Prof. B. Alan Wallace talks on “The Buddhist Science of Mind.” #Day 1

welcome everybody as you are all aware it's a great pleasure to have a booth Helen Wallace here and we know each other for many years and to the great great delight to my ear this morning when we were sitting and talking he told me and he will probably say more did he was the first student in the lab rain event that the Labrador penned was of course American author and expert on Tibetan Buddhism in 1987 bonus obtained a BA in physics philosophy science and Sanskrit from Mrs college followed in 1995 by a PhD in religious studies from Stanford University his doctoral dissertation was on the cultivation of sustained voluntary attention in the Indo Tibetan Buddhism he taught for four years in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara Wallace founded the Center for Institute of consciousness studies in 2003 with the objective of furthering such interdisciplinary and cross-cultural investigation of the nature and potentials of consciousness and extending its benefits to the general public one of the Institute's projects is the schemata project a longitudinal scientific study of the effect of of intensive meditation training this developed into the International schemata project ISP novelist worked with psychologists for treatment and intake men on the cultivation cultivate the emotion balance CD Projekt for over 30 years Wallace's that works upon dream yoga and has collaborated with step in labert his lives works focused on deep engagement between Buddhist philosophically and contemplated in Kali and modern science and philosophy with a special emphasis on exploring the nature and potentials of the mind in a radically empirical manner as free as possible from the drama of religion in materialism well as grew up in American suseelan but left college after three years to study Buddhism in India to come to the very self as interpreter for many Buddhists contemplatives and scholars including his Holiness the Dalai Lama since 1976 Wallace has taught Buddhism philosophy and vegetation in Asia Europe northern South America and Australia having devoted 14 years to planning as a Tibetan Buddhist monk warden by his oldest oil ama with his unique background Allen brings deep experience and applied skills to the challenge of integrating traditional into Tibetan Buddhism with the modern world in 2010 well has become the director and chairman of the Fuki International Academy mind center which provides a blend of contemporary psychology and neuroscience alongside ancient Asian contemplative practices these books discuss Eastern and Western scientific I think they are 40-something I don't know how many many books we made at least if there is a poster we are putting down stairs also because I recorded Blakemore's up in Kali often focusing on the relationship he sees between science and Buddhism it is my great pleasure to have such a dynamic lecturer progressive scholar and one of the most prolific writers in translator this with the best the book that I'm killing here which I read many of this books yes we the cutting-edge science and technology and so forth so still in this juncture there is a lot of discussion whether there is a life afterwards or not whether there is anything called mind other than the workings of the brain so many interesting topics which is really really difficult to fathom ok so so that's a area that we explore and especially if we do it for the benefit of the mankind it's endless so I'm glad really to have a person like him who is really immersed in Buddhism and also science not only in when I say Buddhism is not just intellectual understanding but I know that right from the beginning when he attempted to actually develop schemata and meditated after six months or something here in terms ala with another great teacher Gamelab Rimba I know both of names and he always aspired to really go into the deep and cultivate some of this you know real stuff the Buddhist practices not just some understanding and then doing no practice no matter so highly him and then specially I admire you because he has always been thinking about how to contribute back to the Tibetan community and to serve His Holiness Toyama and we had like long discussion this morning how we can collaborate and do something together and now both of us are getting old yeah - beaver this this morning is this morning we were discussing let us do something that will how to live our life okay so I'm glad that you all are showing interest and normally when I give a talk then I tell people okay I don't want to talk more because this is like preaching the converse you know so you're all good people so I'm really come from their point of view and really there's so many good with things listen to good things so we thought standing in between you and dr. Ellis properly listen the floor is yours and currently welcome him with a thunderous oh yeah it's really a pleasure being with you today it's also very much of an honor as gift should I mentioned when I first came here it was 1971 and I came to Dharamsala specifically because the library was opening Anna Lama with whom I was studying in Switzerland said don't think about any other place I was going to I wanted to find some cave and they Paul I just hunkered down in a cave for the next 30 years that didn't turn out but this bulletin came and the alum I was training with in Switzerland said you this this library this is directly under the auspices of His Holiness Dalai Lama don't think of any other place so I made a beeline here and when I arrived so I was 21 and just recently His Holiness was in just we were having a Skype conversation a little bit and His Holiness told the other people in the room when he came to Dharamsala he was a boy he was a boy it's really true and then when I saw his holiness last May in Pisa he took one look at me is it you become an old geezer some of boy to geezer where did they what are the years ago but actually they've been very happy years pretty much only practicing Dharma studying down there trying to do some good at least more good than bad so I think maybe that's maybe it's okay if I died now maybe okay maybe in the wet in the balance okay I think so tonight or this afternoon I'd like to address the topic I think one of the most important topics in the modern world just it's about the nature of the mind and right now the stakes are very high the the the gravity of the question and the way it's being dealt with my various groups it our whole destiny hinges on the nature of the mind because the nature of our own identity as human beings human nature is absolutely bound up in the mind so if it's true that the mind is nothing more than a brain function then we are nothing more than a brain function and brain acts according to the laws of physical chemistry which means we're robots right and then of course we just we have the lights turn out when they're dead and that's it so there's one view but this afternoon I'd like to focus on a Buddhist science of the mind and I say with great reverence really there are many aspects of the Buddha Dhamma particularly in Tibetan Buddhism for example that are clearly in terms of Western terminology our religious no question about it and I honor those I participate in that I'm not in any way cool or anti religious whatsoever but they're large areas of Buddhism that from a Western perspective we say well that's religious and then when we look into my yarmulke yoga Chavez vuitton Tilikum Lassa Lassa bandulu by Huachuca and so forth there's no question many elements of Buddhism are clearly philosophical using the Western terminological grid but then the question are there elements in Buddhism that are truly scientific that worthy of that name and I'll be making my case this afternoon following in the footsteps of my root Lama yes holiness Dalai Lama that the answer is yes but we'll spend just a short time before going to the Buddhist perspective on nature of mind to look at the West because FL were using a Western term the term science didn't exist in tibetan until they created a term cynic to correspond to the Western Western terms so since this is a Western term let's look a little bit this will be very short at the history of this during the contemn of galileo of course the word science scientists didn't exist 17th century 18th century didn't exist the word scientists didn't even come into usage until the mid mid 19th century but so at that time they were called natural philosophers so Galileo I think was the first great natural philosopher which we nowadays call a scientist and he was clearly the father of or the founder of the scientific revolution and so what was a key feature of that because people had been interested in the stars planets Sun and Moon for a very long time before him but there was something very distinctive about him various things that he fries to his becoming I think the first fully qualified scientists scindia Tom Jaudon Demba and that is he made very careful observations and he used technology and he had hypotheses and he put them to the test of experimentation and he was a brilliant mathematician so he had all of the qualities Copernicus was a great mathematician but he made no observations at all I'm not sure he ever ever even looked up at the sky but very good mathematician but that's not enough to be a scientist Galileo was the full package and so what was characteristic of him and his establishing or triggering the Scientific Revolution is that he rigorously observed physical celestial Sun Moon stars and planets and terrestrial phenomena dropping dropping balls off the Tower of Pisa and so forth and by this rigorous observation really looking carefully at the phenomena he was seeking to understand he launched a revolution in the physical sciences and therefore the father of modern science that's the opinion of Einstein I'll go with Einstein and so that's he came out with his seminal first seminal book in 1610 I think the starry messenger in which he he reveals some of his earliest discoveries and then we saw from sixteen sixteen sixteen nine to eighteen fifty nine so this 250 for 250 years we just whipped right through 1859 was the year of the Charles Darwin published origin of the species and so of course the theory of evolution and how did he come upon this under he developed this theory in the same spirit as Galileo it was decades two twenty twenty twenty-five years a very careful observation of biological phenomena first in Great Britain and then of course is famous circumambulation around the around the earth and so tremendous observation power of observation and on the basis of his very careful observations then he developed the theory of natural selection of biological evolution and he launched a revolution in the life sciences now move forward nineteen Oh 1890 or so that's when when William James one of the great pioneers of modern psychology published his monumental work to volume work principle psychology he was in the first generation of Western scientists of mine psychologists those individuals like Edward Tichenor bill hem votes William James these are all contemporaries they're all pioneers of seeking to do something that had never been done in the West before and that is take the science the study of the science of the mind or the soul out of the realm of theology out of the realm of philosophy and try to bring it into the realm of experimental empirical science like all the all the other branches of the Natural Sciences so they wanted to make it you know one more of the sciences physics chemistry biology psychology in the same mood and so with that same mode he proposed that psychologists like Darwin like Galileo rigorously observed the phenomena they were seeking to understand and these of course when it comes to the mind were mental phenomena so that is he suggested let's take a radically empirical approach to mental mental phenomena as we've previously done with physical phenomena and biological phenomena but now of course there's a catch and that is the great successes of science up until William James entailed looking outwards that that careful observation was always directed outwards to the objective the physical and the quantifiable but now you want to be equally empirical carefully observe the phenomena you're seeking to understand but the catch is they're not objective they're subjective they're not physical they have no physical attributes they're non-physical and they're not quantitative if you ask you know how many units if emotion did you have when you had some emotional experience it's impossible it's qualitative so can you still be truly scientific while observing something carefully observing something that again only you can observe that is when you observe your thoughts how does anybody know else know that you're telling the truth when you report on it so you have first-person where scientists multiple scientists can watch somebody of dropping balls off the Tower of Pisa and you have the third-person perspective it's public right but when you're observing your mind your thoughts your images your desires and so forth it's not third piece so can you do that scientifically well after about 20 35 years or so of some very kind of baby steps into the field of introspective psychology then around 1910 around the same year that William James died that whole movement of introspection in psychology was basically snuffed out like a candle and it snuffed out largely for not practical reasons or empirical reasons but for ideological reasons and these were the ideology of naturalism and the dogma of scientism so let's look briefly at that naturalism is the the user-friendly marketing savvy word the market the words that are not so savvy might in terms of marketing and getting converts are materialism which signs a little bit grotty and physically physicalism which sounds rather cool but naturalism kind of sounds nice but it's the same message it's naturalism is and many many scientists and many people are not scientist embrace this world view it's an ontological commitment to the world as being natural and then what you mean by natural well I've asked many psychologists and others and they pretty much answer by negative terms by natural I mean you know not supernatural and I say what do you mean by supernatural well you know like God and angels and devils and heaven and hell and so forth so in the naturalistic view of reality there are no supernatural causes like divine intervention or demons or spirits angels and so forth there are no supernatural entities and there is also that's the ontological commitment and the epistemological commitment is to the best scientific means to regulate one's inquiry in other words if you want to know it's true find a scientific method because those are the methods that are proven effective for the last three four hundred years and those methods that are not scientific haven't given rise to that type of consensual knowledge in terms of scientists 'im this is kind of like the radical wing of scientific materialism and there are many people embraces today they assert that science is our only source of genuine knowledge about the world everything else is just objective opinion belief speculation religious dogma you want it's almost like a religious Creed like having the only religion so advocates of scientific and say there's only one way ever heard that phrase before there's only one way these are advocates of scientism not to salvation but the knowing reality it is as it is and it is the only way to understand humanity's place in the world so whether it's your human psyche or anything about human nature science is the only way to find out for science provides the only credible view of the world as a whole that's from Auguste Comte so that's been around for more than a century and I think it's growing in its influence this balloon there we go so this gives rise to an epistemological hierarchy and it reminds me a lot of medieval higher medieval epistemological hierarchy where theology was the queen of Sciences quote the ology was the highest form of knowledge there is and beneath that was logic and philosophy philosophy with the handmaiden of theology and beneath that was the knowledge of the senses where Super's considered to be very feeble and superficial and misleading that was medieval kind of hierarchy but the hierarchy from the 20th century right into the 21st century for men many people is first of all the commitment to the ontological and epistemological beliefs of naturalism so assume that first and then beneath that is reason but reason is to serve that paradigm and then you you can have experience but only kinds of experience that conform to the beliefs of naturalism so if you have some kind of experiences like a vision of God or you have precognition or you see a spirit or you have past life recall that just doesn't count it just doesn't count that's just not evidence at all because that evidence is contrary to the beliefs of naturalism so especially over the last 20 years or so the issue of consciousness has become a hotter and hotter topic especially in philosophy that very much so really for the first time is kind of front and center on the table what is the nature of consciousness this is an issue being rappelled with bias neuroscientists by psychologists of course philosophers and others even physicists are jumping into the fray and in terms of the scientific study of mind and consciousness that's been going on now for about 140 years and we can say after a hundred and forty years here's some tips the objective facts of where are we in the year 2017 I think it's quite clear there's a consensus that there is no consensus in terms of a scientific definition of consciousness there's something like 250 definitions of consciousness which is like you know different lineages of a religion they don't agree at all and none of them are rising above the above the rest of them to gain some kind of authority so it's something that they can't even define now when it comes to consciousness again now they're looking outwards to the physical the objective the quantifiable and you can do if you had if you had some like like a Geiger counter but a Geiger counter for consciousness that can tell you if you focus it on one of those insect eating plants are you curious whether insect eating plants enjoy the insects like that you know smack their lips afterward do they have some experience or is it just a mechanical response like that nowadays artificial intelligence many many mechanical response but do they actually know anything does it does like Watson the great computer does it actually experience anything know anything or they simply highly sophisticated programs that are responding stew meat stimuli and so the point here is I think there's a large consensus here is that there is no scientific means of objecting the presence of consciousness in anything not in plants not in robots not in unborn babies not in people who are in the vegetative state you can't measure it at all scientifically objectively maybe the good reason for that it's not objective and then even what are the neural correlates of consciousness I know one of the leading people in the field professor Christof Koch and he invited me to Caltech a few years ago we had 11 hours of conversation or a bracing conversation he came to the big meeting in Deum a world world-class neuroscientist and he worked for years at Caltech seeking what he called the NCC the neural correlates of consciousness what's the minimal amount of neural activity in the brain that is sufficient for generating consciousness they didn't find it and so and then he left Caltech and went to the Allen Institute for brain science and so no they really don't know just they're assuming of course almost without questions that the brain generates consciousness but then you don't need all of the brain there's a young woman in Germany right now very clearly documented scientifically she's born with a half a brain and she's alive and well and he IQ 125 something like that very good sense of humor but she literally has one half of her half of her skull filled with fluid basically water but she's not a half a person and so they don't know but then we come down to what are the necessary and sufficient causes of consciousness what you know what is needed necessary and what is sufficient to generate consciousness the answer is don't know okay ignorance of how the brain generates you know you don't have either how the brain generates or even influences mental states why is it that if you drink a quart of Arak your main might your mind changes yes I haven't tried it actually but it does change yeah how is it that alcohol changes your subjective experience that it changes the chemical Constitution and functioning brain that makes perfectly good sense but how do you go from alcohol to singing in silly songs and having a really ridiculous sense of humor and not being able to walk straight and then one eat a fat vomit and so they don't know they don't know they don't know how how the brain even influences subjective mental states or for that matter the so called placebo effect taking some sugar tablet that you think is medication and then with desire expectation belief that's faith and trust in many cases right in accordance with what you expect happens that does happen in your brain total mystery total mystery so how did that happen don't know so we're basically I call this let me see what I call that the blind spot the blind spot in the Naturalist vision of reality note a blind spot is on it's the back of your back of your retina there's a point where the optic nerve touches the back and then that particular part of the retina your your visual visual perception is getting no signal just noticing like a cell phone so if you if what your brain does your brain mind does that is in fact right about here if you had a pencil and you look straight ahead and you move that pencil around at one point depends would disappear it just it's not there but you don't have two black holes in your visual field your brain mind photoshop's really it photoshop's your vision it fills it in with the colors around where the black spot would be it literally photoshop's if i cool well this is what's happening here is a blind spot and that is in the scientific vision of reality the whole of reality when it comes to consciousness it's a blind spot its no signal I mean you look at all those no knowledge no knowledge it's pretty much no knowledge at all scientifically but what happens the scientific the scientists a scientific community what brushes it paint brushes some like that yeah they photoshop it and they give the impression oh yeah we got this one addled don't worry you got it handled and then you say yeah what do you exactly do you know blind spot there's another blind spot I'm having a hard time with this let me see if I can do this correctly boom-boom-boom yeah I just this was the wireless light I added about half an hour ago thomas huxley very famous biologists he was the Darwin's Bulldog you can see when he lived he was a contemporary of Darwin very fine biologist he was the founder and editor-in-chief of nature magazine one of the most prestigious scientific journals in the world and so he wrote in a long time ago how how it is that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue we say stimuli nowadays we say stimulating neurons how is it that holiday that so remarkable is this just as unaccountable as the appearance of a gin or a genie when Aladdin rubbed his lamp it's it's magical thinking to think you've got these neurons made of chemicals electricity and you stimulate with some electricity and the love of your mother's gonna pop up or an emotion or desire or bodhichitta or realization of emptiness I want definitely I want them to stimulate those neurons in me I'm waiting you know for the realization and not coming so but how do you go from stimulating neurons to having a subjective experience he said this is magical thinking this is like thinking rubbing at rubbing a lamp you know the genie popping out so he was something he was a real hardcore materialist but when it came to consciousness he said you know this doesn't really make any sense and I was listening to a bit of watching a video of a harvest Harvard neuroscientist just a few days ago and he he'd heard a wonderful job of demonizing the brain because we hear so much nowadays not popular media scientific literature that the neurons are sending message back and forth and these remember this and images and visual images about this part of the brain and your own emotions are in this part of the brain and these these neurons are sending message to these neurons it sounds like a beehive or an anthill and ivy actually heard one neuroscientist at Columbia saying that you have 900 billion neurons in your brain I think it's more like a hundred billion and she said each of them knows who they are so she's suggesting you got like a hundred billion 900 billion sentient beings inside your head the problem is you're not one of them so it's basically neuronal possessed possession you know some people are possessed by demons right we're possessed by dddddd neurons and they're the ones who are conscious this is called all of the time what I just said is neural mythology it sounds scientific it's all make-believe it's all make-believe all of the statements I said there's no basis in reality at all this neuroscientist Harvard neuroscientist he kind of clarified the neuro mythology would you like to know what's actually inside your brain you're ready I need a drumroll fat protein water electricity that's it doesn't sound very magical to me and the notion that and that produces bodhichitta which part the fat protein the water electricity or did he just all get it together so we're starting with a big mystery and at least he was very honest saying you know if we're starting here we're starting on very thin ice basically magical thinking and then neuroscientist Donald Hoffman who was really quite remarkable he's worth listening to go go to youtube and check this guy out he's very good and his mainstream is a very fine professor neuroscientist he also unlike almost all neuroscientists is pretty up to date when it comes to modern physics he really is following closely hardly any of them to most neuroscientists are living in the 19th century when it comes to physics because that's when they stopped studying physics they stopped studying physics after Newtonian mechanics and electromagnet like Romanticism but donald kaufman east comments here directly relative to the preceding quote now Huxley knew that both brain activity and conscious experiences are correlated that's very true but he didn't know why to the science of his day it was a mystery this is called the mind-body problem in the years since Huxley science has don't know about a lot about brain activity but the relationship between brain activity and conscious experiences is still a mystery and I think it's not harsh to say it's not incorrect to say it's as much a mystery now as it was during the time of chuckling there's a good reason for that there are many reasons for that but one of them is that many many neuroscientist psychologists so forth are treating acting as if this mind-body problem is already solved they're just saying the mind is but the does next the mind is what the brain does that's their little motto but does anybody actually prove that no they just got talking that way and it caught on it's rather like you know I just came from beer with a lot of dogs you know what happens to dog one dog barks and then two and then five and ten just dog start and I'll stop barking the same way this is dogs barking when you have no evidence so along comes a breath of fresh air right there at the beginnings of modern psychology William James who is one of the most open-minded least dog men dogmatic intellectuals scientists philosophers scholars of the modern era in my opinion and he's seeking to create or at least contribute to the development of a brand new science because before then all they had with theology of the soul and philosophy of mine galore but no consensus whatsoever among the many philosophers who thought about the mind so William James was famous for his spirit of radical empiricism proposed this as a strategy for the scientific study of the mind he comments here introspective observation is what we have to Riley rely on first and foremost and always the word inspection need hardly be defined it means of course the looking into our minds and reporting what we there discover and everyone agrees that we there discover states of consciousness so I love the kind of the the unitive or integrative proposal a strategy that he was proposing because right here he's saying introspective operation should be first and foremost but he also advocated or commented that by studying people's behavior that they speak their facial expression body language based on behavior we can draw a lot of inferential knowledge about what's going on in their minds if they laugh they're probably happy if they're weeping that probably said and so on with much greater nuance so he suggested well study behavior that's very scientific in the old-fashioned sense of the term objective physical and quantifiable so we should add that there's nothing dogmatic or a how do you say eliminative or there's another word exclusive there's nothing exclusive about his approach yes bring in behavior by way of behavior you can draw in Firenze knowledge about the mind and then even though neuroscience at that time was very very in its very primitive stages they were beginning and so it's by studying the neural correlates of subjective experience that too may shed some light so by behavior inferential by studying brain correlates inferential by practicing introspection perceptual direct bring these three together and you have an integrative a package so I thought that made extremely good sense he proposed this and he acknowledged two here quoting him again introspection is difficult and fallible so just the fact that you're observing of thoughts your emotions desires motivations and so on the fact that you observe it is no guarantee that your observation is valid right you can completely miss assess or miss perceive your own motivations does that ever happen people think I'm acting at a pure motivation pure motivation but make sure you put my name on that building that I've just funded it's not about me I just you know it's all for everybody I but put my name on it you know and people can do that they always pure motivation pure motivation yeah pure motivation is hard I think pure renunciation pure pure it's hard and we can easily fool ourselves we can easily fool ourselves that you think we've realized emptiness or realize Rick path and so forth and so on that's in the spiritual category and everywhere else intersection we need to rely upon but it is difficult and it's certainly fallible but then he continues that the difficulty is simply that of all observation of whatever kind to make rigorous valid replicable observations of any sort it's difficult the more subtle the phenomena you're seeking the more difficult it is so what to do then he says the only safeguard is in the final consensus of our farther knowledge about the thing in question father being of course later with later views correcting earlier ones until at last the harmony of a consistent system is reached so as a purely phenomenological purely experiencial approach where he's not saying let's find out what we know to be absolutely true inherently true and we'll build on that which is what Descartes tried to do he said know just jump in and start making some others observations and see if there's any consensus right and then so you gain some knowledge but then you try to inquire more deeply a pride sharper critical analysis may be sharper ability of observation and then maybe as you go and multiple people are doing this their collaborate with each other sharing each other's experiences then you may discover as you go deeper in your modes of observation and analysis that oh we aired at this point is it okay and oh that was a mistake and you keep on going with his internal looping to come up with more and more precise more reliable more penetrating observations and you correct earlier mistakes that is actually described the whole history of modern science and it's not been stagnant I think in any of the fields but what we see this wonderful tandem of increasing technology enable is in a building scientist to make sharper more refined more rigorous more sophisticated observations and then better science and better observations experimentation and science so since Galileo scientists have been correcting themselves all over the place but not just going you know helter skelter but coming up with broad bodies of consensual knowledge that is won by centuries of careful observation experimentation and then correcting earlier mistakes so William James is simply suggesting you like all the other branches of science but for that you do need to have some means of refining your ability to probe into the mind so to sum up this kind of historical brief overview William James wrote towards the end of his life at present psychology is in the condition of physics before Galileo in the laws of motion of chemistry before Lavoisier and the notion that mass is preserved in all reactions the Galilean Lavoisier of psychology would be famous men or they could be women indeed when they come has come they surely has come someday they surely will or past successes are no index to the future when they do come however the necessities of the case will make them metaphysical that is when people gain some real deep insight nature of the mind their discoveries will be deemed by many other people as metaphysical especially if they don't fit in the materialistic paradigm meanwhile the best way in which we can facilitate their Advent is to understand how great is the darkness in which we grope and never to forget that the natural science and this one I didn't memorize so maybe it's lost but there's no way to collapse it a little bit it okay never forget the natural science that I can't remember the list of the köppen they don't have it but it's progressing something like that it's a pretty good ending find it for yourself so now we come back to Asia we come back to Asia and I find it during the time of William James surprising but not astonishing that people like James and petitioner at Cornell University in the United States who are so keenly interested in the mind so it keenly interested in attention and introspection that they never looked outside of Eurocentric civilization I mean not once they didn't even glance so at it so William James for example wrote he wrote brilliant about the tension and how important this development develop attention skills for indications implications applications he was really brilliant and then he said but it seems like attention can't be trained you're either born with good attention or bad what can he do nothing you can do and that seemed to be the working hypothesis for the whole 20th century this is the 20th century where even through the 20th century let alone the 19th the wisdom of India of Southeast Asia of Tibet China Mongolia shall I go on Japan Korea Cambodia and so forth in all of these Asian cult the cultures every single one that was touched by Buddhism and virtually all of Asia was they all receive the heritage of Samadhi of tremendous training and mindfulness of introspection of Vipassana looking into the mind we have 5000 years since the first terracotta images of people sitting in full Lotus you heard about that one so Samadhi basement going on for 5000 years in the Indic cultures so this is basically a 5,000 year old history a culture has taken a keen interest in the mind and found the appropriate technology for fattening the mind the nature of consciousness and even to this day I find to an appalling degree when Western psychologist a neuroscientist come to speak with Buddhists they do about 90% of really I mean conference after conference after conference they're bringing all these Western experts who have no means whatsoever for observing the mind no training in Samadhi no training and developing intention no training in their section they're talking about the brain and behavior and they're talking to Buddhists who have 2,500 years of background and who does all the talking the people who know if people don't know it's a bit odd so maybe this will change soon I keep on pounding the drum and irritating a lot of people but I do with a smile I don't think they really care but in any case here we are here some here's some facts they go back to the Trisha tradition of the Schrom honest and it's it's got to be at least 5,000 years old certainly well before the Buddha came along and these truth seekers these people were willing to sacrifice everything just go out as wandering ascetics truth seekers with no church to tell them what they had to believe right there that's never been the case in India of Conformity and if you don't conform we'll have to burn you at the state I don't never Indian government's ever burning anybody's sake because they believed in God or didn't and so these were these were really open-minded people and a long time ago and who knows when some of these early truth seekers he's from Anna's who drew Goa in Tibetan they they who knows how long it took him centuries or millennia they developed the technology of Samadhi I would say Samadhi is to the mind what a telescope is to astronomy it provides you with that focused attention like a high-powered telescope so you can focus on the mind mental state states of consciousness with continuity with clarity and then you can go beyond that so this Samadhi was already very well thought developed at the time of the Buddha and then twenty-five twenty-six hundred years ago Galton with the gouge on the Buddha after going through his six years of asceticism he restored his physical health and then he commented after those six years and after restoring his health where could he go now because he tried straight Samadhi as an end in itself he tried all manner of ascetic practices and fasting and so forth and so on nothing worked it just damaged his health and then he recalled when he was 35 years old he recalled a spontaneous experience he had when he was a you when he just spun Matt looks effortlessly slipped into what's called the first Jana a very fine state of Samadhi just slipped into it and experienced the sense of well-being of joy the mind was single pointed it was really supple it was suitable that was serviceable and then he slipped out of that he got back to his princely life but at the age of 35 counter memory we called that experience as a youth and the thought arose him and this is on his own narration not somebody at somebody else made up he thought back to that experiences of his youth and he said might that referring to the first jhana rounded-off achievement of Shama two might that be the way to enlightenment he just asked himself and the answer came back intuitively yes it is so he achieved schemata all over again which he'd lost in all of ascetic practices and then he went to this into the through the foot of the Bodhi tree and a pretty short order achieved enlightenment what was distinctive about one of one of the many distinctive things about what the Buddha brought to the contemplative culture in India was the use of refining sustained voluntary tension called that Samata Samadhi with enhanced ability and vividness so very fine Samadhi and then using that since the Samadhi itself was old history that was very well charted territory with all of the jhanas in the forum realm the salmon patties or absorption of the formless realm all of those been explored and gautuma did too but what he added that was unprecedented was finding especially this first jhana where you have the ability to investigate to analysis to analyze it's called tapa and japa you can practice the fashioner and he used schemata he used the way of Samadhi in unprecedent ways to explore states of consciousness and their objects and that was for passion the passion is not simply mindfulness it's not simply bearer attention these are watered-down modern versions which is fine but it's not the Buddhist definition the passion are always entails inquiry if there's no inquiries not the personnel sorry but that's just the way it is tara thought am i under there may any difference sama is simply placing the mind if all you're doing is bare attention or just being mindful that's very nice but that's not for passionate not really this is real you know tales inquiry there's no difference between Ayana here so the buddha then unprecedented li took his skills of schemata that's like the technology and he combined those with Vipassana and that's the science of open-minded critical rational empirical inquiry he fused the two and that was that was a major world how to say Watership point or turning point and then he comments in to summarize this point the mind that is established in equipoise that is overcoming the extremes of laxity and excitation that is balanced that is a state of equanimity comes to know reality as it is and is what he's referring to is exactly the union of schemata and Vibhishana so now what has been discovered because nowadays still is commented by the neuroscientist Donald Hofmann there's still a mind-body problem and that is how does the mind influence or generate the mind how does the mind possibly influence the brain one is non-physical the other one's physical is like a ghost in the machine how does the machine influence a ghost how does it ghost influence the machine so it remains a mind-body problem and I don't see there making any progress David Chalmers with whom had a kind of a debate or conversation earlier this year he very famously pointed out that there's the easy problem and the hard problem when it comes to mind the easy problem and it's not that easy but that's finding specific correlations between very specific brain activity and very specific modes of consciousness very good science but then the hard problem is what's the nature of the correlation that that there are correlations neuroscientists are doing great job but how is it that neurons influence subjective States and vice-versa do neurons generate consciousness or mental images and memories and so forth if so how do they do that that's a hard problem and among people who are thoughtful open-minded and knowledgeable I think there's a wide degree of consensus that remains a mind-body problem is an unsolved problem and I'm sure since it's been an unsolved problem in Western philosophy for like 2,500 years a lot of people probably think it's unsolved unsolvable some people say I'll never be solved we haven't if we we white people we're a center people if we haven't solved it nobody solved it I was at a conference just last January where a very fine scientist he's really good and he commented we don't know what was it about my body or the nature of consciousness he said we don't know it he said we don't know what the nature of consciousness that and I felt low very humble and then he said any added nobody does and I thought whoa how pompous he slipped from humility pomposity ease of slips and humility to omniscience because if you know that nobody knows the nature of consciousness then you have made a major truth claim in all the galaxies of the universe there is no one who knows consciousness a little bit overboard don't you think they're assuming if they don't know nobody knows and I kind of get tired of that let me tell you about another problem it's a real mysterious one you ready it's called the earth planet problem in the year 1600 this was a this was a doozy it's a mysterious problem do planets go around the earth or do they go around the Sun hmm but Ptolemy would they believed in for 1,400 years said that everything goes around the earth planet Suns stars moon everything goes around the earth and that was 1,400 year pedigree at good mathematics behind it Tycho Brahe who they taught the Danish Danish astronomer said the Sun and the moon go around the earth but the planets all go around the Sun and then Copernicus and follow me here and Kepler and Galileo said no no the Sun at do these the the Sun and the moon at the earth and all the planets go around the Sun so it's the planet Earth problem and they just debated back and forth some people like this theory some people like that theory there was no consensus and we could still have an earth planet problem if nobody had developed a telescope because these were all very intelligent I've cared of I very intelligent knowledgable people but it was Galileo developed a telescope and he directed his telescope to Venus and he discovered the phases of Venus and with that one observation which took in just a matter of days he disproved a 1400 year old belief but all him is wrong if Tom Lee right Venus could not pompously have phases it the the earth planets problem was solved by looking carefully at the problems you're seeking to understand the phenomena you're seeking to understand some decades later further investigation we found out Tycho Brahe was also wrong so we're all left with the Copernican system so nobody talked about an earth planet problem right because they found the appropriate technology and they solved it if you want to know the mind-body problem you want to solve that problem on how did the interface it's not enough just look at the body or the brain and it stopped and not even bother to look at the mind you will always have a problem if you have a earth planet problem and you never look at the planets you can have an earth planet problem forever right and you don't just look at them with naked eye you have to use a telescope and then there is no earth planet problem and if you develop very rigorous ways observing in the mind then the mind-body problem vanishes in fact in Buddhism there is no mind-body problem any more of them there's an earth planet problem so let's see about that so can I get this going so there we go so I'm going to look at four dimensions of the mind and I thought what do I have that's not bad 45 minutes yeah good until five okay look at the first one this is the most familiar one the psyche it's what psyche this the psychologists study it's what Buddhists call the course mind the course mind arises in dependence upon is strongly influenced by the brain by language by personal history by many many factors biological social psychological and so on it's a dualistic mind and it did not exist the psyche did not exist before you were conceived and it will not exist when you die so it's bracketed between birth and death that's when the psyche is you didn't have this psyche before you were conceived and you won't have this after you're dead and so it's an embodied mind it's about a mind that is profoundly entangled with physiological processes it includes both conscious and unconscious mental processes so Freud's subconscious it's definitely with me within the embodied mind it's conditioned by the body influenced by sin so many ways by the body and by personal history physical environments and so on so that's the main role very familiar with you say my mind that's what you're probably referring to and it's very important to understand this mind and the way to understand it well it can be studied as it is studied nowadays by psychologists is studied indirectly by interrogation asking other people about their minds their desires thoughts emotions and so forth you'd give them questionnaires that's good indirectly you learn something unless the people you're interrogating are dilution or dishonest so you buy you you do this by ending your interrogation by examination by examination of examination of behavior facial expressions body language and so on and of course examination of the brain is what marvelous new science of neuroscience all of those are indirect but you can also come to understand the mind the psyche the course mind directly through introspection and that is William James said if you follow all of the other sciences this should be primary because all the other sciences Galileo love RCA Darwin they all primarily relied upon observation of the phenomena you're seeking to understand that's scientific for religious people believe what they're told philosophers think an awful lot and scientists look they believe and think a lot too but what sets science apart from philosophy and theology is that emphasis on very careful precise observation and experimentation that's not happening in modern psychology precise observations of mental states with hardly any exceptions even here in India hint-hint India even in India if you look in any of the major universities show me one were undergraduate students in psychology in psychology 101 are given rigorous training introspection training attention skills mindfulness and so forth where is that and if it's not there why on earth not this is at the home of some money for heaven's sakes but they were so blown away by British imperialism they've adopted the myopia of British and American and urine urine centric dogmatism of materialism and snuffed out their own 5000 year heritage I would really like to invite have them invited back as is so far superior so in terms of the direct perception of the mind the empirical investigation of the mind there's a marvelous what I would really call this is just paradigmatic a Buddhist mind science I've studied and I practice that I've taught it for decades now I have to say I adore it it's so profound and it's decided by Tana or the spirit of Astana in Sanskrit Tempah Nisha ji the foreclose applications of mindfulness the first ones a good start you start with the body because that's the courses easiest to observe then you go to feelings because we care so much about them nobody wants to suffer the third one is the mind it's the closed application of mindfulness to the mind and if you look at this at a putana sutra there any commentaries it also occurs in the Prussian palomito literature it's in 62 sama China by shantideva I would just say it I just find it brilliant in terms of truly open minded rigorous rational careful observation of the mind from a first-person perspective by the way the prerequisite for being able to fully engage in such a fit passion is that's what this is is a very rigorous training in developing your attention and mindfulness skills which is done through Shama - hamat is a telescope this is astronomy astronomy of the mind and so what do you do if you look at the side of my my suit you'll see I'm not making up anything here what do you do when you're closely applying mindfulness this means rigorously observing examining investigating real mind science you're observing or contemplating as another translation the process of origination how do mental events of all the kind all kinds arise what are the conditions the triggers and so forth where are they coming from when they are present how are they present are they permanent impermanent are they satisfying unsatisfying are they really yours are they you or not and then when mental events mental processes when they fade away how do they fade away and to where do they go do they go someplace origination abiding and disillusion you carefully examine scientists are doing this all over the place for all other branches how does a planet arise how does it appear and without wind will this planet for example when is it going to come to its demise that's astronomy or study of the planet and then very pragmatically because we consider that all of buddhadharma is rooted in the Four Noble Truths from the very beginnings of the middle in the end it's always oriented towards the alleviation of suffering and finding greater happiness liberation and awakening so we never stray far from that just into egghead speculations or just things for curiosity Buddhism says look life is short we have an opportunity here to identify what are the true causes of suffering so these are called cleshea I think the closest translation is mental affliction and then generically I mean there's a wide variety of glacier or new-mown mental afflictions but they all have in common this definition I memorize about 45 years ago same mash uhgh le Cheng is same gym these are all mental processes that have as their function to disrupt the equilibrium of the mind to disturb the mind to upset the mind with craving that upsets hatred upsets delusion upsets arrogance jealousy they all upset the mind they perturb the mind to throw the mine into chaos mental afflictions do that and we should bear in mind mental fiction sometimes feel really good let me say mental fiction doesn't mean they feel bad when we feel tremendous lust or infatuation with something it can feel really good but it's really really afflicting your mind and so those who reflect those reflections generically and so we examined closely which mental states or processes are wholesome that is constructive conducive to our well-being and that of others which are unwholesome we observe whether mental processes and states are stable or momentary the three marks of existence true sources of happiness are unsatisfying personal or impersonal so these are some of the salient features of kind of questions being posed in this first-person science of the mind and the Buddhist tradition as a translator I've been translating since about 1972 I'm finding a mistranslation very very common so I'm going to beat my drum here a little bit but many many people are translating now quite kind of nonchalantly cliche as negative emotions afflictive emotions or disturbing emotions that's just false because most of the mental afflictions are six primary affections and the twenty derivative most of them are not emotions and so generically say that afflictions mental pleasure our emotions negative and so forth is just terribly misleading so take just for this is just the six and much we implement among which we only get four books and I don't think I remember eyes the other two maybe yes all I can help but our first one obvious a Vidya a Vidya for heaven's sakes ignorance is not an emotion right I tell you it's not it's cognitive you're unaware of something attachment is not an emotion attachment craving clinging is not an emotion it's cognitive it's a an afflictive disturbing type of desire cognitive is about desire aspirations yearning goals ideals and so forth it's not emotional attachment is not an emotion anger is an emotion that's for sure but but pride that's not an emotion either and I can't quite I know that false viewers in there and false views is coming quickly what's that doubt I think that is yeah so doubt is cognitive it's not an emotion and then false views that's not an emotion either and when you look in the twenty derivative ones there's like distraction and laxity that's attentional imbalances most of them are not emotional so it would be good to correct that because when people equate mental fictions with some kind of emotion they've knocked out like three-fourths of the reflections they won't even notice them is they own that's not an emotion I wasn't having a mental affliction I didn't have any particular emotion at all that's a big mistake sometimes words are important in terms of mindfulness we know that mindfulness is really a buzzword there have been on Time magazine over the last 10-15 years two issues totally devoted to mindfulness and as always the modern psychological definition of mindfulness which many people have found useful which I'm very happy for it's this moment moment non-judgmental awareness there's no question many people have found it helpful many scientific studies of it showing its benefits for reducing stress and so on as His Holiness commented in 1990 when he's first introduced to this type of mindfulness he said he was asked whether I actually asked these people that are promoting mindfulness mindfulness but without ever referring to Buddhism what do you think is this plagiarism you know taking somebody else's goods and then put you know presentes your own trademark and as whole in his comment was well the whole point of Buddhism is to alleviate suffering and if these people are drawing from Buddhism giving the Buddha no credit but really helping people alleviating suffering that's good there's nothing there's no what there's no word for plagiarism in Tibet I don't think so maybe new a new one but all nowadays yes he made many new words but in old texts the Jets won't get it just one base one banana I'm plagiarism is Anna use a mud wall you didn't cover my eyes I'm in a condor he's wrong I said no no problem of plagiarism but he said don't mistake this mindfulness for Buddhism unfortunately some of the chief promoters are doing exactly that they're saying this is Buddhist meditation without the Buddhism this is this is Buddhism without the mumbo-jumbo this is the essence of all of Buddhism Buddhist meditation this is the essence of all meditation and a lot of the media unfortunately I've got a lot of gone along for the ride and the using mindfulness and meditation interchangeably so they've dumped it down to a kind of the subterranean level that's kind of unfortunate really because the modern definition of mindfulness has basically nothing to do with a Buddhist definition versus nothing the hardly even overlap here's a classic from Naga Sena an arhat in a very famous famous conversation he had with the King Melinda so and this is the definition of authentic mindfulness that will help you along the path to liberation and enlightenment and so just to quote it briefly mindfulness when it arises it calls to mind wholesome and unwholesome tendencies with false and faultless in theory and we find dark & pure together with our counterparts and that is these are the concomitant mental processes some dinky essentially mindfulness when it arises it follows the courses of beneficial and unbeneficial tendencies it's seen some some surge of an implemental impulse arising and then it watches the repercussions how does this play out I was feeling really sarcastic the other day and I made some really clever but very biting and sarcastic comment it felt so good when I said it and then how did that play out how did it affect your mind how did it affect the other person did that turn out well or not or feeling contempt for somebody or jealous and then you express it how does it play out so it's not following a set of Commandments it's not saying God said this or God said that this is completely pragmatic see how it impacts your mind see how your met your thought processes your emotions and so on how do they influence your mind other people's minds watch it radically empirically so mindfulness when it arises follows the course is a beneficial and beneficial tendencies and recognizes the tendencies these tendencies upon careful examination are beneficial these unbeneficial these tendencies are helpful these unhelpful thus one who practices yoga rejects the unbeneficial and embraces or cultivates the beneficial so that's a real authentic definition of mindfulness and you see it has almost nothing to do with a modern definition this is one that's been useful for two 2,000 years they're a good track record so the mind that we're all familiar with the mind that will vanish when we die because it arises in dependence upon the brain and in the dying process when your brain is shutting down this mind that we identify with very strongly woman's mind man's mind Asian Western and so forth it will dissolve into it doesn't dissolve into nothing contrary to the materialistic belief but it dissolves into a subtler continuum so this is the economic unit amo a subtle continuum mental consciousness I would propose this as a second dimension of consciousness and we've not gone into religion here this is just a bit deeper and you need better technology than that you can say folk psychology just looking or mind now and again folk psychology is like focused Ronna me that's naked naked i stargazing oh isn't the moon beautiful oh there's Jupiter there's the Pleiades oh that's naked eye that's folk astronomy and introspection has been left pretty much at the level of folk psychology in modern science there have been no really no progress since William James of refining in the context of the scientific investigation of mind no progress in terms of developing attention skills mind flows introspection or Samadhi but if you do develop those then you discover another dimension of consciousness it's the same hormone subtle mind or subtle continuum it is indeed a subtle mention of consciousness which is access you slip into it but probably unconsciously in deep sleep when you become comatose when you faint general anesthesia but also at death if you've studied the dyeing process you know the last phase before the clear light of death is this dark near attainment that's when your course mind has dissolved and irreversibly into a subtle continuum and most people when they arrive there they just black out so they are not not explicitly aware of anything very much as if you were in deep dreamless sleep but all but this dimension of consciousness can be accessed lucidly knowingly with a wide-awake mind if you achieve schemata you're accessing the same dimension this subtle continuum this is the ground state of the psyche that is from lifetime to lifetime course Minds arise in dependence upon let's say for animals and human beings arises in dependence upon the brain of a turtle and ant a human being grasshopper and so your subtle continuum is configured configured by the nervous system and the brain of the body that's forming as your body forms in the next life or this life and so the continuum of consciousness that carries from lifetime from lifetime it's like a stem consciousness as they have a stem cell that can be by its environment be configured as a neuron a brain cell as a liver cell bone marrow cell and so forth but itself is kind of hasn't yet been configured the subtle contaminant mental consciousness as such when it's just come to rest is the ground state of the psyche in the Terra Cotta tradition it's called the Pavan go and is that from which all mental activities emerge and into which they dissolve from life to life now this has been this could easily be presented as well this my philosophy or my religious belief but for the real adepts not just philosophers or religious believers when if within Buddhism this is hypothesis that has been tested thousands of times for hundreds of years it's sometimes called the online of each Nana and I know I'm just accepting on to kind of fragile ice here because I know per vehicle about the plus don't get too mad yarmulke at least in the interpretation of tsongkhapa says there is no such thing the whole yoga Chadha notion of it is neither storehouse consciousness or foundation consciousness doesn't exist at all and he gives very compelling reasons for refuting it however Nagarjuna and I'm going to come back to tsongkhapa Nagarjuna in his but his body chitta in his his commentary on bodhichitta Giovana about which I heard his holiness his oral commentary about a year ago in Strasbourg and as long as quoted this first right towards the beginning of the text and unfortunately don't quite have the end of it here's Nagarjuna straight when iron approaches a magnet it quickly spins into place although it has no mind it appears as though it did so iron filings it could look like it could look like they are attracted to the might magnet or look at their run you know look at them look at them move they must like the magnet it appears as if they have a mind but they don't in the same way the substrate consciousness that's my translation of the equation I'm J or Alive is Nanna has no true existence so right immediately he refused it imatra because Jo mantra of course the over child is a Cheeto mantra does assert the existence of the alive is Nanna a storehouse consciousness a repository of all karmic imprints but of course they insist that it is inherently existent Nagarjuna says no it's not it's as empty of inherent nature as anything else but he's not refuting it entirely he's simply saying it has no true existence yep so although it has no true existence yet when it comes from a previous life and goes to the next it moves just as though it were real it moves as if it were inherently existent but it isn't and so it takes hold of one lifetime in succession after another something like that he ends quickly there so talk about wrote a commentary to this text any comments here because he's saying Nagarjuna is affirming existence substrate or sub tree consciousness although he's refuting it's to existence and he says here Tom GABA says that when Nagarjuna affirms here the alive is Nanna what he's referring to is nothing other than the subtle continuum mental consciousness no frills no addition no chit imatra just that it's just another name for the same thing that is nowhere refuted in any of the four schools of Buddhism so I think we can relax around the term alive is Nanna and actually just as a side note in the Sakya tradition Sakya Pandita another great great a tips of the psycho tradition who are very very firm advocates of pressing become a yarmulke they do affirm the existence of the substrate consciousness a lavish naina they simply say yeah but of course it doesn't inherently exist so they're not sure tomorrow they're throwing that out and they'll simply say we're going to use this word let's not make a big deal of it it's simply this up the subtle continuum mental consciousness that carries on from lifetime to lifetime and some people call it the substrate consciousness we shouldn't get upset at that there's a text that I've translated it was one of those challenging translations I've done about 20 books or so that I've translated this is something a book that I hold in awe I mean really deep reference it's actually these are teach it these are this is a text about a 400 page text that is written down by the great 19th century Nima dokyun adam Linga and he received these teachings by way of pure vision Takanawa is called it's actually very common in Tibetan Buddhist tradition and before that India tsongkhapa for example had a number of pure visions from manjushri in which he received teachings from a nursery and then he wrote them down tsongkhapa was described and the teacher was manjushri such and Ganga Ningbo also had visions of manjushri and many others visions of a Trapani and so forth so this was not really unusual do gem Ling by being an extraordinary individual to tremendous realization he had a vision of a manifestation of Padma's Ambala called in tibetan tsukitachi what a lake when mantra so these are the words of padma samatha as they were received in a pure vision by doujin Linga and written down he had the vision around hundred fifty years ago the the quote is a bit long but I think you may find it very relevant here so he's talking about schemata and coming to the culminating phase of Shama - where your mind is solves into this subtle continuum that ends up Chen is also called the substrate consciousness but in accordance with prasanna akka not geometry is they specifically reviewed its inherent existence and so so padma Sambhav estates here the rope of mindfulness and firmly held firmly maintained attention is dissolved by the power of meditative experience as you're proceeding along those nine stages of Shama to many experiences will arise and as they arise if you know how to deal with them skillfully then they purify the operations the distortions the afflictions of the mind and so you the mindfulness and attention that it the power that is like the rope of that the connection between your awareness and the object of awareness is dissolved until finally the ordinary mind of an ordinary being disappears as it were this is your psyche this is the course mind that arises in dependence upon the rain it disappears as it were and once your mind with all of its thoughts and rumination dualistic grasping and so forth once that subsides it dissolves consequently compulsive thinking it's called nam tok in tibetan subsides and roving thoughts vanish into the space of awareness you then slip into the vacuity of the substrate the Alaia O'Quinn Chi which is just a space it's just a vacuous space you slip into the vacuity of the substrate the Vanco space of awareness itself in which self others and objects disappear it's an appearance free space devoid of appearances and objects by adhering to the experience of acuity and luminosity while looking inwards because you have to completely inverted your awareness away from all the five physical senses the appearances of self others and objects vanish this is the substrate consciousness this is the subtle continuum mental consciousness is the ally vision Anna some teachers say that the substrate to which you would you descend is freedom from conceptual elaboration this is what this is the second of the four yoga's in Mahamudra it's a very advanced state of realization and taking the passion a realization of emptiness so they're taking something is just an awareness of acuity and then saying oh this is some realization of emptiness high realization in Maha mudra or they think even beyond that it's one taste which is even a further a higher river realization in Maha mudra so they're completely conflating it but others say it is ethically neutral luma Deen but whatever they call it in truth you've come to the essential nature of the mind the central nature of mind is very clear by context he's not referring to the emptiness of inherent nature of the mind but simply its fundamental faciliate features that in Buddhist psychology definition of consciousness is searching arriba its luminous and cognizant so you've come to onion configure consciousness this this is not male/female it's not or David or Preta it's just kind of stem consciousness stripped clean of all the elaborations configurations influenced by brunt brain society and so forth just naked simple flow of consciousness but it's not Ripa it's not transcendent it's not ultimate it's just the essential nature of your mind bare-bones naked awareness so that's a pretty clear definition it's entirely experiential there's no philosophy here but now in a similar vein here's a man who is one of the great greatest scholars in the globe in tradition as well as a great addict at the primary the root Lama of the fifth dalai lama densha lost ashoka gansan he must be I think the most famous of all the of all the pension Lamas and again we're missing the last line unfortunately so he writes here in his route X and commentary to his tanks on the Maha mudra according to according to the union of the Gila and Country traditions he writes here in this discussion of schemata in this context where you're focusing single pointedly on the mind he writes here the nature of meditative equipoise Yamcha is not obscured by anything that is when you're simply resting in the nature of the mind you're coming to this subtle dimension but it is lucid and clear not establishes anything physical when you come to the very core nature of the essential nature of awareness of consciousness has no physical attributes whatsoever it's not establishes anything physical it is a clear vacuity like space allowing anything to arise it is vividly awake such as the nature of the mind this is superbly witnessed with with direct perception simply through cementum not even talking about the passion area yet it cannot be grasped as this or demonstrated with words and that is if you're talking with somebody else who is conscious then you don't have to spit and speak many words you can say you know being conscious is it yeah you know but if you had a conversation we I don't have myself my cell phones in my daughter if you brought brought out your cell phone you try to have a conversation with City trying to explain to city I'm gonna claim consciousness to consciousness to you Siri you're gonna have a very short conversation I've asked her are you conscious basically blows me off or sends me to a website she's very coy and very adroit dodging in the question if you're talking to a computer there are no words you can use to convey to the computer what it's like to be conscious what it is to know robots artificial intelligence computers don't have a clue and there's no words if you're talking to a zombie or somebody who is simply you know hypothetical person like a zombie who is unconscious you cannot convey to them with words at all and so it's inexpressible to a person who doesn't already know and if you already know you don't have to say much and so it can't be demonstrated with words and now here's an aphorism whatever arise rest loosely without grasping it's a phrase from Tibetan and pension pension our budget comments now for the most part contemplatives of Tibet uniformly proclaimed this as practical advice for achieving enlightenment so this is dumb down mahamudra dumb down so Chen dum dum be passionate where all you have to do is you know whatever comes up just rest loosely don't grasp just be here now even Tibetans did that I think there must have been hip Tibetan hippies because I thought this is California you know like here now dude that's the joint yes I don't think they were passing the passing the joint in Tibet but they even in Tibet I mean you know they're people - they'll dumb down all of my mu draal absorption and just just be here now and so some people think that's all you need just be here now you know just rest and bear awareness choice this awareness and that'll take you all the way to enlightenment so that's a little bit of superstition however I Chucky gansan declared this to be an exceptionally skillful means for novices to achieve mental stillness and ascertain the relative nature of the mind I memorize that one at least very closely he is saying exactly what but masam bhava stated by way of do to Meninga this practice which is a shaman to practice they simply focus on the mind until your mind dissolves into the subtle mind this is a superb method for actually ascertaining the nature of consciousness your knowing it directly like when you eat chocolate there's nothing mysterious about the taste of chocolate you got it you may not know it chemistry but you know the taste of chocolate and you get to this point where you've you've melted your mind down you've simplified it to its core just a sheer luminosity and clarity that luminosity and cognizance and that's it you have discovered the nature of consciousness directly by looking in the right direction with refined attention very careful Samadhi there is no mystery of consciousness in Buddhism there's a mystery consciousness all over the West Oh what is it boy so mysterious Muslim area you know I spend my be speaking with a friend of mine very dear man he's a neuroscientist and he he told me Alan consciousness is such a mystery I'm just polite he's a sweet guy but I didn't have to say bollocks what a load of crap do you only live in California have you've been to India did you not listen the Hindus have a lot of insight into consciousness tera vaada buddhist mahayana buddhist vajrayana buddhism champers there's no mystery about consciousness at all you're just not listening you're talking too much and you're looking in the wrong direction there's a famous analogy a fellow who loses its keys they've heard it it's quoted by john cyril very famous philosopher fellows lost his keys at night and he's groping around under under a streetlight and some fellow comes over and you lose something here you mean my guy says yeah I lost my keys and the fellow said you to lose it here he said no I lost it over there in the dark I said what are you looking here for this is where the light is and so what scientists are very good at where the light is and I say this with respect no sarcasm where the light is there brilliant and illuminating the nature of objective physical and quantifiable phenomena there fantastic that's why it's worthwhile for monks here the library and elsewhere to be studying biology and physics and chemistry and neuroscience because the quest is really good at it they're good at looking outwards but if you keep on looking outwards at the brain and behavior and trying to understand consciousness it's like looking due west and wandering winds the Sun gonna rise you'll be the last one to know because you're looking where the light is but not where you dropped your keys and your drop your hues but it's inside it shouldn't be really of that mysterious but they still haven't caught on I would love to see a Buddhism science conference where 90 just to balance things out a little bit 90% of the talking is done by Buddhists who actually know they're talking about when it comes to consciousness that we put us don't don't know a lot of things about the scientists do know but it wind that comes to consciousness maybe the question should be listening and not talking so much so that's an opinion nobody has to agree with me but it's a strongly held opinion developed schemata and you can really fathom the nature of consciousness and it's remarkable and a lot of benefits in achieving schemata if you develop both summit and Vibhishana and you unify the two this critical inquiry the investigation of the fashioner then another cut type of perception arises nan joking one's own yogic perception and this arises by relying on its dominant cause what is the the dealmaker for bringing forth yoga perception is the union or summit of passion bringing these two together results in a wide variety of modes of perception that are just shuns like leprosy by means I know this because I work with psychologists and neuroscientists a lot but if you raise things like paranormal you know parapsychology remote viewing precognition clairvoyance and so forth they just break into hives you know they just run the opposite direction if you cite any of the 40 years of research on reincarnation done at the universe but the University of Virginia they just run for the hills they won't even critique it I asked the fellow who's running in charge of research is now 40 years of research on enormous amount of data of investigating children who allegedly have past life recall 40 years of research and I asked him his name is Jim Tucker I asked him about a year ago Jim it was first in Stevenson he passed away and I wrote to him Jim how many open-minded critical reviews have you have been published by scientists published in peer-reviewed journals of your research on evidence of children recalling past lives none forty years they haven't even looked so that's worse than refuting if their research is shabby then show how a shabby it is then they can improve but the worst criticism you can give is to ignore entirely because you remember the hierarchy if reincarnation is true that blows the smithereens out of the notion that everything is just physical and then you have to fundamentally reassess your worldview from the bottom up so voting up one of the finest neuroscientist knowledge all of Europe German good friend with my dear friend much of Ricard the two of them this world-class neuroscientist not your MetroCard an outstanding monk they were visiting I think some herbes some Hermitage up in the Himalayas I think it was the monastery of Russia from a chain and so Matt you are serving as interpreter they were speaking with one yogi after another would either experienced some extraordinary abilities or witnessed them and they were telling story after story you know the of the paranormal abilities exercise your perception they came out of really intensive long-term retreat and both saying her bless his heart I don't know him well it met him but he turned to match.you Mary told me this he turned and when they had the conversation he heard all these stories that completely blow away scientific materialism and those thing who is a sign of materialism he turned the matter and said if they're right we're completely wrong i i reaiiy respect that kind of candor and and you know honesty so when you achieve this yogic perception it resolves in a wide variety of modes of extrasensory perception including remote viewing knowing others minds clear audience recollection of past lives and in Buddhist X you'll find people give you basically the strategies exactly how you develop these these are not supernatural a laser is a parapet a laser is paranormal light if you if you could bring again a time machine they take a laser or even a cell phone back to 1900 and showed what you do with a laser you would say God is supernatural it's amazing it's mystical this is not natural it's not if you don't I think it was arthur c clarke the science fiction writer said any degree of technology sufficiently high developed we're not understood as seen as magic but nobody now things lasers a magic cuz we know the technology behind it this is technology this is not magic it's not voodoo it's not religious belief it's not superstition do the hard work and this what comes out of it it's hard work though have no qualms about that in terms of discovery of past lives this some people's so-called secular buddhist they're trying to blow this one off as if the buddha hiccup - he didn't really mean it aw shucks that's bollocks he absolutely meant it he declared that it was his direct perception so nobody has to believe that but if people call themself the Buddhist Buddhist and then blow away what the Buddha said we'll never mind reincarnation karma and so forth I think they're fooling themselves it's like saying I'm a Freudian but I don't believe in the subconscious or the aid or the ego or libido or death wish but I'm afraid I'll just make up my own Freudianism it'll be neo Freudian ISM it's basically Alan Wallace ISM but it's better marketing of a call it Freud because nobody knows well in Wallace's but Freud a lot of people know so I think for marketing reasons people are really not Buddhist at all we'll use the word Buddhism just to you know marketing purposes and call it secular that's what the Buddha said direct quote when my concentrated mind he developed the technology of jhana schemata at least first jhana fourth jhana when my concentrated was thus purified bright unblemished and rid of imperfection that's the work of Shama to do that when it had become malleable less less aroma will they let shinjang so they saw Roma's serviceable shins young is playing but buoyant malleable steady and attained to imperturbability mio that's schemata then he applied the passion I directed I inclined my mind to the knowledge of recollection of past life he took having a chief sama to slipped into that subtle continuum then directed his attention like a laser pointer to the past and he revealed as he said he revealed thousands of previous lives he said I saw with direct knowledge he narrated how he recollected the specific circumstances of many thousands of his own former lives over the course of many ages of world contraction and expansion and this is billions of years so it looked an awful lot like big bang followed by big crunch really that's what it is contraction is big crunch and expansion is that from Big Bang and this is the Buddha talking in the Pali Canon I don't think it's a coincidence and this was the first watch of the night he said this was my first true knowledge during the first first watch of the night attained by me in the first watch of the night ignorance was banished true knowledge arose darkness of Spanish and light arose as it happens in one who is something but I'm not quite sure why because the this light runs out but he states very clearly this is not something that's really ridiculous speculation suggests that the Buddha just picked up reincarnation because a lot of people believed it and he thought it'd be good for good people to believe it make it more ethical this is for other li juvenile it makes the book but I look like an idiot that well we have to make people be good so let's just tell them reincarnation the quest is not true but you know a lot of people believe it's a wedding go along with it you look like frankly an idiot if he did that I'd have no fear that fate that him at all you're like the bill is more wrong but in that was completely nonsense he's like many Hindu edits before him this was this was ancient knowledge this is knowledge but a thousand two thousand years or longer before people would achieve very profound samadhi you can access past light this has been affirmed by Hindu contempt it is long before the Buddha by Buddhist of course by Daoists reincarnation is very central in Taoism there are many Sufis that are certain affirm this in the Muslim tradition early Christians until it was outlawed early christened the death of others many believed in reincarnation in the Kabbalah the Jewish mysticism front and central so this is not just an Eastern deal this is something where ever you find contempt ative switch he very deep Samadhi this just comes up you start recalling things from past lines because all your memories are not stored in the brain there's no evidence they are the brain is more like the keyboard the harddrive is this subtle continuum of consciousness and that you can access to swishah meta when you tap into that dimension of the mind then it becomes quite apparent that among body speech and mind mind is really primary because when you die your body of course just molars in the grave transcend fertilizer your speeches vanishes and the mine carries on and then adopts a new body and with that body has speech again so you see the primacy you sweet your own experience that the mind is primary and one could easily draw the conclusion AHA all there are as appearances to the mind like the Chitra matrons affirmed but it's really mind only the only thing is really absolutely real truly existent is consciousness or mind one could easily draw that conclusion but now in the same text the Vajra essence which is straight zope chen and completely in accordance with prasanta Kamiyama qey I've had 20 years to study reflect upon and practices text then the emptiness of inherent nature of that mind is clearly articulated so here it is rather long quote hopefully worth your while yeah we have a bit of time still so third dimension they're only gonna be four so here's to Germany again it's the Vajra essence by examining whether the mind that is the all creating sovereign that is from which all appearance is manifest it's the one that's in charge it's the primary among body speech in mind that is the all creating sovereign of the body speech and mind examining whether it is really existent or really non-existent when examining this this is with the passion not just shamaton but examining with this vision and the mind is found to have no basis or root it is so it is not established as having any shape or color if you're looking for its inherent qualities as it exists from its own side they're not to be found the five elements and the five sensory objects appear like objects of the mind and your own body appears as its base but if all these are investigated from the ultimate perspective this is done dombay chepa the ontological ontological investigation really probing into the nature of existence of the mind and all these all of these the the century objects the brain the mind the five elements and consciousness itself the mind itself they are found to be like space not truly established as either one thing or many they're not an inherently one or many ascertaining and this is really the core of a passion er in the Mohammed reinsertion traditions ascertaining the origin location and destination of the mind as object less openness is the spontaneous actualization of the essential nature of the path of cutting through that's cutting through to the conditioned mind to pristine awareness or rikta this is not something freshly achieved but is simply the knowledge of the mode of being of the nature of existence so he's gone going beyond the conventional nature of mind to its ultimate nature and finding the mind itself consciousness itself does not exist by its own characteristics it's not a true truly existent does not have its own inherent nature neither its origin nor its location or its destination or its own nature exist inherently the mind is empty of inherent nature its nature is shoonya and that is the emptiness of the mind completely in accordance with Nagarjuna and the pasanga interpretation of the middle way of view so that's three this is still all nature of mind so just pausing for a moment the whole theme of nature of my nature of mind is very very popular nowadays especially in Tibetan Buddhism and many fine and sometimes not so qualified teachers are giving workshops lectures retreats and so forth on this theme and when and sometimes it's a bit vague I've heard a number of talks where the person is speaking with great enthusiasm about nature of mind and after a while you kind of wonder exactly what are you referring to is the only one nature of mind and in this short presentation here it becomes obvious know that we're nature of mind can can apply to four whole dimensions which are very different one is the nature of your mind which mental afflictions are dominant which which mental properties and so forth your mind may male mind female mind and so forth that's nature of mind how do mental afflictions arise and so on that's nature of mind if you dissolve your mind into the underlying continuum and realize its sheer luminosity its sheer cognizance and the qualities of it's called Abedin Day assembly tapa bliss luminosity and non conceptuality that you fathom that you experience when you achieve some Atta and and realize the essential nature of mind that's nature of mind it's not the same as of course mind subtle mind then do an ontological analysis of that and you realize the emptiness of mind it's ultimately empty nature that's nature of mind that's already three and they're not overlapping they're distinct and there's a still a fourth one the carasau yuksam is a Karaca you examine yourself that was and you may say mere servant person if them we shall use them so museum is indwelling mine and ourselves clear light this is the kind of the point especially explicitly of stage of completion practice it is according to His Holiness Dalai Lama this in a indwelling might of clear light is the same as Ripa pristine awareness it's the same issue primordial consciousness and there's open traditions this is the same as dharmakaya same aesthetic agar but Buddha nature so it is a fourth dimension this is not your course mind it's not subtle mind it's not the emptiness of the mind it's another dimension it is the ultimate luminous empty ground state of consciousness pervading all phenomena so it's called Chiana or Yeshe in Tibetan primordial consciousness and this is non-dual from a non-local a temporal absolute space of phenomena or dama don t which is emptiness and it's also non dual from the energy of primordial consciousness or Yoshiki lumen so you have the Dharma to ultimate reality of emptiness you have dharmakaya ultimate consciousness and you have the consciousness the energy you get lumely energy of primordial consciousness and that those three are completely indivisible this is the fourth dimension this is the point explicitly the point of stage of completion practice of mohammed reabsorption and so in Sokcho mrs. rieper commonly referred to as rick be' a pristine awareness and so pristine awareness is realized by recognizing that things appear even though nothing exists from the site of appearances so that's their shoonya nature and that all appearances of the physical worlds and their sentient inhabitants have no existence apart from the ground sugata karma which is Buddha nature which is Rippa while those appearances are of the same nature as the displays or effulgence is of the ground sugata gaba rick patel the fault of the creative displays of Ripa so that's how reality looks when you're viewing it from the perspective of Ripa and Padma symbolic here I think this is from the same text about your essence in complete quote pristine awareness awakens within itself and due to your eye of primordial consciousness penetrating wisdom you perceive all appear at all appearing phenomena samsara and Nirvana with unobscured extrasensory perception like the bright reflections of the planets and stars in a clear pool of water something like that so this is ontological in the sense of viewing from the perspective of rikta you are perceiving all phenomena to be an empty of inherent nature that's ontological you're seeing their ultimate mode of existence but it's phenomenological in the sense that you're also also seeing them in the same moment as pure displays it's called young equally pure displays the whole of samsara and Nirvana equally pure displays of pristine awareness we've definitely gone into fourth mentioned here this is said to be when you're dwelling a Rick but said it said that you're in the fourth time not in the past present or future but in a dimension of time that transcends and permeates the three times and then from the Buddha himself just addressing how much can we know what can be known as we proceed along a path of ever increasing awareness of mindfulness of clarity and two quotes from the Buddha himself pali canon the buddha's grabbing his own wisdom here and he says whatever in this world with its deities is to be seen heard sense and cognized or reached sought out and encompass by the mind that i know that i have directly known it's an extraordinary statement that all they can be known he says I know that is his awareness is unimpeded and this is in the Pali Canon so this is phenomenological that is so you not only have come to know the nature of existence the middle of all phenomena their ultimate mode of existence but it's called in Tibetan genius zkh a primordial consciousness sees the full range of phenomena and the primordial consciousness that knows the nature of existence if she's awake in Beijing and that is bimodal consciousness that knows how phenomena exist the manner of existence so one is auto logical the other ones for non illogical and in a very famous quote from the Buddha he stays it is a miss fathom long carcass this body with his perceptions and its mind that I described the world the origin of the world the cessation of the world and the way that something like it leads to Nirvana I'm dribbling off again and again because what's that and the way leading to the cessation oh very good you that's very good that's almost clairvoyance but you're absolutely right and the way leading to the cessation of the world exactly right good that's about one fifth of the letter and she picked it up Bravo so to sum up then it appears to me that where we are this era in the year in the history of humanity I think it's quite obvious is unprecedented we've never been here before and in some ways catastrophic global warming the decimation of the environment the wiping out of species the spoiling the ocean the spoiling of the air I don't need to go on we've never done this we've white what's happened in the last 40 years is the largest die-off of species on the planet for the last 65 million years it was when the when the meteor hit there was destruction like what we're doing in the last 40 years or last hundred and fifty years and we are we are a meteor modern humans materialistic society that's gobbling up this earth like it's an orange and then hoping that we can all go interstellar like the movie and after we completely ground this to a pulp then the super-rich ones will pop off in a spaceship and find it find another planet to defile and all the rest of us will just kind of rot in the hell we created for ourselves and so I didn't really enjoy that moving much it seemed like it was only food for the exceptionally rich you know the three people in the United States owned as much as the poor half of the whole population three people Jeff Bezos and one Warren Buffett and of course Bill Gates they owned as much as the poor half of the US population and eight people on the planet owned as much as the poor half of the human population eight people owned as much as three point seven five billion people this is not sustainable this is catastrophic and we're not slowing it down right now so yes this is unprecedented there's never happened before and so but it's also unprecedented in remarkable and wonderful ways and we clearly need major major responses to the major catastrophes that are human-made as his holiness was actually think about the catastrophe going on in in Syria you know as should we pray to God we pray for peace in Syria and I'm paraphrasing his response he said look God didn't create that mess so don't ask him to clean it up we created the mess so we have to figure out it clean it up God can applaud us when were finished he didn't quite say that but the gist of it he did say what we've created for planet is not natural catastrophes it's not God angels date or devil we did it and we have to get our act together quickly or we really will destroy our planet and so we need exceptional methods and I think Buddhism offers some extremely important contributions to the possibility of healing the planet and leaving it for our children and grandchildren so forth leaving in the world they would actually be happy to live in so claims of exceptional ways of knowing which we've just seen these four dimensions of consciousness almost all of which are unknown to modern science these call for research involving sophisticated sustained reigning in first-person content ative methods to complement third-person scientific methods but this not combat it's not a contest it's not winners and losers the scientists have a marvelous array of very sophisticated mesh systems of observation that are third-person and Buddhism for 2,500 years there's a marvelous array of first-person bring them together in a spirit of mutual respect and integration rather than the scientists dominating all the conversations and simply studying the brains of behavior of meditators treating them like you know chimpanzees or rats that's what's pretty much happen now very it's a very polite they treat the rats nicely but still the meditators are just subjects for the scientific experiment and they're writing all the papers so I'm kind of tired of it I'd like to see more you know parity and so this would be coming together in mutual respect and really respect and race and not acknowledging the limitations of our respective fields but also respecting the strengths of the other such research should examine the broadest possible range of states of consciousness yogic perception precognition look at the whole range don't just focus on normal people and Psychopaths and be conducted by sceptical rigorous open-minded psychologists neuroscientists physicists philosophers and contemplatives and what I've been proposing for some years now we need not one but a network of centers for contempt of research that should be created for training professional contempt tutors especially in shammed have a passion in collaborative research with scientists and philosophers I think that really holds the key a key something contributing to help heal the planet and save our own species together with all the other species on the planet so that's about it that's a brief interview say by the science of the mind so I was trained in debate in debate at decades ago you want a debate I'm happy to debate anything coming up I'm happy to listen to you great ensure the ion sure if we can't yeah you're quite right you're quite right and so in physics we have non-relative nonrelativistic physics and then relative face to physics right and that is until you stop moving near the speed of light everything is looking very Newtonian right Newton rains but yet up to nine nine tenths of the speed of light and then it's just not Newtonian anymore and what we'd have in modern psychology nervous at the Mayan Sciences I would call non relativistic mind science not pejorative but they're studying ordinary people and people who are subnormal almost invite and variably and if they ever study exceptional people like Yogi's have meditated for forty thousand hours what do they do they study their brains and write a paper about their brains but they don't ask him did you discover anything that's the question I'm waiting for them to ask you don't ask a chimpanzee what he discovered you don't ask a rat but it discovered but if you're dealing with a meditator was meditating for forty thousand hours you might want to ask him whether they discovered anything happened yet and so maybe it's high time but it's not enough also for Less a modern scientist because I'm not just Western their outstanding Indian neuroscientist Singaporean and so forth that has nothing to at the West anymore cuz it's gone global but what we've have thus far in the meetings between scientists and Buddhists by and large with hardly any exceptions is the scientists Hyman DNR reporting on their latest research very good research and we found this last week you know we found this last month we discovered this and the reporting to the Buddhists and then what are the Buddhists do well according to Nagarjuna or tonka pots on kava said or this Lama said or a century ago this there was this yogi who could display we're telling the stories we are telling them philosophy were telling were citing great edits from the past what we're not doing is telling them the vedas reports from our content of research facilities where we have 50 people here or 50 nuns and 50 monks practicing full-time they have achieved sha Mata they're remembering past lives they're starting to develop cities you why are we doing that you know all of the methods are there and it's not happening and so what we have with with the groups like it at the University of Virginia with hundreds of children live examined but they're all ordinary kids and so they're not controlled experiments and Dean Radin I know him I admire him I know the people there at the Institute of noetic Sciences these are people who just happen to happen to have psychic abilities I know another fellow is one of the leaders in the field of studying remote viewing precognition but there's no rigorous training so if somebody comes and this person displays you know and then they write about it but it's very unpersuasive to people or I'm really not open-minded and so what Buddhism has to offer here is not just finding children who randomly seem to remember past lives or people who have psychic abilities and healing abilities but rather train people who don't have any of those abilities normal people but who are very dedicated to Dharma's are intelligent they're ethical highly motivated and spend as long as you need it takes eight years to get a PhD in neuroscience or something like that right so why don't we have research facilities where it takes eight years of rigorous 10 12 hour a day training shammed ever managed to be core and then all the sources tera vaada my an avid Rihanna they all say develop schemata and you start be able to recall past lies and abilities to influence mind with matter but what we don't have right now and I'm just kind of pounding the drum you know as a westerner pounding the Buddhist drums encouraging you know Buddhist including Asian Buddhist we're missing something here we don't have here in India or in the West anywhere contented of research centers where people are spending five ten fifteen years in rigorous training to fully achieve Jean Mehta and on that basis achieve a partner on that basis then maybe through Vajrayana or maybe just wish on that if a partner developed these abilities but now what would be really that what would be really wonderful and what see when we're now planning to do this in Italy we found the land we're getting very close to getting all the pyramid permits needed then its fundraising hopefully by 2019 we're gonna have a contemporary research facility going with twenty to thirty cabins our professionally trained contemplatives and they'll be so mad if a partner and it's completely non sectarian not just a meetin it looked at more but it's very important it's not pushing galoop reverse enigma or Vajrayana over my etc this is Hama Raqqah passion is not sectarian you know it's flat-out here it is but in addition to that and this will make it doubly unique and I'd like to see this everybody I don't want it to be unique but from the time we open the doors we finish the we finish the cabins and we filled them with Yogi's then from the day we open we will invite in open-mindedness scientists psychologists physicists to say look let's do collaborative research here we have this group of 30 people now they're now setting out on the path of Shama to achieve it would you like to work with us in collaboration and study at the brain States the shifts in MRI EEG do psychological measures let's join forces here with your third-person mashup methods our first-person methods and let's get a 3d map of all the United States's of charlotta what happens when a chief shaman and if on that basis exercise free ability z' mind over matter and so forth arise they won't look magical that's big deal they won't look magical because you've it's like building a laser from scratch then you'll see that wasn't magic no magic no magic no magic that looks magic but it's not and then it doesn't it's now you recognize they techno this is technology here is not religion it's not philosophy and it's not magic but and it is it has happened into bed I mean not with with scientists but it has happened but we always have to bear it in the back of mind at the front of the mind that when the Chinese Communist genocide took place they wiped out almost all the monasteries I mean they had one month sever every thousand people this be like going to Europe and America and wiping out virtually all the universities and all the laboratories and then laughing all that science is just superstition because you've killed all the scientists and wiped out all the labs and of course there's scientific materialists doing that and so ok that's water under the bridge but this has been done in the past in Tibet but what is unprecedented is having rigorous training facility with an all very transparent nothing mysterious here no samia's no secrecy this is schemata and bringing the scientists collaboratively I would think in 20 30 years there would be no more mind-body problem because it's no more intrinsically unsolvable than the earth planet problem they develop a telescope it's gone develop Samadhi my body problem my body problem vanishes I think of one more thing to say you're not showing think how you actually influence mentally cuz there's nothing in our physics theory that gives rise to that varied the fun you have to do yeah very good point outstanding point and once again what what plays fronton central in hinduism for thousands of years my Anna Buddhism Vajrayana Buddhism Taoism is prana prana or in the Chinese tradition Qi she's real I was treated by a Chico master and what he did transcended the limits of modern science it was inexplicable I've been with the Tibetan yogi spent nine years in retreat and he used his Chi in ways that were utterly extraordinary I mean absolutely defined alone no not physics but I saw it you know and so it's there but the prana is is the link it's the bridge between body and mind because prana especially the subtle prana that carries on from lifetime to lifetime it is physical it is physical that is it occupies physical space it moves it moves through physical space and it interacts explicitly directly with matter with matter but it also interacts directly with consciousness because it's like an alloy is called lungs an energy mind energy mind is an alloy is not two things slapped together and it's the subtle lumison that carries on from lifetime to lifetime so it has an physical aspect to it a cognitive aspect to it and so it's the prana that is actually the bridge between the two now there I think this could be an immensely rich field of biology but so far they've abandon it for a reason very good at the time it was home hopes the German visit polymath Willy who discovered the law of conservation of energy before him Lavoisier and studied in Toccoa fide the conservation of matter that was big that was chemistry but Helmholtz gave a mathematical formulation through it from thermal energy electromagnet and so forth that energy and all these configurations and changes as always conserved so around 1860s when he was doing his seminal work then an idea came out with free reason that the physical universe is causally closed which is to say there are no non-physical influences on the physical universe otherwise the conservation of energy would be broken right and so that wiped out God and angels and anything non-physical which throws out all the supernatural the you know Delta throws out your mind your desires your motivations your mental fictions you're bodhichitta they're not physical so this means your mind has no influence on the brain and there are many neurosciences that believe that there are non which what they're saying then is the brain operates solely accordance with the laws of physics and biology the laws of physics biology are absolutely amoral amoral the word doesn't mean anything therefore your brain is an amoral organ and your mind is simply what the brain does therefore morality is just whatever the heck you say it is so you've completely demoralized all of human existence so I think it was pretty serious but now that was 1860s that was the that was the height just like it was the height of the British Empire it was also the height of scientific materialism the empting decades of 19th century Lord Kelvin thought would pretty much visit finished with physics we're pretty much done here that's before they even before Max Planck before Einstein and but the quantum mechanics in particular that showed suddenly with the uncertainty principle and so forth not so fast not so fast that there are these from from these quantum fluctuations out of the quantum of the zero-point energy of the electromagnetic field there are these quantum fluctuations and on the surface it looks like they're violating the energy time Heisenberg uncertainty principle at the you know physics for very brief periods you can violate the law of conservation of energy the shorter the period the larger violation and in fact the Big Bang may in fact be such an instance and so that airtight law from hundred fifty years ago is no longer airtight right and so prana was thrown out though this Vivi's Veta the Elan vital because I'm kind of a life energy come out kind of a life the energy that was unique to living organisms thrown out lock stock and barrel with the with the discovery of conservation of energy right but now it's not so clear that that's prohibited and if they're you know we have Tibetan Yogi's and Chinese and Hindu that really have mastery of prana and I've seen it myself with a Chinese towel master I saw it and was the Tibetan master spent nine years meditating above Samir Ling and what they can do it just defies the laws of physics so prana is the mediator it would be biophysics something is biological but it has impact on physics but also direct bearing on the mind and you're controlling the flow of prana or chi with your mind and what can you attempt it's incredible so this I call not paranormal because they they creep out with that word let alone supernatural I always thought I would simply call it relativistic because move it near the speed of light and things look really magical things it shouldn't happen time warping and matter and energy I minutes get really spooky but it's not missed magical just study Einstein is not magical at all and quantum teleportation I know the man who developed that you know Anton Zeilinger that looked like magic that looks like beam me up Scotty you know and yet it's just impeccable physics there's no magic involved but it is quantum teleportation and so this is relativistic physics it's gone beyond Newtonian than normal and what we need I believe very passionately is we need to develop relativistic psychology people developing exceptional paranormal I don't mean spooky I mean exceptional levels of mind where they have exceptional control over prana and they can direct their samadhi like a laser and that's where you start seeing how the mind can manipulate matter and what needs to happen it has to be done under control so controlled experimental conditions otherwise the scientist will always ask what have you got under the sleeve what do you got on your sleeve you know what how did you do it come on tell me what was the trick and so but if they're if they're involved from this from scratch so there's no there's nobody there's no little wires there's no tricky things now it's shammed if apart and that's all we got no wires here if they're partners because I don't want to see religion beat science and I don't want to see science beat religion either fact I've already care that much about religion I just love Dharma you know but if we work in complete collaboration then everybody wins and promise the key is the bridge between the two worlds and it can be studied yeah what else put a limit of many of the Jewish students here ask one question one is when we do the Buddhist practice it should be done either to benefit this life happiness and peace all for many lives to come yeah now it is quite obvious if the practice did be to benefits our life yes reducing your anger in things but it is you see like when we talk about benefit for the many future lives yes then it almost looks like groping in the darkness which which says what's in our future life yeah okay be not thoughts in the future yeah sure then it's almost like groping in the darkness then also the interesting thing interesting or strange thing is these days it looks like whatever experiences we have must be corroborated by scientific findings they would like us to believe that so my question to you is is it necessary that whatever our experience at the end of it must be corroborated by scientific findings because this is not possible as you already mentioned if you don't support you know the story is told so in that in that case if you don't find that support from scientific finding which is difficult then how can we develop that conviction is easier said they've done this way I'm asking this question yeah how can we table the conviction when it comes to and I and I join with the joke light-hearted but when it comes to really a whole shift in the tight Geist in the whole worldview a shift of humanity that our priorities are shifting more towards developing genuine well-being rather than just screwing after one worldly pleasure after another a worldview that's oriented to taking into account future lives and not fixating only on the affairs of this life that would be much larger than the Scientific Revolution right that kind of shift max blank made a nice ring comment here's the founder of quantum mechanics and this was this was a massive shift quantum mechanics relativity it was a massive shift there's an Heisenberg said we feel like the very ground is shaking beneath us this was a big deal for the physicists because the Newtonian physics together with electromagnetism seemed like it was rock-solid airtight and complete and then max planck einstein heisenberg saw they just torpedoed it you know and so it's very difficult for the older generation including max planck himself and other brilliant physicists who were brilliant the late 19th century it was very difficult for them to really attend to and take seriously this new evidence coming in and Max Planck made this comment he said science progresses funeral by funeral and it's just the old ones have to die off we don't kill him they're gonna die a natural death but young people like you so fogies like me set us out to graze you know that will die off slowly slowly and then young people have not yet been brainwashed into into much scientific ISM but are as smart as anybody else but have some an appreciation for the contemplative wisdom of 5,000 years of Hinduism Buddhism but also are rigorously trained in neuroscience physics whatever your field is this was his home to call some hybrids I'm not one I don't have professional training not really professional training in physics Mira science undergrad undergraduate degree in physics is not enough but your generation I'm seeing more and more going the whole way PhDs in neuroscience psychology physics etc etc and really being serious students of drama and meditating seriously Francisco Varela is pretty close he was much more of a scientist than a Content ative but he took his contemporary practice seriously and he sat at the feet of Buddhist masters with reverence that's very rare and I'm very sorry he's gone and so the answer then I think is that there needs to be a breakdown of Eurocentric pomposity and we're still up to our neck in it and we just up to our necks I'm amazed that it's still here the colonialism and imperialism on this level is still so rampant you know it really is and I find it quite unbearable frankly but your generation is not going to tolerate that I don't think so mine has so my generation organizes Buddhism science conferences where 90% of the talking is done by the scientists and then the Dalai Lama is listening as if he's a 20 year old say Oh tell me more master tell me I'm he's so humble sometimes I'm on a screen because I'm nothing humble you know they should maybe listening a little bit more but tonight next generation coming on more hybrids more openness and recognizing that that there is evidence that is credible rigorous replicable authoritative that is not physical and my favourite analogy here we're lingering on but I think you've asked a very seminal question and one can say but you know contemplative experience who can really know who's a great yogi who can really know whether you've realized this or not unless you display a city apart from that and who can really know but you know the whole field of pure mathematics it's entirely subjective when when Sir Andrew Weil solved Fermat's Last Theorem 150 page proof right how many people could follow every line of logic a tiny minority but those who are qualified after he botched it once and then fixed it those who were qualified recognize he'd actually proved it but there's no physical evidence at all it's entirely internal so for highly accomplished Yogi's like a Lingam a chi and a Duchenne remedy and it and then what cancer in Bucheon the tushy damage a rookie teaching approach in that one and on and on my my sense is that these highly and of course is holiness the highly accomplished Yogi's they know who they are His Holiness doesn't write long life prayers for anybody but he does for young Taniguchi for teaching about J and so forth they are like these highly trained mathematicians whereas all internal but they recognize and so this can be a whole this is can be a generational movement where we recognize look there's evidence that is not physical mathematic mathematicians have known this for centuries and contempt it is have known this for centuries but the mere fact that is not physical cannot mean does not mean that it's that it can't be interest objectively rigorous inter subjectively rigorous both the similar training and then you discover you discover you discover and you said yep that's what I saw that's what I saw that's just rigorous as anything and then we we cross the bridge from science being equivalent science become equivalent assign it materialism and contented of inquiry being equivalent to religion and we bridge it yes [Music] mathematics said that even mathematics where said some axioms are truth but we cannot prove it so it means the whole world so structural mathematics they invented or discovered this also there is no certainty because we cannot prove this yeah I don't I don't think it's a good paraphrase actually that is Sir Andrew Weil he basically devoted his whole life when he was a child he picked up a book on famous Last Theorem that had been unproved for like 250 years and he first early pre-pressed life imprints I imagine as a kid he decided I want to solve this problem and it took him about 50 years but he did and when it when he presented the first time there was a flaw one line of reasoning that was a flaw in 150 page proof and somebody picked it up said you didn't do it back to the drawing board and then he came back and he nailed it and then everybody said congratulations he becomes Sir Andrew he got one prize after another after another and so forth I don't think that's uncertainty is it absolute certainty no but is it certainty within conventional reality yes and there are many many mathematical proofs and there are more but for a mathematician they're more certain than the truth based on empirical evidence because there can always be more empirical evidence around the corner you know and so I really feel that we're right now living in an unprecedented but unprecedented Lee fruitful and high potential era of human history where if we go this way will actually destroy ourselves and much of the rest of the planet and go this way and we may find fields of knowledge and of compassion and a value shifting in a marvelous way where everyone wins Buddhism is enriched by the scientific community and the scientific community and the whole world is enriched by the discoveries by science and His Holiness commented in Pisa when we think for I'm paraphrasing now but he said when we take for example the great discoveries in physics we don't think that the Newton's discoveries were British truths and those in Galileo's Italian truths and Gauss German nobody thinks that because it's transcultural it doesn't belong to anybody and some of some of the most brilliant mathematicians like Ramachandran indian and then it's not an indian discovery they happen to be Indian so the button so it's his holliness is saying similarly the discoveries made with a technology of Samadhi and the science of a passion are they're coming from Buddhism but they're not Buddhist as in belonging to some religion and they're not Indian and they're not Tibetan you can be Argentinean you can be simply open-minded you can achieve schemata you don't have to take refuge in the Buddha Dhamma Sangha to achieve schemata when there are cases in the Pali Canon where some people would come to the Buddha seeking seeking guidance the Buddha gave them guidance they put it into practice they became stream enters they realized Nirvana and after realizing Nirvana we came back to the Buddha and said I take refuge in the Buddha in the Dharma and the Sangha he did not say if you want more teachings from me first take refuge let alone first give me a hundred thousand prostrations and finished the five accumulations then I'll teach him till then he never did that tonight he would just teach and sometimes people would get the benefit and then they would take refuge like going to a doctor when you have a terminal disease the doctor cures you and then you go back and say you're my primary physician which is medicine yes you're my root Lama No so this is Buddhism the Buddha really meant it as the donilon's quoted probably hundreds of times by now he is the word and never asked us to accept his his teachings simply out of faith but test it test it test it and if it's sound you'll see it sound if it's not throw it out you [Applause]

Channel: Library of Tibetan Works and Archives

Views: 91,960

Rating: 4.8632727 out of 5

Keywords: Prof. B. Alan Wallace, Alan Wallace, The Buddhist Science of Mind, Buddhist Philosophy, LTWA, Dharamshala, Library of Tibetan Works & Archives, Science, Buddhist, Mind, Talk, Religion, Tibetan Library, Library, Tibet

Id: YcBqFWtdLFI

Length: 126min 48sec (7608 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 05 2017