..续本文上一页 tongue. The tongue is where tastes arise. Tastes come and make contact at the tongue and an awareness arises, called consciousness. But the consciousness that arises: exactly which consciousness arises first

　　 There are living beings that reside in our taste buds, and they have consciousness too, you know. They may know even more than we do. For example, say that there”s food we know is bad for us to eat, but there”s the desire to eat it. Why is there the desire

　　 Sometimes we don”t want to eat it, but the consciousness of some living being wants to eat it. If we eat it, we know it will make us sick, but there”s still the desire to eat it. This is called getting fooled by flavors. Getting fooled by consciousness. There are three sorts of consciousness, as we”ve already mentioned, so which consciousness is getting in the act

　　 Is it our consciousness or not

　　 We”ve never stopped to check. Is it the kind of consciousness that doesn”t yet have a body

　　 Or is it the kind that already has a body appearing in our mouth

　　 We don”t know. When we don”t know, that”s why everything we say comes out all screwy and wrong. These spirits are the ones that make us speak, speaking in all kinds of ways that get us in trouble. Actually, we don”t want to say those things, but we go ahead and say them. That”s a sign that we”ve been associating with fools, with the consciousness of angry demons, without our even realizing it. It”s only afterwards, when we end up suffering, that we realize what”s happened. This is why we keep losing out to them. We don”t know consciousness in the five aggregates. We keep chanting, "Viññanam anatta, anatta, ta, ta," every day, but don”t know a thing. This is what the Buddha called avijja, or unawareness.

　　Kaya-dhatu: The same holds true with the body. The body is where tactile sensations are felt. Tactile sensations make contact and we can know them all: cold, hot, soft, hard. We know. This knowledge of tactile sensations is called consciousness. But whose consciousness it is, we”ve never made a survey. So we think that we”re the ones who are cold, we”re the ones who are hot, and yet it”s not us at all. Like a person possessed by a spirit. What happens when a person is possessed by a spirit

　　 Suppose there”s someone who has never drunk liquor. When a spirit possesses him, he drinks two or three glasses — really enjoying it — but when the spirit leaves, the person who has never drunk liquor is dead drunk. Why

　　 Because there was a consciousness from outside possessing him. He — the real him — never drank liquor, but he drank when an outside spirit possessed him.

　　The same holds true with our mind. When these consciousnesses start getting obstreperous, we start doing things even though we don”t want to do them. Some forms of consciousness like the cold, some like heat. Just like the animals in the world: Some like hot weather, some like cold weather, some like to eat hard things, some like to eat soft things. Worms and caterpillars, for instance: They like to eat hard things. It”s the same with the living beings in our bodies: Some like to eat hard things, so they nibble at our bones — or at our flesh until it sloughs off in pieces. Some drink the liquid parts. Some like hot things, some like cold things. So when it gets cold, we feel that we”re really cold, but we”ve never stopped to think about what”s made us cold. When it gets hot, we don”t know what”s made us hot. We just think that it”s us: this is us, that”s us. When it was that we became a spirit-consciousness along with them, we never noticed.

　　This is why the Buddha said that we have no discernment. We fall for these forms of consciousness, forgetting his teaching that consciousness is not-self. Actually, there”s only one of us, and it”s not all complicated…

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