Now we have functional phenomena. These are nonstatic phenomena; they change from moment to moment, they arise from causes and conditions, and they do something – they affect other things, produce effects. Some of them are eternal and some of them are temporary. So what’s temporary would be, for instance, the computer – this individual computer – or my body, something that arises at a certain point and at a certain point it’s going to disintegrate, fall apart, and moment to moment it is degenerating, going closer and closer to its end. But then there are other functional phenomena, nonstatic phenomena, changing from moment to moment that last forever, like the mental continuum – individual mental continuum – no beginning, no end, but moment to moment it changes, because moment to moment I am aware of different things; the consciousness, the mind, is aware of different things.

My computer is a nonstatic phenomenon. It’s falling apart. Eventually it’s going to break; eventually I’m not going to have it any longer – whether I lose it or somebody steals it or it just breaks. It’s falling apart from moment to moment. Gross impermanence (mi-rtag-pa rags-pa) is when it actually breaks. Subtle impermanence (mi-rtag-pa phra-mo) is that moment to moment it’s getting closer and closer to its end.

Follow that? It’s like this class. It will end. It’s temporary. But moment to moment, something different is happening. When class is over, it’s finished. But each minute, it’s getting closer and closer to the end. What is the reason for the class ending? The reason for it ending is because it started. If it never started, it couldn’t possibly end.

Now that may seem funny, but let’s apply it to the computer. What is the reason the computer breaks? Because it was built. It was built and therefore – depending on parts, and so on, which aren’t constantly being renewed – it’s going to fall apart; it’s going to come to an end. What is the cause of death? Birth. The sickness that I die from is just the circumstance. The actual cause is that I was born. So if we were born, what do we expect? We’re going to die. Buy a computer, what can we expect? At some point it’s going to break. OK?

Is there anything else besides a mental continuum that is eternal and changes from moment to moment? An individual person, me. When we talk about there being no soul (bdag-med, Skt. anatman, lack of an impossible “soul”), it’s not that we’re denying that there is some sort of eternal thing here. The me, the self, is eternal – there’s no beginning and there’s no end – but it doesn’t exist as some sort of unchanging thing that could exist separate from a body and a mind and could be known all by itself. But Buddhism does accept a self – whether you want to call that a soul or a me or an individual or a person – Buddhism does accept that, and it is eternal, and it changes from moment to moment, because now I’m doing this, now I’m doing that. That’s why I prefer to translate as no impossible self, no impossible soul. It’s not that there’s no self or no soul, but what Buddhism is negating is an impossible one. Right?

An impossible self doesn’t correspond to anything. What would be an impossible self? It would be a self that can be known separately from a body and mind and is unaffected by anything, never changes from moment to moment, and it just jumps into this body and mind and, in a sense, drives it, like driving a car, and then leaves it and goes into another car. That’s impossible. That doesn’t correspond to anything real. So that’s voidness. It’s the absence of anything actual that corresponds to this. That’s impossible. That’s why these negation phenomena are important to understand. There is no such thing. When we say the self doesn’t exist like this – well, what’s left over is it exists in some other way. OK? Digest that for a moment please.

Functional phenomena do things. They arise from causes and conditions. They change from moment to moment. Some last forever; some last just a short time, and while they last, they degenerate. There are many other kinds of nonstatic phenomena but I really don’t want to go into that, because that gets very complicated – I explained that the previous time that I explained this topic – and it’s really quite confusing, so let’s not go there.

Forms of Physical Phenomena

Within functional phenomena, we have three types. That’s one way of dividing it. There are many ways of dividing, but here we’ll divide it into three, the most common way of dividing them. Here in German it’s called… the first type is called material phenomena (gzugs). I prefer forms of physical phenomena. But whatever we call it, the point is to understand what we’re talking about. And what we’re talking about is – well, there’s eleven types. So we’re talking about sights, visual sights (gzugs), sounds (sgra), smells (dri), tastes (ro), physical sensations (reg-bya). That’s five. Tactile, physical sensations. Physical sensations include rough and soft, they include hot and cold, they include a physical sensation of motion. There are a lot of physical sensations. You can feel a motion, can’t you? I mean, we would say feel, but this is such a vague word in our languages. But that’s a physical sensation of moving, isn’t it?

If we want to be technical, according to the Buddhist analysis , each of these sensory objects is made of particles, but this becomes quite difficult to understand.



We have another set of five. These are the sensors. So the cognitive sensors (dbang-po). These are the type of tiny little cells that we have with the body that are photosensitive – you know, sensitive to sights (mig-gi dbang-po) – sound-sensitive cells of the ears (rna’i dbang-po), smell-sensitive of the nose (sna’i dbang-po), taste-sensitive of the tongue (lce’i dbang-po), and physical sensation-sensitive of the body (lus-kyi dbang-po).

Then we have a third type, which can only be known by mental consciousness (chos-kyi skye-mched-pa'i gzugs, forms of physical phenomena included only among the cognitive stimulators that are all phenomena); you can’t actually know them in a sensorial sense, a sensorial way. Like for instance, what we perceive in dreams. There are what appear to be sights and sounds, etc., in dreams, but those aren’t actually objects of the eye consciousness or ear consciousness, are they? They’re objects of the mental consciousness. And we have other example as well. Particles, atoms – you can’t actually see them, but they’re a form of physical phenomenon.

So in our discussion here, my body. “I’m a complete idiot,” so my body. “I took the wrong computer,” the computer. These are forms of physical phenomena. The visual sight of the computer, the tactile sensation of the computer if I hold it in my hand, the sound of the computer when I type, these are all forms of physical phenomena. Then of course we can factor in these other divisions that we’ve spoken about. What I am seeing now, what I’m no longer seeing. The visual sight that I’m seeing now, a visual sight that I’m no longer seeing that I saw yesterday. The sight of someone else’s computer that I’m seeing now and the sight of my computer which I’m no longer seeing, for example.

Ways of Being Aware of Something

So we have forms of physical phenomena, then the second division of nonstatic phenomena is ways of being aware of something (shes-pa). There are many different ways of being aware of something:

We have something called consciousness, primary consciousness (rnam-shes). In Buddhism we don’t just speak about consciousness in general, a general term here; we speak of, specifically, visual consciousness (mig-gi rnam-shes), sound consciousness (rna’i rnam-shes), smell consciousness (sna’i rnam-shes), taste consciousness (lce’i rnam-shes), physical sensation consciousness (lus-kyi rnam-shes), and mental consciousness (yid-kyi rnam-shes) (what would be involved with dreaming or thinking). And what primary consciousness does is it cognizes; it’s aware of what’s known as the essential nature (ngo-bo) of something. The essential nature of something is what general type of thing is it. So it’s aware of something as a sight; visual consciousness is aware of something as being a sight. Audio consciousness is aware of something as being a sound. Just this general category of what type of information is it. Is it visual information or audio information? If you think of the example of a computer, we have a digital representation of something, and there has to some sort of processor that can be aware that this is visual information or that this is audio information. This is what primary consciousness does. OK? That’s primary consciousness.

Then we have mental factors (sems-byung, subsidiary awareness), and mental factors help us to deal with that information. So some of these factors are things like attention (yid-la byed-pa), concentration (ting-nge-’dzin, mental fixation), interest (don-gnyer), feeling some level of happy or unhappy (tshor-ba). And then we have all the various emotions that also color our experience of an object, both constructive (dge-ba) or positive emotions, and destructive (mi-dge-ba) ones, disturbing emotions (nyon-mongs).

So we have a whole cluster here of a primary consciousness and all the accompanying mental factors, and they’re all focused on the same object, and they’re occurring at the same time, and so on; they have five things in common (mtshungs-ldan lnga). So we can think of the image of a chandelier, with one bright light – a big light in the middle – and all these little lights around it, all going on at the same time and illuminating the same thing.

OK. So we have ways of being aware of something. So I’m looking at this bag and I’m distinguishing it’s not my computer, and I’m feeling unhappy about it, and I’m angry with it – and all of these things are happening here.

Noncongruent Affecting Variables

Then we have a third category (ldan-min ’du-byed, nonstatic abstraction, noncongruent affecting variable), which is difficult to translate. It is something that is nonstatic – it’s changing from moment to moment – but it is neither a form of physical phenomenon nor a way of being aware of something. For instance, me, the self: it is something that is imputed, we would say, on a stream of continuity of all sorts of changing factors, both physical and ways of being aware.

So what’s happening every moment? What’s happening every moment is that there is a different type of consciousness operating. Sometimes they’re operating several at the same time – both seeing and hearing, for example. Some are manifest. Some are subliminal, like for instance feeling the sensation of my clothing next to my body. I mean, there is that tactile sensation, that consciousness, but I’m not aware of it, so it’s subliminal – not paying attention to it. The physical sensation of your clothing. How about the physical sensation of your tongue in your mouth? How often are you aware of that? But if you paid attention to it, you could feel your tongue in your mouth, can’t you? Which is really quite weird, if you think about it.

So there are all these sights and sounds and smells, and all these consciousnesses, and there’s all these mental factors, and they’re all changing at different rates. Sometimes I’m happy, sometimes I’m unhappy; sometimes I have this emotion, that emotion; my attention is changing, the level of it; my level of interest is changing – all the time at different rates. And we can impute on that me, as a way, in a sense, almost, of organizing this. So am I seeing? Am I thinking? Well, yes. But I’m not thinking by myself. I’m not seeing by myself. It’s the eye consciousness, and the eye consciousness is seeing. And therefore we say, “I am seeing,” though it is imputed, it’s labeled onto what’s happening. The “I” can’t see by itself; it cannot exist separately and cannot be known separately from a basis – here, the consciousness.

The self – me – cannot be known separately, and it can’t see or function or do anything separately, on its own, but only in terms of it being labeled, described, imputed on the experience that’s happening. It’s not something separate from everything that’s going on in my experience, sort of as a distant observer watching it or pressing the buttons and making it happen. This, one has to think about quite a lot.

Who is the author of the voice that goes on in my head? Who is talking? I’m talking, not somebody else. Is there a separate little me sitting somewhere in a little box in a control room with a microphone and talking? Obviously not. It’s getting information in on the video screen and from the audio equipment, coming from the ears, and has this control board there and is worrying “Oh, what should I do now? Oh, I’ll do that. I’ll lift my hand,” and it presses the button and the hand lifts. It’s not like that, is it? But it feels like that. You see, this is the deception. This is confusing, isn’t it? It feels as though there’s somebody inside there talking, but that’s impossible; it doesn’t correspond to anything real. There isn’t actually something sitting inside me, like in the movie “Alien” – some sort of alien thing sitting inside me, possessing my body and manipulating it.

But such an independently existing me seems real – that’s the problem – and we believe it's real. If you stop believing it then you’re a liberated being. And when your mind stops producing this deceptive appearance then you’re a Buddha. That’s the difference. Liberated being: your mind still produces this garbage, but you know it’s garbage and you don’t believe it, so you don’t react to it. When you’re a Buddha your mind doesn’t make this appearance at all.