Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Ven Thubten Gyatso, a Western-trained physician who became a monk eleven years earlier, opens a three-night introductory course by sharing his own path from medicine to Buddhism in Nepal. He establishes common ground by analyzing body and mind empirically: the body as an interconnected system serving sensory pleasure, the mind as six types of consciousness—five sense awarenesses plus mental cognition—that construct experience through concepts, feelings, and mental states like anger and compassion. He then pivots to examining why humans pursue sensory and mental pleasure relentlessly, introducing the Buddhist explanation that conscious attachment to such pleasures is the driving evolutionary force behind human existence. This leads to his core framework: the Six Realms of rebirth—gods, humans, animals, hungry ghosts, and hell—through which beings cycle endlessly, driven by ignorance and karma, until understanding the mechanism itself creates the possibility of enlightenment or Buddhahood, which he describes not as escape but as a perfected state of mind beyond the control of death and ignorance. The talk is pitched at complete newcomers and is conversational rather than formal, with the teacher explicitly inviting interruption and questioning.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 01 IB 1986 03 11.mp3
UUID: f9927ec8-c452-4d03-bcce-a5344c6494be
Teacher: Ven Thubten Gyatso aka Adrian Feldman
Collection: Intro to Buddhism (Ven Thubten Gyatso aka Adrian Feldman)
Date: 1986-03-11
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 92.1 minutes
Words: ~10,121
I guess I should tell you a bit about myself so that you can have some sort of understanding of where I’m coming from. Originally, I come from Melbourne, and I graduated in medicine there about fifteen years ago. I don’t think I had a very extraordinary childhood growing up with university career. I did most of the normal things people do, medical students do. Didn’t have any religious inclination at that stage.
I was, I guess, a pure scientist, that’s my philosophy then. Still is. There’s some modifications and some additions. And perhaps I can share some of my ideas with you over the next three nights I’m giving these talks. I’ve worked as a doctor in Melbourne and in New Guinea.
That was when New Guinea was still part of Australia. Worked with the Australian government in a base hospital in Lehi. Then I went to England and did some postgraduate study in tropical medicine and worked in hospitals around London for about eighteen months with the idea of following on my experience in New Guinea to pursue tropical medicine working in developing countries. And I think it was the interest really in helping people in developing countries and in the medical scene in those areas that, among other things, took me to Nepal about twelve years ago, eleven or twelve years ago. In Nepal I had some old friends who were studying with some Tibetan Lamas and the Lamas were teaching Buddhist philosophy and meditation.
And they were going to teach. And they were giving courses for Westerners, which they’d been giving there for several years. And I attended a course which was very stimulating. I found it very difficult to just sort of immediately accept the Buddhist philosophy. The course was for a month and we sort of stayed with this monastery in Kathmandu for the whole time.
So it was very broad. We had a very good introduction and a good opportunity to really sit down and think about it. There were about two hundred and fifty Westerners who started the Course. A week into the Course it was about one hundred and fifty. And I think at the end of the Course it was a bit over a hundred or something.
It was difficult, conditions were very they weren’t really able to cope with so many people. And it’s quite a confrontation to our accept to the concepts that we’ve grown up to judge the world by, particularly from a scientist’s point of view. We have quite a fixed idea of what we are, and we think we know where we came from. We don’t really know where we’re heading to in this life perhaps, but we don’t know much about after death. You must have all heard about reincarnation and karma.
And these are two probably the two most important aspects aspects of Buddhist philosophy for us to understand what they mean. You know, just what is karma. We all use the word in our in our daily speech but we don’t really understand what it means. We we think about reincarnation but we really don’t know. So I hope that I can, in these talks, clarify these phenomena which quite clearly I’ve accepted as reality, not immediately, but after a lot of deep thinking, receiving many teachings and so on, checking up in my own mind.
Not that I’ve remembered any previous lives. I haven’t had any experience that’s spiritual or out of the ordinary, I don’t think. But it’s sort of a logical deduction that I came to, that reincarnation through reality. Perhaps I can share some of that logic. So I became a monk.
I think I accepted Buddhism as a philosophy and then I made a huge decision to become a monk, which was quite an about-face, a complete about-face of my entire life. And quite clearly to have made that decision, I, you know, I had some very deep inner feeling that it was worthwhile. And one doesn’t turn one’s back upon the whole energy that one’s life has been leading towards without very profound reasons. And I felt it was worthwhile. I felt that the message in Buddhism was very important, and the best way to actualize the sort of meaning behind philosophy was to become a monk.
And so I did that about ten years ago, going back to Nepal. And I lived for the first four years near Kathmandu at the monastery there, where I established a medical clinic as well as living in close proximity to the Lamas and many other western monks and nuns. And we received more teachings and we sort of developed our daily meditation and we got to know more and more. After that, I spent about eighteen months in Melbourne where I went we have a similar place to Buddha House in Melbourne, and I was the resident teacher there. And there wasn’t a Lama there at the time, so I spent that period, which was very good for me, having spent four years in the East and coming back, getting a taste, Australian life once again, still learning.
There were many visiting Lamas who had come through, and so continuing to learn more and to meditate more, increased my own understanding. Then I went back to Nepal and my teacher, Lama Thubten Yeshe, who is the founder of Buddha House, he asked me to go to France and to start a monastery there for the Western monks and nuns. We had communities in India and Nepal, but because of the physical difficulties and the difficulties with visas, it wasn’t possible for us to stay there. And we needed somewhere and there was a very nice house offered to us in France. So I went there five years ago and that’s where I’ve been for the last five years.
I’ve just come back to Australia for a few months to give some talks and then go back to France and continue. So, in France, at the monastery there’s an average of about fifteen monks, fifteen to twenty, there’ll be about twenty when I go back in July. Are nuns we have two buildings on each side of this small town in the south of France, very beautiful. As well as a lay community of Buddhists in a big chateau. There’s about between eight to twelve nuns who share the same teaching program that we have.
And we have a resident Lama who’s tremendously well educated. He really is so highly respected by all of the Tibetans, the refugee Tibetans who are in India, because of his learning and because of his ability to teach, his knowledge. And we’re very lucky to have him as our abbot, and so we’ve been receiving from him continual teachings in various aspects of Buddhism, in the general philosophy, in the general meditation, and in the higher tantric teachings. We’ve been doing retreats, meditation retreats, under guidance. And it’s just been a fantastic time for me, really, to be able to live with such a person and do this daily practice, which is very hard for most of us who are working outside, have jobs, who have children.
And just the daily necessities of living make it hard, I know, for people like yourselves. And But still, there is something that you can do. And I think that you can tremendously benefit, receive benefit in your own lives and in your family’s lives and those around you. You can make your life very meaningful and very happy by understanding Buddhist philosophy and using some Buddhist meditation techniques. So so that’s really why I’m here in Adelaide to try and, I guess, stimulate you, give you some interest, some desire to learn more.
Because obviously, it’s it’s too short a time if you really become completely at ease and understanding the whole thing. But the people at Buddha House here are very qualified and skilled and able to answer your questions, which I hope arise. I hope you question very much all I have to say. It’s very necessary to to think about it. If I make a statement, then think of the implications.
And if you’re unsure, ask. Because that’s what we all do. We gave the Lamas a really hard time. The established Buddhists were horrified at me during my first course when I I would break all the rules of protocol and interrupt the Lamas and ask these outrageous questions. But that’s okay, because I mean, look what happened to me, which also surprised them.
Okay. So I’m not that sure how many people here are completely new? Like, haven’t attended any talks on Buddhism before and have been coming along for the first time? Sort of sprinkling? And the others are fairly regular attenders or something?
Okay. So I’m going to approach the talk from just sort of from my side, not in not a traditional way. And I like I don’t really like having formal lecture situation. If you feel that you want to ask a question question or ask me to clarify something, please don’t, you know, don’t be inhibited. Feel free to just interrupt me and say what you have to say.
So, I think my approach is first to look at ourselves, look at our humanity. Buddhist philosophy is really an explanation of ourselves, of the world, of the way the world is, and how just where we came from and where we’re going, and the mechanism of of life and death and a rebirth again. For me, it gives, you know, very satisfactory explanation of what we are. And the terminology is not something really that we have to learn, like we’re new words, new concepts. The Buddha’s technique was to talk to people and just explain from their experience, you know, things which they already know, they already understand about themselves.
So, it’s important to know ourselves, to know what we are. Really, you know, it’s the beginning, isn’t To to do anything successfully, we have to be sort of confident in ourselves and know what we are, what we’re doing, what where we’re going. And, actually, a lot of us aren’t too sure about ourselves. We’re we grow up and we have a whole lot of social ideas about where we fit in, But it doesn’t always work out that, say, as we grow up, you know, the life we find as an adult is what we imagined when we were at school and we were preparing to be adults. There are there are a lot of contradictions.
There are contradictions which occur in our own feelings. When we start to pursue a career or, you know, develop a relationship with somebody the opposite sex. We start to have families. And somehow things don’t go the way they should. It’s sort of a general experience.
I think that we a lot of us tend to become more confused. The more we start to live life and we see our friends living life and meeting sort of unexpected obstacles and their lives sort of tending to shatter and become little bit loose. And so our conceptual understanding of what we are and where we are in society is often a little bit shaky. And I think it’s because we we really don’t know. We’re we’re actually living in sort of darkness or ignorance or not knowing.
Basically, our minds don’t clearly know who we are, where we’re coming, where we’re going. And this sort of darkness that our awareness abides in, you know, it lives in, and this sort of fogginess of not knowing is really pervasive. It actually pervades all of us. And we’re sort of struggling in this sort of barriers of of darkness and of ignorance, really trying to make sense, trying to make sense of ourselves, trying to make sense of, you know, of other people, you know, and particularly trying to, you know, balance our own personal experience with what we’ve been taught, what we’ve been led to believe in this. So there’s a lot of problems that we that we have in in doing this.
So okay. Let’s try and get some a few things which we can all sort of look at and agree upon. So, most of us we can agree that we’ve got a body. Alright? Not much to tell about that.
We have bodies, all different shapes, but they’re there. We can touch them, you know, and feel them. They’re there. When we look in the mirror we see our body. And we have a mind.
We have consciousness. And the two are very closely related. We think, we have emotions, we have feelings, we have these two things. Now, when we look at our bodies, let’s just, you know, like building blocks. Right, we know there’s a skeleton sort of inside which is very strong and then stacked on the skeleton are the muscles which move it around.
There’s the blood vessels which feed the muscles. There’s the nervous system which coordinates things. There’s the alimentary system which serves to absorb parts of the environment, plants and water and other animals and to keep the body going. What other systems are there? That’s about it.
Well, there’s the important systems that we have to communicate with our environment. The sense of touch, which sort of is all over our body. We have touch, we can feel, we can feel different texture, we can feel, you know, hot and cold, and can learn about our environment through feeling the sense of touch which is all over our body. Then, of course, we’ve got sight. With our eyes, we can we’re aware visually of objects around us.
With our ears, we can hear sounds coming from objects around us. And with our nose, we can smell things. And with our tongue we can taste things. So we’ve got five senses with which we can communicate with with our environment and with other people beings in our environment. Okay.
So, if we look at our body just simply like that, then Like, why do we have a body? Is a question to ask. We accept there’s no doubt that the body exists, but why does the body exist? It’s good to think about it. Some people say that bodies of all the animals, they arose possibly.
Actually, the theories of evolution are a little bit open to question and I don’t know which one holds sway at present. When I was at school there was the of the great soup of chemicals and the pure chance coming together of atoms to make molecules, to make more complex molecules. And somehow, somehow these molecules began to replicate themselves. And this was considered a good thing by the molecules to make more molecules the same. I’m not sure why.
But, over a very, very long time, the molecules began to become more complex and incorporate other molecules and make cells. It’s a huge step from a group of molecules to a cell. I mean we can’t take that one lightly. Then the cells began to grab other cells and so organisms evolved purely by chance, randomly, by accident. And somehow this incredible variety of life as we know it now on the earth and has existed in the past and gone has all come randomly in that way.
Now, I’m not up with current thinking in evolution, but I read one. Maybe somebody knows more than me who do. Please contribute. But I’ve read that mathematically it’s impossible for evolution to have occurred in that way Because the time required to have evolved such complexity that we have now is just too long. It’s just too long.
The earth has not been around that long enough. So, I just throw that in. I’m not putting down evolution entirely, but let’s just leave that one and think about it. The other one and I wasn’t really brought up with any Christian teaching, but there’s the philosophy or the theory, we’re told that man was created and our bodies were created in the image of God, which always begs the question, well, why did God want to create man in his image? As man is imperfect, know, body is always subject to sickness, to aging, to death.
It has pain. Does that mean that God was imperfect? I mean, you know, there’s a lot of a lot of queries about that way, that explanation for our bodies. And so the basic question that we’re searching is why? Why this body?
Why does it exist? Why is it at all? What’s the meaning? Exist? Why is it at all?
What’s the meaning? Now, I look at it very simply. When I look at the body, as I said, there are the five senses. And I can look at it as a machine, and I guess I’ve had a bit of help from doing that by, in medicine, having, you know, cut out many human bodies and looked inside and done operations on them and you put them to sleep, put the mind to sleep and you can take out bits and put new bits in them. It’s easy to get a mechanical view of the body from my experience.
And it is a sort of a machine that we use to use to the environment, in order to put food into the body to keep it going. There’s no more. The heart, the blood vessels, the digestive system. All these complex things, the nervous system, are really a very complicated system to keep the body going. And we have the reproductive system to create new bodies.
Now, is this a reason for existence, to create new bodies? Well, according to the original theories of evolution, yes, that is the only reason for this body to exist, to create new bodies. Why? Isn’t isn’t really explained. But that’s what I grew up to understand in school.
It’s not completely satisfactory. It wasn’t completely satisfactory then. And it’s not Yeah. And if we look at all the other animals, most animals, you know, most of the higher animals have bodies the same as ours. Not physically the same, but underneath they’re the same.
They have the same system, the same type of nervous system, blood system, digestive system and musculoskeletal system. All these birds in the air and dolphins in the water and all the four footed, four legged animals that run around. They’ve all got the same bones that we have, just different shapes. They’re exactly the same bones, just different shape. Their skin’s different colors and has different degrees of hair and feathers and scales, like lizards, crocodiles, frogs, but they’re all really basically the same the same muscles connecting the bones.
And they have the same five sense organs. And they’re all completely preoccupied in organizing the environment to get as much food as they can to keep the body alive, to protect the body from adverse external conditions and to reproduce. So, with all animal life, as we see, they’re very similar. They’re not really that much different to humans. Now so that’s body.
Let’s look at our mind. Now, mind in Buddhism is synonymous with consciousness or awareness or just knowing, the phenomenon of knowing, of being aware. See, mind is not physical. Although it depends upon our body, the human mind depends upon the human body to function, to, you know, to be there, that the result, which is consciousness, is not a physical thing. We can’t have human consciousness without a human brain.
And it’s an effect of the brain. It’s an effect of the food. It’s an effect of the sensory experience that we have in our relationship with the environment with our five senses that I mentioned. So, what types of awareness do we have? Well, we’ve got these five awareness.
We have eye consciousness, don’t we? We see the room, we see people in the room, and we’re conscious through the medium of our eyes, people hear. Now, this awareness of ourselves through our eyes is eye consciousness. It’s one aspect of mind. And the awareness itself isn’t a physical phenomenon, is it?
I mean, we can’t pinpoint with an arrow or look at with a microscope eye consciousness. But those of us who have eyes, eyes, we have this phenomenon of eye consciousness. Those who are blind, they don’t have eye consciousness. It is an aspect of their mind that they just don’t have because their eyes are not working. Now, the difference I mean some blind people have eyes, don’t they?
And the problem might be in the brain. Their eyes are completely normal. Know that you can damage a part of the brain and go blind. So even though they have eyes, they don’t have eye consciousness. So what is the difference between our mind and their mind?
Well, one has eye consciousness and the other doesn’t. And this eye consciousness that we have and they don’t have isn’t something that we can weigh. We can’t sort of measure it. We we can’t say what color it is or, you what shape it is or what length it is. So it’s a formless thing.
This is quite an important concept for us to have when we’re thinking about the mind, it’s just being awareness. And I can use the same way, you know, if think about deaf people, right? We have ear consciousness, we have sound, they don’t What’s the difference? Well, it’s ear consciousness. So there are five types of sense consciousness that we have: touch, taste, smell, sight, and hearing.
So there are five major parts of mind. The sixth is what we can call call the mental consciousness. And we do have other functions of mind, you know, other than our sensory relationship with our environment. And that’s, you know, thinking and cogitation. We can work out a mathematical problem.
Even if we’re blind, we can be told the problem, we can work it out. Or we can just read the problem and then we think about it and we come up with a solution. So there is activity, isn’t there? There is input and there’s activity and then there’s output. So, this we can call mental consciousness.
This is awareness that is not directly dependent upon our five senses. So indirectly it can be because we can see something and that can set our mind off thinking about it. And, you know, we’re doing that all the time. We’re getting with this input we get from our five senses, we are sorting it out with our mental consciousness. So that’s more or less, you call it, the sixth sense or the sixth consciousness.
So what I’m doing now is that I’m, as I analyze the body into its systems, I’m analyzing the mind. And so far, I think, I hope, that I haven’t gone above anybody’s head. Like, it’s just It is our own experience, isn’t it? These mental phenomena that I’ve been talking about, the six types of consciousness. Is that okay?
Alright. So, there are other mental phenomena too, aren’t there? Anybody think of some? Language. Right.
Yeah, I think that’s a good point. It’s good. And we do tend to think in our language. And I’ve noticed this very much living in France, where I know a little bit of French but not enough. And the problem is that when people talk to me in French I have to translate it into English in my head and then answer them in English in my head then translate it into French in my head and then come out with the French words.
Yeah. It is tied up with language. But there’s more to it. We can think in sort of, you might say, more subtle, more intuitive ways, like feelings feelings happiness and unhappiness. With each of these sense consciousnesses we can reduce them to three types of feeling.
Like when we see things, we can feel happy, like, it’s a nice thing I’m looking at, or it’s an ugly thing, so we’re not happy, we have an aversion to it, or it’s boring, I’m not interested, you know. So we have we don’t really have a happy feeling or an unhappy feeling about it. We’re just indifferent. So with I consciousness there are three types of feeling. And the same with the other consciousnesses, we can feel with touch.
We can touch something nice and soft and smooth and that’s pleasurable. So it’s pleasurable feeling. But if somebody beats us with a stick, then that’s painful feeling. And so and the same with sounds. Pleasant, unpleasant, indifferent.
So you see, these feelings can come along with our consciousness. Then there’s well, there there’s many other things. We can we can have let’s talk about sort of an emotional level. We can get angry. Anger is a state of mind, isn’t it?
It’s very much a mental There’s a physical thing as well. The heart goes boom boom and blood pressure goes up and, you know, our face goes red and our whole appearance can change. So there’s a physical sort of indication that anger is happening. But anger anger itself isn’t the heart, it’s not the blood pressure, it’s not the sweaty heat temperature going up and the red face. That’s not anger.
It’s a signpost indicating anger. But anger is a state of mind. It’s sort of a disturbed state of mind. It’s a hostile state of mind. And it can be, you know, harmful to oneself, to somebody else, you know, the object of our anger.
Anger can come up, say, again, through the sense consciousness. So let’s think of a way how it might work. There’s a person down the road who we really don’t like. You know, he chased our kids with something, you know, because they were messing around with his gardens and chased him with a stick that we heard about and we don’t like that guy. So we’re quite happy and we’re going to work and then we see this person is the object of our dislike.
So with our eyes there is no anger yet, there’s just eyes, you know, to see a person. Then the message goes into the mind thinking pattern and think, yeah, right. We pigeonhole him as an enemy or somebody to be not liked. And so hostility arises in our mind towards him. And or is in another case, it might be love or affection towards somebody we like.
So love is the state of mind also. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. To which state of mind?
Right. Perfect. Oh, that’s perfect. That’s, that’s what we’re getting at. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. This is a terrific discussion because it’s exactly what I want to get across. It’s really on the point. It’s really on the point.
And we’ll come back. We’ll get around to that. Thank you very much. What I’m trying to do first is to just talk around some examples of how the mind works and then we can sort of look at these states of mind which do predispose to certain modes of behavior, do predispose to getting angry or having attachment and grasping situations, jealousy and pride, all the states of mind. And the states of mind we need to recognize and know why they arise, how they arise, and whether they’re worthwhile keeping or modifying, and, you know, whether there’s other states of mind which are necessary to develop, to cultivate.
And see Buddhism Buddhism is psychology. It’s it it is a clear explanation of the mind and it’s a not only to say sort of this is how it is, this is how it works, but there are techniques to get to know more about our mind and to work with the mental energies themselves. And so peacefully, not not harshly, and it doesn’t have to come as a great revelation or or even or as a painful psychoanalytic trauma. It’s a peaceful and progressive way of of working with mental energies and being able to abandon those which are harmful and undesirable and painful, and cultivate positive ones which are happy, pleasant, and lead to greater understanding of ourselves and our environment and others and greater things. Okay.
So I’ve mentioned some different aspects of mind. Other aspects, just to name them, are like love and compassion, wisdom, knowledge, just knowledge of ourselves in the world, know, the relative things. And wisdom, which from Buddhist point of view is sort of an inner knowledge, deep inner understanding, a real inner knowing of oneself and the the reality of oneself and the reality of other things. See, we we can know things with words we talked about before about thinking in in our language, which we do. It’s not just words that we think in, we also think in concepts.
We have a concept, which is a sort of a pattern of words and a pattern of mental images. And these very much dominate our behavior. They influence our behavior by our conceptual beliefs that we have. It’s like we might have a conception like this man example was just a man, but a lot of people a lot of people are sort of racially influenced and they they develop hostility if they see people who dress and behave and whose skin color, you know, different to what they’re accustomed to. If I wear my robes down the street I meet a lot of hostility.
And there’s a concept in this there’s a whole conceptual pattern in these people’s minds that this is an alien person, an alien object, there’s some sort of threat. And they react with hostility. So we have mental images and we have judgments judgments of right and wrong, good, bad in our mental consciousness, and we carry these around with us. And we’re often judging good or bad, and that really determines our behavior. So concepts, which are ideas and mental images, they can come develop them through our own experience, what we’re taught at school, what we’re taught by our parents, what we’re taught by our peers, what we read in books and see on television.
We develop sort of a conceptual understanding understanding of ourselves and the world. And this is ideas and images, and it’s really not that accurate, because when we have a mental picture of something, we tend to believe that that picture of ourself or of other people is the real thing we really believe in. Say, if if we if our parents instilled in us, perhaps even subconsciously, racial prejudice, we have a concept of people with, you know, black skin as being inferior, inferior mentally, physically, in all ways. Really, it’s just so frightening. And so they have this whole conceptual image which colors their vision every time they see a black person, and they can’t help it.
It’s right there in their thinking machinery, their mind. So I’m not really going trying to say right or wrong, you know, whether it’s right or wrong. Not gonna put down South Africans. I don’t wanna get into that. I’m just trying to say how to point out how we can very strongly and I think most of us will agree that such conceptions are wrong, that such conceptions of inferiority of other races are incorrect harmful.
And where’s the mistake? The mistake is the concept itself in the mind. It’s not the eye because the eye sees a person whose skin is dark. That’s valid. The skin is a different color.
Right? But when that in that eye consciousness then sends its message to the mental consciousness, the mental consciousness thinks, yet dark skin that inferior. And so the problem then is a wrong concept and it becomes so powerful that it’s almost like there’s no thinking involved. Even their eye consciousness becomes deluded, becomes it sees inferior because of this mental conceptual sort of trip that’s going on. So that’s a game that our minds play with us, and that’s just an example.
It’s happening to us every day in all our reactions that we have with people around us, with ourselves, experience, with our children, husbands, wives. We act and react with each other according to our conceptual images and our ideas. And often, we create a lot of blunders, a lot of sort of mistaken things because of our mental image of what it is that we’re dealing with. So we need to think about that, and I’ll come back to that more. We can actually concepts, one way of knowing things, they’re not a hundred percent bad.
They’re the way we deal with the world. There are other ways of knowing. We we have words for it in English. We’ve got intuitive understanding. When we we really know something, we can’t say why we know.
We we can’t give, you know, the so called rational explanation, but we know it. We sort of have a feeling. It might come as a flash and it might go again. We might lose that. And we can’t bring it back because we don’t it wasn’t conceptual.
We don’t don’t have the thinking machinery to bring back that insight, that flash we have. Really seeing the feeling as if we know something very important, very profound. And often, we can all get this type of feeling. And particularly, if you meditate and the idea of meditation is to develop intuitive awareness, to go even beyond knowing things by ideas and mental images. Even without conceptually knowing, this is a game of mental consciousness working here.
And that’s a whole it’s a huge sphere of mental development and mental experience that most humans don’t even tap into. We have tremendous mental potential, enormously capable mind of understanding so much, so much. And we most of us just never utilize. We don’t know how to open up intuitive awareness and wisdom. Now, that’s possible by understanding and by meditation.
So that’s a really big thing to think about and to you know, it’s a very powerful objective to work for because it’s it’s beneficial and helpful, I hope I can explain either tonight or next week where that can lead us along sort of paths of spiritual development. We use the word spiritual development. Spiritual is a little bit esoteric. What does it mean? Well, to me spiritual just means mental development.
So there is a whole new realm of experience and a more preferable realm of mental experience that we can we can gain if we know how to do it, and there are ways. So let me get back now. I’ve digressed a little bit talking about mind. I’m really discussing mind and touching on a lot of things. We’ve looked at ourselves.
We have a body and we have the mind. Now, human beings let’s look at our behavior as something else. That’s the the things that we do in life. Now, mostly, really, we’re we act when looking for different types of sense happiness. Act for different types of sense happiness.
I think most of our activities are directed towards, you know, getting pleasing things to eat, aren’t they? We really We can work very hard to earn enough money to go to the best restaurant in town where there’s exquisite cooking. And we talk about it all night, and we talk about it for weeks after. And a lot of our activity goes towards preparing food. Yeah.
What? The taste experience. We’re really using tremendous amount of energy, not so much because we need food to eat to to survive. You know, like, really from the Buddhist point of view, food is just fuel, like the petrol and oil you put in a car, and it has no greater significance than that. But for us, food is far more.
Most of us eat far more than we eat. In fact, we have to start I’m amazed coming back to Australia. I don’t watch television in France, but I’m amazed at the industry that has developed over the last five or ten years in losing weight. So we’ve got more fuel than we need, but we still keep eating. Why?
Because we like the taste. We really like the sensation of eating. So a tremendous amount of activity is spent in indulging in happy taste. And if we get something bad, a bad taste, we soon let the cook know about it. So a lot of activities involved there.
Then hearing, you know, listening. We do a lot of things just to indulge in listening to nice sounds. We go to concerts and you know, spend a lot of money to listen to nice music and sing. We really enjoy listening to pleasant sounds. So with a lot of our activities, having pleasant ear consciousness.
And again, we don’t like to hear bad sounds. We try to avoid any harsh sounds which are unpleasant to our ear consciousness. And smells, we wash our body very regularly. We have all special deodorants for different corners of the body which smell differently. We have perfumes and ointments and, you know, sprays.
We really we get into smells like flowers and we like it. It’s nice, it’s pleasant. So we do that. And we don’t like bad smells, we try to avoid bad smells. And touch, physical sensation.
We we go to great lengths to avoid extremes of heat and cold. We want pleasant physical sensation on our body. We go to tremendous lengths to secure a partner to experience the physical sensation of sexual pleasure, which really dominates our mind tremendously, tremendously strong influencing in our daily life activities. We know. I mean, our whole life can orient be oriented around that.
And our general happiness or unhappiness can, you know, is is related to the degree of physical pleasure that we can experience or not experience. And we sort of really don’t ever say we’ve had enough. We usually want more. We want more taste, we want more sounds, we want more sexual pleasure. Very few say, well, that’s enough.
I’m even becoming a monk right now. It doesn’t mean that’s enough, but it’s an indication of something else, an indication that Is this relentless pursuit of physical pleasure what it’s all about? Is is that reality? Is that the meaning of existence? Just to, you know, pursue pleasures of the senses?
To and also there’s extra pleasure, mental pleasure, you know, intellectual games, intellectual thinking of pride, pleasure of having a reputation, pleasure of, you know, people saying nice things about you, pleasure of possessing material things, cars and houses and boats and things, you know, these sort of mental pleasures. Which just about sums up human activity, doesn’t it? Really is very pervasive in in most things we do. There’s other things. We have love.
We we do. We we have affection for our family and our friends. And how does our our affection express itself? We want them, to put them in to have physical and mental eye and ear pleasure. Idea of how we can make those we love happy is to give them chocolates or flowers or take them to a concert or a movie or, you know, give them some sort of pleasure.
I mean, that’s that’s it. That’s how we how our love express itself. So so human beings are doing that a lot. And our body is really, built it’s built to experience pleasure, isn’t it? Now from the Buddhist point of view, that is why human beings exist, because they like pleasure.
And this mental attachment, this mental grasping at sensory pleasure and mental pleasure is the energy which pushed the evolution of humans. And not just humans, all animals, they have the five senses. They’re all seeking pleasure. Right? But we’re just thinking now from the human point of view.
It is our attachment to this pleasure which is the driving force behind the evolution of the human being, the body and the mind. Now, I mentioned before the idea of evolution as being the chance, the haphazard, the coming together, know, atoms and molecules and then mutations, this sort of stuff. And that mathematically it had been proven to be impossible really to have happened that way because there just wasn’t enough time. There has to be something else behind evolution. Now, the fact of physical evolution is undeniable.
We can see from the fossil record that there is this progressive evolving of species. That’s undeniable. It’s undeniable. If we’ve studied embryology and we look at the way the human embryo develops, it’s incredible. It’s one of the most fascinating things as a medical student, to see that we retrace our whole evolutionary history.
You know, we have gills at one stage. Our jaws are actually our lower jaw is a transformed gill, which I always used to think astounding. And some babies actually are born without a lower jaw but with a slit in their their neck. Yeah? Because of some arrest in the stage of transforming from a gill to a jaw.
So, anyway, things like that are fascinating to me. Physical evolution is reality but what’s this extra force that really pushed it along, sped it up through the shorter period of existence of the Well, attachment. Attachment to sense pleasure. And you see, our minds didn’t begin now this is something, a new concept for us. Our minds, this consciousness, did not begin with the coming together of the sperm and the egg appearance.
The body began then. The physical body, sure, determined its shape and appearance determined by the chromosomes. But the consciousness came from a previous existence. And not tonight, but next week I can go into into this mechanism of death and the transference of consciousness from one life to the other. But the point I’m trying to make is that if you can accept for now, you know, conscious activity sort of existed before the body.
Now, because of our, the attachment we have to sense pleasures, and a lot of other mental factors as well, which also I won’t expand upon now, that was the molding energy which molded the shape of human bodies through evolution, chicken bodies, and fish bodies, all the other, you know, animals. And because some are limited, like, if a grasshopper was is only attached to five sense pleasures, why doesn’t it become a human where it can get indulged much better in sense pleasures than a than a grasshopper can? Well, its mind was limited from the previous life. It it didn’t have the the fortune or the other mental qualities that those destined to become a human had at death. But it’s not discriminating against grasshoppers because mental energies which sort of evolved our human existence and our mental energy change.
And it’s possible that when we die, our mental energy can be in the in the shape that’s gonna give rise to a grasshopper existence in the next life. So there can be cyclic things that are up and down. humans can become animals in the next life. Animals can become humans, and there can be a cyclic pattern, you know, going like that, depending upon the mental energies, the attachment, the fortune or the misfortune, the positive or negative qualities of consciousness at the moment of death or the previous life? Now, this the more Well, it’s something that we’ve worked for and we’re driven for and we’ve created good actions for.
But the rewarder is not outside, is not external. It’s a continuity of our mind. Yeah. Yeah. It’s like, if we do something to please somebody and, you know, we give the neighbor a bunch of flowers from our garden Right.
Then we’ve created mental action. We’ve created this mental friendliness. And it’s very easy for them when they grow a whole lot of zucchinis or something to give us a basket of zucchinis in return. And they probably won’t give them to the neighbor on the other side because that neighbor had never given them anything. You know?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right.
Well, according to Buddhism, our minds with their different energies, this fluxing, you know, coming and going of energies, have been in existence since beginningless time that there wasn’t a beginning, that we’ve been experiencing death and rebirth as far back in memory as one can go, which means that before this earth there were previous places where living beings existed. Never a beginning. Even before this whole universe, there was another universe. Well, that’s true. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Also the big bang, which would he have? Big bang or continual? Big bang I think he was.
Right. Of this universe, which is fair enough. In Buddhism, agree. There was a beginning to this universe. But there are other universes and they’re in different states of evolution.
Like the evolution of a universe is it starts, it exists for a hell of a long period of time and then it goes out of existence, maybe it comes back in. And but there are even, like different universes doing the same thing and at different phases, they’re not all in the same phase. There are six general realms of existence that one can experience in this cycle. There’s the Wheel of Life. You’ve probably all heard the term the Wheel of Life, where thinking beings, beings with mind, can be reborn in.
And we’re really only aware of two as humans. We’re aware of the human level and of the animal level. We’re beings with mind and consciousness. And humans and animals necessarily can only live when the earth is in its present state of evolution because we need the environment of comes in concordance with our state of mind, because we’re attached to this environment. Look.
But beaches and, you know, all the sensory pleasurable things exist because we like them. There’s a sort of an interdependent relationship between us and the animals and our environment, and the environmentalists should get on to this. That’s enough. Yeah. Well, I’ll go back to what I was talking about, these six realms.
See, the thing about Buddhism, you know, when we learned at school, the evolution of Western knowledge has been that we admit that we don’t know, and particularly with the materialistic philosophy, the scientific way of understanding which dominates our thinking nowadays spiritual philosophical things of the past but in this day and age it’s a materialist way of looking at things, breaking them down into very concrete atoms and molecules. Admit scientists admit we don’t know, but we make hypotheses and then we test those hypotheses and if things work out according to our predictions then we say this is valid and true. And we also know that as more hypotheses develop, although it was valid for that period of time, in the light of new knowledge it has to be adjusted. Like Newton’s the classical example, Newton’s reality of laws of velocity and stuff aren’t completely accurate although they thought they were perfect. But there’s, you know, relativity and space travel change that anyway.
So our knowledge is regarded as an expanding, growing thing. Right? Now Buddha, who was a living person in India two and a half thousand years ago, he claimed, and for us, it’s just a claim that he made, that he had reached this point of intuitive wisdom wisdom beyond conceptualization, understanding all phenomena, understanding the total reality of existence, the total reality of human existence, other worlds, so much more beyond our understanding. Then he taught it to others. So he had to teach a whole lot.
He had to teach a whole pattern saying, Look, this is the way it is. And then we have to sort of sit back and look at the picture that he painted and see how it interconnects. So what I have to do now is sort of give you some pictures of the way things are and in the way that the Buddha explained. And then you can sort of tie it up. So I can explain these six realms and and we’re gonna think about it, see how they fit in your experience.
So there’s human realm, okay, animal realm, you see. Now some people, some humans can see ghosts. I don’t know if anybody here has seen them or can see it, but they can. We we there are so many stories that people see ghosts. Now I never believed this.
I’ve never seen a ghost. And I found it very hard that there could be another realm, sort of spirit, you know, bodies and living beings around us. But in Buddhism, it’s taught that there is a third level of existence, they call it the hungry ghost realm. These people share our environment, but from our human side we just can’t perceive them. We don’t have the karma.
Maybe I shouldn’t introduce the word karma yet, but we don’t have the mental capacity as humans to perceive them in general. But because humans have a whole spectrum of mental capacities from previous lives, some humans can see spirits and ghosts and they talk about it and everybody says they’re insane and so they shut up. Particularly with children because children’s minds are much more, how do you say, Influenced. Uncluttered. They’re closer to their previous life.
It’s a matter of time. They’ve had less involvement in this life to be more confused and to forgotten, just forgotten. So that’s another thing, I mean many children do remember previous lives and they tell people and they say, Shut up kid! That’s ridiculous, you’re just imagining. Anyway, what I’m thinking of is people who see visions of ghosts and also if there’s people who are sick, they can see visions.
Often we say, it’s hallucination because they’re sick. Well, it might be hallucination, but it might not. There might be both. Some people might be hallucinating. Some people because of their altered mental state because of sickness may see another go.
It might be real, this vision. Under drugs and anaesthetics, there are different things. One experience I’ve had, not of seeing anything, but when I was working as a doctor in this monastery in Nepal, I had a very privileged situation because people would come to me and explain their experience, talk about a lot of Westerners coming to the East. And what I found very interesting was that over a period of three years we used to have an annual course and people come and learn about Buddhist philosophy. Then three different people, completely unrelated, from different countries and different courses, They came to me in my clinic and sat down and said, listen, I’ve got to tell you something.
All my life I’ve been seeing, not all the time, but occasionally I see spirits or ghosts. It’s really upsetting me. Stopped telling people, it’s not crazy. You know, they’ve told me about the things they’ve been seeing. And then each of them has described a particular ghost or spirit or whatever it is that lives under a particular tree at this monastery.
And they’ve all described the same thing. They said, you know, they’ve all said, even here, look, there’s under that tree, there’s this black thing, it’s round and it lives there. And I found that very interesting. I really didn’t prompt them because I did not believe in ghosts myself. I found it very difficult.
But they described the same thing in the same place. And I found that as being, to me, very significant evidence of spirit. hungry spirit realm, it’s said to be a really miserable rebirth, but that’s the third one. Very miserable. They’re very unhappy, these beings, and they have a lot of deprivation of food and water and physical comfort.
Very unhappy. They have different levels, just as humans have different levels of experience. Even with some spirits, it’s pretty good. But anyway, that’s another realm. Another realm is like what we would call hell.
It’s incredible vivid descriptions of pain and misery and suffering and really very heavy. And our word is hell. Is a hell where we’ve been in the past, and we could be in the future. It’s just one of the six. There’s just much pain.
Then, sort of in a more pleasant side than human, there are two levels of rebirth, which they call God realms. And within each there’s a whole spectrum of levels of rebirth and experience. But there are two, you might call them higher planes, higher because they’re more pleasant, they’re more happy. There is no pain or very little pain in some and no pain in others. Tremendous sensual pleasure and indulgence of every variety.
So we can call them God Realms if you like just to keep it simple. So there’s six realms. Two God Realms, human Realm, Animals, Hungry Ghosts and Hell if you like. So these are the six levels of rebirth, and we have been cycling from one to the other up to great pleasures of gods. We’ve all been in the highest god realm before, and sort of down again to immense suffering, back to humans, animals, and this is continual.
Now, back to the evolution of the universe. Before this universe, our present universe arose, we were all gods. We were in a very high god realm where we didn’t have we had bodies, but they’re very subtle, like light. This is just the way it was taught, you know, by Buddha. But our karma, our energy, predispositions to retain that existence began to wear out and our spirituality, our mental development, declined.
And it sort of declined to the point where the earth began to evolve according to the declining karma of the beings. Animal life grew because of the karmic energies, the mental energies of the beings inhabiting the earth. So I’ll leave it at that, the six realms. And and there’s a tremendous number of things I’ve touched on tonight, but we could pick them up again next week. And if anybody wants to ask questions, I’m really happy to continue talking, and there’s gonna be a cup of tea available too.
We can all go down the back and have a cup of tea. So before we go down, there’s any burning questions? Says a few. Yeah. No.
Enlightenment is complete escape from the Wheel of Life altogether. You see, the point is that we cycle from one to the other. From the top one you go down again. And that’s unsatisfactory. So Buddha actually, by recognizing the mechanism of the cyclic existence as being dominated by ignorance, this darkness which I mentioned at the beginning of the talk, this darkness which our minds are occluded by.
Removing the ignorance, one steps out of the Wheel of Life when it’s called nirvana, enlightenment, which isn’t completely away. It’s a state of mind. But it’s a mind no longer dominated by death and karma, and it’s complete power to do whatever you like. You you can manifest I mean, the reason you become a Buddha is because of love and compassion for others. And you have this freedom.
You see, all of existence arose from the mind. Now, Buddha mind is perfect control. So Buddha can think of what he wants to do to help people, and he can appear as that. And that sort of we all have this potential to do that. And it’s really worthwhile to see to do it.
Yeah. Right. Right. Right. I see.
Right. Well, with this body in mind, yeah, it is possible to complete the path of becoming Buddha. But one thing, have you noticed how people’s bodies change with their state of mind? Like, do you think if somebody’s really happy or in love or somebody’s really depressed, they’re not in love, their body changes according to their state of mind? Yeah.
And it’s real, isn’t it? It’s a physical change. Now, Buddhahood is a state of mind and it’s a very pure state of mind. And you progressively reach it. You don’t do it like that.
You have to really work on it. And so you’re changing your level of mind. And as you change your level of mind towards Buddhahood, your body changes. And it’s a human body in the beginning, but because of the power of your mind, and if you do do it in this life, your body can still appear to others to be human, but it’s no longer human body. It’s a Buddha’s body.
They say there are. They say there are Buddhas existing on this earth and working for people. Like, the Tibetans are completely convinced that His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, is a Buddha, whose mind is a Buddha mind. And but because of our human karma, we see a human being. I don’t know.
Well, you see, it’s the same continuity. It’s the same person from previous lives. It’s the same continuity, the same mind, the same mind that is manifested as a human through the ages here. Not a different mind stream. The same as like our mind stream, our lack of the mind to like a flowing river of consciousness, has flowed from being a little baby to a child to a forty-year-old to an adult.
And we can say it’s the same mind, can’t we? But it’s really, when we look at the mind in this evolution, there’s nothing that remains the same in it. It’s been growing and changing. But sitting back and labeling we can say, Oh yeah, it’s the same. So it’s the same with the Tathāgata.
And how how does he come back? Right. Right. Right. By saying he goes outside, I mean, he’s no longer under the control of death and karma and ignorance, which we are.
You see, the energy which causes the Wheel of Life to turn is ignorance and attachment and aversion, which arise out of ignorance, and karma, which is mental energy created by these states of mind. Right? So the Buddha’s mind is just our mind without ignorance, without karma, without attachment, without aversion, but with wisdom and compassion. And so with wisdom and compassion, the Buddha can manifest as if he was reborn, as if he were a human. To our view, we think let’s say, for example, if the Dalai Lama is a Buddha, to our view, we can only see the Dalai Lama as a human being.
But in reality, his body is the body of a Buddha, and his mind is the mind of the Buddha, but we’re not developed enough to perceive. Yeah, that level of mind is completely under control. It’s not as a human, like a human. Let’s say like a human. How much is the baby?
He put his family in the life of him and what he’s like so he can get to the adjective. No, he has the choice. If he wanted to he could stay forever but he doesn’t. I mean, he comes back then. He stays he can choose it’s more of a manifestation than a rebirth from his side.
From our side it’s a rebirth. And he does it in order to benefit people, to continue the teaching. Because the only way we can really benefit is to receive the teachings and to work on them. No, there’s never there’s no beginning. Like no new minds are being created.
They’re all always there. But there might not be issues during the time. In other words, I guess what I’m saying are there more minds being sort of talking in the universe? On this earth? Yes.
There’s sentient existence things with mind throughout the universe. And that’s manifestation of the universe. They’re all within these six realms. It seems though it has no convenience. Well, I think we can go into that next week.
I mean, I intend to go into that in quite detail next week. It’s it’s tricky and it’s but it’s very important. It’s the most important point for us to get to learn. But we can’t just simple question?