Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 34-minute talk, Pamela Lyon explores the third link of dependent origination—consciousness transitioning between lives or moments—and its connection to name and form, the embryonic state. She clarifies that consciousness is not a single entity but a subtle continuum shaped by mental habits, and that these habits flavor the arising of consciousness moment to moment. She then turns to name and form as the five aggregates and discusses how our habitual patterns—whether animalistic or human—determine the shape our life takes. Lyon engages substantive questions about the nature of mind and body, the timing of consciousness in fetal development, and cites research on children who recall past lives, arguing that the evidence suggests consciousness enters at conception and that habits, even violent ones, can lead to continued human rebirth. For those familiar with the twelve links and interested in how Buddhist psychology intersects with contemporary neuroscience.
File metadata (for organising)
File: Pamela Lyon – Track 3.mp3
UUID: 3cc03ee4-4943-40e6-81d3-13588fe0a260
Teacher: Pamela Lyon
Collection: Pamela Lyon (Pamela Lyon)
Date: 2008 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 34.2 minutes
Words: ~3,655
Condition this moment of mind in its transition, either from one moment to the next or from one life to the next. All right? So when the last moment of the previous life, it’s called causal consciousness. And when it’s the first moment of the new life, it’s called the resultant or effect consciousness. And this lasts basically as long as the duration of this before this.
So there’s not much to say about this kind of consciousness. We went through quite a lot about the the definition of mind in in the first lesson. So here we’re going concentrate on name and form. Okay. Now in Yep.
Why is it the third? Well, specifically in a presentation as this Well, you remember, I’ve said a couple of times that the organization can be different. Because it’s a link to the next, from one moment to the next. But it’s not a link between any moment, only certain moments. No.
It could be a link between any moment. Yeah. If you’re looking at this as a presentation of rebirth, it’s the last moment of the previous incarnation and the first moment of the new incarnation. But the twelve links can operate from life to life. They can operate from moment to moment.
They can operate within the course of the day. You can use this kind of causal sequence to make sense of life and subjective experience on a number of different temporal scales. Yes. No. It’s every moment of mind.
Yep. And this is what conditions this. And it doesn’t cause it. I mean, it does cause it. It causes the the sort of the flavor of this consciousness.
You know, the habits don’t cause consciousness per se, but they do cause the flavor of that consciousness. So you’re that consciousness is not pervasive of ignorance and habits and name and things. It is. But as we said in the very beginning, this is all an account of mind. But each link is part of an explanation of how mind works.
Which is why calling this consciousness is really unfortunate, but that’s what they call it. Because how do you have ignorance before you have consciousness? If you’re talking about the substrate, the clear and knowing substrate. And quantum biology and… Yeah. Yeah.
No, no, no. Every single moment, every single link is suffused with mind. Right? But this is particularly, it’s like the flavor of the consciousness that arising, finishing one thing and beginning something else. I mean, it’s not everything is like an arising and a falling away.
So whatever your habits of mind are, are, that flavors the moment of mind in this moment, in this moment, this moment, this moment, this moment, this moment. So where does this last and previous? Is that it’s what is it in the moment of mind, which is actually the last If you’re if this is I’m sorry. I really should have been much more clear on this. This this is yeah.
No. This is a rebirth presentation. If you’re talking about the twelve links in terms of rebirth, this is how it works. Not only rebirth. No.
Okay. Yeah. Okay. Excuse me. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. But if you’re talking about just ordinary everyday mind, it’s last moment, next moment, next, next, next, next, next. The word last, what does it mean? It’s relative to something else.
It have any intrinsic meaning. First doesn’t have any intrinsic meaning. It just depends upon where you parse the thing. And so on rebirth, in this particular presentation, consciousness is specifically last moment of the previous incarnation, first moment of connection with the new incarnation. And the new incarnation is name and form.
Yep. You are asking for a lot. And I’m not going to give you much. That which is clear and knowing. That which is clear and knowing, which is clear being unobstructed.
For our purposes, I can think of the glasses and the things in the other room without actually going in there and I’m not obstructed by the wall. Right? For people of high degree, who have developed their minds to a considerable extent, their minds are also not obstructed by distance. This is not something that’s just evidenced in, is a matter of faith in the Buddhist meditation traditions. Is any anthropologist that works with indigenous people in Central Australia or with Kalahari Bushman have similar stories about knowing things at a distance.
So clear means unobstructed by anything physical. And knowing just means what? It means being able to apprehend an object. But what does that mean? To hold an object.
Does that help? What’s a thought? What is a thought? What is a thought in relation to consciousness? That’s hard, Judith.
It is a phenomenon Okay, I’m making this up. Right? You do understand that, right? This is not doctrine. This is me trying to make sense of that question.
Okay. Which are phenomena from well, in the first instance, your brain and your body. From your brain and your body. How does your brain and your body then relate to clear knowing? I have a hard time grasping.
No, I share your frustrations. However, okay, so we’re talking about what? I mean, couldn’t you think of, you know, Thought is mental activity. Know. But what does that mean?
What does that mean? What you said about the brain. Thinking is a mental activity. Yeah. Respect.
But if link it to what you said about the brain, manifestations of the mind. But I mean if we’re talking about something that’s related to the brain, once you start linking something to a physical organ, it gets all mixed up in sensory motor coordination and all sorts of stuff. Okay. So you’ve got gross, subtle, and very subtle mind in this presentation. Okay?
In the Tibetan presentation. You have something that’s gross, that’s very definitely tied to this kind of body. And you have subtle, which is a more refined kind of mind. And I would think that this is the sort of thing when we’re talking about it being clear and unobstructed at a distance. That’s the kind of thing we’re talking about.
But the very, very subtle mind is described frequently as a drop. And it’s something apparently very, very, very small. And it’s that thing. Is it material? No.
But it travels with the potential for form. See, I think the terms mental and physical really are so ambiguous that we really shouldn’t use them. Basically form is: can you kick it? Can you touch it? It’s material.
It’s mass. Can’t I find the word material much more helpful than physical. Do you? Okay. The definition for clear and for consciousness is a little bit more of clear and clear and knowing without being burdened by perception and apprehension.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But that has to do with the other the rest of the link. So we’re not going there.
We’re not going there yet. What about the notion of awareness? But that’s knowing. Awareness is knowing. But whatever the- the third link is one moment of this.
And it is- when they’re talking about that, they’re basically talking about the very subtle mind moving from moment to moment. But the very subtle mind carries a lot of baggage. Carries an imprint, but is not touched by these. You’re going to be asking me to justify things I can’t. Don’t know anything about.
I’m much more comfortable with biology. A little bit of clarification on a moment of mind. Within a moment, there are Sixty moments. Yes. That’s the old thing that within a finger snap there are actually sixty instances, sixty apprehendable instances if your mind is clarified or not.
So that moment of mine is and it’s very subtle, is less than a pinprick. Yeah. And advanced meditators have used strobe, to measure that whole sixty moments, mind moments in a moment. Is it sixty? Okay, sixty? All of it, I guess.
Never mind. But they’ve done experiments with strobe lights that ordinary people see as just a constant beam of light. And got meditators to count how many pulses they can see. And they can see really, really, really fine gradations. I don’t know if it gets to sixty, but it definitely gets to things like twenty five, thirty, stuff like that.
Do they see them with their eyes or they feel them with their body? I have no idea. They apprehend them. They are aware of them. When they are in a meditative state.
No, when they are looking at the light. When they are looking at the light. Quite elastic, yes. Which is something that Tsurphu Rinpoche gets really, really stuck into. He’s very, very interested in the whole notion of time and temporality.
Okay, so shall we move on? Please, please. But of course consciousness is in the next one too. Name and form is basically the five aggregates. And name is associated with feeling, discrimination, compositional factors, which is kind of a garbage can term.
It’s like there’s a long presentation of all this. But it’s like everything that doesn’t fall into these. And of course consciousness, which is explicitly in name here too. And consciousness there being this. Okay?
And form is material existence. So what name and form basically is, is the life body. Which is is why if we have fishy habits, we become like fish. Or we become fish. Whatever our habits are that are carried on, that are transferred from this crucial moment of consciousness from life to life or from moment to moment, that is the shape our five aggregates take.
And so if you live like a fish, you know, it’s more likely, I would think, that you’re going to be a fish, because you have fishy habits. If you are a human being and you behave like a human being, you have the habits of a human being. You don’t behave as much like an animal as we might and as we’re capable of acting. Presumably, That means that the life body that you assume is that of a human. Now traditionally that is not what is taught.
Traditionally what is taught is that if you are talking about rebirth, from life to life, we are told that we have the karma to be almost everything. You know, we have the karma to be everything. And from one life to another, it’s like, you know, if enter the death state in an uncontrolled state, if you’ve got no control over your mind at all, you can be blown like a leaf anywhere to any kind of reincarnation, to any kind of rebirth. The only empirical, scientifically documented cases that are suggestive of rebirth don’t necessarily bear that out. Because they have a tendency to be cases of children who remember their previous lives, case studies that are developed.
There is a database of over three thousand of them. Most of them are in cultures that accept rebirth, like the Druze of Lebanon, and Hindus, and the Dene, which are a tribe in Canada. And because in cultures like that, when kids start saying, Well, this is not my sister, you’re not my brother, my house is here, my family is like that. They deal with that. It’s generally only when it becomes totally out of hand.
Like, this is not my family. This is not my house. My village is somewhere else. My house looks like this. And it becomes a problem that it comes to the attention of people who investigate these things.
And most of the investigations have been out of the University of Virginia by a guy named Ian Stevenson, who began life as a neuropsychiatrist. He was a brain scientist interested in psychiatry, who, because his mother was a theosophist, was asked to investigate a case. And that’s how he did it out of courtesy to a friend of his mother, I think. Or a friend of a friend of a friend. And it changed his life.
He just kept investigating them and investigating them. And somebody gave the University of Virginia a whole lot of money to endow a chair just for him. So when he dies, I don’t know if it’ll continue. But, but yep. I know.
I think maybe I shouldn’t ask anyone else. Sure. Go ahead. I just wonder if you’ve heard of him talking about somebody without a brain. Do you know about a man without a brain?
If you don’t, I don’t know. No. Without what? Man without a brain? He has to have something.
Alright. Think Doctor. Ian Stevenson is the one who investigated that. Maybe, I don’t know. But he developed a very interesting theory about birthmarks.
Because we don’t know how birthmarks are formed. We don’t know why people get birthmarks. We really don’t know how they’re generated. But when he investigating what he calls cases that are suggestive of rebirth, reincarnation. He doesn’t say it is reincarnation.
He lays the facts out and says, please anybody give me another explanation. This seems to be the most parsimonious explanation. But I’m open to anything. He noticed that people who said that they had been shot in a particular place had a tendency to have birthmarks there. That people, a person who said something exploded in their face had a port-wine birthmark.
Things like that. And what those cases suggest is that even though a lot of these people are dying quite violently and suddenly, they’re being catapulted immediately into a human rebirth. And you’d think at the state, you know, if somebody is being shot, stabbed, something like that, you are in a state of massive fear or something. You are probably your most animal kinds of propensities are coming to the fore. You know, self maintenance.
But they seem to be ending up in human rebirth, so I don’t know. But does seem- but the idea is that habits provide the flavor of the consciousness that then gives rise to the life body, the form of the life, the nature of the five aggregates. Does that make sense? Whether you accept it or not? So if you’re looking at this from a non rebirth standpoint, it would be whatever your habits of mind are, they flavor the consciousness from moment to moment, which gives rise to the state of your five aggregates.
Which is the material form, feelings, discriminations, discriminations, compositional factors and consciousness. Right? Does that make sense? The state of your and Yes, state of your name and form. Except I have a problem with this.
No. Have a problem first of all with name and form. In Sanskrit, the term is namarupa. Rupa means form. That’s really clear.
But nama in Sanskrit apparently means it’s like pasture or ground. It’s the ground. It’s the ground. Not the ground literally, but the ground of something. And so in in Hinduism, nama has a tendency to be to be associated with your spiritual essence.
So it’s the it’s a it’s a basis of some kind, and rupa is the form. So I don’t know where name comes out of that, except that nama sounds like name. So in other words, these if you look at this as nama, rather than name, these are the bases, you know, for behavior, which is part of the self maintenance, which is part of the self, etcetera. Does that make sense? But you can also see here that if this isn’t operative, your habits aren’t necessarily tainted.
Right? The weaker this is, this connection here is not automatic. Your habits can be conditioned by something other than ignorance. Ignorance. If you’ve been familiarizing yourself with positive states of mind, if you’ve been familiarizing yourself with the radical mistake that our normal apprehension makes in trying to undo that.
These habits become quite different. So the flavor of this consciousness is quite different. So the conditioning of Namarupa is quite different. Right? This connection is vital, but it’s not inevitable.
It’s what comes out of our normal biological existence. But is where the real change starts here. It’s breaking the link between this and this. But then the next one, the next chance for breaking that really big time is right after the fifth link. Not next week, but when we meet again, we’ll talk about the fifth link, is the sixth sense spheres.
Let me just finish up on name and form. Name and form is basically the embryonic form. Once the egg and sperm fuse, you have name and form. You have the potential for the five aggregates. The five aggregates are there.
And this link lasts until the fetus has reached the development of the sixth sense spheres, when it has an eye consciousness and ear consciousness and olfaction and tactile sense and that sort of stuff. So this is kind of the placeholder in the rebirth view. If you’re looking at this as something that’s happening over a lifetime, this is the placeholder until until the, the sixth sense spheres are developed, which is the next link. Buddhism, life starts when in the embryo developing six sense. No.
Life starts the moment the moment the consciousness enters the fusion of egg and sperm. The moment that a sperm and an egg become one and then they divide into two shows over. Unfortunately, I mean, like for a lot of women, you can still choose to have an abortion, you know. And I can certainly defend a woman’s right to it. But if you are looking at it from a strictly Buddhist viewpoint, it is right there from the get go.
Because some, not all of the Hīnayāna tradition, believe that consciousness enters as soon as fertilization takes place. It could be empty for months and months. And until the consciousness actually enters, it could be a developed fetus by then. Because they they say to, like, if the fetus is stillborn, that’s because no consciousness entered into that fetus when it was born. This one was stillborn.
I I don’t see how I don’t see how, from a biological standpoint, you could justify that view. I see how you could. Basically you’re saying that for whatever period of time, whether it’s nine months in a human being or it’s however long in a whale or an elephant or a dog or a cat or something like that. From the moment there’s fusion and then there’s division and there’s basically all kinds of self maintenance and division going on. Because as a living entity, the embryo is just dragging off resources every which way.
It’s a placental creature, they’re dragging them out of the mother’s body. If it’s a yolk creature, if it’s an egg, it’s dragging the resources from the egg. But it’s basically engaging in everything else. It is alive. But they feel.
They feel. No, they feel. They apprehend sound. They apprehend light and dark. All that sort of stuff.
This is one of the reasons why there is such a huge debate about late term abortion. Because you’re basically looking at a creature that’s got, I mean, can’t live on its own, for sure. But is displaying an lot of the behavior creatures that we regard as having consciousness. And if you say that an embryo, a fetus doesn’t have consciousness until somehow it’s magically breath enters it at birth. No.
But why but why but why would but why but but that was still not by That’s why. Yeah. That if that body is not occupied by consciousness, but it’s born, it’s stillborn because there is no sixth factor, I guess. Yeah. I don’t think that that’s the Tibetan view.
No, no, it’s not the Tibetan Yeah, yeah. But I’m sure that it is a view. Well, mainly I guess the reason why I hold the view that I do is because, which I find extraordinarily inconvenient, by the way. Is because bacteria behave in the way they do. If in a single cell you’ve got the kind of heavy reactivity that you’ve got, like decision making, affect, memory, sensory behavior, that sort of stuff.
I mean, why on earth wouldn’t that be happening in a blastocyst? Yeah, I mean, in the case of bacteria, how much of it is really a conscious decision a case of automatic? How many of your decisions are conscious decision as opposed to automatic? No. Seriously.
Seriously. I mean, most of us operate off this. Most of us operate off this. Before meditation, my action would be automatic. But after meditation, after I’ve started to be a bit more mindful, then yes, I would say it’s more my conscious decision for me rather than automatic.
Well, then you’re living like a human being and not like an animal. But most of us live like animals. Most human beings live like the animals we are. Most of our behavior is almost entirely unconsciously generated. The amount of evidence from neuroscience and from cognitive psychology of how much basically what we run off nonconscious processes is terrifying in a sense.
Because it means that we are totally under the sway of this. And very rarely do we stop and say, I’m going to correct course. I’m moving in this direction. I see I’m moving in this direction. I don’t want to move in this direction.
I’m going to change course. Because that’s what humans can do. Think this is getting a little bit off the subject. But just going along from that, are you using unconsciously in this time as synonymous with inattentive? Inattentive, yeah.
Okay. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It’s attention, and it’s like the iceberg below. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, think that’s enough. Yeah. Thank you.