At the end of our last meeting I said that this time I would begin discussing consciousness. So I will. That's fine with me. I'm not going to, I don't plan to go through any particular Buddhist text, but I do have a reading list of Buddhist texts which you can pick up from me if you'd like. And then you can read them and then you might have some questions which you can bring up and I'll just be here to respond. I'm going to present some things about Buddhist psychology and about Buddhist practice, and then you can, if you're studying these texts, you can bring them in as you wish.

[01:16]

I thought, you know, what is Buddhist psychology? What is Buddhist psychology? And then, what is Buddha's psychology? And in a way, just the thought occurred to me that Buddha In a sense, Buddha doesn't have a psychology. Because there's like, in Buddha, in awakening, there's not something, you can't get anything there. There's no thing, psychological or otherwise, which characterizes Buddha. So Buddha doesn't have a psychology, but as I was talking like last week, the actual condition of psychology is Buddha.

[02:47]

But it isn't that the psychology is Buddha, it's psychology being just as it is. The way the psychology actually is, is Buddha. So Buddhist psychology or psychology for disciples of Buddha is a psychology, is a teaching about psychological phenomena that helps sentient beings who are involved in psychological phenomena, helps them realize the nature of psychological phenomena. In other words, realize Buddha. Maybe you've heard of transpersonal psychology.

[03:52]

The psychology of a Buddha is not just transpersonal, it's transpsychology psychology. But although Buddha is transpsychology, it is inseparable from psychology because the life of Buddha is beings who are psychological beings. The life of Buddha is and Buddha is the actual nature of those psychological beings. So the actual way that psychological beings are is Buddha. But the actual way that psychological beings are is that they're not psychological beings. And that's what the Buddha teaches. But the Buddha never is the slightest bit separate from psychological beings who may actually not understand their psychological nature.

[04:58]

But if they are encouraged, study their psychological nature so thoroughly that they realize Buddha. That was actually very clear. What I was going to... So in the process of talking to you now about consciousness, consciousness is a... To some extent, consciousness is a psychological phenomena. In the... In one presentation of all phenomena given in the Buddhist tradition, one presentation of it is that all phenomena is consciousness, factors, those psychic factors which accompany consciousness, and materiality, material phenomena.

[06:10]

Those three comprise all phenomena. So consciousness is an important key phenomena for understanding all phenomena. And so some of you may be familiar like every morning at Zen temples we chant the Heart Sutra and it says that the bodhisattva the bodhisattva of infinite compassion when practicing deeply the wisdom which goes beyond wisdom saw that all five groups or aggregates of existence lack inherent existence and these five materiality feeling perceptions formations and consciousness But you can also simplify and just say materiality or forms, consciousness, and those other three, perceptions, feelings, and all kinds of mental formations, those are the groups that accompany consciousness.

[07:30]

So if we live long enough, we will study all five skandhas in our meetings here. But I'd like to start with consciousness. I don't know how I got to be starting on consciousness, but in some ways it seemed like a good place to start. And then, again, in discussing this, I want to give you a big view of this, a big view of consciousness. Okay? Is it okay if we start with a big view? So the big view is Susan O'Connell arranged for me to meet with a science writer. One of his latest books is called The Whole Shebang. You know what it's called? The Whole Shebang? Something like that.

[08:33]

You know what Whole Shebang means? Huh? What? That's right. The whole enchilada. Do you know what the whole enchilada means? You know enchilada? Enchilada? Enchilada? You know what enchilada is? No, that's... Anyway, it means... The whole universe, the whole universe, the whole shebang, the whole works. That's the name of the book. Anyway, so I read this book in preparations for meeting with this science writer who particularly writes about... I think he's kind of particularly interested in physics, astronomy. Is that right? I'd say so. Cosmology. So this book is about cosmology, this book. And one of the statements that I... that caught my attention, which I told him about, I think he said something like, all of the different places that there are now, all of the different places that there are now, you know the different places?

[09:50]

Can you think of some examples of different places? Anybody? Like what? Grand Canyon. New York, Mars, the corridor outside, the east side of the room, the west side of the room, upstairs, black holes, the center, all the different galaxies throughout the universe, all those different places, okay? all the different places that there are right now were once one... all the different places were once the same place. That's the view of cosmology, is that all the places in the universe were once at one place. And then there's this thing called the Big Bang which says that there was this tremendous expansion.

[10:54]

So now you have this one place is spread out. It's called the universe. My Buddhist thing was all the different places are one place. Right now, all the different places in the universe are actually one place. There's not actually two places or six or quite a large, much larger number. There aren't different places. There's just one place, and in that one place, actually, what there is is basically there's possibilities. There's possibilities. And possibilities can also be called probabilities. And there's the possibilities for everything. Everything is possible. Now, the way some things are possible is actually called zero probability. So let me say, well, that's not really possible. But in other words, it's possible that something has a zero probability, that something can't happen.

[11:58]

Right now, all the possibilities are in the same place. That's one of the possibilities, by the way, that it's all in the same place. And their possibility is that I'm wrong and they're all in different places. But I say, actually, I'm emphasizing the possibility that everything is in one place and there isn't an over there. It's not that there's nothing out there. It's that there is really no out there, actually. There's the possibility of out there, But I say that out there, you know, isn't really there, us making it. And it's a constructed thing. Out there is a constructed thing. So out there and in here, or over there and over here, these are important places. We're kind of worried about that. Have you noticed? We're worried about out there and over there and over here. This is like... And this out there and over there and here, these are things which I suggest to you are created in dependence upon consciousness.

[13:14]

In other words, I'm suggesting that what's actually happening, without any messing around by human beings or frogs, is actually the possibility of everything that you think is going on. Everything you think's going on is happening for you because it's possible that it would happen. But there's a lot of other things that could be happening too, but they don't happen because you're human. And being human you have a certain kind of consciousness which creates a certain kind of a universe, but it's not the same universe for frogs, It's not the same universe for eagles, it's not the same universe for flies, and so on. The universe that we have is a byproduct of our mind. Now, you all know that, right? So that's part of what would be I hope.

[14:25]

Now that is saying that the physical universe that we experience, it's not that it's not real or whatever, it's just that it isn't real aside from our mind. It is really, it's real in the sense that it does appear that way, but it's not real like it's actually out there on its own, separate from our mind. If it wasn't for our mind, the world we see wouldn't be there. if there would be the potential or the possibility of the world we see, the world we think of, the world we smell, that world would be possible, all it would take to make it come back would be our minds. And then we'd have it back. But again, this is like just to tell you the other side of the story I'm going to now turn to. And that is a story about a discussion I had with a physicist and cosmologist in Monterey a few years ago.

[15:37]

The topic of the conversation was, what is consciousness? And he presented his view of what consciousness was from his scientific studies. And in preparation for my presentation, I read what physicists and mathematicians think consciousness is so that I could interact with him. And it was an interesting study for me. I didn't start that conversation with what I just mentioned to you, which sort of basically what I just said was that consciousness There are no phenomena. I'm suggesting that. Phenomena, all the things that we think of as phenomena, all the phenomena we know about need consciousness in order to appear.

[16:44]

It's not to say that without consciousness there isn't anything, it's just that what there is is not phenomena. Phenomena require consciousness for them to precipitate out of their probability distribution. This is a basic Buddhist teaching that For something to arise, one of the key elements, and the most subtle element in its arising, is that there has to be conceptual imputation. And so therefore there has to be consciousness. Anyway, I didn't have a discussion with the physicist, but I'm telling you the rest of the story. Where I started with him was, I started with... I started with the physical world. So I'm suggesting to you there wouldn't be a physical world if there's not consciousness. But I forgot about that, I didn't forget about it, I didn't mention that part.

[17:47]

I started as though we have a physical world and then where does consciousness come from if we've got a physical world? Actually it's consciousness and physical world dependently co-arise. There isn't consciousness before the physical world and there's not a physical world before consciousness. They rise together. It's not actually one before. But what I talked about in that talk was how consciousness arises from the physical world. That's what I want to talk about. Are you saying consciousness arises from the physical world? Well, yes, I am saying that. Another thing I said in that talk was that if you study something thoroughly,

[19:03]

you realize that something's missing. And that's a teaching which I first heard from a Japanese Buddhist teacher named Eihei Dogen. He said, when the Dharma or when the truth does not fill your body and mind, you think it's already sufficient. But when it does fill your body and mind, when the truth does fill your body and mind, something is missing. So an example would be, if you haven't yet studied physics, you might think something was missing. Like you might think, hey, I Okay? You might realize that your understanding of physics is missing something.

[20:09]

Like, for example, you're missing a physics class. Does that make sense? Does that make sense to you? What's your name? Keep going. No, not yet? If you haven't studied something at all, can you imagine you might feel something was lacking? Yeah, or like if you hadn't studied Swahili, you might think something's missing because, in fact, you haven't studied Swahili. You might. But anyway, if you study Swahili a little bit, like if you learn one sentence of Swahili, you might, when you first learn it, you go, wow, I learned a sentence of Swahili. At that time, what do you feel like? You feel great, right? Like, Here I am, a white guy speaking Swahili. This is fantastic. Or if you learn some physics and you're kind of like, you're studying, you're studying, you don't get it, and suddenly you understand something about physics, and you think, what do you think?

[21:17]

You think, you don't think something's missing. You think, I just learned something. So if you learn some physics, you think, you mostly feel like, this is sufficient. This is great. If you learn some Buddhism, have any of you ever learned any Buddhism? Did that ever happen to any of you? Didn't you feel good when that happened? Like, kind of like, whoa, I'm losing today. This is like, do you know what I mean? It does happen to people. When you study a little bit, you feel like your mind is full of what you learn. But if you study more, especially you study really a lot more, and finally you realize, it's not just that I have, there's something missing here. So the more you study something up to the point of thoroughness, you realize the limits of your understanding of that topic. And you also realize it's not just that I don't understand, something's missing.

[22:18]

That's one meaning of something missing. The other meaning of something missing that you realize when you study something thoroughly is you realize that what's missing is the essence of the thing you're studying. that what you're studying actually has no essence, has no core when you study something thoroughly. So we're studying consciousness. When you first start studying consciousness now, and when you first learn something about it, you're going to feel pretty full and happy that you learned something. study it more you're going to find out whoa this is like big topic and I don't know it's like beyond my limits to some extent there's certain things I don't know plus also you will eventually if you study thoroughly realize that there's nothing actually inherently existent about consciousness but you don't have to worry about that right now because you haven't got that far I just thought I might mention to you

[23:26]

that when you attain Buddhahood you realize that consciousness lacks inherent existence. Something's missing. Plural consciousness is missing something. And what it's missing is an independent existence. Consciousness does not have an independent existence. I already told you that. What? So why is it missing? It's missing. But once we understood then that nothing is missing. Then once you understood that nothing's missing? Yeah. Yeah, that's what I mean. This is an example. You understand enough to think that nothing's missing. There you go. You're a success. You made it to find sufficiency.

[24:28]

There you are. Yeah, but then you said when you get to sufficiency, then you fall. You already got to sufficiency, right? Didn't you make it there now? Well, are you... My question is like, if you find out that something is missing and you find what is missing... Well, I'm just asking you, if you reach... Then nothing is missing. Have you realized nothing is missing? Right. Are you there now? Or is this just theoretical? Yeah. Okay. So, again, one of these... ...physicist I was reading, physicist mathematician I was reading, he said, he said, he was talking about consciousness and he said, well, I, to tell you the truth, I don't know what consciousness is.

[25:33]

I can't, you know, I can't define what consciousness is. But, you know, we mathematicians and physicists, we don't have to know what something is or be able to define it to talk about it. He actually said, I don't know what it is, but I'm going to talk about it. So how can I talk about something if I don't know what it is? We can talk about stuff that we don't know anything about. I mean, I shouldn't say nothing about, but we don't know what things are, but what we do is we talk about what they're related to. So actually, I cannot actually talk about consciousness because there is actually nothing inherently there. But I can talk about consciousness with you and you can talk about consciousness that is related to things. It is related to things. So what's it related to? And the first thing I'd like to talk about is what it's related to in terms of how it's born. It's born because it's related to something. And what it's related to is the world.

[26:41]

although it is not a physical phenomena itself, it is related to physical phenomena. So this is the birth of consciousness coming out of the physical world. And also the physical world arises, independent of consciousness. But I'm just talking about now how consciousness arises in dependence on the physical world. And again, I would say that there's no physical world prior to consciousness. Some physicists might think there is. First you've got the physical world, then you have, you know, dinosaurs, then you have monkeys, then you have humans, then you have consciousness or something. there's not a physical world and then consciousness.

[27:45]

But if we've got a physical world, then I'm suggesting that when the physical world interacts in a certain way, there is the birth of consciousness. And, yes? Could it be conscious before human consciousness? Yes. It could be before human consciousness. So this is the concept you were talking about right now. But what would this mean is, if you reverse and cross that, before the time that there was no consciousness in human sense, how can you do that? If there was no physical existence before human consciousness, how can you have the artifacts of human consciousness Because the world that you're... the fossil you're looking at is not there before human consciousness.

[28:51]

Yeah, I understand that... over there before. I'm saying that there are no fossils actually out there in the world, out there separate from consciousness. There are no... that isn't the way the world is built. The world doesn't have like street corners, you know, Page and Laguna and fossils. That really isn't the way the world is. That's the way we make it to be. Like you take a dog, you know, take my little dog, put her on the corner over there. She doesn't see fossils and she doesn't see Page and Laguna. That's not what's happening for her. You can say, well, yeah, but we're right and she's right. For her, it's like a palace of smells. That's what's happening out there. And for you, a fossil is something you look at and think about. But for her, it's something that smells or doesn't. Well, who is right?

[29:58]

Whose world is this? I'm saying that what you think of when you think of a fossil, that thing is not there. aside from your dear little mental imputation. The world isn't built the way you see it until you make it that way by your perceiving of it that way. It doesn't mean there's nothing there. It means that there's a lot more possibilities to the world than what we think it is. It's not that they're wrong, it's that there's something missing. And if archaeologists and historians get into their field ,, and you go into their office when they're thoroughly into their field, and you say, well, what's happening? They say, I don't know. But I can talk about it and be very interesting about it for quite a while. So the image that says when you study something ,, you realize something's missing, the image he uses is when you go out in the ocean,

[31:04]

away from the land, and there's no islands, what does the ocean look like? It looks like a circle of water. That's what it looks like. But the ocean is not a circle of water. But that's what it looks like. And you can't see it anywhere. You're stuck in seeing it as a circle of water. And if you got in a spaceship and went up high, then you'd be in another circle of water. You could see the shape of the ocean, but then you'd be in another circle about what's happening out there. We're always subscribed by our conceptual imputations. What's going on is not what we think. It's far more interesting than what we think. You are far more interesting than what I think you are. Fortunately for you. you know and if I stop thinking of you, you don't evaporate and you're far more interesting than what you think you are fortunately for you and for me but you anyway carry around this little circle of water version of yourself and so do I but I don't have to believe that my circle of water idea about you and if I would study you thoroughly I would realize that my view of you

[32:25]

is just a circle of water. And there's a lot missing. Like, a lot. Like the difference between a circle of water and an ocean. That's the difference between how you appear to me and who you really are. And that's the difference between what I'm saying and what I am to you and what I actually am. Does that make more sense? Well, I'm still struggling with it. I understand. exactly lots I take back that there's lots more because lots more implies that there's lots more phenomena out there but there's no phenomena out there other than our phenomena but just that our world is precipitated by our mind and fossils you know the dinosaurs show a dinosaur a fossil they don't know what you're talking about Fossils are a human invention.

[33:28]

No other animals on the planet know what a fossil is but us, because nobody else has the concept. What is it? A phenomenon which requires certain conditions and requires human mental imputation. That's what it is. So it has a name, it has certain criteria, which is satisfying. You can say it's not that thing. It has all those things, but it also has you there conceiving of it. If you take your conception away, and some other being could come in there who doesn't have your equipment, they would not see those bones. So what do the scientists measure when they say... They measure the phenomena that is appearing, which depends on the mind.

[34:35]

That's what they measure. If they study a little, they think that phenomena exist aside from their mental imputation. But if they study more, they realize there is no phenomena separate from their mental imputation. And lots of scientists do now realize that. They've grown up enough to face a bigger, you know, more thorough picture of how phenomena occur. But this is a little bit off the topic of the place I was going to. But if you want to do this, do you want to do this more? Or do you want to go back to the... Oh, okay. Well, if you want to take longer to get over it, fine. You can have like a multiple week transition.

[35:38]

So anyway, the idea here is that you have two basic types of materiality, a gross type and a subtle type. The gross type of materiality comes in five categories, which always amazes me. And nobody's discovered a sixth or reduced it down to four or seven. But anyway, the five that are being proposed are, in layman's terms, sights, smells, tastes, and tangibles.

[36:47]

Those are the gross type of materiality which comprise the physical universe in the gross way. But there's a subtle type of materiality And before I go on to the subtle, I just want to mention another way to talk about these five is electromagnetic radiation, mechanical waves, gases, liquids, touches or tangible things like temperature, roughness, sharpness, smoothness, hot and cold, those kinds of things, that kind of stuff. Those are five, and category. I think any physical, gross physical phenomena you come up with, probably one of those five. The subtle physicality that we have available to us are tissue of living beings.

[37:55]

But not just any old kind of tissue, like, well, I won't get into that right now, but I was going to say a thumbnail, but anyway, that might be confusing. But anyway, the subtle materiality is what we call the eye, the ear, the tongue, and the skin, or the body. And actually, the first four are actually adaptations of the skin. The skin actually touches them, is the primary of the subtle forms of materiality. These are the 10 types of materiality, five of each type. OK? Well, it's not different from touch. It's different from tangibles.

[38:59]

The sense of touch is the skin. On the skin surface, there's a sensitivity to tangible things. Why is it subtle? It's subtle because, for example... you know, you can actually see a color, all right? And you can actually, I think, measure a color quite, now we can measure colors in terms of the wavelength of the electromagnetic radiation. But the ability to see, the sensitivity of this tissue, it's not the eyeball. It's actually the sensitivity. It's this ability to respond. It's one kind of materiality's ability to respond to the other.

[40:04]

That responsiveness is the subtlety. I just want to parenthetically mention that I'm talking about the two types of materiality which will be the birthplace of consciousness. Okay, so it's a good question. How come the eye is called subtle? It doesn't mean the eyeball. It doesn't mean this eyeball, because the eyeball is actually something which we can perceive once consciousness is there. Before there's consciousness, there's no eyeballs. The eyeball, however, is where the sense of sight is most intensely, in the human being, the sense of sight is most intensely concentrated around this area we call the eyeball. But the eyeball has no sense of sight because, as you know, some people have eyeballs, but there's no sense of sight.

[41:05]

They even sometimes have eyeballs with the nerve operating, and the retina, you know, responding properly, and the lenses and everything moving properly. Everything's working, but there's no sense of sight. That the sensitivity, that actual physical sensitivity, it is a physical thing, and it's a sensitivity, it's a physical responsiveness. And it's located here because physical things are located in space. and time. It's located in space, but it is not, you can't actually see it. You can only see it by watching how the organism behaves. You can deduce whether they can see or not, but you can't see the ability to see. It's subtle. The example they sometimes use is when you like, if you take butter and melt it,

[42:06]

There's the part on the top that's clear and the part on the bottom that's kind of cloudy. So the part on the top that's clear, you can actually see through to the cloudy stuff underneath, right? And that's like materiality of what we call organs, the sense organs, is actually you can see through them and hear through them and smell through them and touch through them and taste through them. They themselves, you cannot actually see them, but seeing can help. They're in a sense transparent, somewhat. They're subtly there. When these two interact, when the gross interact with the subtle, When light stimulates an organism and that organism responds to that stimulation, where the organism responds most to that stimulation, whatever it is, for example, electromagnetic radiation, there arises in that, through that interaction, a...

[43:31]

And without the stimulation does not register, it does not, it does not, it's a non-event because there's nobody there. Now if we watch, We can see somebody's eye being stimulated, so it can happen for us, but it doesn't happen over there. This is the way consciousness arises. And in this birth of consciousness between these two kinds of materiality is also something which... Because consciousness is born by this interaction between different kinds of materiality, inherently, not inherently existent, but sort of, maybe congenitally would be better.

[44:47]

Consciousness is congenitally dualistic because it arises from the interaction of two different kinds of things. Its origin is from a dualism. built into consciousnesses as born from different kinds of things interacting. And there's something about this moment here which may have something to do with the birth of life. But maybe not life, because maybe you could say there could be a kind of life where there's not consciousness. It's an esau. But this is the birth of conscious life anyway, is when consciousness arises from this interaction. And particularly, it seems to be, from the Buddhist teaching, it seems to be particularly, if not for all other living beings, it's particularly characteristic and informative.

[46:00]

human consciousness, that human consciousness arises from this kind of interaction. But if you look at other animals, it looks like they got the same thing going, of these gross materialities interacting with these subtle tissue responsiveness. That's where their life starts, too. The animals, anyway. The plants, maybe it's somewhat debatable, which is part of the reason why It may be okay to be a vegetarian. So this may take several seconds to understand what I just told you, but anyway, there it is in very brief form. That's the origin of consciousness from this physical base. Consciousness is not a physical phenomena, but it is something which arises in dependence upon physical phenomena. So the mind is not the brain, but the mind arises in dependence on the brain.

[47:08]

Without a brain, you don't have a mind. Without a nervous system, you don't have a mind. Without sense organs, you don't have a brain. Without sense organs, you don't have consciousness. But with sense organs interacting with physical, there is the birth of consciousness, which is not physical because it's not located, but it depends on something that is located. It depends on two different varieties of things that are located. So a non-localized thing, a thing that's not in time and space, depends on time and space. So here's the spiritual possibilities is that we have something that's born of time and space that transcends time and space and also upon which time and space is born. So there's a cycle of the transcendence, the source of time and space, and so on, round and round this goes. Yes, did someone have their hand raised? Yes? Yes? Yes, yes? Anybody else? Yes? Someone, a friend, was asking a question, and I think maybe it was a question or something.

[48:21]

Okay, let's hear it. I'm not sure, but it was... If a tree falls down in the forest and nobody's there, did the tree fall down? Is that what you're speaking about? Yeah, that's right. So Angelica thinks that if a tree falls down in the forest and nobody's there, it falls down in the forest. I would say that there's not a tree in the forest, nor is there a forest if there's anybody around. There's not even a forest if there's nobody around. There aren't forests on this planet. You take all the people away from this planet, and send back somebody who's not a human, they will not find any forest here. Or take a person, you know, have the humans leave the planet and then go to some place where they have other kinds of intelligent beings, and then you put them in a spaceship and aim them back to what we call the forest, and they fly right back and they land in what we call the forest, they get out of the spaceship and they don't see a forest. And we say, they're in the forest, no wonder what they see. And they tell us what they see.

[49:22]

And what do they see? Well, you'd have to ask them. But they could see something other than a forest because they're not hooked into our conceptual system. Now, we know that other animals don't see forests there. We know, for example, that birds don't see forests. And buffalo don't see forests. And elk don't see forests. So those poor devils, they don't know what a forest is, but we do, right? Like fish. Fish thinks that... If you tell a fish, like Dogen said, if you tell a fish that the ocean is... And they think you're nuts because you just told them that their shopping mall is flowing. You know? You tell a being who's in a state of... yogic bliss, that the water is flowing, and they think you're crazy. They're in a jeweled pleasure palace. You tell a person who is in a state of torment that that's a flowing water, they think you're crazy.

[50:32]

They're up to their eyeballs in bloody pus. Every being, depending on their perspective, has a different take on it. There isn't they're independent. There is not, not only is there not a tree falling in the forest, there's not a tree, there's not falling, there's not forest, there's not a planet, there's not, the universe is not there the way we see it if you take away humans. And any being that you put back into the universe that's conscious, universe according to its equipment. Like a computer, put a computer in this world, what does it see? What does a computer see? It won't see what we see. It'll see some other thing. Yes? The sense consciousness, right? So it's not consciousness how we use it. Start with sense consciousness. That's the first step. So, and that's something about that might be the place where dwellers are.

[51:39]

Yeah. The subtle side of it, that's already kind of a group of relationships. They are like a group of cells or something. I mean, how do you define that as like two things relating? How do I define the tissue and the light as two things relating? Is there something about that I cannot get? If you want, it maybe makes it simpler to go down to a simpler organism where you don't have a complicated, highly evolved thing like the eye organ. and the brain. But anyway, with a simple organism or a complex organism, what you have here is tissue that's very responsive to materiality. Our skin is also responsive.

[52:40]

For example, not light, but electromagnetic radiation. If you shine a green light onto our skin, not much happens. Something can happen, but not too much. If you shine ultraviolet radiation on our skin, it turns brown or gets burned. If you shine infrared radiation onto our skin, it feels warm. So our skin actually responds to electromagnetic radiation, but it responds more to the things outside of the nearly, the stuff that's just a little bit outside the spectrum that we usually call light. It responds to them more than the eye does. But the eye responds more to this range inside there. And both the eye and the skin don't respond much to, for example, gamma rays or radio waves. Radio waves go in our eyes, in our ears, in our brain.

[53:43]

They go right through, don't they? They do. It's because they're nice, big, flat ones. They go . And other ones are so high density, they go through. X-rays go through too, but they cause damage. to the tissue so if you put x-rays through the eye or through the skin it causes it goes knocks things out of place there's a response though so you could say well in that sense of the kind of responsive but it the responsiveness isn't intense enough to create consciousness so when you put x-rays through a human body no matter almost any place you put it through whether you put it through in the skin fingernail It's not intense. There's not an intense enough response chemically. There's destruction, but it's not like a coherent, repeatable response. Whereas if you put light through the eye area, it responds and recovers and responds and recovers. And this kind of responsiveness is the kind of responsiveness. That already sounds like a system.

[54:43]

That's not like a... It already... It sounds like a system? I mean, there's something more happening. It sounds like a system. Yes. Well, how would you make it not a system? Actually, I wanted you to point it to... I don't want this to be a system. This is just a story of the birth of consciousness, and this story of birth of consciousness This is the birth actually of sense consciousnesses, and then the next week I'll talk about the birth of mind consciousness, which is based on sense consciousnesses, one step after this. So first you have materiality without consciousness. Right? But this materiality you have is materiality in a different way than we think of materiality, because materiality is not yet precipitated into phenomena. Because there's no consciousness to make phenomena. What you have now is materiality at a pre-conscious level.

[55:47]

And therefore you don't have the kind of phenomena that we have after consciousness. So we have these two kinds of materiality, but really more we have the potential for materiality to be like... So that's maybe the part about the system you already have. So that's helpful. Because you take one step back now. When I say we have the gross and subtle materiality, what I mean is that there's a gross and subtle potentiality for interaction in such a way that there would... But as soon as consciousness arises, these two are also born as phenomena with the consciousness. Prior to that, they aren't what they are when consciousness arises. So there's no a priori five categories of physicality. That's why I said at the beginning, isn't it funny that there's five? Doesn't that seem kind of like exceptionally auspicious?

[56:51]

That the universe is like fitting into our number system like that? And coming in these magical packages? Before there's human consciousness, there aren't five. But it's not like there's three or nine. There isn't a number of categories of gross materiality prior to human intervention or human birth. There's the potential for five. But once there's a potential for five, there's also a potential for six, by the way, and there's a potential or the probability of nine and two and zero. But it's happened at some point. Those but then it was also five sensitivities in the physical body. Five? What a coincidence. How did that work out? It's so lawful. Somehow the world in such a way to interact such a consciousness arose and consciousness then made five.

[58:09]

And it made five sensitivities. And the five sensitivities came together to make consciousness. All these things somehow to make life. And it starts with sense consciousness. In other words, it's physically based. But again, the coming together is not actually there. aside from that interaction. So you can say that consciousness arises from the material world, but you can also say the material world arises from consciousness. They arise depending on each other. You never have one without the other. You do not have a material world prior to consciousness. You do not have consciousness prior to the material world. Yes? I'm just wondering about these five, like, five subtle receptors, because, I mean, I can think of another one.

[59:19]

Well, like, if someone has intuition. Yeah, intuition. Yeah, but that's a mind, that moves up into the ability of the mind, it's part of the mind-sense equipment. Oh, just that I'm going to say that, that's all. Really, that there is. I feel I have an intuition in my legs, or I have an intuition in my stomach. Right. And maybe they're sensing it, not so much with their thoughts, but with some sort of a feeling. Right, but if they say in their leg, then let's talk about, is touch a temperature? Well, they may just have a sense that maybe it's their life problem, or it's some sort of a, you know, something different than these five things that you said. Yeah, but what is it? Tell me what it is. Well, they may say it's a knowing.

[60:23]

But that's, we already got that accounted, we have the... I say knowing is physically based. I say that, yeah. So the mind consciousness or, you know, both kinds of consciousness have, all kinds of consciousness have knowing as a key ingredient of what we mean by consciousness, is knowing. It's part of it. Okay? So... But what I'm suggesting is that maybe you can know other than through those five that you mentioned. Yes, but the five I mentioned... What I'm saying is that isn't it funny that we say five and nobody comes up with a sixth? You still haven't come up with a sixth. You see? Isn't that funny that we can only, you can't imagine a sixth. You can say, isn't, what I'm saying is that it isn't really, there was a possibility for five and we got five.

[61:26]

But there was also and still is a possibility for six, but we don't have six. You just say, isn't there some possibility for something more? I say you could have 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 80. Well, you're just denying that. No, no, no. I'm saying that there is the potential for an infinite number of categories of gross physical phenomena. Yeah. But in our... for human beings, we have only been able to discover five. And you can say, isn't there more? And I would say, yeah, I'm saying there could be more, but we can't come up with more because we're blocked into the five. And there really is more information possible, but we can't get it because of water. That's what's missing. What's missing is less than and more than five. Those are missing, but those are still possible.

[62:29]

And some organisms do not have five. Organisms that we're quite unfriendly terms with. Organisms are very important to us, not all organisms. But we have five, and no organism that we can find has more than five. Actually, probably they do have more than five, but we can't get it. Because we just can't conceive, if we can conceive of more than five, then somebody please tell me what is the sixth? So if you think what you came up with was a sixth, then tell me the physicality that you're talking about. Well, physicality may not actually be yet defined scientifically because maybe science has come along and said, oh, I... or the this does it, but when people say, okay, like, I know someone just died over in Japan. Right. And they get it that someone just died.

[63:33]

Right. And so somehow they know that. It came to them. Okay. Yeah. And it came to them because they're in people form. Mm-hmm. I mean, maybe if they were ghosts, they would know, too. Right. at this rate, living life, talking about nameless. Right. So there may be other beings who have six or nine. Maybe growth has three and a half. Maybe they're missing three of ours and they have half of another one that we don't have. This is possible. I'm just saying that we humans, our regular humans, who get to be the ones who are alive, living humans, They have living tissue and are reproducing each other. And there's also mutants. Maybe some mutants came up with six. But they weren't the mutants strong enough to convince us that they really had evidence for their sixth one.

[64:36]

But it definitely is possible to have mutants. That's why I said at the beginning, isn't it funny that we have five? Isn't, I mean, isn't it funny that we have five? And now we have five sense organs, four of them, and we don't have like, we have a sixth sense, but that's the mind. But we don't have a seventh sense, do we? And they say, yes, we do. Well, do we have an eighth too? Well, let's see the eighth and the ninth and the fourth. I'm saying, isn't it funny that we have five? And you're saying, isn't it possible to have more than five? I say, yeah, but do we? And you're saying some people do. Okay. Then what's the phenomena they're talking about? With the other ones we can say, it's by light, it's by sound, it's by gas. We can specify the thing. And we can show the responsive part and we can show the thing. They're so well established. These other things are... It would take, you know... a really good spokesperson for these people who can actually detect this stuff on a regular basis.

[65:38]

And once in a while, information from Japan is not going to be enough to, like, get people to say, okay, let's make it six. So we have these five, you know, and then we have this sixth one, which is primarily about people dying in foreign countries. And not only that, but you can often come up with other explanations. Like I had this explanation. This thing happened to me one time. I'm not saying this explains it. But the point is, I'm saying we are in a little circle of waters, what I'm saying to you. But that doesn't mean... The five sense organs doesn't mean it's true that there's only five sense fields. It's just that we are stuck in this little five times five meets five world. We're in that little world. That's what I'm saying. I'm not saying that's the whole ocean. The whole ocean is there's infinite sense organs. And other beings have other sense organs.

[66:42]

They do pick up other stuff already, but we don't know what they're talking about. Because we just can't get out of our little... We can't get out of our little thing. But it's possible that we would be able to, that we could change in such a way that we would be outside of it. A different circle. Anyway, here's an example of something which looks like it's outside, but actually is inside. I was visiting a... mean a friend was visiting me she came over to my house this is somebody I knew for a long time and she we grew up in together in Minnesota and she we're talking and and I said to her how's your dad and she said we were in California as I said how's your dad and she says what are you talking about and I said well Isn't he sick? She says, what do you mean? I thought he was sick. I said, well, who told you that?

[67:43]

I said, I don't know. But I just, I somehow thought he was in the hospital and that he had a heart attack or something like that. And she said, what? She said, can I use your phone? So she goes in my other room, picks up the phone and she calls up and she says, hi mom, how's dad? Shit. Never mind, never mind, what's, what's, you know, never mind how I know that, what, what, blah, blah, oh, shit. You know, and then she, you know, comes back, she hangs the phone, comes back and says, you know, wow, he's had a heart attack. And she sort of ran off to, you know, go back to visit her father. Now, this person thinks that I've got this sixth sense, so for her, that I would know that was not that big a deal, right? And I was kind of thinking, now, how did I know that? And I'm not saying that all of them can be accounted for this way.

[68:44]

But then I realized that a few days before, somebody else had called me from Minnesota, and they just happened to be in the hospital when her father was brought into the hospital. And they saw that. But that person didn't call me to tell me that my father was having a heart attack. She called me about something else and just mentioned that he had it. Because she didn't think she had to tell me It's just, you know, a mutual friend's father have sick, right? But she told me that. And I didn't call my friend to say, did your father have a heart attack? Because I figured she would find out from her mother. I didn't feel I had to be the messenger. This was privileged information or something. So I just got this information and just knew this happened and that was that. And when I saw her, when she came over, I even had forgotten when she came over that, you know, her father had had the heart attack. So when she walked in, we just talked for a while and then suddenly it popped up. And I just had this image of him being, you know. So information comes, in this case, the information came to me through our regular five.

[69:47]

But when I told her, it sounded like it came from a six. Because I didn't know where I got it from, and she didn't know where I got it from. How would I know that her father, who was not a movie star, how would I know before she did that her father was six? And I didn't remember when she was sitting there. I didn't say, oh, so-and-so called me. I just had that information. And I wasn't, like, keeping track of it or anything. So sometimes it can be like this, that it can come this way. But it also could conceivably come other ways, that we could have other senses that are more sensitive than we think. Like, what's his name? I think his name is Ved Mehta. He's a blind writer. Is that his name? You mean nobody knows Ved Mehta? Wow. Wow. Don't you read the New Yorker? Anyway, he's an Indian blind man who is very good. And he wanted to go, his brother went to school on a bicycle and he wanted to go on a bicycle too.

[70:48]

But his father wouldn't let him ride on the bicycle because he was blind, right? So what he did was he felt his way around the world, found bicycle parts and built himself a bicycle. And then he started to ride the bicycle and follow his brother to Skrull. So you know what happened, probably. He'd ride down the bicycle and pedal a little way and then ran into posts and walls and had many accidents. He could ride the bicycle, he just couldn't tell whether there was something out there. But after a while, he noticed that just before he hit something, there was a certain sensation in his cheeks. And he learned that he realized what kind of feeling in his cheeks when he approached objects on the bicycle. And he learned to ride a bicycle by the sensation in his cheeks. So it's not to say that there isn't sense organs in our cheeks.

[71:54]

It's just that they're not, you know, the usual ones. There is, there's senses all over. touch receptors here, but we don't usually use them for, you know, driving bicycles or cars and stuff, but they're in there. So he didn't think, he didn't invent another one, because this is actually, the skin is all over the body, so he just found some potential of the skin, but he didn't think of a sixth. But I'm not saying there isn't a sixth, I say there is the potential for the sixth, but our mind has not precipitated it. So probably there was a trial and error thing there for a while when we tried six and tried seven and tried four, and we made this deal where five seemed like a good number to deal with the potentiality. rather than four or seven. And probably some beings did have six or nine or three, and they weren't successful. So now we're locked into the circle called five. That's my feeling.

[72:56]

But not that this is just a circle. There really is virtually infinite number of other possible ways to group the physical universe besides five. You could do it some other way. You could say one, because they're all physical, and you could have one sense organ for all physical things, and then have consciousness arise with one sense organ, but then you wouldn't be able to differentiate lights, temperatures, and so on. But it doesn't mean there's not another one. It's just saying that we have decided to settle on five. And our consciousness arises from this settling. So our knowing is limited by how we worked out, how our senses worked out to have five rather than six or nine. And so our knowing is basically limited by that too.

[73:57]

So our knowing is actually... fundamentally off in two ways. One, it's circumscribed. And secondly, it's dualistic because of this dual birth right. Did you have something to comment? Well, the duality was most likely created as a result of this organism needing to survive in its physical environment. And it's just getting more, this organism, that human form, that life, is getting more and more complex, just like the universe is expanding from the Big Bang. Well, it's expanding, but

[74:58]

That's our point of view. And also, all the expansion is actually the same place that it always was. So the mind's expansion is the same place that it always was. Okay? So again, I'm not saying that there really is only five. I'm just saying we live in a circle of water. And we have trouble accepting that, that whatever thing we're looking at is a little circle of what's really going on. But when we thoroughly study something, we're more likely to be able to accept that we're limited, and that what we see is not the whole story. And that there's also a whole world of potentials that are before our stories.

[76:11]

And that our stories are what makes the world precipitate into, that makes a world precipitate is because of our stories.

[76:25]

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