monkey see, monkey do serves as a personal blog and creative outlet for
origin of consciousness
yesterday my karma class concluded; that which has a start has an end, or as Shibata Sensei said “hello means goodbye”.
my favorite part of class was the time we spend reviewing the buddhist view of consciousness and feeling, including how consciousness forms, how it relates to feelings, and how thoughts and attitudes spring out of that process. the abhidharma or buddha’s teachings on this go into incredible detail.
the twelve nidanas, it turns out, describes how moment to moment our consciousness forms from nothing, reacts to the perceptions of phenomenon, forms a positive, negative, or neutral opinion of that phenomenon, then jumps to a conclusion about how things should be and habitualizes the result.
we also studied the five skandas, each a mental process which all combined make up what we typically consider self or ego. the formation of the skandas is part of the nidana cycle, the fourth nidana in fact, before sense perceptions start to make contact with the phenomenal world. the consciousness skanda is paramount, but is supported by the skandas of form, feeling, formation, and perception. form constructs distinct views of the world, feeling just provides a very basic positive, negative, or neutral opinion of things, perception processes what we perceive, and formation pigeon-holes things into categories for us.
the importance of these teachings is deep. when Pema teaches about ‘learning to stay’, this comes from the wisdom that the cycle of karma can only be interrupted between the seventh and eighth nidanas - between feeling and craving. once we’ve gone from feeling to actually thirsting for something then we’ve continued a cycle that ends with a further strengthening of ego and solitification of our world view. but if we can learn to rest in feeling (the seventh nidana) then we can interrupt the habituation of ego. in fact, that’s the only way we can work with it and stop the karmic momentum. by karmic momentum i mean the quality that our feelings lead us to action which then sows the seeds of future suffering - in this case the habituation and solidification of our ego-centric view of the world.
trungpa rinpoche also gave an interesting teaching on the skandas and enlightenment. he taught that the skandas in an enlightened being are still there. what’s different is that they aren’t connected. meditation cuts the tight connection between the skandas. then he went further to say that it’s not really a connection that you’re severing. really the skandas are just crammed together by our speed. we hate to experience space, our world feels unsolid in space. so we keep our mind running quickly so we don’t notice that there is a small gap between each skanda. so meditation lets us slow down, and then increase the gap between the skandas or in other words so we can see the large expanse of space which is already between them.
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30. March 2004 at 7:26 am :
I gotta admit, I’ve always been pretty skeptical of this kind of teaching.
If you take the Buddhas most fundamental teaching - that everything is impermanence or illusion, even the ego - then dividing up consicousness into 31 flavors of illusion always seemed kind of silly.
I mean, I know those monks hanging out in 5th century Tibet had little else to do than sit around trying to split hairs on variations of illusion, but isn’t that kind of missing the point?
31. March 2004 at 1:00 am :
Zach’s comment reminds me of Scott’s comment at meditation tonight. I don’t really want to belabor the point ,but I think it’s a balance. The mind can function as a lens zooming and and zooming out in order to understand what it is experiencing in a fuller, more comprehensive way. In general ,we don’t delve into the finer intricacies of our experience. We take them at the face value of our point of view. Also we rarely get enough distance from our experience to see a more spacious view. I see it as a dance. Moving in closer and more intimate and stretching out and more vast. Then of course there is this: the closer in you move, the more you realize that each component can be divided into infinately more components and “there is no there there”. So emptiness comes full circle.
Zach, if you are reading this Mazel Tov on your upcoming Blessed Event!
1. April 2004 at 11:04 am :
In response to Zack’s comment:
The self might be impermanent, but that does not mean that it doesn’t exist. When it arises, in that moment it exists, and when it falls away, it no longer does. This is happening moment by moment. So while it might exist from moment to moment, it doesn’t exist in any permanent way. I take the description that Davee relates as a view of the stuff of that gives rise to this impermanent self moment by moment.
Once we understand the nature of this self that arises moment by moment and clings to its permanance, we can ask: how can we we create the space to realize our true nature and allow the ego to arise and fall away without buying into its grasping? I like that description of resting in the emotional experience, allowing the grasping to uncouple from the emotional energy that normally leads into it.
Another way of putting this was given by Dogen in the Genjokoan:
To study the Dharma is to study the self
To study the self is to forget the self
To forget the self is to be enlighted by all things
4. April 2004 at 1:34 am :
Far be it from me to disagree with Dogen, but I would replace the second line in that poem with “To study the self is to remember the self” as in “The self that puts itself under a magnifying glass to examine only strengthens itself.”
In other words, you can’t forget something by studying it.
6. April 2004 at 9:12 pm :
Just a minor point … It was actually Shibata Sensei, the world reknowned Kyudo master who said “Hello means Goodbye”. bye bye