Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Ven Jampa Gendun opens this 82-minute session with a guided lemon-squeezing exercise — asking listeners to imagine cutting a lemon and letting the juice run onto their tongue — to make a live point from Buddhist epistemology: the mind treats mental appearances as reality, and the saliva proves it. He works through the practical fallout: thoughts are words in the head, yet we fuse with them as if they were facts, so “I am useless” lands like an actual verdict. He introduces a defusion technique — prefixing “I notice I am having the thought that…” — before drawing on evolutionary neurobiology to explain the mind’s deep negative bias. The session then turns to Buddhism’s distinction between skillful and unskillful emotions, using the Cherokee two-wolves story as a hinge, before closing with the claim that all negative emotions share a single root: ignorance — the wrong consciousness that mistakes a mental model of the self for something solid and independent — and that only direct perception of selflessness, rather than remedial antidotes, can cut that root entirely.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 03 MP 2011 07 09.mp3
UUID: a456b6a8-6044-4566-99d3-1a0270f598a4
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: DB Mind and its Potential (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 2011-07-09
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 81.6 minutes
Words: ~9,988
Does anybody have anything they’d like to bring up? Any questions that we’ve, the material we’ve covered thus far? I’ll take responsibility for the mistakes that I make. Some would say that in one division of mind is it the mind and mental factors. You know mental factors, there are six primary consciousnesses, or minds, eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mental.
Yes. Great. Thank you. Yes, I wouldn’t miss it. Yeah, definitely come.
We were talking about heart, oh, mind. Then mental factor, you know, jealousy and attachment but also faith and wisdom, all these mental factors. Some explanation is that the mental factors reside in the heart area and the main consciousness is eye, ear, nose, tongue, and body. The mental consciousness reside in the head region. So there’s that distinction.
But I don’t, yeah. Yeah? Piece of your mind gets transplanted? I think that’s, I don’t think, you know, I mean, they they talk about that. Yeah.
I don’t know I don’t know if that would be true. I don’t know how to what to make of that. No. Any other thoughts I can say? I don’t know what to make of it.
Anybody else have any? I think it was a bit complicated thus far, wasn’t it? How did people react to that? A bit complicated. Yeah.
I know. Which leads into the second quality of knowing. Anyway, think we’ve really just been talking about what it means to know. I think that’s also it’s really difficult. What does it mean to know?
I don’t find some of these explanations completely satisfying but it’s the best that I’ve heard and the best that I can kind of come up with my limited understanding. The mental activity of engaging with a mental object. So the engaging of an object whether we understand the object or not, whether, we’re focused upon the object or not, whether it’s unconscious or conscious is simply producing a mental image and engaging with the object. So producing a mental object like producing the hearing of a sound and knowing of sound are the same thing. Producing the or we can say producing the mental object of sound.
The appearance. Producing in our mind the appearance. It sounds strange to use the word appearance with regard to sounds doesn’t it? But that’s we don’t have one word in the English language which covers it all. But usually when you say appearance we talk about visual objects like producing the mental appearance of a pot and knowing pot are the same activity, are the same thing.
To know a pot and to produce that mental appearance of a pot in your mind. You know, we don’t a thought doesn’t arise before we think it. It’s not like there’s a thought and then we think it. The thinking of the thought and the rising of the thought are the same mental activity. We’re just talking about the same phenomenon, the same occurrence in our mind.
There’s no feeling without it being felt. Being felt and the feeling arising in the mind are the same event, are the same phenomenon, are the same mental activity. The feeling arising in the mind and feeling being felt are the same currents. And then the word mirror. Is simply there to eliminate producing the appearance of something and engaging with the object all that is necessary for mental activity.
We don’t to be able to focus on it, we don’t have to understand it, comprehend it and so forth. Simply, causing that appearance to arise in the mind. Just merely that is what we mean by knowing or simply what we mean by mental activity. So it doesn’t have to be understood, it doesn’t have to be clear in our mind and so forth. Okay.
It’s quite a I think it’s difficult to access what’s trying to be gotten at there. For me it is, at least. As I mentioned, there are a number of different ways in mind and awareness and knowledge of classifying and making divisions of mind. I mentioned here one division into seven. I want maybe I’ll come back to that.
I want to talk about something else I’ve written on the board. And this is one division of minds into and as I mentioned this morning, I think it might be useful for ourselves to talk about this. And that is what we call conceptual and non conceptual. Conceptual and non conceptual. So conceptual consciousnesses are consciousnesses by which we understand or which we get at an object by way of a mental image or idea about the object.
We use models. We use symbols in order to think about something. We engage as we sit here now, you can think about your bedroom at home, can’t you? And it can give us useful information. My bed is over here, my desk is over here, so forth.
And that can be quite accurate. So I’m thinking about knowing an object by way of what? My idea about it. My model. My symbol.
So we rely heavily on using symbols, models, ideals about something. And as opposed to when we know an object directly like my eye consciousness knows the cup directly. I don’t need to use an idea about the cup in order to understand the cup. I can know it directly. This is what we mean by that very first seven fold division, direct perception.
To know an object directly, that’s called non conceptual consciousness As opposed to conceptual consciousness which we call thought. In thought, we know an object but we’re knowing it by way of our idea about it, our mental image, the symbol that we use, about the object. And this becomes very, it becomes, important. I to try an experiment to show you the the full impact of what this has, the significance of what we can get at here in terms of the difference between knowing something directly and knowing something by way of our idea about it. So think about one minute, okay?
And if you would just close your eyes for one minute. And, it’s just a thought experiment. And I’d like for you to, imagine that perhaps you’re in your kitchen at the kitchen counter and there’s a bowl of fruit on the kitchen counter and there’s some, I don’t know what, maybe some oranges and maybe some apples. But there’s also some lemons in the bowl. I’d like for you to reach over and pick up a lemon.
And first notice it’s a bright yellow color. And notice the dimples of its skin, its peel. And bring the lemon to your nose and just smell the lemony scent of peel. Smells quite nice, doesn’t it? And then reach over and get yourself a chopping block and put it in front of you and put the lemon down on the chopping block and pick up a knife and cut the lemon in half.
Notice you break the skin, the peel, the juice begins to squirt out. And you’ve cut the lemon completely in half. And take putting down the knife and pick up one half of the lemon put it in the palm of your hand and lean your head back and squeeze the lemon into your mouth and let it onto your tongue to the back of your throat, swallowing the juice. Squeezing the juice out of the lemon onto your tongue, swallowing. Okay that’s the end of the experiment.
I’d like to see how this works. How many of you how many of you did saliva begin to flow in your mouth? Smelling. You’re smelling, okay. So I always find it quite amazing in a way because logically, rationally, we know there’s no lemon there, right?
But the fact that part of our mind reacts as if there were a lemon there in reality. So how do we know that? Because we reacted physiologically. We’re salivated. So that’s an indication that some part of our mind at least was taking what was merely a mental image, something completely in our imagination as if it were the reality, as if it were the real thing.
It seems that that thought is reality. And this has really important implications. From the point of view of what we call Buddhist epistemology. Epistemology, it’s a big word but it doesn’t have to be so mysterious. It simply means it’s an area of metaphysical study where we try to understand how it is we know.
The area of of how we know things. In that area of study, all conceptual consciousness are mistaken. So all are conceptual consciousness. By conceptual consciousness, I mean thought consciousnesses. The types of consciousness which get at the object by way of an idea about it, by way of a mental image, they’re all mistaken.
This is not to say that they’re not correct. They can be correct. When I think I’m thinking when I’m sitting here in this room and I’m thinking about my bedroom, I’m thinking, oh, if I’m sitting on my bed, my my desk is to my left. That’s correct. It is to my left.
Why is the conceptual conscious mistaken? Because part of our mind takes what is merely an appearance to mind to be the real thing. It’s only from that point of view that it’s said to be mistaken. We take in that thought experiment, we took what is merely an appearance of a lemon, a mental image, an idea in our mind and we took it to be the real thing And we reacted as if it were the real thing. So this can have important consequences for ourselves if we begin to expand upon it.
If I talk extremely simply, which is sometimes hard for me to do, thoughts are just like words in our head. You know, like the word dog. The word dog refers to something, an animal that has four legs and wags its tail. The word dog is not a dog, is it? It refers to something.
When words are on a page, we call them texts. When they’re spoken out loud, we call them speech. When they’re in our head, we call them thoughts. That’s roughly speaking. Now most of our thoughts are either about how we see life, you know, we call these things like opinions and attitudes so forth, ideals or beliefs or theories about life or what we want to do with our life.
Work out plans, we work out strategies, we work out goals, we work out our wishes, we work out values and so forth. More than that, our thoughts that is to say, these words in our head become mixed with the actual thing itself. This is called in some areas of modern day psychology, they call this cognitive fusion. That is to say we cannot differentiate between or at the time of our thinking we don’t differentiate between our thought about the object and the object itself. They become fused.
They become mixed. So how does this affect ourselves? What’s the implication of this? We reacted to the thought about a lemon as if there were an actual lemon there. We might react to, for example, I’m going to fail as if it’s a foregone conclusion that we’ve already failed.
Or we might react to the conclusion, I’m useless As if that were a reality. What is in fact merely a words in our head is taken to be the actual fact itself. Part of our mind is seeing that in fact. So what we think in this way makes a big deal of difference because part of our mind is taking what is merely a thought as being as if it were so in reality. For example, it seems are you following with my long hair?
It seems that and rationally you can disagree with me and I would disagree. I don’t. But in the context of the thought itself this is probably what’s occurring. When we become fused with the thought and take it, we see the thought as being reality. That is as if what we’re thinking were actually happening.
We take our thoughts as if they were truth, if we completely believe them. We take our thoughts as being important. We take them seriously and we give them our full attention. We take our thoughts as if they were orders. We almost automatically obey our own thoughts.
We take them as if they were wise. We assume that they know best and through logic then follow the advice of own thoughts. And some thoughts can be quite frightening. Even in our own head. We can see them as threats to our well-being.
So let’s do we can try another experiment. Think a thought which is of the form I am X. Am X. X can be anything. I am fat.
I am lazy. I am a bad mother. I am a bad father. I am a bad student. I’m particularly going toward the negative here and I’ll explain why we’re doing that.
There’s some type of thought that generally might disturb you. Okay? Of the form I am X. I’m stupid. I can’t do anything right.
I’m not trying to lead you into this. I’m sure you can come up with your own. But some thought I am X and try to play with it. Try to as if you fully believe it and how it affects you both in terms of your mental state, but also maybe there’s some contraction around the heart, there’s some kind of increase of blood pressure and it has some kind of bodily component to I am X. I can’t do this.
I’m bored out of my mind. Then we can, in front of that, I am X, I am lazy, I am fat. We put the phrase, I am having the thought. I am X. I am having the thought I am stupid.
I am having the thought I am fat. I am having the thought I am lazy. I am having the thought I am a bad mother. So what happens? We recognize thought as thought.
We create some distance between ourselves and our idea, the mental image that is working through our mind. We defuse, we step back and we create some space. We recognize that is, that what is appearing to my mind is not reality. It is simply an appearance within my mind. It is a thought within my mind.
I am fat or I am lazy. I am having the thought I am lazy. It is merely a thought. What are you actually knowing at that time? What is your mind actually engaged in?
You’re engaged in your being fat. You’re engaged in the thought I am fat. There’s a big difference. You’re not engaged with you’re being stupid. You’re engaged with the thought I am stupid.
There’s a big difference, isn’t We’re engaged in not in I can’t do this, we’re engaged in the thought I can’t do this. There’s a big difference between I can’t not being able to do something and the thought I can’t do this, whatever it might be. And we can so by recognizing thought as thought, we’re defusing ourselves. We’re no longer taking it as being reality, as truth. It’s merely a thought in our head.
It may be true, It may be correct. But that’s beside the point. At this point it’s only a thought, nothing more than it. We can create more distance actually. We can place it.
We can say, I notice, placing the phrase, I notice that I am having the thought I am X. I am noticing that I am having the thought I am lazy. That’s a very accurate description of what you’re actually experiencing, isn’t it? You’re noticing that you’re having the thought that you’re lazy. You’re not noticing that you’re lazy.
You’re noticing that you’re having the thought that you’re lazy. Does that have does that kind of resonate with you? I think it could become you are less likely to take what you are thinking to be reality. That is, you’re less likely to take your thoughts literally. To take your thoughts as something that is actually the thing in and of itself.
Less likely to fuse with the thought. Instead, you know, it’s a way of creating some space, way of stepping back and seeing those thoughts for what they are. They are words in our head. They are words passing through our mind. They may be correct, they may not be, whichever.
But they are only words in our head. They are not reality. They are not the thing in and of itself. But conceptual consciousnesses are easily susceptible to taking our thoughts as reality. It’s for this reason that all conceptual consciousnesses are said to be mistaken.
They can be correct, but they’re always mistaken. I realize that sounds like a contradiction. Is Saturday. It is Saturday. That’s correct.
That’s a thought. That’s a correct thought. Today is Thursday. That’s not a correct thought. So I can think, well, when sitting on my bed at home, my desk is to my left.
That’s a correct thought. How do I know? Because if invited you to my home, that you’re welcome to come, you could come and sit on my bed and you would say, yes, his desk is to the left. The thought that it’s to my right is incorrect. But both of those are mistaken.
Why? Because I’m taking what is appearing to me to be the actual fact. The thought bed as being an actual bed. The thought desk as being an actual desk. The thought left to be an actual left and so forth.
The practical implication is our ideals are something, about something no matter how accurate they might be are never the thing in itself. You know, it’s like you know, you fall in love with somebody and after six months you say, Well, you’re not quite the person I thought you were. Well, they never were to begin with. We relate with people in terms of our ideas about them. More than that, and sometimes, you know, I’m not saying that it’s not useful, but there’s always, you know we always have to be a little bit suspicious about relating with an idea about the person.
We’re filtering our impressions, we’re going to relate with this person by way of our ideas about that person. Have you ever heard the saying and it’s a very useful idea to keep in mind, the the map is not the territory. The map is not the territory. Have you ever heard that? You know, you have a map and it’s got blue lines on it, red lines and little black dots.
And it yields really valuable information, you know. But you can’t drive on this little red line. You can’t go have something to eat in one of these little black dots. These little red lines and little blue lines and little black, they correspond to a findable reality. If you follow this red line to there and they make a left on that little blue line, you’ll come to a little black dot and you can get something to eat there.
So you drive down the street and make a left and you go, oh, there’s the restaurant. There’s a findable reality according to that map. The map is not the territory though. And some maps don’t even correspond to a findable reality. Like Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.
You know, there’s a map. There’s Middle Earth and all this variety of territory and terrain and so forth. But no matter how long you search for something that corresponds to this map, you’re not going to find it. So some maps correspond to a findable reality. Some maps don’t correspond to any reality at all.
Some of our ideas correspond to a findable, are fairly accurate. And we can, you know, like my idea if across the road is a library. I’m sitting here, this is an idea in my mind. But if I were to go outside and cross the road I’d find that library. Some maps, if I had the idea across the road is a zoo.
I’ll go outside across the road, there’s no zoo there. So maps correspond to a findable reality, some don’t. Some ideas correspond to a reality, we call this correct. Some ideas don’t correspond to a reality, we call this incorrect. Nonetheless, they’re all just maps.
They’re all just ideas in our mind, within our head. So this is why, you know, introducing this notion in our meditation this morning. What is We buy into our thoughts as if they were reality. So you know we tell ourselves stories about ourselves. Some of them can be fairly accurate.
Quite often they’re not. Want to talk a little bit about that later on. But one notion, and I’m just saying this in passing because it’s quite interesting that they’re coming up with in neuropsychology is that there’s a negative bias in our thinking. And this has been evolutionary advantage toward negativity in the evolution of ourselves. And it’s like you know, can you imagine, you know, like five thousand years ago, you know, living in Adelaide.
Saying the jungles of Africa or something, You know, you’re walking down the path and you hear something and you think, ah, there’s probably a saber tooth tiger on the other side of that tree. Yeah. So you creep very cautiously around it. There wasn’t a saber tooth tiger. There was a or let’s say you don’t even go travel around the tree.
Let’s say you ran the other way. And all the time there was this delicious meal. I don’t know what it would have been. Don’t what he would have eaten five thousand years ago. Fig tree or something.
It was around the other side of that tree. So you missed out that opportunity to get those delicious figs on the other but you lived, you know, to eat another day. Okay. Because why? Because if you were biased toward the negative, you thought, oh, there’s probably a sage toothed tiger around the other side of that tree.
Then you and even though you were mistaken, you still live to find food for another day. What happens if you were positively biased? You thought, oh, there’s probably a delicious fig tree around the other side of that tree. There’s probably some food there and you just walked around it and in fact there was a saber tooth tiger. Only get to make that mistake once.
Can make the mistake about, fig trees hundreds of times and you’ll continue to live. So those individuals who were biased the tendency towards positive, they didn’t live very long and seen optimistically. Those who were biased towards seeing things in a rather negative way, they lived longer and their genes were passed on. So it seems as if, according to this idea of neurobiology, that we are there’s a certain evolutionary advantage to thinking negatively. And this also has to do with ourselves, I’m kind of jumping myself here, has to do with ourselves.
There’s a notion attention is reality. What we pay attention to becomes our individual reality. It’s not as if reality is kind of we are simply passive observers, you know, like this notion of a mirror. And we are sort of overwhelmed by the things out there. It is we are involved in co creating our reality.
What we pay attention attention to? You know, for example, you know, can and this is my own, obviously they say you teach what you need to learn. Obviously I need a lot, I have a lot to learn. And this is one area that I have had a lot of lessons, life lessons from. It’s an area of the self critic.
I don’t know if you probably you guys don’t have a self critic, do you? Is it boring? Anyway, so I can you you can do ninety nine things fairly well. Right. You do one thing wrong.
Where does your mind naturally go to? You know, just grab it like iron filings being drawn by a magnet. In bondage to it.. This is all that you’ve ever done in your life. I’m always making mistakes.
I can’t do anything right. What’s wrong with me? You know, you have a natural tendency, there’s a natural bias in what we pay attention to. And that becomes our reality of who we think we are. And it’s not only objectively true, but it doesn’t serve us very well.
It doesn’t. In fact, it becomes a tremendous limiting force in our life. Our minds are being directed. What we pay attention to, what it is that we focus on is more than not below the threshold of our present awareness. And what we go to.
Quite often it tends toward the negative and that becomes our life becomes a self defeating, self fulfilling prophecy. And this becomes a tremendously limiting force in our life. But if we can begin to not fuse ourselves with those thoughts, if we can begin to have the presence of mind to be able to recognize thought as thought, then we don’t continually buy into what our mind naturally tends toward. We don’t fuse with that and story that’s built up around that and become lost in that. So that’s, you know, this morning’s meditation, that was I think one of the skills that can be learned through that technique of noting.
Being able to recognize thought or thought. These stories that we get lost in with a central character. We experience them as if they were real, reality. And we cause ourselves a great deal of pain in a very real way. And it affects how we, the goals that we set for ourselves and how we go about relating to others.
You know, it governs much of our lives. And it has nothing to do, there’s no correspondence to any kind of reality to a large extent. You know, it’s not, you know, in talking about thought consciousness way, conceptual thinking this way, by all means we’re not putting it down. It has a very important place in our lives. You know, it’s necessary to plan, to use our, work out strategies, to dream, have goals.
It’s just that we aren’t relating with thought in a very skillful fashion and it has become dysfunctional in a way. So in learning that skill that I mentioned this morning in our meditation about noting, what am I actually involved in? Thinking. That is recognizing a thought. What am I actually experiencing? It’s only a thought.
Whether it’s a good thought or a bad thought, whether it’s an accurate thought or inaccurate, correct or correct, it’s only a thought. That’s what I’m actually experiencing. I’m not experiencing the reality. If it’s a thought about a person, I’m not experiencing that person. I’m experiencing my idea about that person.
And we have to begin to make that kind of distinction. It’s not to say that that idea about the person might not be useful at times. It might be useful. But we have to be aware that it’s only a thought. It’s not the person themselves.
More than that, we relate with reflections about, our own ideas about people and situations and things rather than the things themselves. And this can become very problematic for ourselves. So one way is simply to recognize thought as thought and creating that space. Don’t want to not engage. We don’t want to lose our emotional capacity.
We don’t want to stand apart. I think we do want to become more skillful in how we relate in the ways that we do relate. But we do want to relate. So it’s not as if we want to become detached from our emotional life and so forth. This brings us into an important area of is this okay with going here?
Brings us into another important area in working with the mind. And that is because the mind is easily susceptible to take our thoughts as the object as reality, one of the central areas of concern of Buddhism is our emotions. Now how do we distinguish Buddhism makes a distinction amongst our emotions. Positive emotions and negative emotions. We can say skillful emotions and un skillful skillful emotions.
Can say wholesome emotions, unwholesome emotions. Whatever word are we gonna. We want to make use of. There are different ways of viewing emotions. You know some modern psychologists say emotions are neutral.
They’re neither good nor bad. Okay. That’s fine. Some people, I’m thinking of Barbara Fredrickson. She wrote a book called Positivity.
She makes a distinction between positive and negative emotions. Positive emotions are enjoyable emotions. They’re pleasurable. Emotions like reverence and awe, humor, fun. We want to have them more in their pleasure.
Other emotions like, there are negative emotions. You know, how do the reason I bring this up is because how we view emotions very much shapes which emotions we unconsciously or perhaps even consciously cultivate, which we promote in our life and those that we naturally restrict in some way. We have some view about emotions. Even to feel emotions. We have some notion about is it safe to feel emotions at all and which emotions isn’t safe to feel and how much is it safe to feel those emotions.
And we may not be aware of the kind of our views around our emotions but nonetheless we have them. So how does Buddhism regard emotion? How do we distinguish between negative and positive emotions? Think Buddhism is saying that emotions, that positive emotions are beneficial and appropriate. Negative emotions are not beneficial and not appropriate.
That is the emotions have consequences, don’t they? Love has consequences. They would say love has beneficial consequences. Compassion has beneficial consequences. Hatred has consequences which are not beneficial either to oneself immediately or to others that wish to harm.
Jealousy, pride, and so forth. Moreover they’re not appropriate. What do we mean by that? Like compassion. It is appropriate in the sense that it is a wish, most essentially a compassion is a wish that another not suffer.
May you not suffer. It could be yourself or it could be another person. That quality of mind which is the wish, may you not suffer. That’s appropriate. Why?
Because people don’t want to suffer. It fits. It’s in keeping with the actual nature of the object. I don’t I wish you not to suffer. And from your side, you don’t want to suffer.
So it’s appropriate to your own feelings about yourself, how I feel about you. Whereas for example, hatred, which most essentially is the wish to harm. The wish that you suffer is not appropriate. It’s in disagreement. It’s in conflict with what it is that you wish for yourself.
So it’s not so you know, again, there’s no moral judgment being made. You know, we’re not trying when we talk about these whether to be, promoting positive emotions and beginning to diminish the force of our negative emotions. It’s not simply a, we’re not, trying to be good boys and girls. Trying to please big daddy up in the sky or something. We’re trying to create the best kind of conditions for happiness for ourselves and others.
Those emotions which are beneficial both immediately, that is to say positive emotions are experienced in a positive manner both immediately. They bring about positive consequences for yourself in the longer run and they bring about the welfare of others. Whereas negative emotions bring about the opposite. Anger is very painful. Hate is very painful even if it’s an immediate experience.
But moreover, it will bring about negative kinds of consequences in the future for yourself and it also brings harm to others. This is kind of the criteria we’re making use of. I think the point it’s not I think in general in the West, I think our natural inclination the way that our view of emotions is probably or maybe naturally in the West is that emotions which are pleasurable are positive. Emotions which are unpleasurable are negative. But in Buddhism, even emotions which we experience as not unpleasant can be positive.
For example, some type of regret. You hurt somebody and you feel sorry. That regret doesn’t feel very good. But Buddhism was saying that’s a positive. Though it doesn’t feel good, it’s still a positive emotion.
So we can’t use the feeling we can’t use the criteria of whether it’s pleasant or unpleasant in determining positive and negative emotions. It’s whether they’re beneficial or inappropriate or not. And how we distinguish our emotions to a large part how we shape our lives. How we view our emotions to a large extent determines which of them eventually dominates our way of relating with the world, shapes the way that we are. There’s a simple story about this.
It’s quite simple, but I think it’s quite effective. And how our view, which probably for many of us toward emotions, is based upon pleasure pain principle. If it feels good, it’s a good emotion. If it feels bad, it’s not a bad emotion. But maybe that doesn’t work for us all that well.
This I don’t know if you do you know the there’s a tribe of American Indians called the Cherokees, okay? This is mentioned in this. It’s just a short paragraph. Kind of a simple story that illustrates this. One evening an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people.
He said, My son, the battle is between two wolves inside us all. One is evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority. The other is good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion.
The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, Which wolf wins? The old Cherokee simply replied, The one you feed. You know, The one we feed is the one we become. So we are continuing every day in one way or another feeding one of those two wolves in terms of our expression of positive emotions, in terms of our expression of negative emotions. The Tibetan term for fact, there’s no Tibetan term for emotion.
But the word that’s being translated here in terms of negative emotion is means afflict obscure. It’s a compound word. Means to afflict, means to obscure. Negative emotions are themselves experienced as disturbing. They afflict.
But as well they prevent our mind from seeing the object for what it really is. And thereby responding to it more accurately, more appropriately, this idea of appropriateness. All negative emotions are wrong consciousnesses. Okay, so I’ve introduced another kind of a term here, wrong consciousness. The objects and this sounds really strange I think when you first hear it.
The objects of our negative emotions, and when I say negative emotions I mean like hatred and attachment and jealousy and pride do not exist. The object which is appearing to you when you’re angry at your partner, that person does not exist at all the way they’re appearing to you. Yeah? What happens? In the case of a negative emotion such as hatred, we will exaggerate.
The mind is imbalanced. It filters out. It’s not seeing the object for what in terms of it’s not seeing the object accurately. It is focusing upon particular characteristics of the object, negative objects, characteristics, exaggerating those negative characteristics and filtering out or obscuring whatever positive aspects, features that object might have. This person, at the moment when I’m angry at my partner, at that moment this isn’t logical.
We have to I think it’s necessary to be mindful enough to have a sense that there’s a great disparity between our emotional life and our logical life, our reasonable life. Otherwise, a great deal of Buddhism, a great deal of mind training doesn’t make any sense. You can say, I don’t think like that. I don’t that’s unreasonable. It is completely unreasonable, but nonetheless it’s the way our minds work.
When you’re in an emotional state, for example that of anger, what is happening at that moment, not later when you step back and you rationally think about it, you’re calm and clear and you begin to consider what’s going on, at that very moment what is appearing to you are the exaggerated negative qualities of that person and no positive qualities. There’s no one who exists like that. There’s no such person in the universe like that, the way that that person is appearing to you at that moment. That’s the person you’re angry at, though. It’s merely an appearance in your mind.
There’s no findable reality. There’s a model, there’s a map in your head, there’s an idea, which doesn’t correspond to any findable person. It’s complete mental fabrication. That’s why it’s called a wrong consciousness. It doesn’t correspond to any form of reality.
So in this way all negative emotions, attachment, hatred, jealousy, pride, they are all wrong consciousnesses. The object which is being grasped at, the object which we are angry at, the object which we’re trying to hold onto, the object we think is so wonderful doesn’t exist. It’s simply an idea in your mind which doesn’t correspond to anything in reality. Does it make any sense? Okay.
The root of all and we touched we just touched upon this this morning. The root of all negative emotions is ignorance. Ignorance is a wrong consciousness. But it’s wrong with this and it’s wrong in a particular way. And I went this is a big subject and it’s but I want to touch on it here because it it because it relates directly with our emotional life and the nature of the mind.
Ignorance is a wrong consciousness. It is wrong with respect to the way things exist. Know Buddhism, it’s wrong with regard to the nature of the self, the I. And this is one way of looking at it, okay? Just one way of looking at it.
But it’s an important way of looking at it. Buddhism is ignorance is mistaken with regard to the nature of I, self, jampa, this person who’s sitting in front of you. In this regard Buddhism is not telling anyone that they should believe that they have a self or that they don’t have a self. It is saying that when we look at the way we suffer and the way that we respond emotionally to life, it is as if we believe that we were a singular, unchanging, independent self or I. When we look for that self, we can never find it in fact.
Now okay this is another example of the fact that you say well I’ve never thought that in my life. I’ve never thought that I was single, unchanged, and independent eye. That’s not the point. This is not a reasonable, rational, logical, intellectual state of mind. It is completely an unbalanced, wrong consciousness.
Buddhism is saying, you know we are model builders. We relate to the world very much in dependence upon our ideas about the world, the models that we have about the world. Ideas, symbols, okay, our mental representations. We have a mental representation of I, self, Jampa. I relate to myself in dependence upon that idea of who I am.
Sometimes the model becomes more stable, more coherent. You know, we’re trying to understand who we really are. Would be really a if you woke up in the morning you had to figure out who you were every morning that you woke up. You never get out of bed. So we tend to hold an image of ourselves.
Well I’m this kind of person. You know. About I like this, I don’t like this, I’m this much beautiful, I’m this much ugly, I’m this much intelligent, I’m this much stupid. You know we can have all these ideas about ourselves. Fit them into a coherent, cohesive idea or model about ourselves.
And this becomes, it’s less chaotic than a real thing. You know, if you were me looking, you all look pretty stable. You all look like you know what you’re doing out there. On this side of the looking glass it’s pretty chaotic, you know. Sometimes I say very intelligent things, sometimes I say very stupid things, sometimes I think I’m handsome, sometimes I’m ugly, you know my lines go and jump jumping up and down.
But my idea about myself is quite different. It’s very stable, coherent. And sometimes it becomes easier to hold onto an idea about ourselves than the actual reality. So we begin to relate with ourselves and relate with the world in terms of our ideas about the world. This is what I was getting at previously when talking about thought consciousness.
A life so we have a model of ourselves, an idea of ourselves. That there’s something that there’s a concrete solid eye. We’re not quite sure. We never really examine it, investigate it. But there’s a sense, you know, I’m over here somewhere.
Animals, both animals and humans act as if they were an independent self, an isolated, concrete. We have emotional reactions, don’t we? Like, I can’t stay. I can’t stay. Can’t stay.
Away from me. You know, there’s something. Or, you know, I get it without you. I can’t go on like this. I.
It’s I. Or, you know, I’m the best thing that ever came to Adelaide. I’m not talking about my body. I’m not talking about my mind, I’m talking about me. I’m the best thing that ever came to Adelaide.
I should have had that, not you. And I deserve that. So it’s always around this I. So when we reflect upon our desires and our hatred, we can see that they’re always generated with the conception of a very solid self. Due to a very sense of a solid self we make a very strong distinction between oneself and other.
And consequently attachment from one’s own side and hostility toward the other side. So attitudes of desire and hatred have an exaggerated thought of I as their basis. I can’t live without you. I hate you. It’s always our life becomes a life consuming project of me versus the world out there.
You know, we have a feeling that there is something within us which is permanent. Something which endures throughout all the changes of our life. We are struggling to make sure of the permanence of the continuity of the safety of that core something at the core of our being who we identify as being who we really are. And when we look at the way that we suffer and normally think and react emotionally, it is as if we believe that we are a self that is partless, whole, enduring in an unchanging manner and existing independent of body and mind. That belief in such a type of self is what we mean by ignorance.
It is a wrong consciousness. Such a type of self does not exist at all. Due to that ignorance, we conceive of ourselves as totally separate from everything else. Based upon that, self attachment goes on to make of that I and other this project of me versus the world. There’s the world out there, there’s me over here, how am I going to protect this self over here, how am I going to make use of that world out there to enhance this self over here, this I over here?
To bring about the welfare, make this mine. Bring it over on this side of the border. And this is the and all of our all of our hostility emerges. All of our attachments arise from this basic misconception. Desire and hatred and all the various negative emotions have as their source this ignorance.
This belief in a particular type of self which is merely an idea in our mind. But we believe it’s much more. We believe it is, you know, we believe it’s more than a map, an idea, a model, an image in our head. We believe that it in fact exists the way it’s appearing to ourselves. Whether or not we are aware of it not we all harbor just such a belief.
And our afflictive emotions of attachment and hatred and so forth are all indications that we do. Just like the fact that we salivated when we imagined a lemon indicates that we took that lemon to be a reality. Hatred and pride and jealousy and attachment indicate that we take what is in fact a model of an idea, an idea of a self, to be a reality as well. They all arise in dependence upon holding on to what is in fact simply an idea in our head to be the way I really am. Ignorance is a misconception of the nature of the self.
It’s like a linchpin which holds the rest of these negative emotions in place. And this is one of the optimistic aspects of Buddhism. In our practice, we have a two tiered practice, the way that we can approach. On one level, it’s like a remedial level. We want to reduce all of these various negative emotions.
Begin to reduce the negative class of emotions, increase the positive class of emotion. Begin to increase our love, decrease our hatred, increase our generosity, decrease our attachment. We can work with each of the various afflictive emotions has a particular way of working with it, particular antidotes and so forth. But that’s on one level that it’s necessary to work with them. But another level, at the very root, we can begin to cut the root.
You know if you cut the root of a tree, then the leaves and the branches and so forth will all wither themselves. If we remove ignorance, then attachment, hatred, jealousy, pride will all cease to themselves. They all arise in dependence upon this basic misconception of the nature of the eye. So how does that I want to come back to this sevenfold division to show how that might work, yeah, just to give you a sense of you know this I didn’t go through the sevenfold division but I’m going to go backwards through it in the case of working with ignorance and then we’ll stop for a while. We started off with the wrong consciousness, Yeah, wrong consciousness which we call ignorance.
What is ignorance? What is ignorance? All conceptual consciousnesses are mistaken. Yeah. Good.
Okay. So misconception with respect to the eye. But it’s misconceiving the eye to be very solid concrete. So there is an eye. There is a self.
But okay. We have a misconception or a wrong consciousness or a wrong conception which believes that the eye exists independent of body and mind, example. It’s permanent and so forth. So we start off with the wrong consciousness. Then okay, you to a teaching or you read a book and it begins to talk about the nature of ignorance in Buddhism.
That talks about the eye and so forth. And you begin to wonder, well, that’s interesting. I never thought about it before. I wonder if really maybe maybe maybe the eye really doesn’t exist the way it appears. Maybe the eye maybe there’s no such thing as independent eye.
But probably there is. So you you anyway, the point is you start developing some kind of doubt. Doubt is a two pointed consciousness. Is it this way? Is it this way?
You can’t you’re coming to any kind of conclusion. Your mind’s wavering back and forth between possibilities. You know? Should should should I have rice for dinner or should I have pasta? That’s doubt.
Not a very important doubt, but I think that’s a doubt. Here it’s a big doubt. And how does the I exist? Maybe it really isn’t independent of existence, maybe it really is dependent of existence. So you’re doubting.
So you begin to you go to some teachings about somebody who knows what they’re talking about, and they begin to describe it in great detail. And then you come to this fourth, number four. You’re correctly assuming consciousness. So you think, Oh yeah, well okay. The eye doesn’t exist the way it appears.
There’s no such thing as an independent self. Yeah. That that’s that sounds right. So you come to a conclusion. It’s correct, but you really haven’t discovered it for yourself through your own reasoning, through your own experience.
You only assume, but it’s correct. Then you begin to use some of your reasoning. Begin to use logic. Well, you begin to look at, well if the self really did exist then there would be these faults and there would be all these logical contradictions. And you come to some very using reasoning based upon reasoning and logic and so forth, you come to some firm conclusion.
No. You come to a real understanding. No, the self doesn’t independent self doesn’t exist. Yeah? You know, it’s interesting what we call, you know sometimes we talk a lot about realizations.
It’s kind of a buzzword in Buddhism. Realizations. What do we mean by realization? I think it’s useful to think of it that it’s not a matter of getting more and more information as if becoming a Buddha were becoming an encyclopedia of knowledge. Realization is like if you were wearing sunglasses and you were in the say you went to Mount Kosciuszko or something, the Victorian Alps and where it was snowing.
And you saw the snow mountains as green because you were wearing sunglasses. Yeah? So the snow mountains appeared to you as green. And realization would be taking off the sunglasses and you see them for what they really are. They’re white, aren’t they?
And you relate with them on the basis of on a more accurate basis on the way they really are and their true nature. That’s all that realization means. It means that you you remove the superimposition or projections that we’re placing upon the object. Remember, we have our idea about the object. Our inaccurate idea about the object.
We remove that and we see the object for whatever it is. So actually it’s not an addition, taking on more information, more knowledge, it’s a removing of misconceptions, of our wrong ideas about the object. So we remove the sunglasses, we see the object for what it really is, and we begin to relate with it more accurately, More in accordance with its true nature. We don’t set up false expectations. It actually has the capacity to deliver as it appears.
We’re no longer disappointed or frustrated with it. We come to some kind of, more, skillful way of relating. Because our way of relating, our view of the object and the way it is, are in accordance. That’s why I think, Larry, the first thing I said this morning, that disparity between our views of an object, the way things are, and the way things are themselves. That disparity, that inaccuracy experiences frustration and disappointment and all the various ways that we suffer.
So the realization is removing those inaccuracies. So we come to an inferential understanding. And then finally we keep, but we’re still understanding the object by way of our idea. We have a very accurate idea of what selflessness is. And we’re working with it again and again.
Finally, we see the object directly. This means we no longer use our idea about the object in order to understand it. We are by the power of the very object we’re understanding it. Just like my eye consciousness is able to see the cup directly without my idea about that cup, likewise we come to an understanding which sees the object directly here, selflessness. It is this which is the direct antidote to ignorance.
All of these other preceding consciousnesses, even though they are correct, for example, correct assuming consciousness, even though inference is correct, they don’t have the power of mind to be able to dissipate, to be able to remove ignorance from the mind. The ignorance will continually be coming back up. You know, it’s a very, I want to say stable reoccurring pattern. It’s very deeply ingrained in the mind. It’s going to keep you know even though we try to think in the kind of analogy.
You know, somebody if you have a relationship with somebody, they’re continually lying to you. And you just don’t believe them anymore. And even when they tell you the truth, I’m sorry, just can’t believe them anymore. It’s so your way of relating is so deeply ingrained that even when they may be telling you the truth, it doesn’t have the effect as if they were telling you the truth anymore. Here our ability to see them for what it really is is such that it can overcome that inability to see the way that they are in fact telling us the truth.
That this is in fact the way it really is. The direct perception has the force of mind to be able to dissipate that pattern, that reoccurring pattern of ignorance, that misconceiving which is continually arising in such a way that it no longer arises anymore. And once ignorance is no longer arising in the mind, remember that if this is present, then this will arise. If this is not present, this will no longer arise. If ignorance is not present, all the very afflictive emotions of attachment, hatred, jealousy, and pride, they no longer will arise.
They all arise in dependence. You know, when you look at the twelve links of Dependent Origination, We have one. The very base the very origin of the twelve links of dependent origination is ignorance. And dependence upon ignorance, karma arises. And dependence upon karma, consciousness arises.
And this whole world as we know it, this conditioned existence arises. in dependence upon something else. The very fundamental cause of this entire experience as we come to know it This is what we call conditioned existence, which is by its very nature dissatisfactory, is based upon ignorance. All oh yes, there it is. It’s ignorant.
On that framed picture on the back there’s a the Wheel of Life. It’d be good teaching. The outer rim of that wheel is the twelve links of dependent origination. And the very the basis of that is ignorance. And it’s all being held in the grasp of Mara.
Mara is Mara, it Mara, usually sometimes it’s translated as a as a demon of the devil. But actually, it’s you know, in Tibetan it’s you know the Buddha is holding an amrita in his left hand and the amrita is nectar, What we call nectar in English. In Tibetan it’s dut si and dut is the Tibetan equivalent for the word mara. Si means remedy. Remedy for Mara.
The cure for Mara is really that which kills the life of our spiritual practice. So the Dharma is the remedy for Mara in whose grasp our present world view exists based upon the basis of ignorance. Anyway, that’s an idea. Should we take a break? Alright.
Is there anything you’d like to talk about before we take a break? I talk quite a lot, don’t I? Please. Yeah. Krishna?
Thought and imagination. I don’t know. I can’t even imagine. I don’t think thought and imagination. Seems as if, would you say all imagination is thought consciousness?
Yeah. I mean we’re just working with symbols aren’t we? Ideas. Kind of arranging them. Mind works, takes a symbol and puts it here and then puts this in, you know, shuffles around it.
We use our imagination. Yeah. Yeah. We we just kind of play with these symbols and putting them in different places and and creating different possibilities. Yeah.
They can yeah. Yeah. They try to threat they can imagine threats. Is it positive? That would depend upon the motivation.
Know, if you were building a bomb for the sake of destroying people then even though it was quite an ingenious device, it would probably be a negative action. So it would come down to your motivation. The why behind what you’re doing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s a good question.
In this sevenfold division, so direct perception is seen as knowing the object by way of the power of the object itself. And not by way of either. So my eye consciousness, the very first moment that I see a cup, I’m seeing the cup by way of the power of the object itself. The second moment is called, is number three, Subsequent cognition. That I’m no longer seeing the cup by way of the power of the object itself, but there’s an element of that I’m remembering the object.
By the power of my previous understanding, I’m seeing the cut by way of my previous understanding of the object. So, you’re right. You know, so in this way of this division, only the very first moment of direct perception is valid. That is say, only the first when I first turn my head and see the cup, that first moment I’m seeing the cup and I’m not seeing it by way of my ideas and moreover I’m seeing it by the power of the cup itself. The second moment I’m seeing the cup through my idea, through my previous understanding of the first moment.
It’s no longer fresh. It’s no longer an ideal consciousness. So they do they do make that distinction. You don’t see the cup as a cup? You see something.
No. But it’s not when you sort through your ideas that you actually That’s another question. I mean if yeah, I mean if somebody I don’t know. You know what yeah, don’t have to see a cup as a cup, for you to see a cup as a cup you have to know the name cup. Yeah.
But not to to see the cup. You know, for example, you know, we have a mutual friend, if we have no. If if I if I go to a party I come later on I come back and we’re talking and you and you say oh did you see John Harris? And I said no I didn’t see John Harris. I don’t know who John Harris is and you describe well he’s got he’s seven foot tall and he’s got you know weighs three hundred pounds and oh yeah I saw that guy.
Well that’s John Harris. So you didn’t see John Harris as John Harris, but you saw John Harris. But you couldn’t label it. You couldn’t give it that name, but you still saw him. Yeah, what you and he was wearing a blue tie.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. But, but, and you had direct perception of John Harris. But you didn’t know John Harris as John Harris. You couldn’t think, oh there’s John Harris because you didn’t know his name.
So, don’t have to see something you don’t have to know its name. But to be able to recognize it as such you have to know its name. Otherwise, yeah, become complicated. Anything else? No.
Okay. Shall we take a break?