Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 89-minute introduction to Buddhism, Ven Thubten Gyatso presents the foundational framework of Buddhist philosophy to a largely newcomer audience. He begins with the relationship between body and mind, arguing they are distinct yet interdependent entities, then moves into consciousness as a continuum unbroken by sleep or death. He explains how consciousness carries karma and karmic imprints from past lives, describing the intermediate state (Bardo) between death and rebirth, and how conception occurs through the meeting of sperm, egg, and consciousness. The talk then surveys the six realms of rebirth—from hell beings and hungry ghosts to humans, animals, demigods, and divine beings—all cycling endlessly until ignorance is uprooted. He concludes by outlining the Buddhist path: recognising that suffering stems from self-centred desire, anger, and confusion; cultivating wisdom, compassion, and moral discipline; and the potential to achieve nirvana or enlightenment. Throughout, he weaves his medical background and Western scientific perspective into the discussion, framing karma as a natural law of mind analogous to gravity.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2004 06 05 tape 1.mp3
UUID: c6512d06-be2e-4c2d-898a-8d077a8a7549
Teacher: Ven Thubten Gyatso aka Adrian Feldman
Collection: Introduction to Buddhism (Ven Thubten Gyatso aka Adrian Feldman)
Date: 2004-06-05
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 89.7 minutes
Words: ~10,123
Which is quite interesting, actually. It’s like we we talk about we we talked about dreaming. And when you’re in the dream, you have a particular aspect, which isn’t necessarily your, you know, your waking body, is it? It could be a different type of body. But during the dream, it’s a hundred percent real for you even though it’s totally bizarre, but still you believe it’s happening.
And you’re doing things, you’re communicating with people, you’re seeing things, you’re experiencing emotions, happy, unhappy, fear, whatever. There’s a whole lot going on in dream, and you’re completely sure it’s true. Right? So how do you know that you’re not dreaming now? Anyway, it could be a dream.
We’re completely sure. Are we here? There’s no as in a dream, there might be a time we’re gonna wake up and we so how do we know we’re not experiencing the dream of some other form of existence or but it’s coming from the mind anyway. This is called idealism. Anyway, Buddhism talks a lot about how everything does come from the mind, and it’s quite fascinating.
But to go back to the first sort of philosophical idea, the body and mind are two separate entities. Well, Buddhism Buddha Buddha taught that that the the body and the mind are different in that the physical world has all of its physical qualities, and the physical body has, know, the atoms, molecules, all of the light, heat, all of the physical things that we can measure and so on. But all that I talked about, all that consciousness, all of that subjective experience, that awareness, the emotions, they are mind and they’re not physical. You cannot measure mind in any physical way, like weight, height, color, shape, because it doesn’t have those qualities. It is just the continuity of consciousness, the stream of awareness, which you have.
Mean, I’m not trying to introduce something which you don’t already know. You have your continuity of awareness, and that is your mind. Now, they’re not completely separate. Obviously, our consciousness is completely dependent. Our human consciousness is completely dependent upon our human body.
Right? We we depend upon the activity of the nervous system of the brain, these sense organs, to be able to have consciousness. If we lose our eyes, we no longer have visual consciousness. It’s impossible. If we lose our ears, if our ear organs are destroyed, we cannot hear, we have no sense of sound.
If parts in the brain are damaged, we lose mental capacity to remember. You know, we get Alzheimer’s. We we start forgetting, and we start losing capacity to even recognize the closest members of our family. The so, obviously, the mind is very much dependent on the functioning of the body. But the very memories, the very experience, the emotions, our mind, they are not physical.
The body itself depends upon the mind in order well, obviously, to feed itself, to keep itself warm, to be healthy, and so on. The the mind works on the body. The body alright. Alright. So that is looking at the human organism.
You can accept body and mind. Is that alright? You can can you see what I’m getting at? How they’re interdependent, but they’re different. Do you get a feeling for that?
It’s a really important point. So the question that we should ask is, I have mind. Alright? I accept that. And I can trace it back yesterday, the day before, trace it back well to birth.
Maybe inside the womb, was there mind? Yes. There was mind in the womb. At least in the in the latter stages pregnancy, the the fetus is awake, is thinking. You’ve heard, I’m sure, that the the mother has a favorite soap that she watches during the day when she sits and relaxes happy watching her soap.
And they’ve they’ve discovered that if a baby is restless and they play the theme music from the mother’s favorite soap, the baby goes to sleep. So obviously, the the baby was quite happy when mother was not moving around and was quite relaxed and peaceful and and and sound goes through the womb. The baby could hear these. It was aware. Well, no, agree.
It makes the mother physically calm, but that benefits the baby. She’s resting. Well, she’s obviously sitting down watching the So so the baby a physical effect on it. Yeah. Well, that would benefit the baby because it’s not being bounced around and the baby’s do the baby’s do hear sounds through the point individually on their own, not just through the mother, not just as a reaction of the mother, but they are their own their own being, and they hear their own noises out.
Sounds of vibration. If it’s how do we know if that is Well, can we do it by inference? We could do it by inference. I mean, can a baby can a newborn baby hear sounds? Yes.
I can. So when did they start hearing? Does it have to be a what what what’s the difference between outside the womb and inside the womb in terms of the development of the ear? There’s no difference. I don’t talk about the later stages of pregnancy.
Of course, it’s only when the organs develop. So we can infer, at least we can infer, that a baby has hearing in the womb. We can check out if you really want to know, you meditate and you can remember. We have the memory. And it’s not difficult.
I have never done it. The yogis, anybody, you don’t have to be Buddhist to get clear concentration. And you can remember very easily your experience in the womb after you started thinking. And the Buddha explained, he said, actually consciousness I mean, the baby is like in deep sleep. After conception, up to about twenty five weeks of gestation, it’s like deep, deep sleep.
But after about twenty five weeks, it’s as if the baby wakes up and it’s conscious. It’s very clear and it has thoughts. And as its sense organs mature, it actually has sensory experience. So it definitely has thoughts. Now, so we have to we can’t meditate.
We have to take the yogi’s report of their meditative experience at face value. We don’t have another way of checking up, but Buddha taught that this is the case and the meditators verified. So what we’re leading to is when did our mind begin? How did it begin? We’ve got this continuum of awareness or consciousness.
It’s not physical. So where did it come from? Well, we might say, well, my parents’ mind. So my mind my body definitely came from the chromosomes came from my mother and father, and the the body came from all the nutrients that I sucked out of my mother’s blood as I was developing as an embryo, a fetus. But my mind, this consciousness, if our minds sort of broke off our mother or father’s mind, we would have the the mental qualities of either both parents or one or the other parent.
We we would we would have their knowledge, their memories, their experience. But the reality is that each baby has a unique first mind. And many babies, I’m sure we can agree, have a almost have a personality that in retrospect, when you know, once they’re growing up, as we can we can even see their unique personality qualities, characteristics when they’re very, very, very young. So almost it seems that babies are born with a with personal personality characteristics. Where how did it start?
How did this continuum of consciousness, where it come if if it’s different to the physical world, it can’t be created by the physical world. Where coming back to the present, my present moment of mind, where did it come from? You know, what’s the primary cause of my mind in the present? What’s the previous moment of mind? Right?
The previous moment of consciousness. And then then it then the present moment becomes the direct cause of the future moment of consciousness. So you have this continuity of consciousness. And as I said, it’s unbroken twenty four hours a day. But it has to have come from there has to have been a first point.
So so Buddha said, well, the answer to that question is that the mind came from a previous life. And the way in which this happens is that when the body dies, the and becomes no longer able to support consciousness. It is just like going to sleep. Actually, the experience of dying is no different to going to sleep. We lose our sensory awareness.
We lose our thinking. We lose all of our emotions. Like completely switch off, but there is still subtle consciousness. So when the body actually dies, it can no longer support mind. This very self consciousness has the capacity to separate from this gross body.
And there’s an extra thing. There is always a very subtle physical continuum associated with consciousness. The Tibetan word is lung. The Sanskrit word is prana. The Chinese word is qi.
And they all translate into English as wind. And literally, it is wind is like the most subtle an extremely subtle form of the material world, more subtle than atoms and molecules. But it is this prana which is the support of consciousness, like a rider and a horse. So what happens when we die is that the the mind supported the the consciousness, which carries with it all the memories, all the positive and negative emotions, all the karmic imprints, is carried on separate from the old dead body.
And instantly, just like when we wake up in a dream, so when we start dreaming, we are in an intermediate state or Bardo. And there is this subtle body. This subtle wind takes the aspect. It it is moved by the ripening karma in that mind to take the aspect of its future life. So it’s like it’s like having a dream body as an animal or as a human or as a divine being or as a hell being, whichever realm of rebirth, you this this Bardo or this intermediate state body has the aspect of the future life.
But it’s subtle. It’s subtle wind. And it’s conscious. Yeah? Why is it called wind?
Is it actually wind? Well, it’s it’s called wind because it’s it’s it’s most extremely subtle manifestation of matter. And just wind is the lightest element. In Buddhism, matter there’s a presentation of, you know, four elements, earth, water, fire, and air, air or wind. This sounds like some alchemy, but actually it’s just a present it’s a presentation of the properties of matter.
It’s quite interesting to look at. Anyway, the air is the is the most subtle. Earth is the most gross. Alright. So so there’s like this ghost like intermediate state being which can still see its whole body, and it still has this strong connection.
It can see the relatives standing around crying and even tries to communicate, but it’s like nobody can see it. And then it sort of wherever it thinks, it goes, like in a dream. In a dream, how the scene can change so quickly. Whatever we think, boom, we’re there. That’s exactly the experience of this intermediate state.
It is conscious, it is thinking, and has With this subtle body, it actually has the sensory experience. But it’s so wherever it thinks it goes. And as I said before, even with the human mind, you know, our living mind, there are two forces which determine what we’re thinking about. One is the our our own accumulation of past experience, knowledge, you know, etcetera, etcetera, the, you know, the manifest desires and dislikes and so on. The other is the ripening of karma, which brings up instinctive or whatever words you use.
So it’s the same with the Bardo being. There’s this combination of conscious direction, which isn’t necessarily controlled, by the way. Just as our conscious activity is not necessarily controlled, often it could be uncontrolled. Our anger can be very uncontrolled. You know, we we we go to a party and I am not gonna get into an argument with auntie so and so.
I’m gonna be nice to auntie so and so. But it we blow it, don’t we? Auntie so and so knows how to push our buttons and we get angry or whatever. So that shows a lack of control even of our conscious emotion. And karma is even less under control.
And that is ripening and pushing. So this intermediate state being, according to its personal karma, can be pleasant, can be unpleasant. And eventually, it is attracted mainly through karma to the situation where the future parents are about to conceive a child. So if it’s going be born human, you know, describe that we’re attracted to the a situation where conception is about to occur, the parents may be engaging in intercourse, and it and if it’s going the way it’s described by by the Buddha is that if already your future sex is karmically determined. So if you’re going to be male, you feel lust and desire for your future mother and anger towards your future father.
The desire attracts you, like uncontrollably attracts you to the union of the sex organs. The anger causes you to die from the intermediate state. Again, the mind becomes extremely subtle and still born on this very subtle wind, and it’s it enters the womb. And so there’s a third factor required for conception. There’s the sperm, there’s the egg, and there’s the consciousness from a past life.
Without consciousness, there won’t be the development of an embryo. You need consciousness with its supporting wind energy as a third factor so that that egg will develop into an embryo. And in fact, it’s very interesting, like from embryology. Well, when I did embryology back in the sixties, a lot of questions of what on earth makes this bunch of grapes, you know, these cells take the shape of a of a human organism? There is some and I think still there are theories, but I don’t think anybody really knows what it is.
Buddha spoke about this two and a half thousand years ago and explained that it is the consciousness immediately from the most subtle death consciousness we call clear light starts to become more gross. And it is the subtle wind energy which flows with consciousness, which acts as the prime mover of the development of the human embryo, because it’s human karma and so on. Okay. Yeah. Can you take a male child?
Oh, yeah. So if it’s female, it’s the obvious reverse. There’s desire And and you just and that anger Yeah. Towards the father. Towards the father.
Desire for the mother. And desire for a female, desire for the father, anger towards the mother. Yeah. I I’m it went through my mind, but it it went out again. Yeah.
The incidence of? Yeah. Well, I think if if let let’s say it’s a condom. Then what would happen is that there might be I’m just speculating that if there’s a a Bardo being as attracted to this male this man and woman as their future parents, they might experience a death, but as there is no proper basis, a fertilized egg, they would then wake up again in the They’d be still in the Bardo. Bardo a while in the Bardo.
Yes. You can. That’s right. Up to seven weeks can happen. And it’s said that you go through these mini deaths.
Like say every week there’s a mini death in the Bardo, but you wake up again in the Bardo. So, yeah, and after about seven weeks most Bardo beings have been reborn. But even some said it can even go longer. Are distributed from the bottom? Are you No.
Universal. Universal. Buddhism says that there is life on other planets throughout the universe and we can actually go to other other planets even. We were cyanobacteria. Yeah.
Alright, just as I’ve just said. Back then we were on another planet somewhere else. Yeah, we were on a planet. Yeah. But there’s actually more to it than that.
It says that there were beings even in the very early phase, even before the sun formed, you know, it was still it says that there were beings with ethereal I haven’t talked about that there are other realms of rebirth. There are more ethereal types of rebirth, which in terms of pleasure are much better than, say, a human rebirth. So in the early days of the earth there were conscious beings in this ethereal, very pleasant state, living and dying. And it was their karma that was degenerating, and then it was actually their karma which caused, which was sort of the prime mover of evolution. See, scientifically, we we say that the body is a result of evolution and the mind is a result of evolution.
Don’t we? That’s what scientists say. Buddhism says that consciousness as we know it, like human consciousness and animal consciousness, we don’t know any other types of consciousness. But human and animal minds consciousness well, even the bodies are the result of the mind. The mind is the prime mover of evolution, not to mention the development of the embryo in the womb.
The consciousness is the prime mover of evolution. Which fits in one point of view that if we look at the fundamental theory of survival of the fittest through chance mutation, mathematicians say that there hasn’t been enough time for the great variety of organisms to have evolved if it were just by chance. There has to be another factor which has sped up the the rate of evolution like some billion fold. And who was it wrote the book called The Selfish Gene? Anyway, there’s a book came out a few years ago, a long time ago, called The Selfish Gene.
And this was a mathematician, biologist who was speculating as to what was this factor that sped up evolution. And so he he gave genes the quality of selfishness, which is a mental quality. And and he and he he in his book, he disguised very, you know, very nicely how the quality of being selfish is a factor which really can speed up evolution. And Buddhism, Buddha says selfishness is your basic drive for existence. Your raison d’etre is selfishness.
And when it comes down to it, you will kill, steal, or lie to get what you want. Now this this in general. We do some pretty mean things to get what we want, especially when we’re young. I’ve already said that our society is not an amoral society. In an amoral society, we would do that.
We would. There will be no holds barred like in so many Hollywood scenarios, the Mad Max things. We’re not an amoral society. We we do have the Judeo Christian morality, which as I I hope to imply that this comes from knowledge, from wisdom, understanding the the truth of karma. Okay.
Now, where were we? We’re in the Are we out of the body yet? No, we’re out. So more or less, there’s more to say about the body, but Yeah. So roughly I’ve I’ve explained it.
So what I just Before we have a break, we’re gonna have a break now for stretch your legs and have a cup of tea or something. Just want to present the various In the wheel of life, it’s not just humans or animals, they are just two levels in the wheel of life. According to our karma, there are realms of rebirth much heavier than human, worse than human. And there are two. At the very bottom is the Sanskrit word is naraka, and I don’t know the literal meaning of naraka, but anyway, we translate it as hell.
And it’s like being born in this psychotic insanity where you’re being tortured by these demons. The demons are hallucinations of your mind. They don’t exist in their own side as living beings. They are products of your mind. There is like burning.
There’s either fire or freezing different environmental miseries, again, which come from the mind of the person experiencing those helms. So that’s one realm of rebirth. Then there’s the hungry ghost realm where it’s not so intensely bad, but it’s still very bad. A lot of difficulty in getting food and drink and shelter. So there’s hells, there’s hungry ghosts, there’s animals.
Those three are considered unfortunate realms of rebirth because it’s difficult to really have control and be happy. Obviously, it’d be better to be an animal than to be a hungry ghost or a hungry ghost or a hell being, but still it’s not so easy for animals. Then humans, we’re sort of in the middle. We can have extreme pleasure, extreme pain. We can have hell like experiences.
Then there are demigods or asura, asura is the Sanskrit word, where these beings are karmically they’re on this earth and the hell beings and the hungry ghosts are on this earth, but they experience an environment according to their karma, their karmic projection. The asuras are described as being martial beings, very jealous. They’re very closely related to the highest, the divine beings, divine rebirth where there’s great pleasure. And the asuras are very close because they can fight. They fight with these divine beings.
It’s like we’re fairly close to the animals. And so the asuras in fact, you can even say that the asuras are very close to are so close to the divine beings that they’re the same because they interbreed. So they’re very close. There are levels of these divine beings. So so many levels.
So those very briefly constitute the six realms of rebirth, divine beings, demigods or asuras, humans, animals, hungry ghosts, hell beings. And our the stream of consciousness, the consciousness, which is which we call my mind, has no beginning. Like, there is no beginning to time. Beginningless, since beginningless time, our stream of consciousness has been dying, being reborn, dying reborn in those various six realms, round and round, up and down according to its karma. We’ve never experienced nirvana or enlightenment since beginningless time.
There was no original creation. Our mind stream has been dying and being reborn. And it will continue to do so into the future unless we get our act together. Right? Unless we destroy the root cause, the self centered ignorance.
If we do that, we will destroy anger attachment and we will eliminate karma and we will replace those disturbing emotions with wisdom, compassion, love. We will become a Buddha, which is our potential. And that’s not deserting the world. Buddhas can manifest anywhere, you know, in a human body or whatever, not through karma, but through compassion where they can take a birth completely in control and do whatever they can to knock a bit of sense into people. Like you can’t as I said before, you can’t force people to change their mind.
People have to be motivated and it’s very rare that people are open enough to even admit that the problem is inside and not out there. You know, it’s Johnny Howard, it’s the economic system, it’s da da da da, the weather, you know, there are plenty of things to blame. But somebody has to have been bashed about a bit actually, experience a few pains in life, and start to question, and open their mind to the thought that there may be something inside that’s a root of it all, and I need to take responsibility to change my life. Then the Buddhas are there like they’re around. We we can’t tell what they look like, but probably, almost certainly, the Dalai Lama is such a person.
I mean, can’t say. My karma sees a human being, a very special human being, but that that that that’s the way in which Buddhas appear. And so they give direction. They said, look, your life can be meaningful. It can be could well have been a Buddha.
I probably was a Buddha. Many religions people who appear in different societies, in different times, say, I am Buddha. They communicate with each society or with each individual according to that that’s culture’s capacity to comprehend. I mean, if Christ said there was no God, that would have crucified him a lot quicker. And Buddha could say it.
Because, as I said, India was a totally different cultural situation to the Mediterranean region where our own Judeo Christian beliefs arose. Anyway, I think that’s more or less what I want to say in the beginning. So let’s have a break and stretch your legs and I hope there’s plenty of tea and then we’ll continue after. We might do a bit of meditation. So for half an hour, I think.
I’ll sit here if anybody wants to ask questions. I’ve got this. This is fine for me. That’s fine for me. I have this hypothesis that I was forming in my mind.
Just wanted to clarify. Yeah. Now is it right to say that before you’re born or rather when you’ve been conceptualized with the union of sperm and an egg that you already have a karma, a predetermined karma, whatever you’ve got, and that guides the development of your mind regardless of whatever environmental circumstance I’m brought up in. It influences mind. Yeah.
But also, of course, the environment influences the development of mind. But but karma is another factor. Have the potential to completely alter? Not completely. No.
Well, depends if you get shot. Maybe I’ll do mine. That that’s the sort of question I have. Like, let’s say, did I did if I did a really bad karma in the past, is it likely that I’m gonna be born in a place where I’m likely to be shocked? Yes.
It’s possible. That’s right. In fact, everything we experience has karma as one condition, but it’s not a total blueprint. It’s not that our life is predetermined. There are environmental conditions and there are also nurture.
You know, scientific terms, we talk about the personality being the result of nature and nurture. Right? Nature, our biological soul, and then nurture is the environment. That’s true. But Buddhism just adds the third factor, karma, which influence is a condition.
But it’s not a definitely not a hundred percent what’s the word? It’s like fate. Yes, that’s right. It’s not total fate. Predestination.
Predestination. But we do have karmic tendencies for sure. It’s like we might have the karma to have smallpox, but the condition, the fact that the virus isn’t around so that karma can’t happen in this life. But we might be born on another planet with a smallpox. What they say is there’s no creator.
Isn’t somebody who, independently of us, created the world and created us, and who is the arbiter of what’s right and wrong and who is punishing and rewarding. That concept also is in Hinduism, Brahma created the world. So from that point of view, there’s no creator, no divine being who’s set the whole ball rolling. Now, I mentioned divine rebirth, and Brahma actually exists, but Brahma is one realm of rebirth. And we’ve been in the realm of Brahma, but that’s still within the wheel of life.
So that exists. It’s the concept of an entity, a being who is in control and created all that’s what’s rejected. Many Christians don’t believe in God as being, like a being as such. They believe in a God principle of wisdom and compassion and so on. And that fits quite well.
To be unified with God is to generate pure wisdom and compassion and love. Buddhism would be very happy if people did that. And to stop harming others, obey the ten commandments. They definitely say that there is an alternative, yes. The first thing I think which is important is that there is survival after death.
And then you’ve to have a mechanism. If there’s survival after death, what’s the mechanism? Well, this dualistic philosophy of body and mind. If it’s only body, we know the body disintegrates, and there can be no survival after death. So it’s got some way.
I didn’t talk about the concept of souls and so on, but we might have to the brain. Apparently communicates with people of the past or crossed over. Oh, yeah. And and he has an audience, and he can say some things that are specific to people in the audience. And but there’s no way he could know the things that he does.
Well, it is possible for certain individuals, or for any of us actually, to have psychic communication with, say, a hungry ghost. And hungry ghosts aren’t all totally miserable, skinny, starving. They’re all on many levels. And it is possible for a person to have a degree of clairvoyant capacity to mentally communicate with a hungry ghost spirit. It may well be somebody’s relative who’s dying and knows a lot about that person, that’s possible.
And it sounds miraculous to us. And it’s true, they do know the things which it’s impossible to think of how they could possibly know. So that is a possible Well, there are rebirth states which are, compared to humans, much preferable. But relatively speaking, say, this is great, come along, come join us. But their minds are still they haven’t escaped karma.
They’ve got this temporary rebirth in a very pleasant state, but they still have the seeds of ignorance, they still have a discriminating mind where they feel angry, jealous, attached, and they still have karma. And when that’s used down, it’s like you’ve spent all your money in the bank, they’re gonna die, and they’re gonna find themselves either back here or even in a worse state. So there is a potential for communication but be careful. Many people follow these spirits who have great power, power of prediction, power of knowledge. We’re warned in the Buddhist texts, don’t, don’t follow.
They’re not reliable. If you’re gonna follow somebody, mean look what humans do to other humans. They commit suicide, like Reverend Jim Jones, unbelievable things that people we give up to other humans so easily. Our life, our wealth, our possessions, give up our husbands, our wives, our children, it’s just terrible. So of course when you have this spirit, humans devote themselves to these spirits and that’s a big mistake.
Big mistake. We have to be very discriminating, very careful. Can I just go back temporarily? A question about gender. I thought I’d heard it in teaching or read somewhere that our consciousness has no gender.
This gender left. So are you saying in the Bardo, we assume or we take on a gender before Oh, I see. We take on before we dive into a female egg or uterus? No. I I think it’s right to say that consciousness is without gender.
And we’ve all had masculine and feminine births in past lives, you know, male or female. It’s just according to our inclinations, really, our karma. Okay. So, good afternoon. My name’s my Tibetan name is Thubten Gyatso or just simply Gyatso.
And I’ve been invited by Buddha House to give an afternoon discussion, discussion, lead some meditation, and try to give an overall picture of the Buddhist presentation of the nature of our mind, know what our mind is, how it is so important in terms of our daily experience, and the world view of Buddhism talking about where our mind comes from reincarnation and the what potential we may have in in the future after this life. From my side I really like to just have everything informal. You’re welcome to ask questions when something may be unclear. Question already? Okay.
One, two, three, four, five, how’s that? Getting better? Okay. Yeah, I can hear it now. Actually, before I begin, I’m interested to know where you’re coming from.
How many people consider yourself very new? You haven’t had much introduction to Buddhism. Okay. And so that’s quite a lot. That’s good.
Because then you can’t contradict me. Anyway, I was saying you’re you’re welcome to ask questions as we go, and I’ll I’ll try and and make the picture as clear as I can. From my side, I’ve been a monk since nineteen seventy five. I met the lamas in Kathmandu in Nepal. They’re giving a meditation course.
And I’d already been traveling in the East, but I had no direct inclination really to meet Buddhism or become a Buddhist for any religion, actually. But through various circumstances, ended up doing a one month course in Kathmandu. And then I also traveled in the East and in Europe and kept checking up my experience with what the lamas had taught. And you can see the result. For for the Western mind, the the two most difficult or the two new subjects, the subjects of karma and and rebirth, they don’t really belong to the scientific world view, which was was my view of the world, still is.
What I found in my own sort of personal thinking about it was that the karma and rebirth are not contradictory to the scientific view and, in fact, they’re complementary. They add, I think, a few missing points. So I’ll try and explain what I mean by that during the talk. But first, we have to really look at the the basis, the the foundation, if you like, the human organism. The Buddhist teachings can be condensed into a presentation of three aspects.
There’s the foundation or the basis, which really refers to us as human beings, plus the other realms of existence and rebirth, like the wheel of life presentation of the various types of rebirth is the basis. Then having understood that, we we can see that there is an alternative to the wheel of life. The the Buddha and the first thing he said, he said, I’ve achieved nirvana. I’ve achieved enlightenment. There’s something else other than what everybody is looking for in the life.
In general, as you said, everybody is looking for happiness, looking for peace, and trying to avoid suffering. But from the, you know, the most impoverished person to the to the kings and, you know, the queens, highest levels of society, there is always dissatisfaction, there is a lack of completion or a lack of success in maintaining happiness and in preventing suffering. But still, people still kept going. They’d be knocked down and they’d get up again and just keep going, looking looking for that elusive peace and happiness, which is sort of the driving force of everything that people do in society. And and he said, look, nobody who has invested their hopes in possessions, yeah, as a means of happiness, in friends as a means of happiness, in family as means of perfect happiness, in reputation, in social position as a source of perfect happiness.
Nobody has gained the complete peace. And in in their striving, they’ve caused a lot of harm to others. And all the time, they’ve been getting older and death has been approaching. The body has been weak, and then they’re gone. And people die dissatisfied.
The life is incomplete. Something was missing. So Buddha said, there is an alternative. And the and I’ve discovered that he had this. He asserted that he had attained nirvana, which is he explained, is is the the peace of complete stillness in the mind, the the lack of the urge, the continual sense of dissatisfied craving and need for happiness.
On top and on top of that, not just the the stilling of of the mind, but the manifestation of a mental bliss, a mental happiness, which is way beyond what we could ever imagine that can be experienced. And he said the the difference is that I I have worked internally on my mind. In other words, the real source of of misery and unhappiness in life is within our own minds. It’s not lack of of money, lack of friends, lack of recognition, lack of good health and all that. It is actually suffering comes from within the mind, and it’s rooted in what are called the three poisons, self centered ignorance, longing desire, and anger or hatred.
And from those three fundamental disturbing emotions, this confused ignorance, just not knowing reality, but having the wrong idea about how things exist. There’s a very self centered approach to life where we see ourselves as most important, and we have aggression towards anything or anyone who intrudes upon our pursuit of happiness, or who we see as a threat to our happiness. And we have longing desire, craving clinging to all of the objects and the persons which we feel, this will make me happy. So those are the sort of fundamental disturbing emotions that are at the root of all suffering. I think we just Very briefly, we’ll go into this in more detail, but you can see how our houses and our attics and garages become very full of objects that we’ve bought.
Spent a lot of money in obtaining, convinced that this is going to make me happy. But it doesn’t last, the object. We either become bored with it or it breaks down or whatever, but it soon gets put aside and we look for something else. Our address books are full of friends who are people who we have really seen as very important for our happiness, but we’ve become bored with them or become you know, something has intervened and we exclude them. Well, I don’t know if we rip them out of the address book or cross them out.
But there are a lot of friends, there’s past wives and past husbands who we have invested all our hope in for happiness. And somehow it didn’t work out as we’d anticipated. So we look elsewhere. This is continual well, I can almost call it a neurotic pursuit of peace and happiness, which causes us to do all the things we do. So it is getting our minds in order by eliminating self centeredness through the cultivation of wisdom, the wisdom seeing reality, by eliminating anger and aggression, by cultivating the mental qualities of patience.
You know, the patience is the capacity to remain calm and peaceful in the face of unwanted events, disturbing events, which usually tip us over into anger. And then once anger explodes, we’ve lost inner peace, we can’t make anybody happy, not to mention ourselves. So patience, this quality of remaining calm is, like, the antidote to to anger. And loving kindness, compassion, generosity, they’re all sort of combined towards others, frees our mind from a longing desire, I want, I want, I want, I must have. I can’t be happy unless I have that thing or that person.
Now, we we tell ourselves this. We see something in the shop window or a person, and we let our mind dwell upon that object, becoming infatuated with it, I must have that, and really feel that we cannot be happy unless we have have that person or that object. And so in that way, we are we’re building a whole fantasy. We were totally peaceful. Well, not totally, but we were before we saw the thing or the person, we were at ease.
We were more or less content. But as soon as we become infatuated with something we think we need, we’re unhappy. And so in our pursuit of the object that we want, we tend, in general, to abandon morality. But what’s the expression? All’s fair in love and war.
We abandon which means forget morality. Forget how your action is going to harm that person’s partner. You’re gonna get that person. Don’t care. What happens to their partner?
You won’t. You’re the most important. You can make them more happy than anybody else. Their partner becomes your enemy. So this is how we we lose our sense of morality.
And in our own lives, we can all see how how this doesn’t bring happiness. This creates so much suffering. Then there’s karma or karma something else. That the actions that we do selfishly, through selfish selfishly pursuing happiness and avoiding suffering, and we harm others, we create the causes for future misery and unhappiness. And we don’t realize that our present pleasures and and pains and sufferings are also karma.
They are the result of actions that we’ve done in the past. So karma is a very incredibly important subject. And how do you I often use the analogy in the physical world of, like, gravity. So, like, gravity is, what do you call it, a natural law of matter. There’s the attraction of the masses.
They have this somehow natural attraction. And if you hold something up and you let it go, will, of course, it will naturally drop. This is sort of a there’s this force, this action that we take for granted as being a natural function of matter, the material world. karma is very similar. It’s a natural function of the mind or the consciousness.
And the way in which it works is, as it says in the the Bible. Well, hold on. Exactly. You reap what you sow. What goes around comes around.
In other words, intentional actions where we do things with a kind heart, a good heart, to please others, to make others happy, not selfish, but thinking of welfare of others, looking after others, Those actions create an imprint or a potential in the mind which attracts the mind towards happiness. Things go well as a result of those actions. They it creates a tendency in the in the mind to be to be for our being to be attracted towards pleasant situations. Actions that we do, on the other hand, to harm others through selfish motivation, through anger, longing desire, pride, jealousy, etcetera, where we uncaringly inflict harm or deliberately inflict harm on others, hurt through killing, stealing, lying, many ways we hurt others. They create they establish tendencies to in the mind that attract us to unpleasant situations.
So this is a very sort of brief idea of what the law of karma is all about. karma literally means action. Right? And primarily, it refers to action of mind, mental action, because it’s it’s our mind which is the the boss of our It’s our mind which decides to do things, you know, like when the body goes to the beach or, you know, whatever the body does, that’s because the mind has decided to do that. Whatever we speak, whatever we say, the words that come out, they don’t come from just, like, from the voice box and the mouth, they come from the mind.
We we have intention behind out the words we say. So so the physical actions and verbal actions create karma, but they in turn come from the mind. So it’s the mind which is the prime mover in our life. Now, just very briefly, there are two sources of mental activity. The decisions we make, the urges that we have to do things in our life come from our own consciousness, come from our our knowledge and our ignorance, you know, that the whole, you know, complexity of of our decision making apparatus.
We, you know, we make decisions to do certain things in our life. So that’s one source of mental activity that makes us think in certain ways and makes us behave or act in certain ways. But there’s another source, and that is the very ripening of those karmic potentials that we’ve established in the past, which are I guess you’d call them subconscious. I don’t know. I’m not sure about Freudian psychology.
But anyway, they’re more subtle subconscious urges that direct our behavior in certain ways. Those can either direct us towards pleasant experience or towards an unpleasant experience. In even a more subtle way, it’s not that the pleasant experience is out there waiting for us to come to it. If we use example of, say, negative karma, harmful karma is ripening, our whole psyche is in such a state that we’re heading for trouble. We’re going to create the trouble.
The point is that the trouble is not there waiting for us, we become an active participant in the creation of a troublesome situation through our karma. We don’t know it, We’re not conscious of it. But we have this gravity, this natural law of the mind is connecting us with unpleasant situations, and the same with pleasant situations. When positive karma is ripening, it sort of tunes our mind, our psyche, be an active participant in creating pleasure, in experiencing pleasure, a pleasant situation. So we’re completely unaware of this.
We haven’t heard about karma before, but we have heard about the ten commandments, we’ve heard about morality, and we live. We’re very fortunate that we have because our morality is based upon the teachings of the Judeo Christian teachings, which explain, you do these actions, you’re heading for trouble. You do these actions, things will go well. The word karma is not used, but that’s what they’re talking about. Whether you use the the result of karma as being explained, oh, there’s this almighty being who’s watching over everything and is keeping a record, you know, you’re watching your good and bad actions and then punishing and rewarding accordingly, well, that’s one way of looking at it.
And in a simplistic way, people will observe morality with that concept. When Buddha taught in India, India was at a peak of of spiritual and, you know, psychological understanding of growth. And the practitioners in India were in terms of their meditation, their understanding of how the mind works were really highly developed. And it was it was a very peaceful place and and incredibly active and intellectually fascinated. And not not just intellectually, but practically, you know, practicing the path to a spiritual goal.
And Buddha really just didn’t didn’t teach anything. No. It did certainly teach some new things in India at the time. But the whole the basic structure of rebirth and karma was already understood. It was known.
It was understood. That the difference what what Buddha taught, he said, that there is a nirvana is a complete cessation of of misery and so on. So and he taught for forty years, so he had a long time to develop the teaching and had a fabulous audience already you know, they were already at, what, PhD level. So he could teach the profound reality of karma as being something very personal. The Judeo Christian format, if you like, of it, like the concept of a a being who’s in control and is punishing and rewarding is very simple, almost like a kindergarten.
I I I know I’m not trying to be I’m not trying to put down that teaching I think it’s true. In as much as if people believe in a God who’s punishing and rewarding and they obey the ten commandments, they’re observing karma. And they will stop creating the causes for suffering and that will create the causes for happiness. So all of that, remember I I I began talking about the three aspects of Buddha’s teaching. I said there’s a basis, there’s a path, and there’s a result.
The result is nirvana or enlightenment, Buddhahood. There’s actually two fold result. We can talk about simple nirvana, and we can talk about the attainment of Buddhahood itself. Enlightenment, the state where one’s mind is a complete union of wisdom and compassion. So whatever one’s mind does comes from total wisdom, seeing, understanding all phenomena, and from pure compassion for all living beings, not just for humans, not just for Buddhists, but for every being with mind, every human, every animal, and the beings in the other realms of rebirth, There is compassion and love spontaneous.
It doesn’t even have to be thought about. So that’s enlightenment. That’s a potential that we have. Our mind is capable of becoming the complete unity of wisdom and compassion. So that’s the result, basis, path and result.
The path is going from our present state where our mind is is disturbed through confusion, at the the root ignorance, not understanding reality, and grasping at so many wrong conceptions, particularly the wrong conception about what I am as an individual. And then the greed and the and the anger and hatred and so on that go from that. So that’s that’s us. That’s the basis. The mind under the control of karma and disturbing emotions.
The path is the progressive cleansing of our mind of ignorance, anger and attachment and so on, through the progressive cultivation of wisdom, compassion, loving kindness, patience, those qualities of mind, which by their nature are peaceful. Their very nature is peace, and they bring peace in our behavior and in society. That that is the real way in which we can contribute to world peace. Don’t throw bombs at another country. You throw bombs inside.
You you want to blast something, then blast your ignorance, blast your anger, your your longing desire, your your lack of concern for the welfare of others. Throw the bombs at your racist attitudes, your discriminating attitudes, which see yourself as more important than others and so on. There’s plenty of things to eliminate, but they’re internal. You don’t throw them at another person’s. How can how we can’t.
We can’t change another person’s mind. And can anybody change your mind? No. Who has access to your mind? Only yourself.
Buddha doesn’t have access to your mind. God doesn’t have access to your mind, but you have access to your mind. And as as Buddha said, he said that the path is you taking personal responsibility to clean up your act with the thought that this is universal responsibility because we are the units of society. We do want peace. We do want world peace, and at least we want something better than there is now.
Okay. Stop blaming others, criticizing others. We’re not saying that there’s no room for political activity. Of course, there is. But the primary activity that each one of us must engage in is to subdue our own mind.
Because if we don’t become a peaceful, happy, loving, constructive person, all our complaints about John Howard are just ridiculous. We have to really look in inside. So the Buddha said, this is the path. Work on yourselves. The result is niphanam.
Is there such a thing as some utopian world peace and happiness? Well, unfortunately not. The the wheel of life goes through many cycles, and and human society cycles through phases of peace and and happiness to phases of great war and destruction. And this is it’s all a it’s a karmic manifestation, like a collective karmic manifestation of our past lives. And and, actually, we are living according to the Buddha in in this in a time of of great degeneration, which means degeneration of the times people are becoming more ignorant, more hateful, more angry and full of hatred, desire, jealousy.
Things are actually getting worse. But that’s a collective manifestation of all our karma. Each individual, we do not have to go down that path. We always have the potential to generate inner peace, and at least our husband, our wife, our kids, at least, if we have a subdued, loving, kind heart, they will benefit. The people that we live with, the people we work with will benefit tremendously.
That alone is a fabulous result. We really, we can talk a lot about our world peace and but if we can’t make our own family happy, what is all this talk about? Peaceful peace in society. So we have to check out how are we in our relationships. Are they succeeding?
Are we are we content with the way in which we communicate with our with our mother, our father, our husband, our wife, our kids? Are we able to make every communication constructive? Are we able to avoid anger, greed, desire, jealousy, and so on and so on? And then when we check out our own personal life, we can see, I’ve got a bit of work to do. Now Alright.
This is really just introductory stuff that we’ve got a long time. From my side, I graduated in medicine in Melbourne way back in sixty-eight. And having gone through uni in the sixties, is a nice time to go to university. I worked for about six years in New Guinea, Australia, England in medicine, and then I met Buddhism. And so I I saw it.
I had no religious background at all. And So I saw Buddhism very much from a medical point of view, but I also saw it from a lot of experience of having worked with people needing to see a doctor in New Guinea, Australia, England. So different people, different societies. But it was perfectly clear to me before I met the lamas that the greatest problem in society is in people’s minds. Most people most illnesses really have have a mental component.
I you know, through overindulgence in cigarettes and alcohol, in food itself. And not to mention that the neuroses and the anxieties and the depressions and the psychosis and so on, which were so common. And I was very I had a sense of frustration or dissatisfaction in in the medical approach of looking for the next drug to, you know, to work on people’s brains and just shut their brains up, make them almost literally in some cases fit back into society, but in this altered state. Almost you know, it it just wasn’t right. And not only that.
When you work with people with mental problems and you you can get them more or less functioning in the hospital, but use I was sending them straight back to this exact social environment where they came from. And things fell apart again. They come back again. And so I didn’t know the answer. I remember actually, even before I met Buddhism, sitting in the grass talking to a guy who’s in a psychiatric hospital.
And I said to him, look, I think you should go to India. I don’t know why, but somehow the answer to your problem is in India. I don’t know if you went or not. Anyway, the drugs have a place. They do have a place in in in everything, anxiety, depression, so on.
But they’re not the solution. And I strongly disagree that the, you know, with with the sort of the the major medical opinion that that the source of of mental unhappiness, mental problems is, you know, biological. I think it’s yeah. There are sure. There there could be some biological conditions associated with depression, with anxiety, psychosis.
But to me, the the real cause is behavioral. You know, the fundamental cause. It is it is our our knowledge, our understanding of how we fit in in a society, what’s meaningful in society, what’s not meaningful in society, how much we get totally trapped in our obsessions. I must have that person. I must live this life.
I’m unhappy. And the more times we tell us we’re unhappy, we become unhappy. Anyway, my approach when I met the Lamas was very much that there is a great scope for growth, of wisdom in our own mind so that we can overcome the mental disturbances through our own activity, through our own efforts. Certainly, this is what the lama said. Okay.
So you have an idea of the basis, path, and result. The the the the basis, the the human organism. If we look at it, you know, now what am I? We ask we ask the question, what am I as a as a person? Well, at least there’s a body.
Right? We all have our own body, our face, and our hair. There’s the physical aspect of a human organism. Right? That’s our own experience.
We definitely have bodies and our bodies are unique in as much as, you know, they’re different to each other. We also have experience, don’t we? I mean, we we we’re all most of us have vision. So we experience colors and shapes. You know, we we actually experience the visual world.
We have experience of sounds. We we experience the the various noises, pleasant noises, unpleasant noises, and so on. Smells, tastes, and tangible sensation, the touch. That’s five senses. So the the five senses, there’s the physical side.
There’s the eyes, ears, you know, nose, tongue, and the touch receptors for your nervous system. And there’s the brain and and the spinal cord, everything which sort of is activated by sensory contact. Right? There’s contact, sensory contact between objects and the sense organs. But then there’s the actual experience itself, the actual consciousness, the awareness of red and blue and yellow and all of the smells and So that is subjective experience, isn’t it?
It? So we have definitely, we have five types of experience of the world. We also have emotions. We have, you know we’ve talked a lot already about a lot of emotions, about positive emotions of love, compassion, patience, and destructive emotions in as much as they disturb the mind of anger, jealousy, pride, and so on. So anger is something it’s an emotional state in the mind.
The sensory experiences are in the mind. In fact, from the Buddhist point of view, they are mind. Now what is mind? Well, what are you thinking about? That is mind.
The very thought activity is mind. The direct sensory experience is mind. Feelings, happiness, unhappiness, pain, pleasure. Those subjective feelings, they are mind. So what is mind?
Very simply, mind is the phenomenon or the energy of awareness itself. So you have awareness. Your mind doesn’t stop. Right? From the moment we wake up, we’re conscious of various things.
We’re thinking about various things. We’re unhappy. We’re unhappy. We’re fluctuating. But we’re continually experiencing things through our senses and through our thoughts.
The senses really just basically apprehend sense objects, and then we do a whole lot of thinking about them. So this goes on, and then at night we go to sleep. Even sleep does not signal an end of the flow of consciousness, the continuity of awareness. In sleep, at first we have very deep sleep. Now, we’re not aware that I’m in deep sleep, but there is a very there is a subtle conscious like darkness.
The mind does not switch off. You don’t pull the plug out like the television set completely stops when you pull out the plug, going to sleep is not pulling out the plug of our continuity of awareness. It just becomes very, very subtle. So subtle that it can’t induce a memory. Then during the night, we start dreaming.
That’s also subtle, but it’s not as subtle as as deep sleep. So in the dreaming, that’s the mind. That’s the conscious activity. That can be strong enough to induce a memory. Sometimes we forget our dreams, sometimes we remember part of them, sometimes we remember a lot of our dreams.
It’s variable, but it’s not as subtle as deep sleep. So there is that continuity of consciousness at a subtle level while we’re sleeping and then we wake up. So you see, mind is the unbroken stream of awareness that we have twenty four hours a day. Now comes the philosophical side. You know in philosophy, I mean everybody asks the question, What am I?
What are we all about in philosophy? And there are various schools of philosophy. There’s the dualistic school which talks about mind, that the human organism has mind and body. And these are two separate entities, Two different things, body and mind. Then there’s the materialistic school of philosophy, which says everything is physical.
There is nothing which is not fundamentally physical. And that is the underlying concept behind all scientific thought. Then well