Details
Session 16 — From Mind-Only to Yogācāra Madhyamaka
Teachers:
Collection:
- Buddhist Classics and Philosophy
Location:
- Gomde Germany-Austria
Features:
- Subtitles ,
- Transcripts
Excerpt
John D. Dunne presents Yogācāra as a crucial step in a deeper Madhyamaka analysis, where both external objects and the sense of an inner subject are gradually undermined. The session also introduces reflexive awareness as a key idea for understanding how non-dual knowing is already present within experience.
Description
In this session, John D. Dunne explains how Yogācāra can serve as a transitional step toward Madhyamaka by shifting attention from outer objects to the structure of experience itself. He shows that ordinary experience presents both an apparent object “out there” and a subject “in here,” but that this dualistic structure is itself mentally constructed and cannot be ultimately established. The teaching then introduces Yogācāra Madhyamaka as a sequential path of analysis: first questioning external objects, then the self as object, then the self as subject, and finally even the subtle tendency to reify mind itself. Dunne also introduces the idea of reflexive awareness, suggesting that every moment of experience already contains a non-dual aspect that does not depend on subject-object structure. In this way, the session becomes an important bridge from philosophical analysis toward Mahāmudrā and Dzogchen approaches to the nature of mind.
Related Course Info
- Emptiness, Luminosity and Compassion Nāgārjuna and the Madhyamaka Tradition Teachings by John D. Dunne and Khenpo Pema Namgyal exploring Nāgārjuna’s Middle Way and the relationship between emptiness, the luminous nature of mind, and compassion.
Video
Audio
okmin chökyi yingkyi phodrang né
düsum sangyé kün gyi ngowo nyi
rangsem chöku ngönsum tönzé pa
tsawai lamai shapla sölwa dep
Okay, So maybe again we start with any questions, so let me invite you again once more to just settle the mind for a moment.
And then bring up our motivation, in the Mahāyāna we aspire to achieve awakening for the sake of all beings. Okay, so...
Uh, any questions?
Let me ask you a question. You heard Khenpo say something about the idea that things are merely mentally imputed are merely mentally imputed tok pe tak sam རྟོག་པའི་བཏགས་པ or conceptually imputed How do you think that applies to so that's in Mādhyamika does that work in Yogācāra, too?
No, I mean like if we say this exists, that... That it exists when I say it exists, I assert it exists. That, that is its existence is actually imputed mentally it doesn't objectively exist
So we end up in the Mādhyamika position we end up saying that all things... Right, that uh... When we're talking about things as real that, that their reality is imputed mentally imputed. Does that work in Yogācāra, too? I would try and I would say no. Because Yogācāran's says that they are objects do, are perceived by the mind. But that doesn't mean that they don't exist outwardly. They have elements. Let me ask you this, this is a vase, correct? Yes. If I say the vase exists for Yogācāra, is that an imputation or are they saying the vase exists? They are saying the vase exists because there is a mind that perceives the vase. Is your mind a vase? No, so it has to be other than the vase. My mind is a vase. Somehow some teachings might say It's an empty vase. It's so what is the vase, you're seeing what is the what are you seeing? I'm seeing an object that is outside... Right, and then Yogācāra says what you're actually seeing is... my own consciousness. Although my is already a little bit... Because my means belonging to a sense of subjectivity, which is the basis for the construction of a self. No, I'm seeing just matrix basically, right? Kind of yes. Right? So that's the... so that's not a vase.
And existence to say that something exists, there's something you've got to be specifying that exists. Right? So this does not mean from the yo... there is a way of construing Yogācāra in which they would totally agree with that Mādhyamika position. And there's a way of construing Yogācāra that turns it more into Cittamātra, mind only. Where uh, you know you're trying to really kind of make the mind into, your trying to... make the mind into a thing that exists in some fashion. Even though it's not a thing, cause you can't... Why can't it be a thing?
What would it me for it to be a thing? It would be an object and who would it be an object for? Yea but the subject is also part of the mind. So how does that work? We're going to try to find out how that works. Yeah, so this was on the foil on that one presentation where you had two ways to understand Yogācāra, right? Yes. One of them is more... So they both have a kind of affirming negation when they say emptiness. There's definitely a sense in which they want to leave experience itself in place. But you can go to a certain, like further point of ontologizing. And the problem with that, even for the type of Yogācāra that doesn't do that, which slips into Mādhyamika basically, becomes very... it almost seems like it is Mādhyamika. And there are certain aspects of that kind of tradition that we're not going to talk about, but, you know, like this would be so-called... these are non-aspectarian Yogācārans, just in case you're wondering. Nirākāra, as they say, not Satyākāra, but Alīkākāra, Namzungbai namdzopa. And I in chart... they the great, what is it, 15th century um... 15th to 16th century scholar Sakya Chokden, Tibetan scholar Sakya Chokden likes to say that that version of Yogācāra in some ways really you can kind of equate with Mādhyamika. And that's where you're not really ontologizing the mind. But there's a way of doing Yogācāra that does ontologize the mind in which you really want to strongly assert that we're talking about it existing, being. And here's the thing that's very important with that word in Sanskrit, that is challenging for us, is that this word is coming from uh, the... This is the Sanskrit word sat, and which is like, uh... This is actually the um, the neuter present participle from the verb us to be. This is the neuter nominative singular. So, that, so something is sat, it is existent, you could say. And you can talk about satya or sattā, which more or less are the same, the existenthood. But it also means to be... So you could say something is existent, it's sat, it's real, that's sat, it's present, that's sat, and even it's true, it's sat. So the Tibetan translations usually use the term den pa བདེན་པ , which is translating just the true part. But it doesn't really capture all the full range of this word. So to say that something exists is to say that in some sense it is present. And this goes into, even for the non-Buddhist traditions in India, a kind of emphasis on like substance. So if you want to say that abstractions are real, that they have sattā, right? That like, for example, the vasness of the vase, unlike a purely platonic approach where you can perhaps assert the existence of those abstractions completely independent of substance. Even the non-Buddhist schools that wanted to say those abstractions are real still said that in some sense that reality only makes sense when you're talking about them as in hearing and substances. Okay? So there's a sense in which the very notion to be real, to exist, and then to have a statement about them refer successfully, i.e. the statement is true, that those are about like things being concretely present, actually. So to be real is to be concretely present, very interestingly, just sort of culturally for Indian thinkers going way back. And what that means is that, right, if it's present, it's also... So one of the ways this is articulated, not just in um, not just in Buddhist works again, is that to be real is to be knowable and nameable, is to be abhidheyatva and jñeyatva, knowable, jñeyatva, and nameable, abhidheyatva. So in San... so in, but of course if something's knowable, then it's got to be knowable for some knower. And if it's nameable, it's nameable in relation to someone who is giving it a designation, Right? In relation to language use. So the minute we start to talk about uh, you know, something being present for some knower, that it's knowable in that sense, is that we're already kind of into that triadic structure of agent, object, and action, and here in the context of the action of knowing, right? And that really seems to, uh, uh... The minute we try to assert existence, we're already into duality. Okay, so if you're trying to be an over... So if you're trying to be a Yogācāra, and... and yet sort of affirm the existence of some kind of causal continuity of the mind, or even some non-causal momentary experience as sat, you've got a problem because you're... merely saying something is existant is already falling into duality. Right? So that's, I think, a very key thing for us to keep in mind. And so when we ask, uh, when we look at Yogācāra, go back to this slide and say, okay, it does not assert that the object pole collapses into the subject pole, so the form of Yogācāra that isn't strongly asserting the existence of the mind is looking pretty uh, pretty okay for Mādhyamika. It does not assert that extramental objects are unreal, and whatever remains is not extramental. And it asserts that our only access to the world is through our, or in experience. But, and remember we had one more line, which actually is missing on this slide, which is that, however, unlike western phenomenology, it doesn't assert intentionality or subject-object structure as an invariant in consciousness. But so of these three things, what's the one that Mādhyamika is going to be? Even with regular Yogācāra, well, I shouldn't say regular, even with the type of Yogācāra that is not strongly ontologizing the mind, asserting like there's a real mind, this is still, like, not quite okay.
So what you therefore need to do is bring a Mādhyamika critique to the uh, to the mind itself. So in this process, this is going to be then the, the uh um, uh... you know, the procedure of, this is going to then lead to the emergence of the Yogācāra Mādhyamika school. Not really school, that style of philosophy. Remember those three, these are the Three Eastern Mādhyamikas, Jñānagarbha, Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla. And Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla, Śāntarakṣita went to Tibet and established uh, the first monastery in Tibet, Samye Monastery, and I think it's 755, someone can look it up. And then uh, and then his student Kamalaśīla came, after he passed away, his student Kamalaśīla came to defend a particular kind of approach that you could say, and, you know, there was allegedly a kind of um, debate, they say, between him and e uh, and a Chinese scholar practitioner. And the upshot of that debate is where Kamalaśīla is basically kind of arguing against a type of mind only approach, essentially, for our purposes. So, uh, and he writes a famous text that we're going to look at in a second, a very short piece of it. And what these Yogācāra Mādhyamikas are going to do is they're going to use this kind of sequential method, which is kind of what we've done this week in some ways, so you kind of start out by looking at, uh, you know, sort of our naive assumption about the material world. For example, that this is a whole, that in that course of doing that, you then critique the naive notion of the self that's constituted by that. And one way to think about that, that this is primarily going after self as object, like our self model as something that we, that is our conceptualization of ourselves. So part of that is also what, and sometimes we call this as the narrative self, like the story we tell of ourselves. And there is a, and the short version of it is just you are not the story you tell of yourself, which, you know, therapeutically can be tremendously helpful. But also that very sense that there's kind of a self that has some kind of a core and changing existence. What would be the problem with that from the Buddhist standpoint, if you had a... if you had that capital S, Self, unchanging, absolute, self-existent, and so on? What's one of the main problems with that idea, besides the fact that it's incoherent? Yeah, Ava. Karma couldn't work out? Or it would work all the time, meaning you couldn't change. So if you're in the state of suffering, that's it, you're stuck. But if I had a self, then that would mean um, there is no cause and effect that would be in. As well, then like that, right, that self couldn't be engaged causally with the world. But if somehow we think, oh, it still engages causally with the world, if we say that somehow it fundamentally can't change, then if it's in a state of suffering, it can never get out of that state. There's also that. Lots of unhappy results that come from this kind of a essentialization of the self. You know, and as a sidebar here, part of what's helpful when people do practices like mindfulness in therapeutic contexts, where they do kind of secular mindfulness, one of the things that's very powerful for many people, sometimes there's types of psychopathologies that involve very negative self models, for example, in depression. And what people can discover through the practice of mindfulness is that the story of themselves is just a story. It's not reality. And that can be very helpful. So that's part of what's happening, like the way we conceptualize ourselves kind of as an object, our self model as something that we can think about is critiqued. And then we can also, then that, say that, so when we do this sequence, though, we went through historically, we went from that early period, which basically does that, you know, takes apart our naive sense of the material world, takes apart our naive sense of the Self. And then in this sequence, it goes to Yogācāra, doesn't go to Mādhyamika. So historically, Mādhyamika comes first. But in this sequencing of analysis, Yogācāra comes next. And then these scholars, the Eastern Mādhyamikas, the Mādhyamikas from the East, they, meaning the East of India, they then say, okay, actually, so you think there's really just a bunch of infinitesimally small bits of matter? Well, guess what? That's not right either. And there isn't even infinitesimally small bits of consciousness either. So, again, it's not just idealism. All of that falls apart. But first, they then in the way that falls apart is they use the Yogācāra analysis, that sense of that duality between self and world collapses. But then you're left with this prob... So that's the kind of next part of the sequence. So we didn't do that sequence. We did it historically. But as a practice, it kind of moves in that sequence. So this would be in Śāntarakṣita's text, the Madhyamakālaṃkāra, the Umagyen དབུ་མ་རྒྱན the ornament of the Mādhyamika. And then you need to do something more to bring it all the way up to Mādhyamika. So what more would you do to bring it up to Mādhyamika?
What arguments could you use that we already know? So what the Yogācāra is saying is... Remember, let's go back to the three natures. You're saying there's a luminous empty mind, but they mean by empty, they mean the emptiness of subject-object duality. So the dependent nature, the causal flow of mind, when it's misunderstood, one takes, or when in, in the state of ignorance, you take the dualistic appearances are taken to be real. There's a world out there, there's a Self in here, there's a subjectivity in here. And now this kind of critique is going to critique that, right? And what you're critiquing is not self as object, but self as subject. The very sense of subjectivity as being who you are. That's what Yogācāra is doing. So like, again, as you see, you know, as you see the vase, or you see me, there's a sense of it's out there, which means, you know, there's somebody looking out from behind your eyes, so to speak. So that's a different sense of self, a subtler sense of self, a self as the subjectivity that's beholding objects. Okay? That's certainly also in that earlier version of self, but that one tends to be more about like looking at yourself and saying, Oh, this must be like this, like that. Here, it's kind of from the first person standpoint, your first personhood, and our identification with first personhood of, you know, being the one seeing, that is critiqued.
Right? Which is, when you really contemplate that is kind of quite something like there's a sense of subjectivity. Right? But that's not you.
Right? So it's happening, but that's not you.
Anyone just want to run away now? Get me out of here. Uh, so what, so when we're seeing that, we're seeing either with content or without content, we're seeing that that subject object structure is collapsed, is gone, and consciousness continues, but there's no identification with the subject pole as the self.
Okay, you're conscious, but you don't identify with this, that one who's seeing as you.
Okay, then. So the probl... so when we think of that, about this, so that's a very powerful... So first you critique like the external world and the naive self as object. Then you critique even the structure of experience and the subtler sense of self as subject. The subjectivity. But that's still not good enough for Mādhyamika. Even if you're not totally ontologizing the mind, the worry is that you're still going to have a subtle ontologizing of the dependent nature itself. Right? That we're gonna, we're gonna think that this you know, this is somehow wuh uh, this is somehow real. Right? So this is somehow, this is like, we're going to try to hang our ontological hat here, which there were non-Buddhist traditions of non-duality as well, like Advaita Vedānta, that does something pretty similar and then turns this into a kind of transcendental self. Not a self that's a subjectivity, exactly, although somewhat with the idea of the witness consciousness, but something that's sort of, you know, beyond your ordinary subjectivity, like a big self. Right? So the Buddhists, so the Mādhyamikas are concerned about that.
So what do you, how would you, what you guys all now are Mādhyamikas, you know the arguments. Right? So this is your test. What, what's, go ahead. Okay, how would that work? What's same or different?
Student: So, one level would be to say, okay, is the dependent nature same or different than the constructed nature? Yeah. Student: Or we can address... You almost got it. Student: Or, or, or... What is the constructed nature? It is nothing other than the dependent nature appearing a certain way. Student: Right. How does it appear? Student: In experience? With subject object duality. So now you've got, now you've got something that's... What's the one here? Neither one nor many, what's the one? Student: That they are the same? No. The mind. Student: The mind. Okay, yes, yes. And the two are the... Parts. Are the appearance of the phenomenal presentations of object subject. Student: Yes, yes. So you can do that. Student: Right. And that can lead to a Mādhyamika conclusion. Okay. That the one, when you do that, neither the one nor the many remains. Student: So is the mind the same as the subject and the object? Right. Student: Okay, or is it different? Right. So that is... You can do that in a way that ends in a Mādhyamika conclusion and Śāntarakṣita does that. But there's an, and... But it gets a little tricky because you could start still maybe try to ontologize the mind and say the other two are just delusions and there was always just the one all along. So the other thing you can do is... What is it? It's the causal... Student: So yeah, the causality. Yes. Student: Again, which requires time. Yes, so you could critique time. Right. Exactly. You could just critique causality. Causality, right. Yep. So there are... But interestingly, it's with Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla. Śāntarakṣita in particular really kind of favored somewhat that more phenomenological one. Neither one nor many analysis of experience itself. But causality is also... Causal critique and critique of time are also like effective. But because there's a kind of sequencing, an experiential sequencing, they and that experiential sequencing is actually found quite explicitly both in the um...uh when we look at these authors in the Śāntarakṣita's... It's not so obvious in Jñānagarbha, although I don't quite remember, I haven't looked at it in a while. It's very clear in Śāntarakṣita's Ornament of Mādhyamika. And then it's also very clear in the um... in the stages of meditation, the Bhāvanākrama, which Kamalaśīla wrote in Tibet as kind of part of that debate. And so you have this sequencing from extern... analysis of external objects to analy... which leads to Yogācāra, which then eventually ends in Mādhyamika. And he cites this verse, or series of verses, from the Lankāvatāra-sūtra, which is a sūtra that both Yogācāra philosophers and Mādhyamika philosophers will cite. cittamātraṃ samāruhya bāhyam arthaṃ na kalpayet tathatālambane sthitvā cittamātram atikramet cittamātram atikramya nirābhāsam atikramet nirābhāsasthito yogī mahāyānaṃ sa paśyati anābhogagatiḥ śāntā praṇidhānair viśodhitā jñānaṃ nirātmakaṃ śreṣṭhaṃ nirābhāsena paśyati Bringing it to mere mind, one does not conceptualize an external object. So there's that word, cittamātra. It's just mind. Right? But you really... This is just mind, what you're seeing. Abiding in the focus that is suchness, meaning the emptiness of the subject-object duality, one transcends mere mind. Transcending mere mind one transcends to non-appearance. We're going to talk about why that is soon. The yoga of abiding in non-appearance sees the Mahāyāna, effortless, abode, peaceful, purified by aspirations. That term effortless is really key and we'll talk about that too. The essence-less supreme awareness sees without appearance. So this is the sort of sequencing that we're talking about which ends in non-dual awareness that is the emptiness awareness. It's the awareness that is the awareness, the ult... the awareness of the ultimate, although of implies an object. So this is what it means for these philosophers to be knowing emptiness, to be in that state of primordial non-dual awareness that is not conceptualizing the three spheres of the knower, the action of knowing, and the object known. Okay? But that still leaves us with this ques... two questions. One of them is, what exactly is that kind of knowing? And second, where do we get it? Like, you know... Can we, can we go to IKEA and pick up a box of non-dual awareness or something? Like? How do we acquire it? So to answer both of those questions, we're going to have to look at something, um, uh, a style of approach to the nature of awareness that the three Easterners rely on very heavily, especially Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla, which is one of the Yogācāra philosophers, Dharmakīrti. Okay? And uh, and I'll just say that, you know just to like, make it uh, to reassure you, you don't have to go get non-dual awareness, because I have some I can give to you, no, because you already have it in every moment of awareness. There's an aspect of awareness, even in deluded awareness, that is already non-dual. And that's how this... So we're talking about this in philosophical terms, of course, in practice, this is what then leads to these Mahāmudrā and Dzogchen styles of practice that are about the nature of the mind. But also, there's quite a robust philosophical account about why that makes sense. I will say that one of the things in the context of practice is that uh, the advantage to uh, to doing philosophical work is that it can lead you, it can help to clarify, like, why are we doing what we do? The disadvantage to it is that it can sort of conceptualize, you can turn the nature of mind, non-dual awareness, into a kind of conceptual object. And because the arguments, like are convincing, you can think you really know what you're talking about. Kind of like me, I don't really know what I'm talking about, but I think I do. Right? So that's a problem. So sometimes the non-dual traditions, they actually uh, like, kind of discourage too much of this type of philosophical work. All right? So we need to be cautious about it. We're going to talk about some of the techniques later, but now let's get into this model, because this is actually very helpful, I think. We're going to learn a kind of model of non-dual awareness that then is the basis for the types of practices that you find in Mahāmudrā and Dzogchen. And Dharmakīrti, as it turns out, is extremely influential for this tradition. Not always recognized, but he is very influential. So let's just assume there's external objects. So this thing is representing an external object. You know, really it's just representing a cause. So there's some stuff that causes an interaction with your eye, with the mechanism that produces visual consciousness, and we'll call it the eye faculty for the moment. And then what happens is that this produces what's called a phenomenal form of the object in consciousness. So the blue box represents consciousness. And then at the same time, a phenomenal form of the subject simultaneously arises. Okay? So you get what we've been talking about, right? You look at this, and what's happening is there's a form of this arising in consciousness and a sense of subjectivity arising with it. And a key part of this is what's called sahopalambha-niyama, or a lhen-chik mig-nge in Tibetan, which is that you can't have one without the other. If you've got a sense of subjectivity, you've got an object. If you've got an object, you've got a sense of subjectivity. You can't, like, drop the object and remain in some pure subjective, you know, your pure subjectivity can't stay. Subjectivity dissipates when objects dissipate. So that's why when people experience non-dual states, you know, part of what can be, depending how they get into them, you know, like if you're using, like, a psychedelic drug or something like that, sometimes it's very confusing for people because, like, they don't know, like, I'm gone. Right? I imagine in your work you hear those kinds of reports, like, I'm not there. That's because the subjectivity is gone. But consciousness isn't gone. Right? Yes?
Studetn: Um, so if you're only in this subjectivity state, there is no object? You can't be in the only subjectivity state. Student: Ah, that's the point. You can't. You can't. If you're... it would look like this. Yeah. If you have no object, you don't have any subject. Student: All right. So you just... You can't be in a pure subject. Student: And if it's just pure awareness, then? Then it has to look like this. Student: Yeah. Can you also describe that? Or does this prevent you from using language at all before you try to conceptualize it or objectify it? It becomes extremely difficult to make a description. Why? Why? There's a reason. We know the reason. Student: Because language was evolved to basically talk about things out there. Which means it was evolved... more precisely, it was evolved to talk... to uh, uh, guide action in the world by an agent. So if there's no sense of agency, how are you going to talk, you like... the, the, both world and self are gone. Right? So in that context, you know, saying anything is like, I don't know what to say. Right? So the indescribability or ineffability of those types of experiences is easily explained in this model. If you assume that conceptual... If you're not a realist about you know, language, uh, uh, it's not because somehow you can no longer see the real categories in the world. It's that the mechanism that enables you to generate, construct categories is not operative because it requires there to be both a subject and an object. A presentation of subject and object in awareness.
Student: But can we use memory here to reflect on this experience? And objectify it and then talk about it? That's what people do, isn't it? Yes. That's right. And so then people... And then there are going to be different versions of it. Like... there is a... we'll come back to this, but there's like contentless versions, completely contentless. Where you're like, you're not experiencing anything. There's no content, but there's awareness. And here that... so remember that metaphor we spoke about before. Let's go back to this for a second, actually, because I think we didn't quite complete this. So the, so prabhāsvara, or prakāśa, which I'm just going to conflate, like lots of other people do, uh, is this luminosity. So on the one hand is a sort of metaphor, which is in this model, okay, in this model, What's... both the objects... but the... What are the phenomenal form of the subject and the phenomenal form of the object? What are they made out of?
Basically, mind, right, they are, right? Especially if we're being substan... If we say this is matter and this side is mind, then this stuff is made out of mind, okay? So what's going on here is, it's not like when you see something, it's not like you're seeing, there's, there's a... you think that the mystic... Isn't it nice that I made your subjectivity smiling? Your smiley face, you think that's doing the action of seeing, but it's not. It's just a structural feature. Okay? It's not doing anything. But both are being presented in awareness. You're aware of both. Like, as you look at the vase, the sense of being looking at, being the one looking at the vase, or the sense of someone's looking at the vase. Subjectivity is being presented even while you're looking at the vase. Right? So they're both presented. We're going to come back to that more. They're both presented like the light is turned on. So whatever is, so to speak, kind of in this box, whatever is in consciousness is presented, whether it's objects or subjects or whatever. So the light's on. But certain states where you kind of have no content, the light's on, but there's nothing in the room, so to speak. It's just light. So... Uh, so that's where that idea of luminosity becomes actually a phenomenal description. Everyone understand what I mean? Okay, we're going to come back to that. Yes?
Student: Would you describe that, we said, structural feature of the subject, or I guess of the subject, object, reality? Right, intentionality in Western philosophy, yep. Um as thought or thought-based, or is it something of its own right? No, it's preconceptual. Definitely preconceptual, yep. And which also like Western phenomenologists would agree, it's like prereflective.
So let's look at that same thing now in a slightly different model with, with temporality added into it, or the time sequence added into it. So like in time one, you've got this interaction. In time two, there's a present. And for now, we can say that this thing is an external object, or really a bundle of atoms. But um... you, you know, what's going to happen eventually in Yogācāra is said, well, there's no need to say that the cause is like different kind of stuff you can get rid of This model still works if you get rid of substance dualism. If you say there's mind stuff and physical stuff, it works. If you say there's, you know, this stuff out here is actually made of the same kind of stuff here, it works. It's just a causal mechanism where there's something interacting with, with the, whatever uh, mechanism allows consciousness to produce experiences. And so there's a cause which constrains this content. And this is, yea these, and in like the waking state, this kind of, these constraints are shared in some fashion. Okay? Got that? So time one. Now, the main thing that's very important to understand is that on this model, just like, you know, much of the Abhidharma models, these things, the reason this is dotted and looks like this is that this is in time two, this has stopped existing. Everything is just a moment. So in the previous, so when we get uh, here, in this moment, what arises is a representation of the subject, a phenomenal form of the subject and a phenomenal form of the object, just in that moment. And then they produce in the next moment consciousness, or it may take a few moments, what happens is you get now the conceptualization, oh, vase. Okay? Because you care about this thing. You only conceptualize the stuff that's relevant to you, not your whole visual field. And then part of the way to think about that is what's happening previously in consciousness is there's all kinds of stuff going on, which I call the gunk. That's what the gunk is, right? Now you've got your worries and concerns, your emotional states and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So this, you see the color here is different than this. That's cause this is not like a picture of reality. This is already conditioned by your own particular whatever. Okay? Including the kinds of sense faculties that's not just, that's not just particular to you, maybe. Maybe you have unique glasses or whatever, or are colorblind, but also we're humans. So we don't see the world the way bats do, for example. But bats, this is happening for bats too, but they have a different kind of sensory world in which they're living, right? But we share the constraints, we have a shared world with bats. Okay, so this is a non-conceptual moment. And this is the conceptual moment, okay? And there's a lot more we could say, like there are whole lot's of a, li... there's kind of a world model that is part of the gunk, and that world model is relevant to how you conceptualize stuff, and there's a self-model that goes with the world model. An important feature here is that, as we can see here, like there's the gunk, and the gunk also, there's subjectivity. So there's a sense, as long as there's something kind of going on, presented in consciousness, which is, which is what's always happening in the waking state, except in extraordinary circumstances, your uh, uh, you also have a sense of subjectivity. But this only lasts a moment. That's why this sense of subjectivity is not the agent knowing this object. Because to be the agent, you have to be present, and then you do something. But this agent is already, this one is not doing this. It's not like engaging with this, such that it then knows it. Right? Because it's just momentary. There's an illusion of continuity of subjectivity, but the claim is that in reality, that representa, that phenomenal presentation is momentary. Okay? Is everyone clear about that, more or less? Yes, Rowan?
Student: In the non-conceptual moment, the blue circle that we see, we call that still an object? Yes. Student: And the smiley face is subject? Yes. Student: And do they arise exactly simultaneously? Yes. Student: Or is there like a nanosecond difference? No, they are simultaneous. Student: They are exactly simultaneous. Okay, yeah, gotcha. Which is why the subject can't be something, doing something to the object as an agent, because they're simultaneous. Right? So you're, so if you just really examine this in your experience, right, so part of the contemplative practice is actually examining that momentary experience. What's happening? And that sense of seeing a visual object, you know, visual, in the styles of Samatha, in Mahāmudrā, for example, often use visual objects, and we're very visual, unlike some other organisms, we're very visual. We have really good eyesight compared to a lot of other organisms, and we're very visually oriented. So that, you know, you just sort of are observing the sense of there being an object and a subject, and part of what you're learning is to observe that without, in a sense, getting caught in it.
Okay? So, that's uh, uh um... that said, this is very important to know, and it's not just a theory, it's experiential. It's like really challenging you to say, does this make sense in your experience? But that requires kind of, you know, that's a contemplative practice. That's not, you're not going to just get there just sitting here now. You need to have, you need to settle the mind, quiet the mind, and develop a certain kind of awareness that we'll talk a little more about. Okay, so now, when this is talking about recognizing the object as, like, you're seeing this, you go, oh, that's, you know, there's that, my vase. Okay? Most of the time, this, this is what's happening, so that when we do this conceptualization, the thing that we're interested in is, you know, whatever caused this image. Right? Because we're trying, well, why? Why are we interested in that?
Why do we conceptualize it? Yeah, to act skillfully in the world, because we want to get the stuff we need and avoid the stuff that'll hurt us or whatever. So we're just like, you know, that's why, so we're like very object-focused, object-focused, object-focused. And so this, this phenomenal form of the object is in most of our ordinary experiences playing the dominant role, okay? But there are times when something else happens, all right, when something else becomes more obvious. So let's so, let's say, you know, we're in the lounge downstairs, okay, and someone comes running in and, you know, they say, you gotta come outside, gotta, gotta, look, look! And then we see, going outside, we see this, right? My favorite Gomde picture. Of course, Mickey, before he runs outside, grabs his camera, because he always has his camera, but. Right? We see this, which really is quite spectacular, isn't it? I mean, really. And then we come back inside, and I say to you, and let's just say you were completely absorbed in this, like, at which we were, right? I mean, it's like, like, holy, like, whoa! Okay, and we're seeing that, and then you come back inside and I say to you, how do you feel? Why you were looking at it? Do you say to me, I don't know how I felt, because I was totally focused on that object, and I was not paying attention to my feelings, so let me go back outside, and then I'll quickly look in to check how I'm feeling. Is that, does anyone feel that that's what they do? Or is the memory of the experience, does it include your sense, does it include things that are not about the object, like your feelings? Are you getting me, my point? Like, you know something, then do I, do you say, do I have, you know, I say, if you say to me, oh, I felt this amazing feeling of awe, and I say to you, are you sure you were feeling that? Do you have any doubt you were feeling it?
No. But were you, uh, were you paying attention to your feelings as an object, like were you returning in and checking? No. For example, let's say a bus is running at you, right, and you just jump out of the way, and I see you there, and then, you know, and I say, you know, how did you feel while the bus was running at you? You know, and you say, oh, I don't know, I was just paying attention to the bus, I don't, I can't remember how I was feeling. So I'll go back out in the front of the bus and look in real quick. So this, like the philosopher mouse, if our, if the state of our organism, our subjectivity, how we're feeling, are we afraid, and so on, things like emotions, which are about guiding action, which are information to guide action, like if you say I want this and I don't want that, what's telling you you want this or you don't want that? Your emotions. But if you had to like constantly check inward to see like, instead of it's the philosopher mouse, maybe it's like, you know, the, the Alexithymic prehistoric mouse who doesn't do well at identifying emotions. And it's like, oh, saber-toothed tiger's coming at me. How do I feel? I don't know, let me check.
Okay? So let me just do a little more. Okay? So there's presentation, simultaneous presentation, we already have said this, that the subject, sense of subjectivity is presented along with the object, and under certain circumstances, that sense of subjectivity is presented such that you actually make a conceptualization based on the subjectivity, not on the object, based on the subject form, not on the object form. Like for example, oh, I'm upset. You know, let's say you're in the middle of a conversation and you're having a debate or something. And then you notice, oh, I'm getting a little too worked up.
Okay? And then you say, oh, when you do that, I'm getting too worked up. You're still, you're focusing on like you're really trying to win the debate or whatever maybe, but you then hopefully notice before you lose a friend, win the debate but lose the friend, you notice how you're feeling.
All right? And there would be various reasons why you notice that. Some would be that this is especially intense. Some would be that you'd have a task set, something you're trying to be mindful about, like your emotions. So that would trigger this as salient. You'd notice it. It's important to you. But in any case, this is not where while you're talking, you have to constantly check in, check in, check in. That's always being presented to you. All right? So this is the idea of what's called reflexive awareness. Okay? And it's happening in every moment of consciousness. So the idea here is that these two things, the phenomenal form of the object and the phenomenal form of the subject arise in each moment with cons, with uh, um, identical to, just they are consciousness. And also at the same time, they're both being presented reflexively. Consciousness is knowing both, reflexively. And I'm going to explain what reflexivity means in a moment. But did you need to ask your question now or you want to hear that explanation first?
Student: Um, so it relates to the example of the rainbows above Gomde. Yes. You said something like, okay, you see it and then you go inside and somebody asks you how it was, and... Right. and you immediately are able to respond without checking in, right? Because the memory includes the sense of your subjectivity. Student: Yeah, but at the same time memory or recall includes also your current state, your current emotions, which also color your recall experience. Yes, they do. Yeah, certainly. So we could say, you know, we could wait until you've calmed down and then ask you the question. But let's do it in a more simple way, okay? Watch this. Do you see this? Yeah, okay. Do you have a sense that there's someone seeing it? Like subjectivity? Student: Yes. Are you sure? Student: Yeah. Are you really the one seeing it? Like, do you feel like... Student: I feel like I'm seeing it, yeah. Maybe it's actually Daniel who's seeing it? No. No. Like, is there any doubt that there's a sense of subjectivity? Student: No. Do you have to turn in and check to see whether you're the one seeing it? Student: I think there is a certain attitude through which I give you this... respond to these questions. Because I asked you. Student: Yeah. There are some demand characteristics present. Yeah. Right? If I ask you, then you kind of like do the intern thing, but... Or, okay, so, uh, like, if I make a sound, you know, where do you want, buh, buh, buh, Buh! Did you hear the sound? Student: Yes. Do you have a sense that you were the one who heard the sound or was somebody else? Student: Yes, me. It's you, right. Is that like just part of the memory of hearing the sound?
Did you eat lunch today? Student: Yes. Do you have... is your memory of lunch like, was that me eating lunch or was it somebody else? Maybe Ava was actually eating lunch? Student: That's what I'm... No, yeah, yeah, it was included, yeah. Yeah, right? Student: But I have to look also. It's not like... If you're the memory, you have to... Yeah, you have to bring up the memory, but the idea is that that's encoded in the memory even though you weren't paying attention to it. So this is actually what phenomenology, Western phenomenology is saying. It's like that structure is invariant in ordinary experience, but it's presented pre-reflectively. It's not like you have to, you know, examine is there a subject. There's a sense of subjectivity is included in objects even while... So while you're focusing on an object, de facto subjectivity is presented. So that's why it's called reflexive. Let me explain that term, okay? So one of the best ways to talk about this is to talk about these languages that have reflexive pronouns and actually in Sanskrit and in Tibetan the words self, this is sometimes translated as self-awareness, sva saṃvitti, sva means self, rang rig རང་རིག་ in Tibetan, rang རང་. Uh, that's actually grammatically is a reflexive pronoun. Like, but it's more obvious in certain languages like romance languages such as French. Anyone speak French? A little bit of French? Okay. Or a little bit of Spanish? A little bit? Okay. So if I say in Spanish, yo hablo Espanol, that means I speak Spanish. But if you say se habla Espanol, like there's sometimes there'll be, you know, a sign in a store in the US, like, aqui se habla Espanol. Uh... Oh, interesting sound. Uh, here, in, in English we have to turn that into a passive. Here Spanish is spoken. But actually it's reflexive. It takes a transitive verb. I speak Spanish, and it makes it intransitive. It's like Spanish speaks itself. Or je vois ça. I see that. As opposed to ça se voi. So the se is the same as the Spanish reflexive pronoun and it takes the transitive verb to see and it makes it intransitive. So this kind of knowing is often called intransitive awareness. Like the transitivity, the sense of an agent doing something is coming from that structure. But the awareness is actually intransitive. There isn't an agent, someone outside looking in like this
to see awareness itself, like to look at your subjectivity. You don't need that because awareness just presents. The only reason one might go to this point is if they are very uncomfortable with the idea that, uh, that uh, of selflessness. Like if you really need there to be somebody that's a self, then there are, I think, leads to these kinds of philosophical attitudes. But if you just say the simplest explanation is just that awareness is intransitive. You don't need another agent to know that sense of subjectivity. You don't need someone from the outside looking in to say, oh yes, that's me seeing that, what's called a second order awareness. Right? It just intransitively presents both without there being an agent doing the transitive action of knowing. Okay. So this is from Thomas, Thomas Metzinger who has written about this. Uh... This stands for good old fashioned intentionality. Okay. And there's a sense in which like, our ordinary sense of there's a self uh, there's a self kind of looking out there. I just realized this slide is... But act... And, and if our sense of knowing our subjectivity required a second order awareness, then we'd have to see that from the standpoint of a subject. But then we'd need to know, okay, so I'm the one that saw that. How do I know that? Well, because I'm looking at myself seeing that, which means I need another subject to see that. And then, of course, how do I know that? I need another subject and I get an infinite regress. So instead of that, you just have this, what Metzinger calls a phenomenal model of the intentionality relation, the subject-object relation. Our sense of subject and object is simultaneously presented in experience without there being some other sense of subjectivity looking at it. Okay?
So part of what that means is that when we make these kinds of reports about our emotional states, about our body position, like, you know, if I say, okay, ready, here comes the sound. One, two, three. Beeep.
Everyone hear the sound? Yes? Were you sitting down when you heard the sound?
Do you, the way you know that, you go, well, I remember coming in sitting down and then uh, I didn't, I don't remember getting up, so I must have been sitting down. Or is it like your memory of the sound includes a sense of the body position, includes a sense of your space, your spacial, your, uh, your what's called proprioception, includes a sense of being the one knowing. So you're knowing, but how are you knowing that you're the one knowing? Are you, is there like, again, is it like this? Or like this? Excuse me.
Or do you not need that?
Okay? So when you're knowing the object, you're knowing it as an object. Along with that is the sense of subjectivity. Like, again, you know, beeep. bubup? it's the heart, you know, bubup, bubup, bubup, coronary disease.
It's like you knew the one hearing it. Right? And it's not like you have to go, you're not confused about that, are you? There are some psychopathologies in which people do, like, am I really the one hearing? Or is someone, is there, they, this, there's a dysfunction in their system, and they kind of can't, they can't identify with their own subjectivity sometimes. Feels like somebody else is doing it. But there's still subjectivity. They just don't identify with it. In a pathological way. So you know that. It's like, there's no question. Oh, yeah, I hear, yeah. Are you making yourself an object to know that? No. So that means you're knowing your sense of subjectivity without it being in a subject-object structure. Correct? What kind of knowing is knowing that is not in subject-object structure? Intransitive knowing was another term for that. Reflexive and non-dual. So you have an aspect of non-dual awareness in every moment of your experience. Already. But it's presented in a dualistic str... as part of a dualistic structure.
Okay?
Let's go. So I think we should take a break before people either collapse from exhaustion, confusion or something else. All right. We'll take a break until 20 after. Is that good? And now you can just sort of
try to see if you can see yourself.
There are people who will insist, no, actually, I'm constantly doing it like flip. While there are other people who will say, actually, no, that's not, your sense of subjectivity is not a part of your phenomenal experience. It's an illusion. You have a second-order cognition that when you need it, it kicks in. But phenomenally, you don't have a subjectivity. And I think those people are, you know, maybe not paying enough attention to their experience, possibly? Or else they're just really different. But anyway, so let's take a break. Ten minutes. And we'll see you back at 20 after.
Okay, So maybe again we start with any questions, so let me invite you again once more to just settle the mind for a moment.
And then bring up our motivation, in the Mahāyāna we aspire to achieve awakening for the sake of all beings. Okay, so...
Uh, any questions?
Let me ask you a question. You heard Khenpo say something about the idea that things are merely mentally imputed are merely mentally imputed tok pe tak sam རྟོག་པའི་བཏགས་པ or conceptually imputed How do you think that applies to so that's in Mādhyamika does that work in Yogācāra, too?
No, I mean like if we say this exists, that... That it exists when I say it exists, I assert it exists. That, that is its existence is actually imputed mentally it doesn't objectively exist
So we end up in the Mādhyamika position we end up saying that all things... Right, that uh... When we're talking about things as real that, that their reality is imputed mentally imputed. Does that work in Yogācāra, too? I would try and I would say no. Because Yogācāran's says that they are objects do, are perceived by the mind. But that doesn't mean that they don't exist outwardly. They have elements. Let me ask you this, this is a vase, correct? Yes. If I say the vase exists for Yogācāra, is that an imputation or are they saying the vase exists? They are saying the vase exists because there is a mind that perceives the vase. Is your mind a vase? No, so it has to be other than the vase. My mind is a vase. Somehow some teachings might say It's an empty vase. It's so what is the vase, you're seeing what is the what are you seeing? I'm seeing an object that is outside... Right, and then Yogācāra says what you're actually seeing is... my own consciousness. Although my is already a little bit... Because my means belonging to a sense of subjectivity, which is the basis for the construction of a self. No, I'm seeing just matrix basically, right? Kind of yes. Right? So that's the... so that's not a vase.
And existence to say that something exists, there's something you've got to be specifying that exists. Right? So this does not mean from the yo... there is a way of construing Yogācāra in which they would totally agree with that Mādhyamika position. And there's a way of construing Yogācāra that turns it more into Cittamātra, mind only. Where uh, you know you're trying to really kind of make the mind into, your trying to... make the mind into a thing that exists in some fashion. Even though it's not a thing, cause you can't... Why can't it be a thing?
What would it me for it to be a thing? It would be an object and who would it be an object for? Yea but the subject is also part of the mind. So how does that work? We're going to try to find out how that works. Yeah, so this was on the foil on that one presentation where you had two ways to understand Yogācāra, right? Yes. One of them is more... So they both have a kind of affirming negation when they say emptiness. There's definitely a sense in which they want to leave experience itself in place. But you can go to a certain, like further point of ontologizing. And the problem with that, even for the type of Yogācāra that doesn't do that, which slips into Mādhyamika basically, becomes very... it almost seems like it is Mādhyamika. And there are certain aspects of that kind of tradition that we're not going to talk about, but, you know, like this would be so-called... these are non-aspectarian Yogācārans, just in case you're wondering. Nirākāra, as they say, not Satyākāra, but Alīkākāra, Namzungbai namdzopa. And I in chart... they the great, what is it, 15th century um... 15th to 16th century scholar Sakya Chokden, Tibetan scholar Sakya Chokden likes to say that that version of Yogācāra in some ways really you can kind of equate with Mādhyamika. And that's where you're not really ontologizing the mind. But there's a way of doing Yogācāra that does ontologize the mind in which you really want to strongly assert that we're talking about it existing, being. And here's the thing that's very important with that word in Sanskrit, that is challenging for us, is that this word is coming from uh, the... This is the Sanskrit word sat, and which is like, uh... This is actually the um, the neuter present participle from the verb us to be. This is the neuter nominative singular. So, that, so something is sat, it is existent, you could say. And you can talk about satya or sattā, which more or less are the same, the existenthood. But it also means to be... So you could say something is existent, it's sat, it's real, that's sat, it's present, that's sat, and even it's true, it's sat. So the Tibetan translations usually use the term den pa བདེན་པ , which is translating just the true part. But it doesn't really capture all the full range of this word. So to say that something exists is to say that in some sense it is present. And this goes into, even for the non-Buddhist traditions in India, a kind of emphasis on like substance. So if you want to say that abstractions are real, that they have sattā, right? That like, for example, the vasness of the vase, unlike a purely platonic approach where you can perhaps assert the existence of those abstractions completely independent of substance. Even the non-Buddhist schools that wanted to say those abstractions are real still said that in some sense that reality only makes sense when you're talking about them as in hearing and substances. Okay? So there's a sense in which the very notion to be real, to exist, and then to have a statement about them refer successfully, i.e. the statement is true, that those are about like things being concretely present, actually. So to be real is to be concretely present, very interestingly, just sort of culturally for Indian thinkers going way back. And what that means is that, right, if it's present, it's also... So one of the ways this is articulated, not just in um, not just in Buddhist works again, is that to be real is to be knowable and nameable, is to be abhidheyatva and jñeyatva, knowable, jñeyatva, and nameable, abhidheyatva. So in San... so in, but of course if something's knowable, then it's got to be knowable for some knower. And if it's nameable, it's nameable in relation to someone who is giving it a designation, Right? In relation to language use. So the minute we start to talk about uh, you know, something being present for some knower, that it's knowable in that sense, is that we're already kind of into that triadic structure of agent, object, and action, and here in the context of the action of knowing, right? And that really seems to, uh, uh... The minute we try to assert existence, we're already into duality. Okay, so if you're trying to be an over... So if you're trying to be a Yogācāra, and... and yet sort of affirm the existence of some kind of causal continuity of the mind, or even some non-causal momentary experience as sat, you've got a problem because you're... merely saying something is existant is already falling into duality. Right? So that's, I think, a very key thing for us to keep in mind. And so when we ask, uh, when we look at Yogācāra, go back to this slide and say, okay, it does not assert that the object pole collapses into the subject pole, so the form of Yogācāra that isn't strongly asserting the existence of the mind is looking pretty uh, pretty okay for Mādhyamika. It does not assert that extramental objects are unreal, and whatever remains is not extramental. And it asserts that our only access to the world is through our, or in experience. But, and remember we had one more line, which actually is missing on this slide, which is that, however, unlike western phenomenology, it doesn't assert intentionality or subject-object structure as an invariant in consciousness. But so of these three things, what's the one that Mādhyamika is going to be? Even with regular Yogācāra, well, I shouldn't say regular, even with the type of Yogācāra that is not strongly ontologizing the mind, asserting like there's a real mind, this is still, like, not quite okay.
So what you therefore need to do is bring a Mādhyamika critique to the uh, to the mind itself. So in this process, this is going to be then the, the uh um, uh... you know, the procedure of, this is going to then lead to the emergence of the Yogācāra Mādhyamika school. Not really school, that style of philosophy. Remember those three, these are the Three Eastern Mādhyamikas, Jñānagarbha, Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla. And Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla, Śāntarakṣita went to Tibet and established uh, the first monastery in Tibet, Samye Monastery, and I think it's 755, someone can look it up. And then uh, and then his student Kamalaśīla came, after he passed away, his student Kamalaśīla came to defend a particular kind of approach that you could say, and, you know, there was allegedly a kind of um, debate, they say, between him and e uh, and a Chinese scholar practitioner. And the upshot of that debate is where Kamalaśīla is basically kind of arguing against a type of mind only approach, essentially, for our purposes. So, uh, and he writes a famous text that we're going to look at in a second, a very short piece of it. And what these Yogācāra Mādhyamikas are going to do is they're going to use this kind of sequential method, which is kind of what we've done this week in some ways, so you kind of start out by looking at, uh, you know, sort of our naive assumption about the material world. For example, that this is a whole, that in that course of doing that, you then critique the naive notion of the self that's constituted by that. And one way to think about that, that this is primarily going after self as object, like our self model as something that we, that is our conceptualization of ourselves. So part of that is also what, and sometimes we call this as the narrative self, like the story we tell of ourselves. And there is a, and the short version of it is just you are not the story you tell of yourself, which, you know, therapeutically can be tremendously helpful. But also that very sense that there's kind of a self that has some kind of a core and changing existence. What would be the problem with that from the Buddhist standpoint, if you had a... if you had that capital S, Self, unchanging, absolute, self-existent, and so on? What's one of the main problems with that idea, besides the fact that it's incoherent? Yeah, Ava. Karma couldn't work out? Or it would work all the time, meaning you couldn't change. So if you're in the state of suffering, that's it, you're stuck. But if I had a self, then that would mean um, there is no cause and effect that would be in. As well, then like that, right, that self couldn't be engaged causally with the world. But if somehow we think, oh, it still engages causally with the world, if we say that somehow it fundamentally can't change, then if it's in a state of suffering, it can never get out of that state. There's also that. Lots of unhappy results that come from this kind of a essentialization of the self. You know, and as a sidebar here, part of what's helpful when people do practices like mindfulness in therapeutic contexts, where they do kind of secular mindfulness, one of the things that's very powerful for many people, sometimes there's types of psychopathologies that involve very negative self models, for example, in depression. And what people can discover through the practice of mindfulness is that the story of themselves is just a story. It's not reality. And that can be very helpful. So that's part of what's happening, like the way we conceptualize ourselves kind of as an object, our self model as something that we can think about is critiqued. And then we can also, then that, say that, so when we do this sequence, though, we went through historically, we went from that early period, which basically does that, you know, takes apart our naive sense of the material world, takes apart our naive sense of the Self. And then in this sequence, it goes to Yogācāra, doesn't go to Mādhyamika. So historically, Mādhyamika comes first. But in this sequencing of analysis, Yogācāra comes next. And then these scholars, the Eastern Mādhyamikas, the Mādhyamikas from the East, they, meaning the East of India, they then say, okay, actually, so you think there's really just a bunch of infinitesimally small bits of matter? Well, guess what? That's not right either. And there isn't even infinitesimally small bits of consciousness either. So, again, it's not just idealism. All of that falls apart. But first, they then in the way that falls apart is they use the Yogācāra analysis, that sense of that duality between self and world collapses. But then you're left with this prob... So that's the kind of next part of the sequence. So we didn't do that sequence. We did it historically. But as a practice, it kind of moves in that sequence. So this would be in Śāntarakṣita's text, the Madhyamakālaṃkāra, the Umagyen དབུ་མ་རྒྱན the ornament of the Mādhyamika. And then you need to do something more to bring it all the way up to Mādhyamika. So what more would you do to bring it up to Mādhyamika?
What arguments could you use that we already know? So what the Yogācāra is saying is... Remember, let's go back to the three natures. You're saying there's a luminous empty mind, but they mean by empty, they mean the emptiness of subject-object duality. So the dependent nature, the causal flow of mind, when it's misunderstood, one takes, or when in, in the state of ignorance, you take the dualistic appearances are taken to be real. There's a world out there, there's a Self in here, there's a subjectivity in here. And now this kind of critique is going to critique that, right? And what you're critiquing is not self as object, but self as subject. The very sense of subjectivity as being who you are. That's what Yogācāra is doing. So like, again, as you see, you know, as you see the vase, or you see me, there's a sense of it's out there, which means, you know, there's somebody looking out from behind your eyes, so to speak. So that's a different sense of self, a subtler sense of self, a self as the subjectivity that's beholding objects. Okay? That's certainly also in that earlier version of self, but that one tends to be more about like looking at yourself and saying, Oh, this must be like this, like that. Here, it's kind of from the first person standpoint, your first personhood, and our identification with first personhood of, you know, being the one seeing, that is critiqued.
Right? Which is, when you really contemplate that is kind of quite something like there's a sense of subjectivity. Right? But that's not you.
Right? So it's happening, but that's not you.
Anyone just want to run away now? Get me out of here. Uh, so what, so when we're seeing that, we're seeing either with content or without content, we're seeing that that subject object structure is collapsed, is gone, and consciousness continues, but there's no identification with the subject pole as the self.
Okay, you're conscious, but you don't identify with this, that one who's seeing as you.
Okay, then. So the probl... so when we think of that, about this, so that's a very powerful... So first you critique like the external world and the naive self as object. Then you critique even the structure of experience and the subtler sense of self as subject. The subjectivity. But that's still not good enough for Mādhyamika. Even if you're not totally ontologizing the mind, the worry is that you're still going to have a subtle ontologizing of the dependent nature itself. Right? That we're gonna, we're gonna think that this you know, this is somehow wuh uh, this is somehow real. Right? So this is somehow, this is like, we're going to try to hang our ontological hat here, which there were non-Buddhist traditions of non-duality as well, like Advaita Vedānta, that does something pretty similar and then turns this into a kind of transcendental self. Not a self that's a subjectivity, exactly, although somewhat with the idea of the witness consciousness, but something that's sort of, you know, beyond your ordinary subjectivity, like a big self. Right? So the Buddhists, so the Mādhyamikas are concerned about that.
So what do you, how would you, what you guys all now are Mādhyamikas, you know the arguments. Right? So this is your test. What, what's, go ahead. Okay, how would that work? What's same or different?
Student: So, one level would be to say, okay, is the dependent nature same or different than the constructed nature? Yeah. Student: Or we can address... You almost got it. Student: Or, or, or... What is the constructed nature? It is nothing other than the dependent nature appearing a certain way. Student: Right. How does it appear? Student: In experience? With subject object duality. So now you've got, now you've got something that's... What's the one here? Neither one nor many, what's the one? Student: That they are the same? No. The mind. Student: The mind. Okay, yes, yes. And the two are the... Parts. Are the appearance of the phenomenal presentations of object subject. Student: Yes, yes. So you can do that. Student: Right. And that can lead to a Mādhyamika conclusion. Okay. That the one, when you do that, neither the one nor the many remains. Student: So is the mind the same as the subject and the object? Right. Student: Okay, or is it different? Right. So that is... You can do that in a way that ends in a Mādhyamika conclusion and Śāntarakṣita does that. But there's an, and... But it gets a little tricky because you could start still maybe try to ontologize the mind and say the other two are just delusions and there was always just the one all along. So the other thing you can do is... What is it? It's the causal... Student: So yeah, the causality. Yes. Student: Again, which requires time. Yes, so you could critique time. Right. Exactly. You could just critique causality. Causality, right. Yep. So there are... But interestingly, it's with Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla. Śāntarakṣita in particular really kind of favored somewhat that more phenomenological one. Neither one nor many analysis of experience itself. But causality is also... Causal critique and critique of time are also like effective. But because there's a kind of sequencing, an experiential sequencing, they and that experiential sequencing is actually found quite explicitly both in the um...uh when we look at these authors in the Śāntarakṣita's... It's not so obvious in Jñānagarbha, although I don't quite remember, I haven't looked at it in a while. It's very clear in Śāntarakṣita's Ornament of Mādhyamika. And then it's also very clear in the um... in the stages of meditation, the Bhāvanākrama, which Kamalaśīla wrote in Tibet as kind of part of that debate. And so you have this sequencing from extern... analysis of external objects to analy... which leads to Yogācāra, which then eventually ends in Mādhyamika. And he cites this verse, or series of verses, from the Lankāvatāra-sūtra, which is a sūtra that both Yogācāra philosophers and Mādhyamika philosophers will cite. cittamātraṃ samāruhya bāhyam arthaṃ na kalpayet tathatālambane sthitvā cittamātram atikramet cittamātram atikramya nirābhāsam atikramet nirābhāsasthito yogī mahāyānaṃ sa paśyati anābhogagatiḥ śāntā praṇidhānair viśodhitā jñānaṃ nirātmakaṃ śreṣṭhaṃ nirābhāsena paśyati Bringing it to mere mind, one does not conceptualize an external object. So there's that word, cittamātra. It's just mind. Right? But you really... This is just mind, what you're seeing. Abiding in the focus that is suchness, meaning the emptiness of the subject-object duality, one transcends mere mind. Transcending mere mind one transcends to non-appearance. We're going to talk about why that is soon. The yoga of abiding in non-appearance sees the Mahāyāna, effortless, abode, peaceful, purified by aspirations. That term effortless is really key and we'll talk about that too. The essence-less supreme awareness sees without appearance. So this is the sort of sequencing that we're talking about which ends in non-dual awareness that is the emptiness awareness. It's the awareness that is the awareness, the ult... the awareness of the ultimate, although of implies an object. So this is what it means for these philosophers to be knowing emptiness, to be in that state of primordial non-dual awareness that is not conceptualizing the three spheres of the knower, the action of knowing, and the object known. Okay? But that still leaves us with this ques... two questions. One of them is, what exactly is that kind of knowing? And second, where do we get it? Like, you know... Can we, can we go to IKEA and pick up a box of non-dual awareness or something? Like? How do we acquire it? So to answer both of those questions, we're going to have to look at something, um, uh, a style of approach to the nature of awareness that the three Easterners rely on very heavily, especially Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla, which is one of the Yogācāra philosophers, Dharmakīrti. Okay? And uh, and I'll just say that, you know just to like, make it uh, to reassure you, you don't have to go get non-dual awareness, because I have some I can give to you, no, because you already have it in every moment of awareness. There's an aspect of awareness, even in deluded awareness, that is already non-dual. And that's how this... So we're talking about this in philosophical terms, of course, in practice, this is what then leads to these Mahāmudrā and Dzogchen styles of practice that are about the nature of the mind. But also, there's quite a robust philosophical account about why that makes sense. I will say that one of the things in the context of practice is that uh, the advantage to uh, to doing philosophical work is that it can lead you, it can help to clarify, like, why are we doing what we do? The disadvantage to it is that it can sort of conceptualize, you can turn the nature of mind, non-dual awareness, into a kind of conceptual object. And because the arguments, like are convincing, you can think you really know what you're talking about. Kind of like me, I don't really know what I'm talking about, but I think I do. Right? So that's a problem. So sometimes the non-dual traditions, they actually uh, like, kind of discourage too much of this type of philosophical work. All right? So we need to be cautious about it. We're going to talk about some of the techniques later, but now let's get into this model, because this is actually very helpful, I think. We're going to learn a kind of model of non-dual awareness that then is the basis for the types of practices that you find in Mahāmudrā and Dzogchen. And Dharmakīrti, as it turns out, is extremely influential for this tradition. Not always recognized, but he is very influential. So let's just assume there's external objects. So this thing is representing an external object. You know, really it's just representing a cause. So there's some stuff that causes an interaction with your eye, with the mechanism that produces visual consciousness, and we'll call it the eye faculty for the moment. And then what happens is that this produces what's called a phenomenal form of the object in consciousness. So the blue box represents consciousness. And then at the same time, a phenomenal form of the subject simultaneously arises. Okay? So you get what we've been talking about, right? You look at this, and what's happening is there's a form of this arising in consciousness and a sense of subjectivity arising with it. And a key part of this is what's called sahopalambha-niyama, or a lhen-chik mig-nge in Tibetan, which is that you can't have one without the other. If you've got a sense of subjectivity, you've got an object. If you've got an object, you've got a sense of subjectivity. You can't, like, drop the object and remain in some pure subjective, you know, your pure subjectivity can't stay. Subjectivity dissipates when objects dissipate. So that's why when people experience non-dual states, you know, part of what can be, depending how they get into them, you know, like if you're using, like, a psychedelic drug or something like that, sometimes it's very confusing for people because, like, they don't know, like, I'm gone. Right? I imagine in your work you hear those kinds of reports, like, I'm not there. That's because the subjectivity is gone. But consciousness isn't gone. Right? Yes?
Studetn: Um, so if you're only in this subjectivity state, there is no object? You can't be in the only subjectivity state. Student: Ah, that's the point. You can't. You can't. If you're... it would look like this. Yeah. If you have no object, you don't have any subject. Student: All right. So you just... You can't be in a pure subject. Student: And if it's just pure awareness, then? Then it has to look like this. Student: Yeah. Can you also describe that? Or does this prevent you from using language at all before you try to conceptualize it or objectify it? It becomes extremely difficult to make a description. Why? Why? There's a reason. We know the reason. Student: Because language was evolved to basically talk about things out there. Which means it was evolved... more precisely, it was evolved to talk... to uh, uh, guide action in the world by an agent. So if there's no sense of agency, how are you going to talk, you like... the, the, both world and self are gone. Right? So in that context, you know, saying anything is like, I don't know what to say. Right? So the indescribability or ineffability of those types of experiences is easily explained in this model. If you assume that conceptual... If you're not a realist about you know, language, uh, uh, it's not because somehow you can no longer see the real categories in the world. It's that the mechanism that enables you to generate, construct categories is not operative because it requires there to be both a subject and an object. A presentation of subject and object in awareness.
Student: But can we use memory here to reflect on this experience? And objectify it and then talk about it? That's what people do, isn't it? Yes. That's right. And so then people... And then there are going to be different versions of it. Like... there is a... we'll come back to this, but there's like contentless versions, completely contentless. Where you're like, you're not experiencing anything. There's no content, but there's awareness. And here that... so remember that metaphor we spoke about before. Let's go back to this for a second, actually, because I think we didn't quite complete this. So the, so prabhāsvara, or prakāśa, which I'm just going to conflate, like lots of other people do, uh, is this luminosity. So on the one hand is a sort of metaphor, which is in this model, okay, in this model, What's... both the objects... but the... What are the phenomenal form of the subject and the phenomenal form of the object? What are they made out of?
Basically, mind, right, they are, right? Especially if we're being substan... If we say this is matter and this side is mind, then this stuff is made out of mind, okay? So what's going on here is, it's not like when you see something, it's not like you're seeing, there's, there's a... you think that the mystic... Isn't it nice that I made your subjectivity smiling? Your smiley face, you think that's doing the action of seeing, but it's not. It's just a structural feature. Okay? It's not doing anything. But both are being presented in awareness. You're aware of both. Like, as you look at the vase, the sense of being looking at, being the one looking at the vase, or the sense of someone's looking at the vase. Subjectivity is being presented even while you're looking at the vase. Right? So they're both presented. We're going to come back to that more. They're both presented like the light is turned on. So whatever is, so to speak, kind of in this box, whatever is in consciousness is presented, whether it's objects or subjects or whatever. So the light's on. But certain states where you kind of have no content, the light's on, but there's nothing in the room, so to speak. It's just light. So... Uh, so that's where that idea of luminosity becomes actually a phenomenal description. Everyone understand what I mean? Okay, we're going to come back to that. Yes?
Student: Would you describe that, we said, structural feature of the subject, or I guess of the subject, object, reality? Right, intentionality in Western philosophy, yep. Um as thought or thought-based, or is it something of its own right? No, it's preconceptual. Definitely preconceptual, yep. And which also like Western phenomenologists would agree, it's like prereflective.
So let's look at that same thing now in a slightly different model with, with temporality added into it, or the time sequence added into it. So like in time one, you've got this interaction. In time two, there's a present. And for now, we can say that this thing is an external object, or really a bundle of atoms. But um... you, you know, what's going to happen eventually in Yogācāra is said, well, there's no need to say that the cause is like different kind of stuff you can get rid of This model still works if you get rid of substance dualism. If you say there's mind stuff and physical stuff, it works. If you say there's, you know, this stuff out here is actually made of the same kind of stuff here, it works. It's just a causal mechanism where there's something interacting with, with the, whatever uh, mechanism allows consciousness to produce experiences. And so there's a cause which constrains this content. And this is, yea these, and in like the waking state, this kind of, these constraints are shared in some fashion. Okay? Got that? So time one. Now, the main thing that's very important to understand is that on this model, just like, you know, much of the Abhidharma models, these things, the reason this is dotted and looks like this is that this is in time two, this has stopped existing. Everything is just a moment. So in the previous, so when we get uh, here, in this moment, what arises is a representation of the subject, a phenomenal form of the subject and a phenomenal form of the object, just in that moment. And then they produce in the next moment consciousness, or it may take a few moments, what happens is you get now the conceptualization, oh, vase. Okay? Because you care about this thing. You only conceptualize the stuff that's relevant to you, not your whole visual field. And then part of the way to think about that is what's happening previously in consciousness is there's all kinds of stuff going on, which I call the gunk. That's what the gunk is, right? Now you've got your worries and concerns, your emotional states and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So this, you see the color here is different than this. That's cause this is not like a picture of reality. This is already conditioned by your own particular whatever. Okay? Including the kinds of sense faculties that's not just, that's not just particular to you, maybe. Maybe you have unique glasses or whatever, or are colorblind, but also we're humans. So we don't see the world the way bats do, for example. But bats, this is happening for bats too, but they have a different kind of sensory world in which they're living, right? But we share the constraints, we have a shared world with bats. Okay, so this is a non-conceptual moment. And this is the conceptual moment, okay? And there's a lot more we could say, like there are whole lot's of a, li... there's kind of a world model that is part of the gunk, and that world model is relevant to how you conceptualize stuff, and there's a self-model that goes with the world model. An important feature here is that, as we can see here, like there's the gunk, and the gunk also, there's subjectivity. So there's a sense, as long as there's something kind of going on, presented in consciousness, which is, which is what's always happening in the waking state, except in extraordinary circumstances, your uh, uh, you also have a sense of subjectivity. But this only lasts a moment. That's why this sense of subjectivity is not the agent knowing this object. Because to be the agent, you have to be present, and then you do something. But this agent is already, this one is not doing this. It's not like engaging with this, such that it then knows it. Right? Because it's just momentary. There's an illusion of continuity of subjectivity, but the claim is that in reality, that representa, that phenomenal presentation is momentary. Okay? Is everyone clear about that, more or less? Yes, Rowan?
Student: In the non-conceptual moment, the blue circle that we see, we call that still an object? Yes. Student: And the smiley face is subject? Yes. Student: And do they arise exactly simultaneously? Yes. Student: Or is there like a nanosecond difference? No, they are simultaneous. Student: They are exactly simultaneous. Okay, yeah, gotcha. Which is why the subject can't be something, doing something to the object as an agent, because they're simultaneous. Right? So you're, so if you just really examine this in your experience, right, so part of the contemplative practice is actually examining that momentary experience. What's happening? And that sense of seeing a visual object, you know, visual, in the styles of Samatha, in Mahāmudrā, for example, often use visual objects, and we're very visual, unlike some other organisms, we're very visual. We have really good eyesight compared to a lot of other organisms, and we're very visually oriented. So that, you know, you just sort of are observing the sense of there being an object and a subject, and part of what you're learning is to observe that without, in a sense, getting caught in it.
Okay? So, that's uh, uh um... that said, this is very important to know, and it's not just a theory, it's experiential. It's like really challenging you to say, does this make sense in your experience? But that requires kind of, you know, that's a contemplative practice. That's not, you're not going to just get there just sitting here now. You need to have, you need to settle the mind, quiet the mind, and develop a certain kind of awareness that we'll talk a little more about. Okay, so now, when this is talking about recognizing the object as, like, you're seeing this, you go, oh, that's, you know, there's that, my vase. Okay? Most of the time, this, this is what's happening, so that when we do this conceptualization, the thing that we're interested in is, you know, whatever caused this image. Right? Because we're trying, well, why? Why are we interested in that?
Why do we conceptualize it? Yeah, to act skillfully in the world, because we want to get the stuff we need and avoid the stuff that'll hurt us or whatever. So we're just like, you know, that's why, so we're like very object-focused, object-focused, object-focused. And so this, this phenomenal form of the object is in most of our ordinary experiences playing the dominant role, okay? But there are times when something else happens, all right, when something else becomes more obvious. So let's so, let's say, you know, we're in the lounge downstairs, okay, and someone comes running in and, you know, they say, you gotta come outside, gotta, gotta, look, look! And then we see, going outside, we see this, right? My favorite Gomde picture. Of course, Mickey, before he runs outside, grabs his camera, because he always has his camera, but. Right? We see this, which really is quite spectacular, isn't it? I mean, really. And then we come back inside, and I say to you, and let's just say you were completely absorbed in this, like, at which we were, right? I mean, it's like, like, holy, like, whoa! Okay, and we're seeing that, and then you come back inside and I say to you, how do you feel? Why you were looking at it? Do you say to me, I don't know how I felt, because I was totally focused on that object, and I was not paying attention to my feelings, so let me go back outside, and then I'll quickly look in to check how I'm feeling. Is that, does anyone feel that that's what they do? Or is the memory of the experience, does it include your sense, does it include things that are not about the object, like your feelings? Are you getting me, my point? Like, you know something, then do I, do you say, do I have, you know, I say, if you say to me, oh, I felt this amazing feeling of awe, and I say to you, are you sure you were feeling that? Do you have any doubt you were feeling it?
No. But were you, uh, were you paying attention to your feelings as an object, like were you returning in and checking? No. For example, let's say a bus is running at you, right, and you just jump out of the way, and I see you there, and then, you know, and I say, you know, how did you feel while the bus was running at you? You know, and you say, oh, I don't know, I was just paying attention to the bus, I don't, I can't remember how I was feeling. So I'll go back out in the front of the bus and look in real quick. So this, like the philosopher mouse, if our, if the state of our organism, our subjectivity, how we're feeling, are we afraid, and so on, things like emotions, which are about guiding action, which are information to guide action, like if you say I want this and I don't want that, what's telling you you want this or you don't want that? Your emotions. But if you had to like constantly check inward to see like, instead of it's the philosopher mouse, maybe it's like, you know, the, the Alexithymic prehistoric mouse who doesn't do well at identifying emotions. And it's like, oh, saber-toothed tiger's coming at me. How do I feel? I don't know, let me check.
Okay? So let me just do a little more. Okay? So there's presentation, simultaneous presentation, we already have said this, that the subject, sense of subjectivity is presented along with the object, and under certain circumstances, that sense of subjectivity is presented such that you actually make a conceptualization based on the subjectivity, not on the object, based on the subject form, not on the object form. Like for example, oh, I'm upset. You know, let's say you're in the middle of a conversation and you're having a debate or something. And then you notice, oh, I'm getting a little too worked up.
Okay? And then you say, oh, when you do that, I'm getting too worked up. You're still, you're focusing on like you're really trying to win the debate or whatever maybe, but you then hopefully notice before you lose a friend, win the debate but lose the friend, you notice how you're feeling.
All right? And there would be various reasons why you notice that. Some would be that this is especially intense. Some would be that you'd have a task set, something you're trying to be mindful about, like your emotions. So that would trigger this as salient. You'd notice it. It's important to you. But in any case, this is not where while you're talking, you have to constantly check in, check in, check in. That's always being presented to you. All right? So this is the idea of what's called reflexive awareness. Okay? And it's happening in every moment of consciousness. So the idea here is that these two things, the phenomenal form of the object and the phenomenal form of the subject arise in each moment with cons, with uh, um, identical to, just they are consciousness. And also at the same time, they're both being presented reflexively. Consciousness is knowing both, reflexively. And I'm going to explain what reflexivity means in a moment. But did you need to ask your question now or you want to hear that explanation first?
Student: Um, so it relates to the example of the rainbows above Gomde. Yes. You said something like, okay, you see it and then you go inside and somebody asks you how it was, and... Right. and you immediately are able to respond without checking in, right? Because the memory includes the sense of your subjectivity. Student: Yeah, but at the same time memory or recall includes also your current state, your current emotions, which also color your recall experience. Yes, they do. Yeah, certainly. So we could say, you know, we could wait until you've calmed down and then ask you the question. But let's do it in a more simple way, okay? Watch this. Do you see this? Yeah, okay. Do you have a sense that there's someone seeing it? Like subjectivity? Student: Yes. Are you sure? Student: Yeah. Are you really the one seeing it? Like, do you feel like... Student: I feel like I'm seeing it, yeah. Maybe it's actually Daniel who's seeing it? No. No. Like, is there any doubt that there's a sense of subjectivity? Student: No. Do you have to turn in and check to see whether you're the one seeing it? Student: I think there is a certain attitude through which I give you this... respond to these questions. Because I asked you. Student: Yeah. There are some demand characteristics present. Yeah. Right? If I ask you, then you kind of like do the intern thing, but... Or, okay, so, uh, like, if I make a sound, you know, where do you want, buh, buh, buh, Buh! Did you hear the sound? Student: Yes. Do you have a sense that you were the one who heard the sound or was somebody else? Student: Yes, me. It's you, right. Is that like just part of the memory of hearing the sound?
Did you eat lunch today? Student: Yes. Do you have... is your memory of lunch like, was that me eating lunch or was it somebody else? Maybe Ava was actually eating lunch? Student: That's what I'm... No, yeah, yeah, it was included, yeah. Yeah, right? Student: But I have to look also. It's not like... If you're the memory, you have to... Yeah, you have to bring up the memory, but the idea is that that's encoded in the memory even though you weren't paying attention to it. So this is actually what phenomenology, Western phenomenology is saying. It's like that structure is invariant in ordinary experience, but it's presented pre-reflectively. It's not like you have to, you know, examine is there a subject. There's a sense of subjectivity is included in objects even while... So while you're focusing on an object, de facto subjectivity is presented. So that's why it's called reflexive. Let me explain that term, okay? So one of the best ways to talk about this is to talk about these languages that have reflexive pronouns and actually in Sanskrit and in Tibetan the words self, this is sometimes translated as self-awareness, sva saṃvitti, sva means self, rang rig རང་རིག་ in Tibetan, rang རང་. Uh, that's actually grammatically is a reflexive pronoun. Like, but it's more obvious in certain languages like romance languages such as French. Anyone speak French? A little bit of French? Okay. Or a little bit of Spanish? A little bit? Okay. So if I say in Spanish, yo hablo Espanol, that means I speak Spanish. But if you say se habla Espanol, like there's sometimes there'll be, you know, a sign in a store in the US, like, aqui se habla Espanol. Uh... Oh, interesting sound. Uh, here, in, in English we have to turn that into a passive. Here Spanish is spoken. But actually it's reflexive. It takes a transitive verb. I speak Spanish, and it makes it intransitive. It's like Spanish speaks itself. Or je vois ça. I see that. As opposed to ça se voi. So the se is the same as the Spanish reflexive pronoun and it takes the transitive verb to see and it makes it intransitive. So this kind of knowing is often called intransitive awareness. Like the transitivity, the sense of an agent doing something is coming from that structure. But the awareness is actually intransitive. There isn't an agent, someone outside looking in like this
to see awareness itself, like to look at your subjectivity. You don't need that because awareness just presents. The only reason one might go to this point is if they are very uncomfortable with the idea that, uh, that uh, of selflessness. Like if you really need there to be somebody that's a self, then there are, I think, leads to these kinds of philosophical attitudes. But if you just say the simplest explanation is just that awareness is intransitive. You don't need another agent to know that sense of subjectivity. You don't need someone from the outside looking in to say, oh yes, that's me seeing that, what's called a second order awareness. Right? It just intransitively presents both without there being an agent doing the transitive action of knowing. Okay. So this is from Thomas, Thomas Metzinger who has written about this. Uh... This stands for good old fashioned intentionality. Okay. And there's a sense in which like, our ordinary sense of there's a self uh, there's a self kind of looking out there. I just realized this slide is... But act... And, and if our sense of knowing our subjectivity required a second order awareness, then we'd have to see that from the standpoint of a subject. But then we'd need to know, okay, so I'm the one that saw that. How do I know that? Well, because I'm looking at myself seeing that, which means I need another subject to see that. And then, of course, how do I know that? I need another subject and I get an infinite regress. So instead of that, you just have this, what Metzinger calls a phenomenal model of the intentionality relation, the subject-object relation. Our sense of subject and object is simultaneously presented in experience without there being some other sense of subjectivity looking at it. Okay?
So part of what that means is that when we make these kinds of reports about our emotional states, about our body position, like, you know, if I say, okay, ready, here comes the sound. One, two, three. Beeep.
Everyone hear the sound? Yes? Were you sitting down when you heard the sound?
Do you, the way you know that, you go, well, I remember coming in sitting down and then uh, I didn't, I don't remember getting up, so I must have been sitting down. Or is it like your memory of the sound includes a sense of the body position, includes a sense of your space, your spacial, your, uh, your what's called proprioception, includes a sense of being the one knowing. So you're knowing, but how are you knowing that you're the one knowing? Are you, is there like, again, is it like this? Or like this? Excuse me.
Or do you not need that?
Okay? So when you're knowing the object, you're knowing it as an object. Along with that is the sense of subjectivity. Like, again, you know, beeep. bubup? it's the heart, you know, bubup, bubup, bubup, coronary disease.
It's like you knew the one hearing it. Right? And it's not like you have to go, you're not confused about that, are you? There are some psychopathologies in which people do, like, am I really the one hearing? Or is someone, is there, they, this, there's a dysfunction in their system, and they kind of can't, they can't identify with their own subjectivity sometimes. Feels like somebody else is doing it. But there's still subjectivity. They just don't identify with it. In a pathological way. So you know that. It's like, there's no question. Oh, yeah, I hear, yeah. Are you making yourself an object to know that? No. So that means you're knowing your sense of subjectivity without it being in a subject-object structure. Correct? What kind of knowing is knowing that is not in subject-object structure? Intransitive knowing was another term for that. Reflexive and non-dual. So you have an aspect of non-dual awareness in every moment of your experience. Already. But it's presented in a dualistic str... as part of a dualistic structure.
Okay?
Let's go. So I think we should take a break before people either collapse from exhaustion, confusion or something else. All right. We'll take a break until 20 after. Is that good? And now you can just sort of
try to see if you can see yourself.
There are people who will insist, no, actually, I'm constantly doing it like flip. While there are other people who will say, actually, no, that's not, your sense of subjectivity is not a part of your phenomenal experience. It's an illusion. You have a second-order cognition that when you need it, it kicks in. But phenomenally, you don't have a subjectivity. And I think those people are, you know, maybe not paying enough attention to their experience, possibly? Or else they're just really different. But anyway, so let's take a break. Ten minutes. And we'll see you back at 20 after.
okmin chökyi yingkyi phodrang né
düsum sangyé kün gyi ngowo nyi
rangsem chöku ngönsum tönzé pa
tsawai lamai shapla sölwa dep
Okay, So maybe again we start with any questions, so let me invite you again once more to just settle the mind for a moment.
And then bring up our motivation, in the Mahāyāna we aspire to achieve awakening for the sake of all beings. Okay, so...
Uh, any questions?
Let me ask you a question. You heard Khenpo say something about the idea that things are merely mentally imputed are merely mentally imputed tok pe tak sam རྟོག་པའི་བཏགས་པ or conceptually imputed How do you think that applies to so that's in Mādhyamika does that work in Yogācāra, too?
No, I mean like if we say this exists, that... That it exists when I say it exists, I assert it exists. That, that is its existence is actually imputed mentally it doesn't objectively exist
So we end up in the Mādhyamika position we end up saying that all things... Right, that uh... When we're talking about things as real that, that their reality is imputed mentally imputed. Does that work in Yogācāra, too? I would try and I would say no. Because Yogācāran's says that they are objects do, are perceived by the mind. But that doesn't mean that they don't exist outwardly. They have elements. Let me ask you this, this is a vase, correct? Yes. If I say the vase exists for Yogācāra, is that an imputation or are they saying the vase exists? They are saying the vase exists because there is a mind that perceives the vase. Is your mind a vase? No, so it has to be other than the vase. My mind is a vase. Somehow some teachings might say It's an empty vase. It's so what is the vase, you're seeing what is the what are you seeing? I'm seeing an object that is outside... Right, and then Yogācāra says what you're actually seeing is... my own consciousness. Although my is already a little bit... Because my means belonging to a sense of subjectivity, which is the basis for the construction of a self. No, I'm seeing just matrix basically, right? Kind of yes. Right? So that's the... so that's not a vase.
And existence to say that something exists, there's something you've got to be specifying that exists. Right? So this does not mean from the yo... there is a way of construing Yogācāra in which they would totally agree with that Mādhyamika position. And there's a way of construing Yogācāra that turns it more into Cittamātra, mind only. Where uh, you know you're trying to really kind of make the mind into, your trying to... make the mind into a thing that exists in some fashion. Even though it's not a thing, cause you can't... Why can't it be a thing?
What would it me for it to be a thing? It would be an object and who would it be an object for? Yea but the subject is also part of the mind. So how does that work? We're going to try to find out how that works. Yeah, so this was on the foil on that one presentation where you had two ways to understand Yogācāra, right? Yes. One of them is more... So they both have a kind of affirming negation when they say emptiness. There's definitely a sense in which they want to leave experience itself in place. But you can go to a certain, like further point of ontologizing. And the problem with that, even for the type of Yogācāra that doesn't do that, which slips into Mādhyamika basically, becomes very... it almost seems like it is Mādhyamika. And there are certain aspects of that kind of tradition that we're not going to talk about, but, you know, like this would be so-called... these are non-aspectarian Yogācārans, just in case you're wondering. Nirākāra, as they say, not Satyākāra, but Alīkākāra, Namzungbai namdzopa. And I in chart... they the great, what is it, 15th century um... 15th to 16th century scholar Sakya Chokden, Tibetan scholar Sakya Chokden likes to say that that version of Yogācāra in some ways really you can kind of equate with Mādhyamika. And that's where you're not really ontologizing the mind. But there's a way of doing Yogācāra that does ontologize the mind in which you really want to strongly assert that we're talking about it existing, being. And here's the thing that's very important with that word in Sanskrit, that is challenging for us, is that this word is coming from uh, the... This is the Sanskrit word sat, and which is like, uh... This is actually the um, the neuter present participle from the verb us to be. This is the neuter nominative singular. So, that, so something is sat, it is existent, you could say. And you can talk about satya or sattā, which more or less are the same, the existenthood. But it also means to be... So you could say something is existent, it's sat, it's real, that's sat, it's present, that's sat, and even it's true, it's sat. So the Tibetan translations usually use the term den pa བདེན་པ , which is translating just the true part. But it doesn't really capture all the full range of this word. So to say that something exists is to say that in some sense it is present. And this goes into, even for the non-Buddhist traditions in India, a kind of emphasis on like substance. So if you want to say that abstractions are real, that they have sattā, right? That like, for example, the vasness of the vase, unlike a purely platonic approach where you can perhaps assert the existence of those abstractions completely independent of substance. Even the non-Buddhist schools that wanted to say those abstractions are real still said that in some sense that reality only makes sense when you're talking about them as in hearing and substances. Okay? So there's a sense in which the very notion to be real, to exist, and then to have a statement about them refer successfully, i.e. the statement is true, that those are about like things being concretely present, actually. So to be real is to be concretely present, very interestingly, just sort of culturally for Indian thinkers going way back. And what that means is that, right, if it's present, it's also... So one of the ways this is articulated, not just in um, not just in Buddhist works again, is that to be real is to be knowable and nameable, is to be abhidheyatva and jñeyatva, knowable, jñeyatva, and nameable, abhidheyatva. So in San... so in, but of course if something's knowable, then it's got to be knowable for some knower. And if it's nameable, it's nameable in relation to someone who is giving it a designation, Right? In relation to language use. So the minute we start to talk about uh, you know, something being present for some knower, that it's knowable in that sense, is that we're already kind of into that triadic structure of agent, object, and action, and here in the context of the action of knowing, right? And that really seems to, uh, uh... The minute we try to assert existence, we're already into duality. Okay, so if you're trying to be an over... So if you're trying to be a Yogācāra, and... and yet sort of affirm the existence of some kind of causal continuity of the mind, or even some non-causal momentary experience as sat, you've got a problem because you're... merely saying something is existant is already falling into duality. Right? So that's, I think, a very key thing for us to keep in mind. And so when we ask, uh, when we look at Yogācāra, go back to this slide and say, okay, it does not assert that the object pole collapses into the subject pole, so the form of Yogācāra that isn't strongly asserting the existence of the mind is looking pretty uh, pretty okay for Mādhyamika. It does not assert that extramental objects are unreal, and whatever remains is not extramental. And it asserts that our only access to the world is through our, or in experience. But, and remember we had one more line, which actually is missing on this slide, which is that, however, unlike western phenomenology, it doesn't assert intentionality or subject-object structure as an invariant in consciousness. But so of these three things, what's the one that Mādhyamika is going to be? Even with regular Yogācāra, well, I shouldn't say regular, even with the type of Yogācāra that is not strongly ontologizing the mind, asserting like there's a real mind, this is still, like, not quite okay.
So what you therefore need to do is bring a Mādhyamika critique to the uh, to the mind itself. So in this process, this is going to be then the, the uh um, uh... you know, the procedure of, this is going to then lead to the emergence of the Yogācāra Mādhyamika school. Not really school, that style of philosophy. Remember those three, these are the Three Eastern Mādhyamikas, Jñānagarbha, Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla. And Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla, Śāntarakṣita went to Tibet and established uh, the first monastery in Tibet, Samye Monastery, and I think it's 755, someone can look it up. And then uh, and then his student Kamalaśīla came, after he passed away, his student Kamalaśīla came to defend a particular kind of approach that you could say, and, you know, there was allegedly a kind of um, debate, they say, between him and e uh, and a Chinese scholar practitioner. And the upshot of that debate is where Kamalaśīla is basically kind of arguing against a type of mind only approach, essentially, for our purposes. So, uh, and he writes a famous text that we're going to look at in a second, a very short piece of it. And what these Yogācāra Mādhyamikas are going to do is they're going to use this kind of sequential method, which is kind of what we've done this week in some ways, so you kind of start out by looking at, uh, you know, sort of our naive assumption about the material world. For example, that this is a whole, that in that course of doing that, you then critique the naive notion of the self that's constituted by that. And one way to think about that, that this is primarily going after self as object, like our self model as something that we, that is our conceptualization of ourselves. So part of that is also what, and sometimes we call this as the narrative self, like the story we tell of ourselves. And there is a, and the short version of it is just you are not the story you tell of yourself, which, you know, therapeutically can be tremendously helpful. But also that very sense that there's kind of a self that has some kind of a core and changing existence. What would be the problem with that from the Buddhist standpoint, if you had a... if you had that capital S, Self, unchanging, absolute, self-existent, and so on? What's one of the main problems with that idea, besides the fact that it's incoherent? Yeah, Ava. Karma couldn't work out? Or it would work all the time, meaning you couldn't change. So if you're in the state of suffering, that's it, you're stuck. But if I had a self, then that would mean um, there is no cause and effect that would be in. As well, then like that, right, that self couldn't be engaged causally with the world. But if somehow we think, oh, it still engages causally with the world, if we say that somehow it fundamentally can't change, then if it's in a state of suffering, it can never get out of that state. There's also that. Lots of unhappy results that come from this kind of a essentialization of the self. You know, and as a sidebar here, part of what's helpful when people do practices like mindfulness in therapeutic contexts, where they do kind of secular mindfulness, one of the things that's very powerful for many people, sometimes there's types of psychopathologies that involve very negative self models, for example, in depression. And what people can discover through the practice of mindfulness is that the story of themselves is just a story. It's not reality. And that can be very helpful. So that's part of what's happening, like the way we conceptualize ourselves kind of as an object, our self model as something that we can think about is critiqued. And then we can also, then that, say that, so when we do this sequence, though, we went through historically, we went from that early period, which basically does that, you know, takes apart our naive sense of the material world, takes apart our naive sense of the Self. And then in this sequence, it goes to Yogācāra, doesn't go to Mādhyamika. So historically, Mādhyamika comes first. But in this sequencing of analysis, Yogācāra comes next. And then these scholars, the Eastern Mādhyamikas, the Mādhyamikas from the East, they, meaning the East of India, they then say, okay, actually, so you think there's really just a bunch of infinitesimally small bits of matter? Well, guess what? That's not right either. And there isn't even infinitesimally small bits of consciousness either. So, again, it's not just idealism. All of that falls apart. But first, they then in the way that falls apart is they use the Yogācāra analysis, that sense of that duality between self and world collapses. But then you're left with this prob... So that's the kind of next part of the sequence. So we didn't do that sequence. We did it historically. But as a practice, it kind of moves in that sequence. So this would be in Śāntarakṣita's text, the Madhyamakālaṃkāra, the Umagyen དབུ་མ་རྒྱན the ornament of the Mādhyamika. And then you need to do something more to bring it all the way up to Mādhyamika. So what more would you do to bring it up to Mādhyamika?
What arguments could you use that we already know? So what the Yogācāra is saying is... Remember, let's go back to the three natures. You're saying there's a luminous empty mind, but they mean by empty, they mean the emptiness of subject-object duality. So the dependent nature, the causal flow of mind, when it's misunderstood, one takes, or when in, in the state of ignorance, you take the dualistic appearances are taken to be real. There's a world out there, there's a Self in here, there's a subjectivity in here. And now this kind of critique is going to critique that, right? And what you're critiquing is not self as object, but self as subject. The very sense of subjectivity as being who you are. That's what Yogācāra is doing. So like, again, as you see, you know, as you see the vase, or you see me, there's a sense of it's out there, which means, you know, there's somebody looking out from behind your eyes, so to speak. So that's a different sense of self, a subtler sense of self, a self as the subjectivity that's beholding objects. Okay? That's certainly also in that earlier version of self, but that one tends to be more about like looking at yourself and saying, Oh, this must be like this, like that. Here, it's kind of from the first person standpoint, your first personhood, and our identification with first personhood of, you know, being the one seeing, that is critiqued.
Right? Which is, when you really contemplate that is kind of quite something like there's a sense of subjectivity. Right? But that's not you.
Right? So it's happening, but that's not you.
Anyone just want to run away now? Get me out of here. Uh, so what, so when we're seeing that, we're seeing either with content or without content, we're seeing that that subject object structure is collapsed, is gone, and consciousness continues, but there's no identification with the subject pole as the self.
Okay, you're conscious, but you don't identify with this, that one who's seeing as you.
Okay, then. So the probl... so when we think of that, about this, so that's a very powerful... So first you critique like the external world and the naive self as object. Then you critique even the structure of experience and the subtler sense of self as subject. The subjectivity. But that's still not good enough for Mādhyamika. Even if you're not totally ontologizing the mind, the worry is that you're still going to have a subtle ontologizing of the dependent nature itself. Right? That we're gonna, we're gonna think that this you know, this is somehow wuh uh, this is somehow real. Right? So this is somehow, this is like, we're going to try to hang our ontological hat here, which there were non-Buddhist traditions of non-duality as well, like Advaita Vedānta, that does something pretty similar and then turns this into a kind of transcendental self. Not a self that's a subjectivity, exactly, although somewhat with the idea of the witness consciousness, but something that's sort of, you know, beyond your ordinary subjectivity, like a big self. Right? So the Buddhists, so the Mādhyamikas are concerned about that.
So what do you, how would you, what you guys all now are Mādhyamikas, you know the arguments. Right? So this is your test. What, what's, go ahead. Okay, how would that work? What's same or different?
Student: So, one level would be to say, okay, is the dependent nature same or different than the constructed nature? Yeah. Student: Or we can address... You almost got it. Student: Or, or, or... What is the constructed nature? It is nothing other than the dependent nature appearing a certain way. Student: Right. How does it appear? Student: In experience? With subject object duality. So now you've got, now you've got something that's... What's the one here? Neither one nor many, what's the one? Student: That they are the same? No. The mind. Student: The mind. Okay, yes, yes. And the two are the... Parts. Are the appearance of the phenomenal presentations of object subject. Student: Yes, yes. So you can do that. Student: Right. And that can lead to a Mādhyamika conclusion. Okay. That the one, when you do that, neither the one nor the many remains. Student: So is the mind the same as the subject and the object? Right. Student: Okay, or is it different? Right. So that is... You can do that in a way that ends in a Mādhyamika conclusion and Śāntarakṣita does that. But there's an, and... But it gets a little tricky because you could start still maybe try to ontologize the mind and say the other two are just delusions and there was always just the one all along. So the other thing you can do is... What is it? It's the causal... Student: So yeah, the causality. Yes. Student: Again, which requires time. Yes, so you could critique time. Right. Exactly. You could just critique causality. Causality, right. Yep. So there are... But interestingly, it's with Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla. Śāntarakṣita in particular really kind of favored somewhat that more phenomenological one. Neither one nor many analysis of experience itself. But causality is also... Causal critique and critique of time are also like effective. But because there's a kind of sequencing, an experiential sequencing, they and that experiential sequencing is actually found quite explicitly both in the um...uh when we look at these authors in the Śāntarakṣita's... It's not so obvious in Jñānagarbha, although I don't quite remember, I haven't looked at it in a while. It's very clear in Śāntarakṣita's Ornament of Mādhyamika. And then it's also very clear in the um... in the stages of meditation, the Bhāvanākrama, which Kamalaśīla wrote in Tibet as kind of part of that debate. And so you have this sequencing from extern... analysis of external objects to analy... which leads to Yogācāra, which then eventually ends in Mādhyamika. And he cites this verse, or series of verses, from the Lankāvatāra-sūtra, which is a sūtra that both Yogācāra philosophers and Mādhyamika philosophers will cite. cittamātraṃ samāruhya bāhyam arthaṃ na kalpayet tathatālambane sthitvā cittamātram atikramet cittamātram atikramya nirābhāsam atikramet nirābhāsasthito yogī mahāyānaṃ sa paśyati anābhogagatiḥ śāntā praṇidhānair viśodhitā jñānaṃ nirātmakaṃ śreṣṭhaṃ nirābhāsena paśyati Bringing it to mere mind, one does not conceptualize an external object. So there's that word, cittamātra. It's just mind. Right? But you really... This is just mind, what you're seeing. Abiding in the focus that is suchness, meaning the emptiness of the subject-object duality, one transcends mere mind. Transcending mere mind one transcends to non-appearance. We're going to talk about why that is soon. The yoga of abiding in non-appearance sees the Mahāyāna, effortless, abode, peaceful, purified by aspirations. That term effortless is really key and we'll talk about that too. The essence-less supreme awareness sees without appearance. So this is the sort of sequencing that we're talking about which ends in non-dual awareness that is the emptiness awareness. It's the awareness that is the awareness, the ult... the awareness of the ultimate, although of implies an object. So this is what it means for these philosophers to be knowing emptiness, to be in that state of primordial non-dual awareness that is not conceptualizing the three spheres of the knower, the action of knowing, and the object known. Okay? But that still leaves us with this ques... two questions. One of them is, what exactly is that kind of knowing? And second, where do we get it? Like, you know... Can we, can we go to IKEA and pick up a box of non-dual awareness or something? Like? How do we acquire it? So to answer both of those questions, we're going to have to look at something, um, uh, a style of approach to the nature of awareness that the three Easterners rely on very heavily, especially Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla, which is one of the Yogācāra philosophers, Dharmakīrti. Okay? And uh, and I'll just say that, you know just to like, make it uh, to reassure you, you don't have to go get non-dual awareness, because I have some I can give to you, no, because you already have it in every moment of awareness. There's an aspect of awareness, even in deluded awareness, that is already non-dual. And that's how this... So we're talking about this in philosophical terms, of course, in practice, this is what then leads to these Mahāmudrā and Dzogchen styles of practice that are about the nature of the mind. But also, there's quite a robust philosophical account about why that makes sense. I will say that one of the things in the context of practice is that uh, the advantage to uh, to doing philosophical work is that it can lead you, it can help to clarify, like, why are we doing what we do? The disadvantage to it is that it can sort of conceptualize, you can turn the nature of mind, non-dual awareness, into a kind of conceptual object. And because the arguments, like are convincing, you can think you really know what you're talking about. Kind of like me, I don't really know what I'm talking about, but I think I do. Right? So that's a problem. So sometimes the non-dual traditions, they actually uh, like, kind of discourage too much of this type of philosophical work. All right? So we need to be cautious about it. We're going to talk about some of the techniques later, but now let's get into this model, because this is actually very helpful, I think. We're going to learn a kind of model of non-dual awareness that then is the basis for the types of practices that you find in Mahāmudrā and Dzogchen. And Dharmakīrti, as it turns out, is extremely influential for this tradition. Not always recognized, but he is very influential. So let's just assume there's external objects. So this thing is representing an external object. You know, really it's just representing a cause. So there's some stuff that causes an interaction with your eye, with the mechanism that produces visual consciousness, and we'll call it the eye faculty for the moment. And then what happens is that this produces what's called a phenomenal form of the object in consciousness. So the blue box represents consciousness. And then at the same time, a phenomenal form of the subject simultaneously arises. Okay? So you get what we've been talking about, right? You look at this, and what's happening is there's a form of this arising in consciousness and a sense of subjectivity arising with it. And a key part of this is what's called sahopalambha-niyama, or a lhen-chik mig-nge in Tibetan, which is that you can't have one without the other. If you've got a sense of subjectivity, you've got an object. If you've got an object, you've got a sense of subjectivity. You can't, like, drop the object and remain in some pure subjective, you know, your pure subjectivity can't stay. Subjectivity dissipates when objects dissipate. So that's why when people experience non-dual states, you know, part of what can be, depending how they get into them, you know, like if you're using, like, a psychedelic drug or something like that, sometimes it's very confusing for people because, like, they don't know, like, I'm gone. Right? I imagine in your work you hear those kinds of reports, like, I'm not there. That's because the subjectivity is gone. But consciousness isn't gone. Right? Yes?
Studetn: Um, so if you're only in this subjectivity state, there is no object? You can't be in the only subjectivity state. Student: Ah, that's the point. You can't. You can't. If you're... it would look like this. Yeah. If you have no object, you don't have any subject. Student: All right. So you just... You can't be in a pure subject. Student: And if it's just pure awareness, then? Then it has to look like this. Student: Yeah. Can you also describe that? Or does this prevent you from using language at all before you try to conceptualize it or objectify it? It becomes extremely difficult to make a description. Why? Why? There's a reason. We know the reason. Student: Because language was evolved to basically talk about things out there. Which means it was evolved... more precisely, it was evolved to talk... to uh, uh, guide action in the world by an agent. So if there's no sense of agency, how are you going to talk, you like... the, the, both world and self are gone. Right? So in that context, you know, saying anything is like, I don't know what to say. Right? So the indescribability or ineffability of those types of experiences is easily explained in this model. If you assume that conceptual... If you're not a realist about you know, language, uh, uh, it's not because somehow you can no longer see the real categories in the world. It's that the mechanism that enables you to generate, construct categories is not operative because it requires there to be both a subject and an object. A presentation of subject and object in awareness.
Student: But can we use memory here to reflect on this experience? And objectify it and then talk about it? That's what people do, isn't it? Yes. That's right. And so then people... And then there are going to be different versions of it. Like... there is a... we'll come back to this, but there's like contentless versions, completely contentless. Where you're like, you're not experiencing anything. There's no content, but there's awareness. And here that... so remember that metaphor we spoke about before. Let's go back to this for a second, actually, because I think we didn't quite complete this. So the, so prabhāsvara, or prakāśa, which I'm just going to conflate, like lots of other people do, uh, is this luminosity. So on the one hand is a sort of metaphor, which is in this model, okay, in this model, What's... both the objects... but the... What are the phenomenal form of the subject and the phenomenal form of the object? What are they made out of?
Basically, mind, right, they are, right? Especially if we're being substan... If we say this is matter and this side is mind, then this stuff is made out of mind, okay? So what's going on here is, it's not like when you see something, it's not like you're seeing, there's, there's a... you think that the mystic... Isn't it nice that I made your subjectivity smiling? Your smiley face, you think that's doing the action of seeing, but it's not. It's just a structural feature. Okay? It's not doing anything. But both are being presented in awareness. You're aware of both. Like, as you look at the vase, the sense of being looking at, being the one looking at the vase, or the sense of someone's looking at the vase. Subjectivity is being presented even while you're looking at the vase. Right? So they're both presented. We're going to come back to that more. They're both presented like the light is turned on. So whatever is, so to speak, kind of in this box, whatever is in consciousness is presented, whether it's objects or subjects or whatever. So the light's on. But certain states where you kind of have no content, the light's on, but there's nothing in the room, so to speak. It's just light. So... Uh, so that's where that idea of luminosity becomes actually a phenomenal description. Everyone understand what I mean? Okay, we're going to come back to that. Yes?
Student: Would you describe that, we said, structural feature of the subject, or I guess of the subject, object, reality? Right, intentionality in Western philosophy, yep. Um as thought or thought-based, or is it something of its own right? No, it's preconceptual. Definitely preconceptual, yep. And which also like Western phenomenologists would agree, it's like prereflective.
So let's look at that same thing now in a slightly different model with, with temporality added into it, or the time sequence added into it. So like in time one, you've got this interaction. In time two, there's a present. And for now, we can say that this thing is an external object, or really a bundle of atoms. But um... you, you know, what's going to happen eventually in Yogācāra is said, well, there's no need to say that the cause is like different kind of stuff you can get rid of This model still works if you get rid of substance dualism. If you say there's mind stuff and physical stuff, it works. If you say there's, you know, this stuff out here is actually made of the same kind of stuff here, it works. It's just a causal mechanism where there's something interacting with, with the, whatever uh, mechanism allows consciousness to produce experiences. And so there's a cause which constrains this content. And this is, yea these, and in like the waking state, this kind of, these constraints are shared in some fashion. Okay? Got that? So time one. Now, the main thing that's very important to understand is that on this model, just like, you know, much of the Abhidharma models, these things, the reason this is dotted and looks like this is that this is in time two, this has stopped existing. Everything is just a moment. So in the previous, so when we get uh, here, in this moment, what arises is a representation of the subject, a phenomenal form of the subject and a phenomenal form of the object, just in that moment. And then they produce in the next moment consciousness, or it may take a few moments, what happens is you get now the conceptualization, oh, vase. Okay? Because you care about this thing. You only conceptualize the stuff that's relevant to you, not your whole visual field. And then part of the way to think about that is what's happening previously in consciousness is there's all kinds of stuff going on, which I call the gunk. That's what the gunk is, right? Now you've got your worries and concerns, your emotional states and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So this, you see the color here is different than this. That's cause this is not like a picture of reality. This is already conditioned by your own particular whatever. Okay? Including the kinds of sense faculties that's not just, that's not just particular to you, maybe. Maybe you have unique glasses or whatever, or are colorblind, but also we're humans. So we don't see the world the way bats do, for example. But bats, this is happening for bats too, but they have a different kind of sensory world in which they're living, right? But we share the constraints, we have a shared world with bats. Okay, so this is a non-conceptual moment. And this is the conceptual moment, okay? And there's a lot more we could say, like there are whole lot's of a, li... there's kind of a world model that is part of the gunk, and that world model is relevant to how you conceptualize stuff, and there's a self-model that goes with the world model. An important feature here is that, as we can see here, like there's the gunk, and the gunk also, there's subjectivity. So there's a sense, as long as there's something kind of going on, presented in consciousness, which is, which is what's always happening in the waking state, except in extraordinary circumstances, your uh, uh, you also have a sense of subjectivity. But this only lasts a moment. That's why this sense of subjectivity is not the agent knowing this object. Because to be the agent, you have to be present, and then you do something. But this agent is already, this one is not doing this. It's not like engaging with this, such that it then knows it. Right? Because it's just momentary. There's an illusion of continuity of subjectivity, but the claim is that in reality, that representa, that phenomenal presentation is momentary. Okay? Is everyone clear about that, more or less? Yes, Rowan?
Student: In the non-conceptual moment, the blue circle that we see, we call that still an object? Yes. Student: And the smiley face is subject? Yes. Student: And do they arise exactly simultaneously? Yes. Student: Or is there like a nanosecond difference? No, they are simultaneous. Student: They are exactly simultaneous. Okay, yeah, gotcha. Which is why the subject can't be something, doing something to the object as an agent, because they're simultaneous. Right? So you're, so if you just really examine this in your experience, right, so part of the contemplative practice is actually examining that momentary experience. What's happening? And that sense of seeing a visual object, you know, visual, in the styles of Samatha, in Mahāmudrā, for example, often use visual objects, and we're very visual, unlike some other organisms, we're very visual. We have really good eyesight compared to a lot of other organisms, and we're very visually oriented. So that, you know, you just sort of are observing the sense of there being an object and a subject, and part of what you're learning is to observe that without, in a sense, getting caught in it.
Okay? So, that's uh, uh um... that said, this is very important to know, and it's not just a theory, it's experiential. It's like really challenging you to say, does this make sense in your experience? But that requires kind of, you know, that's a contemplative practice. That's not, you're not going to just get there just sitting here now. You need to have, you need to settle the mind, quiet the mind, and develop a certain kind of awareness that we'll talk a little more about. Okay, so now, when this is talking about recognizing the object as, like, you're seeing this, you go, oh, that's, you know, there's that, my vase. Okay? Most of the time, this, this is what's happening, so that when we do this conceptualization, the thing that we're interested in is, you know, whatever caused this image. Right? Because we're trying, well, why? Why are we interested in that?
Why do we conceptualize it? Yeah, to act skillfully in the world, because we want to get the stuff we need and avoid the stuff that'll hurt us or whatever. So we're just like, you know, that's why, so we're like very object-focused, object-focused, object-focused. And so this, this phenomenal form of the object is in most of our ordinary experiences playing the dominant role, okay? But there are times when something else happens, all right, when something else becomes more obvious. So let's so, let's say, you know, we're in the lounge downstairs, okay, and someone comes running in and, you know, they say, you gotta come outside, gotta, gotta, look, look! And then we see, going outside, we see this, right? My favorite Gomde picture. Of course, Mickey, before he runs outside, grabs his camera, because he always has his camera, but. Right? We see this, which really is quite spectacular, isn't it? I mean, really. And then we come back inside, and I say to you, and let's just say you were completely absorbed in this, like, at which we were, right? I mean, it's like, like, holy, like, whoa! Okay, and we're seeing that, and then you come back inside and I say to you, how do you feel? Why you were looking at it? Do you say to me, I don't know how I felt, because I was totally focused on that object, and I was not paying attention to my feelings, so let me go back outside, and then I'll quickly look in to check how I'm feeling. Is that, does anyone feel that that's what they do? Or is the memory of the experience, does it include your sense, does it include things that are not about the object, like your feelings? Are you getting me, my point? Like, you know something, then do I, do you say, do I have, you know, I say, if you say to me, oh, I felt this amazing feeling of awe, and I say to you, are you sure you were feeling that? Do you have any doubt you were feeling it?
No. But were you, uh, were you paying attention to your feelings as an object, like were you returning in and checking? No. For example, let's say a bus is running at you, right, and you just jump out of the way, and I see you there, and then, you know, and I say, you know, how did you feel while the bus was running at you? You know, and you say, oh, I don't know, I was just paying attention to the bus, I don't, I can't remember how I was feeling. So I'll go back out in the front of the bus and look in real quick. So this, like the philosopher mouse, if our, if the state of our organism, our subjectivity, how we're feeling, are we afraid, and so on, things like emotions, which are about guiding action, which are information to guide action, like if you say I want this and I don't want that, what's telling you you want this or you don't want that? Your emotions. But if you had to like constantly check inward to see like, instead of it's the philosopher mouse, maybe it's like, you know, the, the Alexithymic prehistoric mouse who doesn't do well at identifying emotions. And it's like, oh, saber-toothed tiger's coming at me. How do I feel? I don't know, let me check.
Okay? So let me just do a little more. Okay? So there's presentation, simultaneous presentation, we already have said this, that the subject, sense of subjectivity is presented along with the object, and under certain circumstances, that sense of subjectivity is presented such that you actually make a conceptualization based on the subjectivity, not on the object, based on the subject form, not on the object form. Like for example, oh, I'm upset. You know, let's say you're in the middle of a conversation and you're having a debate or something. And then you notice, oh, I'm getting a little too worked up.
Okay? And then you say, oh, when you do that, I'm getting too worked up. You're still, you're focusing on like you're really trying to win the debate or whatever maybe, but you then hopefully notice before you lose a friend, win the debate but lose the friend, you notice how you're feeling.
All right? And there would be various reasons why you notice that. Some would be that this is especially intense. Some would be that you'd have a task set, something you're trying to be mindful about, like your emotions. So that would trigger this as salient. You'd notice it. It's important to you. But in any case, this is not where while you're talking, you have to constantly check in, check in, check in. That's always being presented to you. All right? So this is the idea of what's called reflexive awareness. Okay? And it's happening in every moment of consciousness. So the idea here is that these two things, the phenomenal form of the object and the phenomenal form of the subject arise in each moment with cons, with uh, um, identical to, just they are consciousness. And also at the same time, they're both being presented reflexively. Consciousness is knowing both, reflexively. And I'm going to explain what reflexivity means in a moment. But did you need to ask your question now or you want to hear that explanation first?
Student: Um, so it relates to the example of the rainbows above Gomde. Yes. You said something like, okay, you see it and then you go inside and somebody asks you how it was, and... Right. and you immediately are able to respond without checking in, right? Because the memory includes the sense of your subjectivity. Student: Yeah, but at the same time memory or recall includes also your current state, your current emotions, which also color your recall experience. Yes, they do. Yeah, certainly. So we could say, you know, we could wait until you've calmed down and then ask you the question. But let's do it in a more simple way, okay? Watch this. Do you see this? Yeah, okay. Do you have a sense that there's someone seeing it? Like subjectivity? Student: Yes. Are you sure? Student: Yeah. Are you really the one seeing it? Like, do you feel like... Student: I feel like I'm seeing it, yeah. Maybe it's actually Daniel who's seeing it? No. No. Like, is there any doubt that there's a sense of subjectivity? Student: No. Do you have to turn in and check to see whether you're the one seeing it? Student: I think there is a certain attitude through which I give you this... respond to these questions. Because I asked you. Student: Yeah. There are some demand characteristics present. Yeah. Right? If I ask you, then you kind of like do the intern thing, but... Or, okay, so, uh, like, if I make a sound, you know, where do you want, buh, buh, buh, Buh! Did you hear the sound? Student: Yes. Do you have a sense that you were the one who heard the sound or was somebody else? Student: Yes, me. It's you, right. Is that like just part of the memory of hearing the sound?
Did you eat lunch today? Student: Yes. Do you have... is your memory of lunch like, was that me eating lunch or was it somebody else? Maybe Ava was actually eating lunch? Student: That's what I'm... No, yeah, yeah, it was included, yeah. Yeah, right? Student: But I have to look also. It's not like... If you're the memory, you have to... Yeah, you have to bring up the memory, but the idea is that that's encoded in the memory even though you weren't paying attention to it. So this is actually what phenomenology, Western phenomenology is saying. It's like that structure is invariant in ordinary experience, but it's presented pre-reflectively. It's not like you have to, you know, examine is there a subject. There's a sense of subjectivity is included in objects even while... So while you're focusing on an object, de facto subjectivity is presented. So that's why it's called reflexive. Let me explain that term, okay? So one of the best ways to talk about this is to talk about these languages that have reflexive pronouns and actually in Sanskrit and in Tibetan the words self, this is sometimes translated as self-awareness, sva saṃvitti, sva means self, rang rig རང་རིག་ in Tibetan, rang རང་. Uh, that's actually grammatically is a reflexive pronoun. Like, but it's more obvious in certain languages like romance languages such as French. Anyone speak French? A little bit of French? Okay. Or a little bit of Spanish? A little bit? Okay. So if I say in Spanish, yo hablo Espanol, that means I speak Spanish. But if you say se habla Espanol, like there's sometimes there'll be, you know, a sign in a store in the US, like, aqui se habla Espanol. Uh... Oh, interesting sound. Uh, here, in, in English we have to turn that into a passive. Here Spanish is spoken. But actually it's reflexive. It takes a transitive verb. I speak Spanish, and it makes it intransitive. It's like Spanish speaks itself. Or je vois ça. I see that. As opposed to ça se voi. So the se is the same as the Spanish reflexive pronoun and it takes the transitive verb to see and it makes it intransitive. So this kind of knowing is often called intransitive awareness. Like the transitivity, the sense of an agent doing something is coming from that structure. But the awareness is actually intransitive. There isn't an agent, someone outside looking in like this
to see awareness itself, like to look at your subjectivity. You don't need that because awareness just presents. The only reason one might go to this point is if they are very uncomfortable with the idea that, uh, that uh, of selflessness. Like if you really need there to be somebody that's a self, then there are, I think, leads to these kinds of philosophical attitudes. But if you just say the simplest explanation is just that awareness is intransitive. You don't need another agent to know that sense of subjectivity. You don't need someone from the outside looking in to say, oh yes, that's me seeing that, what's called a second order awareness. Right? It just intransitively presents both without there being an agent doing the transitive action of knowing. Okay. So this is from Thomas, Thomas Metzinger who has written about this. Uh... This stands for good old fashioned intentionality. Okay. And there's a sense in which like, our ordinary sense of there's a self uh, there's a self kind of looking out there. I just realized this slide is... But act... And, and if our sense of knowing our subjectivity required a second order awareness, then we'd have to see that from the standpoint of a subject. But then we'd need to know, okay, so I'm the one that saw that. How do I know that? Well, because I'm looking at myself seeing that, which means I need another subject to see that. And then, of course, how do I know that? I need another subject and I get an infinite regress. So instead of that, you just have this, what Metzinger calls a phenomenal model of the intentionality relation, the subject-object relation. Our sense of subject and object is simultaneously presented in experience without there being some other sense of subjectivity looking at it. Okay?
So part of what that means is that when we make these kinds of reports about our emotional states, about our body position, like, you know, if I say, okay, ready, here comes the sound. One, two, three. Beeep.
Everyone hear the sound? Yes? Were you sitting down when you heard the sound?
Do you, the way you know that, you go, well, I remember coming in sitting down and then uh, I didn't, I don't remember getting up, so I must have been sitting down. Or is it like your memory of the sound includes a sense of the body position, includes a sense of your space, your spacial, your, uh, your what's called proprioception, includes a sense of being the one knowing. So you're knowing, but how are you knowing that you're the one knowing? Are you, is there like, again, is it like this? Or like this? Excuse me.
Or do you not need that?
Okay? So when you're knowing the object, you're knowing it as an object. Along with that is the sense of subjectivity. Like, again, you know, beeep. bubup? it's the heart, you know, bubup, bubup, bubup, coronary disease.
It's like you knew the one hearing it. Right? And it's not like you have to go, you're not confused about that, are you? There are some psychopathologies in which people do, like, am I really the one hearing? Or is someone, is there, they, this, there's a dysfunction in their system, and they kind of can't, they can't identify with their own subjectivity sometimes. Feels like somebody else is doing it. But there's still subjectivity. They just don't identify with it. In a pathological way. So you know that. It's like, there's no question. Oh, yeah, I hear, yeah. Are you making yourself an object to know that? No. So that means you're knowing your sense of subjectivity without it being in a subject-object structure. Correct? What kind of knowing is knowing that is not in subject-object structure? Intransitive knowing was another term for that. Reflexive and non-dual. So you have an aspect of non-dual awareness in every moment of your experience. Already. But it's presented in a dualistic str... as part of a dualistic structure.
Okay?
Let's go. So I think we should take a break before people either collapse from exhaustion, confusion or something else. All right. We'll take a break until 20 after. Is that good? And now you can just sort of
try to see if you can see yourself.
There are people who will insist, no, actually, I'm constantly doing it like flip. While there are other people who will say, actually, no, that's not, your sense of subjectivity is not a part of your phenomenal experience. It's an illusion. You have a second-order cognition that when you need it, it kicks in. But phenomenally, you don't have a subjectivity. And I think those people are, you know, maybe not paying enough attention to their experience, possibly? Or else they're just really different. But anyway, so let's take a break. Ten minutes. And we'll see you back at 20 after.
Okay, So maybe again we start with any questions, so let me invite you again once more to just settle the mind for a moment.
And then bring up our motivation, in the Mahāyāna we aspire to achieve awakening for the sake of all beings. Okay, so...
Uh, any questions?
Let me ask you a question. You heard Khenpo say something about the idea that things are merely mentally imputed are merely mentally imputed tok pe tak sam རྟོག་པའི་བཏགས་པ or conceptually imputed How do you think that applies to so that's in Mādhyamika does that work in Yogācāra, too?
No, I mean like if we say this exists, that... That it exists when I say it exists, I assert it exists. That, that is its existence is actually imputed mentally it doesn't objectively exist
So we end up in the Mādhyamika position we end up saying that all things... Right, that uh... When we're talking about things as real that, that their reality is imputed mentally imputed. Does that work in Yogācāra, too? I would try and I would say no. Because Yogācāran's says that they are objects do, are perceived by the mind. But that doesn't mean that they don't exist outwardly. They have elements. Let me ask you this, this is a vase, correct? Yes. If I say the vase exists for Yogācāra, is that an imputation or are they saying the vase exists? They are saying the vase exists because there is a mind that perceives the vase. Is your mind a vase? No, so it has to be other than the vase. My mind is a vase. Somehow some teachings might say It's an empty vase. It's so what is the vase, you're seeing what is the what are you seeing? I'm seeing an object that is outside... Right, and then Yogācāra says what you're actually seeing is... my own consciousness. Although my is already a little bit... Because my means belonging to a sense of subjectivity, which is the basis for the construction of a self. No, I'm seeing just matrix basically, right? Kind of yes. Right? So that's the... so that's not a vase.
And existence to say that something exists, there's something you've got to be specifying that exists. Right? So this does not mean from the yo... there is a way of construing Yogācāra in which they would totally agree with that Mādhyamika position. And there's a way of construing Yogācāra that turns it more into Cittamātra, mind only. Where uh, you know you're trying to really kind of make the mind into, your trying to... make the mind into a thing that exists in some fashion. Even though it's not a thing, cause you can't... Why can't it be a thing?
What would it me for it to be a thing? It would be an object and who would it be an object for? Yea but the subject is also part of the mind. So how does that work? We're going to try to find out how that works. Yeah, so this was on the foil on that one presentation where you had two ways to understand Yogācāra, right? Yes. One of them is more... So they both have a kind of affirming negation when they say emptiness. There's definitely a sense in which they want to leave experience itself in place. But you can go to a certain, like further point of ontologizing. And the problem with that, even for the type of Yogācāra that doesn't do that, which slips into Mādhyamika basically, becomes very... it almost seems like it is Mādhyamika. And there are certain aspects of that kind of tradition that we're not going to talk about, but, you know, like this would be so-called... these are non-aspectarian Yogācārans, just in case you're wondering. Nirākāra, as they say, not Satyākāra, but Alīkākāra, Namzungbai namdzopa. And I in chart... they the great, what is it, 15th century um... 15th to 16th century scholar Sakya Chokden, Tibetan scholar Sakya Chokden likes to say that that version of Yogācāra in some ways really you can kind of equate with Mādhyamika. And that's where you're not really ontologizing the mind. But there's a way of doing Yogācāra that does ontologize the mind in which you really want to strongly assert that we're talking about it existing, being. And here's the thing that's very important with that word in Sanskrit, that is challenging for us, is that this word is coming from uh, the... This is the Sanskrit word sat, and which is like, uh... This is actually the um, the neuter present participle from the verb us to be. This is the neuter nominative singular. So, that, so something is sat, it is existent, you could say. And you can talk about satya or sattā, which more or less are the same, the existenthood. But it also means to be... So you could say something is existent, it's sat, it's real, that's sat, it's present, that's sat, and even it's true, it's sat. So the Tibetan translations usually use the term den pa བདེན་པ , which is translating just the true part. But it doesn't really capture all the full range of this word. So to say that something exists is to say that in some sense it is present. And this goes into, even for the non-Buddhist traditions in India, a kind of emphasis on like substance. So if you want to say that abstractions are real, that they have sattā, right? That like, for example, the vasness of the vase, unlike a purely platonic approach where you can perhaps assert the existence of those abstractions completely independent of substance. Even the non-Buddhist schools that wanted to say those abstractions are real still said that in some sense that reality only makes sense when you're talking about them as in hearing and substances. Okay? So there's a sense in which the very notion to be real, to exist, and then to have a statement about them refer successfully, i.e. the statement is true, that those are about like things being concretely present, actually. So to be real is to be concretely present, very interestingly, just sort of culturally for Indian thinkers going way back. And what that means is that, right, if it's present, it's also... So one of the ways this is articulated, not just in um, not just in Buddhist works again, is that to be real is to be knowable and nameable, is to be abhidheyatva and jñeyatva, knowable, jñeyatva, and nameable, abhidheyatva. So in San... so in, but of course if something's knowable, then it's got to be knowable for some knower. And if it's nameable, it's nameable in relation to someone who is giving it a designation, Right? In relation to language use. So the minute we start to talk about uh, you know, something being present for some knower, that it's knowable in that sense, is that we're already kind of into that triadic structure of agent, object, and action, and here in the context of the action of knowing, right? And that really seems to, uh, uh... The minute we try to assert existence, we're already into duality. Okay, so if you're trying to be an over... So if you're trying to be a Yogācāra, and... and yet sort of affirm the existence of some kind of causal continuity of the mind, or even some non-causal momentary experience as sat, you've got a problem because you're... merely saying something is existant is already falling into duality. Right? So that's, I think, a very key thing for us to keep in mind. And so when we ask, uh, when we look at Yogācāra, go back to this slide and say, okay, it does not assert that the object pole collapses into the subject pole, so the form of Yogācāra that isn't strongly asserting the existence of the mind is looking pretty uh, pretty okay for Mādhyamika. It does not assert that extramental objects are unreal, and whatever remains is not extramental. And it asserts that our only access to the world is through our, or in experience. But, and remember we had one more line, which actually is missing on this slide, which is that, however, unlike western phenomenology, it doesn't assert intentionality or subject-object structure as an invariant in consciousness. But so of these three things, what's the one that Mādhyamika is going to be? Even with regular Yogācāra, well, I shouldn't say regular, even with the type of Yogācāra that is not strongly ontologizing the mind, asserting like there's a real mind, this is still, like, not quite okay.
So what you therefore need to do is bring a Mādhyamika critique to the uh, to the mind itself. So in this process, this is going to be then the, the uh um, uh... you know, the procedure of, this is going to then lead to the emergence of the Yogācāra Mādhyamika school. Not really school, that style of philosophy. Remember those three, these are the Three Eastern Mādhyamikas, Jñānagarbha, Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla. And Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla, Śāntarakṣita went to Tibet and established uh, the first monastery in Tibet, Samye Monastery, and I think it's 755, someone can look it up. And then uh, and then his student Kamalaśīla came, after he passed away, his student Kamalaśīla came to defend a particular kind of approach that you could say, and, you know, there was allegedly a kind of um, debate, they say, between him and e uh, and a Chinese scholar practitioner. And the upshot of that debate is where Kamalaśīla is basically kind of arguing against a type of mind only approach, essentially, for our purposes. So, uh, and he writes a famous text that we're going to look at in a second, a very short piece of it. And what these Yogācāra Mādhyamikas are going to do is they're going to use this kind of sequential method, which is kind of what we've done this week in some ways, so you kind of start out by looking at, uh, you know, sort of our naive assumption about the material world. For example, that this is a whole, that in that course of doing that, you then critique the naive notion of the self that's constituted by that. And one way to think about that, that this is primarily going after self as object, like our self model as something that we, that is our conceptualization of ourselves. So part of that is also what, and sometimes we call this as the narrative self, like the story we tell of ourselves. And there is a, and the short version of it is just you are not the story you tell of yourself, which, you know, therapeutically can be tremendously helpful. But also that very sense that there's kind of a self that has some kind of a core and changing existence. What would be the problem with that from the Buddhist standpoint, if you had a... if you had that capital S, Self, unchanging, absolute, self-existent, and so on? What's one of the main problems with that idea, besides the fact that it's incoherent? Yeah, Ava. Karma couldn't work out? Or it would work all the time, meaning you couldn't change. So if you're in the state of suffering, that's it, you're stuck. But if I had a self, then that would mean um, there is no cause and effect that would be in. As well, then like that, right, that self couldn't be engaged causally with the world. But if somehow we think, oh, it still engages causally with the world, if we say that somehow it fundamentally can't change, then if it's in a state of suffering, it can never get out of that state. There's also that. Lots of unhappy results that come from this kind of a essentialization of the self. You know, and as a sidebar here, part of what's helpful when people do practices like mindfulness in therapeutic contexts, where they do kind of secular mindfulness, one of the things that's very powerful for many people, sometimes there's types of psychopathologies that involve very negative self models, for example, in depression. And what people can discover through the practice of mindfulness is that the story of themselves is just a story. It's not reality. And that can be very helpful. So that's part of what's happening, like the way we conceptualize ourselves kind of as an object, our self model as something that we can think about is critiqued. And then we can also, then that, say that, so when we do this sequence, though, we went through historically, we went from that early period, which basically does that, you know, takes apart our naive sense of the material world, takes apart our naive sense of the Self. And then in this sequence, it goes to Yogācāra, doesn't go to Mādhyamika. So historically, Mādhyamika comes first. But in this sequencing of analysis, Yogācāra comes next. And then these scholars, the Eastern Mādhyamikas, the Mādhyamikas from the East, they, meaning the East of India, they then say, okay, actually, so you think there's really just a bunch of infinitesimally small bits of matter? Well, guess what? That's not right either. And there isn't even infinitesimally small bits of consciousness either. So, again, it's not just idealism. All of that falls apart. But first, they then in the way that falls apart is they use the Yogācāra analysis, that sense of that duality between self and world collapses. But then you're left with this prob... So that's the kind of next part of the sequence. So we didn't do that sequence. We did it historically. But as a practice, it kind of moves in that sequence. So this would be in Śāntarakṣita's text, the Madhyamakālaṃkāra, the Umagyen དབུ་མ་རྒྱན the ornament of the Mādhyamika. And then you need to do something more to bring it all the way up to Mādhyamika. So what more would you do to bring it up to Mādhyamika?
What arguments could you use that we already know? So what the Yogācāra is saying is... Remember, let's go back to the three natures. You're saying there's a luminous empty mind, but they mean by empty, they mean the emptiness of subject-object duality. So the dependent nature, the causal flow of mind, when it's misunderstood, one takes, or when in, in the state of ignorance, you take the dualistic appearances are taken to be real. There's a world out there, there's a Self in here, there's a subjectivity in here. And now this kind of critique is going to critique that, right? And what you're critiquing is not self as object, but self as subject. The very sense of subjectivity as being who you are. That's what Yogācāra is doing. So like, again, as you see, you know, as you see the vase, or you see me, there's a sense of it's out there, which means, you know, there's somebody looking out from behind your eyes, so to speak. So that's a different sense of self, a subtler sense of self, a self as the subjectivity that's beholding objects. Okay? That's certainly also in that earlier version of self, but that one tends to be more about like looking at yourself and saying, Oh, this must be like this, like that. Here, it's kind of from the first person standpoint, your first personhood, and our identification with first personhood of, you know, being the one seeing, that is critiqued.
Right? Which is, when you really contemplate that is kind of quite something like there's a sense of subjectivity. Right? But that's not you.
Right? So it's happening, but that's not you.
Anyone just want to run away now? Get me out of here. Uh, so what, so when we're seeing that, we're seeing either with content or without content, we're seeing that that subject object structure is collapsed, is gone, and consciousness continues, but there's no identification with the subject pole as the self.
Okay, you're conscious, but you don't identify with this, that one who's seeing as you.
Okay, then. So the probl... so when we think of that, about this, so that's a very powerful... So first you critique like the external world and the naive self as object. Then you critique even the structure of experience and the subtler sense of self as subject. The subjectivity. But that's still not good enough for Mādhyamika. Even if you're not totally ontologizing the mind, the worry is that you're still going to have a subtle ontologizing of the dependent nature itself. Right? That we're gonna, we're gonna think that this you know, this is somehow wuh uh, this is somehow real. Right? So this is somehow, this is like, we're going to try to hang our ontological hat here, which there were non-Buddhist traditions of non-duality as well, like Advaita Vedānta, that does something pretty similar and then turns this into a kind of transcendental self. Not a self that's a subjectivity, exactly, although somewhat with the idea of the witness consciousness, but something that's sort of, you know, beyond your ordinary subjectivity, like a big self. Right? So the Buddhists, so the Mādhyamikas are concerned about that.
So what do you, how would you, what you guys all now are Mādhyamikas, you know the arguments. Right? So this is your test. What, what's, go ahead. Okay, how would that work? What's same or different?
Student: So, one level would be to say, okay, is the dependent nature same or different than the constructed nature? Yeah. Student: Or we can address... You almost got it. Student: Or, or, or... What is the constructed nature? It is nothing other than the dependent nature appearing a certain way. Student: Right. How does it appear? Student: In experience? With subject object duality. So now you've got, now you've got something that's... What's the one here? Neither one nor many, what's the one? Student: That they are the same? No. The mind. Student: The mind. Okay, yes, yes. And the two are the... Parts. Are the appearance of the phenomenal presentations of object subject. Student: Yes, yes. So you can do that. Student: Right. And that can lead to a Mādhyamika conclusion. Okay. That the one, when you do that, neither the one nor the many remains. Student: So is the mind the same as the subject and the object? Right. Student: Okay, or is it different? Right. So that is... You can do that in a way that ends in a Mādhyamika conclusion and Śāntarakṣita does that. But there's an, and... But it gets a little tricky because you could start still maybe try to ontologize the mind and say the other two are just delusions and there was always just the one all along. So the other thing you can do is... What is it? It's the causal... Student: So yeah, the causality. Yes. Student: Again, which requires time. Yes, so you could critique time. Right. Exactly. You could just critique causality. Causality, right. Yep. So there are... But interestingly, it's with Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla. Śāntarakṣita in particular really kind of favored somewhat that more phenomenological one. Neither one nor many analysis of experience itself. But causality is also... Causal critique and critique of time are also like effective. But because there's a kind of sequencing, an experiential sequencing, they and that experiential sequencing is actually found quite explicitly both in the um...uh when we look at these authors in the Śāntarakṣita's... It's not so obvious in Jñānagarbha, although I don't quite remember, I haven't looked at it in a while. It's very clear in Śāntarakṣita's Ornament of Mādhyamika. And then it's also very clear in the um... in the stages of meditation, the Bhāvanākrama, which Kamalaśīla wrote in Tibet as kind of part of that debate. And so you have this sequencing from extern... analysis of external objects to analy... which leads to Yogācāra, which then eventually ends in Mādhyamika. And he cites this verse, or series of verses, from the Lankāvatāra-sūtra, which is a sūtra that both Yogācāra philosophers and Mādhyamika philosophers will cite. cittamātraṃ samāruhya bāhyam arthaṃ na kalpayet tathatālambane sthitvā cittamātram atikramet cittamātram atikramya nirābhāsam atikramet nirābhāsasthito yogī mahāyānaṃ sa paśyati anābhogagatiḥ śāntā praṇidhānair viśodhitā jñānaṃ nirātmakaṃ śreṣṭhaṃ nirābhāsena paśyati Bringing it to mere mind, one does not conceptualize an external object. So there's that word, cittamātra. It's just mind. Right? But you really... This is just mind, what you're seeing. Abiding in the focus that is suchness, meaning the emptiness of the subject-object duality, one transcends mere mind. Transcending mere mind one transcends to non-appearance. We're going to talk about why that is soon. The yoga of abiding in non-appearance sees the Mahāyāna, effortless, abode, peaceful, purified by aspirations. That term effortless is really key and we'll talk about that too. The essence-less supreme awareness sees without appearance. So this is the sort of sequencing that we're talking about which ends in non-dual awareness that is the emptiness awareness. It's the awareness that is the awareness, the ult... the awareness of the ultimate, although of implies an object. So this is what it means for these philosophers to be knowing emptiness, to be in that state of primordial non-dual awareness that is not conceptualizing the three spheres of the knower, the action of knowing, and the object known. Okay? But that still leaves us with this ques... two questions. One of them is, what exactly is that kind of knowing? And second, where do we get it? Like, you know... Can we, can we go to IKEA and pick up a box of non-dual awareness or something? Like? How do we acquire it? So to answer both of those questions, we're going to have to look at something, um, uh, a style of approach to the nature of awareness that the three Easterners rely on very heavily, especially Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla, which is one of the Yogācāra philosophers, Dharmakīrti. Okay? And uh, and I'll just say that, you know just to like, make it uh, to reassure you, you don't have to go get non-dual awareness, because I have some I can give to you, no, because you already have it in every moment of awareness. There's an aspect of awareness, even in deluded awareness, that is already non-dual. And that's how this... So we're talking about this in philosophical terms, of course, in practice, this is what then leads to these Mahāmudrā and Dzogchen styles of practice that are about the nature of the mind. But also, there's quite a robust philosophical account about why that makes sense. I will say that one of the things in the context of practice is that uh, the advantage to uh, to doing philosophical work is that it can lead you, it can help to clarify, like, why are we doing what we do? The disadvantage to it is that it can sort of conceptualize, you can turn the nature of mind, non-dual awareness, into a kind of conceptual object. And because the arguments, like are convincing, you can think you really know what you're talking about. Kind of like me, I don't really know what I'm talking about, but I think I do. Right? So that's a problem. So sometimes the non-dual traditions, they actually uh, like, kind of discourage too much of this type of philosophical work. All right? So we need to be cautious about it. We're going to talk about some of the techniques later, but now let's get into this model, because this is actually very helpful, I think. We're going to learn a kind of model of non-dual awareness that then is the basis for the types of practices that you find in Mahāmudrā and Dzogchen. And Dharmakīrti, as it turns out, is extremely influential for this tradition. Not always recognized, but he is very influential. So let's just assume there's external objects. So this thing is representing an external object. You know, really it's just representing a cause. So there's some stuff that causes an interaction with your eye, with the mechanism that produces visual consciousness, and we'll call it the eye faculty for the moment. And then what happens is that this produces what's called a phenomenal form of the object in consciousness. So the blue box represents consciousness. And then at the same time, a phenomenal form of the subject simultaneously arises. Okay? So you get what we've been talking about, right? You look at this, and what's happening is there's a form of this arising in consciousness and a sense of subjectivity arising with it. And a key part of this is what's called sahopalambha-niyama, or a lhen-chik mig-nge in Tibetan, which is that you can't have one without the other. If you've got a sense of subjectivity, you've got an object. If you've got an object, you've got a sense of subjectivity. You can't, like, drop the object and remain in some pure subjective, you know, your pure subjectivity can't stay. Subjectivity dissipates when objects dissipate. So that's why when people experience non-dual states, you know, part of what can be, depending how they get into them, you know, like if you're using, like, a psychedelic drug or something like that, sometimes it's very confusing for people because, like, they don't know, like, I'm gone. Right? I imagine in your work you hear those kinds of reports, like, I'm not there. That's because the subjectivity is gone. But consciousness isn't gone. Right? Yes?
Studetn: Um, so if you're only in this subjectivity state, there is no object? You can't be in the only subjectivity state. Student: Ah, that's the point. You can't. You can't. If you're... it would look like this. Yeah. If you have no object, you don't have any subject. Student: All right. So you just... You can't be in a pure subject. Student: And if it's just pure awareness, then? Then it has to look like this. Student: Yeah. Can you also describe that? Or does this prevent you from using language at all before you try to conceptualize it or objectify it? It becomes extremely difficult to make a description. Why? Why? There's a reason. We know the reason. Student: Because language was evolved to basically talk about things out there. Which means it was evolved... more precisely, it was evolved to talk... to uh, uh, guide action in the world by an agent. So if there's no sense of agency, how are you going to talk, you like... the, the, both world and self are gone. Right? So in that context, you know, saying anything is like, I don't know what to say. Right? So the indescribability or ineffability of those types of experiences is easily explained in this model. If you assume that conceptual... If you're not a realist about you know, language, uh, uh, it's not because somehow you can no longer see the real categories in the world. It's that the mechanism that enables you to generate, construct categories is not operative because it requires there to be both a subject and an object. A presentation of subject and object in awareness.
Student: But can we use memory here to reflect on this experience? And objectify it and then talk about it? That's what people do, isn't it? Yes. That's right. And so then people... And then there are going to be different versions of it. Like... there is a... we'll come back to this, but there's like contentless versions, completely contentless. Where you're like, you're not experiencing anything. There's no content, but there's awareness. And here that... so remember that metaphor we spoke about before. Let's go back to this for a second, actually, because I think we didn't quite complete this. So the, so prabhāsvara, or prakāśa, which I'm just going to conflate, like lots of other people do, uh, is this luminosity. So on the one hand is a sort of metaphor, which is in this model, okay, in this model, What's... both the objects... but the... What are the phenomenal form of the subject and the phenomenal form of the object? What are they made out of?
Basically, mind, right, they are, right? Especially if we're being substan... If we say this is matter and this side is mind, then this stuff is made out of mind, okay? So what's going on here is, it's not like when you see something, it's not like you're seeing, there's, there's a... you think that the mystic... Isn't it nice that I made your subjectivity smiling? Your smiley face, you think that's doing the action of seeing, but it's not. It's just a structural feature. Okay? It's not doing anything. But both are being presented in awareness. You're aware of both. Like, as you look at the vase, the sense of being looking at, being the one looking at the vase, or the sense of someone's looking at the vase. Subjectivity is being presented even while you're looking at the vase. Right? So they're both presented. We're going to come back to that more. They're both presented like the light is turned on. So whatever is, so to speak, kind of in this box, whatever is in consciousness is presented, whether it's objects or subjects or whatever. So the light's on. But certain states where you kind of have no content, the light's on, but there's nothing in the room, so to speak. It's just light. So... Uh, so that's where that idea of luminosity becomes actually a phenomenal description. Everyone understand what I mean? Okay, we're going to come back to that. Yes?
Student: Would you describe that, we said, structural feature of the subject, or I guess of the subject, object, reality? Right, intentionality in Western philosophy, yep. Um as thought or thought-based, or is it something of its own right? No, it's preconceptual. Definitely preconceptual, yep. And which also like Western phenomenologists would agree, it's like prereflective.
So let's look at that same thing now in a slightly different model with, with temporality added into it, or the time sequence added into it. So like in time one, you've got this interaction. In time two, there's a present. And for now, we can say that this thing is an external object, or really a bundle of atoms. But um... you, you know, what's going to happen eventually in Yogācāra is said, well, there's no need to say that the cause is like different kind of stuff you can get rid of This model still works if you get rid of substance dualism. If you say there's mind stuff and physical stuff, it works. If you say there's, you know, this stuff out here is actually made of the same kind of stuff here, it works. It's just a causal mechanism where there's something interacting with, with the, whatever uh, mechanism allows consciousness to produce experiences. And so there's a cause which constrains this content. And this is, yea these, and in like the waking state, this kind of, these constraints are shared in some fashion. Okay? Got that? So time one. Now, the main thing that's very important to understand is that on this model, just like, you know, much of the Abhidharma models, these things, the reason this is dotted and looks like this is that this is in time two, this has stopped existing. Everything is just a moment. So in the previous, so when we get uh, here, in this moment, what arises is a representation of the subject, a phenomenal form of the subject and a phenomenal form of the object, just in that moment. And then they produce in the next moment consciousness, or it may take a few moments, what happens is you get now the conceptualization, oh, vase. Okay? Because you care about this thing. You only conceptualize the stuff that's relevant to you, not your whole visual field. And then part of the way to think about that is what's happening previously in consciousness is there's all kinds of stuff going on, which I call the gunk. That's what the gunk is, right? Now you've got your worries and concerns, your emotional states and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So this, you see the color here is different than this. That's cause this is not like a picture of reality. This is already conditioned by your own particular whatever. Okay? Including the kinds of sense faculties that's not just, that's not just particular to you, maybe. Maybe you have unique glasses or whatever, or are colorblind, but also we're humans. So we don't see the world the way bats do, for example. But bats, this is happening for bats too, but they have a different kind of sensory world in which they're living, right? But we share the constraints, we have a shared world with bats. Okay, so this is a non-conceptual moment. And this is the conceptual moment, okay? And there's a lot more we could say, like there are whole lot's of a, li... there's kind of a world model that is part of the gunk, and that world model is relevant to how you conceptualize stuff, and there's a self-model that goes with the world model. An important feature here is that, as we can see here, like there's the gunk, and the gunk also, there's subjectivity. So there's a sense, as long as there's something kind of going on, presented in consciousness, which is, which is what's always happening in the waking state, except in extraordinary circumstances, your uh, uh, you also have a sense of subjectivity. But this only lasts a moment. That's why this sense of subjectivity is not the agent knowing this object. Because to be the agent, you have to be present, and then you do something. But this agent is already, this one is not doing this. It's not like engaging with this, such that it then knows it. Right? Because it's just momentary. There's an illusion of continuity of subjectivity, but the claim is that in reality, that representa, that phenomenal presentation is momentary. Okay? Is everyone clear about that, more or less? Yes, Rowan?
Student: In the non-conceptual moment, the blue circle that we see, we call that still an object? Yes. Student: And the smiley face is subject? Yes. Student: And do they arise exactly simultaneously? Yes. Student: Or is there like a nanosecond difference? No, they are simultaneous. Student: They are exactly simultaneous. Okay, yeah, gotcha. Which is why the subject can't be something, doing something to the object as an agent, because they're simultaneous. Right? So you're, so if you just really examine this in your experience, right, so part of the contemplative practice is actually examining that momentary experience. What's happening? And that sense of seeing a visual object, you know, visual, in the styles of Samatha, in Mahāmudrā, for example, often use visual objects, and we're very visual, unlike some other organisms, we're very visual. We have really good eyesight compared to a lot of other organisms, and we're very visually oriented. So that, you know, you just sort of are observing the sense of there being an object and a subject, and part of what you're learning is to observe that without, in a sense, getting caught in it.
Okay? So, that's uh, uh um... that said, this is very important to know, and it's not just a theory, it's experiential. It's like really challenging you to say, does this make sense in your experience? But that requires kind of, you know, that's a contemplative practice. That's not, you're not going to just get there just sitting here now. You need to have, you need to settle the mind, quiet the mind, and develop a certain kind of awareness that we'll talk a little more about. Okay, so now, when this is talking about recognizing the object as, like, you're seeing this, you go, oh, that's, you know, there's that, my vase. Okay? Most of the time, this, this is what's happening, so that when we do this conceptualization, the thing that we're interested in is, you know, whatever caused this image. Right? Because we're trying, well, why? Why are we interested in that?
Why do we conceptualize it? Yeah, to act skillfully in the world, because we want to get the stuff we need and avoid the stuff that'll hurt us or whatever. So we're just like, you know, that's why, so we're like very object-focused, object-focused, object-focused. And so this, this phenomenal form of the object is in most of our ordinary experiences playing the dominant role, okay? But there are times when something else happens, all right, when something else becomes more obvious. So let's so, let's say, you know, we're in the lounge downstairs, okay, and someone comes running in and, you know, they say, you gotta come outside, gotta, gotta, look, look! And then we see, going outside, we see this, right? My favorite Gomde picture. Of course, Mickey, before he runs outside, grabs his camera, because he always has his camera, but. Right? We see this, which really is quite spectacular, isn't it? I mean, really. And then we come back inside, and I say to you, and let's just say you were completely absorbed in this, like, at which we were, right? I mean, it's like, like, holy, like, whoa! Okay, and we're seeing that, and then you come back inside and I say to you, how do you feel? Why you were looking at it? Do you say to me, I don't know how I felt, because I was totally focused on that object, and I was not paying attention to my feelings, so let me go back outside, and then I'll quickly look in to check how I'm feeling. Is that, does anyone feel that that's what they do? Or is the memory of the experience, does it include your sense, does it include things that are not about the object, like your feelings? Are you getting me, my point? Like, you know something, then do I, do you say, do I have, you know, I say, if you say to me, oh, I felt this amazing feeling of awe, and I say to you, are you sure you were feeling that? Do you have any doubt you were feeling it?
No. But were you, uh, were you paying attention to your feelings as an object, like were you returning in and checking? No. For example, let's say a bus is running at you, right, and you just jump out of the way, and I see you there, and then, you know, and I say, you know, how did you feel while the bus was running at you? You know, and you say, oh, I don't know, I was just paying attention to the bus, I don't, I can't remember how I was feeling. So I'll go back out in the front of the bus and look in real quick. So this, like the philosopher mouse, if our, if the state of our organism, our subjectivity, how we're feeling, are we afraid, and so on, things like emotions, which are about guiding action, which are information to guide action, like if you say I want this and I don't want that, what's telling you you want this or you don't want that? Your emotions. But if you had to like constantly check inward to see like, instead of it's the philosopher mouse, maybe it's like, you know, the, the Alexithymic prehistoric mouse who doesn't do well at identifying emotions. And it's like, oh, saber-toothed tiger's coming at me. How do I feel? I don't know, let me check.
Okay? So let me just do a little more. Okay? So there's presentation, simultaneous presentation, we already have said this, that the subject, sense of subjectivity is presented along with the object, and under certain circumstances, that sense of subjectivity is presented such that you actually make a conceptualization based on the subjectivity, not on the object, based on the subject form, not on the object form. Like for example, oh, I'm upset. You know, let's say you're in the middle of a conversation and you're having a debate or something. And then you notice, oh, I'm getting a little too worked up.
Okay? And then you say, oh, when you do that, I'm getting too worked up. You're still, you're focusing on like you're really trying to win the debate or whatever maybe, but you then hopefully notice before you lose a friend, win the debate but lose the friend, you notice how you're feeling.
All right? And there would be various reasons why you notice that. Some would be that this is especially intense. Some would be that you'd have a task set, something you're trying to be mindful about, like your emotions. So that would trigger this as salient. You'd notice it. It's important to you. But in any case, this is not where while you're talking, you have to constantly check in, check in, check in. That's always being presented to you. All right? So this is the idea of what's called reflexive awareness. Okay? And it's happening in every moment of consciousness. So the idea here is that these two things, the phenomenal form of the object and the phenomenal form of the subject arise in each moment with cons, with uh, um, identical to, just they are consciousness. And also at the same time, they're both being presented reflexively. Consciousness is knowing both, reflexively. And I'm going to explain what reflexivity means in a moment. But did you need to ask your question now or you want to hear that explanation first?
Student: Um, so it relates to the example of the rainbows above Gomde. Yes. You said something like, okay, you see it and then you go inside and somebody asks you how it was, and... Right. and you immediately are able to respond without checking in, right? Because the memory includes the sense of your subjectivity. Student: Yeah, but at the same time memory or recall includes also your current state, your current emotions, which also color your recall experience. Yes, they do. Yeah, certainly. So we could say, you know, we could wait until you've calmed down and then ask you the question. But let's do it in a more simple way, okay? Watch this. Do you see this? Yeah, okay. Do you have a sense that there's someone seeing it? Like subjectivity? Student: Yes. Are you sure? Student: Yeah. Are you really the one seeing it? Like, do you feel like... Student: I feel like I'm seeing it, yeah. Maybe it's actually Daniel who's seeing it? No. No. Like, is there any doubt that there's a sense of subjectivity? Student: No. Do you have to turn in and check to see whether you're the one seeing it? Student: I think there is a certain attitude through which I give you this... respond to these questions. Because I asked you. Student: Yeah. There are some demand characteristics present. Yeah. Right? If I ask you, then you kind of like do the intern thing, but... Or, okay, so, uh, like, if I make a sound, you know, where do you want, buh, buh, buh, Buh! Did you hear the sound? Student: Yes. Do you have a sense that you were the one who heard the sound or was somebody else? Student: Yes, me. It's you, right. Is that like just part of the memory of hearing the sound?
Did you eat lunch today? Student: Yes. Do you have... is your memory of lunch like, was that me eating lunch or was it somebody else? Maybe Ava was actually eating lunch? Student: That's what I'm... No, yeah, yeah, it was included, yeah. Yeah, right? Student: But I have to look also. It's not like... If you're the memory, you have to... Yeah, you have to bring up the memory, but the idea is that that's encoded in the memory even though you weren't paying attention to it. So this is actually what phenomenology, Western phenomenology is saying. It's like that structure is invariant in ordinary experience, but it's presented pre-reflectively. It's not like you have to, you know, examine is there a subject. There's a sense of subjectivity is included in objects even while... So while you're focusing on an object, de facto subjectivity is presented. So that's why it's called reflexive. Let me explain that term, okay? So one of the best ways to talk about this is to talk about these languages that have reflexive pronouns and actually in Sanskrit and in Tibetan the words self, this is sometimes translated as self-awareness, sva saṃvitti, sva means self, rang rig རང་རིག་ in Tibetan, rang རང་. Uh, that's actually grammatically is a reflexive pronoun. Like, but it's more obvious in certain languages like romance languages such as French. Anyone speak French? A little bit of French? Okay. Or a little bit of Spanish? A little bit? Okay. So if I say in Spanish, yo hablo Espanol, that means I speak Spanish. But if you say se habla Espanol, like there's sometimes there'll be, you know, a sign in a store in the US, like, aqui se habla Espanol. Uh... Oh, interesting sound. Uh, here, in, in English we have to turn that into a passive. Here Spanish is spoken. But actually it's reflexive. It takes a transitive verb. I speak Spanish, and it makes it intransitive. It's like Spanish speaks itself. Or je vois ça. I see that. As opposed to ça se voi. So the se is the same as the Spanish reflexive pronoun and it takes the transitive verb to see and it makes it intransitive. So this kind of knowing is often called intransitive awareness. Like the transitivity, the sense of an agent doing something is coming from that structure. But the awareness is actually intransitive. There isn't an agent, someone outside looking in like this
to see awareness itself, like to look at your subjectivity. You don't need that because awareness just presents. The only reason one might go to this point is if they are very uncomfortable with the idea that, uh, that uh, of selflessness. Like if you really need there to be somebody that's a self, then there are, I think, leads to these kinds of philosophical attitudes. But if you just say the simplest explanation is just that awareness is intransitive. You don't need another agent to know that sense of subjectivity. You don't need someone from the outside looking in to say, oh yes, that's me seeing that, what's called a second order awareness. Right? It just intransitively presents both without there being an agent doing the transitive action of knowing. Okay. So this is from Thomas, Thomas Metzinger who has written about this. Uh... This stands for good old fashioned intentionality. Okay. And there's a sense in which like, our ordinary sense of there's a self uh, there's a self kind of looking out there. I just realized this slide is... But act... And, and if our sense of knowing our subjectivity required a second order awareness, then we'd have to see that from the standpoint of a subject. But then we'd need to know, okay, so I'm the one that saw that. How do I know that? Well, because I'm looking at myself seeing that, which means I need another subject to see that. And then, of course, how do I know that? I need another subject and I get an infinite regress. So instead of that, you just have this, what Metzinger calls a phenomenal model of the intentionality relation, the subject-object relation. Our sense of subject and object is simultaneously presented in experience without there being some other sense of subjectivity looking at it. Okay?
So part of what that means is that when we make these kinds of reports about our emotional states, about our body position, like, you know, if I say, okay, ready, here comes the sound. One, two, three. Beeep.
Everyone hear the sound? Yes? Were you sitting down when you heard the sound?
Do you, the way you know that, you go, well, I remember coming in sitting down and then uh, I didn't, I don't remember getting up, so I must have been sitting down. Or is it like your memory of the sound includes a sense of the body position, includes a sense of your space, your spacial, your, uh, your what's called proprioception, includes a sense of being the one knowing. So you're knowing, but how are you knowing that you're the one knowing? Are you, is there like, again, is it like this? Or like this? Excuse me.
Or do you not need that?
Okay? So when you're knowing the object, you're knowing it as an object. Along with that is the sense of subjectivity. Like, again, you know, beeep. bubup? it's the heart, you know, bubup, bubup, bubup, coronary disease.
It's like you knew the one hearing it. Right? And it's not like you have to go, you're not confused about that, are you? There are some psychopathologies in which people do, like, am I really the one hearing? Or is someone, is there, they, this, there's a dysfunction in their system, and they kind of can't, they can't identify with their own subjectivity sometimes. Feels like somebody else is doing it. But there's still subjectivity. They just don't identify with it. In a pathological way. So you know that. It's like, there's no question. Oh, yeah, I hear, yeah. Are you making yourself an object to know that? No. So that means you're knowing your sense of subjectivity without it being in a subject-object structure. Correct? What kind of knowing is knowing that is not in subject-object structure? Intransitive knowing was another term for that. Reflexive and non-dual. So you have an aspect of non-dual awareness in every moment of your experience. Already. But it's presented in a dualistic str... as part of a dualistic structure.
Okay?
Let's go. So I think we should take a break before people either collapse from exhaustion, confusion or something else. All right. We'll take a break until 20 after. Is that good? And now you can just sort of
try to see if you can see yourself.
There are people who will insist, no, actually, I'm constantly doing it like flip. While there are other people who will say, actually, no, that's not, your sense of subjectivity is not a part of your phenomenal experience. It's an illusion. You have a second-order cognition that when you need it, it kicks in. But phenomenally, you don't have a subjectivity. And I think those people are, you know, maybe not paying enough attention to their experience, possibly? Or else they're just really different. But anyway, so let's take a break. Ten minutes. And we'll see you back at 20 after.
