One of the great ancestors, Dogen Zenji, said that all Buddha, the Tathagatas, who directly transmit the inconceivable and wondrous Dharma and who realize supreme, perfect enlightenment have all had a certain way. And only Buddhas transmit it to Buddhas, and the self-fulfilling awareness is its standard which is sometimes translated as criterion or touchstone, GGU ZAMMAI, self-fulfilling

[01:06]

or self-enjoyment awareness, is the standard of this way that the Buddhas have all used in the transmission and realization of the true Dharma. So, sitting upright is the authentic gate to this self-fulfillment awareness. Sitting upright is the authentic gate to the samadhi which is the standard

[02:14]

way that all Buddhas have realized enlightenment. This is the same as to say that sitting upright is the authentic gate to the study of the self. The study of the Buddha way is the study of the self, the authentic gate to the study of the self is being upright. Now all we have to do is be upright wherever we are. That will be our gate into the realm which is right under our nose, and the realm right

[03:29]

fills the self. If you're in a supermarket and you're upright in the supermarket, you will immediately enter into the self-fulfilling awareness in the supermarket. The situation there you will enter into as this samadhi. If you're in a monastery like this, the situation of the experience here will be revealed to you as the self-fulfilling samadhi of the Buddhas if you're upright with it. In a place like this you get exposed to a text like the 30 verses of Vasubandhu.

[04:39]

If you sit upright in the face of that text, your interactions with the text will be the self-fulfilling awareness, and you will enter the Buddha way through your relationship with the text. If you go into the supermarket and you're not upright, then the realm of self-fulfilling awareness will not open up for you. You will find yourself in the realm of demons. All the people and vegetables and ice cream in the store will assault you, will harass you, will affront you, and impose themselves upon your self.

[05:51]

Similarly, if you meet a text like the 30 verses and you're not upright, the text will be an affront, will be frightening and upsetting to you, will become a demon. So I, in a rhythmic way, off and on remind you that we must be constantly devoted to this upright sitting in order to be able to enter situations of our life as the Samadhi of the Buddhas. Make the situations of our life then turn into and reveal themselves.

[06:55]

Everyone takes off their mask and shows you that really everyone's face is your own. But if we're not upright, we think other people are not us, and we think the 30 verses is not our own story, we think it's somebody else's story. In order to study the self, one of the things we have to experience or have some sense of

[08:10]

is the self. In order to sense and experience the self, we have to experience the other. When the other is actually the other rather than an other which is really part of our self, the other is like death. It's like an unfriendly darkness or it's like life and it's like a friendly light. When it's unfriendly, an enemy and darkness, we tend to be afraid of it and try to avoid it. Then we are possessed by the other.

[09:13]

We are possessed by the demon of the other. We like it, we indulge in it, and then we are possessed also. Liking it and disliking it are called leaning to the right and leaning to the left. To be afraid of the demons, to be afraid of somebody else's story, is to be afraid of being possessed by somebody else's story, is to be a slave of demons.

[10:15]

Of course, to indulge in somebody else's story is also to be a slave. Both are not uprightness, however, if in the face of somebody else's story, which is pleasant or unpleasant, to just simply be upright, their story turns into the self-fulfilling awareness. If your ultimate concern is enlightenment and you settle that deeply, if your ultimate concern is the Buddha way, then one way to express that is to be unconcerned with enlightenment.

[11:26]

To be concerned with enlightenment does not mean to be emotionally attached to it. The ultimate way to be concerned with it is to be unattached with your ultimate concern. Okay, it's nap time, five minute nap time, take a nap. Come on, take a nap, this is your big chance, I mean your little chance.

[12:54]

So, So, to be intimate with the Buddha way is not to attach to it and of course it's not to avoid it or disparage it, it's to have an intimate relationship, to be close with our And similarly, with these demons, with all kinds of destructive, unwholesome, delusional states,

[13:58]

running away from them is another delusional state. So, how can you be just the distance you are from them exactly, not any closer or farther? To be intimate with them too because, in fact, sometimes they're very close. To be intimate and upright, not indulging, not frightened. The same attitude, basically, towards enlightenment and demonic states, uprightness, and the self-fulfilling Samadhi has Buddhas and demons in it, and they come to visit you when they want to. That's the real other, it doesn't have your schedule, and that real other that comes to

[15:13]

you when it wants to is the other that defines yourself. Now, entering what's before us, if we've heard about the Buddha's teaching of mind, and we hear about a Sanskrit word, alaya, alaya-vijnana, alaya, alaya-vijnana,

[16:27]

alaya-vijnana, the mind has infinite capacities. And those capacities can be categorized in a number of ways. One way to categorize the infinite capacities of the mind is by saying that there's one mind, that there's one category of mind, and just let it go at that.

[17:28]

And it's nap time again, take another nap. You should have a little bell to signal. Instead of having a mindfulness bell, you should have a nap bell. Can I have a little bell, is there one nearby? It's way far away? You don't have to get it. Do you have a bell near you? Does somebody have a bell? Do you have a bell? Who has the bell? Charlie has it, so I'll signal you, Charlie. It's easier to sleep while you're talking. Well, I'll talk during the nap time. Okay, ring the bell, it's nap time now. Nap time, so I'll talk now, so you can relax. So, there's one mind, but you have some problems with that, right?

[18:45]

So, now you can split the mind into two parts. One part is the active part, the other part is the passive part. But when they're not separate and they're very harmonious, they're almost like one mind. But when they split, there seems to be some movement. There seems to be the ability to do something and the ability to be acted upon or referred to. There seems to be the ability to refer to something and the referent, that which can think and that which can be thought of. And then the thing that splits them is the capacity of the mind to split itself into

[19:52]

two parts. So, as soon as you talk about the active and passive, something else made it possible to talk about active and passive. That's the mind organ. One becomes then the object of the subject. The subject grew up from the ability of the mind to split itself into two. But the awareness, the thing that can be aware of the object, is not the subject. It is just the ability of the mind to be aware. It's the ability of the mind to think of something.

[20:53]

Now go back. The mind is one. Within this oneness are capacities to be thought of and to think of. To be aware of, that of which we can be aware, and the ability to be aware. The mind has those capacities. And the mind has the capacity to reflect. As soon as it reflects, as soon as there's a split someplace in it, there seems to be movement. If you're upright, this is the dogma.

[22:03]

If you're upright, this is the Dharma realm. If you're leaning, it's the demonic realm. Which was that? Okay, ring the bell, now time's over. I'll be quiet now. I had the weirdest dream. This is early Buddhism presented this way, in a sense. The mind gets split. The ability of one thing, the abilities of this one thing become split, separated, and

[23:17]

they can interact. What was one happy family, now has two sides. The active side and the passive side. And in arising with this ability now, to have these two parts, which are operating in a relationship, which have a coordinated life, and which can reflect upon each other, or at least one can reflect on the other, in relationship to that, there arises a sense of self. The sense of self is not the awareness. It's something that arises because awareness is now separated from what is said to be now an object. The awareness is not the subject, but a subject arises in conjunction with the ability to

[24:22]

be aware of something external. When the mind is still, all the abilities are still. No separation exists. There's no objects external to the situation. The mind is quiet. There is a capacity not operating there for the mind to separate its active potential from its passive potential. But it's not operating. When it's activated, the mind is split into awareness, active awareness, and object.

[25:34]

The splitting makes possible reflection or thinking. The splitting makes possible reflection and thinking. The splitting is not thinking, but it makes possible the activation of the thinking side of the mind. In conjunction with this wonderful thing of splitting the mind, a sense of identity arises. A sense of self. A sense of self-love. A sense of self-esteem. A sense of self-view. And a sense of self-confusion and ignorance. They come up with this ability of the mind being activated.

[26:40]

The ability of the mind to split itself and reflect upon itself. In conjunction with that ability, the self arises. That ability is not the self. The awareness is not the self. The object is not the self. But in conjunction with the mind creating awareness and object, a self arises with these four afflictions. In conjunction with the activity of the organ of the mind, which splits the mind, and is always reflecting the mind and making possible thinking, in conjunction with that activity, with that aspect of mind, the self is born. Now, the Buddha actually said that at this time, then, beings' senses of self

[27:58]

get involved with the thinking and delight in the field of objects. And he said they delight in alaya. They're delighted with alaya. So, discovering this, the later Buddhists developed this, and thought, maybe this field of objects, which can sometimes be called alaya, which means storehouse, or a place to lie down. Maybe this can be really useful for a lot of other phenomena. And so, one of the problems they had was, or one of the phenomena they had was,

[29:06]

when yogis go into certain trances, where basically the mind is almost completely suppressed, deeper than the deepest, dreamless sleep, yogis attain these states, that the experience of the yogi was that they would, in a sense, close their eyes, and they would open their eyes again, and it would seem like the next moment to them. Nothing, they would have no experiences in between. Even if, like, they were looking at somebody's face, and they closed their eyes, so to speak, and opened them seven days later, and even if the same person was sitting there, but turned around, or not there at all, they would still feel like it was the next moment. One time, in the old zendo down there, when I was Juso, actually, 22 years ago,

[30:20]

I was sitting, facing out, and the person carrying the stick was standing right in front of me, his back was to me, and suddenly, I saw him jump through the air, about 60 feet, and landed at the end of the hall. I later realized that he didn't really jump, but that I had closed my eyes, and he had walked to the end of the row, and I opened them again. But to me, him standing here and standing there were like, boom, boom. So I felt him jumping from one end of the room to the other, but he didn't. I check with him later. And I asked him, I said, Did you notice my face when you were carrying the stick? He said, Yes. I said, How did I look? He said, You looked really sad. That didn't help me much. Anyway, so they wondered, how is it that in such a deep trance, the life can continue?

[31:29]

And they thought that there is some consciousness going on between those two awaking states, during up to a week. There's some consciousness that must be going on, because if consciousness leaves the body, the warmth goes away, and you die. There must be some level of consciousness, some vital principle still continued, even in this state where the mind is not functioning according to ordinary ways at all. And they said, Maybe this alaya is that. And maybe what happens is that the mind kind of like lays back into the physical sense organs. Kind of like a virus, you know, settling into the nervous system. All the active consciousnesses, the sense consciousnesses, are not operating.

[32:34]

The person is not experiencing seeing anything or hearing anything. You know, you snap your finger or shine lights on them and stuff like that, or poke them. There's no response. The sense consciousnesses are turned off. They're not thinking anything. They have no images going on in their mind. Even if they keep their eyes shut, their eyes are shut before they go into the trance. So they're not seeing anything anyway. But they're having internal images, and the internal images stop for up to seven days, and then they start again, but they feel in their mind like they're contiguous in time. There's basically no ... The person's practically ... In terms of animation, the person's dead, but they stay warm. So it's that all the active consciousnesses go dormant,

[33:37]

and so they kind of thought, Well, maybe they kind of like rest, that the consciousnesses like rest into the nerves of the sense organs, or back into the sense organs. So that's one way that they came up with the word alaya, that it's the storing of ... You can say the storehouse of, or the storing of consciousness. And this storing of consciousness goes on all the time, even when consciousnesses become activated, this basic storage consciousness, this deep, deep, deep subconscious goes on. And in early Buddhism, they didn't emphasize this too much, but as Buddhism developed, they realized that it would be helpful if they had something like that, something to create a sense of continuity in the life stream, something to finally account for transmigration. And little by little, they developed the idea that this deep unconscious

[34:46]

was actually an ongoing and fundamental component of a personality. And as they started to develop it more, they thought, Actually, another way to understand this word alaya or storehouse is not so much that it lies back down, not so much it's a function of being lying down there all the time at the basis of all of our active consciousness, but also another meaning of lying down is it's what the sense of self lies on. The sense of self, it doesn't work very well for the sense of self to identify with the consciousness. The sense of self wants something to hook onto. You see, the sense of self is just this ethereal thing which was conjured up in conjunction with the ability of the mind to split itself into awareness and aware of. It originally wasn't split into self and other.

[35:50]

But in conjunction with this split, there was a sense of other and self. So now you've got this self. What can it hold onto? It can't hold onto the other. That doesn't work on it. It's born of the other, but it can't identify with the other. Consciousness, awareness itself, isn't a very good home either because actually, if you look at it, it's ungraspable vastness. So what it seemed to find its home in was this alaya, was this... basically, the field from which all the images of concepts or all the concepts are made from. And there is, in fact, some vague sense

[37:01]

of something deeply subconscious that's always going on and that's where you can put yourself and have a sense that there is something there. There is something there all the time. It's not the self, but it's something you can hook the self onto. As Kalupa Hanna says, it's something you can moor the self to. And in fact, it's something that life can get moored to. And in fact, that's part of the presentation, is that life moors itself to this consciousness. So that during deep trances, life can't moor itself to the active consciousnesses. During ordinary life, your life can be hooked into active consciousness and you can use active consciousness, work with your active consciousness and bring warmth into your hands, for example.

[38:04]

Or your active consciousness can cause your warmth of your hands to go away, like in shock. Where does life get moored in terms of awareness? It can be moored and hooked down to a laya, another meaning of a storehouse, a place, a kind of consciousness that you can store your life on. And also, they came up with the research or their finding that a laya would be present at the moment of birth, at the moment of conception, and a laya would be present at the moment of death. A laya would not be there before the moment of birth and would not be there after. But from the moment of birth, the being uses a laya to hook into a life stream.

[39:08]

And at the moment of death, it's the disconnection from a laya that makes life irretrievable. During daily life, you're also hooked into a laya and just in case you lost track of your active consciousness, you wouldn't die, because you're hooked into a laya too. So a laya became almost the same as the principle of vitality or warmth. So it's a good place to camp out your sense of self because you do on some level, not on the level of self, but on the level of a laya itself, a laya is a consciousness. There is a consciousness which is very deep and it isn't permanent, but the nature of life is that causes and conditions keep producing.

[40:16]

If there's life, if life's being produced, also this sense of Charlie at nap time. This sense of life, life produces this consciousness. So we do have a consciousness of this kind of warm dependable place, which is changing all the time, but also being reproduced along with life. And that's where we lay the self down. That's the home of the self. And some people say to me, I don't care what Buddhism says, I have a sense of self. And I think what they're talking about is they have a sense of a laya. Charlie. Yes. Yes.

[41:17]

It looks so much like a self. It looks so much like a soul. And I forgot who said it right now, but I think maybe it was the Buddha or one of the great bodhisattvas says, I'm afraid to teach this a laya because people will make it into a soul, a permanent soul. But it's not a soul because it only exists at this moment by causes and conditions. Just like life is not a soul. It only is something that's conjured up right now. You take away the causes and conditions for life and what do we have? Well, we call it death. But if you have the causes and conditions for life, even inanimate life, unanimated life, life that isn't animated, that has no active sense or mind consciousness, even there there's some warmth and there's consciousness. So, it's not a self,

[42:20]

it's not a permanent self or a soul, it is something which is dependently co-arisen, which has no inherent nature and which is impermanent. Did you want to say something Albert? That was your question? Yes? Does it inherit the karmic effects Is it the sense of self that perhaps that your death can be perfect in the line of the karmic effects? Yes. The karmic effects are not just self, but self is one of the important things. The sense is the karmic effect which is not consciousness, it's not warmth, there's no ... the vivifying principle has been dispersed but the karmic effect or the momentum of karma and karma involves a sense of self doing something. So that mode of psychic functioning

[43:22]

has an effect which is spiritual and which can interact with living tissue in order to cause this birth consciousness and simultaneously cause alaya. And alaya then is the consciousness that provides the way for this karmic effect to hook into organic existence. That's the theory which people have various degrees of realization of over and above theory. So then alaya shifts gradually into being basically psychic existence itself in the sense that alaya is the cause of psychic existence because it gives a place for the self to keep hooking into. Yeah. Cyclic or sansara? Cyclic. In other words, sansara.

[44:24]

Now, Vasubandhu points out, although you may not be able to see it so clearly, if you can study this process you will see that actually the sense of self is always separate from the material of alaya. That this lying down never really... I shouldn't say never really happens. In the realm where the lying down happens and where the self really does hook onto alaya, that's samsara. But where you see that actually the self and the self-attributing function is actually absent from the phenomena of alaya which provides all the images and concepts, the separateness of that is what's called the accomplished and that is release. And then alaya becomes now the referent for release. Once the separateness is realized,

[45:31]

which is simultaneous with the infection, the separateness of the self, the self-making, the substance-making, the separateness of that fabricated aspect of mind with the alaya, the separateness of it is released and the infection or overlap is samsara. Yes. Is alaya anything more or different from the sum of the residue of past experiences? Not necessarily. I don't think so. There is... I think there is something that is other than the sum of the past experiences.

[46:31]

Well, let's hear about it. Huh? What? Hmm? I don't get it. Tell me. By the time I tell you, it's not. Well, I'm not following it. To me, the whole world is dependently co-arisen. So... To me, over here, this person is saying that there's nothing that's not dependently co-arisen. But that's not the same thing as saying that it's just the sum of the past experiences. What's the difference? Um... There is that which arises. And it seems like it's met by by

[47:33]

what's left over from from experience of the past and labeled. It's not labeled exactly, but it's met there and becomes something that can then be labeled. So you're proposing that something arises which is the result of past experience? Are you saying that? I'm saying, yeah. I'm saying that something new arises. Something arises, uh-huh. And it is met by... Does that thing that meets it, does that arise too? Yes. So you have two different things arising? Only for sake of discussion. So really, it's not two different things. Actually, you have the arising of a moment and it's split into two parts, is that what you mean? Well, within consciousness

[48:36]

I think everything arises from... Let me answer your question. Uh... Within consciousness, yes. So what... Are you saying any more than that? I think that there is that which interplays with consciousness. There's that which what? Which has an interplay with consciousness. What is that? I can't know it. So, what are you bringing it up for? Um... I mean, it seems like

[49:39]

it's one thing to talk about, to understand that we're talking about the realm of what we can know consciously and objectify. And it's also important to acknowledge that that there is a dance going on between that and something else that isn't. Um... Okay. Fine. So, there's a dance going on between what is known and what isn't known, is that what you're saying? Yeah. Okay, fine. And that dance produces... But I would say that to say that the thing that's dancing with what is... the thing that's not known which is dancing with what's known, to say that that's not the result

[50:40]

of past what? Past experience? Past experience. That... I... I don't know... I... I don't see that though. Do you think it's not the result? No, I... Okay. So, for example, direct experience is not known. And direct experience is interacting with the realm of subject-object experience. They're dancing together. Yeah. Oh, one other thing I want to say about difference, you know? I had this sense of difference. Like... You look... There's... Like, imagine that we have an earth here, a planet. Of course, anyway, some surface of materiality. Like, for example, maybe, like... Like, imagine yourself out in some desert-like area. And...

[51:43]

You know, there's... There's, like, I don't know what, rocks and sand and clay and stones and stuff like that. And suddenly, you start to see that there's kind of like different kinds of stuff there. Like I was saying the other night, you start to notice that some of the material there is, like, moving in relationship to the other. And in my vision of this physical scene, which has these two kinds of physicality, I felt like somebody or some kind of something was waking up. It's kind of like, you know, like sometimes they...

[52:48]

It's like there's... It's quiet, you know, and then suddenly... Like, you hear silence and then suddenly you hear... And it's like the... It's different from the... There's... You know what I mean? Like there's silence but it's... There's lots of kind of silence in a way. You know what I mean? Like there's this expanse of dirt and suddenly some of the dirt starts to kind of loom up and look down on the other earth or sink down. There seems to be some... Somehow this kind of starts to happen on the earth. And when it happens, when I look at it and when I think about it, I feel something about life. The earth seems to come alive. Like one time I was... I was looking at a... at some

[53:48]

snow that was kind of melting at the same time. I looked at it and suddenly... Anyway, at some point I saw that the snow was pulsing, was undulating. And the snow seemed to be alive. And I realized that what I was seeing was... I realized the pulsing just happened to be coincident with the pulse in my eye. That my heart beating, my blood going through my eye was... I was seeing it in the snow. But even if I could somehow sense something... I shouldn't say sense it, but when I think about the earth pulsing, I feel like the earth is like me. And that's, I think, what I mean by when you look at a planet

[54:51]

you postulate life when you see that kind of difference. When you see rhythm. Rather than... Excuse the preselectionation, but when I was a kid I saw this movie called... What was it called? On the Beach. And everybody in the world was dead except the people in Australia. And they were picking up a signal from San Diego. And the signal was going... It was a shortwave signal. Not shortwave. A telegraph. They're getting this signal. They travel all the way across the ocean to see if there was some life there. And what they found was that some kind of a stick or something had got caught on a on a window shade. Or maybe it was a Coke bottle caught on a window shade. And as the wind moved the Coke bottle would would fall down on the key of the shortwave and go... And the signal...

[55:57]

It wasn't like this. It wasn't... It was enough different. It had enough rhythm so they thought maybe a living person was giving the signal. Like the sound of the the heater over there in the morning. I wondered when I first heard it I was just thinking is that an animal or a machine? You know? And if you listen for a while to these signals if there's... if there's rhythm we think maybe there's life. If it goes... We think maybe there's life there. So this thing about I'm saying that the origins of life have to do with something that the materiality gets into some kind of rhythm with itself. It's like sitting there and suddenly it goes... And that's the birth of consciousness. And

[56:58]

in the same way the same thing happens you know at the next level up where we can know things. But there's an interaction between this lower level which we don't know which has this kind of like rhythm in it that gets transmitted up into the mental realm. We're interplaying with that level all the time. But we don't know that level. But that level is also not a problem to us except as it's a residual of the realm which we... where we have self and other and all that substantiation starts to occur. Let's see. So John and John and Carol. I wanted to ask if current perception do you think is considered to be part of a lie or whether it's considered to be an interaction with a lie or happening together

[58:00]

with a lie which I'm understanding and I will ask you know whether this is correct as a tendency or habit or as a position. Well that's a long question so do you want to split it up into two sections or what do you want to do? The current thinking or perception of is this all part of the lie or is there or is there in this description of consciousness a different part that... Wait a minute. Let's do the first part. Is current thinking what? Is it all part of the lie or is there another part of it? Current thinking is not all a part of a lie. Da-da-da-da-da-da Got that? Okay. What is current thinking a result of? Folks? Causes and conditions. What? Causes and conditions and among causes and conditions which ones is Vasubandhu particularly pointing at? Three transformations

[59:02]

of consciousness that's the current thinking. That isn't the total causation however of current thinking. The total causation of current thinking includes sense consciousness which we don't know about which set the basic kind of model of a heartbeat you know of... of rhythm of the fact that there's different... there's a dynamic in the physical world. The physical world sets the dynamic. If there's no dynamic in the physical world life can't arise. In a planet where the... where the physicality hasn't developed in such a way that there's gross and subtle physicality where one kind of physicality goes Oh, please don't and the other kind says Come on. Where one kind of physicality goes Boom! and the other kind of goes Oh! If you don't have that kind of difference that kind of dance you don't have consciousness. That however is a causation of the present thinking. However that's not the part

[60:02]

we can experience as objective knowledge but in objective knowledge we can experience these three transformations and they account for the sense of self and other and self and other self and elements is part... is what thinking is about. Thinking is reflecting reflecting of the object of awareness is a reflection of something and the elements that are being... the alaya is the storehouse from which the elements are selected but in alaya they're immature. When they're activated they are the concept of the object. I mean, excuse me when they're activated they are the image which which is the content of the concept of something being external. But the current thinking

[61:06]

involves these three transformations and someone said talk about how alaya is a transformation of the mind. How is it a transformation of the mind? In one sense it's just part of the mind but as soon as you take the mind and make a part the mind has been transformed. It is the part of the mind particularly that the self lies on. It's the thing the self hooks on to and it's the thing that the results of the transformation of self living it's the result the self makes possible karma and karma has a momentum and the momentum of karma can lie into this consciousness can hook onto this consciousness. So alaya is the thing that makes it possible for the effects of past karma to hook into life and then once there's life at a certain point the mind manifests its ability to split itself and the sense of self arises

[62:08]

and then alaya is also the place that the sense of self lays back. So the results the implication of self other life which is karma the implications and momentum of that hook into alaya and lie down in it and are stored in it and then once the living being is happening then alaya provides the ongoing place the ultimate or deepest refuge for the self. Or if you want to get nasty about it it's like the deepest darkest hiding place for self cleaning. So you'll never be without a place to hold on and to be attached. You've always got one. And sure enough not sure enough yeah sure enough sure enough the place of enlightenment the actual texture and content of enlightenment the place it will be enacted will be in the deepest

[63:08]

darkest red hiding place of cleaning. Because that's all the other cleanings won't work until you get down to the bottom one. And when that's dealt with then the place you're cleaning will be exactly the place of release. And the material which is obscuring the nature of life will be the material that reflects it and you know radiates it. Next part of the question? So in that sense is alaya habit that functions as foundation or reference? Is it habit that yeah it's the it's the it's the resultant. It's the maturing of all past behavior. Alright? And as such

[64:09]

it provides all the models for habits. All the things that have been done before either once or zillions of times all those all those effects are this consciousness. So when you pull something out of there you might be not everything there is a habit but when you pull things out of there you got a habit an activated habit. And concepts are habits. John? What's the conceptual relation between alaya and prakriti or akasha? By akasha you mean space? Yes. The subtlest element of space. The what? The subtlest element of space? What's the relationship between alaya and that? What do you mean by prakriti? Prakriti would be

[65:11]

the dense form manifestation of what we call matter coming from perhaps out of the akasha. Well is it time for the kitchen to go? Is that what's happening? What time is it? It's ten o'clock. Ten o'clock. Okay. Well in terms of relationship of material to space the relationship is that that space is in some sense an unconditioned thing and space has no interaction with materiality. Materiality the thing about the thing about materiality is that it takes up space but space can include materiality without getting dented. So there's not really much relationship between space and materiality. Materiality in some sense

[66:12]

is related to alaya in that alaya and this manas or this ability of mind to act as an organ and the concept of object particularly but particularly alaya and the ability of mind to act as an organ these are in some sense what are called what do you call it hypothesized not hypothesized but hypothesized in other words made into taking something and like making it concrete as a symbol. So alaya is another danger of it is we're taking the image of a storehouse or a place that you can lie things down. Okay. It's used as an image or a symbol of a process and we have to be careful here because we actually are hypothesizing something. We're taking alaya and making it a concrete symbol for a very subtle a very subtle process but

[67:13]

if we just let and in the early presentation of the mind consciousness you know the mind consciousness which is separate from the mind objects and separated by the mind organ monovijnanadattu monadattu and dharmadattu that early system of the six six consciousnesses and the six organs and the six fields early Buddhism in that presentation the mind consciousness is pretty subtle but if you make it more physical you get some you know other possibilities out of it if you make it more physical then you can imbue a symbolic function to it namely that you can that you can actually it's not that it's the it's the dharmadattu I think in combination with it

[68:15]

you sort of like wrap the dharmadattu the realm of mind objects back around with the mind consciousness because alaya alaya is a consciousness it's not it's not just objects but in the realm of mind objects of mind also partake of consciousness because they're part of consciousness and embraced by consciousness so mind objects are never separate from from consciousness so in order to sort of like give people a handle on meditation on this topic they talked about a storehouse consciousness but that seems to imply some physicality but there is no physicality in the mind so in a sense there's no relationship I mean I shouldn't say no relationship there isn't physicality in alaya there isn't physicality in the mind consciousness there isn't physicality in the mind organ however there's an interplay between physicality

[69:15]

and mind organ because mind organ is modeled on physical consciousness and physical consciousness arises from physicality so physicality gives rise to physical consciousness and the path that the consciousness of physicality is the model for the mind organ so the mind is modeled on and is the result of not just physicality but physical consciousness consciousness of physicality produces the mind organ and once Once the mind has an organ then the mind can then split itself into two parts and the mind can be aware of itself directly. And a lot of what the mind is aware of is again the patterns of physicality and the patterns of karma. The karmic habits are then part of what is impressed upon consciousness and a lie is

[70:16]

a place all that stuff gets laid down and the stuff never gets lost, the results of karma never gets lost, so it's always this subconscious layer of past karma is going on in a living being and then the self can lay down there and be connected to that and then the self can pull up those habits and create more karma which then gets laid back down into a lie in this life. Then when the system gets dispersed and the living principle gets lost and a lie withdraws and disperses then the momentum of this life of self working with this material and hanging on to this sense of continuity, that kind of life produces a momentum which then can produce more life and the way it hooks in is again the thing it last let go of, it hooks into a lie, it hooks into the reservoir of handy-dandy karmic habits so it can go right to work

[71:23]

as soon as it's born unfolding the karmic machinery and it doesn't take too long before it remembers the idea of a self. It doesn't have the self right away because it can't, because it doesn't have a mind. The momentum of karmic life does not have subject-object, does not have consciousness and that which is conscious of and mind-organ. It's not that that goes on, the mind is dispersed because the mind grows up out of life. The full-scale mind is not born full-fledged simultaneously with conception, but it does happen after you get out of the womb, a few months afterwards you start to behave. What is the date that you can tell you that you say your mom's not you, I don't know, six months or three months? About 18 months. 18 months. John? I mean, Robert? So is there a temporality to reliance?

[72:27]

How do you mean temporality? Do you see it in terms of time and development, like a stream or like storehouse implies something more like anything is access, or is it more like a stream and some things might be available and some things are at another time? At a given moment alaya is totally accessible, the whole thing. You can get any part of it at a given moment. Any part of it that it's appearing at that moment, any part of it can be accessed completely. However, part of what's there is that included in alaya is a sense of evolution and alaya does evolve. Because alaya evolves, alaya has a story, which is the effect of its evolution.

[73:31]

Its evolution is part of what's available in it and it evolves like a stream. And originally in every moment and in every life, originally this thing that appears as life has a history and it is like a stream, is like a river. So I've told you this one creation myth, which is in the beginning, in the unborn, it was like a river, but the river became a road, so the road was always hungry. This river becomes a road. How does it become a road? It becomes a road by transforming itself into alaya, subject, I mean alaya, awareness and organ, or alaya, object of consciousness and reflection. That's how you get the sense of separation of self and other, and then there's a road

[74:32]

in this river, the road of separation in this river. So this system is always hungry, it's always hungry, it's always thirsty, what's it hungry for? Reunited. Huh? Reunited. Reunited with what? With itself. With itself? No. It's to be reunited with nothing. There's nothing it gets reunited with, it just gets reunited, it's split, it just gets reunited. And when it gets reunited, it also gets reunited with its unknown aspect, because unknown aspect is totally implied by its present form. So you get the known and unknown get unified, and the split in the present consciousness gets unified, the self and other get unified, and the defilements have no place to hold because the self is not separated from the other anymore, so the defilements, the afflictions

[75:34]

drop away. There's no way to be harassed anymore, there's no way to worry about survival anymore. You just survive according to biological processes then, just like you always did. However, human beings, developing this strange system, became very adaptable on this planet, so there's something adaptable about all this. But it's 10 o'clock now, so I don't want to have a whole kitchen leave. So can you save your questions? Can you remember your questions? You don't want to wait? I'd like to just catch one. How does electromagnetism, or what we refer to as natural forces, fit into it? How do they fit into it? Like I was saying. Instead of thinking of earth, which is more tactile, you can think of a field of electromagnetic radiation. Except it's hard to see that, right?

[76:37]

But there are such fields of electromagnetic radiation, right? How does that fit into the mind? Well, what I was saying was that at some point, if you could see electromagnetic radiation, you'd see at some point that some physicality kind of like whoops it up when it gets touched by electromagnetic radiation. There's some physicality in this world which is very sensitive to that, right? It has effects. Electromagnetic radiation has effects. And at a certain point it had effects on this planet, right? And it had effects on something and caused photosynthesis or something, right? Remember? We had this story, right? That it interacted with chlorophyll or something? How did it happen? I forgot. Anyway, electromagnetic radiation interacted with some kind of material, some kind of chemistry

[77:40]

on this planet, and the two made this big thing called chlorophyll. Is that how it happened? Mark? I don't know. We don't know. Anyway, somehow this interaction started to develop and we don't know exactly how it started, but we do notice how it's going on now. That electromagnetic radiation is interacting with plant tissue in a very vital way, right? The plant material is the plant's material, right? Is that alive? Not yet. And the radiation is material. That kind of material touches the plant. The plant is sensitive to the light. The plant is not light. The light bounces off the plant in the process of bouncing off. It doesn't just bounce off the plant. The light also bounces off iron rods and mountainsides, and they are also affected by the light. They get warmed by it and so on, but they're not quite as responsive. The mountains don't kind of like, hmm, quite the same way the plant does.

[78:42]

They don't like turn towards it in the morning and turn towards it in the afternoon. They do a little bit, you know? The east side gets warmed in the morning and cools off, and the west side ... there is a reaction, but nothing like plants. And as a matter of fact, the plants seem to be ... their whole life seems to be tuned into the light, right? Whereas the mountains, if you turn the light off for a long, long time, they seem to last even without the light. But the plants won't last long without the light, especially the green ones. So you have these little green plants, you know, which are so much dancing with the light. This is life, okay? Then you have this thing of somehow in this dance between light and some other kind of tissue, consciousness arose. And there's consciousness in the plant too. But consciousness arose in these animals who ... they're also very closely related

[79:45]

to the light and the plants, all right? And gradually the consciousness was born in this interplay between this tissue, this plant and animal tissue, and the light, the electromagnetic radiation. That dance is one of the primary dances which led to ... which led to sense consciousness, it led to eye consciousness. And something like that happened with sound waves in the wind, you know, that created other organs and other consciousnesses. And for some reason or other, the most popular and adaptive, excuse me for saying so, the most adaptive living systems are the ones who relate to all five types of physicality. There could be and probably were organisms which were sensitive just to light, but they were kind of checked out in regard to the other ones.

[80:46]

And for human beings too, if you're only sensitive to, what do you call it, four of these realms or three of them, you have a hard time. And it's by the kindness of other living beings usually that you can get around. Now if everybody only had three, I would say that if somebody else got a fourth one they would take over, because in addition to smell and touch and taste, they would say, hey, you can hear stuff too, and then you can move away from the rocks when they fall down the hill. And then somebody else says, you can actually see that there's a rock up there that might fall. So since the organisms are sensitive to all five, we'll be most adaptive. So this is the sense organs. However, at this level of functioning, there's no objective knowledge. There's no awareness of these things as objects. You don't know about them. At some point or other, the system evolved so that they became aware of that's out there, and then the sense of self was born, and then we got these wonderful afflictions which cause

[81:51]

us to be meditators and study the 30 verses, and go to the toilet, and take pictures. Where does alaya come from? Alaya is the ability to be aware of the object, the concept of the object, and it is also the source from which the concepts of objects are drawn. So mind draws from itself by reflection and then is aware of itself by reflection. So mind has the ability to put a mirror up to itself and by pull part of itself up into the mirror, and then as soon as it sees it in the mirror, to be aware of it.

[82:53]

So alaya, as an active consciousness, as a vijnana, can be aware of objects which are drawn from itself, and then also the self which arises in conjunction with this wonderful process lies back into alaya as its sense of continuity. And this is all modeled from the physical situation which gave rise to consciousness in the sense level, and then the sense consciousness finally got split just the way the sense consciousness arose out of a split in the physicality. Then the consciousness itself became another field, just like the physical world, which developed these subtle and gross elements and split into the awareness and the objects. The objects are grosser than the awareness, but where do the objects come from? They come from the same awareness. So alaya has all the possible concepts and also is the awareness of the concepts when

[83:59]

they're projected out into objects. And as soon as alaya is aware of the object as separate, then alaya becomes an active consciousness just like the sense consciousnesses are, which have objects. So this is a story about our mind. It's a popular story in Buddhism. It's not reality. It's a story about delusion, how delusion arises. If you understand this story thoroughly, the proposal is you will see that this is all a made-up thing and you'll become free of it. If you can think of another story, let's hear it. This is Vasubandhu's, as I understand it today, tomorrow it'll be different. My understanding is evolving too.

[84:59]

My alaya is not sitting still here, you know. It sits still for a moment but then it gets active and has effects and then what's available on alaya in the next moment is different. So alaya is always evolving, therefore the opportunities for karmic habit are evolving too. And the more you meditate, the more you are using opportunity differently and then the more different opportunities you have later. This is also called the self-fulfilling awareness if we're upright in this discussion. So you and I, as we discuss these things, have to constantly be upright and present to hear all this because our minds are really active whether we're talking about 30 verses or 2 verses or anything, our minds are always doing something very active and if we're upright then everything will be something like the 30 verses for us.

[86:02]

But 30 verses are one thing we could talk about. So is that enough for today? Huh? Yes. Yes. May our intention equally penetrate every being and place with the true merit of Buddha's way.

[86:37]

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