Y Series: Twelve Links of Dependent Origination
Consciousness (vijnana)
Our next link is the polluted mind stream that we think of ‘ourselves’ as. Consciousness, or how we develop afflictions and execute our karmic tendences. It’s not necessarily a sense or the general pervasiveness of “I am,” rather, in this case, it’s just the moment when we do something with intention. This triggers a karmic connection. The resultant consciousness is the understanding that I am a person. No one seems to know exactly when this comes to be, but it seems to be the sense of individuality and personhood that is the root of a lot of selfish behavior. There are a number of Buddhist schools with all kinds of lists and contradictory understandings of what consciousness is and how that relates to rebirth and karmic repercussions, but I don’t find that particularly helpful in this argument, so I’m going to skip all that. Instead, I would like to offer that consciousness seems to just be the universe looking at a piece of itself, given name and form. Name, in this case, refers to feeling, discrimination, intention, contact, and attention. Thus, your mindstream is yours, but it’s also everyone and everything else’s and it is defined by its relationship with everything else. Thus, you are you, but also an impermanent aggregate of collapsing wave functions and not a definite ‘thing’ separate and distinct from all other material and energetic concepts.
This seems to just be a way for nature to create relationships in the void, and thus materialize energy. So, our teacher in this sections spends a lot of time talking about the different perceptions of the reality of consciousness in the sutras and how it relates to wisdom, but I would like to stick with my take here, as the sutras are rife with metaphor and technical language that I find very unsatisfying. The Dalai Lama summarizes this bit of chaos in saying that consciousness performs a key role of maintaining the continuity of an individual’s existence with life and death. I don’t know if I see that. There’s a lot of talk of karmic seeds and latencies, etc., but I don’t see why those behaviors and actions wouldn’t just be translated into aggregates of energy that ebbs and flows with whatever space its in.
Name and Form
Next up from consciousness is the name and form. Once we name ourselves and identify with this form and body as “I,” we seem to be sort of stuck. The mental and physical aggregates of life are polluted with all manner of afflictions (both innate and adopted) and this seems to start a karmic positive feedback loop that locks us into this self-centered obsession with our own cognition and consciousness. We fill up the emptiness with our own story, so to speak, even though it is just a story. This is the start of dukkha, as we experience in this life and follow on lives. We share in the suffering of everyone and everything as we each act selfishly, not seeing the fundamental connections of energy and emptiness that is the true state of existence. We get very, very interested in attention, feeling, discrimination, and intention as opposed to seeing holistic structures. We get lost in the details, so to speak, and become far more interested in feeling pain/pleasure, making plans, discriminating others’ forms and thus get distracted from seeing the spaces between all those big chunks of ‘form.’
Six Sources
Tibetan Buddhism really likes lists. Lists for all kinds of stuff. I have run across some authors that say that this Sanskrit Srvasti school is the ‘long’ school because it is for highly analytical people who have trouble passing through the gate of emptiness. It’s for the spiritually slow kids in the class, if one were to use an impolite metaphor (though that one’s nicer than the stuff they say about Theraveda/Pali traditions. Woof.). Anyway. In contrast to Chan or Zen Buddhism, the ‘long’ school is a winding path where people essentially have to relearn all their assumptions and convince themselves logically of the Buddhist path to Enlightenment instead of experiencing the instant recognition of emptiness and wisdom that Chan and Zen advocate. As I said before, Zen practitioners are either profoundly lazy or stunningly brilliant. Or both.
Anyway, the six sources are eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mental cognitive faculties. These sense organs allow us to interact with the world, but they also lie to us, pretty consistently. Our perception becomes not an interface, but the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth and we lose the ability to sense internal sources and wisdom since we get all caught up with external phenomena. This includes mental phenomena called dharmayatana in Sanskrit. These are things that are perceptible by mind, but subtle. Like dreams, ethics, etc. They are still real things, but not exactly physical. The Dalai Lama goes through a whole long explanation on how these faculties are defined and what consciousness means for each sense, but I don’t particularly find that helpful. I do find it interesting that he notes that sentient creatures are born in four ways: womb, egg, heat and moisture, and spontaneously. The spontaneous creatures include devas and hell beings and they emerge fully formed and ready to interact with their enivrons without passing go or collecting $200. There is also a lot of talk about dragons in Chan/Zen Buddhism, as if the dharma protectors were actual beings in human form, same for hell-beings. As if human physical form was just sort of a catch-all miscellaneous shape for whatever consciousness happened to drop in there and that the consciousness itself could be a ghost, dragon, hell-being, asura, whatever. Or it could take its true form and exist in its proper dimension, but there seems to be some fluidity about what that dimension is. I’m of the particular opinion that the material realm (where we exist), is it. That the hungry ghosts and demons all exist on our plane, we just see them as human because we are profoundly blind and self-centered creatures and can’t see ourselves on a good day, much less view the true nature of a hungry ghost with any level of accuracy. I say this because I’m very sure I’ve met hungry ghosts in this world and that’s why capitalism and global climate change exists. Similarly, I’m almost positive I have met true demons in this realm, and again, that’s why climate change and capitalism exist. So, my contention is that the illusion of homogeneity in the material realm is just because of my six cognitive faculties and obscurations and if I could see clearly, I would see all the realms reflected around me. I don’t think I’ve met any dragons or devas. A couple actual humans, maybe, but not so for the others.
Buddaghosa has a nice verse for this:
They cannot come to be by their own strength,
Or yet maintain themselves by their own strength.
Relying for support on other states,
Weak in themselves, and formed, they come to be.
They come to be with others as condition;
They are aroused by others as their objects;
They are produced by object and condition,
And each by something other than itself.
And just as people depend upon
A boat for traversing the sea,
So does the mental ‘body’ need
The physical body for occurrence.
And as the boat depends upon
The people for traversing the sea
So does the physical body need
The mental ‘body’ for occurrence.
Depending each upon the other,
The boat and people go on the sea.
And so do mind and body both
Depend the one upon the other.
Only in my perception, the mind can be any kind of sentient being from any realm who can control and build the body of its choice here in the material realm. The Dalai Lama says this is an incorrect view, though, so please don’t agree with me.
Contact (sparsa)
Contact is what happens when we get a body and then can do all manner of nice things with it. The experience of pleasure, pain, or neutrality seems to be a largely conditioned response based on physical obsession or biochemical requirements of existing in material form. Again, there are a lot of special names for cognitive faculties apprehending objects that all define how contact arises, but I’m sorry to report that I am not interested in learning these academic names or debating the exact conditions for each. I don’t care. I am interested in the overall idea and then forgetting the idea in the experience of the truth. Because I am either very lazy or very brilliant or both.
Feeling (vedana)
Here again we have another link based in the idea of finding something pleasurable or painful or neutral. I find little difference between this one and contact, but the Dalai Lama specifies that contact is the cause and the feeling is the result. Evidently, the distinction is important. There are five types that he delineates and with all of the six organs and he says that feeling is the most important because it leads to the most intense cravings. This even applies to beings in the fourth dhyana and above who “who only have neutral feeling and do not wish the peace it brings to cease.” Supposedly, the place between feeling and craving is a weak part of the chain where life-to-life travel can be broken and a good place to start the journey to enlightenment. By recognizing and being aware of feelings without reacting to them, observing when they arise and fall away, and how craving ruins us, we can break the link and see something real.
REFLECTION
1. Observe your feelings with mindfulness and introspective awareness and identify pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral feelings.
2. Be aware that they arise after contact with an object.
3. Watch how instantly craving arises for pleasant feelings to continue and for unpleasant feelings to cease.
4. How do all these feelings, as well as the craving they provoke, affect your life? How do you respond to them?
Since I am a bit of a control freak, I tend to deeply resent things that I crave. The idea that I could want something and not have the ability to decide whether or not it should be in my life provokes an immediate rejection, whether or not it is deserved. But, on the other hand, I crave other people’s understanding and love so badly that I literally will choose to ruin my life on the off-chance that someone will pay attention to me and understand me for once. It never works, it is always unsatisfying or heart-breaking, and yet, I find myself doing those behaviors over and over again. This is the main reason that I chose to reject relationships as a whole. Even friendships are disturbing. Lay life says that you have to have people in your life. That you have to have relationships with your family, friends, etc. and of course, you need a mate. Well. I hate how I am around other people. I hate the black hole need for affection and the way no one ever sees me. So, I decided to stop participating. Keeping things at a much more surface level and letting people disappear whenever they want seems to be much more effective to ease that craving for contact that is so unhelpful.
5. Are there certain objects that it would be helpful for you to avoid temporarily so that you can work on reducing the craving that results from contact with them?
Hmm. I’m still in love with a dead woman. She’s not technically dead. She’s trans and has adopted a new life, married another woman, etc. But for the purposes of this discussion, the woman I was in love with was a woman and it was awful. I genuinely think she was the love of my life and for a couple years, she was the only thing real and beautiful in my rather dark little world. But it didn’t work out. She didn’t see me and had all manner of expectations that I couldn’t fulfill or even recognize. And vice versa. So here, I had a literal soul mate. The culmination of a lifetime of media propaganda and the thing that everyone was working for, and we couldn’t make it work. First of all, being gay in the military is just NOT DONE, so there’s no way she could have come with me on my little Army journey. She never understood what I saw in it anyway, and since I am defined by the warrior ethos and commitment to Service, I doubt we could have anything to talk about. She was more interested in herself – all her traumas and challenges and ‘boundaries’ than anything I could offer. But, I was obsessed with her. For almost twenty years, every time I tried to like another person or tried to be in a relationship or tried to get her out of my soul, those two years where she almost saw me and where we almost connected was enough to contaminate everything with anyone else. In such a short time, I almost felt like a person, but only with her and that ruined me for everyone else. Always reaching out for some understanding that no one else could even approach just made me feel ugly, small, and crushingly alone as she married someone else and then died.
I still think about her every day and miss her every day, but ultimately, whatever I thought love was or what relationships could offer was just the misguided illusions of a craving mind addicted to affection and individuality. At the end, she didn’t even know I existed anyway and whatever hope I had to be seen by anyone every again died with her. And I think it’s good to let it. I don’t know anyone happy in relationships. I don’t know anyone capable of generosity or selflessness or real happiness. We’re all just a bunch of hungry ghosts swallowing shadows made of lead. The lie of intimacy and human connection is the worst crime perpetuated on humanity, in my opinion. I no longer watch media or listen to music because you can’t get away from this lie. This horrible, horrible lie saying that romantic love is possible and that any sort of deep human connection is possible and that you as a person will be anything more than a brief blip of a pleasurable experience to someone else before you are used, ignored, and abandoned is just worse than cruel. I don’t have words for the disappointment and hatred for this lie and I am grateful every day just to be alone and not have to watch her die in front of me.
So this is not a temporary giving up. In my mind, this is a permanent rejection of her, the lie that built her in my mind, and the society that dangles this illusion in front of its citizens as a poor substitute for an actual human experience that we are not capable of having. It is also the reason why I am frustrated with all these Zen Roshi who are married or trying to make money off their so-called spiritual realizations. As far as I can tell, they are trapped in an illusion. Not spiritual at all. They might wear the robes and chant the verses, but as Buddha says:
“The wind cannot overturn a mountain.
Temptation cannot touch the man
Who is awake, strong and humble,
Who masters himself and minds the law.
If a man’s thoughts are muddy,
If he is reckless and full of deceit,
How can he wear the yellow robe?
Whoever is master of his own nature,
Bright, clear, and true…
Desire is a hollow
And people say, “look! He was free. But now he gives up his freedom.”
It is not iron that imprisons you
Nor rope nor wood,
But the pleasure you take in gold and jewels,
In sons and wives.
Soft fetters,
Yet they hold you down.
Can you snap them?
There are those who can,
Who surrender the world,
Forsake desire, and follow the way.”