Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 91-minute teaching, Ven Robina Courtin uses rigorous logical analysis to explain emptiness — not asking for faith but demanding precision. She emphasizes that wisdom simply means being accurate: defining terms clearly, analyzing carefully, checking conclusions for consistency. Using a cup as her primary example, she walks through Lama Tsongkhapa’s presentation of how it exists through countless causes and conditions, through dependence on its parts, and finally as a conceptual label applied by mind. She then applies this same framework to emotions — showing how anger, which feels independently solid, is actually empty of self-existence. She ties this repeatedly back to why it matters: understanding this directly undermines ignorance and suffering. Throughout, she stresses that Buddhist philosophy is logically coherent and knowable. Pitched at practitioners seeking intellectual rigor in spiritual practice.
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File: 01 1998 10 30 WM.mp3
UUID: 180dbec7-6cd6-4bed-ae28-9fab465500e8
Teacher: Ven Robina Courtin
Collection: y Wisdom Mind (Ven Robina Courtin)
Date: 1998-10-30
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 91.0 minutes
Words: ~17,650
Continuation of everything else, think just carry on, isn’t it? Oh, that’s one. That’s what we did yesterday. Oh, no, that’s we did that before. I keep looking timing.
It doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter. Okay. Have most of you been here the last two days? No?
No. Okay, we’ve been talking about the mind. We’ve been talking about the necessity to know it and the potential we have to transform it, which is what so called Buddhadharma is all about. What Buddha is saying is that we’ve got this astonishing potential, and this is in a sense the key point, you know? Otherwise we tend to think, Well, why should I practice a spiritual path?
I mean, what’s the point? Why make myself suffer and make things all so difficult? What’s the reason? So you’ve to have a purpose, you’ve to know why you’re doing it, you know? And Buddha’s reason is simply because, he’s saying simply that this is our potential, that our potential is to be totally free from suffering and to be happy in all these things, you know?
This is our potential. Then all the more so, given that actually if we check up we want to be happy, But all Buddhism is is a presentation of how to get it, that’s all. It’s just an alternative presentation, you know. If you’re a materialist you believe that those things give you, and if you’re a Christian you have that view, and if you’re a communist you have this view, and if you’re a Freudian you have this view. Well here we’ve got Buddha’s view, you know.
And so the onus is on us to check up, to use our wisdom, to find out, because we’re the one who’s got to do the job. So it’s not a question of disbelieving or not believing. It’s not a question of doing it because somebody else said you should. This is the approach, isn’t it, in Buddhism? Even though maybe most of us in this room might say we are Buddhist, right?
But actually what causes us to persevere when times are difficult, which is the real test, is some kind of logical understanding of why we’re a Buddhist. Any choice you make, the more you can see it with any person, the more clear you are in your choice of why you’re doing it, articulating the benefits, looking at the advantages of doing it. That’s what causes you to persevere when it’s difficult. You think you’re going get a beautiful body and someone Push ups will do a great job, good being. You start doing push ups, and start sweating and feeling miserable, you’re to give up, right?
Because you’re not really convinced or sure of just how it’s working. How does this pain bring me a beautiful body? But when you’ve thought through the whole thing, you’ve seen the product, a beautiful body, you understand what muscles mean, you know what you have to do to get there, so you’re prepared to work through the difficult times. Well, that’s using wisdom, you know. Anything we do, we can see.
Anything at all we want to achieve, we have to go from not knowing how to do it, through the painful process of learning, to the accomplishment of it. Anything at all, isn’t it? There’s always a painful process. There’s always a painful part of this process, is the beginning part, and even later on during the middle and the end parts too, where you have to overcome the obstacles and have the perseverance that cause you to go, you know, because learning anything is necessarily difficult. Learning anything, you’re going from not knowing how to do it to learning how to do it, so you’re having to change a very deeply ingrained habit.
This is just logic, and the more we understand our spiritual practice in this sense, the harder we will actually practice, because we will understand why we’re doing it. We’ll have a vision of our potential. This is why Buddha starts off. It’s interesting, in the Kadampa tradition, when they present the Lamrim Okay, when Atisha wrote this little text called Lamp on the Path in the tenth and eleventh centuries, which is the basis for all the whole generic teachings known as Lamrim in Tibet, which the presentation of Buddhist teachings in an orderly way. Our teacher started it with the teaching on death and impermanence, with the preliminary meditation on our perfect human rebirth.
Well, Lama Tsongkhapa in the fourteenth century added to that one the whole teaching on the necessity of finding a teacher and the appropriate way to devote oneself, having found one. Well, Gampopa, one of the lineage Lamas of the Kagyu, when he put his Lamrim together, and you’ve seen it, it’s called in English the jewel ornament. No, something like that. I can’t remember. Something like that.
Well, he started it with this whole thing of presenting Buddha nature, which is very practical. I think for us Westerners it’s very necessary, you know, to really have a clear, intelligent, articulated understanding of what our mind is and what its potential is. In fact, even what its nature is. This is something truly fundamental. Fundamental.
What your nature is is something quite deep, isn’t it? Well that’s what Buddha is saying, Honey, your nature is pure. Your nature is Buddha. Your natural potential is to become enlightened. And I think to really look at this, and this is why it’s so important to start with the mind.
And Lama Zopa when he started teaching Lamrim at Kopan, you know, he would present the different aspects about the mind, because I mean we can see in our Western culture, we have a very different understanding of mind, don’t we? So it’s kind of important just to have a broad overview of what mind is and what it isn’t. I don’t we have one. Pardon? I don’t think we have an overview of mind in the Western culture.
Well, have certain views. I mean, with the brain it’s this and it’s that. There are very long and extensive teachings on the mind, but it’s just seen as the brain, that’s all, isn’t it? Is that what I mean? Probably, I just need a conscious thought about it.
I just don’t think there’s much there like me. Well, there’s very extensive teachings, neurobiology and all this stuff, and they’re talking about that’s what they mean by mind, they’re talking about the brain, you know? The brain. You see, that’s the mind. That’s all there is.
The Western science is no such concept as something non physical, doesn’t exist. It’s certainly not a subject of science, is it? No. Do you see my point? So, this is what I’m saying.
You know, it’s really important for us, especially as we are Western, coming from this very deep instinctive view within us, deeply held, you know, that your mind is your brain, or at least your mind is Hello? Hello? Yeah, absolutely. That your mind know, that your mind, or at least that you think that your mind is the intellectual process. That’s why it’s important to know this word, mind or consciousness.
These words are used synonymously as we’ve discussed, they refer, you know, to everything inside you, all the way from the gross, positive, the negative, the intellectual, conceptual, sensory, emotional, unconscious, subconscious, dream consciousness, soul, spirit, all these words, all of this, the entirety of everything that is you, and in a simple way everything that isn’t your body, essentially in the West doesn’t exist, is what’s called your mind or your consciousness, and that’s where our work is. As Lama Yeshe says, that’s where the workshop is, you know. This is what we have to learn to know about. So initially, of course, it has to be conceptual, so it’s important that we then know about our nature. So, the conventional nature of our mind is said to be that it is clear, clarity, non physical.
The ultimate nature is its emptiness, and that actually is the meaning of Buddha nature. The emptiness of the mind, the emptiness of your mind is your Buddha nature. So what it infers is Because it’s said that because something is empty, so it can change. Because something is empty, so even it exists. Something so fundamental.
It’s important to understand, but in the general sense, in the conventional sense, can say our Buddha nature refers to our capacity to become enlightened, and then the work of doing that. So that’s why it’s important to hear this first, then you have some kind of understanding, Well, I’m a Buddhist because of this, and the advantages of this, and I want to try and do this. So then Buddha’s saying, Well, you know, if you look, all beings want to be happy. Again, we take that for granted so completely. In fact, we so take it for granted, we actually think it’s bit inferior, you know, to say that life’s about getting happy.
We think, Well, come on. It’s a bit more serious than that, but it sounds too simplistic, doesn’t it? But actually, if you check every single thing that you do, say, think, what is it motivated by? When it’s automatic, it’s simply motivated by the wish to be happy and the wish to avoid suffering, automatically. I mean, you know, when you sit down, you adjust your body.
You don’t adjust it into an uncomfortable position, you? You adjust it into a comfortable position, don’t you? It’s spontaneous. When you get a drink, you make it the drink that you like. When you eat, you choose the food you want.
It’s so obvious. It’s so obvious that we don’t really look at it, you know? So given this, then it’s very reasonable to check up. Buddha’s asking us to then check, well okay, you say you want to be happy, you’re trying everything you do, say, and think to get happy. It’s a reasonable question to ask, well have you achieved it?
This of course is where one decides to do the analysis. All this is wisdom. This is wisdom. Wisdom simply means, at the most ordinary level, wisdom, isn’t it, is knowing, is being accurate about something. You know, that’s a toothpick.
It’s Robina’s toothpick with one end used, in fact. I carry a toothpick wherever I go. I’ll put it in my pocket. That’s a toothpick, okay? Well, that’s wisdom.
If you said it’s a cup, you’re in trouble, right? Please pass me a cup and you get a toothpick, a dirty toothpick, you’re gonna be most upset. So, wisdom is simply being accurate. That’s all. You think about it.
Something kind of zen like and kind of weird and religious. Wisdom is simply being accurate at a conventional and an ultimate level. So what we’re dealing with here in the so called wisdom path of Buddhism, this wing of the bird, is we’re dealing with developing the wisdom that sees the ultimate way that things exist, because this is the key point, and we’ve been stressing this now for two days, you know. I think to really get this, I mean, we can all be very clear about the meaning of compassion and love in a general sense. We know very specifically the way maybe even Buddhism defines love, compassion and all the rest.
We mightn’t be so clear about the path to each and the two types of the seven cause and effect, one and the other one of them, different traditions. But we all have a general understanding of the benefits of love and kindness. It’s something fairly clear. But I think the wisdom side, we’re bit confused, you know? It sounds a bit esoteric, and what do you mean wisdom?
Oh, what’s this stuff? It means knowing emptiness, and we kind of But you know, bring it down to Earth, and this whole, the work of this part, this wing here, is the inner work of uncovering your own capacity to see reality as it is. This is wisdom, with the ultimate sense, and all the way from conventional to ultimate. And so Lama Tsongkhapa has a very excellent way of presenting conventional and ultimate reality. So seeing as this talk is today’s label something to do with wisdom, let’s talk about this, emptiness.
Because we’ve been inferring it all the week, all the two days, the last two days. So, okay, what does it mean emptiness? What does it mean ultimate reality? What does it mean conventional reality? And what’s it got to do with life?
It’s always a very good point. What’s it got to do with life? How does it affect me now? How does my seeing myself as empty of existing from its own side have anything to do with my life? Because it doesn’t seem to have initially much relationship.
So, this is what we have to learn to see, you know. So, what Lama Tsongkhapa is doing. Tsongkhapa, know, the lineage, the main lineage Lama of the Gelugpa tradition. All the Lamas, all the traditions present in slightly different ways, you know? So, Lama Tsongkhapa is saying Okay, Buddha is saying everything is ultimately empty, but conventionally things do exist.
But Lama Tsongkhapa has a particular way of presenting. It’s in terms of, you know, these particular way of describing the two truths, if you like, conventional, ultimate reality. So let’s look at that and then see how this relates to our lives. So, cup. Any object you wish to take.
So first of all, when you study Buddhist philosophy, you establish that it’s very important to establish what you’re discussing. Got to have a First you have to understand there’s a label called cup. Cup refers to something. You have to define that cup. You have to understand its nature and its function.
Function. Then you have a basis for discussion, don’t you? This is certainly how it is when you really study Buddhist philosophy. You learn in the very first texts that they study in the monasteries called collected topics. Have you people studied that here, with Geshe, with Cancer and Ruche?
No, anyway. No, okay. I think Tom McGinnon taught these things a while ago. I mean, I’m not sure. Anyway, you have to establish that, okay, we’re discussing a cup.
We can see, especially when we talk about things like love and kindness, everybody, we just assume everybody thinks they all know what it means, but you you say what you think love is, every person in this room will probably come up with a different definition, wouldn’t you? So then you hear Buddhism says, We should develop love, so naturally you think your definition. Then you think, What’s wisdom? Everybody has a different view. So we have to be discussing what on Earth we are talking about before we can even begin to talk about it, don’t we?
And this is interesting, know, you think about this. When we discuss what we mean, what we call science, numbers, things like that, we know you’ve got to be precise and accurate. But that same, what’s interesting, that same precision and accuracy is what Buddhism uses in terms of the mind and discovering the nature of reality. That’s very interesting, we don’t think of that in terms of spiritual do we? We think of spirituals airy, fairy, beyond words, and can’t be described, and can’t be quantified, and can’t be talked about, all this nonsense, you know.
In fact, Buddhism would say everything necessarily is knowable, and can be taught conceptually, because that’s the stepping stone to experiential knowledge. It’s very interesting. So okay, let’s establish what ultimate and conventional means. Here we have cup. We all agree the English word, isn’t it, the English sound that refers to this object that you put your drink in and it has a handle, right?
Whatever you want to define it as, is known as cup. Cup. Just a sound, isn’t it? Cup. We all agree.
Now if we didn’t agree, we’d be in trouble. We couldn’t even begin to discuss, so we have to have established that. So then let’s look at how it exists, because what actually what Buddha’s saying is that there is a way it can exist conventionally, there is a way it exists ultimately, but it’s almost as if we exist in a third mode, which is a complete fantasy, a third mode, which is the mode of ignorance. That ignorance, ignorance which is pervading our minds, and we don’t realize it, because we think we just see a cup, a cup is a cup is a cup, we don’t analyze, you know? But what Buddha is saying is that we have this ignorance in the mind, this unawareness of its true nature, but even, we don’t even get it quite right, conventionally.
So how does it exist conventionally, and what is the relationship between that and ultimate? Because this is the particular way that Lama Tsongkhapa presents it. Because what he’s saying is, Okay, to realize the emptiness of the cup, or the emptiness of I, the emptiness of everything, is what wisdom finally is, is what the cutting of the roots of delusion, the cutting of the roots of saṃsāra is all about. The ultimate, the final, the antidote to the ignorance that clings to me and everything else as self existent, real, solid, independent, inherently existing entity, me ness, which is the source of saṃsāra, the source of all our suffering, and the source of why we harm others, the antidote to this is the wisdom that sees directly and then irreversibly the ultimate way, the actual way, the final way in which the cup does exist. So then, to go into emptiness sometimes, because it’s sort of like a it’s almost like an it can seem almost a nihilistic way of putting things, you know?
It seems like because it’s a negating way, it’s not an affirming way. It’s almost like you’re talking about a negative number. It’s sort of very abstract for our minds, you know? So it can seem a bit spaced out and a bit weird if we sort of talk And we get very nihilistic. What’s emptiness?
How do you get emptiness? Know? So Lama Tsongkhapa’s wonderful way of presenting is in terms You understand emptiness via the root of understanding conventional reality. So, as Lama Yeshe would put it, that one of conventional reality, and as His Holiness says, the term for this, kind of a little catchphrase for conventional reality, is dependent arising. So the little catchphrase, the summary for ultimate reality is emptiness, and the catchphrase for conventional reality is dependent arising, and as Lama Tsongkhapa points out, as he says, you know, that dependent arising is the king of logics to prove emptiness.
And so this is Lama Tsongkhapa’s particular approach, through the approach of logic and analysis and using syllogisms and consequences and things that are used in the Prāsaṇgika Madhyamaka system, you know? It’s a highly sophisticated, very psychologically intelligent system for helping our minds get it that cup is empty, but via the root of conventional reality, via the root of dependent arising. So let’s present that, because it’s very interesting. Pardon? Do you want us to interrupt and ask questions now?
Well, depends. Ask and let me see. On the point of cup, when you say that it’s dependent arising, does that mean that the concept that I have, the version that I have of cup in my head is mine and like you said about the love concept, everyone has some sort of version. Is that what you’re saying? About what?
About cup, the notion of cup. I’m saying we’ve all got a different view. Yeah. But that’s not what I meant there, no. That’s not what I’m meaning there.
I just mean we all know what cup is, in a regular sense, we can all agree that that’s what you put your tea in. It’s a vessel. It isn’t a toothpick. But if we all say love, I’m just suggesting we all have a different view. Do you see my point?
But let me continue. Okay. Okay. We’ve established, right? We’ve established that cup is what you put your drink in, it has a handle, and you know Sure.
We’ve established this, so now we can discuss it. Okay. Oh no, not even a question of that. No, I’m not even saying that. Know what it is.
Sure. So, okay, so we’ve established what a cup is, simply. Now we have to look at how it actually exists, even conventionally, because Buddha saying you don’t get it right at all. You might know the right words, but that’s about it. We’re thick as posts, basically.
Good stuff, yeah. Okay, so just listen then. Get the whole story, then ask questions. Okay, how then does it exist, even conventionally? The point is, think all the time, try to get the feeling that by listening and thinking about and meditating on how it exists conventionally, this is the point here, what it leads to, inevitably, is therefore it is empty.
This is the point. This is the whole point. Because finally, conventional and ultimate reality are simply flip sides of the same coin. Presenting it in terms of its conventional reality leads you to the understanding of its ultimate reality, which is that it is empty of being a cup. So it’s a very interesting point, this is the lamas on cup, there’s a nice tension there, you know.
Okay, so there are three levels at which it exists as a dependent arising. Dependent arising is like a little Buddhist slogan, as Dalai Lama says. So the first level of how this exists as a dependent arising is the level in which it is to do with causes and conditions. Causes and conditions. Now this is very interesting because I remember when Geshe Tektok, who’s now the abbot of Sera Je, which was the job that Khensur Rinpoche had, a couple of you know, they go in seven year jobs, seven year bets, I think.
He was the one couple of times, maybe the last abbot, can’t remember. Can’t remember. Geshe Tektok, who was now the abbot, was an old friend of Lama Yeshe, and he was teaching us in England for many years Geshe studies. When were discussing, I think it was to do with core, we called simply the subject of causes, you know, causes and conditions and things. He used Rubina as the example, he said, well, it can be established, he said, it can be said that everything in the universe, before the existence of Rubina can validly be said to be a cause for the existence of Rubina.
He didn’t go into it, but it sounded like very mind boggling to me. I didn’t, you know, but I think and so this is the presentation, this is the explanation of it. It’s taken me twenty years to get it, okay? Even just conceptually. I don’t get it any other way.
Okay, this cup, okay, cup comes into being or arises, right, in dependence upon causes and conditions. That cup is nothing other than a bunch of causes and conditions, in fact, trillions of causes and conditions, and that you cannot find cup among any of those causes and conditions, you know. So let’s look at that. Okay. What’s the first main cause of this cup, you think about it?
It’s the mind of the human being who first conceptualized it, isn’t it? It has to be the first, one of the main causes, isn’t it? The person who thought of this cup, who visualized this cup with that kind of hand with Starbucks written on it, Starbucks coffee, right? With a bottom like that, exactly this, the mind of that human being, because this cup clearly just didn’t fall out of the sky from its own side, did it? It came out of a human mind.
That’s the first cause, isn’t it? The first essential cause of this cup. You start thinking, that person had a mother, and that person had a mother. You go back for how many mothers, you know, and you remove any one of those mothers, right, and the whole house of cards collapses. There’s no cup is there.
There cannot be. It’s an impossibility. That’s just one train of thought, and already you can start to get the idea. There’s the person, pencil this person used to do a drawing on a piece of paper for this cup. And then there’s the trees the pencil came from.
There are all the insects that died when the tree was cut down. There’s the person who logged who’d cut the log off the tree and put it on the truck and trucked it to the factory. There’s the factory, the person who made the factory, the designer of the factory, all the mothers of the designer, and the grandmothers, and the grandmothers. You can go for an eternity. Every angle you take, you can already see what I’m getting at.
Every one of which is a cause and a condition, validly for the presence of this cup, and that there is no cup other than all of those causes and conditions, but that cup is nothing other than all of those causes and conditions. And you can go on for an eternity, I guess your Tektok statement is exactly right. Everything in the universe can be said to be a cause for any object you want to posit, you know, anything in the universe up to the moment of the beginning of this cup. So if you keep going this way, you know, there’s the factory where this cup was made, the person who made the factory, the designer of the factory, the people who made the bricks, where the bricks came from, all the insects when you pulled the bricks out, wherever they come from, and the person that made them, and the clay, and the factory, and the designer of the brick factory, and the person who made the cement that held the brick together, and the designer of all those, and the person You can go on for an eternity. Everywhere you turn, isn’t it, you’ve got all these sentient beings doing things, all these These are just the sentient beings I’m talking about, all the causes and conditions.
The cup is nothing other than all of those causes and conditions, but that you cannot find cup in any one of those causes and conditions. What that leads to to, and this is point, what it has to come to, is the inevitable realization, like a little light going on. This is the point of contemplating it. Therefore, cup is empty of being an independent, solid, real, existing, in and of itself entity cup, which is how ignorance clings to it. This is the first level of dependent arising, and actually this is a very powerful level.
We can spend the rest of our life contemplating just this one, in terms of cup, and all the causes and conditions for Robina are in fact what’s called karma. karma is a perfect way to begin to understand emptiness of oneself, because it’s the causes and conditions that bring about Rabina, Rabina’s life, Rabina’s experiences, she clings to as being real, solid, out here, separate, independent, self existent. Not fair, poor me. But everything is due to karma, like we talked the last couple of nights, everything, especially yesterday, everything is due to karma, causes and conditions. That Robina is nothing other than a bunch of causes and conditions, the millions of causes and conditions, and that you cannot find Robina among any of those.
So therefore, Robina is empty of being independent, inherent, self existent. This is thinking. This is Lama Tsongkhapa’s approach. This one we can go on from. This is the first level only.
Then it leads you, inevitably, to the second, the more subtle level, the cup. Then you just analyze cup, and you do this in meditation very deeply. Cup. Arises in dependence upon its parts. When I’m in America, I have to say parts, but it’s very painful, because they don’t understand parts.
That’s a weird word, parts. So cup arises in dependence upon its parts. Such a relief to say parts again, thank you. And that it’s nothing other than the parts, and that you cannot find cup among any of those parts. It’s fact, you just analyze.
This is from Candrakīrti’s analysis of a chariot or something. You break it down, you put little piles, you’ve got a handle, you’ve got the bottom part, you’ve the metal part, you’ve got the letters, you’ve got the lid, and then you’ve the screws, then You have an instinct that says, now there’s a cup left over that owns these parts, isn’t there? But there’s no onerous parts, is there? Where do you find it? Where is it?
Even conventionally, even grossly. How can you find an owner? How can you find the cup that owns these parts? How can you find a rabbina that owns the eyelashes, the nose, and the ears, and the this, and the mind, and the anger, and the love, and the watch, and the nails, and the atoms? There’s only parts, right?
For this, what does it lead you to? Robina is empty of being independent, solid, real, findable, pointable, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. You analyze this stuff in meditation for years and years until suddenly we get it. In other words, that’s what an insight, that’s what a realization is, upon analysis, upon conceptual analysis, in this very clear, intelligent, sharp way. This leads you inexorably to the subtlest level of dependent arising, which is that cup arises in dependence upon the mind labeling cup.
That cup is a mere label, a sound coming out of the mouth, and that from the side of the cup there is no cup. But there is a cup, because cup is a label upon its parts. Then we think, Oh, good, are some parts at least. No, because parts, handle, is a label on its parts. Lid is a label on its parts.
And then the parts of the lid are simply mere names or labels upon their parts, and so you go on, you know, labeled imputed on its parts. And you keep getting ever more subtle and you cannot find some fundamental building block, which is what they’re trying to do by breaking down all these atoms into quarks and all this stuff, they spend billions of dollars in these big tunnels trying to get down to the fundamental building block of everything. In Buddhist terms, they even say, the simplest grossest level, you can’t find. There’s no such thing as a partless particle. Because whatever you posit, however minute you get down to the parts of cup, as soon as you posit something as a part, you have to say it has parts, because it has to be a top and bottom, if you posit it physically.
And then mentally, as soon as you say there’s a moment of mind which is a part of mind, then you have to have moments of that mind. It’s not a possibility to have otherwise. And so, the subtlest level of dependent arising, which all of this finally comes to, which is what you actually realize, excuse me, once you realize emptiness, because all this leads you to the realization that therefore, the cup is empty of being an inherent independent cup, which is the way ignorance clings to it. So by looking at how it’s dependent and arising, leads you to emptiness, as Lama Yeshe says, it’s the king of logics to prove emptiness. This is Lama Yeshe’s particular way of presenting.
Does anybody have any questions? Perhaps now, if you have questions. It’s just a very brief presentation. We’re dependent arising in emptiness. It’s okay.
So, okay, so then the whole, you know, one needs to do this on any object. An object in Buddhism, when you study Buddhist philosophy, object, the word object, doesn’t just mean something physical, which is how we use it in our culture. Object refers to anything that exists, quite literally. If something can be established as existing, it is known in Buddhist terms as an object, or a phenomenon, or an existent. These are synonyms.
So that can mean cup, mind, anger, love, you know, toilet, carpet, whatever you want to posit as existing. You establish it. You have to establish it. Even one of the synonyms of these is established base. You have to establish.
You give it a definition, you give it a name, a definition, and then you just, you know, a function, and then you can discuss it. So if it can be established as existing, then in Buddhist terms, exists conventionally and it exists ultimately. It has the two modes of existing, and they exist simultaneously. And there is nothing in the universe that exists, that isn’t empty. There cannot be such a thing existing.
It’s an impossibility, in Buddha’s terms. It’s an impossibility. So eventually, what a Buddha is, from the point of view of wisdom, is a being who sees everything that exists, who knows directly the conventional and ultimate reality of whatever exists, with nothing left over. In other words, everything is necessarily knowable, in Buddhist terms, which is very interesting, very interesting, not like it was vague, well no one knows, as we all say in the West, because we haven’t discovered it, smarty pants Westerners, in the last fifty years, go, well, nobody knows, we say, you know? Mean, talk about ignorance.
It’s embarrassing. I’m not saying Buddha’s right, but, you know, there are a few other ideas around besides what came out of the West. So everything is knowable by any sentient being. This is the point. This is the nature of one’s mind.
One of the qualities of a mind is that it has the potential to know everything that exists, and that’s omniscience, you know. It’s very simple. This is what the point is. This is the wisdom side in Buddhism. So everything that exists can be known by the mind, you know.
It’s one of the definitions, in fact, of one of these synonyms. So the job of a person practicing Buddhism from the wisdom point of view is to know everything. So you can, you know, you can be arrogant, I want know everything. Just cool, because you can. And it’s all here in terms of conventional and ultimate reality.
Conventional and ultimate reality, because things exist in a particular conventional way, we have to establish that, and things exist ultimately, and they have an absolute link. There’s a complete direct relationship. And eventually, when you see these two as the non contradictiveness of these two simultaneously, that’s a characteristic of a Buddha’s mind. How do you meditate on that then? By just learning how to do it.
By listening to the teachings, by understanding how to do single pointed concentration, by understanding how to do analytical meditation, by listening to the teachings, then going away and meditating on it. You have to hear the teachings. You’ve to know what the teachings are. You kind of sit there and go, Well, you know, I’m meditating on emptiness. It’s like, you know, if I say to you, Go away and learn about carpentry, make a table.
Meditating on a table is learning carpentry, so you know how to put it all together. You think about it, then you do it. What’s the same with this stuff? You have to have the information, then you think about it, then you get a realization of it by thinking about it. That’s it.
Somebody else? Audry, some questions? So if we sort of extrapolate then that if we think about an object like a cup Yeah. That we can do the same things like emotions. Precisely.
Precisely. Exactly. Every single thing can be discussed in the same way. It’s causing us a big fuss. Yep.
Except it seems a lot harder. A lot, lot harder. Yes. Yes. Yeah.
Yes. Difficult. Yes, precisely. Because you’re not dealing with anger. But you are still dealing, okay, let’s look at anger.
But you see, thing is here, for us to analyze anger in this way, you need a much quieter mind. It’s not at the time when you’re cause most of the analysis we have to do about anger is where it’s coming from, why am I angry, is it valid? To actually get to the point of analyzing the conventional and ultimate nature of anger is a highly sophisticated thing. It’s almost once the anger’s all gone. You don’t really I mean, if you can think about the emptiness of anger, then that is the most powerful antidote, but that can only come when the mind is quiet.
The same arguments, the same analysis applies, because what you’re trying to do because right now, anger, and this is where we have to try and see how all this argument relates to how I cling to I and why I have suffering, because it’s very hard to see the relationship between that presentation and why I suffer. All Buddha is saying is this: that the extent to which we don’t see this is the extent to, in relation to I, and everything else, is the extent to which we suffer. So to know this first, then to start to investigate, to try to get some conviction about this, this is what is most difficult. And the words for it are simply this, you know, that the extent that we have the ignorance in us, often the one that clings to the eye as opposed to the cup, because I mean if it clings to the eye, also clings to self existing cup and everything else. The ignorance in us clings mostly hugely to the eye, to this eye, you know?
It makes up a story about this eye. The words for it, just like the cup are, that ignorance or ego grasping as it’s sort of colloquially known, this ignorance that clings to the eye, instinctively holds onto and believes in the eye to be real, solid, out here, separate, independent, not caused by anything else. Therefore, it brings the emotion of poor me, why me, not fair, self pity me, as Lama Yeshe calls ego, you know? And you check the feeling of ego, it’s a very accurate way to say it. It’s the self pity me.
So, begin to see how clinging to the eye in this way is why we suffer is very difficult. This is what we have to do, again and again and again. One way of looking at it. Whether it’s anger, or love, or hate, or any other part of the I, or the mind, you can analyse it in the same way. So let’s say we have a problem with anger, then even anger can be analysed in exactly the same way as the cup.
The difference is it’s not made by people, it’s come together, it arises in dependence upon many causes and conditions. So one of the main causes of anger is my past propensity to be angry, my habit to be angry. Another cause of anger is your mean words. Another cause of anger is my, one of the main ones, is my having harmed you in a past life when I met you. I mean you can break it down in just the same way, and that you will come up with the same conclusion intellectually that anger arises in dependence upon many causes and conditions, that it is nothing other than all the coming together of all of those causes and conditions, but that you cannot find it among any of those causes and conditions.
The same argument applies to it. It boggles our mind a bit more, but it can be done. Once you get the words clear, then you simply start thinking, Well, what are the causes and conditions for anger? There are many. That’s it, that’s what anger is, so what it comes as, or what it feels like, is this big, tight, concrete rock, Real, solid, independent, separate from everything, coming from who knows where, solid as a mountain.
That’s how it feels, and that’s the result of ignorance, and it’s a misconception. It’s wrong, it’s a mistake. And this mistake is the deepest one, and it’s eons old in us. So to break this one down is really the essence of breaking down. Because to see the emptiness of everything is what cuts saṃsāra altogether, you know.
Precisely. That’s what emptiness is. But that’s what emptiness is. When you can’t find the real anger. And to see the emptiness, this is the subtlest way we have to analyze everything.
Emptiness is the subtlest one. Emptiness is the deepest one. To look at anger in terms of why I feel it, that’s a grosser level. It’s a necessary part of our analysis to look at the different things and just check it out and to see what’s mine and what’s yours. All this is the grosser level of analysis, we need to do this, but we’re really looking at it in a subtler way, and what we have to eventually do is to see the emptiness of everything.
When we can see the emptiness of our negativity, that’s the ultimate purification. That’s what cuts the root of all delusion. If you were to realize emptiness irreversibly, you’d cut all delusion. Have continual realization of it. This is what nirvana means.
It’s the final, the major purification. But we can see the emptiness of our delusion. This is why when we do our purification practices and whatever, it’s really important to even just think of the words. This negativity is empty of a self existence, it doesn’t exist from its own side. Now the trouble is, when we hear this we get nihilistic, so we tend to think, Oh, it doesn’t really exist, that’s not so important.
Or it depresses us to think that the happiness is empty of existing from its own side, because we want to cling to it as something real, so it sounds a bit depressing to think, Oh, well it’s empty. Because as soon as we say, Oh, it’s empty, we tend to think, Oh, it doesn’t matter. Matter. There’s a nihilism that comes. This is inaccurate.
This is one of the two extremes. The mind goes too far, you know. Could we then actually track it? I mean, something is Yes. Could we track it then to just, like, chemicals in the brain, if you like, that are actually Okay, well this is where no, okay.
So thought has to trigger it. I understand, Audie. Precisely. Okay, thought, okay, this is where, like we talked yesterday and the day before, it’s very important when you study Buddhism to really get into studying what we call Buddhist philosophy and psychology, which we often tend to think, Oh, that’s kind of boring, it’s intellectual, and we don’t see the relationship between that and what we’re discussing here, but it’s absolutely related. So this is where it is really important to understand the mind, how it functions, the difference between mental consciousness and sensory consciousness, the difference between mind and body.
We really need to analyze, and that’s what you do when you study things like these collected topics, you study things like lorig, this text on the mind. You really get some kind of clarity about what is what. Then you know what you’re talking about, so let’s just discuss this, exactly the emotion you described then. Usually we describe it as a completely mental, physical phenomenon, don’t we? Anger, love and emotion.
We see it as completely mixed. We don’t ever separate the body from the mind. We think of anger, it’s the burning heart and the rising emotion, the freaking out voice and the tears coming, we call all of that anger. That’s not accurate. It’s just not accurate, so let’s analyze how it isn’t accurate.
Let’s try to pinpoint precisely where anger is, because again, if we’re going to analyze the emptiness of anger, we better be clear precisely what anger is. If you’re vague about a cup and think it’s a table, you’re in trouble. If you’re vague about anger and think it’s your body, you’re in big trouble, in Buddha’s terms, which is why we’re in trouble. So first of all, as I said, think whatever day it was, as Lama Yeshe says, and this completely shocks us in the West, he says desire, attachment, has nothing to do with the senses. Which is a shocking idea because we think it’s got absolutely everything to do with the senses.
But like we did the little analysis about the chocolate When you check out what’s experiencing the chocolate cake, well, you’ve got your tongue involved, you’ve the hand that picked it up, you’ve got the ear, the nose that smells it, the eyes that see it. Now, there’s sensory consciousness. That is consciousness, it’s non physical part of you, it’s the conscious or aware part of you that depends upon the eyes and the ears and the rest of your senses for it to function. So clearly, your eyes see cake, but in Buddhist terms, the eye consciousness is not the eyeball, that’s just the means through which eye consciousness, which is non physical, can function. So the eye consciousness doesn’t experience what’s called attachment.
The tongue consciousness even, which is what finally tastes the cake, right? It doesn’t experience attachment. So what experiences attachment? Why is the anxiety gated and the freaking out when you want more, and then feeling miserable and depressed because you’ve got too much? You understand, what experiences that?
Okay, your stomach feels full, but it doesn’t experience attachment. Your tongue isn’t having a nervous breakdown. Do you see my point here? So which part of you? So, okay, we’re narrowing it down a bit now to what’s called our mental consciousness, and now let’s look at that.
That is essentially your thoughts. You check. Then when you analyze anger with the same perspective, you’ve got the burning heat in the body, you’ve the guts, the knot in the stomach, you’ve the heart beating fast, all of this. But this is physical. It is simply the body.
It’s like this huge physical kind of eruption. So where is it all coming from? Clearly your body doesn’t want to hurt somebody. My fist doesn’t come out just from its own side and bash you in the face. The heart beating fast doesn’t have a problem, it’s not trying to burst out of my body and do something, if you analyze it in this way.
These are just like the symptoms of something, and what you’re coming right down to is the thoughts. So anger is conceptual. It is a bunch of thoughts about horrible Robina, horrible something. But why the physical components are there and so powerful, it seems to be, is because it’s such a deep habit that the whole of you, the whole deal, just launches into it. It becomes a psychophysical experience, but you have to analyse the parts, and this what you’re doing the Dhamma, you know.
So when you’re really looking at your mind, the time to really get to see the conceptual, which is the very heart of the delusions, is when you’ve subdued the emotional component and the physical one to some extent. So in the quietness of meditation, or even the quietness of just sitting sinking, you can then start to see, first logically, and then you get the experience of it, how anger is a bunch of thoughts, a description. It’s an elaborate novel, a story your mind is making up about somebody. But it doesn’t seem like we’re making it up because it feels so real here and everywhere. That sensory experience of pleasure, of the cake or the person, doesn’t seem like a mental experience, but attachment is exactly the same.
It’s a story the mind has made up about the gorgeous, handsome man, based on the story the mind has made up about I. This is the basis. All the words that we’re thinking in terms of anger and attachment, what are they referring to? I. Always I.
Never anything else, always I. I is a story made up by the biggest delusion of all, the biggest conception of all, called ignorance or unawareness. That’s the one that creates the big story in the first place. So this is the way you have to break down and analyze the way the mind functions, and then you get to the heart of it, and then you start changing the thoughts. That’s what spiritual practice is about, finally, changing your thoughts.
It’s nothing mysterious, it’s nothing esoteric, it’s nothing mystical, it’s just hard bloody work, being your own therapist, as Lama Yeshe says. But you gotta break it down this way to have some kind of logical understanding of what is your mind, what is not, what is sensory, what is mental, what is anger, what is this. You gotta be precise. You gotta have analytical clarity. Then we can make some progress, you know.
And you can only have this by listening to because here we’re talking Buddhism. You don’t have to believe a single word of it. We don’t have to be a Buddhist, but here we’ve Buddha’s deal. This is Buddha’s deal. So we’re talking Buddha here.
We’re talking Buddhist picture of reality, Buddha’s model of the mind, Buddha’s view of reality. So we have to listen to it. We can’t just go off and be holy and do a puja, and say a mantra, and say I’m a Buddhist. You’re better than nothing, but you’ve got to hear teachings. You’ve got to hear Buddha’s understanding of the mind, of function, of how this, why that.
This is what brings the clarity. Then some sanity comes. This is how you make progress. This is the benefit of listening to teachings. We need to.
Only want to feel love. You don’t want to feel anger. Don’t want to feel the But it’s not all things. Is that your negative Yeah, of course. Good God, yes.
I mean, Lord God in heaven, mother of Jesus, everything I always say all those things, mother of God, I say, the old Catholic in me. Completely, totally, the whole point of all this is to remove But why would you want to get rid of positive feelings? No, want to. But you would want to analyze them in the way, because you want to realize the emptiness of them, you would. But the conclusion that would come from realizing these things is that by realizing the emptiness of anger, it would just dissolve it.
By realizing the emptiness of love, it would increase it, because this is the nature of these things. It’s not some Well, that’s what you have to discover. But that’s what Buddha is saying, that what is called positive is simply the natural state of who we are. An analogy I use is sort of like water, H2O is what we mean by water, it’s the components of water, right? Two bits of h, one bit of o, but we know it’s polluted.
Now, we’re so used to the polluted water these days, we kind of just accept it, right? But if we want to have the pure water, we have to learn to know to analyze the nature of the pollution to remove it. It never fundamentally alters the nature of the h two o. Now, the h two o ness of your mind, in Buddhist terms, is love, compassion, wisdom, joy. It’s simply words for what is there naturally.
You have to grow it. But it’s finally when you’ve achieved your full potential, this is simply who you are. It’s simply the nature of who you are. And this, what is interesting, what Buddha is saying is, that the deluded emotions are actually mistaken conceptions conceptions about how things exist. We’ve got it all wrong, we’re up the creek in the way we get reality.
That’s why we suffer. And what positive states of mind are, are correct assessments of reality. They are in sync with how reality is, because everything is interdependent. So when you have removed all delusion and fully developed love and compassion, then that’s simply how things are, interdependent. You’re as big as the universe, you’re on us with all living beings, there is no separation, you see everybody’s minds, all past, all present, all future.
You want to benefit every single one of them, you have the power to do so. This is what a Buddha is, naturally, and this is what our natural potential is, it’s something natural, just that something high in the sky right now for us, and eons away, who knows? But to see it in this kind of clear way, rather than some religious stuff you’re stuffing inside yourself, is a very different taste, you So I love how much that would be an issue. That’s the point, they all are. It’s never pure attachment.
Honey, if you had pure attachment, hundred percent, you would be a total evil monster. You couldn’t be You know, if you suddenly had pure attachment and you were hungry, just eat your next door neighbor like the lion would eat the buffalo for breakfast every day casually. Well, attachment is a million times more strong. She’s probably ninety nine percent attachment, you know. We never have ninety nine percent as humans, we have pretty fierce attachment, but there’s always mix there, that’s the point about them, they’re always mixed.
Now maybe the love is twenty percent sometimes and the attachment’s very fierce. Maybe it’s eighty percent sometimes when the attachment is very small and the love was very huge. And what love is, is a virtue, it’s the wish that another be happy, it’s altruistic, it’s connected to others, it’s pure, it’s the cause of happiness, and it’s what you want to develop. So you want to get rid of the pollution. We have to keep learning to recognize the difference between love and attachment, because at the moment they are this package, this polluted water, they just go together.
And we’re so used to thinking they just go together, we assume they belong together, and Buddha is saying they are absolutely opposed to each other. And the job is simply to get rid of one and increase the other, you know. This is the job. So we have to see it first, be clear what it is, what it’s not, have this kind of clarity and analysis. And from this, a lot of sanity comes, a lot of kind of It’s like a maturity, because right now we’re all like little children, caught up in all the emotions, and we follow feelings, you know.
This is one of our biggest mistakes. It’s fortunate that we might have a good feeling, We’re very fortunate, but that’s only because we’ve practiced very hard in a past life. We’ve now got the imprints to be kind and loving. But don’t make it so concrete, it’s got a cause as well. Whereas we tend to think because something is instinctive, it’s sort of just there, doesn’t have a cause, it’s the view have in the West, you know.
But an instinct is simply the very deep habit of doing something. The lion’s instinct to eat the buffalo for breakfast every day is just because you’ve got huge aggression and attachment ripening as a lion, that’s all. All a body sufferer is is a person who’s instinctively kind because they practice it super hard. So feelings aren’t so special a big deal, you So it’ll analyze them and look at them and then try to increase the positive ones. Yeah, that’s really coming from a different text, isn’t Completely, completely different.
It’s just technology I feel in terms No, we do need all that, but not to accept as valid just because you feel it. This one of the suffering things about karma. Okay, Buddhism would say, you know, that the habit to do something is because you’ve done it before. So a person who, through having killed in the past, let’s say through having completed their karma in the lower realms from the result of killing, they come back into a human life as a result of virtue, but they haven’t purified all aspects of killing, and so they come back most tragically with the habit to keep killing, a deep instinct to keep killing. So they’re gonna meet all the conditions from the time they’re a tiny child that allows them to kill.
Now the tragedy is, when you have habituated to do something, it makes you feel good. This is the tragedy. Yeah, we’re saying we’re comfortable with that in the West, don’t we? I’m talking far more than that. Just listen, hang on, hang on a sec, hang on.
So, you look at people who kill murderers, people who want to kind of rape, you know, dead bodies, or eat bodies, all these weird things we think of, these evil monsters coming from hell, they’ve suddenly got animal karma left over, they’re just karmic imprints, and that’s why they’re so strongly attracted to doing it. Why a person as a child is attracted to, you know, wants to keep killing fish. So what you’re habituated to doing is because you’ve done it before. The tragedy is it causes you What you’re habit What you’re attracted to doing, what you’re habituated to do, you’re attracted to doing it. And what you’re attracted to brings a good feeling.
And then the tragedy is when it because it brings you a good feeling, it obscures you from seeing the suffering of that being. You think about it, it’s the worst part of karma. This is what, you know, in Buddhist terms, the most tragic part of karma, is that because of the habit of having done something, we keep doing it, because you want to keep doing it, you’re attracted to it, and because you’re attracted to it, feel good, and because you feel good, you can’t see the harm. This is the way karma Which is every reason to have compassion for every living being. Those murderers, those cannibals, those rapists, those evil beings we say are coming out of hell, who knows what, they’re just these tragic human beings who have these very powerful instincts because we never look at our minds.
They assume it’s good because you feel good, and unfortunately, the society doesn’t like it, so you gotta hide it. You understand what I’m saying? So we just keep doing what we do, you know? We just keep doing what we do because we feel good, we because we follow a feeling, oh, it feels good, so we do it. It’s total like a child.
It’s it’s like a child. So that’s why we have to analyze, look at our mind, have a basis of morality, and whatever you want to feel like doing, it might be valid, but first check it in relation to your basis of morality. Then, you know, I might want to kill my father, I have to acknowledge it. Don’t pretend, because society says I shouldn’t, which is what we do, or we secretly do it. Recognize I want to kill my father, but then I have a basis of morality, so then according to that basis, according to that morality, it’s not valid, so then I have to struggle to not do it.
That’s what practice is. It needs clarity. This is wisdom. This is the practice of wisdom, you know. Okay.
Okay. By the way, we taping this? I need it for somebody. Yes. Oh, that’s good.
Just want a copy of it. Excuse me. I’m I’m there’s all these guys in prison, and they want to they ask me to make tapes, you see. Not that I do it, but thank god, please. Excuse me.
That’s right. Exactly. K. Yeah. Purification?
Exactly. I know. Sure. Or how does it all fit? It’s a very good question.
Because this is all the stuff that we call so called religious rituals. It doesn’t seem to have any logical basis. Agree with what you’re saying. It doesn’t seem to have. So this is where some areas, you know, for a Buddhist, you get all this stuff we’re talking here, if we have a kind of mind that likes to think, it’s very appealing, isn’t it?
We like this, it does make sense, and it is real, it’s tangible, and all this blah, blah, blah. So then that just comes into where Let me try and use an analogy. Let’s say I’m studying I don’t know anything about Einstein. Let’s say I learn We’re talking one level here about some certain things that Einstein says, but then he says other things that seem Well, you just know this much. When you listen to it, it seems pretty esoteric.
You can’t get it. You’ve got to study for many years to get what he’s saying. I mean, and whether it’s music, any field of study, you’ve got a level where you can see more logic, and then there are the levels that seem more esoteric. Would you not agree? And until you’ve studied all that, you don’t get it, right?
So this seems to me natural, with everything. So, this is where, using our own wisdom to check up, first of all, on Buddha, on Einstein, on anything at all, you check the level that does make sense, and then the more you kind of have confidence in that level by having done it yourself, you’re prepared to give the benefit of the doubt, at least, to the stuff that they’ve given at the more advanced level. In a sense, you’ve to have that sort of leap of some kind of confidence. But, you know, so, okay, so, it’s like that with this stuff. All the teachings from all the lineage lamas, from all the lineages of the various lineages from the Buddha, all of these Tibetans, and blah blah blah, they all give the logical reasons about how this and how this and how this.
It doesn’t appear obvious to most of us how doing a prostration can remove these seeds of ignorance in your mind and purify your mind to enable you to understand emptiness more. How making water bowls on the altar, how doing all these seemingly purely religious ritual things are. But what Buddhism would say is that there’s not a single method, a single word, a single teaching of Buddha that isn’t for the same purpose, to help our mind realize emptiness, and to help our mind develop compassion. To at least hear the theories of them, how they’re said to be able to do this purification, this blah blah blah this, even though maybe initially we might not see the actual direct workings of it, at least if there is some level we do comprehend, and we’re prepared to work with that, and this is certainly the level I function at, I can say to you that I have faith, or confidence, based on the thinking that I’ve done so far, that some of this other stuff that I can’t directly see does have some benefit. I can say also from my own experience, without being able to be too articulate about it, that after doing these so called purification practices for quite a while, you know, that I do see some difference in me.
But I can’t give you more logic than that. But what Buddha is saying eventually, when you do develop So it’s the same with karma. karma is an impossible thing to see. Who’s got clairvoyance? None of us has.
Most of us don’t have the clairvoyance to see even most of this life, for God’s sake. Forget about when your mind was in a previous body, which is what Buddha is asserting. So, then, you know, the whole approach in Buddhism, especially in this particular approach, that The analogy is like this, okay, as an analogy, another analogy now. Let’s say, you know, there’s a place called New York City, and you’ve never been there. Now, you know, because we happen to all have heard about it, we’ve all seen millions of movies and read billions of books, we all kind of pretty much know it does exist, but the method that you have used to discover that New York is real is the same principle.
You’ve listened to people, you’ve read books, you’ve seen movies, you’ve checked it out, you’ve verified. So most people will tell you Park Avenue is there, and then Third Avenue is there, it crosses this way, so you can get pretty good inferential knowledge, can’t you, that will prove to you fairly well that New York City does exist, although you’ve never had the direct experience of it, and you can even know it well enough, conceptually, to even tell me how to get there. Do you see? So this is exactly the approach in Buddhism. You start with, you know, you start listening.
You know, you listen to Buddhist presentation, New York City enlightenment, New York City karma, whichever one you want to say. You have to first listen to what it is, how it is, you listen to the descriptions of it, you then verify that from various sources, you think it through to see if it’s conceptually sound, so slowly you develop some kind of first, maybe you can even call correct belief, they say, but eventually, through more and more logical analysis and clarity, and still conceptual, still conceptual, you get some kind of certainty, you get some inferential certainty about it. Based on this, just like based on New York, you then get the instruction of how to get there, and then it will explain to you when you get to Sydney, you get off the plane at Sydney, you get onto the plane again, you get to Los Angeles, you change planes at Los Angeles, you get to New York, and as you get to each step on the way, having checked first, having the confidence to even make the move to make journey, because you’re confident enough that New York will be at the end of the journey, and then you check even the steps as you go along, and you say, so far, so good.
Now suddenly you end up in Paris, France, and no one said you’re gonna get to Paris, France, then you better check your sources, because you didn’t check up enough. So, sort of, this is the approach they say, that the stuff that’s fairly obvious, you can get it fairly quickly, but there is stuff that’s not so obvious. Emptiness is not obvious, karma is not obvious, to the naked eye. But all the teachings in Buddhism would say, you start off inferentially, you start conceptually, and then you follow the steps, and what Buddha is saying is at a certain stage, through meditation, you will be able to access a subtle level of your consciousness which has the capacity to see past and future. So then you get to that point, Then you keep developing, you keep seeing the signposts and you keep going.
This is the approach, so you’re checking all the way as you’re going along. Is the approach in Buddhism. Buddhism is not pretending there aren’t things that are esoteric, that are difficult to see, definitely it’s true, but you can use some conceptual, you can have some conceptual clarity, and this is the stepping stone to experiential clarity in Buddhism, especially in the Tibetan tradition where they study in these monasteries, and this is the approach. Do that make sense? Who, me?
I don’t think I’ve gotten to that stage of knowledge. I think it’s a fairly highly sophisticated level of knowledge. I could say maybe for me I’ve got correct belief based on some analysis and some logic, some comprehension as method of understanding what the mind is, what it is and how it functions, what karma is, all this. I don’t think I’ve got even I mean, feel there’s certainty in my mind, but I’m prepared also to be wrong. I mean I’m using this certainty to help my own life, which I find important, but think it’d probably be that correct belief level.
I don’t think I’ve gotten to a level of inferential. I know some words, know, and for me it’s a consistent package, I just keep checking as I go along. Okay, goodbye. Thank you. Anybody else?
Yep. K. What’s yours in? Yes. Oh, I see.
No. Okay. Sentient. I never really quite understand that. What does it actually mean in English, sentient?
Okay. Buddhism would say that a sentient being has consciousness, has mind. Actually, Buddha’s model of the mind, most interestingly, doesn’t refer just to humans. It refers to every living being in the universe. And you’ve got sentient beings, and then a non-sentient being is a being who’s no longer caught in saṃsāra.
That’s like a Buddha. That’s all. So there’s consciousness in general, and a Buddha has consciousness, but they’re not a sentient being. So sentient being is a being who’s in saṃsāra, who’s got ignorance as the basis, so he’s caught up in suffering. Every living thing.
Not every living thing, no. Every living being. You have to establish what a living Pardon? What’s a living being? It has consciousness, as opposed to a carrot, which Buddhism would assert doesn’t have consciousness.
I’m just saying what Buddhism says, you can’t see it with the eye because consciousness is non physical. So we can only infer that you and I have got it, because we’re flat dead bodies, we’re not rotting, you know, we’re kind of moving and saying words, and stools don’t smell after, you know, so we can assume, we can infer there is consciousness. So it’s hard to see what has a consciousness. We can infer in Buddhist terms that an ant has consciousness because it’s a moving thing that if you go too close it’ll rush away, and you hurt it, it’ll writhe in agony, and we can just infer. It’s pretty gross, it’s all we can do, it’s the best, because you can’t see mind, it’s not physical.
So there are countless beings, a human realm, for example, in Buddhist terms, is like the sort of point naught naught naught naught of all sentient beings, you know, you’ve got a whole spectrum of possibilities in this realm of existence. You’re starting off, roughly speaking, if you like, within saṃsāra, with what they call different ways of presenting. But you’ve like a There’s a spectrum of possibilities, all the way from enormously blissful experiences, and what they call the so called God realms, where our beings who don’t have a physical body, but they have a subtle physical body, it’s like a life body, so they’re not experienced with human sensory consciousness, right? There’s a whole realm of existence called God realms, God realms, that’s the result, in karmic terms, of enormous virtue. Then you’ve got further down the track, couple of the God realms, then you’ve the human realm, which is what we occupy.
One of them. There are many according to Buddhism. Then you’ve got the animal realm, and we see some of them. All the insects, the tigers, the lions, and the fishes, things, you know. It’s fairly obvious there are an awful lot more of them than us.
You know, on one summer’s day you probably have a few million creatures just pop up like that, boom. So then you’ve got the spirit realm, which is even vastly, vastly, vastly more occupied than the animal realm. And spirits is a good word, you know, doesn’t mean you’re We use that very different meaning in Buddhism. It’s a very suffering realm of existence, a result of very heavy negative karma. The main propensity, which is enormous massive grasping, huge grasping, and then they’re disembodied, they don’t have physical bodies.
There are many, many kinds of beings, and the majority of them have nothing to do with this human realm, but some have some link with this human realm, so the stories of ghosts and all this stuff, they’re dudes in that realm, know. People who speak for other people, that kind of thing, they’re spirits, they’re in that realm. Due to very strong karmic connection with certain humans, they hang about those humans, make a mess, or whatever, you know, harm them. A lot of people who are considered crazy, schizophrenic, hearing voices, they’re just occupied by spirits in Buddhist terms, right? Then you’ve got the most suffering realm of existence of all, known as the hell realms, where again the most, the vast majority of all beings live in, are in this state of being.
Now these aren’t places where you can climb on airplanes to get to, right? They’re just simply states created by the karma of those beings. As Lama Yeshe said, as I said last night maybe, you know hell isn’t some place where the devil is waiting, saying, I’m waiting for Lama Yeshe. It’s simply the manifestation of the very deluded actions, karma, of those beings who are called hell beings. It’s a state of being.
We tend to think, oh well, it’s just a state of mind, it’s sort of not as real as real, you know, but human is just a state of mind as well. It’s a way of seeing reality, based on a certain body, with certain external reality, and it’s all due to karma. And so these countless, it is said there’s not an atomous space where there are not sentient beings. So all these beings have consciousness, have mind, consciousness, mind, at different levels of experience, very deluded or not, they all possess Buddha nature, their minds are beginning they’re endless, they all possess the capacity to be perfect, but they most don’t possess the conditions in which they can exercise that potential. So they what I call sentient beings, so it’s very hard to prove what is a sentient being because it’s not something that’s a result of it, it’s not something you can see through your senses, and there are some humans and some animals, that’s about it that we can see, you know.
So what is established as a sentient So then a sentient being Okay, so something that’s called a cup in Buddhist terms is not a sentient being. Something called a carrot a tree is not a sentient being. It doesn’t mean it’s not a living thing, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t respect it, but it doesn’t have consciousness, it won’t go from life to life, and so on, like that. It can be, a tree can be the home of many sentient beings, many spirits, I mean, in Buddhist terms, many spirits live all over the place. They can live in trees, but it’s not as if a tree is a body of a sentient being, put it like that.
It’s not connected, in a way, to a sentient being’s consciousness, so therefore killing a carrot isn’t killing a sentient being. This is the Buddhist story, What about a two shell or Who? Like a crocodile or something that has sentient being. Well, is it considered to be a living thing? In in in biologic is it considered like a biological or a botanical kind of thing?
What are people saying? A biological. Okay. It’s a sentient being. Should be a sentient being.
Yeah. Some kind of sentient being. Yeah. When you talk about the spirit realm, you know, we we grow up with the idea of if you come from the Christian tradition of guardian angels and Yep. They’re in the god realm, probably.
God realm. But there could be many, many spirits who are actually very manipulative, but who act like they’re gods, act like they’re special. Many people who channel people. Buddhism would perhaps say that many of them are actually negative spirits, hooking you, connecting with you in a negative way by being special, acting like they’re special because they have this power, because they have a lot of power, a lot of the spirits. Huge power.
So can you be reborn as a spirit? Yes, it’s one of the realms of existence. Due to karma, you get born there. Yeah, but that’s a hungry ghost? A hungry ghost is one aspect of spirits.
It’s a particular way that the pretas or hungry ghosts are one type of spirit, who live in the broader spirit realm. They always use that in the Lamrim because it’s to do with the strong experience of suffering, of desire and grasping, but they’re only one element. Like the spirit realm is occupied, like you know, you can see all kinds of humans, can’t you? Whole spectrum of possibilities, so yes, they’re spirits, preta spirits, yeah. Down a bit lower, in the lower realms with animals.
I have three dogs. Two of them are well, they act very well together. The third one has, like, the worst energy that I’ve probably seen in a dog. She tries to kill bees, flies Uh-huh. Sure.
Everything else. Sure. She, it was explained to me from the where I got her that she’d been ill treated. Uh-huh. But, we’ve had enough for five years and she obviously has an enormously coarse level of mind in that she can’t bewell, it’s very hard to calm her.
Right. So what’s the point? My question is, what would be the best thing? To do for her? Yeah.
Just try and, you know, practice patience, understand delusion, understand karma, make strong aspirations not to be born like that yourself, look at her anger, look at her violence, understand the stuff of being a dog, and be kind, be compassionate, and try and give her as much allow her give her the opportunity to not harm as much as possible. Yeah. And that’s all. That’s all you can do. And bless her mind with different things and try Natural.
All that as much as you can. Bless her mind, you know. That’s you can do. Somebody else had a question here behind the man. What’s your name?
Danny. Danny. Go on. That’s me. I’m an ex guy.
I understand. Sure. So, a quick question, I guess. Yes. I understand.
This has nothing to do with Tibet. It’s Buddha. This is the teachings of Buddha, and this is Buddha’s view on reality. It’s Buddha’s take on reality. It’s his presentation of what exists in the Indian texts and everything.
This is Buddha’s teachings on It’s his view of reality. And see, thing is, if you start talking about what you can’t believe in, you know, you’re sure about spirits because it sounds like religious, and I accept your point, but even then, when you start looking at even what Buddhist view of what consciousness is, it’s already sounding like weird and spiritual. You know, in Christian tradition, okay, the Western materialist view, what you can’t see doesn’t exist with the biggest microscope. We might now speculate a little bit, maybe there’s something, maybe, maybe people say, but because you can’t seem to get empirical evidence of it, then we say it doesn’t exist. This is why there’s a strong emphasis in Buddhism on inferential knowledge, conceptual clarity, at least looking at things in a theory level, you know, to see if it’s consistent.
So okay, even when you come to even discussing the mind itself, already in an area where, you know, what we call religious, a superstitious area, because you’re talking about something that cannot be seen with the eyes. So we already went into that even before we talked about spirits. We’re talking about consciousness, you can’t see consciousness. Okay, we can say you exist, but the Buddhism would say that your mind cannot be seen. Your mind is I mean, you weren’t here last night, so let me just give you, I think I did it today, I’ll tell you some of the characteristics, again, of mind in Buddhism.
Consciousness or mind, these words are synonymous. It’s the part of you that isn’t your body. Like I said, it’s the spectrum of everything inside you, your love, your hate, your compassion, your good, your bad, all this. It’s necessarily non physical in Buddhist terms. Now, as Westerners, and this is why we think it is physical, we can see the evidence of it.
When you snarl at me and the fist comes and blood comes out my nose, we can assume that it’s called, what’s called anger in your mind, so then we say, Oh, the brain is the brain that, you know? In Buddhist terms, the brain isn’t mind, the anger isn’t physical, you can’t find it in the brain and cut it out, and like I said last night, we’ve tried pretty hard in Western culture to say it’s in the mind, we’ve even tried to cut it all out in all those lobotomies, but just we make a mess, so it’s sort of interesting that we can’t see it so easily physically, but we can see the evidence of it, we can see the result of it, but in Buddhist terms anger is your mind, it’s your consciousness, whatever isn’t, whatever is your personality, your emotions, your feelings, it’s the difference between a dead body and a live body, is the presence of consciousness, and that is uniquely Dani’s, and where it began Dani began, we can say, at conception. Conception in Buddhist terms is the coming together of egg and sperm, which did come from your mother, father, now your body, no problem.
But what caused those egg and sperm to stay together, as opposed to go down the toilet with the rest, was the entry of what we now label Danny’s consciousness, but a subtler level of Danny’s consciousness, which had come from a previous body where it had been before, then at the time of the death, having programmed that consciousness by the way that previous person worked and lived their life, that’s called karma, Let’s say that person was known as Mary, so you’re a human in a past life. Mary, by the way she lived her life, by being very virtuous, by practicing a spiritual path, this is the Buddhist picture, then the propensity at the time of death in her mind was strong virtue, kindness, compassion maybe, this activated this When the subtle consciousnesses, which is what is all left of Mary, when the rest of Mary finished, all of Mary was thrown off the gross level, the senses, her memory, who seems she was, all the way to the subtlest level of consciousness, when that is And this is what’s called in Buddhism the indestructible consciousness, the subtlest level of your being, beyond which you can’t be subtler, and what it does is it carries all the seeds or the imprints or the propensities of everything that Mary did said and thought, and all the infinite previous lives before that, and that’s this consciousness carrying all this energy, and then due to the way Mary died, due to the way Mary lived, very virtuously it would have to be, that consciousness now on autopilot zapped into one sort of intermediate state between lives, they call a dream state, and then eventually, due to many, many causes of karmic causes and conditions coming together, that consciousness, which was known as Mary but now doesn’t have any personality, just a subtle consciousness, but on autopilot programmed by Mary’s way of dying and living, then zapped into the mother’s womb, this new person’s womb called Danny’s mother.
So then, that consciousness is the glue that held that egg and sperm together, that gave it life, that caused it to turn into the fetus known as Danny. And then all the propensities of Danny are right there from that second, because all this new package then started to ripen and grow into the fetus and then popped out and grew into what we know as Danny, all his thoughts, emotions, feelings, propensities, how good and bad, and all this. This the Buddhist picture of mind and karma, which is central to the Buddhist picture, you know. That’s the beginningless continuity. This consciousness you can’t Because it doesn’t come from God or Buddha, it’s not an atom of you created by a superior being in Buddhist terms.
Your consciousness comes from previous moments of your When you break down what your mind or your consciousness is, it has a bunch of parts, it’s like the cup. It’s got thought, thought, love, hate, this, that, it’s a bunch of stuff which we label Danny’s consciousness. All that stuff comes from previous habits, similar stuff. All these different propensities is what Danny is, he’s a bunch of propensities, know, positive ones, negative ones, thinking ones, this ones, emotional, blah blah blah, you know, and they’re the result of other Just a tiny number, they’re the fruiting, if you wish, the fruiting of just a tiny number of seeds on Danny’s consciousness. There are countless more there, for ant lives, dog lives, hell lives, who knows what lives, suffering lives, good ones, and for Buddhahood, all there latent, waiting for the appropriate conditions to ripen as very positive or very negative experiences.
Meanwhile, just a little bunch of them, which we labeled Danny, are ripening as Danny and his life right now. But that consciousness, if we trace it back before conception, it was in a previous body called Mary, and then at the Mary’s conception, it came from a previous life, and you can’t find a beginning of that particular train of consciousness because it doesn’t come from God or Buddha. Okay, there’s not enough reason now, I’m just giving you what Buddhism says. It’s not a possibility that you can be created by a superior being. It is a possibility that a superior being known as a Buddha, who is a being who is fully enlightened, can manifest their mind in countless forms, including Danny’s, but Danny would be that enlightened being, he wouldn’t be some offshoot.
There’s no such concept like that in Buddhism, right? So you don’t come from a superior being. Your consciousness or your being or your personality do not come from your parents. They can influence you hugely, but they can only influence you to the point that the propensities are within you, right? So if they’re mean and ugly too, and Danny turns into a mean and ugly person because he had the propensity to be mean and ugly as well, but if you didn’t have the propensity to be angry, they could beat you every day and you’d never get angry, because you couldn’t, it’s like you’re tone deaf.
No matter how hard they train you to practice piano, if you’re tone deaf honey, I can’t make you Mozart. But if you’ve got the potential to be Mozart, it’ll grow like that. So they’re the catalysts. So consciousness doesn’t come from mother father, can’t just come out of the blue from nothing, it’s an absurd idea, it’s not a series of random events. It doesn’t come from God or Buddha, so the only other option is it comes from previous moments of itself.
So Danny’s consciousness is a continuity, a beginningless continuity of mental moments, and continually ripening of certain experiences, called positive or negative, which are the result of karma. This is the story somehow. Then according to how you work with that now, is the cause of what you’ll become in the future, given that your consciousness is endless as well. If Mary lived well, does Mary die well? That’s what I was saying before, exactly.
That makes sense. Precisely, yes exactly. No, she said if you live well, it doesn’t because you have a nice life, doesn’t mean you live well. Many people, because their life is very fortunate, don’t make any efforts, they just act out, catch them and act out, they’re pleasant, nice people, but there’s no real practice of virtual morality there. This is very interesting.
Many people, most people don’t think about death, most people don’t think about being, I mean they’re just kind to their friends, they don’t have any violent enemies, they don’t really do anything very violent, negative, but if we look at our minds, following attachment, just following delusion, just can’t be bothered, I mean it’s not being horrible about us. So it’s sort of like using up the money in the bank, not creating more. So if you never think about death, never think about the meaning of life, never really think about the need to be genuinely compassionate to others, then you’re just kind of using up your own virtue, and when time of death comes there’s a lot of attachment there, you freak out. That’s normal. One of my friends, Lenny, who works in California in the hospice movement said, it’s an accepted thing in the hospice movement, not Buddhists, people, that most people die with enormous fear because they’ve never thought about death.
So fear, okay, fear brings up a violent, a freaked out mind, so you’re talking about violence in a car accident? That doesn’t mean they died with non virtue though. It doesn’t mean they didn’t have a good death. Generally speaking, a violent death, naturally if you’ve not trained your mind, the mind will freak out. This is normal, but that’s the result of karma too.
So having a good life doesn’t mean yet you’re leading a virtuous life, that’s different. If you really look at it more deeply. Most people we know in a city like Adelaide, they’re not rapists, they’re not murderers, they’re not thieves, most of us aren’t like Hitler, you know, which we tend to, so we’re ordinary people. And then what happened? In a car.
Doesn’t mean she had a non virtuous mind when she died, though. No. She might have been thinking of somebody else. She was. You don’t know.
Well, there you go. So you don’t know. So, no, that’s that’s got nothing to do with being virtuous. That can be actually purification. That can be a good that can be a good thing, depending on how your mind is is the point.
Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Whether virtue or non virtue, right? They would not be frightened, there’d be no fear.
Let me tell you a story, it’s very interesting, exactly the point Danny. Hang on Audrey, there’s a story. Lama Zopa Rinpoche, who’s the lama of this center, the main lama of this center, who comes every now and again, he’s up on pictures up there somewhere. He was recognized as a little boy, as the reincarnation of a previous lama, who was this great meditator up in the mountains in Nepal. He was known as the Lawudo Lama, because he lived in this little cave where they used to store the radishes, and I think Laudo means radishes, right?
So he spent the last thirty years of his life in this radish cave. He was said to be a great meditator who realized reality, all this stuff, got rid of the eye, developed enormous compassion, therefore had complete control over his death, and then indeed, as they would say in Tibetan tradition, had complete control over his rebirth. They choose exactly where they are going get reborn, there’s no problem, you know. So he was said to be one of these people, and he’s known as the Lawudo Lama. So from the time this new little person, and nobody knew who he was yet, this little boy called Zopa, I think he wasn’t called Zopa then, but he was the same Lama Zopa Rinpoche, since tiny baby, since he could crawl, apparently.
His mother would go out chopping the wood, she’d come back and Zopa would be missing, and then she’d search and he’d be up the mountain, crawling up this mountain to where they knew the Lawudo Lama’s cave was, all the time up there, determined up there, every time she had her back turn, you know, crawling. By the time he could talk, she’d hit him and say come home, that is my home, no, that is my home. So he was saying very clearly who he knew, that he knew exactly who he was, even from the time he could talk, before he could talk, and he wanted to get up there and carry on the job, right? So then he got recognized, eventually they consulted Lamas and he was seen in this whole method in Tibet. He was in Nepal actually.
So then eventually, one time he said he was about eight, and he had been recognized, was known as Rinpoche, it means precious one, a title that’s given to these people. He was in a monastery up the mountain further with some monks and things, and across the river, this big river, there were some white people, westerners, it was fascinating, these blonde, straw haired, blue eyed people, and he wanted to meet them. So he said he eventually got permission to go over and see them, he had a bowl of potatoes, which is what he’s to be offering, so he went over this rickety bridge and he fell in the river, it was just the story. So it was very interesting how he told this story, you know. First of all, he talked about himself quite objectively, as if he were another person, he said, the head kept, maybe his head, kept bobbing up and down, said.
So basically there he was, this little person drowning, and he was up and down, gasping for breath, and his head bobbing up and down, right? But he said, I didn’t know anything about emptiness, meaning in that life he had not had any teachings, but the assumption here is that based on the experiences of emptiness he had gotten in his past life that he had brought with him, they were there vividly. He said, I didn’t know anything about emptiness, but there was no fear. So what we call instinct for survival in the West is something completely just natural, in Buddhist terms is the strongest symptom of ego, the symptom of ignorance. So when that is gone Now that is interesting, because when we think you get rid instinct for survival, as we call it, we think you just, oh well he’d sink to the floor like a stone and not care, because we think unless you have this you can’t discriminate anything.
But in Buddhist terms it’s the diluted aspect of it. So when there’s no fear, he’s still going up and down breath and all that, you know, and trying to save himself, because that’s a natural thing to do, but it wasn’t coming from freak out and grasping. And as he said, he said, Ah, the thought occurred to me, the person known as the Lawudo Lama is about to die. I mean, it’s interesting, eight years old, so it’s very interesting story to illustrate that it must be that that mind was free of grasping, free of delusion, free of fear, fear of freak out, all of which are the sentient beings of this ignorance, and the cause suffering. So it’s an interesting story, I like that story very much.
So he still kind of managed to get saved, and it’s puffing and panting probably, but the mind was unchanged. He would have still had compassion and kindness towards others, and even if he had stopped breathing, it would have just been a very natural, unfearful process. It’s very interesting. Even this thing we call instinct for survival is this huge mass of ignorance. So what happens for most people when we die, if you had a good life and nothing’s threatened you and you just kind of acted out your attachment and loved your kids and did this and did that, but never go much deeper, well then, you’re not really practicing virtue, you’re not doing any harm, but you’re not really deepening anything, so when death comes, because you never thought about it, because you have clinging to life and there’s a very powerful grasping that ripens at the time of death, then of course freak out.
You’re attached to all your kids, don’t want to leave them, you’re panic stricken, you haven’t thought about it, so fear, massive fear comes, and fear is the major symptom of ignorance, and that’s the one that ripens suffering. So it’s very interesting. Even the worst situation, you can think of a person dying in a car accident with their little child next to them, the last thought could be compassion for their child. That person’s mind, no fear, there wouldn’t be fear because there’s no I, there’s nothing in your eye, it’s only when you’re freaking I that there’s fear, it’s interesting. Yes, we can see it’s kind of, it’s psychologically logical.
This is the level we’re talking about all the time, not some hysterical, superstitious, religious, fearful, bad, naughty person go to hell, God’s punishing you view, you know? Your own energy itself produces the results. It’s very important to understand that. And then there’s a sense of responsibility, not kind of fear and guilt. It’s very important, actually.
So on that, when you’ve used the word energy, when people say I didn’t say the word energy. You used the word energy. Which energy are you talking about? Maybe I said it but in relation to what? Subtle consciousness.
Subtle consciousness, yes? Is that okay to use that as an No, energy can mean anything. So subtle consciousness is subtle consciousness. It’s not energy. Energy is this what do we use, mom?
Energy is a very vague Western term. Does it mean? You could say mental energy, physical energy. Mental physical, but mental So it’s mental energy. It’s a reasonable term to say.
Yes? Sometimes when people say, well, what is the Buddhist version of? And you don’t want to go into the lamrim because you’re obviously not qualified, you don’t want enough, and you don’t want to stuff people’s minds up. I have said it is like the energy moving on. Well you’ve got to be more specific, maybe conscious energy.
Energy is a term we use for something that’s kind of living and vibrating, maybe, isn’t it? I don’t know, there’s something that exists. I don’t know, what do we mean by energy? I have no idea, does it have a What? E equals x t squared.
This is energy. There you go, that’s what Einstein says. So then that’s not much relationship to what we’re using here. So just don’t bother using it there. Thank you, that’s very clear.
Thank you very much. Just say mental consciousness, say consciousness, subtle consciousness. I tell you why it worked, because people have heard, you know, equals MC2 and the energy can’t die, so they say, Oh, I can’t see that. Fair enough, okay. Good.
You don’t want to be wrong either. No, it’s important not to say what’s wrong. If you’re calling it Buddhism, you’ve to be accurate. If you’re going to say you ism, and you make your own idea up, that’s cool. But if you’re going to say it’s Buddhism, you’ve to be accurate in what Buddha says.
Don’t just jump in and say any old thing, it’s really inappropriate. Yeah. Fair enough. Well give them something, they’re poor little things, they want answers, come on mom. They ask you to read hard.
I know, I mean, said it’s the hardest ones. I’m sure that’s true. What else, people? Yes. This is the point, that’s what a being is Audrey, is a being who necessarily possesses mind.
Your mother told you? Consciousness and mind, consciousness and mind, first of all, the way we’re using those words here, are essentially synonymous. Okay, but does the mind know itself? It can sound like a tricky question, but what does it really Yes, yes. That’s conventional nature.
Okay. I mean the mind okay. No. No. No.
No, Mind is just a label for the parts of the mind, and what are the parts of your mind? They’re called love, they’re called hate, they’re called joy. It’s not like some mysterious entity called mind, sort of that has bits, that’s not what we’re saying, there’s no cup that possesses parts, it’s a convenient way to label the various parts, so we can say, instead of saying please pass the silver object with the handle on the screw and the lid and the Starbucks written on the black bottom, it’s a bit confusing, you just say cup, it’s shorthand. So mind is a shorthand for all the bits of your mind, and so there’s no mind that knows itself, there’s a bit of your mind called awareness, the function of your mind is awareness. Okay, the function of mind, the function of cup is to hold drink, the function of mind is to be aware, or to cognize, or to know, they’re synonymous, and they know or cognize at different levels, according to what level of mind we’re talking about.
We have the sensory consciousness, like I said. Eye consciousness is aware of, or knows, or cognizes color. Ear consciousness is aware of, cognizes, or knows sound. Mental consciousness functions at two different levels. The level we function at now as a gross human being, which is the tip of the iceberg, is only conceptual, only conceptual.
That is, we have thoughts about things, our emotions, everything, they’re all thoughts, so we know about color, we know about glasses, we know about emptiness. Awareness is the general function of mind itself. Then you have the various bits of mind, and they’re called in Buddhist terms, they have the term mental factors. They’re the parts of your mind, essentially. So what do you have?
You have something called concentration, you have something called love, you have something called kindness. There’s only so many parts, if you wrote a list according to Buddhist model of the mind, there are only so many parts of your mind. Now each of those parts has its particular function. So, you know, concentration has the function to keep the mind on one thing all the time. Mindfulness has the function of keeping, in a similar way, it aids concentration.
You have a particular function of mind called feeling, which experiences, it knows pleasure or knows pain. You have a particular function of mind called love, which is a virtue, which has the capacity to want others to be happy. You have a function of mind called hate, which wants to harm another. Do you see my point here? There’s a bit of your mind that does a job, all the bits do jobs.
So each of those minds does it’s own job. Now the part, as you say, is part of the that’s called, maybe, you know, self reflective, I don’t know what the term is, you know? When you die, it’s just how you’re explaining it. Yep. And then you stop breathing.
Yep. Very subtle, when your consciousness goes from the gross level to the very subtle level of your conscious being, called the indestructible consciousness, or the clear light consciousness. If you’re an ordinary person, Audrey, who hasn’t realized anything, hasn’t accessed a subtle level of your mind during meditation, then you’re not conscious of that level at all, it’s totally unconscious, it just goes on autopilot. There’s no consciousness at all, there’s no awareness, it’s too subtle. But if you’re a meditator, and you’ve accessed during this life, by subduing your grosser level of consciousness, and you’ve plumbed the depths, if you wish, of your consciousness and you’ve accessed the subtler levels, then you die with clarity and control, like Lama Zopa in his previous life, and was able to go through the experience of dying and being re reborn, essentially without losing consciousness, but it would have been at a subtler level of consciousness, such that when he got reborn, even as a wordless baby, he knew who he was.
That’s highly advanced. That’s because he carried over his realizations from the past life, and had volition and control and all these qualities highly developed. Each of those qualities would have to have been highly developed in order to have that kind of awareness, as a tiny baby. This answering your question, slowly?