So I would guess that after listening to Dr. Wohler, you heard quite a bit. And you need a little rest, right? So I want you to take a rest and let that sink in. One of the things I appreciated most that he said, which I've also appreciated... hearing from other, and reading from other scientists is, they ask the question, what is consciousness? And then some of them say, I don't know. And some of them say, we don't know, speaking for their colleagues. And Kai said, nobody knows. That's what I said. So this kind of way of relating to consciousness, you know, I don't know what it is.

[01:04]

It's very close to Buddhism. Whatever, you know, whenever you approach anything, consciousness or you approach an object of consciousness like another person or a tree and you start with I don't know what it is. It's a good start. One of the Zen teachers said, when the enlightened truth, when the truth of the Buddha does not fill your body and mind, you think it's already sufficient. When the truth doesn't completely fill you, you think it's sufficient.

[02:05]

When you know a little bit about consciousness or physics, you think you know what physics is and consciousness is. You might. But when the Buddha's truth completely fills your body and mind, you know something's missing. There's two ways that I'd like to point out that you sense or you feel or you realize that something's missing. In one sense, you know something's missing because you realize that your view, the range of your cognitive power is limited. You understand that when you study something a lot. When you study a little, you might not know that. And the other thing that's missing when you study something, the other thing you realize that's missing when you study something thoroughly is you realize that the essence of the thing is missing.

[03:17]

You realize that whatever you're looking at lacks some kind of inherent independent existence. So you can't know what anything is, but you can understand what it is. When the truth fills you, you understand that everything that you're aware of, consciousness, for example, when you actually have some evidence for it, rather than just dreaming about it, it is something that depends on other things. It is what we call a dependent co-arising. It's related to other things. And because it's related to other things, it's not independent of other things. And because it's not independent of other things, it lacks independent existence.

[04:28]

Therefore, it is nothing all by itself. And there is nothing that you have any evidence of. There's nothing that you can show anybody or yourself actually, that exists all by itself. Everything that you have evidence for is related to other things. So, everything lacks independent existence, and not only that, but my ability to even relate to evidence of these things is also limited. This is the way things look when you study something thoroughly. An image of this is, it's like going out in the ocean in a boat, let's say, so you can get quite a ways out, where there's no islands around.

[05:33]

And you're out in the ocean, and the ocean looks like a circle of water. And that's the way it looks. But the ocean is not a circle of water. But that's the way it looks. Everything we look at is like that. We always have a limited take on it, and it looks a certain way, but it's not the way it really is. However, if you understand that what you see when you look at anything, is just a circle of water in the ocean of what the thing actually is, you can still study the circle of water and understand, number one, that the circle of water wouldn't be behaving this way if there wasn't an ocean around it. And also, you can understand that the circle of water

[06:34]

therefore is not just a circle of water but is a little circle in the middle of an ocean and also you can understand the ocean through the circle of water. But you'll never understand the ocean if you think the circle of water is the ocean. And you'll never understand the ocean unless you study the circle of water and see how the circle of water behaves. The way the water behaves is because it's in the middle of an ocean. And the way your consciousness behaves, although you don't know what it is, because you can only see a circle of water of your consciousness. In the circle of water of your consciousness, you can see that your consciousness, that you can see, that you understand, that you can work with, that shows you what your consciousness actually is, even though you'll never see the whole thing. And when you understand that, you understand that your consciousness is just a little thing in the middle of everything that's happening. And if you understand that limitation, through

[07:35]

the limitation you understand everything that's the possibility that's offered to someone who can accept her limitations and study them is that you can understand what's beyond your limitations if you're humble enough to work seriously and sincerely with what you've got without blowing it out of proportion and making it into more than just a little tiny peek at what's happening. But the processes of the universe don't stop anywhere as far as I know. They're all pervasive. So even a little peak is enough if you study it thoroughly. Another thing that one of the scientists who said he did not understand what consciousness was, he said, well, if I don't know what it is and I can't define it, how come I'm talking about it?

[08:36]

He's a physicist and a mathematician. He says, well, we mathematicians, we don't have to be able to define something or know what it is in order to talk about it. All we need in order to talk about something is how it's connected to other things. Again, that's close to Buddhism in the sense that you don't really have to completely nail something down before you can discuss it because actually you can never nail anything down. So it's good to start with it before that and start talking about its relationships. And you can understand everything through understanding its relationships because that's all anything is. Okay? So, let's look at consciousness. I'm not defining it. I don't know what it is. but I'm going to talk about it. So remember, I don't know what I'm talking about.

[09:39]

I'm just making some observations of things I've heard and seen. All right? One is, so I ask a question. Where, how does consciousness arise? How is it born? And again, although you may not know all about something, its birth is very important. An artist I know said, a lot of people think that if you can understand, you can create. But he says, I think it's the other way around. If you understand how to create, if you can create, you understand. The creation of a thing is very important in understanding it. Not the whole story, but it's a real entry point. So how does consciousness arise? I'd like to start with sense consciousness.

[10:42]

In the Buddha Dharma we have two kinds of consciousness basically, sense consciousness and mind consciousness. There's five kinds of sense consciousness which are named after the organ that's related to the sense consciousness. eye consciousness, eyeball consciousness, eye consciousness, visual consciousness, ear consciousness, nose consciousness, tongue consciousness, and body or skin or touch consciousness. Those are the five. And then there's also called what we have, mind consciousness. So what is first in Buddhist teaching and also, I guess, maybe in the evolution of life on the planet, first came sense consciousness. Now, an amoeba, as you may know if you've ever met an amoeba, responds to physical elements, physicality.

[11:53]

Some other small animals do. Like, it'll maybe move towards or away certain thermal gradients, like if it's too hot, it'll move away, or if it's too cold, it'll move away, or if it needs to get warmer, it'll move towards something, or if it needs to get cooler, it'll move towards something. So it responds to temperature. In other words, it has skin, in a sense, and it can sense temperature, which is one of the main things that the skin can do, is sense temperature. It's a real important part of it. It also can move away from pressure, It's another thing that the skin can sense. The basic sense organ, the fundamental sense organ, is skin. The other sense organs are modifications or elaborations of skin, basically involutions of skin, the eyes and so on. But the skin itself can respond to light and sound also, and gases and liquids.

[13:01]

But the skin, over time, has evolved to make special areas on its surfaces to respond especially to certain kinds of physical data. Okay? That make sense? So around up here in the head is an area which we call the eye. It's especially sensitive to light. Super highly developed sense of sensitive to light, even though the back of our head is also sensitive to light. Actually, most of our skin is sensitive to light. Not the palms of our hands so much, maybe, or our feet, but other parts of our skin, you know, change color and things like that. We, you know, we feel heat from the light and so on. But the eye is really sensitive to light. Although the whole body is sensitive to sound, the ear is very sensitive and so on. So, Imagine a world that has in it physical events.

[14:08]

And the physical events are five types. I don't know of a sixth type of... In the little world of human existence, I only know of five types of physical input. Electromagnetic radiation. And... for us, of a particular wavelength, of a certain band of, you know, link wavelengths, which we call light. It's electromagnetic radiation. Then there's sound waves, mechanical waves in air or water. Then there's gaseous, certain kinds of gases, which we're sensitive to, and also liquids, certain liquids we're sensitive to. And again, pressure, texture, and temperature. These are the kind of physicalities, the five kinds of physicalities, that are relevant for the birth of sense consciousness. Now, imagine a world where there was colors, smells, tastes, textures, and... did I say gases?

[15:23]

Did I say that yet? Anyway, that's the world, okay? I'm not talking... there's not yet any... You know, Cadillacs or popsicles, television sets or humans, pine trees, apartment buildings, nations, planets or stars. Okay? We don't have any of that stuff yet. However, you know, as you know, the way we relate to planets, stars and Cadillacs is through those five dimensions. fundamentally that's the way they impact on us, as sensory events. Does that make sense? But let's say we haven't put them together into these compositions yet, but we're dealing with them as the colors of the Cadillac and the temperature of the star and so on as those things come to us. Consciousness arises at the interface between these gross

[16:27]

physical physicalities the gross ones which are light color and so on and subtle physicalities what are the subtle physicalities those are the physicalities which are sensitive to the gross ones the gross ones respond and interact to each other and among themselves light interacts various kinds of light interacts with light Sounds interact with sounds. And I guess there's some cross-modal interactions too, right? Gases and liquids can interact. Yeah. But they aren't as responsive as a certain kind of physicality which is associated with living tissue. When living tissue is responsive to these grosser, in some sense, more grossly physical forms of matter, that sensitivity becomes what we call a sense organ.

[17:46]

And it turns out that these sense organs, as far as I know, The most sensitive physical tissue to these gross things is tissue associated with living creatures. The most subtle and more varied in terms of responses is in the tissue of living creatures. Living creatures live their life by this interaction. Consciousness is something that arises when these two kinds of physicality start interacting, when they meet, at the place that they meet, is the birth of consciousness, sense consciousness. Your sense consciousness, which you are experiencing through your whole life, is born in that way, is being proposed to you as being born in that way.

[18:53]

We don't know what it is yet, but that's how it's born. However, since it's born that way, maybe it has certain kinds of qualities. For example, maybe it has something to do with relationship, because it's born of relationship. Maybe it has something to do with difference, because it's born of difference. Maybe it has something to do with being aware of difference. Since it's born, its birth is born of difference. Maybe what it is is somehow some kind of awareness of its birth. Now, this sense consciousness level is but there's no conceptual there's no conceptual functioning going on yet there's no people around there's no planets there's no stars there's nothing like that going on here they're just awareness of this physical dance of this dance of the living tissue with the non-living tissue non-living I guess you could say tissue

[20:21]

At some point, what happens is that... How does this happen? Well, what happens is another kind of consciousness is born, which is called mind consciousness. Now, how does that get born? Somehow, this consciousness, which itself is not physical, even though it is based, it has a physical base, somehow this consciousness within itself, somehow, because it was born of difference, splits itself kind of in two.

[21:33]

Since its nature is born of this dualism, it splits itself somehow. And the way it splits itself is by the effects of how it was born. And the effects of how it was born become its way of splitting itself. That's the same thing twice. I said that. So the mind develops ability to be an organ for itself. By being a model of how there was two kinds of physicality, then the mind develops two kinds of mind. Namely, a part of the mind which can affect the mind and a part of the mind which can respond to the mind. Or a part of the mind which can touch the mind, touch itself, and a part of the mind which can respond to that touch.

[22:45]

And then the mind consciousness arises out of that. And then the mind consciousness arising out of sense consciousness, by sense consciousness splitting itself, the mind consciousness is separated from itself by its own organ, just the way sense consciousness is separated from what it knows by its organs. Just like the eye, actually the eye organ, which is not the eyeball, although it's located where the eyeball is, the eye organ is not the eyeball, it just has to be located where the eyeball is. The eye organ is the ability of the sense consciousness to separate itself from what it's aware of. The organ separates the consciousness It separates, for example, eye consciousness from light. If eye consciousness wasn't separated from light, there would be no awareness of light.

[23:48]

The organ separates the consciousness from what it's aware of. Originally, the organ was interacting with its field. But once the consciousness arose, the organ intervenes between the consciousness and its field. Do you see how that happens? No? That wasn't clear? How many people wasn't clear to you? Raise your hand. Originally, I said there's a sense consciousness. If you can get this, it's important, because if you can actually get this, you can actually understand what consciousness is. There's a gross physical existence, like, for example, light. It interacts with physical tissue. of a living being. The tissue responds. This dynamic. It's kind of like those thermometers that have two kinds of metal.

[24:53]

You know what I mean? And one kind of metal expands slower than the other kind of metal when it gets warm or cold. You know about that? Who doesn't know about that? Raise your hand. Okay, so they have these thermometers that you take two pieces of metal and put them together, and one metal expands more rapidly as the temperature rises, and because one expands more rapidly than the other one, it creates electricity. Is that right? It's right. The difference in the way the materiality reacts, the difference in the way these two metals react, since they're touching, creates something new called electricity, called electricity. the difference between the way that gross materiality and tissue, human, not just human, but living tissue, the difference between the way they act kind of creates electricity. Except in this case, because it's a living creature, it's not electricity, it's consciousness. Okay?

[25:55]

So consciousness is born from this interaction, but once the interaction the consciousness is not just born, but the consciousness is conscious of, not the organ. The consciousness doesn't know about the sensitivity of the tissue. The consciousness knows about the physicality of the gross form. Okay? So when eye consciousness develops, it isn't aware of the receptivity of the organ, it's aware of the light. Okay? So the consciousness which was born by being very intimate with the interaction between light and the tissue, the consciousness seems to be separated from what it was born from. This I would like to engrave into your brain and into your bones, that the process here is that

[26:57]

By this process, you become separated from what you're born from. The consciousness becomes, in a sense, separated from what is its birth. The organ, the thing that gives you, that gives a sense consciousness its stuff to work with, is exactly what separates it from what it's born from. This model of separation, which is fundamental to the birth of consciousness, okay, consciousness is born from this dualism, from this, in some sense, nonsensical sense of being separated from what you're connected to. If consciousness weren't connected, if, for example, eye consciousness wasn't connected to light, there would be no eye consciousness. And yet, eye consciousness must be separated, in a sense, from the light in order to be conscious of it.

[28:06]

This is the nature of light consciousness, is this dynamic sense of difference, which is actually an illusion. In that sense, consciousness is an illusion. Now, what happens then, since consciousness has this quality... it then evolves to the next stage of where consciousness itself splits itself into two. And then mind consciousness is born of that duality, and then the mind consciousness feels separate from its own contents. The mind is one consciousness, but because it was born in this dualistic way, That model of dualism becomes the organ. That paradigm of dualism, that paradigm of splitting and duality, that becomes the organ for the mind to split itself again.

[29:09]

The paradigm of separation is the organ. Then the mind gets separated again. Then the mind thinks it's separate from the other part of itself. And the organ separates it from its other part. This is the birth... of mind consciousness. If you can understand this, you will be completely liberated on the spot from all delusion. Most people have trouble, though, getting that intimate with this process. It's very subtle, but if you could watch this process The Buddha said you understand consciousness. You won't know what it is because it doesn't really have an essence, but you understand its nature and become liberated. Now, the next thing that happens, and I'm working my way to how consciousness creates the universe, the next thing that happens is that this...

[30:23]

fantastic thing that I just described happening namely that the mind has split itself into two and now it's able to look at itself and reflect on itself the mind is now aware of itself as external to itself and the mind then says basically let's see there's an identity now there's an awareness of itself And the mind then creates this sense of something which is separate from something else, something which is an identity. And the mind celebrates this breakthrough in delusion by creating what we call an identity. Then the mind takes one more step and says that actually this identity, which is a thing separate from something else, and actually from everything, turns out, makes it into a concrete, real thing.

[31:25]

This is the birth of self. Then this self, which has been born by this process, imagines itself to be able to live by itself, separate from everything that gave it birth, and actually inflates itself to think that it can do the things that are happening in the world. And this is the birth of what we call karma. Or action. Karma means action. The mind now has been shaped so that there's a self, an independent thing, which I told you at the beginning there ain't no such things, but the self, because of its origins, if you watch the way the mind was built, how it grew, you see it inevitably in this process of evolution, it inevitably falls into this pit of believing in a self.

[32:27]

A self of itself, and it projects its selfhood all over the place. It can't help it. The mind then has tremendous variety because the mind gradually incorporates all varieties in terms of its perceptions, starts making concepts, and the mind develops various shapes and inclinations. The mind has various shapes. And those shapes of the mind become the tendencies or intentions or will of the mind. The mind seems to have a direction. And that direction is then coupled with this authoritative self, which thinks it owns that direction and can do that direction. And then that is the birth of what we call action. It is all illusion, but we believe it's real and we act on that basis and that creates karma.

[33:31]

And the results of that karma is the creation of the world. Not the creation exactly of electromagnetic radiation and so on and so forth, but the creation of planets, solar systems, you know, the idea of an atom, Culture, language, particularly language, which is, you know, self, self, self, self. It creates the world. It creates a world which is mind-created. Physicists look out the world, they look at the planets and stars, you know, and they realize that what Jupiter looks like from a distance is not what Jupiter looks like up close. The more closely they look at these things which the world has set up, the more they find out that there's nothing there like what they thought was there originally. The more deeply you look, the more you find no essence.

[34:33]

The more deeply you look, the more it contradicts the world where you set up all these Cadillacs, ice cream cones and planets. But you do look at that and you say, oh, I guess Jupiter's not really the way I thought it was. That doesn't uproot this basic tendency, which is creating karma and rebuilding the world faster than you can dismantle it by examination. So the key thing in Buddhism, in order to become free of the world which we create, is to study the process by which you create it, or by which it is created. The world is created by these intentions of your mind, and the actions which follow from them. If you study the process by which this happens, studying that process transforms the consciousness, it transforms the understanding which is generating the world. By studying the way the world is created, you change the mind which creates it.

[35:39]

By changing the mind that creates it, you transform the world. By transforming the world, then you again change the mind which creates it. So our consciousness is born of materiality and creates our versions of how materiality comes together and forms itself. And if we can turn back and study the process by which consciousness is born and become free of limited ideas of consciousness, right while we have limited ideas of consciousness, That study transforms the consciousness, enlightens the consciousness, wakes it up to the illusory quality of itself, liberates us from thinking that the separation which is born from is a reality. And then that awakening transforms the karma which we do, which transforms the world. And again, the world transformed also backs up and supports the meditation which

[36:44]

transforms the consciousness again and transforms the world so by transforming by studying how delusion transforms the world you transform the consciousness by transforming the consciousness you transform the karma by transforming the karma you transform the world by transforming the world you transform the consciousness further then the karma gets transformed further and the world gets transformed further so in fact whether you're specializing and studying your own consciousness like a Buddhist meditator, or whether you're a scientist or an artist, if in fact you study the process of creation, the world is transformed by your study. The way scientists study the way their mind thinks, as they watch their mind think about the way the world's built, they also partially watch their minds build the world. And as they understand how their mind builds the world, the world is transformed by their understanding.

[37:49]

And the more thoroughly they study,

[37:50]

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