Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. A quote from psychoanalyst Erich Fromm — that the average person is “half asleep,” living on fictions rather than reality — opens this 47-minute session and sets the frame for everything that follows. Ven Jampa Gendun links the idea to mindfulness practice as a path toward wakefulness, then shares a candid personal story about his 1960s California years and the discovery that real freedom is an inner matter rather than a social one. The session then turns to the Three Principal Aspects of the Path, focusing on the third aspect — seeing the nature of reality — at what Gendun calls the Hearer stage. He walks students through the first of four key analytical steps: identifying the felt sense of an unchanging, singular, independent self, illustrated by a ghost analogy that shows why you cannot refute what you have not clearly recognized.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 07 3 PA 1989 09 08.mp3
UUID: 84a55f46-d593-417f-86ba-f87aef31006a
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Three Principal Aspects of the Path 1988-1990 (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1989-09-08
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 46.9 minutes
Words: ~5,534
It’s by an American psychoanalyst, Erich Fromm. He’s talking about our normal everyday ordinary waking consciousness that we conduct our life with. The average person, while he thinks he is awake, actually is half asleep. By half asleep, I mean that his contact with reality is a very partial one. Most of what he believes is to be reality, is a set of fictions which his mind constructs.
He is aware of reality only to the degree which his social functioning makes it necessary. He is aware of his fellow man in as much as he needs to cooperate with them. He is aware of his material and social reality in as much as he needs to be aware of it in order to manipulate it. He is aware of reality to the extent to which the goal of survival makes such awareness necessary. The average person’s consciousness is mainly false consciousness consisting of fictions and illusions while precisely what he is not aware of is reality.
In as much as consciousness represents only a small sector of socially patterned experience and unconsciousness represents the richness and depth of universal man, The state of repressiveness results in the fact that I, the accidental social person, is separated from me, the whole human person. I am a stranger to myself. And to the same degree, everybody is a stranger to me. I am cut off from what the vast area of experience which is human and remains a fragment of a man, a cripple, where experience is only a small part of what is real to him and what is real to others. Most of our life lies at what is now an unconscious level.
All the various influences, the various forces which control our awakened states, which control the various states of mind which arise, the way we react, way we relate with others are beyond our conscious, present conscious awareness. So the process of meditation is to help to bring to awareness all that is at present unconscious to to to become awake in the fullest sense, in the fullest sense of being reborn, to begin to integrate in all of that part of our self which remains in the dim darkness of the cavern of our unconsciousness. You know, to begin to integrate into our waking state. In order to do that we have to become aware of it. And this we have to step outside of our boundaries, step beyond our fictions, our fantasy world, and get in touch with the way things in fact are, the reality of our situations.
To step beyond ego. You know the the basis of Buddhism, perhaps any religion or any any sort of growth, is that the the fact of the situation, the reality, the truth if you like, is therapeutic if we’re willing to face it, if we’re willing to get in touch with it. But this requires a great deal of awareness. It requires a great deal of willingness and patience, determination to come into contact with the way things actually are. Know devoid of our misconceptions, our preconceptions.
To practice touching reality, to become aware, is to grow and heal ourselves. To become aware of our wounds and let them bleed so that we can, from them, grow in compassion and learn about ourselves and learn about others and how to relate with others. Getting to know in fact who we are, beginning to turn our attention to this dimly known unlit darkness within ourselves. Maybe that’s something to do with meditation. So we’ve been practicing at the beginning of our talks the simple fact of mindfulness of breathing.
Simply to become aware of something which is real, to be in the present moment, to step outside of our fantasies and memories and deal with the actual situation as it is, how it’s evolving. A very simple minded way to become sane, to get in touch with what is actually happening within ourselves, to reorientate ourselves from our preoccupation with manipulation, with materialism, you know, all of what was said are condition factors which make us half asleep and try to become awake, to get in contact with the way things are to become more aware and to grow. So if we can This is a simple process of awareness, of coming again and again into contact with the reality. The reality of our situation that the breath is moving in, the breath is moving out. You know, a simple mind approach to sanity and being willing to what they call in Zen, to keep your seat.
Neither to indulge nor to repress all the material that’s going to be coming up, which is going to be bubbling up to the surface once the waters begin to calm down. To be willing to face who you are and who you are maybe much more than ever you had hoped to be. Hopefully, we’re going to talk a little bit about this when we talk about refuge. We have to become we have to get to know ourselves in a very intimate level and be willing to deal with that intimate level of what we find there and begin to allow it to express ourselves. Otherwise, we’re going to always continue to feel this sense of inauthenticity or this alienness that we’re cut off from a very important part of ourselves and thereby cut off from others, that we don’t understand who we in fact are.
It’s simply the process of awareness. That is awareness simply means to be sensitive. You know we’re we’re vulnerable beings. To be human means to be vulnerable and to be willing to bear with that vulnerability. To actually not only accept one’s vulnerability but to sensitize oneself even greater and greater to a greater depth.
And that we have a choice of how we deal with our our humanness. We can either regress to the stage of a child and further in the sense of withdrawing into a fantasy, withdrawing into our memories. We can begin to desensitize ourselves to the point where we can become a stone. You know, as I mentioned before, a stone doesn’t feel any pain, but nor does it feel any love. It doesn’t feel any beauty.
It doesn’t experience anything. And this is the way most of us are leading our lives. One hollow experience to another. And it’s simply on the treadmill of seeking something and never quite finding any inner satisfaction. So the process of finding beauty, finding joy may involve coming in contact with pain, becoming more sensitive to all that we are.
And if we’re going to take one side of the coin, the beautiful, we may have to accept the other side, the ugliness. And so we can develop the ability to accept who in fact we are and understand that we’re vulnerable human beings and begin to be gentle with ourselves. Be accepting. So the process of simply accepting whatever comes up in the course of your meditation without repression, without indulgence is like a training. In a way, this training will carry over into the rest of your life.
We can become more accepting of ourselves, more gentle with ourselves, admit to our vulnerabilities, sensitize ourselves to ourselves, begin to integrate those parts of our which have been repressed up to now into ourselves. We can become more accepting toward others. We can become more gentle with others. We can be willing to integrate others into our life. You know, the way we treat our deeper selves is reflected in the way we treat others.
And very much the way we see others is simply a projection of what we have lost within ourselves, or what we have to deal with within ourselves. So if we could simply use this simple minded method of sanity, this idea of getting in touch with the reality of our present situation, now accepting it, sensitizing ourselves to it, becoming more aware, neither indulging nor repressing. And this, I think, is a very practical method to become whole within ourselves and to find meaning with others that we don’t have to have this constant feeling of separateness from ourselves, from others, from our environment. We can create some integration, some ultimate feeling of well-being about ourselves, accepting ourselves, and be gentle with ourselves. So maybe we can begin with the mindfulness of breathing meditation.
Then we’re going to do mindfulness of breathing, as has been mentioned. And after a few minutes, we’re going to do choiceless awareness. And this simply is allowing the mind to be drawn to whatever object it naturally tends toward, whatever it naturally seeks to become involved in. We’re not going to control the mind, but we’re going to remain aware from moment to moment, noting within your mind softly. You know, whether it’s listening to the heater fan blowing, whether it’s thoughts thinking, thinking, hearing, hearing, feeling, sensing, smelling, seeing, touching, moment to moment.
Just knowing. Simply that. Just to remain in awareness without trying to control or influence the mind in any way. Simply allow the mind to become involved in any object it naturally tends toward. Don’t try to influence, but maintain your awareness, softly noting mentally whatever your mind is involved in moment by moment.
Maintain your awareness. Then we’ll recite the verse of going for refuge. And last week, we talked a little bit about this idea of beginning again. I mentioned my stay at in a monastery in Thailand. And the usual advice, Begin again, start all over again, start anew, whatever is going in the past.
And that’s in the past. We can’t change the past, but we can change our attitude toward it. The idea of beginning again and again. The idea of beginner’s minds. And Suzuki Roshi who lived in America for a number of years, the Zen master.
There’s a book called Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. You know, always questioning, always trying to be aware of what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. Where we want to go and if what we’re doing is taking us where we want to go. And seeing things anew, always this constant searching, exploring perhaps only to arrive at where we started but to know the place for the first time. All these auspicious beginnings.
You know, it seems as if a spiritual path, a path of growth is this constant beginning of trying, of transcending, growing, and beginning again, trying again. You know, I don’t know if I ever told you a little bit about myself when I was in the United States. I haven’t been back to the States in about I think it’s been about sixteen years. But two years before that, I was divorced. I was going to university.
And when I got when my wife left, I dropped out of the university. And I began to realize that having come from Ohio, which is a great place to be from, how much once I got to California, and you know, California is very much of a supermarket where there’s just about everything going on twenty four hours a day. Whatever you want, it’s there. And I began to you know, there were people who had this great idea of a way of life which was involved in trying to be happy. I never thought about this possibility before.
In Ohio, I don’t think anybody really thinks about being happy. Mainly, you do what is expected of you. Was during the Vietnam protest and people were talking about the flower power dropping out and turning on. And people were talking about how society was controlling us. And I had never really I think I was a little bit aware, I guess is what you call I thought, What?
You know, society is doing exactly what I wanted, I thought, at that time. Not until I went to California and then I began to meet a different type of mentality. There were people who were simply interested in doing what made them happy. No matter where that might lead them, they were willing to experiment, to be their own person, to be themselves to as large a degree as they could. Like most of the people then, I dropped out.
I guess you would say in a way, grew long hair and had a beard. And I got a place in the mountains and a cabin. It was quite beautiful. I don’t know. But, you know, I began to notice there were times you know, I wanted to be free, this idea of freedom.
I began to sense that I wasn’t quite sure what that word means. And it’s still changing its meaning for me even now what the word freedom means. But I had some conception of what that word meant to me at least then. And I wanted that end. I wanted to be free.
And dropping out and isolating myself with the rest of the hippies, I thought, well, I’m free. I’ve gotten beyond all the social conditioning. But I began to notice that there were moments when anger was in my mind and it made me unhappy. I didn’t want to be angry. There were moments when I was jealous and it made me unhappy.
I didn’t want to be jealous. And there were moments when I had attachment. And I didn’t want to be attached because it made me unhappy. It hurt. And I removed myself from my social situations and social pressures to a large degree.
But to a large degree, I still wasn’t free. I was still bound, something I couldn’t get away from, that something was in my own mind. And I began to develop this some understanding perhaps, you know. Even a person from Ohio can learn that freedom is very much freedom within your own mind, going beyond the pressures, the conditioning within one’s own mind. In all the various conditions, our past history, to cease to remain a victim of who we have been, to be reborn fully, to who we can become.
And so I guess I developed some determination to be free with that understanding. And I didn’t want to be I still don’t want to be. There are moments when I find myself being petty, when I find myself caught up in some narrow minded hang up, some childhood issues completely dominating my present life. And when I finally realized that, then I have to shake myself. That’s when I determine even more.
I want to be free, whatever that means. Know, to it’s almost you want to fly. Sometimes I want to fly, that kind of sense. You know, to be alive, to be free, free of all that garbage which we’re bound to. Not only free of externals, but also free of anything which reduces me to pattern behavior, which reduces my feeling of aliveness, which reduces my feeling of authenticity, that I’m a whole person.
I wanted to be free, whatever that might mean. I wanted to be a Buddha, whatever that might mean. I wanted to be a happy, loving, healthy, sane human being, whatever that might be. You know, what does a person like Mother Teresa What goes through her mind? What goes through the Dalai Lama’s mind?
I was talking about Suzuki Roshi in his book, Beginner’s Mind. Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. I might have read this before. But there is no certain way that exists permanently. There is no way set up for us.
Moment by moment, we have to find our own way. Some idea or perfection or some perfect way which is set up by someone else is not the true way. Each of us must make his own true way. And when we do, that way will express the universal way. That is the mystery.
When you understand one thing through and through, you understand everything. When you understand When you try to understand everything, you will not understand anything. The best way is to understand yourself, and then you will understand everything. We’re not trying to be good Buddhists or good Christians, perfect Christians, perfect Buddhists, perfect atheists, whatever we are. We might like to be Buddhists, we might like to be Christs, that we have that potential.
It’s just that we want to be happy, we want to be healthy, we want to be sane, loving human beings, we want to be able to act appropriately rather than perfectly perhaps. Appropriate actions in an imperfect world. So, begin our journey to becoming that which we can become. We begin to try to find our own religion. The religion that we get acquainted with from outside, from books of scripture, can in no way become our own religion.
Its association with us is only a matter of habit. To unfold one’s religion within oneself is a lifelong aspiration of every human soul. I think this is the unfolding of one’s own religion within oneself. It is our refuge. It’s the way we’re going to solve our problems, to get in contact with our problems and begin to solve them.
You know, the process of spiritual growth, psychological growth is not simply a matter of skillful avoidance of problems or pains. Now, if I would have continued that verse, it would have said that this unfolding process begins with an acute awareness of suffering. Beginning to acknowledge one’s suffering. Not indulgent, simply to acknowledge it, not to repress it, but simply to acknowledge it and beginning to work with it. You know, we have no choice.
As I said, we’re half awake. Once you’re a little awake, then there’s no going back to sleep. You have to carry on. There’s always going to be this unfinished business, you know, which is it’s always going to haunt you. I read one more quote.
It’s talking about the idea of unfolding. The idea of that we can solve our problems. Within Zen Buddhism, there’s an expression, if you see the Buddha on the road, kill him. You know, this verse even includes that. So I’ll say that.
It says, Ideals are definitely unstable, and the better the ideal, the more volatile it is. That’s because only the better ideals turn into dogma. And it is this process whereby a fresh stimulating human helpful ideal is changed into a robot dogma. The problem starts at the secondary level, not with the originator or the developer of the ideal, but with the people who are attracted by it, who adopt it, who cling to it until the last nail breaks and who invariably lack the overview, flexibility, imagination, and most importantly sense of humor to maintain it in the spirit of which it was hatched. Ideas are made by masters, dogma by disciples, and the Buddha is always killed on the road.
The idea, if you see the Buddha on the road, kill him. If we see the Buddha outside of ourselves, then we’re looking in the wrong place. If we see the solutions to our problems outside of ourselves, then we’re looking in the wrong place. There’s a tendency today to absolve individuals of moral responsibility and treat them as victims of social circumstances. You buy that, you pay with your soul.
It’s not men who limit women. It’s not straights who limit gays. It’s not whites who limit blacks. What limits people is a lack of character. What limits people is that they don’t have the fucking nerve to or the imagination to star in their own movie, let alone direct it.
Yuck. So within the great vehicle, within the Mahāyāna, we not only have to set up become the star of our own movie, the director of our own movie, we have to build a theater so other people can, before they have a chance to, get their cast together and their stage and all the material that they need to make their movie, that they can come and watch our movie and perhaps learn a little bit about it, how to go about putting on a great production. Know, going for refuge to oneself, finding the solutions, the answers within oneself. To the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha, I go for refuge until I’m enlightened. This is the merit I create by practicing giving any other perfections.
May I attain Buddhahood for the sake of all beings. To the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha, I go for refuge until I am enlightened. Through the merit I create by practicing giving any other perfections, may I attain Buddhahood for the sake of all beings. To the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha, I go for refuge until I am enlightened. Through the merit I create by practicing giving any other perfections, may I attain Buddhahood for the sake of all beings.
So we’re discussing the three principal aspects of the path. Developing the determination to be free, opening our hearts to others and seeing deeply into the nature of reality within that latter subject, within that latter principal aspect of the path. Seeing deeply into the nature of reality. And we’re discussing the Hearer stage out of the four stages that we’re going to look at.
The initial stage. I’ve seen deeply into the nature of reality and beginning to understand the nature of the self. Who in fact we are. You know, we’re investigating the nature of the self. At this level, we’re looking at an unchanging, singular, independent self.
What we’re going to look at as we move up through these four levels is going to become more and more subtle. Know, like moving up through the rungs of a ladder. We’re going to use the bottom rung to step up to the next rung. We all act as if we had an unchanging, singular, independent self. This is not something consciously constructed.
It’s instinctive. Animals, babies, they have the same instinct. It’s our constant preoccupation to protect and foster the self which we imagine ourselves to be. We respond emotionally to life from a belief in such a type of self. It’s an emotional response.
It’s not an intellectual construct. We haven’t created constantly this type of self. Now, we didn’t believe, and we’re going to take these three factors, unchanging, singular, independent self. If we didn’t believe in an unchanging self. You we don’t you may say, I don’t constantly feel like that.
When I look at myself, I don’t think, Wow, I have an unchanging self. I have a singular self. I have an independent self. Probably, you haven’t considered who yourself is, but when you begin to look at it, you say, I don’t think of myself that way. But there are signs that in fact, beneath the threshold of awareness that such a belief exists, that we’re holding on to that type of a model, type of conception of such a type of self.
For example, with the first, the unchanging self. If we didn’t believe in an unchanging self, why would we constantly be so anxious about what’s going to happen tomorrow, what’s going to happen next year, for example, in the future. You know if the self is constantly perishing, if the self arises, it ceases. It arises, abides, it ceases. It arises, it abides, it ceases.
It’s constantly perishing moment to to moment, from moment to moment, from minute to minute, from hour to hour. The self, like all products, arises, abides, and ceases. But we hold that it’s unchanging, that it doesn’t arise, abide, and cease. If the self is constantly perishing, it would not be oneself anymore, that person in the future. This is not to say that we wouldn’t make plans.
This is not the point of what you’re going to do on your holiday next month, next year, what you’re going to do at your retirement. But we add something extra on to that planning. We add a worry about what’s going to happen in the future. If we felt that the self was actually changing, perishing, rising, abiding, and ceasing, there would still be this planning of making future considerations for this self. But there wouldn’t be this additional factor of anxiety of what’s going to happen to this self.
Because we’re trying to project the present self as being the same self which is going to undergo those future experiences, which is going to undergo old age, for example. And it’s quite reasonable to make plans. We’re talking about emotional quality which is adding a consideration, a quality, which is considering the future, when we consider the future. You know, when for example you grow depressed because about growing old. Why do you grow depressed when you think about getting old, getting losing your beauty, losing all your abilities?
Maybe you’re strong, you like to have many athletic abilities, for example. You’re very beautiful now. But when you think about losing all those, now what is it that Why does it hurt so much? This arises because of an emotional attachment to an unchanging self. If we were to, for example, to age ten years overnight, You know you went to bed, let’s say when you were seventeen, and you woke up and you had the appearance of a twenty seven year old.
And you woke up and you went to brush your teeth in the morning, and you looked, you’d freak out. But because that change comes about so gradually that we’re able to adjust our self image. But when we project ourselves in the future, we’re thinking how would this present self experience non beauty. The inability to dance, enjoy all the sports that I do now. The same self under those new conditions and an ugly body that I’m unable to engage in sports.
This self that I’m now. We’re projecting we see a type of self which is unchanging and projecting it into all these how it would experience all of these vastly different outward external situations. And we become depressed. You know, if you were a good athlete and you were crippled for some reason, you would feel very depressed. If you’re beautiful and something happened the next day and you’re ugly, you would feel depressed.
So, when we think about the future possibilities, we’re trying to project an unchanging self, this person who I am now, the unchanging it, into future possibilities. You know, the self we are now couldn’t stand to live in an old body. They couldn’t stand not to be able to enjoy our present pleasures. So there’s a belief in an unchanging self which is going to have to endure all of these changes and it’s painful. Again, okay, unchanging, singular.
The self of last year, the self of today, and next year, we sense them to be a whole. You know, these ideas are you have to get a sense of them. You know, we’re working sense of emotional responses. We’re trying to see them intellectually, but we have to get a feeling for what we’re pointing at, what this self is about. It’s more than coming to an intellectual description, but a sense, a feeling of unchanging.
A sense of whole singular unit. No parts. It mean much if I simply say singular. But what does that entail, that word? What does it feel like?
Type of self which is singular as a unit. The type of self which the self of yesterday, the self of today, and the self of tomorrow are seen not as three different selves, but there’s a feeling of amorphous mass, a unit, a single self. That’s not differentiated in time, that’s not differentiated in space. It’s something which is just looming out there in the darkness, that kind of vague mass. This sense of a type of self.
So a type of self which is not individual moments in the stream of the continuum of who I am. We have a sense of self, of a singular identity. You know self, identity, ego image, person, in this sense all being the same. You know, a singular identity as opposed to, for example, a multiplicity of identities. This constant clinging to a sense of this is who I am.
I’ve always been this way. I’m this way now. And I’m always going to be this way in the future. Don’t bother me. This is the resistance to change.
This is why it’s so difficult to change. We’re holding so tightly to a single unified ego image of our self. When we say, When I was a little boy, that I There’s a sense that I is not distinct from the I now. If we rationally think about it intellectually, oh, yes. I was a different person back then.
But when I was a little boy and then I became ten and then I went to I moved from Ohio and then I went to California and then I went to India. It seems like that eye is indistinct. Aren’t individual eyes. They aren’t constantly changing eyes. It’s like a unit of one eye, a singular eye that has experienced all of these experiences.
A sense of a singular identity running through all of this like a thread. You know, like a thread through a rosary joining all the beads together. Like something constant, unifying. A sense of self which has no parts. Now again, this cannot You have to understand that when we explain this, it seems like such a type of self could not exist.
That’s because we’re using our intellectual analysis. And we can understand it. Yes, such a type of self could not exist. But this is not the way we’re operating our emotional life. There’s a distinct difference between how we operate intellectually, rationally, and how we operate on the emotional level.
You have to become aware of that and begin to work with that actual situation. Here we’re talking about the way we’re responding emotionally to situations. We’re responding emotionally, not intellectually, but emotionally to situations on the basis of a type of a belief. A belief in a singular unchanging deep independent self. This is our emotional life.
When we begin to we’re going to use our intellect. You know, we’re going to use controlled, well-formed contradictions to show that in fact this intellectual belief, this belief is baseless. But first we’re going to ascertain the object of negation. We’re talking about what this self feels like. We have to come in contact with our emotional life.
And beneath the intellectual analysis, how we actually feel this self to exist. This is why it’s so hard to identify. You know, we’re going through these four essentials. And the first one is the essential of ascertaining the object of negation. This sense of self.
In this case, at this level, a singular, unchanging, independent self. We have to get a feeling for it. It’s not going to do us any good to read a book and it says this is what this self looks like. It’s not going to touch the object of negation. One of the first things that I mentioned was without touching the object of negation, that self, there’s no way to negate it, to refute it.
We have know what it is that doesn’t exist. We have to know how we’re grasping, what we’re grasping at, the sense of what is there. It’s like a ghost. You know, you’re you’re you’re very afraid. A child is very afraid.
And and the and the and the mother or the father comes in. Oh, it’s okay. It’s okay. Yeah. What are you afraid of?
Oh, there’s a ghost. There’s something out there. Oh, yes? You cannot show that child non ghost. You cannot say, well, is the non ghost.
Why are you getting up so upset? What they have to do you say, what did the ghost look like? Well, it it was big and it was dark and it was ugly. Oh, let’s look around the room. Is that the ghost?
No. Is that the ghost? No. Let’s look under the bed. Is that the ghost in the No.
Let’s look in the closet. Is that the ghost in No. We’ve looked everywhere that we could have found it. We haven’t found it. Oh, I guess maybe I was wrong.
And the child goes to bed. You can only show once we know what we’re looking for. And we can only point out, is this it? Is this it? There’s nowhere else to look.
So we have to identify what we’re looking for. There’s no way that we can show that child non ghost. There’s nothing that we can show that is going to ease that to show that that child’s belief is baseless. We have to go in a negative way to show that such a type of ghost doesn’t exist. We have to get a feeling for what that ghost looks like and then show