← B. Alan Wallace

Four Applications Of Mindfulness Retreat 2013 with B. Alan Wallace (part 41)

B. Alan Wallace · 2013 · 53 min · Vajrayana Institute via Internet Archive

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  • 3:28

    So for starters, we can simply practice shamatha. And that is simply placing the awareness there and attending closely, but without questions. We can do that, in which case, shamatha on the space of the mind. Or we can start posing questions as I did, in which case, as soon as we're posing questions, like does it have a color, does it have a century, a periphery, a shape, a size, location, those are questions.

  • 7:14

    And then when they come to the dogmatic conclusion, that which we cannot measure doesn't exist. That's where I jump off the boat. Whether it's a religious fundamentalist saying that which isn't found in our scripture doesn't exist, or that which we can't find with our methodologies doesn't exist, it just strikes me as all equally silly. Religious fundamentalists, scientific materialists, in my book they're in the same category. But coming back to the point, there clearly is a physical system here, independence upon which visual perception arises.

  • 23:38

    Such that when you bump into it, you'll know it. Right? And so consciousness is said to have simply two defining characteristics. And they're unique to consciousness. Anything that has these two characteristics is consciousness. And anything that is consciousness has these two. Now there's many types of consciousness.

  • 42:20

    Pretty clear now. And it's also quite large, isn't it? You look for parameters, borders and so forth, shape. You may be looking for something that does not exist, but the space of the mind does exist. But then in the second session, then we deliberately withdrew the attention from space. If you're doing it as I was hoping you were doing it, trying to instruct, that you're no longer attending to space. Not even to space itself, let alone a visual object, a thought, or even the space of the mind. You're just resting there.

  • 50:50

    This is the substrate. What's appearing to you is the substrate, and the consciousness with which you experience it is the substrate consciousness. So in the second session, this is where we'll stop, the second session, in contrast to the first one in which we're attending to the substrate, the space of the mind, in the second one we withdraw even from the substrate, let alone all the objects of our sense fields, and withdraw right into the substrate consciousness, stay home and let awareness illuminate itself. Hence it's called self-illuminating consciousness.

0:05 So I'd like to now with words draw a clear distinction between these two practices and the referent of the object of attention in each of these practices. So in the first place we're attending to, attending to the space of the mind, we're looking at something. There is a directionality, there's a vector of attention, it has an object, but that object is very intangible. Report an error

0:33 That is, thoughts themselves are not very tangible, but at least there's a clear target. You can imagine a lamb, you can think Mary had, etc. So it's clearly an object, even though it's non-physical. But when we attend to the space of the mind, that's of course even less tangible. But a major issue in that practice is when invited to focus on the space of the mind, are you now being invited to look at nothing at all, something that doesn't exist? Report an error

1:03 In which case you really can't do it. And I would suggest that the space of the mind does exist, which is to say it does have qualities and they can be observed. So let's take as an analogy. I'll just look straight ahead, look over in the direction of Don. And I can see Don way over yonder, maybe 30 feet away. Report an error

1:25 But then I'm going to withdraw, just like a camera lens. I'm going to withdraw the focus since I'm no longer focusing on his sweater, for example. But simply as if I'm turning the rotating, the focus ring on a camera lens, I'll just focus inwards to about 15 feet and I'm looking at the space in between and I'm seeing something. Report an error

1:49 I'm seeing something that's transparent, has kind of a brightness to it, although that's not quite the right word, but I don't have a better one. It's translucent, has no shape, has no color, and I'm looking at it. Report an error

2:04 And I can see also how much there is of it. That is, I can focus back to 5 feet, back to 3 feet and then out to 25 feet and it's very homogenous. So I'm not looking at nothing. I'm looking at something and it's within this visual space that colors and shapes arise. So just as visual space is not nothing, it is something that has qualities and it is the domain, the space, the field in which visual impressions, visual appearances, Or philosophers call them visual qualia, arise. Likewise, I would suggest that the space of the mind is also something, and it is quite analogously the domain, the space or field, I use those words interchangeably, in which thoughts and images, dreams, appear. Report an error

2:58 Dreams don't appear nowhere, they appear somewhere, and where they appear is the space of the mind. And so when one is focusing on the space of the mind, then one is focusing on something. And there tends to be a sense, kind of a conate sense, that there's awareness here and we're looking at the space over there. Report an error

3:16 Some kind of a differentiation, even a difference in location. Awareness here, space over there. That seems to be the case. And we can investigate this. So for starters, we can simply practice shamatha. And that is simply placing the awareness there and attending closely, but without questions. We can do that, in which case, shamatha on the space of the mind. Report an error

3:42 Or we can start posing questions as I did, in which case, as soon as we're posing questions, like does it have a color, does it have a century, a periphery, a shape, a size, location, those are questions. So we're really probing into its nature, and as soon as we start inquiring in that fashion, then we're engaging in Vipassanā. Report an error

4:01 So we did that. In that first session. And this is really very deep exploration. This is a direct inquiry into the very nature of the mind, the space of the mind. And you won't get any answers at all if you're looking at the brain. Because the brain has a location. It has mass. It has charge. A whole bunch of stuff. It's physical. That's very easy. Report an error

4:23 But you don't learn anything about the space of the mind by looking at neurons. Or let alone behavior. It won't give you a clue. And so the only way, if you're going to... If there are to be any discoveries to be made about the space of the mind, then it's going to be like, when you almost say, pardon me, the, looking at it. Report an error

4:42 And we can look at it. And then we can ask, okay, how big is it? The space of the mind. And here, Buddhist phenomenology, because Buddhism is really very phenomenological, or in the spirit of William James, radically empirical in many, many ways. And so we can take what are called the 18... The 18 elements of our phenomenal existence, of our phenomenal world. I won't go through all of them, but they're actually very simple. So I'll go through them just very briefly. Report an error

5:09 Six modes of consciousness. So the five sensory and mental. That's easy. And then there are six faculties, independent upon which these six modes of consciousness arise. So there's dependent origination there. So quite clearly, visual perception. Arises independence upon a visual faculty. No doubt about it, the Buddhist understanding of the visual faculty is different than that of modern science. They're coming at it in different ways. Report an error

5:38 But we can certainly rely a lot on modern science here. They know a lot about visual perception, the role of the retina, the optic nerve, the visual cortex. And so certainly we would say that whole system, that physical system, is clearly, it's something physical and it is the faculty independence upon which visual perception arises. Report an error

5:57 If you damage any part of it, like damage your retina, you may not see anymore, you may see poorly. A friend of mine had an injury in which just his optic nerve was damaged, just for one eye. He doesn't see through that eye anymore. So that was part of the causal link, damage the optic nerve, so he's blind in one eye now. And then there's all kinds of damage that then occur to the visual cortex. Report an error

6:23 This has been studied a lot. Damage in one way and your vision modifies and then of course damage it sufficiently you won't see anymore. So this is quite understandably why materialists come to the conclusion that the mind is what the brain does. If we take a subset, visual perception is what the visual cortex does or rather more accurately what the whole physical system from starting from the retina and going back to the optic nerve and then going back to the visual cortex. Report an error

6:52 It's very easy to think that Vision is what that whole physical optical system does, but even that's not quite correct because you need some input, photons, electromagnetic waves. But if you include that, they say, okay, now you see. I can understand why they say that, but it's only a partial truth because what, of course, scientists can't measure is non-physical influences. Report an error

7:14 And then when they come to the dogmatic conclusion, that which we cannot measure doesn't exist. That's where I jump off the boat. Whether it's a religious fundamentalist saying that which isn't found in our scripture doesn't exist, or that which we can't find with our methodologies doesn't exist, it just strikes me as all equally silly. Report an error

7:31 Religious fundamentalists, scientific materialists, in my book they're in the same category. But coming back to the point, there clearly is a physical system here, independence upon which visual perception arises. Same thing for auditory, auditory cortices, olfactory lobes, of course the faculty for taste. Report an error

7:50 The faculty for tactile sensations, so all of these have their respective physical sense bases or faculties. And then there's the mind and the faculty of mental consciousness. I won't go into that right now, but it's said to be non-physical. That's the real clincher. The faculties, the indriya, they're called in Sanskrit, where the five physical senses are themselves physical. Report an error

8:14 They're made of atoms. But the faculty, in dependence upon which mental consciousness arises, It's said to be non-physical and for very, very good reason, but we won't go there right now. We'll keep on moving. So we have the six modes of consciousness. We have the six faculties, in dependence upon which those six modes of consciousness arise. Report an error

8:32 And then we have a third set, and that is the six fields, domains, spaces. The visual field, it's elliptical. If you have two eyes that work, it's elliptical. Report an error

8:45 You can look at it, you can kind of see its borders. You look straight ahead, you can see, or you can draw a line around it. You can take your finger and just say, okay, I've got a finger, now I don't have, okay, it's right there, and then you can just draw, you know, etch a sketch. Just draw a line around it, you'll find it's elliptical, that you're getting colors and shapes within that field and you're not getting anything out of that field, outside that field. Report an error

9:12 And so visual space, quite obvious. And then there's auditory, which doesn't have any clear parameters. You can't draw lines around it. There's olfactory domain of experience, gustatory and tactile. Report an error

9:28 And then there's the sixth one, the space domain or field of mental phenomena. That's where it gets very interesting. This is all phenomenological. Nothing here has to believe, taken on faith. We are experts, or at least we have the potential to be experts. With regards to our own first-person experience, which nobody else can see unless they're clairvoyant, and no scientist can see using the methods of science. So it does give us some privileged access here. Report an error

9:56 And so when it comes to the domain of mental events, we can ask, okay, how big is it? Well, first of all, in contrast, Buddhist phenomenology, and again, this doesn't mean it's infallible. It could be a good working hypothesis. See for yourself whether it's true. But the Buddhist hypothesis is that for the five sensory domains, the visual and so forth, that they're non-overlapping. That is, what you see you can't hear. Report an error

10:21 What you hear you can't taste. What you can taste you can't smell. Even if they're somewhat similar, they're not the same. What you can tactically perceive you can't smell or see or hear. And so these are said to be five non-overlapping domains of experience. Report an error

10:40 And then we have mental perception or mental awareness, mental consciousness. And mental consciousness has its own unique domain that is inaccessible. By way of vision, you can't see it, you can't hear, smell, taste or touch it. Report an error

10:55 So just like the visual perception has its own unique domain that you can't hear, taste, touch and so forth, the mental consciousness also has its own unique domain. And that is the domain that's left over, for example, when you're sound asleep and you're dreaming. Your five physical senses are largely dormant. Report an error

11:14 Picking up, again, no signal. That can change when somebody taps you on the shoulder or what have you, but leaving that aside. When the five physical senses are shut down and the whole flow of your awareness is flowing to the mental domain, well, you have a lot more of it than as if you had one kind of one volume of awareness and it's split into six fields. Report an error

11:36 That means there's going to be less for each of the six, right? When you take that which could flow into all six and you put them all into one, The mental domain, then no wonder your visualizing ability is one heck of a lot better when you're dreaming than it is when you're in the waking state. There's a lot of competition in the waking state, especially from the visual, auditory and tactile. Report an error

11:57 So trying to visualize a little lamb, you kind of get it, kind of phase in and out, some people better, some people worse. But have a dream of a lamb, that can be as real as seeing a lamb, touching a lamb, smelling a lamb. It can be really multimodal, smell, touch, taste. Maybe. Look at it. But the point there is that when you're dreaming, all of the flow of awareness is in that one domain and so you get a lot of high resolution, multimodal. Report an error

12:25 You can see it, hear it and taste it and so forth. And that's a unique domain of the mind. One may of course find neurocorrelates of this person is dreaming about this or they recently found the neurocorrelates of people thinking about numbers. And they did that with a whole bunch of trials, asking people, what are you thinking about? Please think about numbers. A whole bunch of trials. And then they found, oh, there's a regularity here. When people are thinking about numbers, this particular type of brain activity takes place. Report an error

12:54 And so now, and then the headline read, scientists can now read the mind. It's really some of the stupidest journalism I've seen in my life. Science reporting is pathetic these days. But of course, they're not reading the mind, it's reading brain correlates. Correlated to subjective experience, and the people have told you what the subjective experiences are. That's how you know. You're not reading the mind, you're reading the brain correlates, and you've learned like a Rosetta Stone, this corresponds to something else which you can't see. Report an error

13:20 Namely, they're thinking about colors, or they're thinking about numbers. So in any case, scientists may very well be able to find out, through a whole process of looking at correlates and getting first-person reports, the kind of things that you're dreaming about, but only you know what you're dreaming of. Report an error

13:36 And that may be true for a very long time. So you have unique access there. It's taking place in the space of the mind. And it's a unique space. That is, you don't get it by any other means. But now is the space of the mind that limited? This is again, this is all the passion on the nature of the mind. We are closely applying mindfulness to the nature of mind. Report an error

13:56 I'm not simply rambling here. It's all very relevant. So we can ask, well, how big is the space of the mind? And does the space of the mind... Does it overlap with any other fields or is it also confined to its own unique domain such that nothing else can get in but it can't get out? That is visual perception can't jump outside its box and go over and look at sounds or look at tastes. It has to stay in its own box. But mental consciousness is different. Report an error

14:26 Mental consciousness, that's a rover. It roves all the time and we're all very familiar with that. And that is mentally, mentally I can look over at Jenny. And so I'm directing my eyes over there, seeing your body, seeing the color and shape of your body, with my visual awareness, mostly clothes actually. Report an error

14:47 Happily, this is good for all of us. Especially when it comes to an old geezer like me. But colors and shapes, that's what I'm really seeing. And so there it is, I'm looking. But I'm also directing my attention. And I know I'm not just looking at colors and shapes, I'm looking at a person. A person by way of colors and shapes. Report an error

15:04 And so clearly I'm directing my mental consciousness, and I'm mentally aware, that's Jenny, and that's not Jenny, you know, and so forth. And so now we see, I can now listen to sounds, which I'm doing, and then I can direct my mental awareness to tactile sensations, which we were doing, tactile sensations of the breath at the nostrils. Report an error

15:24 So we see, mental consciousness has like a Uriel pass. It gets to travel in any of the countries, any of the six countries. It has free access. It has a visa. Let's go anywhere. Everything else, they're all quarantined within their own little country. Visual perception has to stay in the visual. But the mental is a rover. And it roves a lot. Sometimes going more to the auditory. Then it slips over to the visual. Report an error

15:49 Then you feel an itch in your leg. And it conjures the tactile. And then you're thinking about something. It's gone into the mental domain. But it slips off to the mental domain. And you say, oh, what's that fragrance? And so forth. So the domain of mental consciousness is a domain of which we are aware by way of mental consciousness. Report an error

16:11 So it gets very interesting when we ask, where is it? Where is the domain? You can say the visual domain is kind of right in front of you because you don't see anything behind you. Auditory is all over, including you can hear sounds inside your body, coming from within the body, as well as outside, of course. But where is this mental domain? Report an error

16:30 This mental domain, this datu, of phenomena that are apprehended by way of mental consciousness. And just to point out the obvious, but it's not all that obvious until we do it. You can look at the top of my head, visually, and then you can direct your attention, which means now you're directing your mental consciousness to the top of my head. Report an error

16:49 And many of you know what's coming. Can you imagine Mickey Mouse on top of my head? Mickey Mouse, about four or five inches high? A little bit larger than life? See his big smile, big ears, and he's waving, saying, Hi kids! I'm holding very still so he won't fall off. So I'm hoping we have about 50, 55 or so Mickey Mouses all converging in there. Report an error

17:13 I'm the Mickey Mouse pedestal. And so, to varying extent, some of you are probably quite good at it, some others, perhaps a little bit vague. But nevertheless, you can place, can't you? You can place that image right on top of my head. Yeah, not a problem. No big deal. But now, you can say, well, If I ask you, where was that image of Mickey Mouse located? And if you did what I suggested, well it's located right on top of your head. He's kind of the Mickey Mouse crown. Report an error

17:42 And that's quite true. That's where you see it. But of course you're not visually seeing it, because we visually see things stimulated by photons coming in. That's why I'm seeing blue, because of a certain frequency of photons coming in. And not something else. Whereas obviously there's no photons coming from Mickey Mouse. I mean, there's just air there. And so you're seeing Mickey Mouse, but not with visual perception. Report an error

18:05 But although it is in the visual field, because you know exactly where it is, it's right above my head, and that's within your visual field. So you're seeing the Mickey Mouse with mental consciousness, within the visual domain. Report an error

18:20 So mental consciousness cannot not only perceive visual imagery, which we do, it does. And mental consciousness can, of course, attend to sounds, but mental consciousness is also creative, and it's very creative a lot of the time. And that is we create images, whether they're these free, how do you say, the free creations of dreams, or our many imaginations, our projections upon reality, all of these are spewing forth from mental consciousness, which has this dual aspect to it. Report an error

18:51 So interesting. And that is consciousness. Consciousness. is defined in Buddhism utterly phenomenologically. I've read many, many definitions now from psychologists, philosophers. None of them agree and none of them really have any way of testing their hypotheses. Frankly, I find them quite useless because if a definition, if a definition is to be useful, to my mind, and this is great Buddhist talk, so I find this very reasonable on the part of Buddhism, if a definition is to be useful, once you've learned the definition of something, you should be able to use that definition To identify the defined object when you see it. So if you don't know, I'll tell you a type of fruit. You've probably never heard this name before, but the fruit is called the Kela. Report an error

19:38 Kela, K-E-L-A. If you know Hindi, you'll know it. Tibetans use this term. But a Kela, I'm giving it away right away, it's a type of fruit. But unless you know Hindi, or Tibetans use the term, you won't know how to identify a Kela when you see it. How would you have a clue? But I'm going to give you a clue. I'm going to start giving you a list, a fairly short list of defining characteristics. And then when you see a kela, you'll know it. Report an error

20:07 And then you'll know that definition was useful. So you ready for the defining characteristics of kela? It's a fruit. It's kind of shaped somewhat crescent-like. And it's yellow. I Report an error

20:21 think somebody's already got it. It's got a thick skin that chimpanzees like, but I think human beings generally don't. I think I don't need to go on, that was probably enough already, right? And then we can do that for all kinds of things, for a football, for a lamp, for a sun versus a moon, and so forth and so on. Report an error

20:39 This is how definitions are really useful. And that is, okay, you gave another click, and you know what happened there? Here's Buddhist epistemology, I think it's so cool. This is by a process of elimination. Report an error

20:51 And that is when I said kela is a fruit, you just cast aside everything that's not fruit. You're not thinking about vegetables, minerals, planets, electrons and so forth. Boy, now we just have this left over. And then I said crescent shape. Okay, everything is not crescent shape. Out. Yellow. Everything is not yellow. Out. And then we're pretty much finished. Thick skin. Okay. Out. Report an error

21:16 It's not a peach. Not an apple. And process of elimination. What's the one thing left standing? That's how we conceptually identify things. Using definitions. It's process of elimination. I think it's actually true. Quite interesting. When we conceptually identify something by way of a definition, and then once we've conceptually identified it, so you're going through the fruit market, to the grocery store, and you're looking around, okay, Alan was talking about those kelas. Report an error

21:44 Imagine you didn't know what a banana was. And he said, Alan's talking about kelas. Ha! I'm in the fruit department. That's got to be a kela. Maybe, you know, if you didn't know a banana, now you know what a kela is. And then that enabled you to conceptually identify it. Because yeah, that fits everything and nothing else fits that. And then you can buy one and you can put it in your mouth. Report an error

22:08 Preferably after you've peeled it. And then you, now not by a process of elimination, by a process of affirmation. You actually stick the banana in your mouth and you bite down and you chew it. Then no process of elimination there. You are getting something that is positively presenting itself to you. Report an error

22:27 And now you know the taste of banana. And if you want to chew into the peel, you can know the taste of the peel as well and its texture and all of that. But that's it. So the conceptual designation enabled you to find it, but doesn't really give you a clue of what it tastes like. Now, actually, it's really, really interesting. Report an error

22:48 I won't elaborate there, but it does get, continues to be interesting as we pursue that. But so there was a very useful, and we got it so quickly. Definition of Akela that led you right to it. Well, if there's going to be a definition of consciousness, it shouldn't be a Buddhist definition that's only good for Buddhists, or a philosophical definition that only philosophers can understand, and so forth and so on. Report an error

23:11 And there are plenty of those, and they by and large don't agree with each other at all. And many people equating it, since they don't understand it, they equate it with something they do understand. Oh, consciousness is simply the same as neuronal configuration, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's really cheap. Report an error

23:26 You don't understand it, so you simply equate it with something you do understand and say, vision accomplished. That's really pseudoscience. So let's just try a phenomenological definition of consciousness. Such that when you bump into it, you'll know it. Right? And so consciousness is said to have simply two defining characteristics. Report an error

23:48 And they're unique to consciousness. Anything that has these two characteristics is consciousness. And anything that is consciousness has these two. Now there's many types of consciousness. Visual, auditory, inferential, perceptual, and so forth and so on. Consciousness of fantasies, consciousness of memories, but they all have something in common. Report an error

24:07 And the first of the common qualities is cognizance. Cognizance, nice simple term. Do you know it or not? Do you know it or not? As I gaze over at Jenny's jumper there, do I know the color or not? The answer is, yeah, I do. I could be deluded, but yes, I know something. I do know something. Yeah, it's a shade of blue. And so that's the cognizance. Do you know the feeling in your stomach right now? Report an error

24:38 Do you know whether your mind is agitated or calm right now? Well, you do because of consciousness. And so consciousness has that quality that it cognizes. It is capable of cognizing. It cognizes. One of the biggest superstitions nowadays is that the brain cognizes. Report an error

25:01 There's no evidence for that at all. It's so odd that almost everybody in the cognitive sciences believe the brain does this, the brain does that, the brain knows this, the brain knows that. Well, the brain knows that in the same way the hard drive in your computer knows. Maybe if not the same, it's similar. There's just no evidence for it. Independence upon brain activity, cognition takes place. But nobody's ever seen cognition flow out of the brain. Report an error

25:22 Cognition is not physical, not meant, it's not material. And all the functions of the brain are in fact physical and material because it's a physical entity. It's a lot of confusion about that. But consciousness cognizes. Consciousness cognizes. It knows things. But consciousness not only cognizes, if it not only has this quality of cognizance or knowing, but it also, consciousness has the core quality, defining quality. Report an error

25:52 We'll give it the word luminosity, but it needs to be explained. Luminosity. So consciousness is... Cognizant and luminous, knowing and clear. But what the word clear here means is that consciousness, unlike anything else in the universe, illuminates. It illuminates in the sense of it makes manifest. It makes manifest. So if there are no consciousness, I could turn my eyes over to Jenny's pullover there and photons would be smacking into my retina. Report an error

26:25 They would be setting up a very complex electrochemical sequence of events traveling along the optic nerve, coming back to the visual cortex, and that would entail a whole bunch of other electrochemical events. But there would be no blue. There would be no blue. Because blue is not an electrochemical event. Blue that we see is not physical. Report an error

26:49 It's not located inside her sweater. It's not there in the molecules themselves. The photons aren't blue. and no part of the Visual cortex turns blue. Blue is illuminated, made manifest by consciousness, not by the visual cortex. Report an error

27:08 There's no blue in the visual cortex. The visual cortex doesn't spew out blue. There's no blue drips, blue projections in the visual cortex. It's not a mystical phenomenon. It's a very complex physiological phenomenon. It's very interesting. But there's no blue in it and it doesn't produce blue. No blue is ever seen to come out of the brain. Blue is illuminated. Report an error

27:30 By consciousness. Just as sounds, now this is where the word illumination is limited, but it's like I see what you mean. Sounds are illuminated by consciousness or made manifest. That's all we mean by it. Smells. There are no smells and molecules suspended in the air. They don't smell like anything. They're just molecules. But they catalyze the emergence of smell when consciousness is involved. Report an error

27:55 Otherwise you just have a chain reaction of molecules coming into your nose and stimulating the olfactory lobes. But there are no smells in the olfactory lobes. Report an error

28:05 And likewise for taste. There are no taste in the food nor taste inside the tongue. Or the nerve endings, the taste buds in the tongue. Tastes are illuminated by consciousness. And then where this is most evident is in dreams. And that is when you see a sunrise in a dream. Which of course, why not? So what's making the sun bright? Not the sun. There are no nuclear explosions taking place in the sun in the dream because it's not physical. Report an error

28:40 So you can say in a dream, it's quite true, that the sun illuminates. Let's say you're having a dream of being out in the desert and the sun is blazingly hot and bright. You have to put on sunglasses. Say, wow, it's so bright here. All my sunglasses in the dream, right? Say, wow, that's better. Now I can see. It's really straining my eyes here. Report an error

28:58 And you look around and you can see the shadows in the dream, right? Why not? You say, wow, there's a really bright, intense sun here. So you can say the sun is illuminating the dream, right? Report an error

29:09 Then you can ask, what's illuminating the sun? Because it's not atoms, it's not thermonuclear explosions like on that big mass of hot air out there, hot gases. Report an error

29:22 What's illuminating the sun in your dream is, of course, mental consciousness. Nothing else. It's not the brain. The brain doesn't illuminate anything. It's chemicals, electricity. They don't illuminate anything. They don't know anything. They don't illuminate anything. They don't remember anything or figure out anything either. Figuring out, remembering all of these take place independence upon the brain. Report an error

29:44 That's it. That's all that scientists actually know. It's high time to bring out, not Occam's razor, but Occam's cleaver to scrape off all of the illusions of knowledge and thought projections and so forth on the brain. They've made it kind of, they anthropomorphized it to a ridiculous extent. So now we're just shaving it back to consciousness. There's no metaphysics here. It's just kind of obvious that consciousness is making manifest colors, all of the appearances of the five domains, but then also appearances of chit-chat. Report an error

30:17 So, rumination. Consciousness is making them manifest, making dreams manifest, thoughts. Consciousness makes emotions manifest. How do you know you're having an emotion? Because consciousness is illuminating intangibles like emotion. Or if you see that justice is served, there was a criminal, he was tried, got a fair trial, and then he was put in a penitentiary. Report an error

30:40 You say, okay, well justice was meted out. I see that was a just act. The jury, the judge says, this is justice. I'm sorry, we have to quarantine you. You're a danger to society. Justice is done. How do you know that? It was illuminated by consciousness and you know it with consciousness. So that's it. Defining characteristics of consciousness. And so, as you can visualize Mickey Mouse on top of my head, we're now coming right back to mental consciousness, a particular form of consciousness, then consciousness roves into all of the six domains and the domain that is The domain of consciousness is called in Sanskrit Dharma Datu. It's among the 18 Datus and Datu means an element, so it refers to the six modes of consciousness, the six faculties and then finally the six domains. Report an error

31:33 And this is the domain of dharmas and Dharma means phenomena. And phenomena, the term here means something apprehended by mental consciousness. And that includes things that are uniquely mental like dreams you can't perceive in any other way. But also colors and so forth and so on. So the relative Dharmadhatu, some of you have studied Mahāyāna Buddhism, you'll know this Dharmadhatu is a great, big, heavy, massively ontological term referring to emptiness, ultimate nature of reality, absolute space of phenomena. Report an error

32:03 But relatively speaking, Dharmadhatu is simply the domain of phenomena that can be apprehended by mental consciousness. So I'll say that again. Dharma Datu, we call it the space of the mind, is the domain of experience, a phenomena that can be apprehended by mental consciousness. It's one of the six fields of experience, but this is an all-encompassing one. Anything you can see with your eyes, you can also see, that is, with visual perception, you can also see with mental. Report an error

32:38 And likewise, olfactory, gustatory and so forth. So the one that gets to go through all of the fields and does on a regular basis. is mental consciousness. Report an error

32:50 So in this practice that we just concluded, oh the time is passing so quickly, in the first session, then we were attending to the space of the mind, but in a somewhat more limited way, this was shamatha after all, and so we were out of the six domains, we were withdrawing the attention from the visual, the auditory and so forth, and directing mental awareness. Report an error

33:14 To the domain that is uniquely mental. That is, we are specifically looking at that domain of experience in which mental events arise. Knowing full well that mental consciousness can go to all the other five. But we're focusing there, as we are focusing initially on thoughts and images, so purely mental events, then looking at the intervals, and then attending to that. Report an error

33:36 So we're looking at Dharma Datu, the kind of localized Dharma Datu, that specific... Kind of nuclear dharmadhatu in which mental events arise. And we're focusing on that. Now, there's so much there. Very fascinating. As I mentioned before, when you're settling the mind in its natural state and you experience single-pointed mindfulness, simultaneously aware of the stillness of your awareness and the movements of thoughts. Report an error

34:12 Then manifest mindfulness, you're into the flow. And then everything implodes, your senses have imploded, the contents of the mind have all settled down, and you're single-pointedly focused with a whole flow of your awareness, of mental awareness. Report an error

34:25 Now focus single-pointedly on the space of the mind, that subspace, that nuclear space, the space in which mental events arise, in which dreams arise. Report an error

34:36 And with all of the awareness that otherwise goes out of these all six rivulets or tributaries, All now brought into mental and then the mental winds up being empty. So you've just about achieved shamatha, then in that case you have this absence of mindfulness, right? Report an error

34:55 And then following, but you're still attending to something and something is a sheer vacuity. You're not remembering anything from before, but you're not also, you're not in a trance, you're not dazed, you're not just blank. You're luminously cognizant, once again, but just of that nuclear space of Mind, right? It's purely mental. Because, again, the five physical domains have collapsed into that one. A crucial point here is that the five physical sense consciousnesses are all derivative of mental consciousness. Report an error

35:28 That's a core, core theme. So if it's wrong, Buddhism got something really big, wrong. But this is the assertion in all schools of Buddhism, that the visual consciousness, although it arises independence upon a particular part of the brain, as with auditory and so forth, Report an error

35:43 The visual consciousness doesn't arise from that part of the brain. The visual consciousness arises from mental consciousness. And every time you fall asleep and your visual consciousness goes dormant, it doesn't just go poof into space. It doesn't simply become non-existent. But it kind of like, it withdraws back into its source. It goes back into mental consciousness. And likewise for the other four. Report an error

36:08 Sensory modes of consciousness, when you fall asleep and they're all dormant or you get general anesthesia, then they're really drawn in. Somebody can shake you, shout at you and so forth and you don't wake up. Well, they haven't gone back into the brain because they didn't come out of the brain. They have gone back into mental consciousness. But in full anesthesia, mental consciousness has also become dormant. Report an error

36:30 But it's become dormant, not absolutely non-existent. Because if it became non-existent, then you'd never get it back. And so, like if you have a match, you blow it out, and it's cold, you can't make it come back again, it's gone. But if you have a gas range, a gas stove, and you turn on, and there it is, you're cooking some milk, and then you turn the gas off, you look at the top of the stove and say, okay, good, everything, all the gas is off, yep, good, now we can go off on vacation, right? Report an error

37:03 But of course, if a gas stove, the pilot light's there. Not heating up much of anything, and you may not be able to see it from the top, but the pilot light's there. Such that when you come back from vacation or back from work or whatever, and you turn the stove on again, then it goes, out it comes. If there's no pilot light, of course, then you turn it on and you don't get anything, because you have more gas coming. And so the pilot light, it's only an analogy, obviously, but the pilot light is like implicit consciousness. Report an error

37:35 It's not a total absence of consciousness. I would say that my cell phone has, In terms of, like if we put this on a Kelvin degrees temperature, this cell phone has zero degrees consciousness. Nothing. Zero. It will never have consciousness. Never had consciousness. Zero. So you can shout at it, you can electrify it, you can do anything you like. You can make the circuitry infinitely complex, if you like. Report an error

38:01 I mean, imagine, it's a thought experiment, and it still won't become conscious. Because conscious doesn't emerge from matter. And so, that's zero consciousness. But a person who has become comatose, a person who has become vegetative, a person who has received general anesthesia, a person who has fainted, a person who is dead, in all of those cases, a person who has gone asleep, a person who has achieved shamatha. Report an error

38:29 In all of the above cases, your coarse mind has dissolved into the substrate consciousness. In most of those cases, consciousness has become implicit, not non-existent, But its capacity for knowing and illuminating has gone dormant. Not absent, not annihilated, but gone dormant. It's not activated. That happens also in just deep sleep, deep dreamless sleep. That you're, when you're just kind of, just there, just zoned out totally, you're deep asleep, non-lucidly deep asleep. Report an error

39:02 Then you really have no experience of your body, of color, sound and so forth, none of the five senses. And you're in deep sleep, so there's no dream imagery. And you don't even know you're asleep. That's the one thing you should know if you knew anything, that you're asleep, but you don't know that either. You don't know the most obvious thing, which means you don't explicitly know anything at all, right? Report an error

39:25 Does this mean you're absolutely unconscious like the cell phone? No, if you were, then you'd never wake up. That is, there's nothing that can be done, because you can imagine. People could tap on you, shout at you, electrically stimulate you, but if you have zero... It's kind of like taking two non-existent pieces of wood and trying to rub them together. You know, two pieces of non-wood. Well, that's not going to create any friction. Report an error

39:47 You're not going to get any fire out of that. And so there's no explicit consciousness in deep dreamless sleep. But of course we know that if somebody shakes you and says, the house is on fire, get up. You're going to be awake in a second. Less than a second, right? But it's more interesting than that. Much more interesting than that. And again, There are so many interesting points here, it's easy to elaborate. But here's something that I think many mothers, maybe all of them, a number of fathers know, and that is, so I've heard during the first two years, and I have a stepdaughter, I know a lot about her little baby from birth onwards, that during the first two years of having given birth, you don't get a whole lot of sleep, right? Report an error

40:33 Sleep a bit dodgy, in and out, in and out. And so chronic fatigue is pretty common. And so the mother may fall asleep with the baby right in the next room with one of those little speakers, you know, so if the baby cries. And the mother may be really exhausted, really exhausted. She's up every two or three hours breastfeeding, what have you. So she's really out like a light. She's gone. She's gone into non-lucid, deep, dreamless sleep because she's really sleep deprived. Report an error

41:01 And a fire engine may go by. She doesn't wake up. A jet may fly overhead. She doesn't wake up. Her husband may be snoring like a bullfrog. That doesn't wake her up. And then... And she's up like a flash. Right? Happens. Selective attention, isn't it? And I've heard this many times. I mean, I think it's clearly true. That it's not simply waking up because of a louder sound. Report an error

41:31 It's waking up for one sound only. It's the only thing she's going to wake up for. Her babies cry. Even if it's relatively soft. Report an error

41:42 Well, if she's totally unconscious, there's not going to be any discernment there. But there is discernment there. Therefore she must be conscious. Even though she's not explicitly conscious of anything, she doesn't even know she's asleep, there's an implicit consciousness that is not only there but it's discerning. Report an error

42:01 It will wake up with a baby's cry, it will not wake up with a husband's snoring. It's quite interesting. We need to wrap up because what I was really starting to do was, my fundamental intention for this little talk, was to draw a distinction between attending to the space of the mind, Pretty clear now. And it's also quite large, isn't it? You look for parameters, borders and so forth, shape. You may be looking for something that does not exist, but the space of the mind does exist. Report an error

42:30 But then in the second session, then we deliberately withdrew the attention from space. If you're doing it as I was hoping you were doing it, trying to instruct, that you're no longer attending to space. Not even to space itself, let alone a visual object, a thought, or even the space of the mind. You're just resting there. Report an error

42:50 Your awareness resting in space but not looking at it, just going, ah, and not attending to any object whatsoever. Obviously appearances arise but you don't deliberately give any attention to them. Just being present. And in that simple being, then you find you're still knowing something. Even though you're not deliberately attending to anything, you're still knowing something. And what you're knowing is that you're knowing. You're knowing that you're conscious. Report an error

43:24 And in fact, you knew it already. It didn't start then. It was already there. As for the last ten seconds, you already knew that you were aware. That probably wasn't at the forefront. But you know you're not blanked out for the last ten seconds. You know you didn't blank out. You know where you were. There was an awareness of awareness all along there. And to make a final comment on this very important point before we take our break, here's a nice thought experiment that will give you, I think, hopefully a clear sense, conceptual sense, again like definition of Kela. Report an error

43:57 Leading you to the taste of the banana as the definition of consciousness is designed to lead you to the direct taste of consciousness. That you know it and you know it clearly and you know that you know it. That's the point. That's the point of the definition and then the meditation. It's not just theory, something interesting to think about. The theory is the finger pointing to the moon of consciousness and then you experience it directly. Report an error

44:24 So the thought experiment is this. Report an error

44:29 Imagine that you've just taken some stimulant, like let's say three cappuccinos, would that do it? Three cappuccinos, like three shots of whiskey, down, down, down. And so you've got a real buzz on. And now, this is a thought experiment, and now you go into a sensory deprivation tank. But it's a perfect one. Report an error

44:49 So you go into the sensory deprivation tank, you get inside, they close the lid. And so it's pitch black, you can't see anything at all. There are no visual stimulants. There's no visual stimuli coming in at all. No photons. It's soundproof. You can't hear anything. It's a perfect sensory deprivation tank, so you can't even experience your body. Report an error

45:08 They approximate that with a heavy saline solution and water the temperature of your body. It's a good approximation, but no, this is a perfect one. You suddenly can't experience, you don't feel your body at all. And there's no smells and no tastes. Right? Report an error

45:24 Suddenly you've gotten, even though you've got a real buzz on, you're wide awake. You're wide awake. You're now getting no input, no signal. No signal from any of your five, by way of any of your five sense consciousnesses. Now happily we also have a magician in the room, and that's me. And I come in with my magic wand, and I wave it over you and your sensory deprivation tank, and waving my magic wand, I get your mind to totally calm down. Report an error

45:51 Not become dull, but just shh. Silence. No imagery, no thoughts, no activity. But that's all I've calmed. I haven't made you dull in any way. I haven't damped the effect of the cappuccino. But I've just made your mind be quiet. And no imagery is coming up. Just, in other words, no signal in terms of appearances, activations, things to attend to within the mental domain. Report an error

46:16 Right? So you can kind of imagine imagining that. So I've just waved my wand. And now from your perspective, Do you now have no more consciousness than a cell phone? Or do you have some consciousness? And if so, what are you conscious of? And Report an error

46:37 I would suggest that what you're conscious of is space of the mind. Report an error

46:46 You're aware that, because you can't think anything, right? Because I've waved my wand. I put a duct tape over your mental mouth, right? You're not thinking anything, but without thinking anything, you still know. Without saying it, you say, sure it's dark in here. Report an error

47:05 Sure isn't anything happening, is there? But you're not even thinking that, you're just knowing it. Like, Report an error

47:14 a pretty good imitation, okay? And then you're not only aware of a sheer vacuity, without calling it a sheer vacuity, but you also know, without talking about it, I'm still here. Report an error

47:32 Or awareness is still happening. Because we don't really need the personal pronoun. It doesn't add anything more to what we know. That is, it's not, I have consciousness. Like, because I'm aware of me and I'm aware of my consciousness? Well, let's just use Occam's razor again. Cool it with a personal pronoun. Report an error

47:51 What do you really know beyond a shadow of a doubt? Indubitably, incapable of doubting. Awareness is still happening. Report an error

48:04 That's what it would be to be lucidly dead. And as I love to say, the only real downside to being dead is it doesn't last. Report an error

48:17 It's the dead zone. For those of you who study Tibetan Buddhism, they have very detailed expressions of everything shutting down. It's like you're achieving shamatha. Your senses implode and as the brain gradually ceases to function in a nice slow death, the brain is just gradually ceasing to function and your higher faculties, imagination, recognition, memory and so forth, shutting down, all sense modalities shutting down, shutting down. Report an error

48:42 Everything that was derivative of mental consciousness is now imploding into mental consciousness. That implodes into substrate consciousness. And if you're not lucid, then it's like you've received a general anesthesia. Then you're not even aware of being dead. So you had this great, interesting event about the plate tape and you missed it. Like you fell asleep through the movie. And so you're dead and you don't even know it. Report an error

49:11 Just like being deep asleep and you don't know it or receiving general anesthesia and not knowing what it's like once you're out. And then after that then there's more to come. It doesn't last. It can last for a matter of hours being dead. Matter of hours. But then it passes on and you have the clear light of death and then you have some very interesting things happen after that in this flow of consciousness. Report an error

49:33 But what is the really good news here is that when the coarse mind collapses, all the physical senses implode, it is possible to track that lucidly. Report an error

49:46 And that's called achieving shamatha. And that is you're going through this whole process, which is really a simulation of dying, but with no damage to the brain, no damage at all to your health. You'll come right out and be as fit as a fiddle. But it's a very, very similar process. Falling asleep, dying and achieving shamatha, they're all going to the same place. They're all going to the substrate consciousness. Report an error

50:07 By and large, when people fall asleep, they do so non-lucidly, they get asleep, they don't know it. By and large, when people die, they go non-lucid, they're dead, they don't know it. If you achieve shamatha, you come to the same end point. The substrate consciousness, or the bhavaṅga, because you got there lucidly, and not only lucidly, but the degree of clarity, vividness, luminosity, is actually increasing, getting unveiled. Report an error

50:30 So you're getting brighter and brighter and brighter as you approach ground zero, when you finally, your whole coarse mind is dissolved into the substrate consciousness, or the bhavaṅga. It's your three kapuchindos plus some, you know, incredibly, very vividly awake. But now you know that, ah, This is the substrate. What's appearing to you is the substrate, and the consciousness with which you experience it is the substrate consciousness. So in the second session, this is where we'll stop, the second session, in contrast to the first one in which we're attending to the substrate, the space of the mind, in the second one we withdraw even from the substrate, let alone all the objects of our sense fields, and withdraw right into the substrate consciousness, stay home and let awareness illuminate itself. Report an error

51:17 Hence it's called self-illuminating consciousness. Mindfulness. Because the luminosity is not coming from anything else. It's illuminating itself. You've come home. And you're really now discovering the actual nature of consciousness. You're eating the banana. And you don't need to talk about it. Once you're eating a banana, you don't need a commentary. Report an error

51:38 In fact, the less commentary you have, the more clearly you really know what a banana tastes like. Not by thinking about it or writing a book about it. And so likewise, here it is. There's your banana. You're now drinking consciousness. Report an error

51:53 With no additives, straight, nuclear, luminosity and cognizance. So in the brilliant Tsongkhapa with his incredibly voluminous knowledge, his vast erudition, when he refers to this practice of just awareness of awareness, he gives the most concise instruction that he does for any meditation that he ever taught. Report an error

52:13 He said, rest in the sheer luminosity and the sheer cognizance of awareness. That's all he said. Report an error

52:22 Go home, stay home, be aware of what's there. Have a good break. We'll come back a wee tad after 11 o'clock. Report an error

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Talk by B. Alan Wallace. Original at Vajrayana Institute via Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/FourApplicationsOfMindfulnessRetreat2013. Licensed CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. Transcript generated automatically and may contain errors; the audio is the authoritative version.

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