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Root of The Middle Way – Session 21
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- Buddhist Classics and Philosophy
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- Rangjung Yeshe Institute - Nepal
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Session 21 looks into the nature of perception, and what constitutes the Seer and the Seen.
Description
Session 21 delves into the intricacies of perception within the Abhidharma framework, challenging conventional notions about the seer and the seen. Key points include the seer’s inability to perceive itself, leading to questions about the nature of perception. This raises the idea that the seer is a construct rather than a self-aware entity. The discussion pushes boundaries, exploring the potential absence of a clear distinction between reality and dreams or hallucinations, emphasizing the complexity of these philosophical ideas and the importance of communal contemplation and guidance.
Related Course Info
- Root of the Middle Way – Mūlamadhyamakakārikā A course on Nagarjuna’s brilliantly sharp reasoning, taught by Dr. Thomas Doctor at the Rangjung Yeshe Institute over a month. For everyone with an interest in the way things really are.
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Anybody would like to offer
some reflections of yesterday?
Well, and yeah maybe.
Student: "So you asked a few questions yesterday. Should I say what they were?" Okay.
"Yeah, one of them was actually you asked us to go back to the question from before the weekend that we think about what we meant now and what we meant before about the sentence "the girl walks on the path," and then we talked about habits and you asked us to consider what does it mean when we say that habits are strong to see things in a certain way? Basically a lot of your questions yesterday was about considering what are we saying? I mean, you keep saying that. And then the last question and you said, think about for tomorrow is about the virtual and the real, what is substrate and what is emerging experience and that came out from a talk about dharmakaya. There was a question, is dharmakaya real? So, so should I try to say something? Okay.
So the question about what is different from before to now? I'm a little bit blank because we just talked about it in review session yesterday. What did we talk about? Do you remember what we talked about? About what was before and what was now in terms of perception and things arising. I mean, if you look at the sentence, "the girl walks on the path," you don't remember? Okay. Like what we, like, okay, before I began to think about these things, what did I mean and what do I now mean and so on and so forth. Just that sort of. "So I think, I mean, I remember what I was reflecting on was that, that if I'm not aware, if I don't with my will decide to do an analysis, I still tend to, you know, not think about "the girl walks on the path," that, you know, that that has meaning to me and I think there is walking there, but it's on a kind of superficial, non-investigated way. But as soon as I sit down or go walk or whatever I'm doing and decide to do the analysis, then it dissipates entirely. Then there is no girl walking and there is no walking and then there is no path in a way. But it only happens when I do that analysis. And then in terms of why these habits are so strong, that's also just a way of saying, right, because.. I don't know why I keep doing it." Great. "I'm sorry, I'm a little bit blank. We had a really good review session yesterday, we talked a lot about it. Yeah." Good. "Oh yeah, and it came from this, you said, you know, the compelling part that Śāntarakṣita says, you know, that things are only compelling as long as they're not examined.
And then that we should use this reasoning not as a solution but keep doing it, have to keep the two truths dynamic in a way that we don't end up in either being totally spaced out about it and mystified or end up in just labelling this as another worldview and as another theory and then ignoring and just taking it as another thing and then going about with our lives.
That we also talked about." Great. Thank you. So then maybe we should talk a little bit about this virtual and real issue, no? And sort of to get into that we can look at still some verses also. 18. A set of four, 18 to 21, which are analyses of the agent and the act in terms of sameness and difference. "The act of going and the one who goes cannot rightly be said to be the same. And the act of going and the one who goes cannot rightly be said to be different."
We didn't have this yet, no? Oh, we did, yeah, sorry. Then let's go to 22 instead.
"The one who goes does not in go…" So this is, according to the commentary these are a set of three and a half stanzas that is concerned with whether going is singular or multiple.
So "The one who goes does not engage in the going that characterizes him as someone who goes. Because there's no one who goes before going, someone goes somewhere."
So "The one who goes does not engage in the going that characterizes him as the one who goes." So what is the going that characterizes the walker as the one who walks? Well, the action that makes him a walker. So he's a walker because he walks, but the walker does not engage in that walking that makes him a walker. Because if he were to do that he would have to be first someone who is not a walker, for him to engage in an act. There has to be, for someone to engage in an act, like me for example, wanting to drink a cup of tea, then I sit there, look at the tea cup and then decide I want to drink. And then I can pick it up, no? But if we then think of me walking on a path, then it's not that I exist as someone who can engage in the act that makes me a walker. Because what I'm then saying is that I engage in the act of walking while not being in the capacity of a walker. So that clearly cannot be the case.
"Because there's no one who goes before going, there's no walker before the act of walking. So for the walker to engage in the type of walking that makes him a walker would mean that he would have to be, it just doesn't work, because then he would have to be a walker before he engages in the act of walking that characterizes him as a walker. Otherwise the alternative is that he is not a walker when he engages in the act of walking that makes him a walker. So either way that we look at it, it's completely impossible to make sense of this idea that there is an act that characterizes an agent as the agent of that particular action. So that is a sort of groundbreaking news, no? That "The one who goes does not engage in going other than the going that characterizes him as someone who goes. The reason being that for a single agent of going it does not make sense for there to be two acts." So then the alternative would be to say that, okay, he is just the agent, the walker, and then in that capacity performs the action of going. But then we are saying that there are two acts of walking. There's the one that makes the walker the agent of walking, that qualifies him to be the proper agent for such an action, and then in that capacity he walks. But what we are saying then is that there are two actions. And of course this we have looked at already. It does not make sense for there to be two actions because if we then take that further there would also have to be two agents. So that too is completely absurd. "Someone who does not engage in any of the three kinds of going..."
"Someone who goes does not engage in any of the three kinds of going." So someone who is a walker does not perform the act of going on that is past, yet to be done, or in the process of taking place.
And yet someone who does not go does not engage in any of the three kinds of going. So whether we look at an agent who is qualified as a walker, or whether we look at someone who is an agent but not a walker, then it does not make sense for such an agent to engage in an act of walking that has taken place. Of course not, because that action is over. Nor does it make sense for that agent to engage in an action that is yet to occur and like a future going, because it has yet to occur. And apart from acts that have occurred or are yet to occur, what would we mean by present going? We cannot identify any present walking apart from actions that have been completed or yet to occur. So whether we look at someone who is qualified as a walker to perform such actions, it does not make sense. Or whether we look at someone who is not qualified as such, where walking does still not make sense.
Then it could be, as it says in 25, "Someone who does and does not go engage in any of the..."
"Someone who does and does not go does not engage in any of the three kinds of going either." What kind of agent would that be? Someone who both walks and does not walk. And again, looking at the three types of actions, it does not make sense either. So that is then a kind of very exhaustive summary that we have also in those last few stanzas. And then the conclusion follows "There is therefore no going, no one who goes and nothing traversed." And that brings the analysis of going and coming to an end. So the next is about the sense sources. So we can get into that today also.
"Sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch and cognition, the experiential domain of these six faculties are the objects that are seen and so forth."
So here we have introduced the framework of Abhidharma that talks about six faculties and six types of cognition as associated with seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching and cognizing in general. And these three are connecting with distinct objects. So that sight, the faculty of sight is what perceives or is what is behind the perception of or is what is required for the perception of visual objects, the faculty of hearing is what is required for cognizing sounds, for registering and perceiving sounds.
And so forth, also with smell, taste, touch and cognition. So that is the basic framework that will be analysed in this relatively short chapter. So it's the... Oh, OK, sure. I don't know how to do that, though. It's not my screen, yeah? OK, thank you. Yeah. So there we have the beginning of chapter three.
So it's an Abhidharma framework, but it's also a very natural idea to feel that there are certain faculties that are required for us to be able to perceive and cognize certain objects. So that is the idea that is under analysis here. How much sense does that make to think in those terms, to think that there are such things as faculties which connect with distinct fields of perception and experience?
So in 2, it says "A solid establishment of sight cannot be provided through the example of fire."
No, that is 3, sorry. First we have this 2, yeah? "Sight does indeed not see its own identity." So the faculty of seeing, what is that? We may describe it in different ways. We can say it's the eye, or we can say that it's the eye in combination with consciousness. That is the seer of forms. But that which sees in this way does not see itself. It's a very interesting argument that the whole thing begins with. "Sight does indeed not see its own identity. How can something that does not see itself see anything else either?"
So, yeah, it's a striking one somehow. It's presented just like that. But what do you think, how forceful and compelling is this kind of argument, that for something to be the seer, how can it be the seer if it doesn't see itself? What is your impression? Like why, I mean, we have eyes, we're used to thinking that my eye doesn't see itself, but that I can use my eyes to see, but also then if we say, so maybe the eye is just some sort of tool, it's not the real seer, and then whatever else we might say that the real seer is. If we say it's me who is the seer, like to go with some sort of very crude, not Abhidharma, but just crude, mundane idea that I am the seer of things that can be seen. If I can't see myself, then how can I be the seer?
Yeah.
Yeah, please, before we go further, I think it's nice to think in a fresh way what do we think about that. Student: "Yes, so my initial thought is of thinking of like a camera, and the notion of what a camera's function is to do, and it's to take pictures, but obviously the camera also cannot take a picture of itself, though I suppose we could have a selfie conversation, a conversation about selfies, but I think that is quite a different function. But given the last chapter when we were speaking about an action not being able to be owned by two agents, or one agent not being able to own two actions, my hunch, like internal hunch about this is that seeing and being seen are different functions and different actions that couldn't possibly be possessed by one single agent. So that's like the visceral response that comes up in me if I were to put words to it, it's like well of course the seer can't see itself because then it wouldn't be the seer anymore, because it's qualified by the ability to see, you know, I'm trying to avoid the words external, internal, but I guess in this linear fashion that each action is just if we're going to treat it as an isolated thing, then it has to be, the agent has to be qualified by that one action, and it feels like something different to be able to see itself. To me it's not obvious that that would be part of the package." Right, it's not obvious, yeah? So you think like when we hear this it doesn't sound like, why should this be impossible for something to see if it cannot see itself? "Yeah, it doesn't seem like a problem to me." Right, exactly.
Student: "It's like saying a knife can't cut if it can't cut itself, it's counterintuitive." Yeah, so it cannot see itself. "I think Lorenz…" But it's not just that it is impossible for it to see itself, yeah? But then the argument is further that because it's impossible for it to see itself, therefore it cannot see other things either.
That is interesting, no?
Student: "Also when I dream I see, but I don't see myself." Sorry? "Also when I dream I see things, but I don't see myself."
Yeah. "And the eye is not working."
Yeah, I think this is maybe to my understanding it's somewhat underdetermined in the commentaries what this point has made here, yeah? But if we just sort of think of it though, I think there's something… like what does it mean for a seer not to see itself, yeah?
Yeah, I'm sort of struggling to formulate it also, but if a seer doesn't…
It's very close to saying that if the seer cannot see itself, yeah? It's very close to saying that there is no seer, no?
Like whatever it is that we say is the seer, no? If that seer cannot see its own presence as a seer, yeah? Then what are we talking about with the whole thing about an object being seen by something?
I think actually it is very powerful and elegant just to put it like that, yeah? Just the fact that it's not detailed very much makes you think quite a bit about it, yeah? And if… Ok, I say that I see, I say that my eyes see, maybe I say my brain sees, who knows what I say about seeing, yeah? But if that which I refer to as the agent in an act of perception is not perceptible, yeah?
That is, there's something very… Then again, like what is the implication of what I just said? That I see the camera.
If that 'I' that I talk about is not perceptible, is not visually perceptible, or if the eye, my eye sees the camera, if that eye is not in a position to see itself as a seer of things, yeah? To see itself means to see itself as the seer, right? So it annot notice itself, then the seer cannot come across itself, then what is the seer then? If it cannot be… Then we are certainly in the realm of constructs then when it comes to the seer.
"There's some questions online." Yeah? Student: "So, is this also saying that… so if sight was able to see its own identity, would it be able to see everything else?" Well then that's another problem, if it can… how could it see itself, yeah? Because… "But if it could, it's hypothetical." Yeah, but it can't, because then the acrobat can ride on his own shoulders and so on, yeah? And a knife can cut itself. So it doesn't… it cannot see itself, and because it cannot see itself, it cannot see other things either. That's the crazy thing about that argument, yeah? It's not just saying that… it's not just like an argument against self-awareness or something like that, no? It's saying that doesn't happen, and so seeing of other things doesn't happen either.
Student: "First I think I had the same view like the gentleman with the camera, because… But I think that actually implies that we are accepting that the seer has a limited scope, sort of, that it can only see other things, but not itself, like the camera. And I thought it's not a problem. But I guess Nāgārjuna is always like absolutizing things, so I think if he's saying that the seer cannot see itself, which again, in case of the camera, I don't care, but then that would imply that the seer is also a non-seer in regards to itself. And I think that is a problem for Nāgārjuna, that the seer is a seer of others, but a non-seer of itself, so therefore it cannot qualify as a seer, because it's not like an omnipotent seer." Yeah, and I think also we can think of it along sort of mundane terms, yeah? If.. for it to really make sense to say that my eye is what sees, then that seer has to be perceptible as such, yeah? As a seer. Because otherwise the seer is imperceptible, yeah? "But the seer could be perceptible by another entity, let's say, the conceptual mind."
Yeah, and in other words, the upshot of this is then also that the seer is a construct, yeah? And sure, then we can talk about seers and many seers seeing in complex fashion by way of many circumstances, conditions and so on that are in. But all of this then means that there is no seer as such, because the seer as such cannot see itself as such, and because the seer as such is then never ever perceptible as such, then obviously it couldn't be anything but a construct. Maybe that's a way of examining this, but of course the chapter proceeds with someone immediately saying that this doesn't follow. There could be, it makes perfect sense to say that the seer is the seer of other things but not itself. Like for example fire, that's the next in 3, yeah? That fire can burn other things but it doesn't burn itself. Yes, sorry?
Student: "So when we're saying that the seer can't see itself though, the moment that..because the one that cognizes is the consciousness right? The consciousness is the one that sees the object and not the eye itself in this context. So then when the mind is aware that it's seeing, when I realize I am seeing something, isn't the mind seeing the mind? Isn't that the seer seeing the seeing?" Yeah, well that you could say, you know, but then the argument, one of the arguments that could be used against that is then object and agent become the same, yeah? And how could that make sense? Like the knife doesn't cut itself, yeah? It cannot cut itself. "But the mind can be aware of the process that's going on inside it. We're not, like I'm not right now but the mind can do that, right?" It can seem like that, yeah? I mean we can talk like that and it makes sense to say like that in certain ways, no? But is there really a mind that sees itself?
It's hard to find a place for that along these lines, no?
Like if it would see itself it means object and agent have collapsed, no? Then the walker is the walking and so on.
And then here, if however that is not the case, if the knower doesn't know itself then how can it know other things, yeah? It also doesn't make sense. If the knower is unknowable then how, what to say about the things that this knower knows, no? If there is no knowable knower then how can we say that there's knowing and that there's something known?
Yeah, okay.
"Andrew online, do you want to unmute yourself and ask a question or share?" Student: "Yeah, thank you. It seems to me that the argument is presented may confuse the agent with the act of seeing itself. I think the act of seeing itself can see itself. But I actually think the selfie example which was kind of flippantly dismissed, maybe actually a little bit more relevant. For example, when I wake up in the morning I see that I got a bad haircut and I don't love how it looks. So in this situation I think actually it's fine to say that I'm the agent seeing myself. My act of seeing can't see itself but then are we taking away agency from, for example, someone who has lost their eyesight? They remain an intact agent with plenty of other sensory modalities. I think the problem is with the act of seeing. That itself can't be recursive in that moment but the agent as this sort of more complex whole I think seems like we can preserve." But in the end of chapter two, we said that agent and action cannot be considered the same nor can they be considered different from each other. So of course it's irrefutable and totally correct that we say things and do things of the type that you describe. But what follows from that is that there is no agent as such, that there is no action as such, there is no seeing as such, nothing that is seen. "Yeah, you may remember I was the one who is trying to do the not totally different, not absolutely the same. And I think that can kind of preserve these notions if we want to say at a conventional level. But if we want to say that they don't exist in themselves or of themselves then I agree." Yeah, well, then I think that there is no basis for an argument, no? If we agree that if there is sort of consensus that we use terms such as 'same and different,' 'object and agent and action,' but they are just, they are, each one of them is nothing in itself when we look closer than our tendency to, when we want to sort of know the final condition of something is to zoom in and try to notice, okay, what is there, what are the details of this, and sort of get to the bottom of it, no? But when we, whatever we talk about, whether it's a visual perception, whether it's an act of movement, of walking somewhere, that tendency doesn't, when we follow that tendency and that urge to get to the bottom of the event then we come up with nothing at all. So if there is agreement about that then on a sort of conceptual, at the level of conceptual formulation of the Middle Way, like the Middle Way of words as distinguished from Middle Way of meaning, then it's hard to think why anyone who sort of thinks of themself as a proponent of the Middle Way of the words could find something to disagree in there, no?
In other words what we are saying is dependent origination and emptiness or put much more powerfully and beautifully, just like in the opening verses, that what arises dependently neither arises nor ceases, doesn't go and come, is not same and different.
Okay, let's think about that and we can also take 3 and then let's wait with that till tomorrow and then try to think a little bit more about the virtual and the real stuff that we have been sort of bringing up the last few days.
And it's also something that looms in the back of this discussion I think because, okay, what is then the knower, yeah?
And the knower, par excellence, is of course the awakened mind, no? So if we are Buddhists and we want to find out about the knower, then sooner or later we're going to get there, yeah? To talk about awakened wisdom and the Dharmakaya. And how was it that Dharmakaya first came up in the chapter of Going and Coming? It was, yeah, somehow whether it has more reality,
whether it exists in a more genuine way than anything else.
So the... a way of getting into that is thinking of, as we also did, like me and the image of myself on the computer, that there's a basis for the appearance of that virtual me who appears on the screen, yeah? And that basis is here. Another way to think about it is like in dreams and wake-time experience, it's because there is this reality that I'm part of and can experience when I'm awake that it's possible to fall asleep and then have these sort of illusory perceptions that take place during the sleep, yeah? So it's again something that we are very accustomed to doing, thinking that there's something which is real as opposed to something which is not real, yeah? But yet not totally, obviously not real, yeah? That's part of the challenge here, no? We're talking about something that is real and then something that seems quite real but is not really, yeah? So what happens to that kind of distinction when we examine things in the way that we've been doing here along the lines of reasoning in the Mūlamadhyamaka? Is it possible to retain that kind of distinction, something which is seemingly real and something which is only seemingly real and something which is more solidly real and in fact the basis for the appearance of the former?
And a lot of Mādhyamaka philosophy also works on that issue because what is the consequence if we say, No, it's not possible to draw that distinction? Then we're really saying that there is no difference whatsoever between what I experience now and that which I begin to dream about tonight. No difference in their level of reality. Everything is on the same level. Or if I begin to hallucinate and see something that you all say, "Hey, you're crazy. What are you talking about?" Then my crazy hallucination and your perception of me as hallucinating are equally unfounded, yeah? So is that something... That sounds like much, yeah? And a lot of Mādhyamaka philosophy is carried out to
to show that we can still have a distinction, but there's also a lot of Mādhyamaka philosophy that goes to show that it's not possible to make that kind of distinction. So it's a very rich literature that we can draw on there. There are some very grand debates and very passionate debates about this and of what the implications are if you say either one.
The challenge with saying that there is no difference is of course hardly needs to be stated. It seems just...
Yeah, actually it's maybe interesting to think what is wrong with just... What feels wrong about just saying dream and wake time experience are... It's impossible to say that one is more real or unreal than the other.
I was going to say that the problems that come with that are obvious, but actually what are they? Like why is it that it seems problematic to say that?
Yeah. "Luis, online?"
Student: "One of the problems is that you may cause a lot of suffering if you're confused about what's going on and don't engage properly, then one may hurt oneself or... First of all, when maybe you're on influence of some substance and don't really realize you can't fly, and maybe you jump off a balcony or something." But is it...? "If you don't really engage with reality in a way that functions, then you may hurt yourself." Yeah, definitely. But what we're saying is just that there's no difference between dream and this, in the sense that neither of the two are more or less real than the other. "Yeah, but I'm distinguishing, for example, the perception of someone who is engaging with reality in a usual way, as we're doing now, conversating, and someone who is hallucinating. So if we say there's no difference at all, then we're not taking into consideration the suffering that the hallucinating person is experiencing." Right. "Because of the hallucination, as a result of not engaging with things in a proper way." Yeah. So there are certainly more or less beneficial ways of perceiving, no? But again, that is not endangered by more or less enjoyable, more or less successful ways of perceiving. But that is not actually endangered by saying that there's no, in terms of the reality of what we perceive, the hallucination and the stuff that we perceive right now are on this equal footing. You can't say that one is more or less real than the other. That doesn't imply, I think, at all that therefore they are equally good, no? That therefore, or does it? In one way I guess it does, no? Because if they're equally, if their level of reality is equally, is the same, one and the same, no? Then what are we talking about in terms of good and bad, successful and not successful? So that is of course something that follows from it, and it's hard to know what to do with that kind of information, probably.
Like not only do we say that what we see now and what we see when having a bad fever are equally real and equally unreal, both are perceptions of things that seem to be there but aren't at all, then we say that, and on top of that we say, so therefore actually there is no qualitative difference. How could there be that if it's equally real and equally, equally real in the sense of being merely apparent but equally unreal in the sense of being not there as soon as we look closer? So that is probably a kind of message that is very, very difficult to do anything with for far most people, no? Yeah.
Student: "It's just as a response to what Louis said that hallucination might equal suffering but could also not, could also potentially equal happiness in a way, if you have some form of schizophrenia, you might think that you are a healer or the Messiah, you have a connection to, you feel you have a connection to something bigger than yourself and I'm not saying that crashes and burns, that's the problem, but when you are in that state then you are euphoric and happy and everything is swell. Or just because you said "good or bad.." you know so.." Yeah. True. "But then that crashes, so I'm not saying schizophrenia is good in any way." But what doesn't crash also? After all, no matter how nice and meaningful and beautiful our situation is, it falls apart in my experience. "Oh no, not in mine."
Yeah, so since that is so challenging, this message, really, really challenging,
then there's also a lot of effort made to say that, yeah but still don't worry, we can, we can, or perhaps we must, it's crucially important that you don't think like that, that there's a very clear difference between one and the other, one is just hallucination and the other is conventional reality.
So, yeah.
Student: "It seems to me that taking this kind of stance is quite dangerous, it seems like losing action in the view. Yes, like this example of the yogi hitting a rat and saying, "I am emptiness and it is emptiness so it doesn't really matter." But if you do this, then you're kind of ignoring the consequences of what we might say is like conventional reality, losing action in the view." Yeah, so this is definitely nothing, what to say, insignificant or even harmless, no? This is not harmless stuff that we're talking about, yeah?
And Nāgārjuna says if when viewing emptiness wrongly, the feeble minded will be destroyed, yeah?
So it's like this is something that needs very careful inquiry, contemplation and guidance probably as well, no?
Yeah, and a sort of group effort level of things, yeah? It's not something you just take the book home and sit and then you figure it out and then you become something great, no? Probably not, no? It doesn't sound like a very promising way to go about really comprehending, penetrating this issue and being able to integrate fully whatever we then come to see, you know? It doesn't seem that if that is what we are after, then that kind of approach doesn't seem like one that presents itself, no? It's not just going to the library, picking up the book and spending a weekend and then you got that, yeah? It's something that I think this sense of a group effort is very clearly there, no? It's not something.. you need a community to settle these issues. It's not something you can figure out alone. What does that even mean to figure this out alone?
And that is very much the Buddhist approach, that there are three jewels, no? It's not just the Buddha and the Dharma that we take refuge in, but the Sangha is crucial, no?
So being in a community, being active there in various ways, as one becomes, if we are in a community you can't just be passive. You can be more or less active of course, but complete passivity is impossible just by the power of the community setting. So I think that's something to really acknowledge here, that it is a live issue very much, yeah? It's not something that one struggles with alone at all and it's something that has been there for a long time in this world, this issue here.
And it has been dealt with very decisively by many people in the past and what they have done is also something that has implications for us today. We can see all the sort of evidence of what has happened based on joyfully struggling with these issues, no? We have a whole culture, many different cultures, because again it's not one particular way that people have taken up this challenge. They have done that in many different ways in the Buddhist world, if we so want to speak in those terms, yeah?
But the thing is, this is clearly something very significant and something not to be taken lightly. But having said that much, what can we then say about the difference between dream and reality? So try to think about that at home. We know that this issue, as an implication of our study up until now, it can seem that it is hard to find any difference between dream, hallucination, etc. and then what we would like to call 'real' in conventional terms, like our situation now.
So that type of conclusion is, it's hard to know what to do with that kind of information or that type of perspective and it is also clear that this can be therefore also.. create more trouble than perhaps being helpful in the context, yeah? So on the temporary level it can.. make us worse off perhaps than we were before, yeah? And again this is when things have power and significance, that's not unusual, no? That which has power and significance is something that can be used in one way very beautifully and very powerfully and in another with detrimental consequences. That's almost to be expected when something is of that kind, yeah? But so if we have said that, then what can we say about..
so having said that much, what would we like each of us to say about this issue? Keeping in mind on the one hand all the things that take us toward the conclusion that there's no difference between dream and illusion and then what reservations do we have about saying it in that way? And if we have reservations then what would we like to say instead? Instead of just that, how would we like to qualify the statement that there is no qualitative difference between dream and wake time experience? And then, yeah, how would we like to qualify that in a way that considers our reservations, hesitations and so on? Try and think about that tomorrow and then we will also.. so all of this is then taking us further into the contemplation about substrate and appearance, yeah? And we will continue also with chapter three. Thank you.
Student: "So you asked a few questions yesterday. Should I say what they were?" Okay.
"Yeah, one of them was actually you asked us to go back to the question from before the weekend that we think about what we meant now and what we meant before about the sentence "the girl walks on the path," and then we talked about habits and you asked us to consider what does it mean when we say that habits are strong to see things in a certain way? Basically a lot of your questions yesterday was about considering what are we saying? I mean, you keep saying that. And then the last question and you said, think about for tomorrow is about the virtual and the real, what is substrate and what is emerging experience and that came out from a talk about dharmakaya. There was a question, is dharmakaya real? So, so should I try to say something? Okay.
So the question about what is different from before to now? I'm a little bit blank because we just talked about it in review session yesterday. What did we talk about? Do you remember what we talked about? About what was before and what was now in terms of perception and things arising. I mean, if you look at the sentence, "the girl walks on the path," you don't remember? Okay. Like what we, like, okay, before I began to think about these things, what did I mean and what do I now mean and so on and so forth. Just that sort of. "So I think, I mean, I remember what I was reflecting on was that, that if I'm not aware, if I don't with my will decide to do an analysis, I still tend to, you know, not think about "the girl walks on the path," that, you know, that that has meaning to me and I think there is walking there, but it's on a kind of superficial, non-investigated way. But as soon as I sit down or go walk or whatever I'm doing and decide to do the analysis, then it dissipates entirely. Then there is no girl walking and there is no walking and then there is no path in a way. But it only happens when I do that analysis. And then in terms of why these habits are so strong, that's also just a way of saying, right, because.. I don't know why I keep doing it." Great. "I'm sorry, I'm a little bit blank. We had a really good review session yesterday, we talked a lot about it. Yeah." Good. "Oh yeah, and it came from this, you said, you know, the compelling part that Śāntarakṣita says, you know, that things are only compelling as long as they're not examined.
And then that we should use this reasoning not as a solution but keep doing it, have to keep the two truths dynamic in a way that we don't end up in either being totally spaced out about it and mystified or end up in just labelling this as another worldview and as another theory and then ignoring and just taking it as another thing and then going about with our lives.
That we also talked about." Great. Thank you. So then maybe we should talk a little bit about this virtual and real issue, no? And sort of to get into that we can look at still some verses also. 18. A set of four, 18 to 21, which are analyses of the agent and the act in terms of sameness and difference. "The act of going and the one who goes cannot rightly be said to be the same. And the act of going and the one who goes cannot rightly be said to be different."
We didn't have this yet, no? Oh, we did, yeah, sorry. Then let's go to 22 instead.
"The one who goes does not in go…" So this is, according to the commentary these are a set of three and a half stanzas that is concerned with whether going is singular or multiple.
So "The one who goes does not engage in the going that characterizes him as someone who goes. Because there's no one who goes before going, someone goes somewhere."
So "The one who goes does not engage in the going that characterizes him as the one who goes." So what is the going that characterizes the walker as the one who walks? Well, the action that makes him a walker. So he's a walker because he walks, but the walker does not engage in that walking that makes him a walker. Because if he were to do that he would have to be first someone who is not a walker, for him to engage in an act. There has to be, for someone to engage in an act, like me for example, wanting to drink a cup of tea, then I sit there, look at the tea cup and then decide I want to drink. And then I can pick it up, no? But if we then think of me walking on a path, then it's not that I exist as someone who can engage in the act that makes me a walker. Because what I'm then saying is that I engage in the act of walking while not being in the capacity of a walker. So that clearly cannot be the case.
"Because there's no one who goes before going, there's no walker before the act of walking. So for the walker to engage in the type of walking that makes him a walker would mean that he would have to be, it just doesn't work, because then he would have to be a walker before he engages in the act of walking that characterizes him as a walker. Otherwise the alternative is that he is not a walker when he engages in the act of walking that makes him a walker. So either way that we look at it, it's completely impossible to make sense of this idea that there is an act that characterizes an agent as the agent of that particular action. So that is a sort of groundbreaking news, no? That "The one who goes does not engage in going other than the going that characterizes him as someone who goes. The reason being that for a single agent of going it does not make sense for there to be two acts." So then the alternative would be to say that, okay, he is just the agent, the walker, and then in that capacity performs the action of going. But then we are saying that there are two acts of walking. There's the one that makes the walker the agent of walking, that qualifies him to be the proper agent for such an action, and then in that capacity he walks. But what we are saying then is that there are two actions. And of course this we have looked at already. It does not make sense for there to be two actions because if we then take that further there would also have to be two agents. So that too is completely absurd. "Someone who does not engage in any of the three kinds of going..."
"Someone who goes does not engage in any of the three kinds of going." So someone who is a walker does not perform the act of going on that is past, yet to be done, or in the process of taking place.
And yet someone who does not go does not engage in any of the three kinds of going. So whether we look at an agent who is qualified as a walker, or whether we look at someone who is an agent but not a walker, then it does not make sense for such an agent to engage in an act of walking that has taken place. Of course not, because that action is over. Nor does it make sense for that agent to engage in an action that is yet to occur and like a future going, because it has yet to occur. And apart from acts that have occurred or are yet to occur, what would we mean by present going? We cannot identify any present walking apart from actions that have been completed or yet to occur. So whether we look at someone who is qualified as a walker to perform such actions, it does not make sense. Or whether we look at someone who is not qualified as such, where walking does still not make sense.
Then it could be, as it says in 25, "Someone who does and does not go engage in any of the..."
"Someone who does and does not go does not engage in any of the three kinds of going either." What kind of agent would that be? Someone who both walks and does not walk. And again, looking at the three types of actions, it does not make sense either. So that is then a kind of very exhaustive summary that we have also in those last few stanzas. And then the conclusion follows "There is therefore no going, no one who goes and nothing traversed." And that brings the analysis of going and coming to an end. So the next is about the sense sources. So we can get into that today also.
"Sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch and cognition, the experiential domain of these six faculties are the objects that are seen and so forth."
So here we have introduced the framework of Abhidharma that talks about six faculties and six types of cognition as associated with seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching and cognizing in general. And these three are connecting with distinct objects. So that sight, the faculty of sight is what perceives or is what is behind the perception of or is what is required for the perception of visual objects, the faculty of hearing is what is required for cognizing sounds, for registering and perceiving sounds.
And so forth, also with smell, taste, touch and cognition. So that is the basic framework that will be analysed in this relatively short chapter. So it's the... Oh, OK, sure. I don't know how to do that, though. It's not my screen, yeah? OK, thank you. Yeah. So there we have the beginning of chapter three.
So it's an Abhidharma framework, but it's also a very natural idea to feel that there are certain faculties that are required for us to be able to perceive and cognize certain objects. So that is the idea that is under analysis here. How much sense does that make to think in those terms, to think that there are such things as faculties which connect with distinct fields of perception and experience?
So in 2, it says "A solid establishment of sight cannot be provided through the example of fire."
No, that is 3, sorry. First we have this 2, yeah? "Sight does indeed not see its own identity." So the faculty of seeing, what is that? We may describe it in different ways. We can say it's the eye, or we can say that it's the eye in combination with consciousness. That is the seer of forms. But that which sees in this way does not see itself. It's a very interesting argument that the whole thing begins with. "Sight does indeed not see its own identity. How can something that does not see itself see anything else either?"
So, yeah, it's a striking one somehow. It's presented just like that. But what do you think, how forceful and compelling is this kind of argument, that for something to be the seer, how can it be the seer if it doesn't see itself? What is your impression? Like why, I mean, we have eyes, we're used to thinking that my eye doesn't see itself, but that I can use my eyes to see, but also then if we say, so maybe the eye is just some sort of tool, it's not the real seer, and then whatever else we might say that the real seer is. If we say it's me who is the seer, like to go with some sort of very crude, not Abhidharma, but just crude, mundane idea that I am the seer of things that can be seen. If I can't see myself, then how can I be the seer?
Yeah.
Yeah, please, before we go further, I think it's nice to think in a fresh way what do we think about that. Student: "Yes, so my initial thought is of thinking of like a camera, and the notion of what a camera's function is to do, and it's to take pictures, but obviously the camera also cannot take a picture of itself, though I suppose we could have a selfie conversation, a conversation about selfies, but I think that is quite a different function. But given the last chapter when we were speaking about an action not being able to be owned by two agents, or one agent not being able to own two actions, my hunch, like internal hunch about this is that seeing and being seen are different functions and different actions that couldn't possibly be possessed by one single agent. So that's like the visceral response that comes up in me if I were to put words to it, it's like well of course the seer can't see itself because then it wouldn't be the seer anymore, because it's qualified by the ability to see, you know, I'm trying to avoid the words external, internal, but I guess in this linear fashion that each action is just if we're going to treat it as an isolated thing, then it has to be, the agent has to be qualified by that one action, and it feels like something different to be able to see itself. To me it's not obvious that that would be part of the package." Right, it's not obvious, yeah? So you think like when we hear this it doesn't sound like, why should this be impossible for something to see if it cannot see itself? "Yeah, it doesn't seem like a problem to me." Right, exactly.
Student: "It's like saying a knife can't cut if it can't cut itself, it's counterintuitive." Yeah, so it cannot see itself. "I think Lorenz…" But it's not just that it is impossible for it to see itself, yeah? But then the argument is further that because it's impossible for it to see itself, therefore it cannot see other things either.
That is interesting, no?
Student: "Also when I dream I see, but I don't see myself." Sorry? "Also when I dream I see things, but I don't see myself."
Yeah. "And the eye is not working."
Yeah, I think this is maybe to my understanding it's somewhat underdetermined in the commentaries what this point has made here, yeah? But if we just sort of think of it though, I think there's something… like what does it mean for a seer not to see itself, yeah?
Yeah, I'm sort of struggling to formulate it also, but if a seer doesn't…
It's very close to saying that if the seer cannot see itself, yeah? It's very close to saying that there is no seer, no?
Like whatever it is that we say is the seer, no? If that seer cannot see its own presence as a seer, yeah? Then what are we talking about with the whole thing about an object being seen by something?
I think actually it is very powerful and elegant just to put it like that, yeah? Just the fact that it's not detailed very much makes you think quite a bit about it, yeah? And if… Ok, I say that I see, I say that my eyes see, maybe I say my brain sees, who knows what I say about seeing, yeah? But if that which I refer to as the agent in an act of perception is not perceptible, yeah?
That is, there's something very… Then again, like what is the implication of what I just said? That I see the camera.
If that 'I' that I talk about is not perceptible, is not visually perceptible, or if the eye, my eye sees the camera, if that eye is not in a position to see itself as a seer of things, yeah? To see itself means to see itself as the seer, right? So it annot notice itself, then the seer cannot come across itself, then what is the seer then? If it cannot be… Then we are certainly in the realm of constructs then when it comes to the seer.
"There's some questions online." Yeah? Student: "So, is this also saying that… so if sight was able to see its own identity, would it be able to see everything else?" Well then that's another problem, if it can… how could it see itself, yeah? Because… "But if it could, it's hypothetical." Yeah, but it can't, because then the acrobat can ride on his own shoulders and so on, yeah? And a knife can cut itself. So it doesn't… it cannot see itself, and because it cannot see itself, it cannot see other things either. That's the crazy thing about that argument, yeah? It's not just saying that… it's not just like an argument against self-awareness or something like that, no? It's saying that doesn't happen, and so seeing of other things doesn't happen either.
Student: "First I think I had the same view like the gentleman with the camera, because… But I think that actually implies that we are accepting that the seer has a limited scope, sort of, that it can only see other things, but not itself, like the camera. And I thought it's not a problem. But I guess Nāgārjuna is always like absolutizing things, so I think if he's saying that the seer cannot see itself, which again, in case of the camera, I don't care, but then that would imply that the seer is also a non-seer in regards to itself. And I think that is a problem for Nāgārjuna, that the seer is a seer of others, but a non-seer of itself, so therefore it cannot qualify as a seer, because it's not like an omnipotent seer." Yeah, and I think also we can think of it along sort of mundane terms, yeah? If.. for it to really make sense to say that my eye is what sees, then that seer has to be perceptible as such, yeah? As a seer. Because otherwise the seer is imperceptible, yeah? "But the seer could be perceptible by another entity, let's say, the conceptual mind."
Yeah, and in other words, the upshot of this is then also that the seer is a construct, yeah? And sure, then we can talk about seers and many seers seeing in complex fashion by way of many circumstances, conditions and so on that are in. But all of this then means that there is no seer as such, because the seer as such cannot see itself as such, and because the seer as such is then never ever perceptible as such, then obviously it couldn't be anything but a construct. Maybe that's a way of examining this, but of course the chapter proceeds with someone immediately saying that this doesn't follow. There could be, it makes perfect sense to say that the seer is the seer of other things but not itself. Like for example fire, that's the next in 3, yeah? That fire can burn other things but it doesn't burn itself. Yes, sorry?
Student: "So when we're saying that the seer can't see itself though, the moment that..because the one that cognizes is the consciousness right? The consciousness is the one that sees the object and not the eye itself in this context. So then when the mind is aware that it's seeing, when I realize I am seeing something, isn't the mind seeing the mind? Isn't that the seer seeing the seeing?" Yeah, well that you could say, you know, but then the argument, one of the arguments that could be used against that is then object and agent become the same, yeah? And how could that make sense? Like the knife doesn't cut itself, yeah? It cannot cut itself. "But the mind can be aware of the process that's going on inside it. We're not, like I'm not right now but the mind can do that, right?" It can seem like that, yeah? I mean we can talk like that and it makes sense to say like that in certain ways, no? But is there really a mind that sees itself?
It's hard to find a place for that along these lines, no?
Like if it would see itself it means object and agent have collapsed, no? Then the walker is the walking and so on.
And then here, if however that is not the case, if the knower doesn't know itself then how can it know other things, yeah? It also doesn't make sense. If the knower is unknowable then how, what to say about the things that this knower knows, no? If there is no knowable knower then how can we say that there's knowing and that there's something known?
Yeah, okay.
"Andrew online, do you want to unmute yourself and ask a question or share?" Student: "Yeah, thank you. It seems to me that the argument is presented may confuse the agent with the act of seeing itself. I think the act of seeing itself can see itself. But I actually think the selfie example which was kind of flippantly dismissed, maybe actually a little bit more relevant. For example, when I wake up in the morning I see that I got a bad haircut and I don't love how it looks. So in this situation I think actually it's fine to say that I'm the agent seeing myself. My act of seeing can't see itself but then are we taking away agency from, for example, someone who has lost their eyesight? They remain an intact agent with plenty of other sensory modalities. I think the problem is with the act of seeing. That itself can't be recursive in that moment but the agent as this sort of more complex whole I think seems like we can preserve." But in the end of chapter two, we said that agent and action cannot be considered the same nor can they be considered different from each other. So of course it's irrefutable and totally correct that we say things and do things of the type that you describe. But what follows from that is that there is no agent as such, that there is no action as such, there is no seeing as such, nothing that is seen. "Yeah, you may remember I was the one who is trying to do the not totally different, not absolutely the same. And I think that can kind of preserve these notions if we want to say at a conventional level. But if we want to say that they don't exist in themselves or of themselves then I agree." Yeah, well, then I think that there is no basis for an argument, no? If we agree that if there is sort of consensus that we use terms such as 'same and different,' 'object and agent and action,' but they are just, they are, each one of them is nothing in itself when we look closer than our tendency to, when we want to sort of know the final condition of something is to zoom in and try to notice, okay, what is there, what are the details of this, and sort of get to the bottom of it, no? But when we, whatever we talk about, whether it's a visual perception, whether it's an act of movement, of walking somewhere, that tendency doesn't, when we follow that tendency and that urge to get to the bottom of the event then we come up with nothing at all. So if there is agreement about that then on a sort of conceptual, at the level of conceptual formulation of the Middle Way, like the Middle Way of words as distinguished from Middle Way of meaning, then it's hard to think why anyone who sort of thinks of themself as a proponent of the Middle Way of the words could find something to disagree in there, no?
In other words what we are saying is dependent origination and emptiness or put much more powerfully and beautifully, just like in the opening verses, that what arises dependently neither arises nor ceases, doesn't go and come, is not same and different.
Okay, let's think about that and we can also take 3 and then let's wait with that till tomorrow and then try to think a little bit more about the virtual and the real stuff that we have been sort of bringing up the last few days.
And it's also something that looms in the back of this discussion I think because, okay, what is then the knower, yeah?
And the knower, par excellence, is of course the awakened mind, no? So if we are Buddhists and we want to find out about the knower, then sooner or later we're going to get there, yeah? To talk about awakened wisdom and the Dharmakaya. And how was it that Dharmakaya first came up in the chapter of Going and Coming? It was, yeah, somehow whether it has more reality,
whether it exists in a more genuine way than anything else.
So the... a way of getting into that is thinking of, as we also did, like me and the image of myself on the computer, that there's a basis for the appearance of that virtual me who appears on the screen, yeah? And that basis is here. Another way to think about it is like in dreams and wake-time experience, it's because there is this reality that I'm part of and can experience when I'm awake that it's possible to fall asleep and then have these sort of illusory perceptions that take place during the sleep, yeah? So it's again something that we are very accustomed to doing, thinking that there's something which is real as opposed to something which is not real, yeah? But yet not totally, obviously not real, yeah? That's part of the challenge here, no? We're talking about something that is real and then something that seems quite real but is not really, yeah? So what happens to that kind of distinction when we examine things in the way that we've been doing here along the lines of reasoning in the Mūlamadhyamaka? Is it possible to retain that kind of distinction, something which is seemingly real and something which is only seemingly real and something which is more solidly real and in fact the basis for the appearance of the former?
And a lot of Mādhyamaka philosophy also works on that issue because what is the consequence if we say, No, it's not possible to draw that distinction? Then we're really saying that there is no difference whatsoever between what I experience now and that which I begin to dream about tonight. No difference in their level of reality. Everything is on the same level. Or if I begin to hallucinate and see something that you all say, "Hey, you're crazy. What are you talking about?" Then my crazy hallucination and your perception of me as hallucinating are equally unfounded, yeah? So is that something... That sounds like much, yeah? And a lot of Mādhyamaka philosophy is carried out to
to show that we can still have a distinction, but there's also a lot of Mādhyamaka philosophy that goes to show that it's not possible to make that kind of distinction. So it's a very rich literature that we can draw on there. There are some very grand debates and very passionate debates about this and of what the implications are if you say either one.
The challenge with saying that there is no difference is of course hardly needs to be stated. It seems just...
Yeah, actually it's maybe interesting to think what is wrong with just... What feels wrong about just saying dream and wake time experience are... It's impossible to say that one is more real or unreal than the other.
I was going to say that the problems that come with that are obvious, but actually what are they? Like why is it that it seems problematic to say that?
Yeah. "Luis, online?"
Student: "One of the problems is that you may cause a lot of suffering if you're confused about what's going on and don't engage properly, then one may hurt oneself or... First of all, when maybe you're on influence of some substance and don't really realize you can't fly, and maybe you jump off a balcony or something." But is it...? "If you don't really engage with reality in a way that functions, then you may hurt yourself." Yeah, definitely. But what we're saying is just that there's no difference between dream and this, in the sense that neither of the two are more or less real than the other. "Yeah, but I'm distinguishing, for example, the perception of someone who is engaging with reality in a usual way, as we're doing now, conversating, and someone who is hallucinating. So if we say there's no difference at all, then we're not taking into consideration the suffering that the hallucinating person is experiencing." Right. "Because of the hallucination, as a result of not engaging with things in a proper way." Yeah. So there are certainly more or less beneficial ways of perceiving, no? But again, that is not endangered by more or less enjoyable, more or less successful ways of perceiving. But that is not actually endangered by saying that there's no, in terms of the reality of what we perceive, the hallucination and the stuff that we perceive right now are on this equal footing. You can't say that one is more or less real than the other. That doesn't imply, I think, at all that therefore they are equally good, no? That therefore, or does it? In one way I guess it does, no? Because if they're equally, if their level of reality is equally, is the same, one and the same, no? Then what are we talking about in terms of good and bad, successful and not successful? So that is of course something that follows from it, and it's hard to know what to do with that kind of information, probably.
Like not only do we say that what we see now and what we see when having a bad fever are equally real and equally unreal, both are perceptions of things that seem to be there but aren't at all, then we say that, and on top of that we say, so therefore actually there is no qualitative difference. How could there be that if it's equally real and equally, equally real in the sense of being merely apparent but equally unreal in the sense of being not there as soon as we look closer? So that is probably a kind of message that is very, very difficult to do anything with for far most people, no? Yeah.
Student: "It's just as a response to what Louis said that hallucination might equal suffering but could also not, could also potentially equal happiness in a way, if you have some form of schizophrenia, you might think that you are a healer or the Messiah, you have a connection to, you feel you have a connection to something bigger than yourself and I'm not saying that crashes and burns, that's the problem, but when you are in that state then you are euphoric and happy and everything is swell. Or just because you said "good or bad.." you know so.." Yeah. True. "But then that crashes, so I'm not saying schizophrenia is good in any way." But what doesn't crash also? After all, no matter how nice and meaningful and beautiful our situation is, it falls apart in my experience. "Oh no, not in mine."
Yeah, so since that is so challenging, this message, really, really challenging,
then there's also a lot of effort made to say that, yeah but still don't worry, we can, we can, or perhaps we must, it's crucially important that you don't think like that, that there's a very clear difference between one and the other, one is just hallucination and the other is conventional reality.
So, yeah.
Student: "It seems to me that taking this kind of stance is quite dangerous, it seems like losing action in the view. Yes, like this example of the yogi hitting a rat and saying, "I am emptiness and it is emptiness so it doesn't really matter." But if you do this, then you're kind of ignoring the consequences of what we might say is like conventional reality, losing action in the view." Yeah, so this is definitely nothing, what to say, insignificant or even harmless, no? This is not harmless stuff that we're talking about, yeah?
And Nāgārjuna says if when viewing emptiness wrongly, the feeble minded will be destroyed, yeah?
So it's like this is something that needs very careful inquiry, contemplation and guidance probably as well, no?
Yeah, and a sort of group effort level of things, yeah? It's not something you just take the book home and sit and then you figure it out and then you become something great, no? Probably not, no? It doesn't sound like a very promising way to go about really comprehending, penetrating this issue and being able to integrate fully whatever we then come to see, you know? It doesn't seem that if that is what we are after, then that kind of approach doesn't seem like one that presents itself, no? It's not just going to the library, picking up the book and spending a weekend and then you got that, yeah? It's something that I think this sense of a group effort is very clearly there, no? It's not something.. you need a community to settle these issues. It's not something you can figure out alone. What does that even mean to figure this out alone?
And that is very much the Buddhist approach, that there are three jewels, no? It's not just the Buddha and the Dharma that we take refuge in, but the Sangha is crucial, no?
So being in a community, being active there in various ways, as one becomes, if we are in a community you can't just be passive. You can be more or less active of course, but complete passivity is impossible just by the power of the community setting. So I think that's something to really acknowledge here, that it is a live issue very much, yeah? It's not something that one struggles with alone at all and it's something that has been there for a long time in this world, this issue here.
And it has been dealt with very decisively by many people in the past and what they have done is also something that has implications for us today. We can see all the sort of evidence of what has happened based on joyfully struggling with these issues, no? We have a whole culture, many different cultures, because again it's not one particular way that people have taken up this challenge. They have done that in many different ways in the Buddhist world, if we so want to speak in those terms, yeah?
But the thing is, this is clearly something very significant and something not to be taken lightly. But having said that much, what can we then say about the difference between dream and reality? So try to think about that at home. We know that this issue, as an implication of our study up until now, it can seem that it is hard to find any difference between dream, hallucination, etc. and then what we would like to call 'real' in conventional terms, like our situation now.
So that type of conclusion is, it's hard to know what to do with that kind of information or that type of perspective and it is also clear that this can be therefore also.. create more trouble than perhaps being helpful in the context, yeah? So on the temporary level it can.. make us worse off perhaps than we were before, yeah? And again this is when things have power and significance, that's not unusual, no? That which has power and significance is something that can be used in one way very beautifully and very powerfully and in another with detrimental consequences. That's almost to be expected when something is of that kind, yeah? But so if we have said that, then what can we say about..
so having said that much, what would we like each of us to say about this issue? Keeping in mind on the one hand all the things that take us toward the conclusion that there's no difference between dream and illusion and then what reservations do we have about saying it in that way? And if we have reservations then what would we like to say instead? Instead of just that, how would we like to qualify the statement that there is no qualitative difference between dream and wake time experience? And then, yeah, how would we like to qualify that in a way that considers our reservations, hesitations and so on? Try and think about that tomorrow and then we will also.. so all of this is then taking us further into the contemplation about substrate and appearance, yeah? And we will continue also with chapter three. Thank you.
Anybody would like to offer
some reflections of yesterday?
Well, and yeah maybe.
Student: "So you asked a few questions yesterday. Should I say what they were?" Okay.
"Yeah, one of them was actually you asked us to go back to the question from before the weekend that we think about what we meant now and what we meant before about the sentence "the girl walks on the path," and then we talked about habits and you asked us to consider what does it mean when we say that habits are strong to see things in a certain way? Basically a lot of your questions yesterday was about considering what are we saying? I mean, you keep saying that. And then the last question and you said, think about for tomorrow is about the virtual and the real, what is substrate and what is emerging experience and that came out from a talk about dharmakaya. There was a question, is dharmakaya real? So, so should I try to say something? Okay.
So the question about what is different from before to now? I'm a little bit blank because we just talked about it in review session yesterday. What did we talk about? Do you remember what we talked about? About what was before and what was now in terms of perception and things arising. I mean, if you look at the sentence, "the girl walks on the path," you don't remember? Okay. Like what we, like, okay, before I began to think about these things, what did I mean and what do I now mean and so on and so forth. Just that sort of. "So I think, I mean, I remember what I was reflecting on was that, that if I'm not aware, if I don't with my will decide to do an analysis, I still tend to, you know, not think about "the girl walks on the path," that, you know, that that has meaning to me and I think there is walking there, but it's on a kind of superficial, non-investigated way. But as soon as I sit down or go walk or whatever I'm doing and decide to do the analysis, then it dissipates entirely. Then there is no girl walking and there is no walking and then there is no path in a way. But it only happens when I do that analysis. And then in terms of why these habits are so strong, that's also just a way of saying, right, because.. I don't know why I keep doing it." Great. "I'm sorry, I'm a little bit blank. We had a really good review session yesterday, we talked a lot about it. Yeah." Good. "Oh yeah, and it came from this, you said, you know, the compelling part that Śāntarakṣita says, you know, that things are only compelling as long as they're not examined.
And then that we should use this reasoning not as a solution but keep doing it, have to keep the two truths dynamic in a way that we don't end up in either being totally spaced out about it and mystified or end up in just labelling this as another worldview and as another theory and then ignoring and just taking it as another thing and then going about with our lives.
That we also talked about." Great. Thank you. So then maybe we should talk a little bit about this virtual and real issue, no? And sort of to get into that we can look at still some verses also. 18. A set of four, 18 to 21, which are analyses of the agent and the act in terms of sameness and difference. "The act of going and the one who goes cannot rightly be said to be the same. And the act of going and the one who goes cannot rightly be said to be different."
We didn't have this yet, no? Oh, we did, yeah, sorry. Then let's go to 22 instead.
"The one who goes does not in go…" So this is, according to the commentary these are a set of three and a half stanzas that is concerned with whether going is singular or multiple.
So "The one who goes does not engage in the going that characterizes him as someone who goes. Because there's no one who goes before going, someone goes somewhere."
So "The one who goes does not engage in the going that characterizes him as the one who goes." So what is the going that characterizes the walker as the one who walks? Well, the action that makes him a walker. So he's a walker because he walks, but the walker does not engage in that walking that makes him a walker. Because if he were to do that he would have to be first someone who is not a walker, for him to engage in an act. There has to be, for someone to engage in an act, like me for example, wanting to drink a cup of tea, then I sit there, look at the tea cup and then decide I want to drink. And then I can pick it up, no? But if we then think of me walking on a path, then it's not that I exist as someone who can engage in the act that makes me a walker. Because what I'm then saying is that I engage in the act of walking while not being in the capacity of a walker. So that clearly cannot be the case.
"Because there's no one who goes before going, there's no walker before the act of walking. So for the walker to engage in the type of walking that makes him a walker would mean that he would have to be, it just doesn't work, because then he would have to be a walker before he engages in the act of walking that characterizes him as a walker. Otherwise the alternative is that he is not a walker when he engages in the act of walking that makes him a walker. So either way that we look at it, it's completely impossible to make sense of this idea that there is an act that characterizes an agent as the agent of that particular action. So that is a sort of groundbreaking news, no? That "The one who goes does not engage in going other than the going that characterizes him as someone who goes. The reason being that for a single agent of going it does not make sense for there to be two acts." So then the alternative would be to say that, okay, he is just the agent, the walker, and then in that capacity performs the action of going. But then we are saying that there are two acts of walking. There's the one that makes the walker the agent of walking, that qualifies him to be the proper agent for such an action, and then in that capacity he walks. But what we are saying then is that there are two actions. And of course this we have looked at already. It does not make sense for there to be two actions because if we then take that further there would also have to be two agents. So that too is completely absurd. "Someone who does not engage in any of the three kinds of going..."
"Someone who goes does not engage in any of the three kinds of going." So someone who is a walker does not perform the act of going on that is past, yet to be done, or in the process of taking place.
And yet someone who does not go does not engage in any of the three kinds of going. So whether we look at an agent who is qualified as a walker, or whether we look at someone who is an agent but not a walker, then it does not make sense for such an agent to engage in an act of walking that has taken place. Of course not, because that action is over. Nor does it make sense for that agent to engage in an action that is yet to occur and like a future going, because it has yet to occur. And apart from acts that have occurred or are yet to occur, what would we mean by present going? We cannot identify any present walking apart from actions that have been completed or yet to occur. So whether we look at someone who is qualified as a walker to perform such actions, it does not make sense. Or whether we look at someone who is not qualified as such, where walking does still not make sense.
Then it could be, as it says in 25, "Someone who does and does not go engage in any of the..."
"Someone who does and does not go does not engage in any of the three kinds of going either." What kind of agent would that be? Someone who both walks and does not walk. And again, looking at the three types of actions, it does not make sense either. So that is then a kind of very exhaustive summary that we have also in those last few stanzas. And then the conclusion follows "There is therefore no going, no one who goes and nothing traversed." And that brings the analysis of going and coming to an end. So the next is about the sense sources. So we can get into that today also.
"Sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch and cognition, the experiential domain of these six faculties are the objects that are seen and so forth."
So here we have introduced the framework of Abhidharma that talks about six faculties and six types of cognition as associated with seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching and cognizing in general. And these three are connecting with distinct objects. So that sight, the faculty of sight is what perceives or is what is behind the perception of or is what is required for the perception of visual objects, the faculty of hearing is what is required for cognizing sounds, for registering and perceiving sounds.
And so forth, also with smell, taste, touch and cognition. So that is the basic framework that will be analysed in this relatively short chapter. So it's the... Oh, OK, sure. I don't know how to do that, though. It's not my screen, yeah? OK, thank you. Yeah. So there we have the beginning of chapter three.
So it's an Abhidharma framework, but it's also a very natural idea to feel that there are certain faculties that are required for us to be able to perceive and cognize certain objects. So that is the idea that is under analysis here. How much sense does that make to think in those terms, to think that there are such things as faculties which connect with distinct fields of perception and experience?
So in 2, it says "A solid establishment of sight cannot be provided through the example of fire."
No, that is 3, sorry. First we have this 2, yeah? "Sight does indeed not see its own identity." So the faculty of seeing, what is that? We may describe it in different ways. We can say it's the eye, or we can say that it's the eye in combination with consciousness. That is the seer of forms. But that which sees in this way does not see itself. It's a very interesting argument that the whole thing begins with. "Sight does indeed not see its own identity. How can something that does not see itself see anything else either?"
So, yeah, it's a striking one somehow. It's presented just like that. But what do you think, how forceful and compelling is this kind of argument, that for something to be the seer, how can it be the seer if it doesn't see itself? What is your impression? Like why, I mean, we have eyes, we're used to thinking that my eye doesn't see itself, but that I can use my eyes to see, but also then if we say, so maybe the eye is just some sort of tool, it's not the real seer, and then whatever else we might say that the real seer is. If we say it's me who is the seer, like to go with some sort of very crude, not Abhidharma, but just crude, mundane idea that I am the seer of things that can be seen. If I can't see myself, then how can I be the seer?
Yeah.
Yeah, please, before we go further, I think it's nice to think in a fresh way what do we think about that. Student: "Yes, so my initial thought is of thinking of like a camera, and the notion of what a camera's function is to do, and it's to take pictures, but obviously the camera also cannot take a picture of itself, though I suppose we could have a selfie conversation, a conversation about selfies, but I think that is quite a different function. But given the last chapter when we were speaking about an action not being able to be owned by two agents, or one agent not being able to own two actions, my hunch, like internal hunch about this is that seeing and being seen are different functions and different actions that couldn't possibly be possessed by one single agent. So that's like the visceral response that comes up in me if I were to put words to it, it's like well of course the seer can't see itself because then it wouldn't be the seer anymore, because it's qualified by the ability to see, you know, I'm trying to avoid the words external, internal, but I guess in this linear fashion that each action is just if we're going to treat it as an isolated thing, then it has to be, the agent has to be qualified by that one action, and it feels like something different to be able to see itself. To me it's not obvious that that would be part of the package." Right, it's not obvious, yeah? So you think like when we hear this it doesn't sound like, why should this be impossible for something to see if it cannot see itself? "Yeah, it doesn't seem like a problem to me." Right, exactly.
Student: "It's like saying a knife can't cut if it can't cut itself, it's counterintuitive." Yeah, so it cannot see itself. "I think Lorenz…" But it's not just that it is impossible for it to see itself, yeah? But then the argument is further that because it's impossible for it to see itself, therefore it cannot see other things either.
That is interesting, no?
Student: "Also when I dream I see, but I don't see myself." Sorry? "Also when I dream I see things, but I don't see myself."
Yeah. "And the eye is not working."
Yeah, I think this is maybe to my understanding it's somewhat underdetermined in the commentaries what this point has made here, yeah? But if we just sort of think of it though, I think there's something… like what does it mean for a seer not to see itself, yeah?
Yeah, I'm sort of struggling to formulate it also, but if a seer doesn't…
It's very close to saying that if the seer cannot see itself, yeah? It's very close to saying that there is no seer, no?
Like whatever it is that we say is the seer, no? If that seer cannot see its own presence as a seer, yeah? Then what are we talking about with the whole thing about an object being seen by something?
I think actually it is very powerful and elegant just to put it like that, yeah? Just the fact that it's not detailed very much makes you think quite a bit about it, yeah? And if… Ok, I say that I see, I say that my eyes see, maybe I say my brain sees, who knows what I say about seeing, yeah? But if that which I refer to as the agent in an act of perception is not perceptible, yeah?
That is, there's something very… Then again, like what is the implication of what I just said? That I see the camera.
If that 'I' that I talk about is not perceptible, is not visually perceptible, or if the eye, my eye sees the camera, if that eye is not in a position to see itself as a seer of things, yeah? To see itself means to see itself as the seer, right? So it annot notice itself, then the seer cannot come across itself, then what is the seer then? If it cannot be… Then we are certainly in the realm of constructs then when it comes to the seer.
"There's some questions online." Yeah? Student: "So, is this also saying that… so if sight was able to see its own identity, would it be able to see everything else?" Well then that's another problem, if it can… how could it see itself, yeah? Because… "But if it could, it's hypothetical." Yeah, but it can't, because then the acrobat can ride on his own shoulders and so on, yeah? And a knife can cut itself. So it doesn't… it cannot see itself, and because it cannot see itself, it cannot see other things either. That's the crazy thing about that argument, yeah? It's not just saying that… it's not just like an argument against self-awareness or something like that, no? It's saying that doesn't happen, and so seeing of other things doesn't happen either.
Student: "First I think I had the same view like the gentleman with the camera, because… But I think that actually implies that we are accepting that the seer has a limited scope, sort of, that it can only see other things, but not itself, like the camera. And I thought it's not a problem. But I guess Nāgārjuna is always like absolutizing things, so I think if he's saying that the seer cannot see itself, which again, in case of the camera, I don't care, but then that would imply that the seer is also a non-seer in regards to itself. And I think that is a problem for Nāgārjuna, that the seer is a seer of others, but a non-seer of itself, so therefore it cannot qualify as a seer, because it's not like an omnipotent seer." Yeah, and I think also we can think of it along sort of mundane terms, yeah? If.. for it to really make sense to say that my eye is what sees, then that seer has to be perceptible as such, yeah? As a seer. Because otherwise the seer is imperceptible, yeah? "But the seer could be perceptible by another entity, let's say, the conceptual mind."
Yeah, and in other words, the upshot of this is then also that the seer is a construct, yeah? And sure, then we can talk about seers and many seers seeing in complex fashion by way of many circumstances, conditions and so on that are in. But all of this then means that there is no seer as such, because the seer as such cannot see itself as such, and because the seer as such is then never ever perceptible as such, then obviously it couldn't be anything but a construct. Maybe that's a way of examining this, but of course the chapter proceeds with someone immediately saying that this doesn't follow. There could be, it makes perfect sense to say that the seer is the seer of other things but not itself. Like for example fire, that's the next in 3, yeah? That fire can burn other things but it doesn't burn itself. Yes, sorry?
Student: "So when we're saying that the seer can't see itself though, the moment that..because the one that cognizes is the consciousness right? The consciousness is the one that sees the object and not the eye itself in this context. So then when the mind is aware that it's seeing, when I realize I am seeing something, isn't the mind seeing the mind? Isn't that the seer seeing the seeing?" Yeah, well that you could say, you know, but then the argument, one of the arguments that could be used against that is then object and agent become the same, yeah? And how could that make sense? Like the knife doesn't cut itself, yeah? It cannot cut itself. "But the mind can be aware of the process that's going on inside it. We're not, like I'm not right now but the mind can do that, right?" It can seem like that, yeah? I mean we can talk like that and it makes sense to say like that in certain ways, no? But is there really a mind that sees itself?
It's hard to find a place for that along these lines, no?
Like if it would see itself it means object and agent have collapsed, no? Then the walker is the walking and so on.
And then here, if however that is not the case, if the knower doesn't know itself then how can it know other things, yeah? It also doesn't make sense. If the knower is unknowable then how, what to say about the things that this knower knows, no? If there is no knowable knower then how can we say that there's knowing and that there's something known?
Yeah, okay.
"Andrew online, do you want to unmute yourself and ask a question or share?" Student: "Yeah, thank you. It seems to me that the argument is presented may confuse the agent with the act of seeing itself. I think the act of seeing itself can see itself. But I actually think the selfie example which was kind of flippantly dismissed, maybe actually a little bit more relevant. For example, when I wake up in the morning I see that I got a bad haircut and I don't love how it looks. So in this situation I think actually it's fine to say that I'm the agent seeing myself. My act of seeing can't see itself but then are we taking away agency from, for example, someone who has lost their eyesight? They remain an intact agent with plenty of other sensory modalities. I think the problem is with the act of seeing. That itself can't be recursive in that moment but the agent as this sort of more complex whole I think seems like we can preserve." But in the end of chapter two, we said that agent and action cannot be considered the same nor can they be considered different from each other. So of course it's irrefutable and totally correct that we say things and do things of the type that you describe. But what follows from that is that there is no agent as such, that there is no action as such, there is no seeing as such, nothing that is seen. "Yeah, you may remember I was the one who is trying to do the not totally different, not absolutely the same. And I think that can kind of preserve these notions if we want to say at a conventional level. But if we want to say that they don't exist in themselves or of themselves then I agree." Yeah, well, then I think that there is no basis for an argument, no? If we agree that if there is sort of consensus that we use terms such as 'same and different,' 'object and agent and action,' but they are just, they are, each one of them is nothing in itself when we look closer than our tendency to, when we want to sort of know the final condition of something is to zoom in and try to notice, okay, what is there, what are the details of this, and sort of get to the bottom of it, no? But when we, whatever we talk about, whether it's a visual perception, whether it's an act of movement, of walking somewhere, that tendency doesn't, when we follow that tendency and that urge to get to the bottom of the event then we come up with nothing at all. So if there is agreement about that then on a sort of conceptual, at the level of conceptual formulation of the Middle Way, like the Middle Way of words as distinguished from Middle Way of meaning, then it's hard to think why anyone who sort of thinks of themself as a proponent of the Middle Way of the words could find something to disagree in there, no?
In other words what we are saying is dependent origination and emptiness or put much more powerfully and beautifully, just like in the opening verses, that what arises dependently neither arises nor ceases, doesn't go and come, is not same and different.
Okay, let's think about that and we can also take 3 and then let's wait with that till tomorrow and then try to think a little bit more about the virtual and the real stuff that we have been sort of bringing up the last few days.
And it's also something that looms in the back of this discussion I think because, okay, what is then the knower, yeah?
And the knower, par excellence, is of course the awakened mind, no? So if we are Buddhists and we want to find out about the knower, then sooner or later we're going to get there, yeah? To talk about awakened wisdom and the Dharmakaya. And how was it that Dharmakaya first came up in the chapter of Going and Coming? It was, yeah, somehow whether it has more reality,
whether it exists in a more genuine way than anything else.
So the... a way of getting into that is thinking of, as we also did, like me and the image of myself on the computer, that there's a basis for the appearance of that virtual me who appears on the screen, yeah? And that basis is here. Another way to think about it is like in dreams and wake-time experience, it's because there is this reality that I'm part of and can experience when I'm awake that it's possible to fall asleep and then have these sort of illusory perceptions that take place during the sleep, yeah? So it's again something that we are very accustomed to doing, thinking that there's something which is real as opposed to something which is not real, yeah? But yet not totally, obviously not real, yeah? That's part of the challenge here, no? We're talking about something that is real and then something that seems quite real but is not really, yeah? So what happens to that kind of distinction when we examine things in the way that we've been doing here along the lines of reasoning in the Mūlamadhyamaka? Is it possible to retain that kind of distinction, something which is seemingly real and something which is only seemingly real and something which is more solidly real and in fact the basis for the appearance of the former?
And a lot of Mādhyamaka philosophy also works on that issue because what is the consequence if we say, No, it's not possible to draw that distinction? Then we're really saying that there is no difference whatsoever between what I experience now and that which I begin to dream about tonight. No difference in their level of reality. Everything is on the same level. Or if I begin to hallucinate and see something that you all say, "Hey, you're crazy. What are you talking about?" Then my crazy hallucination and your perception of me as hallucinating are equally unfounded, yeah? So is that something... That sounds like much, yeah? And a lot of Mādhyamaka philosophy is carried out to
to show that we can still have a distinction, but there's also a lot of Mādhyamaka philosophy that goes to show that it's not possible to make that kind of distinction. So it's a very rich literature that we can draw on there. There are some very grand debates and very passionate debates about this and of what the implications are if you say either one.
The challenge with saying that there is no difference is of course hardly needs to be stated. It seems just...
Yeah, actually it's maybe interesting to think what is wrong with just... What feels wrong about just saying dream and wake time experience are... It's impossible to say that one is more real or unreal than the other.
I was going to say that the problems that come with that are obvious, but actually what are they? Like why is it that it seems problematic to say that?
Yeah. "Luis, online?"
Student: "One of the problems is that you may cause a lot of suffering if you're confused about what's going on and don't engage properly, then one may hurt oneself or... First of all, when maybe you're on influence of some substance and don't really realize you can't fly, and maybe you jump off a balcony or something." But is it...? "If you don't really engage with reality in a way that functions, then you may hurt yourself." Yeah, definitely. But what we're saying is just that there's no difference between dream and this, in the sense that neither of the two are more or less real than the other. "Yeah, but I'm distinguishing, for example, the perception of someone who is engaging with reality in a usual way, as we're doing now, conversating, and someone who is hallucinating. So if we say there's no difference at all, then we're not taking into consideration the suffering that the hallucinating person is experiencing." Right. "Because of the hallucination, as a result of not engaging with things in a proper way." Yeah. So there are certainly more or less beneficial ways of perceiving, no? But again, that is not endangered by more or less enjoyable, more or less successful ways of perceiving. But that is not actually endangered by saying that there's no, in terms of the reality of what we perceive, the hallucination and the stuff that we perceive right now are on this equal footing. You can't say that one is more or less real than the other. That doesn't imply, I think, at all that therefore they are equally good, no? That therefore, or does it? In one way I guess it does, no? Because if they're equally, if their level of reality is equally, is the same, one and the same, no? Then what are we talking about in terms of good and bad, successful and not successful? So that is of course something that follows from it, and it's hard to know what to do with that kind of information, probably.
Like not only do we say that what we see now and what we see when having a bad fever are equally real and equally unreal, both are perceptions of things that seem to be there but aren't at all, then we say that, and on top of that we say, so therefore actually there is no qualitative difference. How could there be that if it's equally real and equally, equally real in the sense of being merely apparent but equally unreal in the sense of being not there as soon as we look closer? So that is probably a kind of message that is very, very difficult to do anything with for far most people, no? Yeah.
Student: "It's just as a response to what Louis said that hallucination might equal suffering but could also not, could also potentially equal happiness in a way, if you have some form of schizophrenia, you might think that you are a healer or the Messiah, you have a connection to, you feel you have a connection to something bigger than yourself and I'm not saying that crashes and burns, that's the problem, but when you are in that state then you are euphoric and happy and everything is swell. Or just because you said "good or bad.." you know so.." Yeah. True. "But then that crashes, so I'm not saying schizophrenia is good in any way." But what doesn't crash also? After all, no matter how nice and meaningful and beautiful our situation is, it falls apart in my experience. "Oh no, not in mine."
Yeah, so since that is so challenging, this message, really, really challenging,
then there's also a lot of effort made to say that, yeah but still don't worry, we can, we can, or perhaps we must, it's crucially important that you don't think like that, that there's a very clear difference between one and the other, one is just hallucination and the other is conventional reality.
So, yeah.
Student: "It seems to me that taking this kind of stance is quite dangerous, it seems like losing action in the view. Yes, like this example of the yogi hitting a rat and saying, "I am emptiness and it is emptiness so it doesn't really matter." But if you do this, then you're kind of ignoring the consequences of what we might say is like conventional reality, losing action in the view." Yeah, so this is definitely nothing, what to say, insignificant or even harmless, no? This is not harmless stuff that we're talking about, yeah?
And Nāgārjuna says if when viewing emptiness wrongly, the feeble minded will be destroyed, yeah?
So it's like this is something that needs very careful inquiry, contemplation and guidance probably as well, no?
Yeah, and a sort of group effort level of things, yeah? It's not something you just take the book home and sit and then you figure it out and then you become something great, no? Probably not, no? It doesn't sound like a very promising way to go about really comprehending, penetrating this issue and being able to integrate fully whatever we then come to see, you know? It doesn't seem that if that is what we are after, then that kind of approach doesn't seem like one that presents itself, no? It's not just going to the library, picking up the book and spending a weekend and then you got that, yeah? It's something that I think this sense of a group effort is very clearly there, no? It's not something.. you need a community to settle these issues. It's not something you can figure out alone. What does that even mean to figure this out alone?
And that is very much the Buddhist approach, that there are three jewels, no? It's not just the Buddha and the Dharma that we take refuge in, but the Sangha is crucial, no?
So being in a community, being active there in various ways, as one becomes, if we are in a community you can't just be passive. You can be more or less active of course, but complete passivity is impossible just by the power of the community setting. So I think that's something to really acknowledge here, that it is a live issue very much, yeah? It's not something that one struggles with alone at all and it's something that has been there for a long time in this world, this issue here.
And it has been dealt with very decisively by many people in the past and what they have done is also something that has implications for us today. We can see all the sort of evidence of what has happened based on joyfully struggling with these issues, no? We have a whole culture, many different cultures, because again it's not one particular way that people have taken up this challenge. They have done that in many different ways in the Buddhist world, if we so want to speak in those terms, yeah?
But the thing is, this is clearly something very significant and something not to be taken lightly. But having said that much, what can we then say about the difference between dream and reality? So try to think about that at home. We know that this issue, as an implication of our study up until now, it can seem that it is hard to find any difference between dream, hallucination, etc. and then what we would like to call 'real' in conventional terms, like our situation now.
So that type of conclusion is, it's hard to know what to do with that kind of information or that type of perspective and it is also clear that this can be therefore also.. create more trouble than perhaps being helpful in the context, yeah? So on the temporary level it can.. make us worse off perhaps than we were before, yeah? And again this is when things have power and significance, that's not unusual, no? That which has power and significance is something that can be used in one way very beautifully and very powerfully and in another with detrimental consequences. That's almost to be expected when something is of that kind, yeah? But so if we have said that, then what can we say about..
so having said that much, what would we like each of us to say about this issue? Keeping in mind on the one hand all the things that take us toward the conclusion that there's no difference between dream and illusion and then what reservations do we have about saying it in that way? And if we have reservations then what would we like to say instead? Instead of just that, how would we like to qualify the statement that there is no qualitative difference between dream and wake time experience? And then, yeah, how would we like to qualify that in a way that considers our reservations, hesitations and so on? Try and think about that tomorrow and then we will also.. so all of this is then taking us further into the contemplation about substrate and appearance, yeah? And we will continue also with chapter three. Thank you.
Student: "So you asked a few questions yesterday. Should I say what they were?" Okay.
"Yeah, one of them was actually you asked us to go back to the question from before the weekend that we think about what we meant now and what we meant before about the sentence "the girl walks on the path," and then we talked about habits and you asked us to consider what does it mean when we say that habits are strong to see things in a certain way? Basically a lot of your questions yesterday was about considering what are we saying? I mean, you keep saying that. And then the last question and you said, think about for tomorrow is about the virtual and the real, what is substrate and what is emerging experience and that came out from a talk about dharmakaya. There was a question, is dharmakaya real? So, so should I try to say something? Okay.
So the question about what is different from before to now? I'm a little bit blank because we just talked about it in review session yesterday. What did we talk about? Do you remember what we talked about? About what was before and what was now in terms of perception and things arising. I mean, if you look at the sentence, "the girl walks on the path," you don't remember? Okay. Like what we, like, okay, before I began to think about these things, what did I mean and what do I now mean and so on and so forth. Just that sort of. "So I think, I mean, I remember what I was reflecting on was that, that if I'm not aware, if I don't with my will decide to do an analysis, I still tend to, you know, not think about "the girl walks on the path," that, you know, that that has meaning to me and I think there is walking there, but it's on a kind of superficial, non-investigated way. But as soon as I sit down or go walk or whatever I'm doing and decide to do the analysis, then it dissipates entirely. Then there is no girl walking and there is no walking and then there is no path in a way. But it only happens when I do that analysis. And then in terms of why these habits are so strong, that's also just a way of saying, right, because.. I don't know why I keep doing it." Great. "I'm sorry, I'm a little bit blank. We had a really good review session yesterday, we talked a lot about it. Yeah." Good. "Oh yeah, and it came from this, you said, you know, the compelling part that Śāntarakṣita says, you know, that things are only compelling as long as they're not examined.
And then that we should use this reasoning not as a solution but keep doing it, have to keep the two truths dynamic in a way that we don't end up in either being totally spaced out about it and mystified or end up in just labelling this as another worldview and as another theory and then ignoring and just taking it as another thing and then going about with our lives.
That we also talked about." Great. Thank you. So then maybe we should talk a little bit about this virtual and real issue, no? And sort of to get into that we can look at still some verses also. 18. A set of four, 18 to 21, which are analyses of the agent and the act in terms of sameness and difference. "The act of going and the one who goes cannot rightly be said to be the same. And the act of going and the one who goes cannot rightly be said to be different."
We didn't have this yet, no? Oh, we did, yeah, sorry. Then let's go to 22 instead.
"The one who goes does not in go…" So this is, according to the commentary these are a set of three and a half stanzas that is concerned with whether going is singular or multiple.
So "The one who goes does not engage in the going that characterizes him as someone who goes. Because there's no one who goes before going, someone goes somewhere."
So "The one who goes does not engage in the going that characterizes him as the one who goes." So what is the going that characterizes the walker as the one who walks? Well, the action that makes him a walker. So he's a walker because he walks, but the walker does not engage in that walking that makes him a walker. Because if he were to do that he would have to be first someone who is not a walker, for him to engage in an act. There has to be, for someone to engage in an act, like me for example, wanting to drink a cup of tea, then I sit there, look at the tea cup and then decide I want to drink. And then I can pick it up, no? But if we then think of me walking on a path, then it's not that I exist as someone who can engage in the act that makes me a walker. Because what I'm then saying is that I engage in the act of walking while not being in the capacity of a walker. So that clearly cannot be the case.
"Because there's no one who goes before going, there's no walker before the act of walking. So for the walker to engage in the type of walking that makes him a walker would mean that he would have to be, it just doesn't work, because then he would have to be a walker before he engages in the act of walking that characterizes him as a walker. Otherwise the alternative is that he is not a walker when he engages in the act of walking that makes him a walker. So either way that we look at it, it's completely impossible to make sense of this idea that there is an act that characterizes an agent as the agent of that particular action. So that is a sort of groundbreaking news, no? That "The one who goes does not engage in going other than the going that characterizes him as someone who goes. The reason being that for a single agent of going it does not make sense for there to be two acts." So then the alternative would be to say that, okay, he is just the agent, the walker, and then in that capacity performs the action of going. But then we are saying that there are two acts of walking. There's the one that makes the walker the agent of walking, that qualifies him to be the proper agent for such an action, and then in that capacity he walks. But what we are saying then is that there are two actions. And of course this we have looked at already. It does not make sense for there to be two actions because if we then take that further there would also have to be two agents. So that too is completely absurd. "Someone who does not engage in any of the three kinds of going..."
"Someone who goes does not engage in any of the three kinds of going." So someone who is a walker does not perform the act of going on that is past, yet to be done, or in the process of taking place.
And yet someone who does not go does not engage in any of the three kinds of going. So whether we look at an agent who is qualified as a walker, or whether we look at someone who is an agent but not a walker, then it does not make sense for such an agent to engage in an act of walking that has taken place. Of course not, because that action is over. Nor does it make sense for that agent to engage in an action that is yet to occur and like a future going, because it has yet to occur. And apart from acts that have occurred or are yet to occur, what would we mean by present going? We cannot identify any present walking apart from actions that have been completed or yet to occur. So whether we look at someone who is qualified as a walker to perform such actions, it does not make sense. Or whether we look at someone who is not qualified as such, where walking does still not make sense.
Then it could be, as it says in 25, "Someone who does and does not go engage in any of the..."
"Someone who does and does not go does not engage in any of the three kinds of going either." What kind of agent would that be? Someone who both walks and does not walk. And again, looking at the three types of actions, it does not make sense either. So that is then a kind of very exhaustive summary that we have also in those last few stanzas. And then the conclusion follows "There is therefore no going, no one who goes and nothing traversed." And that brings the analysis of going and coming to an end. So the next is about the sense sources. So we can get into that today also.
"Sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch and cognition, the experiential domain of these six faculties are the objects that are seen and so forth."
So here we have introduced the framework of Abhidharma that talks about six faculties and six types of cognition as associated with seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching and cognizing in general. And these three are connecting with distinct objects. So that sight, the faculty of sight is what perceives or is what is behind the perception of or is what is required for the perception of visual objects, the faculty of hearing is what is required for cognizing sounds, for registering and perceiving sounds.
And so forth, also with smell, taste, touch and cognition. So that is the basic framework that will be analysed in this relatively short chapter. So it's the... Oh, OK, sure. I don't know how to do that, though. It's not my screen, yeah? OK, thank you. Yeah. So there we have the beginning of chapter three.
So it's an Abhidharma framework, but it's also a very natural idea to feel that there are certain faculties that are required for us to be able to perceive and cognize certain objects. So that is the idea that is under analysis here. How much sense does that make to think in those terms, to think that there are such things as faculties which connect with distinct fields of perception and experience?
So in 2, it says "A solid establishment of sight cannot be provided through the example of fire."
No, that is 3, sorry. First we have this 2, yeah? "Sight does indeed not see its own identity." So the faculty of seeing, what is that? We may describe it in different ways. We can say it's the eye, or we can say that it's the eye in combination with consciousness. That is the seer of forms. But that which sees in this way does not see itself. It's a very interesting argument that the whole thing begins with. "Sight does indeed not see its own identity. How can something that does not see itself see anything else either?"
So, yeah, it's a striking one somehow. It's presented just like that. But what do you think, how forceful and compelling is this kind of argument, that for something to be the seer, how can it be the seer if it doesn't see itself? What is your impression? Like why, I mean, we have eyes, we're used to thinking that my eye doesn't see itself, but that I can use my eyes to see, but also then if we say, so maybe the eye is just some sort of tool, it's not the real seer, and then whatever else we might say that the real seer is. If we say it's me who is the seer, like to go with some sort of very crude, not Abhidharma, but just crude, mundane idea that I am the seer of things that can be seen. If I can't see myself, then how can I be the seer?
Yeah.
Yeah, please, before we go further, I think it's nice to think in a fresh way what do we think about that. Student: "Yes, so my initial thought is of thinking of like a camera, and the notion of what a camera's function is to do, and it's to take pictures, but obviously the camera also cannot take a picture of itself, though I suppose we could have a selfie conversation, a conversation about selfies, but I think that is quite a different function. But given the last chapter when we were speaking about an action not being able to be owned by two agents, or one agent not being able to own two actions, my hunch, like internal hunch about this is that seeing and being seen are different functions and different actions that couldn't possibly be possessed by one single agent. So that's like the visceral response that comes up in me if I were to put words to it, it's like well of course the seer can't see itself because then it wouldn't be the seer anymore, because it's qualified by the ability to see, you know, I'm trying to avoid the words external, internal, but I guess in this linear fashion that each action is just if we're going to treat it as an isolated thing, then it has to be, the agent has to be qualified by that one action, and it feels like something different to be able to see itself. To me it's not obvious that that would be part of the package." Right, it's not obvious, yeah? So you think like when we hear this it doesn't sound like, why should this be impossible for something to see if it cannot see itself? "Yeah, it doesn't seem like a problem to me." Right, exactly.
Student: "It's like saying a knife can't cut if it can't cut itself, it's counterintuitive." Yeah, so it cannot see itself. "I think Lorenz…" But it's not just that it is impossible for it to see itself, yeah? But then the argument is further that because it's impossible for it to see itself, therefore it cannot see other things either.
That is interesting, no?
Student: "Also when I dream I see, but I don't see myself." Sorry? "Also when I dream I see things, but I don't see myself."
Yeah. "And the eye is not working."
Yeah, I think this is maybe to my understanding it's somewhat underdetermined in the commentaries what this point has made here, yeah? But if we just sort of think of it though, I think there's something… like what does it mean for a seer not to see itself, yeah?
Yeah, I'm sort of struggling to formulate it also, but if a seer doesn't…
It's very close to saying that if the seer cannot see itself, yeah? It's very close to saying that there is no seer, no?
Like whatever it is that we say is the seer, no? If that seer cannot see its own presence as a seer, yeah? Then what are we talking about with the whole thing about an object being seen by something?
I think actually it is very powerful and elegant just to put it like that, yeah? Just the fact that it's not detailed very much makes you think quite a bit about it, yeah? And if… Ok, I say that I see, I say that my eyes see, maybe I say my brain sees, who knows what I say about seeing, yeah? But if that which I refer to as the agent in an act of perception is not perceptible, yeah?
That is, there's something very… Then again, like what is the implication of what I just said? That I see the camera.
If that 'I' that I talk about is not perceptible, is not visually perceptible, or if the eye, my eye sees the camera, if that eye is not in a position to see itself as a seer of things, yeah? To see itself means to see itself as the seer, right? So it annot notice itself, then the seer cannot come across itself, then what is the seer then? If it cannot be… Then we are certainly in the realm of constructs then when it comes to the seer.
"There's some questions online." Yeah? Student: "So, is this also saying that… so if sight was able to see its own identity, would it be able to see everything else?" Well then that's another problem, if it can… how could it see itself, yeah? Because… "But if it could, it's hypothetical." Yeah, but it can't, because then the acrobat can ride on his own shoulders and so on, yeah? And a knife can cut itself. So it doesn't… it cannot see itself, and because it cannot see itself, it cannot see other things either. That's the crazy thing about that argument, yeah? It's not just saying that… it's not just like an argument against self-awareness or something like that, no? It's saying that doesn't happen, and so seeing of other things doesn't happen either.
Student: "First I think I had the same view like the gentleman with the camera, because… But I think that actually implies that we are accepting that the seer has a limited scope, sort of, that it can only see other things, but not itself, like the camera. And I thought it's not a problem. But I guess Nāgārjuna is always like absolutizing things, so I think if he's saying that the seer cannot see itself, which again, in case of the camera, I don't care, but then that would imply that the seer is also a non-seer in regards to itself. And I think that is a problem for Nāgārjuna, that the seer is a seer of others, but a non-seer of itself, so therefore it cannot qualify as a seer, because it's not like an omnipotent seer." Yeah, and I think also we can think of it along sort of mundane terms, yeah? If.. for it to really make sense to say that my eye is what sees, then that seer has to be perceptible as such, yeah? As a seer. Because otherwise the seer is imperceptible, yeah? "But the seer could be perceptible by another entity, let's say, the conceptual mind."
Yeah, and in other words, the upshot of this is then also that the seer is a construct, yeah? And sure, then we can talk about seers and many seers seeing in complex fashion by way of many circumstances, conditions and so on that are in. But all of this then means that there is no seer as such, because the seer as such cannot see itself as such, and because the seer as such is then never ever perceptible as such, then obviously it couldn't be anything but a construct. Maybe that's a way of examining this, but of course the chapter proceeds with someone immediately saying that this doesn't follow. There could be, it makes perfect sense to say that the seer is the seer of other things but not itself. Like for example fire, that's the next in 3, yeah? That fire can burn other things but it doesn't burn itself. Yes, sorry?
Student: "So when we're saying that the seer can't see itself though, the moment that..because the one that cognizes is the consciousness right? The consciousness is the one that sees the object and not the eye itself in this context. So then when the mind is aware that it's seeing, when I realize I am seeing something, isn't the mind seeing the mind? Isn't that the seer seeing the seeing?" Yeah, well that you could say, you know, but then the argument, one of the arguments that could be used against that is then object and agent become the same, yeah? And how could that make sense? Like the knife doesn't cut itself, yeah? It cannot cut itself. "But the mind can be aware of the process that's going on inside it. We're not, like I'm not right now but the mind can do that, right?" It can seem like that, yeah? I mean we can talk like that and it makes sense to say like that in certain ways, no? But is there really a mind that sees itself?
It's hard to find a place for that along these lines, no?
Like if it would see itself it means object and agent have collapsed, no? Then the walker is the walking and so on.
And then here, if however that is not the case, if the knower doesn't know itself then how can it know other things, yeah? It also doesn't make sense. If the knower is unknowable then how, what to say about the things that this knower knows, no? If there is no knowable knower then how can we say that there's knowing and that there's something known?
Yeah, okay.
"Andrew online, do you want to unmute yourself and ask a question or share?" Student: "Yeah, thank you. It seems to me that the argument is presented may confuse the agent with the act of seeing itself. I think the act of seeing itself can see itself. But I actually think the selfie example which was kind of flippantly dismissed, maybe actually a little bit more relevant. For example, when I wake up in the morning I see that I got a bad haircut and I don't love how it looks. So in this situation I think actually it's fine to say that I'm the agent seeing myself. My act of seeing can't see itself but then are we taking away agency from, for example, someone who has lost their eyesight? They remain an intact agent with plenty of other sensory modalities. I think the problem is with the act of seeing. That itself can't be recursive in that moment but the agent as this sort of more complex whole I think seems like we can preserve." But in the end of chapter two, we said that agent and action cannot be considered the same nor can they be considered different from each other. So of course it's irrefutable and totally correct that we say things and do things of the type that you describe. But what follows from that is that there is no agent as such, that there is no action as such, there is no seeing as such, nothing that is seen. "Yeah, you may remember I was the one who is trying to do the not totally different, not absolutely the same. And I think that can kind of preserve these notions if we want to say at a conventional level. But if we want to say that they don't exist in themselves or of themselves then I agree." Yeah, well, then I think that there is no basis for an argument, no? If we agree that if there is sort of consensus that we use terms such as 'same and different,' 'object and agent and action,' but they are just, they are, each one of them is nothing in itself when we look closer than our tendency to, when we want to sort of know the final condition of something is to zoom in and try to notice, okay, what is there, what are the details of this, and sort of get to the bottom of it, no? But when we, whatever we talk about, whether it's a visual perception, whether it's an act of movement, of walking somewhere, that tendency doesn't, when we follow that tendency and that urge to get to the bottom of the event then we come up with nothing at all. So if there is agreement about that then on a sort of conceptual, at the level of conceptual formulation of the Middle Way, like the Middle Way of words as distinguished from Middle Way of meaning, then it's hard to think why anyone who sort of thinks of themself as a proponent of the Middle Way of the words could find something to disagree in there, no?
In other words what we are saying is dependent origination and emptiness or put much more powerfully and beautifully, just like in the opening verses, that what arises dependently neither arises nor ceases, doesn't go and come, is not same and different.
Okay, let's think about that and we can also take 3 and then let's wait with that till tomorrow and then try to think a little bit more about the virtual and the real stuff that we have been sort of bringing up the last few days.
And it's also something that looms in the back of this discussion I think because, okay, what is then the knower, yeah?
And the knower, par excellence, is of course the awakened mind, no? So if we are Buddhists and we want to find out about the knower, then sooner or later we're going to get there, yeah? To talk about awakened wisdom and the Dharmakaya. And how was it that Dharmakaya first came up in the chapter of Going and Coming? It was, yeah, somehow whether it has more reality,
whether it exists in a more genuine way than anything else.
So the... a way of getting into that is thinking of, as we also did, like me and the image of myself on the computer, that there's a basis for the appearance of that virtual me who appears on the screen, yeah? And that basis is here. Another way to think about it is like in dreams and wake-time experience, it's because there is this reality that I'm part of and can experience when I'm awake that it's possible to fall asleep and then have these sort of illusory perceptions that take place during the sleep, yeah? So it's again something that we are very accustomed to doing, thinking that there's something which is real as opposed to something which is not real, yeah? But yet not totally, obviously not real, yeah? That's part of the challenge here, no? We're talking about something that is real and then something that seems quite real but is not really, yeah? So what happens to that kind of distinction when we examine things in the way that we've been doing here along the lines of reasoning in the Mūlamadhyamaka? Is it possible to retain that kind of distinction, something which is seemingly real and something which is only seemingly real and something which is more solidly real and in fact the basis for the appearance of the former?
And a lot of Mādhyamaka philosophy also works on that issue because what is the consequence if we say, No, it's not possible to draw that distinction? Then we're really saying that there is no difference whatsoever between what I experience now and that which I begin to dream about tonight. No difference in their level of reality. Everything is on the same level. Or if I begin to hallucinate and see something that you all say, "Hey, you're crazy. What are you talking about?" Then my crazy hallucination and your perception of me as hallucinating are equally unfounded, yeah? So is that something... That sounds like much, yeah? And a lot of Mādhyamaka philosophy is carried out to
to show that we can still have a distinction, but there's also a lot of Mādhyamaka philosophy that goes to show that it's not possible to make that kind of distinction. So it's a very rich literature that we can draw on there. There are some very grand debates and very passionate debates about this and of what the implications are if you say either one.
The challenge with saying that there is no difference is of course hardly needs to be stated. It seems just...
Yeah, actually it's maybe interesting to think what is wrong with just... What feels wrong about just saying dream and wake time experience are... It's impossible to say that one is more real or unreal than the other.
I was going to say that the problems that come with that are obvious, but actually what are they? Like why is it that it seems problematic to say that?
Yeah. "Luis, online?"
Student: "One of the problems is that you may cause a lot of suffering if you're confused about what's going on and don't engage properly, then one may hurt oneself or... First of all, when maybe you're on influence of some substance and don't really realize you can't fly, and maybe you jump off a balcony or something." But is it...? "If you don't really engage with reality in a way that functions, then you may hurt yourself." Yeah, definitely. But what we're saying is just that there's no difference between dream and this, in the sense that neither of the two are more or less real than the other. "Yeah, but I'm distinguishing, for example, the perception of someone who is engaging with reality in a usual way, as we're doing now, conversating, and someone who is hallucinating. So if we say there's no difference at all, then we're not taking into consideration the suffering that the hallucinating person is experiencing." Right. "Because of the hallucination, as a result of not engaging with things in a proper way." Yeah. So there are certainly more or less beneficial ways of perceiving, no? But again, that is not endangered by more or less enjoyable, more or less successful ways of perceiving. But that is not actually endangered by saying that there's no, in terms of the reality of what we perceive, the hallucination and the stuff that we perceive right now are on this equal footing. You can't say that one is more or less real than the other. That doesn't imply, I think, at all that therefore they are equally good, no? That therefore, or does it? In one way I guess it does, no? Because if they're equally, if their level of reality is equally, is the same, one and the same, no? Then what are we talking about in terms of good and bad, successful and not successful? So that is of course something that follows from it, and it's hard to know what to do with that kind of information, probably.
Like not only do we say that what we see now and what we see when having a bad fever are equally real and equally unreal, both are perceptions of things that seem to be there but aren't at all, then we say that, and on top of that we say, so therefore actually there is no qualitative difference. How could there be that if it's equally real and equally, equally real in the sense of being merely apparent but equally unreal in the sense of being not there as soon as we look closer? So that is probably a kind of message that is very, very difficult to do anything with for far most people, no? Yeah.
Student: "It's just as a response to what Louis said that hallucination might equal suffering but could also not, could also potentially equal happiness in a way, if you have some form of schizophrenia, you might think that you are a healer or the Messiah, you have a connection to, you feel you have a connection to something bigger than yourself and I'm not saying that crashes and burns, that's the problem, but when you are in that state then you are euphoric and happy and everything is swell. Or just because you said "good or bad.." you know so.." Yeah. True. "But then that crashes, so I'm not saying schizophrenia is good in any way." But what doesn't crash also? After all, no matter how nice and meaningful and beautiful our situation is, it falls apart in my experience. "Oh no, not in mine."
Yeah, so since that is so challenging, this message, really, really challenging,
then there's also a lot of effort made to say that, yeah but still don't worry, we can, we can, or perhaps we must, it's crucially important that you don't think like that, that there's a very clear difference between one and the other, one is just hallucination and the other is conventional reality.
So, yeah.
Student: "It seems to me that taking this kind of stance is quite dangerous, it seems like losing action in the view. Yes, like this example of the yogi hitting a rat and saying, "I am emptiness and it is emptiness so it doesn't really matter." But if you do this, then you're kind of ignoring the consequences of what we might say is like conventional reality, losing action in the view." Yeah, so this is definitely nothing, what to say, insignificant or even harmless, no? This is not harmless stuff that we're talking about, yeah?
And Nāgārjuna says if when viewing emptiness wrongly, the feeble minded will be destroyed, yeah?
So it's like this is something that needs very careful inquiry, contemplation and guidance probably as well, no?
Yeah, and a sort of group effort level of things, yeah? It's not something you just take the book home and sit and then you figure it out and then you become something great, no? Probably not, no? It doesn't sound like a very promising way to go about really comprehending, penetrating this issue and being able to integrate fully whatever we then come to see, you know? It doesn't seem that if that is what we are after, then that kind of approach doesn't seem like one that presents itself, no? It's not just going to the library, picking up the book and spending a weekend and then you got that, yeah? It's something that I think this sense of a group effort is very clearly there, no? It's not something.. you need a community to settle these issues. It's not something you can figure out alone. What does that even mean to figure this out alone?
And that is very much the Buddhist approach, that there are three jewels, no? It's not just the Buddha and the Dharma that we take refuge in, but the Sangha is crucial, no?
So being in a community, being active there in various ways, as one becomes, if we are in a community you can't just be passive. You can be more or less active of course, but complete passivity is impossible just by the power of the community setting. So I think that's something to really acknowledge here, that it is a live issue very much, yeah? It's not something that one struggles with alone at all and it's something that has been there for a long time in this world, this issue here.
And it has been dealt with very decisively by many people in the past and what they have done is also something that has implications for us today. We can see all the sort of evidence of what has happened based on joyfully struggling with these issues, no? We have a whole culture, many different cultures, because again it's not one particular way that people have taken up this challenge. They have done that in many different ways in the Buddhist world, if we so want to speak in those terms, yeah?
But the thing is, this is clearly something very significant and something not to be taken lightly. But having said that much, what can we then say about the difference between dream and reality? So try to think about that at home. We know that this issue, as an implication of our study up until now, it can seem that it is hard to find any difference between dream, hallucination, etc. and then what we would like to call 'real' in conventional terms, like our situation now.
So that type of conclusion is, it's hard to know what to do with that kind of information or that type of perspective and it is also clear that this can be therefore also.. create more trouble than perhaps being helpful in the context, yeah? So on the temporary level it can.. make us worse off perhaps than we were before, yeah? And again this is when things have power and significance, that's not unusual, no? That which has power and significance is something that can be used in one way very beautifully and very powerfully and in another with detrimental consequences. That's almost to be expected when something is of that kind, yeah? But so if we have said that, then what can we say about..
so having said that much, what would we like each of us to say about this issue? Keeping in mind on the one hand all the things that take us toward the conclusion that there's no difference between dream and illusion and then what reservations do we have about saying it in that way? And if we have reservations then what would we like to say instead? Instead of just that, how would we like to qualify the statement that there is no qualitative difference between dream and wake time experience? And then, yeah, how would we like to qualify that in a way that considers our reservations, hesitations and so on? Try and think about that tomorrow and then we will also.. so all of this is then taking us further into the contemplation about substrate and appearance, yeah? And we will continue also with chapter three. Thank you.
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