Emptiness — 2008-08-08

Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.

About this talk. In this two-hour introduction to emptiness, Tenzin Chogkyi dismantles common misconceptions about the concept by opening with an extended analogy: discovering an empty pizza box when you expected pizza left inside. He explains that emptiness is not a void or ground of being, but rather a characteristic of all phenomena—the absence of existing independently from conceptual designation. The core teaching unpacks dependent origination across three levels: dependence on causes and conditions, dependence on parts, and most subtly, dependence on conceptual imputation and labeling. Chogkyi walks through how we falsely perceive a glass of water, a book, or the self as existing “from their own side” when they actually exist only as labels placed on valid bases of designation. He explores how this false perception of inherent existence drives afflictions and karma, and how understanding the relationship between emptiness and dependent arising begins to loosen that grip even before direct realization. The session includes extensive Q&A addressing how practitioners function in a conventional world while studying emptiness, how the direct realization differs from intellectual understanding, and how understanding emptiness should sharpen rather than dissolve moral discipline. Suited for both beginners and those with some Buddhist study background.

File metadata (for organising)

File: 2008 08 08 Emptiness_20080808.mp3

UUID: 65b4fdf9-b16a-4f6c-8995-29d353ac338b

Teacher: Tenzin Chogkyi

Collection: Emptiness (Tenzin Chogkyi)

Date: 2008-08-08

Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide

Words: ~17,930

K. What do you think? Take a break. Oh, that’s true. It’ll get noisy.

So, yeah, maybe closed is good. Yeah. Just a cup is fine. Yeah, thank you. Another student.

Okay. Yeah, let’s leave it over for a little bit. I’ll close it. Okay. Okay, so welcome everybody.

Since the last time I was here, there’s a new classroom has been created upstairs, which is an exciting improvement. So now we’ve got kind of double shifts at Satchen Lane, which is great. I was thinking maybe nobody would show up and we could all just go sit in the back upstairs, but it didn’t happen. So what I’d like to do, this is teaching on emptiness tonight, an introduction to emptiness. And then tomorrow, we’re going to do an all day class.

So we’ll kind of give the broad overview tonight. And if any of you feel inspired, you can come back tomorrow for more details. Thank you so much. So as it is a class on emptiness, what I thought would be appropriate to do after setting our motivation is to recite the Heart Sūtra, which is, if you’ve got the green book, it’s on page nine. So what we’ll do is just sit for a minute or two, just watching our breath, just to quiet our minds, get ourselves into the room, into our bodies.

Friday night, there’s been a lot going on for all of us during the week. Maybe you rushed to get here after work. So just take a couple of minutes to focus on your breath and just settle here in the moment. And then let’s just take a minute to set our motivation thinking. We may have come just out of curiosity.

We’ve heard this word emptiness, some curiosity to find out what this means in the Buddhist context. Or it may be that we have some understanding of the nature of our unenlightened existence and wish to free ourselves, meditate on the ultimate nature of reality to get free. And the highest level of motivation, according to the Mahāyāna, is not to just attain liberation for our own sake, but to attain full enlightenment with all the qualities necessary to benefit all living beings, to lead them to liberation. So just reflect for a minute on your motivation for coming here tonight for engaging in your Buddhist study. Set your motivation for tonight’s session.

And now let’s recite together the Heart Sūtra on page nine. I prostrate to the Ārya triple gem. Thus did I hear it one time. The Bhagavan was dwelling on massive vultures mountain in Rajagriha together with a great community of monks and a great community of Bodhisattvas. At that time, the Bhagavan was absorbed in the concentration on the categories of phenomena called profound perception.

Also at that time, the Bodhisattva, Mahāsattva, Ārya Avalokiteśvara looked upon the very practice of the profound perfection of wisdom and beheld those five aggregates also as empty of inherent nature. Then through the power of Buddha, the venerable Śāriputra said this to the Bodhisattva, Mahāsattva, Ārya Avalokiteśvara. How should any son of the lineage train who wishes to practice the activity of the profound perfection of wisdom? He said that, and the Bodhisattva, Mahāsattva, Ārya Avalokiteśvara said this to the Venerable Śāriputra. Śāriputra, any son of the lineage or daughter of the lineage who wishes to practice the activity of the profound perfection of wisdom should look upon it like this, correctly and repeatedly beholding those five aggregates also as empty of inherent nature.

Form is empty. Emptiness is form. Emptiness is not other than form. Form is also not other than emptiness. In the same way, feeling, discrimination, compositional factors, and consciousness are empty.

Shariputratra, likewise, all phenomena are emptiness, without characteristic, unproduced, unceased, stainless, not without stain, not deficient, not fulfilled. Shariputratra, therefore, in emptiness, there is no form, no feeling, no discrimination, no compositional factors, no consciousness, no eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind, no visual form, no sound, no odor, no taste, no object of touch, and no phenomenon. There is no eye element and so on, up to and including no mind element and no mental consciousness element. There is no ignorance, no extinction of ignorance, and so on, up to and including no aging and death, and no extinction of aging and death. Similarly, there is no suffering, origination, cessation, and path.

There is no exalted wisdom, no attainment, and also no non attainment. Shariputratra, therefore, because there is no attainment, Bodhisattvas rely on and dwell in the perfection of wisdom, the mind without obscuration and without fear. Having completely passed beyond error, they reach the endpoint of nirvana. All the Buddhas who dwell in the three times also manifestly completely awaken to unsurpassable, perfect, complete enlightenment in reliance on the perfection of wisdom. Therefore, the mantra of the perfection of wisdom, the mantra of great knowledge, the unsurpassed mantra, the mantra equal to the unequaled, the mantra that thoroughly pacifies all suffering, should be known as truth since it is not false.

The mantra of the perfection of wisdom is declared. Tayata gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha. Śāriputra, the bodhisattva, maLhasattva should train in the profound perfection of wisdom like that. Then the Bhagavan arose from that concentration and commended the Bodhisattva, Mahāsattva, Ārya Avalokiteśvara saying, well said, well said, son of the lineage. It is like that.

It is like that. One should practice the profound perfection of wisdom just as you have indicated. Even the Tathagatas rejoice. The Bhagavan having thus spoken, the Venerable Śāriputra, the Bodhisattva, MaLhasattva, Ārya, Avalokiteśvara, those surrounding in their entirety along with the world of gods, humans, asuras, and gandharvas, were overjoyed and highly praise that spoken by the Bhagavan. The room fills up the minute you start chanting the Heart Sūtra.

It’s magic. Okay. Okay. What I thought we could do first is if everybody just goes around and introduces themselves and maybe just mention if what your background is in Buddhist studies, specifically with emptiness, I can get kind of an idea of what background people have. And I’ll start first.

My name is Tenzin Chogkyi. It’s always nice to be back here at teaching. I’ve been based at Land of Medicine Buddha down in Soquel for the last two years. And I’ve just embarked on a yearlong teaching tour. And this is about my fourth stop.

I’ve been on the East Coast and then in Colorado teaching a retreat in a prison last weekend, which was really great. And I’m here in California for a week and then off to New Zealand Thursday. My god. It’s winter there. I need to repack desperately.

Yeah. So okay. Yeah. Do you wanna we can yeah. Everybody knows you, but go ahead.

No. Actually, yeah, I do. Everybody knows. So I took it in here for eight years and Oh my god. I studied a lot with Geshe la about emptiness.

Geshe la Rinpoche, my main teacher’s on empty ness. Now I’m teaching on emptiness, and so I every class I can go to on emptiness. I just think you’re amazing. Tenzin Chogkyi and I go back literally Nineteen eighty three. Nineteen eighty eighty two.

Was it nineteen eighty two? Yeah. When we were not Buddhist nuns, by the way. We different hairstyles. So but I just think I’ve always thought you were amazing.

I’m really happy that you’re here. Oh, shocks. Okay. Oh, shocks. Great.

Yeah. Good. Thank you. Yeah. My name is Ty, and I just came here just to jump on any opportunity to see a teaching just on emptiness.

You know, it’s something that you don’t get that often. People a lot of time will mention it in another class, but not wanna go into it too deeply. Mhmm. And I was reading some translation of the Heart Sūtra, and the commentator kind of said, you know, like, contemplate ease. It has the power to just remove all your obstacles, basically.

So what more could you want? What more could you want indeed? Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Okay. I’ll do my best. Hopefully, it won’t just confuse you utterly. K. Thanks for coming, Chris.

Little bit. Just yeah. Great. Good. Okay, great.

We kind of did a skipping thing. Sorry, we started with Carla and then skipped, so we could maybe go in from the back to the front. Yeah. Yeah. You’re not alone.

What? Okay. Great. Thank Great. Stuck there.

And that dependent arising with his holiness was your very first teaching. Right? Yeah. Morgan’s mom is a good friend of mine, so I remember meeting him at His Holiness. Very auspicious beginning, Morgan.

Great. Yeah. Great. Good. Thank you, Rose.

Yeah. Because I bonked you on the head with Śākyamūni Buddha’s relics, that’s why. Yeah. I don’t really know what my background is. I’m taking classes, read books.

You know? It’s hard to tell if I understand it or not. I have any idea maybe right now. K. Okay.

And do you know what? We we skipped. Yeah. I’m very sorry. I’m late.

It’s really totally okay. Okay. Okay. Great. Thank you so much.

It’s always kind of nice to see, you know, what people’s understanding is or how how, you know, much of a beginner people consider themselves. And, of course, people are always really modest. And so, you know, you find out that they really know a whole lot more than they let on, but that’s always the case. Okay. So what I thought I would do tonight is just an overview of the concept of emptiness.

For those of you who can join us tomorrow, I’m advertising already about tomorrow. What is helpful often in understanding emptiness more deeply is to go into selflessness according to the four main philosophical schools of Buddhism. And so that’s what we’re gonna be doing tomorrow for for the people who have a little bit more time. Tonight, what we’re gonna do is just talk about emptiness according to the highest philosophical school generally accepted by Tibetan Buddhists. And I qualify that because there is no kind of definitive view.

You have to specify which school you’re coming from. But this is the school that’s accepted and the perspective that’s taught by his holiness, Dalai Lama, Lama Zopa Rinpoche, Khensur Rinpoche, and so on. So what we’ll we’re gonna be kind of jump leaping ahead to that highest view. And then for people who can come tomorrow, we’ll just kind of go up the different schools kind of like rungs of ladders often the way that it’s explained that, you know, you can really understand the higher view much more kind of in-depth and also really understand how the views build on each other by studying the the different philosophical schools. So that’s what we’re gonna be doing tomorrow.

Now emptiness is something that is very much emphasized, and you hear this word thrown around a lot, and you’re told that it’s such an important concept. But as several people have mentioned, it’s hard to get teachings just on emptiness. And I sort of do this myself. I’ll be giving a class in the four noble truths, and I’ll throw around, you know, phrases like the ultimate nature of reality without really explaining what it is. And one of the reasons that teachers do that is because it’s a concept that’s so easily misunderstood.

And unless you have a fair amount of time to present it, it’s easy for people to get quite confused about it, and it’s almost better left alone unless you really have the proper time. If you just give it ten minutes, just sort of pulls the rug out from under people’s understanding of reality, and it can completely freak them out. In fact, there’s all kinds of vows that we take about not explaining it to people unless you have the time to do it properly, and you feel that the people are, you know, ready to hear it and so forth and so on. So for some of you that said you’ve been studying for a while and have never really been able to get teachings on it, that’s one of the reasons why. It’s something that we hesitate to delve into if we can’t spend a proper amount of time on it.

So but I, you know, I trust that none of you are gonna go running off and never be seen from again after two hours tonight, so I’ll just do my best to introduce the concept a little bit. So the word emptiness comes up, for example, in the Lam Rim. We talk about the three principal aspects of the path, the realizations of renunciation, bodhicitta, and emptiness. So it’s seen as very essential all the way through the path. We’re also told that in order to get both liberation and enlightenment, we need to have a direct realization of emptiness.

So we’re we’re often taught that emptiness is something that’s nonnegotiable in the path. Right? Like, have to have an understanding, only intellectually, but we have to have a direct realization of emptiness in order to get liberated, in order to get enlightened, you know, in order to become an Ārya Bodhisattva. So this is something that we absolutely have to directly realize, and the direct realization of emptiness depends on first understanding intellectually the concept of emptiness. Okay?

So that’s why we talk about it. That’s why we explain it intellectually first. And we’re gonna get into the five paths a little bit tomorrow. Some schools of Buddhism emphasize not studying much, not kind of cluttering one’s head with a bunch of concepts. And in the Tibetan Buddhist kind of position on that, we may err a bit on the side of cluttering our minds with too many concepts.

But the point is you need to in order to be able to meditate properly on emptiness or anything else, you need to understand how to do it. You need to understand how to aim. And usually what they do is they say, like, for example, for a bull’s eye, you need to be able to see the middle of the bull’s eye to aim at it, right, in order to do the meditation properly. So we need to understand what emptiness means intellectually, at least theoretically and conceptually, in order to do a proper meditation on it. So that’s the reason that we study emptiness, but it’s no substitute for meditation.

And we’re going to do a little bit of meditation tonight and even more tomorrow. Intellectual understanding of something is not the same as a direct realization. We need to put in the hours with our rear ends in direct contact with the meditation cushion, or we’ll never get the direct realization. No way. We need the concepts to go below the neck.

You know? It’s like they need to actually change our lives. And a lot of times, we especially in the West on thinking that the intellectual understanding is it. Oh, I get it. Know, an emptiness is no big deal to understand, really.

You know, conceptually, it’s not that difficult. You know, it’s not nuclear physics. It’s not the hardest thing in the world to understand. But to actually get the realization is very difficult. It’s very difficult and takes many hours of meditation.

So let’s not of fool ourselves into thinking that just by understanding the concept, we’ve we’ve got the realization because it doesn’t work like that. Okay. What I wanna do is start by explaining what emptiness is not because there are a lot of misconceptions about what emptiness is. Some of these come from these early translators of the sutras. I mean, bless their hearts.

You know, they did they did the best they could. But often, they would translate and do things like, say, the void, capital v. You know, emptiness, capital e. You know, nothingness, capital n. As if it’s something kind of hanging out there.

Right? Some, like, black hole. And this is supposed to be the goal of the path to, like, somehow merge with this black hole. Well, I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t sound very appealing to me at all. You know, like, it’s some kind of thing, and you merge with the void, capital v, and then, you know, you’re extinguished, and, you know, that’s not very appealing as the goal of the path.

And you see a lot of people in Buddhist countries have this misunderstanding. And I I have a a good friend who’s practices in the Thai tradition. He’s a monk in the Thai forest tradition, and he talks about lay people in Thailand have this idea, you know, that nirvana is, like, merging with the black hole and becoming extinguished. And they’re like, hey, man. No.

That doesn’t sound like much fun. I would just rather have one of those deva realms. Like, thank you very much. You know? So it’s sort of the first level of the scope of the lam rim.

Oh, higher rebirth sounds a whole lot better than merging with that black hole. You know? I don’t blame them. I mean, if that’s really what the goal of the path is, sounds a little too scary. It’s very like Carl Sagan, you know, and not not much fun at all.

So that’s a complete wrong concept of what emptiness is that I think comes from some of those early translators. Also, when Buddhism moved through China, it picked up a lot of the flavor of Taoism. And so often you get this idea that emptiness is sort of like the Tao or like Brahman, you know, some existing sort of permanent thing that exists out there, you know, that’s sort of like this ground of being, some sort of permanent ground of being out there from which everything arises like the Tao, like Brahman. So there’s a positive idea that emptiness is something out there from which everything arises. But it’s not like that either.

You know? It’s not like that either. And that’s a view that sometimes you’ll get in in reading that comes from sort of the Taoist strains that that emerge in some Chinese, Japanese, Korean schools of Buddhism combined with the bad translation, so we get this idea. You know, the black hole ground of being that everything kind of springs out of that’s eternal and so forth. And Buddhism says there’s no such thing.

So what is this emptiness thing if it’s not any of those things? You know, if it’s not the black hole thing, if it’s not the Tao ground of being thing, what is it? What is it anyway? And why is it so important to realize it? Like, it’s not any of these positive things that were meant to somehow merge with, what’s going on?

Emptiness is just a characteristic of every phenomena. Okay? Just a characteristic of every phenomena. It doesn’t exist apart from the phenomena of which it is the characteristic of. Sorry.

I don’t know about the syntax there. But every phenomena has its emptiness. There’s no emptiness apart from phenomena. Okay? So there’s no such void black hole out there.

Emptiness is not a positive object. It’s just the characteristic of every phenomena. So it does not exist apart from phenomena, which is why in the Heart Sūtra that we just read, form is emptiness, emptiness is form, Form is not other than emptiness, emptiness is not other than form. That’s what it’s saying in that most famous stanza of the Heart Sūtra. It’s saying emptiness does not exist without form, and form can’t exist without emptiness.

And we’ll go into what that means. But emptiness is just a characteristic or a quality of phenomena. And that quality is a mere absence of a certain way of existing. Okay? So that quality called emptiness is philosophically, they call it a a non affirming negation, which means it’s an absence.

It’s a mere absence of a certain way of existing. And we’re gonna talk about what that certain way of existing that things are absent of means. Okay? So just to dispel at the very outset this idea of emptiness as, you know, some kind of positive existing permanent ground of being. Because I think a lot of us in our reading, we just get confused, and we think that’s what it is.

Okay? So it’s a characteristic of phenomena, and it’s a mere absence of a certain way of being. The characteristic is an absence, a mere absence, a non affirming negation. And we’re going to talk more about what all of these things mean. So every phenomena has its characteristic emptiness.

Okay? A piece of paper has its emptiness. The prayer book has its emptiness. The glass has its emptiness. The clock has its emptiness.

I have my emptiness. Every phenomena has its emptiness. Now, that emptiness is the same in nature. Okay? The same absence of a certain way of existing.

Okay? But each emptiness is on the basis of the object that’s empty. Okay? So how is it what is that absence? What is that mere absence?

First, we need to talk about what we how we falsely view phenomena, you know, how we falsely see think that phenomena exists. And according to that highest school of Buddhism, they say things are empty of inherent existence. Okay? So that’s what the emptiness means. It’s absence of being what’s called inherently existent.

Inherently existent. And that means existing from its own side. You know, there are a lot of synonyms for this existing from its own side, you know, existing through its own nature, things like this. Basically, it’s lack of being anything other than a dependent arising. And dependent arising and emptiness are closely merged.

Okay? And we’ll talk about how that works, too. We’ll talk about how that works, too. But just to give you an idea that this emptiness we’re going to be talking about is a quality of every phenomena. And it’s a mere absence of a false way of existing.

An absence of a false way of existing. Okay? And that quality of emptiness is the same for each object even though the basis is different. So when you have a direct realization of emptiness, you’re having a realization of something that’s not there, of a mere absence. It’s very interesting.

A direct realization of emptiness is a realization of an absence of a quality that you always thought was there. So how do you have a realization of an absence of something? This is where it gets interesting. And I’ll steal an analogy that a friend of mine who’s a Buddhist teacher had this great analogy that some of you may have heard me use, and I apologize if you have. So how do you have, how do you see an absence?

You know, how do we see a mere absence? My friend had this great analogy. He said, okay. You know, let’s say that you’re really tired and you come home from work and you and your roommate decide you’re gonna you know, the Netflix delivery just came in, and you’re just gonna sit around and watch a couple of DVDs and get carryout pizza from Domino’s, you know, because you’re just you know, it’s Friday night, and instead of going to the Dharma teaching, you’re just gonna watch videos because you’re exhausted. So you get the extra large, you know, veggie supreme Domino’s pizza.

You’re sitting there, and you’re watching whatever the video is, and you’re eating the pizza, and there’s two or three pieces left. Right? So you put them in the refrigerator, and then the next day you go to work oh, no. It can’t be Friday night because the next day you go to work. Let’s say it was Tuesday night.

So Wednesday, you go to work, and you work really hard, and you have to skip lunch. You just have one of those horrible cup of noodle things with the hot water in it. And so you’re driving home and you’re really hungry because you just had this horrible cup of noodles thing for lunch from Trader Joe’s, those awful things. And so you you walk in the house and you and you’re fantasizing, like, the whole way home about the three pieces of pizza that are left in the box. Right?

You’re like, oh, I can’t wait because what’s better than cold pizza when you’re really hungry and you just come home from work? So you come home and you see the box on the kitchen counter, and you’re stoked. You know? You go up and you open the box. What do you see?

A mere absence of pizza. Okay? In that moment, that first moment, you’re perceiving a mere absence. You’re not seeing the tissue paper with the tomato smears on it, and you’re not seeing the little plastic thingy that keeps the pizza from smashing. You’re not seeing the little stray green pepper that flew off to this.

You’re only seeing absence of pizza. Right? Your roommate came home early and, like, left the box out to just torment you. You know? So you’re just seeing the absence of pee so that’s how you see a mere absence.

Right? Because in that first moment, you’re not seeing the positive phenomena. You’re not seeing the tissue paper. You’re not seeing the box. You’re not seeing the green pepper.

You’re just seeing no pizza left. And it’s the same when we have a direct realization of emptiness. Okay? Same way that we’re perceiving it. The thing that I always thought existed does not exist at all.

It’s just absent, completely absent. Okay? So that’s what’s happening when we have a direct realization of emptiness. Gabriel, do you have a question? Can I actually ask if we use that mic?

Is that all right? Sorry, just because the people at home listen to it. I felt a little blip of energy back Just wanted to check-in. It doesn’t exist or it has stopped existing? The emptiness exists.

The false way that we thought the object exists does not exist. Okay. So you’re seeing the lack of the false way of existing, the absence of the false way of existing. And we’ll talk a little bit more about what that false way is in a minute. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So there’s a way that phenomena how do I put it to make it less confusing? We think since beginning of this time, we’ve thought that phenomena have existed in a certain way. And emptiness is its phenomena’s lack of existing in that way.

So we’re seeing that for the first time. You know, it’s lack of existing in the way that we always thought it existed. Yeah, Jacob, let’s grab the mic. So in your example, the the false view would be your imagination of the pizza in the box the whole way Yes, yeah, exactly. And then when you get there, see that that was a false view the whole time.

Yeah, exactly. So when you have a direct realization of emptiness, it’s something that you always thought was there, you know, and that you actually thought you were perceiving. Right? We do believe it. You were having real emotions.

From Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And then you you see, it’s not there. And, of course, the difference between the pizza and the and the false sense of of the way phenomena exist is it never existed in the first place.

Like, we’ve been fooled by it all along. At least the pizza used to be there, and that’s where the analogy breaks down a little bit. It’s only an analogy for how you can perceive an a mere absence, and that’s really what you’re perceiving, not what is there, the white cardboard box and the little thingy. Yeah. Okay.

Okay. So the there is a another philosophical term for the way that we think that things exist, especially the self. And we’ll talk a little a little bit about the self tonight and more about the self tomorrow. The thing that we need to see the emptiness of most that will cut through the root of saṃsāra is the false view of how I exist, how you exist, how the self exists. And all other phenomena are equally selfless.

You know, we talk about selflessness of persons, selflessness of phenomena. Everything is equally empty. You know? But the main emptiness that we’re looking to see directly is the emptiness of the self, the emptiness of how we exist. Now Buddhism does not say that we don’t exist.

Buddhism doesn’t say, you know, we’re not all sitting here in this room on our cushions that it’s all just one big mass hallucination. You know? We’re not saying that in Buddhism. But the way that we think that we exist is wrong. You know?

The way that we have perceived ourselves to exist since beginning of this time is is a false one, is false. And that’s what we’re seeing the emptiness of. You know, we don’t disappear. You don’t get a direct realization of emptiness and suddenly poof, no more me because there’s no self. You know, that there’s a certain conventional way of existing that is valid.

We’re gonna talk about conventional reality and ultimate reality. Okay? And Buddhism does say, yes. There’s conventional reality. It does work.

That pizza did make me full. You know, I drove a car here this afternoon from Santa Cruz. That it all works. It all functions. There’s no problem.

It’s just on top of that, we have another layer that’s false. You know? On top of the way that things do validly conventionally exist, we slap on another layer that’s false, that we believe, which, by the way, is the cause of all of our suffering since beginningless time. You know, I don’t know about you guys. I’m a little fed up.

I wanna get rid of that false peel away that one false layer of how we see things existing, and we’re free. We’re liberated. I mean, sounds so easy, doesn’t it? You know? And we can still enjoy pizza, watch the DVD, drive the car.

All of that stuff still exists. It’s not that when we get a direct realization of emptiness, suddenly we can’t function anymore. We’re kind of, like, frozen in, you know, like a sci fi movie or something. No. Everything still works.

It still functions. It still exists conventionally. Okay. So there are three levels at which things are dependently arising. Dependently arising.

And let’s talk about this because that’ll give us insight into emptiness. So we’re gonna switch gears a little bit to dependent origination because that’s the key to getting this direct realization of emptiness that I keep talking about. Okay. So there are three levels of subtlety of dependent origination. The first level says, Things are dependent on causes and conditions.

Things dependently arise in dependence on causes and conditions. And in Buddhism, there’s a category of things called functioning things, produced things, which covers almost everything. There are just about three exceptions. Me, the book, the table, you, the universe. You know?

Buddhas, by the way, also are a result of causes and conditions. Buddhas are not inherently existent either. Enlightenment, you know, all these realizations are also dependently arisen. So functioning things depend on causes and conditions, meaning a cause produces a result. They change moment to moment to moment.

They’re characterized by both gross and subtle impermanence changing moment to moment to moment. Both physical things and mental things are produced. So the previous moment of body and mind of us, to just give an example, produces the very next moment of body and mind. Okay? So things are produced like that as a result of causes and conditions.

So that’s one level. Then the next level says things are dependent on parts. Things are dependent on parts. Myself as a human being, my body is dependent on having a torso, arms, legs, head, face. You know?

How much could be missing, and could I still validly be labeled a human being? You know? How much could be missing? If I were just a head, if my head were just sitting there, you wouldn’t say human being. Maybe the arms and legs could be missing because there’s those thalidomide babies from, you know, and then they’re missing limbs, but they’re still considered human.

But you can see how things are dependent on parts. This is a book, in dependence on the pages, the cover, the spiral binding. One page of it is called a page of a book. It’s not called a book. So things exist in dependence on their parts that make them up.

And now, the subtlest level of dependent arising, which is the key to having the direct realization of emptiness. This is the big key, so pay attention. Write it down, and I’m going to bludgeon you with this for the next ten minutes or so, so you’ll get it right. Things are also dependent on conceptual imputation, on designation. For things to exist the subtlest level, which is only accepted by the Middle Way Consequence School, which is that school that the Tibetan Buddhists buy into, says, things are what they are: independence not only on causes and conditions paper, the pulp, the book, you know, FPMT education department making this book on the parts, all the pages, the covers, and the spiral binding.

But this is a book also because I have the concept book in my mind. I lay my trip on this poor innocent little bundle of paper bound together. Okay. So how does that work? I have a mental image, a concept in my mind.

Book. It’s very generic. You know, it’s very generic. Pages, cover, some sort of binding. You know, that’s all it is.

Some very, very general idea in my mind of book. Then, when I see some raw data out there that matches with enough features that match my generic image, what do I do? Project that label. Conceptual imputation. Impute that idea, that concept, onto this basis of pages, cover, binding.

So far, so good. No problem at all with that. Right? Then there’s one more step that happens, and this is the cause of all of our trouble. I think there’s a book there from its own side that I didn’t create with my concepts.

Right? I think there’s a book there. I walk into this room. I see this sitting on the table. I think there’s a book there that’s been sitting there all along.

I don’t get that I created that book with my concepts, that I laid this trip book on this poor little innocent valid basis of designation is the philosophical term. Okay? And that’s what we do. I’m gonna go through it again, and I’ll do it with a couple of objects so we get what we’re doing all the time, by the way, with every single object that we encounter, including ourselves. Okay.

And then we’ll stop for questions because I know I’m laying a lot of levels of stuff on you. Okay. So what happens? I’m carrying around mental images, you know, little generic images. The Tibetan word is dun chi, often translated generic image, meaning generality.

You’ll hear different words. You know? So I’ve got these concepts in my head. Then I’m going around in my life. I see what we call a valid basis of imputation, something with characteristics that enough match my mental image, that it triggers my concept.

You know, it triggers a concept book, which I then label onto this bundle of paper with covers. Okay? Like I said, so far so good. No problem. Then I think there’s a book there, independent of my concepts, independent of my mental labeling.

Instead of seeing that I am labeling onto everything, all these valid bases of imputation, I think that there’s a book there. Same with the glass of water. Okay? I think there’s a glass of water there. Now let’s look at this glass of water in relation to the three levels of dependent origination.

Okay? So, you know, I don’t know, Ikea or, like, whoever wherever they bought this this these glasses. Yeah. Like, in a case, you know, made somewhere in, I don’t know, Beijing, most probably, out of glass. You know?

So causes and conditions. There’s the material substance that went into making the glass. You know? However they make glass, it’s like they melt all these things together, and then they cook it at high temperatures and then pour it into a mold. Right?

And then somebody had somebody had to work in the factory that they made the glass. So all of those causes and conditions produce the glass. So that’s the first level. Right? Causes and conditions.

The second level is the parts. What we call a glass has to be a cylinder. Right? A glass cylinder made of glass of a certain size that I can pick it up in my hand. If it were a glass cylinder that was like a fifty size of a fifty five gallon drum, we wouldn’t call it a glass of water.

You know, we wouldn’t call it needs to have a bottom to hold the liquid. Right? Because what we label glass of water is a cylinder with a certain size with a bottom that holds liquid. Then the top needs to be open so I can drink it. If the top were closed, we’d call it a bottle.

Right? If it were closed and had a little lid, then it would no longer be a valid basis for the label glass. It would be maybe a valid basis of the label bottle. Right? So all of these parts: cylinder, bottom, open top, small enough to hold in my hand.

All these parts are necessary for me to be able to label it glass of water. And then the final thing is I have an idea of what a glass of water is. Any given cylinder of a certain size with a bottom and an open top, I have this generic image in my head. And when I see this innocent little cylinder out there on my table, I lay my trip on it, glass of water. And I think I have a right to drink out of it because there it is for me to use.

You know? So I think the glass of water is there instead of in my mind as my label. Emptiness is here’s the punchline emptiness means this glass of water existing as anything other than my conceptual designation on a valid basis of imputation. Okay? It doesn’t exist as anything other than you know, a dependent origination in that subtlest sense.

Me laying a concept on a valid basis of imputation. That’s what emptiness is. That it’s nothing other than a dependent arising at that especially at that subtlest level. So it’s devoid of existing from its own side as a glass of water there, independent of my concept labeling it. Okay?

So that’s the punch line. And this is how dependent arising and emptiness are like two sides of a coin. They’re two ways of looking at the same kind of characteristic. Dependent arising says there’s this basis of imputation on that and I say valid because it has to function. I can’t call this a glass of water because I can’t drink out of it.

Right? It needs to be something valid, and we’ll talk about what makes it valid in a minute. But I can’t label anything, anything. Just I label with my concepts doesn’t mean I can just go around labeling anything I want. Okay?

There is a certain amount of consensus involved and function. Right? That what validly exists as a glass of water is a cylinder with a bottom and an open top that I can drink out of. But there’s no glass of water there. There’s a glass of water in my head that I impute onto this functioning object.

But then it comes at me. So I think that there’s a glass there. I think that there’s a book there. I walk into this room and the way I perceive things is coming at me, inherently existent from their own side. And that’s the problem.

Okay, that last level. Now, I think everybody’s utterly confused. Let’s have some questions so that I can clear up confusion. Yeah, Carla. Oh, and let yeah.

Let’s get the microphone so we can You don’t have to turn it on. So is the is the what is preventing me from understanding emptiness? Is it the labeling? And if so, how can I understand emptiness being in a conventional world, you know, being within the conventional world, which everything is related to labeling? You mean how can you have that direct perception, or how can you understand?

Because those are two different things. It seems that to have a direct perception of emptiness, I have to stop creating the labels. How can I stop creating the labels if in the conventional level everything is about labels? Yeah, great question. And I live here.

Right. How do you deal with it? Do you just Yeah, exactly. Great question. Okay.

This is what happens. Okay. This is what happens in practice, and this relates to the different levels. There are five what they call the five paths between, you know, deluded, ordinary, sentient being and and Buddha. And at a certain level well, what happens first is you get an intellectual understanding of emptiness, and you start meditating using your conceptual thoughts.

So you’re not having a direct perception at all yet. Everything still conventionally appears the way it always did. And you start to analyze. You start to use analysis and intellectual understanding on the basis of your study. Right?

So then as you progress along the path, after you have developed perfect single point of concentration, you start to have deeper and deeper intellectual meditations and understandings of emptiness. But it’s still using conceptual thought. It’s still not a direct perception. You haven’t seen the the lack of the pizza yet. Right?

You’re still using analysis. Then at a certain point, you have a direct perception of emptiness. And this is a huge big deal in Buddhism. You’re you’re now called an ārya bodhisattva if you’re on the Mahāyāna path. You’re an ārya.

This word, the four noble truths, the word noble, is a is a translation of the word ārya. Because anyone who’s had that direct perception gets that label ārya or superior. Right? Because their perception of everything is far superior to ordinary beings. Now it’s very interesting.

In meditative absorption, when you’re an ārya and you have a direct realization of emptiness, so you see the mere absence, just like the person that opened the box of pizza. Right? You see that mere absence in meditative absorption, and you don’t see conventional reality at all. You don’t see glass, book, clock, self. You’re just seeing the mere absence just like the pizza example.

You come out of that meditation, and everything looks the way it always did, but you know that your perception is wrong. So they say that you have the you they say that you have the appearance but not the apprehension of things as inherently existent. Everything still looks the way it always did, but you don’t believe it anymore. Now those flip flop all the way to Buddhahood. You know?

And then as you progress along the path, you keep going into the meditative absorption. You know? In your in your meditation, sitting cross legged in your meditation, you see the mere absence. You come out. Everything looks the way it always did, but you don’t believe it anymore.

Only a Buddha can see both simultaneously, both conventional and ultimate reality simultaneously. So there’s no problem in functioning in the world, you know, because you’re not in that meditative absorption when you’re driving your car, when you’re eating your lunch, when you’re at work. You’re only in that meditative absorption seeing the mere absence and not seeing conventional reality when you’re in actual formal deep meditation. Right? So when you come out of meditation, like I said, you see everything the way it always seemed, but you don’t believe it anymore, that it exists that way.

And that starts to work at your mental afflictions because the whole point of having the direct realization of emptiness is it’s the antidote to saṃsāra, especially seeing the emptiness of the way the self exists. Total antidote to delusions and karma, you know, because you can no longer have such strong feelings of attachment, aversion, you know, all of the mental afflictions, all of the all of the twenty derivative mental afflictions when you have that direct realization, of the selflessness of you. You know? There’s no me the way I always thought. That me that you cling onto that makes you, like, push away the things that seem to threaten it, grab onto the stuff that you think makes it happy.

You know? All all of the in the twelve links, ignorance is the first link of the twelve links. And that’s ignorance of the way that things really exist, the ignorance of the ultimate nature of reality. But along the path, it’s not like a direct realization of emptiness makes you dysfunctional, you know, and you can no longer operate in the world, and you’re no longer seeing things conventionally. I mean, the goal of the path is not to create a bunch of, like, dysfunctional, sort of paralyzed catatonic people who can’t function.

We’re supposed to be great bodhisattvas liberating all beings. You can’t do that if you’re just sort of paralyzed in this, oh my god. It’s all so weird. No. Nothing is like what I thought.

So it’s not like that. And then for a Buddha, they can see ultimate reality and conventional reality simultaneously. And then there’s a huge debate. How do Buddha see things? There’s this great text by Candrakīrti called Madhyamakāvatāra, And he goes in great detail into all of the ten levels of the Bodhisattva.

And then he gets to the final chapter, the chapter on Buddhahood. And the first stanza says, oh, way a Buddha perceives things is ineffable, you know, inconceivable, indescribable. And then this one this one American professor was commenting, and he said, oh, but the Gelugpa’s will try and explain it anyway. You know? It’s like here in Madhyamakāvatāra, there’s, like, no way to explain how Buddha perceives.

How do you see the two simultaneously? But boy, the Gelugpas will sure try anyway and write great commentary. So that’s the only being who’s able to see ultimate and conventional simultaneously is a fully enlightened being. For the rest of us, after the direct perception of emptiness, we’re flip flopping. It’s a little schizophrenic.

You come out and you see everything looks the same, but you don’t believe it anymore, which is amazing. That really cuts through your afflictions. You know, even though you see, you’re like, I know that that’s not coming from its own side. You know, it’s just my concept, especially in terms of the self, especially in terms of the way the self exists. So does that help?

Exactly. Then I go to the next level which is then it’s not to get to the direct realization of emptiness is not to start lifting labels of things. You know, taking labels apart of Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It should seek out her process. Yeah.

And see that process. And like I said, there’s no problem labeling it a glass. It’s that last step that we don’t realize that’s what we’ve done. No problem going around labeling book, clock, glass, Tenzin Choki, know, clock, computer, whatever. No problem.

But that’s that last step that we don’t get that it’s what we’ve done this way. We think it’s coming at us that way. And it exists from its own side. So validly labeling a valid basis of imputation according to your generic image, no sweat. No sweat.

But we don’t stop there. We think that it’s coming back at us from its own side. And then that’s where the problem and then we believe it and we act on it. And that’s what gives rise to all afflictions. And let me just talk about the emptiness of this I for a minute.

Because like I said, that’s the big one that we have to realize. And it’s seeing, feeling that there’s some self that exists independent of our labeling process. Right? So in the same way that we falsely believe that the glass exists from there independent of this whole back and forth labeling process, we think there’s some self. We have this innate concept of the self that we feel there’s something in there.

There’s a couple of levels that it exists. There’s one level of self that’s called independent, unitary, you know, partless self. And this is one that they say is philosophically learned. Like, you learn that in church. The the Christian idea of soul is like that.

The Hindu idea of Ātman. Like, there’s some kind of thing in there that’s permanent, unchanging, partless. It’s like the Casper the ghost thing, you know, and then you die and that thing kind of comes out of you, just rises up. Like there’s some self there that’s the real you that’s like your soul. So that’s one level of a wrong idea of self.

And Buddhism says there is no such thing. There is no such thing according to Buddhism. Then there’s another level of self that’s more innate. You know, the first one we learn through a religion, like the Christian idea of soul. The second one is more innate.

And that is the self they say it’s self sufficient and substantially existent. Well, what does that mean? It means independent of the body and mind. And they say sometimes it’s like the driver or the controller. And you can think of like a crane operator on a construction site.

And there’s this crane and it’s got the big bucket thing and it’s like doing these things. And then there’s some little person inside the cab, like running the show. And we think there’s some such thing. To me, I always thought it was here. And it’s like looking through my eyes like the windows.

And it’s like running the show, moving me around, making me talk. It’s looking like it lives here for most of us in the West. In other places, maybe it’s here. Lama Zopa Rinpoche gave this big lecture once about how he thought he’d heard once that in Japan, the I was like lived in the nose. You know?

But for us, it’s mostly here because we’re so cerebral, and it’s kind of looking and, you know, doing its thing. Right? Independent of body and mind. It’s sort of the controller of your body and mind. Then at that subtlest level, we think that there’s just something independent of us labeling self onto a collection of parts.

Right? We have this body and mind. We’re going to talk tomorrow about the five skandhas, the five aggregates, the five heaps. Some of you may have studied this. Right?

But to simplify, we have a body and a mind and then our mental concept lays the label self. in dependence on a functioning human body and mind. Just like we did with the glass. in dependence on the functioning cylinder with the bottom and the open top. in dependence on a functioning human body and mind, we lay a label and a concept.

Me. That’s all. And that’s fine. But we don’t think that that’s all it is, do we? I’m Tenzin Chogkyi’s not just a label, you know, on an especially tall body with this kind of crazy mind going through whatever.

You know, I don’t think like that. I think there’s some real Tenzin Chogkyi there that I need to protect. You know? And somebody disses me, and I get upset. And, you know, I’m gonna defend myself because I have a terrible case of pride.

And then it creates all kinds of afflictions that way, or I get attached to what I think makes me happy, mostly because it’s feeding my ego. And all of that comes from comes from that false sense. So in meditation, we analyze to see that that’s not there. That that self that we falsely believed was there, that thing, you know, that one doesn’t exist. That we’re only just a self, you know, on the basis of a concept laid on top of a functioning body and mind.

And there is no self apart from that. And if we get that, it really cuts through our delusions because so much of our delusions, they we talk about the three poisons. Ignorance, the root ignorance, which is this false idea of how the self exists, which then gives rise to aversion and attachment are the main three poisons. And then from them in you know, there’s a whole list in the literature of derivative delusions, and it’s sort of like two parts of attachment with one part of aversion gives rise to jealousy. You know, there’s all these lists, and they’re actually a recipe of the three root delusions.

You know, two parts of ignorance and one part of attachment, and, sprinkling of aversion gives rise to pride, you know, or whatever it is. And they actually are charts with the recipes for the different delusions, but they’re all based on those three main ones which all spring out of ignorance, the basic ignorance about the way that we exist. So you want to get liberated from saṃsāra? You have to finish your karma. You want to finish your karma?

You’ve got to stop the delusions that lead you to engage in those karmic actions. You want to get rid of your delusions? You have to have a direct realization of emptiness. That’s why I say it’s non negotiable. We can work on these different levels.

We work on the karmic actions. I have a flip chart, and I didn’t bring it, so I’m going have to do it mid air. Ignorance. And then the next thing on the flowchart is mental afflictions, particularly attachment aversion, which then give rise to karmic actions, the ten non virtues body, speech, and mind which then gives rise to suffering. And that’s how the truth of the cause of suffering and the truth of suffering relate.

Okay. So the root of all of it is ignorance. Now, in our Buddhist practice, we work at all levels. We work with vowed morality at the level of karmic action. We take vows.

The five lay vows, not killing, not stealing. So we cut things there so they don’t give rise to suffering. Then we work at the level of delusions by all these wonderful thought transformation techniques. You know, Chuky, I think, just did a Lojong course, thought transformation. So we work with our delusions.

But then to really get at the root, we have to have that direct realization, especially of the selflessness of how we don’t exist in that way we always thought. And then we cut the chain reaction between the second noble truth and the first noble truth at the very root, at ignorance. But that’s hard. So first, we start at the bottom. You know, we work on all these levels.

We work on watching the ten non virtues, not engaging in those actions. Then we work on working with the delusions skillfully, and then we work with the root ignorance. Okay? Yeah. Yeah.

I come from sort of like a Western psychological background. Mhmm. And a lot of the modern ideas of neuroscience sort of correlate with Buddhism. And they say they they talk about the self existent eye as called the homunculus, like the man inside the machine Right. Yeah.

Yeah. You know, watching. Right. Right. And a lot of people are saying that’s not possible.

Right. And so they’re thinking that there’s like an emergent property happening Yeah. With the neurons firing in the brain and one’s senses, somatic, and it’s all being interpreted. The whole emergence is creating our sense of reality. But I think the major gap is that modern science believes that the body, you know, and the brain is all there is to consciousness.

There is not this fundamental thought that a stream of consciousness continues across lifetimes. Right. And thus, a lot of the modern sciences, I think, tend to atheism, you know, as opposed to this. So I guess my question is, how does one prove that there is a continuity of consciousness that goes across lifetimes? You know?

That’s, to me, is still very, you know, untenable, unreal concept. Right. And I think, you know, it’s very interesting because his holiness, the Dalai Lama is so involved in these mind and life conferences and in these meetings, and he’s actually trying to get the neuroscientists to design some sort of an experiment to actually quantify that, you know, mind is not just an epiphenomena of brain function, which is what Western scientific materialism believes. And they’re still really working on that because, you know, according to Buddhism, the the proof for the continuity of consciousness is just that mind is a is completely different than physical substance and that each moment of mind gives rise to the next moment of mind. So it doesn’t cease when physical function and brain function ceases because it’s a whole different entity.

But according to Western science, they, you know, they have yet to actually devise some sort of experimental proof for that. His Holiness says things like, well, you know, there’s no absolute proof for reincarnation, but there’s a whole lot of pretty hard evidence for rebirth. And what goes from life to life isn’t anything physical. Therefore, it must be there must be some mental stream of consciousness that is exists separate from the body that then goes from life to life. Now certain gross consciousnesses are dependent on brain function.

Right? But the very, very subtlest level of consciousness that goes from life to life to life is not dependent on brain function and does not cease when neural function ceases. But that’s one thing that they’re working on, actually coming up with some sort of experiments to prove that. And then the Buddhist view is that mind, It carries those. Yeah, it definitely carries those karmic potentials.

That’s what called karmic seeds or karmic potentials, and those are carried in the stream of consciousness, which is why from life to life to life, you know, your karma doesn’t finish at the end of one lifetime. You carry it into the next life. So we can be experiencing things that we’ve created causes for in past lives because that potential energy, you know, transmits it, like, flops from one moment of consciousness to the next. It carries over and replicates, if you will, from one moment to the next. Yeah.

Yeah. Chris? Sorry to ask this question because I asked it many times to jump in before. So I’m a slow learner. When you talk about the continuity, why wouldn’t you label that subtlest consciousness going from life to life to life as a packet unit of subtle consciousness and label it the self?

Well we don’t. We don’t. In the middle way consequence school, we don’t say that’s the self. Some of the lower schools and we’re gonna get into this in a lot of detail tomorrow. Some of the other philosophical lower tenet systems of Buddhism say, yes, self is mental consciousness.

Some say the self is the five aggregates. But in the Middle Way Consequence School, we say, no, the self is not even that subtle consciousness that goes from life to life. It is just the mere imputation on all five aggregates, on all five heaps. You know, a mere imputation on top of that. That is what’s called The His Holiness the Dalai Lama or just probably Togden Jampal says, the mere I or the illustration of the person.

Each different and this is jumping ahead a little bit. All the different philosophical schools have what they call the illustration of the person, meaning, you know, the basis that self is labeled on. And according to the middle way consequent school, it’s just the all five aggregates and then the label that’s placed on that. Some of the lower schools think that that subtlest consciousness is what the self really is. In fact, for everyone but the middle way consequent school, they say that the self is findable somewhere within the body and mind, and several schools say that it’s that subtle mental consciousness is what you know, will the real self stand up?

You know? And the other the other schools say it’s that subtle mental consciousness, but the highest schools say says, no. The mere I is just that concept labeled onto the five aggregates. And that’s the only way that the self exists. It’s not even that mere mere subtle consciousness that goes from life to life.

K? It’s it’s tricky. It’s hard, and we’re gonna get into that whole realm a lot more tomorrow if people aren’t completely maxed out at the end of tonight. Yeah. So I’m just listening to you talk, and I’m thinking that maybe when you start really to realize that what is the ego and start realize the ultimate reality, you develop a fearlessness because because why we we afraid only because we try to protect ourselves.

Yeah. Yeah. So I think the moment you realize there is nothing to protect and it’s nobody’s attacking you, it’s just I think it’s it’s a very, very unique place where you develop this fearness. At least, just I thought of it when I was listening to your talk. That’s great.

You’ve got great karmic imprints. If that’s what came up for you, right on. That’s awesome. That’s great. Yeah.

I actually had a question. Wanted to ask you, what is the ultimate reality? Well, it’s that Yeah. Ultimate reality is that mere absence, is the fact that things do not exist in that way. It’s that mere absence of that false way of existing.

You know, the ultimate truth is emptiness. So the ultimate truth, in a way, is that things are not how we project and how we think. Are. They’re just Devoid of that false way of existing that we always thought was there. Yeah.

Yeah. And just to comment on the first thing that you said, there was this Lama Zopa Rinpoche in nineteen ninety nine gave three months of teachings at Land of Medicine Buddha in California. It was allegedly a Vajrasattva retreat, but when he taught, it was really all about the Lam Rim, the stages of the path. And I remember he was talking about the direct realization of emptiness in this amazing way. Of course, later he goes, oh, but I don’t want anybody to think I’ve had it or anything.

You know, I don’t wanna cause create the cause for the lower realms. And you’re like, how could he have ever spoken like this if it had you know, anyway, that was my projection. But he went on and on, and he talked about the two ways that you react when you actually have that direct perception. You know, he said some people, you know, when they start to have that direct perception of emptiness, when they finally see that thing that they thought existed since beginning of this time, you know, the way this the self, the way they thought existed since beginning of this time doesn’t exist at all, they feel exactly the way they thought, just completely liberated, like overjoyed, like tears running down their face, completely blissed out, like, free. You know?

Now I’m free. Just incredible. And then he said, then there’s other people who, the rug starts to get pulled out, freak out. You know? They they’re completely terrified, and they panic.

And he says, then they start to back off. Like, they’re starting to go into that realization, and they start to back off. And then he said this beautiful thing. He said, then he goes, at that moment, this may be your one chance to cut through, you know, the root of cyclic existence. You have to push through, he goes, like, wading through a river.

You know? And you just get this vision of wading through a flooding river, and he goes, just be brave and push through because this may be your one chance. And he goes, the fear comes because it has to come. You know? Because the rug is being pulled out from under this way that we always thought we existed, and he says, fear comes because it has to come, but you have to just wade through like wading through a river.

You know? And I think that’s so cool because that’s come up for me not like I have any you know? But that sort of like, oh my god. It’s not like you know? It all starts to get kind of sketchy and groundless, and that’s when you need to just press on because that’s when you’re getting the like, that’s a good sign, actually, that fear.

And then if you have a lot of virtue, it’s like what you said, which is why I said, right on. You know, it’s just this great like, you think, wow. This is amazing. I’m free. You know, that incredible feeling of freedom comes.

Yeah. Yeah. So that’s great. Was there something? Was there somebody over here?

How are you doing, Morgan? Do you want the microphone for a minute? I actually have some different questions. You brought up one point that happens on a meditation from Dependent Arising where I have kind of challenges. So using the cup and kind of looking at the parts and the conditions, and it’s really interesting.

She talked about, you know, labels that we always do. But when you find kind of that nonexistence and then it kind of reverses to the self somehow. Mhmm. It is that what you just kind of said, it’s like a a feeling of vertigo. Mhmm.

That happens. And it happens just over and over. It’s really, it’s not kind of scary, it’s kind of like a little kind of shock for a second. And just kind of continues. It goes away and then kind of continues.

But what happened, the question I have is you mentioned that were the labels and with that concept, it seems like there’s a a separation from that moment from the the human Morgan. Mhmm. And maybe a small concept of a mind beyond what I’ve known. But it but it also is is it are you focusing on the aggregates versus, you know, it’s hard to figure out, well, what is the mind? I mean, what you’re that, you know, it’s beginningless and endless.

Mhmm. And but it’s also kind of everything’s a dependent arising, but it’s it’s it’s hard to kinda grasp. There’s like a distance between, like, the cup, the the body and the mind, you know, the this body, this physical conventional mind, and then the mind. Yeah. Like almost like three layers.

Right. Right. So where are you going in a meditation in that perspective when it’s you you Yeah. I I got dependent arising, but where is the emptiness? Right.

Right. They all seem like just like flash cards in front of you. Mhmm. Mhmm. Well, there are a couple of ways that you can meditate emptiness, and and one of the ways that I found really effective in in Land of Medicine Buddha, we just did this class on the Heart Sūtra.

And one of the ways that you can approach the Heart Sūtra is instructions for your meditation at different levels of the path. And for the path of accumulation and the path of preparation, the main meditation is the emptiness of the five aggregates. Okay? And in the Heart Sūtra, just to reference exactly where that is And there’s a hint for the Heart Sūtra. Every time Avalokiteśvara says Shariputratra’s name, you bump up to a different path.

So every time you say Shariputratra, path of accumulation to path of preparation, path of seeing, path like that. So he said, where are we? Option or request of Lama? Teaching Press. Oh, this is that book that’s all confusing.

Okay. So he says, at the very bottom of the first page, where he’s saying, Sharipucha, therefore, in emptiness, there is no form, no feeling, no discrimination, no compositional factors, no consciousness. Okay. Those are the five aggregates. And so when I was in this long meditation retreat, one of the things Lama Zopa told me to do was do a meditation on meditate on the Heart Sūtra doing you know, pausing to do meditation on the emptiness of the self and the five aggregates at that point.

So recite the Heart Sūtra. He had me do it two hundred times, stopping to meditate at that point. And I found this a very, very powerful meditation that may help you. And what you do, you go through the meditation on the emptiness of all five aggregates. So you see how all five aggregates are empty of inherent existence.

And then you flip over to the I, seeing how it’s just composed of these five aggregates. What we call self is nothing other than a concept laid on top of those five aggregates. So consciousness is no more significant than anything else. Right? In this philosophical school, we don’t say that the self is the consciousness.

We say the self is just a label laid on top of the five aggregates. So you flip to that level and look at all of them together. And by then, because you’ve meditated on the selflessness of the five aggregates, it’s pretty sketchy. You know, the rug’s been pulled out pretty significantly. Right?

And then you meditate on that, and then you flip back and reanalyze the five aggregates again, and then you see how the self is just a label on the basis of those five aggregates, and you go like that, back and forth. And that may help for where you are right now, because I’m hearing that, you know, you’re not quite sure how to how to break down the idea of self, and you’re also kind of prioritizing that consciousness is a little bit more significant right now. So if you do it on the basis of the five aggregates and actually, when you read a commentary on the Heart Sūtra, they say the reason that this is in here like this is because this is instructions on how to meditate at that level of realization. Then after you have the direct realization of emptiness, you meditate on what’s called the eighteen dhatus and the twelve ayatanas, which is like then everything else. You know?

Then everything else. So that’s a long story. And maybe we’ll do a Heart Sūtra class, you know, but that’s that’s a long story. You meditate. But the first thing that you’re getting and that’s because the direct realization of emptiness that you get when when you’re in ārya, that first meditative absorption, is the emptiness of the I.

You know, the emptiness of the cup is not what you become an ariya bodhisattva on the basis of. Later, yes. You know, but in that first breakthrough, direct realization of emptiness, it’s the emptiness of the self that you get the direct realization of, which is why we’re given the instructions in the Heart Sūtra of how to do that meditation on the basis of the emptiness of the five aggregates. And we’re gonna do that tomorrow. See, I’m giving teasing you all.

Come back tomorrow for the real thing. You know? Come back tomorrow for all the meditation. But does that help a little bit now? Yeah.

It’s very helpful. Yeah. Okay. One simple question is Yeah. So what we this is maybe the question you’re not supposed to ask.

So, like, if we it’s beginningless and endless minds. Yes. And and it’s it’s all due to ignorance. So what How did it all begin? Yeah.

Like, what Yeah. Well, from the aggregate perspective. Yeah. So what what caused that? And so when you get in that meditation, you’re like, well, what is this?

A giant lake that goes on forever? And, you know, it’s like what Right. Right. What is what caused the the First moment of ignorance that caused the agony. The label, obviously.

Something caused the lay no. I that’s opposite of what it is. Yeah. There were this famous list of fourteen questions that Lord Buddha refused to answer, and that was one of them. And His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, refuses to answer the question, Lama Zopa Rinpoche, because it basically, the reason that they refused to answer those questions is because any answer would lead you to a wrong view.

Like, people ask that question because they have a wrong view, either eternalism or nihilism. So to answer that question would just, you know, tip you off the razor’s edge into a view of eternalism or nihilism. And, also, there’s a second level of the reason why Lord Buddha didn’t answer that these fourteen questions. And he had this this one disciple, Vashagodha, who was always pestering him with these cosmological questions. Right?

He was always, like, tagging along next to Lord Buddha going, how did the universe begin? How did the you know, will the universe have an end? How did the universe begin? You know? What happens to the Tathāgata after he dies?

What and at one point, you know, I think Lord Buddha’s a little bit fed up with Vashagodha, and they’re walking through and this is in a sūtra. They’re walking through this Sal forest in North India where I drove through last year on my pilgrimage, I’m like, this is it. This is the forest. So Lord Buddha reaches down and he grabs this handful of leaves from the forest, and he asks everybody around, so are there more leaves on the trees in the forest or more leaves in my hand? They’re all like, duh.

You know, more leaves in the forest. And he says, what I know is equal to the amount of leaves on the trees in this forest. What I teach is equal to the amount of leaves in my hand. I teach, you know, the cause of suffering, you know, the end of suffering, you know, the nature of suffering, the path that leads to the end of it. The four noble truths, basically.

He goes, it doesn’t matter how it all started. The fact is, I don’t know about you, but I’m in it. You know, right now, it’s like, I wanna know how to stop it. What I it doesn’t the key to how to stop it doesn’t depend on knowing how it started in the first place. Like, the fact is we had this wrong view of the nature of reality, and we’re taught how to stop it, you know, and that’s all that matters.

And then he gave another analogy at that point walking through the forest, you know, and poor Vashagodha slunk off, you know, completely subdued. He said, somebody shoots you in the arm. You know, before you let the doctor take the arrow out, do you go, I gotta know what the guy’s name was and what village he came in, what cast he’s from, and what he dug for a living, and how many kids he has. You know, before you take the arrow out. He’s like, it’s hurting.

Take the arrow out. You know? Emma said a bad word. Take the arrow out. Just, you know, get rid of your suffering, and we know how to do that.

But I think it’s really because any answer would lead us to a wrong view. It I had this this incident, you know, which which I’ll never forget with one of my first teachers, Kirti Tsenshab Rinpoche, in nineteen it was, like, nineteen ninety one in India, and this guy was asking about time. It was sort of a Vashu Goda question. He just goes, you know, it’s this German guy, and he’s really intense about this time thing, and he goes, I I just want to know because I know it’s not like past, present, and future, and I know time exists in this other way, and yada yada yada. And Kirti Tsenshab Rinpoche just looks at him with this, like, beautiful smile, and he goes, You know, even if I explained it to you, you just really couldn’t get it.

So for now, just work with past, present and future. Like it’s really you know? That’ll work for you. And then when you can see it differently, you’ll be able to get it. But for now, you know, like, I could explain to you till the cows come home and, like, you just couldn’t get it.

So and I think it’s like that with these questions. Like, I don’t think at our level of, you know, lack of real I mean, sorry, Morgan. You know, don’t mean to whoever you know, maybe I mean, I don’t I don’t I think we just misunderstand it. It would lead to wrong view. I think that’s why.

Yeah. Yeah. So yeah. Jacob? You’re speaking of the middle way consequence Yeah.

Couple of things. Yeah. And that in that view, there is no inherent self. Yeah. And the other views do have an inherent self on the subtlest level of consciousness.

Consciousness. Maybe I am misunderstanding it, the middle way consequence school still talks about the beginning of this rebirth and things like So is that subtle consciousness going on from life to life still just a mere reputation? Yes. So, the entire thing is a mere reputation? Yeah.

That’s not inherently existent either. Just because it goes from life to life, right, just because it continues doesn’t mean that it’s inherently existent. Because remember what inherently existent means: independent of causes and conditions, parts, conceptual imputation. Right? So what’s going from life to life, even if it lasts forever, doesn’t mean it’s inherently existent.

Because each moment of consciousness gives rise to the next moment of consciousness. That’s the way in which it exists as a dependent arising at that initial level. Right? Each mind moment of consciousness causes the next moment of consciousness. Right?

And then, you know, moment of consciousness has a duration. So you can say it has parts. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And then each moment of consciousness, what we call moment of consciousness, is just some phenomena that we label moment of consciousness. You know, just the fact that we differentiate between the five aggregates is concepts and imputations that we create with our mind.

So even perceiving subtle consciousness going from life to life is something that’s imputed onto that energy. We think of it, we conceive of it as consciousness. We conceive of it as going from life to life. All of that is created with our concepts on the basis of some functioning energy that we label consciousness. So in all of those levels, it’s not existent from its own side, including the subtlest level.

But it can go on forever, and that’s no problem. Buddhas are lacking inherent existence. You know? Once a being attains Buddhahood, each moment of Buddhahood creates the next moment. You know, it’s also just the idea we have of Buddhahood is a concept that we lay on certain qualities that a being has, certain realizations, you know, that a being has dependent on causes and conditions.

We have an idea, Buddhahood, and we label that onto that being with those realizations. I remember when I started, I thought, oh, I want Buddhists to be inherently existent. Like, because somehow and the thing is, just because things don’t inherently exist doesn’t mean they don’t exist. You know? And that’s where we get into trouble in the beginning.

We think it’s also shaky, and somehow it’s just a hallucination. No. Things validly exist as merely imputed on a valid basis of designation, and that’s the only way that anything ever has existed. But it takes some getting used to. Because now the rug’s pulled out a little bit, and you start thinking, oh, that means things don’t exist.

You know? No. They do exist. And in fact, the only way they can exist in function is because they’re empty. Ārya Nāgārjuna, in one of his texts, I think it’s sixty stanzas, says, you know, because of emptiness, everything is possible.

If things weren’t empty, nothing would be possible. Nothing could change or no. Nothing could change. We could never become Buddhas. Thank god for emptiness because I don’t have to stay stuck, deluded Tenzin Chogkyi forever.

I mean, thank Buddha, whoever. Thank emptiness for emptiness because I have the potential to change. And the way Buddhahood is described in the Gelugpa tradition is the mind’s potential to change. You know? It’s described as the mind’s emptiness because the mind is empty because the delusions are not, you know, inherently part of the nature of mind.

The mind you know, our mind and bodies have the potential to transform into the Buddha’s enlightened mind and body. Thank god. Because of emptiness. That potential exists. If it weren’t for emptiness, my lunch, my burrito I had today, you know, in Santa Cruz would not have made me full.

You know? I nothing would function if it weren’t for emptiness. So it gives everything potential. You know? Instead of thinking, oh, because things are empty, they don’t exist in this all.

If things were inherently existent, they could never exist at all. You know? It allows for existence. It allows for all existence, including our spiritual path, including Buddhahood, every realization we ever had. Right?

But I know in the beginning, you kinda think, oh, it means nothing. And that’s a real wrong view of emptiness. There’s this famous story of Joanna Macy was at some Buddhist conference, and she’s in the line to, you know, return the hotel keys. And the person in front of her at this Buddhist conference, the suitcase, you know, falls open, and all the hotel towels start spilling out. You know?

And then this woman goes, oh, well, it doesn’t matter because it’s empty. Because it’s empty, it totally matters. As a result of causes and conditions, we create our reality up to Buddhahood. So Padmasambhava, this great guru of Tibet, said, you know, my my view is as vast as the sky, and my actions are as fine as flower. Because things are empty, we totally have to watch our morality, you know, and watch our view all the time.

Because things are empty, they matter in a way that we never, you know, had a clue how much they mattered before. So instead of, like, oh, I can steal the hotel’s towels, you know, because it’s empty. Because it’s empty, our virtue creates the cause for us to become an enlightened being. You know? So we need to be more virtuous than we ever imagined possible up to that finest level because we’re creating our reality moment to moment because it’s empty.

You know? So emptiness, instead of making you lose confidence in the law of cause and effect, makes you when you really understand the concept of emptiness, you have even more of an investment in creating the causes for your future happiness because you realize how it’s empty and how you can create it. Right? So it makes you really if studying emptiness doesn’t make you more careful about your karma, you don’t have the right understanding. You know, the side effect of studying emptiness, instead of making you kind of feel like, oh, I can do anything and nothing really exists and whatever, it’s all just a hallucination, should make you really careful about your actions.

And that and then you’re understanding it well. They say when you’re working up you know, you’re working with your view of of selflessness and emptiness, push for the highest view that doesn’t let you lose faith in the law of cause and and effect. You know? If your view of emptiness makes you start to lose your confidence in the law of karma, you know, you need to back off and correct your view. Yeah.

I just wanna check this. In my mind, I’m getting this vision of, like, reality is sort of pieces made of pieces made of pieces ad infinitum. And then there’s no valid way to cut it up into a thing. It’s like it’s like I call a thing these this collection of dots over here. Mhmm.

And I do I circle this and say, okay. That’s a that and that’s a this. But those markings I’m making are not valid. It’s is all just pieces made of pieces added to them. That could be one way of looking at it.

Yeah. Because you just kind of clustering things and labeling them, but there is nothing about them that makes it necessarily what it is from its own side. If I I think that’s I if I’m getting what you’re Yeah. Going through, I think that’s yeah. I think that’s valid.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

There’s another question. I was just thinking of that. And, you know, I I just think about a potential situation when somebody says something to you which really upsets you. You know that upsets you feel attacked. So at this moment, you know, if you can potentially not feel that way, just relax and not feel that way, maybe potentially you can see why this is coming at you in a way why that person is doing that.

Yeah. And I think if you can see that, then you see that really that’s something that they’re suffering with Yeah. Rather than something that they wanted personally to attack you. So in a way, feels like to be able to really see what’s beyond those labels, what things attacking you is like to relax with it. Yeah.

Yeah. At least. Well, this is a way I’m so glad you brought this up because this is how emptiness helps us cut through our afflictions. Right? Because emptiness isn’t just some theory theoretical thing you study in, like, Nāgārjuna’s six famous texts, and then you go around getting angry all the time.

You know? And it doesn’t affect your life at all. By understanding how we create our reality by our conceptual imputation and I’ll give you an example from my life. This was a big breakthrough for me in understanding how these concepts would help my life. A couple of years ago, I did something.

I can’t even remember. I wish I could remember what it was that I did. You know? But I did something, you know. One person in my life thought that I was the most self absorbed jerk on the face of the planet because of doing whatever I did.

Somebody else in my life thought it was like the enlightened activity of an emanation of Vajrayoginī. You know? And then I’m somewhere in the middle trying to find happiness, trying to avoid suffering like everybody else, somehow muddled whatever, doing whatever it was. Right? This person had this extreme negative view.

He was completely horrified that I’d done whatever it was, and I was just like, ugh. You know? And then this other person is like, enlightened activity, you know, of an emanation body. And I’m like, whatever. You know?

I’m just trying but I I remember so clearly in that moment going, I’m not gonna react and get mad at this guy. He’s projecting onto these actions. He’s got a conceptual imputation. I did some action. I wish I could remember what it was, but it was just some neutral action that I did.

He has this concept, self absorbed, unbelievable, horrible thing. Right? Same action somebody else perceives as a skillful means of an enlightened being, you know, to show me the nature of my mind. I’m in the middle, bumbling around as usual, trying to find happiness and avoid suffering. So I remember going, how can I get mad at him?

Poor guy. He’s he’s having a really terrible experience right now because he’s really angry at me and thinks I’m horrible. How can I feel proud at the person who you know, I know that’s not where I was coming from? I just think, wow. I rejoice.

You know, she’s going through life seeing everybody as enlightened beings doing all these skillful things. Wow. You know, that’s pretty cool. I wish I were there. So it’s like you don’t react because you see how everybody is has these filters, you know, created by their karma that’s causing them to perceive things the way they perceive it.

And so when somebody gets upset at something you did, instead of getting angry, you feel compassion. Poor thing. You know, because of their karma, they’re perceiving a threat, which you probably didn’t intend at all. You know? How can you feel anything but compassion when you just see that it’s their projection?

I work I teach in prisons, which is, like, my favorite thing to do, and all my students in Santa Cruz are so sick of hearing stories about the inmates, but I can’t help it. So I’m gonna tell you guys one too, and then you’ll be sick. You know, there are these guys in prison because of all the violence that they’ve engaged in in their life. Right? Because of all those karmic seeds.

And if you study karma, you know. You know? Violence creates the cause for experiencing violence and also having a habit of violence. Right? So there are these guys in prison, and they’re completely paranoid.

They go through, and everything is a threat. And they’re in hell. Everything they perceive is a threat. In fact, there’s a hell realm where you’re constantly being stabbed, you know, and attacked. And these guys in prison are very close.

You know, you look at them cross eyed, and they think that you’re, you know, trying to kill them. And they get always so upset and angry. So how can you how can you feel anything but compassion, you know, for somebody whose karma is creating them to perceive reality like that? You know? So this is how understanding that whole idea of projection can help you cut through so much your own afflictions.

You know, we project our own reality. Other people project onto us through the force of their karma. You know? You wanna change your reality and start seeing everything as, like, lovey, lighty, you know, hearts and flowers, clean up your morality. Clean up your act, and it will force you because it’s empty, it will force you to see things differently.

You know? And this is one of the ways like, you know, meditating on emptiness should be really practical and help us decrease our delusions. And if it doesn’t, we’re not doing it right or it’s some, like, theoretical thing, you know, divorced from our reality. But because things are empty, our karma forces us to experience things in a certain way. You know?

And we wanna change that. We can through correct did you did you have another question? Yeah. I was just thinking, listening again to what you said. So seems that to have the confidence really to to accept this, to accept somebody attacking you and to stay calm.

Mhmm. And in other hand, to accept somebody praising you and to stay calm at the same way, you in a way have to have this very moral clear mind, which every time makes a decisional step with this high morality. So in a way, internally, you know that whatever you’re doing step by step, it’s done following the highest standard of morality that you can think of. Yeah. And I think when you really understand dependent arising and especially, like, the twelve links of dependent origination, that’s the conclusion you come to.

It’s like, if I wanna be happy, you know, if I wanna eventually see myself as a Buddha, yeah, even at the very, very subtlest level to really keep your morality and and just seeing how that helps you cut through the afflictions. You don’t react as much because everybody whatever they say to you, the whole praise blame thing really falls apart. And then you check yourself. You know, you become more kind of self referential in terms of your behavior, and you’re less reacting. I’ve my whole life, you know, I did this dance.

I really needed people to like me. Right? Like you know? So my whole life, you know, I’m doing this dance, trying to do this thing. A, it doesn’t work because not the same thing makes everybody happy even if you could.

And, b, it’s dependent on their karma, what they see anyway. So you might as well just come from your own integrity. Do whatever you think is the right thing to do in any given situation and just let go of whether people are going to like you or not. You can just spend your whole life doing that dance and trying to play to the crowd and, like, god forbid somebody doesn’t like you like that’s gonna kill you. You know?

So it makes you become much more you know, you’re willing to take risks. You’re willing to hold the line. A lot of times, people have trouble with morality because they think it’s gonna make them unpopular if they don’t gossip at work or something like that. You know? But if you really understand the nature of reality, it makes you much more able to just hold the line in terms of of your actions, I think, too, which is a great you know, another side effect of really understanding karma and emptiness.

Yeah. I heard something about not the difference between criticism and discernment, you know? Because on one level, let’s say everything is a projection, so you cannot be sure, you know Yeah. Really what Yeah. What’s going on in the other person’s mind.

Yeah. You know, again, I heard especially with high beings, you know, you Yeah. Project all sorts of stuff. Right. But at the same time, you know, how do you separate that from really, you know, taking a look at someone’s actions and, you know, making a certain assessment of what you believe is right or wrong and having some kind of guidelines to live by in terms of morality and being able to discern people.

Like, for instance, you know, if I get a funny feeling from that guy. Sure. Sure. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Oh, it could be my projection. Oh, it could be a Buddha. But then at the same time you know? Yeah.

And I think it’s you know, for me, the litmus test is does it increase my delusions or not? Like, is the way I’m reacting to a certain person or situation give rise to a delusion in me? You know? Like, am I the way somebody’s treating me, is it making me angry? Is it making me proud?

You know? Is it increasing my delusion? Whereas I can think, oh, somebody’s doing something unskillful, you know, that’s gonna create causes of suffering for them in the future, and then you can try and correct it out of compassion for them. But I think if you’re reacting to how people are behaving, not in a sense of, yeah, just being wise. Is this somebody you wanna get close to?

Is this somebody who’s doing something that you think is, you know, skillful, or are they doing something dangerous? But not to go that extra step of getting angry at them for it, blaming them for it, you know, or, you know, if they’re praising you to feel pride. Just not to invest in your own reaction to it in a way that will give rise to delusions and afflictions for you. But it doesn’t mean be stupid and just think that, you know, nothing is going on. I mean, you know, you have to use your discernment.

You know? But but it’s just that if that person behaves in a way that’s unskillful, it doesn’t give rise to a delusion in me. I can choose to be smart and say, oh, stay away from them or try and, you know, get them to change their behavior because it’s gonna cause suffering for them, but not in a way that gives rise to a delusion for me. Does that make sense? Right.

Like, if I were truly compassionate, I would see whatever I, you know, disapprove of, whatever, unskillful means Yeah. Based on perhaps their own delusions that Yeah. Assess. See if there’s a skillful way you could maybe talk to them. I mean, without being, like, preachy and self righteous, you know, is there a skillful way that you could maybe get them to see things a different way?

If not, just leave it, but don’t let it you know? We have so many reactions to what other people do. You know? Yeah. Couple actions.

Right. Right. Right. Right. On karma.

Yeah. Did did you have some some I can start young. I heard a noise over on this side of it. Yeah. This is kind of, I guess, connects to what you’re saying of you just have to make sure that whatever you’re doing or thinking isn’t gonna create more afflictions for you.

Mhmm. So when you have sort of a concept of emptiness but not a direct no direct understanding, you’re still you’re kind of, like, cognitively aware of the nature of things, but you still perceive them as real. Yeah. You still have attachment and aversion. Yeah.

When things that you have an attachment to come to you, you can say, well, I know this isn’t the do all end all. I know that this won’t really change me. I know that this in the end isn’t going to make me happy. But it’s still pleasant. It’s still your karma to enjoy it.

Whether it’s like music or cheeseburgers or girlfriends or whatever. Mhmm. Is it is it and this is like a personal advice question. If you if those things come to you and you allow yourself to enjoy them, still trying to realize that they’re not what you think they are Mhmm. But you just automatically enjoy them, does that enjoyment that’s part of your affliction kind of, does enjoying that, will that bring you further away from realizing emptiness?

Should you avoid those things or? Yeah. Perfect question. This gets into the twelve links of dependent origination. Are you gonna be here tomorrow?

Yeah. After tonight, I will. Okay. Because we can actually go into that in in detail tomorrow because this is the key to everything is the twelve links of dependent origination, and I I think it would be really great I just try and do it with every single class no matter what, because it’s just so great. But to give you the short answer tonight, there is a link in the twelve links called feeling.

And that’s just pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. It follows right after sense contact, right? So we’re fooled into thinking that sense contact is what gives us a feeling of pleasure or unhappiness. But according to the twelve links, both of those things, the fact that the cheeseburger is in your reality at all and that it makes you happy, are both results of your past karma. And that’s the analysis that you do to break down the grasping.

Because the next link and I’ll just draw it in mid air contact, feeling, and then the next link is craving, and the next link is grasping. So because we’re fooled into thinking the cheeseburger was the cause of our good feeling, we grasp onto we crave more of it. And then we do actions to get it. And then we create more karma, especially if we engage in some kind of non virtue to get what we think caused us happiness. But if you understand the only cause of happiness is some virtue you did in the past, It’s not the cheeseburger.

If you like cheeseburgers, for me it’s chocolate. The fact that there’s cheeseburgers in your reality are also a result of virtue in the past. So what’s the best way to guarantee future lives filled with cheeseburgers is not to do anything negative to get more of them. You can enjoy them. The goal of Buddhism is to be happy.

There’s nothing that says you can’t enjoy the cheeseburgers but knowing where they came from. That delicious cheeseburger that you’re enjoying so much is a result of past virtue, not the fact that you took the cheeseburger from your friend or whatever, especially if it’s something that creates some non virtue. So it’s that understanding. And then you can enjoy, by all means, Lama Yeshe, who I didn’t meet, but I had a friend who was his attendant, and talked about how what a blast he had all the time. I mean, every picture you see of him, right?

There’s all these pictures of vajrapani on the rafters. Totally blissed out all the time. Like, had a ball. You you hear these stories, and he just had But I bet you anything, when he had that feeling from all that fun he was having, he didn’t mistake the cause of it and create another samsaric rebirth for himself the way that we have since beginningless time. But we’ll get into more of it with the twelve links tomorrow because that’s just the essence that shows exactly how we create our unenlightened existence and how that ignorance is the root of it that a direct realization of emptiness cuts through.

But then there’s other ways that we can cut it. And especially just understanding now, and like you said, even before you have the direct realization of emptiness, you can intellectually understand karma and where pleasure and unhappiness come from. And it’s your past karma seeds, not the direct contact with whatever the object is. And what’s the proof of that? Well, the twelfth cheeseburger doesn’t give you the same feeling that the first one cheeseburger were really the cause of happiness, it would always work.

And the twelfth one would taste as good as the first one did. But it doesn’t. It doesn’t. And the same thing that gave you happiness before doesn’t always give you happiness. Right?

You get in a relationship. It’s so blissful for that first six months. And then a year later, he leaves the toilet seat up in the middle of the night. And I fall in. And he’s such a jerk.

And he snores. Well, you didn’t see any of that stuff in the beginning because all the good karma was ripening, and all you were just seeing was the good stuff. And then it changes. karma wears out, which is why those objects don’t give you lasting happiness, which is the big insight of the Buddha. Yo, guys, it’s not out there in getting more of that stuff.

That’s not the cause of lasting happiness. It’s just balancing that house of cards and getting everything set up out there externally. The cause of happiness is virtue. And then it doesn’t matter where you are. I mean, look at Mother Teresa in the middle of the slums of Calcutta, totally blissed out.

Why? Because she had unbelievable virtue. And then the external sense contact, she could care less. But that’s another story. We’ll get into it tomorrow.

Stay tuned. Oh, we were going to meditate tonight, I just talk too much. But we will definitely do meditations on these subjects tomorrow if you can come back. If you can’t come back, thank you for joining us tonight. I hope it didn’t create more confusion than not.

But let’s just sit for a minute and dedicate the merit. Āryadeva in the text four hundred stanzas says, even to doubt for a minute that things exist in the way that we always thought that they did, Even just raising some flicker of doubt, thinking that things are merely labeled on a valid basis, they don’t exist from their own side, Āryadeva said, even just that flicker of doubt tears Samsāra to shreds. So powerful. Since beginningless time, we always believed the way that things appeared to us. We believed that they existed in that way.

So tonight, we’ve raised that doubt. We’ve started to rip saṃsāra to shreds, incredible virtue just from these two hours we’ve had together. So in order that that amazing virtue doesn’t get wasted on more cheeseburgers, more saṃsāra happiness, chocolate, let’s dedicate it. Put it in the karmic bank account towards our future enlightenment for for the sake of all sentient beings, enlightenment that will give us all the qualities and capacity to really benefit beings. Let’s just take a minute to dedicate towards that goal.

Thank you. Thank you so much. I hope I didn’t confuse anybody too much, but come back tomorrow. Do you have Do you want this one? That’s right.

No. It’s okay. So I just wanted to say the hours tomorrow, ten thirty to four. Right? Is that right?

I think so. I don’t do it anymore. I don’t plan the programming anymore. I think it’s ten thirty to with a break at lunch, and we’ll figure out when that is and also how long it is, I guess, dependent upon how things are going. Right?

So yeah. So just come. Yeah. Great. And I promise you we’ll meditate.

I always cheat everybody out of my meditation because I talk too much, but I promise. Because I talk too much, but I promise. Thank you. Thank you for talking too much. Thank you.