← B. Alan Wallace

Empiricism In Buddhism - B. Alan Wallace Public Talk 2016 in Sydney

B. Alan Wallace · 2016 · 1 h 58 min · Vajrayana Institute via Internet Archive

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  • 1:41

    This whole talk tonight is really going to be about empiricism, and specifically radical empiricism, which I'll get to shortly. But I'm suggesting here that the spirit of empiricism, of really taking experience very seriously, and specifically our own.

  • 4:01

    Frankly, only if a scientist makes it. The rest of us. It's the lowest form. So it's really, it's turf. It's turf. Philosopher John Searle, one of the most prominent philosophers of mind in the United States, he comments, and he writes extensively on the nature of mind, that he's a philosopher of mind. He writes, if by introspection we mean a special capacity, just like vision, only less colorful, I guess his introspective abilities are monochrome.

  • 24:49

    So William James is taking that same approach for the mind. The word introspection need hardly be defined. It means, of course, the looking into our minds, our own minds, because those are the only minds we can actually look at, for most of us anyway, and reporting what we there discover. And everyone agrees that we there discover states of consciousness. So it's very commonsensical what he's saying here. Contrary to all of those, you know, Neil deGrasse and so forth and so on, saying, you know, you either can't do it or if you do it, it's completely unreliable.

  • 48:54

    He's saying here, when you see as much as you can, hold back on all the junk, all the stuff you're projecting, and just try to see as naked as you can. When you observe, try to just observe. In the scene, let it be just the scene, and distinguish it from all that you're superimposing upon it. And likewise, there is only the heard. In the heard, there's only the heard. In the felt, that's tactile sensations, there's only the felt. And then he adds, in the cognized, this is mentally perceived,

  • 1:13:01

    And then considered to be ultimate and objectively real, but they're imagining that and never perceiving it. So the conclusion is all that really exists, all that we can know is awareness and the appearance is to awareness and so this is mind only. This mind only conclusion is not something derived on the basis of logical reasoning alone. Instead, it requires a combination of experiential, contemplative inquiry into the nature of the mind and its relation to the world of the physical senses, together with the use of reason to make sense of one's observations.

0:11 of you who've been like a lot of people here you know that we're into a very informative and thought-provoking talk this evening and followed by some of us Report an error

0:26 mind training that's coming up tomorrow. always very honoured to have our busy schedule to give us this time. Oh Report an error

0:49 yeah, so nobody walked out when you saw the title they changed, that's good, that's a good sign. They probably wouldn't give you your money back anyway. So no, the earlier title was A Radically Empirical Approach to the Study of Consciousness. Report an error

1:09 It's the same material but from a different perspective. Because when I looked at the earlier PowerPoint slides, I thought, well, I've covered a lot of this material in earlier lectures right here at Vajrayana Institute, so why not give them something a bit more challenging, which still will be. a radically empirical approach to the study of consciousness. Report an error

1:31 it's going to be at a kind of a more challenging level. Report an error

1:37 So, oh, I just held you two forward? there we go. This whole talk tonight is really going to be about empiricism, and specifically radical empiricism, which I'll get to shortly. But I'm suggesting here that the spirit of empiricism, of really taking experience very seriously, and specifically our own. Report an error

1:59 Not just taking seriously the experiences of scientists. For example, many of you have been probably watching the news that in the nearest star, only about four and a half light years away, I mean really stones throw away, it would take us 70,000 years to get there. At our present technology, there seems to be a planet that is somewhat comparable to our own. It might conceivably be inhabitable. So that was based on observations, right? So they take their observations seriously, but the scientific materialists don't take ours seriously. Report an error

2:27 So an astronomer, very well-known one in the United States, he's very charismatic, very bright and extremely articulate, astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson. He appears on the media a lot. He's just a wonderfully charming, charismatic man. But he's also a very, very committed materialist. And so he writes here, As a scientist, I need something better than your eyewitness testimony. Because even if in the court of law eyewitness testimony is a high form of evidence, enough to send somebody to life imprisonment, In the court of science, it is the lowest form of evidence you could possibly put forth. So eyewitness testimony. Report an error

3:06 Who's he referring to? His? I don't think so. No, in fact, I know the context, and that is speaking out of a context of materialism. The only observations that count, when you speak of evidence-based, evidence-based, that's a big loaded term. Evidence-based means physical evidence, non-physical evidence. Report an error

3:30 It doesn't count. But not just physical evidence, like I saw a UFO yesterday, which I didn't. We'd say, well, I saw something physical and it was a UFO. It could have been a kind of bug that I couldn't identify. It was flying and I couldn't identify what kind of bug, so it's an unidentified flying object. Report an error

3:50 It doesn't have to be spooky. But number one, the only kind of eyewitness testimony that counts is a physical, but also frankly. Frankly, only if a scientist makes it. The rest of us. It's the lowest form. So it's really, it's turf. It's turf. Philosopher John Searle, one of the most prominent philosophers of mind in the United States, he comments, and he writes extensively on the nature of mind, that he's a philosopher of mind. Report an error

4:22 He writes, if by introspection we mean a special capacity, just like vision, only less colorful, I guess his introspective abilities are monochrome. Report an error

4:32 I don't know. If by this we mean a special capacity that we have to spect intro to look within, then it seems to me there is no such capacity. Report an error

4:45 That's rather bold, isn't it? There could not be because the model of specting intro requires a distinction between the object spected and the specting of it and we cannot make this distinction for conscious states. It's a very interesting monolithic kind of view of the mind that there's one chunky thing called the mind. Report an error

5:02 like a rock, and the rock can't hit itself. Report an error

5:08 I do find it astonishing, because I met him, I actually debated with him a long time ago, and he's really not aware of his own thoughts, he's not aware of his moods, his emotions, his desires, not aware of anything going on in his mind, because the mind is one thing and it can't observe itself. But that's his position, and it's actually a very common position, not universally held. Report an error

5:28 Academic psychologists, it's very widespread. Neuroscientists, widespread. Philosophers, not at all unusual to take this view that, in fact I just read and I've quoted recently an article that was published in the New York Times by a philosopher, again a philosopher, but the director of a center at Duke University pertaining to neuroscience and he said, you have no privileged access to your own thoughts. Report an error

5:51 There is no first person perspective. perspective, and you cannot observe your own thoughts. You know more about your own thoughts than Thank Report an error

6:01 you very much. species. But then what really threw me is here's a a Buddhologist and he's a scholar. He runs the Center for Buddhist Studies at UC Berkeley now. And I read this about 20 years ago when I was doing my research for my dissertation at Stanford. I was really nonplussed by his writings because he says, well, experience construed as that which is immediately present may indeed be both irrefutable and indubitable. Report an error

6:33 We must remember that whatever epistemological certainty experience may offer is gained only at the expense of any possible discursive meaning or significance. To put it another way, all attempts to signify inner experience are destined to remain well-meaning squirms that get us nowhere. Report an error

6:55 So we have it from an astronomer, we have it from a philosopher, another philosopher, and Treisman, a very, very distinguished psychologist, said all of our experiences consist of hallucination and when we have subjects and we ask them to report on their first-person experience, we do not regard what they say as true, we simply say it's true that they said it. Report an error

7:15 That's all. I mean, that's data because that's physical data. Report an error

7:26 You're just indoctrinating yourself with a doctrine. you know as much about meditation by reading books on it as you do by meditating. So we see a similar theme here across the board of a radical... Report an error

7:40 expulsion, dismissal first person experience unless it's that of a buddhologist or a philosopher or an astronomer doing their own thing because they're not discrediting themselves just discrediting everybody else to the next slide So I do find something similar here because what I'm seeking, many of you know, I would love to see catalyzed in my lifetime is the first true revolution in the mind sciences. Report an error

8:09 The scientific study of the mind has been going on for about 135 years but I think it's really a stretch to say that there's actually been a Revolution in the mind sciences. Sometimes people suggest Freud or Jung and not to put down anything they've said but simply the impact of Freud and Jung's very ingenious theories and so forth has not had the impact on the mind sciences as Galileo had on astronomy, as Darwin had on biology. Report an error

8:37 There's no comparison. And moreover, many people reject Freud outright and many, many people disregard Jung. So if it's a revolution, it can't be such a narrow niche. But we go back to Galileo's time and I find some very interesting parallels. A friend of his, Cesare Cremonini, a professor of Aristotelian thought. Report an error

9:03 Now bear in mind, this is how he makes his bread and butter. This is his living. That he is professing Aristotle's thought, who is the philosopher, spoke with tremendous authority for the medievalist. This friend, Giammanini, refused to look through a telescope when Galileo was reporting what he saw. Report an error

9:20 This fellow refused to look for Galileo's observation contradicted the views of Aristotle. Now he's making his living teaching Aristotle, so the last thing he wants to do is look through a telescope and discredit his own profession and then lose his job. And so there was definitely some financial interest here. Don't look because you might see something and you don't want to see it. So better save yourself some time. Don't look. Report an error

9:45 And so similarly, many scientific materialists refuse to observe the mind for their introspective observations may turn out to be incompatible with their beliefs. And that is when you start observing thoughts and emotions and desires and dreams and so forth, it's pretty patently obvious that all of them are non-physical in the sense of having no physical characteristics and being unmeasurable with any physical instrument. Report an error

10:07 And moreover, they have clearly causal efficacy. Anybody who doesn't think that their thoughts, emotions and desires have causal efficacy in the natural world is just not paying attention. So better not to look. Better not to look. And in academic psychology, I want to draw a sharp distinction. In clinical psychology, the writings of Freud, in psychophysics, in other areas, introspection does have a role. Report an error

10:29 But in academic psychology, I took a course on academic psychology, cognitive psychology. And introspection was dismissed in the preface and never alluded to again. It had no role. Observing the mind has no role in understanding the mind. It's ironic, but that is in fact the way it is to this day. And so many refuse to look at it because in the same way as Cremonini, I don't want to get in there too deeply because I might actually start to have to challenge my own materialistic beliefs. Report an error

11:00 So that was a friend of his. And then there's an opponent, Giulio Libri. Report an error

11:07 You have to speak Italian with a bit of joie de vivre. If you don't, it's kind of dead Italian. It's like American Italian, German Italian. Report an error

11:18 It's dead on arrival. It's got to be libre. He refused, he refused to look through a telescope for he thought any observations made through it might be optical illusions. Report an error

11:29 And that's an interesting observation because when you look through a telescope, like when Galileo was looking at the moon, for example, and he discovered the craters of the moon. Nobody ever seen those or at least reported those before. Well, it looks like those craters on the moon are way out there in deep space, right? Way, way out there. Report an error

11:46 And it looks like the image you're seeing is way out there. And you're seeing images of the moon. But of course, they knew back then, the time of Galileo, that those images are not coming to you from the moon. Your eyes are not like, Like fly paper, just catching flies coming in, catching images coming in, you're traveling and hitting you, like in the retina. Report an error

12:09 But in fact, these images are arising independence upon your brain. They didn't know the details of visual cortex, but they did know that our observations as human beings are likely to be different than what a cat sees, or a rattlesnake, or a dung beetle, or a bat, and so forth. So therefore, our visual observations are made, we see in this modern terminology, are arising independence upon a human visual cortex. So what we're seeing is not a reflection of what's out there, because human beings didn't make the moon. Report an error

12:40 And so whatever we see, number one, it's illusory in the sense that the appearance seems to be way out there and it's not. And number two, why do you think that this reflects or is an appearance of something objective when it is your own anthropocentric visual perception? Therefore misleading, therefore why bother? Report an error

12:58 Why not rely on the Bible and Aristotle? They're much better than your eyeballs. And so in a similar way I'm suggesting here, and many scientific materials refuse to employ introspection to explore the mind, for they think any such first-person observations are illusory and misleading. It's a very, very common notion, almost universal. And that is, don't rely on introspection. It's illusory and misleading. Whatever you see is just going to be so misleading, so... Report an error

13:25 These may as well just skip it altogether. In other words, it's the same. The same. But Libri had a better reason, had an even more compelling reason than the moderners. Because when you're introspecting, you're observing your thoughts, image and so forth, at least you know that these are created by your own mind. Whereas you look at the image of the moon, then it seems to be out there that that's actually more illusory than observing just mental images in your own mind which you know are in your own mind and created by your own mind. Report an error

13:57 But if Libri had won the day, if he'd been the Pope and could have burnt Galileo at the stake and burnt anybody else at the stake, then they would have stopped the arising and the development of astronomy altogether. They would have prohibited the use of telescopes. Because whatever you see from them is illusory. Don't go there. So it's interesting. Report an error

14:21 I think there are parallels here. You can judge for yourself. Let's move on. Next slide. So now coming to the rescue, William James was very well aware. He lived in the primarily the 19th century, died in 1910. And he was very well of kind of the dogmatism of materialism as he was perfectly aware of the dogmatism that occurs in religion, in politics, philosophy and so forth. Report an error

14:43 And he felt that one of the key elements of a remedy for overcoming dogmatism and closed-mindedness was... empiricism, but then he added the idea of rationality. I think he probably coined the term. He certainly popularized it. And this is what he says about it. I think it's worth reading. I say empiricism because it is contented to regard its most assured conclusions concerning matters of fact as hypotheses, liable to modification in the course of future experience. Report an error

15:12 So the belief, for example, that the... That the earth is the center of the universe. I mean, the Bible says it, Aristotle said it, and for 1400 years, from the time of Ptolemy, in I think the second or third century, until the time of Galileo, all the best and brightest people in Western academia all assumed, of course, that the earth is in the center, the planets go around, and then you can account for very deviations of appearances with epicycles and eccentrics. Report an error

15:40 And it was just kind of like, of course. And then he made them all, that is Copernicus, made them all feel uncomfortable because he questioned that. He questioned common sense of seeing the sun rise and seeing the sun move across the heavens, obviously moving around the earth. But he considered it and then Galileo was the one that actually put it to the test of experience. Galileo was the one, not Copernicus, that proved that the geocentric view, earth being in the center of the universe, he was the one that proved it with empirical evidence. Report an error

16:13 Copernicus gave a good theory to make it plausible. Galileo, with empirical evidence, refuted 1400 years of blind reliance on Ptolemy. So that's empiricism. But then he says, I say radical because it treats the doctrine of monism. Now monism for James was materialistic monism, that everything in the universe boils down to matter, its qualities and emergent properties. Report an error

16:36 That's monism for him. It, radical empiricism, treats the doctrine, the belief system of scientific materialism itself as a hypothesis. And unlike so much of the halfway empiricism that is current under the name of positivism or agnosticism or scientific naturalism, which we also call scientific materialism, it, radical empiricism, does not dogmatically affirm Report an error

17:04 Monism or physicalism or materialism as something with which all experience has got to square. So he's saying this more than a hundred years ago. It's so contemporary because most of science says all of experience must square with a belief, the axiom, that everything that's real is physical. That's the only type of evidence that counts as evidence-based. So it's very refreshed. You can see it's utterly free of dogmatism. It's just, keep on coming back to experience. Report an error

17:33 Back to experience. Let's move on. So, William James did not invent empiricism, even in the West, of course. Go back to David Hume, you'll find it very clearly there. But now we're going to Asia. So this is where the Buddhism starts to come in. Very famous quote, many of you know this verbatim. This is in one of the Mahāyāna Sutras, but it's very much in the spirit of the Buddhist teachings. Report an error

17:57 It's just no question, this is how he spoke. When he says, monks, just as the wise accept gold after testing it, by heating, cutting and rubbing it, So am I wished to be accepted after examining them, but not out of respect for me. So as a religious studies scholar, I have a doctorate in religious studies, then I study comparative religion. Report an error

18:17 And Buddhism within modern academia is almost always, and frankly I think uncritically and perhaps naively and almost certainly ethnocentrically, put into one of our boxes that was designed and created in the West. That is, if you want to study Buddhism in the university, you probably shouldn't go to physics. Even though Buddhism has some amazing things to say about the physical world, you'll probably not find it in psychology. Report an error

18:48 Even though Buddhism is primarily about the nature of mind, you probably won't find it in psychology. Buddhism has elaborate philosophies, which I will discuss somewhat tonight. Philosophy department here or there, but by and large no. Westerners know philosophy, Easterners know Eastern stuff. Report an error

19:10 But I don't know of any other, but so Buddhism is a world religion, that's how we in the West categorize it, not even noticing that the word religion is not found in Sanskrit, Pāli, Tibetan, Mongolian, they don't even have a word for religion. We just superimpose it ethnocentrically on this category because it kind of looks, I mean we see the nuns and I've seen Christian nuns and I bet you worship and you pray and you burn incense and you have rituals and you have churches and so forth and the nuns and the monks of course the same. Report an error

19:38 So it must be a religion. It walks like a religion, it quacks like a religion. You see what's on the surface and then you just put it into the neatest category, overlooking all of the philosophical aspects, the psychological aspects, the rigorous empirical aspects and so forth. It was a cheap shot, frankly, because you highlight the religious aspects, which are there, and I am religious, I'm not embarrassed about that at all, but then it tends to throw into the shadows everything that does not conform to our Western notion. Report an error

20:08 notion by the Abrahamic religions as religious. I don't know of any other founder of a world religion who would ever say something like that. That's what Newton might say. Report an error

20:23 That's what scientists would say. Einstein would say. But that's not the kind of thing we expect founders of a religion to say. Because they will say, except what I'm saying because God said it. Or I'm a prophet. Or I'm enlightened. Or I'm an avatar. or I'm something special but you know after all I said it and I'm either I'm the one I'm representing And the Buddha says, well, chuck that out and just test it yourself and don't accept it unless it really stands up to your most critical analysis. Report an error

20:54 And then we jump to the present and the Dalai Lama, again, he's speaking in exactly the same vein as the Buddha and he speaks for Buddhism at its best. I think really in many respects the Dalai Lama embodies and articulates Buddhism at its best and that's what I'm interested in. I could give lecture after lecture after lecture on the fleas and the moles and the cockroaches and the degenerations of Buddhism. Report an error

21:18 It's very easy to do. There's plenty of work to be done there. But that's not why I study Buddhism. They go off and pick scabs and find faults. Report an error

21:28 If I want to find faults, I don't even have to look outside. I can just spend all the time looking at my own faults. So what I'm interested in with Buddhism is Buddhism at its best, because that's what I like to follow, I like to practice, that's what I do my best to share with others. So here's the Dalai Lama speaking of Buddhism at its best. A general basic stance of Buddhism is that it is inappropriate to hold a view that is logically inconsistent. Report an error

21:52 It doesn't matter who says it, the Buddha or God or anybody else. If it's logically inconsistent, if it's irrational, then don't accept it. This is taboo, he says, but even more taboo than holding a view that is logically inconsistent is holding a view that goes against direct experience. Now that's clearly empiricism. And we have various modes of knowing that are articulated with great precision and detail in Buddhist epistemology. Report an error

22:27 And it's said, unlike Aristotle, for example, That the highest mode of knowing is direct non-conceptual experience. Whereas for Aristotle, for example, the highest knowing is by reason. That unique faculty of man, of reason, women not so much, according to Aristotle. Report an error

22:46 He was very gender biased. But reason has a role that is in the service of direct perception. Rather than direct perception having a role to lead to some conceptual formulation that you can publish and get an award for or at least get tenure. And so there's Buddhist empiricism. Then moving on. So we come back to introspection because this really will be, as promised, this will be about the nature of mind, a radically empirical approach to mind, to consciousness. Report an error

23:14 And so we come back to William James, who really is one of my heroes. And he is the, paraphrasing Robert Frost, he is the road less traveled. Because he set this out as a strategy, an avenue that could be followed more than a century ago. And about 103 years ago, 1913 to be specific, with the rise of behavioral psychology, they simply threw this out lock, stock and barrel. Report an error

23:38 And they never revived it. They kind of put three bullets in its head and buried it. But here's what William James thought. And that is introspective observation, he says, is what we have to rely on first, foremost and always. In other words, for the scientific study of the mind, philosophers had been thinking about the mind for centuries, nothing new about that. But what started in the late 19th century was the empirical and experimental scientific study of the mind. Report an error

24:02 It took them 300 years from the time of Copernicus to even start it, which is kind of a long lag time. But when it got there, William James was really one of the strongest figures in that movement. And he said, this is how we should approach the study of the mind. As, frankly, as we approach this scientific study of everything else, scientifically, whether you want to know geology or microbiology or astronomy or you want to understand birds and so forth, your primary mode of investigation is to take very careful look, to observe with as much sophistication, precision and rigor as you possibly can, to make replicable observations and on that basis then you start to develop. Report an error

24:41 a science of whatever it may be. That's what Galileo did for both terrestrial physics as well as celestial physics or astronomy. So William James is taking that same approach for the mind. The word introspection need hardly be defined. It means, of course, the looking into our minds, our own minds, because those are the only minds we can actually look at, for most of us anyway, and reporting what we there discover. Report an error

25:04 And everyone agrees that we there discover states of consciousness. So it's very commonsensical what he's saying here. Contrary to all of those, you know, Neil deGrasse and so forth and so on, saying, you know, you either can't do it or if you do it, it's completely unreliable. But William James was not gullible or naive when it came to introspection. He didn't believe, as Descartes apparently did, that all of your introspective observations are clear and infallible. Report an error

25:34 And William James, to the contrary, said introspection is difficult and fallible. Our visual observations can be profoundly misleading, all kinds of optical illusions. There are auditory illusions that are amazing and we have other types of illusions as well. Under hypnosis, for example, you can bite into an onion and it tastes like an apple and so on. Well, if our other five sensory modes of perception can be very misleading and illusory, which they certainly can be, then why should introspection be any different? Report an error

26:04 It too can be fallible. But he says here, and I think quite rightly, the difficulty is simply that of all observation of whatever kind. In other words, it's not specifically introspection that's misleading. Just like the critic of Galileo said, you're looking through a telescope, that may be an optical illusion. So, right, it's true. Report an error

26:25 But now William James comes up with the solution. He says the only safeguard is in the final consensus of our farther knowledge, or later knowledge about the thing in question, later views correcting earlier ones until at last the harmony of a consistent system is reached. So I think he actually gave the solution. It's not a soundbite, but he said here's the strategy, and that is keep on looking, and if possible, of course, look with greater sophistication, greater precision, greater clarity, and then have intrasubjective validation. Report an error

26:55 And then you can have a growing body of consensual knowledge. He's suggesting this. As I said, they tried this in a very amateurish, primitive way, frankly, from about 1875 until 1910. And then, with the force of the rise of behavioral psychology, they just scuttled it and never looked back. Not in academic psychology. In Freud, Jung, clinical psychology definitely has a role. Report an error

27:18 So we move on. So, William James also, I think he, I affirm what he's saying here. He's writing again about 115 years ago and he says, at present psychology is in the condition of physics before Galileo and the laws of motion, of chemistry before Lavoisier and the notion that mass is preserved in all reactions. Report an error

27:41 The Galileo and the Lavoisier of psychology will be famous men indeed when they come as come they someday surely will or past successes are no index to the future. When they do come, however, the necessities of the case will make them Metaphysical. That is, they will seem to be operating outside of the bounds of mainstream science. Metaphysical. Why? Because they're looking at something that's not physical. Report an error

28:07 Obviously not physical. We observe the mind, it has no physical characteristics. When you try to observe the mind using the instruments of technology, objectively and physically, it is invisible. So they're going to be deemed metaphysical. That's kind of like a curse. In science, psychology, physics and so forth, if you're saying, oh, you're being metaphysical, that's kind of like you're stupid. It's a total put-down. Report an error

28:31 I mean, I've heard it many times. Richard Feynman and psychology and physics and so forth, as soon as you seem to be metaphysical, which means maybe stepping outside the bounds of materialism, that means you've stepped into the land of la-la land, flakiness, airy-fairy, by the sheer fact that you're addressing something that may not be physical. Report an error

28:52 Which then isn't evidence at all, right? And so meanwhile, the best way in which we can facilitate their advent, the coming of these great individuals, and he says men, what he didn't see is famous men or women, because he was still stuck in the late 19th century where the men were doing all the heavy lifting, right? Report an error

29:11 And women could not get a higher education. And he wasn't so far ahead of his time that he questioned that. Happily, that's one of the great advances of the 20th century. We're no longer that gender stupid. And so he should have said human beings, of course. But meanwhile, the best way in which we can facilitate there those men and women's advent is to understand how great is the darkness in which we grope. Report an error

29:33 And never to forget that the natural science assumptions with which we started are provisional and revisable things. To my mind, that's just magnificent. Report an error

29:44 It's not dogmatic. It's not dogmatically anti-materialistic. It's just being anti-dogmatic altogether. And so that's kind of like, I don't know, a big Report an error

30:00 statement. I'm looking for a better word than that. Like a strategy. So we move on. So we come back to Buddhism now. And we'll spend a lot of time in Buddhism now. This is what I wanted to do is give a bit more challenging material than the other set of slides, which I'm very familiar with. And I think many of you are as well. So here's a bit familiar. And so the Buddhist empirical science of the mind. Report an error

30:23 Because that's really what it was. The Buddha was not starting a religion to have a whole bunch of beliefs about mind, but rather he devised very specific, radically empirical, logical ways to investigate the mind, and the only way that it can be investigated directly, and that's from a first-person perspective. Report an error

30:39 But for that, just like Galileo needed a stable platform for his telescopes, when he went from 3 power to 30, which is pretty good advanced technology for one man, Right? In his lifetime. Well, if you have a hold of three power, that's like an opera glass. You can hold that in your hands with no problem. But a 30 power, unless that's got a very stable mount, you won't be able to make any reliable observations. Report an error

31:01 You're bouncing all over the place. So Galileo knew, of course, because it's common sense, that if you want to make reliable, precise, replicable observations through your 30 power telescope, you've got to have it firmly mounted, stable. You must be able to track, to observe with continuity. The phenomena you're seeking to observe and understand, like the phases of the moon of Venus, which he discovered, or more interestingly perhaps, his discovery that the little dots that appeared right around Jupiter actually move with it across the night sky and they move around it. Report an error

31:38 He got that in one week, but that means he had to look repeatedly, carefully, rigorously, with a question, the little dots around Jupiter, are they left behind as Jupiter moves? Or do they move with Jupiter and do they move around Jupiter? And in one week he discovered those were moons, which contradicted Western beliefs since Aristotle. Report an error

31:57 They said all celestial bodies go in circles, perfect circles, around the Earth. But so simple, one week with a 30-power telescope. Any of us could do that. It's not that hard. But you have to have the stability, the continuity, and you must have very well-polished lenses that are sharply in focus, well-polished, and then you can make veridical. Report an error

32:17 observations and that's what's been done ever since in the fantastic progress in developing telescopes and so many other forms of instruments of measurement. But then when it comes to the mind, all of those instruments of technology are in a way useless in terms of making direct observations of the mind because none of them show up. Report an error

32:38 Brain activity, of course, behavior, of course, but dreams, thoughts, images, they're invisible. And that's because you're using a physical instrument to try to measure something that's not physical. What do you do? But then we can just stop there and say, well, we'll just go back to the physical and we'll do the best, drawing inference based upon behavior and brain activity. Report an error

32:57 That's what the mind sciences have been doing for the last hundred years. Or you cannot give up on first-person observation, but recognize that if you're going to make rigorous, replicable observations from a first-person perspective, you must know how to train your attention. So you can stay focused, not for three seconds or three minutes, but for hours at a time and do it day after day. It makes a very, very deep, rigorous, sustained, clear, high-definition observations of the mind. Report an error

33:26 Then you might really get somewhere. But the first thing is develop attention skills. And secondly, apply those attention skills to your metacognitive awareness of what's going on in the mind itself. So that's what the Indians did. More so than any other society or civilization on the planet. I think this is one of their actually unique contributions. The Indians, thousands of years ago, could have been 4,000 years ago, it could have been five, it was definitely way before the Buddha came along, 2,500 years ago. Report an error

33:54 These counter-cultural truth-seekers, they were called shramanas, they learned to develop stable, highly focused attention, they called it samādhi. More so than the Chinese, the Greeks, the Jews, the Mayans or anybody else, this was one of their great contributions to civilization. And actually the West has still not discovered that they've discovered that. I mean, highly advanced yogis will be invited to laboratories and then the scientists do what they're good at. Report an error

34:27 They study their brain waves and their behavior. William James thought that training attention was impossible. But that's because he never traveled outside of Europe. Never went to any one of those Asian countries where they've been training attention skills to a very high degree for centuries and centuries. That's how ethnocentric we were. Report an error

34:47 We, we Europeans, couldn't consider that those people might know something we don't know. And so Gautama took refined sustained voluntary attention, or samādhi, he refined it. He built on the tremendous progress that had already been made before him. And it was enormous. It was centuries and centuries of progress, developing extraordinarily high states of samādhi about which modern science knows nothing whatsoever. Don't even know they're there. Report an error

35:13 Even though the translations are all there and so forth, they still don't look. They can't imagine these people might actually know something they don't. But he took the pre-existing technology of samādhi, he refined it and then with enhanced stability and vividness, so like the telescope that's firmly mounted with very polished in-focus lenses, He used Samādhi in unprecedented ways to explore states of consciousness and their objects. So the first one, Samādhi, the second one is Vipassanā, actual Vipassanā, not the incredibly watered-down version we have nowadays, which is really often not much more than simply being mindful. Report an error

35:49 And so that was his innovation. That was one of his great innovations. As far as we know, nobody had ever done that before. Samādhi was seen as an end in itself. Achieve high degrees of samādhi, you find bliss, you find serenity, you find escape from all of the ordinary world. And Gautama first mastered that when he left home. But then when he came out of samādhi, he saw that there had been no radical transformation in his mind. And then he had to set out on his own. Report an error

36:16 And out of his six years of austerities and then his tremendously innovative work, like Galileo taking a pre-existing technology of the telescope and using it in unprecedented ways. Galileo was the first person to use a telescope as a scientific instrument, whereas the Dutch, I expect, because I know a lot of people, I think they were using it to make it gaze at men, to gaze at women. Report an error

36:40 That's my hypothesis. know, the peeping, I think. I'm not really sure. But they didn't use it scientifically. Even though he's Italian. Report an error

36:54 The Italian liked their women as much as anybody else, but Galileo liked something more, and that is he directed upwards, not across. And that's what Gautama did. I think it's not a silly parallel. He took the pre-existing technology of samādhi and applied it in unprecedented ways to actually explore states of consciousness, to explore the nature of suffering, the sources of suffering, the possibility of freedom and the path to that. Report an error

37:18 That was the union of shamatha, vipassanā or samādhi and insight. And then the Buddha sums this up. The mind that is established in equipoise, the mind that is balanced, balanced in cultivating a sense of ease, of stillness and clarity, discerning, intelligent, mindful, this is the mind that comes to know reality as it is. Report an error

37:38 Knows reality, just for starters, of your own mind. Because like anything else, if you'd like to understand something, observe it carefully. It's kind of common sense, but Galileo brought it to a very high level of sense. And that's the union of Shantideva and Vipassanā. We move on. Report an error

37:54 Now, on the night of his enlightenment, the Buddha had already achieved a very high level of samādhi. It's called the fourth jhāna, so it's very, very high. It's said to be the perfection of mindfulness. So he was in a very deep state of samādhi. And from that platform, like having this incredibly fine telescope, extremely focused, extremely clear, utterly calm and balanced, he directed his mind now like a laser beam and directed it to his past. Report an error

38:21 And he said, When my concentrated mind was thus purified, bright, unblemished and rid of imperfection. Sounds like he's describing a telescope. Bright, unblemished, rid of imperfections, like lenses, purified, absolutely clear, and he's directing it back to his own past, beyond this life and past, when he had done so and when it became malleable. Report an error

38:46 That is, he's not going into a trance state. But malleable, wieldy, steady and attained to imperturbability, then I directed, I inclined my mind to the knowledge of recollection of past lives. And he saw them. He saw them. He saw countless of his own past lives. And that's what he says. I saw with direct knowledge. So he's claiming a discovery. Report an error

39:09 He's not saying he's a prophet or God granted in this or other Buddhas had granted. He said, I just went through the training and I developed this telescope of the mind and this is what I saw. That's what he said. The Buddha then narrates how with the achievement of the fourth jhāna, so a very high state of samādhi, he recollected the specific circumstances of many thousands of his own former lives over the course of many ages of world contraction and expansion. Report an error

39:35 The expansion and contraction takes place over billions of years. So it's something analogous to Big Bang expanding, but if we put this in the 21st century, there being sufficient dark matter that eventually the... The acceleration of the expansion of the universe slows down and then it goes and starts to contract and goes back into the big crunch. So it starts with a big bang, big crunch, but that's just one cycle. Report an error

39:59 Big bang, big crunch, bang, big crunch. But then the Buddha said there are multiple universes that are operating out of sync happily for sentient beings. Because when it goes crunch, then anybody who has a body gets severely crunched. But you have another universe that's cropping up that is in expansion mode. Report an error

40:17 So if you are migrating from lifetime to lifetime and your universe is crunching, go to another one that's in better shape. And there are countless of those. So nowadays, contemporary state-of-the-art physics, they're debating right now, apparently the evidence is right on the cusp, will the universe eventually contract or not? Report an error

40:36 Einstein thought so, many astronomers think not. But there are many others, I mean top-notch world-classes, saying, you know, we may be dealing with multiverses here. And this is just our universe, but there may be others, others and so forth. And moreover, modern astronomers speak of this taking place on the order of billions of years, so does the Buddha. Report an error

40:56 So I'm not saying it's the same, but I think maybe the coincidence is not casual or merely by accident. And then the Buddha concluded, this was the first true knowledge attained by me in the first watch of the night. That was just the prelude. That's before he made his much deeper insights. Because this is simply discovering things that had been discovered earlier. Report an error

41:15 That is, earlier highly accomplished yogis, Hindu yogis, had already accomplished, had gained direct insight into past lives, but it seems, at least from the Buddha's perspective, that he could see far more. His samādhi was deeper, he probed much more deeply than others who could only recall a few thousand lifetimes, whereas he could recall many more. Report an error

41:36 Pythagoras, one of our earliest philosophers in the Western tradition, it was widely believed during his time that he who clearly advocated Reincarnation, it said that he could recall 20 of his past lives, Pythagoras. And he also has some paranormal abilities, siddhis. And that's what he's mostly known for, not as a mathematician. Report an error

41:54 But Aristotle writes about him, primarily as a wonder worker and a person with tremendous samādhi. And he may have learned it in Egypt. He traveled there. And there were Indian swamis in Egypt at that time. Not Buddhists, because he was a contemporary of the Buddhists, of the Buddha. He is an interesting guy. Report an error

42:13 He may have learned samādhi from Asia. I doubt that he dreamed it up entirely on his own, because the Indians had been at that for a couple of thousand years by the time Pythagoras came along. But Pythagoras advocated reincarnation based on experience, Socrates did, Plato did, and it even occurs in early Christianity. Report an error

42:30 Origen, who was one of the church fathers, advocated very clearly reincarnation within totally the Christian context. So this was the very first true knowledge that attained by being the first watch of the night. Ignorance was banished. And true knowledge arose, darkness was banished and light arose, as happens in one who is diligent, ardent and something. And something. Report an error

42:55 So, something. Something good, I think. Can you go back? Let's just see if we can get... Probably not. Okay. It slipped off. Doesn't matter. So now, so that's just flat out, what do you discover just with samādhi alone? Because you don't need Vipassanā for that. That's just... Getting a laser, like a laser pointer, and being able to illuminate past life memories that are actually stored in a subtle continuum of consciousness that carries on from lifetime to lifetime. Report an error

43:26 But that wasn't enough. Simply to know you have past lives doesn't liberate you. But it does show you the context of your inquiry. That if you have past lives, the chances are you're going to have more to come, in which case factor that in as you consider where you are in the universe. Now there's that, by modern minds, that is absolutely revolutionary. Absolutely revolutionary. To think of this life as being only one episode in a countless series of preceding episodes and there are more to come. Report an error

43:55 That there's no exit from reality is a very startling and daunting prospect. But now I wanted to kind of move this up a bit. So people who are very fresh to Buddhism as a whole, this will be a very steep learning curve. Because within Buddhism there's no such thing as simply Buddhist philosophy as such, because there are multiple interpretations that have developed, been refined over many centuries. Report an error

44:19 And here is kind of like, this is like Galilean, this is like Galileo is to physics, asking very basic questions and coming up with very brilliant insights, but they're still very basic. And then Newton went beyond, and beyond him went James Clerk Maxwell, beyond him went Newton, we went Einstein and so on. Report an error

44:38 Well, this is basic, fundamental, but I think actually very interesting and insightful. It's Vaibhashika. It's one of four schools of philosophical interpretation, very well developed in India over centuries. And this is the most primitive, the most basic, but I don't think it's crude. That's for you to decide. But when it says, I've called it dualistic reductionism because here it is in gist. Report an error

44:59 What's the basic premise? What kind of a world are we living in? And they say, well, As we're just kind of looking around, taking our first-person experience seriously, we look outwards and we see there's a lot of physical stuff out there. And we'll call this a chair, for example. We'll call that a slide projector. We'll call that a sock. Or better, maybe a shoe. A shoe, if he's wearing shoes. Report an error

45:22 Because he's the shoe guy, in case you wondered. But we look at all these things and we identify them. But then these pretty smart people there say, you look at a shoe. But of course, that's viewing it from your perspective and your conceptual grid. A cockroach that bumped into it, probably not think, oh, big shoe. Not likely, in a way they don't have the word, they're not seeing it the same way. Report an error

45:45 Another person might look at it and say, paperweight. People just love to walk barefoot. I have no use for that to put on my foot. Why would anybody want to put that on their foot? But that's a good paperweight. So what he's saying here is in these configurations of matter, viewed from multiple perspectives, it's all relative. Report an error

46:01 To your mode of perception and your mode of conceptualization, right? So there's this whole array of physical things we're seeing out there and as we conceive of them as the chunk of this and a chunk of that, it's all relative. It's not really objective. But that's not all that's going on. They were not, how do you say, prejudiced on taking only the physical to be real. Report an error

46:23 That was actually more primitive than any school of Buddhism. They also, of course, practiced introspection. They're following the Buddha. You can't skip the mind and be a Buddhist. And then they found, this is an emotion, I'm feeling the emotion of feeling malaise. Well, they don't even have a word for malaise in Tibetan. Report an error

46:40 Moreover, they don't have a word for emotion either in Tibetan. And then we have many, many words that have the nuance of English, Italian, French and so forth. And so when we look at these configurations of the mind, these too are seen from a human perspective. And, how do we say, we conceive of them within our... Report an error

46:59 aren't familiar conceptual frameworks, but it's Sanskrit, it's Buddhist, it's Hindu, and so They said, well, what's really there that is not dependent upon your perspective, your conceptual grid, what's really there? They said, well, what's really there, sounds a little bit like Descartes, is, well, there really are atoms out there, just the basic units, that's it, call it whatever you like. Report an error

47:26 We generally call them atoms or nowadays elementary particles. What there is really out there, independent of anybody's perspective, absolutely real objectively, is little units of matter. That's what's out there. But of course to say that's all that's out there is ridiculous because we also are aware of, we have thoughts, emotions, perceptions of them and so what is real subjectively are the individual units of mentation or consciousness. Report an error

47:52 That's real. It's not a matter of perspective or conceptualization. So it's reductionism. It's saying what is ultimately real are the fundamental building blocks, but not just of the physical, as if somehow the mental emerges from the physical, which I thought was preposterous, but rather there are two types of fundamental entities and the basic building blocks are absolutely real and all the configurations of them, which we label from different perspectives, that's relative. Report an error

48:18 So, dualistic reductionism. I don't think it's stupid at all. So there's a basis for this. This is from the Pāli Canon but it shows exactly the spirit of radical empiricism. Report an error

48:30 so here's the Buddha speaking, giving a very, very short discourse to a wandering ascetic by the name of Bahiya. In the scene, there is only the scene. So there's all kinds of projections, associations, conceptual category, associations, transference. I mean, psychologists know this very well. When you're listening to a client and so forth, how much they'll be adding on to experience, interpreting it. But here's He's saying here, when you see as much as you can, hold back on all the junk, all the stuff you're projecting, and just try to see as naked as you can. Report an error

49:04 When you observe, try to just observe. In the scene, let it be just the scene, and distinguish it from all that you're superimposing upon it. And likewise, there is only the heard. In the heard, there's only the heard. In the felt, that's tactile sensations, there's only the felt. And then he adds, in the cognized, this is mentally perceived, There's only the cognized. So we observe feelings and thoughts and perceptions and memories and dreams and images and so forth coming up. Report an error

49:31 And he says when you're perceiving things mentally, so no prejudice against introspection, just note nakedly, without the elaboration, without superposition, what is simply arising from moment to moment. Just keep there. That is how you should train yourself. That's exactly radical empiricism. Report an error

49:52 So that's what he's saying is true, but then for you, when you develop this ability, you learn how to really observe silently without all of the obsessive-compulsive superpositions upon reality, when for you there is only the seen, in reference to the seen, only the heard, in reference to the heard, only the sensed, in reference to the sensed, that's the tactile, and the cognized, in reference to the cognized, then bahia, there is no you here. Report an error

50:19 That is, you see you as a separate agent, a subject, no evidence, something you were superimposing all along. I am looking at that, this separate ego, entity, I, not to be found. There is no you here. When there is no you here, there is no you there. That is, these are just thoughts, but not my thoughts. These are just images, but not my image, sounds, but not my sounds, thoughts, memories and so forth, but not my thoughts. Report an error

50:48 I'm not in them, they don't belong to me. So I'm not in here, I'm not out there. When there is no you here, there is no you there. When there is no you there, you are neither here nor there, nor between the two. This, just this, is the end of suffering. Report an error

51:11 So he's showing liberation by just seeing reality as it is without conflating it with our many superpositions upon it. So that's basic, that's entry level. Let's move on, see where we go from there. So that's considered widely, universally in inter-Tibetan Buddhism. That's the most basic. You learn that one early on. But then you can move beyond that to a greater level of sophistication, Sautrantika. Report an error

51:37 And I call this pluralistic realism. Let's just look at it. And that is, I think it is more sophisticated. Let's see. What we directly perceive with our physical senses. Consists of subjective representations of objective phenomena that are really out there, independent of our percepts and concepts. So it was the criticism of Galileo, that is, you're looking through the telescope, but you're not seeing images that are out there. You're seeing representations, representations which are relative to your subjectivity, but they do correspond to something out there. Report an error

52:11 In other words, you're not just hallucinating. There is a moon out there when you're not looking. But when you do look, you're seeing a subjective representation of it. And you're seeing the moon by way of a representation. So that would be, this view, that would be their retort to the fellow who wouldn't look at the telescope because it's all illusion, say, well, they're illusory. Report an error

52:32 But that doesn't mean there's just a hallucination, like you're psychotic. You are observing the moon, which anybody would say nowadays, any astronomer would say, if you look through a telescope, are you looking at the moon? Report an error

52:44 And they would say, yeah. They say, but aren't you looking at an image generated by your brain? And they say, yeah. By way of an image generated by your brain, you are in fact looking at the moon. We wouldn't have gotten there. We wouldn't have people walking on the moon if all our observations had been completely hallucination. Ridiculous. Report an error

53:04 So we are seeing, but by way of. We're seeing things that are independent of our perceptions. By way of our perceptions. That sounds very familiar. That's actually, that's Newton. That's Newton. And that is we are seeing, we are observing objective reality, what is out there from God's own perspective, but we're seeing objective reality by way of our sensory perceptions. Report an error

53:29 And we're making sense of it by way of our human thoughts, language and so forth. So the physical world is objectively real, say the Sartranticans. It's really out there, just like it's called metaphysical realism. The universe is really out there and we are trying to represent it. By way of our perception, developing theories, it is objectively real, but it is perceived and conceived in various ways, of course, by different people, but also by different species and so on. Report an error

53:58 It's perceived and conceived in various ways depending on the specific nature of our sensory faculties, that of a bat or human being and so forth, our conceptual frameworks, theistic, non-theistic, materialistic and so forth, and languages. So as I said, all of us English speakers, we know perfectly well what emotion means. And there's simply no word for emotion. It's not that they don't have a word for anger and joy and sadness and contempt. Report an error

54:22 They have all of those words. They don't have the category. They don't have the category of emotion. They never needed it. They have a category called klesha, mental afflictions. We don't have that one. We had to make up a term, klesha, mental afflictions. We didn't have it. We have vices. We have neuroses. Report an error

54:40 But we don't have a term. We don't have it. If a person has a very strongly developed sense of I am, they say, well, you have a very strong sense of who you are. Report an error

54:53 Good for you. Jolly good. And the Buddhists would say, well, you're delusional. Different take on the same kind of experience. Report an error

55:06 So, objective reality in and of itself is unknowable apart. That is, this sounds like cunt. Objective reality in and of itself is unknowable apart from our subjective perceptions and the theories we formulate on the basis of those appearances. But it is out there and we can know it by way of subjective perceptions and theories. Report an error

55:29 But real objects must exist out there in order to account for the consensual nature of our experience. There has to be real moons. We didn't invent it. There were already moons around Jupiter. We didn't invent those. Galileo didn't invent them. The Higgs boson was something that was not created with a $7 billion contraption. They built the Large Hadron Super Collider to see whether the Higgs boson was already there, not whether they could create one. Report an error

55:54 If you want to create particles, buy some popcorn. Put in the popcorn, you'll create some popcorn particles. But they made that very expensive gadget to try to discover something really core about the nature of matter. Report an error

56:24 our consensual nature of experience. That is, to be honest, Tibetans and Christians and Buddhists and Chinese and all kinds of people look at the moon and we describe the moon in very similar ways and people from all different worldviews came into this room, we describe it in similar ways. So the fact that we do have a sense that although viewed, how do we say, articulated, conceived in different ways, nevertheless, it's kind of common sense, it's called metaphysical realism. Report an error

56:48 There's something really out there and there's really something in here too, there's something called mind. And it has many processes and it doesn't depend simply on what you believe. If there is really a phenomenon called mind, there's really something called the physical world. So to read that, the real objects must exist out there in order to account for the consensual nature of our experience. The fact that we experience so much of the world around us in common ways. Report an error

57:16 But now this is more sophisticated than the straight kind of Cartesian dualism, mind and matter, right? Or the dualism of the Vaibhashika, elementary units of matter, elementary moments of cognition, because they were, this is again centuries ago, but they pointed out, number one, that which is real is something that presents itself to you. Report an error

57:39 Concepts we project upon reality, but if something is real, it presents itself to it, to your instruments of technology, to your physical senses, to your introspective awareness. And so is there anything out there that's not composed of chunks of matter, Is there anything that exists that it presents itself to us, that we perceive we're directly aware of it, other than configurations of units of matter and other than configurations of moments of awareness, visual, mental and so forth? Report an error

58:09 And they say, yeah. For example, time. We're aware of, we're not just imagining the passage of time. We experience it. But time is not made of matter. It's not just made of mind. So there's more, there's this pluralistic realism. It's a type of metaphysical realism. But there's more than mind and matter. There's time, for example. Report an error

58:32 And then we can think, well, anything else. How about the laws of mathematics? Why do we ask this in the 21st century? The laws of mathematics, the laws of physics, they're not made of atoms. And they're not states of consciousness. And what scientist denies the existence of mathematical laws of nature? But they're not physical. Report an error

58:50 They have no physical location, no mass, they have no physical attributes at all, but they're real and you can observe them. You can observe the inverse square law of gravity. You can observe it. It's true whether you believe it's true, whether you measure it or not, it's already true. So the laws of mathematics are not physical, time is not physical, information is not physical. Report an error

59:13 Information, right? It has no mass, it has no location, you can't measure it physically. Semantic, meaningful information. Report an error

59:23 Justice, beauty, the list goes on and on. People, people, individuals. You're not the same as a body. You have a body. You're not the same as a mind. You have a mind. You observe your mind. You're a person. But you as a person who has a body, observes your body, you as a person are not composed of atoms. Report an error

59:45 Only materialists think that. They're in a tiny minority. And you're not simply a mental state. You're not simply a moment of cognition. You have moments of cognition. You have a mind. So the list goes on and on. There are many, many phenomena that are as real as anything else but they're neither physical nor are they states of consciousness. So it's pluralism and it's open book. Report an error

1:00:05 Just by the way, William James was a pluralist. He was not a monist as a materialist. He was not a Cartesian dualist. He said, no, the world is richer than that and we should keep it open. This is what I find so really truly dogmatic about materialism is they just assume That the whole of reality fits into our category of physical and anything is real must be physical. So even when 96 % of the forces in the universe are totally unexplained on a cosmic level, 96 % are unexplained, they have no idea why the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Report an error

1:00:45 It's unaccountable, inexplicable. In terms of everything we know about the universe, except that it is doing, and the fact that the universe is still so coherent, we have these nice neat galaxies and so forth and so on, there's no explanation within the known universe of why the universe is so orderly and no explanation within the known universe of why the rate of acceleration is increasing. Report an error

1:01:07 96 % of the forces pertaining to expansion but also the contraction are unknown. So what do we attribute that to? Dark matter and dark energy, but without knowing anything about them. So how do you know it's matter if you know nothing about it? Why do you call it matter? Why do you call it physical when you don't even know it's physical? Report an error

1:01:29 It could be cerebrum and cherubim. I don't really have a way to develop that theory, but in principle I know as little about cerebrum and cherubim as I know about dark matter and dark energy. And that goes for the physicists too. It's a placeholder. It's basically said whatever it is, it's physical. And so you theologians keep out. Report an error

1:01:49 Well, we do this a lot. But William James says, well, you know, let's just be pluralistic. Let's not assume everything fits into one or two boxes. In other words, as a materialist, I'll present this. It's so crude. If you're not with us, against us, if you're not a physicalist, if you don't believe everything is physical, then you're a Cartesian dualist. Report an error

1:02:09 And we know that's stupid. So they show the only alternative. It's like a straw horse. Or a straw man. A straw man and a dead horse, I guess. So don't be the straw man and don't try to ride a dead horse. Something like that. In any case, they set up the opposition as being stupid and antiquated. Descartes, oh, you're not with us? Report an error

1:02:28 Then you must be a Cartesian dualist. I've had many neuroscientists say that. Oh, you're Buddhist. Oh, you mean you're dualist. Because that's the only two categories they operate. The stupid one, Descartes, and them. And them is the entire universe. fits into only one category. If you want to be really rich, then you can say, okay, there are four Gospels in the book of nature, according to materialism, four Gospels, and everything fits into four Gospels. Report an error

1:02:55 Mass, energy, space, time. Nothing outside of that. As if somehow the universe conformed itself, that we could capture all of it in four thoughts. I find that to be amazingly bold, to put it mildly, or ridiculous. But now we start challenging metaphysical realism, the notion that there's a physical universe out there, independently of anybody's perspective. Report an error

1:03:24 This is Yogacara, or also called Chittamatra, mind only. It's philosophical idealism. So we have Bishop Barclay, we have Hegel who work along these lines in the West. But this is rooted in contemplative inquiry, unlike Kant and Hegel and others. Well, Kant, but Bishop Barclay was a clear philosophical idealist, a brilliant thinker. Report an error

1:03:42 great philosopher, but not a contemplative. So they're just using their intellect to come up with the really interesting ideas. Where the Yogacara, this is highly rooted meditation. All of these are meditators. Vibhashika, the Sātrāntakins, they're all practicing Samādhi So this is suggested that it is widely accepted in interdependent Buddhism. This is now more sophisticated than what we've seen thus far. Report an error

1:04:08 So now what's the premise here? Truly know is the reality of our own awareness and the sensory and mental appearances that arise to it. That is when we really stop all the conceptual superimpositions and we peel it back, roll it back to right now in terms of your five physical senses, your awareness of the surrounding universe and your body, peel it back to what you immediately know and here's the view, well what you actually know are visual impressions, they're not physical, They don't exist out there, not inside your cortex, not inside your eyeball, not in between. Visual impressions. Sounds, not out there, not inside your auditory cortices. Report an error

1:04:54 Smell, taste and touch, not physical, not located in physical space. And then we have all of our mental experiences, hopes, dreams, fears, memories and so forth. They're not physical, they're not located in physical space. And so what do we really know if we're very strict? Report an error

1:05:13 Minimalist. That we can say, well this we know and we cannot possibly doubt it. We cannot doubt this. So it's kind of going back to the type of certainty Descartes was looking for. Where can I start that nobody can doubt? And let me build a philosophy on that, trying to emulate Euclid, starting with axioms and building up a whole system of geometry. Report an error

1:05:33 Well Descartes wanted to do that, to develop a whole system of reality based upon an unassailable starting point. kogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am. Well, Well, in the Yogacara they say, well, what do we know indubitably beyond any possibility of doubt? Well, not the existence of an objective world. Report an error

1:05:54 Bishop Barclay was a very smart guy. He doubted that intelligently, rationally. And there have been others as well. And so we can doubt that. We can doubt the very existence of the self itself. We can doubt that there is an I who thinks and therefore I am because I think. How do you know you thought it? Maybe the thought just occurred. And maybe you're just a figment of your imagination. But what can you not doubt? Report an error

1:06:20 So this is really radical empiricism. And it's cutting it closer to the bone. And that is, here's what we cannot doubt. We cannot doubt that we're aware. Report an error

1:06:30 If you're doubting it, you're aware that you're doubting it, which means then you're not really doubting it. And so you can't doubt awareness, not reasonably. It is doubted nowadays. I see it and it just boggles my mind that some people are saying consciousness doesn't exist. Well, I don't know whether they came to that conclusion consciously or unconsciously. If unconsciously, then it doesn't count. If consciously, then it doesn't count. Report an error

1:06:55 So there's one thing, awareness. You can't doubt that awareness is taking place, leaving out the first person, I. But awareness is happening and sensory and mental appearances. I mean, we can't doubt. If you have eyes in your sight, you can't doubt their visual impressions. And unless your metacognitive ability is absolutely atrophied to nothing, you can't doubt that feelings like pain, happiness, surprise, fear, you can't doubt that. Report an error

1:07:28 We can't doubt the reality of suffering, which is where the Buddha started in a spirit of radical empiricism. He didn't start with God or the beginning of the universe or I'm enlightened. He started with there's a reality of suffering. Can you really doubt that? So this now on a philosophical level, he said, okay, this is what we can't doubt. Report an error

1:07:46 This is what we know indubitably. Now whatever exists independently of these appearances, that is what's really out there that's giving rise to the photons or the molecules or emitting photons and so forth, what exists independently of these appearances is unknowable in principle. Report an error

1:08:06 And there are no grounds for attributing existence to something that can never be known. What they're saying here is whether you look, so you look with human eyeballs, human visual perception. Report an error

1:08:16 And so we're seeing clearly anthropocentric visual impressions. Different for a bat, an ant, a rattlesnake and so forth. But also let's bring this into the 21st century because I think it's very sophisticated. This is quantum mechanics. And that is whenever you're making a measurement, you're not using God's eye. You're not using nobody's. Report an error

1:08:36 You're not using an anonymous absolute system. You're using a system measurement that you created and it's designed to measure something. So there are systems of measurement that are designed to measure photons, individual photons. And that shows that light consists of photons, little particles, little bundles of energy, photons. Report an error

1:08:58 And you can see it. The evidence is inconvertible that using this system measurement, light is like a little bunch of BBs, individual discrete... Little bullets, right? Use another system of measurement and it's perfectly clear light is a wave. It's a field and it displays interference patterns. So it's a wave. I mean, waves are very well known in water and other media. The interference patterns and so forth, waves are spread out over space. They're not composed of particles. Report an error

1:09:25 So one thing cannot possibly be a particle and a wave. That's not possible. Like being a tomato and a giraffe. It can be one or the other, but there's just one thing, just by definition. You can't be a particle because the qualities of a particle are utterly different than the qualities of a wave or a field. But one system measurement says it's a particle, another one in this system says it's a wave. Report an error

1:09:48 What is it? Now, let's apply Yogacara to that conundrum, which is very well known in quantum mechanics, one of the most well known things. But in fact, what is known in quantum mechanics, not just for light, but in fact all particles of matter can be viewed as fields, as waves. And particles of energy can be viewed as particles. Report an error

1:10:05 Particles or waves. So it goes for electrons as much as it does for photons. They can be viewed as fields, as waves or as particles. And it depends on the system measurement. Then we can ask, that's the one field of science I've been really trained in, then we can get impatient here. Okay, this system shows it's a particle and this system shows it's a wave, but what's really out there independent of any system measurement? Report an error

1:10:27 What's it like from God's perspective? What's already there before you make the measurement? And as Werner Heisenberg said, You're just posing a question for which there's no possible answer because the only way you could try to answer that would bring in another system of measurement but what you'll be observing or measuring with that system of measurement will arise relative to that system and then bring another one and it will arise relative to that system. Report an error

1:10:55 You can never bring in a non-system and observe what is there independent of a system. Every observation you're ever making is rising relative to the system. Always. Report an error

1:11:06 Universally, making the same point. And Heisenberg was among the sense, let us not attribute existence to that which is unknowable in principle. And so is the universe, the physical universe as it exists out there independently of our perceptions and all of our measurements, as it exists out there independently, is that knowable? Report an error

1:11:27 In principle is it knowable? And the answer is no. Whenever you make a measurement, it's rising relative to that system of measurement. So therefore the universe, the physical universe, Which exists out there prior to and independent of all measurements, sensory or technological, is unknowable in principle and therefore there's no reason in the world to posit its existence. Report an error

1:11:49 Therefore, we're going to stick with what we know to be true and not imagine there's a truth out there that nobody's ever seen. In other words, matter now, matter or the objective physical world has taken the status of God for non-contemplatives. Something we believe in, we worship, we believe is the ultimate ground of being, but nobody sees. Nobody can know, because God infinitely transcends the limits of the human mind, a very common theological perspective. Report an error

1:12:16 So I call scientific materialists, I call them materialogians, because they're talking about the ultimate nature of reality, which neither they nor anybody else has ever seen. Because whenever they make a measurement, it's always information. Report an error

1:12:33 Arising relative to a system of measurement, but information is not physical. So everything the scientists actually deal with is not physical. Information and appearances. Appearances and information. Neither one is physical. They've made a conceptual construct of physical, conceptual constructs of particles and fields, space, time, energy, but these are conceptual constructs superimposed upon that which is not physical. Report an error

1:13:01 And then considered to be ultimate and objectively real, but they're imagining that and never perceiving it. So the conclusion is all that really exists, all that we can know is awareness and the appearance is to awareness and so this is mind only. This mind only conclusion is not something derived on the basis of logical reasoning alone. Report an error

1:13:22 Instead, it requires a combination of experiential, contemplative inquiry into the nature of the mind and its relation to the world of the physical senses, together with the use of reason to make sense of one's observations. So many of the greatest proponents of the Chittamatra were some of the greatest epistemologists in the history of Buddhism, Thich Nhat Hanh, Dharmakirti and others. They believed in mind only, but they're also the primary pillars. Report an error

1:13:48 The greatest of the greats when it comes to epistemology and logic. Dignaga Dharmakirti, the greatest of all time in the Buddhist tradition. So it's not just empiricism, but it's making sense with reason of what we do experience and distinguishing between what we superimpose and what we actually experience. Report an error

1:14:06 This is a rational conclusion based upon empirical investigations using contemptative science rather than the materialistic science as we know it today. The culmination of such contemplative inquiry is not merely the intellectual formulation of a physical position, but rather an immediate, non-conceptual experience of the non-duality of subject and object. Report an error

1:14:28 So, the I is not in here, the I is not out there, and the I is not in between. But what they're suggesting is like systems thinking, systems thinking. And that is, we're not dealing with discrete chunks of reality that bump into each other. It's a very Newtonian view and a very Sartronic view, that there's chunks of matter out there and then there's units of consciousness here and they come together and bang and give rise to subjective impressions. Report an error

1:14:53 But in fact, if you look for those chunks of matter independent of all systems of measurement, you can't point to anything because all you can point to are impressions, information, observations made with a specific system of measurement. And so this means that That subject-object, in every case of subject-object, whether it's observing another person or the moons of Jupiter or observing your own thoughts and emotions, the act of observation is a system and not a combination of two independent units. Report an error

1:15:27 Therefore subject-object are always entangled. They're always fundamentally non-dual. Not the same, but not independent and coming together, but rising together. Rising together. Report an error

1:15:42 We're not even finished yet. We have at least another one. The Madhyamaka, the middle way, the one that's trying now to avoid all extremes, and I call this ontological relativism or ontological relativity. Report an error

1:15:55 So here's the Madhyamaka view. Now each one is critiquing the previous. So the Satrantika critiqued the dualistic reductionism of Vipashika. Chittamatra comes back and critiques. You say all these are representations of an objective reality, but who's ever seen that objective reality? All you get are representations, which means they're not representations, they're presentations. And the presentations are primary, not that which you think you're representing, because you're not representing, because you're never representing what was out there prior to the act of measurement. Report an error

1:16:26 So the Madhyamaka says, OK, well, wait a minute here. Now they're going to critique Chittamatra. So as I said, this is a very steep curve. If you've never heard of any of these four, then I should have given out seatbelts. Report an error

1:16:38 So Madhyamaka says, look, both matter and mind, these two categories, matter and mind, are simply conceptual constructs imputed upon appearances. The appearance is of your own awareness, the appearance is to your awareness, and neither one has any existence of its own independent of these conceptual imputations. Report an error

1:16:57 So just as the physical world has no inherent existence, it's not out there independent of all systems of measurement, has no inherent existence independent of words and concepts, neither does the world of the mind. mind, any independent existence independent of words and concepts. is no real physical world existing independently out there, and there is no real mental world existing independently independently. Report an error

1:17:24 So the materialist says that what's real is the physical world out there and mind and thought and consciousness, these are all derivative of, either identical to, Brain activity or derivative of complex configurations of physical phenomena, one of the two, is identical to something physical and real or an emergent property of that which is really real and that's the physical. Report an error

1:17:51 But that means all of our subjective experience is epiphenomenal, derivative, secondary, illusory and not to be taken very seriously. Let's get back to work, roll up our sleeves and get back to studying what's real and that's the objective, the physical quantifiable. The Chittamantrans said, well, you got that exactly wrong. That which you think is real doesn't exist at all. And the only thing that's real is awareness and appearances to awareness. Report an error

1:18:18 But then the Madhyamaka says, look, you Chittamantrans have just said that you have no grounds, no one has any authentic grounds for positing or affirming the existence of a physical universe independent of all measurements. Because it's unknowable in principle. And we will say the same thing is true of the mind or of awareness itself. And that is whenever you observe awareness, it's not a view from nowhere, to use Thomas Nagel's term. Report an error

1:18:43 It's not a view from nowhere, it's a view from your perspective. But now we're back to the same conundrum. You're observing your mind from your perspective, not from no one's perspective, not from God's perspective. And your perspective, as William James said, is fallible. And it's influenced by various factors. And so when you observe your own mind, This also is relative to the system of nourishment, directed inwards, but who has ever found the mind as a thing in itself independent of context, independent of anything outside of mind? Report an error

1:19:13 So the mind as an autonomous, absolutely real entity is no more findable than the physical world is findable. All you always have is always relative. It's an ontological relativity that goes right down to the ground. Report an error

1:19:30 This one's saying, you know, we're going to invite the physical world back in. There is a physical world when nobody's looking at it. But as soon as you conceive of it, when you think of atoms and particles and black holes and everything else, it does exist. It does exist when you're not looking at it. Yes, the moons of Jupiter existed before you looked at them. But when you say moons of Jupiter, you've just couched that in language, in a conceptual framework. Report an error

1:20:00 moons of Jupiter, atoms, particles, Higgs boson, they do exist. They do exist when you're not looking at them. So yes, using the Large Hadron Supercollider, they did discover the Higgs boson. Does the Higgs boson exist independently of the large Hadron supercollider? Yes. Does the Higgs boson exist independently of the conceptual framework in which it was conceived? Report an error

1:20:22 No. Because the word Higgs boson doesn't mean anything independently of the conceptual framework in which it was conceived. Report an error

1:20:31 So just as visual impressions arise relative to visual perception, so do all of our theoretical constructs about the universe. From elementary particles to galactic clusters, they do exist, but they exist relative to the mind that conceives them. And the mind that conceives them doesn't exist in and of itself. The mind that conceives them exists relative to the things that it conceives. Report an error

1:20:55 Visual perception doesn't exist independently. Visual perception exists only relative to visual appearances. Visual appearances arise relative to visual perception. They all are arising relatively and none of them is an ontological absolute. Neither matter nor mind. So Chittamatra, you got it half right and half wrong. In fact, you got it all wrong. Because you threw the baby out with the bathwater when it came to the physical world and you said there isn't any. Report an error

1:21:22 That all of physics is complete fiction existing only in the imaginations of physicists. And that's not true. The moons of Jupiter were out there before Galileo. He didn't make them up. is a physical world out there. There is a subjective world in here. And there are Report an error

1:22:01 dimensions of consciousness that exist independently. appearances independently of our physical measurements using telescopes and so forth and there are Report an error

1:22:03 independently of any physical basis. Now that's something science knows nothing about because they're only looking at things that do have a physical basis. They don't practice introspection. They've never developed samādhi. So if there is a dimension of consciousness that carries on beyond death, the behaviorists and the neuroscientists will be the last people to know. Report an error

1:22:22 Because all the behaviorists know is dead bodies don't behave and all the neuroscientists know is dead brains don't do anything except decompose. So if there's anything continual, they'll be the last people in the neighborhood to know. And the first people to know will be actually people are looking at consciousness and exploring subtler dimension of consciousness that may not be contingent upon the brain. Report an error

1:22:45 But these external physical and internal mental events do not inherently exist independently of conceptual designations. So the word conceive now really does have a double nuance. Conception is these are thoughts but also we are conceiving of the world. With our conceptual formulations, we're drawing things to existence by the power of conceptual designation. And they do exist. When I was first starting to ask these questions, I was being trained by Geshe Ugen Seten. Report an error

1:23:11 He's one of the great Madhyamaka masters living in, teacher of many of my teachers, Geshe Ngam Tagye, one of his teachers. And I was in my late 20s starting to ask these questions in quantum mechanics. And he took me aside and I was translating for him. And he said, Alan, be careful that you don't refute the existence of atoms. Don't get carried away here. Report an error

1:23:30 Atoms do exist, elementary particles do exist. We're not challenging whether they exist, we're challenging how they exist. Obviously I didn't forget what he said. And so by recognizing that these external, physical and internal mental phenomena do not inherently exist independent of conceptual designations, by recognizing the symmetry of the emptiness, the emptiness of inherent nature, the ding an sich, the existence in and of themselves of physical and mental phenomena, Objective and subjective, we avoid the philosophical extremes of both materialism and idealism. And we get there in a spirit of radical empiricism all the way through. Report an error

1:24:11 We continue, we're not done yet. There's something that is beyond but subsumes, embraces but is not limited to, the profound middleweight insights of the Madhyamaka, and that's Dzogchen, the Great Perfection. Where they highlight the one taste of purity and equality of all phenomena, saṃsāra, and the whole bandwidth of saṃsāra. Report an error

1:24:37 So the culmination, I'm suggesting here, the culmination of the path of radical empiricism that brought us from materialism to coming back to our senses and recognizing the mind is as real as matter, and right through satantika, yogacara and bhajamaka, the culmination of the path of radical empiricism occurs when we realize the non-duality of saṃsāra and nirvāṇa. Report an error

1:24:58 That they are not inherently separate, no longer bound within the miseries of the former, of saṃsāra, while not lost in the utter transcendence of the latter. So neither absorbed within saṃsāra, which we're very familiar with, nor completely leaving saṃsāra behind and being totally absorbed in the transcendence of nirvāṇa. Report an error

1:25:18 So this is the middle way of the Dzogchen, generally Mahāyāna. But then specifically there's Oak Chen, for the first time we are truly awake to the nature of the whole of reality, manifesting as displays of the non-duality of primordial consciousness and the absolute space of phenomena. Or Buddha mind and Dharmadhatu, Rigpa pristine awareness and Dharmadhatu, Buddha nature and emptiness, that there is a primordial non-duality of the deepest dimension of consciousness that is truly transcendent. Report an error

1:25:52 Beyond space and time and the deepest dimension of reality as a whole, which is Dharmadhatu, the absolute space of phenomena, out of which emerge all configurations of relative space, time and so forth. And this is the great perfection. Being perfectly awake to this great perfection, all that remains to be done is to awaken everyone else in the dream. Report an error

1:26:15 You awaken from the sense of the duality of saṃsāra and nirvāṇa. You awaken to the illusory nature of yourself as a sentient being. You identify your own Buddha, your own deepest nature, your primordial nature, and you awaken to the fact that you've never been other than a Buddha. Report an error

1:26:34 So the Dalai Lama is counted on this. He's quite a consummate master of Dzogchen himself. And he comments here, for us older people, this comes as a great sense of relief. When you rest the mind, putting it out of work, I feel like doing that every day, the vital energy is the prāṇa. Naturally become refined and solely by non-conceptual meditation. You slip into the clear light of the mind, into the clear light. That's primordial consciousness, pristine awareness, Buddha nature, Dharmakaya. Report an error

1:27:05 You slip into the clear light with the mind and vital energies. And that is your mind dissolves into its primordial ground. Your vital energies dissolve into the energy of primordial consciousness. This requires settling in complete inactivity, which is not easy. Report an error

1:27:23 That was my best shot. And I'm sure he was laughing when he said that. He said this in San Jose when he first taught Dzogchen. Well, not the first time, but one of the earliest times, back in 1990. But he's suggesting this kind of statement is unique to Dzogchen, Dzogchen Mahamudra. And that is that through that utter inactivity, that utter release of all activity to try to strive to become someone you are not, release that and you will realize who you have always been. Report an error

1:27:52 So moving on, I think I have a little bit of, not much time, I'm going to move on. So I could stop there, that would be fun. But I would like to bring this, because it sounds like we've gone way off into some esotericism of the mystical East. And I'd just like to come back to 20th century physics. Radical empiricism in physics is not all dumbbell materialism and so forth. Anton Seilinger is a very astute man, philosophically trained, brilliant experimental physicist, also a very nice person. Report an error

1:28:19 I know him personally, he's a wonderful human being. and done some of the most cutting-edge research in the foundations of quantum mechanics. He makes this statement, and it's a statement based on... He's a radical empiricist. If you get to know him, he is a radical empiricist. And this is what he says based on his experiments, which are world-class. I'm going to read it. Report an error

1:28:38 One may be tempted to assume that whenever we ask questions of nature, of the world there outside, there is reality existing independently of what can be said about it. We may be tempted to assume that. We, that is he, will now claim that such a position is void of any meaning. It is obvious that any property or feature of reality out there can only be based on information we receive, the system of measurement. Report an error

1:29:07 There cannot be any statement whatsoever about the world or about reality that is not based on such information. It therefore follows that the concept of a reality reality, at least the ability in principle to make statements about it, obtain information about its features is devoid of any possibility of confirmation or proof. Report an error

1:29:28 So as soon as you start talking about the world as it exists independently of measurement, you're neither here nor there. You can't confirm or disprove. This implies that the distinction between information, that is knowledge, and reality is devoid of any meaning. Report an error

1:29:46 You're not bringing two things together. But every time you have knowledge, it is intertwined with that which you are knowing. This is very familiar from what I just read. But this is now a man who has not studied Buddhism and is just coming straight out of physics. Report an error

1:30:01 Eventually what we are talking about is again a unification of very different concepts. The reader might recall that unification is one of the main themes of the development of modern science. Report an error

1:30:14 So that may strike you as familiar. Thomas Hertog, student of Stephen Hawking. A very fine theoretical physicist. I've heard a talk of his that was simply brilliant and I've extracted this from one of his talks quite recently. State of the art. He's right there. Cutting edge theoretical physics. Speaking of quantum, quantum reality, quantum cosmology, string theory, M-theory, he says you can think of that quantum reality a bit like a tree. Report an error

1:30:41 The branches represent all possible universes. We are part of the universe so we are And our observations select certain branches and hereby give meaning or give reality to our past in a quantum world. Quantum theory indicates that we may not be mere chemical scum, which is the view of materialists. Life and the cosmos are in the quantum theory a synthesis. Report an error

1:31:08 Life and the cosmos. A synthesis and our observations now give, in fact, reality to its earliest days. That even the history of the universe is rising relative to our observations in the present and do not exist independently of those observations. Report an error

1:31:27 Let's go on. Almost finished. Next one. There we are. Another one. This is a theoretical physicist, again world class, recipient of the Fundamental Physics Prize. I'm just highlighting these are not flaky people, new agey people. There's some of the creme de la creme of modern experimental and theoretical physicists. Report an error

1:31:46 Andrei Lind is very renowned. And he writes here, and I quote, the universe becomes alive, that is, it evolves, it transforms, it's time dependent only when one divides it into two parts, an observer and the rest of the universe. Then the wave function of the rest of the universe depends on the time measured by the observer. In other words, evolution, the whole transformation of the universe from the Big Bang, evolution is possible only with respect to the observer. Report an error

1:32:13 Without an observer, the universe is dead. It's called the problem of frozen time. If you take the observer out, there's no time, there's no transformation, the universe doesn't evolve. This is not flaky physics, this is very mainstream. So he raises his question now, will it not turn out, and we're missing the bottom line unfortunately, will it not turn out with the further development of science that the study of the universe and the study of consciousness will be inseparably linked and at ultimate progress and the one will be impossible without progress in the other. Report an error

1:32:43 After the development of a unified Geometrical description of the weak, strong electromagnetic and gravitational interactions, the next important step, will the next important step not be, and I can only paraphrase, the inclusion of consciousness in our fundamental understanding of the universe, that we've left it out and thought that was insignificant, that it was an accidental byproduct of chemical scum with maybe some electricity and warming. Report an error

1:33:11 They've trivialized consciousness almost to the point of non-existence. knowing anything about it. And it's the physicists, not the neuroscientists, the psychologists who are coming to the rescue. Report an error

1:33:23 And then, Report an error

1:33:38 well, check it out. Let's find out whether it's true or not. is that the last one? Okay, that's enough. Report an error

1:33:32 ends this in a way I think is delicious. Not with, I know the nature of reality, now listen, I just told you. Report an error

1:33:49 That's that. So that was a radically empirical approach to the study of consciousness that was also radical empiricism and Buddhism. So call it what you like. Any comments or questions? Yes, please, you betcha. Report an error

1:34:11 Quite so. Mind Report an error

1:34:21 -only school, huh? Report an error

1:34:25 Western historians make up a lot of stuff. They do. You know, they just do. I mean, I've been in that field for ten years, six years as a graduate student and four years as a lecturer in the finest religious studies department in the United States. There's a lot of conjecture there. But now, they may not be wrong, but they may not be right. First of all, if you check out the Pāli Canon, you can easily find this. Report an error

1:34:53 In the Pāli Canon and in the Melinda Pinya by the conversation between Nagasena and King Melinda or Mahinda in the Greek. Report an error

1:35:03 It's the analogy of a chariot. And you'll find it in the Pāli Canon with a nun, Vajira. is her name, raises the analogy of a chariot and then Nagasena, the great arhat, raises the analogy of a chariot. And so it's right there in the canon and in one of the most formidable commentaries in the whole Theravāda tradition. Report an error

1:35:26 And the gist of it is very simple. And that is what is a chariot? And is a chariot its wheels, its yoke, its planks? What is a chariot? When you look at individual parts and the conclusion is, well, none of those individual parts are a chariot. Nor are if you just roll the parts together, that's not a chariot. A chariot is a word and we impute it upon that configuration of the parts when we decide to. Report an error

1:35:54 But the existence of a chariot is not something that is happening objectively independently of our conceptual framework. That you can damage a chariot and you keep on damaging. At what point do you say there's no longer a chariot there? When you just stop calling it a chariot. And if you're making a chariot, at which point do you say this is... Report an error

1:36:13 A half-built chariot. This is a chariot that's almost completed. At what point is it a chariot that is almost completed or not quite completed? At what point is it a chariot when you say so? And so I've spoken with one of the top scholars of Pāli Canon and I just couldn't get any movement there. I think he was really, didn't want to stop being a Theravāda Buddhist because they said this is Madhyamaka in the Pāli Canon. Report an error

1:36:43 all phenomena There's nothing special about chariots. That goes for acorns and elementary particles and galaxies and people and everything else. What these two brief references are saying is that as we can look at a human being and say, well, what am I, a body or a mind? I'm not a body, I'm not a mind, I'm not simply a combination of the two. But if I look for myself outside of the configuration of body-mind, I'm not to be found. Look outside of the configuration of all the parts of a chariot and look if there's something separate from all the parts that is a chariot. Report an error

1:37:12 Not to be found, the chariot analogy is saying that the same mode of analysis that leads to the insight into the non-existence of an inherently existent self immediately implies the non-existence of a chariot. But if we're going to go to a chariot, that's a slippery slope and I'd be just taking in the entire physical universe. All the five skandhas and everything else. So that looks like Madhyamaka to me and that's Pāli Canon. Report an error

1:37:35 We don't get anything earlier than that. At the same time, all phenomena are preceded by the mind. Issue fourth of the mind, consist of the mind. That's the first verse of the first chapter of Dhammapada. That sounds like one heck of a lot like Chittamatra. All phenomena preceded by the mind, issue fourth of the mind, consist of the mind. And you'll find other similar statements. So basically, I don't believe that the Majjhama came first and that Chittamatra was something conceived by generations later. Report an error

1:38:11 I think you find seeds of all of them. The dialogue to bahiya in the scene left to be just seen, but also in the mentally perceived left to be just the mentally perceived, right? So the physical is the physical and the mental is the mental and go down to the brass tacks, the individual units, and you don't find a self out there or in here or anywhere else. Report an error

1:38:33 That's pretty much vipashika, you know? At the same time, the sautrantika is called sautrantika as in sūtra, ikka. Because it's so much based on the sutras. The Buddha referred to many things that are not simply matter or mind, like people and so forth. So it's pluralistic realism. And Theravāda Buddhism is an expression of metaphysical realism. Theravāda Buddhism. There is really a physical universe out there. Report an error

1:39:01 And that creates real conundrums for contemporary Theravāda Buddhists, if they're really thoughtful. Because there are accounts of the universe and earlier Buddhists and so forth that are extremely hard to square. Report an error

1:39:16 forth. And if you're a metaphysical realist, you're in a really tough spot. either have to throw out science or throw out the words of the Buddha. that's hard. Either one is hard. I would rather throw out metaphysical realism. Report an error

1:39:28 So that's my sense of it. Dzogchen, I've read statements in the Pāli Canon also that having studied, practiced, taught and translated and written about Dzogchen now for 27, 26 years, found things in the Pāli Canon that are very suggestive. Suggestive of Dzogchen as well. So I think they're coming all from the same source. That's my sense of it. Anything else coming up? Report an error

1:40:02 Yes, please, go ahead. Report an error

1:40:07 Absolutely. Report an error

1:40:12 Absolutely, sure. I Report an error

1:40:16 mean, perhaps the most famous phrase in the Heart Sūtra is, apart from form there is no emptiness, apart from emptiness there is no form, right? That non-duality. sūtra and diamond sūtra come back over and over again. Absolutely. Report an error

1:40:27 And then it goes, and then relative to emptiness, that's the best translation I think, relative to emptiness there is no form, there's no etc. There aren't the Four Noble Truths. There's no suffering, there's no achievement, there's no non-achievement. Relative to emptiness is simply showing the ontological relativity of all of them. Report an error

1:40:48 That from the perspective of ultimate reality, all of these exist only relatively. But do not have no root, as they say, have no root, no basis in reality as existing in and of themselves. And so when I speak of Dzogchen, it's just completely apparent to me, I think nothing could persuade me, that Dzogchen is not utterly compatible with Madhyamaka and specifically the view of Madhyamaka that many but not all Tibetan Buddhists embrace as the culmination. Report an error

1:41:19 The highest, most subtle interpretation of Madhyamaka, and that's Prasangika Madhyamaka. Many do, but not all. Whereas I've been trained, I was trained in Galupa for the first 20 years, and just unequivocally, this is the subtlest. No phenomenon has any existence whatsoever, independent of the conceptual designation of it. The phenomena writes relative to conceptual designation. Report an error

1:41:43 Designation. Then I've studied the teachings on emptiness and dependent origination within Dzogchen. That's exactly what it says. Specifically the writings of Dujung Lingpa. I've translated it. And we make up atoms. There's a nice quip. It's nice to have sound bites. They're really useful on occasion. So don't believe in atoms. They make up everything. Yeah, I like that. Report an error

1:41:54 a today they were selling t Report an error

1:42:13 Or I like another t-shirt I've seen because I spent 14 weeks in a one-on-one tutorial that I requested studying the four equations of James Clerk Maxwell. The four equations that explain all the realities of electromagnetism throughout the universe. Four equations did it, yeah? And so there's an equation, there's a t-shirt that lays these four equations out. They're quite short, incredibly beautiful. That's what I wanted to see. So I studied four equations for 14 weeks. Report an error

1:42:40 And so it lays out these four. And then said, God spoke and there was light. But coming back to the earlier point, John Wheeler, and I didn't cite him here, but he was the voice behind these voices. John Wheeler was one of the great formulators of quantum cosmology, which we saw referred to by Anton Seilinger, Andrei Linde, and so on. Thomas Hertogh also. Report an error

1:43:05 And John Archibald Wheeler, who died just a few years ago at the age of 98, He was one of the primary formulators of taking the principle of quantum mechanics and applying them to the entire universe, looking at the whole universe as a quantum system. And what he drew out of this, brilliant theoretical physics, of the stature of Richard Feynman, he's right up there with Richard Feynman, and his soundbite is, it's from bits, and the it's are little chunks of matter, Higgs boson, particles, fields, waves, space, time, those are it's. Report an error

1:43:39 But he said instead of thinking of it's, And that is space-time matter-energy, the four Gospels, as being fundamental and information emerging from matter, matter-energy. Instead of thinking that, he turns it on the head, just like Galileo turned on the head. Instead of everything going around the earth, everything in the solar turns around the sun. Turning on the head is kind of a cool thing that brilliant people do. Report an error

1:44:02 To just finish the thought, that it's widely assumed by his peers, and still to this day, That everything really boils down to space, time, matter, energy. Almost all biologists believe that because they don't study physics very much. They don't study 20th century physics. Hardly any of them do. Neuroscientists don't. They don't have time. And so skipping 20th century, 21st century physics then the assumption is that the its are absolutely fundamental and consciousness, information, everything else emerges out of complex configurations or organization of matter. Report an error

1:44:36 But then John Wheeler, in this spirit of saying, what do we really know? And what we know is information. And information is not physical. And it's out of information that we human beings conceive of the categories of particles, fields, waves, space, time and so forth. It's from bits, bits of information. From information we construct the derivative categories of physical and mental and different types of physical. Report an error

1:45:07 But what is primary is information. He said that's primary. And so, in other words, the entire universe, he says, I'm quoting him very closely here, the entire universe is best understood as an information processing system. But he emphasizes information is semantic information. That is, it's not simply the physicist's notion of information as corresponding to the degree of complexity or organization, which is physical, quantifiable. Report an error

1:45:35 Semantic information always has a referent. It means something. Where simply complexity doesn't refer to anything else. But the word house is not just a configuration of noise. It refers to something. House. Outside of itself. So he's saying that information, semantic information, is fundamental to the universe. Report an error

1:45:58 Information is primary. Semantic, meaningful, he emphasizes. It's not my interpretation. Meaningful information is fundamental to the entire universe. But of course, meaningful information does not exist unless there's something that it refers to. There's no information that doesn't refer to anything. Report an error

1:46:16 Then it's not semantic information. So now we have two elements. There has to be that which the information is referring to. Let's call it the informata. And then the information that's referring to it. But this is meaningful information. Well, there's no such thing as meaningful information unless there's someone who's informed. A book is not informed of anything. Report an error

1:46:37 There's no information in the book. If that's the only thing existing in the universe is a book, it's just matter with ink. But there's no information there, unless there's some conscious being that put it in and can get it out. And so there is no such thing as information without someone who's informed. There's no such thing as somebody being informed without being conscious. You can't be unconsciously informed of anything. Report an error

1:47:00 So now we have a triad. There has to be consciousness for there to be information. No consciousness, no information, but if there's no information, there's no one who's informed, because you're not informed of anything. But if there's no information, that's not something you're informed about. But then you can't speak of something you're informed about without having information about it. So we have three now. This is straight Madhyamaka. We have three. Report an error

1:47:26 And information is primary, but information exists only relative to the informata and the informed. Take out one, the other two vanish. Any one of them, the other two vanish, which means none of those three are independently existent. Because if they were, they would stand even when the other two are gone. Report an error

1:47:45 But this means that consciousness lies at the very foundation of reality. And the notion that it comes from complex configurations of electricity and chemicals is complete fantasy. Report an error

1:47:59 With no basis, no empirical basis at all. It's just a widespread belief. It's a superstition. Interesting, yeah? Report an error

1:48:09 Yes, please, go ahead. Report an error

1:48:16 I couldn't hear. You said you couldn't see the scientific revolution happening in your lifetime. I said I hope it does, but I don't know whether it will or not. When it does finally happen, what do you think the results will be? And do you think technology moving the way it is, it could have an impact on you? Report an error

1:48:37 It would be amazing if it didn't. Because William James himself says that when this happens, I think it was he, pretty sure it was he, So that type of revolution will cast all the preceding revolutions in shadow. I mean, in terms of your own life, just take it very personally. Can you recall any decisions you've made through your 20-some years, I presume, maybe 30? Any decisions you've made over the course of your life that were different because the earth goes around the sun rather than vice versa? Report an error

1:49:08 It is a revolution, but not for you. How about the notion that species are not static, that they actually evolve and mutate with genetic imputation and survival over millions and millions of years? Has that influenced any of the decisions you've made? But you believe it, right? Darwinian evolution is tremendous, very compelling. So there are revolutions. But 42 % of Americans believe the universe is less than 10,000 years old. Report an error

1:49:43 that the... The sun goes around the earth. Yeah. Check it out. Check it out. It's the omniscient Google said so. How could Google do that? I asked Google and Google spoke. I am the prophet. And that's there. You know, the poll's been done. They've done again and again and again and it's, you know, it's the fundamentalist Christianity. Report an error

1:50:04 I mean, they're all the red states and all the ones that are voting for Trump. And I'm not kidding. They think he's a really smart guy and they think the universe is less than 10,000 years old. Report an error

1:50:15 There is a certain And so they are brilliant revolutions. Galileo's revolution, Einstein, Niels Bohr, Max Planck, their revolution, brilliant. The Darwinian revolution, brilliant. But the impact of the revolution has not touched all of humanity and many people don't even really understand it. Whereas if this is true, that is multiple dimensions of consciousness, just the Buddha's first insight that this is one of many lives, If this Report an error

1:50:54 became a scientific discovery, with open-minded, critical, rigorous scientists, world-class, working with contemptatives who are tapping into that level of samādhi, in a controlled experiment, the most rigorously designed experiment, and when people start reporting memories from past lives, it's studied exhaustively by people who don't believe it, who don't want to believe it, but they are open-minded enough that if the evidence, ...forces them to, then they will. If that should happen, then that will be published in Scientific American and the premier journals and still a lot of people will turn away. Report an error

1:51:37 If they turn away from, you know, if they still believe in a 10,000 year old universe, a lot of people will say, well that's not what I believe. Because many people don't believe in science at all. But for those of us who are educated, intelligent, open-minded... who do believe that Galileo, Einstein, Darwin and so forth have made brilliant discoveries, they will see that materialism is shattered. Report an error

1:52:00 It has lost all credibility. All, completely. I mean, it's in rags. It's burnt. It's ashes. That it was enormous, widespread delusion that was embraced uncritically by the media and by almost all branches of science. And that will be Very embarrassing for many people who have staked their entire reputations on it, refused ever to critically examine it, assuming they could get away with it forever, like believing uncritically in Aristotle and all the beliefs of medieval scholasticism and enforcing it with the tyranny of the Church. Report an error

1:52:42 That if you disbelieve, we're going to punish you. Disbelieve, question, as a neuroscientist today, question. The assertion that mind is simply a function of the brain and you're looking at excommunication. You're looking at the loss of job, loss of funding, loss of credibility, loss of tenure. If you've got tenure, then you'll be just insignificant. They know how to punish. And it's not only in neuroscience, it's elsewhere. Question materialism and you're going to find yourself in deep doo-doo very quickly. Report an error

1:53:10 And I know this by listening to one philosopher friend of mine. He's very prestigious, so Dow Chair and all of that. And he told me, Alan, I believe a lot of what you say, but I cannot say that publicly. I cannot say it publicly. You and I can talk. That's why I'm not mentioning his name. I can't say this publicly. Report an error

1:53:27 And so they fear. They're living in fear, actually. They're not living in fear if they don't question it themselves, but if they do, they know, don't question it publicly. My dear friend Francisco Varela, who is, I think he took materialism as a working hypothesis, but not as dogma. He's a lovely man, a fantastic man to talk with. Report an error

1:53:46 I really miss him still. Report an error

1:53:50 But he was open to the possibility of looking into these things because he had so much prestige, he had such renown, he had such security financially. He had a job that was lifelong, lifelong money to do research for the rest of his life. So people like him could be bold because he had nothing to fear. Report an error

1:54:10 But unless you're there, the only other people who are fearless are people who are retired. Then they're not trying to raise money anymore. Science is so money-bound these days, and you cannot get anywhere unless you get funding for your research. You don't research, you don't publish anything, you don't publish anything, you're insignificant, you disappear, you're a non-entity. Report an error

1:54:32 And if you want to conduct research, you have to go where the money is, and all the money, virtually with no exception, is to fund research within the paradigm of materialism. And if you step out, you've just stepped on very thin ice. Report an error

1:54:47 So he told me, Francisco told me that back in the 1990s, he died in 2001, but he told me back in the 1990s, when he was keenly interested in consciousness, but he's a cognitive neuroscientist, he's mainstream, and he said back then, so he's speaking of his field, just collaborating with other internationally renowned neuroscientists, he said, we could never even talk about consciousness in the lab. Report an error

1:55:15 You couldn't talk. Do not mention the word consciousness. Don't talk about it. The only time we could talk about it was over tea. It's kind of like off the record. Nobody's around. No reporters. Nobody's going to be peer review. Okay, over tea. What do you think about consciousness? It makes me really uncomfortable. How about you? So I'm Report an error

1:55:42 hoping that it will be your generation. My generation, scientists of my generation. Well, I think we're living according to the principle laid out by Max Planck, founder of quantum mechanics. And he says, science progresses funeral by funeral. Report an error

1:56:00 And frankly, people of my generation are scientists. They've made their, almost without exception, they've made their reputations, their publications, their awards, their full professorships rooted in materialism. And they cannot budge any more than those two contemporaries of Galileo. Cannot budge. But the next generation, who hasn't yet climbed up the ladder, burn the ladder. Because our generation has to die off. Report an error

1:56:27 Please don't help us, we'll do it in time. I'm not suggesting, you know, wipe us out. We'll die naturally, but as we do, then we'll step aside and another generation will come in. And I think we'll come in basically bored of materialism. Because what's more deadly than boredom? Report an error

1:56:46 If you like it, then you want to keep it. If you hate it, you keep on juicing it up by hating it. Just like all the people talking about Trump. Every time they talk about Trump, they bring him to the light again. That's what the media did. They keep on telling him as they hate him and then he gets more and more famous. Whereas if you ignore Trump, then he'd just be one sleazy billionaire. Report an error

1:57:07 And who would care? But we talk about him so much, that's why he's in the news. Four out of five items is about Trump. People who love him, people who hate him. What I want to do is just let him go home and have a happy life with his kids, seem to really love him. I think that's good. He seemed like a really good father. Report an error

1:57:26 I wish he'd just stay home and be a good dad, not get into mischief. Report an error

1:57:33 He didn't come here to hear my political views. And so have a good night. I wish you all well. Thank Report an error

1:57:54 you so much Alan for a stimulating and revolutionary evening. We look forward to the next revolution. Report an error

1:58:09 look forward to inviting you having you come back here we do always invite you back future hopefully next year see you Good night all. Report an error

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Talk by B. Alan Wallace. Original at Vajrayana Institute via Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/2016EmpiricismInBuddhismVI. Licensed CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. Transcript generated automatically and may contain errors; the audio is the authoritative version.

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