Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. “What does it mean to say the mind is ‘mere clarity and knowing’?” is the question Ven Jampa Gendun unpacks in this 88-minute session, working through three interpretations of the Tibetan term selwa. He opens by arguing that mind is not a thing but a dependent arising — needing a preceding moment of consciousness, a sense organ, and an object — then takes up whether mind and brain are the same substance, illustrating with a television-transmitter analogy: the brain carries the signal but did not originate it. He introduces substantial causes and cooperative conditions to explain why mind can only arise from a previous moment of mind, and what this implies for rebirth. The session closes on a practical note: afflictive emotions are not intrinsic to the mind but adventitious, meaning the mind is workable, like wet clay, and open to transformation.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 02 MP 2011 07 09.mp3
UUID: 8556d72d-ff0a-4090-af7f-9ace37496eec
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: DB Mind and its Potential (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 2011-07-09
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 88.2 minutes
Words: ~10,018
Joseph: We’re going to talk about begin our discussion of mind and the nature of mind. Hopefully it won’t become overly intellectual. I mean, there’s an area of mind, a very important area of study called awareness and knowledge, or in Tibetan, Lorik, in which it goes into all the various classifications of mind, coming at mind from many, many different angles. And out of that trying to get some feeling about what mind is and its many facets. I think that’s quite useful, having that kind of intellectual background.
And it’s part the study of mind is very much in that sense when we look at awareness and knowledge, literally is a part of the basic program studies. I think it’s important to get a sense. And then also I think experientially it becomes important and perhaps we can touch on that. And I mentioned in terms of especially conceptual consciousness, for example, and how we can maybe develop some skill around that, some life skill which would be immediate, well maybe not immediate, fairly immediate practical benefit depending upon our ability to work with that. So some of what I’m going to say is perhaps will be a bit, what do you say, philosophical or doctrinal, if you’d like, giving you the Buddhist position on many of some of these subjects with relationship to mind.
But by all means, hope we can relate it to something which is relevant to ourselves. I’m still struggling with some of that, but anyway, sharing some of this information with you as best we can. This is the standard definition of mind. Mere clarity and knowing. Mere clarity and knowing.
So we’re going to break this down and talk about it a little bit to give us a sense of, you know, this last frontier with our inner space of mind. So mind refers to mental activity, you know, both conscious and unconscious. Roughly speaking, sometimes the word mind is used in a technical sense. There is one classification. I just mentioned that there’s a particular area, a genre of or a category of Buddhist study called awareness and knowledge.
There are many texts in English which cover this. There’s an excellent one by Elizabeth Napper, for example. And there, when they use the word mind, they mean it as opposed to mental factors. So it’s particularly technical use of the word mind. But mind is very often simply used in a general sense by mind.
And there, we can say mind and consciousness, we can almost use them, interchangeably, okay? Synonymously, consciousness, mind. Only when we begin to talk about a particular area of study within this context that mind becomes more technical in terms of what we mean by it. But in our general conversation, mind and consciousness are synonyms. Okay, just wondering.
So just trying to get that notion across. And it’s the mental activity, unconscious and conscious. All living beings have mind. This is we call living beings sentient beings. In Tibetan it’s Sem Chen, Sem Chen.
That simply means having mind. We translate the term Sem Chen as sentient beings. What we mean is that which has a mind is a living being. I don’t want to get into any controversies around this whether plants are sentient beings or living beings and so forth. If they have minds, then they’re sentient beings.
If they don’t have minds, then they’re not sentient beings. We wouldn’t call them living beings in this context. Insects have minds. Animals have minds. human beings begin to wonder sometimes.
In general, humans have minds all the way up to Buddhas. Buddhas have minds as well. But mind does not refer to the agent of the mental activity. There’s no thinker behind our thinking. There’s no feeler behind our feeling.
There’s no all these various activities of mind, there’s no agent which is doing them. It is that very activity itself is what we mean by mind. The thinking itself is mind. The feeling itself is mind. Just that mental activity.
Mind is not the agent of seeing, it’s not the agent of thinking, or we don’t use a mind as if there were a tool that we could make use of to think or we can make use of to feel. It is the very act of thinking, of feeling, or seeing. This is what we mean by mind, that activity, that which is performing that activity. So as we mentioned, the definition of mind is mere clarity and knowing. We’re going to go through what each of those two terms mean.
Trying to and you know, at the course of this, if we can have some discussion around this, then by all means let me know, okay? This word clarity, for example, it can be interpreted in different, you know, there isn’t a homogenous, there isn’t a single viewpoint on many of these, some of these more subtle issues within, even within Buddhism. You know, some people when they hear about Buddhism they think it’s a particular doctrine, it’s homogenous, everybody has the same ideas. But as you begin to delve into Buddhism, that’s not true. There are many divergent points of view on many of these subjects, even down to today, even within the Tibetan tradition, even within the Gelug tradition, which is the main tradition which is followed here at Buddha House.
Different monasteries have different textbooks and they would explain many of these ideas and notions in different ways. And they debate among it. It’s not settled. So I’m just offering you what would be some of the standard notions about mind and some of these various terms that we’re going to look at. But you shouldn’t think that this is kind of, this is the way it is because some people might argue, I don’t agree with that.
So, there are at least three different interpretations of what we mean by clarity. And I don’t want to overcomplicate it, but just to give you to fill it out in different possible ways that we can interpret this, the bigger picture of it all. So, clarity refers to the mental activity of producing a mental object. The mental activity of producing a mental object. Minds are subjects.
Subjects only exist in relationship to objects. We cannot have a subject without an object. There are no objects without subjects. They’re interdependent. They depend upon one another.
If there’s a subject there must be an object. So mind’s mental activity, the subjective activity of the mind always involves knowing something. We always see something. We always feel something. There’s no feeling without a feeling of something.
There’s no seeing without a seeing of something. So there’s always an object involved. We don’t just see, you know, see a sight. When we think, we think a thought. When we feel, we feel a feeling.
It might be a pleasant feeling, it might be an unpleasant feeling, it might be a neutral feeling. But there’s always some feeling there that’s being felt. The very activity of feeling is what we mean. Each moment of our experience entails the arising or the appearing of an object to our mind. Mental objects, there are six types of objects in general.
There are objects of the eye, sights, colors and shapes, nose, odors, eye, sights, colors and shapes. Eye, nose, smells, tastes, flavors, tangible objects, roughness, smoothness, hardness, solidity and so forth. And then mental objects. Mental objects for example thoughts, feelings, emotions, images within our mind and so forth. So these are the objects of mind.
And there are six types of objects. And these are the objects of which the mind is the subject of. This is what is being known by the mind. This is the mental activity. So I’m trying to get across the sense the mind is not a thing.
We often talk about it as if it were a thing, some solid, tangible, physical phenomena. That’s the sense we do that with everything, in fact, but especially with our mind. Mind is a relation. It is the way a subject is relating. It is a notion of the activity of how we’re relating with an object.
The very seeing is the mind. The very hearing is the mind itself. There is no thing which is the mind involves which is doing the activity of hearing an object. It is the very activity itself. There’s no thing which is performing it.
The mind is, as in all phenomena, is a dependent arising. This is an extremely central notion within Buddhism, sometimes referred to as dependent origination. Everything arises in dependence. It all depends. So including the mind.
So if this is one of the fundamental it sounds almost overly simplistic, but it has profound implications. One of the great insights that the Buddha had was dependent arising. If this is present, this will arise. If this is not present, this will not arise. I know that sounds very simple minded, but it has tremendous implications in how we lead our life.
If there’s something that you want to be brought about, you have to create the causes. If there’s something that you don’t want to be brought about, you have to stop creating the causes. It comes down to a simple notion, something as simple as that. So it’s very practical. But it also has very practical application into the notion of mind.
The mind is not a thing in our head. It is a dependent arising. It is evolving. It is an unfoldment of very subtle conditions and causes, which involves a state and we call that mind. Now we can begin to narrow it down to give us a handle on it to begin working on what are all these various complex factors.
Three factors must necessarily come together in order for a mind to arise. So a mind is a dependent arising. It arises in dependence upon particular causes and conditions. It is that which is a result of those particular causes and conditions, that activity, that state, that occurrence, that happening we’re calling mind. Now what are those three factors?
They are, for example, if we take an eye consciousness, an eye consciousness seeing the cup, okay? An eye consciousness seeing the cup, that seeing of a cup is we’re calling a mind, okay? It arises dependent upon three factors. So three conditions have to come together and when they do, there is a happening. We call that happening the eye consciousness seeing the cup.
There is what is called the immediately preceding cause. The immediately preceding cause. There has to be a mind present which immediately precedes. Okay? If there’s no mind present, then you cannot have an eye seeing the cup arise.
That mind cannot arise. That state, that happening cannot occur. So there’s a previous move of the mind. There is a medium, what we call sense power. We need an eye organ, roughly speaking.
And we need a cup. When these three come together, there is a cup, there is an eye organ, And there is, let us say, a medium of relating with the object. And there is the preceding mobile mind. When these three come together, when this is present, that occurs. When these three are present, this occurs.
An eye consciousness seeing the cup arises. So we’re trying to I’m emphasizing this in a way to overcome our sense that there’s some solid entity in our heads, behind our eyes, which we’re calling mind. Why? Because one of the ramifications of this is that we often identify ourself with the mind. We have a sense of a solid I, or a self at which we think as if it were sometimes have a sense it’s behind our eyes somewhere or maybe looking over our shoulder.
And we take we often identify it with the mind itself. And if we begin to break down the notion that the mind is a solid, homogenous unit, concrete thing, if we begin to see it as a complex cause of the conditions which are continually changing, which are continually arising and vanishing, disappearing, then we begin to loosen up around our mind itself in the notion of I. An I consciousness arises in dependence upon three conditions or three factors preceding moment of mind or consciousness, a sense medium, the eye organ or the sense power, more specifically the retina of the eye which the image arises in dependence upon, and a cup. When those three factors come together, an eye consciousness seeing the cup arises. If these three are not present, an eye consciousness seeing the cup does not arise.
So our minds do not produce the cup. They produce the sight of the cup. Sight exists only within the context of being seen by a mind. The cup exists whether we see the cup or not. You know, if you have a pimple on your nose and you cover it with cream, not because the pimple doesn’t go away.
It’s your experience of the pimple goes away because it’s no longer an object of your eye consciousness. But the pimple is still there or whatever it is. It doesn’t vanish simply because you can’t see it. Your experience of it has vanished, but not the object itself. So when we say that the cup or scene of the cup, the sight of the cup arises and depends upon these three factors, we’re not saying that the mind produces the cup.
In some Buddhist schools so we’re trying to get across this word, what we mean by clarity. And we’re going to interpret it in three different ways. And we’re saying that the mental activity producing the object, the mental object, the mental activity of producing the mental object, that is to say the appearance of the cup, not the cup itself, but the appearance of the cup to the mind is one meaning of the word clarity. Some Buddhist schools assert that and these notions, I think, me they’re quite difficult to get my mind around. That the object casts its appearance toward the subject.
That is to say that the object casts its image toward the mind. And the mind is simply like a mirror. As I tried to emphasize, within Buddhism is not homogenous. There’s no one particular doctrine which it adheres to. There are various schools of thought and even within those schools there is a diversity of opinions.
One particular way of looking at the way we come to know is that an object such as a cup casts its image toward mind and the mind is like, is merely like a mirror. It’s passive and it simply reflects what is being cast by the object. The cup casts the image of itself and is reflected by the mirror of the mind. That reflecting of the image of the cup by the mind is what we mean by know. This is what it means to know.
I mean, don’t know if that really tells us much about what it means to know, but that’s one way of thinking about what it means to know. The mirror like quality of mind reflecting the object, which is casting its image. So the clarity is like the space like quality of awareness, which allows the arising of that image. The mind arises in the image of the object which is casting itself. The cup casts an image of itself.
The mind arises in that aspect of that image. It’s simply like reflecting like a mirror. And that’s what we call knowing. That ability for it to rise in that image or the ability of the clarity of the mind which allows it to reflect that object is one interpretation of what we mean by clarity. It’s like this meditation that we were doing this morning.
What the clarity of mind is an aspect of our awareness. It allows objects to arise within our mind. It’s it’s space like in that way. You know, it’s like in the space like awareness of our minds, object can arise. It’s like in the actual sky.
A bird can fly through the sky or smoke can arise or clouds can pass. And the sky, that space like quality of the sky remains undisturbed, unaffected by whatever has passed through. That potential, that ability, the capacity of the sky to allow the movement, the arising and the passing through, all these various objects without itself being affected. That clearness, that what we’re calling clearness or clarity or space like quality of the mind is what is trying to be gotten at here in this first interpretation of the word clarity. That which allows these objects to arise within our mind, that characteristic which allows the images, which is the reflective quality, that space like quality of the mind.
The container of clarity of the mind. Second interpretation of the word clarity is that the mind is a nonphysical entity. And, you know, this is a little bit easier perhaps to get our minds around what we mean by that. That the mind and this is controversial the mind is not equivalent to the brain or the nervous system. Many in materialistic, mechanistic science, they would say that the mind is equivalent to the brain.
And this isn’t particularly satisfying in this kind of interpretation. Buddhism is saying that a state of mind, let us say, this quality of clarity is nonphysical. It is not matter. It is like space. It’s not space, but it’s like space in that it’s nonobstructive.
It’s non material. It’s not matter. The mind depends upon the body. It depends upon matter. But it is not matter.
I mean, for example, there’s an interdependency between mind and body. If you’re sick, let me take a gross example. If you injure the eye consciousness, injure the eye organ, you see. You cannot have an eye consciousness see in the cup. Why?
Because one of the factors is gone. The factor of a medium of exchange between the mind and the object. So that rising of an eye consciousness seeing the cup depends upon an eye organ, the eyeball, okay? Mind, states of mind depend upon the body. If you’re sick, perhaps you can’t think very well and so forth.
And the adverse is equally as true. The body depends upon the mind. You know, various psychosomatic illnesses, you know, like some types of allergies and so forth. Allergies depend upon the mind. So there’s definitely an interdependence between body and mind.
But nonetheless, the body is not the mind and the mind is not the body. In this sense, Buddhism accepts at a course level, and we need to look at this further, at a course level, at a gross level, a dualism between body and mind. Materialistic science would say believes in materialism, or monism. That is to say everything is reduced to material. But it’s interesting in this regard that I don’t know if you’re familiar with Bertrand Russell.
Bertrand Russell was probably one of the great philosophers of the twentieth century, an English philosopher. And in commenting on this, he said that all of the reasoning that is set forth establishing monism, that is to say there is only one substance and it is material, could equally well be able to prove that everything is mind. You can say everything is one substance, but why you come down on the side of material? As opposed to say, Why not come down on the side of mind and say, Everything is mind. That this table is simply mind and so forth.
One equally establishes that as well as the other. And Buddhism, at a gross level at least, accepts a dualism. Generally in the West we don’t like this notion of dualism, but it’s only at the gross level. Let me say there is body and there is mind. And the two are not interchangeable and they are different.
Body is material. It’s obstructive just like this table is obstructive. Mind is non obstructive. It’s space like. It’s not space, but it’s like space in that it doesn’t offer any resistance.
This is the quality of this clarity of mind. The, view of mechanistic science is that the mind arises from body, that the mind arises from the brain or the nervous system. It’s what they call an emergent property. You know, you have hydrogen and you have oxygen, you bring them together under the right conditions, you get water. Water is an emergent property of hydrogen and oxygen.
They’re saying that the mind or mind state is an emergent property of the brain. Then upon death, when the brain deteriorates, the mind simply disappears like a rainbow fading away in the sky. That’s kind of the notion of what more or less what science would be saying. They don’t really know what they mean by mind. But whatever they mean by it, it is matter.
It is an emergent property of matter, of the brain or the nervous system and so forth. I like there’s a contemporary Tibetan teacher. I’d like to just read a paragraph from him, a quote by him. His name is Sogyal Rinpoche. Some people who think of themselves as scientifically minded believe that the mind is the brain or a function of the brain.
And for this reason, there is no essential mind matter dichotomy. Okay, so mind matter dichotomy. There’s brain over here, there’s matter over here, and there’s the mind over here, and this mind is not matter. So there are two things, two very incompatible substances. They’re not interchangeable.
Whereas mechanistic sciences, they refute that there are these two substances. There’s only one substance. They come down on the side of material, on matter, brain, molecules, electrons, the nervous system and so forth. According to their view, everything can be explained in terms of the material world. They choose to overlook the qualities of mind that have no relation to matter, such as subjective experience, thoughts and emotions.
Although they would not take seriously the story of Pinocchio, Although they would not take seriously the story of Pinocchio where a simple piece of matter, a stick, inexplicably develops a mind experiencing hopes and fears, pleasures and pains, and so on, they would not find it strange if subatomic particles, atoms or molecules, started to produce thoughts and feelings. However, not only is there no scientific evidence whatsoever that such a phenomenon is possible, but it represents a semantic confusion of categories. Linguistically, there is the category of mind and what is not mind, matter. Matter or the material world is what exists out there beyond the senses. If it does not exist independent of senses, how can it be categorized as material?
How can a world, which exists outside the senses, also be the senses that sense and experience? Such a theory does not answer anything. It does not even begin to address itself to the question of what consciousness experience is, let alone to the question of what might or might not exist external to it. So, we have to begin so asking the question, the mind is not the brain, then where does mind come from? I mean, you know, this gets to many of some of the basic notions, least doctrinally, of Buddhism.
For example, that of rebirth. It comes down to where does consciousness come from? If it doesn’t come from material substance, then it’s necessary to begin to ask that question. And so we’re going to try to answer this question. Hopefully I’m not becoming too abstract here, okay, too philosophical or speculative.
But there’s a couple in order to begin to research this, there are a couple notions or concepts that we’re going to use like tools and help us to understand the nature of consciousness in terms of where does it arise. If Buddhism is saying it does not arise from matter, well then where does it come from? We have to be able to answer that question. In order to be able to answer that question, we need two tools. And the first of these is to distinguish two types of causes.
One is called a substantial cause and the other is called a cooperative condition. Substantial cause and a cooperative condition. I’ll go through those and how this relates to this idea of where does the mind come from. The other is called the other tool we’re going to make use of is called similarity of type. So we’re going to make we’re using two tools to understand the origin of mind.
One is the concept of two types of causes. One of these two types of causes is called substantial cause and the other is called cooperative condition. The other tool we’re going to make use of this concept is the concept of similarity of type. So let’s kind of copacetic on the same page here. The difference between a substantial cause and cooperative condition is for, we take an example, is like a clay pot, okay.
The substantial cause you have a clay pot. The substantial cause of that clay pot is the wet lump of clay which was fashioned into that pot. So the very that somebody goes to a river or wherever to the shop buys a couple kilos or digs up a couple kilos of clay, puts it on a wheel. That wet lump of clay is fashioned into a pot. Okay?
That lump clay determines the substantial identity of the product, the result. It is a necessary cause of a clay pot, isn’t it? Without a lump of clay, we couldn’t produce a clay pot. And it determines what the substance of it? What is its substantial identity?
It’s not a plastic pot. It’s not an aluminum pot, it’s a clay pot. The wet lumber clay determined it was a cause of the pot and it determined what type of pot, what was the nature of its substance, okay? Now the other one is cooperative condition. So we have this wet lump of clay and we have a potter and the wheel and the various tools.
The potter is the cause of the pot. And without a potter, we couldn’t produce a pot. It assists in the production of the pot. So the potter is necessary to produce that pot. It is the cause of the pot.
It assists in the production of the pot. So is his wheel. So is his various shaping tools and so forth. But they do not enter into the very nature of the pot itself. They don’t become part of the pot itself.
They cooperate in its production. They are necessary to bring about the production of that pot. But they don’t become part of their identity. They determined that it was a pot, but not that it was a clay pot. Okay?
So the cooperative conditions, the potter could have made a plate, could have made a cup, could have made a pitcher. The potter determined that it was a pot, that it’s not a plate. It was the clay was determined it was a clay pot. It had no it determined the quality of being clay. The potter determined the quality of being a pot.
Those two together determined that the final result was a clay pot. Okay. Okay. All products, and by products I mean everything which arises in dependence upon causes and conditions. We’re talking about almost all things tables, houses, universes, people, minds arise dependent upon necessarily arise dependent upon these two types of causes, on a substantial cause and a cooperative condition.
We’ll take another example. You want to grow some flowers, so you get a seed. The seed is the substantial cause. Say you want to grow morning glories, okay, sunflower seeds, you want to grow sunflowers. So you get some sunflowers seeds.
That sunflower seed is the substantial cause of sunflower. But as long as it stays in that package, it’s never going to grow a sunflower. Know, how many years past, if it’s left in that package, it’s still going to remain. The potential is not going to be actualized. It’s not going to be realized.
Though you have substantial cause, without a cooperative condition, it’s not going to activate that potential to produce a sunflower. So it’s necessary that you plant the seed. The soil, the water, the warmth and so forth of the earth and the sun are the cooperative conditions. They activate, they support that substantial cause. Those two working together, what happens?
Strangely enough, it begins to sprout and you grow a substantial, you grow a sunflower. The sunflower carries the genetic information. It determines what is that the final result is a sunflower. It’s not a carrot, it’s not a potato, it is a flower. Moreover, it’s not a tulip, it’s not a rose, it is a sunflower.
Determines that aspect of the identity of the result. But it’s necessary that it be that that potential to bring about a sunflower has to be assisted with these cooperative conditions, the soil and so forth, the moisture, the warmth. Everything in nature necessarily arises and depends upon these two types of causes and conditions. Without both, nothing would arise. Everything in the universe is exactly the same.
Their production requires both a substantial cause and a cooperative condition. Okay, that’s one tool we’re going to make use of. So you have to kind of keep that concept in mind, okay? The other concept that we’re making use of, we’re trying to understand where does the mind come from. And so in order to understand that we have to we’re using some conceptual tools to as a means of investigating.
The other conceptual tool that we’re using is the notion of similarity of type. This, you know, if we state that simply, this means that there’s a consistency of type between a substantial cause and its result. You know, for example, an apple tree grows from an apple seed. It doesn’t grow from a pear seed or an apricot seed. There’s a similarity between the result, an apple tree, and its cause.
A similarity of type. It necessarily grew from an apple seed and nothing even slightly dissimilar from it. Ice comes from water. If this is present, this arises. If this is not present, this doesn’t arise.
Ice arises from water. Water arises from ice. Water doesn’t arise from wood. It doesn’t arise from we could go through a long list of what it doesn’t arise from. People may produce bombs.
People may produce works of art. But people give birth to other people. human beings are born from other human beings. Okay? There’s always a similarity of type between a cause and its effect.
We depend upon this and how we lead our lives. Things are simply transformations of these substantial causes within the continuum of similarity of type. So the mind does not arise from nothing. Nowhere in nature does something come from nothing. It must necessarily have a cause.
That cause must necessarily be both a substantial cause and a co operative condition. Physical phenomena are exactly the same way. They’re material things. This table, for example. This building, for example.
The universe. Whatever it might be. They necessarily arise from a similar type. Now, what is if mind arises from a cause and more particularly, it arises from a similar type of cause, then what can cause mind? Well, matter is not similar in type to mind.
It is nonmaterial and non knowing. Mind is knowing and nonmaterial. Matter is material. Okay? Is non knowing.
It is dissimilar in type to mind. Space is non physical but it’s non knowing. So, you know, when I originally mentioned at the very, very beginning, there is mind is a very unique phenomenon in that it necessarily there’s nothing analogous to it in a way. It necessarily arises from something it necessarily arises from something, a cause, which is similar in type to itself. There is only one phenomena which is similar in type to mind.
That is the previous moment of mind. Mind only arises from mind. It doesn’t arise from that which is not mind. It does not arise from matter. Matter is physical and it is not knowing.
When we talk about, you know, the notion of rebirth and so forth, what we come down to ultimately is where does the first moment of consciousness arise, say in this lifetime? Where does that first moment of mind come about? That’s what the notion of rebirth. Essentially that’s what it comes down to, answering that very question itself. The same can be asked of and this even in contemporary physics hasn’t been able to adequately answer this question.
If this works for mind, it equally applies to matter. When did the first atom arrive in the universe? Where did the first piece of matter come about? What Buddhism is trying to say is that in this analysis, in this investigation is that all products necessarily have a cause. Nowhere in nature does an object or a phenomenon arise without a cause.
That cause must be of a similar type to itself. So matter, we cannot posit a first moment of matter in the universe. The positive first moment of matter means that previous to that there was nothing. Something does not come from nothing. There must have been a cause, and that cause must have been a similar type to the result.
Therefore, we cannot posit a first moment of matter in the universe, the first atom in the universe. That matter of the universe is beginningless. We cannot there’s always a previous moment of matter which acts as this present moment of matter’s cause. The same equally applies to mind. No matter what mind we might point out, it necessarily arose from a previous moment of mind.
And what we can do is can trace this back. And this is what we do when we talk about the beginner’s continuity of mind. The notion that, for example, our present mind that we have here, with all its various characteristics, our memories, our predispositions, our habits, this mind that all the various ways in which it’s conditioned that we have even at this very instant, It arose in dependence on the mind which came in from the break when we went out to have a cup of tea. There was an unbroken continuum of continuity of replicating similar types of habits, of tendencies, of emotions, of feelings, of ways of thinking and so forth. The mind is continually changing from moment to moment.
But nonetheless, there is a continuity of similar types. You know, you don’t have to we don’t recreate ourselves from moment to moment. There is a just like in this table, there is a continuity with the table which existed even one hour ago, one month ago, tracing back to when it was first created. Likewise with our mind. Our minds are in a continuity with the mind that walked in this room from the break.
That mind that we walked in that we experienced during the break was in an uninterrupted continuity of similar types. So we’re getting with the mind that you experienced when you walked into a Buddha house this morning, that when you left your house this morning, that when you woke up this morning, that you went to sleep last night, you know, retracing back and back and back and back and back. That, you know, That same continuum of mind replicating itself in a similar type with all its particular unique characteristics, its particular emotions, tendencies and so forth, predispositions, back and back to when you were five years ago, ten years ago, twenty years ago, thirty years ago. Even when you were a child, an infant, at birth, in gestation, at conception. So, know, what about this mind at the moment of conception?
The very fact of knowing, of clarity in knowing. That very characteristic that defines a mind in and of itself. Where did that quality arise from? From the point of view of Buddhism, that very mind itself and that mind is conditioned in various ways arose in dependence upon a previous moment of mind. And that previous moment of mind was the last moment of mind in our previous life.
And that mind, that last moment of mind in the previous life also arose in dependence upon a previous moment of mind. And it continues back. We cannot posit a first moment of the continuity of our mind’s stream. There’s never a point when it began. It is beginningless.
The same is true of matter. The matter of this universe. Whether we go along with the Big Bang Theory, and Buddhism would very readily go along with that theory, that there are these coming into existence and going out of existence of universes after one after another. This transformations of matter into universes and so forth has been going on beginnuously. There is no first moment when we say, Previous to that there was no matter.
There nothing. For there to be nothing there must be something. Something only has meaning with respect to nothing. Nothing has if there’s not something, nothing has no meaning. There can’t be nothing without something.
There can’t be long without short. There can’t be high without low. So necessarily for something to exist, for nothing to exist there must be something. So something has always existed. I don’t know if we, yeah.
This is trying to get a, you know, this is, in this way we can begin to, this is one of the main, at least in terms of some of the reasoning behind the existence of past and future lives. We have minds as sentient creatures. Mind necessarily depends upon causes. This present moment of mind, state of mind, with all its emotions, with all its predispositions, its memories and knowledges and so forth, the very fact of being knowing, that quality of mind arose and depends upon a cause, which was a previous moment of mind. It did not rise from matter.
Matter is a dissimilar type. We wouldn’t expect an apple tree to arise from a lemon seed. There’s a similarity of type. It arose from a similarity of type and moreover the substantial cause of that. The body is a cooperative condition.
The mind is actualized in dependence upon the body. Just like that the seed of the sunflower has a certain potentiality, but that potentiality is not expressed unless it meets with the proper cooperative conditions, the soil, the water, and so forth. Likewise with the mind. Mind functions within the context of matter, brains, nervous systems. The expression of our mind as a human mind is dependent upon a human brain.
We wouldn’t have a human mind in a dog brain. That cooperative condition is quite different. The physical makeup of a dog’s brain is different than a human brain. So, dependence upon that variance of a cooperative condition, that mind, that potential of mind is going to be expressed in a different fashion. So we express the human mentality and dependence upon the human brain.
But that brain is simply the cooperative condition. It is not the substantial cause. Any question about that? Yeah, please. I’m tired of talking.
Okay. Minding. It’s something that’s doing it. Yeah. It’s a yeah.
So that’s a good question and there’s some debate around that. So what would bring about an end to mind? Say your mind stream, your particular continuity of consciousness. Why does it continue? First, let’s answer that question.
Why is it continuing on? Why does it replicate? And why would it end that replication process? I mean it’s a good question, Kathy. So I mean, there’s some I mean, generally, I think it would be anybody else want to answer that question?
Shucks. I mean generally there’s a driving force behind mind. There are differences of opinion with regard to it. I mean essentially some schools of thought would say, well, it’s craving. The mind is the driving force behind the momentum.
What is pushing mind ahead is craving for sense experience. And moving is moving the mind on. They would say once that stops, and this is one particular area of thought in Buddhism, one school thought the mind would cease. So there are schools within Buddhism in which they would say that upon achieving a cessation of what we call nirvana, the continuity of mind ceases. They liken it to a flame being blown out.
There’s no more. There was a continuity of a flame and then it stopped. And within, yeah, so there’s one in Mahāyāna and especially, does not accept that. They would say there’s no end of mind, that there is always a momentum behind the mind. If it’s not craving, then it becomes compassion.
So it is compassion which, you know, having once upon achieving Buddhahood, for example, having ended all craving, which was the driving force behind the mind, the driving force behind mind now is compassion and working for the benefit of others. And this is what is pushing the mind. I mean, that’s what the Mahāyāna would say, that the mind doesn’t cease. It never ceases. Having said, you know, what is it?
It’s quite I was thinking about this the other day. The very fact of the movement of the mind, we take that why doesn’t the mind simply be? I mean, why isn’t it just at rest, just simply knowing? Why is it always in movement? What is it that takes us out of the simple fact of knowing?
Question. Knowing the current, so you want something arising and something perceiving. So for the mind to yeah. The mind cannot be. There’s always an object.
So what I was thinking about the other day is ignorance. And we’re going to talk about that a little bit later. But when we see the initial movement of mind is approach avoidance. This is basically almost what we mean by sentient life. Almost how we define sentient life.
Even a bacteria or a single cell organism, it will approach that which it sees as enhancing its existence. And it will avoid that which it sees as a threat. If we simplify our life as much as possible, that’s all we’re doing. We’re approaching and avoiding. And we complicate it and become very sophisticated at it, but that’s essentially what we’re doing.
Due the force of ignorance, we see the self as being separate from everything else, an isolated entity which we identify as who we are. And we see that which is and we in protecting this self, anything which is seen as a threat we’re always evaluating our environment. And we react to it in terms of how we if an object is seen as a threat, we move away. If we see it as enhancing, we move toward this approach in avoidance. So the basis in that whole process of approach avoidance, which is the primary movement of mind, is ignorance.
So if that ignorance is removed, then that whole process of approach and avoidance disappears and the mind is at rest, It’s at peace. The mind still exists but it’s no longer involved in this ongoing struggle in terms of its environment, in terms of satisfying its seeming needs in terms of its own existence independent of everything else. So, I don’t know if we answered it. Doctor. I didn’t.
It’s a couple of things that I didn’t answer. Was trying to understand what you’re saying. So here in terms of the second interpretation of what we mean by clarity, it simply means that trying to get across the notion that the mind is not physical, not material, is not matter. And that this that it is not equivalent to the brain or the nervous system. And I mentioned this morning, know, I tried to it’s kind of a mind game you could try to play with yourself.
I’m just all I’m experiencing now is just electrical impulse going from one neuron to another, more or less, the flow of neurons, how does that relate to what I’m actually my actual subjective experience? And I have these certain feelings. I’m looking at you and I’m in this room and I’m warm. It’s really hard to bring those kind of notions together. I mean, what would it mean if I were just electrical impulses?
My whole subjective experience is nothing but. I don’t know. Does that bother anybody? It kind of disturbs me. Do you know what I mean by that?
It doesn’t really sad. It’s not very satisfying. It doesn’t really explain anything to me. Pardon? It’s the nucleus.
No, if mechanistic science is saying that there is just the brain and they can measure it in many ways. They’re really good at MRIs and all this. Can say when you’re happy this portion of the brain lights up and they can do it. But it doesn’t say anything about my subjective experience of how I experience when that portion of my brain lights up. There’s something going on for me which isn’t just which is something totally I’m altogether different dimension as my brain lighting up over here.
And I’m actually experiencing something. The subject of experience. I don’t know. Maybe it’s because my brain is too limited. Yeah.
Yeah. So just the notion, I mean this is pretty, I mean they’re learning a lot in neurobiology and neuropsychology. But they haven’t. But when they start talking about subjective experience then it becomes a whole another something, area of discussion. Why can it something you can’t measure?
Well, they’re saying you can almost. I mean, if you So, in this word clarity, the second interpretation is simply getting at the notion that mind is not equivalent to brain. It isn’t equivalent to the circuitry of the brain and these electrical impulses running around the brain, which are all matter one way or another. It just comes down to that. And if it’s not matter, then that has certain implications Then we have to say, does it not matter?
Where does it come from? And then we begin this explanation that I went through in terms of what the cause of the present moment in the mind is, the previous moment, and back. And that introduces the notion of the beginning of this mind and rebirth and so forth. If there are past lives, then there must be future life because the present life is the future life of my past life and so forth. So these kind of things grow in that way.
I don’t know I could in passing there’s one notion which I haven’t really thought about much about lately. But you know, according to mechanistic science, know because if you feel something or you think about something in certain areas of the brain light up or if they, you know, if they cut this out, you lose your piano lessons or, you know, if you cut that out then you lose certain emotional abilities and so forth. So one refutation of that or one way of looking at that which doesn’t quite support that is the notion of, you know, if you if your television set were on the blink, you know, there’s something something was wrong with your television set. And you called the, you know, television repairman. And he would, by manipulating the knobs, you know, and so forth, he could say, you know, by the fault in the television, he could diagnose it and say, well, there’s a problem with the hardware here.
It needs a connection here, a broken connection here, or it needs a I don’t know what they do these days. You know, they don’t have television tubes anymore, but it needs a new it needs a new resistor or conductor whatever. And he would so the image that you perceive on the screen is directly related to the integrity of the hardware if everything is in working order. The television repairman would not think that that television is the originator of those people and those voices that are being transmitted by the television. You know, by that I mean that somehow, you know, like a computer, a computer can generate images, can’t it?
There are also voice simulators. A television is simply a transmitter. In a studio, maybe fifty kilometers away, there’s a person in front of a camera and they’re speaking. So that image, that’s the original source of what appears on your television. That image is transformed into electrical impulses and so forth, transmitted to your television.
The television is a transmitter of that image. It’s not the originator of that image. It’s not the originator of that voice just like a voice simulator on computer can make up a voice. That is a result of an actual human voice which is in a studio fifty kilometers away. So the television repairman would not say well that television is the originator of that image of a person or that sound of a voice.
But that is being transmitted by an actual voice, an actual person in a studio. So likewise, just because can if we remove a portion of the brain and we lose some emotional effect, It doesn’t mean that that portion of the brain was generating, was the originator or was generating that emotion. It means it’s a necessary part of the hardware for the transmission of that emotion. I don’t know if that makes any sense. The brain, you know, if you get a brain damage, the mind cannot function in the way it did previously.
But that does not mean that simply because a portion of the brain has been damaged, that portion of the brain actually originated that ability. It was a necessary cooperative condition, not the substantial cause. The substantial cause was that person in the studio, for example, by way of analogy. So the brain is like a necessary cooperative condition, a transmitter of a potential of the mind. It expresses it ‘s necessary for that brain, that mind to find expression to have the hardware in working order.
If it’s in working order, then the full potential of that mind can find expression. If you have a seed and you put it in soil which is poor quality, where there’s not enough moisture, you may get a sunflower, but it’s going to be a shriveled, stunted sunflower. Why? Because cooperative conditions do not allow the full potential of that seed to find expression. There’s nothing wrong with it.
The potential is there. It’s not in the soil. The soil is, that seed for its expression is dependent upon that cooperative condition. Our minds are dependent upon the quality of our brains. But the source of those potentials is not the brain itself.
Does that make any sense? Yeah. I don’t know. I don’t know about that. And it’s a that’s I don’t know if they they really established that or not.
No. It’s just a lot of stories. Yeah. There was there was something on People just waking up and raving coffee when they were never Somebody was writing poetry to his wife? Yes.
Yes. He had their written poetry. Straight. Unknown to then. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. For sure.
Well I think one thing we can begin to say, yeah, you can still address, I mean this is some advice that’s not quite often given, is that if someone has a disability, there’s not the mind which is, there’s still a potentiality of mind. It has not been lost. So you can address that potentiality of mind. And maybe, you know, this kind of leads to neuroplasticity of mind. And the mind, brain can retransform itself and other functions can.
So the potential hasn’t Buddhism would say the potential is always there. It’s just that the cooperative conditions aren’t sufficient to support that potential. So in working, so it’s advised that if you’re working with somebody disabled or somebody’s having a brain trauma of some sort, you address yourself to their potential and this will help them to reorganize their mind, the brain itself. You know, it will rather than cooperating with their, well, I mean, rather than seeing them have lost their potential for full capacity. The potential is there even though it’s not able to be expressed.
And so addressing that in that person. One other, okay, one other, and then we’re gonna break for lunch. As I said, I find this quite difficult. It’s a hard area to even think about, let alone to talk about. And third interpretation of clarity, we’ll take a break.
And this is practically a very useful one. It has implications. Is that whatever problems that we might have and just more specifically whatever negativities our mind may now possess, these are not intrinsic to the mind itself. That this is you know we are we take for granted a lot of sophistications in our way of thinking about the mind, in our psychology, which is which are relatively new. And what I mean by that is up to, you know, a hundred years ago there was no notion of consciousness or unconsciousness.
People thought that people had a certain character, that this individual was of a certain character. And this was an inherent quality of them, of who they were. And there was no possibility for change. The notion didn’t come up. That people were in this supported certain caste systems and so forth, but this was in the very nature of but especially I remember in the Victorian era, you know, the upper class and lower class, the aristocracy and there was a certain mentality that went with that.
And so the aristocracy, they felt a certain responsibility to help these poor wretches, you know, who weren’t able to get by in life. They didn’t quite have the potential or qualities that they had. But a person’s character, maybe they were a bad character, maybe they were alcoholics, you know, that’s his nature. That was a current thinking. It was intrinsic to the mind.
It was inherent to the individual. Now what this is saying is that by its very nature, the mind whatever dysfunctional patterns that we have, whatever difficulties we may be having in our mind, the patterns of our thinking and so forth, we are not in the very nature of the mind. They’re not in the fabric of the mind. So Buddhism sees all the afflictive emotions and by afflictive emotions I mean hatred and jealousy and attachment and so forth. All of them do not arise, do not reside within the very nature of the mind.
Hatred does not arise, for example, in the very nature of the mind. If were in the very nature of the mind, if it resided within the fabric of the mind, we should always, anytime we were conscious, we should be angry. And we’re not. Sometimes we’re angry, sometimes we’re not. That in itself indicates that it depends upon certain conditions, anger does arise.
When those conditions aren’t present, it doesn’t arise. So therefore, the very fact of anger, that quality of anger, that particular emotion, is not in the very nature of the mind itself. It’s adventitious. It comes and goes according to certain varying conditions. I mean this sounds simple minded but I think it’s because we’re rather sophisticated in this way.
This would not some people might have argued two hundred years ago. Even in the West they might have argued against this. They would say no, no, no. There are certain qualities which are inherent in individuals. And no matter what you do in training them, they’re never going to change.
This clarity means that these qualities, whatever there’s a Zen saying, original nature is good in nature. That these qualities are not in the very nature of the mind, that the mind is open ended. It’s like the stuff of wet clay. I’m going back to clay again. We can, according to our skills or our lack of skills, according to our determination and effort, we can make of that wet clay, that lump of wet clay of the mind.
The clay like mind, something magnificently beautiful like a Michael Angelo’s Madonna and Child, or we can make of our minds an ashtray. It has the neuroplasticity. It’s plastic, it’s clay. Neuroplasticity of the mind. It’s workable.
The mind is workable. It doesn’t have any particular inherent nature which prevents us from working with the very qualities of mind, the characteristics which we take so much for granted about ourselves. That the positive, you know, there’s a positive class of emotions and a negative class of emotions and these are mutually contradictive. For example, love and hate. You cannot, at the same time, in the same mind, you cannot love the person that you’re hating.
Love essentially is the wish to happiness. Hate is essentially the wish to harm. Those two cannot coexist in the same mind at the same time. They’re usually like hot and cold water. They’re usually exclusive of one another.
As one class begins to increase, one class of positive emotions begins to increase, the other begins to decrease. So in that way the mind, the point is this interpretation of the word clarity is that our states are workable. We don’t feel that way about ourselves quite often. We feel as if this is the way I really am. At some level we don’t think we can change.
I’m pretty sure of that. Intellectually we do. I get you that. Most of us would say, Oh yeah, I can change. But at an emotional level we’re pretty for most of us we’re pretty stuck in I wouldn’t be who I am if I were any different.
And I’d like to talk a little bit more about that. It’s how we keep reinforcing the notions that we have about ourselves. And it very much keeps us stuck. Keeps us going around in the same circles. Okay, so the clarity one of the third interpretations for clarity is that the various qualities of mind are not in a very fabric of mind itself.
They are not inherent to the mind, that the mind is open and can be changed. It is workable. One other, and then we’ll stop, promise you. The word that’s being translated for clarity in Tibetan is Selwa. Selwa.
Another word for Selwah, another possible translation. So all these three interpretations of word clarity are coming from translating as clarity. Another way that it can be translated is luminosity. And here the luminous characteristic of mind is that the mind illuminates this factor of selwa. It illuminates an object and then the mind knows it.
It’s like a torch. This quality of mind to be able to illuminate objects, to cause them to appear, to allow them to appear, the capacity for the image to rise, and then the mind knows it. That’s the knowing part. So that luminosity, it clarifies objects. They’re trying to get the same sense of causing objects to appear and then knowing.
Like a torch, that causes an object to appear and then we can see it. So that’s another sometimes this word is translated as luminosity in that way. And we’ll talk about what it means to know after we’ve had our lunch. Can we have lunch? Shall we break for lunch?