When we were discussing apperceptive cognition or self-knowing cognition, there was a question about whether or not... Well, let me just ask you, can apperceptive cognition or self-knowing cognition be an inattentive perception? Do you think so? And can it be a valid perception? Can it be a wrong perception? Yes, it can.

[01:04]

Can it be a subsequent perception? Can it be a valid inference? No. And what's the reason? Right. But it can be a self-knowing perception of an inference. So even conceptual cognitions are accompanied by these direct perceptions. And there was a question about whether in a direct perception, a direct yogic perception, whether the self-knowing perception could be inattentive.

[02:17]

And Fred said, no. And Fred's right. So because a... Because the yogic direct awareness is never inattentive, yogic direct awareness clearly apprehends the object that appears to it, and the apperceptive cognition or the apperceptive perception is also, in that case, must be and is attentive or ascertains this object. Now, it seems to me, although I haven't been able to find this particular point, that a direct perception, a self-knowing perception of a perception that's inattentive, I think that that perception would also be inattentive.

[03:26]

In other words, you wouldn't be able to remember a direct perception that you weren't clearly aware of when it happened. That make sense? No? Because if that was the case, For example, all inattentive direct perceptions are accompanied by apperceptive perceptions, apperceptive cognitions. They're all accompanied by it. But if the apperceptive perception that accompanies an inattentive direct perception was attentive, then you'd be aware of the things you weren't aware of, which doesn't make sense to me. So I think that the inattentive perception, which is accompanied by an apperceptive perception, would render that apperceptive perception also inattentive.

[04:39]

And an attentive direct perception accompanied by a self-knowing perception would be also attentive. And again, direct yogic perceptions are always attentive. Now again, for a cognition that's attentive, I mean for a conceptual cognition that's attentive, and that's why I gave that assignment, generally speaking, almost all, actually almost all, conceptual cognitions are attentive. You ascertain, when you have perceptual cognitions, you almost always, as far as I know, ascertain the object, clearly. And partly because you're apprehending the object through the media of this image, which makes it easier to be conscious. And what we usually call consciousness, what the average person, and there's a lot of people in this average person category,

[05:47]

You might say non-yogis, non-developed yogis, because most people, what they call conscious experience is conceptual cognition. And all those conscious conceptual cognitions are accompanied by direct perception, which will also be an attentive direct perception. It makes sense? Lots of frowns. It makes sense. However, it seems to me, and I'm just thinking what the daydreaming situation is, it seems like sometimes you're not aware of your conceptual cognitions. It's only because, I don't think that, because sometimes it seems like you call upon it or something, and you go, oh, that was all, you know. I don't know how to explain this. I was lost in thought.

[06:50]

But you don't... And I don't know what that... Coming to attention after that daydream, that means you're kind of... What? It was in a... If you review your daydream... Well, let's say... If you can review your daydream, you might be able to know that each one of those elements in the daydream, when they were happening, you knew them. Like, having a memory of a conceptual cognition doesn't mean you can recall it. For example, if you like, let's just say, you know, I tell you a story now, and every step of the story, and you're kind of paying attention, and you don't go wandering off into daydreams about the story I'm telling you. But when you finish the story, you can't necessarily tell me the story back.

[07:54]

But you might feel like, that was really interesting and I was paying attention to every element of the story as it was happening. And each one of those, and those are multiple conceptual cognitions of the story, each one of those was accompanied by a direct perception, a perceptive one, which helps you remember the story. But it's also possible that your mind is jumping around, so you have daydreams on daydreams, and that's hard to remember. But when you watch, if you're mindful, you can see that actually most of the time when your mind jumps from one to the other, it consciously jumps from, for example, meditating on the breath, it jumps to, you know, what's that sound outside? But it's not like you do know you're thinking. At that moment, what you saw outside. But if I ask you later, when you were meditating on your breath at the beginning of the period, what was the first thing that took you away from that?

[09:00]

You might not be able to tell me. Now, if I happen to have the ability to see what it was, and I told it to you, you might be able to say, oh yeah, that's right. That's what it was. Or I could have even done an experiment to do something to see if you would notice it. and then later tell you that that's what it was. Some people can actually see when you shift from one thing to the other, and they could ask you about that. So that's what I would say about that. I don't want to spend too much... I just wanted to... That was sort of like going back to something I said I would check out when we had that question before, and Fred said no. So I want to say Fred was right when he said that. The other thing that was left over from last week was we were talking about how the object of direct perception is an impermanent thing. Direct perception is aware of impermanent things directly.

[10:02]

Conceptual cognitions are also sometimes aware of impermanent things, like, for example, a sound or a person. color or a smell. Those are impermanent things which conceptual cognition can know. However, conceptual cognition apprehends those impermanent things through an image. Direct perception directly apprehends the impermanent thing, and the impermanent thing could be also called something that has its own unique characteristics. And the direct perception apprehends the unique characteristics, which is the same as apprehending a permanent thing. And the unique characteristics of each... For example, each person you meet moment you meet them is that many conditions come together to create that particular person that specific person and because many conditions create that person that person can't last for more than a moment because the conditions they depend on change and they change and then often there's another person related to the first

[11:25]

karmically and consciously related to causation. It's also uniquely created for a moment, and direct perception apprehends that person, can apprehend that person. So direct perceptions are about impermanent things. with one exception, which I'll tell you about, and probably take the rest of the class by telling you about it, but one exception is that perception can apprehend the emptiness of things. Emptiness is not an impermanent phenomenon. Now, the image through which you have conceptual cognitions is what can also be called a general characteristic of the object.

[12:28]

So you're looking at a color, you're smelling a smell, you're aware of a smell, you're aware of a sound. And if it's a conceptual cognition, you don't apprehend the sound directly, you apprehend it through the media. or the medium of an image. And the image, I said last week, Rochelle had problems with this, the image is permanent. But it's permanent in the sense that the image, it's permanent in two senses, in a way. It's permanent because it doesn't deteriorate moment by moment. And the other way it's permanent is that it's a negative phenomenon. For example, the image I have of Linda is a negative phenomena, which is simply the elimination of everything that's not Linda. But the elimination of everything that's not Linda isn't impermanent.

[13:30]

doesn't change, you know. It's like an imaginary construction of everything that's not Linda. And she'll always be that way. As an image, she'll always be the elimination of everything that's not Linda. That doesn't change moment by moment. So the image of her might change in a sense of You know, I might notice that she's growing older or something like that, and still incorporate that into the image. Still, basically, the image of her is always the same, but sort of. It's elimination of everything that she isn't. But there's nothing about duration here. It's not like the image lasts, and it's not like the elimination of everything that's not Rochelle lasts. There's no duration in this kind of permanence. There's nothing that nothing has duration. But some things are permanent in the sense that they're always that way.

[14:34]

So emptiness is permanent that way. That it's always just, it's always the way, things are always that way. So in that sense, things have this permanent nature, namely that they're empty of any kind of thought construction. So that's, in that sense, conceptual cognitions apprehended object through the media of a permanent image. Another way to say it is using the example of using a lens to see a landscape or an animal. So you're looking at the landscape without the lens. You can't see it very clearly, but it's out there. You sort of know something's out there. You put the lens on, and then you see the images, and then you see the thing through the image that the lens creates.

[15:37]

The scene changes, but the lens doesn't. So that's another way. And also the lens has this quality of... making your muscles see a certain way. And it will always do that. You say, well, what if your muscles change? Then the lens won't be able to make them, you know. So there's that fact, too. So at that point, I dropped the analogy. But in that sense, conceptual cognition gets at its object, which is an impermanent thing, unless it's emptiness or space. Space is also a conceptual thing, an imaginary thing, but it has a function, so it's a phenomenon. but it's not impermanent. But for almost all of the things, impermanent things, you get, you apprehend them through an image, and the image is, in a sense, permanent, unchanging, basically.

[16:45]

Okay, that's kind of a review of some difficult points. And now, can we go on? I passed this chart out last week, and did I leave some here? I can't find any more. No? I can make more. But anyway, most of you got one of these, right? So the discussion we just had was the kind of discussion we've been having most of the class in terms of describing how we know. And then last week we started to shift to, in some sense, taking different ways of knowing and then looking now at the, in a sense, the mental factors that accompany all these states of cognition.

[17:50]

So these states of cognition are sometimes called... These states of cognition are the mind as it knows. In other words, the mind knows that something exists. Now the mind can be wrong, but basically it is knowing, basically, that something's there. That's the basic kind of cognition, just knowing the mere existence of an object. And then we're talking about different ways that you can just know that something's there. But this kind of knowing never happens all by itself. It's always accompanied by, we can say, mental factors. But these mental factors could also be said to be, in a sense, cognitions also. The type of cognitions we've been talking about are the type which basically know that something's there, like they know that a cell's there, and that's a wrong cognition.

[19:12]

They know that a color's there, and if there is a color, it's a true cognition, and that can be perceptual or conceptual. But arising with those cognitions, now we learn there are other mental factors, or in some sense subordinate cognitions, that arise with it. And these subordinate cognitions, or mental factors, are the main knowing that something's there. They know specific aspects of the object. The basic cognition just knows something's there, and it kind of knows what's there, but it doesn't know the details or the facets or the aspects. The mental factors know these many facets of the object. And then I also mentioned this last time, and I'll mention it again, that one of the mental factors on this list is called chetana, or intention, volition, number 15.

[20:32]

Number 15 on the list, in a sense, is a mind. But in another sense, it's the pattern of all the minds that accompany the main mind. And that mental factor, or that mind, it directs the main mind to its object. And it is also the definition, it is actually the principle of karma, or the principle of activity. So these mental factors bring into knowing, bring into consciousness, the phenomena of activity. And not just the activity like when you're aware and you know some object, which could be an activity, like you see a running antelope.

[21:42]

but rather it is that these mental factors bring into consciousness itself activity. And the activity is this chetana or this intention or volition. So before we were just talking about way of knowing. Now we're talking about We have these ways of knowing, and then depending on the composition of the mental factors that are arising with the way of knowing, we have now different types of action, different types of activity. Now we bring behavior into the field of consciousness. through this study. So we're shifting again from philosophy to psychology. And psychology, I think when I first took it in as a freshman in college, they said psychology is the study of behavior.

[22:45]

And so behavior could be study of behavior that is intentional, and it could be study of behavior that's not intentional. the word karma is used in the Buddha Dharma to refer to the type of activity which is intentional. So, if there's some psychological study of behavior that's not intentional, and there could be, but I don't know if that would be considered psychology. You might call it physiology. For example, the behavior of a cell when subjected to heat. That might be considered physiology rather than psychology. So maybe psychology also is mostly concerned of motivated or intentional behavior. And again, in Buddhadharma, what we mean by karma is intentional behavior, intentional activity.

[23:54]

Intentional activity is moral psychology, is psychologically, is morally psychological, psychologically moral. Yes? Jerry? It can be aware and not aware. But the good news is that it is possible to become aware, actually deeply aware, of the intentions of heaven. But some intentions people are not aware of. Huh? It's subconscious. But it is the shape of the consciousness. So, for example... a cognition arises, and with the cognition arises an intention.

[25:02]

And the intention directs the cognition which arises towards, for example, an unwholesome object. Unwholesome in the sense of that this cognition, the reason for turning the cognition towards this object is because of past unskillful action. And that passion and skillful action directs the attention to this object, which will probably produce new unwholesome action, a new unwholesome intention, new unwholesome... It's like a pattern of behavior. It's a pattern, which is the definition of behavior. It's the definition of the principle of behavior. And the other thing about it is that it has consequence. And when you first hear about this mental factor of karma, I mean this mental factor of chaitanya, when you first hear about karma, the Buddha says, well, what do we call karma?

[26:11]

skillful action. And the definition of skillful action is action that has, you could say, good results. And what do you call unskillful action? It's action that has good results. It seems kind of circular. But another way to put it is that the emphasis here is on the effect it has on life. So its behavior in terms of what effect does it have on life, what effect does it have, what are the consequences. So it's temporal and it's causational. It's causation, and it has to do with concern with results or consequences for the living organism and for the community of organisms. And the mental action itself has consequence, and the mental action itself is not exactly a consequence of... It is a consequence of past mental action.

[27:28]

So your present mental action is a consequence of past mental action. However, it's not deterministic, so past mental action doesn't completely determine present mental action. It is possible that past mental action conditions you to think a certain way. And again, thinking is another word for volition or intention. So past karma conditions your mind to be shaped a certain way, thinking a certain way. What you're looking at could be, for example, a Dharma teacher. which tells you, perhaps, about what's going on right now and tells you to look at it. Now, if your past karma is such that you're going to think in such a way that you can't listen to that, then, in that particular case, the effect of that teaching about what's going on, which could turn your attention back to look at what's going on,

[28:45]

might be very small. But there's other cases where your mind would be conditioned by past thoughts to think a certain way, but then you might get teachings coming to you which, even though you think a certain way, that way of thinking would allow you to listen to the teaching and let it change the way you're experiencing what you're doing. So you actually are able to allow teachings about the nature of mind come into the mind In other cases, you wouldn't be able to, but still, there would be an effect of hearing something, even if you couldn't sink in. Okay. The Chinese word, a Chinese character that is used to translate chaitanya, and could be translated as intention, but is often translated as thinking, it's composed of two characters.

[30:09]

One character is an ideogram or a picture of a rice paddy, a rice field. It looks kind of like a rice field. And the character underneath is mind. So the character that they built, the thinking, was a character meaning the pattern of mind. So the word the Chinese used for thinking was, if you look at it, it says thinking is the pattern of the mind. And they used that word to translate chaitanya. Chaitanya, in a sense, is the pattern of the mind. And it's the overall pattern. It's not the specific little, each specific little element. It's sort of the pattern of all the things that are going on. And one of the aspects of the pattern is that the mind is directed towards objects. And one of the things about, and so one of the patterns of consciousness is that mind is directed towards objects bypassed

[31:12]

Minds being directed toward past objects. So minds that have been going in certain directions that have been influenced to look at certain things, because of past minds that have been looking at certain things, produce future minds which will look at certain things. And the things that were looked at in the past will influence the things that are looked at in the present. Now the things in the past oftentimes are gone. So we have to apply now this thinking pattern to the present situation. If it were exactly the same object, then the way of thinking about it would be more likely just about the same. So if the mind is directed toward... If the mind thinks in unwholesome ways, that means it thinks about objects in unwholesome ways, so that tends to produce another mind which thinks about objects in unwholesome ways.

[32:17]

The shape of the mind is that it looks at things which go with an unwholesome tendency, and now because of that there's a tendency to look at things unwholesomely again, unskillfully again. So this shape is transmitted. It's not exactly the same, because other things are changing, but there is some tendency, because of thinking unwholesomely in the past, to think unwholesomely with what's going on now, what's being presented to you now. However, there's new things that can be presented. So, like, there'd be a tendency for some people to see, for example, a Buddha, and they have lots of unwholesome tendencies, But they also have some wholesome tendencies. And now with the presence of the skill of the Buddha, the Buddha might be able to offer them something which will somehow provoke a shift in this perhaps not very skillful pattern could shift because the meeting of the skill of the Buddha with the person could shift it.

[33:29]

And it's not exactly like the Buddha can come and shift people's consciousness, but what the Buddha can do is the Buddha can say something to the person, not to get them to give up their unwholesome tendencies in terms of greed and hate, but maybe get them to look at what's going on, because that wouldn't necessarily be a big diversion of their main trip But they might say, oh, well, I, you know, and there's something about that presence that maybe make you think, well, I could look at myself. So the person has to do the work of looking inwardly to see what's going on. And yet, if they're able to listen to the teaching, which this person can give to them because this person sees kind of where they're at. Because this person has the background of understanding mind, her own and this person's, they can send a message to this person which influences, which can be taken in and it will change the pattern.

[34:33]

So there's a possibility of positive evolution even in an unwholesome state. And the unwholesome state is unwholesome because this person has had past unwholesome states. One other teaching about Buddha from the Buddha is that human beings generally have quite a bit of background good karma. The Buddha had a very high opinion of human beings. He knew that they were totally blind, but they were totally blind in an auspicious way because they had the ability to speak and understand language, and the Buddha was able to give them teachings in language. So the Buddha can also educate animals that don't have language, but the ability to teach is much stronger for the Buddha with the people, with the beings that could understand his speech, human speech.

[35:42]

Good is happiness. Happiness for the whole thing would be a bigger happiness, wouldn't it? No, it would be winning a million dollars and being happy when you win a million dollars. Some people win a million dollars and they're not even happy when they win a million dollars. They're so depressed. There are some people that if you give them a million dollars, they will not come out of their depression. I mean, there are quite a few millionaires who are depressed. Billionaires, probably. There's a perfectly good example. Money does not make depressed people stop being depressed.

[36:55]

Right. And... And good resolve is basically happiness or joy in the midst of whatever situation you're in. And I guess you could say, what about somebody who is happy about being cruel to someone? Somebody wants to take revenge on somebody. And then they're finally able to do it and they feel good. Would that be skillful karma? In a sense, it would be.

[37:56]

A person who was somewhat skillful, they were able to skillfully execute their vengeance and they felt good about that. So in some sense, that would be skillful karma in a sense. Hmm? Well, you know, you could say something like that, yeah. However, there's also a bad result there because since the person did that, that's going to have consequence. One of the consequences beyond that momentary kind of pleasure at succeeding in the revenge program is that way of thinking which wanted to harm someone and felt good about it that will tend to make the person want to do that again. And if the person does do it again, if there's other people that the person wants to take revenge on, if the person would then do that with them, and also still feel good about that, each one feel good, one after another feel good about, riding along with these nice kind of good feelings that the person's having about eliminating all these people,

[39:16]

Riding along with that is the repetition of this cruelty. So the first cruelty was pretty bad, even though the person kind of felt good about the results, the short-term results. But if the person just did one cruel thing and then the results were something they felt kind of good about... and that cruel thing they did didn't repeat itself, then that would be an example of not the law of karma. The law of karma is if you do something cruel and you like the result, the important consequence is that you'll tend to do something cruel again and like the result. and tend to do something cruel again and like the result. That would be the tendency.

[40:19]

That would be the consequence that's more important than the short-term effect of doing a cruel thing you felt good about and felt some pleasure about. The much more important result, consequence, would be that you would be inclined to do that again. And that to say the very least that you'd suffer, you know, worse than suffer. I mean, unspeakable suffering from doing that kind of thing. Plus being trapped into it because the habit's so strong that you can't, even when you start to see that this kind of way of being, of wanting to take, the reason why people want to take revenge on you is because they got hurt or something that they loved got hurt. And they feel sometimes that they can't get away from the hurt, that they're submerged in and chained to the hurt.

[41:19]

And they think if they took revenge that this would free them from this. And then if they do it and they feel good about it, then they're even much, much, much more chained to the terrible situation that they thought that this would get them out of. And that would be the actual result rather than the temporary positive feeling. The positive feeling, actually, that comes from being cruel to people might not be coming from the cruelty. It might be coming from some other time when you did something kind. And the kindness just happened to mature right after you did the revenge. But you confuse it, and then you think, I'm glad I did the revenge. Huh? You feel good, but it may not be from doing the revenge. It may be from doing some kindness. If I do some cruel thing and I feel good about it and I feel pleasure and then I feel glad that I did the cruel thing, that's much worse than doing the cruel thing, feeling pleasure for some reason and feeling really bad that I did the cruel thing.

[42:37]

Many times people do cruel things and they do not feel pleasure right afterwards. Sometimes they feel fairly rapidly really, really bad that they did a cruel thing. They thought doing the cruel thing would be good and they do it and they feel really bad. They feel negative sensation plus they feel tremendous shame and they also feel like they're burying themselves deeper into this thing that they are trying to get out of by the cruelty. Yes, sorry. . In a way, you know, the way I'd like to talk about it tonight, I'm not going to say no to that, but I'm going to turn that around.

[44:01]

And the way I would turn it around is that when you, for example, if you think negatively about life, if you don't appreciate life, you know, if you don't appreciate the object you're seeing, if you don't feel positive and grateful for what you see, In other words, you think about things, the way you think about what's happening is you think it's no good. You think it's etc. Negative, negative, bad, bad. That's the way you think about it. What's being said here is that that way of thinking, that's your mind. You could say your mind is being directed towards a negative object, towards an unbeneficial object. You could say it that way. But you could also say that because of past thinking, your mind is shaped towards being negative about what's happening, and the mind is shaped towards thinking about what's happening in an unbeneficial way. Rather than saying the object's unbeneficial, I would say, because of past karma, I have an unbeneficial way of thinking about the objects I meet.

[45:07]

Now, is that that my past karma brought an unbeneficial object to me? You could say it that way, but I think tonight I would say it's that the past karma of thinking unskillfully about things, meaning to think about them in such a way that you'll think about what's happening in the future that is unbeneficial and unhappy and painful and bondage. That's the way you'll think about it. So this is saying the world isn't actually out there being mean to you. What's being mean to you is the way... Karma's the bad guy. Karma's responsible for all the bad stuff, not the people. But the people are the place where karma lives. To blame it on the people, you know, how can you change people? To blame it on the karma, if you change the karma, if you change the way of thinking, then the world will change. And the world we make is a world that's made by karma. Karma makes the world, but makes the physical world.

[46:11]

I'm actually saying the physical world is made by karma. But tonight, to say that unskillful karma has the consequence of drawing unskillfulness towards us, I would say tonight that it's more like it has the consequence of whatever comes towards us when we think about it in an unskillful way again. And skillful karma is the kind of karma that when things come to meet us, we think about them skillfully. So if sickness comes, you could say sickness comes because you have bad karma. You did unskillful actions, so now you get sick. I would say it's more like sickness arises, and sickness is not outside the causal situation. Sickness and health, it's all happening together because the physical world

[47:15]

which has your body in it and my body in it and has your teeth in it and my tooth decay in it, all those physical phenomena are in the world created by karma, which is arising now. But what I want to emphasize tonight is that whatever comes, a healthy tooth or a decayed tooth, you can think about that skillfully or unskillfully. If you think about it skillfully, the results will be that you'll think about other teeth skillfully and other bodies skillfully and other illnesses skillfully and other health conditions help. You will think about what's happening skillfully, and the more you think about things skillfully, the more you get close to the point of realizing that karma, which is the source of all our suffering and ignorance, is actually by its very nature not karma and not the source of suffering.

[48:21]

In other words, you can become free of karma by understanding how it works. And to that I'm emphasizing not that that action brings on the physical world, a bad physical world. It does bring on the physical world, though. My karma and your karma and Fred's karma and Bernard's karma and animals' karma, other animals, all of our karma brings on a physical world. It does bring the physical world with sickness and health in it. And it brings on the appearance And the world that's brought on can be thought of in various ways. And the ways it's thought of are conditioned by the ways you thought before. And the ways you thought before, for example, thinking, karma, is basically temporal. So the world that appears to you is a temporal world.

[49:26]

But the world is not temporal aside from being a consequence of thinking karmically, which is temporal. When you understand how the temporal world is created by karma, you can realize that the world is not temporal. When you see how the world of birth and death is created by karma, it's not that the world of birth and death is brought to you. It's that the world is brought to you, and because of past karma, we interpret it as birth and death. When you see how it's your interpretation of the world that creates birth and death, then you have what's called freedom from birth and death. So right in karma you realize no karma, and right in birth and death you realize no birth and death, which is called nirvana. However, nirvana, just like birth and death, in itself is not birth and death.

[50:28]

Karma in itself is not karma. Nirvana in itself is not nirvana. Karma in itself is not karma. Nirvana in itself is not nirvana. So when you realize that birth and death is by its own nature not birth and death. It's not that birth and death isn't birth and death. Birth and death, of course, is birth and death. But by its nature, it's also not birth and death. And karma is karma, but by its nature, it's not karma. If you penetrate what karma is, you'll realize karma is not karma. And when you realize that, you turn, you pivot, you are liberated from the world of karma, and your heart has now moved to the world of no karma. However, the world of no karma itself is the world of karma. Therefore, your heart turns from the world of no karma

[51:33]

to the world of karma. And when you see that the world of birth and death is a result of the way you've been thinking, which accompanies all cognition, and you see how that works, you realize that birth and death itself is not birth and death. It is nirvana. And when you realize nirvana, you realize nirvana itself is not nirvana. It is birth and death. So you don't stay in you don't stay in karma. The only time you stay in karma is if you don't study it. And even if you study it, you stay in it for a little while until you study it deeply. And even if you study it deeply, you keep studying it deeply until you study it all the way to the end. At the end of studying karma, at the end of studying your thinking, the shorter your consciousness, at that point you realize that this shape is fundamentally not this shape, and thinking, intention, and so on are not.

[52:39]

But in the realm of where thinking is still being studied, it has this temporal quality. It is temporal, and it is the past and the present and between the past and the future is the present, and the present is where the karma is. Your present karma, your present thinking, connects your past with your future. It's temporal, and we have to study that. And you can study it, because your present thinking is the shape of your present mind. It's the way you're thinking, it's the way your mind is tending, and it connects past and future. And not only that, but as you study this, the link between this past and this future which would ordinarily be expected from this past and the kind of thinking that this past leads to in the present and the future that this kind of present thinking would lead to, sometimes in this present situation, it kind of turns, instead of just a link which is going straight, turns into a link like being a switch in a railroad track.

[53:48]

And you switch from one future to another. In other words, you don't necessarily keep going in the direction of thinking selfishly forever. Not to mention you don't keep thinking unwholesomely forever. You can switch from this is unwholesome thought, which is conditioning this thought, which connects this past thought to a future thought. which should be unwholesome, but it doesn't always go that way. Sometimes the past unwholesome thought leads to a present wholesome thought, which produces a different future. Not only that, but the future that happens can change the past through karma. The future can change the past through karma. Just like usually the past changes the future through karma. Karma is the present. And karma has consequences.

[54:49]

Karma is the aspect of our life that's sort of the focus point of temporality, cause and effect, and bondage, and suffering. But by studying it, there's a possibility of becoming free of it. by the very nature of the process, but also the nature of the process is that becoming free of it does not mean that you stay in freedom, stay in what freedom, how the freedom manifested originally. That you'd also study that process and become free of that process and be able to return to karma to prove that you're free. Yes? Yes. It changed the past.

[55:52]

through karma which changes the future. You do something in the present which creates a future which changes your past. So if you have, like, I don't know what, abusive parents, in other words, you think they were abusive, and you could have present karma, which is that you think they're abusive, And that would be, if you wanted to keep them being abusive, keep a nice steady abuse pattern here. I thought of them as abusive in the past, so in the present I'm going to remember to think of them as abusive. I thought of them as abusive in the past and had low quality parents in the past. I did that. So it should be pretty easy for me to think of them as low quality abusive parents in the present. And if I do that, then that would make a nice link to thinking of them as abusive parents in the future.

[57:10]

Does that make sense? And that's usually what, often that's what happens. Thinking of them that way in the past causes us, becomes a condition for thinking of them that way in the present, and that those two together make a nice thing to think of them that way in the future. And there is to some extent in us, I wish, to make sure that our parents will always be thought of as unskillful and abusive. And so that in the infinite future, we'll have abusive parents. So then back there, they'll always be enshrined as abusive parents. They'll never get changed because, you know, we're going to keep that going, going to keep that story going. Let me just say a little bit more. But if in the present you would consider thinking of them in a different way, Then, although you've been thinking about them in this way of very negative, bad parents for a long time, and one moment of thinking of them slightly differently probably won't upset the apple cart, but there's a chance that it would.

[58:17]

And that's why you don't want to think that. You don't want to think, maybe they weren't so bad. Maybe they actually were the greatest parents that I could have possibly had. But I shouldn't think that because that would, you know, That's hard to think because I've thought that some other way all this time. But it can happen. Things can happen. For some reason, you can think that thought. And that thought, well, all this other conditioning is behind you, but that thought becomes a new condition that you hadn't thought of for a long time, that you had great parents. And then it's possible that that would condition the birth of another one of those thoughts. and another, and another, and another. And this future now is changed from the future we thought we were going to have. We've got this future of thinking well of our abusive parents. If this goes on much longer, the history is going to get revised. Studying karma is revisionist.

[59:18]

It will revise your story. It will not It will not destroy anything. It will not annihilate those past stories. It will revise them. But when they get revised in the future, they get revised in the past. In other words, the whole situation, not just the future, but the past and the future and the present can change and are changing. The story can change. And when the present story changes, it changes the future stories. And when the present and the future stories start changing, the past stories... What's his name? Kierkegaard, I just... Kierkegaard has finally got into my life. I've been trying for years. He's finally got in. And he was like, you know, zero for 50 years after he died, or more. You know, he was just completely suppressed because he questioned the authority of the Danish church.

[60:27]

The Danish church. And... But somebody started thinking differently about him around 1920. And then a lot of people started thinking differently about him. And he went from, like, you know, totally, like, put-down guy to be considered, you know... This is an amazing, amazing being. Now, people are thinking about Shakespeare a certain way, thinking about Shakespeare a certain way, and somebody thinks a different way. And then the past starts changing. There was a time when he was not so cool, and now he's cool. And he can change again. The past can change through the present, which changes the future. The present just changing is not enough. So again, it's not enough that you think your parents were not the most wonderful beings that they could possibly be. You haven't been thinking that thought, and you think it once. That's not enough.

[61:30]

It has to change the future, too, which it will. But you have to see it, and then you have to join it. And the more you join it in the present and change the future, and join it in the present and change the future, the more the past gets changed. Without trying to avoid any of the old stories, It's just that they change. I used to think they were this way, and now I think they're this way, and they and I together are free. They are free. They've been dead a long time, and they are now liberated. This is the Mormons do that, right? They're trying to liberate, they're trying to sign your parents up and make them Mormons and liberate them. But there's something to that. that you can liberate your parents after they're dead by studying your mind. Yeah? I think of one person thinking of you as a parent, or not a parent, but wherever the parents can change that person's own comment as well as the parent's own comment.

[62:42]

Yes. A lot of times people, you know, come to me after, well, after someone dies, right? And they're grieving, and to a certain extent I have a very positive frame on grieving over lost things. But at a certain point, when I feel a person's getting close to being done with their grieving, or I sometimes as from the shift now to how to make this person who has died make their life a success. You can make your ancestors' life a success. You can make the people that you've lost, you can make their life successful because they are part of why you are a good person. But some people feel like, you know, It's almost that they think, if my parents die and I totally fall apart, that shows that I love them.

[63:49]

Well, yes, it does. I can see that. But it doesn't necessarily show that they're good parents, which is one of the main relationships to have with you. For you to become a great person, that would show that they were great parents. And that also shows you love them. But for you to fall apart, in some sense, then what you're doing is you're changing the past too. You have these wonderful parents, and then so you think you should fall apart because you have wonderful parents, but then what you do is you change the history and you make your parents bad parents. Because bad parents have kids who meditate improperly. You think they're great parents, but you say, well, they were so great, now they're gone. I'm not going to meditate anymore. I'm not going to look at my mind anymore. I'm going to pay homage to them by becoming totally depressed.

[64:52]

Or you've just put your parents in the role of the devil. If they were good, you should prove it by thinking how good they were And by thinking how good they were, period, not thinking how good they were, therefore I should think about being depressed, but think about how good they were until you are thinking very positively about the whole universe. And then you have just made your parents into great Buddhas. You must have had great parents because look at you now. You're making your parents a success. And if they were successes before, now you're just, what do you call it, you're adorning their success by your continual positive thinking, appreciative thinking, skillful thinking.

[65:58]

But basically you see what this is, is that you're becoming free of time. in this way. You're becoming liberated from the temporality. So again, we have to turn into the temporality in order to become free of it. And when you're free of it, then future can change past. Of course, past can change future. It all becomes one completely interdependent wonder. And to prove it is really so, you even come back into the world of time, you know, where things are all chopped up in little pieces again to see if you can even in that realm, continue your practice. So this is how looking at the states of consciousness and meditating on what composes them and how the composition is the shape and composition of the moment, this kind of study, and becoming more and more thorough about this, is itself more wholesome

[67:02]

And also, it is studying the unwholesomeness and the wholesomeness. Because again, studying unwholesomeness is wholesome. And studying wholesomeness is also wholesome. Studying unskillfulness is skillful. Being aware of unskillfulness is skillful. Being unaware of unskillfulness, did your daughter ask a question about that last week? Yeah, yeah. So being mindful of unskillfulness is skillful. Being mindful of cruel thought, you know, what are the consequences? Where did it come from? Being mindful of that is skillful. And not being mindful of a cruel thought, not being mindful is unskillful, because then the cruel thought just rolls forward. And the future cruelness proves the past cruelness. They were cruel to me, so I'm going to be cruel to them.

[68:05]

That's my present thing. Right now, I want to say, you are cruel to me, so I'll be cruel to you. That connects the past. Seeing I saw cruelty in the past, I see it in the future. And the present connects them. And that's unskillful. To bring skill into the situation is to notice, oh, I think about the past as being cruel, and now I'm thinking about the present in a cruel way. And that's going to produce a cruelty to the future. That observation is skillful. And the more I see that, the more I realize, yeah, I did see the past cruelness. I did see the present cruelness because of the past cruelness. And that did produce future cruelness. But now I see, actually, I don't want to do this anymore. By watching it, you get to think a new way. The observation of the old way produces a new way. called, this is really, this is really the problem.

[69:07]

And this isn't helping anybody. And this isn't even hurting the people that I want to hurt. It's just hurting everybody. And me, most of all. And when you see that, that's right. And you've just had a kind of valid cognition by studying your karma. See, now the cognitions are evolving because you're studying the shapes of the cognitions. Steven. When you talk about studying your mind, it's not kind of self-explanatory. So I have a feeling that when you're thinking, you need to remind yourself to get one's mind looking in, in order to act and feel like yourself. Definitely. And that way of thinking is also skillful, bringing that into it. And that way of thinking would also tend to make you open to listening to other people.

[70:16]

So then they can start making inputs into this causal process and into this thinking. So then you can get all kinds of new ways of thinking that you wouldn't think up yourself, but that your friends would think up, especially your friends who, like, you know, you're considering and thinking of as potential inputs in the skillfulness process. Yeah, very much. That would be part of it. Yes? Yes. So you're thinking about your parents, OK? If they're alive or dead, your parents are things you can think about. Ordinarily, when you think about them, you think about them conceptually.

[71:19]

In other words, through an image. And the image is, as we said, it's generic or somewhat permanent, okay? So now I'm looking at my parents right now. I'm looking at my parents right now. My parents are so-called not alive, but I'm looking at both of them. I can look at them backwards or forwards, but I see my parents now. And basically I'm looking at an image. Now, with that image... I have this conceptual cognition. Now, what is the shape of this conceptual cognition? That's the way I'm thinking about my parents. And the way I think about my parents right now is influenced by the way I thought about my parents before. And the way I thought about them before is the definition of my karma relative to them. The way I thought about them before was my basic karmic response to them, and then that basic thinking ramified into the way I talked to them and the hand gestures and body gestures through which I related to them.

[72:26]

So those physical and vocal and mental acts with my parents in the past, they tend to, they led to me thinking about them in the present. Many presences were conditioned by those pasts. But all those presences influenced by all those pasts, those were all thinking about my parents. through, usually, through the medium of an image of them. So the image may be not changing, but the thinking is changing. However, even though it's changing, it's sometimes changing in a way of just getting deeper and deeper into a rut. But I have news for you. I feel like, and I don't know what would have happened if I hadn't practiced, but my way of thinking about my parents did evolve tremendously during the almost 40 years of practice. Now with my father, he died before I practiced very long. But I continue to change my way of thinking about my father the longer I practice.

[73:29]

And I make my father, because of my transformation in my way of thinking and becoming free of my way of thinking to studying my thinking, my father becomes more and more wonderful. With all his problems, I remember his problems, But now I see his problems as gifts to me. And now I see his problems as his life being sacrificed to show me the wholesome way to live. His unwholesome, unskillful ways of living. The more I meditate on them and see the skillful and unskillful ways to think about his unskillfulness, the more I appreciate him and the more he's a successful father. Because he is the father of the person who was thinking about him, has evolved to be more and more appreciative of him without denying his unskillfulness and the fact that he drank and hoped that he was a big, beautiful, intelligent person who drank and smoked and ate improperly and didn't get any exercise and overworked.

[74:37]

He was a tragic person and his life It was a great benefit to me. And if I'm of any benefit to you, it's because of him. If I'm any good in the world, it's because of him. And he had a lot of bad habits. And he lived out. But we make him. We make him a great man with all his problems. If our thinking evolves. But still, I kind of like I still kind of see that same kind of guy, you know, this handsome guy. It's kind of the same image. And the same with my mother, you know. But my mother just recently died, so I had a lot more years with her to actually act out a new way of being with her, of getting over thinking about her in ways that were conditioned by ways that I thought about her, which were conditioned by ways I thought about her, which were conditioned by, and so on. I started to think of her in new ways and be with her in new ways because I studied the way I used to think about her.

[75:45]

And I studied the way I thought about her now was conditioned by the way I thought about her in the past. My thinking was transformed from meditation on my thinking. My karma in relationship to my mother, while she was still alive, changed a lot because I studied my karma in relationship to my mother. My karma in relationship to my mother, while she was still alive, changed a lot because I studied my karma in relationship to my mother. And it got better and better and better. And in the end, you know, like one of the last times I saw her, my mother smoked for 72 years. And she was, you know, she didn't start when she was one. Yeah. Studied for 72 years. No, she studied for 72 years. And she tried to quit many times.

[76:52]

And she had other habits, other unhealthy habits too. But smoking was like, that's a big one. So towards the end of her life, you know, I'd go to see her, and she was still smoking. She stopped. Stopped. She was smoking. And she had some pals at this place she lived, very nice place she lived, with lots of pals, some of whom smoked. And they would go outside and smoke. And I actually went with them. And I actually, one of the last times I filmed my mother, I actually had a good time being out there with the secondary smoke outside with them. And I actually... It was just great. I wasn't down on her smoking anymore at all. And it was like I was free. And she got to enjoy me being with her, with me being free. She partook in it. She was able to have a nice time while she was doing the thing, which my brother had been struggling with her to get her to quit for many years.

[77:53]

Anyway, just lots of wonderful things happened towards the end there. Without erasing anything, without denying anything, it can change. Because the future can change. Because the present can change. You can have new responses in the present. But you have to study. We have to study. You have to notice what's going on. Otherwise, the main thing about karma is it keeps itself going. It wants to do it again. The thinking wants to think the same thing again, wants to make a new little baby of itself as best it can under the circumstances. Yes? Meditation, in this particular meditation, I talked to two meditations this course. One is, in the herd, there'll be just the herd.

[78:54]

In the herd, there will be just the herd. In the scene, there will be just the scene. That type of meditation is give up discursive thought. That's one type of meditation. That's a calming type. Now we're talking about meditating on karma. Observing your karma is meditating. It's contemplating karma. And I'm suggesting to you, by studying your karma, which is to study this psychophysical pattern of the different constituents of the moment, accompanying these cognitions, studying the karma and seeing whether it's skillful or unskillful, and seeing how it's conditioned by the past, and seeing how the present way conditions the future, studying this is meditation. Now, if you're calm, it will be easier to study this. But if you're not calm, to become calm, you don't do this kind of meditation. So I'm calm enough and you're calm enough for us to discuss this in this class. But if we were calmer, our discussion would even be more skillful and settle into us more.

[79:58]

So there's two types of meditation. So the one I'm recommending in this class, mostly we're working on now, is to study your mind. And I'm trying to discuss with you how you can actually study your mind and become free of, particularly become free of karmic patterns, because karma is what basically is causing our bondage and suffering. But karma is also which, what, when you study it, will be the place you'll become free of karma and free of suffering. So that's basically what I'm bringing up tonight and which I'll go into more next week. Does that make sense? And that's a different type of meditation from tranquility meditation. They're both highly recommended. Okay? Thank you very much. Also, by the way, there's a camp here. It's called Camp Open View.

[80:59]

This camp has karma for kids. Do you want to send your kids to karma camp? There it is. They had tranquility meditation and study of karma.

[81:11]

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