← B. Alan Wallace

Four Applications Of Mindfulness Retreat 2013 with B. Alan Wallace (part 50)

B. Alan Wallace · 2013 · 1 h 21 min · Vajrayana Institute via Internet Archive

Download audio

Automated transcript, not yet checked by a person; report an error.

Words the recogniser was unsure of are underlined with dots. Use “Report an error” beside any passage to tell us what the teacher actually says.

Key passages

The teacher's own words, quoted from the transcript below and chosen automatically as representative.

  • 0:20

    Luminosity or clarity and Tong, emptiness. You'll find them in the literature of Mahamudra and Dzogchen. And it usually comes with the phrase, the indivisibility, the indivisibility or non-duality of luminosity and emptiness. In the Mahamudra and the Dzogchen literature, then this is referring to the primordial, not unity, but indivisibility of the luminosity of primordial consciousness and the emptiness of the absolute space of phenomena or dharmadhatu, so ultimate ground.

  • 1:00

    But it's also true, that is the words also ring true, have a very direct relevance to the experience of the substrate consciousness. And that is once you've achieved shamatha, Then you're resting in that self-illuminating mindfulness, that self-illuminating dimension of awareness, the substrate consciousness.

  • 3:05

    If that's what it's like, good, I'm going to make that my method. And that method is called merging mind with space, and we just had a little introduction to that. And so your method itself is a great approximation of the fruition, and the more deeply you go into it, then the more you taste the fruition until there's just no longer any difference between the path and the end result, or the culmination of the path.

  • 20:55

    And it's fine that we're not going into some kind of a transcendent sphere here. Okay, now phenomena, because it's just phenomena, but rather the central emphasis of the fourth application of mindfulness is on prattita-samuppada, dependent origination. And so here's where bear attention is really utterly lacking. I mean, it's a nice crack in the door, but it just is not up to the task. Because bear attention gives you a whole bunch of snapshots, just little staccato moments, very nice. But bear attention doesn't see the patterns. To see patterns, you have to see things over time. You need to see regularities.

  • 43:23

    with emergent properties of subjective experience, considering that it is fundamentally an information processing system in which consciousness is integral, fundamental. And not derivative and epiphenomenal, which means having no causal efficacy. If we view the body-mind system in that way, in which information is fundamental, I would suggest my hypothesis. I've written about this at length in Meditations of Vodoskeptic. Now the placebo effect becomes completely intelligible.

0:03 So Report an error

0:07 those two short words, Sel Tong, we'll just have one session this time. Those two short words, Sel Tong, in Tibetan, crop up in multiple contexts. Report an error

0:20 Luminosity or clarity and Tong, emptiness. You'll find them in the literature of Mahamudra and Dzogchen. And it usually comes with the phrase, the indivisibility, the indivisibility or non-duality of luminosity and emptiness. Report an error

0:39 In the Mahamudra and the Dzogchen literature, then this is referring to the primordial, not unity, but indivisibility of the luminosity of primordial consciousness and the emptiness of the absolute space of phenomena or dharmadhatu, so ultimate ground. Report an error

1:00 But it's also true, that is the words also ring true, have a very direct relevance to the experience of the substrate consciousness. And that is once you've achieved shamatha, Then you're resting in that self-illuminating mindfulness, that self-illuminating dimension of awareness, the substrate consciousness. Report an error

1:22 And of course what that consciousness is conscious of is the substrate, hence substrate consciousness. And that substrate is sheer vacuity. But you don't have a sense of real, any kind of separation or like kind of two things coming together or there's the substrate over there and here's the substrate consciousness over here. Report an error

1:38 Rather, there's a lot of symmetry in that experience. Once you've achieved shamatha, the symmetry is that your self-illuminating awareness of the substrate consciousness is co-extensive with your awareness of the substrate. The substrate is permeated by consciousness. Consciousness illuminates that entire space. And so there on a relative level is the non-duality. Report an error

2:09 Of the luminosity and emptiness, luminosity and vacuity. So this practice then is very much one of kind of taking the fruition as the path. That's a term that comes up a lot in Vajrayana Buddhism. Where rather than taking it step by step, step by step, maybe multiple methods leading to some eventual goal, you kind of just reach your hand out into the future and you pluck the fruit. Report an error

2:34 And you say, I'll take that as my path. Thank you very much. And your path, your method itself is a close approximation. It is as close an approximation as you can deliver of the fruition of the path that you're seeking to realize. So now we know. The fruition of the path, I mean conceptually we know, is then your senses have imploded, the mind has gone completely non-discursive, non-conceptual. Report an error

3:01 It's luminous, it's still, it's clear and it's permeating space. If that's what it's like, good, I'm going to make that my method. And that method is called merging mind with space, and we just had a little introduction to that. Report an error

3:15 And so your method itself is a great approximation of the fruition, and the more deeply you go into it, then the more you taste the fruition until there's just no longer any difference between the path and the end result, or the culmination of the path. Report an error

3:30 So for this modality, we can put it into one bundle if you like, awareness of awareness, and then kind of segueing into Merging mind with space. Here's really a quintessential example or a paradigmatic example of discovery versus development. Because you're not developing stability, you're releasing all grasping and it's only because of the presence of grasping that we have the experience of our awareness being jerked around. Report an error

4:03 Oh, I was caught up in rumination, then I would drift off the future. Then that chirping of the bird caught my attention, my mind went off there, and so forth. So we have this whole sense of restlessness, agitation, moving, moving, moving. Report an error

4:16 Well, there's one simple reason for that. It's called grasping. It's called grasping by way of either attachment, desire, by way of aversion, or by sheer habit. Report an error

4:27 But simply by releasing grasping, then the nature of awareness presents itself as being still. Because there's only grasping that sets it in motion. And so this is not a matter of developing stability or stillness. The words are the same. Stillness is actually a little bit better. It's not a matter of so much of developing, cultivating stillness of awareness in contrast to excitation, agitation and distraction, but rather discovering it by releasing everything that is contrary to it, namely all types of grasping. Report an error

5:06 And likewise, the practice is not one of developing clarity. Developing greater brightness, acuity, high resolution luminosity. You're not developing anything. You're simply unveiling the natural luminosity of your own awareness, of substrate consciousness, which is within the context of saṃsāra, within the context of conditioned existence, that's as bright as it gets. Report an error

5:29 The substrate consciousness is completely unveiled, unadorned, unelaborated, unconfigured. So it's just sheer, raw, basic, fundamental, primal cognizance and luminosity. That's the thousand-watt bulb. That's what's illuminating all your dreams, when you don't have the competition of that same source of illumination, the substrate consciousness. Illuminating the visual field, the auditory, the tactile, and so on. Report an error

5:53 Which means a lot of that luminosity is going out there, and if simultaneously you're trying to practice shamatha, then you see, you get the leftovers. That is, whatever visual impressions are not being illuminated, sounds are not being illuminated or may manifest, tactile sensations are not becoming manifest. Report an error

6:11 Then the awareness that's left over after it keeps on dribbling out there, you know, like poor plumbing, it keeps on leaking into those. What's left over is what you can apply to your shamatha practice. If you're doing a visualization practice, like imagining the Buddha, then that little weak, faint, little wavering image, that's all you got. Report an error

6:31 That's how much awareness was left over to illuminate that image. Whereas in contrast, if you're in either hypnagogic imagery, So that kind of imagery that comes when you're not quite asleep but you're not quite awake, a lot of people have had that. The really defining characteristic of that is it's incredibly clear. Report an error

6:50 It's like virtually seeing it with your eyes, if it's visual. It may be sound also, it could be taste. But the visual in that hypnagogic imagery is just incredibly clear, distinct, vivid. And likewise in a really vivid dream. I remember I had a dream some time back where... It was so vivid. Everything was such precise detail. The thought arose, might this be a dream? Just the thought came out, might this be a dream? Report an error

7:16 And the answer came back, nah, not possible. No way. This is just way too vivid. Dreams can't be this vivid. And I just carried on being non-lucid. Report an error

7:26 Because it was just too real. I said, no way a dream can be. Like right now, could this be a dream? Nah, not possible. Or maybe it could be. But the high resolution there is because, again, A simple explanation is there's no competition. All of that luminosity, the whole projector of your substrate consciousness is now all focused in one domain, the mental. Report an error

7:51 And there you go. Very realistic, very lifelike imagery coming up of all the sense modalities. You can smell, taste, touch and so forth. So that's the kind of microcosm, macrocosm of the unity of luminosity and vacuity or emptiness. in the substrate consciousness, then in a much deeper level, which I'll look to briefly a little bit later on this morning, as time is running short. But I wanted to find here in the notes little phrase that I did not quote earlier. Report an error

8:28 it's relevant right now. Report an error

8:34 Today, of course, we're turning to the close application of mindfulness of phenomena. phenomena, phenomena. And one might very well wonder, well, what do we need that for? Haven't we pretty well covered it? And that is, in terms of the close application of mindfulness to the body, you might recall that it's not just to your body, not just to others' body, not just to the interaction between one's own and others' bodies, but in fact implicitly all physical phenomena, everything that appears to by way of the five physical senses. Report an error

9:04 That's all grist for the mill in the close application of mindfulness to the body, which means all kind of bodies. Every sensory impression. And so we've covered that. We've covered the physical world in the first application of mindfulness. Then in the second one we cover that which we care most about, our feelings, don't like suffering, want happiness. Report an error

9:26 And then we go to the mind, which is where we have just this mother load of causes that give rise to happiness and sorrow and so forth. This tremendously rich array, the society of mind with all of its many impulses, emotions, thoughts, memories, dreams and so forth. So there we've come really, okay, the mind. For which, let's just quote this really briefly, because I didn't quote it earlier, but just highlighting how enormously central this is to the whole Buddhist worldview and Buddhist practice. Report an error

9:57 And I'm quoting it right, I Report an error

10:03 know it's there, Report an error

10:07 from the Dhammapada. Oh, there it is, bottom of page 13. Dhammapada, first verse, first chapter. The most famous line or verse within the Dhammapada. Which is a compilation of aphorisms of the Buddha compiled in the Pāli language. The Buddha states, all phenomena are preceded by the mind, issued forth from the mind and consist of the mind. Report an error

10:33 So one sees how diametrically opposed this is to the beliefs of materialism. And phenomena, by the way, really, it's Dharma. Dharma, right? But it doesn't mean entities. It doesn't mean electrons emerge from the mind. You know, like the mind is kind of... Any more than thoughts are spewed forth by the brain, you know, like John Sewell said, like bile from the gallbladder. Well, nobody's ever seen that, it's just superstition. Report an error

10:59 But nor does Buddhism say, okay, here's you got your mind and it's spitting out elementary particles. That's kind of a bit odd too. So no, it's not referring to entities out there existing independently of our experience, which is the general presupposition of modern science, that the world is already out there. Report an error

11:16 It's not that. When speaking of dharmas, it's referring to experiences. Bearing in mind all phenomena within the loka, within the experienced Lebenswelt, the world of experience. So phenomena are experienced events or experiences. And so if we just paraphrase that, all experiences are preceded by the mind. Issue fourth of the mind consists of the mind. So that would be classic Buddhism. Report an error

11:40 And now see how utterly diametrically opposed that is to the following statement. All experiences, all subjective experiences of every kind, sensory perceptions, Thoughts, images, memories, dreams and so forth. See if this sounds familiar. All experiences, all subjective experiences are preceded by the brain, issue forth from the brain and consist of the brain or brain activities. Report an error

12:06 Does that sound very familiar? Because that's exactly what they say. Right? All the materialists, that's exactly what they say. The brain is the prime mover. The brain is. I just read this from Eric Kandel, a renowned neurologist. He said, it's the brain that does everything. Including all things that you think human beings do, the brain does it. Artistic creation, thinking, acting, moving, deciding, the brain does everything. Report an error

12:30 And we're really not responsible. He says specifically we're not responsible for, I think I mentioned this before, right? Didn't I in this retreat? Yeah, so just that. So we're not responsible for things like depression and therefore why should we be responsible for anger? And why should we be responsible for hatred? And then why should we be responsible for murder? Report an error

12:48 Because after all... I mean, just one links to another and they all trace back to the brain. So if you're asking, whodunit, it's the brain. So, you know, send the brain to jail, but not me. Send the brain to jail, I'm going to stay out. I've got to, you know, go home free card. And so, but this notion that the brain is the agent, this now saturates, just saturates popular media. Report an error

13:09 You'll hardly ever see the mind referred to as an agent anymore. Major media, I don't know if it's different in Australia, but I doubt it. But I watch this closely, I read regularly a lot of the major media. When it comes to human activity, human mental activity, thinking, remembering and so forth, the brain is nailed every single time. And now it's become homogenous. That the brain is the agent, which means you're just along for the ride. Report an error

13:30 So this is a really catastrophic superstition that's permeating the press. So if it's true, then Buddhism really may as well flush it down the toilet. Because Buddhism is so wrong that you might have a little few shell fragments of therapy here and there. But that's it. I mean, Buddha was just having a psychotic fit on the night of his enlightenment. Report an error

13:50 People like, you know, Stephen Baxter is an old friend of mine, but man, does he miss the boat. You know, he wants to have the Buddha, you know, put a happy face on the Buddha, but by the way, he didn't discover anything. And, you know, on the night of his enlightenment, he was going into meltdown because he said he could remember all his past lives and karma and the past lives of other beings. And, you know, so it's simply absurd. Report an error

14:10 So, how do you say, so either Buddha was having a psychotic fit or sign of materialism is completely wrong. But you can't have both ways. Buddhism was a really nice guy and he was a materialist too. No, not really. And so there's a strict, there's a fundamental parting of ways. Buddhism may be compatible with science, in many respects it is, but just no way that is compatible with the beliefs of scientific materialism, which then are presented ludicrously as having no beliefs. Report an error

14:39 I don't know, hardly know of any book that is more naive than that one. So that's from the Dhammapada and then in terms of the Mahāyāna Sutras, from the Ratna Megha Sūtra. Similar statement, all phenomena are preceded by the mind. When the mind is comprehended, all phenomena are comprehended. A big statement. And by bringing the mind under control, all things are brought under control. So that's really heavily weighted now. And that would take a lot of unpacking, but we're not going to do it right now because our time is so short. Report an error

15:07 But if we go back just briefly to that, all phenomena are preceded by the mind. All experiences. Are preceded by the mind. Then right in that same context we can ask, now to return to a question that I sidestepped a day or two ago. And that as I mentioned among the 18 elements of phenomenological elements of existence, remember there were six faculties. Report an error

15:32 And the faculties for the 5th century, modal perception, are all physical. They're in the brain, the eyes and so forth. And then there's the faculty. The Indriya, the faculty, the independence upon which mental consciousness emerges. So what would that faculty be? Since there's no question, all schools of Buddhists say it's not physical. For the other ones, yes, but not for this one, not physical. Therefore, mental consciousness does not arise independence upon, just raw basic mental consciousness, does not emerge from or arise independence upon the brain. Report an error

16:10 Because it does arise independent upon a faculty that is non-physical. So what would that faculty be? Well, I think there's only one obvious answer. And that is if we use the Dzogchen terminology, it's the substrate consciousness. Because the substrate consciousness is not human mental consciousness. It's not human. Report an error

16:28 It's a stem consciousness, like a stem cell. So it's independent upon that very simple, raw, primal flow of cognizance and luminosity. Report an error

16:41 Independence upon that, as that comes in conjunction with, let's say, the egg and sperm in a human conception, as that comes in conjunction with that, and then the egg and sperm develop, a nervous system develops, then independence upon that, a human flow of mental consciousness arises. Report an error

16:58 But where it's springing from, it arises independence upon substrate consciousness. And then when specific aspects of mental consciousness, like attention, language skills, analysis, imagination, and so forth, They arise independent upon different brain functions, but fundamentally, core mental consciousness as such, raw and naked mental consciousness arises independent upon substrate consciousness. Report an error

17:24 And so similarly throughout the course of the life, every time we wake up, every time we start dreaming, then the experiences we have fundamentally are preceded by the substrate consciousness. That precedes the dream. That is, prior to the dream, in most cases, if not all, You're first in the substrate consciousness, the symmetry is broken, it's aroused and out of the substrate consciousness emerges dream consciousness. So all the phenomena or the experiences of dream consciousness are preceded by the substrate consciousness. Report an error

17:56 And then all these appearances issue forth from the substrate consciousness. Report an error

18:05 Without the substrate consciousness they're not illuminated. So they issue forth from, they manifest from the appearances themselves. They issue forth from the substrate consciousness and they really consist of The substrate consciousness, they're simply permutations, configurations of the substrate consciousness projected into the substrate. And of course the substrate is where all these appearances right now are occurring. Report an error

18:26 And that is the appearances of the room. Not the molecules making up the room, they were built by somebody and so forth, they have their own history. But the appearances that are arising to us right now, the visual appearances of the room, the sound of the voice, tactile sensations in your body, all of these are arising right now in your substrate. Report an error

18:47 Not anywhere else. They're not in physical space, that's for sure. All these appearances are not located inside your brain. There's no evidence for that. And any reasoning is completely convoluted. So the notion that all these appearances are inside your head, it's a silly notion. Again, no evidence and no reasoning. So it's just kind of one of those opinions that gets accepted uncritically. Report an error

19:08 And then not anywhere else. And so all these appearances do exist someplace, but they exist in the substrate. And the substrate is not located in physical space. Not anywhere. Not outside, inside or in between. So there's just a little reference back to the centrality of mind in Buddhism. That if the Buddhist teachings on the mind are incorrect, then everything else is just shell fragments. You might be able to, you know, through almost like a bomb dropped on it, you might find a little fragment of something useful here and there, but the whole core is gutted. Report an error

19:45 So somebody's really seriously wrong here. Either the materialist or the Buddhist, but they can't be right. They can't both be right. As I said though, there's an enormous amount of compatibility between scientific knowledge of the brain, the mind and so forth, and Buddhism. And this is where whole dialogue can take place, because they're both bound to have limitations and errors in one place or another. But the one verse I wanted to cite here, as we move on now with that rather long preamble, From the close application of mind to the close application of mindfulness to phenomena. So, again, I'll get to the verse in a second. Report an error

20:24 But we say, haven't we covered it? We've covered the physical world that we access by way of the five physical senses. And nowadays, accentuated and augmented, extended by way of technology. But again, how do you read any information from your technology? By way of the five physical senses. Pretty much vision. Report an error

20:41 And so, wonderful extension with technology, but we've covered that with the first application of mindfulness, and then feelings, and then mind. I mean, what else is there? We cover the outer world, we cover the mind, feelings that we care so much about, and now what is there? And it's fine that we're not going into some kind of a transcendent sphere here. Okay, now phenomena, because it's just phenomena, but rather the central emphasis of the fourth application of mindfulness is on prattita-samuppada, dependent origination. Report an error

21:11 And so here's where bear attention is really utterly lacking. I mean, it's a nice crack in the door, but it just is not up to the task. Because bear attention gives you a whole bunch of snapshots, just little staccato moments, very nice. But bear attention doesn't see the patterns. To see patterns, you have to see things over time. You need to see regularities. Report an error

21:33 You know, whether the baseball player putting a rabbit's foot in his pocket and hitting more home runs. Is that actually a pattern? Is it a regularity? Is this a law of nature that rabbit's woods do really help you hit the ball? Or is that a pseudo-causality that's really basically bolstered by the man's confidence that he thinks, oh, this is going to do it, and then he has greater confidence. Report an error

21:54 So there are a lot of, how do you say, false leads in terms of causality, where you simply see one thing preceded another and they say, oh, that which preceded A, which preceded B, A must have caused B. Because after all, it happened and then this happened. That's the wellspring of an infinite amount of superstition. Right? It happens all over the place. Report an error

22:17 And it's coming from snapshots. Wow, last Tuesday I brought my rabbit's foot and I hit a hole and run. That must have done it. I got a snapshot. Bear attention. But science is so much... Scientists and the whole scientific endeavor are so much smarter than that. And they're not looking for just this happened and then this happened. But what are the regularities? Report an error

22:36 What are the patterns? They're under controlled experiment or simply repeated observation over a period of time. You see, when this occurred, then that occurred. These are the correlations. It's wonderful brain science. I truly admire brain science. And that is, they're not finding just this happened and then that happened, but they're finding regularities, regularities, regularities. Report an error

22:58 If this happened, then this must have happened prior to it. It's retrospective. It's retrospective. And as you see the effect, and you say, okay, were there any causes? And here it is again, any cause? And then as you're going from one effect to another, looking at similar effects, like the experience of, let's say, remembering something, that you had a childhood memory. Report an error

23:21 And let's imagine you, so the scientist asks you, okay, please choose a childhood memory. You pick one. Say, okay, now please remember it. And then the scientist checks, okay, as you're remembering that, what are the correlated mental activities, neuronal activity? He said, OK, now stop. And now think of something else. Now please remember it again. And then you checked again. And then, OK, do that ten times. Report an error

23:43 And then we see every time you thought that there was a correlation between this type of activity in the mind, now let's see if we stimulate. Maybe it's a ganglia of neurons. If we use a microelectrode and stimulate that identified ganglia of neurons, might that trigger the memory? And in some cases it does. Very cool. Report an error

24:05 Then you might wonder, well, if we do a little micro-surgery and take out that little set of neurons, might you lose the memory? That does happen on occasion. But sometimes with neuroplasticity, another ganglion of neurons takes over. So there was a case in, I know I'm rambling here, but I just find it so interesting. Report an error

24:28 Not my voice, but the content. There was a case where there was a person with pathological anger. Really debilitating. And he was pretty much willing to do anything. It's a scientific study, but all the details I've forgotten. But I think the principle of it is perfectly sound. And that is debilitating anger. Report an error

24:46 It was ruining his life. And he said, you know, I'm willing to make major sacrifices not to have this anger. So please find the part of the brain that's causing my anger and take it out. You know, I'm willing to suffer the consequences because this is killing me. Maybe I'm going to kill somebody else. I can't stand it. Report an error

25:05 And so, some decades ago, as I recall, they went in, they found the part of the brain correlated with anger, they gouged it out, and then lo and behold, you still had anger because another part of the brain took over and did the same thing. So neuroplasticity. So the girl who had half of the brain, well, the other hemisphere, as she was growing up, took over all the tasks that the missing hemisphere should have been doing. Report an error

25:30 It didn't, so it took them all over. But that takes a lot of time. Report an error

25:37 So, that was a tangent to something, I have no idea what. Correlations, causality. See, it doesn't take me too long. Correlations. So this is where really good science is, and there's a lot of it. I'm not just seeing this happen, then that happen, or that happen, what happened prior to it. Everything happens prior to it. Report an error

25:58 Right? I'm thinking right now of my mom. What happened the second before? Everything. You know, really. Everything. So, what are you going to choose from? Because everything. Report an error

26:11 Everything that was happening a second before happened a second before. Everything didn't cause my thinking of my mom. Something very specific did. And then you can think, all right, for me to think of my mom, what are the patterns? What must precede it? Now this becomes crucial when it comes to the first and the second noble truths. We suffer frequently, right? Report an error

26:31 And many things catalyze it, but they don't always. Somebody says, you're an idiot. And we get unhappy. And then somebody says, oh, you're such an idiot. And we smile. Because it's said with a different point of voice and it's another person saying it. And so clearly that's not what's making us unhappy. Report an error

26:49 Something else is. And that's where we ferret through all of this. All the preceding causes and conditions. And we say, aha, we find the real culprits. How about hostility, craving and delusion? They're always implicated. Take them out and you're an idiot, you're an idiot and you never get angry. Put them in and somebody just goes and you get angry. Report an error

27:10 Not because somebody went like that. Craving hostility and delusion were there. So, causality, that's what the fourth application of mindfulness is all about. To ferret out, to identify regularity. It's really science. It's a science of experience and it's all about, bearing in mind this is all couched within the fourth noble truth, this is all about ferreting out, identifying and eradicating the true causes of suffering, ferreting out and identifying and cultivating the true causes of happiness, of genuine happiness. Report an error

27:43 Those we can actually identify and cultivate or ameliorate in the midst of a world over which we have almost no control. That's really smart. And we're really deluded when we say, well, never mind my mind, I just want you to change. Never mind my mind, I want the party in charge of Australia to change because I'm so unhappy this one's in power. Or, you know, et cetera, et cetera. If I'll just be happy, you know, in America, if the Republicans would just shut up, then I'll be much happier. Report an error

28:09 So please, M.T. party, you know, go drown yourself. Report an error

28:16 Then I'll be happy. But until you are, I can't be very happy. I keep on hearing this nonsense you're spouting. One little teapot spouting to another. Report an error

28:26 I Report an error

28:33 don't know if that ever occurred to me. They're just spouting off all the time. I'm a little teapot. Report an error

28:46 So that's the fourth application of mindfulness. It's causality. It's looking. And of course, it's not ontologically biased with this absurd bias of materialism that only material phenomena have causal efficacy and immaterial ones don't. That is so absurd, one should never even have entertained it. But again, it just shows the, I don't know. Einstein said, he said, remember, he said, there are two things that I think are infinite, space and the human capacity for self-delusion. Report an error

29:14 And then he thought about it a little bit more, he said, I'm not so sure about space. Report an error

29:25 So, causality, causal nexuses, patterns, regularities in terms of what types of states of consciousness, what types of behavior, on our own, on the part, and it's internally, externally, internally and externally. What modes of thought, of ideation, of attitude, mental activity, what modes of speech, what modes of bodily activity in oneself and others, which of these lead us away from liberation, which lead us towards liberation, and then mindfully cultivate one and attenuate the other. Report an error

29:56 That's what the fourth one is all about. It's all about causality. But now, I'd like to return to this verse I didn't comment on earlier, because I think it relates to a topic a number of us found quite interesting last night. This whole notion, the macrocosmic notion from John Wheeler, Paul Davies and other very brilliant scientists, viewing the universe now as not as fundamentally consisting of configurations of mass energy within space-time, all of it being mindless, meaningless and amoral, which is the common view. Report an error

30:30 It is the materialistic view, such that, oh, one well-known physicist, I think he is at Texas, He said, the more we, remember this statement, the more we come to understand the universe, the more meaningless it appears. Remember that one? By a Nobel laureate in physics. I just can't remember, it doesn't matter. But that's a good articulation of the materialistic view of the universe. The more thoroughly we understand it, the more meaningless it appears. Report an error

31:01 And of course that's because you're asking meaningless questions of the universe. So, duh. But what you're assuming as a universe is a great big, A matrix of space-time with mindless configurations of mass energy bumping into each other mindlessly, amorally, and consciousness is trivial. And so instead of that, that's one view. It's held by many people. But the view proposed by John Wheeler and then other outstanding physicists since then is the universe is an information processing system in which information is fundamental, not matter and energy, as I explained last night. Report an error

31:43 And so it's an interesting notion that the role of information primary and of course for there to be information, consciousness has to be implicated. And Paul Davies makes this incredibly interesting comment. And he's coming right out of this. It's mainstream thought. Again, it's not some flaky, flaky, new-agey thought. Report an error

32:01 And he said, when you look at the equations for quantum cosmology, time falls out when you take the Schrodinger wave equation and apply it to the whole universe. The whole time, the variable of time falls out of the equation. It's not there. And so you must introduce, to understand the universe as a quantum system, you must introduce the observer participant. Report an error

32:22 If you don't introduce that, the observer participant, then what you have is, he wrote a whole book about this, it's frozen time. The universe does not evolve. The universe does not change without the intervention of an observer participant. Report an error

32:39 To put it simply, but you can read this, he's written a number of books, I think they're all good, Paul Davies, is that what you need is the observer participant to basically, to use a tiny bit of Buddhist terminology, to conceptually designate now. Report an error

32:55 And as soon as you've done that, relative to now, you can speak of the future and the past, and now you have a continuum, and now you can speak of the universe evolving. But the universe doesn't say now by itself. The objective universe, the quantum system, It doesn't have built into it, objectively, an observer participant. There needs to be a subjective observer participant to demarcate time, now. Report an error

33:20 And then, oh, not yet, and it just happened. And then as soon as the observer participant comes in, then time unfolds. But without that, he said, the universe is frozen time. The universe does not evolve. So it would once again suggest a really absolutely fundamental role of the observer participant of information and therefore of consciousness. Report an error

33:40 That's the macrocosm. Now I just casually commented last night, consider the possibility that there are multiverses, which people like Stephen Hawking and others now are advocating, not just one, but multiple ones. Consider the possibility that there's one universe for every sentient being. There are multiverses. As many as there are sentient beings, so many universes are there. Report an error

34:08 And of course they overlap, there's no question about that. But how about that? Well, let's take a microcosm now. We just looked at the macrocosm of this universe as an information processing system. Here from the Samyutta Nikaya, again a collection of the Buddhist own discourses in the Pāli language, the Buddha declared, it is in this fathom long body with its perception and its mind that I describe the world, that is the universe, the origin of the universe, the cessation of the universe and the way leading to the cessation of the universe. Report an error

34:45 It's quoted quite frequently, interpreted in various ways, but clearly suggesting a kind of microcosm, macrocosm symmetry. And it could easily be interpreted as saying, when the Arhat, when a person like Bahiya achieves Arhatship, he has now come to the end of the line of himself as a sentient being, cast into the world by his karma and klesha, by his karma and mental afflictions. Report an error

35:18 And there he is, he achieves arhatship, becomes a liberated being, free now entirely and irreversibly of all mental afflictions. He is no longer accumulating any further karma. That he's not sowing seeds for any future rebirth. That's finished. Because that's all rooted in the delusion of grasping to the self. He's free of that now. Report an error

35:38 So there he is, he's just heard this short discourse by the Buddha, he's become an arhat. For one week he's said to be an arhat with remainder. And that he's still carrying the baggage. of the effects of his previous karma and klesha from past lives which propelled him into this life and which gave rise to his body and all the five skandhas, his body, his perceptions, feelings and so forth. Report an error

36:00 And so he's carrying the baggage. He's not accumulating any further causes for future baggage, any future rebirth of being propelled once again into the world. But he's carrying this final baggage, the last vestiges of saṃsāra for him. And in his case, he carried that baggage only for a week. And then he was gored by the cow. He died. And then he became an arhat without remainder. That's the technical term. Or he had to achieve liberation without remainder. Report an error

36:29 Which is to say, from his perspective, number one, does this mean annihilation? The answer is unequivocally no. That is, is the whole point of spiritual practice in, let's say, Theravāda Buddhism to go for absolute and irreversible annihilation? The answer is unequivocally no. There are very uninformed people who maybe say that, but it's really false. Report an error

36:47 Check out any good scholarship. Bhikkhu Bodhi wrote very well on this point. Peter Harvey, one after another, everybody who knows what's going on. No, that's not it. It is cessation, but it is not absolute termination. Which again, if we consider a conservation principle of consciousness, you can't turn it into nothing. Report an error

37:08 You cannot exit from reality entirely, but you can exit from saṃsāra. And so for that arhat with rot remainder, that continuum of The five skandhas with a body, various mental factors, and then six modes of consciousness, all conditioned by prior causes and conditions, propelled by karma and so forth, all six modes of consciousness that are conditioned, flowing through time, terminated. Report an error

37:37 It ceased. There's no question about it. Very, very clear in the Pāli Canon. All of your five skandhas terminated irreversibly of conditioned consciousness. Report an error

37:50 And yet, it's very clear from the Buddha's own teachings, That he refers to nirvāṇa not only as an absence of suffering, the causes of suffering, klesha, karma, he does do that, but he also refers to nirvāṇa in positive terms, such as immutable bliss, for example. And other statements, I haven't memorized them all, but there are a number of occasions when the Buddha does refer to it affirmatively, which suggests there must be some type of consciousness. Report an error

38:22 You can't have bliss with no consciousness. A robot is not blissful. A cell phone is not blissful. It has no consciousness. And so there must be some type of consciousness for the arhat who slipped into nirvāṇa without remainder. But it's not conditioned consciousness. It can't be. Because that's already been refuted. Now that it's terminated. And so the Buddha does refute it. Report an error

38:43 It's not often. But he does refer to it. In one sutta that I've cited in a couple of my books, Meditation of the Buddha Skeptic and in Mind and the Balance, right from the suttas, when the Buddha refers to a signless consciousness, unborn consciousness. So something lingers. But from the Pāli Canon, from the Theravāda perspective, there is a lingering, but you have gone into hyperspace. Report an error

39:17 You're not in our space with all the interesting phenomena arising and so forth. You've completely transcended that. Kind of a hyperspace, absolute space, Dharmadhatu. You've gone into some transcendent realm beyond space and time, beyond causality. It's called unborn, unborn and therefore unceasing, which means for you the world has disappeared. For you, the world of this and that, the richness, the color, all the cosmos, for you it's irreversibly vanished in the Pāli Canon and the Theravāda interpretation. Report an error

39:52 Your world has come to an end and you've checked out irreversibly, not into annihilation but into a state that is so transcendent that the Buddha would very rarely speak about it. And only once in a while would make any positive statement about it, just to ward off the notion, if you think this is your annihilation, you got that one wrong. So, that would suggest that if we consider an Arhat in the center of her, because there were women Arhat, let's switch to gender, a woman becomes an Arhat, there were a number of occasions where that happened, and then the woman dies. Report an error

40:27 As she dies, She vanishes as an individuated self, a person arising in dependence upon causal conditions, but also her whole universe dies, vanishes, perishes, disappears. And all that lingers is unborn, unceasing, immutably blissful consciousness, aware of only one thing, Dhamma Datu, which is Nirvāṇa, which is emptiness, which is absolute space of phenomena, which is ultimate reality. Report an error

40:57 And one's viewing it, there's a symmetry there. And that is the reality that one experiences is unborn, unceasing, unchanging, unconditioned, does not arise, independence upon cause and condition, and the same must be true of the consciousness of which you are aware of it. It has to be, because the Buddha said so. I mean, if one's going to believe this, it's unborn consciousness. There's a perfect symmetry there. Unborn consciousness being non-dually aware of unborn Dhamma Dhatu, ultimate Dhamma Dhatu, absolute space phenomenon, nirvāṇa, which means your world has disappeared. Report an error

41:31 You disappeared, your world disappeared. You as, again, this persona. So, the notion that the body, this fathom, so, your body, but not just a chunk of matter. He says, the body, sure, made of matter. That's never a question, really, in Buddhism. Made of cells, if we use modern terminology, cells, molecules, atoms, elementary particles. Report an error

41:54 But with its perception and its mind, it is in this that I describe the world. In other words, It really looks like microcosm, macrocosm. If you really fathom your body and the body of this body-mind system, that's what he's really referring to. This microcosmic, individuated, singular, body-mind system of your own is that in this context that I describe the universe, the origin of the universe, the cessation of the universe, that's when you achieve arhatship without liberation and the way leading to the cessation of the universe. Report an error

42:35 So how far can we push that and what benefits might there be in viewing the universe as an information processing system which is very compatible with Buddhism? Report an error

42:45 And then the notion of our body minds, that package right there, being not just a chunk of matter and energy, mass energy with emergent properties of consciousness, that is your body mind is not fundamentally consisting of matter. Just like John Wheeler says, the universe doesn't fundamentally consist of matter, but rather fundamentally consists of information and your body-mind system, instead of viewing it as just a body of material, mass energy, Report an error

43:23 with emergent properties of subjective experience, considering that it is fundamentally an information processing system in which consciousness is integral, fundamental. And not derivative and epiphenomenal, which means having no causal efficacy. If we view the body-mind system in that way, in which information is fundamental, Report an error

43:51 I would suggest my hypothesis. I've written about this at length in Meditations of Vodoskeptic. Now the placebo effect becomes completely intelligible. Report an error

44:04 It's completely unintelligible within the materialistic view. It doesn't make any sense. It shouldn't happen. It sounds like magic. It just shouldn't be happening at all. You know, especially when that, like in that case of the Parkinson's, where you just, if I take this pill, my symptoms will get better. I believe the doctor, this is going to be really going to work. Report an error

44:22 I mean, that was a level of knowledge. Yeah, the trembling and all of that. If I take this pill, that's going to go away. And then lo and behold, that simple, naive, uninformed, frankly, ignorant belief, that is just trust. Well, the doctor must know what he's doing, you know. And you take that sugar tablet, and of course it's not a sugar tablet. Report an error

44:42 It's that belief, that conviction, aspiration, hope, uninformed. But you've gotten information. That's what you've really gotten. Patient, take this pill and your symptoms of Parkinson's are going to be alleviated. That's information. That's all it is. This is irrelevant, what you're taking in, right? Report an error

45:02 But you've got some information. If you take this, your symptoms of Parkinson's are going to subside. You've got the information. It's assimilated. It's embraced. Report an error

45:12 And it activates the system. And it activates it from information to matter. It activates the system in exactly the biological manner that is needed to bring about the expected result. Report an error

45:27 The production of endogenous dopamine in your brain is activated. And the symptoms of Parkinson's subside. That actually makes sense. That's intelligible. And the materialists have no intelligible explanation at all, therefore they stop asking questions about it. Instead of questioning the limitations of their own dogma, they just simply said, well, we just won't think about that. It's double think. Orwell called it crime stop. Report an error

45:58 Crime stop. And crime stop is when you see, if I follow this line of reasoning, I won't like the result, therefore I won't follow that line of reasoning. Crime stop. I think it's Animal Farm. I think it's there. Crime stop. There's an awful lot of crime stop in modern materialists thinking about the mind. Report an error

46:16 Eric Kandel, a really smart man. And I imagine he's a very ethical man. I know people who know him. I have great respect for him. But when he attributes, like so many people, I'm just picking on him because he's very brilliant and a Nobel laureate. So not because he's stupid. He's not stupid. Most of these people aren't. But when he says the brain is the agent, brain's doing everything, and you're not responsible, I'm going to speculate that he's engaging in Crime Stop, as many, many, many of his peers do. Report an error

46:47 And as that sounds nice, I don't want to feel responsible for my depression. I'd like to think that it's the brain doing it, let alone if I have a relative or someone who's schizophrenic. We don't want to think that person's to blame, that's savage. So this isn't kind of nice, good, kind of lets me off the hook. And I feel good right now, and I'm going to stop thinking about it. Report an error

47:07 I feel better about it. And the brain's doing it. Then I don't have to feel so guilty. Good, I don't want to feel guilty. Crime stop. I just don't follow up with the implications. The implications are nobody is responsible for anything. And you're a robot. And you're not doing anything at all. You're screwed. Report an error

47:27 Because something you don't even understand is controlling everything you're doing while you have this ludicrous sense of actually being in control of something where you're in control of nothing whatsoever because you're fluff. You're an epiphenomen. Maybe don't exist at all. Don't go there. Suddenly that gives me the creeps. So there's an enormous amount of crime stop here where people just don't follow out the implications. Report an error

47:49 And so I saw this most vividly, most vividly. In 1989, I was with the Dalai Lama, Mind of Life meeting, just two days I think it was. Report an error

47:59 And in that particular meeting, the man who's organized the meeting, a very dear man named Robert Livingston, who's now passed away, but he was one of the pioneers of modern cognitive neuroscience. He decided for that particular meeting, only the second one we had in the series of Mind of Life meeting, that he would simply invite... Report an error

48:13 Not scientists who were open-minded, who were sympathetic to Buddhism, had an interest in Buddhism, or in the Dalai Lama in Tibet. No, he simply decided, and it was a reasonable kind of thing, I'm just going to invite the best people around. The best people. The best neuroscientists, the best philosophers, best, best, best. The most premier, the most distinguished and eminent. So that's what he did. Report an error

48:34 Packed the room with just that. The director of the National Institute of Mental Health. Patricia Churchland, winner of the MacArthur Award, philosopher, a limited materialist, highly regarded by her peers, philosopher, and then other people of that stature. Really, yeah, I won't give all the names, but they were all five-star. And they're all materialists. They were like a choir, all singing the same song. And so they're all saying, as Antonio Damasio, he was there. Report an error

49:07 He said, renowned neurologist. He said, A human being is a brain carrying a body in its back. And they all agreed with that, that human beings are brains. U equals brain. So they all agreed on that. And so the Dalai Lama is there. A long time ago, 1989. And the Dalai Lama is hearing this and they're all agreeing. Because there are no naysayers. Report an error

49:30 Materialism is just true. And then the Dalai Lama turned to them and said, Do you love brains? Because you love human beings. Everybody loves somebody. Report an error

49:43 They all said, yeah. But he wouldn't let them off. Maybe you didn't understand the question. When you look at your children, you feel kind of a warmth, a connection, affection. You just look in their faces, or your spouse, or your loved ones. And your heart is moved. You just look at them and you feel this tenderness, this warmth, the connection, affection that we have, one human being to another human being. Report an error

50:11 When you look at a brain, do you feel the same thing? Report an error

50:18 A lot of silence. And Patricia Churchland said, Look out, it's a trick. Report an error

50:32 I quote, Don't follow the implications of what he just said, otherwise you will find that my position looks stupid. Report an error

50:43 Because if the brain and human beings are the same, you love one, you really should love the other. You know, they're a quick one and the same thing. Well, she was the only one in the room who actually doesn't have much hands-on experience with brains. All the rest of them do. And one by one, remember a debate? You take off your hat? Report an error

51:01 One by one they said, okay, no, I don't love brains. I find them fascinating, interesting, but do I love a brain as I love my wife or my children? No, I don't. It's true, I don't. Report an error

51:18 And all of them one by one, I love my loved ones, but I don't look at a brain and say, oh, I make my heart go pitter-patter. Don't do that. There was only one person who stuck by her guns, Rabbi Yasu. She says, yes, I love brains. Patricia Churchland. She's stuck by her guns all the way through. I do love brains. Because she's a philosopher. And the philosopher is, you know, the death knell for a philosopher is to lose your fundamental argument. Report an error

51:46 And so she said to the bitter end, something I don't believe anybody in the room believed her. Except maybe herself. She said, no, I do love brains. Of course, she doesn't deal with them, so it's love from afar. Report an error

51:59 But I've heard that her husband, Paul Churchland, and they're both peas in a pod, he Now, this is a long time ago. Remember when men had wallets and they carried the pictures of the photos of their wives in a wallet? Remember that? Don't do it anymore, right? Report an error

52:16 Show your cell phone how many photos you want to see. Report an error

52:23 It is said, and I believe it's true, I believe it's true, that Paul Church and they both have the same view. A limited materialism, subjective experience doesn't exist at all. It's just an illusion. That's her view. that he He also, like many men, carried a photo of his wife in his wallet. And it was a brain scan. Report an error

52:54 This is all a commentary on the coolest application of mindfulness to a phenomenon, in case you were wondering. But that notion right there, again, the placebo effect, and it's so well documented. I mean, when it first came up in the 1950s, it was given that label, placebo effect, heyday of materialism, heyday of behaviorism, when the mind should not have any causal efficacy at all. Report an error

53:18 Because it was really hardcore back in the 50s, really hardcore behavioral psychology. Subjective experience doesn't even exist. If it doesn't exist, then it certainly has no causal efficacy. So what do we call this when people believe something that it happens? We'll call it, well, who's the nearest innocent bystander? Report an error

53:36 The placebo, right? The pill. Okay, it's placebo effect. Of course, that's the thing, the one thing in the universe you know it's not an effect of, but it's there. You done it. Placebo effect. They didn't really mean it was caused by the placebo, because the placebo is defined as something that doesn't have therapeutic effect, but they called it that. And then for some time it was seriously doubted. Report an error

53:58 The materialists said, no, it can't happen, can't happen. And then there was just so much evidence, and it was so necessary to exclude that from pharmaceutical research, that now I don't think anybody's right mind denies that it exists. But once again, there is simply no explanation whatsoever from the materialist paradigm. It absolutely shouldn't exist. Report an error

54:16 Maybe if you take it, you feel happy. Well, that could happen, subjective to subjective. But an uninformed belief influencing exactly the mechanisms in the brain and the rest of the body to bring about what you expect to happen, that's about as reasonable as a genie and a lamp. It's just absurd. It makes no sense. It's impossible. And material is a paradigm. And it happens every single day. And hundreds of millions of dollars are spent every year by the pharmaceutical industry trying to sift that out because they can't sell it. Report an error

54:46 They can sell drugs but they can't sell the placebo effect. And they're into making money. So there is an interpretation of just a revolution of viewing how we are present in the world as information processing system. It sounds rather, how do you say, a bit dry. But it doesn't have to be that as human beings we are, this whole mind-body system is a system in which information is primary. Report an error

55:13 And so not only can you believe something and then it makes you And then you feel better because it activated the mechanism of the body. It's not only the placebo effect, but also, of course, the nocebo effect. It's not only positive, there's a symmetry there. The nocebo effect, you know it? And that is, it happens in the United States a lot, where many people, unfortunately, have no health insurance. Report an error

55:37 So they feel ill, they feel some bad symptoms, they can't afford to go to the doctor. But they can make their way to at least some public computer. And they type in their symptoms on the computer, on the internet, and then it comes back. You're going to get some stuff. And they'll see, oh, this type of disease has such and such symptoms. Report an error

55:55 And then they self-diagnose, based upon the internet. Because they can't afford the doctor, right? Well, what's happened many, many times now, it's rather famous, is that people try to self-diagnose by finding something. They say, oh, I have this, oh. And then they read about some disease. For which their symptoms are symptoms of that disease and then they read about other symptoms of the disease and they think, oh, I must have that disease. They start getting those symptoms and they don't have the disease at all. Report an error

56:28 So it works both ways. So their mind activating exactly those parts of the body that will give rise to the symptoms that they believe they have because they think they have that kind of disease. So there's a real symmetry there. All experiences arise from the mind. Or preceded by the mind, issued forth from the mind, consisted of the mind. The mind is really primary, really central. So, we'll come back briefly now to the theme of Paratyati Sambhadpada. Report an error

57:03 And that is, we can ask quite reasonably, if we're really curious about reality, where do all these appearances come from? Where are they coming from? I mean, there they are, they're impermanent, they're not the appearances, I'll just give the Buddhist spiel, all these appearances to the five and six senses. Report an error

57:20 All of these appearances are impermanent, subject moment to moment to moment, rising and passing. They're not permanent. Many of them will, most of them, will terminate. Report an error

57:31 They're not veritable sources of well-being, second one. All these appearances, they're not intrinsically I or mine. It's a matter of control. Report an error

57:43 And that is, the CEO or the owner of a company believes he owns a company. If the people in it do what he says, right? But if they suddenly all go on strike, then he says, oh, but where's my company? If they don't obey him, then he can wonder, maybe this is not my company. So the whole issue of is it mine or not, can I do anything with this cell phone that I want, including destroy it or give it away? Yeah, I can, because more or less it belongs to me. Report an error

58:11 Whereas he can't do that with other people's. And then can I modify my emotions? Can I influence my emotions? Yes, I can. How about my breath, my thoughts, my physical behavior? Can I control that? To a certain extent I can, certainly a lot more than I can control your thoughts, emotions, behavior and so forth. Very little control. But if I'm a master and you're a slave, then I have more and then I say you're mine. Report an error

58:32 Right? If you're actually my slave, then I say, okay, then do this and you have to do it, otherwise I get to punish you. And so control is a major issue. And then other issues are like privileged access. And that is when I have a sense that I can observe my thoughts, but I have a sense nobody else can. Report an error

58:52 So since I have privileged access, even if I can't control them entirely, I say, well, the privileged access, and I can see that nobody else can, at least to my knowledge, therefore they must be mine, whereas yours, they're not mine because I can't even see them or influence them in any significant way. Report an error

59:07 So the issue of my or mine is very, very relative. It fluctuates and has everything to do with conceptual designation. And I'll give you just one quote, a lovely quote, and I haven't been able to trace who said it, but it was a Hindu, a Hindu Swami, and spoke with a great deal of wisdom, I believe. It's a lovely quote, you might want to remember it. And he said, when I view the world with the eyes of wisdom, I see that I am nothing. When I view the world with the eyes of compassion, I see that I am everything. Report an error

59:38 So, where do all the appearances come from? I've suggested they don't come from the brain. For the simple reason, there's no evidence that they do. And it's quite a silly notion, actually, to think that chemicals and electricity will give rise to appearances like emotions and colors and smells and so forth, all by themselves. Report an error

1:00:01 It's an absurd idea. Very common, but it's absurd. So if that's not true, then another major hypothesis promoted by people such as Bishop Barclay, the Irish Roman Catholic philosopher, George Barclay, God did it. God not only created the universe, but God is the unmoved mover, Aristotle, that is presenting all of our appearances to us at all times. Report an error

1:00:27 God is the unmoved mover. Just as, frankly, in materialism, they really do regard matter. It's so Aristotelian, it's quite charming. Stupid, but charming. That matter is the unmoved mover in the following way. Not that matter doesn't move, of course. So matter interacts with matter. Everybody knows that. Matter interacts with energy. Sure, sure. But when it comes to matter, material phenomenon, and then non-material, immaterial, non-physical, the epiphenomenal emerges from the brain. Report an error

1:01:02 Such as emotions and thoughts and dreams and so forth. Fundamental view of materialism is that the universe is causally closed. And that is to say the only things that have causal efficacy in the physical universe are themselves physical. Big principle. It's full of holes ever since the rise of quantum mechanics. Report an error

1:01:23 But it seemed to be airtight back in the 19th century and that's where neuroscience is still pretty much lodged. But the notion of the universe being causally closed means that the physical can influence It's epiphenomenal spewings such as thoughts, images, all kinds of subjective experience. So you stimulate the brain and out comes a memory. Report an error

1:01:45 So a memory pops up, right? Or you can influence subjective experience in many ways by influencing the brain with alcohol and so forth and so on. But the materialistic view is that non-physical Subjective experience, again, has no physical attributes. What are you going to do? That non-physical subjective experience has no causal efficacy on the brain or anything else. Report an error

1:02:11 Hence, Eric Kandel saying the brain does everything because that's where all the matter is. That's what matters, so to speak. So the brain influences the mind, but the mind doesn't influence the brain. That is not any non-physical mind because it can't get in. The ghost can't impinge upon the machine. And so then, vis-a-vis, Matter versus non-physical epiphenomena, such as all subjective experience, is a one-way causality. One-way causality. Matter influences subjective experience, but subjective experience doesn't influence matter. Report an error

1:02:45 So once again, welcome to robot land, because none of your thoughts, emotions, desires and so forth matter, because they're not material. And that which is doing everything is that which is material, but you don't know anything about that, unless you're a brain scientist. So it gives all the power to the brain scientist and takes away all power from everybody who's not a brain scientist. But even, of course, they're disempowered because they're robots like everybody else. Report an error

1:03:09 So it's really an incredibly savage worldview by implication. But if you practice Crimestop, then you get to remain in your little bubble of thinking this is a fun world to be in. Report an error

1:03:21 So the unmoved mover, matter vis-a-vis non-matter, there it is. It's straight from Aristotle. And then going back to Bishop Barclay. I hope you can follow all this. I'm creating quite a mosaic here. Bishop Barclay was one view, he was a rather famous philosopher, said that there is no matter out there. He was an idealist, promoting idealism as a philosophy. Report an error

1:03:45 There's no matter out there, there's no objective physical world out there. Actually God is creating all appearances and doesn't need a physical, absolutely external physical world to do that. So God did it. So if you ask why your baby got sick or why your baby got well, Why it's raining today and it's a drought next year. God did it. All these appearances are rising from God. So that's one. Report an error

1:04:12 It makes sense within that context. Materialism makes sense tautologically for those for whom it makes sense. But is there any other option? Where do these appearances come from? If they don't come lofting off of the brain, if they don't simply come from a transcendent source beaming down from God, where do they come from? Report an error

1:04:36 Well, of course, the quick Buddhist answer is they come from the substrate consciousness. But then you say, well, yeah, okay, elaborate. Otherwise, that's just a little collection of words. Report an error

1:04:46 And that is, why does one person experience one set, even in the same environment? Why does one person experience kind of different kind of appearances with some commonality, whereas another person experiences very different? And so the Buddhist view here, and it's pan-Buddhist. And diametrically opposed to materialism is summarized in a verse, very easy for me to remember, from the Abhidama Kosha, classic, classic text, studied in all schools of Tibetan Buddhism, and it was a classic in India for, oh, more than 500 years, until Buddhism was wiped out there. Report an error

1:05:25 It's by Vasubandhu, 5th century or so, Abhidama Kosha, Treasury of Anonymology, and the Tibetan one goes really easily, Jikten Lala Lelejung, very easy to remember, Jikten Lala Lejung. the myriad worlds, the myriad loka, the many loka. Lala means many. So in other words we have multiverses. The many worlds, jikran lala, lala means many, jikran lala, lele jung, emerge from karma. Report an error

1:05:56 The many worlds emerge from karma. So now instead of matter and becoming a materialogian, or a theos and becoming a theologian, we are karmalogians. And that is the myriad appearances of worlds. Report an error

1:06:12 One world per person. The myriad appearances arise from karma. As you sow, so shall you reap. That the world you're experiencing is fundamentally issuing forth, yes from your mind, but why this? Because of the tremendous configuration, the momentum, the seeds of accumulated karma. And you're experiencing, each of us experience in terms of the appearances arising to us that are being dished up. Report an error

1:06:44 Not voluntarily, they're just happening to us. But these appearances arising from moment to moment by way of all of the six senses really, the appearances arising to us, but especially those highlighting those of the physical world, are not coming from some independently existing matter, material world, nor from God, nor from anybody else, but are actually issuing forth as the fruition, the manifestation of our own karma. Report an error

1:07:09 Now karma is individual and it's collective. And that is there are things that we do on our lonesome. We're sitting in our room by ourselves and we do something with no collaboration at all. That's individual karma. There's a lot of that. But of course there's many, I mean countless cases of people, sentient beings, human beings for example, doing things collectively. Report an error

1:07:31 Collectively. So maybe two people that plan a bank job, a bank robbery together. And then they commit it together and then by the law they're both culpable. But by karma also they're now cultivating collective karma, the two of them. Or one of the instances of this where it was a very large collective was, it just leaps to my mind, the Second World War. Report an error

1:07:54 The Allies versus the Axis powers. And I know most about America just because I know more of its history than other countries' history. But during the Second World War there was a tremendous, not 100%, but a great deal of unanimity within the American public that this was a war we had to fight. And we had to win it. And so the general population being willing to make sacrifices of taxes and many, many other things, and thinking in a unified way, we, we, they bombed Pearl Harbor, we did this, we did that, we dropped the atom bomb, and we paid for it, and we're for it, and that brought the war to a close. Report an error

1:08:36 Major, hundreds of millions of people engaging in collective karma. And of course it wasn't just the United States. There were the two teams. And so a great deal of collective karma from the side of Austria, Germany and so forth, and then collective karma from the Allies. So in that case, Report an error

1:08:54 karma that is an assembly of many people collectively, which means that when that karma comes to fruition, it will be a bunch of people having that experience simultaneously and they'll have very, very similar experiences because it's from collective karma. So a lot of our experiences are consensual. Report an error

1:09:15 As in when we gaze around the grounds here of the Brahma Kumaras, we're going to see very similar things. Very, very similar things. Collective karma. Collective karma. And of course many people around us. So, interesting point, now we're going deeply into Buddhist worldview that it's not going to be easy to verify until you're extremely far along the path. Report an error

1:09:39 But it said when a universe is formed in these multiverses, emerging from the form realm into the desire realm, It is said, and you have these whole populations of sentient beings migrating from one universe to another, collectively experienced, that when there's a migration into a forming universe, it's said it's the karma of those sentient beings that's catalyzing the formation of that universe. Report an error

1:10:03 They're kind of creating their own house and moving into it. It's the actions of sentient beings that are creating universes. And then within it, there are many unique perspectives, unusual perspectives, and that's where the individual karma comes in. So karma, as for the theist, the whole ontological burden of reality is placed on one person's shoulders, God. And for many people that really works. Report an error

1:10:25 For the materialists, the whole ontological burden is placed on matter energy. And it really makes sense. I agree, it does make sense within its confines. It just has a lot of inexplicables like subjective experience. And for the Buddha, the ontological burden is placed on karma. That's what's being dished up. But now this can easily be interpreted. Report an error

1:10:49 As predetermination. Well, what can I do? It's my karma. What can I do? I mean, I had karma. Or we can then with cold indifference say, well, yes, this person has gotten ill with cancer, but it's his karma. What can you do? It's his karma. Or yes, there's a great deal of poverty in Northeast Africa, but that's their karma. Or Syria, so much misery there. Well, that's their karma. Report an error

1:11:13 What can you do? And that's a way to totally pervert Buddhism into something that's ugly. Despicable and dehumanizing. Not the Buddhist words. Not the Buddhist message at all. Karma is what's being dished up. And this is why in a way, in a very benevolent healing way, when the Tibetans experience something that they in that generation did not deserve, I don't think in any manner I can imagine the Tibetans living in 1950, who grew up let's say from 1920 or 1910, that somehow they as a population had done something so awful to the Chinese. Report an error

1:11:48 That they were reaping what they sowed because of their despicable behavior towards the Chinese. There's just no evidence for that at all. They were quite innocent. They had pretty amicable relationships, pretty much trade back and forth with the Chinese, but not a whole lot of contact. Report an error

1:12:02 They had a lot of problems with the society, but nothing really exceptional. It wasn't a beastly society. Actually, it was quite benevolent in many ways, but they hadn't done anything Chinese. They were quite innocent. And then comes this steamroller that just completely creams them, kills a million of them. Report an error

1:12:17 One out of six people were killed. Machine gun and slow forth. The whole culture decimated. It was catastrophe. It was hell on earth. And you say, well, but they didn't deserve it. And the answer is, yeah, they really didn't. They really didn't. They hadn't done anything to warrant that any more than they do now. They haven't done violent terrorism to fight back against the Chinese, pacifism. Report an error

1:12:39 They keep on looking to the Dalai Lama. He says, thumbs down on violence. And then the Chinese government vilifies him when he's the one that's keeping them. Not violent is incredibly psychotic on the part of the Chinese government. Because he's the one person that's preventing them from a significant number of them being really violent, becoming really macho terrorists. Report an error

1:12:59 And there aren't any Tibetan terrorists. They won't go against the Dalai Lama. There's a story there, I won't go into it right now. But they won't do it. There was a little terrorist movement that started up in about 1976. Little one. They said I wouldn't do it. It's too good. Report an error

1:13:17 It was about 1976. There was a small group of young men. It was when Yasser Arafat was invited to the United Nations. It was about 1976 years old. Yasser Arafat, head of PLO, a terrorist, he blew up people, right? He was invited to the United Nations to speak. That was 1976. The Dalai Lama was not given a visa to come to the United States until 1979. And there was a small group of young, sturdy... Report an error

1:13:48 Courageous young Tibetan men that said, screw this. A terrorist gets to speak, but our leader is not even given a visa. I really want to use the F word, but you can imagine that one. They said, screw this. He shows what works in the modern world we're experiencing. Blow up people, it catches their attention. And then they give you the microphone. Speak pacifism, speak love, speak forgiveness. You don't even get a visa. Report an error

1:14:21 So let's start blowing up stuff. It works. I mean, it's evident. Yes, Dalai Lama, no. Okay, we want to have the Dalai Lama get the microphone, have him invited to the United Nations, which has never happened. Report an error

1:14:35 And so let's start blowing up stuff. Report an error

1:14:39 Dalai Lama heard about it. Report an error

1:14:44 And he sent out a message to all of the Tibetan people scattered all over the world because they're Tibetan diaspora, all over the place. And he said, I've heard about this movement, about kind of a Tibetan, you know, terrorist movement. And he said, if that's the way you want to go, then count me out. I'm going to retire and I won't be your head any longer. Report an error

1:15:02 I'll no longer lead you. If that's the way you want to go, you can, it's your choice, but I will not lead you any longer. And that word got out. And what happened to us Tibetans all over the world, I don't know about Tibet, they probably couldn't hear him, but in the diaspora all over the world, they rallied to that. Report an error

1:15:20 And they sent in letters from all over the, there's something of a kind of a grassroots movement, and they sent in letters from all over the world to the Dalai Lama's private office saying, we're not siding with that, we're siding with you. We want the way of peace, of compassion, not violence. And to show you that we mean it, our group here in Auckland, because it was all over the world, Auckland, you know, how many Tibetans there? Report an error

1:15:46 We are going to recite 10 million Omane Pemehum. Our group, 100 million Omane Pemehum. Our group, 5 million. We're going to be just reciting Omane Pemehum all over the world. And here's our pledge. All over, it's kind of this groundswell. Omane Pemehum, mantra of compassion. Report an error

1:16:07 And that silenced it. That did it. And the group, the young group of young Tibetan men, very courageous and rational, they saw, okay, we got no support here from anyone. Of course, not the Dalai Lama, but not from any of our compadres, Tibetans around the world. And so they stopped the idea. They didn't blow up anything. And then the Dalai Lama did something quite remarkable. He recruited them. Report an error

1:16:35 He recruited them. He said, come, come, I'm going to employ you guys. You've got courage, you have vision. Your patriots. Report an error

1:16:51 What's dished up is karma. By karma. In the Buddhist worldview. But we're not helpless. Because what's dished up is an array of appearances. Report an error

1:17:05 But we're the ones that make sense of the appearances. We're the ones that designate objects based upon appearances. The objects then becoming the attribute bearers of the appearances as their attributes. How we respond, how we designate, how we populate the world that we experience with objects and with subjects. Report an error

1:17:27 That's in our hands. It's not predetermined by karma. It's a choice we make from moment to moment. Shall we regard, for example, in the Dalai Lama's case, shall we regard the Chinese people as our enemies who have destroyed our culture, killed our monks, destroyed our monasteries, burned our books? Shall we regard them in that way? That's one way of designating them. They are our enemies, very understandably. There's a reality basis for that designation. If you want to make that designation, it's a realistic one. Report an error

1:17:56 Or you can designate them as our brothers and sisters. And what we experienced was the ripening of our own karma. And they were the vehicles, the agents. Although they are responsible for their behavior, we are responsible that it happened to us. It's maturation of our karma. They were the instruments of the karma, catalyzed by their mental afflictions. But we have now, we, in the 1950s, 60s, 70s and to the present, we are simply reaping the results of our own karma. Report an error

1:18:27 Therefore, we'll not whip the finger out and say, you're absolutely responsible. And you are our brothers and sisters. And the Dalai, I've seen this going on for years now. When Chinese come to him for teachings from Taiwan, Hong Kong and so forth, he just makes a way for a schedule. He'll meet with them in Pasadena, California. A special, oh, the Chinese want to come? Absolutely, please come. Please come. More than the Bolivians or the Portuguese or the Germans. Report an error

1:18:54 Oh, the Chinese? Oh, Chinese? Oh, you're welcome. Sure, I'm happy to share Dhan with you. So if anything, give some privilege access rather than the contrary. That was his choice. That was his choice. The karma was delivered up, but how do you designate it? What's your perspective? How do you evaluate it? Report an error

1:19:11 How do you make sense of it? So the appearances are empty of objectivity. The appearances do not have in their own nature something objectively absolutely real that's being sledgehammered onto us. Simply an array of appearances and then we designate them and that is where we are making choices. Shall we designate this as adversity or shall we designate this as a wonderful opportunity for practicing Dharma? Report an error

1:19:35 Should we designate this felicity and therefore an object of grasping? Or should we designate it as something for which we can be grateful and try to use in the most meaningful way? Report an error

1:19:44 How we designate is where our freedom lies. What's dished up is dished up. But how we interpret it, how we make sense of it, how we designate it, that's how we find ourselves in a world that makes sense to us, populated by many things, objective and subjective. Report an error

1:20:03 And so all appearances are empty of any inherent objectivity. Report an error

1:20:13 Form is emptiness. And out of that field of possibilities, which by nature is empty, emerge all appearances. Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. And therein lies our freedom. Not in choosing the type of appearances that happen, choosing how we interpret them, make sense of them, how we populate our world in which we are in the center in a way that makes sense to us, that is meaningful. Report an error

1:20:44 So that's the freedom of Dhamma. Report an error

1:20:49 I think it's time to end. Take a break. Come back at 11.15. Report an error

Report an error

Passage at . Please listen to the audio before you suggest a fix.

Suggest a fix

Passage at . Please listen to the audio before you suggest a fix.

Related talks

  1. Four Applications Of Mindfulness Retreat 2013 with B. Alan Wallace (part 46)

    B. Alan Wallace · 2013 · 1 h 15 min

  2. Four Applications Of Mindfulness Retreat 2013 with B. Alan Wallace (part 48)

    B. Alan Wallace · 2013 · 1 h 5 min

  3. Four Applications Of Mindfulness Retreat 2013 with B. Alan Wallace (part 7)

    B. Alan Wallace · 2013 · 1 h 22 min

  4. Four Applications Of Mindfulness Retreat 2013 with B. Alan Wallace (part 38)

    B. Alan Wallace · 2013 · 1 h 15 min

  5. Four Applications Of Mindfulness Retreat 2013 with B. Alan Wallace (part 35)

    B. Alan Wallace · 2013 · 53 min

  6. Four Applications Of Mindfulness Retreat 2013 with B. Alan Wallace (part 1)

    B. Alan Wallace · 2013 · 1 h 59 min

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.

Recorded at Vajrayana Institute, Sydney, and archived by the institute on Internet Archive. More from Vajrayana Institute

Listen on Internet Archive · CC BY-NC-ND 3.0