Buddha’s Core Teaching

Dependent Origination maps the causal links that give rise to any experience. To relieve suffering, we need to see the subtle, hidden causes, and relax them rather than blame ourselves. This is the core of the Buddha’s teaching.

Transcript

Welcome.

The white plague gets its name from its most conspicuous symptom.

A person's complexion gets paler and paler and paler and meanwhile they lose appetite,

Lose weight,

Lose vigor,

Eventually start spitting up blood and over a period of months or sometimes years they just gradually waste away and die.

The white plague was the leading cause of death in Europe for many,

Many centuries.

There's evidence of the disease back as far as 9,

000 years.

In more recent centuries it was called consumption because it just seems to consume the body.

Medical interventions of the day were completely ineffective so naturally everybody assumed it was personal.

It was a sign of weak moral character,

That it was flaws in their personality which was nice because then you could believe if you just prayed a lot and went to church and had a healthy life you could avoid this dreaded disease.

Well in the 17th and 18th century the white plague killed one out of four people in Europe.

When we don't understand something we tend to personalize it.

Blame ourselves or try to blame it on some other person.

Tonight I'm not interested in talking about the white plague.

I want to talk about dependent origination but I thought the white plague sounded a little more interesting,

You know,

Place to start.

To begin to talk about dependent origination what I like to do first is to put it in a very large frame.

Why did the Buddha draw this map of dependent origination in the first place?

What was it after?

What practical use is it to us in our practice and our lives?

Well the reason the Buddha drew this is because we tend to personalize what we don't understand.

When we understand something we tend to see it objectively.

When we don't we personalize it and because of that we suffer unnecessarily.

This tendency to personalize I think has just been wired into us by the forces of evolution.

You know all it really takes is just a string of bad luck.

Branch falls on the car,

Plane flight is canceled,

Boss comes in angry and we find ourselves looking at the sky and thinking why are you picking on me?

What did I do wrong?

You know,

As if the branch falling off the tree and your boss's bad mood and the plane flight cancellation was all about me,

Myself and mine.

I think one of the reasons that we tend to personalize what we don't understand is because each of us is right in the center of the universe that we experience.

Everything we know comes in through the senses that are connected to this body or the mind which seems to follow this body around like a puppy on a leash.

So if we don't understand something,

Let's look around and wonder what's going on.

Well we're right in the center of what's going on so we think it's us.

Meanwhile in the late 19th century the true cause of the white plague was discovered.

It was this little tiny bacterium,

Tuberculobaxillus that attacks the lungs.

Today we call it tuberculosis.

And since we now understand how it really operates we can treat it much more effectively and prevent it much more effectively.

We don't tend to see it as a moral failing anymore.

Well some people do but I don't think anybody really thinks those little bacteria are out there plotting against us.

This tendency to personalize could be,

Yes.

Okay well there are a few people who hold out for the personal theory of it.

You know we just personalize so easily.

You know it doesn't even take fear to do it.

You know perhaps our life is going okay.

The job is okay.

The family is okay.

Our partner is okay.

But life just seems a little dull,

A little flat.

One of the most popular diagnosis for this ennui is to say,

Well I've lost touch with my life purpose.

It assumes that life has given me a purpose.

Like a secret mission.

You know that I'm supposed to go out and discover and fulfill.

So if life just kind of feels out of balance and I can't figure out why,

Well it's because I've lost touch with my secret purpose.

So when I start thinking this way what I like to do is reflect on this photograph taken by the Hubble telescope.

You know about that?

You know about this one?

In the fall of 2003 scientists pointed the telescope at this little tiny spot in the sky southwest of Orion.

From what we knew at the time there was nothing in it.

It was a completely empty place.

And the spot had an arc,

One tenth the arc of a full moon.

So it was a little tiny dot in the sky.

And for three months they focused these ultra sensitive instruments in this one little dot.

And they collected all that data and they compiled it and they actually printed it up in a photograph that's called the Hubble Deep Field.

You can look it up on the internet.

And within this little tiny dot they found 10,

000 galaxies.

Not stars but galaxies.

The average galaxy has about a billion stars in it.

So now I'm trying to estimate how many stars there are in the universe.

The most conservative estimates now say that there is about 100 million million,

100 million million billion.

That's one followed by 23 zeros.

And some estimates go up a lot higher than that.

So the interesting question then is how many of those stars have planets that might support complex life as we understand it?

That's pretty hard to calculate but they've taken some intelligent guesses and the estimates range from about one star in five up to pretty much all of them on average.

So what are the chances of intelligent life out there?

That's about as close to 100% as you could imagine.

And what's the chance that we are the most advanced species in the universe?

Just about zero.

Arthur C.

Clarke,

He once said,

I'm sure the universe is full of intelligent life.

It's just too intelligent to come here.

So these are really astronomical numbers.

I have no idea what 100 million million billion is.

And so I did some calculations to try to see if I could cut this down to something that made sense to me.

So let's take an extremely conservative estimate.

Let's say one in a million stars has life more intelligent than us.

I think that's pretty conservative.

And I still worked out all these calculations.

And so if you look up at the sky and look at any spot about the size of the moon,

Within that spot of sky,

There are somewhere in the range of three quarters of a billion species smarter than us.

Who knows?

So when I think the universe has assigned me a special purpose,

What I like to do is to go outside on a clear night,

Sometimes to lie down,

Look up at the sky,

Billions of galaxies,

Billions and millions of stars,

Probably millions and millions of species smarter than me.

And here I am lying on the edge of this little planet spinning around a nondescript star,

Living a life that lasts less than a blink of an eye compared to the 13 and a half billion years the universe has been unfolding.

And I'm thinking that all the forces of time and space have assigned me a special purpose.

Sounds pretty narcissistic,

Doesn't it?

I do think that we all arose out of all of this.

So I do think it's possible for us to live in harmony with all of this.

And I think sometimes when people feel that sense of harmony,

They think that's a purpose,

But it's actually just living in harmony with it.

To think that the universe has singled me out of what is about seven billion people living on the planet,

Out of hundreds of billions of species,

Out of billions and billions of stars out there,

Is just self-centered silliness.

Unfortunately,

This silliness creates a lot of unnecessary suffering.

Buddha said that one of the primary reasons that we suffer is that we take things personally.

So to relieve the suffering,

What we need to do is find some way to break out of this narcissistic trance.

So we have a self,

Clearly have a self,

But it is not separate from everything in the universe and it is not eternal.

So the question becomes,

How could the Buddha or you or me or anyone convince somebody that something that doesn't exist,

Particularly when that goes counter to these wired in instincts that we have?

Well,

People stopped believing that tuberculosis was personal when they found a better explanation to explain how it arose,

How it worked,

How it functioned.

So if we can demonstrate,

If we can find some way of showing ourselves that there is a more effective explanation for this phenomenon that we call self,

Maybe we can begin to shift our understanding.

But to work,

It has to not be just an intellectual understanding,

But something we actually experience,

Something that's really rooted in our direct experience.

Most of us identify ourselves,

We identify with this flow of sensations and memories and memory traces and feelings,

Et cetera.

Unfortunately,

The laws that govern how this flow of sensation and experiences and subjective experience,

The laws that govern that are so subtle and so complex that they're very difficult to see,

Harder to see than the tuberculosis bacteria.

In order to see them,

The only way that we can do that is to cultivate a mind-heart that is very still,

Quiet,

Devoid of tension,

Devoid of distortion,

And still alert and aware.

So we can begin to see and experience directly how this flow of phenomena that we identify personally,

Is to see how that works.

Not so easy to do.

Not so easy to do.

But if the mind and heart are clear and relaxed enough,

What happens is they shut down.

And then when they come back online,

There are these moments of remarkable clarity.

When we just see how it is,

I say,

Wow,

It brings an incredibly powerful sense of relief.

So simple.

That's what it is.

And within that experience,

There is no suffering,

At least until the narcissistic trance starts back up again.

But even if we can just get a little glimpse of that,

Just a fleeting glimpse for a moment,

It begins to weaken that identification with the personal self.

It can't take it quite so sincerely.

So what the Buddha did was he put together a set of exercises and attitudes that help cultivate this kind of,

Oh,

Wow,

Deep,

Direct seeing of all this.

OK,

Does that make sense?

So remember that people didn't understand tuberculosis when they didn't understand how it worked.

They thought it was personal,

And they suffered.

When they did understand how it worked,

They didn't personalize it so much,

And they found much more effective ways of dealing with it.

Similarly,

When we don't understand how the mind and heart work,

We take it personally.

It's just how we're wired.

And we suffer because of that.

When we can begin to see directly,

Experience how it really works,

Then we're much wiser.

We don't personalize it so much,

And we're much wiser in how we deal with it.

So to help cultivate this,

It's actually very natural,

Impersonal,

Oh,

Wow,

Experience.

Buddha drew this map about how all those things work.

And he called it Patakasamuppada.

Sounds kind of like a bongo rift,

You know?

Patakasamuppada.

Which translates as the laws of dependent origination.

So it's just talking about causation,

How everything arises dependent on something else.

It's important to understand that this map of dependent origination is only a map.

It is not the territory.

You can hang it up with a wall,

And it's not going to do you any good.

But the map is very useful in guiding our exploration.

You know,

A map says,

Look,

You need to look behind that rock over that hill over there.

And then it's up to us to actually do that exploration.

But that's how Patakasamuppada tended to help to guide us into this direct scene.

So a little later in the retreat,

I want to talk more about the phenomena self and non-self.

And what I call the infinitely expanding self.

But tonight,

I do want to look right just at the Patakasamuppada,

The laws of dependent origination.

And I'd like to look at it from a couple different angles.

One is to just take a quick look at how it appears in the text.

And then I'd like to look at how dependent origination appears in our lives.

And then we'll look at how it shows up in meditation,

Particularly this kind of meditation,

Because this meditation was designed actually to reveal direct experience,

To actually see how this works.

So we'll just put all that together to see how that works.

But first,

Let's look at some of the text.

The text is pretty dry.

But I do think it's helpful just to have a sense of some of the source material.

Because when people talk about it,

This is the material that they're all drawing from.

Sure.

That sounds like a good idea.

I don't have actual text there,

But what I do have is actually a structure of it.

So dependent origination of the text is usually described in a series of stylized statements.

So this is a typical example that comes from the discourse of many kinds of elements.

It's Manjumat Kaya,

Number 115,

For those of you who are keeping score.

Picking up at verse 11,

First the Buddha describes,

It's just a general formula.

So he says,

When this exists,

That comes to be.

With the arising of this,

That arises.

When this does not exist,

That does not come to be.

With the cessation of this,

That ceases.

So there's a couple of elements there.

It's easy to pass over.

So what he's talking about is independent origination,

This cause and effect.

He's looking at what is a necessary thing to have for this effect to happen.

And also,

When that cause is taken away,

Then the effect ceases.

And there are some problems with it,

Even as it appears in the text.

We'll come back to that in a little bit.

So in the discourse of many kinds of elements,

There's this phrase,

When this exists,

That comes to be.

With the arising of this,

That arises.

When this does not exist,

That does not come to be.

With the cessation of this,

That ceases.

And then he goes on to get specific and says,

That is,

With ignorance as condition,

Formations come to be.

So this is what you'll see on the chart.

With formations as condition,

What comes to be?

Consciousness comes to be.

With consciousness as condition,

Mentality,

Materiality.

So this will sound like a second grade reading of something.

With mentality and materiality as condition,

Six-fold bases come to be.

With a six-fold base as condition,

Contact as condition,

Feeling tone as condition,

Craving as condition,

Clinging comes to be.

With clinging as condition,

Habitual tendencies as condition.

With birth of action as condition,

Aging,

Death,

Sorrow,

Lamentation,

Pain,

Grief and despair come to be,

Such as the origin of this whole mass of suffering.

Sounds jolly,

Doesn't it?

It certainly sounds familiar.

So this is how it's often presented in the suttas,

Except sometimes it's presented in reverse order.

For example,

In the greater discourse on the destruction of craving,

This is Majjh Maitreya number 38.

He says,

With the cessation of birth and action comes the cessation of aging and death and the whole mass of suffering.

With a cessation of habitual tendencies comes the cessation of birth and action.

With a cessation of clinging comes the cessation of craving comes the cessation of feeling tone comes the cessation of craving.

With the cessation of contact comes the cessation of Letculity.

With the cessation of the six-fold base comes the cessation of Concentration.

With the cessation of mentality materiality comes the cessation of Consciousness Consciousness Consciousness With the cessation of consciousness comes the cessation of Concentration Consciousness Consciousness With the cessation of mentality materiality consciousness Consciousness Consciousness Consciousness consciousness Consciousness Consciousness Consciousness Consciousness With the cessation of consciousness comes Consciousness Consciousness Consciousness Consciousness Consciousness Consciousness Consciousness Consciousness Consciousness Consciousness Consciousness Consciousness Consciousness Consciousness Consciousness Consciousness Consciousnesscks TensorFlow With the cessation of consciousness comes the cessation of?

Equality.

With the cessation of formation comes the cessation of?

Consciousness.

With the cessation of ignorance comes the cessation of?

Pornation.

Okay.

So you all passed the reading test.

How much of that did you absorb?

Almost.

Yes.

It's pretty dense.

It's pretty dense,

Isn't it?

It's backwards like that.

We were talking yesterday about people being dead.

When you go backwards,

It's not long before you're actually dead to make all this stuff stop.

That seems to be in the feeling tone.

It's contact,

Right?

Normally not enough contact is pretty much to be dead.

That's right.

That's not very useful.

Right.

That's not very useful.

So hang on to that.

We're going to come back to it because you've pinpointed what the problem in all this is.

I want to get this through that,

But I'm glad you caught that because we'll see how to work with it.

It's really important.

So let's move from this abstract Venn diagram,

Sixth grade reader list of,

I think it's more like a multiplication table to memorize.

And just move into,

I'll just share an example of how this might show up in everyday life.

In this example is a variation of one that's in Buddha's map,

So it might be a little familiar to you.

So looking through in the refrigerator one morning,

I open the refrigerator and I see some flan.

Yes.

I'm like,

Hmm.

You know,

This flan,

This looks good.

Well,

Maybe not for breakfast.

Okay.

But the idea is planted in my head.

So I go out to work and as I go through the day,

I keep thinking about,

Ah,

There's this flan there,

You know,

And walking home,

Ah,

There's this flan.

And so I walk in the house and I open the refrigerator and it's still there.

And so I reach in and I grab it and pick it up and hang onto it as I look for a spoon,

Just to make sure it doesn't get away.

And then I take a scoop and put it in my mouth and there is this sweet burst of sensation and this moment of just bliss,

Just bliss.

Ah.

Mind stops.

It's wonderful.

It's heaven.

And if you're like me,

It lasts upwards to three seconds maybe.

And the sensations start to fade and I think,

Ah,

I need another bite.

And the second bite,

You know,

The bliss lasts,

You know,

A second or two.

By the third bite,

There is no more bliss,

But it's kind of comfortable.

You know,

It's pleasant.

So I just sort of gobble it on down.

So the question is,

What is the cause of ecstasy in that first bite?

The gurus of the advertising industry are very clear about what causes that bliss.

You know,

You got something you wanted.

You know.

I was hankering for that flan and I got what I wanted and so of course I feel happy.

So in our quest for happiness in America we have built lifestyles,

Culture,

Whole economic system around this philosophy to get what we want makes us happy.

And we have become incredibly proficient at satisfying desires.

We have flan,

Ice cream,

Hot tubs,

Designer clothes,

Luxury cars,

Evenings at the theater,

Varieties of chocolate,

300 cable channels on TV,

Personalized bed settings,

You know.

Right?

Vacation packages,

Books,

Music,

On and on and on.

Our technologies for producing comfort exceed anything that the world has ever seen.

They really have.

We are the gods on Mount Olympus.

The envy of a lot of the world.

But are we really happy?

Are we really happy?

Most people spend more time earning money to buy the good life than they do actually enjoying it.

Crime and violence abound.

Many people are afraid to let their children play out in the neighborhood.

Teenage suicide,

Alcoholism,

Depression that affects by some estimates as much as 75% of the population,

Diffuse anxiety,

On and on and on.

So what's the matter up here on Mount Olympus?

What went wrong with all this?

Why doesn't this feel like heaven?

So let's go back and take a closer look at that,

At my little example here,

And see if we can see what really happened.

So longing for the desert all day,

Thinking about it all day,

That actually is not happiness.

There's a little bit of grasping,

A little bit of hunger.

It's not pleasant.

In fact,

It's so unpleasant that we oftentimes try to take our mind off it by maybe fantasizing what it's going to be like to have the flan.

Sweet anticipation,

We call it.

And this is,

It's really unfortunate because without awareness there is no wisdom.

Wisdom is just awareness.

Wisdom is perception.

It's like seeing deeply into things.

So without awareness there's no wisdom.

And without wisdom we have no way of dealing with the discomfort of the moment rather than fantasy.

So in this country we have these vast entertainment industries.

Movies,

TVs,

Sports shows,

Radios,

Magazines,

Music,

Video games,

Web surfing,

Social media,

All these things to keep us distracted.

Okay.

So wanting isn't pleasant,

But what about that first bite?

Certainly that was genuine.

And I actually think it is.

It is genuine,

Deep,

Deep contentment.

But it's important to look and see what was really going on in that moment.

Feel it closely during the first moment,

You know,

When I or you take a bite and taste that.

There is the sensation,

But also what happens in that moment is the desire disappears.

I don't want anymore because I've got it.

And it feels wonderful.

The flan didn't create the happiness.

It's the absence of desire that created the happiness.

Lao Tzu wrote,

You're rich when you know you have enough.

And furthermore,

The sensations can be so strong that for a moment the mind actually just stops.

So there's no desire,

There's no movements of the mind,

There's no holding,

There's no grasping,

And there's just a natural bliss that comes up.

So on Mount Olympus here,

We have confused satisfying desire with the absence of desire.

We have confused getting what we want with not wanting.

So what happens is that with that confusion we get focused on the object rather than what's going on inside ourselves.

So when it subsides we focus back on the object.

Ah,

It was the flan,

So we go for another bite and another bite and another bite.

I suspect that most of us here are fairly clear that material items don't really bring deepest well-being.

So rather than collect stuff,

A lot of us like to collect experiences.

After the flan,

A glass of wine,

Watch a little TV,

Soak in a hot tub,

Listen to the music,

Have sex,

Read a few books,

Go hiking,

Swimming in the ocean,

Camping,

Going and taking in the theater.

That's a busy day.

That's right.

We leap from desire to desire and comfort and comfort to comfort until we are stressed and exhausted,

You know,

And dying of stress-induced diseases.

So let's go back to that mouthful of flan and see if we can trace the actual flow of events that's going on there.

See if we can map this back.

So the story begins by opening the refrigerator and there's light that strikes the flan and comes up to my eye.

Contact.

So there's PASA.

It's called contact,

Which means contact between a physical sensation,

A sensory organ,

And awareness.

And we have contact.

And it's just raw sensation.

Actually,

That's like time your insulin levels just spiked.

Seriously,

The mere sight of something that's sweet are insulin levels.

Ah.

So you're having a physical reaction.

Yeah,

Yeah.

Of course,

I'm talking about first thing in the morning when I didn't actually get the – as a big delayed response,

But yeah,

There's that little flash.

Yeah.

Good.

So if I could just – so preceding that on your chart,

You have consciousness here.

So I would just want to add that in an anaya is consciousness here.

And there are those that believe that that actually would be a means of perception.

So what's happening,

If you have eye and eye contact,

There is perception.

Right.

So there's a consciousness there already.

I was picking up at number six here because those earlier stages are subtle enough.

You can see them in meditation,

But I just wanted to start with the range.

The range is kind of a normal awareness or – So everything preceding that is just potentially there,

Ready to go?

It is there.

The engine is running.

The engine is running.

Well,

I want to come back and we'll go through all of those.

But to get familiar with it,

How it works,

We'll go through the stuff we know.

And actually the stuff that we experience directly is enough to really understand what's going on.

Because these subtler ones,

Like I say,

They only show up and really – mind has to be very,

Very still to see those.

And they don't appear in ways that we might intuitively think they do.

But we can talk about that.

So starting from contact,

There is the sensation,

Consciousness.

The consciousness here is really referring to awareness.

The consciousness that's talked about there is a little different than Yana.

So there is raw sensation,

There's contact.

And very quickly after that,

The next thing that arises is a feeling tone.

We have a raw sensation,

Which is just the sensation itself.

And then it feels either pleasant,

Unpleasant,

Or neutral.

That's fame now.

If it feels pleasant,

We tend to lean into it.

Want more of it?

That leads to kind of grasping.

Itana,

Right.

If it's unpleasant,

We tend to pull back or push it away.

That's aversion.

And if it's neither pleasant nor unpleasant,

We tend to be less interested and not notice it so clearly.

So these are the three stujas that we talked about the other night,

Lobadosa and moa,

Agreed hatred and delusion.

A collectivity called craving.

And the craving can be ravenous or it can be just very,

Very subtle.

So in the flan story,

There's just this pleasant feeling that comes up.

The desire for the flan didn't fade,

So I found myself thinking about it,

Actually kind of identifying with it all day.

I'm hungry,

I would like some,

I hope nobody takes mine.

After this we're going to have flood,

Right?

After this we're going to have a leaf or a cream.

After the flood.

Oh,

I have to tell you this little story about identification.

I have a collapsible umbrella that somebody gave me.

It's from REI.

It fits in this brown bag.

And there was this,

I was teaching a meditation class at Sacramento State University and I was going to miss,

I was going to be out of town because I was leading a retreat one Friday.

And so a friend of mine in town who also teaches,

Not this style,

But teaches meditation,

He was going to come in and take the class for that one day.

But he wanted to drive over to meet with the class on the first day.

And as we got out of the car,

I grabbed my umbrella,

And he grabbed his and they were identical.

And my first thought was,

Oh my goodness,

We've got to be very careful.

I will mix these up and we won't even know which one is mine and which one is his.

Oh,

The mind,

The mind,

The mind.

So the first thought,

See the flan,

You know,

It's pleasant,

There's a little bit of craving.

And the craving is actually pre-verbal.

But what happens very quickly after that is the mind kind of latches onto it.

I like to say it shrink wraps around it.

It says,

Ah,

You know what I mean.

That's Upadana.

It's called clinging.

And clinging always appears as a thought.

It's always accompanied by a thought.

And then that thought triggers other thoughts,

Or we can just repeat that thought and create this whole pattern.

And that is bhava.

It follows our habitual tendencies.

Here's a great example of bhava.

I'll give you an Upadana and you can provide the bhava.

So I'll give you one thought and we'll see which thoughts come up for you.

Donald Trump.

Can you see how that happens?

Most of us just almost immediately have three or four paragraphs.

Just like,

There it is.

So this can go pretty quickly.

In this particular example I just saw the flan.

Ah,

You know,

I want it.

Bhava is,

Bonte translates it as habitual tendencies.

And I think it's a really useful,

Very practical translation because it's something you can work with.

Other times it's translated as becoming,

Or being,

Which for most people is confusing.

It's like,

What's that all about?

And I think where it comes from,

Part of it,

You know,

I was talking about,

You know,

Pepsi Cola going into China,

And part of it is the translations.

That I think what it's about is that it's called becoming because most of us really identify with those thought patterns.

So this is where a sense of self can really take root.

But that's just my theory.

I'm probably wrong.

A lot of this stuff you can get from evoked potentials,

Where you measure the E.

T.

At the point where the exposure occurs,

And there's differences for preferences or non-preferences,

Or all sorts of stuff.

And actually you can see wiggly lines representing all of these values in the human.

So you know what they're thinking without even asking them,

Which is interesting with that technology.

So one of my little thoughts is when you said little wiggly lines,

Ah,

That means they're real.

Yeah,

It's exactly what our lives are.

Right,

Right,

Right.

But once you can see it on the screen,

Then it's real.

It's like I remember hearing this,

It was a news report once that came on us really excited,

That said that,

You know,

Runner's high is real.

Like I just discovered some of the chemicals that happened,

It wasn't real before.

So that's habitual tendencies,

I think that's why it's labeled becoming sometimes.

Latent tendencies,

Which are not as different,

Right,

So how are we saying habitual tendencies are same as latent tendencies?

No,

No,

No,

They're not,

It's a different phenomena than latent tendencies.

Yeah,

Anusias are very,

Very subtle biologically based hindrances that fly below the radar screen.

And actually bhava-tana,

The desire to exist,

Is one of them,

It's this reflex to personalize things.

And what the Buddha said about the anusias and about bhava-tana is that,

You know,

They're very powerful and they color our experience,

But they're very hard to see directly.

So that's what the latent tendencies are.

And the other part of this course is that they actually sit there dormantly.

Well,

As you and I know from some of our discussions,

So for example,

There is a latent tendency to prefer things that are pleasant.

So it's just there and you don't see it unless it gets triggered as a specific one,

But there's this whole tendency of the organism to move towards what's pleasant and move away what's unpleasant,

Which doesn't take a lot of deep thought to realize the evolutionary advantage of that.

I'm sorry,

But maybe it's because of meditating all day,

It seems like you're talking really fast.

Am I talking really fast?

I could be.

Okay,

Thank you,

Thank you,

I will slow down.

Yeah,

So if you come closer I'll sound slower.

No,

I'm sorry.

You sound slower.

Oh,

Do you?

Well,

Part of honesty what I'm concerned about is there's just a lot of dense material and I don't know how to do it,

But if I'm going so fast that it's like just a stone skipping over the water that doesn't sink in,

Then that's not going to be helpful either.

So please.

So is there something in this that you feel you missed or?

Okay,

Okay,

Okay.

So contact figures that just the sensations of seeing the fawn,

It's pleasant,

Maybe because of insulin levels,

Who knows.

It goes into the craving,

The tanha,

The grasping,

Which triggers this process whereby the mind shrink wraps around it,

Gives it a label,

Triggers this habitual pattern.

You know,

Another label for bhava is just emotional stuff.

That's the territory we're in,

These deeply habituated patterns,

How we think and feel,

Etc.

Those will influence,

If there's a lot of energy in it,

Will move us towards some action.

And it can be a physical action,

A verbal action,

Or just a mental action.

In this case,

It rode with me all day and eventually led to getting the fawn out.

And then the actions can trigger great suffering.

Okay.

So do we have that much of it?

Then maybe I could slow down a little bit.

So the first thing when you look at this is that it's not really completely true,

Is it?

Because every time there is a physical sensation,

It doesn't always end in suffering.

There can be a physical sensation and it can be quite pleasant,

But that doesn't necessarily lead to craving.

If we're unconscious about it,

It probably will,

But it is possible to relax the tension in that.

And every time there is a craving,

It doesn't mean you actually act on it.

There's a tendency to do that.

And so you go right on down the line.

And so,

This actually,

I was talking with Pat last night,

I was trying to figure out,

Because I was looking at these translations that I know so well.

So I go back,

The Buddha says,

When this exists,

That comes to be.

When there arises this,

That arises.

When this does not exist,

That does not come to be.

With the cessation of this,

That ceases.

So I think,

For example,

Look at these cause and effect things.

You have a match that you strike and you throw it into a puddle of gasoline and it catches fire.

So you may think that the match is one of the causes,

But according to this formula,

The causes that the Buddha is interested in is the ones that when they are removed,

It ceases.

So you throw the match away,

The fire keeps going.

So gasoline would be a primary cause,

Because you take the gasoline away and the fire is gone.

Okay?

I'm upset because Joe called me a name.

So I could think that the cause of this is Joe calling me a name.

But she stopped saying that and I'm still upset.

So that actually doesn't fit that whole formula.

There's something that's going on inside me that she triggered.

And so what we do in this culture a lot is I can blame Joe.

But it doesn't help.

It doesn't help unless I see what the internal cause is in here.

It's interesting to think about the first fuel.

Yeah,

That's right.

What is fuel in that?

Because if there's no fuel,

You know,

She says,

Well,

You're a jerk and I think,

You know,

I think you're right.

There am.

So is there a point?

You know,

It's like,

So what if there's no fuel to be ignited?

So I think this is important in looking at all this.

And in fact,

In the text,

It doesn't translate consistently through,

In the text,

The Buddha says very,

Very consistently that the correct way to view dependent origination is in reverse,

Going upstream.

Oh,

Yeah.

Because then it's already happened.

So what he's saying,

If there is suffering,

There was always some action that preceded it.

If there was some action that preceded it,

There was,

You know,

An habitual tendency before that.

If there was an habitual tendency that got triggered,

There was an upadana.

There was some clinging.

If there was some clinging,

There was some craving,

Some tonic.

There was some craving.

There was pleasant,

Unpleasant,

Neutral,

And traces on back up the line.

And it makes a lot of sense because what the Buddha was always,

The only thing he was interested in,

When it comes right down to it,

Is a relief of suffering.

And I think what happened,

And what happened with the text,

Is it's a lot easier to learn these causal relationships going downstream,

If you will.

And I think there is a tendency for them to go that way.

But I was fooling around with translations in a way I would like to say it.

When this exists,

That may come to be.

With the arising of this,

That may arise.

When this does not exist,

That does not come to be.

Right.

Right.

Right.

Right.

Yeah.

Okay.

Is this making sense?

Because it's really,

Really important because without it,

You end up with this kind of philosophical chart on the wall about how things operate,

But doesn't have much application.

But when you start using this in reverse order.

.

.

So this is kind of related to when he tells his son that when he finished something,

Notice if it caused something or not,

And if it did,

Then look back at it and see where you went wrong.

So this is how we would look back at it.

That's right.

That's right.

But that makes perfect sense.

Yeah.

Isn't that how he discovered it?

Yes.

By deconstruction.

The engineering.

Sure.

Right.

It was reverse engineered.

Reverse engineered.

Yeah.

Right.

And there may be like an original cause at some point where it just becomes papantia after a while where it is simply.

.

.

There was contact at one point,

But that initial contact caused mental prolification that may have ended in suffering or may not,

Or may have gone part way but not all the way.

They don't even have to have papantia.

So this could be scaled in any way.

Yeah.

As long as you start from the deconstruction.

Yeah.

So it starts from the deconstruction.

Do you want to put one more curve into this?

No.

Go for it.

So there can also be backwaters.

So you can have a sensation,

It has a feeling tone which leads to a craving,

Which triggers a thought,

Which triggers this whole thought pattern,

And then you can dislike the thought pattern which is actually back upstream,

So they can feed back on themselves.

So this is really laid out as a sort of minimalistic diagram on which when life actually happens can have all kinds of complexities in it.

You wrote a book about the holographic.

.

.

What's the name of it?

I can't remember,

But anyway he talks about that,

How all these things blink into each other and you can go off any way you want and bang a couple of them together and get more suffering.

I can't remember it now,

But it's a D'Arbo book.

Because they don't have to necessarily happen in order.

Yeah,

This is set up sequentially,

But it doesn't necessarily happen sequentially.

It does the same,

It's just banging around.

Right.

Yeah,

And the reason that they're laid out that way is actually because of the sensation.

Because if you remove this one,

Then the things downstream disappear.

And in relieving suffering,

That's the piece that really matters most.

So it's set out for simply and then it gets really complicated,

But that principle is the one he was driving at.

What's the piece that matters most?

Removing the cause.

Removing the cause,

Yeah.

And that's what you're doing when you're six-aring.

Right,

And that's what you started out the first night talking about.

The cause,

The kingpin in here is a tanha.

Right.

Well,

And it's in two different ways,

As you know well,

That there is the tanha right there as one of the links,

One of the dominoes,

To use metaphor from the other night.

And there's a little bit,

There's actually a little bit of tanha in each one of the links,

Within each one.

There's a little bit of tension in each one.

It's the kind of glue that keeps them together.

So within unpleasantness,

There'll be just a little,

You know,

Whiff of that tension that actually drives the whole thing.

And the same with pleasantness,

Right?

So it's an unpleasantness that has the same thing,

Because it has that,

Call it magnetism.

Right,

Right,

Right.

Okay,

Yeah.

I have two questions.

So where is the,

Number one,

Where is the six-hour constant?

Is that removing pain or removing any link possible?

That's number one.

Number two,

Ignorance is self,

Right?

Ignorance is,

Is that ignorance itself?

Oh,

Boy.

There's a couple ways of thinking about it.

One,

You know,

In the text,

Ignorance usually means not understanding dependent origination,

Not understanding this process by how all this works.

Because presumably,

If you see how it all works,

I mean,

In a really deep embodied way,

Then you're not caught by it.

But the ignorance,

Yeah,

I'm not sure I could say any more intelligent about it.

This is the reason I'm asking this question.

If ignorance is self,

Then if you remove self,

Non-self,

Then the chain moves dark.

Right,

Well,

Self has tension within it.

But ignorance,

You know,

Formations,

For example,

These first ones are extraordinarily subtle.

So I was meditating at Damasuka,

And there weren't many people there.

So rather than go on for a short interview with Bonte,

Once a day I would go over there and we'd do the interview,

And we'd sit around talking for a while.

So I did my interview part,

And then we were talking about this,

That,

And the other.

And I told him,

I said,

You know,

There's this faint image.

Because I was going very deep,

But there was this,

I mean,

I could hardly see it.

And what it was,

Was an image.

It's like this ball of energy that's just coming at me and going,

Whew,

On by.

And it was one of those things that was so faint that I,

Ordinarily,

I wouldn't see it at all.

But I kept on seeing it over and over again,

And it was enough.

It wasn't enough for me to even bring it up in the interview.

But when we were talking just about this,

That,

And the other,

I said,

You know,

There's this really kind of interesting image,

And I don't know what it is.

And I said,

You know,

And if I look at it in my mind,

To me,

It seems like a stem cell.

You know,

In the sense that this ball of energy could become anything.

It could become an arm,

It could become a craving,

It could become a piece of an automobile,

It could become a cell in my brain.

So it's not anything.

It could become anything.

But it actually has some substance of its own,

Like a stem cell.

And Bonte looked at me and he said,

You're seeing formations.

That that's what they were.

And,

But I have to say,

You know,

The perception of it was so wispy out there.

I mean,

What,

You know,

And I asked him,

I said,

How do you know that?

What's this and this other one?

And he said,

Well,

Because the Buddha mapped all this stuff out.

And I,

You know,

I was blown just again.

I mean,

It's so hard to see,

But to think that the Buddha could actually put this map together of all this stuff.

It's like,

Ah,

My goodness.

But that's all to say that these up before contact are really quite faint in meditation,

You know,

From sixth sense basis,

You know,

On upstream.

Mostly how,

When people experience them,

What they do is they experience like just a little bit of sort of vibration or something in the mind.

And then it's like the volume of it sort of cuts in half.

You know,

That's,

That's usually people that experience these.

The,

The volume or the strength of the vibration,

It just drops a little bit.

Yeah.

And that's how they're experiencing.

And it's,

It's usually,

You know,

In pretty deep,

Deep states.

And,

You know,

And to think that the Buddha could put all this stuff together,

You know,

It's just,

It's very,

Very faint.

Okay.

Other questions?

Please.

This is,

This is.

You know,

You're talking about formation and Vajrayudhaji calls formations or sankara,

Constructions.

Well,

The word sankara,

The,

The,

Where it actually comes from,

The car in there is the same car as,

As in karma,

Means action.

And the sawn gives it a little extra push.

So the word literally means something that has been pushed into form.

And it's an unfortunate translation because we call it formations.

And the implication is something that's pushed into form can fall apart really easily.

But when you translate it into English as formations that,

You know,

The connotation there is of what,

A granite formation.

That's why construction I think is a more helpful word.

Yeah,

Than formations.

Yeah,

Yeah.

Yeah.

And there,

There are a couple of other ones that people use.

I don't remember.

The difficulty with construction is,

Is that it,

It sounds,

I don't know,

The connotations for me always sound a little too thick.

I see like verb to construct.

That word still exists in,

In Singhalese today where they use the word sankara.

It's not exactly sankara,

But it's like sankari or something.

Right.

Which means to construct.

Right.

Right.

Right.

Okay.

So we look at this in meditation.

Yeah.

Okay.

So when you said the,

You see the song,

Right?

That's the contact,

Right?

Right.

So,

But before the contact,

Those,

When,

Okay,

Five of them,

These also happen,

But you just realize the contact.

That's right.

That's right.

Okay.

So these all exist,

But you just,

It was so subtle to realize it,

But you do realize the contact.

That's right.

Yeah.

In,

In,

In ordinary awareness,

In deep meditative states,

When you're feeling,

When you can actually see these very subtle ones and the vibration and actually relax those,

Then even the contact doesn't arise.

But that's really hard to do and it's not really necessary for freedom,

But,

But they are a cause in the sense that if it's taken away,

The next item just doesn't come up.

She asked a question about the self.

So in my mind,

The self is really up there in bhava.

What we think of as self is,

Well,

It's,

It's a whole bunch of things,

But the idea of self is certainly a mental construct in the story.

But the idea of self is not really a mental construct.

It's more akin to an emotion.

Emotions have a visceral part,

A body part,

There's ideas,

There's feelings,

There's a whole bunch of stuff that comes together in a sankara,

In a form that's put together.

Get a sense of self,

Well,

It can form around contact.

So?

Contact.

When you're going… Yes.

Very good.

Yeah,

And that's further downstream.

I'm just seeing if I can get up further than that.

But yeah,

What they're craving,

Start to get it.

So there's a flow of phenomena.

So you can have all those flow of phenomena.

The self doesn't arise until you start to split your experience into me and not me.

The very early ones.

There's just stuff that happens.

I'm going to talk about this aspect of it a little bit more on another night when we get back into it.

Okay.

So I just wanted to say that.

The punaji says that the vabha is our unique kind of particular circumstances,

How it will manifest through the sort of vabha filter.

Because that's our sort of packaging of karma,

Which is the only way we can manifest.

We can't manifest through somebody else's package.

That's sort of the lens in which everything is the lens.

Does that make sense?

Yeah,

It does.

I'm not sure I'd buy it completely,

But I understand what he's saying.

I'm trying to sell it.

I'm just trying to bounce it.

Right.

Because I think those patterns and stuff can be laid down in places other than in habitual tendencies.

Habitual tendencies have more to do with thought and concepts,

Et cetera.

You can have conditioning for which there's no thought around.

There was a guy who fairly advanced Alzheimer's and had to go see the doctor every week.

But he couldn't,

You know,

Didn't remember the doctor at all.

So every week his wife had to reintroduce him to the doctor and he would have his examination,

Et cetera,

Et cetera.

So one week the doctor got one of these rings that had a little point on the inside of it.

And so when he was introduced he shook hands and a pricked him.

The next week when he came in his wife introduced him.

He had no idea who the doctor was,

But when he went to shake hands he pulled his hand away.

So subliminal conditioning just happens all the time.

Yeah,

It's fascinating stuff.

Shall we look at this in meditation?

Are you ready for that part of it?

So in meditation we're always concerned with going upstream.

So let me just describe the process this way.

So this is our object of meditation.

This is the meta,

The peacefulness stuff that you are sending out.

And here's your awareness.

It's just resting on that.

It's resting very quietly so it's wonderful and sweet.

And you're sitting there meditating and the next thing you know you're thinking,

That guy is such a jerk.

I mean why did he say we were having such a good time?

Why do you have to,

Oh,

I'm meditating.

Right,

Okay.

So you recognize,

You're thinking,

Release,

Relax,

You smile,

Come back to the object of meditation.

That guy is such a jerk.

Oh,

I'm meditating.

Recognize,

Release,

Relax.

Smile,

Come back.

That jerk,

Oh,

I'm meditating.

So you see what's happening?

The pattern keeps coming up but as you six hour it over and over again the tension starts to drain out of it so that now there's just the word jerk comes up.

It's the first thought and before the whole thought storm gets going you actually catch it right at that point.

You say jerk and you six hour it at that point and all the rest of the story doesn't follow out of that.

So you're sitting there meditating,

Jerk,

Six hour it,

Come back.

Well,

Jerk has got a lot of tension in it so you're meditating and then you notice this tension comes up and even before the word jerk emerges in the mind you six hour it.

Recognize,

Release,

Relax.

And then there's just,

It's not even a tension but it's just the mind is sort of peacefully there and then it just starts to feel a little unpleasant and even before it starts to tense and up around it you six hour.

Recognize,

Release,

Relax.

And then you were there,

The mind is very still and of course as you're doing all this the length of time that you go without needing the six hour begins to get longer and longer as it's draining out and the amount of time that you're caught gets shorter and shorter and so then you're down there and you're meditating and you notice the mind just starts to wobble a little bit.

You have no idea what it is,

It just starts to wobble and so by choosing six hour the wobble.

Of course at that point it's probably not six,

It's probably one hour,

They're all kind of flowing together,

You just relax the wobble.

And then before the wobble there's maybe just a little bit of a vibration that happens,

Just relax that.

And then there's just,

And then you go into nirvana.

You go into nirvana.

Okay,

So you see how dependent origination works in that?

You know,

He's a jerk,

All that is above as a story line,

The jerk is the upadana.

This is that first grasping and then you see the craving,

The unpleasantness and then it can even get subtler than that.

That's when we start drifting up to the pre-contact ones.

Okay.

Pre-contact ones are the fun ones because you feel it like it has a little field in its arm and it's sort of like off and you don't necessarily need six hour it because you can just sort of almost observe it without really directly observing it and you can feel that disappear.

Don't even look at it.

Don't even look at it.

If you look.

Is that sort of like whispering to mommy when she's talking on the telephone?

Yes,

Yeah,

Yeah,

Yeah,

Exactly.

So and the other thing that's happening with all this is that as you're six hour and as you're releasing that tension,

As the mind is becoming a lot more stable,

A lot clearer,

A lot more perceptive and you are not doing it.

You are not making the mind more stable.

You are not,

You know,

Making it be more perceptive.

The only thing you're doing is actually releasing,

Skillfully releasing the tension around it and then those natural qualities just begin to,

They're what's left behind.

What's just there naturally.

Does that suggest that then you've got a generalize that's across classes of the mind now rather than just… That's right.

So this undermines our habitual tendencies in general.

Just the whole thing.

Right.

So it undermines our habitual tendencies.

Yeah.

Two steps.

Right.

Who am I without my habitual tendencies?

Nobody.

What is the sentence?

Okay.

So that's enough of me presenting stuff.

Other questions?

I mean I have a whole series of different points about all this but I want to see what's useful for you guys.

In this picture is a little tiny guy ignorance?

Oh,

Of the Russian dolls?

So there are lots of different models of dependent origination.

One is links.

Links of dependent origination.

That doesn't appear in any of the texts.

That was a later invention.

I like the metaphor of the river and it's the one I really utilize in Buddha's Map and just as it was going to press I just had this idea of this other which is of these Russian dolls.

Because it's within.

So there's this tendency of lying them all up in a row but actually inside the habitual tendencies is the clinging and inside the clinging is the time.

So all of those are actually in there.

So that's why you can actually release the tension because they're actually inside it.

So I just really like that model.

That's really helpful when you think about it from the back.

That's right.

Yeah because otherwise.

The river is hard to think about.

Right and then the cause was somehow in the past and so here I am having this thought storm and I'm supposed to go back and find something that happened three or four or five minutes ago or seconds ago or something.

It doesn't work.

But if you realize that the tension that creates that thought storm exists inside it.

The cause is actually still there within the habitual tendencies.

Each kind of envelops the other.

So if you can pull this is really mixing.

If you can pull the plug on that one if you can get that one to dissolve then the other one's just evaporate.

So it's an accumulation.

Yes.

It's like a process of accumulation.

They get encrusted.

They get more and more and more and more.

Right.

So it's like taking layers off and getting down.

And that's again what the six Rs are like so efficient at because particularly as you get used to it you can actually do it without having a conceptual understanding.

You can just see when you're on experience there's this stuff you can do.

Okay.

So we're talking about the universe in general today.

Pardon?

We're talking about the universe in general today.

I didn't catch that.

Yes.

Yeah,

The experiences are different but the jhanas are actually a different map.

They're not actually dependent origination.

And what happens as the jhanas go deeper is you can see dependent origination more clearly but it's not that dependent origination and the jhanas are the same map.

As the mind gets quieter you can see more and more of what's going on.

And this was the point of the whole thing for the Buddha is that if we can see how all this stuff operates what happens as you see how this stuff operates it just starts to look really mechanical and quite impersonal.

So the jhanas enable you to reverse engineer.

That's right.

That's right.

Thank you.

Yeah,

That's exactly what it is.

What did you say?

The jhanas enable us to basically reconstruct.

But they reveal them and then we can.

.

.

Yeah,

They decondition.

Right.

And what I would say,

Just since we're playing this metaphor,

Is there is deconstruction and reverse engineering but the actual experience of it is that with the awareness it's actually it's not our job to deconstruct it.

Our job is to see it clearly.

And when you see it clearly you can think of it as when you see it clearly the awareness does all the work.

Most people know when their gas meter gets on the E they better not drive to Los Angeles.

So that's the kind of way I think that's done.

Meditation slows me down enough to see that.

To see what's going on.

Yeah,

Yeah.

So we're not really deconstructing it as an act of process but it's as we see it.

It evaporates.

It just loses its substance.

I think of them,

They're sort of like ghosts.

Ghosts only have power if you're scared of them.

If you're not scared of them then they're just phantoms.

So that's the potential so that you dissolve them before they actually actualize in substantive form.

So to which genre are you able to see those elements?

To see the elements of that and the energy transition?

Okay it's a little more complicated than that because I do think that people have different gifts.

There are some people who will see these quite naturally and early on there's some people who will never see them.

It just depends on their constitution.

I always like to,

I maybe have mentioned before here Sariputta and Mogadilana.

They were brothers and they were like number one and number two.

They were very senior disciples of the Buddha.

Sariputta had this capacity to actually see in this minute detail all those little pieces of what were going on.

So he was somebody who could see all this stuff.

Mogadilana couldn't.

Mogadilana had a lot of,

Was more feeling based,

Was much more intuitive,

Psychic powers,

A whole different thing.

You don't have to have psychic powers and you don't have to be able to see all that detail.

What you do is release the tension.

And the map is just actually used to guide our experience to begin to see mechanically how it works and so that if there's tension,

Because what happens,

Particularly as the meditation gets deeper,

One thing I had to learn to let go of is I just really love insights.

Well to have an insight and know it,

It takes a little time and stuff gets so subtle that if I was,

If I wanted to have it,

That I had to six-hour the insights.

At some point they get in the way.

They talk about,

I mean they talk about insights,

But there is that story where they're like,

Oh we're having these beautiful visions and knowing,

It's like well you know you're just distracting yourself there and you can hang out with them as you want,

But if you want to get to Nirvana,

You've got to let those guys go.

Yeah,

So it's true,

We get stuck on things.

Yeah and that's,

Different people get stuck on different things depending on our conditioning and all kinds of.

.

.

I ran into Ajahn Pasanno in a waiting room in the doctor's office a couple of years ago and I was asking him about dependent origination because I was really touched,

I was like I could not understand it and he said,

Well Ajahn Pasanno said you don't need,

If you're falling out of the tree you don't need to be able to count every single branch on the way down.

Yeah,

Exactly,

Exactly.

Other comments?

I read that Sariputta was asked what right view is and so then he went and listed dependent origination,

Backward and forward and said that's right perspective,

Right view.

So it's the backbone of the teaching.

It's the backbone of the teaching and the reason that that could be equated with wise view is that when you see how this whole thing works in an embodied way it becomes very impersonal and mechanical and this is the details and Sariputta could see all the little details of it.

Not all of us need to see all those details in order to release it and there's somebody,

There are people like me who I'll just hang on to anything I can so it takes a long time for me.

I'll point out just one or two other things quickly,

There's no wheel in this.

The wheel I think is the conflation of the wheel of samsara and dependent origination but dependent origination is always presented as this linear.

Yeah particularly the Tibetans tend to,

But if you read the text,

Suffering,

Well when I say suffering leads to ignorance but the text doesn't talk about it that way.

Because I was always told that the Buddha drew that wheel that's on the Indian flag in the middle there,

That the Buddha drew that,

That was on all the monasteries back in the day.

How do we know that?

Good question.

I don't know I just think of Gershwin,

It ain't necessarily so.

The stories are liable here in the Bible,

It ain't necessarily so.

All I can say is if you go back to the earlier text it's not there.

There are some of the other traditions in later texts way down the line,

Those things do appear but in the earlier ones they don't.

I always assume that those wheels have eight spokes and that it's the eightfold path.

Yeah they do have eight.

And the eightfold path is actually not sequential.

No it's linear too.

Yeah.

Well it's actually multi-dimensional.

It's very linear.

It's listed,

It's more holographic.

Everything's related to everything else.

It's looking at the same thing from different angles.

But I guess Joe what did you say?

I said holographic.

Holographic.

Yeah.

Every piece has the whole thing.

Yeah.

The whole thing is also looking at the same thing.

Yeah.

Just like dependent origination really is kind of like that too.

Well the whole Buddha Dhamma,

If you go deeply enough in any little piece of it you get the whole thing which is where the holographic metaphor works so well.

And so you find some part that resonates with you.

The flan part.

The flan causes suffering.

I don't know who you're taking away here.

Anything else I want to throw at you?

In Buddhism Mappi is the river metaphor because these are always talked about in twelve steps.

It's not a twelve step program.

There's some places where they're thirteen,

There's some places where they're nine,

There's some places where there's twenty-seven.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The different phases of it.

And in meditation,

Oftentimes you'll see places that are actually in between two of these.

It's always like the idea of a river.

There's a rapid here and there's calm here and they're very different but there's a transition and it was really more like a flow of energy.

I mean truly the remarkable thing is that it exactly replicates modern science's idea of psychology in terms of all of the unconscious processes ultimately producing consciousness and behavior and that there's a lot of stuff that's still coded in the machine code of the brain before it gets to the point where it's elaborated in consciousness.

Right.

It's so powerful.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I know it was right in the textbooks on neurological science but they were lost.

Okay.

I have a final quiz but is there any more thoughts or comments?

So here's your take home exam.

One of the earliest Greek proofs for the existence of God says that everything has a cause.

And that cause has a cause and that cause has a cause and that has a cause and if you go back far enough you get to the original cause,

Sometimes called the unmoved mover,

You know the original cause.

What's the difference between that and the Buddhist dependent origination?

Because the Buddha is talking about causes,

Causes,

Causes.

Are they the same thing or is there something different?

How are they?

Pardon?

How are they?

How so?

What's the difference?

Because this is just one thing and one thing died down.

That is just many things,

You know,

More macro,

On the macro level.

This is a micro level.

Yeah.

Other thoughts?

Well the other thought is that the explosion of the universe out of nothing is really interesting because there is then no way to get to the universe.

There is an uncaused cause except that the way that they want to,

The physicists want to handle it,

Is that either there was a pre-existence state of the universe which was very exotic and which they are trying to plot or and that at some point it suddenly,

Actually you get the big explosion,

You get all the expansion and stuff like that so that you get it truly out of nowhere is some models of them but others of them actually have ideas for putting together a pre-existence model for what space and time didn't exist at that point but what the pre-space and time universe was or caused that.

So it's kind of like so contact is our big bang.

Yeah.

But you don't,

The point is you don't escape at some level because you keep pushing it back and you keep saying,

You know,

I push it back and you keep saying well what caused that?

How come?

How come?

So I think I'm following what you're saying but in terms of what I'm grading your exam and how does that relate to this question,

I'm not sure you get a very good grade.

What's the difference between the duck?

What's the difference between the duck?

What's the difference between this model,

This proof of the existence of God that talks about causes and causes?

What's the difference between that and dependent origination or are they the same?

Some are the same to me.

One is inside a biological system so it's a totally different domain from the physics of the pre-space universe.

Okay,

We'll give partial credit for that.

Oh,

That's pretty funny.

One expresses existence and non-existence.

Okay.

I mean.

So it's getting late.

I'll give you,

This is the answer but it got you a hundred points.

Some of these other ones will get you some credit,

Is that in the Buddhist system there is no unmoved mover.

There is no primal cause.

Everything circles back around and is related to everything else.

So if you can answer that.

Oh,

It's closed loop.

Yeah.

Yeah,

And it's actually,

Yeah,

This whole tangle of loops that all turn back on themselves.

So in the Buddhist system you don't have a primary starting point.

So there's never not ignorance in the Buddhist system.

Right.

Well,

He was asked at one point in the Diggity,

What was the original cause?

Waiting for the answer.

I can imagine.

I just thought that was a question.

The answer was chance.

Chance?

That's how it was translated.

I don't know what he said.

The great mystery.

Well,

That's a question we're not used to saying.

That's what they say out there in the paintings if you look.

He says the NASA ponder doesn't even think that there is a final word.

Pardon?

He doesn't think about the thing that they can't really know.

There's no answer for that.

Okay.

So that's the question.

So this is refuting Jordan.

Because the Buddha did say when you ask,

I mean other places,

Who knows?

People in different places.

But in other places he says actually trying to figure out where all this stuff comes from will drive you nuts.

And it's not a worthy thing to contemplate.

It's not really relevant.

So he called them imponderables.

Bhikkhu Bodhi translated it as vexed.

You will become vexed if you try to answer these.

It's vexing.

He was asked that all the time and he answered it well.

Yeah.

Because some place would not stop asking.

It's the same answer.

It's the same answer.

It's the same answer.

Yeah.

Right?

Yeah.

It's the same answer.

Yeah.

So it's a chance.

It sort of kicks the metaphysical can down the road.

Right.

Which,

I mean this is another whole thing,

But from my perspective,

Even positing God just kicks the metaphysical can down the road.

You say God did it.

Well,

Why?

Who was God?

Well,

And what created God?

Why did he do it?

Where did God come from?

What are the conditions that created God?

It just actually just stops the conversation.

It says this is beyond,

So it doesn't answer anything.

And so I think the Buddha's is a little more direct.

Just say,

You know,

That'll drive you nuts.

It doesn't pretend to give an answer.

But saying it's chance,

I wonder if it's one of those things that just kind of shuts them up.

I think that was one of the things that it's like if he was going to give an answer,

That answer was.

.

.

I mean,

It probably could never be framed in words if it could be framed.

And that was the short answer.

Okay.

Okay.

Is that enough?

Is that more than enough?

And so just feeling our interconnections and this web of life and sending out through those connections to one another here and out into the world.

May all beings be peaceful.

May all beings know their true nature.

May all beings be free.

May it be so.

So if you have some good energy,

You can continue meditating or get some tea or walk a little bit and meditate some more.

If you're done,

Sweet dreams.

Namaste.

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If looking for an introduction to the core teachings of the Buddha then this is one helpful discourse. (Dependent origination, paticca samuppada)