Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Ven Jampa Gendun opens this two-hour session by reading Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese” — “You do not have to be good, you do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles, repenting” — as a prompt for reflecting on self-trust and living from deep values before pivoting to formal practice. After the Heart Sūtra and a guided meditation in which students search through the body’s elements and mental aggregates for a findable “I,” he continues his commentary on the Mind Only school, explaining its three natures — imaginary, dependent, and thoroughly established — through film and dream analogies. A lively audience discussion about whether anyone can prove they are not dreaming right now grounds the philosophy in lived experience, before he explains how recognizing objects as empty of external existence dissolves attachment and aversion. Best suited to practitioners already following the series.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 27 3PA 2008 11 03.mp3
UUID: 40ae5936-4f80-452f-81eb-2562cb1f5e50
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Three Principle Aspects of the Path 2008-2009 (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 2008-11-03
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 121.0 minutes
Words: ~10,941
Can you hear me okay? I’m going to read you a piece of a bit of poetry. All right. It’s by one of my favorite poets. Her name is Mary Oliver.
Mary Oliver is an American poet. She writes a lot about nature, but sometimes she writes about people. But there’s always some kind of message. This message is fairly direct, but it might be interesting to discuss it in a way. You do not have to be good.
You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You have only to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile, the world goes on.
Meanwhile, the sun and clear pebbles of rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and rivers. Meanwhile, the wild geese high in the blue air are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting, over and over announcing your place in the family of things. So you do not have to be good. You know, I don’t know quite what she means by all that.
I can only second guess or I can misinterpret it in terms of what I think about it. You know, we don’t have to perform. Perform, we don’t have to live a life as others might think we should or we feel we should. We have you have only to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. You know, to perhaps get in touch with our deeply most held values, what matters to us, what feels right to us, what resonates at a deep level of our being to us, what makes us feel good about ourselves in this thing called life, what brings us a feeling of excitement, aliveness, joy to our life.
So I think this is in a way, I think, an appeal to our own deep basic sanity, our own natural caring, both about ourselves and about others and the world about us. So I think it’s in a way asking us to return to ourselves, what matters to ourselves. And in some ways, think, you know, we can find our way. Find that, you know, each of us has to find our own way. You know, Buddha set out a particular way.
He set out, I think, a general description of the journey, the path that we are to follow. Within that general description, we have to adapt it each to our individual needs, individual selves, our particular situations, and dispositions, and tendencies, and capacities. What is important to each of ourselves as unique, self actualizing individuals. So in a way, we have to depend upon ourselves to a great degree and find what works for ourselves and trust in ourselves and trust in our own basic sanity that we can heal ourselves, we solve our problems at a more basic level. So all of this healing process, this solving of our problems, really doesn’t depend upon the external circumstances that we oftentimes get caught up in.
Whatever situation we might find ourselves, our financial or circumstantial, the job and so forth. You know, all of these, our relations and so forth, they all contribute to a good life. But the good life is something lived out of a deeper part of our being. We can have all the things in the world and still be miserable. But if we have ourselves, and if we have joy, and from living out the kind of life that we feel is right for our individual selves, then we can respect ourselves, we can admire ourselves, and others will learn from us.
To be no one in a world which is night and day, trying to make everyone else is the most difficult fight we have to fight, and we have to fight it every day of our lives. So finding what it is, you know, we have to find the Buddha withinside of ourselves, I think, in some way or another. You know, we talk about Buddha in terms of wisdom, and love, and compassion, and inner strength, and courage. When are we going to start exercising our own wisdom? Not information or what we’ve learned from others, but what we know for ourselves, what we’ve accumulated along the road of our life up to this point through our various experiences.
When are we going to start loving? We live in such great fear, don’t we? As I like to point out, there are two basic emotions to our life: love and fear. And if we were to examine this to be the case in my life, at a deeper level, most of my motivation, most of the choices that I make and the things that I do are being in some way, directly or indirectly, driven by fear in some form or another. Trying to make myself comfortable, afraid of the unknown, maintaining my comfort zone in one way or another.
When are we going to have courage? The courage of living the kind of life that we feel is, you know, the courage of going out into the unknown. Know, living without a safety net, if you like. Taking a chance, taking a risk on our own basic goodness, on the basic goodness of life. I think these teachings are important because they can help us to learn about how to deepen our understanding about the way things actually are so that we can we can make wiser choices.
But we still have to make choices. Compassionate choices, courageous choices, but Compassionate choices, courageous choices, but we still have to make choices. And it’s the choosing of the path with heart which makes the Bodhisattva different than the ordinary individual. You know, a path of heart is you come to know it when you feel a deep inner sense of fulfillment and aliveness, maybe of joy in its treading. Even from just moment moment, once in a while, we feel good about the direction of our life and what we’re doing.
And we provide our own inspiration. We encourage ourselves by what it is, the risks that we take and what we do. And so we can do this in little ways, just making little choices. They don’t have to be overly dramatic. Maybe that would be artificial, maybe that would be just another performance in one way or another.
But choosing love when we could have chose fear, to choose to be generous when we could have chose to be selfish, choose to be little more patient, or a little more caring, kind, understanding, whatever the situation might call for. But we do have options. The choices are open to ourselves. This becomes, I guess, a refuge, doesn’t it? I go for refuge until I’m awakened to the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha.
Through my practice of generosity and the other perfections, may I become a Buddha for the sake of all sentient beings. I go for refuge until I am awakened to the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. Through my practice of generosity and the other perfections, may I become a Buddha for the sake of all sentient beings. I go for refuge until I am awakened to the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. Through my practice of generosity and the other perfections, may I become a Buddha for the sake of all sentient beings.
May all sentient beings have happiness and the causes of happiness. May all sentient beings be free from suffering and the causes of suffering. May all sentient beings be inseparable from the joy that is without sorrow. May all sentient beings abide in equanimity, free from attachment for some and aversion toward others. Thus did I hear at one time the Bhagavan was dwelling on a mass of Vultures Mountain in Rajgira, together with a great community of monks and a great community of Bodhisattvas.
At that time, the Bhagavan was absorbed in the concentration on the categories of phenomena called profound perception. Also at that time, the Bodhisattva Mahāsattva Avalokiteśvara looked upon the very practice of the profound perfection of wisdom and beheld those five aggregates also as empty of inherent nature. Then through the power of the Buddha, the Venerable Śāriputra said this to the Bodhisattva, Mahāsattva, Ārya, How should any son of the lineage train who wishes to practice the activity of the profound perfection of wisdom? He said that, and the Bodhisattva, Mahāsattva Avalokiteśvara said this to the Venerable Śāriputra, Śāriputra, any son or daughter of the lineage who wishes to practice the activity of the profound perfection of wisdom should look upon it like this correctly and repeatedly, beholding those five aggregates also as empty of inherent nature. Form is empty.
Emptiness is form. Emptiness is not other than form. Form is also not other than emptiness. In the same way, feelings, discriminations, compositional factors and consciousness are empty. Śāriputra, likewise all phenomena are emptiness, without characteristics, unproduced, unceased, stainless, not without stain, not deficient, not fulfilled.
Śāriputra, therefore, in emptiness, there is no form, no feeling, no discrimination, no compositional factors, no consciousness, no eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind, no visual form, no sound, no odor, taste, no object of touch, and no phenomena. There is no eye element so on up to and including no mind element and no mental consciousness element. There is no ignorance, no extinction of ignorance and so on up to and including no aging and death and no extinction of aging and death. Similarly, there is no suffering, origination, cessation and path. There is no exalted wisdom, no attainment, no non attainment.
Therefore, because there is no attainment, bodhisattvas rely on and dwell in the perfection of wisdom, the mind without obscuration and without fear. Having completely passed beyond error, they reach the point of nirvana. All the Buddhists who dwell in the three times also manifestly completely awakened to unsurpassable, perfect, complete enlightenment in reliance on the perfection of wisdom. Therefore, the mantra of the perfection of wisdom, the mantra of great knowledge, the unsurpassed mantra, the mantra equal to the unequaled, the mantra that thoroughly pacifies all suffering should be known as the truth since it is not false. Mantra of the perfection of wisdom is declared, Tayatha, Gate Gate Pāragate Pārasamgate Bodhi Svāhā.
Śāriputra, the Bodhisattva, mahasattva should train in the profound perfection of wisdom like that. Then the Bhagavan arose from that concentration and commended the bodhisattva, Mahāsattva Avalokiteśvara, saying, Well said, well said, son of good lineage. It is like that. It is like that. One should practice the profound perfection of wisdom, just as you have indicated, even the Tathagatas rejoice.
The Bhagavan, having thus spoken the Venerable Śāriputra, the Bodhisattva, mahasattva, Ārya Avalokiteśvara, those surrounding in their entirety, along with the worlds of gods, humans, the asuras, and Gandharvas, were overjoyed and highly praised as spoken by the Bhagavan. So if you’d like to stand up and stretch and we’ll meditate together. The Tibetan word for meditation is gom. It’s not a very exotic term. It simply means habit or familiarization or accustoming.
Meditation is a way of accustoming ourselves, getting used to some new reality, some new feeling, some new experience. And here we’re getting used to accustom ourselves to this idea of the unfindability of a fantasized self, which we, you know, we take very much for granted, at least we have taken it for granted up to now perhaps. At the Hearer stage we examined the nature of the self and we found that a unitary, let’s say partless, unchanging, independent self appears to ourselves. And it appears most vividly when we have strong emotions, both positive and negative. It appears clear, obvious, something solid, concrete, who we are, who is the subject of our experience, and then there’s the object of our various experiences.
When we search for that solid concrete self, we can’t find it. We accustom ourselves to that search and the non findability of that anything which corresponds to that appearance. And that begins to undermine the belief in its existence. It still appears, but we no longer buy into that appearance as being true. It doesn’t appear quite as solid and concrete as substantial.
It begins to whenever we think about ourselves, whenever we reflect and this can be done consciously or unconsciously we’re always working with a model of the self, an idea about the self, a self representation. No self rep the self representation is not the self. It is not the I. It is not who in fact we are. We’re always but we take that self representation with all its very characteristics.
And I I mean both in the conventional, but also in the deeper nature of the self, as we identify as being the I, the self. And this causes a lot of problems. And the deeper level, the deepest level, you know, at a superficial level. What do we do? We build up a personality, don’t we?
What is a personality? It’s a fairly persistent pattern of behavior, feelings, emotions that we’ve singled out amongst our vast repertoire of behaviors, feelings and emotions, ways of thinking, these stories. We’ve invested a great deal of attention to a particular type of behavior, a particular type of feeling, particular type of emotion, regular patterns which seem to persist, and we develop a sense of this is who I am. They’re just fairly just regularities, but they’re only regularities due to our having singled them out and unconsciously chosen to pay attention to them, to the exclusion exclusion and overlooking other behaviors, other types, other feelings, other emotions, for one reason or another. And we develop a very we’re trying to develop a sense of security in knowing who we are.
I’m this way. This is what I do when this kind of situation arises. Is how I normally react. I’m a fairly kind person, but not terribly kind. I’m mediocre intelligence.
Given this situation, I can handle myself. So we’ve singled out particular behaviors, feelings, emotions, stories, thoughts. And we use those to have a sense of predictability, of a persistent self, who we identify with in order to find some kind of security. At least I know who I am. This has lots of ramifications on us, doesn’t it?
Even in a mundane level, psychological level, in the sense that it limits what we do seek in our life and what we do achieve in our life. Our life, to a large degree, becomes a self defeating, self fulfilling prophecy, doesn’t it? We limit ourselves. You know, it’s like we have there’s an island of ego, and outside of this island is the vast ocean of psyche. Potentials that we aren’t able to identify with, nonetheless, they reside within the nature of our own present mind.
But we as if exclude those other possibilities, other ways of being, other resources of wisdom and compassion, all the other potentialities of mind. We we hang on to this island as if all that’s this is our universe, as if that’s all there is. There’s nothing beyond the reality of ego, this personality structure that we identify so strongly with. So one of the purposes of, you know, of psychotherapy, and I think of Buddhism, is to help us not to hold so tightly to these self representations. The self representations, they have their function.
You know, if I had to wake up every morning and try to figure out what do I like, what I don’t like, you know, I wouldn’t get out of bed. Do I like to get out of bed or do I like to stand? What do I eat in the morning? Do I like muesli or do I not like muesli? You know, we’d have to figure out everything all over and over again.
So we develop a pattern of habits. It serves some practical needs. It works, more or less. But there are certain areas that it doesn’t work very well for ourselves. It limits ourselves.
You know, it’s like not holding so tightly to these self representations, these images, these conceptions about who we are, holding them like butterfly, so you don’t crush them. Allowing some fluidity, not identifying so strongly. So, at a mundane level, but even at a deeper level, we realize that we are not these self representations, in fact, at all. And it’s dependent upon identifying with these self representations. And that factor of mind, that function of mind which does that, which it believes has self representation as the actual I, the self, is ignorance.
And holding on to a substantial solid self with particular characteristics, then we develop, you know, and then the world becomes a battleground for ourselves. You know, that coupled with our own self centeredness and making, you know, this this this self this identity that we’re holding on to, this self representation, was in fact a model of ourselves as being the center of our universe, as being an isolated skin encapsulated ego. Anything which is seen as enhancing the existence, which confirms our sense of identity, we develop attachment. Anything which detracts, which we see as a threat to our self identity and the security that we’re able to get from it is seen as we develop aversion, we develop hostility. So they arise in dependence upon ignorance.
Even if we aren’t able to, you know, just this familiarization, going through this process again and again, searching again for this I, which appears so solid, so concrete, especially when we’re undergoing emotional experience. That’s again and again and again familiarizing ourselves with that unfindability. It appears, but I can’t find anything which corresponds to it again and again. It begins we begin to I take it, it begins to undermine, even on a very superficial level, the grasping about some identity, this is the way I am, and this is the way I’m always going to be.’ You not think that consciously. Probably most of us don’t.
But nonetheless, at an unconscious level, are. And I think it begins to lessen the strength that they’re grasping to such a type of self. Anyway, we’re going to meditate on the self as we did last week, okay? So we’re just as we did last week, you know, just trying to evoke an emotional experience. Experimenting.
That’s all. Just experimenting. Playing around with it. Don’t get overly serious about it. You know, just evoking some kind of strong emotion, positive, negative, whichever.
And then rather than paying attention to the object, I hate you, who is the subject of that experience, that I which is doing the hating? What does it look like, feel like? Just getting a sense as best you can, and then we’ll search for it. And we search where it appears, around this vicinity of the body and mind. We search through the elements, beginning with the body, working through the elements, earth, water, fire, wind, and then the space element, and then working with the consciousness in terms of the four remaining aggregates of feeling discriminations, compositional factors, and consciousness.
And then we’ll see if it’s well, maybe it’s separate from the body. Maybe this eye is embedded in the body, stuck somewhere in the body like a pea inside of a bowl of stones, pebbles. If I take all the pebbles out one by one, I’m going to be left with that pee left at the bottom of the bowl. So we we get rid of the body. We get rid of the of the mind.
But in terms of the four aggregates, we should be left with that that pee. We’ve gotten rid of the pebbles. We should be left with an eye on our cushion. So just doing the familiarizing again and again and again, searching and searching. I mean, yeah, you know, really trying to give it some kind of curiosity rather than going through it in kind of a mechanical way.
Really kind of like a curious scientist. Okay. So let’s take in a comfortable posture. Begin with relaxation of the body, starting at the crown of the head, the scalp. Feeling the wrinkles in your your forehead and your brow beginning to smooth out.
The pressure in and around your eyes diminishing. Muscles in the face softening, relaxing. Your jaws relaxed. Bring your awareness to the back of your neck and perhaps gently turning your head to each side a few times. Very gently loosening, stretching the muscles of the back of the neck.
Relaxing the muscles of the throat. Bringing your awareness to your upper back and shoulders. Perhaps rotating your shoulders a few times. Lifting them up towards your ears and just allowing them to drop comfortably to the sides. Feeling perhaps some kind of burden that you’ve been unknowingly carrying around on your back over the course of the day, moving down through your body into the ground.
Shoulders relax. Bring your awareness all the way down to your hands. Your hands are soft, loose. Relaxing your lower arms. Your upper arms.
Your chest is at ease. Relaxing throughout the heart area. And the lung. And the central region of your back. Stomach.
Reducing the tension that we hold in our stomach muscles, allowing your belly to go soft throughout the abdominal cavity. Keeping your back straight, your trunk erect, relax your lower back muscles. Buttocks. Throughout your upper legs, Lower legs. And finally, your feet soft, loose.
And bringing your awareness to your body in general, just roughly scanning through the body. Noticing any tightnesses, any tensions which remain in the body, any areas of discomfort. And focusing upon those areas, Breathing into the tightness. Breathing out from the tightness, feeling it loosen. Breathing into the tension.
Breathing out from the tension, it diminish. Tension, feeling it diminish. The area of discomfort, don’t avoid it or struggle against it. Just breathe into that area. And like a mother cradling her hurt child, cradle it with your breath.
Surround it with a kind, acceptance. It’s part of who you are. It needs your kind attention. Breathing in to discomfort. Breathing out, opening, accepting, softening.
Your body becoming comfortable, at ease, a feeling physical well-being pervading your entire body, just imagine as if that were the case. Nowhere to go, nothing to think about, no one to please. Just giving yourself a break. Whatever else has happened, this is a chance just to be just be your body for a few moments. Just stay with your body.
Just come back to your body. Practice the breath exercise. Just breathing in comfortably normally, breathing out, extending the exhalation, completely emptying the lungs, breathing in comfortably normally. Again, extending the exhalation. And then bring your mind to the breath.
See, easy, in and out flow of the natural breath. If it’s helpful, you could use the techniques of counting and noting, naming your present experience. Bring your mind back to the breath. Stay awake. Stay aware.
Now we’re going to meditate on the self, and we begin just by getting a sense of the self. Solid, concrete. And we do this by just evoking with an imagination or by means of remembrance some emotional situation. Somebody would have called you stupid. Hey, stupid.
Or somebody did something that you didn’t like and you got really upset, angry. And maybe you won something. I’m so happy. And a very strong sense of I. And just get a feeling, a sense of something there within you, that strong sense of I.
Solid. Okay. We’re gonna search for that eye. In the vicinity it appears is somewhere around the body and mind, perhaps on your chair, on your cushion, somewhere around there. First we’re going to look in the body.
Look at all the various elements in the body. First, the earth element, the solid, hard structures of the body beginning at the top of your head. The hair on top of your head moving down. Is that the self, the eye, the bone, the skull, the eyeballs, the organs, the tongue, the brain moving down, teeth, all the way down to the tips of your toes. And as you come along to any solid structure, hard parts, organs, and so forth, is this the eye?
Is this the self? Let’s look at the water element. The fluids, the flowing substances in the body. So again, starting at the top of your head and moving down, you come across a flow of substances as the I, the blood, saliva, mucus, urine, all the liquids in the body. What about the fire element?
The warmth of the body. Is that the self? Yeah. Maybe it’s the wind energy element, respiration, the air flowing in and out of the body, the energies moving throughout the body, or they they self, the Maybe it’s a space element. The cavities, the hollows in the body.
So starting at the crown of your head and working through. When you come across the hollow cavity, is that cavity itself. Is that the eye? Maybe it’s one of the four mental aggregates, feelings, pleasurable feelings, unpleasurable feelings, neutral feelings. Are one of them the I?
Because a pleasurable feeling is at the I, the self. What about discrimination? Recognition? The kinds of simple thoughts. This is good.
This is bad. This is a book. This is a table. Those kinds of recognitions, those kinds of thoughts, simple thoughts, are they the I the Self? Maybe it’s compositional factors, complex patterns of thought, emotions, positive emotions like compassion or wisdom, faith, patience, negative emotions, anger, jealousy, pride, attachment?
Are any of the complex patterns of thought, emotions? Are any of them the I, the self? What about consciousnesses? Eye consciousness. Consciousness which see shapes and colors, your consciousness, nose consciousness, Tongue consciousness.
The consciousness experiences objects of touch. Mental consciousness, experiences, images, and thoughts in our mind. So the body and mind are not the self, the eye. Maybe the self, the eye, is somehow embedded, is either the body or the mind, like a pea in a bowl of pebbles. So let’s remove all the peas, starting with the body.
Mentally removing your right arm, looking at it, examining it, so you don’t overlook the eye. It might be somehow embedded inside that arm. Is there anything there’s an eye in the hand and wrist and forearms? Upper arms? Is there an I in there somewhere?
Setting it aside and doing the same with the left arm. I’m setting it to the side, your right leg. And setting it to the side, left leg. Setting it aside, the trunk of the body. Is there an eye in somewhere in that trunk of the body?
Setting it to the side, and finally the the head. Is there something you can call an eye that you find in the head? And setting it to the side. So we removed all the pebbles. We removed the arms, legs, trunk, head, and mind.
And we should be left over with a pee sitting on your cushion, sitting on your chair. Is there something left over that you can identify as the I, the self? I looked, I looked, I searched. I couldn’t find it. It appears, I can’t find anything that corresponds to that appearance.
When I search for it, I can’t find it. It’s there’s nothing there. It’s just an appearance like a mirage, like a snake where there’s a rope. There’s nothing there. I can’t find that eye.
I find the absence. I find its non existence. And then bring your mind back to the breath. And get in touch with your body. And become aware of your surrounding.
So if you like to stand up and stretch, stretch, take a good stretch. It’s a long meditation. Slowly. I wonder if we’re going into this. Okay, we’re working through the four stages coming to development of an awakened mind, seeing the deeper nature of reality.
We work through the hearer stage and now we’re working through the mind only stage. As I mentioned, I think the mind only stage in Sanskrit, the Cittamātra, is probably the most complex. But it’s only a stage. And that’s not to say that we’re going to accept everything that’s said at this particular point. At the Hearer stage, we took for granted the world around us.
Accepted it as objectively existent, and we ourselves are simply passive observers, like a mirror, simply reflecting what’s already pre existing out there. The only thing that we called into question was the nature of the I, the Self. In this we found that there is a certain degree of falsity. Though a unitary, unchanging, independent self appears, it doesn’t exist. It appears, but doesn’t exist.
Moreover, at a certain level, we believe it exists. That is ignorance believes it to exist. On that basis, we react with all the various self defeating patterns of thought. At the mind only stage, we call into question this world, this appearance of the world about us. We are going to take it for granted.
We understand from the Hearer stage that mere appearance is not sufficient to establish existence. Just like the snake, where a rope appears as a snake. Merely because the snake appears doesn’t mean it exists. So we’re developing some critical mind around these appearances, and we’re calling into the question the appearance of external phenomena. This is the way the world appears to us, to exist externally.
Is that appearance true or false? Question. We come to understand, we talked about last week, using the analogy of a dream, where you’re dreaming of yourself being chased by a tiger. You see in the dream you see a tiger and you develop fear, aversion, you’re running. And we understand that entire appearance, both in terms of the object, the tiger, and the eye consciousness of the dream figure, which sees the tiger.
These are both they don’t exist in reality. They only exist within the context of the dream due to certain conditions. That both the eye consciousness, which sees the tiger and the tiger, they both arise from the mind. They are simply like they’re just the play of the mind, the dream the dream mind, the dream consciousness. They’re like like waves separate from the mind itself.
Know, they can waves on an ocean connect to various forms. They can be huge waves or just ripples and so forth, but they never separate from the ocean itself. They don’t attain a separate entity separate from the ocean. Likewise, the tiger and so forth, they don’t have a separate entity from the mind itself. Neither does the eye consciousness have a separate entity from the mind itself, the dream consciousness.
And this we can carry over into our everyday waking state. That both the eye consciousness, which sees this table, and the table do not have a separate entity apart from the mind itself. That they all rise like waves on an ocean, like waves on the mind. These waves have both the subjective, the eye consciousness, and objective aspects, the table. Eye consciousness sees the table.
They’re both the same entity as the mind. And the way that we accounted for this process by positing a type of consciousness which in the mind only is called a mind basis of all. It’s a neutral consciousness, so we said that within the Cittamātra school, the mind only school, they posit eight types of consciousnesses: eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mental consciousness, the usual six a seventh, which is called afflicted consciousness and an eighth, which is called mind basis of all. This mind basis of all is the repository of our karmic seeds. You know, all our various actions, they leave some kind of residue, they condition this mind.
We call that seeds, and these seeds are left upon the consciousness. This is what goes on to take rebirth, this mind basis of all according to the Cittamātra school. So everything we’re saying is according to this particular school. When these seeds, just like a flower seed and so forth, meet with a proper activating condition, some kind of a particular result arises. When this seed upon the mind basis of all, left by a past action, meets with a proper activating condition, some kind of result arise.
What kind of result? The result of the perceived object and the perceiving subject. An eye consciousness arises, which sees the table and the object table. They both arise from the same seed. They both arise from the same substance.
So we say that they’re of the same substance. They’re empty of being different substances. You can also say that that table is empty of existing external to the mind. It’s the same entity as the mind. Just like the waves are the same entity as the ocean, that table is the same entity as the perceiving mind.
We went on to talk about I think that’s about where we got to last week. All of the six consciousnesses, I. E, nose, tongue, body, mental consciousness. Sometimes I’m a bit concerned. Maybe I go into too much detail.
I think we find too much detail. Would you like the easy version or the difficult one? I’m with concern sometimes. Anyway, I’ll just keep struggling on in my own little way here, whatever best I can. All of these six types of consciousness, eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mental consciousness, all six types of center consciousness, you know, and their they’re objects.
Objects of eye consciousness are shapes and colors, objects of ear consciousness, sounds and so forth. They all are manifestations. They all manifest on the basis of this consciousness, this mind basis of all. Both the six types of perceiving consciousness and the six types of perceiving objects are like waves on the ocean. They never are other than ocean.
They are all partake of the same substance of the ocean. They’re like the waves on the ocean. They manifest differently. They take on different shapes. So we said that the mind only school asserts eight different types of consciousness, six usual types of consciousnesses.
And we mentioned an eighth consciousness, the mind basis of all. The seventh consciousness is called afflicted mind, and this is ignorance. Afflicted mind is the ignorant moment of consciousness that instantaneously follows a sense consciousness causing the causing the outer perceived and the inner perceiving aspects to appear as separate entities. So it is due to there’s an eye consciousness seeing the table. There’s an instant eye consciousness simply seeing the table.
Next moment that that is comes under the influence of ignorance due to which the the table and the eye consciousness perceiving the table are seen as separate entities. We come to sense there’s an external reality. There’s a reality that this table exists external to my mind, out there. The first moment of sense consciousness is free from this ignorance, but it’s so swift one is not aware of it and all one’s conceptual notions follow on the basis of the following moment, the afflicted mind. So, you know, as I mentioned, at the Hearer stage we question the appearance of the I, the Self.
Though a unitary, unchanging I Self appears, we understand it doesn’t exist. It’s a falsity. Falsity is something which appears one way and exists another. Truth is that which the it appears and the way it exists are the same. So there’s an appearance of an I which there’s an I which appears to be unitary, unchanging, independent.
It is a falsity. Why? It doesn’t exist that way. The I doesn’t exist that way. At the mind only stage, we call into question the truth or falsity of external phenomena.
And we examine them. And we come to understand. So we’re becoming a little more critical than we at the earlier stage. We don’t accept these appearances about ourselves. And we begin to examine these appearances with a little greater degree of analysis, greater degree of attention.
And we analyze these appearances, we analyze phenomena into what are called the six natures. Six natures, three natures. I’ll write them on the board. Imaginary nature. Dependent nature.
Literally this is other power. And the third is thoroughly established nature. This is emptiness in the mind only school. Here’s what we briefly go through what we mean by each of those, I think. Okay.
Imaginary nature is simply a fabrication of mind. It’s a contrivance of mind. It’s a creation only of the mind. It doesn’t exist in reality. Or I should say, there are two types of imaginary natures.
Sorry for that. Two types of imaginary natures. An existent and nonexistent. Imaginary natures. Okay?
The imaginary natures are just are conceptual. In the sense that they are that in the sense that our concepts about the world are taken to be the real thing for which our ideals about the world are taken to be the actual thing itself. We mistake the map for the actual territory. Then is to say, our idea about something is taken to be that thing in fact. Okay.
It’s purely imagining. It’s purely a fabrication of the mind. Like that snake. It’s purely a fabrication of the mind. Yeah.
There are both you know, the snake is a is a nonexistent imaginary, isn’t it? There there are existing imaginaries. For example, there aren’t very many, I’ll give you one example, is space. Unconditioned space. You know, the space if the space didn’t exist, I could move my arm.
The definition of space is the absence of obstructive contact. The absence of obstructive contact. Can infer the existence of space because I can move my arm. I can infer the absence of the obstruction of contact. Here I can’t.
No space. It’s purely a fabrication of mind. It’s an idea in my head. It but it exists. Space exists.
Why? Because that fabrication, that thought consciousness which is doing that, inferring that of its existence, it is correct consciousness. It’s not a mistaken consciousness. The the fabrication of mind, that thought consciousness which is which apprehends the snake is a mistaken consciousness. Therefore, that snake is a nonexistent imaginary.
So we’re going see how this works. We’ll just go through these terms. So, dependent nature, okay, is relative or other powered. In the sense that it has the quality of depending upon something other than itself or its existence. It depends upon causes and conditions.
Table is dependent nature. This building is a dependent nature. I am a dependent nature. I depend upon I’m other powered. Like, I come into existence in dependence upon something other than myself.
I’m dependent upon causes and conditions. This is like the, you know, if we have a map, if we have a map of some territory, that territory depends upon buildings and roads, you know, the city, things like that. The land. Finally, the third nature, thoroughly established nature. So this is the quality of being complete without any relative reference.
It’s like, what we mean by this is, it’s like the non existence of the territory in the map. The non existence of the territory in the map, or the nonexistence of the snake on the rope. The nonexistence of the snake in the rope. You know, there’s a rope there. Right?
And but we there appears to be a snake. The nonexistence of that snake in that rope is the thoroughly established. That that rope is empty of snake, isn’t it? There is no snake there. So these three natures are a very important element of the mind only stage.
The Buddha said that every phenomenon has these three natures. That he called attention to the illusionary nature of our ordinary experiences. And that it’s subject and object as different entities is an imaginary nature, a nonexistent imaginary nature. My eye consciousness perceiving the flower and that flower as being different entities, alright, is an imaginary existent imaginary nature. It’s simply from the point of view of mind only school, it’s just a fabrication of mind.
It’s fabricated under the influence of ignorance. They don’t exist. An external flower doesn’t exist. A flower in the eye consciousness apprehending that flower being different entities do not exist. They’re the same entity, in fact.
They’re empty of that way of existing. It’s a falsity. That flower appearing external to my mind is a falsity. Why? Because it is a fabrication of a mistaken consciousness.
Ignorance. The object which serves as the basis, the flower, that is a dependent nature. It arises in dependence upon cause and conditions. It appears to be external, but that externally existing flower is a falsity. The flower in itself, before I start conceptualizing, thinking about it, is a dependent dependent nature.
The nonexistence of the imaginary nature I write this. I know this sounds like Greek, doesn’t it? You want want to know what the mind only school is all about? The the nonexistence of the imaginary and the dependent nature. This nonexistence is a thoroughly established nature, emptiness.
The imaginary is the mental fabrication of being a different entity, of existing external to the mind. The dependent nature is the object itself before we begin to think about it, conceptualize around it. The emptiness of the externally existent flower in the flower. The nonexistence of the flower being a different entity from the mind. What does this mean?
Why do we want to know that? What happens? Why do we generate attachment, aversion? And what are we struggling to do? Trying to we see these things out there, and they appear attractive.
We want to make them mind. We want to bring them on this side of the looking glass, this side of the border. We want to incorporate them into our self identity. Want to bring them over here, don’t we? We want to be able to hold on to them forever, make them a permanent part of ourselves.
Make them who we make them ourselves, incorporate them into our self identity, make them. And it’s so that we always have they’re always there as part of ourselves. Why? Why? What would happen if we didn’t see them as outside of ourselves to begin with?
What would happen if we were having a vivid dream and we realized that external beautiful flower is just a part of your dream consciousness? Would you grasp towards the tiger? Would you try to push it away, the tiger, knowing that there’s no possibility of pushing it away, there’s no possibility of bringing it inside yourself because it’s already there. It has never been separate from yourself, from your own mind. You begin to relate with these objects, these appearances in a radically different manner.
Once you begin to see that all these various appearances are simply manifestations of these karmic seeds within your own mind, like a show, like a magic performance, then you wouldn’t it would radically alter the way that you relate it to these objects. You’d be more concerned with the karmic seeds in your mind, and what kinds of seeds am I creating, and what kinds of seeds do I already have in my own mind? You wouldn’t your your orientation would not be in terms of the external because you begin to understand there is no external. It’s all arising from your own mind. Therefore, you your the the attachment and the aversion would begin to cease of themselves once you realize that things were empty of any external existence, that that beautiful flower is empty existing external to your own mind.
What is there to grasp at? What is there to avoid, to have aversion toward? Something in your own head, in your own mind, that doesn’t help. It’s there, whatever you feel about it. You can’t get away from it.
It’s in your own mind. So, you know, this isn’t meant all of these schools, it’s not a matter of simply of taking, you know, developing philosophic positions. It’s really the way the Buddha was trying to help people to work with lessening the afflictions. Afflictions. A way of lessening attachment, aversion to skillful means, you know, as a way of ultimately removing ignorance from the mind.
Why? As a means of finding peace. So it wasn’t simply a, you know, an academic academic pursuit to complicate our lives. It might look like that sometimes. What do we call it?
It had there was some underlying intention behind it, and that intention was to help us subdue our own minds. If we go back to the dream, the dream itself arises in dependence upon causes and conditions. The dream itself is a dependent nature. In the dream there is a manifestation in a week about different objects. We conceptualize: there is a tiger, there is a man, there is me, there is the town, and so forth.
These conceptualizations are all imaginary imaginary natures. We see them as separate. Over there, there’s a man. Over there, there’s a tiger. That seeing them as separate is their imaginary nature.
The third established nature is the emptiness of the mind of those entities existing separate from the mind. Is the non existence of these separate entities, independent entities. There’s no independent person over there. There’s no independent tiger over there. It appears, but they’re in fact empty.
That’s their thoroughly established nature. They’re empty of existing independent of the mind. Another example, this is a quote, okay? Another example would be a film of a tiger. The concept of a real tiger is the imaginary nature.
You know, you go to a movie. What what are we actually watching? We’re actually we’re actually watching color color lights flicker upon the flat surface. But, you know, you don’t go to a movie to watch colored lights flicker on the surface. You go to be entertained, to escape.
You know? And so you so you you you set aside your normal way of viewing things and you enter into this relative world of this movie. And you suspend critical analysis. If you sat there watching all of this, you’ve got that nice colored light on it, it wouldn’t be much of a movie. Maybe if it was very visually pleasing.
But usually there’s some plot and there’s some emotions that we want to get involved in. You want to feel the drama, get the juices going on. So you suspend your your critical analysis, and you enter into the subjectivity of that particular context that is as if this were really happening. So there’s a tiger. And it was, in fact, it’s just colored lights, but it has the aspect of it, shape of a tiger, and you take that to be a real tiger.
That’s imaginary nature. And you react to that. So the appearance of the tiger, that is the colored lights playing on the screen, that’s the dependent nature. So you’ve taken the dependent nature of these colored lights in the shape of a tiger and you’ve conceptualized around it to be a real tiger, really out there. You get scared.
That those colored lights being empty of being a real tiger is the third established nature. Yeah. So there’s these colored lights rising due to causing conditions, which is the dependent nature. We conceptualize around them as being a real tiger. That real tiger is imaginary nature.
The emptiness of that those colored lights as being a real tiger is the third established nature. Okay? The mind only school views the world as being a play of the mind, initiated by the ripening of these karmic seeds on the mind basis of all. Like the waves on the ocean. These waves are both the perceiving consciousness and the perceived object.
They all are simply arising out of the activation of karmic seeds upon the mind, deposited upon the mind bases of all. But due to the force of ignorance, which is called afflicted mind, the seventh of these eight consciousnesses, under that influence we take them to be real, you know, as being separate entities. Okay. None of what just as in the case of it, you know, it’s really something to think about here. And it’s good.
Why? Because When when we’re when we’re for example, when we’re dreaming, none of what appears to exist exists separate from the dream consciousness. None of what appears to exist separate from the dream consciousness exists. Nothing exists separate from that dream consciousness. That tiger does not exist separate from the dream consciousness.
So how do you know you’re not dreaming now? How do you know? Maybe you feel like saying, because dreams are never so vivid as this, colors are not so bright, form, sound, smells, touch and tastes are not so clear and precise. However, someone else might disagree and say his dreams are even more vivid than his daytime experience. Does this then make his dream waking experience and his waking a dream?
Does it mean if your faculties become impaired so that you no longer experience things so clearly and precisely that your life becomes a dream? On further reflection, you might suggest that you know that you’re not dreaming because of the continuity of your life. Everything is predictable. In a predictable place, there is a sense of cause and effect, regularity, an established pattern of events and so on. You might say that dreams are not like that.
They are unpredictable. They can change in bizarre ways without warning and for any apparent reason. There is no real continuity and you might find yourself in any place, time, shape or form. Are you saying then that if a dream were to stabilize so that there were a continuity and a fairly predictable pattern of events. If then it were to continue for long periods of time and your waking experiences were only to last for brief periods in which you were very confused and dis disoriented, then the dream would have become waking experience and the waking experience dream.
For after all, it is not unusual for people to dream of ordinary situations, for example, that they got up and that they got their breakfast and gone to work and so on. You may laugh at the suggestion that you are dreaming now. You may think that if you were asleep and dreaming, dreaming, everybody would stop interacting with you. They would tell you when you woke up that you had been dreaming. That there is no way that one could confuse dreaming with waking.
However, there is no inherent reason why you should not dream that people have woken you up and told you that you had just awakened from a dream. You might be familiar with the verse by Where he awoke had a dream that he was a butterfly, and when he awoke, he became rather confused. He wasn’t sure if he were a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuangzi who had just awoken from a dream, or whether he was Zhuangzi who had just dreamt that he was a butterfly. It’s kind of a frightening possibility, isn’t it? There’s no reasonable proof that as we sit here now, you might not be you, in fact, may not be at home in your bed comfortably sleeping, you know, comfortably sleeping at three o’clock in the morning dreaming that it’s Monday night, you’re attending Jampa’s class, and he’s talking about dreaming and so forth.
Gets a bit shaky. Finally, don’t know what he’s doing. I don’t know what’s scary. Finally, one has to admit that there is no characteristic of waking experience. Well, maybe I should ask you.
Can anyone prove they’re not dreaming at this present moment? Any reason, whatever comes to mind. I mean, don’t believe you’re dreaming, do you? Why don’t you believe you’re not dreaming right now? Not in my bedtime yet.
Not his yet. I’ll just stand by that. So you’ve never dreamt that it was nine o’clock in the evening? It’s a little bit relevant. Think when I’m dreaming, the time of day generally doesn’t seem to factor in very much.
So you can have a dream and it could be any time of day. Various times, possible times of day. I can’t really say that I won’t really be paying much attention to day or night or So you could easily dream that you were attending Jampas class? Yeah. Anybody want to offer a possibility?
Establishing that they aren’t dreaming at this very moment. Would it come to mean if you said, Oh, yeah, I am dreaming? Would that make any difference to you? Remember once I was having a dream, and I was having a bad dream. And I thought, well, all I have to do is wake up.
I was aware that I was dreaming, but the dream was continuing. Was coming in and out of this dream. So I pinched myself while I was dreaming, to wake myself up so the dream would stop. If you are not enjoying the present moment, pinch yourself. Maybe you’ll wake up.
I was thinking in dreams, I don’t think you feel pain. You feel emotional pain, but not physical pain when you’re dreaming. But in real life, people feel Yeah. Wow. I see.
So you don’t feel pain, you don’t feel, if you stub your toe in a dream, you don’t? No, I think there have been studies done that if you feel pain in a dream it’s because you’re actually feeling a pain and you’re just incorporating it in your dream. So you do feel pain in your dream? No, it’s real pain though that you’re feeling. Yeah, but incorporating it in your dream.
So that incorporated pain, dream pain. Well, it’s actually physically, it’s actually happening physically. But you do feel okay, it may be actually happening physically, but it is felt in the dream. Yes. Yeah, so there is dream pain.
But it’s actually happening physically, there is dream pain. That is felt in the dream as pain. Am I just confusing the issue? There’s something there. Anyway, something to Finally, one has to admit that there is no characteristic of awakening experience that clearly distinguishes it from dreaming.
It is only a matter of degree and one’s emotional predispositions. You believe you are awake because you want to feel secure and feel that your world is solid, real and supportive around you. If you were to seriously doubt you were awake, you would feel frightened and confused. The stability of the experience of being awake reassures you so you believe in it and give it a reality that you did not afford dreams. You may want to argue that there must be world out there that is not mind or there would be no consensus about the world.
We tend to take as real whatever the general consensus of opinion dictates, especially when it coincides with our experience and opinions. However, consensus is only a matter of degree. We have no means of knowing whether any of us ever sees experiences anything in exactly the same way as anybody else. At the same time, there is plenty of evidence that we do not see and experience the same thing in the same way. The difference is even more marked when one considers how differently different creatures experience the same thing.
You know, we’ve talked about that in the Mind Only school. They like to use the example of a glass of liquid. We could have different types of beings observing the same glass of liquid, but they experience it in radically different ways. A god would experience that glass of liquid as a glass of nectar, and it would be blissful. A human would experience it as water, and it could be refreshing.
If they if they had rabies, hydrophobia, they would experience it as being fearful. A hungry ghost would experience it as pus and blood. A hell being would experience it as molten lead, and it’d be extremely painful if they went to drink it. A mosquito would experience it as a place to lay its eggs. A fish would experience it as a a complete environment to live in.
So all those all those different possible ways of experiencing what appears to be a common object, a glass or liquid. Again, take the example of someone like Mao Zedong, okay? To some he appeared as dangerous enemy and to others a dear friend. Yet to a mosquito he appeared just as a source of nourishment and to the parasite in his body a complete universe. Since for any object, every aspect is established through the perception of the moment of consciousness perceiving it, how can its existence independent of these consciousness be established?
So how does the mind only school account for consensus? Guess we all are seeing a table. So they would posit two karmic karmic seeds ripening within each of ourselves, within each of our upon our mind bases of all simultaneously. One of these karmic seeds would cause us the appearance of a commonly perceived table. We would all agree table.
We would all see table. But the other karmic seed, we would each experience the table from a slightly different table, from a particular perspective, a particular point of view. We all agree that there’s a table, but I’m seeing the table from a different perspective. See a scratch on the table. I’m seeing it from a particular side.
The light is shining on it from a particular angle, and so forth. So we’re not quite seeing the same table. It’s not identical. We’re seeing a common table, but within that commonality, we’re seeing a specific table unique to each of ourselves. Let’s do to another specific karma.
So there are the common and uncommon karmas ripening simultaneously. I’ll just read you. We can’t quite dismiss the mind only school, because there are problems even within We can’t say that things exist separate from the mind. There are fundamental problems involved in positing existence of some substance other than mind. How can such a substance be found or known?
If something cannot be known without a knower, how can it ever be shown to exist independently? How does this is a problem that’s in the Western psychology philosophy, you know, been going on for thousands of years. The interface between body and mind. How does the interface between mind and matter actually work? How can matter enter into relationship with mind or mind with matter?
Since the alternative explanation put forward by Cittamātra dispenses with such a problem, it demands serious consideration. And even Buddhism, they see mind as non physical. You know, in Western materialism, there’s a monism, everything is material. But that doesn’t say anything about the real world. It doesn’t say anything about our subjective experiences, emotions, feelings.
Does an immaterial mind, a non physical mind, interact with the physical world? What is the interface? How do we relate? How do the two relate? Some people who think of themselves as scientifically minded believe that the mind is the brain or a function of the brain and that for this reason there is no essential mind matter dichotomy.
According to their view, everything can be explained in terms of the material world. They choose to overlook qualities of mind that have no relation to matter, such as subjective experience, thoughts, emotions. Although they would not take seriously the story of Pinocchio. Are people familiar with the story of Pinocchio? Where a simple piece of matter, a stick, inexplicably develops a mind experiencing hopes and fears, pleasures and pains and so on.
They would not find strange if subatomic particles, atoms or molecules started to produce thoughts and feelings. However, not only is there no scientific evidence whatsoever that such a phenomena is possible, but it represents a semantic confusion of categories. Linguistically, there is the category of mind and what is not mind, matter. Matter or the material world exists out there beyond the senses. If it does not exist independent of the senses, how can it be categorized as material?
How can a material world that exists outside the senses also be the senses that sense and experience them? Such a theory does not answer anything. It does not even begin to address itself to the question of what might not exist external to it. So due to Yeah, I mean, I guess it hasn’t gone very far. But essentially, the materialist would reduce mind to extremely complicated computer process.
I mean, the brain is simply an extremely complicated computer. And those processes of a computer are what we call mind. They never transcend the circuitry, the hardware, the materiality, the electrical impulses and so forth of the computer. So what does that say about subjective experience? That I have a sense of seeing the world and having feelings and emotions.
Is that seeing, feeling, those emotional experiences, are there just electrons whirling around? It doesn’t really explain very much in a way. And is my feeling of happiness just an electron moving from one circuit to another. That’s the materials would reduce this subjective experience too, just the movement of electrons in some way fashion or another. But it doesn’t explain anything.
It doesn’t explain its subjective experience. What is subjective experience? Due to ignorance, conceiving as real objects which appear to exist external to the mind, attachment arises, aversion arises. If the object appears attractive, we develop attachment. We see it as external to ourselves, our mind, we want to make it part of ourselves.
If it’s unattractive, we develop aversion. We want to separate from ourselves. This is due to the force of ignorance conceiving the externality, that object as being a different entity from our own minds. When we realize that the emptiness of these objects of such an imaginary nature as being external to the mind, as being a different entity to the mind. One cuts through all that attachment, all that aversion, and all of the associated sufferings which arise from that, you know, all the karma which is created as as a result of that, it all ceases, and the mind rests free of all the conceptual contrivances based upon such a dualistic thinking.
A struggle has gone out of the process. We no longer see these beautiful, these ugly things as a different outside of ourselves. And all the struggle, you know, movements of the mind, either toward or away, ceases. And the mind rests free of all that dualistic thinking within this vast expanse of emptiness. Okay.
So next week, we’re we’re gonna march right on the Middle Way school. Okay. Any any thoughts around this? Any any did it bring up anything? Questions?
So we can dedicate the positive energy that we’ve created together. So we created some karma. We deposit these on our mind bases of all. And this kind of we can associate that those karmic seeds with aspiration, which will help in assisting in bringing about that result. May all beings everywhere plagued by suffering of body and mind attain an ocean of happiness and joy by virtue of my merits?
May no living creatures suffer, commit evil, or fall ill. May no one be afraid or belittled with a mind weighed down by depression. May the blind see forms, the deaf hear sounds. May those whose bodies are worn with toil be restored and finding repose. May the naked find clothing, the hungry find food.
May the thirsty find water and delicious drink. May the poor find wealth, those weak with sorrow find joy. May the forlorn find hope, constant happiness and prosperity. May there be timely rains and bountiful harvest. May all medicines be effective and wholesome prayers bear fruit.
May all who are sick and ill quickly be freed from their ailments. Whatever diseases there are in the world, may they never occur again. May the frightened cease to be afraid, and those bound be freed. May the powerless find power, and may people think of benefiting each other. For as long as space remains, for as long as sentient beings remain, until then may I too remain to dispel the miseries of the world.
Through these skillful actions, may I quickly become an awakened spiritual master and lead each and every living being to that awakened realm. May the supreme jewel, the awakened heart that has not arisen, arise and grow. And may that which has arisen never diminish, but increase more and more. In the land circled by snow mountains, you are the source of all happiness and well-being. Powerful Chenrezig, Tenzin, Gyatso, please remain Thank you.
If you like to grab a cup of tea, we’ll have a discussion. Otherwise, have a good night. Thank you.