So, as I say, this is not so much a talk, it's more a rehearsal of material so that you can focus your minds upon it, reflect upon it, discuss it, and meditate upon it. I'm not going to necessarily give a very exact and scholarly definition of every topic, it's more just to collectively focus our minds upon whatever the topic is. I've come to think that this is one of the most important things we can do. There's so much of the dhamma that most of us know pretty well. But what we need to do is just bring it into our minds and focus our minds upon it and then involve ourselves more deeply with it. So it's in that spirit that I'm going to be speaking. I don't suppose I'm going to be saying anything that's very new to anybody. I just wanted to say a few words by way of preamble as to why I've chosen this particular theme, or we've chosen this particular theme. Probably some of you know that I've been studying and leading retreats on this pretty constantly for the last three years, I think it is. I've done a number of retreats in India on this theme and a number of retreats also in England. I started off at Kamalasheela's suggestion. We were trying to find a sort of structure for the part of the order course on ethics. And Kamalasheela had just read the newly published Know Your Mind and suggested that we took that as the theme or as the text. When I looked at the text, I saw immediately what he meant because although Know Your Mind is, as it were, a psychological text, it's very much an ethical psychology that's presented in Know Your Mind. And it seemed to us that that was a very good basis for looking at ethics in general, Buddhist ethics as an ethics of intention, so that you need to look at your mental states in order to evaluate the skillfulness or unskillfulness of your actions. So it seemed very important indeed that we approached psychology from the point of view of ethics. I may say that in India, my reasons for taking up the text were the reverse. In India, there's a tendency to see ethics in social terms and to see ethics in terms of, you know, satisfying conventional morality, not upsetting people and so on. So I felt there it was important to emphasize a psychological dimension to ethics, but that is it made in both settings. I thought this was a very important theme for the whole order to focus upon. There are various reasons why I thought it was particularly appropriate at the moment, and at least one of those reasons was that I saw that there was still quite a bit of disharmony. We don't seem to have these days very much large-scale disharmony in the order, but there's still quite a lot of disharmony between two or three people here and there. For no doubt, that's an inevitable factor in any community. But one of the things I observed in trying to help people to resolve their disharmonies was that there seemed to be a very strong tendency to be concerned with other people's behavior, other people's motives, and not with one's own. And it always seemed to be the most essential thing that, before a resolution could take place, people needed to accept their own mental states that contributed to the disharmony and to focus very much on what mental state they were in, rather than other people's. And often when you do that, everything comes into proportion, the other person's actions, whether they're skillful or unschoolful, as it happens or not, they achieve some proportion, because you see your own reaction to them at best, and perhaps even your own initiation of unschoolfulness. So I felt that this sort of text was a very, very important basis for helping to bring greater harmony within the order. If we all just looked at our own states and confessed our own unschoolfulness, well, problems would disappear between us, as it were. But one of the reasons why I felt that this was perhaps not so common amongst us that we did look at things in those terms was that I wasn't sure that we had a very clear common language for discussing mental states, a common language that was unambiguously based in ethical discrimination, and this text seemed to me to do that very, very clearly. I must say, as I studied the text more and more and did retreats on it, I found it had a stronger and stronger effect on me, and that the primary effect that it had was that it made me realize more clearly what I had to work on, and what I had to work with constructively. I learned to understand my own habits and unskillful patterns of behavior, and to see more clearly, therefore, what I needed to be doing. And again, this is an impression that we've had at Marginaloka doing these chapter retreats that quite often, very good, very faithful, very dedicated order members, don't seem to have a sharp or clear enough idea of what the spiritual task is that immediately confronts them. Yes, they know they must do their meditation, they know they must communicate, they know they must study and so on. But what specifically they need to be working on in their own minds, moment by moment, in every situation of their lives, doesn't often seem to be so clear. And I suppose I realized it wasn't so clear for me until I began going over this material again and again and again. And that is, I think, one of the most important things, it gives a way of looking at yourself that helps you to understand what exactly your own unskillfulness is, what your own strengths are, what your own skillful states are, that you can develop and extend and take further. So I hope that through doing this, we'll take a step forward in self-understanding and in understanding others. If we appreciate ourselves and understand the workings of our own minds, we'll probably be more tolerant and forgiving of other people in their mistakes and unskillfulness, rather than picking on their faults and neglecting our own. And perhaps we'll all get a sharper and clearer focus for our spiritual lives. Because spiritual life isn't a matter of doing certain things, it isn't a matter of living in a certain way, although that may all be helpful. Spiritual life in the end is a matter of transforming your mind. And to transform your mind, you need to know your mind. So that's the background to this particular retreat, why I felt that this approach is very, very useful for the whole order. And I suspect that if most order members had studied this material and reflected upon it in the way that we're going to do, it would have a dramatic effect upon the order. I've seen that happening in India. I think something like a half of the order in India has been through this material. And it has made a big difference to the quality of communication and the nature of people's confidence in spiritual life. I'm going to be following pretty broadly what Banta has to say in Know Your Mind, although there are places where I've come to somewhat different conclusions about the precise meaning of some of the terms. This is not because Banta is wrong and I'm right necessarily, but it's because the terms are variously interpreted in tradition. There are about six or seven different accounts of the 51 mental events published in English. And they all bring up slightly different shades of meaning for some of the mental events, and in some cases, even quite different. The book other than Banta is that I found most useful is Geshe-Rabten's Mind and Its Functions, which is translated by Stephen Bachelor. I wrote to Stephen Bachelor thanking him for the work, and he said that it was one of the works that I think he even said it was the work he was most proud of. And he was very glad indeed that it was being used in the order because he felt he'd put a lot of effort into it. It is available still from Tupper Choling, something like that, the Geshe-Rabten's Publishing House in Switzerland. So as I've already said last night, we're going to be pursuing the theme on three different levels. I shall be talking each morning, outlining, introducing a topic from the theme. And if you want to, you can read up on it in Know Your Mind. I know some people have brought their copies and will be wanting to follow up, and I will try to remember each day to tell you what the theme of the morrow is so that you can read up in advance if you want to. So in that way, we'll get just the broad facts, so to speak, clear, or at least out on the table. Then we'll be reflecting, Chintal May Pregnal, by reporting in each day. So, well, of course, you can do what you like in your groups, but what I suggest is that you just go around, divide up the time, equitably, and each person reflects on their experience during the previous 24 hours, fairly fully, fairly deeply, confessionally. And especially let the theme of the last 24 hours sort of permeate your reflection. So if, for instance, we've been talking about Shredha and Ashradya, faith and lack of faith, well then that inevitably, hopefully, will come through in your reflections. Your report in on your understanding and experience of faith, especially in the very recent past, but perhaps even more extensively. And if you are reporting in the context of your chapter, I think this will help you to get to know each other much, much more deeply, and it will provide, then, a basis in your chapter meetings in the future for a deeper, mutual understanding, so that when you start talking about something, when you start expressing your experience of faith in the future, well, your other chapter members will have heard what you've got to say about it on this occasion, will understand the sort of evolution of your own relationship to that mental event. So I hope that by reporting in, it will be an aid to reflection. What we found in doing this is that because you know you're going to report in, you have an extra element of attention to your experience, and especially to your experience around the theme. And so you're sort of collecting experience to report in. Of course, there's a bit of a danger that you start sort of inventing experience to report in, but perhaps it won't happen immediately. But yes, it does help, I think, to reflect more deeply on one's own inner experience, as well as providing a basis for better communication. And of course, one would expect that in going over these topics, this is going to be a confessional element inevitably a high ideal is going to emerge as we go through the mental events. We're going to be talking about ideal mind in a sense, implicitly, and a thoroughly skillful mind implicitly, and one will be aware of how much once fallen short of that. So the reporting in groups are an opportunity to confess, and thereby to renew one's confidence in one's own spiritual aspiration and progress. Then finally, we'll be meditating by taking the broad major themes and systematically reflecting upon them. Tejananda will lead us in meditations that take us through the basic themes of the material. And in the Puja too, we will be pursuing that theme, and especially the theme of confession, I'm sure, will come out in the Pujas, which is, in itself, a practice of Babnamaya Pragnya. So I hope this will have a very good effect on the order as a whole and on the chapters in particular, so that we can all go much deeper in our experience and our communication with each other, and that we'll be able to see more clearly what we need to work on. Incidentally, as I said last night, if any group, any chapter comes up with things that they feel they need some outside help with, then please do see one of the team leaders, and we'll see if somebody can help or just find somebody who you'd like to just join you for a few days or whatever. Because I think with somebody from outside, where there is a little bit of difficulty, a big change can take place, you've got somebody to mirror back to you. So yes, I think this is a very, very big opportunity for the order as a whole and for each of us individually, and I really hope it does work. Of course, I've got my heart slightly in my mouth as to whether it's the appropriate thing to do on a men's convention, but I feel fairly optimistic that we will be able to sort of take it seriously and thoroughly and not find it sort of lost, as it were, in the dispersal of the event. So we know that the mind is absolutely fundamental in Buddhism. In fact, you know that the first pair of the section of pairs in the Domapada deals with precisely this thing. Unfortunately, with lack of mindfulness, I've forgotten to bring my copy of that text. But Dante's new translation goes something like experiences produced by mind, led by mind, and made up of mind. If one acts with an impure mind, suffering follows as the cart follows the hoof of the ox. And then the other way round, experiences led by mind, made up of mind, produced by mind. If one acts with a pure mind, then happiness follows, as your shadow follows you. He puts it better than that. But these are really fundamental texts from the Dhamma in a way that sums up the whole Dhamma. Three things, as I said, fundamentally. First of all, that mind is the basis of all experience. Everything that we experience derives from our minds in the first place, under the law of karma, and of course is experienced in our minds. Then it says that the suffering and happiness that we experience is based upon the actions that we perform, and those actions themselves emerge out of our mental states. So that mind, in the end, produces own happiness and suffering. And of course, we need to really absorb this very fully and deeply. If we suffer, it's because of our own mind. It emerges from our own minds. If we're happy, it emerges from our own minds. So that then means, thirdly, that the key to happiness is the purification of the mind. If we can purify the mind, then we can live happily. If we can purify the mind in the deepest possible sense, which is understanding, if you like, the true nature of the mind, the true nature of all things, then happiness is ours inevitably, finally. Without possibility of suffering, at least, in the deepest sense. So the dhamma pada begins on this note. The mind is the basis of everything. Our suffering and our happiness is determined by our minds. And it's the purification of our minds that is the basis for our future happiness and ultimately for our enlightenment, as we understand the mind completely and fully. So the question arises, how do we purify the mind? There's a very interesting sutta in Majima Nikaya called the devaya vitaka, a sutta, a sutta of two kinds of thought. And in this, the Buddha is reflecting on his own early experience. And he says that when he was a Bodhisattva, it occurred to him that there were two different kinds of thought. There were those thoughts that were connected with craving or karma, hatred and cruelty, dosa and hingsa. So there were those kinds of thoughts, those that were connected with craving, hatred and cruelty, on the one hand. On the other hand, there were those thoughts that were connected with renunciation, non-hatred and non-craving. Now these are put negatively, but clearly there's a positive content to them. Renunciation isn't just giving something up. It's taking something on. So you could say that the positive equivalent of renunciation is faith and commitment. It's inspiration. It's inspiration that leads you to act, moving towards something that you hold up as a higher ideal, and moving away from that which you consider to be lower and enmeshing in unskillfulness. So renunciation is really a positive term in Buddhism. It has that positive connotation. It doesn't just mean giving up something that you like. Non-hatred, of course, is meta, and non-cruilty is karuna. So on the one hand, you've got craving, hatred and cruelty. On the other hand, you've got faith, inspiration, commitment, meta and karuna. So he said that it occurred to him that why didn't he sort of examine his mind and divide his thoughts into these two heaps? And sort of notice, well, these thoughts belong in this category, these thoughts belong in that category. And then to think, well, when thoughts that are connected with craving, hatred or cruelty arise, to reflect, this is just painful. It's painful in itself. It's painful to crave. We don't always realize that because craving, of course, is connected with the idea of pleasure, but it's actually an experience of the lack of pleasure and longing for it. So craving is inherently painful, even though we don't think of it like that. Hatred is, of course, a very unpleasant state to experience and cruelty even worse. So when you first of all think, these states are connected with pain. They're painful in themselves and they lead to pain. If you are driven by craving, you act inevitably, unmindfully. You've got life out of proportion. You perceive things in a distorted way. So you act in a distorted way, which inevitably means that you get everything thrown back in your face. You suffer and, well, hatred very obviously, you create an unpleasant environment around you in which sooner or later people will retaliate against you. And cruelty, well, it's just a far greater degree of hatred. So you realize that those sort of mental states, those sort of thoughts in that category lead to pain as well as being painful. And they don't just lead to pain for you. They lead to pain for other people. This is the way you reflect. But if I'm in a state of craving, I'm not going to consider other people properly. I'm going to want something sort of to an unreasonable degree and deprive somebody else of it and so on. Well, hatred is obviously painful to others, cruelty even more so. So again, you reflect in this sort of way. Then you reflect, well, does this really fulfill my highest ambitions, having these sort of mental states? Does this really take me to what I aspire to, what I'm worthy of, what I'm capable of? This is what the Buddha says. Your effect, well, no, it doesn't. So he says, well, when he thought like this, when these sort of thoughts came up in his mind, he found those thoughts subsided and died away and stopped arising. So he applied mindfulness. He saw the unskilled mental states for what they were. He reflected on them and saw their consequences and their nature, their discordance with reality. And he was then able to abandon them. No doubt, the Buddha was unusually sharp and clear and determined. But, well, obviously, that is what we have to do. On the other hand, he says that he realized when he saw the skillful mental states, those that were connected with renunciation, with non-hatred non-cruelty, or with inspiration and faith and commitment and maitre and karuna, he realized, well, these are pleasant states that they are fulfilling to me, they're fulfilling to other people. And he realized furthermore that what the mind dwells upon, that it tends towards, what it tends towards, that it becomes. So what you give your mind to is what your mind then flows towards more and more firmly and clearly and fully, and it's what it ultimately actually becomes. So he thought, well, since what I give my mind to is what my mind will become, why don't I give my mind to these skillful thoughts and not to these unskilled ones? And, of course, in this is the whole essential principle of spiritual life. We are deliberately trying to give our minds to the skillful things because, through doing that, we will ourselves become more and more skillful. It'll be easier and easier to live like that. It's a bit like the way in which rain, when it falls to the ground, starts to dig channels in a very vivid sort of experience of this in the rainy season in India, I just returned. And you just see a small trickle of water flowing across a path. And when you come back later in the day, the path is gone. The water has just flowed deeper and deeper and deeper and taken more and more of the path away with it. So in the same way, our thoughts dig a channel. And the deeper the channel, the more readily our thoughts flow down that channel. This is the principle of karma. So the job that we have to do is to try to stop gradually and skillfully our thoughts flowing down the unskilled channels, that kind of thought, and to make it flow more and more deeply down the other kind of channel, the skillful one. That is the essence of spiritual life. This, of course, really comes down to, first of all, mindfulness. It comes down to watching our minds and sorting out what's going on in our minds. Often, we're not sufficiently clear of what's going on to be able to determine which kind of mental event is arising, which category it belongs in. And so when we react to somebody else, we justify our reactions by looking at their behavior without ever really connecting with the fact that what's going on is actually to do with our own unskilledfulness, regardless of what they've done. So we need to sharpen our clarity on what the nature, the ethical nature of our own mental states is, to be able to divide our own thoughts into two heaps by watching them very, very closely. So we need to develop this systematic application of mindfulness to what's going on, moment by moment in our minds. This is, if you like, kitta and dhamma, satipatana, the second two satipatanas, the first two are more to do with vipaka, these are definitely to do with karmana. So we're trying to become more aware of the ethically determined nature of our mental states. And this is perhaps summed up best in the term dhamma vichaya. Dhamma, of course, here means mental states, objects of the mind. But objects of the mind, not just in the sense of objects external to us, but the sort of coagulations, the crystallizations of the mind into mental states. Vichaya means investigation, inquiry, even sort of pointing out. So dhamma vichaya is investigation of mental events. It is this mindfulness of what is going on in our minds, not just in the sense of sort of noting what's there, but noting its ethical character, being aware of what its real nature is, what's broadly, whether it's skillful or unskillful and so on. And this is really going to be the basic practice of the retreat. All the way through what we're going to be doing is dhamma vichaya. And I believe that Tejananda will start off by leading us in dhamma vichaya meditation, so that we start to watch our minds more and more, and start to discriminate our mental states more and more. And I hope that we won't be just doing that in the meditation sessions, but at other times too, as the retreat goes on, especially after the first four days, we will begin to have more silence, and that will be an opportunity to watch your mind at other points during the day, and thereby to practice dhamma vichaya more and more vigorously, rigorously. I hope that we can build up an atmosphere of dhamma vichaya at all times. Perhaps that's what's going to be hardest given the parameters of the event. But I think we can probably do quite a lot in that respect, but no doubt it's up to the individual just how much they want to make that the theme of the gathering for them. But I think that to any extent that you practice this, you will find it very valuable and that it will give you a clearer perception of what it is that you need to work on, what your own mind is like. In the Anapanasati Sutta, the Buddha describes dhamma vichaya as watching your mind, watching the mental events that arise in your mind, and checking to see whether, first of all, they're skillful or unskillful. Do they belong in the first box or the second? Then, considering whether your mental states are praiseworthy or blameworthy, it's very interesting. In other words, you use apotropia. You may not have a sharp enough ethical consciousness to be able to distinguish for yourself, but you could sort of think, well, how would my kalyanamitra feel about this mental state? Would my kalyanamitra think this is worthy? Or this is unworthy? What would Bante think? Or whatever? Not in a guilt-ridden or projective way, not seeing your kalyanamitras in authority, but seeing them as somebody who embodies ethical principles to a deeper degree than you do at the very least, and therefore, as being more capable of sort of sensing what is skillful or unskillful than you are, is certainly not to do with internal superego, although, of course, it's very closely mimics it. And that made itself involve some sorting out for some of us who seem to be quite caught up with authority and so on. Very common. Then, the Buddha says, you ask, is that mental state high or low? This is a very interesting reflection, because what it really implies is that you ask yourself, is the mental state that you've got not just skillful or unskillful, but is it good enough, as it were? It may be skillful, but could it be better? Remember Bante is saying that he thought that most people put up with a far lower mental state than they could easily accomplish all the time, that we put up with a fairly sort of grubby mental state, where with just a little bit of effort, we could be in a much more positive state all the time, and we just get accustomed to a low grumble, as it were, or a slightly cloudy day. But with a bit of effort, we could lift ourselves up. So, in practicing dumb of a chire, in this way, you ask yourself, well, could I go further? Not to sort of beat yourself up and think, oh, you know, I'm not good enough, I haven't got enlightened or anything like that, but just realizing, well, you could go further, there's more to gain. And then he says, is it light or dark? Well, I can't really sort of say anything new about this. It's just an interesting poetic image. Is your mental state one that could be brighter? Let's just say that. So, this is what the Buddha says dumb of a chire consists in. It's the examination of your mind to see whether your mental states, as they arise, one after the other, are skillful or unskillful, praiseworthy or blameworthy, high or low, light or dark. So, it's a pretty broad calibration. It gives you just a very sort of rough and ready angle on the mind. And you could just use them, you could just stick with those sort of broad categories. That might be enough. Or you could use categories like greed, hatred and delusion, generosity, love and clarity. Those are quite adequate categorizations of mental events, to some degree. But the mind is very complex and tricky. It has many folds and curves and secrets, hidden corners. And probably most of us need a more sophisticated analytic tool to help us to understand and grasp what's going on. We may not always be quite clear whether a mental state that arises is skillful or unskillful. And we may need to examine it more deeply. And we may therefore need a more sophisticated analytic tool. And it's the business of the various abhidhammas, abhidhammas of the Buddhist tradition to provide these analytic tools. It seems to have begun quite early on in the history of Buddhism. In the Suttas, there's some categorizations, and most of the abhidhamma terms derive from Sutta categorizations, but they go much further, they're much more systematic. And to some extent, they become obsessive and scholastic. But presumably in their origins, they're aged to meditation, they're aged to dhamma vichaya. They're ways in which you can get a sharper and clearer idea of what's going on in your mind so that you can push through your own vagueness, your own confusion, and so on. The listing that we're going to use is one that derives from a sangha in the abhidhammas somewhere chaya. I don't know what its antecedents are before that. I haven't been able to find out, perhaps somebody else might know. But we've taken this one up for fortuitous reasons, just because Banti took it up. And I think he took it up because he initially studied minding Buddhist psychology, which was the first sort of simple survey, so to speak, of the field of abhidhamma. And on the basis of that, no, your mind was produced. And frankly, I think it's as good as any other, not that I've looked in detail at others. I don't think it really matters. It's not that there are only 51 states and anybody who says there are 56 is wrong. There are really an infinite number of subtle differences in mental states. No two mental states are really alike. But an analytic tool helps us to get deeper into the nature of the mental states and different analytic systems will look at things differently. So we are going to use this system simply because it's the one that our teacher has used and examined, which seems a perfectly adequate one, at least as a basis. I think that actually it's not entirely satisfactory. There are aspects of mental states that seem very important, that are not gone into. For instance, there's no discussion of fear, which seems pretty fundamental. There's even one of the accounts in the Pali canon, which talks not just in terms of greed, hate, and delusion, but greed, hatred, delusion, and fear. Fear would seem to be so fundamental. It seems rather odd that it's not included. And there are other mental states that seem, you know, such sort of minor shades of differentiation that you wonder why they're bothering. But perhaps it just illustrates the fact that the mind cannot in the end be categorized and that the categorizations are just aids to awareness. And I suspect that in time we will need to develop our own categorization of mental events, which is more appropriate to our own experience. And perhaps it'll even be different in different places, in different cultures, because I'm sure these things are culturally determined, to some extent. But let's just work with the unsatisfactoriness of the system that we're using and think of this as a sort of prologeminar to the evolution of a Western Buddhist abidometer, or at least a broad categorization of mental events. No doubt somebody will be intrigued enough to sit down and try to work it out for themselves. Sometimes it's very schematic. You can see that they've said that, so they've got to say that. This list has sort of worked its way in. And once you start on the list, you've got to finish it, even if it doesn't quite work. So it's not entirely satisfactory. Well, at least I haven't been able to sort of fully sort of make it all fit together. Maybe that's my own limitation. But I suspect not. I suspect it is something to do with the times in which it was created and the nature of the enterprise, and so on. So yes, it would be very interesting to think that perhaps out of this sort of endeavor, we will begin to evolve our own approach to categorizing mental events. But it's a good enough basis and a good enough basis for us to do a three-wisdoms reflection on our minds. It helps us to recognize our minds and helps us to do dumb of a child. So in order to go into this more fully, I need to look a little bit at the most fundamental points. What is mind? That's a pretty dreadful question. In a way, you cannot give an answer in the very nature of the business. Mind is, by very definition, not an object. It's not like a table or a chair that you can describe and categorize and define. It is that which categorizes. So it's like an "I" trying to see itself to provide a satisfactory definition of mind. It's that which does the defining, you could even say. So it's by its very nature, a difficult subject. And indeed, the more you examine what mind is, the more indefinable it becomes and the more all-encompassing it becomes. As we all know, in a major school of Buddhist philosophy, deriving from Asanga, mind came to be seen as everything. In the Yoga Chara, everything is seen as an aspect of mind. Everything is mind-only, Chitamatra. So if we're asking what mind is, we could take ourselves very, very deep indeed. But I'm not going to go into things in that way. That's not the approach that the Abhidhamma takes. The Abhidhamma takes a more common sense approach to what mind is. And that is what I'm going to use as a working basis. Mind here is the subjective dimension in our experience. It's the subjective pole of our experience in this understanding. And this is the basic Buddhist understanding. In the Savastivada, it's said that mind has three essential characteristics. Its first characteristic is described as clarity. But what is meant by clarity here is really unclarity. In the sense that it's the indefinable nature of mind. Mind is clear in the sense that you can see through it or you can't see it. It's not got any physical characteristics. You can't sort of pin it down, tie it down, label it, come up with what it's really like. Because it is this essentially subjective dimension. We can define and describe what is objective. But we can't satisfactorily describe what is subjective. It's non-material. It's said to be space-like in character, a space you cannot see, so to speak. You cannot measure. You can measure bits of space, but you cannot measure space itself. Or you can measure things within space. But space is a category of consciousness. So consciousness itself, mind itself, is different. Again, it's not something abstract and conceptual like space. It is something definite and not concrete, but definite. But without a material definable characteristic. So that's the clarity of mind. Secondly, mind according to Savastivada categorization is defined by cognition. The nature of mind is to apprehend an object. So that mind is always present when an object is present. This of course becomes very interesting when one begins to think of the ontological implications of that. But for the Savastivada, and indeed for all what is tradition, I would say, objects exist in relation to mind. Mind exists in relation to objects. Mind is that which cognizes, apprehends, knows objects. Of course it knows it in so many different and complex ways. Interlection, emotion, all those various ways of knowing, simply perception. All those different aspects of mind are ways of knowing, aspects of knowing. And they are what make up mind. Then thirdly, mind is considered in the Abhidhamma as momentary. Of course, mind isn't really momentary. It's not that you get a certain instantaneous existence of mind, which then gives way to another mind. You have a continuum, you have a flow of mental experience. But the way in which Abhidhamma treats it is as a continuous arising of individual moments of mind. So it talks in terms of mind continuously arising, moments of mind continuously arising. And it's said that each chitta, this moment of mind, lasts for one sixty-fourth of a finger snap. Who would I measure that? I don't know. That's presumably that means very quick. But really of course they have no time at all because time is within mind, rather than mind within time. But for purposes of thought, where we need to sort of think of them as at least having some kind of existence, even if that existence is instantaneous. So these moments of mind are seen as dependently arising and passing away, all the time in interaction with everything else. The moments of mind are, as I've said, the chittas. These are sometimes spoken of as primary mind. And they are the kind of totality of each mental moment. And in themselves they constitute the bare illumination of the object. The object presents itself to mind. That is primary mind. But then that bare illumination of the object is given sort of specificity, specificity, as you begin to sort of determine the separate characteristics of the object. Can you hear me with that? So what it is that determines the specific characteristics of the object of mind. And of course the object, a physical object or a mental object, are the chatedotomous. Chatedotom means connected with mind. Chatedotomous sometimes translated as mental event. That's our usual translation. Sometimes mental factor or even mental concomitant. But they're sort of mindlets. Each moment of mind, each chitter, arises with its attendant, Chatedotomous. It sometimes said the king arrives with his ministers. The king has a general function of ruling, so to speak. The ministers carry out, you know, the home office, the foreign office, the exchequer and so forth. They have their separate individual functions. So each moment of mind, according to this way of thinking, which is a little strange for us, but we just need to sort of accept it as a working model. Each moment of mind arrives as a basic primary chitter with attendant, Chatedotomous. Which distinguish and discern the individual characteristics of things, like color, shape. But also, you know, particular shades of feeling, particular analysis, particular levels of experience. All these are sort of teased out by the Chatedotomous. And it's the Chatedotomous that give the Chitter the primary mind its characteristics. So you've got mind flowing along, and all the time within mind, there's moments of mind independently arising. The Chatedotomous, which give mind at each moment, is particular characteristics. And mind is permeated by the flavor of the Chatedotomous as salt permeates water, so it says. So the totality of each moment, each moment of consciousness, is made up of a primary mind with attendant Chatedotomous. Each moment of consciousness comes with a number of Chatedotomous. It could be just with a few, it could be with quite a lot. All of which sort of cohere into the total experience of being conscious of an object. There are five which always come, and the others come in various sort of combinations in various ways. So that the assemblage of all these mental events creates the distinct character of the Chitter. So what we're going to be doing is examining Chitter by means of the Chatedotomous. You can't sort of examine Chitter because Chitter itself is featureless, or it rather takes on the features of the Chatedotomous. So if you come to examine the Chatedotomous to observe your Chatedotomous, you get to see the nature of your consciousness. And we're going to be using these 51 mental events. We're going to be looking at them in two separate groupings. The first of which we'll look at in these first four days, and the last 41 of which we'll look at in the remaining six days. So if you're only here for four days, you only got a quarter of a mind by the end of it. The first grouping that we'll be looking at before the changeover are what I term epistemic. They're to do with the way we are conscious, they're to do with the way in which we perceive, the way in which we come to be in relation to an object. They're the factors that are present in being conscious. And furthermore, they're the factors which, if we develop them, take us into deeper and closer consciousness of the object. So they're primarily to do with the way in which we're conscious, and the way in which we become more conscious. Of course, the categories are not entirely tidy, but that is the basic character of the first 10 that we'll be dealing with over these four days. And they are the Savatraga Chaita Dharmas, and the veneeta Chaita Dharmas, five each, which are the Savatraga, those that are present in each conscious moment. They're the five Chaita Dharmas that constitute the essentials of consciousness. You cannot have consciousness without those five being present. That's what we'll deal with tomorrow if you want to read up. We'll deal with the universal or omnipresent mental events that the Savatraga mental events. The day after that, we'll deal with the veneeta Chaita Dharmas, I think. You never know how things may unfold, which are to do with getting up closer to the object so that you see it ultimately as it really is. So that's what we'll be playing with over these five days, more to do with how we're conscious and how we get more conscious. Then in the second six days, we'll be dealing with the ethical aspects of consciousness. We'll be looking at 41 mental events that are ethically distributed, and therefore the primary tools for us discerning what is skillful and what is unskillful. We'll be dealing with the four undetermined or annita Chaita Dharmas, that is mental events that can go either way. They can be skillful or unskillful, or even neutral. Then with the 11 Kushala Chaita Dharmas, the positive mental events, which are quite well known amongst us, then the six Kleshas or Mula Kleshas, the defiled mental states, the root defiled mental states, and then the 20 Upa Klesha Chaita Dharmas, which are the secondary or derivative defiled mental states, which are sort of forms or modifications of the Mula Kleshas. And we'll deal with those in clusters, but I needn't go into that now. So that's the structure of our event. We'll deal with the epistemic ones during these next three days, the saba traga and the five anita Chaita Dharmas, and then we'll deal with the ethical categories. Now, it's a fairly simple categorization, but it's important not to get lost or not to lose touch with what we're trying to do. We're not just trying to do a scholastic exercise and learn off categories. Already, I warned you that I don't think these are entirely satisfactory, but there are tools for Dharmas Chaita. There are tools for knowing ourselves, for knowing our own minds, for watching our minds to see what is arising, and determine which of the two kinds it belongs within, thereby following the Buddha's own practice when he was butter bodhisattva, which, in his own words, led him to enlightenment. We'll be able to determine the character of our mental states, and thereby to change our mental states. If you want to change your mental states, well, you need to know what they are, because once you've identified them, well, you can see whether they're skillful or unskillful, whether they need to be got rid of, or whether they need to be developed, how you have to apply which of the full right efforts. Actually, just observing mental states has an effect in itself. I often found this in trying to do Dharmavichaya, lead Dharmavichaya, do it myself, that you tell people just to watch what's going on, but perversely, what goes on tends to get better and better, tends to get brighter and brighter, and you don't have the opportunity to really observe unskillful mental events, because consciousness is transformative, so Dharmavichaya in itself becomes a transforming practice. But often, well, we can't change the states that are going on, but at least we can watch them, at least we cannot react to them. So this is what we're primed now to do. We will be, above all over the next two days, practicing Dharmavichaya, and gradually learning what consciousness is, how it works, at least in this Yoga Chara Abhidhamma system, which I'm sure will be very helpful, even if it's not ultimately satisfactory or definitive. And I'm sure that that will help us in our own work on ourselves to be clear about what we need to work on. Probably we'll realize we're not as conscious as we should be, but we'll see how we could be more conscious. And it'll help us in our chapters, because we'll be relating to each other in our examination of our minds. We'll be doing Dharmavichaya together. And I suggest that today in your groups this afternoon, well, yes, you do just reflect on your experience since this part of the convention has begun, your experience in the puja, your experience in the meditation that we'll have this morning. And try to see, well, to what extent Dharmavichaya is really there? Are you doing it? Do you need to do it more? What's stopping you from doing it? What is it that distracts you? And so on. How much are you doing it most of the time? In this way, begin to sort of focus on the theme of Dharmavichaya. And I'm sure that by doing that, it will come much more to life. So that's all I have to say to this morning. And it's just now for us to get a cup of tea and to get smart view to the Shrine Room by 12 o'clock for Tejananda to lead us in Dharmavichaya. As I say tomorrow, we'll be looking at the Sarvatraga mental events. And if you want to do some reading up, that would be what to look at.
