Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:00 Welcome to my Bob Thurman podcast. I'm so grateful. Some good friends enabled me to present them to you. If you enjoy them and find them useful, please think of becoming a member of Tibet house us to help preserve Tibetan culture. Tibet house is the Dal Lamas cultural center in America. All best wishes. Have a great day.
Speaker 1 00:00:27 This is episode number 21 title, the Buddhist soul.
Speaker 0 00:00:36 Any questions to start the day from yesterday? Meditation. Does anyone have a question about that?
Speaker 2 00:00:45 Just Buddhism, believe
Speaker 0 00:00:46 In soul. I'm sorry.
Speaker 2 00:00:47 Does Buddhism have believe in the soul
Speaker 0 00:00:50 Putt believe in the soul that we have a soul? Well, it depends on how you define the soul. Um, but if you, if that's a way of the, that's a very key point in the sense that, uh, Buddhism is absolutely involved with the idea of former and future life. There, there are some people who wanna be what they call modern Buddhist, and they want to say that they don't need former and future life. And they're modern people and they're scientific, and this is all that's all completely unproven. And so meanwhile, they consider it's proven that there is no former in future life, but I like to ask that question back. How would you prove that <laugh> and who has proven it has Richard Dawkins actually proven that Richard Dawkins did not succeed in pursuing the selfish gene into the future life of any individual person, but does that mean that he disprove the existence of a future life for consciousness of the human being?
Speaker 0 00:01:56 I think the scientists, basically the more intelligent ones they say that, um, they can't pass an opinion on that, but the larger sort of scientific materialist view is that since we have de theory of materialism, there is no mind beyond the brain. And therefore when the brain stops at the end of it and, uh, that's established fact sort of thing, oh, I put the wrong battery in the wrong Harriet <laugh>. So that's an established fact. And uh, in fact I once was in Bellevue hospital. I wasn't an inmate polite, but I went there because, uh, I was meeting with a neuroscientist who was deeply hoping to get the dialog into his lab and put him into one of his machines to see what the dial brain was doing, which he did not succeed in doing <laugh>. Uh, but anyway, he was talking to me and then I was in the context of our talking.
Speaker 0 00:02:56 I said to him, well, you know, you, what you could get is I think we could arrange to get some of these Tibetan yogis could help with that arrangement. I don't think he wants to come to your lab, but you could, you could, um, arrange that those yogis who are able to leave their bodies with their consciousness and simulate the after death state, you could then study the body when they're outer body, you know, they might allow you to do such an experiment. I said to him, and he went completely preserved. He was a Latino gentleman. And, uh, he was, um, I think an Israeli or something. And he was, but he distinguished scientist. And he went totally nuts about how don't say that in this place. It is just, we are certain that there is no nothing. There's no consciousness after death. He said, I've had, I've had corpses in my F MRI and believe me, there's no action in those brains.
Speaker 0 00:03:51 He said, those brains are flat. So we know that there's no consciousness after death. He said, and he was so vehement, you know, and he was Latino. So he was like, Mo like I said, so, so, so I was like, okay, I'll never mention it again. And, uh, so, uh, about 36 hours later, I was going to, um, subsequent meeting about the same conference we were organizing with Beth Israel, neuroscience, uh, hospital branch, pediatric neuro neuroscience branch. And, uh, I, the, the Pakistani taxi driver was alarmed because I burst out laughing <laugh> uh, because somehow it finally worked its way through my head that that gentleman had felt that, you know, he, as a great neuroscientist had discovered the nothingness, the nothing status of human consciousness after death, he felt that as a discovery that had been made, which means that he was certifiably insane, actually properly in Bellevue because who who's, who's gonna discover nothing.
Speaker 0 00:05:01 How are you gonna do that? I mean, you don't have to be a scientist. Just think about it. Where is nothing? <laugh> what is it? Nothing. Can you get into nothing? Can anything go in their physical thing? You know, the law of second law of neurodynamics no energy has ever destroyed. You know, that's one of their theories because, because something cannot become nothing. So they're so except that principle, but somehow they think, therefore that means if they say consciousness is nothing. When the brain ceases to function, that means that consciousness isn't anything. Now it's just the brain doing something. So that does, that means not only do you not have a soul, but that means you don't really exist. You're just a robot, kind of a brain robot. Sumay thinks it's Sumay and you know that you're gonna cook something for lunch, or you have something and you don't really exist.
Speaker 0 00:05:56 So that means we all don't exist, actually, really we justly think we exist and it's that same. What do we call someone who runs around thinking they don't exist? A psycho actually don't we, we call that person's psycho. Why? Because since they think they don't exist in some way, they're not responsible for their presence or their actions. And therefore we, you know, that's like sociopaths psychopath, right? Tony Perkins in the shower. Right. <laugh> because he's not responsible, you know, doesn't know what he's doing because he doesn't exist. So, um, put it this way. Buddhism is common, sensical and realistic. And we do not know no one sort of can take a hold of consciousness. And, um, but you know, has, we don't deny it. We have it. And that it's something we don't know what exactly, but everyone is conscious and it's something, right? I mean, you're you think you're there now?
Speaker 0 00:06:59 You may be the way you think we are there. Buddhism would agree with, um, like I had a debate with Daniel Deni once who was the philosopher at Tufts university and a big, he tried to get into the Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins market, like Christopher Hitchins did and make, be a best seller talking about how everything is nothing and religion sucks and all this kind. And I had a debate with him about, he said, I have discovered that Daniel Deni, I couldn't find Daniel Deni. He says to me, and, uh, and therefore I'm sure that I will not have any future life. And when my, this current body stops, that's it for me, I'm, I'm certain of that. So, uh, then I asked him, I said, well, you know, you are a philosopher and you know, the philosophy of science and you know that in the quantum era term era, that there's areas in the super subtle level of material reality that people don't know what's going on.
Speaker 0 00:07:55 They're just making statistical probabilistic guesses about what's happening. And they don't know that a particle is really there. They might be a wave or particle. They have no idea. It doesn't OB laws of ordinary course matter. You know, doesn't obey laws like that. You know, you have spin of two particles, like thousands of miles apart that seem to be influencing to each other simultaneously, which should be impossible. For example, you know, so I said, you, you cannot have examined that level of your physical being to be sure that there isn't some continuum of something that will be there, that it maybe may not have the name Daniel in it. And it certainly won't have tenure Tufts in the philosophy department. <laugh>, but that there's some continuity from your existence. You cannot actually say that by examination. And he had admitted that he admitted that. And then he said, but he said, I don't care though.
Speaker 0 00:08:46 He says, because I don't have to have a future life. I can be ethical. Anyway. He said, so I said, well, I'm not asking for, for the ethical, I know you're ethical, but I'm questioning your assertion to the public. That you're certain that you will not exist after you die. There'll be nothing that exists. And, uh, he, then he didn't answer that, cuz he'd already admitted that he couldn't be, but he didn't change his statement. And instead he said, yeah, but I can still be ethical. It's what he kept saying. So then I had to say, well, yes, but how ethical, what would you sacrifice to be ethical since finally you are not there to experience the consequence of whatever you've done in life. So there our materialistic philosophy, this brings us, so anyway, I'll start, we'll, we'll do this in the meditation. So Budha denied what the Indians, Don of as a soul mm-hmm <affirmative> meaning a fixed thing.
Speaker 0 00:09:37 That is the, is the fixed like a barcode of sume. Mm-hmm <affirmative>, that's an unchanging thing. Mm-hmm <affirmative> so that when you think of something happened to you, when you were 18 years old, mm-hmm <affirmative> and now you feel you're the same exact pers something there that hasn't changed all that time. And that feeling is misplaced according to Budds analysis. So he agrees with Daniel Deni in a way that you can't find an unchanged fixed thing. That's the essential you, the essential identity. When the word identity right comes from Latin, I then means the same. So identity means the same. That's really basically is what it means. So our feeling that we have such an identity, a fixed self-sufficient, it's almost absolute, you could say unchanging identity. He said, that's a mistaken. That's not correct, but, but a said, there's no such thing, but continuity.
Speaker 0 00:10:28 Then he said there is, but he was a little reluctant to go back to the sole word because he knew people are so strongly invested in their, their absolute reality of their essential self, which, which it's a very liberating experience. Apparently he considers it to be, to discover that there' no such thing. And yet to still be a relative self that's that's the Buddhist enlightenment experience supposedly. And, uh, that's so important. He didn't want to give any kind of concept to people that they could hang that feeling of rigid unchanging identity on to follow me because it's a big thing to be relational identity, to realize that you're completely relational. When you realize that you become much more connected to everything mm-hmm <affirmative> and it completely changes how you connect to the world. Do you know what I mean? That, and it actually believes you of tremendous suffering in his analysis.
Speaker 0 00:11:18 Mm-hmm <affirmative> and this will get to in toward, in a few days, actually more in detail about the whole subject of selflessness as they call it or identity lessness and what that means and how, but I could say right away, cuz people do worry about it. People both worry about it and they wrongly think, or they wrongly like it about Buddhism. Some at these sofas could modern Buddhist. They like the selflessness idea because they think it agrees with, uh, the materialist scientific idea, scientific materialist idea that a human being is just really a kind of biological mechanism. And you know, the individual has no continuity. The genes have a continuity, but the individual person doesn't have a continuity. So the individual person ultimately doesn't exist. And it's just a momentary genetic byproduct, you know, carrying your genes from a to B well, what does, yeah. What does continue then to life, to life?
Speaker 0 00:12:20 Well, that's a, something subtle, something super subtle, but it's have a term for it. They call in the esoteric levels. As I said, bud was hesitant to make anything. He calls it continuity of mind. I mean, is the word they use out there on the simplest level, Chita Santa, the continuity of mind. But, uh, then what is that exactly? They're little vague about that on purpose, not to encourage, as I was saying, the idea that there's this fixed thing continues, the totally fixated thing continues. What, what's the matter to me, I'm just getting my notebook. Oh, you're getting not. And um, but in the esoteric thing at the more developed sort of subtle levels of bud is science. What is the area of what's called the tantra. They call it, they have a term, various terms. One of them is the spiritual gene, the, the genes from the parents.
Speaker 0 00:13:16 They have a term for that actually, although they didn't have Watson and creeks particular, you know, Eureka moment, but they consider that there's, you know, they could, they, they associate them with, with, uh, blood OV and semen, you know, the genes coming from the parents. But then there's a third gene involved in a being, which is their own continuity of consciousness coming from previous life, which selects those parents to those, the union of those three genes, those two genes of the two parents, uh, who selects that as a vehicle for building a new body. And it's very patriotic for American. Very nice. Cuz the mother has, Jean is red associated with blood. The fathers is white associated with seamen and bone and the Al gene is a deep blue <laugh> red, white, and blue could be French then what could be French? Yeah, yeah. From French.
Speaker 0 00:14:08 Yes. It's connected red, white and blue. Yes, exactly. So, uh, but we don't want use that word. Right. We went to freedom fries, right? So it's a freedom, the freedom gene freedom gene. Yeah. So, so, uh, uh, so that they, they have different churches. That's at the esoteric level though. Traditionally it was at the esoteric level, but now that those levels are becoming all available in, uh, in modern society because modern society is different and we're not 98% agricultural, you know, illiterate farmers and peasants, et cetera. Like they were in Asia over the, over the millennia. But, um, but the, you know, the, as I say, the substances thing is often misunderstood because those people who think that they don't exist because of their addiction to, or their conditioning to scientific materialism, they think Buda pre discovered that. So they kind of, I met a lot of people at Zen centers.
Speaker 0 00:15:01 I confess to say, not, not to cast this versions on the child tradition, which I really like and the Zen tradition, but some versions of it who think that, uh, but uh, they go and do a session and what they're waiting for is to disappear. And I always kid them, like you had some disappearing experiences on that last long session you did and wasn't it great. And you didn't have to worry about anything cuz you weren't there for brief moment. Me or maybe meditatively. It might have been a while, but to you it seemed like a moment I said, but the boring thing isn't it is that now you're back and you have to listen to me, <laugh> <laugh> or worry about your parking tickets or whatever. And they would snicker kind of guiltily. So there's an idea where selflessness was misunderstood as just meaning ultimate non-existence, which is incorrect.
Speaker 0 00:15:49 And then the other idea is that, uh, uh, you know, uh, selflessness is some kind of, um, is wrong or something like that, you know, is that is, is a mistake. You know? So, but the point is that selflessness means that you, your self is a relational thing and you don't have the absolute self that you feel you have. It's not absolute, it's only relative. And uh, and so you have a self, you know, it is the person who discovers their selflessness is the relative self type of thing. Person who becomes a Buddha is the relative self and become a relative bud at et cetera. And to do that, they have to understand what the absolute is. And then they call the absolute emptiness or selflessness to critique all notions that a relative structure can be absolute, you know, which is very logical at them.
Speaker 0 00:16:39 You know, similar like the idea, the Protestant idea of the absolute otherness of God, for example, which is like the Islamic idea that there's, that God is an absolute being that is not related to the universe, but somehow creates it in an off moment or something or accidentally. And uh, and yet has an absolute power authority. And therefore that the absolute can act when absolute means non relational. So therefore absolute cannot do anything by definition. So it's those theological things are just really dogmatic, assertions and cannot be logical. And Buddhism is very logical. So they, that's why the absolute being emptiness means that all we have actually is the relative and that the emptiness means that every relative thing is empty of any non-relative essential component. Okay. And at first that seems obvious. So it isn't even a startling statement, but what is not obvious to is our an unconscious habit of feeling that ourself is absolute and more suddenly the idea that when we, you know, the, our use of words or I see a piece of wood or floor, I feel that the floor has what some modern sociologists call a kind of massive ity.
Speaker 0 00:18:00 I love their depressions and it has a massive objectivity. That's sort of like massive and it's a floor in itself and philosophers from play till right on down to BCH and Russell. They, they always think, and it, and the contemporary UN philosophical self-examine scientist, they think that when they see something that it has a kind of absolute essence to it, and then they wanna find a way of understanding that absolute essence, they think maybe through mathematics. And then when they have a whole of the absolute core of the things, they'll be able to control it with their theories. That's the kind of, that's the delusionary scientific dream that the Buddha Buddha rejected 2,500 years ago as he predated quantum physics by 2,500 years in, in stating that he had discovered the infinite visibility of all things, including Adams. And it was that everything dissolves under analysis, there's no analysis resistant absolute court to anything.
Speaker 0 00:18:58 And yet that doesn't mean the relative things don't exist. They do, but all totally related, no, no absolute aspect in that. That's what it is. And um, so that's just the preview of what we'll talk about more at length, a few sessions from now, okay. And you got into this trouble, <laugh>, there's more to come. So yeah, we have a soul. You can call that third gene, the sole gene, if you like. And, and that's why their belief, the way you behave in your life and not only your physical actions and verbal actions, but your thoughts, which are mental actions and shape your, they shape your evolution. So we are also, they proceeded Darwin. We are evolutionary beings. What we do affects or shape shapes our life. The reason fact we are humans is because we shaped our life in such a way that we, we evolved toward where we wanted such a form.
Speaker 0 00:19:52 We were attracted towards other human beings, our human parents, and born in a womb. It's not an obvious thing that you'd be attracted towards a human body. If you were like a happy crocodile rolling around in the mud and hopping on the occasional zebra that comes across the mudhole. You know, it's not very obvious that you would like to be a strange looking person with the soft skin and no big jaw. And, you know, can't swim that well. And, and, um, I don't think we could lie in a mudhole, but they saw eyes sticking out and hop on a zebra and chomp it down very easily. Not, not at all. We could play the piano, but it must talk. I wouldn't think of playing the piano <laugh> so how do you evolve to where you think a human form is something marvelous? Human is actually people.
Speaker 0 00:20:41 We don't really have big claws. We don't have big teeth, only the vampires in Hollywood do we don't have, you know, we're not that strong, but, but, and we're sort of chicken hearted actually a little bit. And therefore we learned to talk. We had to hide while the tigers were stalking outside our caves and things. And then we started chatting when we hi hit, we were hiding in the Cape. We started talking and chatting. We had like meditation sessions. And then we figured out how to make Spears and guns and arrows and bows and tiger hunting mechanisms. And we be stronger than the tiger using our intelligence, shared intelligence, our connectedness, right? And we inherited the knowledge of making these things from, from parents and ancestors, because we got had language and we had this brain, but if you were a crocodile, a weird looking person running around, carrying a heavy brain, that would not be an obvious form that you would be gravitate toward.
Speaker 0 00:21:37 In fact, if you think about, so as I, as I said to them, I said, evolution is not a, we're not talking creationism here. Evolution is not a problem in a non materialistic philosophical view of evolution. There is evolution, but the individual is responsible for their evolution. To some extent their circumstances. Also their environment is important, but the individual evolves themselves. They choose their evolution. And how, how do you get to be human by cultivating altruism, being more aware of the feelings of other beings? How do you get to be a mammal? Even it's not obvious thing, much more convenient, drops some eggs in the sand, put some sand over the top with your pole and take over and go for swim. Carry that being around in your belly for nine months. That's again, not really comfy thing. It's not that comfy guys wouldn't wanna do it.
Speaker 0 00:22:33 <laugh> wouldn't they would not. But, but, and then you are being, that's carried in the body of another member of your species, and then you're elderly, helpless, independent on that member and associated fouls and husbands and fathers and whatever your uncles and things you're, you're helpless for, for decades. Actually, mm-hmm <affirmative> by purity. You think you're not helpless, but we know that you are until you're in, you know, graduate from something, you know, anyway. So, so the Buddhist view of evolution is actually more biologically intimate for the individual by far than the Darwinian one, because the, in the, in the materialist one, you don't have any say about it and you don't reap the effects of any good thing you did in your life because you don't exist after you die. You just, your genes go on. If you're lucky, but that's relevant to you because you never really exist exist.
Speaker 0 00:23:31 Right? So therefore, you know, nevermind, I won't go on with that, but we, we can come to that and debate, cuz I know that some of you will probably be a little bit upset by the idea of having to worry, not only about your pension, your retirement and your funeral plot, but your next life, that's gonna be upsetting when we're not used to that. And, and, uh, it is upsetting people worry about it. My, my 92 year, my grandfather was like 92 already. When I started studying bud informally. And we started debating that topic when I would come visit home from the monastery where I was. And then by around 95 or six, he actually caved his lifelong materialism and he realized he might have to hedge his beds and worry about it. And he became a changed person for the last three or four years. He died in his late, almost 98. He was trying to make a hundred. He was bent on getting a hundred, but he made 98. And he was very changed from about 95, since 96 like that. Oh wow. Because he realized that if he was really grumpy the whole time, then this Grum might lead into a more grumpy future life, which he didn't really, he didn't really think that'd be nice because other people might be grumpy back or other beings here. Okay. Well let's meditate a little bit. That is a good question.
