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Session 17 — Reflexive Awareness and the Background of Practice
Teachers:
Collection:
- Buddhist Classics and Philosophy
Location:
- Gomde Germany-Austria
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Excerpt
John D. Dunne relates the course’s philosophical analysis to Mahāmudrā practice by explaining reflexive awareness, meta-awareness, and the difference between objects of attention and the background quality of awareness itself. The session shows how meditation can reveal the luminous and non-dual nature of mind that is already present within ordinary experience.
Description
In this session, John D. Dunne explains how the philosophical models explored during the course relate directly to Mahāmudrā-style practice, while also cautioning that they remain conceptual maps rather than the practice itself. He focuses on reflexive awareness and meta-awareness, showing how every moment of experience includes not only objects of attention but also an immediate, non-objective awareness of subjectivity, emotions, and the quality of awareness itself. This helps clarify how mindfulness and meditation can train practitioners to notice not only what they are experiencing, but also how they are experiencing it, without turning awareness into another object. Dunne connects this to objectless samatha and to practices that gradually reveal the non-dual, luminous, and empty nature of mind already present within ordinary awareness. The session also shows how philosophical inquiry, tantric methods, and devotion can each serve as different gateways into recognizing 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
36:06
So before I say more, I just want to say that
the, we're doing this sort of philosophical,
conceptual models that are the
background of Mahāmudrā style practices.
And again, just cautionary tale is that
it's a model, it's a map.
Uh, one doesn't want it to get in the way of
the practices.
But there are already, perhaps, you can see
how maybe some of the practices, if you've been
practicing with Eric, that there are practices
that are very closely related to this.
So one of them is that
our ordinary sense of subjectivity
is that there's a sort of a thing that is
the subject that we could see as an object.
So when we have this,
if you see, remember this diagram.
When the sense of subjectivity causes the
conceptualization.
Right?
So like,
I'm getting very emotional,
and I go, oh, I'm very emotional.
So in that case, in this moment, let's
say I'm focusing on something or whatever,
and then I kind of make a
conceptualization, instead of making,
instead of this kind of conceptualization,
where the object form is dominant.
Right?
Sorry, come on. Instead of this kind of conceptualization, where the object form is dominant. Like, oh, look at this. Wow, look at that. Instead, I have a conceptualization where the subject form is dominant. Like, I'm looking at this, and so there's my vase, and then maybe like, oh, wow, I really missed it.
You making fun of my relationship with my vase? Yes.
Okay. So like, but in that moment, it seems like I'm looking back at myself, right? Like, oh, I'm seeing kind of looking to my feelings. But on this model, that's not what's happening. It's that because of the reflexive awareness, it's presenting the subject and the object simultaneously. And under what whichever conditions, basically conditions that have to do with attention, and what's salient, like you pay attention to what's salient. So maybe I explain that for a moment. And this is also that, you know, the movie that many of you have seen, and if you haven't seen it, you can go on YouTube and just type invisible gorilla. Right? So again, as you might recall, it's this, you know, movie that's used to teach something called inattentional blindness, you're told at the beginning of the movie, well, I'm not going to ruin it, who has not seen it? Oh, okay, basically, without I'm not going to ruin the movie. But basically, so just watch the movie. And there are versions of it, newer versions of it that even if you've watched it, it'll still work. I'll just say that much. And the idea is that, for example, um, uh... for example, everybody has seen something in this room that you don't know is there. What I mean is, you've seen it. But you did not do the... so you saw it as an object, right? In this way, but you did not conceptualize it, or identify it, and it cross through your visual awareness, depending on some people will say, you didn't even reach the level of phenomenality. But I think the general consensus now is that it does get to a phenomenal level, but you just don't like conceptualize it. So you don't remember it. Okay. So I'm going to give you an example. Uh, in this room, there is a green sign with a little person on it. Who has seen the green sign with a person?
You've everybody's seen that. It's crossed your visual awareness. You've all seen that, right? Okay. Everybody's seen that. There are lots of things in this room that are like that, for sure. But we don't notice because they're not relevant. Like maybe if you're a fan of signs, you notice all the signs in a room, you're a sign collector, or, you know, you're especially worried about how to run downstairs and you see the little icon of the running person on the green sign.
You know, so it's like, whatever. Or maybe you've noticed, okay, so there are, in this room, there are uh several uh, uh, kind of glass, um, lampshades, right? So everyone noticed. Now you'd look around and say, oh, yeah, there are. How many of you actually honestly didn't know that there were these light shades? Am I right? A few people really didn't notice, right? Maybe. So there are all kinds of things that you see, like, you've probably seen the big drums, do you know whether there is anything at the center of the big drums in the back of the room? You can turn around and look now and see that there's a joy swirl in the center of the drums in the back of the room. Obviously, very easy to see, right? It's not like, oh, I just didn't see it.
It's just you didn't like, you know, you didn't attend to it in a way that enabled you to conceptualize it. So what's happening here, most of the time, we don't attend to the information. So what's happening here is all of experience is being presented, objects, stuff, and then non-object stuff. But since we're so focused on objects, because the reason we're focused on objects is we want this, we don't want that, we want this, we don't want that. We don't actually often do this, where that moment of experience, instead of producing a conceptualization like this, about an object, instead of produces a conceptualization like this, about the non-object side, basically, the background. Okay, so that means that most of the time, what's salient, and this is a term in the context of attention, it means, in a sense, it's popping out to us, it's what's important to us, it's what we care about. And there are lots of things that are salient. Uh, you know we have like a, this has to do with what you can call our task set, like, what is running in the background as relevant to, like part of the gunk here, like, what's really, what are our goals? So one task set would be, for example, I'll just give you a quick example. Let's just suppose you're like, you know, someone who's a gardener or whatever, and then you would have noticed, probably that there's like a, some kind of a small gardening machine running in the background right now, right?
But maybe if you're not a fan of gardening, or you know, you don't, you just haven't really, you just filtered that out. If you all care about your emotional states, and you can do that in positive and negative ways, right? So in certain kinds of anxiety disorders, there's a kind of too much concern with the internal states, and your physical states, and so on. And then you kind of heighten that and then become, you know, too much, in a sense, acutely aware of your appropriate, your interoceptive or proprioceptive information, mostly interoceptive, and that can create, you know, issues. But also, I could have, let's say, I'm a practitioner. And as part of my goals, it's like, I want to be kind to people. And so I'm kind of monitoring in the background without, even while I'm doing something. I can be monitoring in the background, how I'm doing it. Okay, because, and this is called meta-awareness. But it's not a meta-awareness that is like this. Okay? Rather, it's the meta, the kind of a meta-awareness that's just like that.
So that you are able to implicitly, and I've written an article about this with Evan Thompson and Jonathan Schooler, that I can share with you guys, that you can implicitly be aware of, you can cultivate actually, and increase, we all have this capacity, but you can kind of increase that capacity, first of all. And then secondly, you can tie it to certain types of goals that are not about just, you know, getting stuff in the world or winning a debate or whatever, but are also about a certain sense of being what kind of person you want to be. And so if you have a very big deficit in this area, everyone has some of it, because you wouldn't be able to actually navigate the world if you didn't have this. But uh, if you have a deficit, then you don't notice you're getting upset, like you're in the middle of an argument, and someone says to you, you're angry, and you go, I'm not angry.
Is this ever happened to you? What do you mean? You're angry.
Right, or whatever. So you can, so this is very important in practice. And one of the ways that this is articulated, actually, even prior to, uh, you know, this kind of implicit theories, again, none of this stuff just comes out of nowhere. There are, you know, in Buddhist practices and in Buddhist theories, both in their interactions lead to these types of, you can almost say discoveries. And so the idea of mindfulness style practice, a big part of mindfulness style practice is monitoring not just what's happening with an object, but what's happening with yours, the background, so to speak, your emotions, and so on, the quality of your awareness. So when you have, so the idea here is that even while you're focused on an object, let's say you're focused on your breath, you're doing, you know, mindfulness of breathing, you have an awareness of how you're focusing, not just what you're focusing on, but the quality of your awareness. So as you're, as you're cultivating that kind of mindfulness, you're also cultivating this meta awareness. And the term for that in Sanskrit is samprajanya, or Tibetan shes bzhin ཤེས་བཞིན་. So you have dren pa དྲན་པ་, which again, is that thing that prevents you from, prevents, remember, that's mindfulness, smṛti, sati, dren pa དྲན་པ་, that prevents your mind from getting caught. But you also have samprajanya, or shes bzhin ཤེས་བཞིན་ in Tibetan, which we can translate as meta awareness, which is noticing how it's going. So even while you're focused on something, you can be noticing how you're focusing the quality of your awareness. Right? And this, you know, there are many different places where this is relevant. This is very relevant in music performance, right? It's relevant in sports, dance, in all kinds of situations, it's very relevant, that this capacity is very important. And it's very important for a practitioner, because if we are, you know, if we're trying to cultivate certain types of virtues, we're trying to cultivate compassion, we want to be aware of how we are with others. But if the way we have to do that is, I'm talking to you, uh, how am I doing, how am I, uh you know,
people are not going to want to talk to you anymore. If it's like, I have to look in. Right? You could start to seem very uptight.
So it's not that, it's cultivating that meta awareness. And then there are styles of practice, which enable you to cultivate that meta awareness very deliberately. So mindfulness styles of practice, and actually, really, the term, you know, when we talk about this aspect of meditation, and really, you can say this as this is an aspect of really kind of all meditative practices. The Tibetans don't just say smṛti when or sati, you know, or dren pa དྲན་པ་ is their word, right? They don't just call it that. They say, when you're talking about this feature, which we could kind of use a single word mindfulness for in English, they say dren shes དྲན་ཤེས་, which is a, which is a compound formed from two words, dren pa དྲན་པ་ and shes bzhin ཤེས་བཞིན་, dren shes དྲན་ཤེས་. That's, and that means mindfulness, smṛti, mindfulness and meta awareness. That's the whole package. And how could you, what kind of a practice could you do, by the way, without, you know, it's without kind of, this isn't nature of mind practice, but it would be preparatory to it, what kind of a practice could you do that would very deliberately cultivate that meta awareness side?
Yes?
Rowan? Student: And noting your emotional mental state. You could do a noting practice, which you will find in like Vipassanā, and so on. But the one thing about, about noting practice in general is it can make you kind of do the turn in, right? Where you're kind of objectifying self. What if you were to, like, you take the object, take the flower as an object. Okay, everyone look at the flower. Keep looking, looking, look, look, look. Undistracted, completely mindful, keep looking, look, undistracted.
Like you, there's a moment they were like, you're still aware, you're not distracted, but you're not aware of something.
Right? So that's, that's uh, uh, objectless Samatha. I think Eric's been talking to you about Samatha, which is developing a kind of mental stability. And that's done with an object. But you can then in the Mahāmudrā gradual training, you actually then do a kind of Samatha, which is without an object. So that's getting you toward that undistracted non meditation, you're cultivating meta awareness, but you're not focusing on an object. So you start often by by using an object could be visual object could be your breath. And then you sort of drop the object. And you just remain undistracted. And that's Samatha. It's not, you know, into what we call Vipassanā insight. It's not, you know, recognizing the nature of the mind. But it's very important for preparing for that. And that's all but it also then has very useful other aspects, because it then enables you when you're off the cushion, it cultivates that capacity to kind of even while you're focused on something, you notice how you're doing. And if part of your task set, your goal set is like to be a generous kind person, that'll also that'll make it more salient. Just like if you're a sign collector, you would have noticed the sign. Right? You're that stuff about your subject side, your emotions and so on becomes more obvious to you in a health in a healthy way. Yes, Josh.
Student: The practice you just showed when you drop the flower and we're still in this awareness, is that the same as just like trying to be in this open state and kind of waiting until something arises in our awareness? Yeah, like, like choiceless awareness, as some people call it. Yeah, it is similar. Yes, it can be like that. Except the difference there is that you don't, it's not like you're waiting for anything.
In other words, you're part of what it means to be undistracted in that context is not to select any object. So if there's a loud sound right now, one of our baseline tasks or goals is to stay alive. So if you had a loud sound, like boom, we would all go what? Right? Because that would be salient, is that a threat? Okay, so that loud sound captured our attention, because it's important to us, in this very baseline thing. And this, this, the kind of practice here, objectless Samatha, is to actually not be captured by anything.
So you're aware, you're doing, you're, you're, um, you know, you're certainly fully aware, but you're not trying to focus on anything, and the mind is not, the attention is not being captured by anything. Student: Maybe a bit like being in the forest at night, and then suddenly you hear something, but then the noise is over, but you're just like super alert, and like. Yes, exactly. Yes, so actually, you know, a traditional way to introduce some of these types of practices is through startle, what’s called the startle response. So if you have a loud sound, our system goes up, and then after that, like there's this kind of moment of, you're fully aware, but not of anything. That's right, exactly right. Yep. That's starting to get more into actual nature of mind practice, where you might use a shout, like this, of the syllable phet ཕཊ་, or, you know, in Zen, the master will come up and smack you in the head. I'm thinking of introducing some of that here.
And Eric has some great stories about Zen, Zen encounters with Tibetans. You know, they like, you know, try to shock you. Just a quick story. So there was when Joseph Goldstein wrote this great book, One Dharma, which maybe we're going to try to like do an event, the sort of 2.0, so to speak, pretty soon, maybe next year. But um, and uh, Joseph is a very well known Vipassanā teacher, who became, because in a sense, that which is very interesting, like that sort of meta-awareness that is cultivated, even in Vipassanā style mindfulness practice, that's a route into Mahāmudrā Dzogchen. So when Joseph and others kind of encountered Mahāmudrā and Dzogchen they went, oh, that's what we've been doing.
And then, you know, because Zen practice also is really about that kind of non-dual awareness too, they arranged to have a meeting between Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche, a very famous Dzogchen teacher, the late Nyoshul Khen, and a Zen master. I can't remember which one. This is how he starts the book, you know, and the Zen master is trying to do this startle thing too. And one way you do that is not by shouting or whatever, but you just ask people like, it's called Dharma combat, you know, when two masters meets, like, I'm going to make your mind go, boom. So at a certain point in the conversation, the Zen master, there's a bowl of fruit, you know, that's been offered. He grabs an orange and he goes, what is this? And Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche turns to his translator and says, what, they don't have oranges where they come from?
And then,
Yes.
Student: Just to get it clear, is this meta-awareness happening simultaneously? Because, Yes. usually it's said that you can't multitask. So if it is simultaneously, it's non-dual. Is this the point? That's right. It is, it is, yes, exactly. Every moment of awareness on this model, every moment of awareness has this meta-awareness. And if it's not... Because it is actually, it is, this meta-awareness is actually a version or, you know, depends on that reflexivity. Student: And if it's not simultaneously, it's conceptual? Then it would be... No, it wouldn't necessarily be conceptual, but it might be second order. It might be, you know, there are people who will say that meta-awareness, there is no such thing as this kind of first order, reflexive meta-awareness. There's this thing, there's a second order meta-awareness that only happens consciously when you, when you uh, look at your own mind or something like that. Okay, so, so, so the... So this is the theory here is that every moment of consciousness has meta-awareness. Because that's actually what it means to be conscious. Student: And this means also to be non-dual in... Yes, well, it's... So the non-dual idea of it is that there's an aspect of your awareness that is being presented to you, non-dually, because your sense of subjectivity is known without making it an object. And if you've been doing any of practices with Eric, I think you see this. Like what happens when you try to see your subjectivity? You look for the subject, look for the self. What happens? Like if you go, oh, who's, who's, who's seeing right now? What happens when you try to see that seer?
Yeah, like, well, yeah. And the reason you can't find something is that that's, that you're doing, you're just trying to, you just turned yourself into, you've done this. See here, this moment, the sense of subjectivity is being presented reflexively. And here I'm going, oh, I, I am this, you know, from the standpoint of a subject, I am, you know, happy or upset or whatever.
So that you've conceptualized yourself. So the only kind of self you can know in that way as something that you'd look at as an object is a conceptualized self, which is not a self, it's a concept.
Okay.
Student: Does that mean you can't really turn awareness into an object? No, yeah, that's right. You cannot, you, you, you can, you can, uh, you can take it this, this moment, and you can conceptualize various aspects of that moment. Can you conceptualize all of the vase? Everything about the vase? No, because there's an infinite number of possible conceptualizations. In that territory, you can make an infinite number of maps. Some of them are probably extremely useless maps. You know, like, how many barely visible fingerprints are there on there? But, probably not a super useful map.
But you can make a lot, an infinite number of maps. And, you know, a map always chooses data. If it's, if it has to filter out some of the territory. Otherwise it's just the territory, like that story by Borges. Right? So, you know, you can have, we can make a map of Gomde, which is, you know, based on the grasshopper population. Like they're little grasshoppers, you've probably seen around. And we can even try to make the map as a grasshopper map. Like, how does a grasshopper see Gomde? That would be useful for grasshoppers to negotiate Gomde. But like, so that would be an interpretive grasshopper interpretation of the territory. We make our own interpretations, human interpretations. You know, if you're a big sign fan, maybe there'd be a sign map of all the signs at Gomde.
Right? But they're all just taking the territory and choosing things that are relevant. That's what concepts do. So you could never map all of consciousness, just like you can't even map all of the vase. But you can't stand outside of consciousness and look at it. That's the main, which is also the flaw in a lot of consciousness research. You can't like, look at consciousness outside of consciousness. You can't do that. Then you're not conscious.
Okay, and that's also a point made in that book, The Blind Spot, which I've recommended to you.
Uh, so what happens when you try to look in? You don't, you can't find that because, of course you can't, because you're doing, you know, when you're looking, you're doing this. You're assuming a new standpoint of subjectivity and looking. But when you don't find, you know, when you don't find that self, when you try to look and do that like that, part of what you're discovering is the sense in which, the sense of subjectivity is being presented to you without you having to do that. So that again is a kind of step toward the nature of mind practice, or the recognition of the nature of mind, right? Which Eric has been leading you through somewhat. Not, you know, we don't presume to give, you know, pointing out what's called pointing out instructions. So when we said that, Eric and I were talking, the uh, when the um, you can say through meditation you find the view, that's where you basically come to a nature of mind experience just on your own through meditation practice. Most of the time, as I said, except for extraordinary cases, it's you have a view, really a conceptual view, and then you come to the experience of the nature of mind. And that conceptual view can be philosophy, but it doesn't have to be that. It can be also like the interaction with a master who's using words, symbols, and so on. But there's going to be some key like issues that even there that we should, that we will talk about probably tomorrow. And part of this also then is, what you can see in a way is that, um, you know, the act, even just the act of like choosing what to conceptualize, whether it's subject or object, is in a sense creating a reality.
And so which framework we use to conceptualize also is really relevant. And I think also what that tells you is that the framework, under certain conditions, you start to recognize how the framework is contingent. And I think the double slit experiment is a very good case of that. So we're going to, Philippe's going to present that to us tomorrow. I think maybe though we shouldn't start at 9:30 because it's two and a half hours is too long. So let's just start at 10 tomorrow. And maybe we'll start with that just for fun.
Uh, so, uh... when, so one of the questions is, how do we really like, part of the nature of the mind is definitely going to be that is this like sheer luminosity, this reflexive awareness, that is the mind itself, that is characterizing every moment of consciousness, and also that it's empty, it's empty of the subject-object duality. Now, and this is both like theoretically, like you could say, or analytically the case, because those using Mādhyamika analysis, it is um, the subject and the object can't be essentially real because they would not be relational then, right? So we know that if something is relational, it's necessarily empty of a fixed identity. Consciousness is relational and dynamic in this way. So it has to be empty, not just of subject-object duality, but of any fixed identity. So it's luminous, but empty of any fixed identity. Right? But there's another way in which you could say the nature of consciousness or the nature of mind is not dualistic. Remember, the nature of something is what the thing has in every permutation. Water is H2O, whether it's liquid, gas or solid, right? So if there's something about the particular instance of water you're dealing with, like it's muddy, then that, and that doesn't occur in some other permutation, that means that muddiness is not essential to the water. Right? Okay? Or maybe some water has salt in it. You can take the salt out and it's still water, so that means salt is just accidental. So what this is also saying, which is important, and this is also then becomes a technique, is you can also say if you want to really kind of demonstrate to someone that the nature of mind is empty of duality and luminous, you could induce a state in which that happens, meaning there is no content. There's just sheer luminosity. Okay? So you could put somebody in a state like that, just putting, just inducing that state and the way you would do that is through certain tantric techniques. But the way you would do that, right, just doing that is not enough. And this is also why, like, you know, people think, well, I take certain psychedelics. That's not enough. Just inducing the state is not it. Because you then, like the fourth initiation, as Rinpoche, you know, was explaining, is really in a sense telling you what it means when you're in there, not even what it means, like pointing out what is the nature of that state, what you need to, in a sense, learn from that experience. Okay? And one thing you're learning is that this dualistic structure, and one way you get rid of dualistic structure is you just, you know, wipe out content, and then there's just sheer luminosity, right? But you don't have to do that. You can also, in a sense, the content can remain without this, without the dualistic structure seeming real, without the reality habit of the dualistic structure. So that means that there are other ways of getting there. And even philosophy can do that. And so this is what's called sūtra Mahāmudrā, where you use philosophy, and on the figure on the right is a depiction of a very important Indian scholar practitioner. He's very important for the Mahāmudrā tradition. Uh, his, this is Advayavajra, the non-dual vajra, also known as Maitrīpa. He wrote some very important texts in Mahāmudrā tradition. And so philosophy is one way of doing this. Tantric practice is another way of doing this. So this is the sūtra level, so-called sūtra, non-tantric level, this then there's the tantric level. And then there's also a kind of another level in a way, which is the devotional level. And we'll talk maybe tomorrow more about why devotion might be so important uh, for this kind of practice. Again, you know, talking about things does have the slight danger of, you know, making us too conceptualizing them too much. But since most of us Westerners are so over-educated, it's better for us to like work through our crazy ideas about this stuff
and get clear about it. Okay, so we'll do some of that tomorrow. Look at the double split, slit. We'll uh, um... talk a little bit more about how this, what kinds of practices are involved and maybe deal with your questions about, um, about this kind of reflexive awareness If you have any, so think about it. Let me know any other questions from the week that you may have. Uh, so please uh, have a good evening of contemplation.
Let's dedicate.
sönam diyi thamché sikpa nyi thopné nyepai dranam phamjé né kyega nachi balap trukpa yi sipai tsolé drowa drölwar shok jangchup semchok rinpoché ma kyepa nam kyé gyurchik kyepa nyampa mepa yang gongné gongdu phelwar shok
Okay, thank you.
Sorry, come on. Instead of this kind of conceptualization, where the object form is dominant. Like, oh, look at this. Wow, look at that. Instead, I have a conceptualization where the subject form is dominant. Like, I'm looking at this, and so there's my vase, and then maybe like, oh, wow, I really missed it.
You making fun of my relationship with my vase? Yes.
Okay. So like, but in that moment, it seems like I'm looking back at myself, right? Like, oh, I'm seeing kind of looking to my feelings. But on this model, that's not what's happening. It's that because of the reflexive awareness, it's presenting the subject and the object simultaneously. And under what whichever conditions, basically conditions that have to do with attention, and what's salient, like you pay attention to what's salient. So maybe I explain that for a moment. And this is also that, you know, the movie that many of you have seen, and if you haven't seen it, you can go on YouTube and just type invisible gorilla. Right? So again, as you might recall, it's this, you know, movie that's used to teach something called inattentional blindness, you're told at the beginning of the movie, well, I'm not going to ruin it, who has not seen it? Oh, okay, basically, without I'm not going to ruin the movie. But basically, so just watch the movie. And there are versions of it, newer versions of it that even if you've watched it, it'll still work. I'll just say that much. And the idea is that, for example, um, uh... for example, everybody has seen something in this room that you don't know is there. What I mean is, you've seen it. But you did not do the... so you saw it as an object, right? In this way, but you did not conceptualize it, or identify it, and it cross through your visual awareness, depending on some people will say, you didn't even reach the level of phenomenality. But I think the general consensus now is that it does get to a phenomenal level, but you just don't like conceptualize it. So you don't remember it. Okay. So I'm going to give you an example. Uh, in this room, there is a green sign with a little person on it. Who has seen the green sign with a person?
You've everybody's seen that. It's crossed your visual awareness. You've all seen that, right? Okay. Everybody's seen that. There are lots of things in this room that are like that, for sure. But we don't notice because they're not relevant. Like maybe if you're a fan of signs, you notice all the signs in a room, you're a sign collector, or, you know, you're especially worried about how to run downstairs and you see the little icon of the running person on the green sign.
You know, so it's like, whatever. Or maybe you've noticed, okay, so there are, in this room, there are uh several uh, uh, kind of glass, um, lampshades, right? So everyone noticed. Now you'd look around and say, oh, yeah, there are. How many of you actually honestly didn't know that there were these light shades? Am I right? A few people really didn't notice, right? Maybe. So there are all kinds of things that you see, like, you've probably seen the big drums, do you know whether there is anything at the center of the big drums in the back of the room? You can turn around and look now and see that there's a joy swirl in the center of the drums in the back of the room. Obviously, very easy to see, right? It's not like, oh, I just didn't see it.
It's just you didn't like, you know, you didn't attend to it in a way that enabled you to conceptualize it. So what's happening here, most of the time, we don't attend to the information. So what's happening here is all of experience is being presented, objects, stuff, and then non-object stuff. But since we're so focused on objects, because the reason we're focused on objects is we want this, we don't want that, we want this, we don't want that. We don't actually often do this, where that moment of experience, instead of producing a conceptualization like this, about an object, instead of produces a conceptualization like this, about the non-object side, basically, the background. Okay, so that means that most of the time, what's salient, and this is a term in the context of attention, it means, in a sense, it's popping out to us, it's what's important to us, it's what we care about. And there are lots of things that are salient. Uh, you know we have like a, this has to do with what you can call our task set, like, what is running in the background as relevant to, like part of the gunk here, like, what's really, what are our goals? So one task set would be, for example, I'll just give you a quick example. Let's just suppose you're like, you know, someone who's a gardener or whatever, and then you would have noticed, probably that there's like a, some kind of a small gardening machine running in the background right now, right?
But maybe if you're not a fan of gardening, or you know, you don't, you just haven't really, you just filtered that out. If you all care about your emotional states, and you can do that in positive and negative ways, right? So in certain kinds of anxiety disorders, there's a kind of too much concern with the internal states, and your physical states, and so on. And then you kind of heighten that and then become, you know, too much, in a sense, acutely aware of your appropriate, your interoceptive or proprioceptive information, mostly interoceptive, and that can create, you know, issues. But also, I could have, let's say, I'm a practitioner. And as part of my goals, it's like, I want to be kind to people. And so I'm kind of monitoring in the background without, even while I'm doing something. I can be monitoring in the background, how I'm doing it. Okay, because, and this is called meta-awareness. But it's not a meta-awareness that is like this. Okay? Rather, it's the meta, the kind of a meta-awareness that's just like that.
So that you are able to implicitly, and I've written an article about this with Evan Thompson and Jonathan Schooler, that I can share with you guys, that you can implicitly be aware of, you can cultivate actually, and increase, we all have this capacity, but you can kind of increase that capacity, first of all. And then secondly, you can tie it to certain types of goals that are not about just, you know, getting stuff in the world or winning a debate or whatever, but are also about a certain sense of being what kind of person you want to be. And so if you have a very big deficit in this area, everyone has some of it, because you wouldn't be able to actually navigate the world if you didn't have this. But uh, if you have a deficit, then you don't notice you're getting upset, like you're in the middle of an argument, and someone says to you, you're angry, and you go, I'm not angry.
Is this ever happened to you? What do you mean? You're angry.
Right, or whatever. So you can, so this is very important in practice. And one of the ways that this is articulated, actually, even prior to, uh, you know, this kind of implicit theories, again, none of this stuff just comes out of nowhere. There are, you know, in Buddhist practices and in Buddhist theories, both in their interactions lead to these types of, you can almost say discoveries. And so the idea of mindfulness style practice, a big part of mindfulness style practice is monitoring not just what's happening with an object, but what's happening with yours, the background, so to speak, your emotions, and so on, the quality of your awareness. So when you have, so the idea here is that even while you're focused on an object, let's say you're focused on your breath, you're doing, you know, mindfulness of breathing, you have an awareness of how you're focusing, not just what you're focusing on, but the quality of your awareness. So as you're, as you're cultivating that kind of mindfulness, you're also cultivating this meta awareness. And the term for that in Sanskrit is samprajanya, or Tibetan shes bzhin ཤེས་བཞིན་. So you have dren pa དྲན་པ་, which again, is that thing that prevents you from, prevents, remember, that's mindfulness, smṛti, sati, dren pa དྲན་པ་, that prevents your mind from getting caught. But you also have samprajanya, or shes bzhin ཤེས་བཞིན་ in Tibetan, which we can translate as meta awareness, which is noticing how it's going. So even while you're focused on something, you can be noticing how you're focusing the quality of your awareness. Right? And this, you know, there are many different places where this is relevant. This is very relevant in music performance, right? It's relevant in sports, dance, in all kinds of situations, it's very relevant, that this capacity is very important. And it's very important for a practitioner, because if we are, you know, if we're trying to cultivate certain types of virtues, we're trying to cultivate compassion, we want to be aware of how we are with others. But if the way we have to do that is, I'm talking to you, uh, how am I doing, how am I, uh you know,
people are not going to want to talk to you anymore. If it's like, I have to look in. Right? You could start to seem very uptight.
So it's not that, it's cultivating that meta awareness. And then there are styles of practice, which enable you to cultivate that meta awareness very deliberately. So mindfulness styles of practice, and actually, really, the term, you know, when we talk about this aspect of meditation, and really, you can say this as this is an aspect of really kind of all meditative practices. The Tibetans don't just say smṛti when or sati, you know, or dren pa དྲན་པ་ is their word, right? They don't just call it that. They say, when you're talking about this feature, which we could kind of use a single word mindfulness for in English, they say dren shes དྲན་ཤེས་, which is a, which is a compound formed from two words, dren pa དྲན་པ་ and shes bzhin ཤེས་བཞིན་, dren shes དྲན་ཤེས་. That's, and that means mindfulness, smṛti, mindfulness and meta awareness. That's the whole package. And how could you, what kind of a practice could you do, by the way, without, you know, it's without kind of, this isn't nature of mind practice, but it would be preparatory to it, what kind of a practice could you do that would very deliberately cultivate that meta awareness side?
Yes?
Rowan? Student: And noting your emotional mental state. You could do a noting practice, which you will find in like Vipassanā, and so on. But the one thing about, about noting practice in general is it can make you kind of do the turn in, right? Where you're kind of objectifying self. What if you were to, like, you take the object, take the flower as an object. Okay, everyone look at the flower. Keep looking, looking, look, look, look. Undistracted, completely mindful, keep looking, look, undistracted.
Like you, there's a moment they were like, you're still aware, you're not distracted, but you're not aware of something.
Right? So that's, that's uh, uh, objectless Samatha. I think Eric's been talking to you about Samatha, which is developing a kind of mental stability. And that's done with an object. But you can then in the Mahāmudrā gradual training, you actually then do a kind of Samatha, which is without an object. So that's getting you toward that undistracted non meditation, you're cultivating meta awareness, but you're not focusing on an object. So you start often by by using an object could be visual object could be your breath. And then you sort of drop the object. And you just remain undistracted. And that's Samatha. It's not, you know, into what we call Vipassanā insight. It's not, you know, recognizing the nature of the mind. But it's very important for preparing for that. And that's all but it also then has very useful other aspects, because it then enables you when you're off the cushion, it cultivates that capacity to kind of even while you're focused on something, you notice how you're doing. And if part of your task set, your goal set is like to be a generous kind person, that'll also that'll make it more salient. Just like if you're a sign collector, you would have noticed the sign. Right? You're that stuff about your subject side, your emotions and so on becomes more obvious to you in a health in a healthy way. Yes, Josh.
Student: The practice you just showed when you drop the flower and we're still in this awareness, is that the same as just like trying to be in this open state and kind of waiting until something arises in our awareness? Yeah, like, like choiceless awareness, as some people call it. Yeah, it is similar. Yes, it can be like that. Except the difference there is that you don't, it's not like you're waiting for anything.
In other words, you're part of what it means to be undistracted in that context is not to select any object. So if there's a loud sound right now, one of our baseline tasks or goals is to stay alive. So if you had a loud sound, like boom, we would all go what? Right? Because that would be salient, is that a threat? Okay, so that loud sound captured our attention, because it's important to us, in this very baseline thing. And this, this, the kind of practice here, objectless Samatha, is to actually not be captured by anything.
So you're aware, you're doing, you're, you're, um, you know, you're certainly fully aware, but you're not trying to focus on anything, and the mind is not, the attention is not being captured by anything. Student: Maybe a bit like being in the forest at night, and then suddenly you hear something, but then the noise is over, but you're just like super alert, and like. Yes, exactly. Yes, so actually, you know, a traditional way to introduce some of these types of practices is through startle, what’s called the startle response. So if you have a loud sound, our system goes up, and then after that, like there's this kind of moment of, you're fully aware, but not of anything. That's right, exactly right. Yep. That's starting to get more into actual nature of mind practice, where you might use a shout, like this, of the syllable phet ཕཊ་, or, you know, in Zen, the master will come up and smack you in the head. I'm thinking of introducing some of that here.
And Eric has some great stories about Zen, Zen encounters with Tibetans. You know, they like, you know, try to shock you. Just a quick story. So there was when Joseph Goldstein wrote this great book, One Dharma, which maybe we're going to try to like do an event, the sort of 2.0, so to speak, pretty soon, maybe next year. But um, and uh, Joseph is a very well known Vipassanā teacher, who became, because in a sense, that which is very interesting, like that sort of meta-awareness that is cultivated, even in Vipassanā style mindfulness practice, that's a route into Mahāmudrā Dzogchen. So when Joseph and others kind of encountered Mahāmudrā and Dzogchen they went, oh, that's what we've been doing.
And then, you know, because Zen practice also is really about that kind of non-dual awareness too, they arranged to have a meeting between Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche, a very famous Dzogchen teacher, the late Nyoshul Khen, and a Zen master. I can't remember which one. This is how he starts the book, you know, and the Zen master is trying to do this startle thing too. And one way you do that is not by shouting or whatever, but you just ask people like, it's called Dharma combat, you know, when two masters meets, like, I'm going to make your mind go, boom. So at a certain point in the conversation, the Zen master, there's a bowl of fruit, you know, that's been offered. He grabs an orange and he goes, what is this? And Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche turns to his translator and says, what, they don't have oranges where they come from?
And then,
Yes.
Student: Just to get it clear, is this meta-awareness happening simultaneously? Because, Yes. usually it's said that you can't multitask. So if it is simultaneously, it's non-dual. Is this the point? That's right. It is, it is, yes, exactly. Every moment of awareness on this model, every moment of awareness has this meta-awareness. And if it's not... Because it is actually, it is, this meta-awareness is actually a version or, you know, depends on that reflexivity. Student: And if it's not simultaneously, it's conceptual? Then it would be... No, it wouldn't necessarily be conceptual, but it might be second order. It might be, you know, there are people who will say that meta-awareness, there is no such thing as this kind of first order, reflexive meta-awareness. There's this thing, there's a second order meta-awareness that only happens consciously when you, when you uh, look at your own mind or something like that. Okay, so, so, so the... So this is the theory here is that every moment of consciousness has meta-awareness. Because that's actually what it means to be conscious. Student: And this means also to be non-dual in... Yes, well, it's... So the non-dual idea of it is that there's an aspect of your awareness that is being presented to you, non-dually, because your sense of subjectivity is known without making it an object. And if you've been doing any of practices with Eric, I think you see this. Like what happens when you try to see your subjectivity? You look for the subject, look for the self. What happens? Like if you go, oh, who's, who's, who's seeing right now? What happens when you try to see that seer?
Yeah, like, well, yeah. And the reason you can't find something is that that's, that you're doing, you're just trying to, you just turned yourself into, you've done this. See here, this moment, the sense of subjectivity is being presented reflexively. And here I'm going, oh, I, I am this, you know, from the standpoint of a subject, I am, you know, happy or upset or whatever.
So that you've conceptualized yourself. So the only kind of self you can know in that way as something that you'd look at as an object is a conceptualized self, which is not a self, it's a concept.
Okay.
Student: Does that mean you can't really turn awareness into an object? No, yeah, that's right. You cannot, you, you, you can, you can, uh, you can take it this, this moment, and you can conceptualize various aspects of that moment. Can you conceptualize all of the vase? Everything about the vase? No, because there's an infinite number of possible conceptualizations. In that territory, you can make an infinite number of maps. Some of them are probably extremely useless maps. You know, like, how many barely visible fingerprints are there on there? But, probably not a super useful map.
But you can make a lot, an infinite number of maps. And, you know, a map always chooses data. If it's, if it has to filter out some of the territory. Otherwise it's just the territory, like that story by Borges. Right? So, you know, you can have, we can make a map of Gomde, which is, you know, based on the grasshopper population. Like they're little grasshoppers, you've probably seen around. And we can even try to make the map as a grasshopper map. Like, how does a grasshopper see Gomde? That would be useful for grasshoppers to negotiate Gomde. But like, so that would be an interpretive grasshopper interpretation of the territory. We make our own interpretations, human interpretations. You know, if you're a big sign fan, maybe there'd be a sign map of all the signs at Gomde.
Right? But they're all just taking the territory and choosing things that are relevant. That's what concepts do. So you could never map all of consciousness, just like you can't even map all of the vase. But you can't stand outside of consciousness and look at it. That's the main, which is also the flaw in a lot of consciousness research. You can't like, look at consciousness outside of consciousness. You can't do that. Then you're not conscious.
Okay, and that's also a point made in that book, The Blind Spot, which I've recommended to you.
Uh, so what happens when you try to look in? You don't, you can't find that because, of course you can't, because you're doing, you know, when you're looking, you're doing this. You're assuming a new standpoint of subjectivity and looking. But when you don't find, you know, when you don't find that self, when you try to look and do that like that, part of what you're discovering is the sense in which, the sense of subjectivity is being presented to you without you having to do that. So that again is a kind of step toward the nature of mind practice, or the recognition of the nature of mind, right? Which Eric has been leading you through somewhat. Not, you know, we don't presume to give, you know, pointing out what's called pointing out instructions. So when we said that, Eric and I were talking, the uh, when the um, you can say through meditation you find the view, that's where you basically come to a nature of mind experience just on your own through meditation practice. Most of the time, as I said, except for extraordinary cases, it's you have a view, really a conceptual view, and then you come to the experience of the nature of mind. And that conceptual view can be philosophy, but it doesn't have to be that. It can be also like the interaction with a master who's using words, symbols, and so on. But there's going to be some key like issues that even there that we should, that we will talk about probably tomorrow. And part of this also then is, what you can see in a way is that, um, you know, the act, even just the act of like choosing what to conceptualize, whether it's subject or object, is in a sense creating a reality.
And so which framework we use to conceptualize also is really relevant. And I think also what that tells you is that the framework, under certain conditions, you start to recognize how the framework is contingent. And I think the double slit experiment is a very good case of that. So we're going to, Philippe's going to present that to us tomorrow. I think maybe though we shouldn't start at 9:30 because it's two and a half hours is too long. So let's just start at 10 tomorrow. And maybe we'll start with that just for fun.
Uh, so, uh... when, so one of the questions is, how do we really like, part of the nature of the mind is definitely going to be that is this like sheer luminosity, this reflexive awareness, that is the mind itself, that is characterizing every moment of consciousness, and also that it's empty, it's empty of the subject-object duality. Now, and this is both like theoretically, like you could say, or analytically the case, because those using Mādhyamika analysis, it is um, the subject and the object can't be essentially real because they would not be relational then, right? So we know that if something is relational, it's necessarily empty of a fixed identity. Consciousness is relational and dynamic in this way. So it has to be empty, not just of subject-object duality, but of any fixed identity. So it's luminous, but empty of any fixed identity. Right? But there's another way in which you could say the nature of consciousness or the nature of mind is not dualistic. Remember, the nature of something is what the thing has in every permutation. Water is H2O, whether it's liquid, gas or solid, right? So if there's something about the particular instance of water you're dealing with, like it's muddy, then that, and that doesn't occur in some other permutation, that means that muddiness is not essential to the water. Right? Okay? Or maybe some water has salt in it. You can take the salt out and it's still water, so that means salt is just accidental. So what this is also saying, which is important, and this is also then becomes a technique, is you can also say if you want to really kind of demonstrate to someone that the nature of mind is empty of duality and luminous, you could induce a state in which that happens, meaning there is no content. There's just sheer luminosity. Okay? So you could put somebody in a state like that, just putting, just inducing that state and the way you would do that is through certain tantric techniques. But the way you would do that, right, just doing that is not enough. And this is also why, like, you know, people think, well, I take certain psychedelics. That's not enough. Just inducing the state is not it. Because you then, like the fourth initiation, as Rinpoche, you know, was explaining, is really in a sense telling you what it means when you're in there, not even what it means, like pointing out what is the nature of that state, what you need to, in a sense, learn from that experience. Okay? And one thing you're learning is that this dualistic structure, and one way you get rid of dualistic structure is you just, you know, wipe out content, and then there's just sheer luminosity, right? But you don't have to do that. You can also, in a sense, the content can remain without this, without the dualistic structure seeming real, without the reality habit of the dualistic structure. So that means that there are other ways of getting there. And even philosophy can do that. And so this is what's called sūtra Mahāmudrā, where you use philosophy, and on the figure on the right is a depiction of a very important Indian scholar practitioner. He's very important for the Mahāmudrā tradition. Uh, his, this is Advayavajra, the non-dual vajra, also known as Maitrīpa. He wrote some very important texts in Mahāmudrā tradition. And so philosophy is one way of doing this. Tantric practice is another way of doing this. So this is the sūtra level, so-called sūtra, non-tantric level, this then there's the tantric level. And then there's also a kind of another level in a way, which is the devotional level. And we'll talk maybe tomorrow more about why devotion might be so important uh, for this kind of practice. Again, you know, talking about things does have the slight danger of, you know, making us too conceptualizing them too much. But since most of us Westerners are so over-educated, it's better for us to like work through our crazy ideas about this stuff
and get clear about it. Okay, so we'll do some of that tomorrow. Look at the double split, slit. We'll uh, um... talk a little bit more about how this, what kinds of practices are involved and maybe deal with your questions about, um, about this kind of reflexive awareness If you have any, so think about it. Let me know any other questions from the week that you may have. Uh, so please uh, have a good evening of contemplation.
Let's dedicate.
sönam diyi thamché sikpa nyi thopné nyepai dranam phamjé né kyega nachi balap trukpa yi sipai tsolé drowa drölwar shok jangchup semchok rinpoché ma kyepa nam kyé gyurchik kyepa nyampa mepa yang gongné gongdu phelwar shok
Okay, thank you.
So before I say more, I just want to say that
the, we're doing this sort of philosophical,
conceptual models that are the
background of Mahāmudrā style practices.
And again, just cautionary tale is that
it's a model, it's a map.
Uh, one doesn't want it to get in the way of
the practices.
But there are already, perhaps, you can see
how maybe some of the practices, if you've been
practicing with Eric, that there are practices
that are very closely related to this.
So one of them is that
our ordinary sense of subjectivity
is that there's a sort of a thing that is
the subject that we could see as an object.
So when we have this,
if you see, remember this diagram.
When the sense of subjectivity causes the
conceptualization.
Right?
So like,
I'm getting very emotional,
and I go, oh, I'm very emotional.
So in that case, in this moment, let's
say I'm focusing on something or whatever,
and then I kind of make a
conceptualization, instead of making,
instead of this kind of conceptualization,
where the object form is dominant.
Right?
Sorry, come on. Instead of this kind of conceptualization, where the object form is dominant. Like, oh, look at this. Wow, look at that. Instead, I have a conceptualization where the subject form is dominant. Like, I'm looking at this, and so there's my vase, and then maybe like, oh, wow, I really missed it.
You making fun of my relationship with my vase? Yes.
Okay. So like, but in that moment, it seems like I'm looking back at myself, right? Like, oh, I'm seeing kind of looking to my feelings. But on this model, that's not what's happening. It's that because of the reflexive awareness, it's presenting the subject and the object simultaneously. And under what whichever conditions, basically conditions that have to do with attention, and what's salient, like you pay attention to what's salient. So maybe I explain that for a moment. And this is also that, you know, the movie that many of you have seen, and if you haven't seen it, you can go on YouTube and just type invisible gorilla. Right? So again, as you might recall, it's this, you know, movie that's used to teach something called inattentional blindness, you're told at the beginning of the movie, well, I'm not going to ruin it, who has not seen it? Oh, okay, basically, without I'm not going to ruin the movie. But basically, so just watch the movie. And there are versions of it, newer versions of it that even if you've watched it, it'll still work. I'll just say that much. And the idea is that, for example, um, uh... for example, everybody has seen something in this room that you don't know is there. What I mean is, you've seen it. But you did not do the... so you saw it as an object, right? In this way, but you did not conceptualize it, or identify it, and it cross through your visual awareness, depending on some people will say, you didn't even reach the level of phenomenality. But I think the general consensus now is that it does get to a phenomenal level, but you just don't like conceptualize it. So you don't remember it. Okay. So I'm going to give you an example. Uh, in this room, there is a green sign with a little person on it. Who has seen the green sign with a person?
You've everybody's seen that. It's crossed your visual awareness. You've all seen that, right? Okay. Everybody's seen that. There are lots of things in this room that are like that, for sure. But we don't notice because they're not relevant. Like maybe if you're a fan of signs, you notice all the signs in a room, you're a sign collector, or, you know, you're especially worried about how to run downstairs and you see the little icon of the running person on the green sign.
You know, so it's like, whatever. Or maybe you've noticed, okay, so there are, in this room, there are uh several uh, uh, kind of glass, um, lampshades, right? So everyone noticed. Now you'd look around and say, oh, yeah, there are. How many of you actually honestly didn't know that there were these light shades? Am I right? A few people really didn't notice, right? Maybe. So there are all kinds of things that you see, like, you've probably seen the big drums, do you know whether there is anything at the center of the big drums in the back of the room? You can turn around and look now and see that there's a joy swirl in the center of the drums in the back of the room. Obviously, very easy to see, right? It's not like, oh, I just didn't see it.
It's just you didn't like, you know, you didn't attend to it in a way that enabled you to conceptualize it. So what's happening here, most of the time, we don't attend to the information. So what's happening here is all of experience is being presented, objects, stuff, and then non-object stuff. But since we're so focused on objects, because the reason we're focused on objects is we want this, we don't want that, we want this, we don't want that. We don't actually often do this, where that moment of experience, instead of producing a conceptualization like this, about an object, instead of produces a conceptualization like this, about the non-object side, basically, the background. Okay, so that means that most of the time, what's salient, and this is a term in the context of attention, it means, in a sense, it's popping out to us, it's what's important to us, it's what we care about. And there are lots of things that are salient. Uh, you know we have like a, this has to do with what you can call our task set, like, what is running in the background as relevant to, like part of the gunk here, like, what's really, what are our goals? So one task set would be, for example, I'll just give you a quick example. Let's just suppose you're like, you know, someone who's a gardener or whatever, and then you would have noticed, probably that there's like a, some kind of a small gardening machine running in the background right now, right?
But maybe if you're not a fan of gardening, or you know, you don't, you just haven't really, you just filtered that out. If you all care about your emotional states, and you can do that in positive and negative ways, right? So in certain kinds of anxiety disorders, there's a kind of too much concern with the internal states, and your physical states, and so on. And then you kind of heighten that and then become, you know, too much, in a sense, acutely aware of your appropriate, your interoceptive or proprioceptive information, mostly interoceptive, and that can create, you know, issues. But also, I could have, let's say, I'm a practitioner. And as part of my goals, it's like, I want to be kind to people. And so I'm kind of monitoring in the background without, even while I'm doing something. I can be monitoring in the background, how I'm doing it. Okay, because, and this is called meta-awareness. But it's not a meta-awareness that is like this. Okay? Rather, it's the meta, the kind of a meta-awareness that's just like that.
So that you are able to implicitly, and I've written an article about this with Evan Thompson and Jonathan Schooler, that I can share with you guys, that you can implicitly be aware of, you can cultivate actually, and increase, we all have this capacity, but you can kind of increase that capacity, first of all. And then secondly, you can tie it to certain types of goals that are not about just, you know, getting stuff in the world or winning a debate or whatever, but are also about a certain sense of being what kind of person you want to be. And so if you have a very big deficit in this area, everyone has some of it, because you wouldn't be able to actually navigate the world if you didn't have this. But uh, if you have a deficit, then you don't notice you're getting upset, like you're in the middle of an argument, and someone says to you, you're angry, and you go, I'm not angry.
Is this ever happened to you? What do you mean? You're angry.
Right, or whatever. So you can, so this is very important in practice. And one of the ways that this is articulated, actually, even prior to, uh, you know, this kind of implicit theories, again, none of this stuff just comes out of nowhere. There are, you know, in Buddhist practices and in Buddhist theories, both in their interactions lead to these types of, you can almost say discoveries. And so the idea of mindfulness style practice, a big part of mindfulness style practice is monitoring not just what's happening with an object, but what's happening with yours, the background, so to speak, your emotions, and so on, the quality of your awareness. So when you have, so the idea here is that even while you're focused on an object, let's say you're focused on your breath, you're doing, you know, mindfulness of breathing, you have an awareness of how you're focusing, not just what you're focusing on, but the quality of your awareness. So as you're, as you're cultivating that kind of mindfulness, you're also cultivating this meta awareness. And the term for that in Sanskrit is samprajanya, or Tibetan shes bzhin ཤེས་བཞིན་. So you have dren pa དྲན་པ་, which again, is that thing that prevents you from, prevents, remember, that's mindfulness, smṛti, sati, dren pa དྲན་པ་, that prevents your mind from getting caught. But you also have samprajanya, or shes bzhin ཤེས་བཞིན་ in Tibetan, which we can translate as meta awareness, which is noticing how it's going. So even while you're focused on something, you can be noticing how you're focusing the quality of your awareness. Right? And this, you know, there are many different places where this is relevant. This is very relevant in music performance, right? It's relevant in sports, dance, in all kinds of situations, it's very relevant, that this capacity is very important. And it's very important for a practitioner, because if we are, you know, if we're trying to cultivate certain types of virtues, we're trying to cultivate compassion, we want to be aware of how we are with others. But if the way we have to do that is, I'm talking to you, uh, how am I doing, how am I, uh you know,
people are not going to want to talk to you anymore. If it's like, I have to look in. Right? You could start to seem very uptight.
So it's not that, it's cultivating that meta awareness. And then there are styles of practice, which enable you to cultivate that meta awareness very deliberately. So mindfulness styles of practice, and actually, really, the term, you know, when we talk about this aspect of meditation, and really, you can say this as this is an aspect of really kind of all meditative practices. The Tibetans don't just say smṛti when or sati, you know, or dren pa དྲན་པ་ is their word, right? They don't just call it that. They say, when you're talking about this feature, which we could kind of use a single word mindfulness for in English, they say dren shes དྲན་ཤེས་, which is a, which is a compound formed from two words, dren pa དྲན་པ་ and shes bzhin ཤེས་བཞིན་, dren shes དྲན་ཤེས་. That's, and that means mindfulness, smṛti, mindfulness and meta awareness. That's the whole package. And how could you, what kind of a practice could you do, by the way, without, you know, it's without kind of, this isn't nature of mind practice, but it would be preparatory to it, what kind of a practice could you do that would very deliberately cultivate that meta awareness side?
Yes?
Rowan? Student: And noting your emotional mental state. You could do a noting practice, which you will find in like Vipassanā, and so on. But the one thing about, about noting practice in general is it can make you kind of do the turn in, right? Where you're kind of objectifying self. What if you were to, like, you take the object, take the flower as an object. Okay, everyone look at the flower. Keep looking, looking, look, look, look. Undistracted, completely mindful, keep looking, look, undistracted.
Like you, there's a moment they were like, you're still aware, you're not distracted, but you're not aware of something.
Right? So that's, that's uh, uh, objectless Samatha. I think Eric's been talking to you about Samatha, which is developing a kind of mental stability. And that's done with an object. But you can then in the Mahāmudrā gradual training, you actually then do a kind of Samatha, which is without an object. So that's getting you toward that undistracted non meditation, you're cultivating meta awareness, but you're not focusing on an object. So you start often by by using an object could be visual object could be your breath. And then you sort of drop the object. And you just remain undistracted. And that's Samatha. It's not, you know, into what we call Vipassanā insight. It's not, you know, recognizing the nature of the mind. But it's very important for preparing for that. And that's all but it also then has very useful other aspects, because it then enables you when you're off the cushion, it cultivates that capacity to kind of even while you're focused on something, you notice how you're doing. And if part of your task set, your goal set is like to be a generous kind person, that'll also that'll make it more salient. Just like if you're a sign collector, you would have noticed the sign. Right? You're that stuff about your subject side, your emotions and so on becomes more obvious to you in a health in a healthy way. Yes, Josh.
Student: The practice you just showed when you drop the flower and we're still in this awareness, is that the same as just like trying to be in this open state and kind of waiting until something arises in our awareness? Yeah, like, like choiceless awareness, as some people call it. Yeah, it is similar. Yes, it can be like that. Except the difference there is that you don't, it's not like you're waiting for anything.
In other words, you're part of what it means to be undistracted in that context is not to select any object. So if there's a loud sound right now, one of our baseline tasks or goals is to stay alive. So if you had a loud sound, like boom, we would all go what? Right? Because that would be salient, is that a threat? Okay, so that loud sound captured our attention, because it's important to us, in this very baseline thing. And this, this, the kind of practice here, objectless Samatha, is to actually not be captured by anything.
So you're aware, you're doing, you're, you're, um, you know, you're certainly fully aware, but you're not trying to focus on anything, and the mind is not, the attention is not being captured by anything. Student: Maybe a bit like being in the forest at night, and then suddenly you hear something, but then the noise is over, but you're just like super alert, and like. Yes, exactly. Yes, so actually, you know, a traditional way to introduce some of these types of practices is through startle, what’s called the startle response. So if you have a loud sound, our system goes up, and then after that, like there's this kind of moment of, you're fully aware, but not of anything. That's right, exactly right. Yep. That's starting to get more into actual nature of mind practice, where you might use a shout, like this, of the syllable phet ཕཊ་, or, you know, in Zen, the master will come up and smack you in the head. I'm thinking of introducing some of that here.
And Eric has some great stories about Zen, Zen encounters with Tibetans. You know, they like, you know, try to shock you. Just a quick story. So there was when Joseph Goldstein wrote this great book, One Dharma, which maybe we're going to try to like do an event, the sort of 2.0, so to speak, pretty soon, maybe next year. But um, and uh, Joseph is a very well known Vipassanā teacher, who became, because in a sense, that which is very interesting, like that sort of meta-awareness that is cultivated, even in Vipassanā style mindfulness practice, that's a route into Mahāmudrā Dzogchen. So when Joseph and others kind of encountered Mahāmudrā and Dzogchen they went, oh, that's what we've been doing.
And then, you know, because Zen practice also is really about that kind of non-dual awareness too, they arranged to have a meeting between Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche, a very famous Dzogchen teacher, the late Nyoshul Khen, and a Zen master. I can't remember which one. This is how he starts the book, you know, and the Zen master is trying to do this startle thing too. And one way you do that is not by shouting or whatever, but you just ask people like, it's called Dharma combat, you know, when two masters meets, like, I'm going to make your mind go, boom. So at a certain point in the conversation, the Zen master, there's a bowl of fruit, you know, that's been offered. He grabs an orange and he goes, what is this? And Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche turns to his translator and says, what, they don't have oranges where they come from?
And then,
Yes.
Student: Just to get it clear, is this meta-awareness happening simultaneously? Because, Yes. usually it's said that you can't multitask. So if it is simultaneously, it's non-dual. Is this the point? That's right. It is, it is, yes, exactly. Every moment of awareness on this model, every moment of awareness has this meta-awareness. And if it's not... Because it is actually, it is, this meta-awareness is actually a version or, you know, depends on that reflexivity. Student: And if it's not simultaneously, it's conceptual? Then it would be... No, it wouldn't necessarily be conceptual, but it might be second order. It might be, you know, there are people who will say that meta-awareness, there is no such thing as this kind of first order, reflexive meta-awareness. There's this thing, there's a second order meta-awareness that only happens consciously when you, when you uh, look at your own mind or something like that. Okay, so, so, so the... So this is the theory here is that every moment of consciousness has meta-awareness. Because that's actually what it means to be conscious. Student: And this means also to be non-dual in... Yes, well, it's... So the non-dual idea of it is that there's an aspect of your awareness that is being presented to you, non-dually, because your sense of subjectivity is known without making it an object. And if you've been doing any of practices with Eric, I think you see this. Like what happens when you try to see your subjectivity? You look for the subject, look for the self. What happens? Like if you go, oh, who's, who's, who's seeing right now? What happens when you try to see that seer?
Yeah, like, well, yeah. And the reason you can't find something is that that's, that you're doing, you're just trying to, you just turned yourself into, you've done this. See here, this moment, the sense of subjectivity is being presented reflexively. And here I'm going, oh, I, I am this, you know, from the standpoint of a subject, I am, you know, happy or upset or whatever.
So that you've conceptualized yourself. So the only kind of self you can know in that way as something that you'd look at as an object is a conceptualized self, which is not a self, it's a concept.
Okay.
Student: Does that mean you can't really turn awareness into an object? No, yeah, that's right. You cannot, you, you, you can, you can, uh, you can take it this, this moment, and you can conceptualize various aspects of that moment. Can you conceptualize all of the vase? Everything about the vase? No, because there's an infinite number of possible conceptualizations. In that territory, you can make an infinite number of maps. Some of them are probably extremely useless maps. You know, like, how many barely visible fingerprints are there on there? But, probably not a super useful map.
But you can make a lot, an infinite number of maps. And, you know, a map always chooses data. If it's, if it has to filter out some of the territory. Otherwise it's just the territory, like that story by Borges. Right? So, you know, you can have, we can make a map of Gomde, which is, you know, based on the grasshopper population. Like they're little grasshoppers, you've probably seen around. And we can even try to make the map as a grasshopper map. Like, how does a grasshopper see Gomde? That would be useful for grasshoppers to negotiate Gomde. But like, so that would be an interpretive grasshopper interpretation of the territory. We make our own interpretations, human interpretations. You know, if you're a big sign fan, maybe there'd be a sign map of all the signs at Gomde.
Right? But they're all just taking the territory and choosing things that are relevant. That's what concepts do. So you could never map all of consciousness, just like you can't even map all of the vase. But you can't stand outside of consciousness and look at it. That's the main, which is also the flaw in a lot of consciousness research. You can't like, look at consciousness outside of consciousness. You can't do that. Then you're not conscious.
Okay, and that's also a point made in that book, The Blind Spot, which I've recommended to you.
Uh, so what happens when you try to look in? You don't, you can't find that because, of course you can't, because you're doing, you know, when you're looking, you're doing this. You're assuming a new standpoint of subjectivity and looking. But when you don't find, you know, when you don't find that self, when you try to look and do that like that, part of what you're discovering is the sense in which, the sense of subjectivity is being presented to you without you having to do that. So that again is a kind of step toward the nature of mind practice, or the recognition of the nature of mind, right? Which Eric has been leading you through somewhat. Not, you know, we don't presume to give, you know, pointing out what's called pointing out instructions. So when we said that, Eric and I were talking, the uh, when the um, you can say through meditation you find the view, that's where you basically come to a nature of mind experience just on your own through meditation practice. Most of the time, as I said, except for extraordinary cases, it's you have a view, really a conceptual view, and then you come to the experience of the nature of mind. And that conceptual view can be philosophy, but it doesn't have to be that. It can be also like the interaction with a master who's using words, symbols, and so on. But there's going to be some key like issues that even there that we should, that we will talk about probably tomorrow. And part of this also then is, what you can see in a way is that, um, you know, the act, even just the act of like choosing what to conceptualize, whether it's subject or object, is in a sense creating a reality.
And so which framework we use to conceptualize also is really relevant. And I think also what that tells you is that the framework, under certain conditions, you start to recognize how the framework is contingent. And I think the double slit experiment is a very good case of that. So we're going to, Philippe's going to present that to us tomorrow. I think maybe though we shouldn't start at 9:30 because it's two and a half hours is too long. So let's just start at 10 tomorrow. And maybe we'll start with that just for fun.
Uh, so, uh... when, so one of the questions is, how do we really like, part of the nature of the mind is definitely going to be that is this like sheer luminosity, this reflexive awareness, that is the mind itself, that is characterizing every moment of consciousness, and also that it's empty, it's empty of the subject-object duality. Now, and this is both like theoretically, like you could say, or analytically the case, because those using Mādhyamika analysis, it is um, the subject and the object can't be essentially real because they would not be relational then, right? So we know that if something is relational, it's necessarily empty of a fixed identity. Consciousness is relational and dynamic in this way. So it has to be empty, not just of subject-object duality, but of any fixed identity. So it's luminous, but empty of any fixed identity. Right? But there's another way in which you could say the nature of consciousness or the nature of mind is not dualistic. Remember, the nature of something is what the thing has in every permutation. Water is H2O, whether it's liquid, gas or solid, right? So if there's something about the particular instance of water you're dealing with, like it's muddy, then that, and that doesn't occur in some other permutation, that means that muddiness is not essential to the water. Right? Okay? Or maybe some water has salt in it. You can take the salt out and it's still water, so that means salt is just accidental. So what this is also saying, which is important, and this is also then becomes a technique, is you can also say if you want to really kind of demonstrate to someone that the nature of mind is empty of duality and luminous, you could induce a state in which that happens, meaning there is no content. There's just sheer luminosity. Okay? So you could put somebody in a state like that, just putting, just inducing that state and the way you would do that is through certain tantric techniques. But the way you would do that, right, just doing that is not enough. And this is also why, like, you know, people think, well, I take certain psychedelics. That's not enough. Just inducing the state is not it. Because you then, like the fourth initiation, as Rinpoche, you know, was explaining, is really in a sense telling you what it means when you're in there, not even what it means, like pointing out what is the nature of that state, what you need to, in a sense, learn from that experience. Okay? And one thing you're learning is that this dualistic structure, and one way you get rid of dualistic structure is you just, you know, wipe out content, and then there's just sheer luminosity, right? But you don't have to do that. You can also, in a sense, the content can remain without this, without the dualistic structure seeming real, without the reality habit of the dualistic structure. So that means that there are other ways of getting there. And even philosophy can do that. And so this is what's called sūtra Mahāmudrā, where you use philosophy, and on the figure on the right is a depiction of a very important Indian scholar practitioner. He's very important for the Mahāmudrā tradition. Uh, his, this is Advayavajra, the non-dual vajra, also known as Maitrīpa. He wrote some very important texts in Mahāmudrā tradition. And so philosophy is one way of doing this. Tantric practice is another way of doing this. So this is the sūtra level, so-called sūtra, non-tantric level, this then there's the tantric level. And then there's also a kind of another level in a way, which is the devotional level. And we'll talk maybe tomorrow more about why devotion might be so important uh, for this kind of practice. Again, you know, talking about things does have the slight danger of, you know, making us too conceptualizing them too much. But since most of us Westerners are so over-educated, it's better for us to like work through our crazy ideas about this stuff
and get clear about it. Okay, so we'll do some of that tomorrow. Look at the double split, slit. We'll uh, um... talk a little bit more about how this, what kinds of practices are involved and maybe deal with your questions about, um, about this kind of reflexive awareness If you have any, so think about it. Let me know any other questions from the week that you may have. Uh, so please uh, have a good evening of contemplation.
Let's dedicate.
sönam diyi thamché sikpa nyi thopné nyepai dranam phamjé né kyega nachi balap trukpa yi sipai tsolé drowa drölwar shok jangchup semchok rinpoché ma kyepa nam kyé gyurchik kyepa nyampa mepa yang gongné gongdu phelwar shok
Okay, thank you.
Sorry, come on. Instead of this kind of conceptualization, where the object form is dominant. Like, oh, look at this. Wow, look at that. Instead, I have a conceptualization where the subject form is dominant. Like, I'm looking at this, and so there's my vase, and then maybe like, oh, wow, I really missed it.
You making fun of my relationship with my vase? Yes.
Okay. So like, but in that moment, it seems like I'm looking back at myself, right? Like, oh, I'm seeing kind of looking to my feelings. But on this model, that's not what's happening. It's that because of the reflexive awareness, it's presenting the subject and the object simultaneously. And under what whichever conditions, basically conditions that have to do with attention, and what's salient, like you pay attention to what's salient. So maybe I explain that for a moment. And this is also that, you know, the movie that many of you have seen, and if you haven't seen it, you can go on YouTube and just type invisible gorilla. Right? So again, as you might recall, it's this, you know, movie that's used to teach something called inattentional blindness, you're told at the beginning of the movie, well, I'm not going to ruin it, who has not seen it? Oh, okay, basically, without I'm not going to ruin the movie. But basically, so just watch the movie. And there are versions of it, newer versions of it that even if you've watched it, it'll still work. I'll just say that much. And the idea is that, for example, um, uh... for example, everybody has seen something in this room that you don't know is there. What I mean is, you've seen it. But you did not do the... so you saw it as an object, right? In this way, but you did not conceptualize it, or identify it, and it cross through your visual awareness, depending on some people will say, you didn't even reach the level of phenomenality. But I think the general consensus now is that it does get to a phenomenal level, but you just don't like conceptualize it. So you don't remember it. Okay. So I'm going to give you an example. Uh, in this room, there is a green sign with a little person on it. Who has seen the green sign with a person?
You've everybody's seen that. It's crossed your visual awareness. You've all seen that, right? Okay. Everybody's seen that. There are lots of things in this room that are like that, for sure. But we don't notice because they're not relevant. Like maybe if you're a fan of signs, you notice all the signs in a room, you're a sign collector, or, you know, you're especially worried about how to run downstairs and you see the little icon of the running person on the green sign.
You know, so it's like, whatever. Or maybe you've noticed, okay, so there are, in this room, there are uh several uh, uh, kind of glass, um, lampshades, right? So everyone noticed. Now you'd look around and say, oh, yeah, there are. How many of you actually honestly didn't know that there were these light shades? Am I right? A few people really didn't notice, right? Maybe. So there are all kinds of things that you see, like, you've probably seen the big drums, do you know whether there is anything at the center of the big drums in the back of the room? You can turn around and look now and see that there's a joy swirl in the center of the drums in the back of the room. Obviously, very easy to see, right? It's not like, oh, I just didn't see it.
It's just you didn't like, you know, you didn't attend to it in a way that enabled you to conceptualize it. So what's happening here, most of the time, we don't attend to the information. So what's happening here is all of experience is being presented, objects, stuff, and then non-object stuff. But since we're so focused on objects, because the reason we're focused on objects is we want this, we don't want that, we want this, we don't want that. We don't actually often do this, where that moment of experience, instead of producing a conceptualization like this, about an object, instead of produces a conceptualization like this, about the non-object side, basically, the background. Okay, so that means that most of the time, what's salient, and this is a term in the context of attention, it means, in a sense, it's popping out to us, it's what's important to us, it's what we care about. And there are lots of things that are salient. Uh, you know we have like a, this has to do with what you can call our task set, like, what is running in the background as relevant to, like part of the gunk here, like, what's really, what are our goals? So one task set would be, for example, I'll just give you a quick example. Let's just suppose you're like, you know, someone who's a gardener or whatever, and then you would have noticed, probably that there's like a, some kind of a small gardening machine running in the background right now, right?
But maybe if you're not a fan of gardening, or you know, you don't, you just haven't really, you just filtered that out. If you all care about your emotional states, and you can do that in positive and negative ways, right? So in certain kinds of anxiety disorders, there's a kind of too much concern with the internal states, and your physical states, and so on. And then you kind of heighten that and then become, you know, too much, in a sense, acutely aware of your appropriate, your interoceptive or proprioceptive information, mostly interoceptive, and that can create, you know, issues. But also, I could have, let's say, I'm a practitioner. And as part of my goals, it's like, I want to be kind to people. And so I'm kind of monitoring in the background without, even while I'm doing something. I can be monitoring in the background, how I'm doing it. Okay, because, and this is called meta-awareness. But it's not a meta-awareness that is like this. Okay? Rather, it's the meta, the kind of a meta-awareness that's just like that.
So that you are able to implicitly, and I've written an article about this with Evan Thompson and Jonathan Schooler, that I can share with you guys, that you can implicitly be aware of, you can cultivate actually, and increase, we all have this capacity, but you can kind of increase that capacity, first of all. And then secondly, you can tie it to certain types of goals that are not about just, you know, getting stuff in the world or winning a debate or whatever, but are also about a certain sense of being what kind of person you want to be. And so if you have a very big deficit in this area, everyone has some of it, because you wouldn't be able to actually navigate the world if you didn't have this. But uh, if you have a deficit, then you don't notice you're getting upset, like you're in the middle of an argument, and someone says to you, you're angry, and you go, I'm not angry.
Is this ever happened to you? What do you mean? You're angry.
Right, or whatever. So you can, so this is very important in practice. And one of the ways that this is articulated, actually, even prior to, uh, you know, this kind of implicit theories, again, none of this stuff just comes out of nowhere. There are, you know, in Buddhist practices and in Buddhist theories, both in their interactions lead to these types of, you can almost say discoveries. And so the idea of mindfulness style practice, a big part of mindfulness style practice is monitoring not just what's happening with an object, but what's happening with yours, the background, so to speak, your emotions, and so on, the quality of your awareness. So when you have, so the idea here is that even while you're focused on an object, let's say you're focused on your breath, you're doing, you know, mindfulness of breathing, you have an awareness of how you're focusing, not just what you're focusing on, but the quality of your awareness. So as you're, as you're cultivating that kind of mindfulness, you're also cultivating this meta awareness. And the term for that in Sanskrit is samprajanya, or Tibetan shes bzhin ཤེས་བཞིན་. So you have dren pa དྲན་པ་, which again, is that thing that prevents you from, prevents, remember, that's mindfulness, smṛti, sati, dren pa དྲན་པ་, that prevents your mind from getting caught. But you also have samprajanya, or shes bzhin ཤེས་བཞིན་ in Tibetan, which we can translate as meta awareness, which is noticing how it's going. So even while you're focused on something, you can be noticing how you're focusing the quality of your awareness. Right? And this, you know, there are many different places where this is relevant. This is very relevant in music performance, right? It's relevant in sports, dance, in all kinds of situations, it's very relevant, that this capacity is very important. And it's very important for a practitioner, because if we are, you know, if we're trying to cultivate certain types of virtues, we're trying to cultivate compassion, we want to be aware of how we are with others. But if the way we have to do that is, I'm talking to you, uh, how am I doing, how am I, uh you know,
people are not going to want to talk to you anymore. If it's like, I have to look in. Right? You could start to seem very uptight.
So it's not that, it's cultivating that meta awareness. And then there are styles of practice, which enable you to cultivate that meta awareness very deliberately. So mindfulness styles of practice, and actually, really, the term, you know, when we talk about this aspect of meditation, and really, you can say this as this is an aspect of really kind of all meditative practices. The Tibetans don't just say smṛti when or sati, you know, or dren pa དྲན་པ་ is their word, right? They don't just call it that. They say, when you're talking about this feature, which we could kind of use a single word mindfulness for in English, they say dren shes དྲན་ཤེས་, which is a, which is a compound formed from two words, dren pa དྲན་པ་ and shes bzhin ཤེས་བཞིན་, dren shes དྲན་ཤེས་. That's, and that means mindfulness, smṛti, mindfulness and meta awareness. That's the whole package. And how could you, what kind of a practice could you do, by the way, without, you know, it's without kind of, this isn't nature of mind practice, but it would be preparatory to it, what kind of a practice could you do that would very deliberately cultivate that meta awareness side?
Yes?
Rowan? Student: And noting your emotional mental state. You could do a noting practice, which you will find in like Vipassanā, and so on. But the one thing about, about noting practice in general is it can make you kind of do the turn in, right? Where you're kind of objectifying self. What if you were to, like, you take the object, take the flower as an object. Okay, everyone look at the flower. Keep looking, looking, look, look, look. Undistracted, completely mindful, keep looking, look, undistracted.
Like you, there's a moment they were like, you're still aware, you're not distracted, but you're not aware of something.
Right? So that's, that's uh, uh, objectless Samatha. I think Eric's been talking to you about Samatha, which is developing a kind of mental stability. And that's done with an object. But you can then in the Mahāmudrā gradual training, you actually then do a kind of Samatha, which is without an object. So that's getting you toward that undistracted non meditation, you're cultivating meta awareness, but you're not focusing on an object. So you start often by by using an object could be visual object could be your breath. And then you sort of drop the object. And you just remain undistracted. And that's Samatha. It's not, you know, into what we call Vipassanā insight. It's not, you know, recognizing the nature of the mind. But it's very important for preparing for that. And that's all but it also then has very useful other aspects, because it then enables you when you're off the cushion, it cultivates that capacity to kind of even while you're focused on something, you notice how you're doing. And if part of your task set, your goal set is like to be a generous kind person, that'll also that'll make it more salient. Just like if you're a sign collector, you would have noticed the sign. Right? You're that stuff about your subject side, your emotions and so on becomes more obvious to you in a health in a healthy way. Yes, Josh.
Student: The practice you just showed when you drop the flower and we're still in this awareness, is that the same as just like trying to be in this open state and kind of waiting until something arises in our awareness? Yeah, like, like choiceless awareness, as some people call it. Yeah, it is similar. Yes, it can be like that. Except the difference there is that you don't, it's not like you're waiting for anything.
In other words, you're part of what it means to be undistracted in that context is not to select any object. So if there's a loud sound right now, one of our baseline tasks or goals is to stay alive. So if you had a loud sound, like boom, we would all go what? Right? Because that would be salient, is that a threat? Okay, so that loud sound captured our attention, because it's important to us, in this very baseline thing. And this, this, the kind of practice here, objectless Samatha, is to actually not be captured by anything.
So you're aware, you're doing, you're, you're, um, you know, you're certainly fully aware, but you're not trying to focus on anything, and the mind is not, the attention is not being captured by anything. Student: Maybe a bit like being in the forest at night, and then suddenly you hear something, but then the noise is over, but you're just like super alert, and like. Yes, exactly. Yes, so actually, you know, a traditional way to introduce some of these types of practices is through startle, what’s called the startle response. So if you have a loud sound, our system goes up, and then after that, like there's this kind of moment of, you're fully aware, but not of anything. That's right, exactly right. Yep. That's starting to get more into actual nature of mind practice, where you might use a shout, like this, of the syllable phet ཕཊ་, or, you know, in Zen, the master will come up and smack you in the head. I'm thinking of introducing some of that here.
And Eric has some great stories about Zen, Zen encounters with Tibetans. You know, they like, you know, try to shock you. Just a quick story. So there was when Joseph Goldstein wrote this great book, One Dharma, which maybe we're going to try to like do an event, the sort of 2.0, so to speak, pretty soon, maybe next year. But um, and uh, Joseph is a very well known Vipassanā teacher, who became, because in a sense, that which is very interesting, like that sort of meta-awareness that is cultivated, even in Vipassanā style mindfulness practice, that's a route into Mahāmudrā Dzogchen. So when Joseph and others kind of encountered Mahāmudrā and Dzogchen they went, oh, that's what we've been doing.
And then, you know, because Zen practice also is really about that kind of non-dual awareness too, they arranged to have a meeting between Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche, a very famous Dzogchen teacher, the late Nyoshul Khen, and a Zen master. I can't remember which one. This is how he starts the book, you know, and the Zen master is trying to do this startle thing too. And one way you do that is not by shouting or whatever, but you just ask people like, it's called Dharma combat, you know, when two masters meets, like, I'm going to make your mind go, boom. So at a certain point in the conversation, the Zen master, there's a bowl of fruit, you know, that's been offered. He grabs an orange and he goes, what is this? And Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche turns to his translator and says, what, they don't have oranges where they come from?
And then,
Yes.
Student: Just to get it clear, is this meta-awareness happening simultaneously? Because, Yes. usually it's said that you can't multitask. So if it is simultaneously, it's non-dual. Is this the point? That's right. It is, it is, yes, exactly. Every moment of awareness on this model, every moment of awareness has this meta-awareness. And if it's not... Because it is actually, it is, this meta-awareness is actually a version or, you know, depends on that reflexivity. Student: And if it's not simultaneously, it's conceptual? Then it would be... No, it wouldn't necessarily be conceptual, but it might be second order. It might be, you know, there are people who will say that meta-awareness, there is no such thing as this kind of first order, reflexive meta-awareness. There's this thing, there's a second order meta-awareness that only happens consciously when you, when you uh, look at your own mind or something like that. Okay, so, so, so the... So this is the theory here is that every moment of consciousness has meta-awareness. Because that's actually what it means to be conscious. Student: And this means also to be non-dual in... Yes, well, it's... So the non-dual idea of it is that there's an aspect of your awareness that is being presented to you, non-dually, because your sense of subjectivity is known without making it an object. And if you've been doing any of practices with Eric, I think you see this. Like what happens when you try to see your subjectivity? You look for the subject, look for the self. What happens? Like if you go, oh, who's, who's, who's seeing right now? What happens when you try to see that seer?
Yeah, like, well, yeah. And the reason you can't find something is that that's, that you're doing, you're just trying to, you just turned yourself into, you've done this. See here, this moment, the sense of subjectivity is being presented reflexively. And here I'm going, oh, I, I am this, you know, from the standpoint of a subject, I am, you know, happy or upset or whatever.
So that you've conceptualized yourself. So the only kind of self you can know in that way as something that you'd look at as an object is a conceptualized self, which is not a self, it's a concept.
Okay.
Student: Does that mean you can't really turn awareness into an object? No, yeah, that's right. You cannot, you, you, you can, you can, uh, you can take it this, this moment, and you can conceptualize various aspects of that moment. Can you conceptualize all of the vase? Everything about the vase? No, because there's an infinite number of possible conceptualizations. In that territory, you can make an infinite number of maps. Some of them are probably extremely useless maps. You know, like, how many barely visible fingerprints are there on there? But, probably not a super useful map.
But you can make a lot, an infinite number of maps. And, you know, a map always chooses data. If it's, if it has to filter out some of the territory. Otherwise it's just the territory, like that story by Borges. Right? So, you know, you can have, we can make a map of Gomde, which is, you know, based on the grasshopper population. Like they're little grasshoppers, you've probably seen around. And we can even try to make the map as a grasshopper map. Like, how does a grasshopper see Gomde? That would be useful for grasshoppers to negotiate Gomde. But like, so that would be an interpretive grasshopper interpretation of the territory. We make our own interpretations, human interpretations. You know, if you're a big sign fan, maybe there'd be a sign map of all the signs at Gomde.
Right? But they're all just taking the territory and choosing things that are relevant. That's what concepts do. So you could never map all of consciousness, just like you can't even map all of the vase. But you can't stand outside of consciousness and look at it. That's the main, which is also the flaw in a lot of consciousness research. You can't like, look at consciousness outside of consciousness. You can't do that. Then you're not conscious.
Okay, and that's also a point made in that book, The Blind Spot, which I've recommended to you.
Uh, so what happens when you try to look in? You don't, you can't find that because, of course you can't, because you're doing, you know, when you're looking, you're doing this. You're assuming a new standpoint of subjectivity and looking. But when you don't find, you know, when you don't find that self, when you try to look and do that like that, part of what you're discovering is the sense in which, the sense of subjectivity is being presented to you without you having to do that. So that again is a kind of step toward the nature of mind practice, or the recognition of the nature of mind, right? Which Eric has been leading you through somewhat. Not, you know, we don't presume to give, you know, pointing out what's called pointing out instructions. So when we said that, Eric and I were talking, the uh, when the um, you can say through meditation you find the view, that's where you basically come to a nature of mind experience just on your own through meditation practice. Most of the time, as I said, except for extraordinary cases, it's you have a view, really a conceptual view, and then you come to the experience of the nature of mind. And that conceptual view can be philosophy, but it doesn't have to be that. It can be also like the interaction with a master who's using words, symbols, and so on. But there's going to be some key like issues that even there that we should, that we will talk about probably tomorrow. And part of this also then is, what you can see in a way is that, um, you know, the act, even just the act of like choosing what to conceptualize, whether it's subject or object, is in a sense creating a reality.
And so which framework we use to conceptualize also is really relevant. And I think also what that tells you is that the framework, under certain conditions, you start to recognize how the framework is contingent. And I think the double slit experiment is a very good case of that. So we're going to, Philippe's going to present that to us tomorrow. I think maybe though we shouldn't start at 9:30 because it's two and a half hours is too long. So let's just start at 10 tomorrow. And maybe we'll start with that just for fun.
Uh, so, uh... when, so one of the questions is, how do we really like, part of the nature of the mind is definitely going to be that is this like sheer luminosity, this reflexive awareness, that is the mind itself, that is characterizing every moment of consciousness, and also that it's empty, it's empty of the subject-object duality. Now, and this is both like theoretically, like you could say, or analytically the case, because those using Mādhyamika analysis, it is um, the subject and the object can't be essentially real because they would not be relational then, right? So we know that if something is relational, it's necessarily empty of a fixed identity. Consciousness is relational and dynamic in this way. So it has to be empty, not just of subject-object duality, but of any fixed identity. So it's luminous, but empty of any fixed identity. Right? But there's another way in which you could say the nature of consciousness or the nature of mind is not dualistic. Remember, the nature of something is what the thing has in every permutation. Water is H2O, whether it's liquid, gas or solid, right? So if there's something about the particular instance of water you're dealing with, like it's muddy, then that, and that doesn't occur in some other permutation, that means that muddiness is not essential to the water. Right? Okay? Or maybe some water has salt in it. You can take the salt out and it's still water, so that means salt is just accidental. So what this is also saying, which is important, and this is also then becomes a technique, is you can also say if you want to really kind of demonstrate to someone that the nature of mind is empty of duality and luminous, you could induce a state in which that happens, meaning there is no content. There's just sheer luminosity. Okay? So you could put somebody in a state like that, just putting, just inducing that state and the way you would do that is through certain tantric techniques. But the way you would do that, right, just doing that is not enough. And this is also why, like, you know, people think, well, I take certain psychedelics. That's not enough. Just inducing the state is not it. Because you then, like the fourth initiation, as Rinpoche, you know, was explaining, is really in a sense telling you what it means when you're in there, not even what it means, like pointing out what is the nature of that state, what you need to, in a sense, learn from that experience. Okay? And one thing you're learning is that this dualistic structure, and one way you get rid of dualistic structure is you just, you know, wipe out content, and then there's just sheer luminosity, right? But you don't have to do that. You can also, in a sense, the content can remain without this, without the dualistic structure seeming real, without the reality habit of the dualistic structure. So that means that there are other ways of getting there. And even philosophy can do that. And so this is what's called sūtra Mahāmudrā, where you use philosophy, and on the figure on the right is a depiction of a very important Indian scholar practitioner. He's very important for the Mahāmudrā tradition. Uh, his, this is Advayavajra, the non-dual vajra, also known as Maitrīpa. He wrote some very important texts in Mahāmudrā tradition. And so philosophy is one way of doing this. Tantric practice is another way of doing this. So this is the sūtra level, so-called sūtra, non-tantric level, this then there's the tantric level. And then there's also a kind of another level in a way, which is the devotional level. And we'll talk maybe tomorrow more about why devotion might be so important uh, for this kind of practice. Again, you know, talking about things does have the slight danger of, you know, making us too conceptualizing them too much. But since most of us Westerners are so over-educated, it's better for us to like work through our crazy ideas about this stuff
and get clear about it. Okay, so we'll do some of that tomorrow. Look at the double split, slit. We'll uh, um... talk a little bit more about how this, what kinds of practices are involved and maybe deal with your questions about, um, about this kind of reflexive awareness If you have any, so think about it. Let me know any other questions from the week that you may have. Uh, so please uh, have a good evening of contemplation.
Let's dedicate.
sönam diyi thamché sikpa nyi thopné nyepai dranam phamjé né kyega nachi balap trukpa yi sipai tsolé drowa drölwar shok jangchup semchok rinpoché ma kyepa nam kyé gyurchik kyepa nyampa mepa yang gongné gongdu phelwar shok
Okay, thank you.
