Being Nothing

Most of humanity's problems arise from a hyper-developed sense of self. Yet do we really have a self? A century from now, will my existence have made any difference? What matters? How can we lighten up a sense of self and be nothing?

Transcript

So,

Erica had a dream years ago that she was looking out a hotel window and looking down about 25 stories and there was somebody that was in a pool who had drowned.

And she could tell it was me because the pockets were all bulging.

I do very well because I know it's true.

I'm a chipmunk with my cheeks down here.

So,

In just a few words,

What I would like to suggest tonight is that there is no freedom for ourselves.

It just really is not possible.

There is only freedom from a self.

So,

What I want to talk about is being nothing.

We can do no self,

But that's easy.

I want to talk about being nothing.

So,

I'll start with a couple stories.

When I was about seven years old,

My mommy sat me down and she told me where babies came from.

It was the sperm and the egg and the sex act,

I mean the whole business.

And I think I had a really typical seven year old response.

It was like,

Oh gross,

You've got to be kidding me.

But I remember later on that evening,

I was lying in my bed,

My bedroom up on the second floor,

Sort of gazing at the ceiling in the sort of half light of the evening.

And I got to thinking,

What if my mommy and daddy had not gone to the University of Michigan at the same time?

Then I would not exist.

They might have never met and I wouldn't have been conceived and I wouldn't exist.

And that just seemed really weird.

Or maybe they went at the same time,

But it's a big place and maybe they never met or maybe they met and didn't fall in love or maybe they fell in love but didn't get married or maybe they got married but weren't in the mood for starting a baby on a certain summer afternoon in 1947.

Or what if a different one of those five million sperm got to the egg first?

I could just think of millions of contingencies under which I would not exist.

Maybe they would have had a different second child.

And maybe they would have given it my name.

No one would know anything about me,

No one would even miss me because I didn't exist.

It's pretty weird.

We may think we're part of some larger plan,

But life itself may be inevitable.

But any particular organism,

It just seemed to me like a statistical fluke.

And that just seemed pretty weird.

So,

Flash forward,

It's about eight years or so.

When I was a junior in high school,

I had another experience that I had never had before,

Up to that time.

One guy in my circle of friends ceased to exist.

Larry was this kind,

Grounded,

Sweet,

Creative,

Smart guy.

And one morning I got to school and Paul told me that Larry had been killed in a car accident the night before.

But the thing that was really,

Really bizarre about it was about five days later,

We had our French midterm exam right on schedule.

And I remember sitting at my desk,

Was over by the window in the classroom,

I remember in the middle of the exam,

Looking around,

Larry used to sit up on the other side up front near the door and his desk was empty.

And I was looking around and I was thinking,

Does anybody notice that Larry isn't here?

Does his life make any difference to anybody?

I wanted to write across the exam,

Lawrence Amore,

Lawrence Amore.

But I didn't.

Because it was beginning to sink in that when I die,

99.

9999% of the billions of people on the planet are not going to even notice.

And a few people will warn me for a while,

But even with them,

The next day they will probably get up and have breakfast and maybe go for walks,

Read books,

Complain about politics.

The sun will keep coming up in the morning,

The birds will sing in the spring,

The peepers will peep in the evening,

The clouds will not fall out of the sky.

Within about five or ten years,

Probably all signs of my existence will just dissolve back into the larger flow of life.

As if I had never been here.

Pretty weird.

So this evening,

What I want to do is explore all this.

It comes down to about three questions.

Do we really exist in any significant way?

Do we have a self?

And what matters?

Given all that,

What really matters?

The Buddha said that one of the fundamental facts of life was anatta.

Atta is a Pali word for self and an is a negation.

Can we talk about this here?

Did we?

Ok.

So I'll go through this quickly.

So,

Anatta means self,

An is a negation,

So anatta is usually translated as non-self or no-self.

And on the face of it,

That is just nonsense.

I mean,

I'm here,

Right?

I've got a self,

It seems it's really obvious.

And if I don't have a self,

What is it that experiences this non-self?

So paradoxes abound.

But the Buddha was quite insistent that anatta was one of the three major characteristics of life.

The eightfold path,

The first fold of the eightfold path is wise you.

And the major component of that is that it's all impersonal.

Everything's impersonal.

So I would like to suggest that whether you or I or any of us believe in a self or not actually is not that important.

I think from the Buddha's perspective,

The only thing that's important is whether we hold that lightly enough so it doesn't become a boulder on the spiritual path.

To stay pretty light with all of this.

Figure out how to get that self out of the way of what we need to do.

I know this can all sound really esoteric and almost geeky.

And I certainly am a Buddhist geek.

But I would suggest that it's actually a terribly,

Terribly important topic.

That I think most of the issues that humanity faces as a species can be traced directly to a hyperdeveloped sense of self.

This really overdeveloped sense of self.

I mean you just go down the list of them.

Political gridlock.

You know they're just a bunch of egos battling against each other.

War and terrorism.

You know at the base of that mostly it's people saying my god is better than your god.

Or my point of view is better than your point of view.

What else?

Income inequality.

You know it's just greed.

People holding on to stuff.

Climate disruption.

You know I think a lot of climate disruption really grows out of this tendency for us to put so much emphasis on the self that somehow we think that our well-being can be separated from the environment in which we live.

And so forth.

So getting this hyperdeveloped sense of self out of the way in and of itself isn't going to solve all our problems.

But it creates an environment in which I think solutions are a lot,

Lot easier to come to.

So this evening I'm actually not going to try to convince you one way or another whether we have a self or not.

The Buddha was not particularly interested in those sort of grandiose views of things.

So what I would like to do is just kind of share some stories and some images and stuff that will kind of help us find ways to just kind of explore this issue,

Tease it out,

See where we are in relationship to it.

So,

Place to start is probably that word anatta.

In his book What the Buddha Taught.

Not what the Buddha taught,

But what the Buddha thought.

It's really quite amazing.

It's by Richard Gombrich who is a student of who wrote What the Buddha Taught.

It's one of his students.

So the title was actually a direct reference to that.

And it's really great because he spends a lot of time doing the sort of research that really sort of excites me but I would never have the energy for,

Which is going back through all the old religions and the myths and stuff that were around at the Buddhist time.

So you can look at the language he used and how the people around him would have thought about and what he might have thought,

Etc.

And so he makes the case that translating anatta as no self may be accurate but it is really incomplete.

It's not adequate.

And he says that the way to fix it is simple.

He just put the word unchanging in the middle of the phrase and it becomes no unchanging self.

That the Buddhist contemporaries,

That's what they would have heard.

Because anatta did not refer to self in just the ordinary way we used it.

It referred to the Sanskrit of it as atman.

It referred to the true self,

The eternal self,

The real self behind all these false selves.

Something that is eternal and unchanging and is always there.

So when the Buddha said we have no ata,

The people who were listening to him would have heard we have no unchanging self.

But in English without that cultural context it kind of gets filtered out.

And I like it because it brings anatta out of this esoteric realm into something that feels a lot more familiar.

You know we all know,

I mean we're not the same person we were twenty years ago or two years ago or even two weeks ago.

So he's just saying that the self is in flux.

And I think I mentioned the other day that there is no word in Pali for process.

So this is what the Buddha is referring to as the self in process but there just wasn't a language for it.

So to see how the Buddha used this term I'd like to tell you the story about this character called Bahiya the bark cloth.

This is the Bahiya Sutta.

It's a lovely little story.

It comes out of the Udana which is this collection of fairly short suttas and they are among some of the oldest of them.

So these go way back.

And it's short enough where I'm just going to go through and read you the whole sutta.

We'll talk about it as we go along.

This rendering of it is one that I put together from the work of John Ireland,

Thamisaro Bhikkhu,

With some help from Lee Brazington and John Peacock just to be transparent.

They all collaborated?

No they didn't collaborate.

What I do is I get all their translations and stuff like that and put them all out there and go through it all.

He has a translation of that?

I don't know if he has one out there but I had a long conversation with him about it and he brought in some pieces of stuff that I'll share with you that I think are really really helpful.

So thus I have heard at one time the Blessed One was staying in Shravasti in Jeddah's Grove at Anitha Pandika's Park.

Shravasti is a small city in northern India.

Jeddah's Grove is this wooded area next to Shravasti and Anitha Pandika's Park was a plot of land within that that was given to the Buddhist Sangha by this wealthy merchant by the name of Anitha Pandika who was a lay follower of the Buddha.

The Buddha spent about thirty of the annual rains retreats in Anitha Pandika's Park.

The picture of me on the back of Buddha's map was actually taken right across from the Buddha's kuti.

He wasn't there anymore.

Yeah,

My sensitivities are pretty coarse though so who knows.

At that time Bahiya the bar cloth was living by the seashore at Saparaka.

Saparaka was a waver on the west coast of India actually near Mumbai.

It's about twelve hundred miles from Shravasti.

The later commentary suggests that Bahiya was shipwrecked and that he lost everything he had and so he was reduced for a while to getting bark from trees to make clothes for himself.

But John Peacock,

And this is the conversation I had with Lee Braisington,

I had this long conversation with John Peacock about this,

And John Peacock is this scholar who really has a much more plausible explanation which is that Bahiya was probably a follower of what's known as the Bhaiyadharan yaka Upanishad.

One of the books comes out of the Vedic literature and the Bhaiyadharan yaka means the great forest.

So the people who were the followers of this particular Upanishad were really into trees.

Out there communing with trees,

Hanging out with trees,

Making clothes from trees,

Probably taking fibers out of trees and weaving them in a cloth and all kinds of things.

And the importance of this will come clear in a little bit.

He,

Bahiya,

Was respected,

Revered,

Honored,

Venerated and given homage and was one who had obtained the requisites of robes,

Alma-sud,

Lodging and medicine.

So this indicates that Bahiya was not just an isolated yogi,

That he was actually quite accomplished and probably had a fairly large following.

Now,

While he was in seclusion,

This reflection arose in the mind of Bahiya.

Am I one of those in the world who was an arahant or on the path to arahantship?

So Bahiya is wondering about his practice and he goes off to reflect and see if he can sort of intuit where he is.

An arahant of course is a fully enlightened being.

So Bahiya is wondering about his progress.

Have any of you ever wondered about your meditation progress?

So that's what he's doing.

Then a devata,

A spirit,

Who was a former blood relation of Bahiya,

Of the bar cloth,

Understood that reflection in his mind.

Being compassionate and wishing to benefit him,

He approached Bahiya and said,

You Bahiya are neither an arahant nor on the path to arahantship.

Lumber!

That's not in the suttas.

You do not follow a practice where you could be an arahant.

So don't take this dialogue literally as I was saying a couple of nights ago.

They had a different understanding of where thoughts and stuff came from.

They thought it came from dialogues with spirits.

So basically Bahiya reflects on his progress and he thinks,

Nah,

I'm not enlightened and I don't think I'm even going in the right direction.

So he has great doubt.

Have you ever wondered if your practice is going anywhere?

Then in this world,

Who are the arahants who know the path?

So he's asking,

Where in the world can I find a good teacher?

And he has an intuitive flash,

That's quite specific.

Bahiya,

In a far country,

Is a town called Sravasti.

There lives a blessed one who is fully enlightened.

He is indeed an arahant and he teaches Dhamma leading to arahantship.

Bahiya was profoundly stirred.

Then and there he departed from Siparaka,

Stopping only for one night everywhere along the way he went to Sravasti and Anathas,

At Pandikas Park.

So when I get an inspiration to go on retreat,

I check my calendar,

I check my bank account,

I check with the family,

I make arrangements to have the newspaper not delivered,

Put an autoresponder onto my email.

It can take me weeks or months sometimes before,

Of planning before I can go off on a retreat for a couple of weeks.

But Bahiya is really dedicated.

He gets this inspiration and he's out the door.

And he doesn't stop at health spas,

He doesn't drop in on relatives,

He doesn't sight see along the way,

He just stops at night,

Just long enough to rest enough to have the energy to keep going the next day.

So what kind of machinations do you go through when you go on retreat?

So Bahiya arrives at Jeddah's Grove.

At that time a number of monks were walking up and down in the open air.

Bahiya,

The bark cloth,

Approached those monks and said,

Where revered serves is the Blessed One living?

We wish to see that arhat,

The fully enlightened one.

The Blessed One,

Bahiya,

Is gone for alms food among the houses.

Then Bahiya hurried out of Jeddah's Grove.

Entering Shavasti,

He saw the Blessed One walking for alms food.

I love this little passage.

He saw the Blessed One watching for alms food,

Pleasing,

Lovely to see with calm senses and tranquil mind,

Attained to perfect poise and calm,

Controlled,

A perfected one,

Watchful with restrained senses.

Sounds kind of adoring.

On scene,

He,

Bahiya,

Approached,

Fell down with his head at the Blessed One's feet and said,

Teach me Dhamma,

Blessed One,

Teach me Dhamma,

One well gone,

So that it will be for my good and happiness for a long time.

So again,

We get a measure of Bahiya's dedication.

He gets to Shavasti,

The monks are doing their walking meditation,

And rather than sit down and respectfully wait for them to finish,

He goes up and says,

Where is the dude?

Where is the Buddha?

And they say,

He's often talent on alms rounds.

And then rather than actually waiting for him to return and looking for appropriate time,

He goes into Shavasti,

Looks around,

Runs the Buddha down in the street and drops at his feet and says,

Teach me the Dhamma.

Upon being spoken to thus,

The Blessed One said,

It is an unsuitable time,

Bahiya,

We have entered among the houses for alms food.

So you get that,

For a Buddha to say,

It's unsuitable time,

It's a little like saying,

What are you doing,

You jerk?

Slow down,

Cool your jets,

You're way out of line,

Shut up,

Back off.

So how do you think Bahiya responds?

A second time Bahiya said to the Blessed One,

Pat,

This is just for you.

A second time Bahiya says to the Blessed One,

It is difficult to know for certain,

Revered sir,

How long the Blessed One will live.

Or how long I will live.

No,

No,

Teach me Dhamma so it will be for my good and happiness for a long time.

So despite the reprimand,

I mean,

Buddha is just going for it and he ups the ante.

He says,

You know,

We could die at any moment,

So please let's get on with it.

Just like Pat would,

Right?

The inside joke is that Pat has a new book coming out of his death.

I'm dying to read it.

I hope you get a chance.

Tell me now.

Let me seat you.

Anybody got a camera?

So what does the Buddha say?

A second time,

Which is like Pat,

For a second time the Blessed One said,

It is an unsuitable time Bahiya,

We have entered among the houses for Am-Sud.

She's playing the role well.

Buddha shoes him away.

A third time Bahiya said to the Buddha,

It is difficult to know for certain how long any of us will live.

Teach me Dhamma for my good and happiness for a long time.

So part of what's going on in ancient times,

You know,

Three was the number for completion and when you asked,

You know,

Three times it was not only an indication of depth of your sincerity but it was a request that was very hard for a Buddha anybody to resist.

After asking the Buddha three times,

Yeah,

OK,

So the Buddha responds,

Bahiya,

You should train yourself thus.

In seeing there is merely seeing.

In hearing there is merely hearing.

In sensing there is merely sensing.

In cognizing there is merely cognizing.

In this way you should train yourself Bahiya.

So those are kind of weird instructions.

So the question is why did the Buddha give Bahiya those particular instructions?

So remember that the Buddha was trained in the Vedic scriptures.

Any educated man at that time would have had a great deal of familiarity with him.

So he recognized Bahiya's tree-made clothes was probably an indication that he was a follower of the Vrindhara-yaka,

Upanishad.

And let me just quote you from it a little bit.

This particular Vedic scripture encourages yogis to look for the unseen seer,

The unheard hearer.

Are you familiar with this language?

The unthought thinker,

The uncognized cognizer.

This is thyself,

The inner controller,

The immortal.

Imperishable is the unseen seer,

The unheard hearer,

The unthought thinker,

The ununderstood understander.

Other than it there is not that sees.

Other than it there is not that hears.

Other than it there is not that thinks.

Other than it there is not that understand.

So here this is all referring to this eternal Atman,

The true self beyond all our false selves under here.

And so what we already know about Bahiya,

If he is a follower of this,

Is that for years he has been trying to find,

To recognize the unseen seer,

To find the unthought thinker.

He's looked under every rock,

Under every tree,

He's looked in his mind,

In his heart,

In his feelings,

In his thoughts,

In his perceptions.

Yet he's been unsuccessful because we know from the early part of the sutta when he was reflecting on it,

He was saying this isn't working.

So this doubt has arisen in him.

How come he keeps failing?

How come he can't find the true self within all this even though he has looked very sincerely for a long time?

And so what the Buddha says,

He says there is no unseen seer,

There is no unthought thinker.

And just to drive the point home,

The Buddha goes on and he says,

Bahiya,

When there is only seeing and seeing,

When there is only hearing and hearing,

When there is only sensing and sensing,

When there is only cognizing and cognizing,

Then you will not be with that.

When you are not with that,

You will not be in that.

When you are not in that,

You will be neither here nor beyond nor between the two.

Just this is the end of suffering.

So I don't know about you but I find this a little bit hard to follow.

I had to sit with it for a while.

It's important to remember that the Buddha wasn't speaking English,

That this has been translated through a bunch of different languages.

So when I get to these very nuanced sections,

There is a couple of things I think help.

One is get a lot of different translations and compare them to see what the Buddha might have been saying that can be translated or mistranslated in all these various ways.

And then what you kind of have to do is to loosen your mind up and just kind of let go and relax into it and see if you can feel your way into what's going on here.

So when he says,

You will not be with that,

He is saying,

When there is just hearing in the hearing,

When you are paying attention to the actual phenomenon of hearing,

There is actually no self in that.

Like when you are listening to the frogs out here,

When you are not thinking about it,

When you are just purely in the hearing,

There is just the sound of it.

And if you imagine a you,

That's actually being placed on top of all this.

It's not there in the actual experience.

When there is just hearing in the hearing,

There is no you within the hearing,

There is no you here or beyond or anywhere.

There is no you at all.

So with pure awareness,

When there is just awareness with no interpretation being thrown on it.

Are any of you familiar with Jean Piaget?

He is a Swiss psychologist who did a lot of really groundbreaking work on the development of intelligence in children.

And he used to say that knowing begins at the boundary between the organism and the environment.

That's what we actually experience.

And then what happens is that we extrapolate from that experience out to imagine what's going on out there and we extrapolate inward to see if we can figure out who it is that is experiencing this.

But the actual experience doesn't have any of that and the further we get away from that raw experience,

The more conceptualized and abstract it becomes.

So the Buddha is pointing to if you just come to the raw sensation of what's there,

There is actually no self in it.

Through hearing this brief explanation of the Dhamma from the Blessed One,

The mind of bahiya,

The bark cloth,

Right then and there was freed from the taints through lack of grasping.

So lack of grasping just means we are relaxed and freed from the taints means that he became fully enlightened.

Just like that.

Having instructed bahiya the bark cloth with these words of the Dhamma,

The Blessed One left.

And just for Pat's sake,

We'll finish out a little bit of it,

The story takes a turn.

Not long after the Buddha departed,

A cow with a young calf attacked bahiya of the bark cloth and killed him.

So his premonition,

Whatever that was,

He got it.

But there is the sense with that,

He died fulfilled,

He died complete,

He had accomplished his goal.

And in the sutta,

Of course as the message reflects back to us,

It's saying,

As Pat would say,

There is a kind of urgency to all of this.

Right?

Our time may be shorter than we think,

So practice is good,

Get on with it.

So the sutta kind of winds down from there.

Is it a good time to ask a question?

It's a wonderful time.

I want to make sure it wasn't interrupting.

So there's like two questions.

We are on alms round.

So there's two questions that I think kind of go together.

One is,

So when,

What's his name?

Bahiya.

Bahiya was back in the coast or wherever he was with the group and he was wondering whether he was on the path to enlightenment.

Was he actually thinking of it as enlightenment or was he just wondering if he was going the right direction?

Because how would he have known about what enlightenment was?

Oh,

Yeah.

The enlightenment and liberation and all of those concepts were writ large all over the culture.

It was just different,

Meant different things?

Yeah,

There were different understandings of how you got there,

Etc.

But it was a time of quite a lot of ferment and fervent seeking.

And then the related question would be,

Before you read that,

The Suda,

You talked about,

Or during the Suda,

How his group,

The tree group,

Basically believed in the unseen seer and all those things like the Atman.

And I guess I'm having trouble seeing,

Maybe even ask this for the last retreat or I definitely asked this before but clearly it's a slippery fish for me.

It's like what is the difference between that conception of this unchanging higher self or greater self and the Buddha's conception of the awareness behind it all that's the luminous awareness that is kind of,

You can't corrupt that or you can't mess with that no matter what happens and it's always there waiting to be seen.

Yeah,

I think the difference is that the awareness behind it all is not personal,

It's not ours.

It's like there is this pure awareness and the pure awareness that you experience and the pure awareness that I experience are basically the same.

There is only one of them but we are just looking at it from different perspectives.

I see,

So the Atman wasn't really considered to be like that kind of like everybody,

Like a shared collective awareness.

So everyone had their own Atman.

Yeah,

You are looking for your true self.

I mean it's like we hear a lot of that today,

We hear a lot of everything,

Looking for your real self,

Etc.

Ok,

That makes sense.

Ok,

Good.

So let me know tomorrow if it slipped away again.

But it was a universal self,

The Atman.

It's self-realization,

There is a universal kind of self that is the oneness of all.

If you look,

Read about Jhana Yoga and just study Patanjali,

Boom,

He kind of lays it out and that was ancient.

They had that found thousands of years.

They had ten different definitions for concentration.

They had access concentration,

Absorption concentration,

Six steps,

Four steps in each one of the jhanas,

They had figured out.

They just couldn't attain the body.

That was the deal.

I want to come back to this because there is an important element that really has to be seen in all of this.

But before we pull all that,

I just want to finish out some stuff about the sutta.

I'm going back to the particular instructions the Buddha gave because they had obviously a very profound effect.

So let me read them again.

When there is only seeing in the seeing,

Hearing in the hearing,

Sensing in the sensing,

Cognizing in the cognizing,

Then you will not be with that.

When you are not with that,

You will not be in that.

When you are not in that,

You will be neither here nor beyond nor in between the two.

And hearing these words by hearing became fully enlightened.

You've heard the words twice now.

How many of you became fully enlightened?

Oh,

Yes,

I did.

So tell us.

I heard a cow outside.

That's the other moral of the story.

When you get enlightened,

Stay away from cows.

So the rest of us didn't make it and I haven't made it either.

So what's the difference between bahiya and us?

It could be because perhaps the Buddha was more charismatic than I am,

Which I strongly suspect.

And it can also be that bahiya actually heard this in a way different than how we hear it.

So when the Buddha said there is no you in the hearing,

There is no you here or over there or in both or neither,

This was not a logical or a philosophical or a metaphysical or a theological statement.

The Buddha was just not interested in views like that.

What that really is,

Is a set of meditation instructions.

The Buddha is suggesting to bahiya how he should examine all this.

As we were talking about a couple of days ago,

Logically it is impossible to prove a negation.

So when you say there is no self,

It is impossible to prove that.

If I believe there are tiny space aliens that have infested this place and that are watching us,

It's just if I am sincerely attached to that,

It will be very difficult for you to prove otherwise because all you can do is just take me through the whole place.

When we don't see evidence,

I just know it's because they've got these,

It just proves they've got cloaking devices.

It's really advanced.

It's impossible to prove to the other person the negation.

Just strictly logically.

However,

If I were to search over and over and over for a long time and over a long period of time,

Didn't find anything,

It may start to sink in.

Maybe this is a trick of the mind.

But it takes that willingness to search and search and search and search.

So the Buddha knew that bahiya had been searching diligently for many many many years involved in this practice of looking,

Trying to find the self,

Trying to find the true self,

The deeper self,

The real self.

And he had failed over and over.

So he knew that territory really really well.

So the Buddha just turned him around and said the reason you haven't succeeded in finding this is because there is no self.

And because he'd been over and over that territory for so long,

He just got it.

And he woke up.

So tomorrow we'll hear Aaron's story about how he got it.

So since the rest of us didn't wake up,

Let me see if I can comment this whole thing from a different angle.

And then I want to get back to your question and your comments.

So let me give you a handout.

So there is a British philosopher by the name of Julian Baggini who makes I think the same point that the Buddha talked about.

But he doesn't use Buddha language or Buddha images.

He uses a lot of contemporary psychology and science.

And there is a TED talk in which he makes the observation that the way we look at self is very different than everything else in life.

It's completely different than everything else in life.

And to demonstrate this,

I wanted to flash all this stuff up on the screen in that talk but we didn't have that here so that's why he had this diagram.

So he flashed up on the screen this circle.

This is just to get a warm up illustration.

A circle with the word water in the middle of it.

And he says,

Okay,

So what is water?

And we all know from our high school science classes that water is H2O.

It has two hydrogen molecules and one oxygen molecule.

So he flashes up figure two on the screen which has the water with,

You see,

Two hydrogen molecules and one oxygen molecule attached to it.

And so that all looks pretty good.

And then he says,

So what's the matter with that diagram?

What's the matter with figure two there?

Yeah,

Yeah.

And at the same time it looks like if you took away the hydrogen and the oxygen molecules the water would still be there.

So it sort of implies there's a waterness in there.

So his third figure was number three which is the more standard scientific representation.

There's just an oxygen molecule with two hydrogen attached to it.

That's H2O.

And then his final one as he flashes up there is the same diagram with the word water just kind of loosely over top of it indicating that water is an abstraction.

It's an umbrella term that we use to refer to a particular configuration of these molecules.

So,

You all with me on this?

And the molecules are particular configurations of atoms.

Yes,

Yeah,

We can go through the whole arcing.

So I got kind of excited about this and so I went home and I put together this diagram,

Figure five to bring into my little Sangha.

So I passed it around to them and I said,

Where exactly in all these bicycle parts is the bicycle?

And of course they all laughed because we all know a bicycle is this collection of parts that are put together.

You take all the parts away and there is no bicycle.

There's no bicycleness.

It's just that configuration.

So this seems pretty easy to grasp,

Almost so intuitively obvious.

It's like what's the big deal?

But when we come to self,

We look at it really differently.

So we imagine self to be like a circle with the word me in the middle of it and attached to me are all these various attributes.

You know,

Body parts,

Emotions,

Intellect,

Memories,

Neuroses,

Hang-ups,

All that stuff that are connected to it.

But of course there is no me in a circle inside of us.

There is just this collection of thoughts and memories and energies and talents and all that.

If you take all those,

The body parts and the memories and the thoughts and take all that away,

There is nothing that's left.

So I put the final diagram in there which is just those attributes with the word me kind of floating over it.

Again,

It's an abstraction.

It's an umbrella term that just refers to me as this particular collection of stuff and things and energies.

Do you think in the West that to me what comes out of Figure 6 is soul?

Do you think because of our Judeo-Christian culture and moment of Presbyterian school and these sort of things,

That's really the kind of subconscious idea of soul is quite strong?

Well,

I would go a little further.

I wouldn't blame it on Christianity.

I think that's how we're wired.

I also think that even our concept of God,

When people have it,

It's actually the same thing.

It's just projecting a meanness out on something to give it a kind of familiar form.

At least the popular conceptions of God is kind of an infinitely perfect Santa Claus.

There's another piece that we're going to have to get into.

In the relative world there is no soul.

I mean in the absolute sense of it there is no soul in terms of an eternally existing essence.

And I think that's what the Buddha said.

There's a nuance that we're going to have to tease out of that.

But before we do that I just want to take on this thing of why,

Because like I said I don't think it comes out of Christianity,

This idea of the soul.

I think it comes out of our wiring.

And so the question is why is it so difficult for us to look at ourselves like a collection of bicycle parts as opposed to some soul or essence or something that has everything else stuck to it.

And I think we talked about this a little bit the other day.

An example of a million or two years ago some pre-human ancestors walking through the forest and the one is a paranoid squirrel that is anxious and very protective of his body and the other is super mellow.

And so we got the DNA of the one who had this strong sense of self.

The squirrely one.

We got the squirrely one.

So when we were a marginal species in a world filled with huge predators this instinct to protect ourselves,

To protect this,

Served us very well.

And it has served us very well.

As a species we've been almost too successful.

We have at this point,

We have contained or wiped out any other creature that poses a significant existential threat to us.

The only real threat to us now is this instinct to keep ourselves intact.

We've become our biggest enemy.

And yet this instinctive way of thinking about an inner self or a soul or a higher self or something remains deeply wired in us.

The Buddha called it Bhavatanā which is usually translated as the desire to exist.

But I think the way it manifests much more often is in the inability,

The extreme difficulty that we have in imagining us not existing.

It's like really hard to hold that thought.

You know I was lying in bed as a seven years old and I got it intellectually,

Okay I would not exist.

But right at the next thought I was thinking somebody had taken my name away as if I had a name.

So the idea of a god of self just kind of leaks right back in there.

And I think it's biologically based.

If our ancestors in the forest had been comfortable with the thought of not existing we probably would not be sitting here tonight wondering about our existence.

So how are we doing on time?

Okay,

So I have another little piece of this that will probably take ten or fifteen minutes which I can go into tonight.

I can do tonight or we can do tomorrow.

It's just seven.

Just to clarify,

The distortion of that is the flip side which is the desire to not exist which is our suicidal tendency.

It's like that's still ego-centered based on the sense of existence isn't it?

Yeah,

It is so central to how we think about ourselves that we don't even see it.

It's right under our nose.

And clearly in an evolutionary sense if a creature was attacking us and had to think do I have a self I should protect?

We'd be gone.

So it really has to be wired in so it just triggers in like that.

And that's what we experience in ourselves and it feels normal and it is normal for a human but it is a distortion.

It is a distortion.

And so I want to do one more exercise.

It's kind of like a guided meditation in which I hope we can get at it.

And this is based on another way that the Buddha came at this whole question which is this business of two realities,

An absolute reality and a relative reality.

And it's in all Buddhist traditions but it's really been kind of amplified particularly in the Mahayana and the Tibetan,

Not so much in the Theravana,

But it is back there.

So this is a thought experiment to illustrate.

So imagine that you live for a hundred years.

And every day of your life you go into a room and take off your clothes and somebody takes a picture of you.

And now each of those pictures become a single frame in a movie.

So we can put them together and see a movie of your entire life that will run,

Let's say,

About twenty minutes.

And to make it interesting we start,

Say,

A couple of years before you are born and continue the film to,

Let's say,

Ten years after you die.

So what are we going to see?

So just kind of allow yourself to be with this.

At first when the movie starts the screen would be blank or maybe you have your parents there.

And then very quickly your mother gets pregnant and she swells up and out you pop.

And at first all you can do is nurse and pee and poop and gurgle a little bit.

But as all that food is flowing through your body over the next few film minutes your body starts to stretch out,

It gets a little bit longer,

The musculature builds up and then pretty soon you can stand up and you can walk around.

Air begins to fill out and as the film goes on your body matures sexually.

Its frame,

Its eyes,

Its skin become vibrant with youth,

Young adulthood.

After several minutes,

Three or four minutes it comes into its full stature.

And then the film keeps going and the groin slows down.

The hair starts to thin out a little bit.

Some blemishes on the skin.

The skin starts to sag here and there a little bit.

And then in about a dozen minutes the shoulders start to slump.

The eyes are clear but some of the body tone is gone.

Maybe there's a little extra fat here and there.

And then the body actually starts to seem to shrink a little bit.

And the parts don't quite line up so smoothly,

Some of the symmetry is gone.

Hair loses its color.

Skin becomes kind of uneven and blotchy.

Frame becomes frail.

The eyes turn watery.

Then suddenly the body is lying down,

Eyes are closed,

No signs of life.

The film continues.

As the film continues we see the skin and the tissue start to dry out and shrivel and disintegrate,

Waste away.

In a few film moments there's not much left but just bones.

But the film continues and the bones start to dry out themselves and start to crumble.

And then a few moments later even the bone dust is gone.

And then in the last few minutes of the film the screen is completely blank and this question comes up on the screen.

It asks,

Do you exist?

And then that question fades and another one comes up and it says,

What matters?

What matters?

So,

Let's look at those two questions.

How you answer the question,

Do you exist,

Really depends on a frame of reference.

In the film we're using time.

So,

In relationship to time,

You exist for a short amount of time.

As a baby,

As a youth,

As a young adult,

As a middle aged,

As an old,

As a corpse.

We can say we exist but in the absolute sense,

Looking over a span of eternity,

We don't exist.

What we think of as us is just a whole bunch of elements and energies that come together and form this configuration and then it all dissolves and spreads back out.

And nothing that is real is lost.

The other day we talked about,

Used the metaphor of a sandcastle,

We built this nice sandcastle and a wave goes over it.

The sandcastle goes away but nothing real is lost.

And so,

From the Buddhist perspective,

There are these two different realities that operate very,

Very differently.

There is the absolute in which we don't exist and there is the relative in which we do exist,

Rapidly changing but only for a short amount of time.

And one of the things that's different about Buddhism from Western philosophy is because there is some of this,

You know,

The platonic ideals that are the real world and what's here is just a degenerate form of it.

From the Buddhist perspective,

Both the relative and the absolute are real,

They're just very different.

The relative is not a degenerate form of the absolute,

It's just different,

It just obeys different laws.

So let me do just one other thing with you,

If you could just maybe close your eyes for a few minutes.

Some of you may have kept them closed,

That's fine.

And I want you to just imagine not existing.

You know,

You can use the images I've offered or just use whatever comes to mind.

Yes,

Today you have something we could call a self but in fifty or a hundred years there will be little discernible traces of it left.

That's our fate.

It's unavoidable.

So see if you can imagine not existing.

If it feels sad or scary just ignore it.

See if you can just relax into non-existence.

Kind of soften into nothingness,

Nothing to do,

Nowhere to go,

Nothing to be.

Just see what happens to relax into being nothing.

There is no freedom for ourselves.

There is only freedom from a self.

So is Buddhism just another form of materialism?

Can you elaborate on that?

Is Buddhism just another form of materialism,

Scientific materialism?

Your description of from nothing to nothing,

Scientific materialism is essentially the same thing.

Yes,

But in Buddhism there is more acknowledgement of a wide range of phenomena.

So there is what's sometimes called a mind stream which may be passed on from body to body.

But even that is a body that's held together and that the actual goal is eventually allowing even that to lose its cohesion.

If you want freedom from suffering liberation it's losing its cohesion and going back.

So you're saying it's only in this particular notion of no self that it would have a parallel to scientific materialism?

I'm hesitating because I don't like flatland scientific materialism.

I do think there are multiple dimensions that we're part of.

So the film thing that I was picturing was just looking at the material element because at least we can agree with that much.

I think the same thing applies across a wider range of them.

So comments,

What happened for you when you're looking at that inside?

The other part that I would say is that Buddhism can feel like it moves towards scientific materialism a little bit.

But I think it was only because the Buddha was most interested in the practical issue of relieving suffering.

And it wasn't that he denied there weren't other dimensions or other stuff there,

But he was really interested on what would give you leverage in releasing that.

And certainly relaxing the clinging,

The holding on to a sense of self is probably a requirement for a deep full release.

And what's actually going on metaphysically behind it is another whole bunch of questions that the Buddha steered away from because he felt it just distracted people from the main course there,

Which was actually how they get a sense of freedom.

I think it feels like,

This isn't just reiterating what you're saying,

But it's like in scientific materialism,

You're just looking at the physical world and saying all of this stuff is changing,

And all of this stuff is changing.

And in your meditation you're looking not just at the material form,

But you're looking at all kinds of sensations and perceptions and memories and how they come together and how much solidity there is.

Basically the instructions are that when you get too much solidity it's time to six R.

I view Buddha's work,

He was a phenomenologist,

And part of it was the phenomenology of the mind,

For sure.

According to the Satipa Tana Sutta,

He said,

Look at the activities in these areas,

Body sensations,

Emotions and cognitive activity.

These are where the foundations of the activities are.

Watch these.

They're all going to come from there.

The rest of it,

There's the important stuff.

That's how I see it.

And he explored each one of them in incredible detail and linked them together as a scientist.

I think that's the brilliance.

He went way beyond the Vedas in explaining that.

They weren't even close to it.

One of the things that I find,

Particularly with this little bit of meditation and looking at it,

Is the thought of non-self and non-existence can be a little frightening,

But actually when you give in to it and open up it's quite liberating.

It's like,

Oh my goodness,

All these projects that I'm trying to put together and build for myself,

They're all going to evaporate.

There is a blow away in the wind.

It's no big deal.

So that gets into the absolute world in the relative world.

There may be stuff to be done in the absolute.

But how do we live our life knowing this?

I think the sand castle thing is great.

Some people say but you still build it.

The Buddha taught the Dhama knowing that it would all that work and 45 years teaching that it's just going to run out and be lost and gone.

So one of our teachers,

Bhante Poonerjee,

Says that essentially the Buddha taught us how to awaken from the dream of existence.

Gurdjieff said something similar,

We're awake,

No we're asleep,

We're awake.

Yeah,

Yeah.

Yeah,

Who was the guy from University of Davis?

I call it consensus trance.

Ah,

Right.

So what it really does say,

Yeah I can build my sand councils anyway,

But I can't claim to them.

You know,

That's the important piece of the Buddha's teaching.

Or I can build the ones that are really necessary.

I can build the sand councils that are really necessary.

Well,

So I think what we're dancing around is,

As it comes to that question,

Given all that,

Yeah,

What matters?

What actually matters in all that?

There's varying scopes for that though.

There's sort of this practical absolute sense of what matters about,

Really not that much,

So therefore I can let go of tension and be sort of more fast or more wider,

Like myself.

But within the scope of relative human existence,

It seems there is,

Like,

You can deduce certain things that matter based on humanity.

It's not like social good,

And sort of seeing others as yourself,

And contribution,

Compassion,

Empathy.

Yeah.

So have any of you read some Carlos Castaneda's?

Oh yeah.

Yeah,

So he had,

Yeah,

So we're fitting ourselves where we are in the generations.

But he has this phrase that he got from his teacher in life,

He called it controlled folly.

You know,

That,

In a sense,

What you do is all folly,

But still what are you going to do?

And so it's being aware of both of those.

And this feels like a slippery fish that I can probably say over and over again because I was in this study group,

That you were in and out of a little bit,

With Tony Bernard,

Where we were studying Nagarjuna,

Who is probably considered second only to the Buddha in terms of really sort of articulating.

And he's the one who really fleshed out these two realities.

And within this group when we were studying it,

What I could see in the group was that the thinking always went to the absolute is real,

The relative is not real.

And that's not what the Buddha said.

They are both real.

You know,

They operate differently,

We live in both of them,

So the absolute is not an escape from the relative.

But we live in both of them.

In controlled folly,

He also said what makes controlled folly important is that death is always at your left shoulder.

So you're always looking at the fact that you're not going to exist.

He used death as an advisor.

He also said,

I remember this,

He said,

The sorcerer because of this always acts impeccably,

As if it's his last act on earth.

Wow!

That's mindful.

That's your lunches.

It's impeccable.

Let's see if I have my Carlos Castaneda's quote here.

So let me just read this.

This is my favorite thing for me.

Does this path have a heart?

If it does,

The path is good.

If it doesn't,

It is of no use.

Both paths lead nowhere.

But one has a heart and the other doesn't.

One makes for a joyful journey as long as you follow it and are one with it.

The other will make you curse your life.

One makes you strong,

The other weakens you.

How did I spend some time with a man who was with Castaneda a lot?

And he says,

Everything you've read about him is all true and everything you imagine about him is all so true.

Because he did have some real experiences and he really messed up a lot.

When he did some strange bizarre stuff,

He got caught in the ego toward the end of his life.

What he did was,

He was brilliant at synthesizing and then creating a larger range of experiences that he actually had with the Yaqui Indians down in Mexico.

And out of that,

It is the traditional thing of somebody figuring out what is my Ph.

D.

Project going to be.

And in anthropology he thought,

Wow,

What if I could find somebody?

And so he started creating all this stuff.

And he knew enough about the Yaqui culture to kind of make it reasonable.

And then it took off.

And so he just kept writing books.

The later books are really kind of way off the wall.

Yeah,

I got up to Journey to Ixalan.

That was the last one.

Touch me deeply.

Yeah,

Right.

Okay,

So let's sort of bring it back for those who know him so well and include everybody.

So any other questions or reflections on this?

Just in that guided meditation I asked you,

When you asked us to suspense,

That it would,

It would be extremely easy to feel the boundaryless,

The lack of boundaryless,

I don't know,

And to access it.

And it's not scary.

Did the rest of you feel like you could access that in some significant way?

I had some resistance to it.

I think I said,

I don't like this.

Because I could have said to myself,

There's an inner dialogue saying,

Okay,

It's a mention that I'm not here.

And my wife instantly gets back,

No I don't like this.

Well,

It's exotic.

She'll be out a bit.

It's initially definitely some resistance to it.

Yeah,

Yeah.

Well,

No,

It's important because to just watch some of the language you were speaking,

You're saying I had resistance to it.

But I think what you described as you went into it,

It wasn't like you did anything.

It was like this,

This stuff,

It just comes right up.

It's not like you're doing it,

But it does come up because it's inner wiring.

Yeah,

It's inner wiring.

Can you talk about that as it tends to come up for me in the sort of later stages of the jhanas?

That sense of slipping away and grasping for the self.

Yeah,

I think it's sort of like Perry was talking about,

It does show up and logistics are it.

And what happens in the upper jhanas,

It's not that different in the lower jhanas,

It's very,

Very,

Very subtle.

And so that's the thing that keeps catching us,

That there are these subtler and subtler layers.

I think of it sometimes,

Another way to think of it is relaxing into the insubstantiality of life,

You know,

Of into that sense of the fluidness and that's,

Because it's not that there's nothing there,

But it's like there's nothing that's going to last,

There's nothing that's going to hold its configuration.

The thing I don't know about it is awareness,

Not our awareness,

But just awareness,

Whether that's,

I mean I do have this working hypothesis that awareness is,

Some of you have heard this,

Awareness is fundamental to the universe.

Matter,

Energy,

Space,

Time and awareness,

That we live in a universe in which something can be aware of something else and that our nervous system just amplifies it,

It doesn't actually create it but it amplifies it.

Because there is a sense,

Because that pure awareness sometimes is called the deathless,

It's called unborn and undying,

It just means that it's there.

But it doesn't draw any attention to itself,

But you can,

If you let go of the substantiality of things,

Then you can feel it and be with it and it seems like something that may continue after this body disappears.

But also our whole ego structure,

You know,

Wants to latch onto that will go too,

So the awareness may be there but what we think of as our self won't.

But the awareness may continue but what we think of as our self won't.

When we do die,

That moment and that stage is up to dying,

There is an importance in being in the right state of mind when the body finally drops or something.

Are there particular steps that we need to be mindful of?

Yeah,

Read Pat's book.

What quality of mind is a daddy?

More that,

If we know we are going to die or we are sick or something like that as opposed to being hit by a car,

What can we do to cultivate the state of mind that we die in?

Because from what I am told,

If we die in an agitated state of mind that is going to have negative consequences for rebirth and things like that,

If we die in the upper jardis then that would be more advantageous than dying in and potentially being reborn.

How well if you are in a car that is not a gradual sign?

I think the optimal strategy for this is actually just doing your practice.

If we get into a frame of mind of let's figure out what I have to do so it will be ok when I die,

That becomes sort of fear based and has all these constructs around it and what happens is everything dissolves.

If you are doing a practice like this where you actually tap into and begin to experience some of that and it becomes familiar to you,

Then when the body starts to fade and that presumably is not as much of a freak out and you can just be there.

I don't know this for sure but my instinct says to try to put together and file away this plan for what I am going to think and feel when I die actually doesn't work but actually cultivating in the direct connection with that does.

Is there still room to…?

In my experience,

In my personal experience with this I have no idea.

One of the things I found was that meditation really is a preparation for death.

So what he is saying is true,

Just keep your practice going.

You know exactly what mind is going to do but the meditation will take you.

But it sounds as if you are concerned about what happens then after death and am I going to die in a good position?

Yeah,

Yeah,

I have done all this work and then at the moment… You are going to be reborn as a rodent.

You know that moment everything goes wrong and it will be like,

I am going to come back to the earth and I will be reborn.

My instinct is that the death of religion and spirituality is in-literalizing it too much.

I am sure many of us have been in a situation where there has been a sudden crisis and we actually don't know what is going to happen.

You know our son when he was quite small had a seizure.

He had several.

I was just amazed to look back on it afterwards.

It is like I just… someone said I went dead from the net down but my mind just came completely clear.

It was like you call the doctor,

You get a blanket,

We are going to do this.

And before that happened I could imagine myself going on a hysterical or something.

But I think when you do this practice,

The capacity to be equanimous in the face of pain or mental pain or disturbance or stuff like that,

When you get really familiar with that territory,

That it won't throw you as much.

And I don't think that there is a certain moment when you are dying when St.

Peter comes in and says,

That's what makes it,

You are a rat,

You are an angel.

I think it is really much more organic.

What we know about death too is that it is a long process.

And even after… there is this wonderful book,

Oh My Goodness,

Erasing Death by Sam Parnia.

He is a resuscitation specialist.

And there is some stuff I didn't know.

Under certain circumstances people can be clinically dead,

Heart stopped,

No neural activity,

No breathing for as long as eight hours and be completely revived.

Because part of it is what happens if they deep freeze them.

Because what happens with the death is that biochemically stuff keeps on going on.

And so what they do in a lot of hospitals and stuff,

They are working with this,

Is they just bring the body temperature back down,

Slow down all the biochemical processes until they can repair whatever and see if they can bring them back.

And they also say that a lot of the damage comes when they are bringing them back online.

So they do that really slowly.

And to your thing,

What comes out of this work too is a lot of people have very clear memories.

Sam Parnia is doing this stuff in the high shelves inside the emergency rooms.

He is putting pictures that face up because a lot of people out of the body,

They are up there looking down at it.

So there is something you couldn't see which is above it.

So he is starting to collect some sort of hard core empirical validation.

And the conclusion that he comes to is that,

Because he goes through all the different explanations,

Is there is something of the consciousness principle which can survive without a body for I guess we are up to many months now.

Because people do have memories.

My favorite one was this guy went into cardiac arrest on the operating table and they switched him into emergency mode.

He had dentures so they pulled him out and the nurse stuck him in this drawer on the operating table and they go on to put tubes down on him and all this stuff.

And the next day,

He is in the recovery room and he was brought back and he was fine.

And he says,

Where are my dentures?

And they say,

I don't know,

We've all lost him.

And he says,

Oh,

They are in that drawer,

Underneath there.

Well,

He was completely flat lined at that point.

There is no way scientifically that we could explain how somebody would remember that when there is no brain activity.

But there it is.

I had several instances of respiratory arrest and one in the OR,

Which is not at all scary for me,

It was very scary for the anesthesiologist and a lot of others.

But that sense of being very conscious and watching all the stuff going on,

But being in other boundaryless spaces was ok.

I was like,

What's the big deal?

Chill.

So I put that stuff right on him.

So Plungy made a statement one time that he thinks that consciousness is in the blood,

Not in the brain.

Because the blood is everywhere.

There may be less material in everything.

There was a little boy that was waiting for a liver transplant and then there was a little boy that was killed,

A car wreck or something like that.

So they set up to do the liver transplant,

Which they did,

Which was done successfully.

And the parents of the child who had died asked if they could meet the boy who got the liver.

Normally that's not done,

But you can understand that.

So they allowed it.

And so this little boy that received the liver came in and the donor's mother walked into the room and looked up and said,

I'm going to get the blood.

And he said,

I'm going to get the blood.

And he said,

I'm going to get the blood.

And he was flat lining down.

And so I was talking to him about him moving on and all this.

And the nurse and the doctor rushed in and they were having a hard time finding blood that was compatible.

I put the blood in and I could begin to see it go down.

And then as it hit his body,

He told me later,

He started to see all these scenes of the person whose blood he came from.

He just knew it.

He knew it.

As he was getting the transfusion.

Is that why generations witness don't do blood treatment?

I don't know enough about it,

But my suspicion is that it doesn't come from that necessarily scientific understanding.

A couple of things.

You could have a heart that's towards the cell,

But what keeps going on is the brain.

And it's in the frequency of gamma.

And it can go on for quite a while.

So there's,

In other words,

On the other side,

There's still pictures or feelings or anything that's going on.

The other thing is the Dalai Lama says that as you meditate and as your mind becomes stable,

That will be what will take you through to the other side without,

Like he was saying,

Anguish and anxiety.

It's the stability of your meditation that will follow you through without getting so lost in pain.

I always wondered that about using pain medication.

Should you use it?

Does that affect your consciousness?

And would that potentially affect your water?

Yeah,

If he says no,

It really doesn't work.

That's why meditation is so important in time.

The classic thing is about what you're saying,

Murder or accident.

The classic example is Gandhi when he was shot.

He immediately started to say wrong because that was his practice.

And he just died in that state of his own mind.

And I would say,

Just to add on to that as another plug,

Is actually I think why the six R's are so important.

So if some fear comes up that you have a deeply,

Deeply conditioned response,

Or like those three practices I was talking about,

To turn towards and open and relax into as opposed to fight it off.

Because I think there can be all those fears and stuff come up,

But if you have a skillful way of dealing with it,

Then you'll be good.

Are you talking about the Tibetan book of the dead in your book?

I do,

I've read it.

I just saw a video and it was past two weeks ago.

Have you heard about it?

I thought about the different stages of dying,

Like how to prepare for it,

And then I had these guys talk about it.

And I don't know how real it is,

But it's talking about how different stages,

Or your second periods of time,

And then if you don't make it out,

Then you end up reincarnating financially in the god realm,

Or sort of as an animal,

Or lesser realm.

I don't know how you put it out.

Well,

I look at it more as psychological states.

Again,

By he I don't think it was actually talking to his third cousin.

I read somewhere,

Maybe the Deguṇa-kāya,

That when somebody attains an arūpa-jāna,

They have a sort of automatic destination to be reborn in a certain realm.

Yeah,

It cuts off the lower realms.

I think that there's a lot of truth to that,

But it gets over-literalized.

It's when you try to pin it down to literal specifics,

I think it becomes a little silly,

But the overall sentiment of that is as it goes deeper.

Because the jānas are just artificial markers,

But as the mind is able to relax and open and stabilize in a lot of different situations.

And if what is evolving is actually consciousness,

Not physical bodies or physical things,

At least that's what our science has given us,

Is that nothing has been put together.

But then the presumption is that the dimensionality of what evolves is far beyond what we could ever conceptualize at the time.

It feels like to me consciousness evolving is what drives the physical evolution too.

What causes a reptile or a fish to start to walk?

There's some conscious aspect of growth that causes the cells to start to change and modify.

So when Teilhard de Chardin,

The Phenomenon Man,

Gives that whole story of consciousness and complexity moving side by side as you go through the evolutionary change,

You come to this point where consciousness starts moving up the arc because complexity is going to the second law of thermodynamics,

It's going to disappear like a story,

Right?

But then consciousness as it moves up is what is moving toward change of states.

And so he talks about all of these evolutionary points as change of states.

And so his view,

If you come to Omega Point,

Which is where the whole species,

Any species,

And he's talked about that all along,

If the whole species doesn't move through the evolutionary change,

They flame out.

So evolution,

His argument is when you get to this Omega Point,

This point of real transition,

Then what's going to happen is you're going to see indicators of the change going across – Buddha,

Christ,

Whoever – but then ultimately the pressure is that the whole species has to go across if it's going to go through a change of state.

And he says you can't deny the evolutionary principles because that's what goes on,

We can observe that happening.

And so his argument was that when we come to the newest here,

That we're at the beginning point of that opportunity of change of state.

So he said for the human race,

The ultimate thing that has to happen is that it has to be threatened.

That's what causes the shift of a species to go across,

Something in the environment.

And he said until the whole planet is threatened by extinction,

You're not going to see the ultimate shifting of consciousness into something else.

If we can manage that,

Yeah.

Vote for Trump.

What's the guy's name?

This is Adi Shardani.

Phenomena of man,

He was a Catholic priest and an anthropologist.

He was one of the dissovers of the Peking man.

A paleontologist.

Yeah.

And so the Catholic Church wouldn't let his writings out because they were so quote,

Heretical.

And so this was written in the early 40s,

I believe it was.

I was going to say probably could be 70 years ago.

Yeah.

Jean Houston was mentored by him a little bit.

Is this the guy you mentioned getting out of the way that was in the park?

Yes,

That was Theodore de Shardani.

That was Theodore de Shardani.

I feel like the singularity has the potential,

The sort of rapid technological acceleration has the potential to lead towards some sort of broad consciousness.

Yeah.

Okay,

I want to sort of move us back to our practice and I think,

We're actually going to pick up here and do a little more with this tomorrow,

I think.

We're going to see if we can bring it into our personal energy a little bit more.

We'll do some more dialogues and some stuff with that.

So we'll have a chance to get back at this.

So for now,

Just take a moment.

And just let your sense of self sort of gently expand.

So that the peepers and the fan and the lights and the jungle around us feel like they're a little bit kind of inside us.

Let's imagine what that would be like.

And from this place,

All of us together in our own ways,

Just sending out some kindness,

Some sense of friendliness out into the world.

To me that's what matters most.

May all beings know kindness.

May all beings know their true nature,

What it is and what it isn't.

May all beings be comfortable with expanding.

And neither be freedom.

Thank you all for your practice.

It's great seeing you individually every day.

You guys are doing really great.

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