Thank you again for being here in this Winter Branches program. Yeah, and I kind of look forward to the Taisho during the day to see if I can say something. And then I'm also faced by, you know, I can't really say much. It's just... week is already well into its middle and what can we do? As usual, I'm going to have to depend mostly on you to do the work of this on your own. Hmm. Yeah, and I wish I could, you know, it's been a long time since I studied the Abhidharma constructively.

[01:10]

It was the very first part of my practice. When I noticed, you know, different, yeah, different nuances of mind or something like that. And I decided I better find out what Buddhism has to say about the mind. Buddhism divides the path into precepts or virtue or morality and mental development and wisdom and we can say Abhidharma is the process of mental development

[02:12]

It's not to educate the mind about things, but to educate the mind itself. And it was a wonderful process of discovery for me. Yeah, noticing the categories, the many categories. And of course many of the categories are just versions of each other in different, the same mental state or attitude. over and over again, but in different functional categories. And we could say that Buddhism, the Abhidharma, is a phenomenological

[03:32]

Not an ontological philosophy. So it's not a philosophy of being, but a philosophy of phenomena, of perception. Yeah, so you can Now let's look at the wonder that anything exists at all. We have two choices faced with this. Based on our experience. Only two categories of our experience that we can imagine is that everything had a beginning. Then you need a beginner.

[05:02]

Or you need some idea of what was before the beginning. Or you can have another view, which is everything always existed. There was no beginning. It makes a big difference which you choose. Let's say simply that yogic cultures chose it always existed. And time is... Yeah, endless. As you know, we chant kalpas. Don't we chant that just before we start the tesha? We say kalpas. Kalpas, yeah. I forget one. 1,420,000,000 years or something like that.

[06:03]

Or it's imagined if you had a cube of stone, one mile on each side. And every hundred years you'd... just brushed a piece of silk across it. When it was worn down, this would be a kalpa, not even the end of a kalpa. And when within a kalpa, whole world systems are created, exist and are destroyed. And within a Kuiper whole world systems are created, exist and are destroyed again? Yes. This floor is like silk.

[07:06]

But it didn't take a kalpa for Otmar and others to sand it. Or like velvet. Now we have some brief kalpa floor here. So if you have this imagination of Endless kalpas, and the kalpas are unimaginable lengths of time. You can see that really all you have is the present. Now, I noticed, you know, again, small things and you guys have spoken about things. And as I said this morning, like going into the details of the music, each note.

[08:18]

For me it's almost like going back to my initial practice to hear you describe your experience of body and mind. If I let myself just settle into what you're saying, To feel what you're saying and not think about it. It's almost like, it feels like my experience too. I'm trying to find some way to speak to all this. As one could make the choice, have things always existed or did they have a beginning?

[09:21]

Is the distinction, we can make a similar choice, is the distinction between me, say, and an object, one of being and non-being, Between me and an object? Yeah, between you and an object. Or even between Neil and myself. Is it a distinction between subject and object or material and mind and so forth? Or is it a distinction in perception, in the way we know things? Of course, the rock out there, the window, the floor, they're not being in the way Neil and I are being. And you too, by the way. The Abhidharma doesn't emphasize that kind of difference.

[10:52]

The Abhidharma emphasizes that there are distinctions in how we know them. They're all constituents, constituent factors. They're constituted factors. Constituted or constituent. In English, constituted is a little clearer to say. And they're constituted from each other. They're dependent on each other. So we're all dependent on each other. And these constituent or constituted factors are called dharmas.

[12:04]

Now, this is, again, a long process to come to. everything's interdependent and yet we see things separately. We see relationships and we can call these momentary relationships dharmas. Now I've often wondered why What's the difference between Buddhism and the earlier teachings, Indic teachings, teachings in India? I would say it's, to my mind right now, it's the rigor of the worldview that the Buddha and his descendants brought to these experiences.

[13:16]

The rigor of the world view. Because all the various meditative experiences and states, etc., were all present before the Buddha, before the historical Buddha. So I'm mentioning this because it's not just your meditation practice that counts, it's the rigor of the worldview in which you notice these experiences. The worldview is not added by belief. It doesn't come from belief. The worldview arises from these experiences. But the consequences of these experiences were thought through very carefully by the Buddha and the Sangha that followed him.

[14:48]

Now, the Rig Veda and the Vedic teachings go back in written form a couple, two thousand or more years before Christ. And much farther back in oral tradition. And they had an idea of, I don't know how to pronounce it, spelled R-T-A. It sounds like a radio station. KRTA or something. Anyway, RTA. And it may be one of the sources of the idea of Dharma. Because they also perceived The fundamental nature, nature, reality, was change.

[16:07]

Everything's changing. Now, again, what I'm trying to do here is look at some very simple ways of looking at the world. And the consequences of that. Because I think the Abhidharma will make most sense to you if you can feel the way it assumes the world is, or the way it looks at the world. And if you can see that, hey, I could look at the world that way too, it makes sense. Then the The Abhidharmic teachings will make, yeah, will unfold quite, I think, easily for you.

[17:20]

And what you want to see is them unfold in a parallel way in yourself. Or perhaps in a different way, but in a similar process. Like my definition of consciousness is certainly... a similar process, although it's a somewhat different way of looking at consciousness. The early Vedic teachings also didn't really look at entities, they looked at activity.

[18:24]

If you say the world has a beginning, then you start looking at created things. But if you say that there's no beginning, If you say there's no beginning, then you're looking at continuing things that change. Or even, I can't even say continuing things that change, you're looking at change itself. because our culture tends to assume and other cultures as well that there's entities that have qualities that change and that's deeply embedded in our thinking in our language our culture our habits our

[19:32]

The hope of getting that thoroughly out of you, which is exactly what ignorance means in Buddhism. Ignorance mind? Why ignorance? It means less man-paying. I see. Okay, thanks. A Buddhist would say, strictly speaking, strictly a Buddhist would say, the chance of getting this ignorance of an assumed entity out of your system is very small indeed. But we can do it by the mental development of meditation and mindfulness. If we're really open to meditation, noticing our assumed views.

[21:17]

When you have a phenomenological philosophy instead of an ontological philosophy, the subjective experiencer is only an assumption. Then that's what I said this morning. So there are only qualities. There's no entity which has qualities. There are qualities and we assume an entity. So the way consciousness functions, is it assumes predictability or entities.

[22:25]

So, before you get into the categories of the Abhidharma, you have to retrain your consciousness. And you can do it in little things like seeing trees instead of trees. And train yourself in a way. Remind yourself. To see activity. To notice relationships. And notice when there is an implicit assumption of entity-ness or permanence. So if we have kalpas and kalpas, no beginning, then when we see change, and we only see change, because there's no permanence, there's only change, so we don't form

[23:54]

We don't have the assumption there's a beginning. If you have an assumption there's a beginning, Here we're going to say that things have a beginning and an end. And some sort of thing exists in between the beginning and the end. But if you assume that there's no beginning or end, Then things between what we call a beginning and what we call an end are also changing. No, we know this. I mean, you know that intellectually. And you know that through your practice. But to really know it in your views that are behind your thinking, that's more difficult.

[25:15]

And Abhidharma is trying to take those views of, those assumptions of a perceiving subject and entities away. And Abhidharma then doesn't say, just, oh, that's the case, sort of philosophically or scientifically. It says, actualize this in your mind. mind and body. Or rather, activate it in the activity of your mind and body. Okay, so in the early Rig Veda, or Vedas, they saw this, they had this word, RTA. Yeah, real-time actualization.

[26:20]

No, no, I don't think so. Might be. Okay. And RTA... RTA. RTA... Let's call it RT. Okay, RTA meant the course of things. So if you see that everything's changing, what conclusion do you draw from that? How do you relate to that? Well, they said, everything's changing, but there's a kind of order in the change. So RTA became the word for change and order. Or the coursing, the course of things.

[27:40]

And we say in the more accurate translation for the Heart Sutra is the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara was coursing in deep meditations. And we say a ship, the word in English for a ship going to the water, is it's coursing. So even if this has been an important word for me, and even in meditation I can feel coursing, kind of coursing through the fluids of mind. Something like that, really. So RTA as the course of things, change plus order, then became the path of things.

[28:56]

And you see how You know, a simple idea, everything's changing. There's not a beginning and end. There aren't entities. And yet there's a kind of order that happens in the course of things, the path of the stars, the river, our beautiful creek going down through our gardens. The clouds in the sky, they change but they change with some kind of order or pattern. Now if we have a phenomenological view of the world and not an ontological view of the world, then that world and we are the same.

[30:05]

It has its course. and we have our course. So the path of the world and the path of ourselves, yeah, they're intertwining or the same path. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So the course of things became the path. Der Lauf, Verlauf, der Pfad, der Dinge wurde zum Weg, zum Pfad. Here the whole idea of practice is present.

[31:07]

Und hier ist schon die ganze Idee, die ganze Vorstellung von Praxis ist schon anwesend. We have no choice but to be on this path. Wir haben keine andere Wahl als auf diesem Weg zu sein. Because we're changing. Weil wir uns ändern. Yeah. So Rite Arte then meant to find the path in yourself which was the order of things as they are. Which is the order of things as they are. Now, there's no outside rule book. There's no commandments. Each of you is unique. Each of you has to step into your own path and find how to Follow it.

[32:27]

Live it. So, from having no beginning, yet seeing change, change becomes a path. And change becomes a path inseparable from each other and all things. So we are in fact intertwining paths. Yeah, and then Buddhism says, with the rigor of its worldview, Let's look at this more carefully and rigorously.

[33:28]

What is this path? First it has to be wholesome. It has to be wholesome. And second, there has to be mental development. And third, there has to be wisdom. And wholesome is the precepts. Because if your path is unwholesome, yes, karmic influences take hold of you. Yeah, consciousness is shaped by experience.

[34:29]

And consciousness is the source of suffering. You may suffer in your dreams as well. Vielleicht leidest du innerhalb deiner Träume ebenfalls. Aber das Leiden steigt auf im Bewusstsein. Wie macht denn das Bewusstsein uns leiden? Wie verursacht es das Leiden? Well, that question leads to the mental developments that's considered necessary through meditation and mindfulness practices. Now tomorrow I'll speak about that from the abhidharmic perspective. So there's no natural here, there's no natural mind.

[35:51]

Mental development. No, once I was on a bus. Yeah, I've been on a bus lots, but this time I was on a bus. I was on a bus once in San Francisco. Going to work. And I was a little late. And the bus was later. I don't know what. We were stuck. There was a car accident or something. And I had the observation that I've had many times before. And I couldn't do anything about it. The bus, you know, I couldn't get out and walk. It wouldn't have worked. So I just had to wait. But prior to that time, I would be sitting there, come on, bus, come on, come on, come on. At this point, by this time I'd been practicing a year or so.

[37:07]

I just decided I can't do anything about it. So I rested in the mind that can't do anything about it. And that capacity has never changed for me. Why was I able to do that after I started practicing and not before? It seems possible. Anyone could do it. We all do it to some extent. What can we do? The plane is late. It's tied up. So we just relax. But in small things, when these small things change our mind,

[38:10]

This is Abhidharma practice, actually. And when we can do it very clearly, understanding how the mind functions, this is the purpose of these teachings. Thank you very much.

[38:46]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_73.79