And this karma is rather a gross level of mental activity, easier to watch than how a sense consciousness is born of the interaction of subtle and gross matter, easier to watch than how your sense of mind consciousness is born, how your sense of self is born. Because karma action operates at the level of where you think, me, you know, me, Reb Anderson, walks across the street, I think I can actually do that. I can watch myself eat that way. I can see how that level of understanding, what that creates in the world. So the meditation which opens this up is simply to watch not only what you're doing, but that you think you do it. And how the different varieties of your action lead to different worlds for you. how your world is the result of what you do and how you think. As you study that, your mind is transformed.

[01:02]

As your mind is transformed, the world is transformed. And as you start to see that relationship, your mind is transformed further, and so on. But you're watching the creation of your world in relationship to the way you think, the way you talk, and the way you use your body. That is how our world is created, by that mean. You can watch this, you can learn about this, and wake up to how it's happening. And as you wake up to how it's happening, the prison-like quality of the world of deluded action starts to become liberated, and can be completely liberated which include understanding what consciousness is, understanding why it's perfectly wonderful that nobody knows what it is.

[02:02]

Good luck. Should we take a break before questions so some people can go home? Or do you want to go right into them? Do you want to go ahead? Let's go ahead. We'll go ahead with questions and responses. Yes. We're limited. We can't let the consciousness by large and small look at it. Are you talking to me, by the way?

[03:13]

Are you saying that certain forms of addiction interfere with your understanding of consciousness? Enhancing your karma. Certainly with enhancing your karma. Well, addictions are kind of karmic, aren't they? They're kind of a karma, aren't they? Right. So what you do is you study how it is that you think or I study how I think that I can do something on my own, called Addiction X. I watch myself do that, and I watch how I think I did that, and then I watch the consequences of that. And as I see how thinking that way, how acting that way leads to these results, as I see that pattern, my consciousness is transformed.

[04:15]

If I see myself do something enough time, just see how it works enough time, it transforms the basis of the action. And when the transformation is sufficiently established, the behavior stops. And addictions, what are addictions, basically? Addictions are, what are they? What are addictions? Huh? Huh? They're habits. Uncontrollable responses to a stimulus. So, let's say habits are what you can't do anything about, uncontrollable responses to stimulus, like pain, you do some habitual thing in relationship to pain. If you watch the pattern enough, It isn't that you then become in control, you just have a different respond, which is informed by the awareness of what the thing does, and you're transformed.

[05:22]

And that's what I'm talking about. And what we call it, what people are... the predictions people are really hot on now are really serious to be hot on and we should work on them, but we have deeper... then you get deeper and deeper addictions. The basic addiction is... the most basic addiction which we have to work our way down to is the addiction of thinking that we're independent. But if you watch how that one works enough times, which is very difficult to work because it's so painful to see how thinking we're separate, how much pain that causes, how much trouble it causes, but if you can watch it enough times your attitude, your understanding is transformed, and you actually become free of that idea. Even though you still have the idea, you become free of it. You realize it's just an idea. That's all it is. But if you don't pay attention to it, you think it's real. And then you're a selfish person who believes that there's some basis to selfishness. There's several...

[06:27]

Do you moderate ? Yeah. Protect us from picking and choosing. What if the bird is getting the embryo before ? I think of I see it as a layer on top of the brain where the information is totally wild, and we pick it and we develop an image. And from that agent, you can see I was always reflecting upon this raw data. I was always giving it a picture like a TV tree, but it looked like it was there now. And I constantly changed on that. And I found that I'm constantly playing more and more experience over it to have a different perspective of what's going on. I told you, what was the illusion?

[07:31]

What's illusion? Right, you're not separated from your mother. You're not separated, right. But you're built to think you are separated. However, you don't have to believe that. But you are given that perception that you're separated, for example, from whatever you're aware of. And in fact, we cannot avoid the image being seen as external. The concept that whatever we're aware of is external comes with human life. normal human life, whatever you're aware of, you think is external.

[08:31]

But as you watch it carefully and study how that is, you see that that's not true. But that's pretty subtle. So the way, if you can't do that, which is pretty hard, what you can do is you can think that you're independent of me and you're independent of your actions. And you can watch how acting from that independent stance, what that leads to. And it leads to prison, bondage, acting. Everything you do based on your independence entraps you, limits you, tightens your life, makes you insecure. As you see that more and more, that transforms your understanding. As your understanding gets more transformed, then it gets more subtle, and you can start seeing these more subtle matters. So start with the gross things, like, you know, the physical gross karmas that you're doing, the things that you think that you can do all by yourself. Start with those, and these more subtle levels will start opening up as the gross ones become more familiar.

[09:33]

But the thing that I'm holding on to, I, Yes, I. Yes. Yes. No. You give it up and become uncomfortable with it. And through your discomfort with it, you start to become impressed by that way of thinking is uncomfortable. And as you get enough learning sessions where that way of thinking is uncomfortable, it changes the way you think. And then when your way of thinking changes, you become comfortable, because you adopt a new way of thinking, which is

[10:34]

Actually, you don't start thinking, I'm not separate from other people. You start thinking, it's not the way that I think I'm separate that makes me so uncomfortable. It's that I believe the separation. Did you say you always have to worry about the seduction? No, you do have the discomfort. You said something like, well, how about letting go and becoming comfortable? You're already uncomfortable. First, you're uncomfortable and you want to get comfortable, right? So you think, well, maybe if I let go of this way of thinking, I'll become comfortable. Or maybe I won't. No, I think he said, let go and just become comfortable with that way of thinking. You have to let go of that way of thinking to be comfortable. But you can't let go of it until you actually think it's not true anymore. As long as you think it's true, it isn't just that we entertain the possibility that we're separate from each other. We think it's true. When push comes to shove, we actually think it's real. Or it's actually just an image. It's just a kind of thinking that comes with territory because it was useful in certain ways.

[11:38]

In the history of our species, the first person on the block to be able to think his neighbor was external to him had an evolutionary advantage. The first lady who could think that men were separate from her was kind of like the other guy. All the men thought she was fantastic. She had this great artistic and spiritual breakthrough. It was an illusion, but people couldn't resist it. It is the major, you know, technological breakthrough in the history of the species. And it's based on thinking that thing is external. First external, then believe it. Or, you know, and believing it, then you don't have to, like, think, well, actually I just dreamed this up in the first place, and keep saying, well, you know, I just dreamed this up because it was useful. No, you really believe it. Then you're caught. You can't pull that belief out except by seeing over and over, this belief is painful, this belief is painful, this belief is painful. So after you see it enough times, and also see all the terrible things you do, all the karmas you do because you believe you're separate, and how much trouble those karmas do you, as you see it, it transforms your understanding.

[12:46]

You say, well, maybe I could loosen up on this a little bit. And you do. and you open up to the fact of seeing, well, actually, if you look carefully, you don't have to talk yourself into it. It actually is obvious that you're not independent. But you won't look at that. It's too much trouble to look at that unless you're convinced that it's extremely painful not to look at it. And it is extremely painful not to look at it, because as long as you don't look at it, you keep believing it's something that's causing you pain. So it's only by facing it, seeing the pain it causes you, and facing it, and facing it, and facing it, that you finally transform yourself. Exactly. Then you give it up, but you give it up in a cellular way. In the brain kitchen, you give it up. Your brain changes. But how that works is, we don't know how it works, but it does. Between now and when you find out how it works, practice it. Thank you.

[13:48]

And my understanding is if you keep working on it, some epithets are reproducing constantly into the active gap. Now, I know you didn't do the speech, but he just read this book, didn't you? Well, I've read a Google, and I'm still reading it. But I didn't want to. But I have. In fact, you could share it. That's the gap between the biology of it and the experiential dimension of it, which I think he's trying to be sure. Well, I have to pass on that. I find Penrose too difficult. Well, I've been here. And Penrose has recently written a book, a smaller book, about his notion of how consciousness may be related to these microtubules in the nerve cells. Now, I didn't read the book. So I don't know anything. So I'm going to tell you about this now. Let me do it. Can I answer this question first?

[14:55]

Which book? This is a book called The Large, The Small, and The Human Mind. So first he talks about the large, the universe. Then he talks about the small, the quantum level. The large, the classical. The small, the quantum. And then he talks about the human mind. And he's the guy who said, I can't define consciousness because I don't know what it is. but I can talk about it because I know how it's related to other things. So he does. And one of the things he says is that in the physical world, one of the characteristics of the physical world is that it's computational. Okay? A lot of scientists and philosophers now think that the consciousness is its primary causal basis is the physical brain. Okay? But the problem is, how does the brain give rise to the consciousness? This is the problem.

[15:57]

This is the question. And there's four basic points of view. One point of view is that the brain, the way the brain operates, you can deal with in terms of physical computational quality of the brain. And some people say, what is called the functional school, or what is called strong artificial intelligence school, they say that consciousness is actually directly related to the brain by computational means although they haven't done it yet that you could eventually write a program which would count for consciousness and would evoke consciousness that when you got the certain computations going consciousness would arise if you could simulate if you could simulate brain computation of a certain type you would create consciousness that's the first school second school is All physical actions of the brain can be stimulated computationally.

[16:58]

The same as the first one. Both schools, both the first school and second school say all physical activity of the brain can be stimulated computationally. Okay? But, The first school says that that will directly elicit and invoke consciousness, that computation. The second school says that that simulation will not elicit consciousness. Even though the simulation will directly, perfectly characterize the action of the brain, that computation will not be aware. The computation will not feel. That's the second school. The third school, which is Penrose's position, there's two divisions, but I'll just tell you his point. His point is that although it may be true, he also, I think, might agree that you could account for almost any action of the brain by computational model, simulated by a computational model. Even if you could, he also agrees that it would not give rise to consciousness because consciousness awareness is

[18:01]

in many cases, and he thinks probably universally, is not computational. And he shows various proofs of how, if you use computational models, you cannot come up with what the human brain can do. A computer cannot be aware. You keep computers ruled by which they can come up with various solutions, but he uses like chess problems and so on, to show that what a computer will do, the best computer with all the rules to do will do things that a child could see were stupid because a child can be aware of the situation the computer can't but he thinks that it's possible that there would be somehow you could find a non-computational a non-computational simulation of brain activity that would evoke consciousness but he says in order to come up with this non-computational simulation of the brain activity to test to see whether the brain is actually, how the brain gives rise to consciousness would require a new physics.

[19:07]

And not only that, but a new physics that's the physics of the brain. And he says that's a rather tall order. But this guy is really optimistic and really smart, and he thinks it might be possible. The fourth rule is that the brain is like water. Consciousness is like wine. And how water gets changed into wine, we will never, ever understand. And these are scientists and philosophers who take that position, that it is beyond human cognitive power to understand how gray matter evokes consciousness. They don't think it's possible. It's a poor school. And anyway, I think Roger Penrose is really interesting. And it's not that that chapter is not that difficult if you skip the hard part. What? The fourth point? Oh, Penrose makes a... That's Penrose.

[20:10]

Roger Penrose. There's two books. There's an earlier book, The Shadows of the Mind. Shadows of the Mind. No. After this, he enrolled a shorter, less technical overview conversation of the main problem. And the challenge of the mind was really difficult. It was all into the quantum mechanics and all the mathematics about this computability, which is this. He spent 200 pages showing how there's no loopholes in the argument. that consciousness is non-computational. But the people he's arguing with are not us. Excuse me, you had a question still, though. The man who was just talking still had a question. Yeah, it's directly for you.

[21:14]

I'm just checking up on the variant. OK. You think that you are asserting a position that there is no such thing out in the logical world. and objectively out, and I want to know what I'm correct in arriving at that conclusion. My position is that there is no, ontologically speaking, there are no things that exist independent of other things. That there is a reality, there is reality, but reality doesn't have independent things in it, that's what I'm saying. No, it was just a traditional Buddhist view that all the things we have evidence for are things that are related to other things. All the things we can experience directly and come up with proof for are things that have no independent existence. That's what I'm saying. I thought you were saying that the mind creates everything. No, I said the mind creates the world you live in. You know, your world is created by your mind, and you're in cooperation with the rest of us.

[22:20]

So we make this world together. So we all say, you know, there's planets out there, and they look like that. But a lot of physicists, when they look closely, they say, well, guess what? It doesn't look like that up close. It's not what we thought it was. And the same with atoms. The more closely you look, the more surprised you get. Excuse me for speaking for you. Yeah, and that's really so. They know that all we do is making models. We're trying to make the best model that we can by constantly checking what's out there with whatever sensors we can bring to bear on. And we see that these models are changing, because as we look deeper and deeper and deeper, we saw these big pieces of matter first, and then they run out, they are made of small things, atoms, and then, no, the atoms have nuclear, and most of it is in the nucleus, and then we're trying out all these elementary things that are made of parts also, and who knows what comes after that. The closer we look, the more we become aware we're shaping our models to make the best

[23:24]

picture that we can that has some predictive power and gives us sort of a survival feeling that, yeah, we understand enough to know what's going on there. But it is a model building. And I personally think that something like this, I heard, we come with this. Our whole machinery that we have originated in a survival tool. And so the more we are aware of that, the better off we are, I think, to know that everything is growing and everything is changing on us all the time, and that we are making models. And what is beyond those models is the word ethno. Robert put this word ethno in it, and it scared the hell out of me. Bad Robert. I understand essence to be the beingness of being things.

[24:30]

I know that we have no way to get at this because everything we're taking in are the appearances. And on top of this, they're going to get processed by this complicated machinery. My eyes, they only see dots and lines and some other structures, and then they'll mess this up and make an image out of it. We have no idea yet how does my image of the world, is this a faithful image of the outside? And the only, I will never know, I think, and the only way that I can say perhaps it is because if my image that my sensory system and my processing system make, if that is not good enough an image of what is really out there, then it's not a very good survival tool. And I kind of hope that nature has given me enough tools to be close enough to it, but that's all I know. Thank you. Yes, the separate mind consciousness is developed outside of the phylico-neurological mechanism.

[25:42]

Then how do you come to the conclusion that all of us get a fairly consistent view? I know it changes over time, but we have a pretty consistent view of what's going on out there. Well, first of all, I'm not saying that it's created outside of the physical base, okay? But how do we come up with a similar thing? We come up with it because we talk to each other. The world we live in, it has a lot to do with the fact of language, that we have language and we create. Without language we can't make things. And since we use the same language, and language isn't worked out at language conventions, we create a conventional world through language. That's why we agree. We tell children in different language systems, we tell them what to see and what not to see. By the time they're a certain age, they've eliminated a lot of possibilities of what could be happening. And they pretty much, in order to get along with us, they've kind of buckled under our version of reality.

[26:44]

And then we work together to perpetuate this world of the things are the way we say they are. We tell stories and we say these are true stories. Now... Right. Right, and also the development of language came from the mind. Karma created Our actions created language, and then language becomes the world, and then the world leads to more actions to substantiate that world. So the karmic world and the language world are constantly reinforcing each other and making this sense that what we think is actually what's happening, even though what we think is actually just our imagination. And finally, it doesn't go without the possibility that the development of the mind consciousness is, in fact, an intellectual phenomenon that I don't rule that out, no.

[27:48]

But an important thing for me, as a Buddhist, is that no matter how it arises, whether scientists can explain it or not, that human beings, every individual person understands the process by which it operates, so they can become free of the prison that they live in by making what they think into an external reality. and particularly making a reality out of the fact that we're separate. We're not in reality. I want to make a quick response. I wouldn't go quite as far as saying that the commonality that we have in our imagery is all top. I have a feeling that some of the image patterns come genetically. They are genetically pre-programmed and get elaborated on by education, by inculturation. I agree with that.

[28:50]

I would say most of it comes genetically. Language, for example, comes genetically. That's part of what I mean. The world where we have a world with people like us who have our genetics, our genetics is the result of our karma. the way we've made love for eons, had to do with the bodies we have. And the bodies we have, you know, again, some people say, how come Neanderthals died out? You know, weren't they as cute as the Cro-Manians? Did you know that they're bigger? Neanderthals were bigger. How come they died out? And some people think it's because they didn't talk. And the people who could talk just didn't dig them. You have a group of people, you know, and have one that can talk. The other person will be much more attractive. Thank you. On part of the daily post-bac, the query did, which doesn't have a lot of reflecting address.

[29:56]

And this would be a key story that could be believed, can be believed. Then you get a very evocative, and that's the confluence of life. So yeah, but I guess I feel otherwise. I read something in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. And there they're saying that don't worry about these images. This is stuff that's happening to your dying brain. It's all signals and stuff that go in criss-cross as long as there's activity. You know, a few years ago, on this day, when we had this earthquake, what struck me most was that one gentleman was reporting he was under this bridge that collapsed, and he crawled out from under it, and there was a brain lying from one who had been squashed by the death.

[31:00]

And that brain was... was hopping, was moving. So that tells me even if you're disconnected from the body, there is brain activity going on. I believe that these near-death experiences are the final firings of these nerve systems, and they throw up. But you say the deceased means the deceased by Western standards. Yeah. Western doctors pronounce a person dead When, according to Buddhism, the dying process has just started.

[32:05]

Right, so that's the definition. But from the Buddhist point of view, there's lots going on after most Western people would say the person's dead. Lots still happening. But there's no bodily report. There's no respiration, no heartbeat, and no neural thing going on. But something's still going on. Okay? But it still doesn't say that consciousness isn't brain-based originally. Something can be physically based and go on, you know, afterwards. Because even physicality, when something, like a brain, like when a brain is not operating ordinarily, it still hasn't, nothing like goes away completely. Everything has effects. So anyway, in Buddhist meditation on death, We take care of the person up to dying, but the real care for the person starts after the doctor says they're dead, and the real care for the dying. That's when the dying really starts.

[33:11]

Before that, they're still basically alive. Then there's a dying process which can happen for quite a while after Western medicine says the person's dead. When they still don't do anything more for the person at a certain point, then the Buddhist priest comes in and goes to work. I mean, the before, too, but that's particularly... It's totally spiritual at that point, though. So when somebody reports that he has died on the table and he's still seeing something in the environment, I mean, I talked about the blind side. If the V1 center drops out, there is still input going in, there is still... There's still processing going on, and the person will say, I don't see anything. So in my mind, it can well be that a person who is momentarily dead or apparently dead and then comes back, that he is actually taking images in.

[34:13]

He's not that more conscious of them. And he comes back, and then those images have been stored, and he can talk about it. So I how that's quite possible. For me, it's a simplified part of this, how it works, than going beyond and thinking of something supernatural going on. Sorry. I'd like an opinion from Peter to talk more about this question. There's one sort of thought that when there are enough human beings on planet, it will form a neural network by sheer size. It will be a bride to a naked consciousness and humanity is that kind. How do you feel about that? You want to do the bottom? You can go first. I know one organization that's very closely tied together. There's lots of communication lines and computers and everything called government.

[35:19]

In my mind, operates on a much lower intellectual level than we do. It's a good example. So my opinion is that when that happens, and we're doing it. I mean, here we're hooked on the internet. And I mean, you can talk to everybody going back and forth. And already our children begin to sit and just punch the button. Now it's new image, [...] star another one. All these images coming in. They're doing nothing with it. I don't think they're very smart. So I think that super brain is not going to be very smart. Well, that's what Kyle is referring to. kind of interaction transforms the world in a certain way. Now the other way would be if you or I would study ourselves and become free of our own belief in our independent existence, it's possible to achieve a state called Buddhahood. In a state called Buddhahood, your life becomes the life of every living being.

[36:22]

This understanding that your life is actually the life of all beings, transforms the world. Because your action then is transformed by that understanding, and your action contributes to the world. Just like your action now contributes to the world. Like these kids that we're just talking about, their actions make the world a certain way. The way they work with computers has an effect. How long they play with those computers transforms the world. When you understand that your life is the life of all beings, the actions you do transform the world in another way and raise the world to another level. Meantime, the kids are transforming in two. So it's a race. Who's going to transform it most? So Buddhists have to get more and more enlightened to not keep up with the kid. It's called job security. . Well, I don't know, we'll talk about great liberation, but I'll just take the first thing that comes to mind, okay?

[37:34]

I used to eat a kind of hamburger called White Castle hamburgers. Okay? You don't know what... Todd, do you know White Castle? So, White Castle hamburgers, when I was a kid, they were very small. They're about the size of a triscuit. You know what a triscuit is? Very small. Just about the size of a triscuit. And they cost, they were very inexpensive. They cost 11 cents at that time. And I used to, I liked to eat them. Particularly after I used to go to the Y and go swimming and stuff. On my way home, it'd be kind of cold in Minnesota and go by this White Castle stand and it would be all steamy and stuff and smell good. And I'd go in and have a White Castle hamburger. I used to do that. Okay. And then one day, because of my consciousness coming up a little bit, I tasted the hamburger. And my mind was instantly transformed. I realized by tasting it that it tasted bad. And I no longer wanted to eat it. So I was liberated from White Castle hamburgers.

[38:36]

That's about the greatest enlightenment I've ever had. Thank you all.

[38:44]

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