. . . So this is, wow, what a sound.

[14:22]

This is case, I think it's 29 of the Blue Cliff record. Okay, so when the Kalpa fire comes and destroys the entire world system, is this one destroyed or not? And Daswe says, destroyed. And then he says, okay, fine. So does it go along with it? And Daswe says, it goes along. Which sounds pretty, you know, I don't know. final program or something but anyway so in the widest possible view life is depending on how you look at it either just inextricably entangled with memory

[15:49]

or else actually just is memory. And I tend to fall on the side of the life is memory proposition. So if you look back, there's a whole bunch of theories about the origin of life, but my favorite one is there's this sort of evolutionary biologist by the name of Nick Lane who wrote a book called The Vital Question. I don't know if anybody's ever read it. It's a very good book. But he makes the claim that life arose in serpentinizing deep ocean vents, right? And the idea is that, you know, there are these vents that make this sort of rock sponge, right? And in these little tiny chambers in this rock sponge, it was possible to have enough kind of simultaneous stability and flow of chemicals of various sorts to establish the chemistry of life.

[17:05]

And when you look at the chemistry of life, his claim is that that primary memory mechanism is remembered in part because of with using these minerals that kind of have the signature of serpentinizing deep ocean vents, which is kind of an amazing proposition, right? So we have pieces of ancient open ocean crust like floating around in our body chemistry, right? And the other good part about that is that the relics of serpentinizing deep ocean vents are just landed all over Mount Tamalpais. So you can go up and walk up on Mount Tamalpais and see a big pile of green rock. The interesting thing about serpentine is that hardly anything can grow in a serpentine outcrop, right? So there are these bare spots that were this wild looking green rock and you're like, where's your life?

[18:10]

Nice. Probably didn't happen in the ones that are on Mount Tamalpais. It happened, you know, They just go, but anyway, so from that point, like the process continued, right? And, and, and the, you know, life remembered how to live, um, and then got more complicated and started burning more energy and, um, And it got more multilayered and multicellular. And then after a while, there was us. And it's been about, I think, something like one third or so of the entire life of the universe, as far as we know, that that's been going on here on this planet, which is kind of remarkable. That's a long time.

[19:12]

nobody really knows, has a clear idea at all about when, you know, mind arose, right? And up until quite recently in this kind of, you know, modern Western culture, you know, Euro-American culture or something like that, the the assumption was that only humans had one, right? And if you were religious, it was humans and some other spirit beings, gods, demons, you know, angels, and so on and so forth. And everybody else didn't have one, right? But by now it seems pretty inescapable. The evidence seems pretty undeniable that a huge variety of animals have, non-human animals, have mechanisms that are similar to or exactly like ours, mental mechanisms, and also even the ones that aren't particularly similar, like there's a bunch of

[20:47]

that are extremely smart, right? They nonetheless seem to display a kind of self-awareness and sentience, right? Remarkable. And so we're, you know, that should give us all pause, right? But we have no idea what their mind is like but the way we experience it sort of conventionally let's put it that way it's kind of like a it's like the frosting on this incredibly deep layer cake of memory based life mechanisms that go all the way down to the subcellular level with things like mitochondria And the frosting part, the part that we're usually mostly aware of and conscious of, has a number of qualities.

[22:04]

One is that it's really, really tangled up with language. I've probably told everyone in this room this story, but I'll tell it again anyway. When my daughter Deirdre is now, I guess, 34 and a college professor in Pittsburgh, was about two, we were talking on the phone and she said, you know, Dad, I just discovered today that I can talk to myself without talking out loud. And I was like, yeah. And then I was also like, oh. Because, you know, that's essentially how it starts, right? You discover that you can tell the story of your life, right?

[23:13]

yourself and that story comes with over time that story gets more elaborate and also we learn the sort of emotional constructs that go along with it that underscore our self-narrative thoughts. In fact, that underscore pretty much every thought. There's a book called Descartes' Error that's essentially about this, and it references a case study where there's this guy, a neuroscientist, who was working with a man who was was a working lawyer, but during the course of his adult life, he'd had some disease that had kind of wrecked his ability to attach emotional weights to the thoughts, basically.

[24:22]

So there's very little emotional drive in his sort of everyday cognitive activity. And he would... The neuroscientist and cognitive psychologist would do these experiments where he'd say, okay, you need to sign this document here. And he'd pluck down three pens on the table, right? And the guy would sit there like... Because he couldn't generate a sufficiently strong preference to pick up one pen over another. I mean, so it really is a big deal, right? The emotional drivers of our everyday thinking, right? And also that sort of everyday conventional cognitive mind, right?

[25:28]

that we carry around with us and that a lot of people think is the only way there is to be. The book Descartes' Error is named Descartes' Error because, well, for a number of reasons, but one of the things he critiques is the whole notion of, I think, therefore I am. No, that's not exactly right. And in fact, it's a common mistake. That mind is... Well, let me say one additional thing there. Obviously, this sort of philosophical stance about the nature of mind has a name, and it's usually called physicalism, right?

[26:29]

The idea that that the mind is embedded in body, right? The critiques of physicalism almost always make this error in their argument, which is that that They accuse the physicalists of saying that mind is the same as body, right? That's not true, okay? It's like the body is a physical machine and substrate, and mind is an emergent process that has completely different characteristics and is, you know, in many ways like auto-catalyzing

[27:29]

obviously with help from the underlying substrate, but it has its own... It's its own thing. It's a different thing. If it's a physical... If the name of the philosophical stance is physicalism, then this is the metaphysics of physicalism. It's metaphysical. And even more interesting... that mind is constructed, because it's so richly entangled with language, it's constructed entirely out of things that people have said to each other, right? And said to me, right? The mind is made out of things that people have said to me. That's how I learned the language that I self-marrate with, right? And that's how I learned the... that's how I learned the emotional constructs that go along with it, right?

[28:33]

By observation and listening. And so that, that, the metaphysics of, you know, physicalism has to include the fact that it's actually kind of, mind is actually kind of a shared field of mental activity, right? It's, and it, and it, mental activity, speech, and observation, and it goes back into the depths of time. It's almost the same as ancient twisted karma. In fact, it's a component of ancient twisted karma. So the whole Kalbafara thing, in South Asia, you know, pre-Buddhism, like in, I think the Vedas and the Upanishads, certainly in the Upanishads, there's this, there's this scheme for describing the universe, the time scales in the universe, right?

[29:54]

And The idea is there are these incredibly long periods called kaphas. They're estimated, or when people do all the math on them, they're a little over four billion years long. And they're each divided up into a number of periods, sub-periods, that are called yugas. I forget the names of all the rest of them, and for reasons it will become obvious in a second, but the last yuga in each kalpa is called Kali Yuga, and Kali Yuga is named after the goddess of destruction. And it's the really bad one. It's also the shortest, but it's also the worst. things go really badly, everyone's awful to each other, et cetera, et cetera.

[30:56]

And then the whole world comes apart, and this massive fire comes up, and it burns everything. And the name of that event is the pralaya, right? So when the monk was asking Dasui about what happens, he's talking about the pralaya. And the... The notion that was in place at the time of the Buddha, and as far as I know, is still in place, is that we're really kind of getting near the end of the present Kali Yuga, and that, you know, the end is near, basically, and the fire is going to show up kind of soon, right? Hmm. I don't want to talk too much but I'm already doing it so sorry it's not totally clear to me that Daswe and the monk really believed this in this system right it sounds to me like they're mostly just using it as a way of talking about the nature of life mind and consciousness right

[32:21]

but even if they were, we can do that, right? And what's fascinating about their exchange, right, is that that it's, you know, Dasui takes a very kind of straightforward view of the of the nature of, you know, I've sort of already said this, of the nature of mind and body, consciousness and body. And he's basically saying, like Suzuki Roshi says, that they're not one and not two, right? They're interdependent, they're connected, they're deeply entangled and inextricable. The pralaya, also well before Buddhism, was used as a metaphor for states of mind that were available usually through meditative practice or yogic practice, in which the...

[33:55]

activity of conventional cognition would cease or settle or recede into the background, leaving a broader field, basically. And in the context of that broader field, other things can happen, right? So that includes what people usually talk about as enlightenment, right? And it's probably the case that... ...that Daswini and the monk were also talking about that. So how does that work?

[35:02]

I just remembered I was going to read you a poem and I forgot the piece of paper. So I apologize for that. All I had to do was bring this and a piece of paper. If we, in the context at least of zazen and elsewhere as well, it's the case that over time this other mode of engagement comes into view. It does it on its own time and in its own way. And it, you know... It's not always the same experience, and sometimes it's really obvious and riveting, and sometimes it's subtle.

[36:13]

But in any case, it comes into view, and we can practice with that. And in the context of that practice, one of the things that becomes clear, right, is that this activity that we've been talking about, the activity of bringing perceptions, you know, up from our essentially sensory hardware, contact between our sensory hardware and the world of form, right, and measuring their valence and then allowing the ones with the powerful valence to arise to the level of perception, which is, again, the reason for that is that those perceptions, in the light of awareness, are input to our storehouse consciousness and outcomes stuff, mental activity.

[37:33]

that's critical to everything about what it is to be human. And so some of the things that it is to be human that that's critical to are marvelous. We have this capacity to, well, write poetry, for example, even though We have this capacity to forget to bring it. We have a capacity to make elaborate, long-range plans and cooperate smoothly with people to implement them. And it makes, among other things, smartphones and green tea ice cream. Wonderful. And then the other fact is that it's at the core of our self-delusion and suffering, right?

[38:54]

Because, again, our memory is great, but it completely reflects... only our own very narrow path through the world and the things that people had to say to us along that path, right? That's it. That's what we've got. And then after a while, we can read some stuff too, right? Maybe some Buddhist literature or something, right? But that's what we've got. We have this really limited view, and our capacity to understand is... is dwarfed by the whole universe of things that we can't know and can't understand? How could we not delude ourselves? And so this activity of laying down memory traces and picking them up

[40:05]

and acting on them based on their emotional drivers is something to be careful and discerning with, right? And I think most people will tell you that those things happen Automatically, it's like, you know, they just said this thing and I got mad and I hit him. That particular mechanism wants to be free to operate without intervention, right? And it sort of operates in this sort of... to semi-conscious realm.

[41:07]

And so it's hard to look at, right? Hard to watch. But in the presence of big mind, it becomes quite visible, actually. You can really see how it's working. Usually our periods of being able to do that are limited by this cycle of attention we have where normally our attention is being pulled from broader awareness to pretty focused awareness on the process of cognition and then, you know, opening back up again to pay attention to the world, right? But over time, it becomes more possible to hold everyday mind in the context of big mind, right? And when that happens, it's possible to soften the emotional drivers of our habit energy and habitual response, it becomes possible to see other possibilities.

[42:13]

It becomes possible to move deliberately and see the spaces in between recognizing, responding, and acting. So the last thing I wanted to say is this. There's this phrase that shows up all over the Zen literature, the idea of leaving no trace. I would say that based on what I've been talking about for the last little while, It's impossible to leave no trace. What we do in life is we leave traces in our minds and we leave traces in the minds of others.

[43:14]

That's what we do, right? But leaving no trace is kind of a nod to the... the Taoist notion of wu-wei, right? Non-doing. Non-doing doesn't mean not doing anything. It means doing things in such a way that the activity is so wholehearted and untainted by self-regard that even though you're sitting there working your ass off, nobody, including you, even knows, basically. That's kind of not doing. And that's leaving no trace. That's kind of the best we can do. So should we chant and then have questions, or what should we do?

[44:24]

Great, let's do some questions. Do we have time for a few? It is so little. So, any questions? If you have a question, raise your hand and speak louder. Go ahead. Yeah, I'm curious, what do you believe happens in consciousness, or let this go on and say happens in consciousness, when they're on their own body?

[45:36]

Yeah. I mean, so it's a great question. I personally think that the proposition not one, not two means that even though they're not the same, they're sufficiently interdependent so that if the body goes away, the mind goes away, and with humans, if the mind goes away, the body goes away, right? It's a, eventually, it's a, it's a cooperative emergent process, but it needs to emerge from some substrate and mechanism, right? And the, you know, if you think about it, like, okay, so, In a disembodied being, where is the storehouse consciousness stored?

[46:39]

There's got to be something, right? And if you observe the day-to-day activity of your mind, what is it usually taken up with? What would you say? I would say more constantly, it's the constant absorption of information from the phenomenal world moment by moment in a river of information, a flood of information, that we barely take it in. Our strategy for that is take in a bunch of information, throw away 90% of it, hammer the rest of it into a little frame and go, okay, this is reality.

[47:40]

But we're doing that every moment. The activity of thinking, as we conventionally cast it, is famously kind of low bandwidth compared to the activity of just standing in one place and taking in the world. And by low bandwidth, I mean... Multiple orders of magnitude lower in bandwidth. Anyway, that's kind of my take on it. Great. Anyone? Anyone? Hmm. I would not say that we are our thoughts. I would say some people think that, but I would, I would not say that at all.

[48:46]

I would say we're a, um, we're a child's ball floating on a, floating on a river, basically. The river of the phenomenal world. And, um, we, we, We're a nexus of energy and information in this vast four-dimensional river of phenomenal activity. And one of the things that we do is we occasionally produce a thought. Does that help? Yeah. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

[50:08]

I don't know. [...] I'll put my people out of my books in the comments. Thank you for coming this evening.

[52:51]

The next items off will be on Saturday at 10 a.m. at 11 a.m. It's our re-medication ceremony as we ceremony over in this council back up.

[53:02]

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