Up until now we have been studying How We Know: the different ways of knowing, e.g., sense perception, mental perception, mental conception. Now we will shift to looking at the mental factors that accompany a moment of cognition. The basic cognition is the mind as it knows something exists. The mind can be wrong, but the basic cognition just knows something’s there, and it kind of knows what’s there, but it doesn’t know details, facets, or aspects. It knows that a self is there – that’s a wrong cognition. It knows that a certain color is there, and if that certain color is there, it’s a true cognition.
Arising with the basic cognition are other mental factors, and these mental factors could also be described as cognitions. These subordinate cognitions know different aspects of the object. The various schools of Abhidharma have different lists of 75, 101, mental factors or subordinate cognitions.
Tonight we’ll be focusing on one of the most important mental factors on all the lists: cetana – intention, volition, motivation. Cetana is, in a sense, a mental factor, a subordinate cognition, but it’s also described as the pattern of all the subordinate cognitions that accompany the main cognition. Cetana directs the mind to it’s object. It is also the definition or the principle of karma, which is the principle of activity, the principle of behavior. The subordinate cognitions bring into consciousness the phenomena of activity. And not just activity in the sense that the object that you know is an activity, like seeing a running antelope. Rather, these subordinate cognitions, these mental factors, bring into consciousness activity itself. And cetana is a word for the overall pattern of the activity, which can also be translated as intention, volition, motivation. First we learned about the different ways of knowing, and now we will study how, depending on the overall pattern of the mental factors that arise with these ways of knowing, there arise different types of activity or behavior. Through this study, we are bringing behavior into the field of consciousness. In the west, psychology is the study of behavior, so now we’re shifting from philosophy to psychology. In Buddhadharma, what we mean by karma is intentional behavior, and Western psychology is also concerned with motivated or intentional behavior. Intentional behavior is morally psychological, psychological moral. And cetana is the mental factor that describes the overall pattern of a given behavior – the intention, the motivation. Q. When you say intentional, do you mean when you’re aware of it, you make a conscious decision? You can be aware or not aware, but the good news is, it is possible to become aware, deeply aware, of the intentions that we have. Sometimes we’re not aware of our intentions, they are subconscious, but our motivation or intention is still the shape of our consciousness. A cognition arises with an intention, and the intention directs the cognition towards, for example, an unwholesome object [LS - should this be rephrased? In light of what unfolds later below… .turns the mind towards its object in an unwholesome way?] – unwholesome in the sense that the motivation for turning towards the object is past unskillful action. Past unskillful action directs the attention [to respond unskillfully?] towards an object, which will probably produce a new unwholesome action. Karma is the overall pattern, which is the definition of behavior, the principle of behavior. And the other important thing about karma is that it has consequence. When the Buddha talks about karma, he asks, “What do we call skillful action?” His definition of skillful action is action that has good results. “And what do we call unskillful action?” Action that has bad results. It may seem kind of circular, but the emphasis here is on the effect our behavior has on life. It is behavior in terms of what effect it has on life; what are the consequences? It’s temporal, it’s causal. It’s concerned with results or consequences for the living organism and for the community of organisms. The mental action, the behavior, has consequences, and the mental action itself is a consequence of past mental action. Your present mental action is a consequence of past mental action. However, it’s not deterministic. Past mental action does not completely determine present mental action. Past mental action conditions you to think a certain way, so another translation of cetana is thinking. Thinking is another word for volition, intention, motivation – the overall pattern of thinking which accompanies a moment of cognition. Past karma conditions your mind to be shaped a certain way, to think a certain way. You’re object could be, for example, a dharma teaching that tells you to look at what’s going on right now. If your past karma, your past way of thinking, is such that you can’t listen to it, then the effect of that teaching might be very small. But it could happen that even though your mind is conditioned by past thoughts to think a certain way, the teaching that is coming to you could allow you to listen to the teaching, and let it change the way you’re experiencing what you’re doing. You could actually allow teachings about the nature of mind to come into the mind and change the mind.
Q. How are thinking and intention the same?
The Chinese character that is used to translate the Sanskrit word cetana can be translated into English as ‘intention,’ but is often translated into English as ‘thinking.’ It is composed of two characters; the top one looks like a picture of a rice field, and the character underneath is the one for ‘mind.’ The character that the Chinese built to mean thinking looks like, ‘thinking is the pattern of the mind.’ They used that character to translate cetana. Cetana is the pattern of mind, and it’s the overall pattern, not each specific little element. It’s the pattern of all the things that are going on in a moment. One important aspect of the pattern is the way that the mind is directed towards objects. One of the patterns of consciousness is that mind is directed towards objects as a consequence of past minds being directed towards past objects. So, minds that have been going in certain directions have been influenced by past minds going in certain directions, and these produce future minds going in certain directions. The things that were looked at in the past will influence the things that are looked at in the present, which will influence the things that are looked at in the future. Even though the objects that were looked at in the past are gone, we can see the pattern of the past thinking in the present thinking. If the mind thinks in unskillful ways, it means it thinks about objects in unskillful ways. That tends to produce another mind which thinks about objects in unskillful ways. The shape or pattern 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 being presented now. However, new things can be presented. So a person could see, for example, a Buddha. They may have lots of unwholesome tendencies, but they also have some wholesome tendencies, and now the Buddha, with his or her presence and skill, might be able to offer them something which would somehow provoke a shift in this unskillful pattern. It’s not exactly like the Buddha can shift people’s consciousness, but the Buddha can say something to the person to get them to look at what’s going on. It might not threaten them at first, because it wouldn’t necessarily be a big diversion from their main trip, their main pattern. There’s something about that awakened presence that can make you think, “I could look at myself.” The Buddha is a person who understands minds, her own and others, and she can send a message which can influence, which can be taken in, and it can change the pattern. Each person has to do the work of looking inwardly to see what’s going on, but there’s always a possibility of positive evolution, even in an unwholesome state. Buddha had a very high opinion of human beings. He taught that they generally have quite a bit of background good karma. He knew that they were totally blind, but in an auspicious way, because they have the ability to speak and understand language, so the Buddha was able to give them teaching in language.
[LS – if we were to use this next section, it needs a lot of work. I think Reb kind of contradicts himself and it’s not very clear. It is an important point and it would be a good thing to clarify, but also okay to take out. I’ve done some editing but it’s not ready as is.]
Q. You talked about having good outcome or good result. How does one understand a good result versus a not-good result?
Good is happiness.
Q. Happiness for the whole thing?
Happiness for the whole thing would be a bigger happiness, wouldn’t it?
Q. But could good be, “Whoopee doo, I won a million dollars?”
No, it would be winning a million dollars and being happy when you won a million dollars. Some people win a million dollars and they’re not even happy when they win a million dollars, they are so depressed. There are some people who, even though you give them a million dollars, will not come out of their depression. I mean, there a quite a few millionaires who are depressed. Billionaires, even.
Q. That was a bad example, actually.
It was a perfectly good example. Money does not make depressed people stop being depressed.
Q. I meant a response to a limited event, that a person who feels separate might have, would that be called happiness, or is happiness something...
A good result is basically happiness or joy in the midst of whatever situation you’re in. I guess you could say, “What about if somebody is happy about being cruel to someone?” Somebody wants to take revenge on somebody and they’re finally able to do it and they feel good. Would that be skillful karma? In a sense it would be. That the person was able to skillfully execute their vengeance, and they felt good about that. That would be skillful karma in some sense. [LS – isn’t part of the idea that the way human’s are built, we don’t actually feel happy when we are cruel?]
Q. And that would be called a good result?
Well you could say something like that. However there’s also a bad result there, because since the person did that, that’s going to have consequence. And one of the consequences, beyond that momentary pleasure in succeeding in the revenge program, is that way of thinking which wanted to harm someone and felt good about it, will tend to repeat itself. Riding along with the good feelings that the person is having about is the repetition of this cruelty. So the first cruelty was pretty bad, even though the person kind of felt good about the short term results. But if the person just did one cruel thing and 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 that 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 [LS – so when does the suffering come in?] That would be the more important consequence.
Q. And at some point you’d suffer….
To say the very least, you’d suffer. [LS – this is not well explained. Is it that the mindset of cruelty is a mind set of separateness, and that’s the mindset that gets replicated, and that mindset of separateness is the suffering?] Unspeakable suffering, plus being trapped into it because the habit is so strong. For example, people want to take revenge because they got hurt, or something that they loved got hurt, and they feel that they can’t get away from the hurt, they’re submerged in and chained to the hurt. They think revenge would free them from this. So if they feel good about it, they’re even much, much more chained to the terrible situation that they thought this would get them out of. And that would be the actual result, rather than the temporary positive feeling. It’s more common that when people do cruel things, they do not feel pleasure afterwards. Sometimes they feel, very rapidly, really, really bad. They thought doing the cruel thing would feel 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 are burying themselves deeper, into this thing that they were trying to get out of by the cruelty.
Q. I thought I’d heard or read that part of the result of doing something is that you draw that thing towards you. Not just that you tend to want to do it again, but you attract that result to you.
If you don’t appreciate life, if you don’t appreciate the objects you’re seeing, if you think what’s happening is no good, if that’s the way you think about it – you could say that your mind is being directed towards a negative object, 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. Your mind is shaped towards thinking about what’s happening in an unbeneficial way, rather than that the object’s unbeneficial. So let’s say, because of past karma, I have an unbeneficial way of thinking about the objects I meet. Now, is it that my past karma brought an unbeneficial object to me? You could say it that way. But the way I’m talking about it tonight is that the past karma, thinking unskillfully about things, means that in the future, you’ll think things are unbeneficial, unhappy, painful and bondage; you’ll think unskillfully about things in the future. So this way of talking about it is that the world is not actually out there being mean to you. What’s being mean to you – karma is the bad guy, karma is responsible for all the bad stuff, not the people. The people are the place where karma lives, but to blame it on the people, how can you change people? Blame it on the karma; then if you change the karma, change the way of thinking, the world will change. Karma makes the world; it makes the physical world. But rather than saying that unskillful karma has the consequence of making an unskillful world, it’s more like unskillful karma, unskillful behavior has the consequence that whatever comes towards us we will think about it again in an unskillful way. And skillful karma has the result that when things come to meet us, we think about them skillfully. If sickness comes, you could say sickness comes because you have bad karma, you did unskillful action so now you get sick. So sickness is not outside of what we’re talking about – sickness and health, it’s all happening together, because the physical world, which has your body in it and my body in it and your teeth and my tooth decay – all those physical phenomena are in the world, created by karma, which is arising now. But I want to emphasize tonight 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 result will be that you’ll think about other teeth skillfully, and other bodies skillfully and other illnesses skillfully, and other health conditions skillfully. 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 it’s very nature, not karma, and not the source of suffering. In other words, you can become free of karma by understanding how it works. In this way of describing it, it’s not that bad action brings on a bad physical world. It does bring the physical world, though. My karma and your karma, all of our karma brings on the physical world, with sickness and health in it. And the world that’s brought on can be thought of in various ways, and the ways you think of it are conditioned by the ways you thought before. Thinking, karma, is basically temporal, so the world that appears to you is a temporal world. 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, you see how 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, you 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, also known as nirvana. However nirvana – just like birth and death in itself is not birth and death, and karma in itself is not karma – nirvana in itself in not nirvana. Birth and death is, of course, birth and death. But by its nature it’s also not birth and death. And karma is karma, but by its nature, it’s also not karma. If you penetrate what karma is, you realize karma is not karma. And when you realize this, you turn, you pivot, you are liberated from the world of karma. Your heart has now turned 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 back to the world of karma. When you see that the world of birth and death is the result of the way you’ve been thinking, the overall pattern of thinking which accompanies all cognitions – when 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 that nirvana itself is not nirvana, it is birth and death. So 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’ve studied it deeply, you keep studying it deeply, until you study it all the way to the end. At the end of studying karma, studying your thinking, studying the overall shape of your consciousness, at that point you realize that the shape is fundamentally not the shape, i.e., that thinking, intention, and so on, are not themselves. So the realm of karma, where thinking is being studied, has this temporal quality; there is a past and a future, and between the past and the future is the present. And the present is where the karma is. Your present thinking connects your past with your future. It’s temporal. 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 now. It connects past and future. And not only that. As you study the link between this past and this future – the future that would ordinarily be expected from this past, i.e, the kind of thinking that this past leads to in this present, and the future that this present thinking would lead to – sometimes in this present, the karma turns. Instead of being a link which goes straight, it turns into a link like a switch in a railroad track, and you switch from one future to another. In other words, you don’t necessarily keep going in the direction of thinking selfishly forever. You don’t keep thinking unskillfully forever. You can switch. This past unskillful, unwholesome thought can lead to a present wholesome thought, which produces a different future. Not only that, the future that happens can change the past, through karma. The future can change the past, through karma, just like the way the past usually changes the future, through karma. Karma is the present, and karma has consequences. Karma is the aspect of our life that is the focus point of temporality, cause and effect, bondage, and suffering. But by studying it, there’s a possibility of becoming free of it, by the very nature of the process. In addition, the nature of the process is such that becoming free of it does not mean that you stay in freedom, the way freedom manifested originally. You’d also study that process, and be free of that process, and be able to return to the world of karma, to prove that you’re free. Is it possible to change the past karma, for example, of your parents, who are already dead?Yes. You can change the past, through karma. You do something in the present, which creates a future, which changes your past. Say you had abusive parents, in other words, you think of them as having been abusive in the past. And your present karma is to think of them as abusive. If you want to keep thinking of them as abusive, keep a nice steady abuse pattern going: “I thought of them as abusive in the past, I had low quality parents in the past, so it is pretty easy for me to think of them as low-quality, abusive parents in the present. That makes a nice link to thinking of them as abusive parents in the future.” That’s what often happens. Thinking of them a certain way in the past becomes a condition for thinking of them that way in the present, and those two together incline the mind to think of them that way in the future.To some extent, we have a wish to make sure that our parents will always be thought of as unskillful and abusive, so that in the infinite future we’ll have abusive parents, so then back there in the past they will always be enshrined as abusive parents. They’ll never change, because we’re going to keep that story going. However, you might consider thinking of them in a different way in the present. Since you’ve been thinking of them as very negative bad parents for a long time, one moment of thinking of them slightly differently probably won’t upset the apple cart, but there’s a chance that it would. That’s why you don’t want to think it. 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’s hard to think. I’ve thought the other way all this time.” Still, it can happen. Things can happen. Due to some new conditions, you can think a new thought. All this other conditioning is behind you, but the new thought, that you had great parents, itself becomes a new condition. It’s possible that the new thought would condition the birth of another similar thought. And another and another and another. Now we have a new overall pattern of thinking, and the future now is changed from the future we thought we were going to have. Now we’ve got a future of thinking well of our abusive parents. If this goes on much longer, the history will be revised. Studying karma is revisionist; it will revise your story. It will not destroy anything, it will not annihilate those past stories, it will revise them. But when they get revised in the future, guess what? They get revised in the past. In other words, the whole situation, not just future, but the past and the present can change. They are always changing anyway. The story can change, and when the present story changes, it changes the future stories. And when the present and the future stories change, the past stories change. The philosopher Kierkegaard was not respected during his lifetime, or for many years after he died. He was completely suppressed, because he questioned the Danish church. Around 1920, somebody started thinking differently about him. And then a lot of people started thinking differently about him. He went from being completely disrespected to being considered an amazing philosopher. People think about Shakespeare a certain way. There was a time when he was not so cool, 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. It’s not enough to think once your parents were the most wonderful beings that they could possibly be. To think that thought once is not enough. It has to change the future, too. Which it will, but you have to see it, and then you have to join it. The more you join it in the present and change the future, join it in the present and change the future, the more the past gets changed. Without getting rid of 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 now they are liberated. You can liberate your parents after they’re dead, by studying your mind.
Q. So one person thinking their abusive parents were not abusive but were really good parents can change that’s person’s karma as well as their parents karma?
Yes. People frequently come to me after someone dies, and they’re grieving. To a certain extent I have a very positive frame on grieving over lost things. When the person is getting close to being done with their grieving, I sometimes ask them to shift; shift to how to make the dead person’s life a success. You can make your ancestors’ life a success. The people that you’ve lost, you can make their life successful, because they are part of why you are a good person. Some people feel like, “If my parents die and I totally fall apart, that shows that I love them.” Yes, I can see that. But it doesn’t necessarily show that they were good parents. For you to become a great person – that would show that they were great parents. It also shows that you love them. But for you to fall apart – in some sense you’re changing the past there, too. You make your parents into bad parents, because bad parents have kids who meditate improperly. So you say, “They were so great; now they’re gone. I’m not going to meditate any more, I’m not going to look at my mind any more. I’m going to pay homage to them by becoming totally depressed.” You’ve just put your parents in the role of the devil. If they were good, you should prove it, by thinking about how good they were. And by thinking about how good they were, period. Not thinking about how good they were, therefore I should think be depressed. Think about how good they were until you are thinking very positively about the whole universe, and then you’ve 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 successful before, now you’re adorning their success by your positive thinking, appreciative thinking, skillful thinking. You see what this is? In this way you’re becoming free of time. You are becoming liberated from temporality. We have to tune into temporality in order to become free of it. And when we’re free of it, future can change past and past can change future. It all becomes one completely interdependent wonder. And to prove it’s really so, you even come back into the world of time, where things are chopped up into little pieces again, to see if you can, even in that realm, continue this practice. This is how looking at these states of consciousness, meditating on what composes them, and noticing how the composition is the shape of the moment – this kind of study is itself wholesome. It is studying the unwholesomeness and the wholesomeness, because studying unwholesomeness is wholesome, and studying wholesomeness is also wholesome. Studying unskillfulness is skillful. Being aware of unskillfulness is skillful. Being unaware of unskillfulness is skillful.Being mindful of a cruel thought: what are the consequences? Where did it come from? This is skillful. Not being mindful of a cruel thought 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. That’s my thing in the present. It connects past to future. I saw cruelty in the past, I see it in the future, the present connects them. That’s unskillful. To notice, “Oh, I think about the past as being cruel, and now I think about the present in a cruel way. That’s going to produce cruelty in the future.” That observation is skillful. The more I realize, “Yeah, I did see the past cruelness, and I did see the present cruelness because of past cruelness, and that did produce future cruelness. But now I see that I don’t want to do this any more.” Just by watching it, you get to think in a new way. Observation of the old way produces a new way: “This cruelness is really the problem. It isn’t helping anybody, and it’s not even hurting the people that I want to hurt. It’s just hurting everybody, me most of all.” When you see that, you’ve just had a valid cognition, by studying your karma.
Q When you talk about studying your mind, it sounds kind of self-enclosed to me. But I would assume that to change your thinking, you would also let yourself be influenced by the thinking of another.
Definitely. And that way of thinking is also skillful, bringing that into it. That way of thinking would also make you open to listening to other people, so they could make inputs into this causal process, into this thinking. You can get all kinds of new ways of thinking that you wouldn’t think up yourself, that your friends would think up. Yes, very much, that would be part of it.
Q. In noticing or revising or shifting karma, where does the teaching come in, about how in conception (as opposed to perception) we always use an image to apprehend an object? If the object is our parents...?
Well, so, your parents, whether they are alive or dead, are things you can think about. Ordinarily when you think about them, you think about them conceptionally, in other words, through an image. And the image is, as we said, generic, or somewhat permanent. So I’m looking at my parents right now, may parents are so-called ‘not alive,’ but I’m looking at both of them, and basically I’m looking at an image. It’s a conceptual cognition. Now, what is the shape of that conceptual cognition? That’s the way I’m thinking about my parents. The way I think about my parents right now is influenced by the way thought about my parents before, and the way I thought about them before is my karma relative to them. The way I thought about them before was my basic karmic response, and that basic way of thinking conditioned the way I talked to them, and the hand gestures and body gestures through which I related to them. Those physical, vocal, and mental acts led to me think about my parents in the present. Many presents were conditioned by those pasts, but all those presents, influenced by all those pasts, were all thinking about my parents, usually through the medium of an image. The image may be not changing, but the thinking is changing. However even though it’s changing, sometimes it’s changing in by just getting deeper and deeper into a rut. But I have news for you. 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 40 years of practice. Now, my father died before I had practiced very long, but I continue to change my way of thinking about my father, the longer I practice. And because of the transformation of my way of thinking – becoming free of my way of thinking through studying my way of 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. 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. He’s a successful father, because he’s is the father of a person whose thinking about him has evolved to be more and more appreciative of him. Without denying his unskillfulness. He was a big, beautiful, intelligent person who drank and smoked and ate improperly and overworked and didn’t get any exercise. He was a tragic person and his life was of 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. He had a lot of bad habits, and he missed out, but we can make him a great man, if our thinking evolves. But still, I kinda see that same guy, you know. That handsome guy, the same image.The same with my mother. My mother died just recently, so I had many more years to actually act out new ways of being with her. More years to get over thinking about her in ways that were conditioned by the ways that I had thought about her before, which were conditioned by ways I had thought about her before. I started to think of her in new ways and be with her in new ways, because I studied the way I was thinking about her. I studied how the way I was thinking about her now was conditioned by the way I thought about her in the past. My thinking was transformed through meditation on my thinking. My karma in relationship to my mother changed a lot, while she was still alive, because I studied my karma in relationship to my mother. It got better and better and better. And in the end, you know, one of the last times I saw her. . . My mother smoked for 72 years; she had tried to quit many times. She had other unhealthy habits, too, but smoking was the big one. She had some pals at this place she lived – a very nice place with lots of pals, some of whom smoked. They would go outside and smoke. And one of the last times I visited my mother, I actually had a good time being outside with them, breathing in the secondary smoke. It was just great. I wasn’t down on her smoking anymore; I was free. And she got to enjoy my company. With me being free, she shared my enjoyment. She was able to have a nice time while doing this thing, which my brother, who had been struggling to get her to quit for many years, could not enjoy. Lots of wonderful things happened towards the end of her life. The past can change. Without erasing anything, without denying anything, it can change. Because the future can change, because the present can change. We can have new responses in the present. But we have to study, we have to notice what’s going on. Otherwise, the main thing about karma is, it keeps itself going. The thinking wants to think the same thing again, as well as it can under the circumstances.
Q. You keep saying you’ve got to study, is study the same as meditation?
I taught you two meditations during this course. First I taught you, “In the heard there will be just the heard, in the seen there will be just the seen.” That type of meditation is the calming type. You give up discursive thought. That’s one type of meditation. Now we’re talking about a different kind of meditation, an insight meditation. Observing your karma is meditating; it’s contemplating karma. Studying your karma – studying the psycho-physical pattern of the constituents of mind accompanying a moment of cognition – noticing whether it’s skillful or unskillful, seeing how it’s conditioned by the past, and how the present way of thinking conditions the future – studying this is meditation. It will be easier to study this if you’re calm. If you’re not calm, don’t do this kind of meditation. We’re calm enough to discuss this in this class, but if we were calmer, our discussions would even be more skillful, and settle into us even more. These are the two types of Buddhist meditation. Studying our karma is different from tranquility meditation; both are highly recommended.