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Session 15 — Yogācāra, Duality, and the Nature of Experience
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- Buddhist Classics and Philosophy
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- Gomde Germany-Austria
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Excerpt
John D. Dunne presents Yogācāra as a response to the question of what experience is when subject-object duality is seen as false. The session introduces luminous, non-dual experience as what remains in emptiness, while warning against reifying consciousness into a new ultimate reality.
Description
In this session, John D. Dunne introduces key Yogācāra ideas as a development that responds to questions left open by Madhyamaka, especially the nature of experience and what remains when subject-object duality is negated. He explains that the fundamental distortion is not merely conceptual thought, but the more basic construction of experience into an “out there” object and an “in here” subject. Using examples such as dreams, visual illusions, and the Matrix, he shows how experience is presented within consciousness, while the apparent duality of subject and object is false. The session then introduces Yogācāra’s model of the three natures, culminating in the claim that what remains in emptiness is luminous, non-dual experience rather than a nihilistic void. At the same time, Dunne shows why even this view must be handled carefully, since affirming luminosity too strongly risks turning consciousness itself into a new essence.
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.
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48:39
Okay, so...
Uh, so here's the commentary. The conceptual construction of the unreal is the conceptual construction of object and subject. Emptiness is the lack of objects and subjects in the conceptual construction of the unreal. It, the conceptual construction of the unreal also exists within emptiness. Thus, the following quote gives the correct definition of emptiness. That in which something does not exist is empty of that thing. Knowing this, one truly sees. You're seeing reality, true reality. But what remains here is real here; knowing this, one truly knows. Okay, so what are they saying? We're gonna go through this in various ways, but the basic point here is this. The conceptual construction of the real exists. They say asti, like, and what is it that is existing is that there's a process called parikalpita or parikalpanā, which is we are constructing experience. And when we're constructing experience, and that's happening. So that's a very interesting claim that they're saying, like, you know, experience is happening. Right? They're really affirming experience is happening. But when in the process of that construction, the way experience is happening, the way there's some process that's producing, and it's basically causal process of experience occurring, that it's occurring with an out there and an in here. And the out there and the in here part of it is false. Okay, so actually, the experience is empty of out there in here. So knowing so, and so that's the new definition of emptiness, but it's not really new. Because Nāgārjuna would totally agree with that, like subjects and objects are in that kind of relational identity. And if you say there's an essential object, if objects exist, essentially, they could never be known by subjects, because they couldn't come into contact with them. But you can't define something as an object without defining it in terms of the subject. Likewise, you can't define something as a subject without defining it in terms of the object. Right? So Nāgārjuna would totally agree with that. But here, they're going to focus in on that as the key issue, underlying everything. Okay. Because what are they, in some ways, what you can say is what are they trying to point to? Prapañca. Like what's needed in order for us to bem so remember, Nāgārjuna says, you know, karma-kleśa-kṣayād mokṣaḥ karma-kleśā vikalpataḥ te prapañcātmakāś caiva śūnyatāyāṃ nirudhyate Right? Through the cessation of karma and kleśa comes liberation, libera... karma and kleśa come from concepts, concepts come from prapañca and prapañca ceases in emptiness. So basically, what they're saying is what's prapañca? Prapañca is subject-object duality. Right? In a causal flow. So there's a causal flow that there are a causal flow of experience that they are affirming. And they're saying, but they're saying the duality in that experience is false.
And when you're knowing the ultimate, you're knowing that causal flow as empty of duality. You're experiencing the causal flow as empty of duality. But you're also experiencing the causal flow. And so the Yogācāra are affirming that's real. That remains in emptiness, to quote the title of an article by the great Japanese scholar, Gajin Nagao, from quite many years ago, the late Japanese scholar. But they wouldn't say causation is real. These are Yogācāra. They're not Mādhyamikas. So they kind of seem to be saying yes, causation is real. Because they're saying there's a moment of experience that's caught in causation. There's a moment of experience that's in a causal flow. I'm gonna uh, we'll come more. Okay. Because this is not Yogācāra Mādhyamika yet. This is Yogācāra. Yes. This is from Asaṅga's text that was dictated to him by the future Buddha Maitreya. There's a wonderful story about how he met Maitreya that you should read sometime. It's very wonderful story about compassion. But we shouldn't take time to tell it now. Okay, so the new form of ignorance is not imputation of essences. It's actually not about svabhāva. Svabhāva is, you know, derivative of something more basic. So if I don't have that, shoot, maybe I should have had that diagram. So actually, maybe I'll put it up here. Let me just see if I can.
You could say that the thing about imputation of essences is arguably happening at the conceptual level. Like, this is really a cup. And there's something deeper than the imputation of an essence like this is essentially a cup that's in place that it makes it possible for us to do that. And that what's in place is that sort of reality habit, right? Which makes us want to impute essence or need to impute essence or just redo it. But the imputation of essences is more at this interpretive level. And emptiness is getting at something that's before that, for Nāgārjuna. So that you could conceivably like get rid of all of that, and there'd still be some kind of a distortion that's pre conceptual. Right? Now, maybe Nāgārjuna would think, Oh, imputation of essences is pre conceptual. But the Yogācāra clearly think that there's something more basic than just attributing essences to things. That's, that's the root of this reality habit. And that thing that for them, what is that thing? It's subject object duality. Okay. And that makes, you know, that does make pretty good sense. Because uh, the, you know, if you think about what needs to be in place for conceptuality, and then, and this is then emerging with a theory of conceptuality, called the apoha or exclusion theory, is emerging right around this time as well, or a little after this, when, you know, Buddhists are already very comfortable by this time thinking that, oh, we're, you know, concepts, labels are actually just imputations, they don't refer to real things in the world. Like, there are no real cups. So the word cup is an imputation on a bunch of, you know, parts or whatever. Uh, and but even the idea of cupness is something that we fabricate. And uh, the reason we're doing that, so we're not just discovering cupness in the world, we're creating that because we want to act in the world. Remember that? We want to get what we want and avoid what we don't want. So we need to categorize our information, organize our sensory experience. And we do that by creating these categories. And there are categories about, you know, in similar to the sort of an active perspective, there are categories about getting what we want, avoiding what we don't want, acting in the world, which means there are categories about an agent in the world. So they're inherently dualistic. So, so duality, dualistic cognition, or the dualistic structure in cognition or in awareness, is more primitive than conceptualization, actually. So when we talk about this word, conceptual construction, it's conceptual construction, abhūtaparikalpa, it's kind of like, they want, they have the same verb in there for concepts, but there's not exactly the same word. And it's sort of implying that there's something even though we're using it, using the, even using the word conceptual is maybe a problem, depending on how you think about that word. But there's a constructive process that's dualistic, that's presenting a world to us, even before we label things. Okay. So hence, for the Yogācāra, the... the fundamental expression of ignorance is subject-object duality. It's the most obvious foundation for essentialism. As I just said, and it's also an obvious target of dyadic relational analysis, because what you could say is, all of the other kinds of, you know, things that we come up with, existence, non existence, good, bad, you know, beautiful, ugly, all of those kinds of things that we're doing, they all have to rest on experience itself. If we don't have experience, we're not saying we're not going to be conceptualizing things as good or bad or whatever. So experience precedes all of that. Right? Experience, in a sense, is the territory that we're trying to map. And it's the only territory we have. It's not like we have an exp... like there's more like, you know, if you're going to try to make, what are you making sense of your experience? You say, well, you know what, I'm going to try to make sense of the world, not my experience. Well, yeah, okay, how are you going to do that? You're going to get out of your experience, so you can just deal with the world. You have some other like route to the world that's not through your experience. Or that isn't, you have a world you have access to a world that's not a world that's presented in experience. Anyone have that? Just wondering. The so called objective world? Yeah, kind of a strange idea anyway. What so what remains, but again, you know, that that would you can say that's built in our cognitive system, there's like a world out there, we're in here, we don't think of those two things as indepen, interdependent. You know, it's like there's that world and there's in here. And that's all that that's all she wrote, so to speak. That's just reality. So the sense of objective reality that there's objectivity, that things are just what they are. And we're not, you know, it's not dependent in any way and our cognition or something that just seems natural built into the system. So a big question then is what remains after the negation? What exactly is remaining after the you negate subject object duality? Okay. So... this brings up this basic ontology of what's called the three natures.
This is key to Yogācāra that there's the constructed nature, that's the subject object duality. It's the basic content of our ordinary experience. And there's the dependent nature, which is the causal flow of mind or experience. And then there's the perfect nature, which is the dependent nature empty of the constructed nature.
And that's kind of a bunch of stuff. But here's an easy way, I think, to kind of understand it, a metaphor for this that I often use in teaching. And the Wachowski's when they made this movie, actually clearly were thinking about some of this type of philosophy. And they have said that somewhat imperfectly so. But anyway, so yes, it's our The Matrix. When I first started using this many years ago, you know, like all the undergrads had seen The Matrix. And now they go, The Matrix? What's that?
And like some large percentage of them have never even seen it, leave it or even heard of it, you know, so. But hopefully, who's it? Anyone here not seen The Matrix? It's okay. Don't be embarrassed. You've not really? Connor in the back hasn't seen it. He just lives in The Matrix. So he doesn't. So the basic story, right, is that if in the future, the humans had a war with the AI's and the AI's won basically, and or mostly won and they created a virtual reality that the humans are stuck inside of so that they can use human bodies as batteries. So the humans are kind of in these like pods, but they think they're in that world. And then there's a sort of you know like, it's a complicated story, some of it, but there's a hacker named Neo. And it's like 1980s or 1990s Chicago, basically, is the reality. Like, why would they choose that? There's a whole reason actually. They said, first, we tried to make it like a paradise and you know, it stopped working. No one would believe, the humans wouldn't believe it. So we had to make it like a crappy city. So anyway, you know, saṃsāra, it had to be saṃsāra. So, you know, then there's a certain individual who's kind of prophesied called, named Neo, who just is an acronym for the one. And he is going to have capacity to sort of see through The Matrix and, you know, save everybody kind of thing. Okay. So, so they're living in this, you know, virtual reality, this simulation. And by the way, you know, there is a very serious group of people and I'm forgetting the name of the Swedish philosopher. Maybe somebody here knows who sincerely have argued that we are most likely living in a simulation. I don't know if you're familiar with that. I'll tell you the name of the fellow later. Very serious and quite popular in Silicon Valley, apparently. What? Yeah. Bostrom. Yeah. Well, I forget his first name, but Bostrom. Nick. Is it Nick? Yeah, I think so. Yeah. He's the one who first wrote the most influential article on this. And it's an intriguing argument. But anyway, so they're in the virtual reality. They're kind of everyone's imprisoned in it, saṃsāra. And then Neo comes along and what Neo is able to do, and these are like agents, these are AI's pretending to be humans or having taken over some humans. And then Neo, and they try to shoot Neo, you know, they have this final encounter in the movie, this key moment in the movie. Sorry to ruin the movie for you guys, but, and, and he is able to, instead of like being caught by the bullets, he's able to see what's really happening, which is this. Okay. So if we think of this in terms of the three natures, experience is happening. But when you experience it as the constructed nature, remember, we have the constructed nature, you see this, right? You think it's real subject obj... it is a real world out there. And then, you know, there's a subject in here, but then you're with your Neo like capacities, you see what's really going on. It's just a causal flow that's not out there and not in here. It's just a bunch of data, so to speak. Okay. So that's seeing in a way, that's seeing the constructed nature as empty of the duality. It's an imperfect metaphor, but I think it helps.
The constructed nature is.., the dependent nature. Sorry, actually, I did say that wrong. The dependent nature, the flow of experience is actually empty of the constructed nature. The reality that looks like this is actually this.
Okay. So in a similar way, like as you're seeing, you know, our favorite vase here, the first step in this, in this way of thinking is to perform, what in the phenomenological tradition would be called a kind of reduction, which is to say, uh, where is the vase? Where is what you're seeing? Where is the visual content?
Where is the visual content? Maybe in between us, but one way of thinking about it, if we do like a very simplistic kind of, I don't know, high school physics version, there's some stuff out here interacting with light and so on, so that it, that light reflects off of here, hits your retina, causes a certain kind of signal, goes to the thalamus, into the visual cortex, and somehow it moves forward in the brain and eventually you see something. So one way to talk about this is color, right?
So that, yeah, well, so right now it's just like, what are we seeing? The actual content of what we're seeing on this account is not outside of consciousness.
It's being caused perhaps by something outside of consciousness, but the content of what we're seeing is not outside of consciousness. Does everyone understand that? Is that clear? So that the visual perception that you're having of this is actually something that is presented to you in your consciousness, depending on your visual system. So if you have colorblind or whatever, you'll have a slightly different one. If you were a different kind of organism, and here, here's a pitch for another great book called An Immense World by Ed Yong, which talks about the Weltumgebung, the life worlds of various kinds of organisms. And there are, you know, like there are living things that see, have unbelievable perceptual capacities that we don't have. An immense world, an immense world. Ed Yong. I'm sure it's been translated into German. Really fun. It gets a little too detailed at points, but it's, it's from my taste, but it's really great. You know, like bats, obviously, but also some creatures that, you know, see ultraviolet. So they're, what's presented to them and their perception, it's not the, you know, they have a different kind of phenomenal experience visually. So what, so that, what we're visually seeing, and if you have like a defective, eye, vis... you know, sight or whatever, or you've got, uh, you know, you've had too much to drink is like, how many vases are there or whatever it is, right? You have a certain visual experience and that's, so if you, you know, do get, uh, not recommending that you get so drunk tonight that you can't, uh, that you see two vases, but if you were to do that, it's not like there are two vases out there, right? Not that anyone has had that experience here, but right, it's not like there are actually two vases and we can manipulate things so that you see, you know, visually things that aren't there if we wanted to.
So, uh, and actually, you know, here's a, okay, let's just do this real quick. I do one more thing. Uh, where's the, can use a triangle?
By the way, uh, David Hayden is asking causal flow nature, um, par paric. Uh, yeah, yeah. Uh, could you give a more literal translation? Other dependent, the dependent nature is what it, the translation is dependent nature. That's a good, that's a good translation. Okay, so who sees, do you see a white triangle or a gray triangle? Is there a gray triangle there? No, I mean, like here, this, do you see a gray triangle here? Really? Hey, wait, let's go like this.
Do you still see a triangle? Do you see, can I go over here?
What do you see now? Pac-Man. Okay, there's no triangle, right? This is called the contour illusion. So your visual system is making you see something that's not there, but you're seeing it in your visual system, right? But it's not there. And if we could set up the right circumstances, it goes away. I've written an article about this. You can also, um, if you just say you can use your conceptual system to try to override it by just looking at one of the, one of these things and say, repeatedly, Pac-Man, Pac-Man, Pac-Man, Pac-Man, Pac-Man, Pac-Man, Pac-Man, Pac-Man.
And does it go away a little bit? It's kind of amazing, right? Goes away. I can just like, I've done that so many times now. It's like, yeah, Pac-Man.
And just, I can just make it go away, just like that. It's quite easy for me to do that. It's a useless thing I've practiced.
And you, you know, if we had some Pac-Man gaming experts out here, they could all do it too. I'm sure. They're kind of looking for the monster, you know. Okay. So our, we're seeing what we're seeing, just like the Kanizsa triangle is like a thing in our mind. That's a way of constructing that is in a causal process. And that causes, so there's some, you know, we don't just see whatever we want. There's some constraints from the causes. But then our visual system works with those causes and produces things that we see as our kind of beings. We are, other beings see other kinds of things, you know, still with the same causes. Like if you're some kind of a special alien, you can't see, you know, what we would call the banana in my hand. That's not going to happen. Those are the constraints of the causes and the shared life world that we have. Okay. So that's a very important idea. There's some kind of shared life world that we're in where there are constraints. So this doesn't mean you just make up the world yourself. But it also doesn't mean that the world is just objectively out there. And the world you actually have access to is not really out there. And, but then again, that's what the world is. So the whole out thereness is kind of the confused part. Okay. So everyone understand that? So like what you're seeing is presented within consciousness. This is my favorite part of this. So I'm in your mind, hello...
get out of my mind, please. Okay. So seeing the ultimate, what does seeing the ultimate mean? Maybe it means seeing just sheer mind without any content.
And then the post-meditative state is more like this. Or maybe it means something like this, where you still have the content, but somehow it doesn't present as out there in here. Okay.
All right. So the critiques of subject-to-object duality, one way of doing this is actually to use the neither one nor many argument that we did before. You remember with the atoms, like what's this made out of? Atoms. But then you go down to the atoms and you find even partless atoms don't make sense. So... therefore, there's no matter. Really, therefore, there's no, that model of matter doesn't work. But if that's what we think the only option for a model of matter is, then we say there's no matter, meaning there's no stuff outside the mind. There's not like mind stuff and matter stuff that are defined in terms of each other. There's mind, mind and non-mind, or matter and non-matter. Okay. That's one approach. Another approach is to analyze the mind itself using a mind, neither one nor many argument. We won't go through that. And then you can use the critique of relations that we talked about, how objects are defined in terms of subjects, objects, right? But where you end up in is a place where there's presentation in a sense of in there, out there, but the in there, out there is false.
And that's, of course, true. Like if your content of experience is actually, what you're seeing is actually within consciousness, then it's not different. It's not different than your sense of subjectivity. In the sense that they're both just consciousness. Your sense of subjectivity is also being presented in consciousness. So they're just like both aspects of consciousness. You get it?
They're not actually different. So like in a dream, like when you dream, when you have a dream, is the stuff you see in the dream outside of consciousness? Has anyone managed to dream like that? It's within consciousness, right? Correct? That's also true of your waking life on this account. Like this is within consciousness. The difference between dreaming in the Yogācāra, the way they explain this is in dreaming, you have less connection with the shared life world. And when you're awake, you have a strong connection with the shared life world. So those constraints on your experience are much stronger when you're in a waking state. So you can't just, you know, make things happen because you want them to. Sorry, folks. Actually, not sorry. That would probably be a really bad thing. Okay, so, you know, like, unlike Neo, you can't just fly through the sky or whatever. At least not in our ordinary state. Uh so, the kind, what kinds of negation are we, did w... A very important thing that is relevant here to understand is that there is a, there is a difference between the kind of negation that Nāgārjuna, at least in his philosophical texts, is primarily using. Maybe he doesn't do that in some other texts, but in his philosophical texts, he's using the bottom one, non-implicative negation. A negation that does not affirm anything at all. It's basically not this and only not this, full stop. Like, it is not the case that there is such a thing as Martians. It is not the case that there is such a thing as square circles. Okay? As opposed to the example, and these are actually coming out of Sanskrit grammar, as opposed to an implicative negation or a paryudāsa, which when you negate something, you're implying something else, like, pinu devadatta devasena bhumpte, pīno devadattaḥ divā na bhuṅkte is the grammatical example. Fat devadatta does not eat during the day. Which means?
Very good! He eats at night. Right? Okay? I say, the car isn't in the garage, meaning... somewhere else. Right? As opposed to me saying, I don't own a car. Like, where's the car? Well, I don't own a car. I'm not affirming... In that, you might say, well, maybe I'm saying I imply I own something else. Maybe not. Maybe I'm a monk and I don't own anything. Okay? So, that's a non-implicative negation. Yogācāra should be understood as engaging in an implicative negation. So, emptiness here is an implicative negation. What's negated in emptiness? Subject-object duality. What remains in emptiness? Non-dual experience. Okay? So, then this becomes... So, there are some questions about what this means in Yogācāra. One of those questions... So, the basic idea here is that the, the, the subject-object structure in your experience is false. Okay? Now, under what conditions would we say that the subject-object structure is true? Even after we do this reduction, meaning, okay, I'll admit that what's being presented in my experience, on the one hand, and my sense of subjectivity on the other, are both just aspects of consciousness. But this structure is not false. Under what conditions would that be the case?
When would you be able to endorse that, but not say that it's false?
When you're so close to lunch that you don't know what to say. Right?
When the causal process that's producing this is somehow accurately reflecting the otherness of these things. Right? Like, there's consciousness and something other than consciousness. So, when the causes are other than consciousness, so that when, you know, what I'm seeing is actually something within consciousness, but what's causing this aspect of consciousness, the object aspect of consciousness, the causes of that are somehow outside consciousness. So the otherness, the twoness in consciousness, is just reflecting the fact that consciousness is one kind of stuff, and the causes that created this image in consciousness are another kind of stuff. You see that? Did everyone get that? Any questions about it? You don't get that? So... So, for example,
if, let's see, let me think if I can think of an example. So if you dream of something, right? Like, let's say you dream of a beautiful mountain, and you wake up and, you know, and you say to me, did you see that beautiful mountain? Oh, let's not, that doesn't work. How about you dream of like a spectacular meteor. And then you wake up and you say to me, did you see that beautiful meteor last night?
And I say, what meteor? And you describe where it was, and at what time, and I say, I was right there, it's not there. So then your experience of the meteor was not caused by something out there. So in that sense, it was false, right? But if the meteor was actually there, then there was something outside your mind, it wasn't a dream, there was something outside your mind that interacted with your visual system, and then you saw it, even though what you're seeing is within consciousness. So in that case, the sense of, oh, this thing is out there, the actual image in your mind is not out there. It's in your consciousness. But the sense of it being out there is not wrong, because it's caused by something out there. Everybody get that? The out-thereness, the bāhyatā, or bahir, yeah, bāhyatā, of this, the outsideness or out-thereness of the visual object is just a reflection of the fact that the causes which participated in producing this image are unlike a dream, are not just internal to consciousness, they're outside consciousness. Okay? Everybody get that? So there's some kind of extra mental stuff that interacts with, somehow, with the mental stuff to produce these images. All right?
There's still, there's definitely stuff, and then there's two kinds of stuff. There's like mind stuff and non-mind stuff. Right? And, yes?
It's basically inner and outer stuff, yeah, you could say. But it's really, on this model, what we're saying is that the outer stuff is not the same as consciousness stuff. Like, we're going to propose a dualistic, a substance dualism, where there's mind stuff and there's basically matter stuff. Okay? Yogācāra says that's wrong.
But some people will say, will think that Yogācāra is idealism, and that's in the top version. Right? This is from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which is a great resource, when you're looking for just some basic, like, definitional type stuff, and some really good, longer articles, too.
So you could talk about, when we use this term philosophical idealism in Western philosophy, we say that something mental, the mind, spirit, reason, et cetera, is the ultimate foundation of all reality, or even exhaustive of reality. That would be the second type here. Where, like, there's only mind stuff. Everything is actually mind stuff.
Uh, and then number two is actually going toward a position where, although the existence of something independent of the mind is conceded, everything that we can know about this independent reality is held to be permeated by the creative, formative, or constructive activities of the mind. That all claims to knowledge must be considered in some sense to be a form of self-knowledge. Neither of these is Yogācāra. Okay? Because Yogācāra is saying the idea of there's mind stuff is dependent on there being non-mind stuff.
So when you say there's nothing outside the mind, which they will say, like, we can establish that if we try to say there's non, like there's a world out there, we can't establish that. But that also means there isn't an in here. Because the in here depends on the out there. So it's not idealism in that sense. It's kind of saying all of this, everything's the same kind of stuff. If it, it in, but they are saying it's, you know, there's something real. But it's all the same kind of stuff. That doesn't mean that the causes are just your mind. That's very important. It's some kind of a shared constraints. And they have a complicated way of trying to describe how that works. And I will say that there are forms of Yogācāra that did tend toward number one in particular, where like everything is just mind, there was definitely forms and therefore you sometimes hear this term Cittamātra mind only as a description of this philosophy. And that's where it does become a kind of idealism. But that's not characteristic of all Yogācāra at all. Okay, then is it phenomenology? Phenomenology studies structures is also from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. We'll stop soon. Phenomenology studies structures of conscious experience as experienced from the first person point of view along with the relevant conditions of experience, the central structure of an experience is intentionality, which means subject object structure, the way it is directed through its content and meaning toward a certain object in the world. So it's not phenomenology on this definition either. But it's like both of those in certain ways. And phenomenology is probably the closest way of describing what Yogācāra is doing. But Yogācāra is specifically saying that intentionality, which is a philosophical term for subject-object duality, is false. Right? And it's, there are versions of Yogācāra which you're interested in within that false kind of dualistic cognition. How does that work? And so that's what Dignāga and Dharmakīrti are doing. But they're really doing that primarily so that you get to the point where you understand why it has to be false. Okay? As opposed to phenomenologists who just assume that's true, that structure is true, and then they're trying to describe you know, how that works, so to speak. What is this experience? What are the invariant features of experience, for example, beyond just intentionality? Okay. So then what is Yogācāra? It does not assert that the object pole collapses into the subject pole so that whatever stuff constitutes the subject pole is all that remains. If you say that whatever constitutes the subject pole, the subject side, is all that there is, and that's called subjective idealism, and that is perhaps what Cittamātra, or mind only, is, but that's only a subset of Yogācāra. However, it does assert that extramental objects are unreal, and whatever remains, I should say, is not extramental.
Okay? So it is denying that there's a kind of like... It's denying substance dualism. There's stuff, non-mind stuff, and there's mind stuff. It's denying that. And it asserts that our only access to the world is through our, through or in experience.
That's all you got to go on. However, it denies the claim that intentionality is essential to consciousness. So it's neither idealism nor phenomenology as it was defined in those articles. And so then the question really becomes, what then is... what are we knowing when we're knowing uh, reality? So now, very briefly, give me five more minutes. Is that okay? So...
when you see this, what is... where is this being presented?
In Milwaukee. No, in consciousness, right? Okay? Chicago. It's being presented within consciousness, right? Can you know anything that's not being presented in consciousness? No. Okay? So if you wanted... so what we mean by reality, whether we're talking about what we take to be part of our subject, like emotions and so on, what we take to be objects that we're perceiving, that whatever... all of that is being presented in consciousness. So if you want to know what the nature of reality is, so one way to understand, this is where Yogācāra is a little different than Mādhyamika, if you want to understand what is the nature of reality, what does that mean, you don't need to understand? The nature of consciousness. Or the nature of mind. Right? So the nature of something is something that characterizes it in all of its different permutations, like what's always the case in all of its manifestations, like, you know, in a simplistic way, we could say the nature of water is H2O, like whether it's liquid, whether it's steam or gas, whether it's solid ice. So what's the same about all moments of consciousness? What? Student: Cognition?
Yeah, like knowingness. So here's... this is what they're going to say. It's luminous empty mind. The nature of the mind is luminous emptiness. Okay? But specifically emptiness as subject-object duality, because we're going to need to go through one more step to get to... This is eventually going to be combined with Mādhyamika. But right now we're saying, what's characteristic of experience is not subject-object duality. But... so it's empty of that. But what is present in every moment of experience is a kind of knowingness. So that's this idea of luminosity. It's a metaphor. We'll say more about it later. So from another perspective, because the mind is not empty in the sense that there's this presence of experience, luminosity. Okay? So experience remains in emptiness, luminous, luminosity. And that applies to all cases. And that's what emptiness is like for the Yogācāra. And so nihilism is avoided, right? And everybody's happy. And knowing is accounted for. However, as we will see... And so this is what... And so emptiness for Yogācāra is an implicative negation. This is how Dharmakīrti talks about that. prabhāsvaram idaṃ cittaṃ prakṛtyāgantavo malāḥ Which we cited before. This mind is by its nature luminous. The defilements are adventitious. The defilements here especially are ignorance that causes subject-object duality. Okay? But... this is still not going to be sufficient for Mahāmudrā Dzogchen style because what might you be doing in this context? Maybe... So the way we described it actually probably are doing.
Maybe... Yes you're more ontologizing that luminosity itself. Affirming that it's real.
And that's going to be a problem. So what's going to happen, we're going to circle back to this this afternoon, is that there's going to be a style of Mādhyamika, the style of Mādhyamika that reaches to Tibet, which is actually going to adopt this kind of Yogācāra as part of a process that starts from a naive analysis, an analysis of our naive sense that there are, you know wholes in the world and so on, and begins with an analysis that says, sure, there's matter, whatever you say, and then moves through Yogācāra and then goes to Mādhyamika. So that's the style of Mādhyamika that goes to Tibet. And it's called Yogācāra Mādhyamika. And we're going to do that after. And it's going to raise a very important question, which is, okay, we have, we said that, sure, knowing is accounted for, but what kind of knowing? So one of the things that's going to be very continuous is how we describe this kind of awareness. Still, we're going to say, empty luminosity, we're going to modify the empty part. But we still need to say, well, what's that luminosity? And that's going to also lead us to a discussion of what's called uh, svasaṃvitti or rang rig རང་རིག་ in Tibetan, which means reflexive awareness.
So that's... most of that will happen after lunch, if you can still stand it. Okay, let's have a good lunch. Let's do our dedication. 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
Thank you.
Uh, so here's the commentary. The conceptual construction of the unreal is the conceptual construction of object and subject. Emptiness is the lack of objects and subjects in the conceptual construction of the unreal. It, the conceptual construction of the unreal also exists within emptiness. Thus, the following quote gives the correct definition of emptiness. That in which something does not exist is empty of that thing. Knowing this, one truly sees. You're seeing reality, true reality. But what remains here is real here; knowing this, one truly knows. Okay, so what are they saying? We're gonna go through this in various ways, but the basic point here is this. The conceptual construction of the real exists. They say asti, like, and what is it that is existing is that there's a process called parikalpita or parikalpanā, which is we are constructing experience. And when we're constructing experience, and that's happening. So that's a very interesting claim that they're saying, like, you know, experience is happening. Right? They're really affirming experience is happening. But when in the process of that construction, the way experience is happening, the way there's some process that's producing, and it's basically causal process of experience occurring, that it's occurring with an out there and an in here. And the out there and the in here part of it is false. Okay, so actually, the experience is empty of out there in here. So knowing so, and so that's the new definition of emptiness, but it's not really new. Because Nāgārjuna would totally agree with that, like subjects and objects are in that kind of relational identity. And if you say there's an essential object, if objects exist, essentially, they could never be known by subjects, because they couldn't come into contact with them. But you can't define something as an object without defining it in terms of the subject. Likewise, you can't define something as a subject without defining it in terms of the object. Right? So Nāgārjuna would totally agree with that. But here, they're going to focus in on that as the key issue, underlying everything. Okay. Because what are they, in some ways, what you can say is what are they trying to point to? Prapañca. Like what's needed in order for us to bem so remember, Nāgārjuna says, you know, karma-kleśa-kṣayād mokṣaḥ karma-kleśā vikalpataḥ te prapañcātmakāś caiva śūnyatāyāṃ nirudhyate Right? Through the cessation of karma and kleśa comes liberation, libera... karma and kleśa come from concepts, concepts come from prapañca and prapañca ceases in emptiness. So basically, what they're saying is what's prapañca? Prapañca is subject-object duality. Right? In a causal flow. So there's a causal flow that there are a causal flow of experience that they are affirming. And they're saying, but they're saying the duality in that experience is false.
And when you're knowing the ultimate, you're knowing that causal flow as empty of duality. You're experiencing the causal flow as empty of duality. But you're also experiencing the causal flow. And so the Yogācāra are affirming that's real. That remains in emptiness, to quote the title of an article by the great Japanese scholar, Gajin Nagao, from quite many years ago, the late Japanese scholar. But they wouldn't say causation is real. These are Yogācāra. They're not Mādhyamikas. So they kind of seem to be saying yes, causation is real. Because they're saying there's a moment of experience that's caught in causation. There's a moment of experience that's in a causal flow. I'm gonna uh, we'll come more. Okay. Because this is not Yogācāra Mādhyamika yet. This is Yogācāra. Yes. This is from Asaṅga's text that was dictated to him by the future Buddha Maitreya. There's a wonderful story about how he met Maitreya that you should read sometime. It's very wonderful story about compassion. But we shouldn't take time to tell it now. Okay, so the new form of ignorance is not imputation of essences. It's actually not about svabhāva. Svabhāva is, you know, derivative of something more basic. So if I don't have that, shoot, maybe I should have had that diagram. So actually, maybe I'll put it up here. Let me just see if I can.
You could say that the thing about imputation of essences is arguably happening at the conceptual level. Like, this is really a cup. And there's something deeper than the imputation of an essence like this is essentially a cup that's in place that it makes it possible for us to do that. And that what's in place is that sort of reality habit, right? Which makes us want to impute essence or need to impute essence or just redo it. But the imputation of essences is more at this interpretive level. And emptiness is getting at something that's before that, for Nāgārjuna. So that you could conceivably like get rid of all of that, and there'd still be some kind of a distortion that's pre conceptual. Right? Now, maybe Nāgārjuna would think, Oh, imputation of essences is pre conceptual. But the Yogācāra clearly think that there's something more basic than just attributing essences to things. That's, that's the root of this reality habit. And that thing that for them, what is that thing? It's subject object duality. Okay. And that makes, you know, that does make pretty good sense. Because uh, the, you know, if you think about what needs to be in place for conceptuality, and then, and this is then emerging with a theory of conceptuality, called the apoha or exclusion theory, is emerging right around this time as well, or a little after this, when, you know, Buddhists are already very comfortable by this time thinking that, oh, we're, you know, concepts, labels are actually just imputations, they don't refer to real things in the world. Like, there are no real cups. So the word cup is an imputation on a bunch of, you know, parts or whatever. Uh, and but even the idea of cupness is something that we fabricate. And uh, the reason we're doing that, so we're not just discovering cupness in the world, we're creating that because we want to act in the world. Remember that? We want to get what we want and avoid what we don't want. So we need to categorize our information, organize our sensory experience. And we do that by creating these categories. And there are categories about, you know, in similar to the sort of an active perspective, there are categories about getting what we want, avoiding what we don't want, acting in the world, which means there are categories about an agent in the world. So they're inherently dualistic. So, so duality, dualistic cognition, or the dualistic structure in cognition or in awareness, is more primitive than conceptualization, actually. So when we talk about this word, conceptual construction, it's conceptual construction, abhūtaparikalpa, it's kind of like, they want, they have the same verb in there for concepts, but there's not exactly the same word. And it's sort of implying that there's something even though we're using it, using the, even using the word conceptual is maybe a problem, depending on how you think about that word. But there's a constructive process that's dualistic, that's presenting a world to us, even before we label things. Okay. So hence, for the Yogācāra, the... the fundamental expression of ignorance is subject-object duality. It's the most obvious foundation for essentialism. As I just said, and it's also an obvious target of dyadic relational analysis, because what you could say is, all of the other kinds of, you know, things that we come up with, existence, non existence, good, bad, you know, beautiful, ugly, all of those kinds of things that we're doing, they all have to rest on experience itself. If we don't have experience, we're not saying we're not going to be conceptualizing things as good or bad or whatever. So experience precedes all of that. Right? Experience, in a sense, is the territory that we're trying to map. And it's the only territory we have. It's not like we have an exp... like there's more like, you know, if you're going to try to make, what are you making sense of your experience? You say, well, you know what, I'm going to try to make sense of the world, not my experience. Well, yeah, okay, how are you going to do that? You're going to get out of your experience, so you can just deal with the world. You have some other like route to the world that's not through your experience. Or that isn't, you have a world you have access to a world that's not a world that's presented in experience. Anyone have that? Just wondering. The so called objective world? Yeah, kind of a strange idea anyway. What so what remains, but again, you know, that that would you can say that's built in our cognitive system, there's like a world out there, we're in here, we don't think of those two things as indepen, interdependent. You know, it's like there's that world and there's in here. And that's all that that's all she wrote, so to speak. That's just reality. So the sense of objective reality that there's objectivity, that things are just what they are. And we're not, you know, it's not dependent in any way and our cognition or something that just seems natural built into the system. So a big question then is what remains after the negation? What exactly is remaining after the you negate subject object duality? Okay. So... this brings up this basic ontology of what's called the three natures.
This is key to Yogācāra that there's the constructed nature, that's the subject object duality. It's the basic content of our ordinary experience. And there's the dependent nature, which is the causal flow of mind or experience. And then there's the perfect nature, which is the dependent nature empty of the constructed nature.
And that's kind of a bunch of stuff. But here's an easy way, I think, to kind of understand it, a metaphor for this that I often use in teaching. And the Wachowski's when they made this movie, actually clearly were thinking about some of this type of philosophy. And they have said that somewhat imperfectly so. But anyway, so yes, it's our The Matrix. When I first started using this many years ago, you know, like all the undergrads had seen The Matrix. And now they go, The Matrix? What's that?
And like some large percentage of them have never even seen it, leave it or even heard of it, you know, so. But hopefully, who's it? Anyone here not seen The Matrix? It's okay. Don't be embarrassed. You've not really? Connor in the back hasn't seen it. He just lives in The Matrix. So he doesn't. So the basic story, right, is that if in the future, the humans had a war with the AI's and the AI's won basically, and or mostly won and they created a virtual reality that the humans are stuck inside of so that they can use human bodies as batteries. So the humans are kind of in these like pods, but they think they're in that world. And then there's a sort of you know like, it's a complicated story, some of it, but there's a hacker named Neo. And it's like 1980s or 1990s Chicago, basically, is the reality. Like, why would they choose that? There's a whole reason actually. They said, first, we tried to make it like a paradise and you know, it stopped working. No one would believe, the humans wouldn't believe it. So we had to make it like a crappy city. So anyway, you know, saṃsāra, it had to be saṃsāra. So, you know, then there's a certain individual who's kind of prophesied called, named Neo, who just is an acronym for the one. And he is going to have capacity to sort of see through The Matrix and, you know, save everybody kind of thing. Okay. So, so they're living in this, you know, virtual reality, this simulation. And by the way, you know, there is a very serious group of people and I'm forgetting the name of the Swedish philosopher. Maybe somebody here knows who sincerely have argued that we are most likely living in a simulation. I don't know if you're familiar with that. I'll tell you the name of the fellow later. Very serious and quite popular in Silicon Valley, apparently. What? Yeah. Bostrom. Yeah. Well, I forget his first name, but Bostrom. Nick. Is it Nick? Yeah, I think so. Yeah. He's the one who first wrote the most influential article on this. And it's an intriguing argument. But anyway, so they're in the virtual reality. They're kind of everyone's imprisoned in it, saṃsāra. And then Neo comes along and what Neo is able to do, and these are like agents, these are AI's pretending to be humans or having taken over some humans. And then Neo, and they try to shoot Neo, you know, they have this final encounter in the movie, this key moment in the movie. Sorry to ruin the movie for you guys, but, and, and he is able to, instead of like being caught by the bullets, he's able to see what's really happening, which is this. Okay. So if we think of this in terms of the three natures, experience is happening. But when you experience it as the constructed nature, remember, we have the constructed nature, you see this, right? You think it's real subject obj... it is a real world out there. And then, you know, there's a subject in here, but then you're with your Neo like capacities, you see what's really going on. It's just a causal flow that's not out there and not in here. It's just a bunch of data, so to speak. Okay. So that's seeing in a way, that's seeing the constructed nature as empty of the duality. It's an imperfect metaphor, but I think it helps.
The constructed nature is.., the dependent nature. Sorry, actually, I did say that wrong. The dependent nature, the flow of experience is actually empty of the constructed nature. The reality that looks like this is actually this.
Okay. So in a similar way, like as you're seeing, you know, our favorite vase here, the first step in this, in this way of thinking is to perform, what in the phenomenological tradition would be called a kind of reduction, which is to say, uh, where is the vase? Where is what you're seeing? Where is the visual content?
Where is the visual content? Maybe in between us, but one way of thinking about it, if we do like a very simplistic kind of, I don't know, high school physics version, there's some stuff out here interacting with light and so on, so that it, that light reflects off of here, hits your retina, causes a certain kind of signal, goes to the thalamus, into the visual cortex, and somehow it moves forward in the brain and eventually you see something. So one way to talk about this is color, right?
So that, yeah, well, so right now it's just like, what are we seeing? The actual content of what we're seeing on this account is not outside of consciousness.
It's being caused perhaps by something outside of consciousness, but the content of what we're seeing is not outside of consciousness. Does everyone understand that? Is that clear? So that the visual perception that you're having of this is actually something that is presented to you in your consciousness, depending on your visual system. So if you have colorblind or whatever, you'll have a slightly different one. If you were a different kind of organism, and here, here's a pitch for another great book called An Immense World by Ed Yong, which talks about the Weltumgebung, the life worlds of various kinds of organisms. And there are, you know, like there are living things that see, have unbelievable perceptual capacities that we don't have. An immense world, an immense world. Ed Yong. I'm sure it's been translated into German. Really fun. It gets a little too detailed at points, but it's, it's from my taste, but it's really great. You know, like bats, obviously, but also some creatures that, you know, see ultraviolet. So they're, what's presented to them and their perception, it's not the, you know, they have a different kind of phenomenal experience visually. So what, so that, what we're visually seeing, and if you have like a defective, eye, vis... you know, sight or whatever, or you've got, uh, you know, you've had too much to drink is like, how many vases are there or whatever it is, right? You have a certain visual experience and that's, so if you, you know, do get, uh, not recommending that you get so drunk tonight that you can't, uh, that you see two vases, but if you were to do that, it's not like there are two vases out there, right? Not that anyone has had that experience here, but right, it's not like there are actually two vases and we can manipulate things so that you see, you know, visually things that aren't there if we wanted to.
So, uh, and actually, you know, here's a, okay, let's just do this real quick. I do one more thing. Uh, where's the, can use a triangle?
By the way, uh, David Hayden is asking causal flow nature, um, par paric. Uh, yeah, yeah. Uh, could you give a more literal translation? Other dependent, the dependent nature is what it, the translation is dependent nature. That's a good, that's a good translation. Okay, so who sees, do you see a white triangle or a gray triangle? Is there a gray triangle there? No, I mean, like here, this, do you see a gray triangle here? Really? Hey, wait, let's go like this.
Do you still see a triangle? Do you see, can I go over here?
What do you see now? Pac-Man. Okay, there's no triangle, right? This is called the contour illusion. So your visual system is making you see something that's not there, but you're seeing it in your visual system, right? But it's not there. And if we could set up the right circumstances, it goes away. I've written an article about this. You can also, um, if you just say you can use your conceptual system to try to override it by just looking at one of the, one of these things and say, repeatedly, Pac-Man, Pac-Man, Pac-Man, Pac-Man, Pac-Man, Pac-Man, Pac-Man, Pac-Man.
And does it go away a little bit? It's kind of amazing, right? Goes away. I can just like, I've done that so many times now. It's like, yeah, Pac-Man.
And just, I can just make it go away, just like that. It's quite easy for me to do that. It's a useless thing I've practiced.
And you, you know, if we had some Pac-Man gaming experts out here, they could all do it too. I'm sure. They're kind of looking for the monster, you know. Okay. So our, we're seeing what we're seeing, just like the Kanizsa triangle is like a thing in our mind. That's a way of constructing that is in a causal process. And that causes, so there's some, you know, we don't just see whatever we want. There's some constraints from the causes. But then our visual system works with those causes and produces things that we see as our kind of beings. We are, other beings see other kinds of things, you know, still with the same causes. Like if you're some kind of a special alien, you can't see, you know, what we would call the banana in my hand. That's not going to happen. Those are the constraints of the causes and the shared life world that we have. Okay. So that's a very important idea. There's some kind of shared life world that we're in where there are constraints. So this doesn't mean you just make up the world yourself. But it also doesn't mean that the world is just objectively out there. And the world you actually have access to is not really out there. And, but then again, that's what the world is. So the whole out thereness is kind of the confused part. Okay. So everyone understand that? So like what you're seeing is presented within consciousness. This is my favorite part of this. So I'm in your mind, hello...
get out of my mind, please. Okay. So seeing the ultimate, what does seeing the ultimate mean? Maybe it means seeing just sheer mind without any content.
And then the post-meditative state is more like this. Or maybe it means something like this, where you still have the content, but somehow it doesn't present as out there in here. Okay.
All right. So the critiques of subject-to-object duality, one way of doing this is actually to use the neither one nor many argument that we did before. You remember with the atoms, like what's this made out of? Atoms. But then you go down to the atoms and you find even partless atoms don't make sense. So... therefore, there's no matter. Really, therefore, there's no, that model of matter doesn't work. But if that's what we think the only option for a model of matter is, then we say there's no matter, meaning there's no stuff outside the mind. There's not like mind stuff and matter stuff that are defined in terms of each other. There's mind, mind and non-mind, or matter and non-matter. Okay. That's one approach. Another approach is to analyze the mind itself using a mind, neither one nor many argument. We won't go through that. And then you can use the critique of relations that we talked about, how objects are defined in terms of subjects, objects, right? But where you end up in is a place where there's presentation in a sense of in there, out there, but the in there, out there is false.
And that's, of course, true. Like if your content of experience is actually, what you're seeing is actually within consciousness, then it's not different. It's not different than your sense of subjectivity. In the sense that they're both just consciousness. Your sense of subjectivity is also being presented in consciousness. So they're just like both aspects of consciousness. You get it?
They're not actually different. So like in a dream, like when you dream, when you have a dream, is the stuff you see in the dream outside of consciousness? Has anyone managed to dream like that? It's within consciousness, right? Correct? That's also true of your waking life on this account. Like this is within consciousness. The difference between dreaming in the Yogācāra, the way they explain this is in dreaming, you have less connection with the shared life world. And when you're awake, you have a strong connection with the shared life world. So those constraints on your experience are much stronger when you're in a waking state. So you can't just, you know, make things happen because you want them to. Sorry, folks. Actually, not sorry. That would probably be a really bad thing. Okay, so, you know, like, unlike Neo, you can't just fly through the sky or whatever. At least not in our ordinary state. Uh so, the kind, what kinds of negation are we, did w... A very important thing that is relevant here to understand is that there is a, there is a difference between the kind of negation that Nāgārjuna, at least in his philosophical texts, is primarily using. Maybe he doesn't do that in some other texts, but in his philosophical texts, he's using the bottom one, non-implicative negation. A negation that does not affirm anything at all. It's basically not this and only not this, full stop. Like, it is not the case that there is such a thing as Martians. It is not the case that there is such a thing as square circles. Okay? As opposed to the example, and these are actually coming out of Sanskrit grammar, as opposed to an implicative negation or a paryudāsa, which when you negate something, you're implying something else, like, pinu devadatta devasena bhumpte, pīno devadattaḥ divā na bhuṅkte is the grammatical example. Fat devadatta does not eat during the day. Which means?
Very good! He eats at night. Right? Okay? I say, the car isn't in the garage, meaning... somewhere else. Right? As opposed to me saying, I don't own a car. Like, where's the car? Well, I don't own a car. I'm not affirming... In that, you might say, well, maybe I'm saying I imply I own something else. Maybe not. Maybe I'm a monk and I don't own anything. Okay? So, that's a non-implicative negation. Yogācāra should be understood as engaging in an implicative negation. So, emptiness here is an implicative negation. What's negated in emptiness? Subject-object duality. What remains in emptiness? Non-dual experience. Okay? So, then this becomes... So, there are some questions about what this means in Yogācāra. One of those questions... So, the basic idea here is that the, the, the subject-object structure in your experience is false. Okay? Now, under what conditions would we say that the subject-object structure is true? Even after we do this reduction, meaning, okay, I'll admit that what's being presented in my experience, on the one hand, and my sense of subjectivity on the other, are both just aspects of consciousness. But this structure is not false. Under what conditions would that be the case?
When would you be able to endorse that, but not say that it's false?
When you're so close to lunch that you don't know what to say. Right?
When the causal process that's producing this is somehow accurately reflecting the otherness of these things. Right? Like, there's consciousness and something other than consciousness. So, when the causes are other than consciousness, so that when, you know, what I'm seeing is actually something within consciousness, but what's causing this aspect of consciousness, the object aspect of consciousness, the causes of that are somehow outside consciousness. So the otherness, the twoness in consciousness, is just reflecting the fact that consciousness is one kind of stuff, and the causes that created this image in consciousness are another kind of stuff. You see that? Did everyone get that? Any questions about it? You don't get that? So... So, for example,
if, let's see, let me think if I can think of an example. So if you dream of something, right? Like, let's say you dream of a beautiful mountain, and you wake up and, you know, and you say to me, did you see that beautiful mountain? Oh, let's not, that doesn't work. How about you dream of like a spectacular meteor. And then you wake up and you say to me, did you see that beautiful meteor last night?
And I say, what meteor? And you describe where it was, and at what time, and I say, I was right there, it's not there. So then your experience of the meteor was not caused by something out there. So in that sense, it was false, right? But if the meteor was actually there, then there was something outside your mind, it wasn't a dream, there was something outside your mind that interacted with your visual system, and then you saw it, even though what you're seeing is within consciousness. So in that case, the sense of, oh, this thing is out there, the actual image in your mind is not out there. It's in your consciousness. But the sense of it being out there is not wrong, because it's caused by something out there. Everybody get that? The out-thereness, the bāhyatā, or bahir, yeah, bāhyatā, of this, the outsideness or out-thereness of the visual object is just a reflection of the fact that the causes which participated in producing this image are unlike a dream, are not just internal to consciousness, they're outside consciousness. Okay? Everybody get that? So there's some kind of extra mental stuff that interacts with, somehow, with the mental stuff to produce these images. All right?
There's still, there's definitely stuff, and then there's two kinds of stuff. There's like mind stuff and non-mind stuff. Right? And, yes?
It's basically inner and outer stuff, yeah, you could say. But it's really, on this model, what we're saying is that the outer stuff is not the same as consciousness stuff. Like, we're going to propose a dualistic, a substance dualism, where there's mind stuff and there's basically matter stuff. Okay? Yogācāra says that's wrong.
But some people will say, will think that Yogācāra is idealism, and that's in the top version. Right? This is from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which is a great resource, when you're looking for just some basic, like, definitional type stuff, and some really good, longer articles, too.
So you could talk about, when we use this term philosophical idealism in Western philosophy, we say that something mental, the mind, spirit, reason, et cetera, is the ultimate foundation of all reality, or even exhaustive of reality. That would be the second type here. Where, like, there's only mind stuff. Everything is actually mind stuff.
Uh, and then number two is actually going toward a position where, although the existence of something independent of the mind is conceded, everything that we can know about this independent reality is held to be permeated by the creative, formative, or constructive activities of the mind. That all claims to knowledge must be considered in some sense to be a form of self-knowledge. Neither of these is Yogācāra. Okay? Because Yogācāra is saying the idea of there's mind stuff is dependent on there being non-mind stuff.
So when you say there's nothing outside the mind, which they will say, like, we can establish that if we try to say there's non, like there's a world out there, we can't establish that. But that also means there isn't an in here. Because the in here depends on the out there. So it's not idealism in that sense. It's kind of saying all of this, everything's the same kind of stuff. If it, it in, but they are saying it's, you know, there's something real. But it's all the same kind of stuff. That doesn't mean that the causes are just your mind. That's very important. It's some kind of a shared constraints. And they have a complicated way of trying to describe how that works. And I will say that there are forms of Yogācāra that did tend toward number one in particular, where like everything is just mind, there was definitely forms and therefore you sometimes hear this term Cittamātra mind only as a description of this philosophy. And that's where it does become a kind of idealism. But that's not characteristic of all Yogācāra at all. Okay, then is it phenomenology? Phenomenology studies structures is also from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. We'll stop soon. Phenomenology studies structures of conscious experience as experienced from the first person point of view along with the relevant conditions of experience, the central structure of an experience is intentionality, which means subject object structure, the way it is directed through its content and meaning toward a certain object in the world. So it's not phenomenology on this definition either. But it's like both of those in certain ways. And phenomenology is probably the closest way of describing what Yogācāra is doing. But Yogācāra is specifically saying that intentionality, which is a philosophical term for subject-object duality, is false. Right? And it's, there are versions of Yogācāra which you're interested in within that false kind of dualistic cognition. How does that work? And so that's what Dignāga and Dharmakīrti are doing. But they're really doing that primarily so that you get to the point where you understand why it has to be false. Okay? As opposed to phenomenologists who just assume that's true, that structure is true, and then they're trying to describe you know, how that works, so to speak. What is this experience? What are the invariant features of experience, for example, beyond just intentionality? Okay. So then what is Yogācāra? It does not assert that the object pole collapses into the subject pole so that whatever stuff constitutes the subject pole is all that remains. If you say that whatever constitutes the subject pole, the subject side, is all that there is, and that's called subjective idealism, and that is perhaps what Cittamātra, or mind only, is, but that's only a subset of Yogācāra. However, it does assert that extramental objects are unreal, and whatever remains, I should say, is not extramental.
Okay? So it is denying that there's a kind of like... It's denying substance dualism. There's stuff, non-mind stuff, and there's mind stuff. It's denying that. And it asserts that our only access to the world is through our, through or in experience.
That's all you got to go on. However, it denies the claim that intentionality is essential to consciousness. So it's neither idealism nor phenomenology as it was defined in those articles. And so then the question really becomes, what then is... what are we knowing when we're knowing uh, reality? So now, very briefly, give me five more minutes. Is that okay? So...
when you see this, what is... where is this being presented?
In Milwaukee. No, in consciousness, right? Okay? Chicago. It's being presented within consciousness, right? Can you know anything that's not being presented in consciousness? No. Okay? So if you wanted... so what we mean by reality, whether we're talking about what we take to be part of our subject, like emotions and so on, what we take to be objects that we're perceiving, that whatever... all of that is being presented in consciousness. So if you want to know what the nature of reality is, so one way to understand, this is where Yogācāra is a little different than Mādhyamika, if you want to understand what is the nature of reality, what does that mean, you don't need to understand? The nature of consciousness. Or the nature of mind. Right? So the nature of something is something that characterizes it in all of its different permutations, like what's always the case in all of its manifestations, like, you know, in a simplistic way, we could say the nature of water is H2O, like whether it's liquid, whether it's steam or gas, whether it's solid ice. So what's the same about all moments of consciousness? What? Student: Cognition?
Yeah, like knowingness. So here's... this is what they're going to say. It's luminous empty mind. The nature of the mind is luminous emptiness. Okay? But specifically emptiness as subject-object duality, because we're going to need to go through one more step to get to... This is eventually going to be combined with Mādhyamika. But right now we're saying, what's characteristic of experience is not subject-object duality. But... so it's empty of that. But what is present in every moment of experience is a kind of knowingness. So that's this idea of luminosity. It's a metaphor. We'll say more about it later. So from another perspective, because the mind is not empty in the sense that there's this presence of experience, luminosity. Okay? So experience remains in emptiness, luminous, luminosity. And that applies to all cases. And that's what emptiness is like for the Yogācāra. And so nihilism is avoided, right? And everybody's happy. And knowing is accounted for. However, as we will see... And so this is what... And so emptiness for Yogācāra is an implicative negation. This is how Dharmakīrti talks about that. prabhāsvaram idaṃ cittaṃ prakṛtyāgantavo malāḥ Which we cited before. This mind is by its nature luminous. The defilements are adventitious. The defilements here especially are ignorance that causes subject-object duality. Okay? But... this is still not going to be sufficient for Mahāmudrā Dzogchen style because what might you be doing in this context? Maybe... So the way we described it actually probably are doing.
Maybe... Yes you're more ontologizing that luminosity itself. Affirming that it's real.
And that's going to be a problem. So what's going to happen, we're going to circle back to this this afternoon, is that there's going to be a style of Mādhyamika, the style of Mādhyamika that reaches to Tibet, which is actually going to adopt this kind of Yogācāra as part of a process that starts from a naive analysis, an analysis of our naive sense that there are, you know wholes in the world and so on, and begins with an analysis that says, sure, there's matter, whatever you say, and then moves through Yogācāra and then goes to Mādhyamika. So that's the style of Mādhyamika that goes to Tibet. And it's called Yogācāra Mādhyamika. And we're going to do that after. And it's going to raise a very important question, which is, okay, we have, we said that, sure, knowing is accounted for, but what kind of knowing? So one of the things that's going to be very continuous is how we describe this kind of awareness. Still, we're going to say, empty luminosity, we're going to modify the empty part. But we still need to say, well, what's that luminosity? And that's going to also lead us to a discussion of what's called uh, svasaṃvitti or rang rig རང་རིག་ in Tibetan, which means reflexive awareness.
So that's... most of that will happen after lunch, if you can still stand it. Okay, let's have a good lunch. Let's do our dedication. 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
Thank you.
Okay, so...
Uh, so here's the commentary. The conceptual construction of the unreal is the conceptual construction of object and subject. Emptiness is the lack of objects and subjects in the conceptual construction of the unreal. It, the conceptual construction of the unreal also exists within emptiness. Thus, the following quote gives the correct definition of emptiness. That in which something does not exist is empty of that thing. Knowing this, one truly sees. You're seeing reality, true reality. But what remains here is real here; knowing this, one truly knows. Okay, so what are they saying? We're gonna go through this in various ways, but the basic point here is this. The conceptual construction of the real exists. They say asti, like, and what is it that is existing is that there's a process called parikalpita or parikalpanā, which is we are constructing experience. And when we're constructing experience, and that's happening. So that's a very interesting claim that they're saying, like, you know, experience is happening. Right? They're really affirming experience is happening. But when in the process of that construction, the way experience is happening, the way there's some process that's producing, and it's basically causal process of experience occurring, that it's occurring with an out there and an in here. And the out there and the in here part of it is false. Okay, so actually, the experience is empty of out there in here. So knowing so, and so that's the new definition of emptiness, but it's not really new. Because Nāgārjuna would totally agree with that, like subjects and objects are in that kind of relational identity. And if you say there's an essential object, if objects exist, essentially, they could never be known by subjects, because they couldn't come into contact with them. But you can't define something as an object without defining it in terms of the subject. Likewise, you can't define something as a subject without defining it in terms of the object. Right? So Nāgārjuna would totally agree with that. But here, they're going to focus in on that as the key issue, underlying everything. Okay. Because what are they, in some ways, what you can say is what are they trying to point to? Prapañca. Like what's needed in order for us to bem so remember, Nāgārjuna says, you know, karma-kleśa-kṣayād mokṣaḥ karma-kleśā vikalpataḥ te prapañcātmakāś caiva śūnyatāyāṃ nirudhyate Right? Through the cessation of karma and kleśa comes liberation, libera... karma and kleśa come from concepts, concepts come from prapañca and prapañca ceases in emptiness. So basically, what they're saying is what's prapañca? Prapañca is subject-object duality. Right? In a causal flow. So there's a causal flow that there are a causal flow of experience that they are affirming. And they're saying, but they're saying the duality in that experience is false.
And when you're knowing the ultimate, you're knowing that causal flow as empty of duality. You're experiencing the causal flow as empty of duality. But you're also experiencing the causal flow. And so the Yogācāra are affirming that's real. That remains in emptiness, to quote the title of an article by the great Japanese scholar, Gajin Nagao, from quite many years ago, the late Japanese scholar. But they wouldn't say causation is real. These are Yogācāra. They're not Mādhyamikas. So they kind of seem to be saying yes, causation is real. Because they're saying there's a moment of experience that's caught in causation. There's a moment of experience that's in a causal flow. I'm gonna uh, we'll come more. Okay. Because this is not Yogācāra Mādhyamika yet. This is Yogācāra. Yes. This is from Asaṅga's text that was dictated to him by the future Buddha Maitreya. There's a wonderful story about how he met Maitreya that you should read sometime. It's very wonderful story about compassion. But we shouldn't take time to tell it now. Okay, so the new form of ignorance is not imputation of essences. It's actually not about svabhāva. Svabhāva is, you know, derivative of something more basic. So if I don't have that, shoot, maybe I should have had that diagram. So actually, maybe I'll put it up here. Let me just see if I can.
You could say that the thing about imputation of essences is arguably happening at the conceptual level. Like, this is really a cup. And there's something deeper than the imputation of an essence like this is essentially a cup that's in place that it makes it possible for us to do that. And that what's in place is that sort of reality habit, right? Which makes us want to impute essence or need to impute essence or just redo it. But the imputation of essences is more at this interpretive level. And emptiness is getting at something that's before that, for Nāgārjuna. So that you could conceivably like get rid of all of that, and there'd still be some kind of a distortion that's pre conceptual. Right? Now, maybe Nāgārjuna would think, Oh, imputation of essences is pre conceptual. But the Yogācāra clearly think that there's something more basic than just attributing essences to things. That's, that's the root of this reality habit. And that thing that for them, what is that thing? It's subject object duality. Okay. And that makes, you know, that does make pretty good sense. Because uh, the, you know, if you think about what needs to be in place for conceptuality, and then, and this is then emerging with a theory of conceptuality, called the apoha or exclusion theory, is emerging right around this time as well, or a little after this, when, you know, Buddhists are already very comfortable by this time thinking that, oh, we're, you know, concepts, labels are actually just imputations, they don't refer to real things in the world. Like, there are no real cups. So the word cup is an imputation on a bunch of, you know, parts or whatever. Uh, and but even the idea of cupness is something that we fabricate. And uh, the reason we're doing that, so we're not just discovering cupness in the world, we're creating that because we want to act in the world. Remember that? We want to get what we want and avoid what we don't want. So we need to categorize our information, organize our sensory experience. And we do that by creating these categories. And there are categories about, you know, in similar to the sort of an active perspective, there are categories about getting what we want, avoiding what we don't want, acting in the world, which means there are categories about an agent in the world. So they're inherently dualistic. So, so duality, dualistic cognition, or the dualistic structure in cognition or in awareness, is more primitive than conceptualization, actually. So when we talk about this word, conceptual construction, it's conceptual construction, abhūtaparikalpa, it's kind of like, they want, they have the same verb in there for concepts, but there's not exactly the same word. And it's sort of implying that there's something even though we're using it, using the, even using the word conceptual is maybe a problem, depending on how you think about that word. But there's a constructive process that's dualistic, that's presenting a world to us, even before we label things. Okay. So hence, for the Yogācāra, the... the fundamental expression of ignorance is subject-object duality. It's the most obvious foundation for essentialism. As I just said, and it's also an obvious target of dyadic relational analysis, because what you could say is, all of the other kinds of, you know, things that we come up with, existence, non existence, good, bad, you know, beautiful, ugly, all of those kinds of things that we're doing, they all have to rest on experience itself. If we don't have experience, we're not saying we're not going to be conceptualizing things as good or bad or whatever. So experience precedes all of that. Right? Experience, in a sense, is the territory that we're trying to map. And it's the only territory we have. It's not like we have an exp... like there's more like, you know, if you're going to try to make, what are you making sense of your experience? You say, well, you know what, I'm going to try to make sense of the world, not my experience. Well, yeah, okay, how are you going to do that? You're going to get out of your experience, so you can just deal with the world. You have some other like route to the world that's not through your experience. Or that isn't, you have a world you have access to a world that's not a world that's presented in experience. Anyone have that? Just wondering. The so called objective world? Yeah, kind of a strange idea anyway. What so what remains, but again, you know, that that would you can say that's built in our cognitive system, there's like a world out there, we're in here, we don't think of those two things as indepen, interdependent. You know, it's like there's that world and there's in here. And that's all that that's all she wrote, so to speak. That's just reality. So the sense of objective reality that there's objectivity, that things are just what they are. And we're not, you know, it's not dependent in any way and our cognition or something that just seems natural built into the system. So a big question then is what remains after the negation? What exactly is remaining after the you negate subject object duality? Okay. So... this brings up this basic ontology of what's called the three natures.
This is key to Yogācāra that there's the constructed nature, that's the subject object duality. It's the basic content of our ordinary experience. And there's the dependent nature, which is the causal flow of mind or experience. And then there's the perfect nature, which is the dependent nature empty of the constructed nature.
And that's kind of a bunch of stuff. But here's an easy way, I think, to kind of understand it, a metaphor for this that I often use in teaching. And the Wachowski's when they made this movie, actually clearly were thinking about some of this type of philosophy. And they have said that somewhat imperfectly so. But anyway, so yes, it's our The Matrix. When I first started using this many years ago, you know, like all the undergrads had seen The Matrix. And now they go, The Matrix? What's that?
And like some large percentage of them have never even seen it, leave it or even heard of it, you know, so. But hopefully, who's it? Anyone here not seen The Matrix? It's okay. Don't be embarrassed. You've not really? Connor in the back hasn't seen it. He just lives in The Matrix. So he doesn't. So the basic story, right, is that if in the future, the humans had a war with the AI's and the AI's won basically, and or mostly won and they created a virtual reality that the humans are stuck inside of so that they can use human bodies as batteries. So the humans are kind of in these like pods, but they think they're in that world. And then there's a sort of you know like, it's a complicated story, some of it, but there's a hacker named Neo. And it's like 1980s or 1990s Chicago, basically, is the reality. Like, why would they choose that? There's a whole reason actually. They said, first, we tried to make it like a paradise and you know, it stopped working. No one would believe, the humans wouldn't believe it. So we had to make it like a crappy city. So anyway, you know, saṃsāra, it had to be saṃsāra. So, you know, then there's a certain individual who's kind of prophesied called, named Neo, who just is an acronym for the one. And he is going to have capacity to sort of see through The Matrix and, you know, save everybody kind of thing. Okay. So, so they're living in this, you know, virtual reality, this simulation. And by the way, you know, there is a very serious group of people and I'm forgetting the name of the Swedish philosopher. Maybe somebody here knows who sincerely have argued that we are most likely living in a simulation. I don't know if you're familiar with that. I'll tell you the name of the fellow later. Very serious and quite popular in Silicon Valley, apparently. What? Yeah. Bostrom. Yeah. Well, I forget his first name, but Bostrom. Nick. Is it Nick? Yeah, I think so. Yeah. He's the one who first wrote the most influential article on this. And it's an intriguing argument. But anyway, so they're in the virtual reality. They're kind of everyone's imprisoned in it, saṃsāra. And then Neo comes along and what Neo is able to do, and these are like agents, these are AI's pretending to be humans or having taken over some humans. And then Neo, and they try to shoot Neo, you know, they have this final encounter in the movie, this key moment in the movie. Sorry to ruin the movie for you guys, but, and, and he is able to, instead of like being caught by the bullets, he's able to see what's really happening, which is this. Okay. So if we think of this in terms of the three natures, experience is happening. But when you experience it as the constructed nature, remember, we have the constructed nature, you see this, right? You think it's real subject obj... it is a real world out there. And then, you know, there's a subject in here, but then you're with your Neo like capacities, you see what's really going on. It's just a causal flow that's not out there and not in here. It's just a bunch of data, so to speak. Okay. So that's seeing in a way, that's seeing the constructed nature as empty of the duality. It's an imperfect metaphor, but I think it helps.
The constructed nature is.., the dependent nature. Sorry, actually, I did say that wrong. The dependent nature, the flow of experience is actually empty of the constructed nature. The reality that looks like this is actually this.
Okay. So in a similar way, like as you're seeing, you know, our favorite vase here, the first step in this, in this way of thinking is to perform, what in the phenomenological tradition would be called a kind of reduction, which is to say, uh, where is the vase? Where is what you're seeing? Where is the visual content?
Where is the visual content? Maybe in between us, but one way of thinking about it, if we do like a very simplistic kind of, I don't know, high school physics version, there's some stuff out here interacting with light and so on, so that it, that light reflects off of here, hits your retina, causes a certain kind of signal, goes to the thalamus, into the visual cortex, and somehow it moves forward in the brain and eventually you see something. So one way to talk about this is color, right?
So that, yeah, well, so right now it's just like, what are we seeing? The actual content of what we're seeing on this account is not outside of consciousness.
It's being caused perhaps by something outside of consciousness, but the content of what we're seeing is not outside of consciousness. Does everyone understand that? Is that clear? So that the visual perception that you're having of this is actually something that is presented to you in your consciousness, depending on your visual system. So if you have colorblind or whatever, you'll have a slightly different one. If you were a different kind of organism, and here, here's a pitch for another great book called An Immense World by Ed Yong, which talks about the Weltumgebung, the life worlds of various kinds of organisms. And there are, you know, like there are living things that see, have unbelievable perceptual capacities that we don't have. An immense world, an immense world. Ed Yong. I'm sure it's been translated into German. Really fun. It gets a little too detailed at points, but it's, it's from my taste, but it's really great. You know, like bats, obviously, but also some creatures that, you know, see ultraviolet. So they're, what's presented to them and their perception, it's not the, you know, they have a different kind of phenomenal experience visually. So what, so that, what we're visually seeing, and if you have like a defective, eye, vis... you know, sight or whatever, or you've got, uh, you know, you've had too much to drink is like, how many vases are there or whatever it is, right? You have a certain visual experience and that's, so if you, you know, do get, uh, not recommending that you get so drunk tonight that you can't, uh, that you see two vases, but if you were to do that, it's not like there are two vases out there, right? Not that anyone has had that experience here, but right, it's not like there are actually two vases and we can manipulate things so that you see, you know, visually things that aren't there if we wanted to.
So, uh, and actually, you know, here's a, okay, let's just do this real quick. I do one more thing. Uh, where's the, can use a triangle?
By the way, uh, David Hayden is asking causal flow nature, um, par paric. Uh, yeah, yeah. Uh, could you give a more literal translation? Other dependent, the dependent nature is what it, the translation is dependent nature. That's a good, that's a good translation. Okay, so who sees, do you see a white triangle or a gray triangle? Is there a gray triangle there? No, I mean, like here, this, do you see a gray triangle here? Really? Hey, wait, let's go like this.
Do you still see a triangle? Do you see, can I go over here?
What do you see now? Pac-Man. Okay, there's no triangle, right? This is called the contour illusion. So your visual system is making you see something that's not there, but you're seeing it in your visual system, right? But it's not there. And if we could set up the right circumstances, it goes away. I've written an article about this. You can also, um, if you just say you can use your conceptual system to try to override it by just looking at one of the, one of these things and say, repeatedly, Pac-Man, Pac-Man, Pac-Man, Pac-Man, Pac-Man, Pac-Man, Pac-Man, Pac-Man.
And does it go away a little bit? It's kind of amazing, right? Goes away. I can just like, I've done that so many times now. It's like, yeah, Pac-Man.
And just, I can just make it go away, just like that. It's quite easy for me to do that. It's a useless thing I've practiced.
And you, you know, if we had some Pac-Man gaming experts out here, they could all do it too. I'm sure. They're kind of looking for the monster, you know. Okay. So our, we're seeing what we're seeing, just like the Kanizsa triangle is like a thing in our mind. That's a way of constructing that is in a causal process. And that causes, so there's some, you know, we don't just see whatever we want. There's some constraints from the causes. But then our visual system works with those causes and produces things that we see as our kind of beings. We are, other beings see other kinds of things, you know, still with the same causes. Like if you're some kind of a special alien, you can't see, you know, what we would call the banana in my hand. That's not going to happen. Those are the constraints of the causes and the shared life world that we have. Okay. So that's a very important idea. There's some kind of shared life world that we're in where there are constraints. So this doesn't mean you just make up the world yourself. But it also doesn't mean that the world is just objectively out there. And the world you actually have access to is not really out there. And, but then again, that's what the world is. So the whole out thereness is kind of the confused part. Okay. So everyone understand that? So like what you're seeing is presented within consciousness. This is my favorite part of this. So I'm in your mind, hello...
get out of my mind, please. Okay. So seeing the ultimate, what does seeing the ultimate mean? Maybe it means seeing just sheer mind without any content.
And then the post-meditative state is more like this. Or maybe it means something like this, where you still have the content, but somehow it doesn't present as out there in here. Okay.
All right. So the critiques of subject-to-object duality, one way of doing this is actually to use the neither one nor many argument that we did before. You remember with the atoms, like what's this made out of? Atoms. But then you go down to the atoms and you find even partless atoms don't make sense. So... therefore, there's no matter. Really, therefore, there's no, that model of matter doesn't work. But if that's what we think the only option for a model of matter is, then we say there's no matter, meaning there's no stuff outside the mind. There's not like mind stuff and matter stuff that are defined in terms of each other. There's mind, mind and non-mind, or matter and non-matter. Okay. That's one approach. Another approach is to analyze the mind itself using a mind, neither one nor many argument. We won't go through that. And then you can use the critique of relations that we talked about, how objects are defined in terms of subjects, objects, right? But where you end up in is a place where there's presentation in a sense of in there, out there, but the in there, out there is false.
And that's, of course, true. Like if your content of experience is actually, what you're seeing is actually within consciousness, then it's not different. It's not different than your sense of subjectivity. In the sense that they're both just consciousness. Your sense of subjectivity is also being presented in consciousness. So they're just like both aspects of consciousness. You get it?
They're not actually different. So like in a dream, like when you dream, when you have a dream, is the stuff you see in the dream outside of consciousness? Has anyone managed to dream like that? It's within consciousness, right? Correct? That's also true of your waking life on this account. Like this is within consciousness. The difference between dreaming in the Yogācāra, the way they explain this is in dreaming, you have less connection with the shared life world. And when you're awake, you have a strong connection with the shared life world. So those constraints on your experience are much stronger when you're in a waking state. So you can't just, you know, make things happen because you want them to. Sorry, folks. Actually, not sorry. That would probably be a really bad thing. Okay, so, you know, like, unlike Neo, you can't just fly through the sky or whatever. At least not in our ordinary state. Uh so, the kind, what kinds of negation are we, did w... A very important thing that is relevant here to understand is that there is a, there is a difference between the kind of negation that Nāgārjuna, at least in his philosophical texts, is primarily using. Maybe he doesn't do that in some other texts, but in his philosophical texts, he's using the bottom one, non-implicative negation. A negation that does not affirm anything at all. It's basically not this and only not this, full stop. Like, it is not the case that there is such a thing as Martians. It is not the case that there is such a thing as square circles. Okay? As opposed to the example, and these are actually coming out of Sanskrit grammar, as opposed to an implicative negation or a paryudāsa, which when you negate something, you're implying something else, like, pinu devadatta devasena bhumpte, pīno devadattaḥ divā na bhuṅkte is the grammatical example. Fat devadatta does not eat during the day. Which means?
Very good! He eats at night. Right? Okay? I say, the car isn't in the garage, meaning... somewhere else. Right? As opposed to me saying, I don't own a car. Like, where's the car? Well, I don't own a car. I'm not affirming... In that, you might say, well, maybe I'm saying I imply I own something else. Maybe not. Maybe I'm a monk and I don't own anything. Okay? So, that's a non-implicative negation. Yogācāra should be understood as engaging in an implicative negation. So, emptiness here is an implicative negation. What's negated in emptiness? Subject-object duality. What remains in emptiness? Non-dual experience. Okay? So, then this becomes... So, there are some questions about what this means in Yogācāra. One of those questions... So, the basic idea here is that the, the, the subject-object structure in your experience is false. Okay? Now, under what conditions would we say that the subject-object structure is true? Even after we do this reduction, meaning, okay, I'll admit that what's being presented in my experience, on the one hand, and my sense of subjectivity on the other, are both just aspects of consciousness. But this structure is not false. Under what conditions would that be the case?
When would you be able to endorse that, but not say that it's false?
When you're so close to lunch that you don't know what to say. Right?
When the causal process that's producing this is somehow accurately reflecting the otherness of these things. Right? Like, there's consciousness and something other than consciousness. So, when the causes are other than consciousness, so that when, you know, what I'm seeing is actually something within consciousness, but what's causing this aspect of consciousness, the object aspect of consciousness, the causes of that are somehow outside consciousness. So the otherness, the twoness in consciousness, is just reflecting the fact that consciousness is one kind of stuff, and the causes that created this image in consciousness are another kind of stuff. You see that? Did everyone get that? Any questions about it? You don't get that? So... So, for example,
if, let's see, let me think if I can think of an example. So if you dream of something, right? Like, let's say you dream of a beautiful mountain, and you wake up and, you know, and you say to me, did you see that beautiful mountain? Oh, let's not, that doesn't work. How about you dream of like a spectacular meteor. And then you wake up and you say to me, did you see that beautiful meteor last night?
And I say, what meteor? And you describe where it was, and at what time, and I say, I was right there, it's not there. So then your experience of the meteor was not caused by something out there. So in that sense, it was false, right? But if the meteor was actually there, then there was something outside your mind, it wasn't a dream, there was something outside your mind that interacted with your visual system, and then you saw it, even though what you're seeing is within consciousness. So in that case, the sense of, oh, this thing is out there, the actual image in your mind is not out there. It's in your consciousness. But the sense of it being out there is not wrong, because it's caused by something out there. Everybody get that? The out-thereness, the bāhyatā, or bahir, yeah, bāhyatā, of this, the outsideness or out-thereness of the visual object is just a reflection of the fact that the causes which participated in producing this image are unlike a dream, are not just internal to consciousness, they're outside consciousness. Okay? Everybody get that? So there's some kind of extra mental stuff that interacts with, somehow, with the mental stuff to produce these images. All right?
There's still, there's definitely stuff, and then there's two kinds of stuff. There's like mind stuff and non-mind stuff. Right? And, yes?
It's basically inner and outer stuff, yeah, you could say. But it's really, on this model, what we're saying is that the outer stuff is not the same as consciousness stuff. Like, we're going to propose a dualistic, a substance dualism, where there's mind stuff and there's basically matter stuff. Okay? Yogācāra says that's wrong.
But some people will say, will think that Yogācāra is idealism, and that's in the top version. Right? This is from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which is a great resource, when you're looking for just some basic, like, definitional type stuff, and some really good, longer articles, too.
So you could talk about, when we use this term philosophical idealism in Western philosophy, we say that something mental, the mind, spirit, reason, et cetera, is the ultimate foundation of all reality, or even exhaustive of reality. That would be the second type here. Where, like, there's only mind stuff. Everything is actually mind stuff.
Uh, and then number two is actually going toward a position where, although the existence of something independent of the mind is conceded, everything that we can know about this independent reality is held to be permeated by the creative, formative, or constructive activities of the mind. That all claims to knowledge must be considered in some sense to be a form of self-knowledge. Neither of these is Yogācāra. Okay? Because Yogācāra is saying the idea of there's mind stuff is dependent on there being non-mind stuff.
So when you say there's nothing outside the mind, which they will say, like, we can establish that if we try to say there's non, like there's a world out there, we can't establish that. But that also means there isn't an in here. Because the in here depends on the out there. So it's not idealism in that sense. It's kind of saying all of this, everything's the same kind of stuff. If it, it in, but they are saying it's, you know, there's something real. But it's all the same kind of stuff. That doesn't mean that the causes are just your mind. That's very important. It's some kind of a shared constraints. And they have a complicated way of trying to describe how that works. And I will say that there are forms of Yogācāra that did tend toward number one in particular, where like everything is just mind, there was definitely forms and therefore you sometimes hear this term Cittamātra mind only as a description of this philosophy. And that's where it does become a kind of idealism. But that's not characteristic of all Yogācāra at all. Okay, then is it phenomenology? Phenomenology studies structures is also from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. We'll stop soon. Phenomenology studies structures of conscious experience as experienced from the first person point of view along with the relevant conditions of experience, the central structure of an experience is intentionality, which means subject object structure, the way it is directed through its content and meaning toward a certain object in the world. So it's not phenomenology on this definition either. But it's like both of those in certain ways. And phenomenology is probably the closest way of describing what Yogācāra is doing. But Yogācāra is specifically saying that intentionality, which is a philosophical term for subject-object duality, is false. Right? And it's, there are versions of Yogācāra which you're interested in within that false kind of dualistic cognition. How does that work? And so that's what Dignāga and Dharmakīrti are doing. But they're really doing that primarily so that you get to the point where you understand why it has to be false. Okay? As opposed to phenomenologists who just assume that's true, that structure is true, and then they're trying to describe you know, how that works, so to speak. What is this experience? What are the invariant features of experience, for example, beyond just intentionality? Okay. So then what is Yogācāra? It does not assert that the object pole collapses into the subject pole so that whatever stuff constitutes the subject pole is all that remains. If you say that whatever constitutes the subject pole, the subject side, is all that there is, and that's called subjective idealism, and that is perhaps what Cittamātra, or mind only, is, but that's only a subset of Yogācāra. However, it does assert that extramental objects are unreal, and whatever remains, I should say, is not extramental.
Okay? So it is denying that there's a kind of like... It's denying substance dualism. There's stuff, non-mind stuff, and there's mind stuff. It's denying that. And it asserts that our only access to the world is through our, through or in experience.
That's all you got to go on. However, it denies the claim that intentionality is essential to consciousness. So it's neither idealism nor phenomenology as it was defined in those articles. And so then the question really becomes, what then is... what are we knowing when we're knowing uh, reality? So now, very briefly, give me five more minutes. Is that okay? So...
when you see this, what is... where is this being presented?
In Milwaukee. No, in consciousness, right? Okay? Chicago. It's being presented within consciousness, right? Can you know anything that's not being presented in consciousness? No. Okay? So if you wanted... so what we mean by reality, whether we're talking about what we take to be part of our subject, like emotions and so on, what we take to be objects that we're perceiving, that whatever... all of that is being presented in consciousness. So if you want to know what the nature of reality is, so one way to understand, this is where Yogācāra is a little different than Mādhyamika, if you want to understand what is the nature of reality, what does that mean, you don't need to understand? The nature of consciousness. Or the nature of mind. Right? So the nature of something is something that characterizes it in all of its different permutations, like what's always the case in all of its manifestations, like, you know, in a simplistic way, we could say the nature of water is H2O, like whether it's liquid, whether it's steam or gas, whether it's solid ice. So what's the same about all moments of consciousness? What? Student: Cognition?
Yeah, like knowingness. So here's... this is what they're going to say. It's luminous empty mind. The nature of the mind is luminous emptiness. Okay? But specifically emptiness as subject-object duality, because we're going to need to go through one more step to get to... This is eventually going to be combined with Mādhyamika. But right now we're saying, what's characteristic of experience is not subject-object duality. But... so it's empty of that. But what is present in every moment of experience is a kind of knowingness. So that's this idea of luminosity. It's a metaphor. We'll say more about it later. So from another perspective, because the mind is not empty in the sense that there's this presence of experience, luminosity. Okay? So experience remains in emptiness, luminous, luminosity. And that applies to all cases. And that's what emptiness is like for the Yogācāra. And so nihilism is avoided, right? And everybody's happy. And knowing is accounted for. However, as we will see... And so this is what... And so emptiness for Yogācāra is an implicative negation. This is how Dharmakīrti talks about that. prabhāsvaram idaṃ cittaṃ prakṛtyāgantavo malāḥ Which we cited before. This mind is by its nature luminous. The defilements are adventitious. The defilements here especially are ignorance that causes subject-object duality. Okay? But... this is still not going to be sufficient for Mahāmudrā Dzogchen style because what might you be doing in this context? Maybe... So the way we described it actually probably are doing.
Maybe... Yes you're more ontologizing that luminosity itself. Affirming that it's real.
And that's going to be a problem. So what's going to happen, we're going to circle back to this this afternoon, is that there's going to be a style of Mādhyamika, the style of Mādhyamika that reaches to Tibet, which is actually going to adopt this kind of Yogācāra as part of a process that starts from a naive analysis, an analysis of our naive sense that there are, you know wholes in the world and so on, and begins with an analysis that says, sure, there's matter, whatever you say, and then moves through Yogācāra and then goes to Mādhyamika. So that's the style of Mādhyamika that goes to Tibet. And it's called Yogācāra Mādhyamika. And we're going to do that after. And it's going to raise a very important question, which is, okay, we have, we said that, sure, knowing is accounted for, but what kind of knowing? So one of the things that's going to be very continuous is how we describe this kind of awareness. Still, we're going to say, empty luminosity, we're going to modify the empty part. But we still need to say, well, what's that luminosity? And that's going to also lead us to a discussion of what's called uh, svasaṃvitti or rang rig རང་རིག་ in Tibetan, which means reflexive awareness.
So that's... most of that will happen after lunch, if you can still stand it. Okay, let's have a good lunch. Let's do our dedication. 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
Thank you.
Uh, so here's the commentary. The conceptual construction of the unreal is the conceptual construction of object and subject. Emptiness is the lack of objects and subjects in the conceptual construction of the unreal. It, the conceptual construction of the unreal also exists within emptiness. Thus, the following quote gives the correct definition of emptiness. That in which something does not exist is empty of that thing. Knowing this, one truly sees. You're seeing reality, true reality. But what remains here is real here; knowing this, one truly knows. Okay, so what are they saying? We're gonna go through this in various ways, but the basic point here is this. The conceptual construction of the real exists. They say asti, like, and what is it that is existing is that there's a process called parikalpita or parikalpanā, which is we are constructing experience. And when we're constructing experience, and that's happening. So that's a very interesting claim that they're saying, like, you know, experience is happening. Right? They're really affirming experience is happening. But when in the process of that construction, the way experience is happening, the way there's some process that's producing, and it's basically causal process of experience occurring, that it's occurring with an out there and an in here. And the out there and the in here part of it is false. Okay, so actually, the experience is empty of out there in here. So knowing so, and so that's the new definition of emptiness, but it's not really new. Because Nāgārjuna would totally agree with that, like subjects and objects are in that kind of relational identity. And if you say there's an essential object, if objects exist, essentially, they could never be known by subjects, because they couldn't come into contact with them. But you can't define something as an object without defining it in terms of the subject. Likewise, you can't define something as a subject without defining it in terms of the object. Right? So Nāgārjuna would totally agree with that. But here, they're going to focus in on that as the key issue, underlying everything. Okay. Because what are they, in some ways, what you can say is what are they trying to point to? Prapañca. Like what's needed in order for us to bem so remember, Nāgārjuna says, you know, karma-kleśa-kṣayād mokṣaḥ karma-kleśā vikalpataḥ te prapañcātmakāś caiva śūnyatāyāṃ nirudhyate Right? Through the cessation of karma and kleśa comes liberation, libera... karma and kleśa come from concepts, concepts come from prapañca and prapañca ceases in emptiness. So basically, what they're saying is what's prapañca? Prapañca is subject-object duality. Right? In a causal flow. So there's a causal flow that there are a causal flow of experience that they are affirming. And they're saying, but they're saying the duality in that experience is false.
And when you're knowing the ultimate, you're knowing that causal flow as empty of duality. You're experiencing the causal flow as empty of duality. But you're also experiencing the causal flow. And so the Yogācāra are affirming that's real. That remains in emptiness, to quote the title of an article by the great Japanese scholar, Gajin Nagao, from quite many years ago, the late Japanese scholar. But they wouldn't say causation is real. These are Yogācāra. They're not Mādhyamikas. So they kind of seem to be saying yes, causation is real. Because they're saying there's a moment of experience that's caught in causation. There's a moment of experience that's in a causal flow. I'm gonna uh, we'll come more. Okay. Because this is not Yogācāra Mādhyamika yet. This is Yogācāra. Yes. This is from Asaṅga's text that was dictated to him by the future Buddha Maitreya. There's a wonderful story about how he met Maitreya that you should read sometime. It's very wonderful story about compassion. But we shouldn't take time to tell it now. Okay, so the new form of ignorance is not imputation of essences. It's actually not about svabhāva. Svabhāva is, you know, derivative of something more basic. So if I don't have that, shoot, maybe I should have had that diagram. So actually, maybe I'll put it up here. Let me just see if I can.
You could say that the thing about imputation of essences is arguably happening at the conceptual level. Like, this is really a cup. And there's something deeper than the imputation of an essence like this is essentially a cup that's in place that it makes it possible for us to do that. And that what's in place is that sort of reality habit, right? Which makes us want to impute essence or need to impute essence or just redo it. But the imputation of essences is more at this interpretive level. And emptiness is getting at something that's before that, for Nāgārjuna. So that you could conceivably like get rid of all of that, and there'd still be some kind of a distortion that's pre conceptual. Right? Now, maybe Nāgārjuna would think, Oh, imputation of essences is pre conceptual. But the Yogācāra clearly think that there's something more basic than just attributing essences to things. That's, that's the root of this reality habit. And that thing that for them, what is that thing? It's subject object duality. Okay. And that makes, you know, that does make pretty good sense. Because uh, the, you know, if you think about what needs to be in place for conceptuality, and then, and this is then emerging with a theory of conceptuality, called the apoha or exclusion theory, is emerging right around this time as well, or a little after this, when, you know, Buddhists are already very comfortable by this time thinking that, oh, we're, you know, concepts, labels are actually just imputations, they don't refer to real things in the world. Like, there are no real cups. So the word cup is an imputation on a bunch of, you know, parts or whatever. Uh, and but even the idea of cupness is something that we fabricate. And uh, the reason we're doing that, so we're not just discovering cupness in the world, we're creating that because we want to act in the world. Remember that? We want to get what we want and avoid what we don't want. So we need to categorize our information, organize our sensory experience. And we do that by creating these categories. And there are categories about, you know, in similar to the sort of an active perspective, there are categories about getting what we want, avoiding what we don't want, acting in the world, which means there are categories about an agent in the world. So they're inherently dualistic. So, so duality, dualistic cognition, or the dualistic structure in cognition or in awareness, is more primitive than conceptualization, actually. So when we talk about this word, conceptual construction, it's conceptual construction, abhūtaparikalpa, it's kind of like, they want, they have the same verb in there for concepts, but there's not exactly the same word. And it's sort of implying that there's something even though we're using it, using the, even using the word conceptual is maybe a problem, depending on how you think about that word. But there's a constructive process that's dualistic, that's presenting a world to us, even before we label things. Okay. So hence, for the Yogācāra, the... the fundamental expression of ignorance is subject-object duality. It's the most obvious foundation for essentialism. As I just said, and it's also an obvious target of dyadic relational analysis, because what you could say is, all of the other kinds of, you know, things that we come up with, existence, non existence, good, bad, you know, beautiful, ugly, all of those kinds of things that we're doing, they all have to rest on experience itself. If we don't have experience, we're not saying we're not going to be conceptualizing things as good or bad or whatever. So experience precedes all of that. Right? Experience, in a sense, is the territory that we're trying to map. And it's the only territory we have. It's not like we have an exp... like there's more like, you know, if you're going to try to make, what are you making sense of your experience? You say, well, you know what, I'm going to try to make sense of the world, not my experience. Well, yeah, okay, how are you going to do that? You're going to get out of your experience, so you can just deal with the world. You have some other like route to the world that's not through your experience. Or that isn't, you have a world you have access to a world that's not a world that's presented in experience. Anyone have that? Just wondering. The so called objective world? Yeah, kind of a strange idea anyway. What so what remains, but again, you know, that that would you can say that's built in our cognitive system, there's like a world out there, we're in here, we don't think of those two things as indepen, interdependent. You know, it's like there's that world and there's in here. And that's all that that's all she wrote, so to speak. That's just reality. So the sense of objective reality that there's objectivity, that things are just what they are. And we're not, you know, it's not dependent in any way and our cognition or something that just seems natural built into the system. So a big question then is what remains after the negation? What exactly is remaining after the you negate subject object duality? Okay. So... this brings up this basic ontology of what's called the three natures.
This is key to Yogācāra that there's the constructed nature, that's the subject object duality. It's the basic content of our ordinary experience. And there's the dependent nature, which is the causal flow of mind or experience. And then there's the perfect nature, which is the dependent nature empty of the constructed nature.
And that's kind of a bunch of stuff. But here's an easy way, I think, to kind of understand it, a metaphor for this that I often use in teaching. And the Wachowski's when they made this movie, actually clearly were thinking about some of this type of philosophy. And they have said that somewhat imperfectly so. But anyway, so yes, it's our The Matrix. When I first started using this many years ago, you know, like all the undergrads had seen The Matrix. And now they go, The Matrix? What's that?
And like some large percentage of them have never even seen it, leave it or even heard of it, you know, so. But hopefully, who's it? Anyone here not seen The Matrix? It's okay. Don't be embarrassed. You've not really? Connor in the back hasn't seen it. He just lives in The Matrix. So he doesn't. So the basic story, right, is that if in the future, the humans had a war with the AI's and the AI's won basically, and or mostly won and they created a virtual reality that the humans are stuck inside of so that they can use human bodies as batteries. So the humans are kind of in these like pods, but they think they're in that world. And then there's a sort of you know like, it's a complicated story, some of it, but there's a hacker named Neo. And it's like 1980s or 1990s Chicago, basically, is the reality. Like, why would they choose that? There's a whole reason actually. They said, first, we tried to make it like a paradise and you know, it stopped working. No one would believe, the humans wouldn't believe it. So we had to make it like a crappy city. So anyway, you know, saṃsāra, it had to be saṃsāra. So, you know, then there's a certain individual who's kind of prophesied called, named Neo, who just is an acronym for the one. And he is going to have capacity to sort of see through The Matrix and, you know, save everybody kind of thing. Okay. So, so they're living in this, you know, virtual reality, this simulation. And by the way, you know, there is a very serious group of people and I'm forgetting the name of the Swedish philosopher. Maybe somebody here knows who sincerely have argued that we are most likely living in a simulation. I don't know if you're familiar with that. I'll tell you the name of the fellow later. Very serious and quite popular in Silicon Valley, apparently. What? Yeah. Bostrom. Yeah. Well, I forget his first name, but Bostrom. Nick. Is it Nick? Yeah, I think so. Yeah. He's the one who first wrote the most influential article on this. And it's an intriguing argument. But anyway, so they're in the virtual reality. They're kind of everyone's imprisoned in it, saṃsāra. And then Neo comes along and what Neo is able to do, and these are like agents, these are AI's pretending to be humans or having taken over some humans. And then Neo, and they try to shoot Neo, you know, they have this final encounter in the movie, this key moment in the movie. Sorry to ruin the movie for you guys, but, and, and he is able to, instead of like being caught by the bullets, he's able to see what's really happening, which is this. Okay. So if we think of this in terms of the three natures, experience is happening. But when you experience it as the constructed nature, remember, we have the constructed nature, you see this, right? You think it's real subject obj... it is a real world out there. And then, you know, there's a subject in here, but then you're with your Neo like capacities, you see what's really going on. It's just a causal flow that's not out there and not in here. It's just a bunch of data, so to speak. Okay. So that's seeing in a way, that's seeing the constructed nature as empty of the duality. It's an imperfect metaphor, but I think it helps.
The constructed nature is.., the dependent nature. Sorry, actually, I did say that wrong. The dependent nature, the flow of experience is actually empty of the constructed nature. The reality that looks like this is actually this.
Okay. So in a similar way, like as you're seeing, you know, our favorite vase here, the first step in this, in this way of thinking is to perform, what in the phenomenological tradition would be called a kind of reduction, which is to say, uh, where is the vase? Where is what you're seeing? Where is the visual content?
Where is the visual content? Maybe in between us, but one way of thinking about it, if we do like a very simplistic kind of, I don't know, high school physics version, there's some stuff out here interacting with light and so on, so that it, that light reflects off of here, hits your retina, causes a certain kind of signal, goes to the thalamus, into the visual cortex, and somehow it moves forward in the brain and eventually you see something. So one way to talk about this is color, right?
So that, yeah, well, so right now it's just like, what are we seeing? The actual content of what we're seeing on this account is not outside of consciousness.
It's being caused perhaps by something outside of consciousness, but the content of what we're seeing is not outside of consciousness. Does everyone understand that? Is that clear? So that the visual perception that you're having of this is actually something that is presented to you in your consciousness, depending on your visual system. So if you have colorblind or whatever, you'll have a slightly different one. If you were a different kind of organism, and here, here's a pitch for another great book called An Immense World by Ed Yong, which talks about the Weltumgebung, the life worlds of various kinds of organisms. And there are, you know, like there are living things that see, have unbelievable perceptual capacities that we don't have. An immense world, an immense world. Ed Yong. I'm sure it's been translated into German. Really fun. It gets a little too detailed at points, but it's, it's from my taste, but it's really great. You know, like bats, obviously, but also some creatures that, you know, see ultraviolet. So they're, what's presented to them and their perception, it's not the, you know, they have a different kind of phenomenal experience visually. So what, so that, what we're visually seeing, and if you have like a defective, eye, vis... you know, sight or whatever, or you've got, uh, you know, you've had too much to drink is like, how many vases are there or whatever it is, right? You have a certain visual experience and that's, so if you, you know, do get, uh, not recommending that you get so drunk tonight that you can't, uh, that you see two vases, but if you were to do that, it's not like there are two vases out there, right? Not that anyone has had that experience here, but right, it's not like there are actually two vases and we can manipulate things so that you see, you know, visually things that aren't there if we wanted to.
So, uh, and actually, you know, here's a, okay, let's just do this real quick. I do one more thing. Uh, where's the, can use a triangle?
By the way, uh, David Hayden is asking causal flow nature, um, par paric. Uh, yeah, yeah. Uh, could you give a more literal translation? Other dependent, the dependent nature is what it, the translation is dependent nature. That's a good, that's a good translation. Okay, so who sees, do you see a white triangle or a gray triangle? Is there a gray triangle there? No, I mean, like here, this, do you see a gray triangle here? Really? Hey, wait, let's go like this.
Do you still see a triangle? Do you see, can I go over here?
What do you see now? Pac-Man. Okay, there's no triangle, right? This is called the contour illusion. So your visual system is making you see something that's not there, but you're seeing it in your visual system, right? But it's not there. And if we could set up the right circumstances, it goes away. I've written an article about this. You can also, um, if you just say you can use your conceptual system to try to override it by just looking at one of the, one of these things and say, repeatedly, Pac-Man, Pac-Man, Pac-Man, Pac-Man, Pac-Man, Pac-Man, Pac-Man, Pac-Man.
And does it go away a little bit? It's kind of amazing, right? Goes away. I can just like, I've done that so many times now. It's like, yeah, Pac-Man.
And just, I can just make it go away, just like that. It's quite easy for me to do that. It's a useless thing I've practiced.
And you, you know, if we had some Pac-Man gaming experts out here, they could all do it too. I'm sure. They're kind of looking for the monster, you know. Okay. So our, we're seeing what we're seeing, just like the Kanizsa triangle is like a thing in our mind. That's a way of constructing that is in a causal process. And that causes, so there's some, you know, we don't just see whatever we want. There's some constraints from the causes. But then our visual system works with those causes and produces things that we see as our kind of beings. We are, other beings see other kinds of things, you know, still with the same causes. Like if you're some kind of a special alien, you can't see, you know, what we would call the banana in my hand. That's not going to happen. Those are the constraints of the causes and the shared life world that we have. Okay. So that's a very important idea. There's some kind of shared life world that we're in where there are constraints. So this doesn't mean you just make up the world yourself. But it also doesn't mean that the world is just objectively out there. And the world you actually have access to is not really out there. And, but then again, that's what the world is. So the whole out thereness is kind of the confused part. Okay. So everyone understand that? So like what you're seeing is presented within consciousness. This is my favorite part of this. So I'm in your mind, hello...
get out of my mind, please. Okay. So seeing the ultimate, what does seeing the ultimate mean? Maybe it means seeing just sheer mind without any content.
And then the post-meditative state is more like this. Or maybe it means something like this, where you still have the content, but somehow it doesn't present as out there in here. Okay.
All right. So the critiques of subject-to-object duality, one way of doing this is actually to use the neither one nor many argument that we did before. You remember with the atoms, like what's this made out of? Atoms. But then you go down to the atoms and you find even partless atoms don't make sense. So... therefore, there's no matter. Really, therefore, there's no, that model of matter doesn't work. But if that's what we think the only option for a model of matter is, then we say there's no matter, meaning there's no stuff outside the mind. There's not like mind stuff and matter stuff that are defined in terms of each other. There's mind, mind and non-mind, or matter and non-matter. Okay. That's one approach. Another approach is to analyze the mind itself using a mind, neither one nor many argument. We won't go through that. And then you can use the critique of relations that we talked about, how objects are defined in terms of subjects, objects, right? But where you end up in is a place where there's presentation in a sense of in there, out there, but the in there, out there is false.
And that's, of course, true. Like if your content of experience is actually, what you're seeing is actually within consciousness, then it's not different. It's not different than your sense of subjectivity. In the sense that they're both just consciousness. Your sense of subjectivity is also being presented in consciousness. So they're just like both aspects of consciousness. You get it?
They're not actually different. So like in a dream, like when you dream, when you have a dream, is the stuff you see in the dream outside of consciousness? Has anyone managed to dream like that? It's within consciousness, right? Correct? That's also true of your waking life on this account. Like this is within consciousness. The difference between dreaming in the Yogācāra, the way they explain this is in dreaming, you have less connection with the shared life world. And when you're awake, you have a strong connection with the shared life world. So those constraints on your experience are much stronger when you're in a waking state. So you can't just, you know, make things happen because you want them to. Sorry, folks. Actually, not sorry. That would probably be a really bad thing. Okay, so, you know, like, unlike Neo, you can't just fly through the sky or whatever. At least not in our ordinary state. Uh so, the kind, what kinds of negation are we, did w... A very important thing that is relevant here to understand is that there is a, there is a difference between the kind of negation that Nāgārjuna, at least in his philosophical texts, is primarily using. Maybe he doesn't do that in some other texts, but in his philosophical texts, he's using the bottom one, non-implicative negation. A negation that does not affirm anything at all. It's basically not this and only not this, full stop. Like, it is not the case that there is such a thing as Martians. It is not the case that there is such a thing as square circles. Okay? As opposed to the example, and these are actually coming out of Sanskrit grammar, as opposed to an implicative negation or a paryudāsa, which when you negate something, you're implying something else, like, pinu devadatta devasena bhumpte, pīno devadattaḥ divā na bhuṅkte is the grammatical example. Fat devadatta does not eat during the day. Which means?
Very good! He eats at night. Right? Okay? I say, the car isn't in the garage, meaning... somewhere else. Right? As opposed to me saying, I don't own a car. Like, where's the car? Well, I don't own a car. I'm not affirming... In that, you might say, well, maybe I'm saying I imply I own something else. Maybe not. Maybe I'm a monk and I don't own anything. Okay? So, that's a non-implicative negation. Yogācāra should be understood as engaging in an implicative negation. So, emptiness here is an implicative negation. What's negated in emptiness? Subject-object duality. What remains in emptiness? Non-dual experience. Okay? So, then this becomes... So, there are some questions about what this means in Yogācāra. One of those questions... So, the basic idea here is that the, the, the subject-object structure in your experience is false. Okay? Now, under what conditions would we say that the subject-object structure is true? Even after we do this reduction, meaning, okay, I'll admit that what's being presented in my experience, on the one hand, and my sense of subjectivity on the other, are both just aspects of consciousness. But this structure is not false. Under what conditions would that be the case?
When would you be able to endorse that, but not say that it's false?
When you're so close to lunch that you don't know what to say. Right?
When the causal process that's producing this is somehow accurately reflecting the otherness of these things. Right? Like, there's consciousness and something other than consciousness. So, when the causes are other than consciousness, so that when, you know, what I'm seeing is actually something within consciousness, but what's causing this aspect of consciousness, the object aspect of consciousness, the causes of that are somehow outside consciousness. So the otherness, the twoness in consciousness, is just reflecting the fact that consciousness is one kind of stuff, and the causes that created this image in consciousness are another kind of stuff. You see that? Did everyone get that? Any questions about it? You don't get that? So... So, for example,
if, let's see, let me think if I can think of an example. So if you dream of something, right? Like, let's say you dream of a beautiful mountain, and you wake up and, you know, and you say to me, did you see that beautiful mountain? Oh, let's not, that doesn't work. How about you dream of like a spectacular meteor. And then you wake up and you say to me, did you see that beautiful meteor last night?
And I say, what meteor? And you describe where it was, and at what time, and I say, I was right there, it's not there. So then your experience of the meteor was not caused by something out there. So in that sense, it was false, right? But if the meteor was actually there, then there was something outside your mind, it wasn't a dream, there was something outside your mind that interacted with your visual system, and then you saw it, even though what you're seeing is within consciousness. So in that case, the sense of, oh, this thing is out there, the actual image in your mind is not out there. It's in your consciousness. But the sense of it being out there is not wrong, because it's caused by something out there. Everybody get that? The out-thereness, the bāhyatā, or bahir, yeah, bāhyatā, of this, the outsideness or out-thereness of the visual object is just a reflection of the fact that the causes which participated in producing this image are unlike a dream, are not just internal to consciousness, they're outside consciousness. Okay? Everybody get that? So there's some kind of extra mental stuff that interacts with, somehow, with the mental stuff to produce these images. All right?
There's still, there's definitely stuff, and then there's two kinds of stuff. There's like mind stuff and non-mind stuff. Right? And, yes?
It's basically inner and outer stuff, yeah, you could say. But it's really, on this model, what we're saying is that the outer stuff is not the same as consciousness stuff. Like, we're going to propose a dualistic, a substance dualism, where there's mind stuff and there's basically matter stuff. Okay? Yogācāra says that's wrong.
But some people will say, will think that Yogācāra is idealism, and that's in the top version. Right? This is from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which is a great resource, when you're looking for just some basic, like, definitional type stuff, and some really good, longer articles, too.
So you could talk about, when we use this term philosophical idealism in Western philosophy, we say that something mental, the mind, spirit, reason, et cetera, is the ultimate foundation of all reality, or even exhaustive of reality. That would be the second type here. Where, like, there's only mind stuff. Everything is actually mind stuff.
Uh, and then number two is actually going toward a position where, although the existence of something independent of the mind is conceded, everything that we can know about this independent reality is held to be permeated by the creative, formative, or constructive activities of the mind. That all claims to knowledge must be considered in some sense to be a form of self-knowledge. Neither of these is Yogācāra. Okay? Because Yogācāra is saying the idea of there's mind stuff is dependent on there being non-mind stuff.
So when you say there's nothing outside the mind, which they will say, like, we can establish that if we try to say there's non, like there's a world out there, we can't establish that. But that also means there isn't an in here. Because the in here depends on the out there. So it's not idealism in that sense. It's kind of saying all of this, everything's the same kind of stuff. If it, it in, but they are saying it's, you know, there's something real. But it's all the same kind of stuff. That doesn't mean that the causes are just your mind. That's very important. It's some kind of a shared constraints. And they have a complicated way of trying to describe how that works. And I will say that there are forms of Yogācāra that did tend toward number one in particular, where like everything is just mind, there was definitely forms and therefore you sometimes hear this term Cittamātra mind only as a description of this philosophy. And that's where it does become a kind of idealism. But that's not characteristic of all Yogācāra at all. Okay, then is it phenomenology? Phenomenology studies structures is also from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. We'll stop soon. Phenomenology studies structures of conscious experience as experienced from the first person point of view along with the relevant conditions of experience, the central structure of an experience is intentionality, which means subject object structure, the way it is directed through its content and meaning toward a certain object in the world. So it's not phenomenology on this definition either. But it's like both of those in certain ways. And phenomenology is probably the closest way of describing what Yogācāra is doing. But Yogācāra is specifically saying that intentionality, which is a philosophical term for subject-object duality, is false. Right? And it's, there are versions of Yogācāra which you're interested in within that false kind of dualistic cognition. How does that work? And so that's what Dignāga and Dharmakīrti are doing. But they're really doing that primarily so that you get to the point where you understand why it has to be false. Okay? As opposed to phenomenologists who just assume that's true, that structure is true, and then they're trying to describe you know, how that works, so to speak. What is this experience? What are the invariant features of experience, for example, beyond just intentionality? Okay. So then what is Yogācāra? It does not assert that the object pole collapses into the subject pole so that whatever stuff constitutes the subject pole is all that remains. If you say that whatever constitutes the subject pole, the subject side, is all that there is, and that's called subjective idealism, and that is perhaps what Cittamātra, or mind only, is, but that's only a subset of Yogācāra. However, it does assert that extramental objects are unreal, and whatever remains, I should say, is not extramental.
Okay? So it is denying that there's a kind of like... It's denying substance dualism. There's stuff, non-mind stuff, and there's mind stuff. It's denying that. And it asserts that our only access to the world is through our, through or in experience.
That's all you got to go on. However, it denies the claim that intentionality is essential to consciousness. So it's neither idealism nor phenomenology as it was defined in those articles. And so then the question really becomes, what then is... what are we knowing when we're knowing uh, reality? So now, very briefly, give me five more minutes. Is that okay? So...
when you see this, what is... where is this being presented?
In Milwaukee. No, in consciousness, right? Okay? Chicago. It's being presented within consciousness, right? Can you know anything that's not being presented in consciousness? No. Okay? So if you wanted... so what we mean by reality, whether we're talking about what we take to be part of our subject, like emotions and so on, what we take to be objects that we're perceiving, that whatever... all of that is being presented in consciousness. So if you want to know what the nature of reality is, so one way to understand, this is where Yogācāra is a little different than Mādhyamika, if you want to understand what is the nature of reality, what does that mean, you don't need to understand? The nature of consciousness. Or the nature of mind. Right? So the nature of something is something that characterizes it in all of its different permutations, like what's always the case in all of its manifestations, like, you know, in a simplistic way, we could say the nature of water is H2O, like whether it's liquid, whether it's steam or gas, whether it's solid ice. So what's the same about all moments of consciousness? What? Student: Cognition?
Yeah, like knowingness. So here's... this is what they're going to say. It's luminous empty mind. The nature of the mind is luminous emptiness. Okay? But specifically emptiness as subject-object duality, because we're going to need to go through one more step to get to... This is eventually going to be combined with Mādhyamika. But right now we're saying, what's characteristic of experience is not subject-object duality. But... so it's empty of that. But what is present in every moment of experience is a kind of knowingness. So that's this idea of luminosity. It's a metaphor. We'll say more about it later. So from another perspective, because the mind is not empty in the sense that there's this presence of experience, luminosity. Okay? So experience remains in emptiness, luminous, luminosity. And that applies to all cases. And that's what emptiness is like for the Yogācāra. And so nihilism is avoided, right? And everybody's happy. And knowing is accounted for. However, as we will see... And so this is what... And so emptiness for Yogācāra is an implicative negation. This is how Dharmakīrti talks about that. prabhāsvaram idaṃ cittaṃ prakṛtyāgantavo malāḥ Which we cited before. This mind is by its nature luminous. The defilements are adventitious. The defilements here especially are ignorance that causes subject-object duality. Okay? But... this is still not going to be sufficient for Mahāmudrā Dzogchen style because what might you be doing in this context? Maybe... So the way we described it actually probably are doing.
Maybe... Yes you're more ontologizing that luminosity itself. Affirming that it's real.
And that's going to be a problem. So what's going to happen, we're going to circle back to this this afternoon, is that there's going to be a style of Mādhyamika, the style of Mādhyamika that reaches to Tibet, which is actually going to adopt this kind of Yogācāra as part of a process that starts from a naive analysis, an analysis of our naive sense that there are, you know wholes in the world and so on, and begins with an analysis that says, sure, there's matter, whatever you say, and then moves through Yogācāra and then goes to Mādhyamika. So that's the style of Mādhyamika that goes to Tibet. And it's called Yogācāra Mādhyamika. And we're going to do that after. And it's going to raise a very important question, which is, okay, we have, we said that, sure, knowing is accounted for, but what kind of knowing? So one of the things that's going to be very continuous is how we describe this kind of awareness. Still, we're going to say, empty luminosity, we're going to modify the empty part. But we still need to say, well, what's that luminosity? And that's going to also lead us to a discussion of what's called uh, svasaṃvitti or rang rig རང་རིག་ in Tibetan, which means reflexive awareness.
So that's... most of that will happen after lunch, if you can still stand it. Okay, let's have a good lunch. Let's do our dedication. 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
Thank you.
