, which is the first link, which is how it makes the whole thing go. Richard, you got a question? No.
I was only going to comment that this The division between persisting is the desire to persist and the don’t care, which is an anthropomorphism. No doubt it’s an anthropomorphism, but these rocks don’t care. No. They don’t resist. They don’t resist perturbation.
So we had a billion years, slightly less, of nothing but don’t care. Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t understand how you get I don’t understand how you go from hot boiling world to something that is alive even in one billion years, if you are looking at total accident. We had a period of no care.
And as soon as life came There was lot of caring. There was a lot of caring. There was a lot of desire to persist. Ignorance as a result of mistaken apprehension No, I think ignorance began exactly at the same moment that life began. If not before.
There is a desire for when and before you ever came to Buddha House, did you particularly have this desire to overcome anything about ignorance? I mean, you may have wanted to transcend an experience, but you weren’t necessarily looking for to overcome ignorance. You didn’t know what it was. To a I don’t care. Rocks stay.
Yeah. Well, I don’t think we have that choice, but but it anyway yeah. I I’ve got sort of things that are all over the place, but persist and don’t care, I I think you have to go back to the you know, what is the that like, they don’t exist Oh, absolutely. Oh, okay. Sure.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.
That’s right. Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s it’s all conditioned. It’s all causes and conditions.
It’s all conditioned phenomena. It’s all coming together, falling apart, coming together, falling apart. I’m not saying that there is any Good clarification. There’s no essence here. There’s no essence here.
A lot of it is tied up in circumstances. Yeah. Totally. Totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, But there’s no essence here. Okay, so this is the first link. And what this leads to is If the main thing is self and self maintenance, Again, this requires, if you value certain things, if you have to keep your biochemical profile within particular parameters, within particular ranges of value, if you have pattern of interacting with the world that helps you to persist, thrive, and reproduce, then basically as a result of that you develop habits. Because habits are the easiest way to do this. Really important for this.
Because every generation had to relearn everything, we wouldn’t be able to reproduce as well as we do. We wouldn’t be able to live as well as we do. So some of these habits become innate, although that’s a problematic term. Don’t think that any of this is absolutely preprogrammed. But a lot of it is it’s canalized.
It’s like if you’re on a pinball machine and you pull the thing back like that and the ball goes up and it goes around like that. It could go anywhere, right? But as soon as it starts falling into particular canals, it can only go in one place. So we do have there’s a certain openness about even our genetic endowment that gets canalized right away, just by the nature of our being. So you have habits that are innate.
You have habits that are acquired in their truest sense both by convention and personal experience. And in the category convention, I came across a study in psychological science today, which feeds into that whole thing about the difference between Asian cultures and Western cultures. There was a study of Japanese college students and American college students. And they were asked to choose amongst a selection of pens as a reward for having filled out a particular survey. And if they consider themselves somewhere in the middle of the group of people who would be choosing from the pens, the Japanese student there was one color and then all the rest of the pens were the same color.
Right? All the Japanese students, without exception, chose one of the, common colors. They didn’t take the one that was the special color. Right? And all the Michigan students took the special color.
Because they had much more of a sense. It’s like the difference between an individualized culture and a collective collective culture. But, but if they thought they were the first or the last, everybody took the special color. Because there’s no blame attached. Because if you take the first, nobody knows there was ever a special color.
Right? Nobody knows there was a special color. And if you’re the last, there’s nobody after you. So they all did it. They all wanted a special pen because it’s different.
It’s novel. So your habits of mind and behavior can be conditioned by convention or personal experience. And the more valuable they are, the more ingrained they are. The more they’re repeated, the more ingrained they are. And the stronger the emotional charge, the more ingrained they are.
So if you have if you have a response that’s conditioned by extreme anger or even really just a little bit of anger, you’re going to remember that experience a whole lot more easily than something that was just sort of like, an indifferent feeling. If something is imprinted with great feeling happiness, you’re going to remember that a whole lot more easily than something that’s more indifferent. So the greater the emotional charge, the more ingrained it becomes. And the more ingrained it becomes, the more automatic it becomes. And these habits on the on the second link are called volitional dispositions.
They’re called dispositions because they’re states of mind that lead to actions. They’re dispositions to act. And they’re volitional because they shape our motivation for acting. Okay? Can you just say that again?
Yeah. Yep. I’m missing the more Automatic. Yep. An example of, automaticity is walking.
We have to learn to walk. And once it becomes automatic, we don’t even think about it. We have to learn to talk. Once we start talking, it becomes very automatic for most of us. If you are a pianist, you have to learn the scales and everything else.
But once the skill, it’s automatic. It’s second nature. And you only actually notice it when something goes wrong. So it becomes a matter of, coming. So it’s a disposition because it’s a state of mind.
And I’ll say mind body because that includes the soma. That is a disposition to act. And it’s volitional because it relates to motivation or drive to act. And because both of these things relate to action, this link is sometimes referred to as karma. karma is the Sanskrit word for action.
It has nothing to do with retribution or doling out rewards and punishments. It just means action. So it is the dispositions of mind and the motivations of mind that lead to actions and hence karma. Okay. Oh, one of the things I forgot to mention about this last week that’s so important is in the Tibetan tradition, the word for meditation is gom, which means familiarize.
It doesn’t mean meditate. It means familiarize. You know, like meditate like some technique technique or other. It’s basically familiarizing your mind with a particular way of being. And the reason why meditation is so important is because the states that you cultivate in meditation become repeated, ingrained and automatic.
Really simple. That’s the idea behind meditation. It’s so that you develop a habit of mind. Mind. You become so familiar with a particular state of mind that it becomes your state of mind.
Because what the mind holds repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly is what the mind becomes. If you get angry easily, you hold anger in your mind. If you love deeply, love is in your mind. You know? If you are concerned with your work, it might show up in your dreams because work is on your mind.
Right? Thank you. You’re very good at the nutshell, aren’t you? Very good. Too much?
Any gaps? Does it work? Does the leap work? Good. Okay.
Good. So it should be clear by now that it’s really kind of difficult to undo this part. The first link and the second link are kind of like, are kind of the foundation stones. And if you develop habits out of ignorance, those habits are going to permeate everything you do. They’re going to permeate.
And because they’re evolved from the time we were single cells, with all this grasping itself because we have to self maintain, Even the behaviors of ourselves are like this. It’s not just our top down mind, the mind that we’re used to living in. It’s all the unconscious substructure of our minds as well. Of the gross mind. The very subtle mind is, although these are imprints upon that mind, the very subtle mind is essentially stainless.
And if it wasn’t, we actually get rid of these things. Because you don’t get rid of them, you move through them, I think. It’s called purification, but I’m not sure these go anywhere. Do you know what I mean? Maybe burning is the best image.
Not sure. But the point is that ignorance based habits function. You know, They work, more or less. We live our lives. We’re on a bit of a roller coaster.
We’re up, we’re down. We’re up, we’re down. We’re up, we’re down. Because all of our habits are basically based on a misapprehension. We’re up, we’re down, we’re up, we’re down.
Our experience is like a yo yo. It’s kind of yo experience. And so it is that up and down nature of ignorance ingrained habit and mind that gives our existences its suffering texture. We can have overt pain. We’re all familiar with overt pain.
Any time you stub your toe, any time somebody tells you something you don’t want to hear, we physical pain, we have mental pain. But it’s the fact that we’re up or down. We’re constantly being disappointed, then elated, and then disappointed again. And then our expectations are built up again. And it’s the idea that somehow or other we’re going be able to get all this together.
Somehow or other all this is going to be able to get together sufficiently so things will be better. That creates that subtle texture of suffering. Suffering. And for practicing Buddhist, it’s like, surely my meditation will get better. Surely my practice will get better.
It’s like Leslie showed me a cartoon once of one meditator saying to another, what’s next? And the other meditator says, what do you mean what’s next? This is it. It’s the idea that there’s always going to be something better over the hill. That it isn’t this moment right now that creates the suffering texture of our lives.
And the reason why we think it’s going to be better is because if you’re living like this, self maintenance, you’ve always got to be projecting into the future. What’s next? What’s next? What’s next? What’s next?
Is it a predator? Is it food? Is it something good? Is it something bad? So our entire mentality is constantly projecting into the future.
It has to because of this. Which is why it’s so difficult to be in the present moment. But the present moment is all we have. Because the past is finished, the future isn’t here. The present moment is all we have.
So you can see that this makes it really, really difficult to get a handle on how things really are. And it all comes out of mistaken apprehensions about this. And how that projects onto everything. Should we have a break? Should we have chai?