Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. The provocative question closing this 46-minute session — “How do we know we’re not dreaming right now?” — grows naturally from careful philosophical argument. Ven Jampa Gendun opens with two types of faith: reasoned faith, built through logical analysis, and trusting faith, extended from confidence in the teacher’s living example. He then returns to Tsongkhapa’s Three Principal Aspects of the Path, focusing on the third aspect — seeing deeply into the nature of reality. He recaps the hearer stage’s insight that the self is not singular, unchanging, or independent, then introduces the mind-only view: that all phenomena are the same entity as mind without being mind itself, illustrated through the dream analogy and distinguished carefully from solipsism. Suited to practitioners already following the series.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 01 3 PA 1990 10 05.mp3
UUID: 00a554ba-fdee-4551-9a08-f89f0099b2e5
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Three Principal Aspects of the Path 1988-1990 (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1990-10-05
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 46.3 minutes
Words: ~5,298
The reorientation of one’s priorities, the as to what is the actual sources of happiness, which is going to help us solve our problems, involves a question of faith and aspiration. That having faith that there is a possibility to solve our problems. Both faith within ourselves that we have the basis for transformation, that having this confidence or this trust for oneself. That is to say, we begin to take ourselves seriously and begin to take responsibility and begin to seek out methods to bring about this this inner transformation. You know, having seen that we orientated ourselves from seeing our happiness and therefore the solution as the methods for finding happiness outside of ourselves to seeing that the causes for happiness are within our own mind and our problems again are within our own mind and therefore the solutions to our problems are within our own mind.
Beginning to see with one within one’s own experience the necessity to have to transform oneself. That simply merely manipulating our environment, our circumstances is at best a means to find a minor minor types of happinesses, at best a means of solving our minor problems. But the deeper problems and the finding of a more meaningful authentic way of being, meaningful authentic way of being, a real joy and real peace has to deal with one’s own mind, with one’s own inner qualities. And the only way that one will become serious about this is this continual reorientation, a consistent choice to develop oneself, to grow. And this The two causes for this are anxiety and faith.
And Tuesday night Rinpoche was talking about faith, and I just thought I would mention before it leaked out of this, cracked the vessel of myself, the two types of faith that he talked about. There are different classifications of faith, but perhaps to give some feeling about what we might mean when we talk about faith from the Buddhist point of view. The first is those those who have a higher intelligence. They they take what is being said. You know, they listen to the teachings, they study, they read books, etcetera.
And they’re able to analyze the point that’s being gotten at. They’re able to analyze with various lines of reasoning, reason analysis. And they’re able to come to some logical conclusion which has gives them a great deal of confidence that what is being talked about is in fact valid. And out of this conviction arises what is called reasoned faith. Reasoned faith.
Seeing within validating what is being said by means of their reasoning and their own experience. And this gives them the the impetus, the confidence, the energy to carry on a consistent orientation to implement those teachings, and in order to achieve that end. Now we on the other hand, those who have are like ourselves perhaps or are like myself, who have a very limited intelligence, who aren’t able to fathom the deeper explanations of what the teachings are getting at. We have to develop We too also have to develop faith, but perhaps along different lines. And this is termed trusting faith.
In that we try to understand what is being said, what is being taught, the various teachings, the four noble truths, the Two Truths, the Three Principal Aspects of the Paths. We try to validate those within our own reasoning and our own experience. We have to make this effort. But additionally, we look to the teacher, the person who is actually giving the explanation. We look to their example, you know, what type of person they are.
And I’m not talking about myself but in terms of a qualified teacher such as, you know, Kyabje Rinpoche that you look to the person who’s giving the teachings and you see that they are a happy person. They are at peace with themselves and peace with the world. That they are quite honest and straightforward. They they are emulating all the qualities that they’re talking about, that they are expressions of their teachings, that they are a living embodiment of what they’re talking about, of the teachings. And though I can’t understand everything that you’re saying and all the subtleties, all the various points that you’re making.
Still, I I because I trust in you, I can extend that for the time being temporarily till I understand teachings on my within my own experience and reasoning, I can extrapolate from your example to what you’re saying, and I will have faith in them. That means to say, I will extend myself to implement the objects of those teachings. And this is called trusting faith. Because of one’s trust in the teaching, one temporarily assumes the validity of the teachings until one can prove them for oneself and implements and practices the teachings. And we have to develop one of these two types of faith, either reason faith or trusting faith.
Faith has the idea of aspiration to achieve an end. One sees, for example, that bodhicitta sees that bodhicitta is a real solution to many of your problems. One sees that the wisdom, understanding, selflessness is a real solution to your problems, and one aspires to to incorporate that into oneself. This is the the meaning of faith. To seeing an object of respect and wishing to emulate, to bring that within your own continuum, to make it a part of yourself, to integrate the object of faith within oneself.
And this takes requires a great deal of consistency in this orientation. Know, consistently taking the direction. You know, here we take the direction of Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. And making that consistent choice, making these a priority as a real means to solve the deeper problems in your life, not the superficial difficulties, the temporal Problems which are simply an expression of underlying neurotic patterns, faulty ways of faulty viewpoints. Trying to work at perhaps a more deeper level than we’re used to.
And this requires a great deal of consistency of again and again reorientating oneself, again and again taking the direction of developing the Buddha within yourself, of implementing the methods of Dharma within the context of the spiritual community of Sangha. So making developing these two qualities of faith. Faith the stronger our faith, the the greater the consistency and the greater the the effort that we’re going to make. Out of faith arises aspiration. Out of aspiration arises effort.
Out of effort arises the result. So f faith is the is the foundation. So we we cannot idly sit by and let the teachings pass over us. We have to actively and analyze them, try to understand them. We have to actively analyze the person who’s explaining the teachings to to cause the arousal of faith to arise.
This is the first cause, you know, of this consistent path of going for refuge, of this committing ourselves again and again to our own inner development, the two causes of the awareness of anxiety and the development of faith. I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the highest assembly. From the virtuous merit that I collect by listening to the teachings, may I attain the state of Buddha to be able to benefit all sentient beings. I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma in the highest assembly. Then the virtuous merit that I collect by listening to the teachings, may I attain the state of a Buddha to be able to benefit all sentient beings.
I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the highest assembly. From the virtuous merit that I collect by listening to the teachings, may I attain a state of a Buddha to be able to benefit all sentient beings. Looking at the Three Principal Aspects of the Path, a short text by the fourteenth century yogi scholar Tsongkhapa. And the Three Principal Aspects of the Path, developing the determination to be free, opening your hearts to others, and seeing deeply into the nature of reality. And we’re slowly working our way through seeing deeply into the nature of reality, the way things actually are.
You know, the the first step in in a process of change or growth is to challenge our habitual self perception and our experience of reality are what we deem reality. As I’ve mentioned before, to the degree that our notions do not accord with the way things are, to the degree that our beliefs, ideas, our assumptions about our the world are not do not approximate the way things are in fact, to that same degree, we will experience disappointment, frustration, disappointment. Simply cannot make the world into our own self image. We cannot make it run according to our wishes. We have to live in harmony with it, or we will always be continually frustrated, disappointed, and dissatisfied.
So if our conceptions of happiness, of value, of meaning are in accord with the way things are, then we can realistically hope, expect to be able to achieve these ends of happiness, of meaning, of value, value in ourselves, and value in our our experience of life. And so the path consists of exploring all our erroneous and distorted conceptions that we have, beliefs that we have, our worldview, our crooked ways of thinking, bringing them to conscious awareness, seeing that in fact they’re not in keeping with the way things are, that they’re and conflict with the real world, contradicting them, reshaping them, and then ultimately, you know, transforming them and finally transcending them altogether. So it’s it’s a process, a a gradual unfolding of bringing to awareness these mistaken ideas, beliefs, our worldview, seeing that they are in conflict with the way things actually are, transforming them to ways of thinking, our worldview which is in harmony with the way things are, and then finally transcending all types of beliefs, ideas, and living in spontaneous suchness, the way things actually are beyond concepts, beyond any type of pattern modes of behavior at all, seeing directly how things are.
So we have to become aware that we are persistently holding on to wrong ideas. You know, we and we have to identify them, transform them so that ultimately we can transcend them. From the Buddhist point of view, a person suffers because he or she has limited viewpoint of the way things are, that we ignore other possibilities, realities, other ways of being, other views, worldviews. You know, they talk about religion, one’s religion. Lama Yeshe once said, one’s religion is the the wisdom which one has integrated into one’s consciousness.
Or we could say one’s religion is one’s worldview. Whether one calls oneself Christian or a Buddhist, it is really one one’s world worldview. How one views, for example, reality. Is it benevolent? Is it hostile?
The people around us and how are we to relate with them and how what do we think of ourselves? There’s these three areas are scopes of activity. The the world around us, including you, the people, ourselves, and then the way we relate between these two that we have to concern ourselves with. There are other levels of reality, other ways of viewing than those we now believe in. You know, we continue to to suffer because we persist in leading a life which is characterized by a stubborn closed mindedness about learning anything which would disturb our present view of reality, anything which we we we would sense as a threat to our security.
Security. And that that and that this there’s a reef not only a resistance to change, an inertia to change, but there’s a a downright working against change. Any anything which we might feel upset our sense of security, we will not only ignore but actively resist. You know, there’s a there’s a a movement toward inertia simply means that we in the sense of one is not growing, one will remain still. But there is more than simply this resistance to movement.
There is actually a entropy that is a movement toward randomness. You know, to persist in living a life characterized by ignoring the real the realities is to live not only a frustrated life, but ultimately, one that is an illusion, incomplete, that we live in an illusion. So, you know, we’re talking about seeing deeply in the nature of reality, Seeing deeply the reality seeing deep seeing into reality entails, firstly, that we we step outside of our desires and wishes about how we would like things to be, how we want them to be. But we understand the way things are in and of themselves, divorced of our mis conceptions, our our wrong ideas, our mistaken beliefs. This requires some courage, you know, to to make this effort to see reality, but to but more than just seeing reality, there are various levels of reality.
Here, we’re talking about seeing deeply into reality. And this means the final mode ultimate nature of things. And we can talk about the reality of this this table. We can talk about in terms of a carpenter might look at it as wood. A botanist would look at it as a specific species of tree.
A chemist might look at it, the various molecular makeup. An atomic physicist might look at the the electronic the subatomic particles of it. So they can all look at it from different levels and deeper and deeper into its nature. Here, we’re we’re looking at the final way the object exists. What is the ultimate way things exist?
Myself, others, you know, the entire universe, all things, all matter, minds, whatever. But if we were to ultimately look at them, their final nature, what would they appear? What would we understand? What would we find? So in coming to this understanding of the ultimate nature of objects.
There as I had mentioned, there are four readily recognizable stages, you know, just like run rungs of a ladder that we that we pass through, coming to a more and more subtle understanding, levels of understanding. And these are the hearer’s level or the hearer stage, the mind only stage, the autonomy middle way stage, and the Consequentialist Middle Way stage. These are the four stages that we we pass through in under in our understanding till we come to the final thought of the Buddha as to the actual nature of reality, the final ultimate nature of things. So, you know, these are named after schools, tenets of philosophy within Buddhism. But although they’re named after them, in fact, they represent the process of the development developmental stages of a single individual coming to a more and more subtle understanding.
And each each level of the understanding builds on a preceding one. Each each stage challenges more and more deeply our our strongly held views about the way things are, our models of reality, until finally we go beyond all various views together and we see reality directly. So we finished the first of these four stages. We finished the hearer stage. You know, the hearer the hearer does not question, call into question the the world around him.
He accepts, you know, just as in the case of a naive realist, that things are the way they appear. They truly exist. They’re solid out there, objectively existing from their own side. What he or she does call into question is the nature of the self, this I, the person, the thing that we think ourselves to be. This is called into question.
The world out there is is accepted. Let us say, the world which is other than the self is left unquestioned. But he he does call into question the personal self. What is its nature? You know, the he begins to see that that his suffering is always associated with a strong emotional attachment to self.
And so he begins to call call into question the self in trying to understand the problem of suffering, this I. And he begins to see that he has innate by innate instinctive, one which is not learned but which has is encoded in our very in our mind. He has an innate tendency to grasp at a singular, singular, unchanging, independent self, instinctively trying to fabricate such a self type of self. And in a more subtle level, which we discussed, a type of self which is called substantially existent or self sufficient self. So in trying to understand this self that he’s grasping at, he makes use of what we call the four essentials.
They’re making it you know, in order to gain a cognition of selflessness, you know, based upon generating controlled, well formed contradictions. You know, if he if he if he gives the the requisite commitment to logic, to to reason, then the force of realizing a particular viewpoint or attitude is baseless. You know, he he has a viewpoint. He has an attitude, and he begins to see. And this attitude or viewpoint is is conceiving of a certain type of self, this I, this the person that I I habitually conceive myself to be when when I don’t analyze the nature of myself.
The person who who worries about the future, the person who’s hurt when they’re called a bad name. This I which is jealous, which becomes angry, which is so attached. He begins to see that all of this suffering is always associated. There’s always when there’s suffering, there’s always at the same time, there’s always this grasping at a certain type of self, a certain type of eye. So he begins to look.
Well, you know, if there’s always suffering when I’m when this is present and I don’t want to suffer, I better check up. What is the nature of this I? What is the nature of this self? And he begins to see that, in fact, his conception, his belief in such such a type of self, and here we’re talking about a singular, unchanging, independent self, a self sufficient, substantially existent self, was baseless. It didn’t it had no reference in reality.
He was grasping at something which didn’t exist. He was fabricating something which, in fact, had no reality. And in order to come to this and he understands that there was a lack of such a type of self. There is a selflessness of this type of self. He makes use of the four essentials, and we went through these four essentials.
The essential of ascertaining the object of negation. What type of self does is he actually grasping for? The object of negation. The object which we’re trying to refute. Singular, independent, unchanging type of self, for example.
Then we we the ascertaining the of ascertaining the pervasion. The essential of ascertaining the lack of oneness. The essential of ascertaining the lack of difference. Making use of these four essentials, he is able to gain total conviction, to see, to understand for himself that his habitual grasping at a particular type of self was mistaken, that such a type of self, in fact, does not exist. It has never existed at any time, at any place.
And dependence upon these these four essentials, the hearer realizes that a singular, unchanging, independent self and a self sufficient self, like, substantially existent self cannot be found upon analysis. And that such a type of self is merely appears it appears through the influence of ignorance, through the influence of of misconception. But in fact, it doesn’t exist in reality. All of the suffering, all of the afflictive emotions which arise in dependence upon this misconception, this grasping of such a type of self, fade away because they no longer have a basis for their arising. All our difficulties at this stage, all our problems, all our anger, hatred, jealousy arise on the basis of a misconception, misconceiving the nature of the self.
Once we understand that the the we are able to remove this misconception, then we remove the primary cause for all of these misconceptions, all of these mistaken afflicted emotions, and therefore all of the suffering which which ensues from these mistaken modes of being disappear. There is a cell. It is changing. It is dependent. It’s dependent.
It’s constant moment by moment is changing. It’s a manner of speaking. It’s a conventionality which we designate to the body and mind. Nothing more than that. We misconceive.
We we try to make it something into very solid, concrete, and the dependence upon that, all our various difficulties arise. Through this analysis, the hearer removes a coarse level of ignorance. Now we’re moving through stages in order to remove ignorance to see to develop the wisdom, understanding, emptiness, the ultimate nature of reality. So through this understanding, they hear at this stage has removed a coarse level of ignorance, but we still have more levels like peeling an onion. We peeled away a layer.
Now we’ve got to keep on peeling away. And moving closer and closer to the wisdom, understanding the ultimate nature of reality. So in order to remove more subtle levels of ignorance, in order to move closer to the final mode of reality, we have to pass on to the mind only stage, the second stage in this this progression. I mean, it’s only by by removing ignorance completely and all of its traces of ignorance from our mind stream that we can the fullness of human potential can be realized. It’s only by removing completely all misconceptions from the mind that we’re able to reach a state of perfect, complete awakening, that we come out we awaken from our trance that we are presently in.
These veils are lifted. And this state is, you know, is characterized by complete inner peace, inner peace within and through the force of one’s compassion working without with skillful means to bring about that same awakening for all sentient being. This is the complete actualization of the human potential, and this can only arise by the complete elimination of ignorance along with its traces. So in the with such an aspiration to benefit all sentient beings as a basis, then we we move on to the next stage, and that is the, you know, the mind only stage. So the you know, as I mentioned, the the hearer takes for granted a world out there, a world beyond the senses.
At the mind only stage or in Sanskrit Sanskrit, the mind only stage, this the world out there beyond the senses is now brought into question. So this stage is called mind only because, you know, this this school of thought asserts that all phenomena are the nature are are of the nature or are the entity of mind. There is only mind. All phenomena, merely mind. All phenomena are of the nature or the same entity as mind.
Now when we say this, we have trying to understand what we’re getting at here is that this is not the same as asserting that all phenomena are mind. If we said that all phenomena were mind, then this table would be mind. Minds are perceivers. They know things. And if this table were mine, then objects such as this table would would be perceivers, would absurd absurdly be perceivers.
Cars, books, houses would be perceivers, would be knowers. All things are not mind. All things are the same entity of mind as mind. And this may sound like just some kind of technical distinction, but maybe we can make it clear. All things are in the nature of mind.
All things are the same entity as mind, but they are not mind. This table is not mind. It is not a perceiver. It is not a knower. Minds are knowers.
They perceive things. And it just you know, just as dream objects are not mind. You know, you have a dream, and in the dream, there are houses, there are tables. And those how those dream houses, dream tables are not mind. They are the object of mind, but they are not mind.
They are the but they are not the same entity of they are the same entity of mind. They are not separate from the mind, but they are not mind. The dream objects, all the various objects which occur in a dream, houses, people, trees, tables, they they don’t exist anywhere else but in your mind, but they are not not mind. Therefore, we say they are the same entity in mind, same nature as mind. But but the but the dream table is not a knower.
It doesn’t have an it doesn’t it doesn’t observe objects. It is simply an object of mental consciousness. It is not it is not outside of the mind. It is within the mind. It’s within the entity entity of mind.
It’s not separate from the mind, but it’s not mind. Does that make a little bit of sense? So when they say mind only, they’re not this is they’re not saying that everything, all this stuff is mine, consciousness, that it knows things. You know, this table doesn’t know anything, but it’s not a separate entity from my mind. Just as a dream table is not a separate entity from the from the dream mind, from the dream consciousness.
Nothing it doesn’t exist outside of this table does not exist outside of my mind. Nothing exists external to my mind. Everything is within the same entity as my mind. We’ll make this as we go along. Hopefully, it’ll become clear.
You know, we’ve been so neither does the practitioner of the mind only stage take what you know, there’s a called solipsism. Solipsism view. Solipsism view. Is to say that the world is one’s own invention. The the that nothing exists outside of myself.
This is just this whole thing is just my one big dream, the whole entire universe. You know, this is the view solipsism —Lama Losang Tubwang Dorje Chang — it is a metaphysical view that the self is the only knowable or that the only existent. There was only me. I’m just dreaming of this whole thing. You’re just my you’re just in my dream.
You know, this this this fear. So this the state mind only is not taking this position, that everything is simply my my my mind, that you are, you know, you people sitting there are are simply a fantasy of my mind. You know, he understands for for one thing. The this practitioner understands, you know, he’s able to avoid this view because he already realizes that selflessness. He already has realized selflessness, that there’s no the nonexistence of a self that could be a creator of such a type of fantasy world.
There’s no there’s no there’s no agent creating this fantasy world. Also, though all phenomena are the same entity as mind, all phenomena are not the same entity as my mind. Unless, of course, I’m omniscient, which I’m not. Not not not all phenomena exist for each of us. Not all thing you know, the you know, what what they’re serving in a restaurant in Kandahar, Afghanistan at this moment is not an object that exists for me.
It is for some person sitting at a table in Kandahar, Afghanistan at this moment, whatever he’s eating. Not all phenomena are exist for me. For something to exist, it doesn’t have to exist for me. Therefore, for something to exist, it doesn’t have to be the same entity as my mind, but it has to be the same entity of a mind, for example, omniscient mind. So therefore, we can say that all phenomena are the same entity as mind, but not that but all phenomena are not the same entity as this particular mind, my mind.
Not all particular mind, my mind. All the objects which I perceive are the same entity as my mind. But anything which but everything that exists doesn’t have to be. I don’t necessarily perceive. So we can say in general that all phenomena are the same entity as mind because all phenomena are objects of perception of, for example, omniscient consciousness, which perceives all objects.
And therefore, all objects are the same entity as that mind. So this this practitioner, he has he understands that there’s no previously from his previous understanding, he has gained insight that there is no self sufficient substantial existent self with within the aggregates, within the aggregates of forms, feelings, perceptions, thought constructions, and consciousness, or we can just say mind and body. Now he he begins to look at the aggregates more closer, more detail. And he begins to realize that the divisions of each moment of awareness in into an inner perceiver and an outer perceived object is a conceptual invention. This that is to say external objects are a fabrication of the mind.
External objects. We and we’re talking about from a particular viewpoint of the of the mind only stage. This this appearance of things to exist out there, to my own mind, this table, people, building, is merely a misconception of my mind. It’s a fabrication of my mind, that things exist external to my mind. For example, you know, again, coming back to the dream example, which is a very good example, all the way through this understanding.
In in a dream, one experiences inner perceiving moments of consciousness, aware of seemingly outer perceived objects. For example, one experiences an eye consciousness in a dream. One experiences an eye consciousness perceiving an the object of a, say, a tiger, and one becomes afraid. In a dream, one has the experiences an inner perceiver that is an eye consciousness being aware of what what appears to be an external object, some kind of tiger. And out of this, one one becomes afraid.
But but when we wake up from the dream, we realize that that there was no outer perceived tiger. There was no outer perceived object at all. That there was that there was no tiger outside of the mind itself. Though there appeared to be a tiger outside the mind, there was in fact no tiger. That both the the eye consciousness, the inner perceiver, and the perceived object were simply different manifestations of the mind.
Both the inner perceiver in a dream, the eye consciousness, and the object perceived, the tiger, were just manifestations of a single mind. Both the eye consciousness and the tiger seen were simply different manifestations of mind. So this, you know, this shows that mere appearances of seemingly outer perceived object is not proof that they’re that they in fact exist, that there is any substance other than mind anywhere. You know, you know, furthermore, the the Buddhist said that the three realms are the three realms of existence are merely mind. And for we can, you know, we can ask a question.
Maybe we can talk about this a little bit. How do we know that we’re not dreaming at this at this very moment? Is there any way that we can establish? What reason can we give to prove that we’re not dreaming at this very moment? And what?
And what happened? You have pain? You have bad pain in a dream? Could you there any reason why you couldn’t conceive of pinching yourself in a dream and experiencing pain? So that’s how can we prove that we’re not dreaming at this very moment?