But the real one, the real living drama of your delusion, you know, just spontaneously, immediately, non-discursively delivered to you by dependent co-arising. And uprightness is the way to enter that realm. Of course, if anybody wants to try another way, that's fine too, because any idea you have of uprightness is not uprightness either. Yes? I thought of a story. It's a story in the class. Yeah, the class sort of started, yeah. But it's also almost time to stop the class, so I don't know if we should spend time chanting to start the class. It's a story, yet with even a hundred thousand million kalpas, having it to see and listen

[01:26]

to, to remember and accept, I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words. Whatever, indeed, is the variety of ideas of self and elements that prevails, it occurs in the transformation of consciousness. Such transformation is threefold, namely the resultant, what is called thinking, as well as the concept of the object. Herein, the consciousness called alaya, with all its seeds, is the resultant. It is unidentified in terms of concepts of object and location, and is always possessed of activities such as contact, attention, feeling, perception and volition. In that context, the neutral feeling is uninterrupted and is not defined.

[02:28]

So are contact and so on, and it proceeds like the current of a stream. Its dissipation occurs in arhatship. Associated with this process and depending upon it, a consciousness occurs, the consciousness called manas, which is of the nature of thinking or reflecting. Endowed with the four types of defilement, constantly concealed and undefined, involving self-view, self-confusion, self-esteem and self-pride, self-love. Okay, so, I thought five and six would be good to work on for a little while, and so

[03:54]

you might have some questions about what it means when it says its dissipation occurs in arhatship, and I was thinking maybe it would be good to talk about six and then go back to five as a way to understand more fully about what this dissipation might be. And the Sanskrit word that they're translating as dissipation is, what is it called, it's vyavrtti, there's a bunch of words like this, vyavrtti, pravrtti, paravrtti, and vrtti basically means to turn. So its turning occurs in arhatship, it turns, it revolves, it is revolutionized, that occurs

[05:09]

in arhatship. Yes? I have a kind of question, so, it's dissipation is talking about the resolving, which is … Alaya's transformation, alaya's, I shouldn't use the word transformation, alaya's turning, alaya's revolution, occurs in arhatship. It also occurs in advanced bodhisattvas, what are called irreversible bodhisattvas. What do you mean by turning, or revolution, what is that? It means that it turns from being an obscuring field to being either just a regular vijnana,

[06:11]

or in the case of a bodhisattva it turns into wisdom, it turns into great mirror-like wisdom in the case of an advanced bodhisattva. In the case of an arhat, the lineage of the process of obscuration is cut, the process of obscuration is this process where the defiling impressions or defiling effects of selfhood or ego distortions on everything that then form these dispositions or these inclinations or these, you know, what do you call it, these customary fixed ways of relating to things based on our own ego view, these dispositions that have been laid down on alaya for a long period of time get penetrated and cut through, and also the defiling activity of the ego

[07:24]

in the process of taking in new information is also cut. The defiling activity associated with the functioning of manas is also stopped. That's why it says in Karika, when it's talking about manas in Karika 7, it says it's not found in the worthy one. Manas is not found in the worthy one, that's the arhat. Okay, so the arhat doesn't have the manas function with the reflection anymore,

[08:27]

the defiling function of manas isn't happening, so they're not laying down more dispositions, and also they have been able to meditate on the dispositions and be relieved of them. So when alaya is no longer being used as a source for dispositions to be brought up with every intake and when the distortion of the ego is not happening to create more dispositions to be laid down, this lineage, this process of defilement and then resorting to defilement in the process of perception is cut in the arhat. And it might help a little bit to go to the next one then, for all the examples

[09:28]

of all these distorting functions and talk about how meditation on those would be involved in what Kalipahana calls appeasing the dispositions. All right, so what do we have? We have that it's said that endowed with the four types of defilement, constantly concealed and undefined, so the proposal here is that the ball, you know, that you're supposed to be studying the self, if you study the self, if you can bring the self into view, get a little taste of it, and you can get taste of it, you can get these fleeting senses of it, it does leave traces, you know, because

[10:33]

we do view things through the self. We have a self-view, we have our view, we have a view of what we are, we have a view of where we start and where we end, we have a view of the self so that we can be insulted and outraged, so that we can feel disrespected and attacked. We use our self-view to feel these feelings, we use our self-view to feel that someone's angry at us and to be hurt by that, because we love the self. All right, so in a sense we do have a sense of the self and we use it quite a bit. We're driven by this sense or this view of the self, we're afflicted by it. However, if you look at it in a biased way, you may be able to say, well, I found it, this is it. But if you are upright and you look at the self, you won't be so successful of finding something.

[11:41]

And part of uprightness could be a rational discussion with yourself or with somebody else about what you found. And what you might have found actually is a field of obscuration. You might have found what is called alaya, which was where all the effects of many zillions of moments of laying down the results of feeling self-clinging, clinging to something that you really didn't have a hold of but you thought you did because you were biased. Am I talking too fast? A touch. So we do have a fleeting sense of self and again we have a sense of its beginning and its end. But if you actually try to establish its beginning and end, Dogen recommends, try to find the beginning and the end of the self. If you really are thorough-bodied, you will be unsuccessful.

[12:48]

And I have a standing offer of a small monetary reward for anyone who can bring me a self. I make it small enough so that no one would lie. It's a dollar. I may raise it but it's small enough so that no one would lie. It's big enough to maybe encourage anybody who actually thinks they've found a self to tell me about it and then we can look to see what it is. And again, the way of looking at the way it is is called uprightness. In other words, your psychic processes are going on and then in that process if you want to bring a self forward then just let your psychic processes operate in relationship to what you found. And in Shobogenzo Zenki, Dogen says life is like riding in a boat. You get in the boat and you work the oars and put the sail up and steer with the rudder.

[13:59]

And however, although you do that, nobody could ride in a boat without the boat. On the other hand, you being in the boat makes a boat what a boat is. A boat's not something that people don't ride in. So the boat makes you or you can't play with the boat unless there's a boat and yet you do play with the boat and you riding the boat makes the boat the boat. And then actually in that situation then the whole world becomes the world of the boat. The water then becomes the world of the boat too because you can't have boats without water and then you can't have water without a shore and without a sky. So the whole ocean and the mountains and the sky also become the world of the boat, which is also the world you're working, but also you wouldn't be able to work that world if it weren't for the boat in the world and so on. And Dogen says, concentrate quietly on such a moment. In other words, all moments are really like that, where you make them happen, you participate with

[15:08]

them, but without what you're working with, without your boat, you wouldn't be able to be there. So the boat creates you and you create the boat. If you look at the self in this way, if you follow through on what's going on there, you'll find out that you make the self and the self makes you. And you use certain things to make the self and certain things are made used to make you, your experience. If you analyze back and forth like this, pretty soon you realize there's no such thing as a boat or you or the ocean. It's all one dependently co-arisen world, a blooming, ungraspable, inconceivable situation. And you won't any longer be able to get a boat aside from you, because there is no boat aside from you because you make the boat. You'll not be able to find a self aside from yourself, aside from your processes of thinking about it and how you use it.

[16:12]

In other words, you won't be able to find it. It's undefinable and it's constantly undefinable. However, even so, the self-view is there all the time. Also self-confusion, because again, you can't have a self without the other. The only way you can have a self is to have a limit and an other, but the other makes the self and anything that makes something and is always there with the thing is identical to it. So the self is completely identical with what it isn't. In other words, the nature of self is completely contradictory and self-identical through that contradiction. And when we get situations like that, we get confused. We're very confused about what the self is. And if we're not confused, then we're just asleep.

[17:16]

And because the self does this wonderful thing of coordinating this whole process that we've just been describing, namely, it takes credit for the reflective capacity of the mind, it takes credit for the thinking ability of the mind, and it also takes credit for the fact that the mind can know objects, because the mind only knows external things. It also takes credit for that. So it takes credit for the arising of reflective abilities, it takes credit for the ability to know things, and for coordinating the reflection and the knowing. So the self says, I'm coordinating the manas and I'm coordinating the second and third transformation. Before the second and third transformation, there wasn't a self, but as soon as the reflection comes up, there's a sense of identity born, and then it takes credit for the arising of what gave rise to itself. And then it also takes credit for coordinating the interactions between the reflection and the sense of objective or external concepts by which knowledge occurs. And then it also has

[18:29]

proof that it exists because it keeps lying down in this sense of continuity of this thing called alaya, which of course is also made into a thing because the self has laid down on it. So it's made into a substantial thing by the self too, so therefore it's all the more reliable to prove that it's there. You can't get a hold of self, but you see you're building a really good case for it. So that's why there can be a self-view going on, in a sense basically that it's always there. So this permanent self-view of a dependable self-home. And self-love or self-pride arises because of this wonderful function it performs, and then self-love arrives because it's such a precious thing, because it can die. It dies at the limit of itself, right on the other side of itself is death. It is in fact, by definition,

[19:31]

a very precious thing. What is by definition precious, what the self is, is defined by pride. It's defined by its great accomplishments. It's not a low quality thing, it's an almost transcendent thing. It's a luminous thing. There's an archetype called the self, you know, and it's a bright, shining archetype. It's closely related to reality. It's a time-honored tradition. Time-honored tradition, Nietzsche said. By time it's become honored. It's been used a long time and now it's a well-established tradition and it's honored. It should be honored. It's a powerhouse and it's a precious thing. So this love comes naturally to it. You know, there's this thing in our society about helping people develop self-esteem.

[20:37]

Really, everyone that has a sense of self has self-esteem. By definition, this text says, as soon as there's a sense of self, there's self-esteem. But our society says, don't have self-esteem, so we repress it or hide it. After a while, we believe it. And when we believe it, it is really healthy to get people to come out of the closet and admit that they don't feel that way, because they don't. Deep down, we all have self-esteem. So I think it is a good movement to get people to admit their self-esteem. They talk about giving it to them, but really you're giving them permission to admit it. Like the other day when Alan was work leader, you know, remember? Give people the chance, let them come out. But a lot of times they come out and what they do, we beat them back in the closet. Whoa! And that's because of our self, you know.

[21:45]

That we have a problem here. We forget. The strange thing is, what was that koan you told me about, Mark? The monk comes up and says, why do I always confuse others for myself? The monk says, why do I take the world for myself? It's the reverse of what we usually do. Usually we take the world as other, but the world we take is always the world of ourself. It's not that the world really is ourself, but for ourself, the world is always ourself. So that monk, if that monk did take the world for himself, he would be in a self-fulfilling samadhi. When you take everybody here as yourself, really, I mean, not just like thinking that, but you really feel that way, your self has been fulfilled. That self you can enjoy. The self that's over here, and then there's all the others over there, that self is always there. That self is getting attacked. Even somehow attacked lovingly and sweetly and with affection, still it's a harassment.

[22:48]

You may think you like it, but you're disturbed by it. You're afraid they're going to stop. But the self, but the understanding, the awareness that sees all this as the self, including seeing the self as the self, because when you see the self, it's an object. In other words, the person, the meditator who sees everything as herself, has entered the self-fulfillment awareness. And then your entrance into this awareness is, of course, uprightness, and then to continue to be upright in the face of all this being you, yourself, that's the gate to liberation. And I'm still presenting here a little bit. So if you can meditate on this self thing, you get in there and these heavy-duty rigid processes,

[23:51]

which are then laid down and create these dispositions, these habitual emotional responses of greed, hate and delusion, like, tune in this stimulus and you always get this response, you know. Tune in that one, you get that response. In other words, bondage. In other words, a laya overlaid with these dispositions, and these dispositions always coming up, and there we are just walking along and boom! Dispositions mature. We're just sitting ducks, you know. We think, oh, that person came down here and insulted me. And then you feel this way. But the interpretation of the insult and the way you feel, it's just a maturing of past rigidities, which you laid down and are just now coming up, and then that's your frame of mind. So whatever happens, that's what you're going to think. But you think, no, no, if something else had happened, then I would have felt differently.

[24:55]

Well, that's another thing that gets laid down and comes up and makes it happen again. If you can analyze the process of this self and how you believe in it, and try to find it, and also watch these afflictions, you're getting at the root of what lays down these dispositions. And if you get at the root of it, you can apply the same process to the dispositions when they come up, plus you stop laying them down. So working with these afflictions, and studying the self, and being unsuccessful at studying the self, and realizing that the self is really you or the boat, whichever one you want, and focusing on such situations, which are all situations. In other words, focusing on dependent co-arising of the self and other, that meditation will be on what happens in

[25:57]

Karaka 6, and that will then cause a gradual dissipation or reversion of alaya, by freeing yourself from these dispositions. But, even before this long process of transforming all the dispositions, bodhisattvas can have encouraging insights, even before this happens. So, it isn't until advanced bodhisattvahood that one reaches a stage where this alaya actually turns and stops being obscuring, and stops kind of upchucking dispositions on you. I mean, 8th level bodhisattva is like, excuse me for saying so, but magician bodhisattva, that kind of person. They're bodhisattvas who aren't even doing any work anymore, because they've cut off, you know, they've done something similar to what arhats do,

[27:03]

they don't have any more striving, so they're really advanced, irreversible bodhisattvas. Even the first stage of a bodhisattva, like Nagarjuna was stage one, but he was a Buddha too, you know, I mean, basically. But, in terms of development of a bodhisattva, he wasn't that high. But, part of the wonder of Zen practice is that our practice is actually on the 9th stage. So, we do a practice which actually manifests and, you know, directly points to a realization far beyond our personal achievement. So, let's see, it is 7.31 now, so maybe a few questions and then you go to bed.

[28:09]

And, I'll try to develop this more during the session. What was funny about that? It's a 7.31 rather than 8.31. It sounds early. It may sound early, but gradually you'll get understanding why it's that time. I think Robin's been having her hand up for a while. You can hear all that again. Okay, if you now, in your uprightness, okay, you're just basically practicing uprightness. So, what will be revealed to you

[29:11]

in your uprightness? Situations will be revealed to you, right? Now, what may seem to be revealed to you may look like situations where it's interesting, you know, one of the scriptures that Buddha talked about, Alaya, Buddha said that, how do you put it? These human progeny are delighted in Alaya, delighted by Alaya, excited by Alaya. By these progeny delighting in Alaya, delighted by Alaya and excited by Alaya, the following kinds of situations are not easily perceived, namely dependent co-arising. Okay, so our usual way is that we're, which we may try to be upright maybe, or maybe we don't, but anyway, our usual meditation, our usual walking around is that we're delighted by Alaya. What's Alaya? Alaya is like

[30:14]

a Sala, you know, the Sala is Alaya for me. What does that mean? It means that she's a definite thing, you know, like she's cute or something, right? That's a definite thing, that's an example and I'm delighted by that, so that's Alaya. Alaya, in other words, an obscuring thing. What does it obscure? What does it obscure when I look at Sala and see Sala? It obscures the fact of looking at Sala is a moment like riding in a boat. Instead of seeing how, you know, I look at her and by looking at her, you know, I can use my eyes and I can use the light bouncing off her and I can have the consciousness, you know, and I wouldn't be able to see her if it wasn't for her, but she wouldn't be there if it wasn't for me. Without meditating on things that way, I just sort of like delight in these people, in these solid things. That's what people do and it's interesting,

[31:24]

I looked up in the Sutra, I looked up the Pali scripture of this thing and I found a different word for Alaya used in the Pali text society and they said the same thing. They said, human progeny are delighted by sensual pleasure, delighted by sensual pleasure, excited by sensual pleasure. The word I think probably was the Sanskrit word or the Pali word Alaya, but I think that probably when they were translating they were probably talking to some Pali monks and the Pali monks said, well that's sensual pleasure that they're excited by. Now sensual pleasure means, you know, you have pleasure in these objects, right, these substantial objects. So how does Alaya come to you? Alaya is this place where stuff is stored, right? Not place, but this is consciousness where all this stuff sticks, where all these dispositions

[32:26]

are laid down, but when you have an experience, you don't have experience of all of Alaya, what do you have experience of? You have experience of one little chunk of Alaya being reflected by your reflecting capacity. You're thinking about one object among the basically infinite number of objects, you're thinking about one little piece of Alaya, like Sala or Kerry or Stuart. And when you think about one little chunk of Alaya, you can have sensual pleasure and you get excited by it. But because you're excited by Steve and Dorothea and red tablecloths and breakfast, because you're excited by these reflections of Alaya, by these reflections which are basically arising up out of Alaya, because you're excited by those kinds of things, you don't see dependent co-arising. You don't see the situation of causation and therefore you don't see the appeasement of all

[33:27]

dispositions. You don't see the relinquishment of all grasping. You don't see the waning of craving and you don't see the cessation of craving and you don't see freedom. Human beings do that. They delight in Alaya. They delight in Alaya in the form of sensual pleasure. And even painful things, there is a pleasure in the fact that our senses are functioning on an object. There's also misery with that because a sense of self is arising and these four afflictions are there. So we're constantly miserable while we're simultaneously delighting in sensual pleasure. They'll go together. But the misery is not what's obscuring the Alaya, obscuring the process. The misery is a result of the process being obscured. The obscuring is due to us looking at those little mirrors and saying, wow, that's a thing, rather than, what is that? My God, what is that? What is that? What is that?

[34:30]

Is that so? Is this happening? What's going on? No, I know what's going on. That person insulted me. I have no question about it. That hurt. But really, you determined that it was an insult before it hurt. On some level, maybe you didn't even know how you did it, but you figured it out, what it was. And by consulting one of those dispositions and plopping it out there, you've got it. Again, you delight in the nice functioning of your Alaya. But when you delight and get excited about the way your Alaya is appearing to you, it obscures dependent co-arising. So, back to, you know, I didn't exactly replay that, but what you're doing now is you're looking at situations as always like going riding in a boat. Okay? Then if you do that, that breaks up, in a sense, at that moment when you see through the process of the self, is it isn't the self, isn't a boat, or it isn't you riding in the boat. It's this dynamic process.

[35:34]

When you see things that way, you don't lay down any more dispositions. Okay? Not only that, but when the dispositions come up, accompanying you and get themselves reflected into your awareness, you study all the dispositions individually. Now, you can't look down where the dispositions are laid. You can't look down in Alaya where they're all laid. They just get brought up one by one from Alaya, made into objects, and then you get to see how there is a disposition. When this happened, when that person talks to me that way, I do this. But there's a dynamic there, and if you can see that actually you've got a person riding in a boat there, then you're tuning into the dynamic. You know, the chapter that's in is total dynamic working. The whole universe is working through this riding in a boat. The whole universe is working through this perception of this person. The whole universe is working through the way you hear this and the way you're hurt by it. All that dynamic, if you tune into that, you will penetrate and clarify the self, and then you will see the appeasement of the dispositions, you will see dependent

[36:40]

co-arising, you will see relinquishment of all grasping, you will see the end of suffering by this uprightness. And so, one way to tell uprightness is just by your sense of uprightness. Another way to tell uprightness is, are you starting to open up to the complexity of things and see this dance? Are you starting to make a little space around the attacks that are happening on you all the time? And so on. And I think Mark was next, I don't know. Right, it's alaya. That means that in alaya there's no locations, there's no addresses of things. In order for things to have an address or be identified, you have to have this sense of self. Okay? You need to project the thing up into the reflection, make it object. It has to be object

[37:46]

in order to be known, okay? And then it has to have this reflection in order to be separated. So once it's separated, then there's a location, and then it can be an identity, and it can be known. But in alaya there isn't any of this. Do the dispositions include the wholesome, like all wholesome psychological conditions, and the environments, and all of that? Yeah, so in the mind consciousness, okay, in one sense you can see the mind consciousness has a big canopy over our mind, a big knowing canopy, or you could think of it as just a spot of knowing, but anyway I'd like to think of it as a canopy or a sphere all the way around us, and the reflection can light up any part of the canopy, okay, and on that canopy can be the primary and secondary defilements, the universals,

[38:47]

all that stuff can get flashed up on the surface of knowledge by the activity of reflection. So all those things that get flashed up there are these seeds from alaya, and all these seeds from alaya are dispositions and concepts. I'm sorry, what's the canopy? The canopy is a surface of knowing, you know, there's a sense of awareness of these objects, right? The objects ... actually it's the surface of the ... it's the external surface of objects is what it is, which are known, and across the surface can be that list, you know, anger, greed, concentration, feeling, positive and negative feeling, all this stuff gets flashed across this thin surface, it's just the thickness of knowledge, it's just the thickness of the concept of object, but we see it and swirling across this surface are all the things listed from karaka 9 to 15. Now, if these dharmas that were flashed up there were not part of a

[39:58]

disposition system, they still could be flashed up there, but they would no longer be dispositions, they would no longer be bonding, they would just be appearing by dependent co-arising, and the things that appear by dependent co-arising are examples of emptiness and freedom and possibility, rather than rigid forms projected from the rigidity out as objects now, where you feel like when you're angry you have to be a certain way. John? Yes, the question that keeps on coming up to me is how ... if this concept of alaya has been mythologized, if you can find deification of representatives, we have the deification of the concept of god and mind in the form of Buddha, what do we call a deification of this concept of god and mind? Well, it seems like we treat it almost like it's a deity. Yeah, that's... We love it. Preeminent, do you think it would be in the deified psychology?

[41:00]

Right here. I think a lot of the Greek gods are deifications of manas, I mean of alaya. Ares, Venus, Hephaestus, a lot of those gods, Apollo, they're deifications of these basically non-stop forces of the psyche, and these deities control us, right? They control us just like alaya does, kind of controls us. Because it's just a conscious quality, I kind of attribute a feminine aspect. Well, it is... I'm almost trying to say it's like, would it be in its own brain, say it's Tara, I'm just curious. Well, I think they don't want to say Tara because alaya, for the most part, until it becomes released from it, alaya becomes a springboard for wisdom for the

[42:04]

bodhisattvas. But the arhats, it's not a springboard, it's something that is actually reversed. It's cut, it's stopped, its function is defunct in the arhat. In the bodhisattvas, it's a springboard for wisdom, but alaya in its usual functioning is basically just samsara, and Tara is not a deification of samsara. Tara is a deification of compassion for beings that are stuck in alaya. Tara is compassion for beings who delight in alaya, who are excited by alaya, for beings for whom alaya is obscuring the teaching which Tara has studied, realized, and therefore has compassion for beings that do not realize it, and understands exactly why they're acting that way, and why they're in agony, and how they couldn't be any other way given their understanding. So we deify the understanding of how alaya is both a bondage samsaric kind of force and how actually alaya is nothing at all in itself, just like samsara really isn't,

[43:08]

but also it can be the surface or the material that a bodhisattva uses to develop this all-embracing wisdom. Okay, it is now almost eight o'clock. Huh? Yeah. No, no, no, no. Oh, Roberto, you have to go to bed now. Get your slippers on. Okay, let's see, one more question. Yeah, you. I wanted to know, okay, so between where most of us are and our hardship, what do we do to, if it's reversion, it doesn't happen instantaneously? So between, what do we do? Okay, so what we do is, first of all, we practice uprightness,

[44:13]

okay? Now, if you tried to look at situations, if you try to go, now, where's the boat and the oar and the sail and the ocean and the, you know, where's all that in this moment, right? That won't be the way to study it. That's too artificial, you know, and again, you'll just be imposing your dispositions onto that instruction, but that instruction is to say, you be upright, okay? And I'll talk a lot about what uprightness is, okay? That'll be my main thing I'll keep reminding you of, my sense of that. And in your uprightness, be ready to see things differently. Be ready to see not boats and yourself riding, not you and me, you know, not you being the dawn and me being the abbot and all that kind of stuff, or you riding on my back down the street, but how, if you are riding my back down the street, meditate on how, you know, I couldn't be

[45:18]

your carrier without you, and you wouldn't be able to be carried without me. Be open to seeing things in this dynamic, multi-causal, mutually co-creating way, but to forcibly start to think that way, I don't think is as good as just being upright and have that revealed to you. You're going to be getting teachings thrown at you all week, which are going to remind you of that, you know, the self-fulfilling samadhi is going to keep telling you over and over about how you help all the tiles and the pebbles and the grasses and the walls, and you're going to be helping them and how they're helping you, and this is going to be drilled into you, but you don't have to think of it. And actually, the Blue Jays out there and the servers and everything is going to be telling you this over and over, all you got to do is just be upright, and your test of your uprightness is when this starts to be revealed to you, then you can say, oh, it must be working, I'm starting to see that actually these people are me. And I'll give you examples of surprising things that have happened to me, where I thought what wasn't me was actually me, and then maybe you can think

[46:23]

of examples of things that you didn't think were you turned out to be you, that the person attacking you was actually your friend, and so on. But I'm not saying you should try to think that way, you just deal with what's happening in an upright way and it'll gradually turn into this self-fulfilling samadhi, which is a samadhi which starts to meditate on dependent co-arising of everything. And that's how you get from here to our hardship, but you don't stop at our hardship, you keep going, okay?

[46:56]

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