Ever Changing Self

We arise out of the web of all life. In time, we dissolve back into it. Self is only an ephemeral construct. Given this, where do we find contentment? What matters? There is no freedom for yourself. There is only freedom from a self.

Transcript

So,

Tonight I wanted to talk about the ever-changing self.

If you've read any Buddhist literature,

Particularly looks at traditional Buddhist ideas,

You've probably come across what's called the three characteristics,

Three characteristics of all things.

The Pali terms for them are dukkha,

Anicca,

And anatta.

Dukkha is often translated as suffering or unsatisfactoriness,

And there's a wide range between those,

And the term actually has this huge range of meaning.

The etymology of the term dukkha had actually originally referred to the hole in the center of a wheel.

So the axle goes through so it turns.

And I've heard two different variations on this.

I think it was Joseph Goldstein years ago said that it referred to the hole and was slightly off-center.

So as the wheel turned,

It sort of pressed and grinded.

And I just ran across this thing from Lee Brazington where he said it actually refers to a dirty hole.

So you have grease on the axle,

And so sand and gravel may stick to it and it gets dirty,

And so the wheel turns,

And again it grinds.

So if you think of saying that life kind of presses and grinds on us,

Lee Brazington has this fun little article on his website where he was talking about how to really accurately translate dukkha because it has this whole range of meanings,

And he would take some of the classical passages where the Buddha says,

Birth is dukkha,

Death is dukkha,

Illness is dukkha,

Death,

Pain,

Grief is dukkha,

Associating with what you don't like is dukkha,

Not getting what you want is dukkha,

Having what you don't want is dukkha.

And he goes through and he plugs in these different words,

So like suffering.

So birth is suffering,

Well okay.

Death is suffering is okay.

Associating with what you don't like,

Or associating with what's unpleasant.

So you drop peanut butter on your shoe,

Dukkha.

It's kind of a little over the top,

Right?

So he takes all these different words.

Stephen Batchelor uses,

What's the word he uses?

Anguish.

Anguish.

Goes through all of these and then the word that he likes the most as he sticks in there is bummer.

Birth is a bummer,

Death is a bummer,

Peanut butter on your shoes is a bummer.

So he refers to this whole wide range.

So there's dukkha,

Anicca,

It's usually translated as impermanence.

I like Paul Simon's translation of it,

Although he didn't realize he was translating it.

There's a line in one of his songs where he says,

Everything puts together sooner or later falls apart.

So it has to do with that changeable nature.

And then there's anatta.

Atta means self.

In Sanskrit it's atman.

And an is negation.

So it means not self.

These three terms are not talking about really separate things so you put them all together and it says since everything is changing if we base our happiness on anything in the world since it's changing we're going to suffer.

So they all flow together.

I think the most difficult of these three terms,

The one that's hardest for people to get their mind around is not self.

There's no self.

So who is this self that experiences this not self?

Paradoxes abound with it.

So tonight I just want to play with this.

Hopefully we'll have some fun with it.

The best description I've heard about what it's really about comes from Richard Gombrich who was a British scholar,

Wrote this book called What the Buddha Thought.

And he just knows a lot about the various languages and cultures and stuff back there.

And he says if you want to understand what anatta means is you take no self and then you insert in between those words unchanging.

He was really saying there is no unchanging self and it kind of brings it down out of the stratosphere into something that's yeah,

Okay,

I mean we're always changing.

I'm not the same person I was a year ago.

I'm not the same person I was this morning.

It kind of brings it into range.

Attha in Atman in Sanskrit has some connotations.

It doesn't quite carry in English.

It's really talking about the real self,

The true self,

The eternal self.

It has a sense of permanence.

Emerson translated it as over soul.

It's who the real us is behind it all.

And so to say unchanging attha to the people the Buddha would have been talking to would have been totally redundant for him to say anatta really carried all this sense of there's no self that doesn't change.

So what the word really means is that there is no enduring essence.

There is no self that goes on for it.

It's not that we don't have a self but that it comes and it goes,

It arises and passes.

So the other thing that Richard Gombrich said about it that really caught my attention,

This little piece of Pali trivia that will be on the test,

You have to remember this for the test tomorrow,

Is that there is no word in Pali that comes even close to the English word process.

What the Buddha was really saying in all this is that everything is in process,

Everything is changing,

But there was no actual language for it.

So when you don't have the words for it you go to metaphors.

So he talks about impermanence,

Arising and passing,

But he's really talking about everything being in process,

Including self.

So here's a little thought experiment that hopefully make this just a little more concrete.

So imagine that you live for a hundred years and every day of your life you go into a room and you take your clothes off and somebody takes a picture of you.

And so we have a hundred years of these photos every day and so we put each of those photos becomes a frame in a movie.

So you put together this whole movie of your entire life and it runs out in about twenty minutes.

And just to make this a little more interesting,

We will start the film,

Let's say two decades before you were born,

And run the film for a hundred years after you die.

So the film comes on and at first it's blank,

There's nobody,

Or maybe your parents are there.

And then it goes on and very quickly there's your mother and she's pregnant and she swells up and poof,

Out you come.

And at first you can't do much but nurse and pee and poop and gurgle.

But as the food flows through your body,

You know,

Each day as it moves very quickly your body starts to stretch out and get a little more muscle tone and stand up.

And there you are and then you keep growing and come up in stature and pretty soon you've got hair,

More hair growing on your body and you get a little bit larger and you come into your sexual maturity and then pretty soon you hear the vibrancy and the vitality of youth and young adulthood.

And then the film keeps going and the growth seems to slow down a little bit and then the growth seems to stop and the body goes along and then there's,

You know,

Maybe things begin to sag a little bit here and there and the skin gets,

You know,

A little blotchy and the film keeps going and then the hair starts to lose its color and then the body starts to stoop a little bit,

Kind of loses its symmetry,

The body parts don't quite line up like they used to and the film keeps going and there's still a vibrancy in the eyes but the body has lost a lot of its vitality and then there's this sagging and the body actually seems to shrink a little bit as the film continues and it gets smaller just a little bit and then suddenly it's just lying down.

It's dead.

And the film continues and the skin begins to dry out and shrink and shrivel in the tissue and so very quickly there's nothing left there but a skeleton and the film keeps going and the bones gradually start to crumble and turn to dust and then the dust blows away and there's nothing and the film keeps going and this sign appears on the screen that says,

Do you exist?

And then that fades and another little question comes up that says,

What matters?

What matters?

So how do you answer that first question?

Do you exist?

Well,

Relative to time,

You know,

At any snapshot,

Any place along the film,

You know,

Yeah,

There's obviously there's somebody there.

I mean we can see them.

There's a baby,

There's a youth,

Maybe it's changing but there's somebody there and it moves through time but in the whole span of thing,

Do you ultimately exist?

I don't think so.

I don't think so.

We arise out of a whole lot of material and energies and come together into this form and then there's a self there relative to time and then it disappears and it goes back and there's nothing.

It's sort of like a sandcastle,

You know?

The big sandcastle on the beach is very obvious and a wave washes over it.

The sandcastle's gone,

You know?

All the sand is still there.

And essential is lost but it just sort of blends back into everything that is.

So where then,

Does that make sense?

Follow with me.

So there is this idea.

It's hard to film that.

It's hard to capture that.

We have lots of ideas about it.

In terms of empirical evidence,

It's pretty thin but that doesn't say,

You know,

It's not there but in Buddhism there is actually no sense of eternal soul either.

We have a self but it is not eternal and that it's not unchanging.

So the question becomes,

Where does this idea of a solid,

Enduring self come from?

The Buddha called it bhava-tana,

The desire to exist,

And it's actually what's known as an anusya.

Is that a familiar term?

Anusya.

Anusya is like a hindrance on steroids.

Anusya are hindrances that are just having a body.

It's stuff that's just wired into us that actually distorts our perception,

Thinking and feeling.

Anusyas tend to be ones that are deeply ingrained and somewhat dormant but they get fired someplace.

So one of them is this desire to exist.

Life clings to itself.

And so where does this come from?

Why is it so hard to imagine us not existing?

It's like just trying to imagine you not existing.

Let me tell you another story.

When I was about seven years old,

Six or seven years old,

I remember my mother telling me where babies came from,

About the sperm and the egg and the sexual act,

The whole business.

And I think I had a pretty typical seven-year-old reaction to this information.

Oh,

Gross!

But I do remember later on that night lying in my bed,

Looking up at the ceiling and thinking,

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

What if they had never met?

I would not have been conceived.

I would not exist.

Non-existence was a kind of pretty weird thing for a seven-year-old to think about.

I would not exist.

Or what if they had met but had not fallen in love?

Or if they had fallen in love but actually not gotten married?

What if they hadn't been in the mood to start a baby on a particular August afternoon in 1947?

What if a different one of those 50 million sperm had gotten to the egg first?

I could think of literally millions of contingencies by which I would not exist.

I would not be here.

Maybe they would have had another second child and given that child my name.

Nobody would even miss me.

No one would realize that I didn't exist because I didn't exist.

Pretty weird stuff to think about.

So flash forward about eight or nine years.

During my junior year in high school,

There was another really weird thing that happened for me.

Somebody in my close circle of friends ceased to exist.

It wasn't a close personal friend but it was in this group of maybe six,

Seven or eight of us.

Larry was very smart and was actually kind and quite imaginative,

Quite a creative guy.

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

That had never happened to me before.

But the strangest part about it was about five or six days later,

We had our French midterm exam right on schedule.

I remember sitting in that class because I used to sit over by the window and Larry sat over there next to the door and I was sitting there in the middle of the exam and I looked around and I wanted to scream out loud,

Has anybody noticed that Larry isn't here?

Does it make any difference at all?

I wanted to write,

Lawrence Amore,

Lawrence Amore,

All across that test.

But I didn't because it had begun to sink in,

This sort of inkling,

That when I die,

When I die,

99.

9999999% of the billions of people on the planet would not even notice.

There were a few people who would mourn my passing,

Would grieve,

That would probably happen,

But even for them they would probably get up the next morning and have breakfast and go for walks and go to movies and complain about politics and read books and all the rest.

The sun would keep on rising every morning,

The birds would sing in the spring.

And how long would that last?

But if what's being created here actually comes to fruition and creates a society or an organization that has life through time,

Then you've got to wrap it up.

And how long would that last?

Oh,

If you're talking about a long lasting,

That's not guaranteed here at all.

So that in a matter of time,

For a relatively short amount of time,

There would be very little sign,

Even the obituaries would be gone very quickly,

Very little sign that I had ever walked on this earth.

And that anything I had done would just sort of flow back into,

Like the sandcastle,

Just flow back into this whole flow of time.

So again we come back to this question about how come it is so hard to hold this thought that at some point I'm not going to exist,

This bhava-tanah.

And I think that it is a product of evolution.

It's an evolutionary adaptation.

If you imagine two people walking through a prehistoric forest,

One of them is at one,

With the birds and the trees and the lakes and the sky and the saber-toothed kitty and the giant bears and all the rest.

And the other is just a little freaked out.

You know,

It's just like sort of paranoid about protecting this body and keeping everything intact and all that sort of stuff.

You know,

Well whose DNA did we inherit?

First guy got eaten.

So we have inherited the genes,

The genetic material from our ancestors who were really preoccupied with keeping this body alive.

And there was a big period of time where we lived all these gigantic carnivores.

So the survival instinct though is different than the concept of maybe what we're.

.

.

Yeah,

So all I'm talking about in that is,

So logically we can look at it,

Yeah we don't have an eternal self and yet it's so deeply ingrained in us.

If you just sit here and try to just contemplate the world around you without you in it,

The world that you know without you in it,

It's really hard to hold that image.

Right,

And I think that on one level we do have a deep psychological built in survival instinct to stay alive.

But then we have this civilizing instinct also that's been kind of socialized into us to look towards something else.

We watch all these documentaries and things like that and it's a sign of civilization that we have religion,

That we turn to look outside of ourselves,

Towards a God,

A higher power or whatever.

And so by being part of that club,

Then you get to go into that state for the future.

So I think those are forms of more biological instinct and one is more of a part of a civilizing instinct.

Yeah,

So I'm not necessarily talking about whether it's civilizing or not,

But what drives us to think that if we can have divine beings and stuff that that's going to mean that we have a permanent existence when there's not really any empirical evidence.

So what is the instinct?

What I'm saying is that's what I think has really been bred into us.

And it's been bred into us by the mechanics of evolution about whose DNA gets passed along.

It's not being passed on by necessarily any ontological insight,

But it's actually just being biologically driven.

I take your points,

But I think that's two interesting points that haven't been taken account of.

One is that I would suspect that people have very different expectations of whether they'll be remembered,

Depending on the density of their social relationships while they're alive.

If you're living all on your own on an island with no friends,

Then that's going to give you a very different image of your existence than if you're deeply embedded in the family and community by the bar.

And then the other thing is,

Here you are talking from the background where a skeptic could say,

Oh my God,

You guys actually believe in incarnation.

That's eternal existence for the human soul.

So what are you talking about?

It doesn't exist.

You've got the most instantiated buying there for the existence of a person through time,

Of any group.

Right.

Right.

Yeah.

I think that once when you started being good,

You were just one tiny cell and that cell was fed with the milk,

With the chicken,

With the berries.

And you needed the rest of the world to create you and grow,

Grow,

Grow,

Grow.

And after some time comes the time that you are giving away all that the whole world gave to you to make you be strong and smart and so on.

And now you started to give this away so that you are now influencing other beings and then slowly,

Slowly you become a being.

Slowly,

Slowly.

And then you go again into the next person.

Yeah.

Maybe in a position or something.

So,

So,

So.

Yeah,

And so you can see how compelled we are to try to figure out some way to make sense of that there is something here that continues if not in this body of something else.

You know,

One of the ways that this is done and you hear it a lot is people talk about life purpose.

You know,

There is a purpose of me coming here.

It's like life has given me a secret mission.

And if my life feels flat or it feels meaningless or,

You know,

Just out of sorts it means I probably have lost touch with my purpose.

And so I need to go out and find what my purpose is and then my life will feel whole because I'll be living in a relationship to all of this.

When I find myself thinking this way,

I like to think about the Hubble telescope.

The Hubble telescope back in,

When was that,

2003.

The scientists turned and focused the Hubble telescope at this tiny place in the sky southwest of the constellation Orion.

It was a little dot that was one-tenth the arc of the moon.

So it was this little tiny dot and from all that we knew,

From all that we had gathered over the centuries,

As far as we knew there was nothing in that little dot of space.

And so they focused the Hubble telescope there for I think it was three months.

Ultra sensitive equipment just gathering as much data as they could out of this empty spot in space and they combined it into one photograph.

You can find it online.

It's called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field.

And in that one little dot of space they found 10,

000 galaxies.

Not stars but 10,

000 galaxies.

And there are on average about a billion stars per galaxy in that one little dot of space.

And so from our perspective,

The question is,

How many of those stars are likely to have planets that could support life as we understand it?

And if you go around,

I spent some time looking around the web and of course our data on this is really,

Really thin and the estimates run from on average maybe just about everyone because some would have more than one planet down to maybe about one in five.

So oh,

I needed to give you some of these numbers first.

So if there are 10,

000 galaxies and a billion stars in a galaxy,

Scientists estimate that the universe contains at least 100 million,

Million,

Billion stars.

That's one followed by 23 zeros.

So how many of those might have intelligent life?

What are the chances that there is intelligent life out there?

Probably about as close to 100% as we can imagine.

What are the chances that we humans are the most evolved species in the universe?

Pretty darn close to zero.

So I was trying to figure out some way to get my mind around all this stuff and so if we'll go very,

Very conservative.

Let's say there's one star in a million has intelligent life on it.

Very,

Very conservative estimate.

That means that when we look up at the sky in an area about the size of the full moon,

That within that area there are probably at least three quarters of a billion species who are smarter than us.

That's just what the odds are.

Arthur C.

Clarke once said,

I'm sure there's intelligent life out there.

It's just too intelligent to come here.

So when I like to think that my life has some special purpose or some secret mission,

I like to go outside on a clear night and lie down and look up at the sky and there are all these billions and billions of galaxies and billions and billions and billions and hundreds and millions of species smarter than me.

And here I am lying on the edge of this planet spinning around a kind of nondescript yellow star on the outer arm of the Milky Way galaxy thinking that the forces of the universe have come together.

I'm living this life that lasts less than a blink of an eye compared to the thirteen and a half billion years the universe has been around.

And I'm thinking all these forces have come together to give me a special mission.

Totally narcissistic.

I smile when I think of that.

And I would say the flip side of it is that we arise out of all of this.

I mean our bodies are literally stardust.

The atoms in our bodies come out of the center of stars.

We are a part of all of this so that it's really likely that there's a way that we can live in harmony with all of that,

All the stuff that's there.

And I think when people feel that kind of resonance and stuff,

They call that purpose,

But to think that the universe is assigned as a purpose,

You know,

It's just kind of,

It self-absorbs silliness.

Self-absorbs silliness.

So let me sort of see if I can bring this back into a Buddhist context.

If I can sort my notes out here.

So I'd like us to talk about this a little bit.

This past year or so I've been thinking about trying to find just a quick way to describe what Buddhism is,

You know,

A few simple phrases.

And I decided that probably questions would do better because Buddhism is basically a form of investigation.

You know,

The Buddha said you had to figure this out,

You had to discover this stuff for yourself.

And so I came up with six questions.

And I want us to work a little bit with two of them that I've already brought up tonight.

But I'll just give you the six questions.

They come in three pairs.

The first question is how do we suffer?

How do we suffer?

You know,

What is the process by which we experience plumbers?

Buddhism starts with looking at suffering.

Second question is how do we find contentment?

And so the two of those go together.

How do we suffer?

Not why do we suffer but what is the process?

And the second one is how do we find contentment?

You know,

Sometimes people think it's focused on suffering.

No,

It's really focused on contentment.

You know,

He was trying to solve that.

So you look at both of those and you're not going to find contentment unless you understand how we suffer.

So there's those two.

Once you start figuring those out,

You move to the question that showed up at the end of the movie there.

You know,

What am I?

Basically when you put us in the expanse of the entire galaxy out there,

What am I?

And given that,

What matters in the thirteen and a half billion years?

And once you have some sense of that,

Then it moves in a slightly more practical direction.

The next two questions are what's next?

Once you have a sense of what matters,

What are you going to do about it?

And the last question is what helps?

What helps?

When you know what's next,

What actually helps?

The Buddha had a lot to say about that too.

So that's not the answer to any of those questions.

But what I would like us to spend a little time doing,

And then we can go into a larger group discussion,

Is to deal with these middle two questions,

What am I and what matters.

And I'm going to ask you to get a partner,

And we're going to just do a little sharing and dyads around these two questions.

And it'll be a sharing and witnessing,

So your partner is not going to be talking with you,

But it's just going to be listening,

Just this presence as we were doing before.

And when it's your turn to share,

You're going to be responding to these questions.

And the question about what am I,

It's not asking for the politically correct or Buddhistically correct or philosophically correct,

To really kind of take it just sort of gut instinct,

So what comes out of you and think,

What am I,

So what arises in you.

It's not looking for a definitive answer,

But what does that spark in you.

And then the second question is going to be,

What matters.

Okay.

So find a partner.

Okay.

So,

What I want you to do.

So we have a threesome over here.

We came out with an even number of people.

So you can either sit on the floor or you can get some chairs.

So your first task is to figure out who's going to speak first and who's going to witness.

So,

I would like,

Before you start,

The person who's going to be speaking,

Raise their hand.

This is a test to see if you've got one person in each here.

Okay.

Good,

Good.

You're successful.

And so just close your eyes for a moment.

And so if you're going to be the witness,

What you're doing is just a commitment within yourself to just be present for your partner.

And I'm going to ask you not to ask meaningful questions.

I'm going to ask you not even to nod and stuff,

But to just listen.

When we listen actively,

We actually lead the other person.

I'll tell you a little story.

When I was at the University of Wisconsin,

There was this friend of mine who was working with operant conditioning.

You know how you use rewards to get rats run through mazes.

He was interested in how subtle the reinforcers could be and be effective.

And so he did this experiment with his roommate without telling his roommate.

And his experiment was every time that his roommate moved his hand towards his ear,

He would just smile,

Just very softly and quietly.

And within a couple days,

His roommate had this habit of pulling on his earlobe.

So when you were being a good,

Active,

Reinforcing partner,

What happens is you're actually guiding them because we are very responsive of that.

So in this exercise,

I want you to just be a presence,

Just be a presence and not guide them.

And what happens when you're sharing is sometimes,

When I was doing this,

I used to always start telling jokes,

Just anything to get a response.

But after a while,

You realize your partner is just going to be meditating on you and is going to be present in there.

And you can't get a rise out of them,

So there's nothing left for you to do but drop into yourself and see how you respond to this.

And that can actually be freeing.

So,

Close your eyes and so the witness is coming into this place that's just going to be meditating on your partner,

That rather than the metta,

You just have this sort of uplifted,

Very receptive awareness of your partner.

And the person that's going to be speaking first just takes on this question,

What am I?

And the question is not a corral,

It's not like you have to find something within,

Inside that question,

The question is like a stimulus.

So what am I?

See what that sparks in you and just see what comes up from that.

So open your eyes and begin.

Two or three minutes.

Okay,

Thank you very much.

Thanks.

I think that's a good question.

I thought I'd be more of a workman.

I think I could come on this floor.

I see myself in some topics,

And I'm interested in patterns,

Based on patterns that come up in the first place.

I think that's a very simple situation,

But we're really interested,

And I think that those kinds of things haverious and Ann Hammam,

Assistant Professor of Branch Science,

We have this problem of whether we get new gorilla or fish from fisheries,

When you're witnessing,

It's okay to have your eyes open and be looking at your partner.

You just don't want to be responding.

Just one.

So close your eyes for just a moment and come into silence.

And by the way,

The format of this is the witness says,

Thank you.

And then come into silence and then make the shift.

So if you're just speaking,

It's letting go of all your stuff and coming into that place where you can just be a presence for your partner.

And if you're about to be the speaker,

Then you take into this question,

What am I?

What am I?

What am I?

And just see what that sparks inside you.

And then open your eyes and begin the dialing tone.

See here.

So,

How do you One?

What's going on?

I'm glad you just don't want to talk to me.

Okay.

Okay,

There's the boy.

Okay,

Yes,

Go ahead and sit down.

I don't want to miss this turn.

Yeah,

That one's okay.

Okay.

Do you want to come on and join with me or would you rather just sit quietly?

Yeah,

That would be fun.

I'm going to be a little bit distracted because I need to pay attention to time.

What time do you need to start?

Because I can track that while we're here.

I've got it here.

We've got about another minute.

Oh,

Okay.

Well,

I've always wanted to listen to this.

I want to hear it from you.

Oh,

Okay.

Did you speak before?

Yes,

I was the first one to speak.

Okay.

I realize this isn't going to work.

This isn't going to work.

I realize I actually can't do the whole group and do mine.

Oh,

That's fine.

It's not the same time.

No problem.

Yeah,

Yeah,

Okay,

Yeah,

Yeah,

Yeah.

She's doing okay.

She's fine.

Okay.

And then it says thank you.

And then you close your eyes and shift roles.

And this time the question is going to be what matters?

What is ultimately most real?

What is ultimately most important to you?

What matters in life?

Particularly given how fleeting and changing our lives are in this vast expanse.

What matters?

What matters?

And see,

Just see what that draws up inside you.

You probably can't answer this from a strictly rational place.

You can try.

Maybe you can.

But just kind of feel it intuitively.

What matters?

And then when you're ready,

Open your eyes and the original speaker responds to this question,

What matters?

Okay.

What matters?

What matters?

What matters?

Just to gradually.

Okay.

The witness says thank you.

Close your eyes and just shift roles.

Share to witness,

Witness to share.

The new witness coming into that place of just being present.

The share,

Settling into this question,

What matters?

What matters?

What matters?

What matters?

Open your eyes and begin.

Open your eyes and begin.

Open your eyes and begin.

Open your eyes and begin.

Open your eyes and begin.

Open your eyes and begin.

Open your eyes and begin.

The witness says thank you.

And we're going to do one more round,

Which is there are no rules,

It's free form.

You can just talk to one another in a regular way about these two questions back and forth any way you want.

Begin.

The witness says there are no rules,

It's free form.

You can just talk to one another If we have a minute or two,

If you could really quickly explain to me what you said at the end of our interview together,

That would be enormously helpful,

Because I didn't quite get what you said.

I just wanted to say that I should try and grab something very early on,

And it's arising to be able to then allow myself to not nullify.

We're out of time.

Let's talk after that.

That would be great.

I'd be glad to do that.

Let's bow to each other.

And let's come back into a large circle.

You can stay with your partner or move your chairs,

I don't care.

So what are you?

Talkative.

Talkative.

Alchemists.

Alchemists.

I'm a dot.

A dot.

What came up for you out of this process,

Even looking at that question?

What other things came up for you?

We were thinking about a question of if there's no permanent self in this process,

Then we can't really see it,

But it's a good question and it's one that comes up a lot.

I think the answer to it,

My understanding of it,

Is that from the Buddha's perspective,

There is something of a consciousness principle,

A mindstream.

And the Buddha said that what creates a life,

Well,

It takes sperm and an egg,

There are different words for it,

And it takes a mindstream.

When those three come together,

You get a life.

And the mindstream goes on and can move into another body,

So it has a little bit longer cohesion,

But eventually it dissolves back.

And so what this enlightenment project is,

Is to get your mindstream to dissolve,

Which is probably not what people envisioned when they came into this.

But that's actually the traditional answer to it.

What are some of the other ways you respond to that?

I noticed that you didn't mention karma at all.

Everything that we think,

Say,

And do,

Which is a process,

It's an ongoing process,

And it definitely influences our next rebirth.

And it certainly brought about this rebirth.

And even in the Jataka tales,

It's mentioned that the one story where Buddha's cousin or something wants to push the boulder down on him,

And he only gets a little chip that cuts his foot or something,

Because he just had a little tiny bit of residual karma left over,

But the boulder was defective.

But he still had a tiny little bit of karma that was left over.

These come through mythic literal cultures.

But my answer to what karma is,

Is it's tension.

That's really about the whole works of it.

So there may be tension in this mindstream,

And as you relax the tension,

Then the whole thing dissolves.

So I don't know if any of you had this experience,

But I had this one retreat where there was about three or four days where anything,

Any disturbance at all that came up inside me,

Like immediately,

Was seeing some tension that had started it.

It may be something somebody had said the day before,

It may have been something that was years and years ago,

But it left a little bit of tightness in me,

And it merges.

And so karma is not destiny,

But it creates this leaning in a direction.

And so if you can genuinely deeply relax all that,

Then the karma is actually,

Let me say,

Burnt out.

The metaphor doesn't quite work,

But it's done.

That's my sense of it.

To me I think it's a little bit more intense than that,

Because if you go in and you shoot up a school,

It's not just you have tension.

Oh yeah?

It's more than just tension.

I mean,

You're taking.

.

.

And so what would be more?

Well,

I think it's,

You're obviously willfully killing other sentient beings.

I mean,

There's a major precept that's being broken here,

But you have anger that's arisen.

So what's anger?

Well,

I mean,

Maybe it comes out of tension originally,

But it's not something you can just say,

Well,

If I just relax the tension,

I won't have any residual effects of my behavior that I've caused if I've killed 30 people or something like that.

Yeah.

It's consequences for behavior.

Right.

But the question is,

What is the mechanism by which that.

.

.

So we could imagine precepts having some ontological existence or something like that.

No,

I think it's all carried through tension.

I mean,

The Buddha had back pain,

And he related it back to something that he had done.

He was wrestled with people and used to break their backs,

And so he was an enlightened being,

But still some of that tension was still playing out.

And so what we're trying to do in his lifetime is actually not create more tension.

So as this stuff comes up,

If you respond to it with wisdom and kindness and openness,

Then it doesn't carry forward.

So it can get extremely intricate.

And it's actually one of the imponderables.

Try to figure out all the karma that led to a specific event,

The Buddha said,

It'll drive you nuts because it is so vastly complicated and complex that we just don't.

.

.

I mean,

My language is we just don't have enough brain cells to actually compute it all,

But that's actually the vehicle of it.

And so I'm not saying that,

Okay,

If you can just relax and sigh,

That you're free of all your past stuff,

But that's what the work is,

And that's what enlightenment actually is,

Is resolving that.

There may be some residual stuff,

Again,

Like the Buddha,

That keeps you informed long enough for that to burn out.

But to make it.

.

.

Well,

People had different ideas about it,

But my sense of it is it is really that simple.

But it's a little bit like the game of Go.

It's the Go where you just put one piece on the board.

So the actions are incredibly simple,

But the combinations and the complexities of what that simple thing can do is really enormous.

If our life is here very short and actually not existing in kind of like meaningless,

Meaningless,

There are still some great moments in the human kind that there were some beings who had left a huge mark on the human planet,

And we are now definitely going to destroy ourselves,

Whatever.

Buddha,

Great name.

And then we can go through the history,

Finding these great people,

I mean people who have accomplished something without asking what am I going to do with myself.

They did something.

They built statues,

Pictures,

And they still exist.

So maybe we are not those people,

Us here right now,

But if we would,

Maybe there was a mistake in building this person that we didn't become kind of normal.

Thanks.

Thank you.

So what are some other ways that you respond to these questions of what are you and what matters?

Relationships came up for me.

Pardon?

Relationships.

Yep.

That's what I'm required for.

Yeah.

I'm pretty clear that that discrimination in relationships is what got me started.

It's not a path,

And it's been a big part of the fuel that's kept me going,

Sharing things with people,

Seeing them sort of light up and look at the world differently as a result of me having shared my experience.

And my relationship with myself has also been a big part of that process too.

And relative to the cosmic scale that we were discussing earlier,

There isn't a lot of meaning necessarily in this one iota of consciousness.

But as a whole,

A pretty interesting phenomenon and participating in that thought,

I mean,

It's just fun.

So a couple other responses.

And also,

I would just throw into this mix,

If you can really take in that not very long after each of us die,

The likelihood is there's not going to be much mark that we were around.

And we'll be with a few people.

Seven billion people on the planet,

You know.

Few people make big marks,

But most of us.

Can you let that soak in and sort of feel what the implications are?

Feel what that does for you?

It's actually a free process.

It's a free process.

That's my answer,

Matter,

Energy,

And time.

That notion for me is extremely freeing.

That it still gives me the space and the opportunity to be kindness personified and to help the connectivity of those that I share the space with,

The themes of all kinds.

But it softens it.

Instead of feeling that,

Oh my god,

I've got to really strive and achieve if I'm going to stand up.

And it's not that,

It's more like standing down.

Right.

Anybody else get that sense from it too?

It's like you can feel the incredible burden of fulfilling this purpose that you've been chosen out of this vast universe in 13 and a half billion years and you better do it or what you're going to get the attention,

I don't know.

I think the whole purpose thing is much more of an American trip than it is European or European trip than it is European.

I think that's the whole purpose of the whole thing.

And so we have English and Americans and then we have billions and billions of species smarter than us.

But Americans are people who took over somebody else's country,

Largely eliminated them and brought slaves and have a considerable karma in certain respects.

And so in a way Americans have a duty to build up their country which then progressively historically has sort of infused the two.

They have a duty to build up their country.

Okay,

I just,

Duty to.

The English don't have a clear start to their country because it was too far to the human memory of the existing people to remember.

Yeah,

Okay.

So that's an interesting perspective.

It seems like folks from other countries kind of know that they're from that country and they're really relaxed and in place there.

And in America it's a free fall.

You can become the upper crust,

You can fall down and become the poor.

So there's a bit of a tension that exists.

We don't really sit back and say,

Oh,

I'm just in the States because of what was just said about the early history and the beginnings.

So I think that he's very,

Very right.

It's enviable,

The sort of freedom that others have outside of his country.

So part of,

We should come out with envy?

Oh,

I know you do that,

But I didn't come.

Yeah,

Okay.

So,

What are you?

What matters?

One thing that came out of the music was the idea of life force and how this particular thing is going to diffuse,

But the life force goes on and the life force we share with all those other beings that are the unknown ones.

So I'm a piece of that.

And so what matters?

Well,

From that point of view.

.

.

What matters from your point of view?

I guess I was creating this as we asked the question.

What matters is,

From that perspective,

Is supporting life,

Easing the life of beings that I have contacted.

Good,

Good.

I think like the movie Her,

I think somewhere in this experience that we have,

Love plays a huge part.

And if one starts to think,

So what's love?

Love's kind of a combination of really positive energy,

Kindness,

Caring,

Easing of suffering.

And I know that this is just.

.

.

It is the most powerful force we have on this planet.

And I think it deserves to be recognized as such,

And I think it's really integral to our experience on the planet.

So I think the more we can generate of that,

The more energy of a positive nature we can put out into the planet,

Even if it's just at the time that we're here,

Hopefully some.

.

.

I think love can go.

.

.

You or I as a person can die,

And people will not necessarily remember us in the time,

But the experience of love seems to be able to identify people all over the world in an essence,

In a sense that can go through many,

Many generations and many centuries.

We all know what that experience is.

Thank you.

Gary?

I think the cultural,

Probably not even culture,

Chinese culture compared with the U.

S.

Culture is very different.

We're not lived by ourselves alone.

When I was young,

We educated from very beginning,

We have great expectations.

We have become the father,

Become the great hero.

Not actually in this country,

But in education,

High school,

Education,

Anything that you do.

But we were taught that we are great people,

Individual.

So everybody has something to be there.

I want to do something great for everybody.

Can we be remembered by everybody?

And to serve everybody is not just by myself.

I have my family,

I have my friends,

I have my culture.

It's very important for us.

In this country,

You serve by yourself,

You're an individual person.

So that's what matters for you.

And that's what matters for you.

Yes.

I think we do have some mission here to do something in this life.

Not just like he described,

Edge to edge,

Very passive.

But only at the moment in time we do something for ourselves.

So you believe that we do have a mission.

Okay.

Do you know where that comes from?

Yeah,

From my experience,

From my culture,

From my ideas.

You have a mission that comes from your culture and your experience and your ideas.

Okay.

I'm an aged dimension to this.

I agree with a lot with what you said and definitely in terms of the content.

I think that people change,

Particularly males.

Where I started off as very ambitious,

I wanted to discover all sorts of stuff.

I was the mad scientist,

Blah,

Blah,

Blah.

I was a professor at the University of Delauval.

And as I get older,

All of that becomes really interesting stuff to play with,

But much less fundamentally important.

And what matters is the texture of my relationships to other people and how I love the people in my family.

But what I want is every one of the people with whom I interact should feel that I care about them,

That I want the best for them,

That I want to extend my love to the world.

Because for me,

That's the only way that I can see myself living in a situation where I can feel really good about how I'm living.

Okay.

That's my love.

So you and Cameron come in the same camp.

The relationships and the qualities of those become really important.

I'd like to piggyback on Cameron and this gentleman and Michelle and also James.

Gail.

Gail.

Gail is that somebody mentioned the word generation.

There's a generational quality about the love that we have that does have some universality to it,

But from the perspective of my generation,

I would,

For me,

This is very personal,

There is no greater love and no greater demonstration of kindness than a parent to a child.

To me,

That's what I've experienced in my lifetime as the ultimate.

Yeah.

A lot of people feel that,

Too.

I would just suggest,

And I'm not arguing with it,

But that's evolutionary,

Too.

Yes,

And that's the generational part of it.

That it's wired in by evolutionary mechanics because we have this delayed infancy,

That we wouldn't survive.

And you can see how it's easy to raise that,

To reify that to a sort of a metaphysical,

I'm not,

You're not doing it,

But how important that is.

And it's interesting to see how it's just wired in and how we're driven by that.

But there are places that you do not have a child.

Pardon?

There are places that you do not have a child.

That's right.

So,

What's the limit?

Yeah.

There's still business?

There's survival?

There are still relationships.

Love?

Yeah.

So,

Can we take maybe one more?

Connectedness?

Connectedness.

Connectedness.

Just that realization when you stop and pause and you really observe that everything is interconnected and that it literally cannot be otherwise.

And that what you do and say and how you act and how you treat everything,

It all matters.

Yeah.

It's all part of a greater system and not quite as old as Julian,

But I will say that as I get older,

That definitely comes into play as you start to feel that.

Julian's seventeen.

I would say,

And especially as I'm coming to your point as my daughter's gotten older,

And as my parents are at age,

You really feel that that is what matters.

And it's not,

For me,

It's not just people.

All the people are very important.

There's a relationship with nature and the stars and the water and all of it.

It's all blended together.

It all matters.

It all affects each other.

Okay.

So I think these are some of the core questions that Buddhism raises.

And that when you look at our life as existing as one fragment of this thirteen and a half billion years and of where our place really is in the universe,

You can,

At least for me,

It does bring up a real kind of sense of emptiness almost.

It's like we're always looking for something to sort of justify who and what we are,

And how much of that justification comes out of basically evolutionary dynamics.

And I think what meditation is really trying to do is to kind of open us up a little bit beyond the limitations of our biological wiring to something that's a little bit larger.

And for me,

What it does is it moves through this place where suddenly all those justifications just begin to fall apart.

And it's left with no justification for everything because,

You know,

Thirteen and a half billion years,

What difference does that make?

And then out of that instinct,

You know,

For me,

It is very much similar to what a lot of you have said.

If there's anything,

I had this,

It was one vision.

I was on a retreat with Bhante and I woke up in the middle of the night and I felt like I was seeing,

You know,

This mindstream going back through hundreds and thousands,

Not just of,

You know,

Worlds,

But of universes.

It's on and on and on and on forever.

And given that vast expanse,

What makes any difference at all?

What makes any difference in all that vastness?

And you can feel there's,

You know,

A place that actually fights against that and resists it,

So one something to hold on to,

But if you just relax into that,

What makes any difference?

And I don't know if anything does,

But if anything does,

Anything makes any difference over that expanse,

It's probably kindness.

It's probably kindness.

You know,

You can think of lots of wonderful things you can do and there's side effects and after effects,

But it's actually just the kindness that might move in that direction.

And what happened with that was I woke up in the middle of the night and this whole stuff was right out in front of me and if I moved so much as to wiggle a little finger,

That would break it.

And so I just stayed there with all that.

And what I did at that point was I just took some vows because I knew I would come out of it.

And the vows were to let kindness be an organizing principle even when I forgot that it was because I knew I would forget and just trying to anchor in that.

And I don't know if it really makes any difference,

But it feels to me if there's anything that moves,

It's that.

And I think that's actually the core of what this whole practice is.

It's really the deep cultivation of kindness.

There's no kindness if you don't see things as they are.

There's no kindness if you don't accept things as they are.

There's no kindness if you are whacked around by greed,

Hatred,

And delusion.

So it's just trying to clean out and move that way.

So I would encourage you to,

We're coming into the last day of the retreat.

This is a time when it's easy to kind of slide out and start talking and stuff,

But just to kind of open up to that sense that what any one of us is in the span of things is just such a little tiny spark of a firefly in the middle of a summer afternoon.

It's gone like that.

And so what is it that really matters to you deeply in that?

For me,

That's what I always come back to,

Kindness.

This is from Carlos Castaneda.

Does a path have a heart?

If it does,

The path is good.

If it doesn't,

It's of no use.

Both paths lead nowhere.

Both paths lead nowhere.

But one has heart and the other doesn't.

One makes for a joyful journey.

As long as you follow it,

You are one with it.

The other makes you curse your life.

One makes you strong.

The other weakens you.

May all beings have the wisdom to fall out of narcissistic silliness.

May all beings know that we are just part of an energetic flow that's much larger than us.

May all beings know kindness.

May all beings know heart.

May all beings be free.

Namaste.

Yoga in about 15 minutes,

10 minutes.

Namaste.

This time that we're here is really precious.

You can feel some of the preciousness of it.

And so really be kind to the space,

Your internal space.

Allow yourself to be with it in silence.

And allow us to be in community as well.

It doesn't mean we're in isolation.

It's just we're sharing a subtler way of being together.

If you have good energy,

Keep practicing.

When your body is tired,

Be kind to it.

Get rest.

See you tomorrow.