The Subtlety of Dependent Origination

So, wanting to continue a little bit from yesterday, and filling out this map of where practice may be heading, where practice possibly can head. And just reflecting, as I was lighting the candle, our capacity for love, our capacity to give has everything to do with our fearlessness, our ability to be fearless. And that fearlessness rests on our seeing emptiness. Or rather, our seeing of emptiness is something that profoundly enlarges our capacity for fearlessness. When there's fearlessness, there's more capacity to give. And I'm saying that partly because -- I don't know -- as we go into the deeper regions here, it may seem that it's a bit abstract. It may seem that it's a bit like some very microscopic surgery on consciousness. But it's all in the service of that freedom, of that fearlessness, which is in the service of that capacity to give. So I hope it doesn't sound abstract. I hope that you can get a sense of the beauty of where this is leading. And so, again, everything I said yesterday at the beginning applies today. No pressure in these talks -- kind of just listening and filing it for later, and being interested, etc. No pressure, but not underestimating what is actually possible for us. Everything that I'm talking about is possible to see, possible to work with in meditation, possible to realize.

What I want to go into tonight kind of follows on, as I said, from yesterday. Both John and I have talked already about dependent origination in different ways, and I want to say more about dependent origination. Dependent origination is a very interesting teaching, partly because -- and I think I threw this out at one point -- it can be investigated at a number of different levels. We can investigate it at a kind of everyday level, more and more, more and more subtle. And so, there's the level -- very, very useful -- of looking at dependent origination that's about the ego becoming, the self becoming this or that in the future, etc.; about our psychological identities; about the way that our perceptions are shaped by our habitual patterns of mind coming from the past, and they shape the perception of the situation, and what we want to become, etc. And those kinds of habit patterns, and the way they influence the sense we have of a situation or event, and the way the self then arises dependent on that perception and together.

I want to take it another level down. In this talk, if it's not [too ambitious] -- it is too ambitious, but I want to talk about time, and finish talking about awareness, and particularly talk about the first four links of dependent arising. That's a lot for one talk. We'll see what we get to. But there's a reason for putting those together, because they're all actually linked. They're all dependent.

Let's start with time. We've touched on this in question and answers already. The intuitive sense that we have of time, most of the time, is that it appears to us as if time has a kind of independent existence. It's almost as if time is a container for events to unfold in. It's as if -- someone quoted once -- it's a "vessel of existence."^[1] Time kind of goes on, and different things happen in time, or they don't happen. But time kind of unfolds independently, and in that unfolding of this vessel, different things come into being, go out of being, etc. We may intellectualize it or not, but for the most part, that's the sort of intuitive sense of time that we have: time having inherent existence, an independent existence, trundling along no matter what.

We've talked a lot in terms of dependent arising, in terms of clinging. And we've seen, through the practices that we've been doing, what happens when I cling less, what happens when the level of clinging in the being goes down. Well, you may have noticed this on this retreat: when there's less clinging -- what can we say? -- the time-sense sometimes becomes less prominent. It's just less of a sort of in-your-face, present thing. Did anyone notice this? Yeah? Good. So already, that's another factor. We've had a whole list of aspects of our existence that turn out to be dependent on clinging, and kind of decrease their appearance, their prominence, dependent on releasing clinging. Well, getting very suspicious that time might be one of those things too. And we can look: for instance, you're sitting in meditation -- well, do you have bells in here any more? You don't have bells for the sitting. Well, if you ...

Yogi 1: We light the candles in the morning ...

Rob: But not for sittings. Well, if you remember back to those [laughs] old days when there used to be bells ...

Yogi 1: Well, there weren't bells here until this morning. The Zen folks had bells.

Rob: For timing your sittings. I'm talking about in the sittings. If you remember back to that, and this sense sometimes, when it's difficult, and there's, "When is the bell going to ring? Has the teacher fallen asleep?" Or whatever. [laughter] "What's happening?" And time, because of clinging, because there's pain or restlessness, whatever, there's clinging in relation to that, and time is so prominent in consciousness. Time is in your face. Very, very present, very prominent. We say time is more perceptible, more solid, given more sense of substantiality.

Similarly if you're queuing for something. Maybe you're queuing for food, and you're really hungry. Maybe you're queuing to buy something in the Christmas sale [laughs], whatever it is, queuing, or just queuing in the post office to get something done and get it out of the way. So it could be wanting something pleasant, wanting to get rid of something unpleasant, that the queue is for. But again, in that, in the clinging that's present, time is given -- it feels like it has more prominence, more substance, right? If there's something in the upcoming future that you're dreading, something that you've got to do -- you've got to perform something or present something -- and again, there's clinging in relation to this imagined thing, time takes on such a heavy, palpable substantiality when the dreading, when the clinging is very strong.

Now, those are everyday kind of examples, in and out of meditation. In meditation, many of the practices we've pointed out, been developing so far -- say, the open awareness -- in that space of vastness of awareness, there is less clinging. It's a space of less clinging. In the relaxing of the push and pull that we've been talking about, relaxing the aversion to the unpleasant, the grasping at the pleasant, in the release of identification and this habitual me-mining, and just, "There is this," or "not-self," or however you're doing it, "not me, not mine" -- in any of those modes, occasionally, we get a sense, to some degree or other, of time becoming less prominent, less substantial, kind of less solid and in one's face, right? At first, for a meditator, typically what tends to happen is, as the clinging gets less, the two aspects of time that tend to decrease first are the sense of past and future. They tend to kind of decrease. Their sense of reality, of substantiality, almost -- people say, "They're just imaginings. They're not really real." And one is left with a sense of Now, Nowness, present moment. Past and future begin to fade a little bit in their sense of reality, and we're left with Now.

But it is also possible that even the sense of present is seen through. And that, again, one of the things it depends on is how much clinging there is. So there's really, really, really a letting go of clinging. Sometimes a person, in different ways (the experience can be different for a meditator), actually has a sense of "Even the present isn't something real, doesn't have that inherent existence." I would say that in the unfolding of meditation, deep practice, actually, we need to get to that point where the Now also is seen through. That's actually quite an important aspect of practice, quite an important place in practice. Even if we're just getting a glimpse of how the time-sense is less prominent at times, more prominent, dependent on clinging, all of that raises a question: is time a dependent arising? We usually think dependent arising is happening in time. That's the usual way it gets explained, and at one level that's true. Even at whatever level of practice, we begin to get a suspicion that maybe time-sense is also a dependent arising and not inherently existent.

So let's go into this a little bit. Before I get into that, it's a natural progression, probably for everyone, to let go of past and future first, and then have a feeling like, "It's always Now," or "Only the Now really exists. That's the only thing that you can say really exists," or a sense of "an endless Now. It's endlessly Now." And again, it's a lovely opening in meditation. It's a meditative perception. Very important. And this is to be explored. It's not to be brushed over. Really, there's quite a lot, just in that letting go of the past and future, having a sense of a kind of "always Nowness," an "endlessly open Now." Very much to be explored, and there's great deal of freedom from that level.

But as usual, careful that we are reifying something, giving it inherent existence, or even perhaps kind of eternalizing a sense of Now, making a kind of Now that's eternal in some way. So what would it be to try, also, at some point, or realize, also, "You know, it's never Now." [laughs] You could say it's always Now. It's perhaps, you could say, deeper to say it's never Now. It's never Now, really. In a way, there's not enough time for it to be Now. [laughs] The present also is empty. The past is empty -- I'm going to go into this more -- past, future; present also is empty. That, when one sees it in meditation, is a deeper level of freedom, a deeper sense of release than just the past and the future being empty.

[13:33] So let's go into this a little bit. Remember, we talked about the two sides of a stick and the middle of a stick, the left and right and the centre, and we said that left, right, centre are kind of mutually dependent. They lack inherent existence. Past, present, future: same, same. They are concepts that lack any independent existence. The moment we have a sense of past, it implies the others. The moment we have a sense of future, it implies the others. The moment we have a sense of present, 'present' as a concept, as a felt sense, does not, cannot stand independent of 'past' and 'future.' The 'centre' cannot mean anything without concepts of 'left' and 'right,' even if we're not actually thinking that. So we might say, "Well, I'm seeing in meditation, I have this sense in meditation, as I begin to deepen my meditation, that the past and future are illusions." But if the centre of the stick depends on the left and the right, and the present depends on the past and the future, then again, the present is depending on illusion, resting on something empty, dependent on something empty. The 'present' only means the 'present,' almost by definition, as something between past and future. 'Present' means that which is between past and future.

We can go into this a little bit more rigorously or, perhaps, hopefully convincingly -- depends. With time, it's so interesting, like many areas of emptiness practice, there are many ways you can approach seeing its emptiness. People will find different ways that are more convincing and helpful for them. Say, this present moment -- this present moment that I either have a sense of in this moment or I postulate -- is it one or many, really? Remember this 'one or many' analysis we did? Bring it in, not just with spatial existence, but with temporal existence, time. Is it one or many? This moment, let's say it's one. If it's one, it could either be divisible into a beginning, middle, and end, or not. If it has a beginning, middle, end -- this moment -- then it's actually three moments. It's not one, because when time is at the beginning, it's not at the end. Can't be. When it's at the end, it's not at the beginning. The time -- little, you know, thing -- is at the beginning of the moment or at the end of the moment.

Let's say it's three. Okay, so it's three. So I take the beginning moment, and same again, same again. I cannot find a 'one.' I cannot find an inherent 'one,' a real 'one' there. So I say, "All right, so it's many. Fine. It's many." But it cannot be a real 'many' if I can't find a real 'one.' [laughter]

Yogi 2: How is that again? [laughter]

Rob: I'll go through it again, but if we could have questions afterwards. I don't know -- shall I do it again now, or shall we wait until later?

Yogi 3: But if we say "Now," you can't do it "Now." [laughter]

Rob: Let's do it at the end, okay? As I said, the talks, they're for repeated listening. When you get the CD or whatever, you just rewind it and listen again. Even when you've got it, you're going to need to reflect on it and get it so it's portable, and you can just plug it into your meditation. And if it's your thing, if it turns out to be your thing -- incredibly powerful. I also had a lot of doubt about this and resistance to this for many years. I'm not saying it has to work for you, but it can. It really, really can.

The important thing is that it's a practice. So in relation to that one (and I went through it quite quickly there, and same when we did it last time with spatial things), a person can say (and last year someone said), "Well, okay. Can't we just say there are no moments, then? There are no moments. It's not that time doesn't exist. It's just there are no moments." But this is just playing with language, because what could we say? There are -- I don't know what -- 'portions' of time that we feel, we sense, we feel that we experience; portions of time that we say, "Some are happening now, in existence. And others are not happening now. They're not in existence." And if they're not in existence, there are two ways that they can be not in existence: either they're gone, they're past, or they're not yet to be, they're future. So I might just change the language a little bit, but basically, I'm back, really, to the same concept of 'moments,' portions of time, just playing with the language.

Language is not the problem. That's not what Nāgārjuna was getting at in all his reasonings on emptiness. He's not pointing and saying, "Language is the problem. If only human beings could exist without language, we'd be okay." That's actually not what's being said. It's something more deep, in our very intuitive sense of things as having inherent existence. But as I say, it's possible that one reflects on this, reaches a point of conviction, and then is able to really plug it in in practice. And that's the key thing: practice, practice, practice, and bringing it in, in ways that can be incredibly powerful. And one sees, the moment cannot have any inherent existence. Time cannot have any inherent existence. For any -- any, any, any, any -- thing to be, you could say, well, it needs a time to be in, and there isn't that. There isn't that, really.

So if we go back, remember, last night I was talking about three reasons that Gampopa (this Tibetan teacher from the eleventh century) gave for why awareness could have no inherent existence. This is the last one. This is the kind of final nail in the coffin of the inherent existence of awareness. Very, very powerful, to actually contemplate this moment of awareness in this way.

Yogi 4: Unfindability, knower and knowing, and time?

Rob: Yes, unfindability, knowing and known, and time.

Yogi 5: Unfindability and what?

Rob: Knowing and known, and emptiness of time, emptiness of this moment. There's another reasoning. I just want to throw it out. Again, it's probably difficult to grasp in one go, but I just want to put it out so you have it. In the first verse of Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, he says:

Things do not arise from self. They do not arise from other. They do not arise from both self and other, or neither.^[2]

We say this moment, it cannot arise from itself. This moment can't arise from itself because arising has no meaning for something that already exists. It's already in existence. A thing can't arise from itself. So you go through all the possibilities of arising for this moment, all the possibilities, and he says: first one, arising from self, cannot be.

Second one: arising from something other. This moment can't arise from a future moment, can't arise from some thing in the present, some other factor or force or energy in the present moment, because actually, whatever else I find in the present moment is just the present moment, right? It's itself, again. If I'm looking for something in the present moment that gives rise to this moment, it's the same as the first one. It's still the present moment. I say, "Well, it's the past moment that gives rise to the present moment. Something other, the past moment, gives rise to the present moment." But 'past,' almost by definition, is that which has disappeared. It's past. It's gone. It's disappeared. How can something that's disappeared give rise to something else? It's gone. There's no contact between past and present, really, if I look closely at it.

I could say, "Somehow, the past and present kind of overlap in some region that allows an influence of the past to kind of create the present moment, and you've kind of got these two circles overlapping, so to speak." [laughs] Is that really possible? The past overlaps into the present? Really? Or you could say, "Well, there's a point of contact." And then that becomes another moment, that point of contact. You can see where I'm going with this. [laughs] That becomes another moment. That has to have a beginning and an end. Whoops! Maybe it has a middle too. I've now got three moments in the middle there, and they're getting smaller. But that present moment -- so-called 'present moment' -- is now three moments removed from the past moment, and they have to have beginning, [middle, and end], so it's nine, etc., down to an unfindable moment, an infinite number of moments away from the present. Past and present cannot have, actually, any contact. Without contact, how can it give rise to the present? If something is gone, how can it give rise to the present?

So what Nāgārjuna's doing is laying out all the possible options for arising. Either something arises from self, or other, or both, or neither. Both just repeats the mistakes of the first two. So "it's both self and other" just repeats them. Neither means things arise causelessly, without causes and conditions. But we see, somehow, this moment, it clearly depends on others perceiving it. It's just that that dependency isn't an inherently existing dependency. We say the implication is the present moment lacks inherent existence. It doesn't have inherently existing arising. I'll just throw it out. Again, if you can get into this, in fact, they can be very, very powerful -- and very quick, actually, not necessarily big, kind of lugubrious machinations in meditation.

There's a passage in Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, which is the sort of seminal text on emptiness; it was a few hundred years after the Buddha's death. He says the same things in a different, roundabout way. He says something like: if, for example, the present inherently depended on the past and future, it would actually have to exist in the past and the future, because for one thing to depend on another, the two have to meet. They actually have to meet. One must somehow emerge from the other as its basis. Otherwise, if that wasn't the case, when the time on which the present depends existed -- when the past, let's say, or the future, if you're saying the present depends on the past -- when that existed, the thing doesn't exist. The present doesn't exist. Or at the time when the present exists, that on which it depends -- the past -- doesn't exist.^[3] Same thing in different words. Not easy, but actually penetrable and doable in meditation. So I just wanted to throw that out.

Let's go into this, what I was calling more the phenomenological mode, not so much in terms of reasoning, but in terms of, what do I see when I go deep in the quietness of meditation? I'm actually looking at how this sense of dukkha and experience is operating. Three facets of our experience that are intuitive and felt to be inherently existent: self, thing, and time. Any moment of experience has some degree of that triangle-sense operating: the self, the thing, and the time in which it happens.

Now, when I say "self," again, I mean the whole spectrum of self. I don't just mean the big, gross personality self of papañca and all that -- sure, that, definitely -- but even just the subtlest, barest sense of self. What you have is a self knowing something in a moment, in a sense of time. Self, things, and time -- they go together.

We've already said at the beginning that time, that sense of time is given substance when we give substance to things. In other words, when this 'queuing' is important -- 'what I'm going to get to,' whatever it is -- when, in this moment of meditation, I'm giving substance to a thing, the thing is important for the self, the time-sense will be given substance. The substantiality of the time-sense is dependent on the meaning for us, the implicit, felt meaning of things, of an object, of a perception. So, when there is a perception of a thing -- any thing, any thing at all -- in a way, we draw in the time-sense by kind of implicitly measuring that thing in terms of its past, its present, and its future in relationship to the self. This thing becomes important in terms of, "What will it do for me in time? What has it done for me in time?" If it's been a good thing, then I cast thing and self forward into a future: "Maybe it will continue to be a good thing." If it's been a bad thing, again, I cast it. If it's been a good thing, "Maybe it will get bad. Maybe it will disappear." If it's been a bad thing, "I hope it disappears in the future." Do you understand?

Yogi 6: It's clinging, grasping, aversion.

Rob: Exactly. It's implicit, actually, in the very perception of a thing. Implicit in the very perception of a thing for a self is the 'worried-about' -- that's too strong a word, but the 'worried-about' meaning of that thing, for the self, in time. So there's a kind of conjuring up of the sense of time through the investment of the self. And the self is always invested, even if it's a quiet self, a subtle self. It's invested in a thing and brings time with that, because the thing always goes with a sense of measurement, measuring that thing over time. And the self too -- we have a sense of self continuing in time: "How will it be for me, in time, in the future? It was this way in the past."

So thing-belief builds time-belief. Self-belief also gives substance to things. The more self-belief I have in that moment, the more I'm injecting an investment into thing (what we're calling 'perception,' 'experience,' 'object,' 'thing' -- all the same) and into time. That could be extremely gross, extremely frantic and agonized. It could be very, very subtle, extremely subtle. Somehow, this is bound up with the perceptual process, even if it's very subtle. Any time there is a sense of self, a sense of a present moment, and a sense of a thing that's known by that self, that triangle, this is going on in perception. "What can I get? What will I get? What do I hope I don't get?" Not as thoughts, necessarily -- they're sort of subtly woven into the perception: "What does it mean for me?"

But the dependency, like always, works the other way too. Self-belief (guess what?) needs time-belief. Self -- a view of a self, a sense of a self -- needs a sense of time and a belief in time. Who am I if there is only a present moment, and that's nothing, it's ungraspable? Who do I become? There's nothing graspable of a present moment. Who am I then? Again, this is a meditative question. It's meditative. All this -- I'm pointing to meditation. So you can get this sense, it's like there's nothing actually findable here. What does that do for the self-sense?

Self-sense gets built. Moving, just jumping to a gross level for a second: my story, my mother's story, my grandmother's story -- all of that goes into my narrative, and "What will happen to me in time?" And the self-sense gains solidity by stretching out story and worry and projection into the future, in time -- at a gross level, at a very subtle level. Who will I be when I drop that sense of continuity -- past, future -- and I see that the present is ungraspable? Who am I then? And if the present is ungraspable, if time-sense isn't really real, what then is the significance of things, if they don't last, if they're not really something in time?

So things, we've said already, are drawn out and stand out dependent on selfing. Again, the more self there is, the more prominent this thing is, the more important this thing is, and the more it stands out to perception. We're talking about how perception is fabricated. And things also need time-belief for their continuation. Otherwise, why would we worry about things, this thing? All these three are like a tripod. What's sitting on top of the tripod? Dukkha, dukkha. Actually, you could say this is how our experience gets built, mutually dependent arising, mutually built. Self, things, time: self, however subtle; thing, however subtle, even a sense of 'no thing'; time, however subtle, just the barest sense of a present moment, 'now.' All this can be very gross -- big past/future story, big self-story, big thing/deal -- or very, very subtle. Tripod, mutually dependent arising, and in the mutual dependent arising means 'mutually empty.' None of them -- not the self-sense, not the sense of time, of present moment, not the sense of a thing, an object -- none of them can stand alone. They rely -- like three sticks in a tripod leaning on each other -- they rely on each other for their support. They're not inherently existent. They cannot exist by themselves.

Again, this is meditation, meditation, meditation. What happens when I bring that into meditation, and I really begin teasing this? I can pull at any one of these three legs. When things are mutually dependent, it opens up the possibilities for meditation. I can go this way. I could pull at this leg. I could pull at that leg. So what can I see in meditation? When the self-sense gets less, for whatever reason -- maybe I'm practising anattā, whatever -- the thing-sense gets less. We've already said this, that perception begins to fade, etc. And also, the time-sense gets less, to whatever degree. It's a spectrum, like everything else.

Going via the other leg, what happens when the push-pull gets less? Same deal, and the self-sense gets less, time also, etc. What happens if I find a way to let go, for instance, just in the belief in past and future? And I just kind of snip them off. I just cut them off. What happens to experience? What happens to the sense of self? What happens to the sense of thing? And I actually get closer and closer and closer, down to this ungraspable present. Or through whatever reason, I may have had a glimpse that becomes a conviction in time being empty, and then I just remind myself of the emptiness of time. I'm pulling at the other leg of the tripod. Do you understand? Meditation.

So where there's a sense of self -- no matter how light that sense of self, no matter how refined, no matter how subtle -- that sense of self has with it an investment. It's an investment: "What will it be for me? How will it be for me? How is it for me? How will it be for me?" And that investment comes from a sense of self, but it also comes from the sense of thing.

So let's talk about this a little bit more, how these are tied. We talk about delusion, avijjā, or ignorance, what the Buddha calls delusion or ignorance, avijjā. He says it's the root of dependent arising. I can't remember when it was, but I was talking about thinking, and saying, perhaps the deeper problem is not so much thinking but conceiving.^[4] Do you remember I said this a while ago? Conceiving rather than thinking, because you can experience no thought in meditation; it doesn't mean that one has finished the path or arrived at anything transcendently deep, in terms of one's understanding of emptiness.

But 'conceiving' means something slightly different. If I have a thing in the present for consciousness -- an inner thing, an outer thing, any thing -- I would say that wrapped up in that sense or perception of a 'thing' is the concept, the conceiving of 'not that thing.' In other words, this goes a little bit back to the duality thing we were talking about. This 'thing' has its meaning in relation to what is 'not that thing.' Rather, let's say, some pleasantness in meditation exists, and that's my perception. Right now, there's some stillness. There's some calm. That 'thing,' my perception of that 'thing,' wrapped up in that perception is the concept of 'not that thing' -- perhaps 'not that thing in the future.' It may go, right? Again, it could be conscious, or it's implicitly wrapped up in the perception. That conception of 'thing' goes with the conception of 'not that thing in the future.' So time is implicitly hidden, wrapped up, woven into the perception of a 'thing.' Because of that, and because the self has investment, the future-sense begins gaining significance. It's wrapped up, without us realizing it, in the perception of a 'thing' as a hidden concept, and it gains significance dependent on the belief in it and the investment, dependent on the delusion. So when I say conceiving, in that sense, and delusion actually go together. When I believe a thing is really this thing, then there's really not that thing, and it's wrapped up with time-sense and everything else. Do you understand?

Yogi 7: Can you give a concrete example?

Rob: Yeah. Well, let's say I have stillness in meditation, and I like it. Maybe I'm not even particularly used to it. And I want. Wrapped up in that, I may have a thought, a conscious thought: "What will happen? I hope this lasts. I hope it doesn't vanish." But even if I don't, implicit in a 'thing' is the idea of 'not that thing.' And if there's an investment, that idea of 'not that thing,' 'possibly not that thing in that future,' 'possibly that thing vanishing,' that sense of future is wrapped up in that. It's wrapped up. Present thing, as a perception -- wrapped up in that is the conception of 'future' and 'possible not that thing.' As a conception, they're woven together, and that's part of fundamental delusion. That's what I was saying. Fundamental delusion is wrapped up in perception. It's a much deeper problem than, say, language or thinking. It's very, very deeply woven in.

Yogi 8: When you say "investment," you're saying "attachment."

Rob: Yes, basically, but it's a subtle level. So the time-sense, in all these ways, is actually wrapped up and dependent on the perception of things. We're not saying that time is non-existent. We're just saying it's not inherently existent. Again, all these things are woven together. They all arise together. Appearances, empty appearances arise together, dependent on each other. If time-sense is dependent on thing-sense -- thing, perception, experience, object, whichever word we use -- things being empty, again, we have time resting on, leaning on something empty, leaning on a vacuum.

What about consciousness? Consciousness, knowing, is also dependent on time. To know, there needs to be a known. But there also needs to a be present moment, this sense of a present moment in which knowing is happening. We've already said in different ways, the present moment is actually dependent on the past and future. It's dependent on the thing, on the object, on the perception. So actually, the present is empty, in which case consciousness is leaning on something empty too.

[42:07] If time is empty, [then] production, abiding, ceasing are empty. Arising, staying, ending are empty. In the Vimalakīrti Sūtra, one of the very famous Mahāyāna sūtras, it says:

Phenomena do not arise. They do not abide. They do not cease.^[5]

And you get that kind of statement many times in Prajñāpāramitā texts. It means, ultimately speaking, time is empty, so you can't really say that really, things abide, arise, and cease. If we go back to something Nick asked way, way back when we were talking about the three characteristics: is impermanence ultimately true? It can't be ultimately true. Impermanence relies on a thing to be impermanent and a time to be impermanent in. If neither thing is really real nor time is really real, impermanence also cannot be really real. Conventionally it's true. Conventionally it's very important. And conventionally it's a very important insight, and it's a stepping-stone. Ultimately speaking, it's not true.

So consciousness too is empty. Awareness too is empty. But it's wrapped up with time. It's wrapped up. All these things are woven together. [43:31]

I know this is difficult, but just going back to what I said, I hope you can get a sense that what I'm talking about is not abstract. It's really for meditative use. It's not abstract. There is, if one can find -- eventually, whenever that is -- a way to use this stuff in meditation, a real beauty opens up with this, a real beauty. I'm not talking about something dry or intellectual.

Let's revisit those first few links of dependent origination a bit more subtly. Do you remember? I can't remember if it was in a question and answer period. I was talking about, there's one sutta -- actually, there are a couple of suttas where it's actually ten links of dependent origination given, not twelve, and it actually stops. It goes back and it ends at consciousness. It doesn't go into saṅkhāras and ignorance. There are at least two instances.^[6]

The Buddha, when he gives his most complete description of his awakening realization, he says he kept asking questions: "What does this depend on?" And then getting an answer. "And what does that depend on?" And tracing the wheel of dependent origination back, coming to nāmarūpa, and saying, "What does nāmarūpa [classically the fourth link] depend on?" And then he says, "Then I realized: it depends on consciousness, depends on knowing." Then he said, then he asked himself, "What does knowing depend on? What does consciousness depend on?" And he says, "It depends on nāmarūpa." He said that was the moment of awakening, realizing the mutuality, the mutual dependency, and the implicit mutual emptiness of consciousness and nāmarūpa.^[7]

Nāmarūpa, if we unpack it -- rūpa, forms and perceptions of forms. But nāma is, for our purposes here, the important part: it's perception, vedanā, attention, intention, and contact.^[8] That makes up the processes of the perceiving mind, we could say. The Buddha's saying, "Consciousness is dependent on those; those are dependent on consciousness." That was the moment of awakening. Other instances, too, when it gets described as a ten-link chain -- I wonder if that was the original presentation, and afterwards he sort of added a couple more to sort of fill it out and explain what was it really resting on, in a sense.

So let's unpick this a little bit. Take one of those aspects: attention. A couple of people have reported this: feeling like, or getting a glimpse of the mind, in its movement of paying attention to one thing, perception, object, experience, or another thing, perception, object, experience, and actually, the push-pull of attention -- almost indistinguishable from the push-pull of craving and grasping. It's almost as if the mind, in paying attention to something, goes like this [pushing-pulling hand gestures], as if it's kind of doing [that], pushing that away and grasping at this. It's quite subtle, but can be caught. Actually implicit in our process of attention is a kind of push-pull.

What's attention? How would we define 'attention'? You could say attention is consciousness plus intention. It's directed knowing. Consciousness directed at this, directed at that, with the intention to keep -- either we're aware of that intention or not, but you could say that's what attention is. So whether or not one sees that, or even agrees that there's this kind of push-pull involved in paying attention, there's something else that we can point to. We've already said objects, perceptions, things, experiences depend on push and pull. We've seen that, and we talked about the fading, etc. Push and pull depends on object. Mutual dependent arising again: object depends on push and pull; push and pull depends on object, right? We've already gone into this in terms of reaction and vedanā, grasping and thing. Do we need to go into that again?

Yogi 9: That was yesterday?

Rob: Yesterday and another talk, I think, last week.^[9] I'm going to say something further, and perhaps, you could say, a bit more subtle. I don't know. A sense of an object, an object for consciousness, depends on attention. It's what makes an object an object for consciousness: it's my paying attention to it. Again, could be deliberate or non-deliberate. But the mind moves, in its kind of seizing on something, as attention. An object for consciousness depends on attention.

What does attention need to be attention? An object! I cannot have attention to something without an object for which it's attending, right? Attention needs to land on something, hold something, even for a millisecond, right? Objects and attention, mutually dependent, mutually dependent. Attention needs an object; objects need attention to be that, to be that for consciousness.

[49:40] If I have a sense of this moment, this present moment, that can seem like, "This is the only thing that's real, this moment." But this moment, for consciousness, in a way, it's delineated, so to speak, by perception. In other words, how I get a sense of this moment is a sense of some thing, experience, in this moment. That's what gives me a sense of this moment. So this moment, we could say, is delineated by perception, or we could say, delineated by what is known. Again, known: it's a known. Because I know something, this is known in the moment. And I then have a sense of a moment of that known.

So again, we can find all these mutual dependencies here. This moment -- which means 'time,' time in its most bare sense -- is actually, then, dependent on knowing. Time is dependent on consciousness. This moment is dependent on knowing. Knowing means consciousness. Time is dependent on consciousness. Knowing depends on time, this moment.

Same for attention, like we just said. Attention delineates a moment. A moment is delineated for attention. Attention needs a moment -- same thing as saying it needs an experience. When things are mutually dependent, it means they're mutually empty. You cannot have mutual dependence without that implication. And the sense of leaning on emptiness, leaning on a vacuum -- things are leaning. So this is the meaning of 'groundless': there's no real support for anything.

Let's revisit this word of the Buddha, avijjā. Perhaps -- I don't know how it happened -- as the teachings matured, and he found himself talking to more people, I don't know, maybe he added the avijjā piece later. That's not actually there in the consciousness and nāmarūpa thing. He says, well, why do we do all that? Well, it's dependent on avijjā. So that's the root of it all.

What does this mean, avijjā, delusion, ignorance, or whatever translation? It has a whole range of meanings. At one level, avijjā, delusion, is not being clear about what qualities and actions in life bring suffering, and what qualities and actions bring freedom. Doing the wrong thing ethically, doing the wrong thing in terms what I'm developing in my being -- that's one meaning of avijjā. It also means not being aware of impermanence, forgetting impermanence.

One more perhaps deeper meaning is believing in the self to be something real. That's part of root ignorance. But self, as I said, can be anywhere on that spectrum: the gross self, the personality self, the story self, the narrative self, the bonkers self. Or really, really subtle -- just the barest sense of awareness, subject, a knower. No story, no personality, no me, no name -- a knower, a self. An object, no matter how subtle, even nothing as an object -- subject and object. Time, no matter how bare, just a present moment. Believing in that trinity as inherently existent is root delusion. That's the root delusion. In that duality of subject and object, in that duality, it's almost like there comes a charge in that duality. When you have duality, the sense of subject, it's pregnant with a charge. The subject must have some kind of investment.

Saṅkhāras is a word that has lots of meanings. But we could say, out of that, then, comes the intention to pay attention to something, based on this sense of self, belief in self (no matter how subtle), belief in object, belief in time. Saṅkhāras can get translated in many different ways. It has a range of meanings. I think it's good to allow it, that range of meaning. At one level, it means our neuroses -- you know, what we're bringing from the past in terms of, "I keep dragging my neurotic predispositions and stories into the present moment," and that begins to colour everything, shape everything, contract everything, and shape my perception and the way the self gets built. Of course.

Originally it has, actually, to do with -- what's it called when, if you're firing a clay pot, and you make a mould of an impression, and you fire it repeatedly into clay pots, you know, to make that design in the pot?

Yogi 10: Cast.

Rob: 'Cast,' yeah, exactly. That cast or impression, that's the meaning of saṅkhārā. And you can do the same with the mind. It's to do with karma*,* regardless of past lives and all that, just the way the mind has impressions, that it carries them into the future, carries them into the present moment. John's probably been through this with you, right? Yeah, good.

That's one level. That's really important. But it also has the meaning of 'fabrications,' or I would also add 'fabricators,' 'fashioners,' that which forces, and movements of the mind that fashion and fabricate ... what? Experience and dukkha, the whole sense of reality. Out of delusion comes these impulses, intentions, ways of relating, conceiving, etc., perceiving, that fashion, that fabricate. But even those, you can say the intention to pay attention is a very subtle movement of saṅkhārā. You could also find that in nāmarūpa, in our list of five: perception, vedanā, attention, intention, and contact. That's why it's almost like the saṅkhāras and the delusion are a little bit -- not redundant, but they're sort of included in the nāmarūpa. Intentions require an object to intend to attend to. I have to believe in that. I have to believe in this object to intend to pay attention to. I have to have a sense of the next moment. I can't have an intention without a sense of a next moment. I intend to do something. Intention has to do with now and the future. Even if it's the most milli-milli-millisecond future, it's an intention. So implicit in intention is a sense of the next moment, and a sense of a subject with an investment, to some degree or other.

Again, all this mutual emptiness, mutual dependent arising -- time is actually dependent on knowing; it's dependent on the movement of intention, the saṅkhāras, and investment; time is dependent on conceiving, conceiving of an object, a thing in the present moment. And you could say the other way around: consciousness, knowing, is also dependent on object, attention, intentions, time.

If I look at the mind, any which way I look at the mind, I cannot find any aspect of the mind, no matter how the Buddha or anyone else chops it up as attention -- mind is attention plus intention, plus this, plus that. In all these factors, I will find a mutual dependency, a mutual emptiness. There's nothing in there that's not empty. We took attention: attention depends on object. Object depends attention. Empty.

We say, what about delusion? All this depends on delusion. But delusion, too, is a dependent arising. Delusion doesn't exist in the abstract. You can't have abstract delusion. Delusion has to do with what? Delusion exists in the present moment, in relationship to thing, in relationship to all of that. It's actually, delusion ends up being dependent on the other factors too. What you've got in dependent arising is this web. Every factor in the web is affecting every other factor, is dependent on every other factor. I cannot find inherently existent delusion either. It's dependent on consciousness, dependent on mind, dependent on perception.

So how will I bring all this into practice, or some of this into practice? We've said about building platforms, so to speak, digging tunnels, and then reaching a point of conviction, and then going further. If I reach the point of conviction through practice (through three characteristics or whatever other practice), "Objects are empty. They're just a fabricated perception. It's just a perception. It's empty," then I may begin to add, when I'm resting on that platform: "The mind is empty too." And I can even do the mind as a whole, or including all the mental factors (attention, etc.), and I can go through them in the meditation, and actually see that for the different reasons. As I've been saying, they're dependent on empty objects. They're leaning on something empty. [59:46] Staying with that, I could then bring, in meditation (I'm talking about, again, very deep but very possible meditative investigation): "The object's empty. Mind: empty." I bring in: "Time and present moment: empty." And this trinity of subject, object, time -- see all three, from all three, all together, I'm seeing them as empty.

I appreciate that may seem completely impossible, but it's really, really not. It's really not. I wouldn't say it's easy, but it's not impossible. And right from the beginning, I've been stressing this: develop the practice, develop the practice, because as we develop it, we can then go to the next unfoldment, so to speak. That becomes a conviction, goes to the base of the next one. I develop, develop, develop. We get insights, and then those insights -- for instance, that perceptions are empty; objects, experiences are empty -- that then becomes consolidated through repeating. And that consolidated insight becomes the platform for the next level.

So this emptiness of time, for a meditator -- just throwing this out -- many, many possible different flavours of it and experience of it. One can have a sense of, "There's no time, really, for anything to be in." One can also have a sense of -- it's hard to put it into language -- a kind of 'eternity,' but the meaning of that word is not the same as 'everlasting stretches of time.' It means something beyond time. It's not that. Or sometimes there's a sense, somehow, in a way that a person can't really put into words, that somehow, "All time is here. All the past and all the future is here, right now. It's all here somehow."

Yogi 11: You said there's no Now.

Rob: It's all here, somehow. Sometimes in meditation, it's like the language can't hold the insights, because language is based on notions of time and subject and object, etc.

Yogi 12: Is that before cessation?

Rob: People have lots ... yeah, I will talk about cessation tomorrow. And partly what I want to say is, it's important, but it's also not as important as some people say. It's both. What's important is seeing the emptiness of things. To see this in any way, in terms of time, is going to be enormously freeing. Someone could have a cessation experience and actually not have that much freedom come out of it, or a so-called 'cessation experience.' So when I try and give maps, and it sounds like, "This happens in this order," rarely is it formulaic or linear. It's more, what I'm trying to give is a sense of how you could develop practice, as I said, to consolidate certain insights that come up, that then lead you to the next level, etc. But no one's practice unfolds in a completely formulaic way. And other times, in terms of moving towards cessation, it's like the whole structure fades. Perception fades, time fades, self fades, and that fading movement is on the way to cessation. But I wouldn't make too much of a deal of the cessation. It's more like, what does the fading mean about the emptiness and the dependent arising? That's the thing that frees: the understanding.

So this quote that I gave yesterday from Ajaan Mahā Boowa, the Thai Forest master -- he said, when he was walking in meditation, that this realization came, this voice came: "Whenever there's a centre to the knowing, there is dukkha."^[10] [1:03:37] Then I said that could be interpreted at a lot of different levels: the centre in the self ("I am knowing; this is my knowing, my consciousness"). But also a centre in time, in the present. A centre in space -- remember, space is just a perception. We can also do 'not one, not many' on space. No centre there. No centre in mental factors. Knowing is actually not separate from empty perceptions. We have a sense of a centre of knowing as something that's somehow separate. It's actually not separate from what is empty.

Again, if I fill out the aspect from last night's talk, it's like, does awareness have inherent existence? All this points to no, it doesn't. All these are ways of seeing that it doesn't. I realize that actually, I cannot separate consciousness, awareness, whatever I want to call it, mind, from attention, from intention, from perception, from object, from feeling, from saṅkhāras, from past, present, future. I cannot separate any of that. I can't find a dividing line. So we say things are interdependent, but in a way, they're more than that. They're interpenetrating. They're inseparable.

There was a great Tibetan teacher who died in 1912 called Mipham Rinpoche from the Nyingma tradition, a very great scholar and yogi, meditator. And he's talking about dependent arising and the subtlety of it. And so, when we first hear about dependent arising, it sounds like: "These are separate things, and this thing is dependent on that thing, and it's something else." He says:

Those who believe in substantial reality [in inherent existence] may, when something is produced from a cause other than itself, believe that this is a case of dependent [origination]. They may think like this, but they misunderstand....

To say that something is produced by something else suggests a relationship of dependence in the ordinary sense of the word. But the meaning of dependent origination is more subtle than this.^[11]

So this framework that the Buddha, I threw it out -- I think it was a question and answer period -- I said, at first it seems like you've got twelve different things. It's actually not that. You can start with that. The more you get into it, you realize, you see it's not actually twelve different links. They're inseparable. They're mutually dependent. They're empty. And that is getting, in a way, at the more subtle and the more full meaning of dependent arising. As I said (I can't remember when), that too would give more of a fullness of the mind being 'unfindable' then as well, unfindable as a separate entity, or consciousness or awareness being unfindable, the first of Gampopa's reasonings.^[12]

Remember (I can't remember when it was), I was telling you the story of when Ānanda said to the Buddha, "I think I understand dependent arising now." And the Buddha said, "Hold on. Don't say that yet. Don't say that. It's really, really deep."^[13] It's pointing to something that goes almost beyond itself. It goes beyond the very concepts that make it up. It's not linear. It's not "This leads to this, leads to this, leads to this." And it's also, when we really go into it, it's not even a process happening in time; it's that time is dependently arisen. At one level, it is a linear process. And at one level it is a process happening in time. It's important to see that and work with it at that level. When you really get into it, it's actually something beyond that.

With all this kind of mutual dependency, and this depends on this, and that also depends on the other thing and everything, it can seem like, with all that and all those factors, what you've got is a completely unentangleable knot of spaghetti. It can seem [like] that, and that therefore it's hopeless. "It's a completely hopeless situation. How could I possibly do anything with all that?" But actually it's the opposite: it's that, because there are all these strands of spaghetti, so to speak, hanging out, we can pull on this one or this one. It opens up many options for the way we contemplate things, just like that house of cards of analogy: many options for which card we draw out. So even though it goes, so to speak, beyond concepts, it doesn't mean that it does not function as a tool, as a conceptual tool that takes you beyond concepts. It doesn't mean that: contemplate dependent arising, contemplate what we talked about tonight, and then say, "Well, can't really know anything about anything. Nothing makes sense." We can know what we need to know, and that is the dependent arising, mutual emptiness of things. That's what we need to know.

This image -- I'm not sure if it's a good image or not, but the snake swallowing its own tail: the deep, subtle contemplation of dependent arising is a conceptual tool that eats its own conceptuality. So not, for a practitioner, to get stuck in reifying even the elements of the Buddha's teaching, the elements of dependent arising. That would be not quite going far enough. Not to go to the other extreme and be too sloppy and say, "Whatever, it's all one," or some other -- something that's toothless. Using these concepts in a way that goes beyond concepts -- that's partly what's meant by the Middle Way.

This point is -- I don't know if you can get a sense; there's something so beautiful that this is pointing to, that when one sees it, it's so touching of the heart at such a profound level. When we start dissecting things this way, going back to the beginning of the talk, it can sound like I'm giving a description of some kind of microscopic keyhole surgery or something, and it's all very dry and very precise. But there's something that it's unravelling there that's incredibly beautiful, and it's pointing to the total emptiness of everything. Everything. There's nothing outside that emptiness, nothing that stands outside what is empty, what is mutually dependent, what is groundless. The whole of existence is groundless. And there's a totality in that and a beauty in that. What I'm hoping to just give are possible tools, that a meditator can find their way to snake through this in meditation, navigate, and find a way that this begins to unbind and unravel and reveal something -- something really, really beautiful.

Okay, let's sit for a minute.