Lankavatara 2:IV:1-10

*transcript generated by AI

All right, so welcome to our first in a series of actually working with the Lanka last week, we kind of introduced and took up some of the kind of introductory material around key concepts in the Lankavatara.

And today, and what the Lankavatara is and decided that we’ll actually work with it.

And today, we open by reading an excerpt from the first few pages that went from kind of the introductory material up to a certain point.

And then we begin with in Red Pine’s version, it’s chapter two, section four, which begins on page 65 of the edition that I have.

Before I forget a brief note, while doing some research, I did find out that Thomas Cleary also has a translation of the Lankavatara that I have not read.

It was also published in 2012.

And Clary’s work can be great, Clary’s work can be less great.

His body of work is prolific, and we owe him a great deal.

And sometimes it was a little inconsistent.

So I haven’t read it, I don’t know which category the Lanka falls into.

But it’s out there as well.

One thing that I noticed, which is something I noticed when I was teaching this text for priest training is that at times, I just don’t like Red Pine’s version.

I generally speaking, think that he does a great job of a kind of scholarly approach with extensive footnoting and kind of giving a historical context and comparing it to other teachings.

And he does all sorts of really great work.

But at times, it doesn’t feel like I’m, I guess my critique would be that he makes it read like something that was written in English.

And it’s not.

And so when we work directly, when I work directly with the Chinese versions, there’s a lot more punchy clarity that comes through in the text.

So I actually translated this section that we’re about to work with myself to just kind of give some compare and contrast.

So that’s our framing for today.

We’ll get through what we get through.

We could stay on this section for a couple weeks, we might find that there’s nothing really to talk about.

And then I’ll have to figure out what to do next week.

We’ll just see what happens.

But this section starts with a question, as most of our sections will start with a question.

And that question is, in my translation, Mahamati asked the Buddha, honored one, how many types of arising, abiding and cessation of consciousness are there?

It’s kind of an interesting question, but that’s where we start.

How many types of arising, abiding and cessation of consciousness are there?

And the Buddha answered Mahamati, Mahamati, the arising, abiding and cessation of consciousness cannot be understood through recursive thought.

Mahamati, the various consciousness each have two types of arising, abiding and ceasing.

The two kinds of ceasing, abiding and arising are cessation of characteristics and cessation of continuity.

So that’s already plenty, I figured we could dig into for now.

The one quick note that I want to put in before we open it up for what comes up for everyone else is the name Mahamati.

Mahamati is like the high minded, great minded.

It’s like the wise yogin is kind of what it means.

And when I work with it in the Chinese, which is a little bit removed because I think this was originally composed in Sanskrit.

Sometimes I question the idea that this is really about like bodhisattva or historical exchange.

And when we look at the introduction that we read, it said that Ravana was in meditation and had this great visionary experience and it was like, well, who was talking?

So for me, when I read these, I see the bodhisattvas as deifications or personifications of aspects of our own consciousness.

Which reminds me of the koan about Zengan calls himself master, right?

Stay awake, stay awake.

And then he would run up and down the things like, do not be fooled by anyone at any place or any time.

And then he’d run back down and be like, yes, yes.

Right.

And he was talking to himself.

And so when each time we hear this Mahamati or each time I hear this Mahamati, I hear a call to wisdom.

It’s like, like a mantra, like cutting through, right?

This cannot be understood through recursive thought.

We have to rely on Mahamati, Mahamati, right?

I’m going to say something and then Mahamati, remember Mahamati.

If you think this makes sense with recursive thought, Mahamati, which I think makes the whole text far more entertaining.

Otherwise the amount of times that we have to say Mahamati gets really annoying.

There we are.

There are two types of the arising, abiding and cessation of consciousness.

And those two types of the cessation of characteristics and cessation of continuity.

Does that bring up any questions, comments or points of discussion?

Well I could take a swing at it.

Sure.

Well, yeah, just a few things come up for me.

And this will take me a few minutes to have a few minutes to speak openly.

Sure.

We’ve got about 35 minutes.

Okay.

So as I was listening to that sutra, it’s always been like my impression in the past of studying these things are just, they’re a feast to go into.

And in this one, you know, I look at it as look at how the mind is working at the beginning and the beginning is like, can you visualize, can you see the Buddhas on the mountaintops?

And it’s kind of this big, beautiful, enchanted view of the world.

It’s almost kind of informing your one’s view is like, can you see this?

Can you visualize this?

Can you use that capacity and actually transform your state into seeing this in the world?

And then, you know, obviously it would, but that’s not it.

You can do that.

That’s okay.

And it’ll help your mind in some way, you know, now you’re going to be steeped in it.

But don’t hang on to that.

And in my view, what I just did is I’ll give you my secrets, what I do.

So as I was listening to that, that is all sutras.

It’s like, wow, this complex, beautiful thing.

There’s these serious teachings about non-attachment and letting go in it and don’t hang on to what’s a dharma and not a dharma.

That’s not it.

Here I’m telling you to think about it at the same time.

So it’s kind of a little bit of a trickery.

And as we ended that, I always thought, well, this feels kind of, there’s almost like an incoherence to it.

It’s like a, like a, it’s like an epic poem or drama that seems a little out of kilter and it doesn’t quite work.

And then I looked up, this is just a brief, this is just a brief explanation of what Suzuki and Takasaki Jikoda have noted about it, that this particular text is that it’s unsystematic and disorganized resembling the notebook or commonplace book of a Mahayana master, which recorded important teachings.

And Takasaki says it’s merely a mosaic collection of small parts put at random within the frame of a sutra.

So that kind of, you know, I feel vindicated that like, yeah, there’s just really kind of not a whole lot of coherence to this thing.

You can look at this a lot of different ways, but the wisdom is in it.

And, you know, this will keep the monks out of trouble for four years.

Give them that sutra and have them go study that.

And, but there is a wisdom, you know, the notion of visualizing, can you see the Buddha world?

Is it enchanted?

Can you feel transformed by that?

And yet let that go.

That’s not it.

That’s not it.

That’s not it.

And then, you know, you get down to the Zen of it, that’s not it.

So that’s my brief take on it.

Your brief take, just to be clear, that was your brief take on the research that you did in between sessions and also a little bit of your reflection on the meditation that we did earlier, just to be clear for the context of what you were sharing.

And then did you have anything that you wanted to say about the opening excerpt that we’re taking up for discussion today?

Oh, as you said, yes, I can see as you’re framing it, the Mahavata, like the big Mahamati.

Mahamati, yes.

So that’s I can see that as well.

It’s almost like the voices, what voices are at dialogue in my head.

I can agree with that.

Like there’s a there’s no literal relationship to these in the world, but they’re big voice of Buddha.

And the questioning voice of uncertainty, Mahamati.

So, yeah, that’s another way you can look at us.

Do you want to do you want to take up the content of the passage that we’re examining?

Robin, I don’t know if you I see you reading along as well.

Did you have anything that you wanted to bring in terms of taking up this hiding, arising and ceasing of consciousness and continuity or characteristic?

I guess what I’m getting from it is it’s either a continuation or it’s, I don’t know, labelable, but it’s either a continuation or it’s, I don’t know, it’s a continuation.

Or it’s.

I don’t know, labelable, if that’s even a word.

Yeah, that’s a step into it, so basically, and as we get farther and this kind of gets expanded, but stopping here for discussion, I think it’s important.

So when when I look at this, the cessation of characteristics is.

Like phenomenon that we can observe in the world that arise and fall away, so it’s like our capacity to perceive something as a characteristic, so when I look at the computer screen, I have a characteristic and when I look away from the computer screen, that characteristic is ceased and another one has started.

Right.

And so there’s characteristic of phenomenon in our experience and in meditation, we can have a cessation of that experience.

We can experience that there’s an interruption or a step of meditation where we are not perceiving phenomenon.

And so that’s a characteristic continuity, is that in our altered states of deep meditation, we can we generally experience a continuity of awareness that persists over time.

And it’s like an uninterruptible flow of consciousness that we may take to be an underlying substratum of self.

Well, that can also cease.

So how does that work and if that ceases, what’s left?

And so this is kind of where the text is taking us as an investigation into these two different types of the cessation of consciousness as we come to understand how our mind works to create the reality.

Thank you for turning something very fuzzy into something that’s clear.

Hopefully we can keep doing that.

So, Michael, do you have any lingering questions on that particular passage before we move on?

Well, yeah, I the I guess the you know, the safe cessation and characteristics.

Of.

Is there any possibility that this.

Or continuity and characteristics, I’m sorry, and then seeing the cessation eventually is that is that continuity like I have a continuity of.

Continually seeing.

Something is difficult or is it without any emotion to it, I also can continue to see something as permanent and relevant, and there’s a kind of attachment to that.

And also in the continuity of just.

By overall reifying myself, there’s the constant kind of there’s a me here doing this.

Is that a fair way to expand on that, or is it just a very clear, simple, straightforward as you were describing?

Those would all be in the realm of characteristics.

And and we get further into reification and emotion and grasping and attachment as we move on, as when we get into two main categories of consciousness, which is the the which I think show up in the next couple paragraphs here, so we might just.

But I think that’s going to keep happening where this will, the sutra will walk us into a question and then it will answer the question that it just walked us into.

So let’s see what this says about kind of what you were talking about.

OK, so it says Mahamati consciousness has three types.

The first transformational characteristics, things changing over time, the second karmic characteristics, the interplay of cause and effect, the third wisdom characteristics or the characteristic of clear knowledge.

Mahamati, there are three types of consciousness, and they’re all very similar, but they’re Mahamati.

There are eight kinds of consciousness, which are summarized in two categories.

Which two?

First, discriminating consciousness, which is the capacity to perceive distinct phenomena.

That’s me doing an inline definition there.

Second, conceptualizing consciousness, which is our abstracting consciousness and our selfing consciousness, our conceptual overlay on what we perceive.

Mahamati, like seeing many forms in a mirror, the discriminating consciousness perceives mirror-like appearances.

Discriminating and conceptualizing consciousnesses or consciousness has no distinguishing characteristics.

Each is the cause of the other in turn.

Right, so discriminating and conceptualizing consciousness, these are the two types of consciousness, have no distinguishing characteristics.

It’s impossible to tell them apart.

Each is the cause of the other in turn.

So there’s the three types of consciousnesses that show up again later in the text, and we revisit many times.

And right now, we kind of like dropped that in there as a seed and then came back to there’s eight consciousnesses, and these eight consciousnesses live in two types.

They’re the type that has a direct perceptual experience, and there’s a type that abstracts, conceptualize, and generates a subjective relationship to those direct experiences.

And these two co-arise and co-create each other.

So Michael, what you were saying there is you have a direct experience of something, which is a characteristic, and you take that characteristic and you abstract it and you create a self-relationship to it, and there is your conceptualizing consciousness, right?

So the discriminating consciousness says, I’m having this experience, this perception.

Your conceptualizing consciousness says, well, I think that is really difficult.

So discriminating is meaning making?

Meaning making is conceptualizing.

Oh, fuck.

Yeah, so this is a beautiful question.

This is why this can take us a while, because these are really complex and nuanced phenomena.

I need a flowchart.

Well, you are welcome to bring a journal and make one.

So when we look at our discriminating consciousness, the Chinese is really revealing, it’s liao bia shi, which is understanding others, the consciousness of understanding others.

Okay, and what that means is it’s kind of like that direct, like touch the stove, ow, stove hot, right?

It’s that direct experience of the hotness.

That’s what the discriminating consciousness does for us.

It’s just touch, the capacity to perceive the touch and have an experience.

The conceptualizing consciousness is the one that goes, ow, I just got burned.

Oh, it hurts.

Right?

And that’s fun bia shi.

And fun bia shi is separating others.

So that’s the process of attracting a layer of meaning from the direct experience.

So just in your own experience right now, can you pick those two apart?

Can you just, knowing what to look for, just look and see how there’s a direct experience of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, thinking.

And then there’s immediately an abstraction of that information into a relationship that you take to it.

Yeah, so one has that, well, yeah, there’s that kind of the immediate direct experience of, oh, and then we go into, oh, I like this, I don’t like this.

It’s beautiful.

It’s ugly.

We find these real polarities.

It’s good.

It’s bad.

I like them.

I don’t like them.

It gets very nuanced.

But there’s just the immediacy of the experience itself.

And then we have all these conceptual overlays of conditioning.

Conditioning.

Once again, you’re walking us into the next question.

So, oh, look at you.

Good job, Michael.

All right.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

And so, how does that work?

What is going on with conditioning, right?

And so, the Buddha continues by saying the discriminating consciousness, the consciousness of direct experience is unfathomably perfumed with latent karmic expressions.

And basically, that phrase, perfuming a consciousness is a really specific Yogacara term.

But it’s basically saying that there was a cause and effect that happened at some time in the past.

And that lives deep within the storehouse consciousness.

And that storehouse consciousness is just sitting there.

And it is the causes and effects that are held in that storehouse consciousness directly impact the way the discriminating consciousness has a direct experience.

And this is very deep level of conditioning.

It’s the kind of conditioning that says you got stung by a bee and you had a really bad allergic reaction.

And then when you directly perceive a bee, that perception is automatically colored with fear.

That’s not a layer of abstraction.

It’s part of the direct experience.

Because your discriminating consciousness takes what’s happening in the sense organ, like the eye, and what’s happening in the alaya-vijnana of your perfumed characteristics and puts them together as part of the discriminating process.

And then there’s an abstraction layer that happens.

And so the conceptualizing consciousness discriminates and grasps at perceived objects.

The conceptualizing consciousness discriminates and grasps at perceived objects.

So we have this perceived objects of the scary bee.

And then it does what Michael was saying.

Oh, I don’t like that.

I don’t like that.

Like that.

And I’m going to now grasp to the idea that I don’t like that.

And I’m going to have an anxious reaction.

And I’m going to run away from the bee because of this.

And this is what this means to me.

And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Okay.

So discriminating consciousness is unfathomably perfumed with latent karmic impressions.

The conceptualizing consciousness discriminates and grasps at perceived objects.

So unfathomable.

My example isn’t quite that unfathomable.

That’s a pretty direct cause and effect relationship.

But there’s other things that are quite unfathomable about the process.

But since they’re unfathomable, it’s awfully hard for me to talk about them as examples.

Perhaps I may take a speak though at this.

So that unfathomable perfuming, I understand that as and I may be wrong, is that there’s like our personal unfathomable perfumed reality.

But also it’s kind of just, we came out of a womb with this perfume as well.

Like we have just this human condition that’s informing this as well.

And this is where we could get into reincarnation and say, well, you’re actually bringing stuff from your previous life.

So there’s just this, we don’t know where these causes and conditions began.

We try to equate it with being born.

But do we actually know how mysterious this is in the end?

How far back does it go, blah, blah, blah.

Again, you’re walking us into the next lines of the Sutra.

You are synced right up with Mahamati right now.

And I didn’t even do my homework.

Mahamati, from beginningless time, from beginningless time, conceptual proliferation has perfumed the mind.

As the various perfumed tendencies of the alaya consciousnesses, alaya consciousnesses diluted distinctions are brought to cessation, the sense faculties likewise cease.

And then we have a little bit of a about face in what the Sutra is teaching us right here in terms of liberation.

But it does answer the question.

According to deep meditators, consciousness is beginningless.

No one has identified the beginning of consciousness or sentient experience.

And so that is an important thing to understand.

So is the fact that Jackson just came in.

Where are you going?

Ah, the Buddha arrived.

Oh, well, thank you.

It doesn’t have that one.

That’s the Shinrei.

That one’s gone.

Bye, buddy.

Love you.

So anything coming up around the idea of beginningless time, conceptual proliferation has perfumed.

Now, so then this other part here is really fun, because it’s a really great meditation instruction.

As the various perfumed tendencies of the alaya consciousnesses diluted distinctions are brought to cessation, the sense faculties likewise cease.

Mahamati, this is called the cessation of characteristics.

Does anyone remember the part in the Heart Sutra where it goes, no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, and no mind?

Yes.

One by one, deep meditation shuts them off.

Oh.

Oh.

Do we say shut them off, or did we just see them for what they are?

Shutting them off sounds suppressive.

Cessation.

This is not vague.

It says specifically, as the various perfumed tendencies of the alaya consciousnesses diluted distinctions are brought to cessation, the sense faculties likewise cease.

The sense faculties likewise cease.

This is voidness.

This is the seventh jhana.

This is the experience of nothingness.

And we can relate to it very directly.

Has anyone ever been so concentrated on something that when somebody called your name, you didn’t hear them?

Well, in that sense, the alaya consciousnesses perfuming had ceased.

It was no longer perfuming the ears.

And so there was no hearing.

In deep meditation, eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, mind, all get deprived of the alaya consciousnesses support.

And therefore, there are no characteristics which arise.

There’s nothing there.

So now we’re talking seventh and eighth jhanas.

We’re talking about a certain type of cessation experience.

Well, it’s not like you never see or smell again.

So it’s not like they’ve ceased.

These same cease is that in that state, you cease to be moved by them.

So the faculties shut down and the faculties come back online, which asks the question, how is it possible?

What is the basis that persists during the period of time where I’m no longer experiencing something?

That sounds a lot like continuity, a question of continuity, doesn’t it?

Well, it’s not a question of continuity.

It’s a question of continuity.

It’s not a question of continuity.

It’s a question of continuity.

Something that sounds a lot like continuity, a question of continuity, doesn’t it?

Could you restate that, please?

Sure.

So the question is, if I can experience that my sense faculties have all shut down and that I’m no longer experiencing sensing anything through my eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body or mind, right?

I’m experiencing nothing, but there’s still an I’m experiencing nothing.

Right.

So there’s a continuity of consciousness that’s happening despite stimulation from the sense faculties.

What is that?

That continuity can cease as well.

Yes.

Right.

Which is where the suture goes next.

Okay.

Okay.

So are we tracking so far?

It’s pretty deep stuff.

But if we’re hanging on, then we can take up the next little section here.

Yeah.

Track it.

It’s just the different labels that are getting put with things.

But I’m understanding the concept.

I’ll get the labels later.

Exactly.

Vocabulary will come.

Okay.

So we just got described the cessation of characteristics.

And then it says Mahamati.

Mahamati.

Don’t rely on recursive thought for this.

Mahamati.

The cessation of continuity occurs when the cause of continuity ceases.

Okay.

When both the cause and the conditions cease, continuity ceases.

Mahamati.

This is what is meant by relying on dharmas and relying on conditions.

Consciousness relies on dharmas and relies on conditions.

Relying on dharmas refers to the beginningless perfuming of the mind by conceptual proliferation and false ideation.

Okay.

Basically, it’s saying that phenomenon arise on the basis of our alaya consciousness.

Arise on the basis of our deep conditioning.

Relying on conditions refers to one’s own mind consciousness perceiving and discriminating the field of phenomenon.

Okay.

Right.

So this is the cause and the conditions.

The dharma, dharmas, as in phenomenological experience being perfumed by the storehouse.

And then one’s own mind consciousness perceiving and discriminating the field of phenomenon.

The actual field of phenomenon, pure selfless awareness.

Right.

So there’s the things that arise in selfless awareness, which are dharmas.

And there’s pure selfless awareness itself.

Right.

Which is the conditions.

When both of these cease, we experience a cessation in continuity.

And this reveals to us the truth that consciousness itself is not an underlying eternal substratum self like Brahman.

This is where the Mahayana Buddhists get more non-dual than the Advaita Vedantins.

Right.

Is that there is no underlying ever eternal, unchanging substratum of experience that can be considered a self.

That’s the critical insight.

How does that insight arise?

When we shut down the discriminating consciousness long enough.

So that there’s so little stimulation from phenomenological experience that our mind actually shuts itself off like deep sleep.

This is why this shows up so often in metaphor like deep sleep when you are so dead asleep that you have no experience of sleeping.

And then it’s like you wake up and it’s 10 hours later because you just had a great night’s sleep.

Right.

Same thing.

Only the experience is such that, you know, you entered it on purpose through meditative practices.

And when you emerged, you know that you never fell asleep.

And that’s where you know you experienced a cessation in continuity.

And what happens is you can watch yourself restart self-awareness that perceives phenomenon that gives the meaning.

And through that, then you can deconstruct the idea that you have any permanent separate self and also that any particular dharma, any particular phenomenological experience has any permanent separate self nature because it also ceased to exist when you did.

And this is a deep and profound form of liberation.

And now you’re perfume.

Now, you know, you did your existence.

You’ve perfumed.

The alive vision in a different way, you think you never forget this.

This will change.

Right.

And yeah.

There’s no turning back.

What do you mean I’m wrong?

Yeah, well, what’s really beautiful about it is later on in the sutra, we’ll explore how this experience is called turning about in the base.

And now, instead of being called the alaya consciousness, it’s called the womb of the Buddha, the Tagata Garba.

And basically, what it’s saying is that we’ve gone into this place that’s dark, which is this like unfathomably perfumed experience.

And now we’ve illuminated it.

And by illuminating it, we see how our consciousness is working.

We see what contributes to the way we directly experience things.

We see how we abstract from those things and how we conceptualize and how we grasp anything.

Now, we instead of being in ignorance and darkness of this process, we are awakened to we have illuminated this process.

And this process is what we are.

There is no who involved.

It’s simply a what of unfolding.

And now we’re living awakening.

So were you saying that the.

The.

In the literature that the.

The processes themselves have different names prior to awakening and post awakening is post awakening, it is then perfumed by the knowledge of.

Nothing.

Sort of.

So the second part, yes, the first part.

I think the only term that changes is the idea of a storehouse consciousness becoming the woman.

You know, and I think that’s.

So it’s not the process.

It’s the the storehouse itself.

Right.

And it changes.

You have a dark warehouse and that’s just like the thing over there that’s called the Alaya.

And then you’ve gone into it and you flip the lights on and now it’s the womb of the Buddha.

OK, and this kind of ties into some of what Michael was saying earlier that this text, while I don’t necessarily agree with the assessment, I think it’s incredibly complex and nuanced and requires extensive training to be able to understand how this text is entirely coherent within itself.

One thing that it does do is it leaves a lot.

For the practitioner to directly experience without overexplaining.

And one of the things that that does is it creates certain ambiguities.

So some yoga charan commentators will say that there’s actually nine consciousnesses and that the Tathagatagarbha is actually a separate consciousness from the Alaya vision of Alaya Vijnana through some of the ambiguities of language and then the way people understand the ontology of the practice.

And it’s not incoherent, but it does allow people to make certain statements that aren’t falsifiable based on the text, or at least in the translations that we have.

It is one of the reasons why I’m committed to retranslating, because in my experience of the Chinese, while it’s deeply confusing and it has taken me at times months to understand a single sentence, I’ve never actually found it to be internally incoherent.

I’ve never actually found it to be internally incoherent.

That might change as I do the whole thing in Chinese rigorously.

But for now, I have a lot of faith in this text as being a coherent practice manual.

Is Alaya Vijnana and Vijnana are two things like Vijnana is a small stream, isn’t it?

Alaya is like the big stream, or is that not true?

So Vijnana is made of Vi and Jnana, which means something along the lines of separating knowledge, separating knowledge discrimination.

And it is the general term for consciousness that shows up quite a lot.

And all of the eight layers of all of the eight consciousnesses in the Yogacara model are some Vijnana.

Like there’s the Manas Vijnana, there’s the Mano Vijnana, and there’s the Alaya Vijnana.

And the five Manas Vijnanas have their own names that relate to eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and body.

And so Vijnana as a term really is just kind of pointing to streams of consciousness.

And then the other name like Alaya is just saying, well, this is the storehouse stream.

And you could kind of think of it as eight rivers.

It’s like one river with like eight strata that is all kind of flowing and interplaying together.

That’s one potential metaphor for how to think of this system.

Uh-huh.

Or like the eight rivers in the riverless river.

It’s just it’s in a bigger thing, maybe.

Yeah.

I kind of like to think of more like a nuclear fission kind of thing where like everything bombards in and explodes out.

And it’s like bombarding in and exploding out at the same time.

Uh-huh.

Oh, yeah.

Chaos and order.

Yeah.

Okay.

So there’s our entry into the Lankavatara.

Hopefully you find it psychoactive and mind warping.

And it gives you plenty to chew on for the next seven days when we pick up from where we left off with the next section here in chapter two, part four.

Um, we have enough left probably to stay with this for our next Dharma discussion.

And then we’ll go from there.

So at this point, I’d like to invite closing check-in, whatever may feel right for you to wrap up our time together and step into what’s next.

I’ve been checking in.

Well, this has given me a lot to work with, one, intellectually and then internalizing it.

And it brings me back to the struggle I’ve always had with this practice of at what point does learning about the text, reading the text, then color your experience?

Instead of having direct experience, are you, I don’t know, perfuming your experience with something that you’ve read and you’ve internalized from the mind in as opposed to direct experience in, if that makes any sense?

The thinking mind in.

And so then does it cease to be authentic?

If what you’re experiencing is what somebody has told you, you are going to experience and then spinning on this muddy mess.

And that’s where I am.

Well, I’ll let you chew on that and you can decide whether to come back and ask us a question next time.

Okay.

Oh, yeah, Michael, a lot of gratitude.

I feel some wonderful perfuming and some wonderful cessation here together today.

Great time spent together.

Time well spent.

I’m in.

And let me check in with joy and gratitude.

There’s nothing quite like nerding out on one of my favorite sutras with other cool people who like to nerd out on consciousness.

So I’m feeling energized and excited for this project and in the translation work, but then also to kind of come in and use this as a vehicle to deepen our practice.

So deep gratitude for y’all and making the sangha real.

Have a wonderful week.

We will see you and talk to you soon.

See you.