Emptiness the Womb of Compassion, Robert Thurman

[Music] [Applause] [Music]

How is everybody? Congratulations for getting up in the morning. And uh, where do I have a slide up there? Oh. Oh, good. So, that's that's my my what I'm talking about. And um, I like, I also like the introduction because focusing on what one wanted to do today, I realized that I most likely would like to take a nap. However, another nap, you know, being somewhat jetlike. However, I have not yet achieved what my son once said when we attended a lecture by a great Zen master in Santa Cruz, actually years ago, and some people from a different Zen center were present there, and they all fell asleep during the lecture. And my son, who was younger in those days, he was very annoyed and felt it was very much an insult to the visiting Zen master. But then they said, "Oh, no, it's a great compliment to a lecture or teacher or dharma talk giver when you fall asleep, sleep when he when he talks." So my son wasn't buying it. And he said, "I'm sorry, that doesn't work. If, in fact, the person who's giving the lecture could fall asleep while giving it and keep giving it, then I'd be impressed." He said, he said, "So that would be true non-dual lecture would be to sound asleep, resting in the absolute and giving the lecture and the relatives simultaneously. That would be perfect because the achievement of non-duality, basically, one of the one of the aspects of it is the ability to be asleep and awake at the same time."

Anyway, anyway, so this is, I always show this slide beginning these things because this is Medicine Buddha, who is my, one of my favorite manifestations of Buddha, which, um, which is in his mandala of healing, of healing energy. Why is it so different when I walk over here? Healing energy. And, um, when he thinks of human beings suffering of sickness, he turns blue and then he holds a plant of the myrobalan nut in one hand, which is a kind of panacea medicine in Ayurvedic and Tibetan medicine, Buddhist medicine, Indian and Tibetan Buddhist medicine. And that's he's in his garden. And when he teaches the teaching of healing from the Buddhist point of view, uh, temporarily, everyone who is present, and there are Hindus and Buddhists and Jains and all kinds of people in that assembly, and humans and gods are also both there. But everything in the universe, they have a vision while they listen to him of everything being medicine. There's no, you know, even poison is medicine if you have the knowledge that that it can be beneficial in certain contexts. So suddenly, instead of our usual feeling of some germs coming after us or some problem happening, there's some toxins in around us, there's a vision of everything as healing, everything as healing, which I like very much. But that's just for fun.

So now, I was just talking to Sky, who is a physicist. And, um, and I, I was saying that I consider, I'm very much into the idea that we should try to swallow the idea, us modern people who think we are so advanced and we have great sciences and we're uniquely, we're the uniquely avant-garde front culture in the history of the universe, of this world at least, of this planet. Of course, we thinking that this planet is the only one with human beings. And I like to overthrow that idea. I don't agree with that idea. And so I make a big thing about Buddha as a scientist, has to be considered a scientist. And why? Rather than a religion founder or a prophet. And why? Because, uh, Buddha's discovery was the nature of reality. They say, I mean, of course, we, they may be wrong. We have to be aware of that. We have to critically evaluate that. He asked us to critically evaluate it. He didn't say, "Believe that I'm a Buddha." He said, "I am a Buddha and I know everything." And having discovered the true nature of reality, I'm totally gassed out because the true nature of reality is bliss. It's nirvana. That's that was his discovery. His discovery was not suffering. Any idiot can discover suffering. Just, just stub your toe. Just stub your toe and, uh, or stay up an extra two days or something without sleep, and you know suffering. But, but he discovered bliss, actually. And that's why he then focused on, "If you insist on being unenlightened, then you will suffer." That was his sort of message, you know. The only reason he did that, as the Dalai Lama says, if he hadn't discovered bliss being the option that you have by choosing a different understanding, then, and dispelling the illusory understanding that we are conditioned to by cultures which mostly want us to, mostly want us to suffer. Uh, you know, the elites of the different cultures, the high priests, the rulers, they want, because they want us to work and they want us, they don't want us to feel too good because then we might not want to work all the time for them. So, so and so that's why in most societies in world history, bliss is illegal. In our country too, very much so. And, uh, so anyway, we have the world totally upside down. We think that relative reality is absolute. We think we are absolute, each person about their own ego, about their own self. They think there's something in there that's the real thing. As my old Mongolian guru used to say, "Everyone is correct that they're real. Everyone is real." But the problem is, everyone thinks they're *really* real, and there they are way off base. Actually, they're only unreal. But that's still real enough to worry about, of course, and to deal with it. But it's not that exaggerated level of being the absolute reality, yourself, the center of the universe, etc., and therefore others as subsidiary to you, or possibly simply a matrix illusion, and you're the one, you know. He used to say that too, like decades before The Matrix, he used to say, "Everybody goes around secretly thinking, 'I'm the one.'" And, uh, and that's a problem. But, but Buddhism doesn't solve that problem just to dispel that illusion by everybody discovering that they don't exist. That would be also idiotic. If Buddha was going to say, "Oh, my discovery is that we all don't exist, so we're cool." Like, most, like, like modern materialist scientists do. They go around claiming that they've discovered that there's no soul, soul, and therefore no future life, and therefore everybody's automatically cool. All you have to do is die, and then you'll, you'll, you'll return to your basically non-existent state, and they'll take your body and put it in the heavenly rest, permanent sleep cemetery, and then you won't have any further problems. But that, but I would not agree with that. That's not correct.

The, the whole correction of enlightenment is to stop being the one yourself. Realize you're not the one. You're one of the ones. You and other people are all, everybody else is the one too. And once you know that, and there's so many more of them, you automatically become an altruist. You become a bodhisattva, and you want to help them. And then you become happy rather than miserable. Anyway, we think our rigidized self-identity is really us. That it opposes a world absolutely other, and that situation produces suffering. All right, that's really simple. It's not rocket science. It doesn't require major enlightenment. Just a little bit of human enlightenment for us to deal with that idea, those ideas. Okay? Then he looks for that self, that absolute self. It doesn't help to just say, "Oh yeah, I'm selfless." That won't help because at the gut level, you still think you're absolute. And if you're unenlightened, I mean, you may all be enlightened by now. You're, you've already been in the conference for three days. So never mind if I'm, if I'm shortchanging you. If you're enlightened, you don't mind. If you're unenlightened, you're offended if I assume that you're unenlightened. So, I'll just assume, since I'm unenlightened, I'll assume that we all are. So, but Buddha realized his freedom from that separate selfhood, that absolute separateness from everything else, enjoyed the release of his relative self, and thereby realized infinite interconnection with all life. And this is a central thing in my talk to this morning that, um, that the key about non-duality is that this right here, now, is non-duality. Non-duality doesn't mean that we're going to disappear into some vast state and it's all have an experience of like, it's all one, but nobody's there. It's all there, no problems, because nobody's in the one, because, because all the separate people are just an illusion, and we're an illusion. But we enjoy being just one with everything with nobody home. That's not, that is wrong. That is a mistake. But it is a mistake that many mystics make, actually, according to Buddhist critique. That's the main thrust of what I'm going to talk about.

So he discovered the release of the relative self. That is, he couldn't find it. But then he didn't make this mistake of thinking that he had found nothing, because he wasn't insane like scientific materialists are, who think, no, they think they found nothing. After people die, they go to the corpse and they put some electrodes on the corpse and they say, "Oh, nothing's happening in the brain, so they don't exist anymore. We found their, we found them not being there." That's insane. Do you realize that? You realize that that's insane. If you think you find nothing, then you're cuckoo, you know, and do you expect a prize or an award or grant money for finding nothing? Finding nothing's a mistake. You just didn't find what you were looking for. It doesn't mean it isn't something isn't somewhere else. That there is no nothing. So, you can't find it. That's very important. Remember that. If you die expecting to become nothing, you're going to be in for a problem. As Pascal understood. But in case you're correct, you won't have to worry. You'll just be nothing, and you won't be upset. If you tried to learn to meditate and became mindful and tried to deal with yourself and your life and acted as if everything, your life had a consequence, even to yourself in a future existence, if you, in case it does, then you'll be happy you worked on that. In case it doesn't, you're not going to mind, you know. You're going to join Carl Sagan saying, "Isn't it great? I'm okay." So, so the key, therefore, is the realization of non-duality makes compassion, universal compassion, meaning the unbearability of others' suffering as well as your own. Of course, you're compassionate to yourself. But that makes that the absolute concern, using the word absolute in a relative way. Okay? Using it for emphasis, like not in a technical way. Okay. What's that? What's that? What happened?

So, this is, I'm going to skip. Well, yeah, it's science-based Buddha's discovery. It's freed by wisdom, knowledge, and wisdom doesn't mean just some sort of resignation to the way things are, like, "Oh, I give up, so I'm wise." You know, sort of the old gray beard type of wisdom. The symbol of wisdom of Buddhism is a 16-year-old kid who, orange colored, holds a book in one hand and a sword of critical intelligence in the other hand. And the word prajna means something like super intelligence. It doesn't mean everyone has that. All human beings have that super intelligence, whether it's been developed or not. They all have it, according to the Buddhists. That's one of the challenges which you never heard that from, from either religious people in your, in our culture or scientific people. If any scientist says, "Eureka! I now understand everything," they will give him Prozac at the minute, at the least. If, uh, the religious people say, "Oh yeah, God understands, but you don't, and you just believe what I tell you to believe." So everyone tells you you can't understand. And that's why I was not satisfied as a youth in my, in this culture, in this society, and I wasn't satisfied until I encountered Nagarjuna and the Buddha, who tell you that not only can you understand the, the world yourself, in the world, but you have to understand. If you want to be happy, you cannot do it by just believing that everything is fine or will be fine, or Buddha's fine, or God's fine. That will be nice, it might make you feel good for a hell, but it will not actually free you from suffering. And that suffering can go on infinitely, actually, unfortunately, because there's no such thing as an energy process continuum becoming nothing. That is an incoherent idea that that can happen. It never happens. Law of conservation of energy, right? Even the materialists will agree with that. It's just they don't think consciousness has any energy. And that, of course, is silly. That's being denying, living in denial that they are there, you know, that they are conscious, you know. Whoops. That's something going on. I think, what do you think if you're awake? Okay.

Anyway, so Buddha's teaching is taught in this short thing in Sanskrit here. That's a summary of his teaching, which means "of things that are produced by causes. What are the causes and how to terminate them? That is what the realized one declared." That's sort of a summary of the teaching. So Buddha is celebrated for discovering causation, not for talking to God and being given a role as a prophet in founding a religion, but discovering causation in the sixth century before the common era. And that was a big deal at that time because before that, people thought the gods caused everything, and the Brahman priests ruled because you had to get them to make offerings to appease the gods in order to get well or be happy or be successful. Whereas once you have causation, then you have to look into the causes and conditions of your conditions, of how you are, and you have to try to critique the negative ones and reinforce the positive ones. So, so therefore, the title of my talk, which means voidness or emptiness. I do prefer the word voidness, but I'm not wedded to it. You're used to emptiness. Emptiness, the womb of compassion. It's a phrase of Nagarjuna, the great philosopher of the around the turn of the common, the, you know, from before the common era to the common era. And the Buddhists think he lived 600 years, actually. But Westerners, of course, oh, that can't be. Those are silly Asian people. They think that can happen. We know that that can't happen, even though we don't know anything. And, um, supposedly, and that was his phrase, and it's such a beautiful phrase. I, I love it. It's almost the Dalai Lama loves it. It's, it's the nature of the Kalachakra form of Buddha that they talk about. And it's the idea of emptiness. You know, you think that emptiness, we tend to think, I think a lot of Western Buddhists, and even Asian Buddhists in the past, thought that emptiness was something like nothingness. It was like a blank space, a void. And maybe that's the problem with the word voidness that I do like. But, but emptiness is not a void. This is emptiness. You know, emptiness is form, which is mistranslated. Emptiness is matter. Matter is emptiness. That's the famous formula. So emptiness just means that relative things have no non-relational essence. No what they call intrinsic reality, intrinsic objectivity, intrinsic identity. No person has that. No thing has that. Their emptiness of that assures total relativity. Buddha is the discoverer as a scientist of the total interrelatedness of all things in the universe, of total relativity. And emptiness, in a way, is a critique of the concept of a separate absolute which human beings have, because the psychosis of the unenlightened person is thinking that my essence is something separate from everything else. I have this inviolate soul that no, nothing touches, never changes. And, uh, and so the, the role of the mystic is to withdraw from all this bothersome interrelationships. And it's a very male thing, by the way. In ancient India, Indian dualism, the purusha, the word purusha, which meant the spirit, was male. It also means a male. And maya, illusory relativity, is female. And so the whole idea is for the male to get away from the kitchen, the male Brahman, and to get away from birth and get away from connectedness. And in that concept, if Buddha was the discoverer of relativity, and if enlightenment is a complete immersion in relativity and an awareness of your complete interconnection forever with everyone, then the female is more enlightened than the male. Very sorry, guys, you know. And if you don't believe that, if you think you're more enlightened, then just think, do a thought experiment. You're just going along one day, you just had some fun, you got kind of wild on Saturday night. And then suddenly you note there's a new being, total stranger. You don't know where it came from in your stomach. And it's there like clutched onto your, the lining of your womb, like a little alien. And it's going to get bigger and bigger and start kicking, and then you're going to give it free pay, free space, no rent condominium. And then you got to get it out of there, which is like your husband will faint, and you have to do that. And then, you know, you don't sleep for another year or two. And then, then at 13 years old, they tell you, "It's my life. Don't bother me." And then you have to pay tuition, a quarter of a million dollars to get through Stanford. So, which, which guy is going to do that? Which male guy is going to do that? Excuse me. I got something in my... No way. So, so the women are way ahead. I, but in California, it's fairly safe to say that. In New York, you're really in trouble. Wall Street, they'll kill you.

So anyway, so emptiness is not a null state at all. Emptiness just means that everything is totally interwoven. So therefore, the concept there is that it is a womb, a membrane, a nurturing membrane. Reality, the deepest absolute reality is a nurturing membrane. And what it nurtures is compassion, which is actually love. Of course, love is defined in the Buddhist sciences and psychology as the wish for the beloved's happiness. That's pure love. It's like that. And compassion is the unbearability of the beloved's suffering. So the two are, you know, take the suffering away, provide the other one with happiness. That's love and compassion. That's their, that's their partnership in the, in psychology. That's just concepts, you know. So illusory relative reality is so deep reality. So as a scientific thing, the, the discovery of emptiness and relativism is that deep reality is beyond conceptual capture, which I believe was the, the main meat of the Copenhagen interpretation almost 100 years ago, which people have been in denial about, scientific materialists have been denial about ever since, mostly. Deep and illusory relative reality is open to hypothesis. It's explorable by experience or experiment. And the experience of a yogi or yogini is an experiment. And the result, when you merge with the nature of reality, which you can't capture with a concept, but you can capture an experience, then you can report the result of your experiment. And your result is, luckily, Buddha's experiment, which has been repeated many times by millions of people, is that reality is okay. It's cool. It's bliss. It's fine. We are surrounded by an envelope of blissful infinite energy that we can draw on completely to satisfy everything and everybody, if we only knew about it. The problem is, we don't know about it, and we think we're just us inside our skin. Everybody else is out there. And occasionally, someone likes me, so then I'm cool. But mostly I'm in a struggle with all of them. And then when two people are in love, that's why we all get jealous, because they're, they're reinforcing each other's insanity. Each one looks at the other one and says, "You're the one, dear." And then the other one says, "Oh, no, you're the one." And then they, like, they spiral out of control. And then everybody else wants to assassinate them, Romeo and Juliet, because they're like, everyone else is like, "What do you mean? I'm the one, not them." You know? So, so that's the, that's where reality seems awful because you never get satisfied. There's no satisfaction. But when, when, when you're living in love, when you just want the happiness of all beings. So Buddha is just a person in love with everybody. A Buddha is a being who has fallen in love with the entire, even cockroaches and spiders and mosquitoes. Totally in love with them all. Mining only wants their happiness, and therefore is totally an engine of bliss, an ocean of bliss. That's all.

So anyway, but these are scientific things. Experience is superior to inference or belief or any conceptual structure. The mind, subtle as subtle energy, super subtle energy, is more powerful than coarse matter, and wisdom potential is unlimited and deathless and aware, therefore, of everything changing. Now, now, this is really what... Okay. Yeah. So then non-duality discovered. And I hope I didn't skip like 10 things. Yeah, I didn't. Good. Okay. Non-duality is a scientific discovery, whether by a Buddhist or a Vedantist or a Hindu. And I make those as three different things. People go Vedantic Hinduism, but actually Vedantism is quite different from Hinduism. Hinduism is really a combination of Vedism and shamanism. But I don't want to go into that at length, but that, because you know, some of the, a lot of the non-dual people here are Vedantic oriented, which is great. But I do have some, we do have a little discussion about that, which I'll explain. Anyway, it is experienced, which is a result of experiment, guided by critical theory, interpreted by critical reason. And Buddha was an adept of samadhi, dana, and samapatti, three different types of trance. I, I translate is translati, dana as contemplation, and samadhi as concentration, which is, you know, there are different ways you can translate them all as meditation, but that's kind of meaningless in a way. Then it becomes meaningless. The word that is usually translated meditation, bhavana, actually really means realization, because it's from the verb to be. So bhavana means to make something exist, to create something. It doesn't just mean sit and think about something. But dana is a little bit thinking about something, anyway. He ranged up and down in and out of the body, ultimately returning to his body. And, um, now there is this thing here. He left a cosmology, the Buddha did, of what he calls the tri-universe, the tridhatuka lokatu, for those of you who know Sanskrit. And, and this became a generic layout in the Indic world, in all the Jainism and, and Hinduism, uh, eventually. But he did this from his experience. And the world that we are in is, if you look at the, or I don't have that here, anyway. These are the eight states of the meditational achievement or contemplational achievement that he left, you know, sort of as a, as a phenomenology of altered states, you could say. And the first four of them are called the Brahma Viharas, the divine abodes, the godly abodes, Brahma abodes. And they are, or they're also called the four immeasurable states. And the first one is love. Second one, kind, loving kindness, they say, which is a word that got into Buddhist translations because the Buddhists didn't want to use the word love, because Christian missionaries in Asia used the word love, and then they killed you if you weren't Christian. So they didn't, they wanted to avoid that. So they put in kindness in there, loving kindness, but it's just love, wishing happiness of the beloved. And then karuna, it's compassion, wishing them not to suffer. Mudita is joy, which means appreciating the bliss and happiness that every being already has. And there is there, the Buddha's vision in that nirvanic vision that he had is that actually we all are blissful. Everyone. Even you're miserable this morning, you have a headache, you did too much non-duality last night, and you're feeling tired, and you'd rather be taking a nap. But the reason that your body is holding together, and the atoms even of your chair, from a Buddhist point of view, is that the energy of love and bliss is in your atoms. The strong force of the universe. You can bet the physicists don't know what it is, because it's described with an Anglo-Saxon word, not a Greek word. If they knew what it was, it would have a Greek word. Not, they wouldn't say strong. Strong and weak mean they haven't quite figured it out yet. And the strong force, from Buddha's point of view, is this infinite energy of the clear light of the void, the clear light of emptiness, which is a concept I'm coming to, anyway. So those are four immeasurable states, and that is constitutes something that is called, let me, let me switch the next one. Uh, that constitutes what is called the pure matter realm, which in Buddhist translations they call the form realm, which is a translation of the state form being the visual object. But the matter is some things you can't see are still material, and that, and then in that context, it means, that's what it means. It doesn't mean just a visual object, which is only, it's the same word in Sanskrit, rupa. But that's because the most sort of noticeable physical objects are visible ones, but there are non-visible ones. So material is a better word. And the realm of pure matter, there are, this is the four of them called the realm which is above where we are, which is called the desire realm, which I list on the side of this slide. The, there are six heavens of the desire realm, which are what we think of as heavens, and really pleasurable place. And then titans, humans, animals, pests, and naraka, very bad suffering forms of life. And, uh, that's where we are at the moment, on the human plane. And then this is the realm of pure matter. You can reach with those four dhyanas, as they're called, four contemplations. And these dhyanas are connected to extreme where you withdraw from normal sense connections, and you go into just a pure feeling of love. And that love becomes the basis of that realm of pure matter. And you, since you're willing the love of all, you're connecting to that energy that, that is available to all as a will, as a to make their happiness possible. And therefore, you're, it's called the immeasurable love and compassion is there, where it begins to enfold beings who themselves are thinking, "I'm not happy." And that's where compassion wants to help them feel that they are happy. And then mudita is to enjoy the fact that they are actually already happy, which at a subliminal level, there's a joyfulness in their cells, which actually is their health, which actually is their energy of life. And then finally, upekkha, which is where you're equal to all beings in, in those earlier three feelings, which are connected altogether together. And then the top of that, the boundary between the realm of pure matter and the immaterial realms, these four, is where, you know, matter becomes mass becomes infinite. It's like the speed of light for Einstein, which he thought was the limit of all things, because he was a materialist trying to be a materialist. But meanwhile, beyond that, there are four realms that are considered purely mental or immaterial, although there's a very, very subtle form of energy always where there's mind. And therefore, in a way, they are not purely immaterial, but they're called immaterial or formless realm. And these are very interesting states. The first one is a state of, and these are called trance states. And the body of a yogi who reaches this, or yogini who reaches this, goes into what you might call cataleptic trance, where it just, you know, there like hibernation state, because the mind is completely gets abstracted from being connected with the body in these states. And one is called a state of infinite space, or the medium of infinite space, because it's not a realm or a state, because it's no, there's no physicality about it, no overt physicality about it. The next, second one is the realm of infinite consciousness. The third one, the realm of nothingness, which is of course not nothing. It's a realm that, or it's a medium, a place where the mind goes like a dark realm for rest, and a place where even there's no consciousness of being in the place where one goes into it, in a way of feeling it's more subtle than being infinite consciousness, which is kind of tiresome. Nothing to be, it's boring. Nothing to be conscious of. You're just infinite consciousness. And then you become this. You, you kind of go to sleep in that third realm as a, as a pleasant thing. And then there's one beyond that, the fourth realm, which is neither conscious or unconscious, where sleep and wake are together, and almost like an enlightened state, but not an enlightened state from Buddha's point of view, because you're separated from everything, all the differentiated things in the universe. And once you're separated, once it's, it seems to be an absolute to the yogi who, who experiences it. But once they're separate from everything else, of course, it isn't. It's a relative state. It's achieved causally. Therefore, it's a made and created state, and that being moved into it from another through a series of causes and conditions of their yogic practice and discipline. And therefore, it's, it only, it tricks someone who is expecting an absolute state apart from the universe, which actually from Buddha's point of view, psychological point of view, is a projection of the psychosis of thinking that my real self is something disconnected from me. It's an absolute that is not affected by my relativity. And then I think through that meditation, I've reached that absolute, and that's my absolute self, and it's me, and, and then I'll say, just for the hell of it, I'll include God in it, but it's me and God, and nobody else. And therefore, it's a, basically from a Buddhist point of view, a psychotic state, actually, even though it's a mystic. 10 minutes. Thank you. I know that I'm, as you hear, I'm talking like a New Yorker, okay? Fast.

So now, now in the Book of the Dead, I'm connecting, now I'm sharing with you something I've never really shared at length with my academic colleagues, and I think it's something I have to claim. It's a kind of unique insight. In the Book of the Dead, you turn this upside down, and the process of dissolution in the death state, or when you faint, or when you fall asleep at night, even. But you don't, you're not conscious of it, because we're not attuned to the finer shifts in our consciousness, really, because we're always involved in sense stimuli and in, uh, in our sense consciousnesses. But if you develop a greater mindfulness, mindfulness moving in the direction of being aware of how the inner, inner mechanism of mind works, you get to this one. And so first is called earth to water. And, uh, when you're first, and when you're dying, and then earth to water transition is where you see like the world is like a mirage, like a hallucination. You can't recognize anything. Your language, your speech, things stop. Your feeling of solidity and your body stops. Your body sort of goes, starts going to sleep, you know, not just your arm because you're sitting or your leg because you're sitting in an odd posture. Your whole body starts to go to sleep and becomes numb. Then water to fire is, so the inner sign of that is a kind of hallucinatory state. Then water to fire, the inner sign of that transition is where you see like everything feels like a smoke. You're surrounded by smokiness, and there's kind of a heat feeling. Then fire to wind, and it's not air, because wind means movement, actually. So it has to, there it's energy movement. It's not the stillness. Air can be still. So you shouldn't translate as air. Fire to wind is where you see sparks. And then you have, or even they say fireflies, a swarm of fireflies, like little green things going like that, and getting cooler. The heat dissipates and cooler. And then you have wind to space, or consciousness, where you kind of go into a, you lose a sense of your differentiated sense organism, and you go into just feeling. You go, go into space, which you fear when you die. You feel you're losing consciousness, but you haven't lost consciousness. You just feel that you're a spacious entity. And then consciousness to luminance. I call luminance, which is where you, as if the inner sign of which is that, uh, you feel that space, that space is like a white moonlight, like a pure moonlit sky. Scientist named Sky, that's so far out. A moonlit sky, and there's no moon. It's just everything is this white light. And I call it luminance. And then where luminance goes into radiance, the next stage, it's like becomes more solar, where your mind, like it heats up and becomes like orange red, like a sunshine, and very brilliant. And you, you are that brilliance. It's not like you're there being bedazzled by, because you don't have ordinary senses. You're not in your body, in your ordinary body. And it's this brilliant redness. And then that's too much for you, kind of. And you want, you go into imminence, which means threshold, kind of thing, where that's that's like darkness. It's like a brilliant blackness. And then the final stage, where imminence goes to what is called clear light, or although actually clear light is not a light. It's a brilliant thing where everything is transparent, and everything illuminates itself, and there's no shadow. And in a way, it's beyond the duality of light and dark, actually. Although it's called by people's habit, clear light, the proper translation really should be transparency. And it's actually a gray type of light. I wore a gray shirt in honor of it, because the mixture of black and white is gray, right? Kind of a luminous gray, but not really luminous, because no shadow. So, it's a, it's a diamond. Sometimes they compare it to a diamond. A diamond light. A diamond doesn't, is just transparent like glass, you know. So, glass would also be a good thing. So, these are the stages of, uh, stages. Oh, it's a typo. These are the stages of the death dissolution that everybody does every time they die. And actually, they say every time we withdraw from our sense consciousnesses, we go through that state. Okay.

Now, next one. I'm showing you this. You turn that upside down, that that set of transitions and those inner signs, and you connect it to these eight meditative states of the yogi. And what you see is that the yogi coming from the desire realm below the maitri, below the love, you know, where you're just in your sense, your coarse body mind with your sense organs and so forth, and you go into boundless love, boundless compassion, joy, and equipoise. And this connects to the earth to water, to fire, fire to wind, to space. And then that boundary line is where mass becomes infinite, and only mind can go where, you know, it's pure light, you could say. And then you go to space, to that parallels the dissolution process of space to luminance. Then when you're in this vast space, you're not a body floating in it. You are that vast space. And it's a really, it's like as solid as being in this room to you at the time as a yogi. And it feels like a big relief because you're away from being bothered by any kind of unpleasant relationality. And then your mind wants to spread through it. It kind of explodes in that situation, your consciousness does, and then it fills it with consciousness, and it becomes radiance like the sun. Your consciousness is like a sun. And so that corresponds to this vijnana, the infinite consciousness realm or medium. And then finally, that gets boring and too bright, and you go into darkness, which is the same, the same as that. And then finally, the fourth state, which in some forms of Hinduism they think is enlightenment, and in some forms of dualistic Buddhism, Theravada Buddhism, where they teach that nirvana is somewhere beyond the world, not the world, and the world is sucks. They teach the usual thing that the world sucks, and there's a nirvana somewhere else, which, which non-dual Buddhism rejects as a naive, like lack of thinking and lack of understanding, crit, lack of critical insight. And, uh, and Buddha carefully doesn't tell. And actually, by giving this phenomenology, Buddha told those even those dualistic monks, because this is in Pali Buddhism, he said, when you get those states of abstraction that you think is kind of the brink of nirvana, you're going to disappear into, because your self-centeredness wants to disappear, because you associate being related to things as leading to suffering. So when you do that, you're really, that's not nirvana. He says, those four states are not nirvana. He says that, but he doesn't really push it into non-duality, but in a way that is pushing it to non-duality. And there are many hints in the Theravada Buddhism about that. So this, this connection, nobody normally thinks of. But what's beautiful about it is it means that the enlightened mind is accessible to everyone. And every time we have died, and from the Buddhist point of view, we have all died innumerable times, is one reason we're scared of dying. It's not, we, I mean, we are until we're in terrible pain, then we, we call Jack Borian. But, but if we are foolish enough as a materialist to think that we'll just automatically be anesthetized in nothingness, uh, if we have that irrational view, that blind faith view, that can never have evidence for it, by the way. Never, ever. There's no evidence for that. No, Carl Sagan has not reported back that he doesn't exist. And no, and never will. No one who, no one ever will. They do report back occasionally. It's documented in many anecdotal cases of people reporting back after they're dead, and they say, "I'm, I'm here. Feed my cat." You know, we have, we have all of these guys on the, on the TV. They're doing that. They're channeling those people. And of course, the materialist thinks it's all fake, but of course, it isn't, because they know where the cat food is kept. They tell the people. So, though, anyway, my point is, this is, this is very important. It means that every time we die, even every time we fall asleep, we skid past enlightened consciousness, because death is defined as when you reach the clear light state. And the clear light state, or the transparency state, is completely inconceivable, inexpressible, and all this, but it is experiencable. But it's so subtle that normally we don't experience it. I know I've got to quickly go because we're almost done.

Now, um, now if you align the tantric yogis, the psychonauts, Standoff, where is he? I love Standoff. He invented that word psychonaut, which I like. Like astronaut, but the Buddhist inner scientist is a psychonaut at the advanced level. He doesn't go into outer space, goes into inner space like an astronaut, but it's a psychonaut. Anyway, coarse body mind, which we're in now, most of us. I mean, we're paying attention to, rather, we're in all three all the time, but we're paying attention to that is defined as it, it dissolves in this four steps of dissolution as you see on the right. Then there's something called subtle body mind, and that's consists, the body consists of channels, winds, and drops, you know, nadi, vayu, and bindu in Sanskrit, which is that inner chakra system, the neurology. It's actually a kind of neurological system that is the subtle body. And the subtle mind going with that is a mind that is pure luminance, radiance, and imminence. It's a mind of just pure, those pure three light, light states, light realms. And, um, and, uh, which corresponds to those stages of dissolution. And then the super subtle body mind is where body and mind are no different, actually. And Dalai Lama doesn't like to tell this to scientific materialists that he dialogues with, because he thinks they'll triumphantly say, "Aha, mind is matter." And it is, actually, at the super subtle level, there's no difference. But the thing that he's, he's not relying on them understanding is that also matter is mind. There's no difference between matter and mind. So therefore, reductionism to matter can work and be useful for some context, as long as it doesn't become a fanatical dogma, as it has become in our culture. And, but also matter can be mind. And the subtle mind, the power of the subtle mind is actually supreme. So, so that is the main point I wanted to make. And then finally, to talk about Shunyata. I have, I have another at least hour to talk, but I don't. So, final point I want to make is, before I stop, which will be soon, I'm sure, is it already? Okay, one minute. One minute. So the final point I want to make is that this is very, very key, and this is a difference between Buddhist non-duality and Advaita Hindu non-duality. And this is why later Vedantic philosophers in India rejected Shankara's theories, the greatest of the non-dualists on the Hindu side, because they said he was a crypto-Buddhist. He was sneaking Buddhism in on them. And what they meant by that was that Buddhism does not believe in the absoluteness of the caste system, of the Brahman versus the, the low caste person. Buddhism believes all beings are equal. Everyone has a chance to be enlightened, and so forth. Everyone actually is enlightened every time they drop dead. They have a split second of enlightenment, but they haven't trained themselves to catch and to be conscious of the reality from the super subtle level, and thereby be able to really feel that bliss at all times, and be able to share that bliss with other beings. So, so the difference there is that the Buddhist and Shankara's radical nirguna Brahman idea, unqualified Brahman idea, is that all relational things are only relational, and there's no absolute caste system. There's no absolute personal God. There's no absolute creator, and so forth. That those are all projected concepts, and the absolute is inexpressible and transcendent of all of that. And that leaves that leaves the nirguna Brahman to be similar to emptiness. That's why he was rejected by most of the, what they call qualified non-dualists. And even they reached, but with Madhva in the 14th, 15th century, they reached what they call dualistic non-dualism, which I, which is really cool as a way of keeping their Brahman, you know, superiority in their minds, and the absoluteness of that, and then therefore the absoluteness of their own absolute self that they think is absolute, you know. And so that's an important psychological difference. And there are versions of the Hindu one that are like the Buddhist one, and there are versions of the Buddhist one from the non-dualist Theravada traditions type traditions that are like the, like the Hindu one, where they want to keep some sort of absolute, absolute. They want to have an absolute, absolute to get into, to get away from everything, which is the last bastion of the psychotic self-separated absolute self. So, so, so, so therefore, don't be trapped. If you're a good yogi or yogini, and you get into a samadhi, and you withdraw from the sense organs, and you're zipping away there, and you zip up through the eight states, and you're up there, and you're in the fourth state, and you're both awake and asleep at the same time, and you're totally cool, don't think that's the absolute state. That is a kind of, that itself is also empty, that state. And by being empty, it's a relational state. So you can't be there forever. It has causes. The, the absolute, as Buddha described, is uncreated. And I'll leave you with that, which means that we're in Nirvana now. You're right now in Nirvana. Not only when you're at the non-dualist conference, even when you go home, you're in Nirvana, and you've always been there. And when you finally strip away the misknowing, the misunderstanding that you're not in Nirvana, and you're struggling to get somewhere and deal with like Calvin and hell, and Luther and God, and, and nothingness, and a rarefied nothingness. When you're dealing with that, you're still in Nirvana. When you understand that you're in Nirvana, you realize you are always in Nirvana. And that's how I console myself for being unenlightened, by the way, when people ask me after 50 years of study. Because actually, although I am not enlightened, and I never would dare claim it, my wife would throw me out of the house if I did, uh, when I do get enlightened, which I will definitely in some future life, I will revise my experience of being here with you a little bit over my time, and I'll realize that I was already enlightened now, and I will re-experience this moment with you all retroactively as nirvanic bliss. Okay, with all of you in. Okay, bye. Thank you. Thank you very much. Okay, how about that? [Music]