The Aggregates of Distinguishing and Feelings: Karma Kagyu

Next, we need to look at the other factors that make up the awareness side of our mental activity. These are known as mental factors. These are subsidiary awarenesses, next to the primary consciousness. We can use the example of the chandelier as mentioned before. Primary consciousness is like the main big light in the middle and the other mental factors are around it, coming together with it like the little lights of the chandelier.

There are many mental factors and they are aware of the defining characteristics of objects in special ways without interpolating or repudiating anything. “Interpolate” means literally “to add a feather on the end of an arrow,” adding something that’s not there. This means that they don’t make up and project something onto the object or deny something that concerns the object. Our grasping for true existence is what does that. Various types of grasping do that, such as grasping for a truly existent self; however, these subsidiary mental factors and primary consciousness as well doesn’t do that. 

Some subsidiary factors, such as attention, interest or concentration perform functions that help primary consciousness to cognitively take or engage in an object. Others add an emotional flavor to the engagement with the object. These are the two most general type of functions that they perform. They help a primary consciousness to connect to an object, pay attention to it or stay focused on it. It can be quite mechanical and others add some emotional flavor such as love, compassion, anger, hatred, these types of things.

A network of mental factors accompanies each moment of our mental consciousness. Some mental factors are always there. There’s a standard list of fifty-one that we find in the Indian author Asanga’s presentation. There are other presentations of it: there is one in Theravada, and Vasubandhu has another presentation. They overlap in many ways, although a few things are added or left out. What one needs to appreciate is that these fifty-one in the list that we’ll look at here is just the main ones. It doesn’t include everything. 

The example that we can use for understanding that is a very large pie that we can divide into fifty-one pieces two ways. One is to divide the whole pie into fifty-one pieces and the other is to divide part of the pie into fifty-one pieces and then there’s a lot left over. The second example is more fitting to the presentation of fifty-one mental factors. This is because, for instance, they don’t include compassion. Obviously, compassion is a mental factor. Why the fifty-one that are there were chosen and others were left out, I really have no idea and have never seen an explanation of that.

The first time that I saw this list of mental factors, it was presented as a hundred or hundred and one.

I’ve never heard of a list with those numbers, but why not? However, it’s not in the standard Abhidharma texts. Everyone studies two Abhidharma texts, Abhidharmakosha by Vasubandhu and Abhidharmasamuccaya by Asanga. These are the main sources; the Theravada may have their own sources. Each of the eighteen schools of the original Hinayana have their own Abhidharmas. Each of them has a different listing of these mental factors as does the Bon tradition, many of which correspond to the Buddhist ones and several of which aren’t included in any of the Buddhist lists. 

There are all these different presentations; nothing special. Of course, we will have different presentations; why not? There are 84,000 dharmas, things that can be known. Dharma is defined as something that holds its essential nature. A distinct thing that isn’t made into a solid thing. There are 84,000 – the number usually mentioned in the sutras – so why not a hundred and one.

I just got an email from someone in Russia asking for the list of the 84,000 [laughter]. I will have to disappoint him.

Five Congruent Features

As mentioned, a network of mental factors accompanies each moment of primary consciousness and shares five congruent features with the primary consciousness it accompanies. As taught in high school geometry, there are congruent triangles that share the same shape and angles and so on. Reviving high school geometry, we can use that word in that they share five things in common. Remember the analogy is the chandelier.

First, they share the same reliance. With the chandelier, the main bulbs and the little bulbs all around it all share the same electricity, all focused on the same object. It is a similar thing with the primary consciousness and mental factors. This is usually referred to as mind and mental factors, but it’s actually consciousness and mental factors. 

They also all rely on the same cognitive sensor, the sensors, meaning, for instance, what senses that a light has been turned on or a door has opened. They are the photosensitive cells of the eyes, sound-sensitive of the ears, smell of the noise, taste of the tongue, physical sensation of the body except for fingernails, hair and hemorrhoids. I won’t tell you how I found that out. Just a little factoid to throw out at people. For the mind, the immediately preceding moment is the sensor or what’s called the dominant condition for the arising. It is the dominant condition that affects what is going to be a sight, sound, smell or taste. For the mind, it’s the previous moment that determines that the next moment is also going to be mental. With the mental factors, whether we’re talking about sense perception or just thinking, all the mental factors from the mental consciousness rely on the same cognitive sensor.

Next, they share the same object and are aiming at the same object. Let’s say the colored shapes, the little conglomerations of molecules or electromagnetic waves, also give rise to the same mental aspects, the mental hologram. They all give rise together to one mental hologram.

Next, they are occurring simultaneously, all at the same time.

They also have what is called the same natal source, interpreted here as meaning that they have the same slant. In other words, they work harmoniously together. They all fit nicely together in that sense and share the same the same orientation. For example, we can’t have love and hatred at the same time. We can have a love-hate relationship but not exactly in the same one moment.

This are the mental factors and they share these five things in common, these five congruent features. Digest that for a moment. I think the analogy of the chandelier is quite helpful here.

Five Ever-Functioning Mental Factors

There are five ever-functioning mental factors that accompany every moment of mental activity. Depending on the system, one can say that there are ten there all the time; but in Asanga’s presentation, the second set of five are defined very specifically as just being focused on constructive objects, or when they themselves are constructive. This is taking a special case. However, Vasubandhu explains them as all ten being there all the time. All in all, the five are the most basic. 

Feeling a Level of Happiness and Distinguishing

Of these five, two constitute their own aggregates. All the rest of them are thrown into the aggregate of other affecting variables. These two are distinguishing and feeling a level of happiness. The reason for that is that craving after feelings of happiness causes disputes among householders. They fight over what they like and what they want and so on. This is coming directly out of the Abhidharma text to explain why these two are specified as their own type of mental factor. 

Feeling is very important because householders argue about that. Also, as explained before, because of our craving after happy feelings to make things secure, and with unhappiness, that we have to get rid of it, this activates karmic potentials. The feeling of happiness and unhappiness is therefore made into its own aggregate. 

Distinguishing is its own aggregate. The reason that’s given is that distinguishing this view of reality from that view causes disputes among the monastics. Householders argue about money or whatever will give them more happiness, while monastics are debating about distinguishing philosophical views and that causes their arguments. Therefore, distinguishing is made into an aggregate all by itself. This also activates karmic potentials and is cause for further rebirth.

That’s why these two were made into aggregates by themselves. Thereby, our way of dividing the five aggregates isn’t symmetrical. As one of my Rinpoche friends once said “symmetry is stupid.” There’s no reason why things should be symmetrical. In this case, we have two aggregates that only have one item in them, and one aggregate that has an unbelievable number of items in it.

Distinguishing is sometimes translated as perception and sometimes as recognition. If we look at the definition, it is that it focuses on a defining characteristic mark, defining characteristic feature of an appearing object, a mental hologram, and differentiates it from what is other than it. Karma Kagyu has a special explanation about when and how it functions limited to conceptual cognition. If we think in terms of conceptual cognition, when we are perceiving, when we are looking, although we are seeing electromagnetic waves, a couple of microseconds later, the mind is making the appearance of whole objects. There are all these bodies and people and other things that are in our field of cognition.

Distinguishing allows us to distinguish one object from another. If we couldn’t do that, in the Gelugpa context, we are distinguishing colored shapes from other colored shapes. If we think of it at that level, how do we distinguish all the colored shapes that make up a face from the colored shapes of the people behind that and the wall. If we limit this, as in the Karma Kagyu presentation, to whole objects, how do we distinguish this whole object from everything around it? Otherwise, we can’t make sense of anything that we’re aware of. 

This distinguishing is one of the most fundamental basic mental factors. Without it we can’t possibly make any sense of a whole field of vision, a mental field or whatever. It allows us to specify one object from everything else around it or anything else. That’s why the translation as recognition doesn’t work here. Recognition is that we knew it before and it doesn’t have that. For instance, an infant can distinguish hot and cold, hungry and not hungry, light and dark. It doesn’t mean that they have words for it or recognize it. It’s very basic; worms can do that. That’s what distinguishing is about. Without it, there is no way of dealing with the world.

[Pause]

That’s what we’re talking about with that aggregate. Remember that in the discussion of the five aggregates, it has to apply to worms as well, not just humans.

This distinguishing has to do with very basic things like you mentioned, dark or light. Are these categories that any sentient being would distinguish?

In the Karma Kagyu usage of it, it involves categories. In other presentations, like the Gelugpa presentation, it doesn’t necessarily imply categories at all. It just distinguishes this colored shape from that colored shape. It doesn’t put it into any category and doesn’t give it a word. But even in the Kagyu presentation, it doesn’t necessarily apply a word. However, it is also distinguishing one category from another category. For example, the category of apples as opposed to the category of oranges, cats or dogs. Dog would also be distinguished from cold and from anything not dog.

Two Levels of Distinguishing

There are two levels of distinguishing. There’s distinguishing the categories; categories have what is known as composite features, a composite of all the items that are in it. This would be distinguishing the category of dog from the category of cat. But then, with specific items, we distinguish one item from another item, such as right hand from left hand, this dog from that dog. It works on both levels. We have distinguishing with what’s called specifically characterized phenomenon, specific items; and then we have distinguishing with generally categorized phenomenon, that’s a technical term, and that’s the categories. 

One is focused on an individual defining characteristic feature; and categories focus on what I translate as a composite feature, as it’s a composite of all the items that fit into the category of, for instance, dogs. Once we think of dog, then we have a mental picture of what represents a dog for us. When we think of a dog, everybody is going to have a different mental picture of what represents a dog.

I find it a bit confusing because the categorization of hot and cold or dark and light are basic. They don’t seem to be concepts; but dog is a concept.

This is the whole point. In Karma Kagyu, distinguishing isn’t manifest in non-conceptual sensory cognition. In Gelugpa, it is manifest. Kagyu says no it isn’t manifest at that time. It’s only manifest in terms of distinguishing whole objects from each other. Distinguishing doesn’t occur, it’s unmanifest, and obviously there’s continuity during that microsecond of bare sensory cognition and the bare mental cognition. That’s just a mental hologram of little patches of colored shapes. 

Next, when we have conceptual cognition and a mental synthesis of a whole object, like hand, then there is something that represents it. It’s based on sensory cognition and an image similar to the visual sense. If we’re just thinking it, it’s probably visual, although we can also imagine what it feels like, for instance, if we are blind, what the physical sensation is to have a handshake. There is the mental representation and there’s a category.

We are distinguishing, in terms of the mental representation, this mental representation of a hand from the mental representation that we might have of everyone else or the wall in the background. Otherwise, we couldn’t focus on the hand. Also, it’s distinguishing the category of what kind of thing is this? A category answers the question of what kind of thing is this? It’s in that category of hand. It doesn’t have to apply a word. We don’t have to think of hand in order to see a mental representation of a whole object. We don’t have to have words at all. 

The distinguishing doesn’t attach a word to it. According to the Karma Kagyu explanation, it’s only in the next moment that we have grasping for true existence and that the thing truly exists in this category. There is also the dualistic appearance of “me” looking at it; the truly existent “me” on one side looking dualistically at the the truly existent object on the other side. That comes in the next moment; but just with the distinguishing itself, it allows for our dealing with the hand. If we have a splinter in the hand, we have to see it. We see it mixed with the conceptual construct of a whole object.

This is a special quality only of Karma Kagyu, that distinguishing doesn’t manifest in our sense perception, that the mental little aspect helps transfer it from sensory to mental.

It sounds like you’re describing some temporal sequence and it is always true. It seems to me that it is something that all happens at once.

It appears as if it is all happening at once because, we’re talking about microseconds. That’s the way it’s explained in the texts. When they say one moment, it is defined as 1/64 of the time of a finger snap. That’s the textual definition of it; that’s pretty fast. It’s a crucial point when it comes to other points in this presentation. There are certain things that with our sensory perception, it’s just too fast to be able to ascertain or know it with certainty. There is one way of knowing that I translate as non-determining cognition. Something appears and it arises, but we can’t determine it with certainty. Sometimes that’s translated as inattentive attention, but this isn’t correct in terms of the defining characteristic. It’s not that we aren’t paying attention to it; it’s just that it’s so fast and there’s no certainty.

When we distinguish a hand from the wall, and we don’t put a name on it, but just put it into a category, doesn’t the category have a name? Is it that we don’t distinguish it as a hand but just as something different from the wall?

In that first moment of conceptual cognition, as far as I understand, there is the conceptually constructed whole object and together with that there is the collection synthesis. It’s not just something that appears to include all the sensory data, but also that extends over time because only one moment happens at a time. There’s a synthesis like that; but there is also the synthesis that it’s some kind of thing. Those come together. It’s only in the next moment, that makes that kind of thing, that category into a box, and this object fits into that. For us, it is a hand; for the tiger, it’s food. Although we can put it into different categories, first it’s some kind of thing. Everything is some kind of thing. That’s what’s called a kind synthesis.

Is this like if we are in a different culture and we see an object, we distinguish it as different from the wall, but we don’t have a concept for it?

Right. This is a very interesting point. For instance, we see a mango for the first time. We have no idea what it is, but we can certainly distinguish it from the table or from somebody’s hand. We know that it’s some kind of thing, but we don’t know what. We might have a general category of fruit or something edible. This starts to become very interesting when we relate this to babies. How does a baby learn the category of edible and not edible? A baby puts everything into its mouth, so it has to learn by exclusion that something isn’t edible. Everything that is left over is edible. Categories are actually based on exclusions of everything that doesn’t fit into a specific category. It’s everything that’s left over because we can’t actually point to the category. Where is it? It’s metaphysical; that’s how I translate the word because it isn’t actually physical.

We see this thing. We don’t know what it is and we certainly don’t know the name for it, “mango,” but we know that it’s some kind of thing and maybe we fit it into the category of edible object or fruit. We don’t fit it into the specific category. When we see a mongoose for the first time, we know it’s an animal but we have no idea what it is. We haven’t seen it before. The whole topic of how babies learn is fascinating if we look at it from a Buddhist analytical point of view.

This really applies to how people are migrating these days and how they have different categories and why it’s so hard for them to understand each other.

It is difficult when we have different categories for things and also definitions of the categories. For instance, politeness. What we consider polite in Europe and what someone from an Asian or Middle Eastern country considers polite would be very different. It’s not polite to eat with a left hand or to give someone something with the left hand in many Asian and Middle eastern cultures. In Western culture that doesn’t fit into the category of impolite. Categories can have different definitions as well with different composite defining characteristics, and that’s the problem. What is appropriate conduct between men and women is a big issue, in terms of what fits into that category. Different cultures and peoples will define them differently and that causes an awful lot of trouble.

When we greet someone, we have a handshake in our culture. In another time, it was considered bourgeois, and we only were to say hello. These days, when we greet a Muslim, it’s the hand on the heart and not a handshake.

Greetings are terribly confusing categories in terms of what is appropriate and what is inappropriate, especially the kiss on the cheek. How many times do we kiss? In some cultures, it’s once; in others, it’s twice, once on each cheek; in some it’s three and some even four. If we do it the incorrect number of times, it means something else. Should lips touch a person’s cheeks or not is also a variable. Do we make a sound “mwah” or not?

I have gotten into trouble traveling around in many different countries, not knowing what is appropriate. Now I ask what is appropriate; that’s the best way. Sure, in some Middle Eastern cultures a handshake isn’t appropriate, it’s not. Now, lots of people hug each other. At what point in knowing somebody do we hug them when we see them? 

That’s the problem with these categories. There are general categories, a list of eighty of them actually, that are universal. It has to do with certain instinctiveness, different for differing species. For instance, the category that when we’re happy we smile. That’s a category of the type of action that we do. For a dog, it would be wagging the tail. As humans we don’t have that one. Another is when sad, we cry. The instinct to suck as a baby. These are general ones; but then we have our personal ones. 

There are levels of these categories and conceptual things. There are individual personal ones, such as the category of our mother and the mental image that we each have when we think of our mothers. Memories fit into that. Then there are more universal instinctive categories. It’s very interesting and sophisticated. Let’s go on.

That is the aggregate of distinguishing. It isn’t “recognition.” It doesn’t apply a word or a name, but just enables us to focus on one object in a cognitive field. This is distinguishing one object from another object; this is specifying in a sense. It’s associated with specifying deep awareness, or sometimes it’s called individualizing deep awareness, distinguishing from everything else that’s not it. 

The next aggregate is feeling a level of happiness, unhappiness or a neutral feeling. For our normal ordinary experience, in each moment we’re going to have some level on the spectrum between happiness and unhappiness. When we talk about a neutral feeling, we’re not talking about the point exactly at the middle. This isn’t what neutral refers to. 

Neutral Feeling

Neutral refers to the state after we’ve achieved shamatha, perfect concentration, a stilled and settled mind, and then going deeper and deeper into the so-called dhyanas, and as we go deeper, certain mental factors become non-manifest. When we reach the fourth dhyana, at that point, the feeling that we experience is what is referred to as neutral. It’s no longer physical or mental happiness or unhappiness. That’s what is meant by neutral. Deeper than that, there are the four absorptions. They are accompanied by neutral feeling.

For us regular people that’s something that we don’t feel. If we think in terms of a spectrum of happiness to unhappiness, it doesn’t have to be extreme or dramatic, but it’s there on a very subtle level all the time.

It’s very good to spend time trying to identify each of these aggregates. Distinguishing is pretty easy to identify. We can tell the difference between looking a group of people, one body from another body. They don’t just merge into one object, do they? That’s quite easy, isn’t it? 

Feeling a level of happiness or unhappiness is a little bit more subtle, because for many of us we say that we don’t feel anything. That’s not quite true. It just means that we’re not paying attention to what we’re feeling. It doesn’t mean that we’re not feeling anything. It’s indicated by the fact that we move our head. We stop looking at one thing, and move on to look at something else. That’s being unhappy with it; that’s unhappiness on a very low level. If we continue looking at something, we’re happy to continue looking at it. We want to stay there and don’t want to change.

Defining Happiness and Unhappiness

Happy and unhappy in most cases is very subtle. Happiness is defined as that feeling that when it arises, we want for it to continue and don’t want to be parted from it. It doesn’t mean that we’re making it into something special and a big thing. That’s craving. It’s fine, nice, happy. Watching something on YouTube, for example, and we don’t change it. If we look to something else, move our head, we’re unhappy, didn’t like it, don’t want it anymore. That’s unhappiness, the feeling that when it arises, we want to be parted from it. Again, not making it into a monster, we’re talking about just the basic fundamental thing.

If we do achieve these deep meditations with the neutral feeling, we neither want it to continue or not continue. We’re too absorbed. It’s only when we make it into a thing, that then it’s described as not wanting it to degenerate or go away.

Defining Feeling

We can identify this and know what we’re feeling. That requires being really very sensitive. Feeling as defined as the way in which we experience the ripening of our karma. It’s a very interesting definition. That’s the definition. How do we experience the ripening of our karma? Without feeling some level of happiness, we’re not experiencing anything. 

This is the major difference between a mind and a computer. A computer has almost all of the features of mind; but a computer doesn’t experience anything. A computer crashes and it doesn’t feel unhappy about that. It doesn’t swear when it crashes and doesn’t feel happy when it’s working. That’s the difference. A computer doesn’t build up negative karma by crashing all the time. It doesn’t work like that.

What are we experiencing? How do we experience the aggregate factors with which we are born? We talk about what ripens from karma, from our karmic potentials actually, the aftermath of potentials and tendencies. This includes our body, intelligence, talents, personality and the aggregates in each moment. How do we experience it?

For example, when we talk about what ripens from karmic potentials, if we are hit by a car, our karmic potentials don’t cause the other person to hit us with the car. That’s a terrible mistaken view of guilt. The other person’s karmic potentials cause that person to hit you with the car. Our own karmic potentials cause us to experience being hit by a car. When we look at the discussion of what ripens from karma, the word “experience” is always there. We are experiencing that. With some tendency to be hit by a car, that urge comes up and then because of distraction or something like that, you cross the street without looking. Bam! You are hit buy a car. 

Happiness and Unhappiness Differ from Pleasure and Pain

How do we experience that? We experience that with unhappiness. We don’t experience being hit by a car with happiness. It’s not that we are so happy to be hit by a car. Happiness and unhappiness aren’t the same as pleasure and pain. These are physical sensations and forms of physical phenomenon. This is a very important point as a lot of people confuse these. They are different. Happiness and unhappiness are how we experience physical things, such sights, sounds, or sensations like pleasure or pain. 

If we do a lot of hard physical training, we feel pain afterwards and we’re happy about that because it means that we really had a good workout. We’re really building our muscles and so we can feel happy about that pain. We can also feel happy or unhappy when we’re thinking about something.

It was about the experiencing of getting hit by a car. What are we supposed to learn from this?

This is something that can be found in Theosophy, and maybe in some other Western philosophical views, which is basically that God has given us lessons to learn and we can’t go onto the next stage of our development until we learn the lesson. That’s not Buddhism. Can we learn something from it? Yes. We can learn to look both ways before crossing the street, for example; but it isn’t that God made us get hit by a car so we could learn to look both ways. This is like learning a lesson and deserving that accident to learn it, bad boy or bad girl. It’s not like that.

This is a short comment about pain and pleasure. There is a Japanese author who is also a marathon runner who says pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.

Right. Suffering is unhappiness. We can experience pleasure and be very unhappy about it, because we might feel we don’t deserve it. It’s a very unfortunate state of mind to think like that. They don’t necessarily go together, pleasure and happiness and pain and unhappiness. 

Happiness and unhappiness, how we experience what is happening to us, this is our aggregates. It’s how we experience what we’re born with such as a deformity, or great intelligence, or strength. We can feel we’re so strong or so weak, getting sick all the time. It’s also how we experience the environment in which we live. Environment doesn’t just mean the ecology, but everything around us. 

It’s how we experience the compulsory wanting to repeat our previous patterns of behavior, such as a compulsive chocolate eater. Maybe we are very happy about that or unhappy about that, but compulsively we repeat certain patterns of behavior. It’s getting into situations where things happen to us similar to what we did to others. It’s also how we experience that with happiness or unhappiness. That also ripens. If we always cause division by slandering and saying bad things about others, it causes friends to leave and so on, then we experience, as a result of that, that our relationships always end. People leave us. This actually does make sense. If we speak badly about one person, our friends might wonder what we are saying about them behind their backs. It makes sense in terms of things happening to us being similar to what we cause others.

It’s how we experience all of this as well. All these things are happening, and feeling is how we experience it. It’s the feeling that we have. That’s the feeling aggregate.

To repeat, we have distinguishing, we have forms of physical phenomena, and consciousness. There’s consciousness, there’s the form of physical object, the mental hologram. Consciousness is the primary consciousness; is it a sight, a sound, and so on? When the conceptual consciousness constructs it into a whole commonsense object, then distinguishing is how we distinguish one form another, and there is a feeling of some level of happiness or unhappiness.

Categories are Static and Not Part of the Aggregates

When we see a person, we aren’t talking about which categories we’re going to fit them into. This becomes very interesting. This is where our Western idea of concepts comes in. The most general category is a knowable object. What kind of knowable object is it? It can be human being, but we can also attach on the category of friend, someone we don’t like, category of good or bad person, category of annoying, all sorts of categories. These are the categories with which we further elaborate in conceptual cognition. These categories aren’t part of the aggregates, because they are static and don’t do anything.

However, grasping for truly established existence makes things appear as if they really exist within that particular box. They really are from their own side established as an annoying person, for example. Or we think that we’re really established as a loser; perhaps we feel we fit in the category of “somebody that nobody likes” or this sort of things. From this, we get all sorts of disturbing emotions. That is more of what we speak about in the West when we discuss concepts.

A category is just the box that we put things into. Ideally, either don’t put it into a box or change the box. This person annoying us is now in the box of “teacher teaching us patience”; and this is lojong training. Or it can be the box of “cranky baby.” This is attitude training or mind training. If we understand how the mind works and how mental activity works, we know all these strategies we can use to change our experience. We also understand that nobody truly exists in any box. Just because someone might think that “you are a loser,” doesn’t mean that we are a loser. We don’t have to be in that box or think of ourselves in that box. It can be “God’s gift to the world” or whatever.

Some of these boxes are conventions, like “human being.” That’s pretty basic. That’s the box that, for example His Holiness the Dalai Lama puts everybody into when he meets them. It’s a human being; every human being wants to be happy and nobody wants to be unhappy. No difference; everybody is the same in that respect, rather than putting it into the box of nationality, religion, age, gender or anything like that. This is a very important lesson that these boxes or categories are optional. We can change them with mind training, lojong, a very basic teaching. That’s very important in our attitudes about ourselves and others.

To repeat, we’ve presented distinguishing and feeling a level of happiness, consciousness and forms of physical phenomena, although not in the standard order. Next, we have the last one, the aggregate of everything else, other affecting variables.

First, let’s examine the three remaining of the five ever-functioning mental factors. Remember the five include distinguishing and feeling a level of happiness. 

Urge

The first one is an urge. We’ve discussed that a bit. It’s defined as the main mental factor that affects, meaning moves, the mental activity and sets it in motion causing it to go toward something specific. In Asanga’s autocommentary to this, he states that it’s like a movement of a piece of iron caused by a magnet. It’s compelling, this urge that just draws the whole package of the primary consciousness and other mental factors with them to the object like a piece of iron being drawn to a magnet. Depending on the strength of our habit and so on, it can be very strong or weaker.

All these mental factors are variables. They can have a spectrum of strength and there are various things that we can do to strengthen or weaken them. That is an urge, and it causes the mind to go toward something specific. It can go toward the tiny colored shapes in non-conceptual sensory cognition; or it can go toward the mentally conceptually synthesized commonsense whole object. In this way mental activity can engage in some way with the object. This is an urge and it’s very basic. 

It can draw one to focus on an object and then do something with it – act toward it, think about it, speak to it, or something like that. It draws us into an action, draws us into just focusing on an object as well.

Wondering about karma, is everything karma?

There is a list and I’m sorry I don’t recall the whole list. Gravity, for example, isn’t karma. There is a list of five of them that we find in a Theravada sutra. It might be the activity of the sensors to be able to sense data; but one of them had to do with just physical objects. Throwing a ball up in the air when there’s earth’s gravity and not in space, that it comes back down, isn’t karma. It wasn’t that we trained the ball to come back down, whereas karmic motion and action is based on previous habits and thereby becomes compulsive. 

The key word in understanding karma is compulsive. It’s compelling and we don’t have any control over it. At least that’s how we experience it. The only way that we can deal with it is when it occurs that the thought compulsively comes up to think about yelling at someone or embracing someone, saying something nasty or nice, that thought arises and then there’s the mental action of considering it. There’s the urge to think something quite compulsively. It is triggered by something, like seeing a person. Then, that mental action reaches the finale when we make the decision that we’re going to say something to the person, perhaps greet the person. 

That’s where there is this gap between when we’ve made that decision and when the urge draws us into actually saying something or doing something. That’s where we can stop it. Otherwise, in the consideration, in the mental action of deciding if we should say something or not, we can decide not. This is where we can break it.

There are certain other types of behavior that we can get into without having thought about it before. For instance, we can be dancing with someone and step on their foot. We didn’t plan to step on the person’s foot; but there was an urge that drew us into the action of stepping on the person’s foot. That is very difficult to break unless we have great carefulness not to do that. There is this distinction between actions that are thought out before and actions that are not.

Are only the actions thought out beforehand karmic?

No, both of them are karmic. The difference has to do with the time span of when they will ripen. If it’s thought out before, it will have a definite time of when it will ripen. This refers to being whether in this lifetime, immediately following lifetime or some lifetime after that. If it is non-deliberate action, then there is no certainty. It will ripen at some time but without any specific certainty. There are some very heavy actions that will ripen in this lifetime. There’s a specific set of actions, like killing our mother or father, that will send us to some horrible hell realm immediately in the next lifetime. Then, there are actions that will definitely ripen in some lifetime after that. 

For instance, we’ve killed our mother or father and have a hell rebirth. But we’ve also built up the karma that will definitely ripen at some time in a lifetime after that, perhaps to be born as a human again. That would be a karmic sequence, for example, and this would all depend on how strong the motivation is and many other factors. However, the main influence is how strong our motivation is when we commit an action and who we’re doing it to. There is a difference between killing our mother and stepping on an ant.

Then, regarding these things that aren’t deliberate, there isn’t a definite time when it will ripen. It could be millions of lifetimes later, depending on whether or not we keep on reinforcing it. If we keep on stepping on the same person’s foot over and over, then it starts to become heavier than if it only happens once and regret it, as in saying, “Sorry I stepped on your foot. I’ll try to be more careful.” Karma gets very complicated, but it’s possible to unravel all the different pieces that are involved.

Okay, that’s an urge. There’s a mental urge, a mental factor. There can be an urge for a mental action, a physical action and an urge for a verbal action. The urge will bring us into focusing on an object and doing something with it.

Paying Attention

Then, there is paying attention or, literally, taking to mind. This is the mental factor that differentiates an object as the object of focus and this enables the mental activity to cognize it or focus on it. That’s paying attention to something. The urge brings us there and paying attention differentiates it. Distinguishing distinguishes this object from another object, and now attention is going to enable us to determine that this is what we’re going to focus on. Taking it to mind, literally, can be many varieties. 

It can be momentary, as in each moment in the directions for shamatha. Every moment that our attention goes away, we bring it back. We repeat this, bring the attention back over and over. There is painstaking attention, in which we really make an effort to put our focus on it. There is also effortless attention. There are these different types of attention. We can pay a lot of attention to something or very little. This is a variable.

Also involved with this is how we consider things, how we pay attention to something. There is correct and incorrect consideration. To consider something which is by nature suffering as happiness; or something that is pure by nature as impure; or impermanent as permanent.

There’s also a way of paying attention to something and all of that is involved with this mental factor. It’s there all the time. If we don’t pay attention to something, we’re not going to take it as an object of focus. It hasn’t come to our attention, we would say; whereas the Buddhist way of saying it is that our attention goes to something rater than it coming to our attention.

Contacting Awareness

Sometimes this is translated just as “contact” but that is very misleading because contact is a physical thing. We’re talking about a mental factor. Contacting awareness differentiates the object of cognition or the concept as pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. For example, our mind has constructed into a whole object a smelly French piece of cheese and contacting awareness with that is unpleasant. It is the basis for feeling unhappy. We don’t like smelly cheeses. We then see a piece of Norwegian goat cheese and the contacting awareness is pleasant. This has to do with what we like an don’t like, basically. That’s what this is all about. We love Norwegian goat cheese so we experience it with happiness. 

This is contacting awareness and, as its function, it serves as the foundation for experiencing that object with a feeling of happiness or unhappiness or neutral feeling. Pleasant literally means that it comes or goes to mind easily. Unpleasant is that it doesn’t go to our mind easily. “Ugh,” it’s this type of thing when we see something we don’t like. Obviously, that’s based on many factors, isn’t it? 

We could see that from previous lives, we’re sort of born with different things, like some people don’t like to be touched and some people like to touch everything. Why is it that someone likes vanilla or chocolate? It could be that we’re influenced by our parents. Our mother might serve us certain things that she didn’t like, and it was like “Ugh, eat this. Eat your vegetables, your broccoli,” or whatever it might be. We can be taught that this is not something very nice to eat. 

We can be influenced by society. In Thailand, eating insects is really cool and very nice; eating fried grasshoppers or beetles in the West, the contacting awareness would be quite unpleasant. It’s very interesting when we start to analyze what we like and don’t like and why. However, it’s because of that, these tendencies are experienced as unpleasant or pleasant. Then the karma ripens, and we experience that with unhappiness and aversion and don’t want to eat that; or we experience it with greed, and we demand more. 

Brief Review

These are our five ever-functioning mental factors that are there in every single moment. Although there is a special Karma Kagyu assertion that I’m unsure of regarding whether distinguishing is unmanifest during non-conceptual cognition, it might be just being defined in terms of distinguishing whole conventional objects and there might be distinguishing one colored shape from another colored shape. I’ve not seen a very detailed analysis of it. It could work in both ways. 

Undoubtedly, there are some masters who have described it one way and some others who have described it another way. Inevitably, when there are two plausible explanations, someone has asserted it one way and someone else asserted it another way. That’s Tibetan Buddhism and welcome to the world of debate.

In each moment, if we’re dealing with whole objects, we have a distinguishing this object from everything else in the background. There is the urge that moves the consciousness to that object based on paying attention to it, that it specifies that there is something to go toward. The urge brings us to it and the contacting awareness of the whole thing is pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. Then, we experience it with either happiness or unhappiness, on some level. This then causes us to continue paying attention to it or to turn our attention to something else. If we turn our attention to something else, we didn’t like it anymore. It is because of the unpleasant contacting awareness, as if a boring video that we start to watch, don’t like it anymore and turn to something else. 

These are the five ever-functioning mental factors, and as mentioned, feeling and distinguishing are both separate aggregates, and then urge, paying attention and contacting awareness are in the big network of other affecting variables. There are going to be a lot more, but we will speak about them in the next lecture.

I have this notion about liking and disliking, when we are walking down the street, it’s almost like there is too much information to comprehend. We are constantly seeing things that we like, dislike and are neutral about coming at us like a wave all the time. Is this something that we’re just not aware of all the time at some level because it’s actually outside our capacity to be aware of it?

That’s right. When someone has autism, usually that’s described as not being able to filter the information. It’s too overwhelming. That’s usually one of the descriptions that I’ve heard, although I’m not a psychologist. But that’s why the mental factors are very important. Within all of that information, we are seeing the electromagnetic waves from this room, for instance. Next, there is the first hologram of just colored shapes transformed into some sort of a display or mental hologram. Next, conceptually we mentally construct objects. We have these objects and things. What are we going to pay attention to?

We could pay attention what clothes everyone is wearing; but, for example, I’m paying no attention to that at all. I don’t distinguish that. I don’t distinguish that or pay attention to it and I certainly don’t remember what someone was wearing yesterday because of not paying attention to it. That has to do with regard, another mental factor that we will discuss. Do we regard something as important or not? I don’t care at all what someone is wearing; but for someone very into fashion, they care very much. 

The distinguishing of one person from another; but not necessarily distinguishing what a person is wearing from other clothes the person could be wearing. We aren’t paying attention to it; our focus doesn’t go there, and there’s no urge from previous habits of being concerned about fashion to draw the focus to what anyone is wearing.

These factors help us to filter information so that we don’t get overwhelmed trying to be aware of everything. A Buddha is aware of everything and not overwhelmed with it like somebody with autism. Mental activity, the mind is capable of being aware of everything. That’s called omniscience. We have limited hardware. Our bodies are limited and because the bodies are limited, the mental activity is limited. It’s even worse if we were a fly, born in a fly body with a fly brain.

The Art of Fly Catching

On the topic of flies, with a little bit of time left over. Did you know that the speed of consciousness in a fly brain and fly eyes is very different from the speed of cognition in human apparatus? There is a certain number of frames, as it were, in a second. We might have, let’s say, 64 finger snaps per second. A fly might have about 200; a fly has much more. When we try to catch a fly in our hand, which many of my Tibetan friends in India are quite good at and find it quite amusing, for us the fly moves incredibly quickly. How is it able to do that? It’s because from a fly’s perspectives there are, let’s say, 200 frames when for us there are 64. It seems to the fly that our motion is slow motion, so a fly is able to react much more quickly that a human. This is indicative of the cognitive sensors of the hardware. Fly hardware is far superior in that respect than human hardware, but not so much in other ways.

It is possible to exploit that experience of the difference between a fly and a human. If one moves very slow, the fly will experience it as standing still. If one wants to catch a fly, just move very slow all the way across, and then poof, the fly is caught.

Ah, the art of fly catching is to move very slowly. Fly eyes also have panoramic vision. They can see a much wider field of vision than human eyes because it is multi-prismatic. If we come from behind a fly and the hand is moving in the direction that the fly will take to fly off, we have a much better chance of catching it in our hand than if we approach it head on. Yes, there are many strategies for catching a fly in our hands; but what we have to be careful of is not squeezing too hard. Then, that’s rather unfortunate for the fly.

That we want to catch it at all, is that some kind of urge or tendency?

Yes, that is an urge; and then the emotion that accompanies the action as part of the motivation is crucial. What do we plan to do with the fly? If we want to catch it because it has invaded our space, a space invader, an unacceptable life form in my space, and we’re going to throw it out the window even though it’s minus ten degrees outside, good luck with that. That’s one intention. There can also be the intention to catch it to and crush it in our hand. They are dirty; we put it into the box of “dirty.”

On the other hand, my Tibetan friends think it is great fun. They shake it up, and make it dizzy and then when it flies, they laugh and laugh. They think this is great fun to play with the flies. It’s a very different intention. But it is an urge and we have to differentiate the urge form the intention and the emotion that accompanies that.

Thinking about urges, what came to mind is a person with Tourette’s syndrome who might stand up and swear repeatedly and more so when excited. Just wondered if there is a relation between that and this phenomenon?

Yes, this is the urge that comes up. An urge, from a karmic point of view is compelling. We have no control over it. Therefore, the type of urges that will come up are based on previous behavior either in this lifetime or previous lifetimes. Someone with Tourette’s syndrome has very strong urges. The strength of the compelling urge can be little or very strong. We can understand that with the simple example of an itch. How strong is the urge to scratch it? It might be just a small urge, for example when we’re meditating. But it might become so strong that we can’t control it, and then we just scratch it. Urges will have different strengths. But with Tourette’s syndrome, it’s absolutely so strong that there can be no control. What is repeating is undoubtedly built up in previous lives. The more excited we are, if we look at it in terms of the subtle energy system, the energy is moving with more force. There is a certain energy as well with the karmic urge. It’s another way of looking at it in terms of a physical basis. Then it becomes stronger and more compelling.

Going back to the fly, is it possible for an urge to change in a lifetime? Twenty years ago, I would kill a fly because it annoyed me. Now I get annoyed with people killing flies. Is that an urge, the same urge of getting annoyed? The perspective changed however about the killing.

Yes, we can change which karmic tendencies will ripen very much in terms of the categories with which we perceive the fly. We can perceive it as a pest or perceive it in another category. For example, I remember when my uncle died, there was this fly that was always landing on my face no matter how much I waved it away. I started to wonder if this was now my uncle reborn as a fly and instinctively recognized me and wanted to make contact. Looking at it as the reincarnation of my uncle, then I certainly didn’t want to kill it. 

When we perceive something in a different category, that changes what kind of urge or impulse will arise in terms of how we deal with it. That’s part of mind training and is what lojong is all about. Change your attitudes and categories with which we conceptualize things.

Let’s end with a dedication. We think whatever understanding, whatever positive force has come form this, may it go deeper and deeper and act as a cause for all beings to reach the enlightened state of a Buddha for the benefit of all.