In the mind we’ve got the sensory consciousness and we’ve got the mental consciousness. Within the mental consciousness, we only function at the grossest level and that’s called “conceptuality.”
There are levels of conceptuality, of course. Lots of our thoughts, like about music and math – these brilliant conceptual thoughts – are just conceptual thoughts about how things exist, and there’s nothing wrong with those. You learn mathematics, and they’re valid cognitions because there’s a whole system called math: you learn those concepts, you prove them to be true, and they’re called valid cognitions, they’re fine.
Then you’ve got the emotional concepts, and they’re the ones the Buddha focuses on in the middle scope of the lamrim where he talks about the mind. He focuses on the neurotic concepts, the emotional ones.
Why are they emotional? Because we’ve practiced them for so long.
That includes love and compassion. How come some persons are able effortlessly to have compassion for strangers? It’s because they’ve practiced it – they’ve practiced it to the point where it’s now natural.
When you see a person who plays the piano play beautifully, you know it doesn’t come from the sky: you know they’ve practiced it for a long time, isn’t it? It’s obvious.
So if you see in your mind you get angry easily, it’s because you’ve practiced it in the past. It’s so simple, the explanation. We say, “Why am I angry?” And of course, we’ll say, “My mother did this, and my father did that, and the person twenty-two years ago did this to me.” Yeah, they might have, but that’s not the reason you’re angry. It’s because you’ve done it before, babe, that’s all.
Well, why did I do it before? Because you’ve done it before that. And why did I do it before that? Because you’ve done it before – and you never get to the first moment. Anger’s a habit: it’s not even complicated, it’s a habit. All these neuroses are habits, and so is love and compassion.
If as a little boy you run to fishing and immediately fall in love with fishing and start killing the fish, and no one’s taught you to love fishing, you can deduce you’ve done it before.
If you’re another little child, like my friend, Dechen – three years old and his mother was taking the lice out of his head, and he started crying with compassion for the lice – you can deduce he has the habit of compassion from before. No one taught him this – he came with this tendency. He’s crying in compassion for the lice: “Mummy, Mummy, leave them alone, it’s their home,” you know? And he’s never killed a living being in this life because he’s practiced compassion, practiced non-killing.
This is the simple concept of karma. I think psychologically it’s about the best explanation you can find for why one child wants to kill somebody and why one child wants to be helpful. It’s not just random. You can’t blame Hitler’s mother for Hitler, I’m sorry. Do you understand? It just doesn’t work, you know? It’s not a difficult concept even theoretically.
So our mind is full of concepts. Anger and compassion and love, at the level we function at the moment, are all rooted in, underpinned by, being conceptual thoughts. But when you practice and practice and practice them, that’s when they become emotional – and what I mean by that is when the body’s involved. Can you hear me?
When you see a person who’s angry, what you’re seeing is a little child shouting and yelling and screaming, isn’t it? “Uh-oh, she’s angry,” you’ll say. Well, what are you seeing? You’re seeing a body flailing, you’re seeing a voice shouting, eyes as wide as saucers, spit coming out the mouth, and, also, coming out the mouth, completely irrational, absurd words – and what are words but thoughts? Do you hear my point?
“How dare you do that to me, I hate you.” What is that but a thought? And a thought is another word for a concept. Are you hearing me, people?
Anger is conceptual, but it comes along with the emotion because you’ve practiced it. The same with love: if you’ve really practiced love you will have incredible affection and you’ll be crying with compassion for sentient beings because you’ve practiced it – it’s not cosmic or unusual.
Finally we live at this very gross level of conceptuality, and then Buddha focuses in the middle scope not on the concept of theories about music and math – that’s not his expertise. Here we’re talking the emotional ones – the neurotic emotional ones – because they’re the problem: they cause suffering.
Let’s look at those. Why do they cause suffering. And why, crucially, are they misconceptions? This is the point. Why are they called “misconceptions”?
First we have to start with the definition of a concept. If you say one plus one is two, that is a concept, it’s a thought, and then it has to have a valid basis. Any thought – the way they talk about the mind – any thought you have, if it’s a valid thought, it’s not in a sense of being, “Oh, you won the lottery, you’re correct, you’re a good girl,” but literally being correct, actual truth.
If one plus one is two, how do you prove it? Well, it’s within the dependent arising of the concept of the world of mathematics, and the people have come up with these concepts, and then you look and you can prove it: one plus one is two.
A valid concept in general in Buddhism is a thought that’s in sync with the thing that you’re talking about.
If you say, “That is a rose,” you have to establish what we’re talking about here. So we have to first know the English language, obviously. We have to know what that means: “is a rose.” And once we all agree that thing there is a rose – and you define what a rose is, you define the words – you’ll say, “There’s a rose,” and we’ll all remember it because we’ve learned. “That is a rose,” you will say.
If I say I have a vase of roses, you don’t just believe me: you’ve got to look in that direction, you’ll identify that it’s a rose, you’ll identify it’s a vase, you’ll identify it’s more than one, so you’ll go, “Tick the boxes, she just spoke the truth.” Isn’t it reasonable? Now wouldn’t it be nice if we could all speak the truth?
Now look at the world: there’s hardly a word that comes out of the internet that’s valid – it’s just vomit pouring forth from people’s deluded minds. Literally we live in conspiracy theories every day, but we do it even in the normal world, you know: “Oh, she’s horrible, she did this,” and you believe it’s true, you believe what you’re seeing.
If you’re colorblind, you’ll point to a pink rose and say, “That’s blue.” But that’s not true. Within the thing of roses and colors, a pink rose is not blue. There’s no absolute blue, there’s no absolute rose, there’s no absolute red, but within the dependent arising of the world of convention, a pink rose is pink – or whatever color it is.
We’ve got to establish truth, and that really is the point for the Buddha: the whole deal is he is saying we suffer because we have misconceptions. That is honestly the truth, that’s how he’s summarizing everything: we suffer because our mind is driven by misconceptions.
And because they’re emotional, and because they’re practiced from countless lifetimes, they are so primordial within us that we don’t even know we have a misconception. That’s the tragedy. “Bad enough,” as Lama Zopa says, “we’re caught up in the delusions, in the misconceptions, but we believe they are true.” This is the tragedy.
So we should have compassion for ourselves, and have humility and patience, because they’re primordially deep misconceptions. And as Lama Yeshe says, “I can tell you about attachment for a whole year, we’ll never begin to understand it until we start deep work internally,” you know? But we’ve got to first have the words, though, identify it. Do you understand?