Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 92-minute session, Ven Thubten Dondrub explores the structure and potential of the mind through Buddhist psychology, starting with the foundational teaching that bodhicitta—the heartfelt wish to become enlightened for all beings’ sake—arises from understanding our interdependence with every living being. He walks through the mind’s architecture: the six consciousnesses (five sense consciousnesses plus the crucial mental consciousness), fifty-one mental factors, and crucially, the eleven virtuous mental factors like faith, non-attachment, and patience that naturally produce happiness, versus the root afflictions like ignorance and attachment that produce suffering. A key insight emerges: in any moment, a virtuous state of mind brings pleasant feeling without exception, while non-virtuous states bring suffering—making the cultivation of virtue the only reliable path to lasting contentment. Dondrub contrasts direct perception with conceptual knowing, explains why meditation isolates the sense consciousnesses to allow the mental consciousness to work clearly and powerfully, and distinguishes between love (wanting another’s happiness) and attachment (wanting them to make me happy). Throughout, he emphasizes that all genuine suffering and happiness originate in the mind, not in external conditions, and demonstrates why understanding this is the Buddha’s most radical and liberating teaching. Appropriate for serious practitioners beginning to study Buddhist psychology and Tibetan Buddhist meditation.
File metadata (for organising)
File: Mind and its potential week 3.mp3
UUID: 34aca81e-ef95-4397-a180-7b7d30defe12
Teacher: Ven Thubten Dondrub
Collection: DB Mind and its Potential 2017-18 (Ven Thubten Dondrub)
Date: 2017 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 92.5 minutes
Words: ~9,909
Perspective, and and we taught about our mind to discover the potential of our mind to encourage us to, work to awaken the full potential of our mind to become Buddhas. So generating that wish to become a Buddha is called bodhicitta. So bodhicitta is the mind wanting to become enlightened or become a Buddha for a very particular reason understanding that only as a Buddha one has all the special qualities, positive qualities and free of all negative qualities that enable one to be of perfect benefit to all sentient beings without exception. And one develops that wish to be of perfect benefit to all sentient beings by recognising that one is connected to all sentient beings, that all sentient beings have been our mother, have been immensely kind to us in every conceivable way many many many many times in beginning with saṃsāra. But unfortunately all these beings are suffering helplessly, not even aware of the situation they’re in and how they are ignorantly, unknowingly creating the causes of suffering over and over again.
So to help them stop creating the causes of suffering, help them create the causes of happiness, to guide them out of saṃsāra to the state of enlightenment we have to become Buddhas. And to become Buddhas we really have to understand our mind. Everything the Buddha taught is based on an understanding of the mind and its potential and how the mind works. So please try and generate as much as possible that motivation of bodhicitta, At least wanting to subdue as much as possible the negative aspects of one’s mind not only because it harms oneself but our unsubdued mind leads to harm to others and wanting to awaken more and more release those positive potentials of our mind not only because they benefit ourselves but because they will naturally benefit other living beings. So we can say the prayer of refuge in bodhicitta, which is on page ten, if you’d like to join in.
And as I’ve mentioned before, to make it more effective we visualise the Buddha in front of us as our source of refuge, inspiration and guidance and try to think of all sentient beings surrounding us, at least those we are most connected to in this life. So thinking of our mother on our left, our father on our right, family, friends and helpers behind us, harmers in front, and then as much as possible all other living beings. I go for refuge until I’m enlightened to the Buddha, Dharma, and the supreme assembly. By my merits, I achieved through listening to the Dharma. May I become a Buddha in order to benefit all sentient beings.
So thinking the Buddha is pleased with our motivation, we imagine the Buddha coming to the crown of our head, and then when directly above our crown the Buddha dissolves into blissful golden light that pours down into us, blessing our mind. So we imagine our mind becoming very calm, very clear, very peaceful. So can reinforce that positive state of mind by just briefly doing the nine round breathing exercise. One can combine it with the visualization of breathing in white light, breathing out all one’s disturbances and negativities and so on in the form of very thick black smoke. Okay.
Thank you. So just in case you haven’t looked at the course outline, Tonight’s supposed to be about the potential of the mind and so on, but I’m just gonna change class three and four, just reverse those. So, I’ll talk about class four tonight and class three next week If you remember last week, at the end of last week I was talking about how the mind, what we refer to as the mind, can be divided into these or looked at or the mind is that which knows or the mind knows in different ways. So there are six, the mind could be said to be made up of six different kinds of consciousness, each one knowing specific objects. So we have an eye consciousness, an ear consciousness, nose consciousness, tongue consciousness, body consciousness.
These are the five sense consciousnesses and then we have the mental consciousness. So the mental consciousness is the most important aspect of the mind, okay. Just like our heart is the most important part of our body in a sense, the mental consciousness is the most important aspect of our mind. It puts all the information from the other five sense consciousnesses together to create the illusion of this world in a sense. And it’s our mental consciousness that thinks about things.
There’s a whole in Buddhist psychology there’s a whole explanation of these six consciousnesses. This is just an introduction to the mind. So just very briefly, the eye consciousness, what it perceives is shape and color, right? The ear consciousness hears sounds, it distinguishes between meaningful sounds and meaningless sounds, then the nose consciousness distinguishes, it knows smells, that’s all it knows. The eye consciousness only knows shapes and colours, the ear consciousness only knows sounds, and then the nose consciousness only knows smells, pleasant smells, unpleasant smells.
The tongue consciousness only knows tastes, doesn’t know anything else. So there’s bitter and astringent and sour and sweet and so on. And then there is what have we got left, the body consciousness which distinguishes or knows soft and hard, hot and cold and things like that. This is all it knows. It doesn’t know anything else and it doesn’t think about those things.
So it’s the mental consciousness that gives labels to all of these things and puts them all together and thinks about them. It distinguishes that this shape and colour is a flower and then it might think about that flower as being a nice flower, it’s my flower and so on and whatever like that. And it’s also as I’ve said before, it is the mental consciousness that one can think of that has these three layers or three levels. There is the gross level of mental consciousness which is what we are using now. Of course we’re using our sense consciousnesses but it’s only the gross level of our mental consciousness that is functioning now and that is arising depending on our sense consciousnesses and the sense organs and this body, the nervous system and the brain.
But then there is a more subtle level of consciousness and then there is the very, very subtle level of consciousness. So as His Holiness the Dalai Lama points out, the more subtle a level of consciousness we are able to access, the less that level of consciousness is dependent on and affected by the body. Alright, so I’d just like to say this again because it is very helpful to know about these three levels of consciousness even now, but remember these three levels of consciousness are talked about only in the tantric, the teachings of the Buddha which are the most advanced teachings of the Buddha. And these these the gross sorry. The subtle and very subtle levels of consciousness, these cannot be accessed.
Well, no. The only way they can be accessed to be experienced is by someone, a very advanced practitioner of Tantra. Right? Even those, you know, who follow the Theravāda path, to nirvana, to become an arhat, those beings do not have the ability, do not know the methods to access the subtle and especially the very subtle level of consciousness. This is something that is unique to Tantra and this is why Tantra is the fast path to enlightenment but also the tricky or somewhat dangerous path to enlightenment because to access that very subtle level of consciousness can be very dangerous if one doesn’t know how to do it and one hasn’t trained properly for a long period of time under a very, very highly qualified teacher of tantra and someone who doesn’t simply know the words but has a very deep experience of how to work with these subtle levels of mind.
But even so as the gross mind has these more subtle levels and the more subtle you can access those even the less that level of mind is affected by this body. So for us in general, especially someone who hasn’t worked with their mind at all, like when we are physically sick then it’s very difficult to work, know, for our mind doesn’t function very well and we tend to get, you know, when we’re sick and all very sick we tend to get unhappy and a bit depressed and down and the mind’s not very clear and so on. But someone who really works with their mind can maintain a very clear, happy, peaceful mind even if even if they’re extremely sick and dying and so on. Right? It all depends on how we work with and train our mind.
And also for just simple examples like hot weather, when it gets very hot and our body heats up our mind tends to go like a swamp. It becomes really dull and sleepy, mean generally your mind certainly does. So our mind is very much affected by the external environment, right? But the more we work with our mind we are less affected by our own body and the external environment. Of course we’re affected by other people.
If we’re with happy people we tend to be happy. If we’re with really miserable, angry, nasty people it brings us down and also we tend to those negative qualities in ourself tend to come encouraged to hang out with good people. We may want to go out and save everyone, but unfortunately unless our mind is extremely strong where instead of saving those people we may be badly affected by them. Okay, so there are these six consciousnesses, the five sense consciousnesses and then there is the mental consciousness that make up the mind. So just to I don’t if I’m drowning you in information.
Some of you said there’s quite a lot of material that we’ve gone through already and it takes a while to absorb it. But anyway, as I said at the very beginning, I’m just trying to give you some idea of the mind. You don’t have to try and understand it all at once in this course. It’s just to give you some idea, some things to think about and investigate in the future. So another way of looking at the mind is that there are what are called the primary consciousnesses and then there are the secondary mental consciousnesses or mental factors.
So the primary consciousnesses refer to there is the primary eye consciousness, there is the primary ear consciousness, the primary nose consciousness, primary tongue consciousness, the primary body consciousness and then there is the primary mental consciousness. So there are six primary consciousnesses, right? And then there are these what are called mental factors or secondary minds. So for example, the primary eye consciousness just sees its shapes and colors in a very very general way. And so it only gives a certain amount of information, something very very general.
And so to fill in all of that, there are all these other mental factors which you have a list of. There’s probably a lot more than these but in Buddhist psychology, do you all have this handout? Remember each week at the beginning of the class it’s good to put in your new homework, collect the marked homework, often there will be a handout, not every class but some classes there will be one or two handouts and there’s also the discussion topics for the discussion group. So I’m not going to go into any detail on this because this is a major topic that one can study for months. It’s just to give some idea of your mind, right.
So there are the six primary minds or consciousnesses and then there are the secondary minds and the secondary minds or secondary consciousnesses are divided up into a group of called what are called the five omnipresent mental factors because they’re operating with the primary consciousnesses all the time. They’re omnipresent, always present. So there’s always feeling, you’re always having some feeling, right? Pleasant, unpleasant, neutral that goes when you see something there’s either a pleasant feeling, unpleasant feeling or a neutral feeling. And there’s some kind of basic discrimination distinguishing this from that.
Anyway, other factors also. Then there’s also the five object determining factors and then what I’d like to just very briefly focus on is that there are also these virtuous mental factors, virtuous states of mind. There are eleven main ones. So there’s the mind of faith, the mind of shame, embarrassment, non attachment, non delusion, effort, pliancy, conscientiousness, equanimity, non hatred and non cruelty. So these are virtuous mental factors that we’re encouraged to.
So we have the potential for all of these, every consciousness has the potential for all of these qualities. Pliancy, you know, see these are mental factors of what pliancy refers to for example, it’s this mental factor that very easily engages or happily engages in virtue. Good stuff. What is meaningful? I don’t want to embarrass anyone about anything, but what tends to happen, like even for example when listening to a dharma talk, when you watch television people can watch television for hours, but when you listen to a dharma talk people tend to go to sleep.
Get bored, dull, sleepy. You know people can attend parties for hours and hours and hours and hours, but to do something virtuous, you know the body gets tired, the mind gets tired. This is because we lack this mental pliancy. When we have a lot of mental pliancy our mind is very, there’s no resistance to doing good things, virtuous things. It it it yeah, it’s just like when the body gets old and stiff, there’s no pliancy and it’s very difficult just to do physical stuff.
But here this pliancy is we’re talking about the mind and it’s a virtuous kind of pliancy, the mind that it it can be sort of molded to do good stuff. Yeah. And then there are the six root afflictions, there are these mental factors, these negative mental factors of attachment, anger, pride, ignorance, afflictive doubt, all sorts of wrong views. And then there are these other, so in Buddhism they talk about what are called the six, sorry, the three poisonous minds or the three root delusions. So this is ignorance because this is the very, the worst, this is the main delusion problem that obscures our mind, ignorance.
It’s this mental factor that doesn’t perceive things as they actually are. It may come as a surprise to you but the Buddha says that absolutely everything that we see, hear, smell, taste, touch, contact, you know, think about everything is false. It doesn’t exist that way. Nothing. We don’t perceive anything correctly.
At all. In a conventional way we may, you know, we all agree this is a flower, but the actual way this flower exists we do not see. And that’s the the Buddha discovered that ignorance is the source of all our problems. Because of that we have attachment, we have anger, pride, jealousy, all the other root afflictions, the other six root afflictions and this wonderful list of twenty secondary afflictions such as hatred, resentment, concealment where we conceal negative qualities, we conceal our negative qualities, we have spite, envy, avarice, dishonesty, pretension, arrogance, non shame, inconsideration, dullness, you know our mind becomes very dull in relation to virtuous things, excitement, non faith, laziness, which refers to spiritual laziness. We may be very active like going to parties and shopping and stuff like that, but we can be very lazy in meditating.
I did check the ticks against your meditation days. There’s negligence, forgetfulness, you know we forget virtuous things. We remember all the harms people did against us, we remember those very clearly, but we forget all the kindness, non introspection and distraction. And then there are what are called the four variable mental factors meaning that these can be either, depending on various factors, they can become virtuous or non virtuous. So there’s reflection, so if we’re reflecting on something good that becomes a virtuous mind.
If we reflect on something bad like oh you know he or she said this terrible thing to me blah blah blah, we go on it so that’s a negative state of mind. Again with analysis we analyse things like doing analytical meditation, this is a virtuous state mind. When we analyse how to rob a bank, that is a non virtuous state of mind. When we regret doing something negative, that is virtuous. When we regret doing something virtuous, that is non virtuous.
Right? And then there’s this wonderful phenomenon which is a mental factor. Sleep is a mental factor. It is a, yes, yeah. And it’s all of these fifty one mental factors have definitions but I only remember one of them which is sleep and the definition of sleep is concentrating on darkness.
That’s what sleep is, it’s the mind, it’s the mental consciousness concentrating on darkness. And when you do that, sleep occurs. And sleep can be virtuous or non virtuous, depending on why you go to sleep. So if you go to sleep to get up bright and early in the morning to meditate and do your homework, that’s virtuous. If one just does it out of laziness and this and that it can be non, or it could be neutral or it could be non virtuous.
It really depends. So there’s all these mental factors. So it’s also interesting to note that according to Buddhist psychology that what tends to happen with our mind is that you know, we have this primary mind, so for example the mental consciousness and the primary mental consciousness, and it’s knowing something, it’s thinking about something. So if what we’re thinking about is motivated by anger, that one mental factor of anger, what tends to happen is many of the other negative mental factors also start to bubble up. It’s like a train, you have this engine of anger or attachment and it tends to drag along with it all the other mental factors bubble up.
But also on the other hand, if one of the virtuous mental factors starts taking over the mind, it tends to draw into it all the other ones as well to some extent. Alright. So if one is motivated by loving kindness towards someone you will also tend to be patient with that person. People we like, we are more patient with people that we like than whom we don’t like. If someone we don’t like is wasting our time, get angry or upset, impatient very quickly.
But if someone we like and but they’re taking a long time to do something, we’re more likely to be patient with them because we like them because, so those mental factors, the good mental factors tend to come together and support each other, unfortunately the negative mental factors tend to come together and make a really nasty mess of everything. Yeah. That’s why we need to try to cultivate a virtuous mind. Get one of those positive mental factors going and it will the others will tend to come along to support it. And it’s also, I think I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s also important to understand that although our mind is changing moment by moment, there’s this mental, our mind is like a stream of consciousness that is arising moment by moment and remember a moment when you analyse it, What is a moment?
Now we have nanoseconds and things like that. So in every tiniest moment the mind is changing. But actually in any one single moment the mind is only knowing one thing and experiencing therefore feeling one thing. So in any particular moment you are either happy or unhappy. Or you could be neutral but we don’t have to worry about neutral feelings, they are not a problem.
The problem for us is feelings of happiness and feelings of suffering. Experiences of happiness and suffering, pleasant feelings, unpleasant feelings. So in any one moment we can we’re either experiencing a pleasant feeling or an unpleasant feeling. You can’t have both together. As I tried to say before, neutral feelings are not not a combination of pleasant and unpleasant.
Neutral feelings are a separate category altogether. So one is either experiencing pleasure, pleasant feeling, unpleasant feeling or neutral feeling. You can’t have both together. And one is only, this is a very important simple fact about aspect of Buddhist psychology is that when a virtuous mind, the nature of virtuous minds is that the feeling that goes with that experience of a virtuous mind of love, compassion, kindness, any of those eleven virtuous mental factors, the feeling that goes with that automatically is pleasant feeling. When you experience love, compassion, patience, etcetera, etcetera, that feeling is pleasant.
It is never ever unpleasant. It doesn’t vary. Whereas when one is in a negative state of mind, when one of the negative mental factors has taken over the primary mental consciousness, then that feeling that always goes with it is suffering. Right? That’s the fundamental aspect of Buddhist psychology.
If we want to be happy, we have to cultivate our mind and we have to cultivate the virtuous minds. They are the actual source of every kind of happiness, nothing else. Alright? Especially I mean genuine lasting happiness, the real thing, real peace, contentment etc. Whereas all suffering comes when our negative states of mind of anger, attachment, afflicted desire, pride, jealousy and so on when they take over.
Just very simply, I won’t go into any big detail about this now because it all takes too much time and we’ll talk about it in another time, especially in other courses. But from Buddhist point of view there is a big difference between love and loving kindness and attachment. So often in in our language we use attachment in relation to loving kindness, but in Buddhism attachment, that this English term is used to translate a term which is referring to a negative state of mind. Attachment is a non virtuous state of mind. Right?
It’s based on afflicted desire which exaggerates the good quality of something far beyond what is there and attachment, the particular feature of attachment is that on the basis of afflicted desire it gets stuck to this thing or situation or person that it’s exaggerating how good it is and can’t let go. So just very simply in any relationship it’s not the love for that person that causes suffering and problems, it is the attachment. It’s not one’s love for somebody that causes any suffering and pain, it’s the attachment. So those two things are quite different. They can look the same, but they are quite different.
Because love is also about the person, whereas attachment is about me. I love you because you make me happy. That’s attachment. Love is just wanting another person to be happy. I just want you to be happy.
That’s all. Right. So our mind, you know, like a piece of paper flipping by, can change moment by moment so there can be happiness, sufferings, happiness, suffering, so it all gets jumbled up. But in any one moment there is either this virtuous mind, non virtuous mind, some kind of happiness or contentment peace or suffering and agitation. The one time I want to use it, I don’t have it.
It’s always the case. Where’s where’s my bottle of water? It’s gone. Anyway, I need a bottle of water to demonstrate the mind, but do we have a bottle of water? Is it there?
No, it doesn’t matter. See, this is our mind. The true nature of my of our mind is clear and beautiful and still and peaceful. And in that state is able it is able sort of in a sense like a mirror to know things exactly as they are. Right?
But when a negative state of mind, anger, attachment, pride and jealousy take over, the mind becomes like that. Yeah. It just becomes a mess, and that is suffering. And when the mind is like that, it is not able to perceive things as they are. So we make even more mistakes, right?
We’ve made the mistake of letting our mind get controlled by something negative, and then in that confused state we make more mistakes, because we’re not seeing our self properly, we’re not seeing others anything correctly, although we’re convinced we are, so we make all these other mistakes and that just makes it more more mess. Alright. So we’re trying to do that as much as we we can. The equipment, sorry. Me and technical things don’t go together.
Right, okay, where are we? Any questions? Please don’t be polite, you know, well not be polite, but please ask questions. Don’t, yes. Well compassion is for people who are suffering.
But, okay, so major. Major, major. So aren’t you having another person? Yeah, this is a very tricky thing, but I think it’s partly because what we think of as compassion is not maybe the real thing. And I think what happens, because again I think this is also an example maybe of how our mind is changing rapidly so there’s these moments of compassion mixed with this other thing which is the painful bit and that is our ego because when we are feeling compassion for others it’s often about, oh I should be doing something and we feel, oh I can’t, oh this is, oh I’m failing.
So that it’s, there’s all of that thoughts and that cause the problem and the suffering and the agitation. It’s not actually, yeah. True, but body suffers from compassion. Yeah, they just do it, you know, they just and it’s not about, oh, succeeding or not, oh, I failed to help that person, oh, blah blah blah. It’s just the mind is focused on the other.
I think somehow Yeah, it’s a very tricky thing. I must confess I haven’t really got my mind around this properly at all either. I have some faith that compassion is the way to go, that this is what we should be really developing. Because also when you hear His Holiness Dalai Lama talk about compassion, he always talks about that in relation to courage, having courage. Compassion gives you courage to do something and when you’re courageous you can be compassionate.
It’s easier to be compassionate when you’re courageous because you don’t worry about what’s going to happen to me and what will other people think whether I’m succeeding failing or doing a good job, you’re just doing it, right? So there’s that courage and also His Holiness always talks about if you hope. There’s a lot of hope in the whole thing. Even if you fail there’s this hope like His Holiness has great hope for Tibet even though it’s being destroyed but there is hope there still. And that gives courage to do something.
And if you check-in your own experience when we ourselves have some problem, some sickness, it’s always, Oh, poor little me, poor little me, oh, boo hoo hoo me, I’m sick, I’m sick. But if there’s someone else sick we do have some energy to do something. It’s not so boo hoo hoo. We can just, oh this person needs my help, I’ve got to do something. But when we’re just sick, it’s oh boo hoo hoo me.
Did that make sense? I couldn’t explain it very well, His Holiness has talked about that in a very nice way. When we get rid of all the ego stuff there’s just that clarity of doing something for the other, which is kind of somehow brings some sense of satisfaction and connection, you’re feeling that connection. Because when we’re caught up in our self-cherishing, the more self-cherishing we have, the more isolated we are in a sense, and we create this very cold, miserable little world for ourselves. But when there’s compassion there is a greater sense of connection.
And when there’s that, there isn’t so much suffering. Because one of the great sufferings of our society, of our world, is alienation. So going back, six consciousnesses. So our primary consciousness, primary mental consciousness is the most important aspect of our mind. It brings us the greatest suffering but the greatest happiness.
It’s that which we that we really need to work with. We don’t have to worry about our eye consciousness too much or our ear consciousness, it’s the mental consciousness which is, that has this incredible potential for great happiness and benefit but the potential for great suffering and harm. So this is what we really have to work with. But at the moment, the way we live our lives, especially in the modern world and particularly in an urban environment, our poor little mental consciousness just gets bombarded. And I always give this analogy that our mental consciousness is like an office worker at a desk and this poor little office worker has got six telephones on their desk.
Oh no, the office worker is like the mental consciousness and this person has got five telephones on the desk and they are always ringing. So there’s the the ear consciousness one, no the eye consciousness because that’s I think one of our most important ones. It rings and says look at that, look at that, don’t look at that, look at that, oh that’s terrific, don’t look at that. Then the ear consciousness rings and says, listen to that, oh don’t listen to that, listen to that, oh that’s good, that’s good, that’s bad, that’s bad, don’t listen to that. And then the eye, you know, the nose consciousness smell that, smell that, oh that’s delicious, oh where is that, where is that?
And then the tongue consciousness you know rings, I’ve got to eat something, taste that, taste, oh that’s horrible, that’s horrible, that needs more sugar, more salt, less salt, more sugar, more this, more that, not that, oh, right? Or touch that, touch that, no, that’s not nice, that’s hot, that’s too cold, oh, that’s too rough, oh that’s nice and soft. Boom, this poor little office worker has just worked off their tiny little feet. Mental consciousness doesn’t actually have feet, but just all day long. And then it goes home, falls asleep and just gets bombarded by dreams, you know, about what happened during the day.
No peace whatsoever. And then we go crazy and die. That’s our life. So what we need to do is take care of our mind to and one way to do this is to simplify our life, have a less stressful, less busy life in many ways. Even in some ways, probably I shouldn’t say this, but even doing lots of virtuous things can be a mistake.
One can get stressed out doing too many good things and this is something that can happen at dharma centres, it happens quite regularly, that people end up doing too much and they end up not taking too many external good things without still taking care of the mind. Right? I mean that’s better than running around doing negative things but still. But simplifying the mind and not doing so much is good, so that’s an indirect way of taking care of the mind. But the main way of taking well there’s many ways take of the mind, but the most direct way of course is meditation.
It’s not the only way but it is the single most powerful direct way and it should be done. It’s best done in conjunction with with other things. The way one lives one’s life, living a a virtuous life. A peaceful life and and and a meaningful life and a caring life and so on. So in meditation what we are trying to do, maybe just go back a bit.
When we go to sleep at night what happens is that the five sense consciousnesses shut down. We close our eyes, we concentrate on darkness, we don’t bombard our mental consciousness with all the information from seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching and so on. So our sense consciousnesses shut down. They don’t disappear, but they shut down and what is left is just the mental consciousness. And that mental consciousness focuses on darkness more and more and then there is sleep.
Right? So in a sense this is what we’re trying to do when we meditate, we are trying to create a situation whereby we are encouraging our sense consciousnesses to shut down as much as possible. So that what is left is just the mental consciousness, but instead of going to sleep, we’re trying to create a situation, not force it, where the mind becomes even more clear, more awake than it is now in a waking day, right? That’s what we’re trying to do in Buddhist meditation. There are a lot of things thAt this stage are called meditation where you listen to whale sounds and dolphins and you look at candles or lotuses and you know, so you’re using your eye consciousness or ear consciousness and in some ways those things can be relatively peaceful because you’re just focusing on one thing.
It’s kind of nice but it’s not really taking the mind where it could go because what we need to do, what Buddhist, you know, what the Buddhist path is about is understanding our mind and getting to know directly understanding, not just believing the Buddha or whatever, but discovering one self that it is a certain, it is this aspect of the mind that is causing me suffering. It’s not my neighbors, my mother-in-law, my husband or wife, or kids, or the government, or the weather, or any, it’s not that stuff that is really causing me suffering, it is my mind. Of course there are plenty of things in the external world that are conditions for our suffering, but not the actual cause, the root cause. This is what we need to understand that for both for happiness and suffering to occur there need to be conditions and causes. And we make the mistake of thinking the conditions are the cause, whereas in fact what the Buddha is saying is that what we think are the causes are the conditions.
The real causes of all our suffering lie within our mind. And all the real actual causes of all kinds of happiness lie within our mind. And of course, when there are the conditions for suffering in the in our external world, we will experience suffering And the more uncontrolled our mind is, the more we will suffer from those conditions. But the more our more controlled, and I don’t mean by controlled, by repressed. I mean the more we’ve worked with our mind and subdued it and so on, the less those external conditions will cause us suffering.
Or we can use that suffering in a meaningful way. We can learn from it. Right? And even when in the external environment there are many good conditions for happiness, if our mind is out control, it won’t make us very happy. Right?
It really all depends on our mind. This is the message of the Buddha, everything depends on our mind. Someone gives you some flowers, ultimately that depends on our mind. We created the cause to receive the flowers. Then how we experience those, that gift, depends on our mind.
Oh, they’re very little flowers. Oh, god. Why’d they give me such little flowers? I want a big bunch of flowers. They’re little cheap ones.
Why’d they give me cheap ones? I was nice. Mean, it was okay. But gee, miserable little bunch of Yeah. So our own mind, you know, there was a nice present.
We could have thought, oh, fantastic. Isn’t that nice? But our mind reduces it. Yeah, there is group of new ageing people who say that all sickness is because you’ve been thinking in a bad way. So this is a very simplistic interpretation because Buddhism is saying that all sickness, you know, any bad thing that happens to us from the tiniest to the most horrific is we have created the cause for it.
This is the whole topic of another module on karma. So our mind did something negative, it created the cause so sooner or later we get the result. So if we have sickness in this life it may have nothing to do with what we’ve done in this life, it is the karmic result of something done in the past. But in some cases, because our mind can create sickness in this life, it can do that. Also as scientists and doctors are discovering, the state of our mind is very significant in how a disease progresses and how we deal with it.
If we react in a very negative way it can make the disease worse, if we have a positive state of mind to it, it can be very beneficial in reducing the intensity of the sickness and how long it lasts and so on. But it is a very complicated thing. And of course many studies have been done where people have been given placebos and saying this is a sugar pill but they’re told by a doctor that they trust that this is the latest cure for your disease and you’ll be fine if you take it and the person really believes it and they get cured because it depends on the mind. And of course there are people who go to see doctors and the doctor says you’ve got such and such a disease, I give you three months to live and they go away and die in three months because the doctor said. Lama Yeshe’s incarnation is Tenzin Ösel, this man with a little beard over there.
His mother has liver cancer, I think liver cancer, her doctor told her she would die in a few months, this was twenty years ago or more. So she went to Lama Zopa Rinpoche and Lama Zopa Rinpoche gave her some practices to do and she’s still alive. She went back to the doctor and told him, You better be very careful what you tell people. Because that’s what they do, doctors are gods in our society and the doctor says, I’m going to die in three months, so I will die in three months. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. Yeah.
Possible. Yeah. I mean, it’s not always the case, but it depends, you know, how strongly we believe believe things. Yeah. In the present.
Yeah, it could be done by something in the present but not always, not like this new age people. Because actually that’s quite harmful thinking because it can make the sickness worse because they think, oh I’m sick because I’m a bad person, I’ve got a bad mind, this is not right understanding at all. It’s much more complicated and subtle than that. How much time, fifteen minutes before the break? Eight minutes.
Oh, I’m way behind in what I’ve just talked about. Okay, so in meditation what we’re trying to do is isolate, calm down the senses. Of course the more we calm them down in their daily life, don’t agitate them too much and get through attachment and anger, then in meditation it’s easier to subdue the mind and the senses and just sit quietly. So this is why one keeps the eyes closed or just a little bit open, you don’t try to move your body too much when you’re meditating, you don’t eat while you’re meditating or eat or drink while you’re meditating and so on. To let the senses become pacified as much as possible.
And then there’s just the mental consciousness less bombarded, and so it’s easier, relatively easier to work with, and then one directs it onto an object, either a neutral object or a virtuous object. So a neutral object like the breath, or it’s better to place it on a virtuous object. And this is what the analytical meditations that are your homework are about and which is what Gelugpa tradition emphasises a lot, the importance of doing analytical meditation where we think about something meaningful and in a virtuous way and it’s guiding us away from our false and negative way of thinking. Because the term, the Tibetan term that is we translate as meditation, the Tibetan term is gom. That means familiarity or habit.
And what Buddhist meditation is trying to do is habituate our mind with what is meaningful and virtuous and true. Because our mind in general is habituated with what is not meaningful, not virtuous and not true. Because everything, as I said, everything we experience with our eyes, ears, nose, inner consciousness, mental consciousness, it’s all false in some way. So analytical meditation is trying to break down all those false habits of thinking and perceiving and replacing it step by step with what is more meaningful, more virtuous, more valid, more true. Not through just like propaganda and indoctrination.
In a sense meditation is indoctrination but we’re doing it voluntarily and it’s about checking up, not blindly believing. We’re trying to check up, is this true? How can I, what reasons can I understand and believe that lead me to accept that what the Buddha said is true? And what I’ve believed and held onto myself actually is false. Whereas so many other things that are labelled meditation can be very nice, very pleasant at the time, but ultimately they’re doing nothing to actually change the situation.
It’s like you have a terrible disease and you take a pill that makes you feel good, but it does absolutely nothing to affect the disease. So what we need to do is take, get rid of the disease step by step. And that’s what Tibetan Buddhist meditation is doing directly or indirectly. It’s not about just trying to feel nice. I mean some meditations are not so nice to do to be honest.
They’re quite hard to do and very confronting, they can be very confronting to one’s ego and self-cherishing, but they are very beneficial. Check up. Don’t believe me, check up. How many minutes have I got left? Three.
Oh gosh. Do I ask a question then? No, another time. I’ve just got to say something. I’ve got a bit of time after the discussion, haven’t I?
A little bit, five minutes or something. But there’s so many things to say. Okay, there’s many ways our mind knows. So there are two major ways. There is we know things either directly or what is called through perception, directly knowing something, or we know things indirectly, which is via concepts.
So at the moment it is only our sense consciousnesses which know things directly, we perceive things directly with our eye consciousnesses. So without my eye consciousness, with all our eye consciousnesses, we directly perceive this colour and shape of this flower. Yeah. We perceive it directly, there’s no intermediary thing needed to know these shapes and colors, we directly perceive them. But our mental consciousness, which is the most important part of our mind, that right now knows things almost entirely conceptually, indirectly via concepts and what are called generic images.
For example, like if I mean, some of these most of these flowers here are false on these are real. Those are false. But they’re they’re all different kinds of flowers here, but we recognize that all of these objects in vases are flowers because we have a generic image based on many different kinds of flowers, but because of that generic image we can see that this particular kind of shape and colour, that is Because we have a generic image of flowers and chairs and many different kinds of chairs, tables, human beings, but we can recognise, oh this is a human being, because we have a generic image in our mental consciousness of a human being. Or a car or a dog, oh that’s a dog, it’s not a rat, it’s a dog, we have a generic image of a dog, because we’ve seen many different kinds of dogs. So it’s all conceptual.
But what the Buddha is telling us is that, and some concepts are correct and some of our concepts are completely off the planet, completely wrong. But what the Buddha is saying is that ultimately, finally, our mental consciousness has this amazing ability to directly perceive everything. Not to rely on concepts, but to know unmistakenly. This is how the Buddha knows everything, directly, through direct perception. Valid direct perception.
Because you’re really worried there. Many people complained about my wonderful diagram of the mind. If we could just turn to that for a moment. We might just go over time a little because I’ve got to talk about this, then we’ll have a break. It’s on towards the back of the book in section three.
I would encourage everyone who is attending the class to bring their student material with them and everything else from the past, handouts, etc. On the right hand side, anyway, there is also in Buddhist psychology it talks about there are seven major ways of knowing things, some of which are correct and some of them are incorrect. So it starts with wrong ideas, this is the worst way of knowing things because it’s completely false, we have a wrong concept about something. Right? So particularly we can relate this to, and this is very important, a good example is understanding the Dharma itself.
As a brand new person we come along to a Dharma talk and you stare at the teacher like this all the time, what is he saying, what is he saying? And one completely misunderstands it, right? So one has a completely and you know, mixes it with one’s own ideas and concepts about, oh I’ve heard about Buddhism and it must be like this. So then you hear a talk and you get a completely wrong idea. Because many people think that Buddhists believe that I will get reborn as a dog.
I, me, will become a dog. That’s impossible. You don’t I as we are, we’re not going to turn into a dog. Right, this is not Buddhist view. But our mental consciousness could end up in the womb of dog and end up with a dog’s body.
But me as I am, this me is not going to turn into a dog. But my mental consciousness might end up in the dog’s body. Anyway we start off having a completely wrong idea of something, right? And then another way of knowing, which is slightly better, is we may start to have doubts. There are three kinds of doubts.
There are doubts tending towards what is wrong. There’s a doubt that is kind of halfway between being correct and knowing something that is true as true or knowing something that is true as being wrong, so it’s kind of wavering doubt. And then there is a doubt that is tending towards believing what is true is true. Right? So we start off with the Buddha, maybe with the Dharma as having completely wrong view of it, then we start to doubt it, we may think it’s probably wrong, then we may start thinking, oh, maybe it’s right, and then we may start thinking, oh, it’s probably, oh, it’s probably right.
Yeah. And then the next stage of knowing, one may never get out of any of these stages but this is the possible evolution, is what is called presumption. So a presumption is you believe there’s something that is true and you believe it’s true but you have no real reason for it. You go to a talk by the Dalai Lama, he seems a really really nice person and very honest and kind and compassionate and he says something, so, oh, that’s probably, you know, I believe that. We presume it’s true because it’s said by this person who seems really good.
Like when we watch the television news or read newspapers, we usually most of the time believe what’s there because we presume, well maybe we don’t anymore, but we presume that it’s supposed to be the truth. I mean it’s claiming to be the truth telling us what happened. Presume it, but we have no way of explaining whether it’s right or wrong, we just believe it. Right? So then we can move into an even better way of knowing which is inference, which is where one has rational reasons.
It’s still an indirect conceptual way of knowing something but it’s correct. I mean, there can be false inference, you can make false inferences about something. You know, people go overseas and they get robbed in some countries so they say all the people from that country are robbers. That is a false inference. But then there is correct inference and the traditional example that is given in Buddhism is if there’s a range of hills and behind those hills you can see a continuous amount of smoke coming up above those hills.
What can you infer correctly? There’s a fire? Yes, yes, where there’s smoke there’s fire. You can’t see the fire, you can’t directly see the fire, but you can correctly infer that there is a fire there. That’s inference, an example of correct inference.
So a lot of what we know is that. Probably most of what we think we know is presumption, presumption, but some of it is correct inference. But this is what we should do with the teachings. We should try and work out reasons to believe that there is a mind not a brain and this is and so on. That’s up to you.
I’ve tried to do something along these lines, it’s not easy, but this is what we should do in all of the cases. This is what is what the Buddha says, don’t don’t believe what I said because I said it, work it out yourself. Because if you work it out yourself, your belief will be very very strong. Because you’ve got reasons to believe, not just, oh he’s a nice guy or everybody says this is true so it must be true. But if we’ve got some really solid reasons for believing something, then our faith can be very strong.
And then finally there is direct perception. Oh, another way of knowing things, sorry, is inattentive, what’s it called, inattentive perception. An example that is given of this in the teachings is, for example, if you’re reading the newspaper and someone calls you to do something, especially to do some work, so you kind of hear this, you kind of hear something but you’re really paying attention to the newspaper and you don’t particularly want to hear what’s being said. So you know there’s some inattentive perception of what’s going on. So you’re not knowing it very well at all.
Something is registering but not very strongly. And this happens a lot of course in dharma talks. There’s a lot of inattention going on. Yeah. And that’s why we don’t remember it, and we can’t be mindful because we weren’t fully attentive to it.
But then finally the best way of knowing is direct perception, when our mind can directly perceive the truth of things. So for example, the main teaching of the Buddha is about the nature of reality, developing the wisdom that directly perceives the actual way we and all phenomena exist. So right now have completely wrong ideas, wrong concept of how we exist and everything. And then once we hear the teachings about the nature of reality that the Buddha taught, we may have some doubts about all this and misunderstanding, but then we can study it more and then we presume it’s correct. Because know, all these Lamas are very impressive and they’ve got all these arguments, I don’t understand the arguments but it kind of seems to make some sense.
But then as we study it ourselves and meditate on it, we can start to get some inference that if things appear this way, but then you analyse that well, hold on, it takes too long. Study the arguments that the Buddha gave and you realise that although something appears this way, it couldn’t exist that way. It’s impossible to exist that way. So then one’s wrong views start to fade away. And then one is able to develop a correct inference about the way things actually exist.
And on the basis of understanding that correct inference about the nature of reality, one can then meditate on that more and more strongly and then that ignorance that which is grasping at a wrong view gets weaker and weaker and weaker because you pound it with the right arguments again and again which you believe and see these are right, these are correct. And so that grasping at this wrong view just gets weaker and weaker and finally it collapses and then the mind, the mental consciousness is able to directly perceive what is there. Not have a concept about what is there, but one directly perceives. Dong. Yes.
Maybe just one question before we go. Well clairvoyance is a type of direct perceiving so there’s, you can have, I don’t know if the technical term now but one can develop ordinary direct perception of something where the mind becomes very clear and directly perceives it. Then there is sort of a clairvoyance where you can, which there’s different kinds of clairvoyance, some of which is there are some people who are clairvoyant but they haven’t done anything to be clairvoyant, it’s just some imprint from the past, they have no control over it. Reliable but there is a clairvoyance that comes from formally training the mind. So that’s a very reliable kind of clairvoyance.
And then there’s what is called Yogic direct perception, perception, so that’s the most, the highest level which comes from when someone has developed single pointed concentration and so mind is very stable and clear, and that mind is able to unmistakenly directly perceive things or when it’s trained properly. So so there’s a kind of ordinary direct perception, and then there’s a sort of clairvoyant direct perception, and then there’s the yogic one. Okay, thank you very much. So please have a cup of tea and coffee or something, which you will be able to directly perceive with your taste consciousness and your mental consciousness can then conceptualise whether it was was good or bad or this or that. And as you are having that, get into your groups.
So the two groups that were in here, something I can clarify. Actually could I suggest that in the discussion groups at the end maybe somebody, it could vary each week, write down a question or two that may have come up and then they could be asked in the group, you know, the big group at the end of the session or the next week or sometime. So yeah. No pressing questions? No?
Yeah? Yes, number one is wrong conception, two is doubt, three is presumption, four is inference, five is inattentive perception, six is direct valid perception of which there are the different varieties. Okay, so number one is wrong conception, two is doubt, three is presumption, four is inference, five is sorry, hold on. Four is inference. Five is inattentive perception.
I think six is direct valid perception, ordinary valid perception and then the six is yogic direct perception. Think, sorry, I’ll have to check that. Anyway, we’re just going to do very, very simple meditation just for a couple of minutes. Just trying to get us I just want for you to check up for yourself to get some idea, trying to see some get some idea what is the difference between knowing things conceptually and direct perception. Try just to reflect on the difference between, for example, how so we sit comfortably in the correct posture as much as possible.
And then just reflect about how our eye consciousness, for example, is able to directly perceive its object. It doesn’t require any intermediary of a concept about something, a generic image or anything else, it simply directly perceives the object. The eye consciousness directly perceives shapes and colors, The ear consciousness directly hears sounds. The tongue consciousness directly experiences the different kinds of tastes. Tastes.
So this is perception. But at the moment, much of our knowing, our more abstract knowing with our mental consciousness is indirect. It’s conceptual. Rather than directly knowing, directly perceiving, we have concepts about things, about ourself, about others, about the world, about what is right and wrong. We have all these concepts.
And we mistake these concepts for reality. We may have correct concepts, but we may have many incorrect concepts. I mean, just a simple example, there are many famous people we know about. We’ve never met them. We’ve never, our eye consciousness has never directly perceived them.
We’ve never directly heard their voice. But we have opinions about them. We have concepts about them, which we take for the reality of the person. We believe that we know this person is like this. But just a concept.
It’s not a direct perception. It’s not a direct unmistaken perception. We have so many concepts about ourself, right concepts, wrong concepts about ourselves. So many labels we put on ourselves. But we don’t directly perceive our true nature.
Think how wonderful it would be if I could directly perceive my true nature. If I could directly perceive unmistakenly all things all the time. That is the actual potential of my mind to do that, to be able to do that. So now we can dedicate, page, page, I think, ten, is it? Page ten.
Page ten. You can dedicate the merit of the positive imprint created by the positive imprints that was created tonight, trying to understand more about our mind so that we can work with our mind in a truly creative way, awakening our positive potentials, helping to overcome, subdue, pacify our negative potentials, so that we can be of greater benefit to ourself and to others. Eventually achieving the enlightened state where we can perfectly repay the kindness of mother sentient beings. Due to the merits of these virtuous actions, may I quickly attain the state of a guru buddha and lead all living beings without exception into that enlightened state. May the precious body mind, not yet born, arise and grow.
May that born have no decline, but increase forevermore. Okay, thank you. So please, if you haven’t handed in your homework yet, please put it in and also collect the homework for the coming week. And I hope to see you next week.