Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 59-minute session, Ven Thubten Gyatso explores the nature of mind as the foundation of Buddhist practice, drawing on his experience as a psychiatrist seeking more effective approaches to human suffering. He contrasts the Western medical model—which emphasizes boosting self-esteem and ego—with the Buddhist insight that the root of our distress is not external circumstances but a fundamental misconception of self. He walks through the Buddhist model of consciousness: five sense awarenesses plus mental consciousness, which operates in both conceptual and direct-perceptual modes. He explains how conceptual thinking, though useful for understanding doctrine, introduces distortion by confusing mental images with reality. He then introduces the subtle mind and clear light—the non-conceptual luminosity said to be the mind’s true nature and the basis for enlightenment. Finally, he addresses the continuity of mind across lifetimes and clarifies the Buddhist position on rebirth: a seamless flow of subtle mind-and-wind that carries karmic imprints, while the “person” or “I” exists merely as a label on that continuum. Practical and philosophical in tone, pitched at those new to Buddhist psychology.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 02 2010 02 02 M&N.mp3
UUID: 2e4c2553-61b2-4650-82b3-770f9affc14c
Teacher: Ven Thubten Gyatso aka Adrian Feldman
Collection: Misc teachings (Ven Thubten Gyatso aka Adrian Feldman)
Date: 2010-02-02
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 59.4 minutes
Words: ~6,810
Okay. I remember my own experience was I went to Nepal with some enthusiasm to learn about Buddhism, but as soon as the Lamas began talking, I became very skeptical because they started to talk about very alien concepts alien to my mind of karma and reincarnation in other realms like hells, hungry ghosts, being reborn as animals or even as divine beings and so on. And I found that very difficult to incorporate into my scientific view of the world. But once the lamas began to talk about the mind and the psychology, the way in which our minds function, and the way in which unhappiness, disturbing emotions arise, where they come from, and how they can be countered by happiness and positive attitudes. That came through very clear and very true to me, particularly as just prior to going to Nepal, not long before, I’d spent five or six months working as a doctor in a psychiatric hospital in Melbourne as part of my general training and during that period I had been quite, I guess, disappointed in Western, not Western, just our approach, the, you know, medical approach to mental problems and many questions had arisen in my mind, like what is the mind and what is the real origin and source of the many anxiety neurotic states that came and psychotic states that I saw, and the whole, the main emphasis on treatment in that hospital was, you know, medical treatment and shock therapy and so on.
And I remember feeling very dissatisfied with what I was doing, that I felt I really wasn’t helping people. Sure, people would come in in a very upset state and we’d, over a period of time, we would boost them to a point where they’re more stabilized and we’re able to send them out. But I always felt I’m sending them back to where they came from. And I never really felt that I’d given great, like, a long lasting help to these people with, you know, with mental with, mental terms of mental unhappiness, mental disturbance, and what was the ego, and why? It seemed a paradox to me that the psychiatrist who I was working with very emphatically declared the whole purpose of, or the main purpose of our work was to increase power, the confidence of people’s self esteem and their ego, their sort of self image.
A question arose in my mind when I was working in hospital. That’s true. People in this hospital are shattered. They are completely, well not completely, but very much lacking self esteem. They’re having a big problem with the self image.
But I recognize that in society one’s self image is very often enhanced at the expense of others’ self image. That there is battle going on, a strong battle. There’s competition, ego conflict, and we are indeed striving for a sense of security security and stability, having this strong self image, but in most social situations it is acquired at the expense of somebody else. We go up and up by putting others down. And I felt there’s something wrong here but I didn’t know what it was.
And then, so the questions were in my mind, and then I was in Nepal a few months later and the Lamas were talking about self consciousness, the idea of self, and they explained that the the root problem, the root cause of all unhappiness, all problems, not only psychological but even physical problems in the world, is the misconception of what we are as an individual. The wrong conception of self, which is sort of innate and it dominates our psychology in as much as we grow this strong sense of me and not me and me and others and acutely sort of conscious or aware of one’s own self image, we very rapidly generate the disturbing emotions of clinging and desire and wanting everyone and everything that enhances my self image, that makes me happy, that’s the me behind it that wants to be happy. And we become become very angry and aggressive and rejecting towards anything which threatens my happiness, my peace of mind, my possessions, my world. And these disturbing emotions of anger and attachment and also pride and jealousy are all based upon acute self consciousness. And so what the Lamas was saying was that what we think we are is incorrect.
It’s a mistake. And we are trying to support and maintain a false self image. And so, only or the real solution to mental disturbance is to generate the wisdom which sees reality of how we do exist as an individual and dissolve away the intense, tight self image that we’ve been carrying all our life and which we feel needs to be protected and is the one that’s going to be hurt. And the one which wants happiness, I want happiness, I don’t want unhappiness. By dissolving away the intensity of self consciousness, one is able to be relaxed.
One is actually able to love. One becomes capable of compassion and kindness to go outwards towards others without fear of burnout, you know, compassion burnout, or without fear of being rejected. So often, we’re so hesitant to express and give love because we fear so much rejection. Oh, they don’t like me. I’m bad.
I’m terrible. And there’s this ongoing worry that is in general in most people’s lives. And so, I thought about what the Lamas were saying, and I didn’t quite understand how we had this wrong self image. They talked about emptiness or ego lessness, which was a difficult idea to comprehend. I’m still trying to sort out what they were saying, what the real meaning of emptiness, you know, ego lessness.
But whatever they said about karma reincarnation I put on hold and I readily accepted this presentation of the mind and how the mind is actually the source, the root source of our unhappiness and not the external world believe that the source of problems is outside and the source of pleasure is external. Actually, the root of problems and the root of happiness is internal. And also that as much as we try to organize the external world, we can never make it perfect. We can never organize it such that it will always be pleasant, always nice, never bad. But we can work with our mind.
Our mind is ours and only we have access to our mind. Nobody else can get into our mind. So there’s a sense of personal capacity and There’s something very much that we can do with our mind. We can work with it. And the Lama’s said again and again that we will have Buddha nature, Buddha potential.
Our mind mind has the potential to become an enlightened mind, a Buddha’s mind. And it’s all up to us. And so the teachings they gave were the beginning beginning of how we can understand mind and work with it. So, tonight I want to talk about the mind and try and gain a clear picture of what it is that we’re going to work with or we need we need to work with. Now when we If we look, you know, if we ask the question, What is a human being?
Then I think this question was asked during that first course I was at a long time ago. But a very simple answer is: A human being is somebody who looks and thinks like we do. Looks like us and acts like us. In other words, a human being is somebody who has a body and mind like ours. Other animals have bodies and minds, but we can definitely distinguish between their bodies and our bodies.
We don’t know a lot about their psychology or their minds, but we can infer that dog’s or cat’s or a rabbit’s mind is definitely there. They think about things, they have feelings of happiness, unhappiness and so on, but they’re not quite up to the human level of intelligence. But there is mind. We know from science that intellectual capacity is directly related to the complexity of our brain, our nervous system, that our brain is supreme in the animal world in being able to allow intellectual functions to manifest and to operate at a very high degree compared to the other animals. Now, so we can all accept, alright, a human has a body and a human has a mind.
But what about the me? You know, talk about my mind and my body. So that implies that we all have a sense of me as being the owner or the possessor of the body and the owner or possessor of the mind. If we’re happy, we don’t say, This mind is happy. We say, I am happy.
Or if the body is sick we don’t say, The body’s sick. We usually say, I’m sick. So we all have this we accept this sense of I as being a possessor of the body and mind. Something different from the body and mind. Right?
It’s just a general accepted idea that there’s the person who is the owner of body and mind. The Lamas went to great depths to explain that this idea of there being a true me who possesses the body and mind is a mistake. That if there were a third thing, if there were body and mind and person or me, I, independent of the body and mind, then if we really look for the eye, for the person, if it does exist as it appears to us, we should be able to find it. And if we eliminate the body and if we eliminate the mind, there should be specific characteristics of the person which are not physical or mental. But it doesn’t take long if we’re analyzing, trying to pinpoint, locate the I separate from the body and mind that there’s nothing that we can find, nothing which we hold up and say, Oh, this is the me that owns this body and owns this mind.
Whenever we talk about a person, we always refer to them or describe them in terms of their physical or mental, both physical and mental characteristics. Right? Male, female, old, young, intelligent, stupid, know, fair, dark, you know, we describe them, this is this person, we describe the body and the mind. We never talk about the unique individual which will have a sense of me. So, at a gross level, this idea that there is me who owns this body and owns this mind and a me who will maybe die and a me who will go into heaven or hell or wherever, that is in general a mistake.
There is no such me or I independent of the body and mind. I’m not saying there is no self. I’m saying there is no self independent of the body and mind that possesses the body and mind. Alright? Can you accept that?
So, somehow the person who exists is related, is dependent upon the body and mind. Every time we describe a person we talk about physical and mental characteristics. Now, I’m going to that subject of identifying the self or the person aside for the moment and I want to talk about the mind as the basis of what we call self or the person. The body is fairly clear. The body has its gross aspects, the gross qualities of the body which we can all describe in great detail.
In Buddhism there’s also subtle aspects of the body which you don’t read about in the anatomy texts. There is described a system of subtle physical channels and chakras within, like a subtle body and within those channels and chakras is described winds wind is just the literal meaning of the Tibetan word lung or Sanskrit prana, nothing in Chinese qi, they all in English have the connotation of wind or the meaning of wind, referring to the most subtle physical of the physical world. And this wind energy that flows within the channels and chakras is said to be intimately, inseparably associated with consciousness, with mind. Where there’s movement of wind, there is consciousness happening. So talking about the body, we have this gross body which you read about in the anatomy texts.
You have the subtle body which is the channels and chakras and very subtle body that the winds flowing in those channels. It’s an interesting subject, but it’s not tonight’s subject, but there is clearly, when you look at the depictions winds, which really is a diagram for meditators to meditate upon, there is a close correlation with our nervous system and even with the various chakras, that from my investigation, there seems to be a very close correlation with the chemicals they secrete have a very profound influence upon mental activity or state of mind. So, that’s very interesting. But again, that’s not tonight’s subject. Tonight’s subject is the mind.
So, when we talk about mind, there is also a presentation of gross, subtle, and very subtle mind. The gross gross mind is what we experience normally in our waking state. And if we divide up our mental experience during the day, are the six types of consciousness. Have we handed out the notes? Oh, there’s a bunch of notes somewhere.
If there are couples here, maybe you could have one for each couple because we may not have enough for everybody. People could share. Anyway, I’ll talk about what’s there. At the top of the notes there is just a list of the six main types of consciousness. So, we can divide our mental experience up into the experiences associated with our five senses.
There is eye consciousness, there is ear consciousness, sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. So, these are five types of awareness, five types of and mind are synonyms. So, they’re different because we distinguish between visual objects you know, different types of smell, pleasant, unpleasant, etc. And different types of taste. So, can distinguish the five senses as being different types of consciousness but they’re all mind.
There is a sixth level of consciousness which we call mental consciousness and mental consciousness is the realm us, it’s the realm of thoughts, thinking, ideas, conceptualizations. So, we, in our daily life, we are constantly receiving various sensory inputs, which is simply direct experience of the sense objects. And what are we doing with that information? We start thinking about it, we start labeling it, we start judging it, and we’re, you know, so mostly our mind is in the aspect of thinking and cogitating and intellectualizing. So, is occurring in what we call mental consciousness, the sixth level of awareness.
When we’re thinking about something or having conception, we have an idea about something. It’s like you have all, you know, you know what the place where you live, you know what it looks like, you’ve seen it with your eyes. And if I say, think about the place where you live, you generate a mental picture, an image associated with what you have seen with your eyes. So, you we can all think about where we’re living and we generate a mental picture of the place where we live. So, concepts see their objects indirectly through a mental picture.
Ideas Ideas and thoughts always have this mental image of what it is that they’re thinking about. They’re not directly experiencing the object of thought, they’re thinking of their idea of the object of thought. And in that conceptualization there is an obvious element of mistake because we confuse our idea of something with the actual thing. Even we think of mother, right? So, have a mental image of mother.
Now, a mother is a real real person, maybe dead or alive, but has been real, and when we think mother this mental image comes of mother. Can We start to feel some emotion directed towards the mental image of mother or you can think of a lover or somebody you hate. Just having the idea, like in dreams, you have mental pictures, we have such strong emotions in dreams believing the picture appearing to the mind is real, is the actual person. And so we can definitely have emotions if we think of mother or father or somebody in our life. That is an indication that we’re confusing our mental picture with the actual person.
So there is an element of mistake in ideas and thoughts which is always there. Even if it’s a correct thought, we have this sort of duality or this breakdown of mental picture from the actual object. On top of that, we have so many conceptual projections. We have so many ideas which we project onto mother or father or lover or enemy etc. And these are very much coming from our side.
But we don’t know that and our mental image can be extremely distorted subjectively by our own mind, by our prejudices, or by our knowledge, or by our ignorance. So many positive or negative attributes we may place upon a mental picture of others which are not there. They’re fabricated by our mind but we don’t realize that. We think it comes from their side and so we believe it to be true. Like there’s somebody we dislike and so our mind pains a very negative picture of them.
More negative than they actually are. And we can start thinking about somebody who’s been bad to us and we can work ourselves up into anger by painting this ugly picture. This happens. You try it in meditation retreat. It happens.
Now that person may be completely innocently sitting thinking very nice thoughts towards us, very kind, sorry that they hurt us and wanting to help but we’re just getting angry and more angry because we’re believing our projections to be true, not coming from us but belonging to them. Right? Thinking is dangerous. We create such a false world around us but we don’t realize it’s coming from us. We believe it’s coming from the outside and this is what the Lama ‘s call saṃsāra.
This is our personal created miserable world and this is the real source of our problems and this needs to be cured. It can be cured because it’s false! Therefore, it can be cured by correctness, by wisdom, by the mind that sees reality, the mind that is able to cut through conceptual elaboration. And those few who are lucky enough to get the notes, see mental consciousness is divided up into two types. There’s conception, this whole realm of thoughts and ideas, and there’s perception.
Perception, in this context, we define it as direct awareness of the object without the intervention of a mental image. There’s no idea intervening as there is with thoughts, but there is direct experience of the object. And mental consciousness, our mind, has the capacity to experience any phenomenon directly. We don’t even need our sense consciousnesses. This sixth type of consciousness, the mental consciousness, when it’s trained through meditation, it can experience even sensory objects directly without need of sense organs.
Don’t ask me how! I accept it as being very valid. Not only sensory objects, it can experience the minds of others. Not only can it experience the minds of others, it can have the capacity of knowing others’ previous lives, knowing one’s own previous lives. Even being able to see into the future.
It’s not saying the future exists and is waiting for us to get there, but it is able to it has that capacity, this mental consciousness, to know the three times they say past, present and future. So, mental perception is a possibility but for us, where our mental consciousness is so dominated by thinking activity that we can never gain access. We cannot utilize this potential. It is only through the power of meditation where progressively gains the power of single point of concentration and one is able to go beyond conceptual activity and see things directly as they are. That capacity to see things directly as they are is a natural capacity of our mind.
This is what we call the Buddha nature. Mind, which is not in, you know, mental consciousness, which is not in conceptual mode, but is in direct perceptual mode, by its own very nature is see things without distortion because there is no conceptual distortion. By definition, we have eliminated conceptual elaboration. And this we call the clear light mind. It is something that we experience only when we die.
When we die, the natural function of death is to absorb or stop conceptual elaboration. And this continues on even up up to the point of when we stop breathing but we’re not yet dead. After we stop breathing, the mind becomes more and more and more subtle and all conceptual activity ceases and we finally reach reach the clear light state of mind. But for the ordinary person this is so subtle that it’s just it’s not recognizable. It’s like going to sleep.
We’ve lost any subjective awareness that this is happening, even perhaps before we stop breathing. But it does happen, and it’s only after the clear light manifests that death actually occurs when the stream of consciousness separates from the body and goes through an intermediate dream like state and eventually reaches where it’s karma will lead it to another rebirth, another body. So, the purpose then of the Buddhist path is to understand mind, gain the power of mind, and a long period of time, drop the habit of conceptualization, increase the power, the capacity to experience things directly, and eventually a Buddha’s mind is always in the clear light state. A Buddha’s mind Buddhists never think. They have no conceptual activity.
They’re in the state of clear light where they know exactly what’s going on and without spontaneously act to help others because to achieve Buddhahood one cultivates the power of total altruistic compassion, the intention guide others out of suffering. So, over many lifetimes on the Bodhisattva’s path, a Buddha eventually reaches a state beyond conceptualization, this unification of wisdom and compassion, where spontaneously they help others. Now, how do they help others? Unfortunately, they can’t just take us by the hand and lift us out of the wheel of life and suffering. They can’t transplant their wisdom into our mind.
They can’t do anything with our mind. They can only show us the way that they followed and inspire us and help us as we follow that path. So this is something that we can do that Buddhas can’t do. We can work with our mind. We can get into our minds and we can eliminate the cause of suffering and cultivate the cause of happiness.
Also cultivate the altruistic aspiration to rescue all beings from suffering, we can become a Buddha. We’re the ones who have to do that. Buddhas just show us how. And Buddhas manifest either as Śākyamūni Buddha two and a half thousand years ago in India or as the the teachers. Buddhas could have the capacity to appear in any form as an animal, even as a inanimate object.
So, especially as as a teacher, a Buddha has has the natural way that Buddha would appear. Like His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Our karmic projection sees a a human being. And when we say an ordinary human, not special human being, but we still see a human being. We don’t have the I don’t know whether the Dalai Lama is a Buddha or not.
I think if anybody in this world is a Buddha then he’s probably the highest candidate. Maybe Roger Federer. Well, I read in the news this morning that Roger Federer’s stability and calm and peace of mind is greater than the Dalai Lama’s. They’re cool. So, he’s a Buddha.
As I’ve told my friends, in my next life I think I’ll be a champion tennis player. So, we can’t say because we can only I haven’t really talked about karma but is also a means by which our mind projects falsity on the outside world, on self and the other, and is another means by which we distort reality. Now that’s something else karma. So, we can only see human beings. But, anyway, Buddhas can appear, which in as teachers, such as Dalai Lama, We don’t know that, but it’s very skillful to have respect and recognize teachers as at least emissaries of the Buddhas, you know, they are are doing the Buddha’s work.
They are showing us the nature of our mind, showing us the true cause of suffering and the true method to get rid of suffering, and this is how Buddhas help sentient beings. So, anyway, when the Buddhas do this, they don’t have to think about it. Right? They have no conceptualization. They just act spontaneously.
Now, so this spontaneity from the Buddha side, there has to be something from our side to meet, to meet their compassion, to meet their kindness. And it has to be an openness, an interest, a willingness to learn, to know this desire desire to know reality, especially when this desire comes from seeing the suffering in the world and having the thought, what can I do? How can I? Why is there so much suffering in the world? What can I do in some way to ease the sense of suffering?
This very thought of compassion is what connects us with the spontaneity or spontaneous appearance of Buddhas. So, it’s very important that all religions, I think, fundamentally talk about compassion and love as being essential qualities of mind to cultivate. And this is what will enable us to connect with the teacher, with the guide, whether it’s God or Christ or Buddha or who ever, it is the essential ingredient for entering the spiritual path. And what is the spiritual path? Anyway, the spiritual path is simply the inner cultivation of wisdom and compassion to the point of unification, where wisdom and compassion are united in the one state of mind.
That’s the spiritual path. It’s not something external or something you have to go on pilgrimage or, you know, go to a temple or anywhere else. It’s completely internal and we each have our own personal spiritual path to follow. And so, we need need help and inspiration to encourage to actually make the decision to enter into our mind and transform it from its present state of confusion, uncontrolled unhappiness, and emotional disturbance, to the state of clarity and wisdom and compassion to help others. So, it’s possible because the fundamental nature of our mind is clear light which sees reality as it is.
Now, alright, so, mind and awareness and consciousness are all synonyms. Awareness and consciousness are all synonyms. Consciousness can be divided up into six, the five sense consciousnesses and mental consciousness, and mental consciousness has the two conceptual awareness and perceptual awareness. Conceptual awareness has an element of mistake and we need to go beyond it, but we should not think that all thoughts, all intellectual activity is to be eliminated. I mean, a lot of Buddhists think this, but they’re wrong.
In our mind, we have many ideas many ideas about things and about people and about philosophy and about reality. Some of those ideas are totally wrong, some are right. But even the correct ideas and correct conceptions have an element of mistake in that we confuse our mental image of what it is that we’re thinking about with the actual object. But to approach the wisdom directly seeing reality we need to first eliminate the wrong conceptions and then enhance the right conceptions, the right ideas. And when we’re meditating on ultimate reality, we need to know exactly, have a conceptual understanding of ultimate reality, otherwise we will have nothing to meditate on.
We won’t be able to break through the mental images and see reality directly because we will be led astray. It’s like in Buddhism you often hear the terms emptiness, non duality, even in the Buddhist schools that reject intellectualization and conceptualization, they still have these words: non duality, emptiness. As soon as we hear those words we get an idea of what non duality means. We can’t help because we are conceptualizing beings. Now, if our idea idea is incorrect and we’re trying to meditate and achieve ultimate reality the wrong conception, the wrong idea is going be a complete barrier to experiencing reality. So, our teachers emphasize the importance of gaining a correct correct intellectual understanding of reality and then using that as a focus of one’s meditation to then, through the power of single pointed concentration, break through the mental image and see reality as it is.
That is the means by which we need to achieve that wisdom. Next thing I have in this these are just some notes that I had I printed out. We’re not going to talk about it all tonight. There’s a couple of weeks here, but my dictionary says, Mind is that which thinks, knows, feels, and wills. I looked it up in the dictionary, that was its definition.
So, that which thinks, knows, feels, and wills. And so, I’ve said that according to scientists, this list of mental activities thinking, knowing, feeling and willing can equally be a description of cerebral activity, activity within the brain, because if we stick electrodes around the brain and we tell somebody to think about something, then we can measure thinking activity. Or feeling we can measure. There are different electrical measurements that can be taken. So, scientists say that all of those activities are activities of the brain because brain is mind.
That is what we believe in the scientific world. Reject any form of so called duality of mind being different to the brain or different to the nervous system, some phenomenon different to the nervous system. For many years I’ve been subscribing I don’t know why it’s getting more and more expensive, but I subscribe to the New Scientist because I want to keep up. I haven’t rejected my scientific worldview, I’ve just added to it all the Buddhist ideas, which I think make it so much better. But I get very upset when I start reading articles on the mind in New Scientist.
The mind is in vogue these days. And one paragraph can be talking about mind and the next paragraph they’re talking about brain. There’s no excuse for changing the subject from mind to brain because they’re seen as identical. They are the one thing. Buddhism says, No.
Buddhism says the nervous system, the whole body, is the support of mind. Mind exists in dependence upon the active nervous system. Mind is not physical. Mind has no shape, no color, no taste, no smell. It has no physical qualities, but it cannot exist without a physical support.
So Buddhism says there is a duality of body and mind, but these are inseparable. They always come together. Of course, when we die, the gross body obviously disintegrates, but the physical support of the mind remains as the subtle wind energy that I’ve mentioned. It is this combination of subtle wind energy and mental consciousness, because all the sense consciousnesses have obviously ceased. So, at death, most subtle wind together with the most subtle mind this is one entity.
This unit of most subtle wind, most subtle mind. But it has two functions. One function is movement and we just label that wind. The other function is awareness. We label that mind.
So, the awareness, this most subtle awareness with this most subtle support, this wind energy actually separates from the body. And continuity of awareness, the most subtle mental consciousness, carries all the imprints, all the memories, all the karmic imprints, all of the seeds of our anger, our love, our ignorance, our wisdom, our compassion, our hatred, all the constructive and destructive emotions in seed form are carried upon or with that most subtle consciousness, which eventually will become the mind of a future person or a future animal, wherever the karma takes it. So, the new life has a new body derived from the union of the, you know, the chromosomes of mother and father. But the mind doesn’t come from mother and father. The mind comes from a previous life.
Just as our mind was not created at conception or at birth or whenever, we were we inherited a mind from a previous life. Not ourself, it was some other person who existed in a previous life. We inherited their mind. We always say my mind but we already had pre existing traits, mental tendencies. Some good, some bad.
Some maybe artistically oriented, some not artistically oriented, some more mathematically oriented, whatever. All our minds are very different even from birth. And we, overall, they’re similar. We all have self grasping ignorance, we all have anger, have attachment, but we have these and positive qualities in different capacities. So, we all have second hand minds, right?
And what we should realize is that we’re going to pass this mind on to somebody else in the future. When we die, we will cease but we’re going to pass our mind on to another person. So, let’s be kind to that other person. Let’s give them a good start in life. Let’s get rid of our self centered arrogance, our anger, our attachment, and inject a bit of love and wisdom and compassion into this mind stream and give that future baby a good start in life.
We, coming back to the concept of self, I said, there is no self that is separate from the body and mind. There is no self that owns the body, owns the mind. Even though we have the idea that there is, that is a mistaken idea, that’s one of our major mistakes in life. There is a self, of course. We all are individual persons.
We all have different bodies, we have different minds. There’s not a universal consciousness. But, so how do we distinguish ourselves? Well, maybe if we sign up for something, we write our name. We introduce ourselves to each other.
We exchange names. So, we are identified dependence upon our name. And, you know, if we see a stranger we ask somebody else, Who’s that? They give us a name. Ah, I know that now I understand who it is.
So, from Buddhist point of view, the self, the person, merely exists in dependence upon the name. Just the label given to a body and mind. That’s all. There is no essence of you beyond establishing the conventional existence of this person, in dependence upon their name. So, we can talk about the continuity of a person going from life to life because even though the gross body and mind cease and they both become very subtle at death, there is still a continuity of body and mind.
Even through the intermediate state there is subtle body and mind and the future birth is a body and mind. So, when we talk about person going from life to life we just talk about the merely labeled I or the merely labeled person that’s given to this continuity, the subtle body mind which exits from this gross one. In the intermediate state there’s a sense of self, like in a dream, there’s a sense of self, even though the experience of a dream is unreal, it’s purely projected by the mind, there’s still a sense of self and other and emotions, etc. So, there is an I in the intermediate state, there is an I in the next life, even within the womb. When, you know, it’s said that the developing fetus remains in deep sleep for the first twenty-five weeks, but after about twenty five weeks of gestation the foetus wakes up and its mind is very clear and it has a sense, Where am I?
Immediately there’s this thought. Actually it is taught that mind is extremely clear at that point and awareness of the past life exists. Memories are there and it seemingly it has this intuitive understanding of of rebirth, death and rebirth and the cause and effect of rebirth. And even it’s in one of medical texts I’ve read that it says that there’s a sense of of melancholy, like, Here we go again! Like, so many people have said to me, I don’t want to be reborn.
Don’t want to go through this again. But I say, You’ve got no choice. So, what I’m saying is that there is a sense of I, so there is there’s never a break in the continuity of a merely labeled self or person going from life to life. They’re different. They’re clearly different.
You know, we think I’m the I of this life, you know, we don’t identify with an I of the past life, so we’re not the same person exactly as a past life because that person had a particular body and mind. We do have the continuity of their mind, but that’s always changing. And there’s no true essence in the mind, so our mind has changed a lot during life. Then we’re going to give it up. So the eye of this life, you know, the one who has the I of this life, clearly ceases.
So we shouldn’t think that mom and dad are waiting for us in the next life and greet us with hugs and we’ll all be happily ever after again. It’s not like that. Mom and dad are all around us. Mom and Dad may be our own children. They may be our neighbor’s children who we dislike or they may be the dog that we kick or we don’t know, but they’re around.
Okay. Now, we’ll leave the self and we’ll come back to the mind. So, I said here that Buddhism asserts that although mind exists in dependence upon the body in general, and the nervous system in particular, mind is a different entity to physical matter. It’s not physical. Now, I forgot to say, look, please, if you’ve got questions, just put your hand up and we can have discussion during this talk.
It’s not just like a lecture, but if you want to clarify any point, you’re welcome. So, now, so what’s the definition of mind in Buddhism? The simple definition is that mind is mere clarity and awareness. The term clarity is sometimes translated as luminosity. I’ve tried to find out what they mean by luminosity, but I’ve never been it seems to be a very American term.
I don’t know. Jeffrey Hopkins likes even his Holiness, the Dalai Lama’s translators tend to use it. You know, clarity. We’ll talk about what they mean. Mere, there are three things: Mere, clarity and awareness.
Okay, now clarity. In general, so when we talk about a definition of something, there are defining characteristics. So these three things: mere clarity and awareness. These are the defining characteristics of mind. Whatever has these three is mind.
Whatever doesn’t have these three is not mind. Okay. Clarity. In general, it refers to the non physical nature of mind. That mind has no color, no shape, no material dimensions.
It’s not made of atoms and molecules. At a deeper level, in the definition, the term clarity refers to the function of mind which gives rise to appearances or image of things that are known. For example, a mirror. A mirror, you know, silver on the back of a bit of glass and a mirror will accurately reflect whatever is placed in front of it. It reflects an image.
So, one of the functions of mind is to appear in the aspect of what is known. It’s like we are seeing each other, but there is a whole we are truly seeing external objects, but the way in which we see each other is through the generation of the mind, the colors and the shapes. We know the pathway coming in through the eye, hitting the retina, being transformed into signals, electrical signals, which then go to the brain and then the brain has an area which generates an image of the people in the room. Clearly we need the brain, we need the sense organs to have eye consciousness. But when we are aware of each other, this very awareness is happening inside.
It’s happening as an internal this is the meaning of clarity. Mind generates an image of what is known.