Before I answer that, could I talk to you after class? We're going to have a meeting next Thursday at what time? At 7 o'clock in here. A brief less than a half an hour about the writing project that I mentioned last week. If you're interested... You're welcome to join the meeting. One thing which I feel a little uncomfortable mentioning, but anyway, I just want to mention, and that is when the sitting group, when this group was meeting out in, sort of out in the neighborhood, so to speak.

[01:10]

What did you call that neighborhood? The Mission? Yeah, when we were meeting in the Mission, gradually became, or became sort of representative of the racial mix of San Francisco. Did you notice that? And when it moved to Zen Center, it gradually became more and more white again. And without getting into the details of that, like tonight there's a little sitting group upstairs in the office that I use for people of color. Yeah. So I don't know what the problem is. But if any of you, if it seems appropriate to encourage your friends of color to come to the sitting, I think that would be good.

[02:23]

I kind of miss it. If it doesn't happen pretty soon, I think maybe we should move back into the neighborhood. By the neighborhood, I mean maybe out of the big institution. Maybe that's part of the situation. Maybe some people feel, oh Zen Center, that's for white people. But maybe a yoga studio, that doesn't, you know, maybe that's more open, I don't know. Anyway, we have a few Asians in the group tonight, but not many In Latina, we have some people from South America, but they're kind of white South Americans. Anyway, if there's some way to encourage that, please do. It was great when we had more of a mix. Didn't you?

[03:26]

Yes. Yeah, it was good. Pardon? Pardon? Yeah, it seems like it should reflect the neighborhood. But in that other group, the other area was a mixed neighborhood, and it seemed like it was reflective of that neighborhood. So what's missing? I don't know. I mean, I do know it's missing, so let's see if we can encourage that to happen more. I'd like to continue to talk about this topic of consciousness. And I did a little dictionary work because people often say, well, it's awareness and so on. And Basically, the word conscious means to be aware or means aware or awareness.

[04:42]

And consciousness is a state of being conscious, right? it's a state of being conscious, it's a state of being aware. Awareness is knowing, and knowing is cognition. So consciousness is cognition, it is knowing, it is awareness, and it includes perception. Perception is to become aware or to perceive is to become aware. And to know is to be aware and to knowledge is a state of knowing or the state of being aware. So knowledge and consciousness are states and they're both states of being aware.

[05:46]

And There's another word that's important in this discussion, that is sense. And sense as a verb means to be aware or to become aware or to perceive. So there's nuances among these, but anyway, to perceive is to become aware or to come to know. or to come to sense. And perception and sensation are processes by which we come to know and come to be aware. So these words are almost quite knowledge, consciousness, knowing, perceiving, awareness, aware, becoming aware, perceiving, conscious, consciousness, awareness.

[06:54]

And so I'll probably just use them somewhat, and you can use them somewhat interchangeably. And, yes? There's another aspect, like, for example, the old brain Constantly monitoring the blood and the, you know, every part of our body. There is a part of us that is aware, even we are not aware of it. What is that for? Well, that's what I'll be talking about. But I would say that that would come under the category, again, of what we often call selfishness. But again, sense consciousness is redundant because sense means to be aware, and so does consciousness. But in the way we often speak in translating Buddhism, we often speak of sense consciousness referring to the consciousness of physical phenomena.

[08:03]

And consciousness of physical phenomena is what Nureet was speaking of as a kind of awareness, but we don't seem to know about it. There is awareness of it, the awareness that we associate with, for example, it's not mediated by conception. So, for a lot of our You know, our life as an ego or as a self has to do with so-called objective knowledge. And objective knowledge is the knowledge which is known by a subject. Now this whole set-up is illusory, but still there is this set-up of a subject which has consciousness, which knows an object.

[09:08]

And subjects which know objects are in the realm of mind consciousness. But sense, these physical consciousnesses, knowing the object. They're just consciousness, object, and organ. But that's part of what I'd like to go over again tonight is the origins of the physical consciousnesses. But again, the physical consciousness is because consciousness isn't physical, but consciousness is physically based. So, are you ready to do it again? Here's the story. The story, this is the, what do you call it, creation story of consciousness. Can this be turned down a little bit? Kind of... Isn't it going... Yeah. So I propose that just imagine that tonight we won't be talking about how the creation

[10:18]

we'll just talk about we have a physical world arising and in the arising of this physical world we have two basic types for the sake of you know the psychology of human beings we have two basic types of physicality and what are the two basic types of physicality that human beings have Subtle and gross. Okay? And what are the gross physicalities for us? Huh? But that's close. That's only one category off. Huh? What? Louder, please. The items which the senses perceive. The items which the senses perceive. I would say that's not quite right, but still, what are the items which the senses are responding to?

[11:29]

Senses actually do not, the senses, the physical senses do not perceive anything. Okay? They don't perceive anything. We can talk about that, but they respond to something. And what do they respond to? They respond to the gross, they respond to the gross physical materiality. What are the categories of gross physical materiality? Light? Huh? Sound? What? Five skandhas? No. Taste? Texture? Huh? Tangible, that's texture. Smell. Smell. Okay. What are our answers to these questions? Pardon? No, color is not a sense. Light isn't a sense.

[12:33]

Color isn't a sense. A smell is not a sense. An odor. is not a sense. Yeah. Usually what we mean by sense, by sense organ, and again sense is a funny word because sense means to be aware, right? But what we mean by sense organ is that which responds to odor or that which responds to light or that which responds, okay? But there actually there's a problem in us saying light and sound. Because light and sound, they're actually, it's not actually that there's sounds out there in the physical world. Now I shouldn't say out there. There's not that in the physical world there are sounds and lights. just like there's no actual rainbows aside from somebody to see them.

[13:45]

There aren't really light, there isn't really light out there. Light is something that only happens when it's, when you get it together with something that responds to it and a consciousness which arises. That's what light is. And even then, there still might not be any light if there's certain things faulty in the consciousness or in the organ. So strictly speaking, in terms of physicality, to be more strict, we would say a certain type of electromagnetic or take away a certain type, electromagnetic radiation, mechanical waves, chemicals, gases, and matter. Those are the five.

[14:47]

Okay? So the mechanical waves are not sounds until they touch some tissue and a consciousness arises. So if, for example, a mechanical are in the water, is propagated through space, through the water space, and touches an ear, and the ear, and this ear responds, but consciousness doesn't arise, I would suggest to you that there's there's a movement of the eardrum, and probably the anvil, the stirrup, and the, what's the other thing? Anvil, the hammer and the stirrup, is that it? anvil, hammer, stirrup. Is that right? So the eardrum moves, the anvil, hammer, stirrup do their thing, the cilia inside they go wiggle, wiggle, but no consciousness arises. I would say that sound has not occurred.

[15:49]

Sound means that it is an event for a consciousness. I think maybe, well, maybe some people are, there's relative degrees of deafness, right? But some people have a situation where there's no ear consciousness and some people have situations where there's no eye consciousness. Now, so those are the five gross kinds of physicality, and the five subtle kinds of physicality for psychological experience, what we call the eye organ, the ear organ, the nose organ, the tongue organ, and the body organ, or the skin organ. But actually, skin is actually sort of primitive too because

[16:54]

There's surfaces inside the body and sometimes inside organs that also are sensitive to temperature and pressure. And if you can ever get in there, some of them might be also sensitive to gradations in roughness or smoothness. But not all of them, just some of them have some kind of sense organs on them, even though they're under the basic skin. In some sense, the skin is the most basic sense organ. So the basic proposal here is that when this gross physicality touches another kind of physicality that's very responsive to it. And this subtle materiality is not actually just a physical location, it is but it's a physical responsiveness.

[18:03]

And it's in, again, for the purposes of psychology, it's in a living being. Because we're talking about, because electromagnetic radiation can also touch physicality that respond to it too. And mechanical waves can touch other kinds of physicality that respond to it too, like sound waves can break glass. So in that sense, glass is a sense organ to the mechanical wave in the air. Did I say sound can break the glass? Yeah, so I slipped there. Mechanical waves in the air can break glass. So the glass in that sense is functioning like, in a sense, a sense organ. Meaning, another meaning of sense is a noun which means the meaning of something. So, when glass breaks, it's behaving like an eardrum.

[19:09]

But, as far as we know, but, you know, as far as I know anyway, no consciousness arises when a sound wave, when a, we call it a sound wave, it's not sound, but when a mechanical wave, a sound wave, hits a glass and breaks it, we don't know of any consciousness arising in that interaction. Maybe there is, but again, we don't know about that as far as I know. And also, it's not so relevant for our psychological processes. But when these mechanical waves touch the body in certain places, like they can also touch, you can also feel sound in your cheeks, right? You can feel mechanical waves. Right? You ever felt it? It's hard to separate the two, but you can actually feel. Well, like again, your eardrum is like your skin, and your eardrum can break.

[20:20]

But that's not the same as hearing. The hearing happens not when the eardrum moves, because if the eardrum moves but there's other parts of the ear aren't functioning, we don't hear anything. It's got to be eardrum, anvil, hammer, stirrup, cilia, and then the nerves at the end of those little things going off and sending nerve impulses up to the brain is what gives rise in us to this thing called sound. But the eardrum itself is, in a sense, like a glass breaking. But no consciousness arises right from the eardrum. But still, basically arises from this responsiveness of tissue to this kind of physical sensation. And some things for you to think about are that the consciousness is not, for example, hearing.

[21:27]

The consciousness is not seeing. The ear is not hearing. The eye is not seeing. And the sound wave, or the mechanical wave, is not hearing. And the electromagnetic radiation is not seeing. Is that right? In this culture, most people would say, yeah, of course light doesn't see and sound doesn't hear. But not a lot of people would say that the eye sees and the ear hears. And some other people would say, no, the eye consciousness sees and the ear consciousness hears. But the Buddhist psychologists, none of those three hear. The consciousness knows and is aware of the object But a knowing the object is still not the same as, knowing the color is not the same as the experience of seeing.

[22:46]

Experience of seeing is light, knowing, and this eye organ functioning together. Because you could know a light or know a color and there could be no color there. In other words, you could dream of a color. But we don't call that seeing. For seeing, there has to be a color. But it can't just be a color touching an organ. So the consciousness that we call seeing is not the consciousness where we know the color blue. but it's actually the consciousness, the physical consciousness that arises from those three. And one more thing is necessary for it, because those three have to be in contact. So you don't have three of them, but they have to be in contact. Those three operating in contact together, like they're together, that's what it takes for a physical sense consciousness to arise.

[23:54]

And there is a meditation called in meditation, which means, ayatana means doors of arrival. And it means doors of arrival of, or arising of consciousness. Consciousness arises at these doors. The doors are the sense field and the sense organs. And when, in relationship to the organ, the physical, the gross physical materiality are called fields. And I think of them as they're the fields where the organs play. But when consciousness arises, the consciousness is the field. So then the field is called an object. It's an object of consciousness. It's an object of awareness. And in this process, notice that the consciousness knows its object, the field of the organ, but the conscious does not actually perceive or know the organ.

[25:07]

It could infer the organ, but that would be another process, a process of inference. You could figure out the organ, but you don't actually see it. You see through the organ, but also the organ is what separates knowledge from what it knows. So the eye, in one sense, is how light comes... And it's the place where light stimulates the body in a very complex and intense way. And because of that intensity, the consciousness arises, but it also is what separates consciousness from what it knows. Because in a very basic way, consciousness is nothing other than what it knows, because all it is, basically, is knowing. And what does it know? It knows its object. And it's not another physical thing.

[26:16]

So when you have a physical thing like light, a physical thing like electromagnetic radiation, then you have the seeing, a light, the knowledge of it is really nothing in addition to the light. You have the physical event of the light, and then you have a knowing of it, but the knowing is nothing really in addition. So it's like before there was knowing of the light, or before there was knowing of electromagnetic radiation, it wasn't light. Once it's light, you've accounted for consciousness. Is it taught? I would say it was consciousness. You could say consciousness was the way the universe taught how to appreciate itself.

[27:23]

somehow at some point in the history of this universe, at least in this neighborhood, physicality started interacting with itself and produced and rose out of that interaction. And there was, but there's also, again, there's physical interactions where consciousness doesn't seem to arise. Like, for example, once again, mechanical waves, like the mechanical waves can be in water, can be in air, can be in, can be in, in carbolic acid. In other words, energy can be propagated through media, through gases, and through liquids, and also can be propagated through solids. Right? But of course, through air, it's, most subtle, through water it's a little grosser, but it's also faster through water, isn't it?

[28:34]

It's slower through air, next fastest through material, through solid stuff, usually. Anyway, mechanical energy can be transmitted through media, right? And then the energy then can, at a certain point, touch other material, right? Like that example, that thing where you have all these five balls hanging down, and you pull one ball and hit it, and then the middle one stays still and the last one flies out. So in the same way you can transmit energy into a media and then at the other end of the media break glass. The breaking of the glass is an example of something that can respond to that energy transmitted through this other material. But we don't, again, consciousness doesn't seem to arise there. But when it's a certain kind of material, which we are tempted to call life, but I'd rather not call it life,

[29:40]

because I think actually it wasn't life for a while. It wasn't life, but it was sensitive in such a way and it interacted in such a way with these gross material categories that consciousness arose. Well, last week I pointed out there's a problem in putting anything before anything else. It's really a circle. So it's hard to put physicality before. But I think this group is not ready for that right now. I'll get to that later. Let's just say we got a physical thing situation. Yes? I answered it? Okay. So again, like the eyeball, look at the eyeball. Eyeball, you're not seeing the organ of sight.

[30:45]

You're seeing where the organ of sight is. The organ of sight is the ability of the physical tissue in this area to respond. response. When you see the response, you're seeing the functioning of the organ. And the organ is located, but the way it looks to you is not the organ. The way it functions is the organ. The way it dances is the organ. And so we have these five organ intensity areas. around our face and all over our body, and the skin was probably the first one. So if you look at very simple organisms like an amoeba, I don't know amoebas very well, but my sense is that amoebas, if you bring certain kinds of materiality near amoeba, they move away from it, and you bring other kinds of material near them and touch the skin surface, and they move around it.

[31:59]

If you bring something hot towards it, something a little bit too hot, it'll move away. Bring something too cold, it'll move away. Bring something the right temperature, and it'll probably move around it. I would say that in the interaction between something hot near the skin surface or the cell wall of an amoeba, when the amoeba responds to that by moving away or moving towards, in that interaction, consciousness arises. So it's not necessarily just to appreciate itself, but it's also... Well, you can say that consciousness is for learning. If you make a note of it, then you won't do a mistake or you will go towards something that you remember to be Everything that's happened since amoebas, you can say, was the purpose of amoebas. You know, if you want to.

[33:02]

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If you put on a mask, for instance, with bright colors and it looks aerial, I'm just making an example. So that's where I'm getting stuck. So how does that develop? So let's see. You're stuck. What's the sticking point? See, that's what I'm stuck in. It's a response to a stereo thing. A stereo thing, you see. And it takes their feel. I think your question is developmentally advanced in my presentation.

[34:05]

So I would ask you just to suffer with your question for a couple more weeks, because I haven't yet got to mind consciousness, which babies have. But as far as I know, amoebas do not. But maybe they do. But let me just, I think I need to play this out a little bit more because you're going to ask a lot of questions which will be a lot different after I tell you some more stuff. Can I go on? Remind you of the reasons for looking at it? Well, consciousness, one of the meanings of consciousness is as one of the twelvefold links of causation. But the reason why I'm bringing up now is psychological phenomena because all experience can be categorized into one of the five categories of consciousness, various kinds of mental formations and physical formations, but mental formations and...

[35:18]

the fourth group, the third group, perception, the second group, feelings, and the first group, these physical material, these two types of physical material, those five aggregates account for all experience. All experience can be, you know, composed, account for all kinds of experience under these five categories. So I'm starting with consciousness because I just thought that's the most overall of the group. Where are we right now? I think all 12 are present right now. One of the things I was trying to point out here is that this consciousness is by nature dualistic.

[36:24]

And it's dualistic because its roots are between a kind of distinction in the physical world, not just in terms of five categories, but between these two major types. So there's five categories, but for any kind of physical event there's this basic split between, and it's the split in the physical world that gave rise to consciousness. It isn't just that there are five categories. We talked about there could be six or forty-eight categories. Isn't it funny that there's five? I would say that's an evolutionary artifact that there's five for us. I think some beings may have 6, 10, 87, 3. What I'm suggesting is the fact that two different types or two different aspects of materiality interacting is the source of consciousness.

[37:32]

So consciousness arises out of a difference, out of a duality, out of a... and that consciousness is really nothing other than the thing it knows. But it seems like it is. It seems like there's knowing something which is different from the known. Like we know something that's separate, in a sense there's that kind of separation. But you see it's built that way because The organ intervenes between the knowing and the known. Speak louder, please. That's not yet the original sin. The original sin is going to come soon now. Because this level of consciousness, there is no objective knowledge.

[38:36]

in some sense that this level of organic conscious life that I've just described is the Garden of Eden. Because there is awareness, there is life with consciousness, there is life, yeah, there's conscious life of separation and no sense of objective knowledge at this level of sense functioning. And this level of sense functioning is going on for us right now non-stop. And it comes in little packages called physical conscious experience. It isn't physical but it's physically based and there are these rapid successions of this very direct awareness And it's dualistic even though there isn't yet a sense of subject and object. Objective knowledge at this point.

[39:42]

There is knowing but there is not a sense of a knowing something which is separate from the knowing. Of a knowing and a known and that the knowing and the known are separate. There isn't this sense here. And there is not a knower who owns the knowing of the known. So there's no objective knowledge at this point, even though there is knowledge. It's not objective. The object is not external. And in fact, that's actually the case, that consciousness is not external to these two. It's totally intimate with them. So I just want, before I take these questions, I want to say my next step will be to talk about the arising of mind consciousness or objective knowledge. Yes? Yes. it has this dualistic root because it arises from the interaction of these two different modalities.

[40:57]

And then now with that, after it arises, it is separated in a sense from one of them by the other one. It's almost like It's really that what is not... In one Buddhist psychology book it says, if you took away the organ, the consciousness would just collapse into the object because they're basically the same. And there would be no knowledge. There would just be physicality. Pardon? I can't understand your question. I heard birth of form. is what the birth of porn? No, I'm describing the birth of consciousness. I'm describing the birth of what we call the eye consciousness, the ear consciousness, the nose consciousness, and the skin consciousness or body consciousness.

[42:04]

Yes? Yes? What's wisdom? It's understanding-ness. When you understand how this stuff happens, that's wisdom. But again, it's not like I say, when you understand that, but I take away you. The understanding of this is wisdom. in accord with the way this actually is. Okay, you ready for the next step? No? Yes? Yes. I understand it. It's just this self-consciousness of... so there's no awareness of... I can't remember the... It's just like there's just the experiencing because the experiencing... There's the experience, there's what?

[43:11]

In sense consciousness there is, sense consciousness is the raw impression of a physical event. And the physical event is not the electromagnetic radiation, but the electromagnetic radiation touching a tissue which responds. You don't get it? The dualism is that there's two different types of materiality. Because dualism means two. The sense consciousness is arising out of two types interacting. It doesn't necessarily think that there's two types, but in fact its roots are two types.

[44:24]

Keep listening. Okay? The next step is the arising of mind consciousness. And mind consciousness perceives mind. And mind consciousness perceives concepts. And concepts can be objectively known. You mean thoughts? Well, thoughts, but thoughts that are concepts. But again, what you have here is that in the mental world, based on the consciousness which arose from physicality.

[45:28]

So the first level of consciousness arises directly out of physicality, but not just physicality, but a dynamic, interactive physicality, gross and subtle types. Then, arising from this consciousness, is another kind of consciousness which reenacts the same process but this time what it does instead of having the physical world being split into two so you could say the physical world is not split into two it's not split into two but when it seems to be split into two then consciousness arises the physical world really isn't split into two It's not really a split between gross and subtle materiality. There's really no separation between radiation and tissue that responds to it. There's not really a separation.

[46:29]

But when there seems to be the apparent separation, it gives rise to consciousness. Or consciousness is the apparent separation. It's not a real separation. So consciousness is based on something that's not real. And that goes back, to make life more complicated, to the twelve links of causation. Consciousness arises from karmic formations. Karmic formations arise from ignorance. Consciousness is at root ignorant. Because it is actually arising from a difference which really isn't there. But without difference, ladies and gentlemen, there is no life. So another story about the origins of consciousness is that the origins of consciousness and the origins of life that the universe played on itself. That the universe created a sense of separation among itself and that that separation became the source

[47:34]

of the arising of consciousness. Then, once there's consciousness, then consciousness itself is split itself. And really, in the universe, there's not a separation between consciousness and what it knows, but the organs, the organ creates a separation. And same in the mind, there's not really a separation. the knowledge of the mind and what it knows. But the mind has the ability to split itself into two and make one side of it the knowing and the other side the known. But it's just reenacting the same creation process that consciousness in the first place out of the physical world. So then, within the mind, the mind looks at itself The mind splits itself in two and looks at itself and says that one part of itself is outside of itself and the other side of itself is inside of itself.

[48:37]

We're all looking at each other, you know, and we all have our own mental version of each other and we think that our mental version of each other is actually something outside of ourselves called these other people. not to say there's no other people it's just to say what we see is our mind but that dualism in our mind and that original sin of having objective knowledge which makes us feel separate from everything we know you can see that there was no way to stop it it was just built life is just built on this dualism or this separation. And so if you think there's something wrong with this, actually, it's just unavoidably, we're just unavoidably dualistic beings. What we are, it's necessary.

[49:42]

No, it's like you have a different system. You know, a rose cannot be a lemon. So you need this differentiation to create something to you, actually, to create something whole, or enclosed in its own system. It is in a way different, and in a way it's the same. It's both. I think the same with the awareness of the body, the one that knows, even if we are asleep, and it still knows what to do, but you need to know that the particular acid, and this kind of material, and that kind of material, you need to know the borders, the definitions. Well, you don't need to have it unless you want life. But there's places in the universe where there doesn't seem to be life and there doesn't seem to be borders. There's not consciousness there. Right. We can look at it and make up borders, but the place there doesn't know it has any borders and it's not alive.

[50:49]

Where there's life, there's borders. Say it again. Our own by-spirit nature. By-spirit. I mean, there's something about us that's dual within itself. What do you mean, what about it? That's what I'm saying. I'm saying we're fundamentally dualistic. Are you just giving another example of what you're doing? Yes. Talk a little bit more about that mind is seeing itself. Right. Mind, seeing, and self. Well, first, yeah, so, for example, the concept, I have a concept called Jackie. And that's actually my concept. I can prove that. So what's mine? What? What's mine? What's mind? My concept. Your concept of what?

[51:51]

Jackie? I just said, I'm just saying, this mind, the mind over here that's the sponsor of this speech, this mind has a concept of Jackie, but that's this mind's concept of Jackie, that's not Jackie, as you know. This mind has a concept, Jackie, and it can know that concept Jackie. and it can split itself into two parts and say one part is the knowing of the concept and the other part is the concept. One part is the knowing, the other part is that which is known. Mind has this ability to... mind has a quality of perceiver of the object and the object perceived. They're both mind. They're actually one mind. Perceiver of object, perceiving of object, or perception of object, and object perceived.

[52:54]

They're two different aspects of mind. The active and the passive aspects of mind. But they're really just one mind. But there is the misconception that this mind is actually looking at something outside itself. But it's just looking at itself. And the mind has the ability to look at itself, but also the mind has the ability to split itself in two. And that's the way the mind acts like here. It splits itself into two so that it can feel separated from itself. The mind has this ability to like make part of itself seem separate from the other part and then know the part that's separate from. So it has an active and a passive. It has a that which, a that which, and a that which, which is. and that which is known, and that which proceeds, and that which is perceived. This is the nature of mind, but you see it's built out of its dualistic roots. So I'm just saying that it's built up out of our dualistic mind, comes up out of the earth, comes up out of the... I say out of the earth, but it actually doesn't even come up out of the earth.

[54:03]

The earth is something, again, which we've made up. It really comes out of... electromagnetic radiation of a certain range, mechanical waves of a certain range, certain chemicals, certain gases, textures, these things, up out of these interactions between these and tissue arises consciousness. This consciousness is dualistic and then this dualism is reenacted within the consciousness and the consciousness then gets split. Physical world gets split, gives rise to consciousness. Consciousness gives split, gives rise to mind consciousness. Physical world gets split, physical consciousness, consciousness of the physical world. The consciousness of the physical world gets split, mind consciousness. And in mind consciousness we have all these concepts which make up our conscious, our objectively conscious sinful world. speak up please no no no everything that you perceive in terms of objective consciousness is your mind but as at the beginning when Nuri says what about this kind of experience that we don't know about these are not just your mind

[55:34]

See, the difference between sense consciousness is that mind consciousness is just your mind. But sense consciousness is not just your mind. It's your mind and the physical world in union. Sense consciousness, because it isn't the consciousness that knows, that sees. It isn't the consciousness that hears. It isn't the consciousness that tastes. taste that tastes or the hearing that or the sound that the electromagnetic radiation that sees it's the three of them all of them together the organ the object and the consciousness together that's the process but mind consciousness is different mind consciousness is just mind split into two physical sensations are physical the physical world arbitrarily split and out of this kind of like arbitrary kind of mutant take on the physical world, like there's two types, suddenly you have consciousness. But the consciousness is nothing separate from the physical world and the physical world is not separate.

[56:41]

They're intimately interpenetrating and mutually creating each other. So there you can't say that the consciousness is just mind because it depends on these physicalities and also the experience Seeing is not just mind. It is also actually light. Because up in the mind consciousness you can have the perception of a light which is not at all physical. It's totally a concept of light. It's just your concept of being. It's not physical. It's totally mental. But that's not actually seeing a color as a direct sensory experience. But you can know that. Whereas at the direct sensory level, we're actually responding consciously, not just responding consciously, but your consciousness is born physical data.

[57:42]

At that level, you do not consciously know in the sense of objective consciousness. This is just a story. It's just a story from Buddhist psychology. Don't worry about it. But I can tell it again several different ways. It's probably nine o'clock now. Isn't it?

[58:04]

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