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The title of my little piece is Towards Enlightenment, Buddhism's Contribution to Common Good through Establishing Contemplative Culture.

Okay, I'll just jump right in.

Buddhism, says Professor Robert Thurman, who is a noted American Buddhist scholar and practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism.

He says, Buddhism is a system of education.

So the way I'm taking up his statement is as follows.

Buddhism is a curriculum and pedagogy that are designed to transform our consciousness at its roots,

from improving humanity from dualistic ego consciousness to non-dual post-ego consciousness.

So that's kind of my terminology.

Traditionally, that's known as enlightenment, eastern enlightenment, in contrast to western enlightenment of the 18th century.

Dualistic consciousness sees the world in terms of such categorical dichotomy as self-other,

as well as a host of other binaries, mind-body, good, evil, or bad, right-wrong, moral, immoral, and so on.

To note, the self-other dichotomy applies to individual persons as well as to groups and nations.

Dualistic consciousness is the basis for self-other conflict, competition, and survival battles on both large and small scales.

Large scales, of course, we have genocide, ethnic war, all the wars.

Small scales, sibling rivalry, although they can be applied to groups too, like three religions of the book.

There seems to be rivalry, right? Bloody ones.

And those of us who are married, marital conflicts, that's a small enough scale.

And also, inside us, there is so much battle going on.

I hear so much about my students talking about how self-critical they are,

that they're just criticizing themselves all the time, beating themselves up kind of thing.

So, psychologically, this notion of conflict, conflicted consciousness is everywhere.

Dichotomous positioning invariably brings about the attitude of indifference, avoidance, exclusion,

and at the worst, active hostility and violence towards otherness.

So, next section, I titled, Ego and Post-Egoic Consciousness.

Another name that we can use for dualistic consciousness is ego consciousness.

Ego is the self that sees itself as separate from the non-self.

That is, whatever is not seen as the self or belonging to the self,

which, if we think about it, is really the rest of the cosmos, vast otherness.

So, one little ego facing vast otherness.

That's totally scary.

The little ego feels overwhelmed and threatened.

Ego consciousness, therefore, constantly separates out what is self and what is not self, hence otherness.

Ego consciousness, however, is not all there is to human consciousness.

This can be a tricky point to establish.

Okintu, so this is my side remark.

Okintu explained to a frog that there are other pawns than the little one that it inhabits.

There are other modes of consciousness that we can loosely and generally term as post-ego consciousness.

Basically, in post-ego consciousness, the self other boundary softened and made porous,

which precipitates non-conventional, that is, non-ordinary, experiencing of everyday events.

I have some of my own experiences to relate to you.

Twenty-eight years ago, I had a small dose of experiencing a post-ego consciousness.

I was holding my newborn on my lap, and I was suddenly flooded with the felt sense of what I can only describe as timelessness.

The ordinary sense of time that marches forward inexorably suddenly vanished, and I was left with a sense of foreverness.

At the same time, I was completely relaxed in a way that was not at all familiar to me.

I didn't think that I had much anxiety until that moment when I experienced complete freedom from anxiety.

I was quite astonished by that experience, which seemed to be coming from an egoic thinking mind

that was still somehow online and was commenting that this experience I was having was unreal,

or at least foreign to me as an ego consciousness.

Yet, the experience of timelessness was no less real than the reality of the ego mind speaking,