Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 38-minute talk, Ven Thubten Gyatso examines disturbing emotions through the lens of Buddhist psychology. He begins with the six types of consciousness—five sensory awarenesses and mental consciousness—and shows how each can be colored by either disturbing states like attachment and anger or peaceful states like genuine love and compassion. He distinguishes love (wanting others to be happy) from attachment (clinging, grasping, anxiety). He then uses sleep and dreaming as analogies to explain what happens at death: the dissolution of gross sense consciousnesses into an increasingly subtle mental consciousness, the intermediate state, and the eventual rebirth process. Drawing on Tibetan Buddhist texts, he describes how a fetus becomes conscious around 25 weeks with clear memories of past lives, which are gradually forgotten after birth due to the overwhelming intensity of new sensory experience. He addresses love and wisdom as inseparable wings needed for genuine compassion, illustrates intermediate state rebirth with a case story, and concludes with a brief meditation on stilling the mind. Suitable for those new to Buddhist psychology and rebirth teachings.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 03 DE 1995 10 21.mp3
UUID: 0eb207c2-d5be-477b-827c-2d6d584f3368
Teacher: Ven Thubten Gyatso aka Adrian Feldman
Collection: Dealing With Disturbing Emotions (Ven Thubten Gyatso aka Adrian Feldman)
Date: 1995-10-21
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 37.6 minutes
Words: ~4,116
Yeah. As you say, we can at a gross level divide mind into six types of consciousness. And these six types of consciousness include all aspects of mind. And they are the five sense consciousnesses, the eye consciousness, the awareness of sights and colors and shapes, ear consciousness, awareness of sounds, smell consciousness, taste consciousness and touch. So the five physical senses.
Each of those sensory experiences is a type of mind, a type of consciousness. They are specific according to the particular object that we apprehend through our senses. The sixth sense or the sixth type of consciousness is called mental consciousness. And for us, like now, our mental consciousness is functioning in terms of our thoughts, our thinking, our ideas, aspirations, and our plans for the future, and our memories. These all operate within the mental consciousness.
Any of those six consciousnesses can be associated with happiness, with unhappiness. We can have pleasure when we see pleasant visual objects or displeasure when we see unpleasant visual objects. We can have pleasurable auditory consciousness when we hear pleasant things. We can have unpleasant or unhappy consciousness when we hear unpleasant things and so on. We can have pleasure in our mental consciousness when we think good things and we can have pain, misery, unhappiness when we think bad, you know, unhappy things.
So the feelings of pleasure, pain, and indifference are associated with all six. Also, the other mental factors of love and compassion, these can come with any of the six. When we have love, if we see somebody and we have love, even our eye consciousness is influenced by love. And we see them as attractive and as objects to give pleasure to. Not objects to give me pleasure, that’s attachment.
Love and attachment we’re going to talk more about attachment. Often we call one the other. When we say we love somebody, we do indeed have some love that we want them to be happy but our love is mixed with attachment wanting me to be happy and that person is the object of my happiness. So it’s like a clinging attachment. It is this clinging attitude of not wanting to separate from either a person or even a physical object which gives us pleasure.
And that is a disturbing state of mind. Attachment is when that’s manifesting, our mind is disturbed. It becomes anxious and clings and longs for the object of pleasure. So it’s unpleasant. But love, whenever love is manifesting, the mind is naturally calm and peaceful, just wanting the other to be happy.
Okay. So, those six consciousnesses. Now, those six consciousnesses can operate and when we’re alive and well then they’re all going. Now when we go to sleep, actually our five sense consciousnesses cease in deep sleep. So we no longer hear sounds. We no longer feel touch. We have none of the five senses. They cease. Our memories stop.
Our thoughts stop. Our self awareness stops. Everything stops in deep sleep. But when we wake up, they’re there again. All the memories, the knowledge of who we are, who our friends are, what our job is.
So it’s gone through this phase of completely non-manifesting in deep sleep. In dreams, then it comes out a little bit but it can be a bit strange. Sense of self can be entirely different. We can have a different body. But in dream we do things.
It’s like the five senses are operating but in fact it’s the mental consciousness. The dream consciousness is the sixth sense. It’s the mental consciousness. So mental consciousness can mimic the five senses because we see things, we can smell things, we touch things, we experience pleasure, we experience pain and so on and so on in our dreams. Then as our mind becomes lighter and lighter towards the end of the night, even the sense consciousnesses start to function and even sounds and so on could be incorporated into our dreams and then we wake up.
Now during the time of deep sleep, we didn’t lose those qualities at all. Even though they weren’t manifesting in deep sleep, they were there in what we call seed form. Exactly the same thing happens when we die. When we die, there’s just contraction of the mind, the loss of the sense consciousnesses into the mental consciousness, and it goes very, very, very subtle like deep sleep. Then we die.
And instead of sort of waking up again, it is said that the mind, this continuum separates from the body and then just like waking up in a dream, becomes conscious in the Bardo form, the intermediate state. And there, it’s like a dream body. We do have a subtle body in this intermediate state. It’s not composed of atoms and molecules, but it is form, but it’s subtle form. We call it wind energy.
Chinese call it qi energy or prana or lung. Tibetan is lung. But anyway, wind. Wind is the most subtle, you know, expression of form just in a general way. So this intermediate state, the experience just as in a dream, we experience things according to our state of mind.
So in the intermediate state, we experience things according to our state of mind. And then eventually, in a situation where our future parents are about to conceive. And so we experience a type of death where, again, the consciousness goes into deep, deep, deep, subtle unconscious state, if you like, And the mind enters or joins with a fertilized egg in the future mother’s womb. Still very subtle, but becoming a little more gross. And as the mind sort of expands within the developing nervous system of the new body, it reaches a point where we become conscious.
And it’s said in the Buddhist Tibetan medical texts which are based upon Buddhist teachings that the fetus becomes conscious about twenty-five weeks of gestation. And at that point, its mind is so clear. It’s so clear. It has all the memories of its previous life. It can see where it’s been and it’s like a clairvoyant mind.
And it sees where it is now and it even understands the nature of the wheel of life. And it’s said that the fetus feels some sort of sense of, like, remorse. Here I go again. Things are very clear in the memories. And this clarity remains.
Still there’s still, what, still a few more weeks of gestation to go. Another fifteen weeks. So as we’re growing, then this clarity is there and it’s still there when we’re born. But it’s getting less because the memories don’t have anything to reinforce them.
There’s nothing to pin them onto. And then suddenly we’re born and boom. There’s this whole new life and we’re waking, sleeping. So the immediacy of the experience of this new life is very evident, very strong. And the memories in our mind just become lost.
Not lost forever. The imprints are still there, but they don’t have anything to hang on to. Just like when we have a powerful dream and it’s so clear. And we wake up and we might, for a few minutes, we might remember it clearly. But as soon as we start getting dressed and walking around, we’ve forgotten what happened in the dream.
So we do have these memories when we’re born, but they slowly go. They can even be retained, but we can’t talk about it. We can’t tell anybody. And we can’t really talk coherently, you know, for two or three years. And even if we do, when we’re two we start telling mommy about where we were in our previous life. Mommy will say, shut up and eat your cornflakes. Don’t talk rubbish. So we’re not encouraged to talk about it and so it’s forgotten. But there are stories not only in Eastern countries where rebirth is accepted but in Western countries as well.
There’s a book by Stevenson called Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. It was an American psychologist or psychiatrist or something who investigated many stories of young children who without any prompting or apparently, I mean, some may have been prompting and he investigated many cases and he selected the twenty most likely to be not false but to be accurate events. Children were taken to villages where they said they’d lived in their previous life and they would identify relatives of their previous life in the crowd and even the house they lived in. I think one was in India. A girl said that she’d been a householder, I don’t know, a man or woman, but anyway had buried some coins in a corner of the garden and pointed out where they had been buried and they dug down but they didn’t find anything.
But then one of the uncles from the previous life confessed that he knew that they had been buried there and he dug it up after his brother or sister had died. So what I’m getting at is that although we lose the sense consciousnesses, the imprints are retained in this subtle mind. They are retained. And even now, our mind has not only the imprints of our previous life, but our mind contains the memory imprints of all our previous lives, beginningless lives.
They’re there. Does that answer the question? Sorry? Occurrence is what children report. Well, I think I just explained why.
Because although we have the awareness in the womb and at birth, as we’re growing up, the memory gets lost. Like, we forget about the dream. We just forget. And even if we remember for the first two years, we still can’t talk about it. And as time passes, the memory gets more and more suppressed, blocked, nothing to support it.
I think that’s a reasonable explanation of why it’s rare. We can’t remember the first few years of this life. I think that’s why. Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know. Yeah. I don’t know. Maybe there could be some if it’s a bad thing maybe there could be some imprint of anxiety or worry in similar circumstances. I think definitely.
Definitely. Our mind can be set and it is set. This is why we crave love. Love is food. It’s nourishment for babies.
If they’re not given affection and love then it’s been shown that developmentally we become retarded. Our nervous system does not grow as well as it could. All are aware of the needs of the growing body of the baby, but the growing mind of the baby equally needs nourishment. And the nourishment is love and care and peace and stability. And that will it’s like molding us.
It’s such a responsibility that we have for our children. Yeah. I think so. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Well, if you can give that, that’s I think that’s good enough. And, you know, the story I saw on TV in Romania, all of the orphans who were totally neglected and they totally regressed. They couldn’t walk. They couldn’t talk.
Three and four year olds who all their life had had this total deprivation. And this group of English doctors and nurses went there and, although they had medicines and stuff, what they prescribed was just affection. And the whole team spent all day cuddling these little children. And within weeks I swear, within weeks the ward was transformed from this rocking and this terrible, isolated, withdrawn behavior to happy, laughing, walking kids playing with toys. And the prescription was love.
And so definitely we can or none of us will have a perfect upbringing. The parents argue, shouting at each other and the baby cries. The baby’s being traumatized. So we’ve all been traumatized and definitely the way to look after each other is to give love and compassion. It’s the best medicine.
No. It’s not. You’re right. And I don’t think the Buddhist teachers say it’s just the motivation of love and compassion. I mean, they all say that, the, you know, loving kindness and compassion are like one wing.
A bird can’t fly with one wing. It needs two wings and the other wing is wisdom, understanding. And understanding not only ultimate reality of emptiness, you know, selflessness, but also the relative reality of cause and effect, of karma, of how individuals are disturbed by disturbing emotions. And so our love and compassion must be supported by wisdom. And there are times when we, you know, we need to be strong and stern even if we’re gonna make a child cry or an adult cry.
But our strength is not anger. It’s love. Because we have the wisdom that they’re really getting into a bad space and we need to be strong and prevent them from sinking and spiraling into an even worse state. So that comes from wisdom. Otherwise, if we just have this love and compassion, doing good by helping, then we become afraid to stand up to people when they’re clearly making big mistakes.
Well, not so much afraid. We don’t know how to deal with other people’s disturbing emotions. And we might be afraid to make them unhappy. Think, oh, this isn’t love and compassion. If I don’t do what they want me to do then I’m not being loving and compassionate.
That is a lack of wisdom. We need to have this wisdom seeing the whole situation. That’s not easy. To see the whole situation and to know the right path to act. So that’s to me, that’s how we do it.
We need to support our love and compassion with understanding. Then slowly, slowly, we’ll still make mistakes, but slowly, slowly we will grow and it will become more and more spontaneous. And we see the example in the Lamas who come and show through their remarkable example of patience, incredible patience and kindness and strength. So, you know, they can be very stern with us, but you know that there’s no anger or anything negative. So they’re the example of what we can do.
The mind is you mean in this intermediate state? Or is that what you’re referring? In the example that I gave, the intermediate state between one life and the next. Oh, I see. But you don’t have to.
What evidence would you like? Oh, really? How could I prove it to you? Right. Right.
Well, I think that we can believe it through inference, you know, inferential. We can make an inference from what we understand now. Then we can think, oh, well, if that happens then, it’s feasible. Clearly, until we generate through meditation the memory of that experience, we can’t have direct proof. That’s possible.
I mean, the real proof is to generate through meditation the heightened awareness where we can remember back. And we go exactly like that. We go back in time. We can start remembering the early years of this life, which were forgotten. And then through meditation we can remember back to being born and being in the womb, intermediate state, previous life, and back and back and back. So that’s direct proof through the power of meditation. Indirect proof through inference is to study the Buddhist presentation of psychology of the mind, of how the mind functions, and then also to think about dreams because the dream is very similar. Dream experience is extremely similar to the intermediate experience. And then although we don’t have direct in our hands proof, by analogy we think, well, I don’t know what happens between this life and the next, but that seems a reasonable thing that there is this subtle wind energy or prana which is the basis of mind.
And, yeah, well, like that. And that’s how I do it. But, obviously, I don’t have direct experience, but it’s very logical to me. Well, we need to enter this topic with a great deal of detail, and we don’t really have time, but it’s just that the consciousness or mind is dependent upon the gross body for sure, like our brain and nervous system and our sense organs. Clearly, our mind is dependent on the gross body.
It’s just taught that within the nervous system there is a flow of subtle energy, physical energy, more subtle than atoms and molecules which is intimately associated with consciousness. So inseparable there is this movement of wind energy with consciousness. They are inseparable. Consciousness is always with subtle wind energy. It’s just a diagrammatic description of channels and chakras.
You may have heard of chakras and so on. So this wind energy flows within these channels and chakras which are throughout the body. And consciousness occurs where there is movement of wind energy in particular regions. That’s all. When we die all the wind energy contracts, becomes more and more subtle to the heart, separates and as it is inseparable from mind the two go together.
But the next moment after the moment of death, the separation of our mind from this body, the mind becomes more gross and the wind energy becomes more gross. From this most subtle aspect, it becomes more gross. And it sort of creates a Bardo body, what we call the body of the intermediate state being. So the primary cause for the body of a Bardo is the subtle wind. The secondary cause is the mind.
And then the primary cause for the mind of the being is the consciousness from previous life. And the secondary cause for the mind is the wind. They’re fitting in. So like a dream body is produced by our mind, the intermediate state body is produced by our mind and it functions. It can go here, there.
It can see the old body. It can see the parents, maybe not the parents, the family weeping and so on. But so it’s said that there’s no longer this strong feeling of attachment. It could be. I was digressing a little bit, but maybe a few years ago I was in Sydney and I gave a talk.
It was a weekend seminar at University of Sydney. And it was on the near death experience, and I gave the Buddhist presentation. And somebody else gave a presentation where they showed a video that had been taken in England where there was a family and the mother, she had been married previously and her daughter had died and she had been divorced and she got married again and she had another daughter. Both daughters had the same name. I forget the name.
Lucy. So one day the new family were driving past the village where the mother had lived previously and they passed the cemetery where Lucy number one had been buried. And the new daughter, she was about five or six, she said, Mommy, why were you crying when I was buried there? And she said, What are you talking about? And she said that not when I died but when Lucy number one died, I’m Lucy number two.
And she described that she remembered having been sort of like looking down upon the funeral ceremony and seeing mother crying and the family crying. And while she was reporting this, this is later now, this particular memory was actually induced through hypnosis. She was put under hypnosis and she was now describing the memories. And the mother was sitting in the background. And she said that she had seen the funeral and she felt so sorry for her mother that she wanted to be her baby girl again.
She made that decision and she’s saying this under hypnosis. And she said, And I knew that this time that my new daddy wouldn’t hurt me when I’m in my mommy’s tummy. And when she said that, the mother who’s in the background, she started crying. And she explained afterwards that unknown to anybody, the previous husband had beaten the mother when she was pregnant and had actually caused some injury to the first daughter before she was born. And certainly Lucy two didn’t know that.
And also Lucy two said that in the coffin which was open before it was buried, there was a doll, a favorite doll. And the mother sort of questioned that. She said she hadn’t put the doll there but then her sister, the child’s auntie, said that she had put the doll in the coffin. So that sort of, anyway, it was very interesting to see this video. And from the Buddhist point of view, she was in the Bardo stage and her desire, her wish to be the mother’s baby again was the connection which so she had the karma to be human and she was actually reborn again with the same mother, a different father.
So I just report that to give you an idea of how the intermediate state can function in one situation. Now it doesn’t always happen like that. It can be like a nightmare. It can be totally confusing or it can be totally pleasant like dreams. It can be terrifying or pleasant.
It depends upon the way we die. Just as our dreams depend upon our state of mind when we go to sleep, that can influence whether it’s a pleasant or unpleasant dream. When we die, that will influence whether our future life will be pleasant or unpleasant. So that gives a bit more insight perhaps into this intermediate state. Yes.
Because the problem is not in the mind. It’s in the nervous system. Right. Their mind becomes clear again. Maybe we develop desire for the sense objects.
Well, people have pretty weird ideas. Just don’t get a test tube fetish. Well, it might be alright. Who knows? No.
I don’t know. I don’t know. The mind may enter when the sperm and the egg are joined and then it’s frozen. Maybe it happens. Or maybe it happens after when the fertilized egg is put in the womb.
It might happen then. I don’t know. It’s very interesting because in the Buddhist in the Abhidharmakośa, which is like a presentation of the Buddhist teachings on Abhidharma, you know, metaphysics, if you like. And this was written by Vasubandhu, a very famous Indian scholar. There’s a question answer thing.
And this will resolve the present ethical questions about in vitro fertilization. And the question they’re talking about the most heinous karma, the most heavy karmas, which there are five, and one is to kill your mother. So the question is if an egg is taken from the womb of one woman and placed in the womb of another and the resulting child grows up and kills the surrogate mother, is that the heinous karma of killing your mother? That’s like the hypothetical question. And the answer is no.
It’s not the heinous karma of killing your mother. It’s still negative karma. So the next question is if that child kills the mother who donated the egg, is that the heinous crime of killing your mother? And the answer is yes. So that sort of debate which was written I don’t know when was Vasubandhu alive?
It must have been a long time ago. It was about fifteen hundred years ago when in the West we didn’t know how babies were made and eggs from one womb to the other. Well, it sort of answers the ethical problems, I think. Who is the real mother? If we want to have it answered, that answers it.
Anyway, we’re straying from the emotional. I thought we would just do a short meditation now. Okay. So try to be comfortable. It won’t be too long this time.
Just mainly to just get practice stilling our minds to hold our mind free of conceptualization of thoughts, thought patterns. So sit with your back straight. Relax all the muscle groups in your body. Your eyes very lightly closed. And focus your whole awareness on the sensation of your breathing, the air coming and going at the nostrils.