ACI 14 «Лоджонг: развитие доброго сердца», занятие 5

<Geshe Michael Roach>
<ACI Course XIV: Lojong, Developing the Good Heart>
<Class Five: The Ultimate powa: Sending Your Mind Into Death>
<11 June 1998>
<Tape 5. Transcribed by Angie Overy>



[prayer: short mandala]
[prayer: refuge]

All right. We’re halfway through {b: lojong dun duma - Seven Point Instruction
On How To Develop A Good Heart}. And this is kind of the dessert okay. I
really like the end of the text is really cool. And I kind of saved it … I broke it in
two halves so you could have the second half and enjoy it okay. We’ve reached
the fourth part, and you’ll get the reading during the break because when we
reach the end, the sixth and seventh parts, some of the instructions there are
very weird, and kind of strange. And if you don’t get an oral explanation of
them you’ll never get it straight, so during the break you’ll be getting your copy
of the rest of the text and then I’ll go through explaining. There are eighteen
different little advices like ‘don’t expect anyone to thank you’ and stuff like that
okay. They’re very beautiful. We’re going to go through now parts four and
five before the break. Part four is called ‘Summary of an Entire Lifetime’s
Practice’. And it’s basically five different parts to your practice for the rest of
your life okay. Five brief points for practicing for the rest of your life. And at
the end of this section which is only four lines, okay, very nice lojong, very short.
At the end of this lojong, of this verse, he teaches you how to do {powa} okay
{powa} is very sexy and very popular. You have to teach for one day teaching in
New York City if you do {powa} you get the most people to come, you know.
And Rinpoche doesn’t teach {powa} and it’s very, very secret in our lineage. We
have a {powa}, there’s a {Vajrayogini powa}, very beautiful and very deep, but
here in the {b: lojong dun duma} you get the best lojong of all. He actually goes
into great detail and it’s been approved for us. I mean it’s all right that I go over
it. So in the {b: lojong dun duma} is a very powerful {powa} practice. {powa}
means to … {powa} comes from a verb {powa} {spos ba} and {powa} means in the
monastery you say {dra shak, pu ge re da} which means, I don’t like my room
and I’d like to move to a different room, you know. Then you go to the guy’s
room and you say, Where did he go? And he says {pu shak, gupu shak , gu par
re pur shak} means he’s changed rooms, he’s moved rooms, he’s moved. In the
sense of a moving van you know, moved. And {powa} has that meaning.
{Powa} means to move your consciousness . It’s to deliver your consciousness or
to send your consciousness into death, okay. It’s the proper way at the moment
of death or as you die or if you find out that you’re going you die and there are
certain practices for figuring that out. Like if you find out you’re going to die
within a month or something, there are certain special practices for… you know,
calling the moving van and moving your mind to a better place before it actually
happens. And this is a very secret, normally secret practice, and there’s a {powa}
here which is supposed to be even more effective than the other ones. The other
ones are strange, they require some very special practice. Of course they would
be strange, right. And after they get through explaining this {powa} in the {b:
lojong dun duma, in The Seven-Point Lojong}, they say this is the most powerful
one and this one you can teach. So we’ll be going into that.
 We have to start with what to do before that okay. Five steps to do during this
life and those are called the 5 powers, okay. This is the same spelling as the
{topshi} {stobs bzhi}, a lot of you have had the four forces of cleaning away bad
karma; how to clean out your bad karma. And here you get five okay. And
they’re a different set, different meaning okay. {stobs lnga}. Say {top} [repeat]
{nga} [repeat], {topnga} [repeat]. {top} means force or power. I call it power in
this case okay. Like there’s a thing called {top kye men}. {Men} {sman} means
herbs or some kind of concoction. {Kye} means that which produces {tob} and
{tob kye men} is the Tibetan for … they use another word which is
‘bitamin’,’bitamin’ okay (laughter). So vitamins are {tob kye men}, they give you
{tob}. So {tob} means power or strength okay. And {nga} means five. Here’s
the first of them. There are five different {tobs}. And these are powers or forces
that you have to use during your whole life. {‘phan pa} Say {penpa} [repeat] … I
think this one is misspelled, no it’s okay. Say {penpa} [repeat]. {Penpa}, the verb
{pen} means to project something like the word for shooting an arrow is called
{da penpa}, and an archery master is called a {darpen lopen}. So {pen} means to
throw something or project something. Like projecting karma is called {penjay
kyi le}.. Here it has a special meaning that all throughout your life, from now on ,
when you get up in the morning everyday, you do a {penpa}. You do a special
practice called {penpa}. And you know you can do it before you even sit up. You
know when you wake up and you haven’t sat up yet, just lay there and keep
your eyes closed and do {penpa}. {Penpa} means to decide what you’re going to
do for the whole day. It’s called projecting … I call it making a resolution for the
future. And the future can be the rest of this day, or the rest of the month, or the
rest of the year, or the rest of your life. But before you get up off the bed, before
you even sit up, you sit there with your eyes closed and you do {penpa}. And
{penpa} means I will not waste this day I’m going to use this day in a very good
way. And you just decide when you wake up, first thing you think of ‘I’m going
to use this day well. This is another day of my life and I am will use it well’.
Doing what? And then he says you have to decide that during this day you will
try to overcome the mistake of watching out for number one. There was this
New York best time…best seller, New York Times best seller, like a couple of
years ago, ‘Watching Out for Number One’. Totally sick, wrong idea according
to Buddhism. Like the worst thing to do. If you want to ruin your life, watch
out for number one. We are in a realm … I mean you are the evidence of your
attempt to watch out for number one. You life, as it’s going now and this world
that you live in, is the result of trying to watch out for number one. You know
as long as you continue this very big mistake of trying to take care of what you
want before you take care of what other people need, then your life will never
go right. And the fact that you’re getting older, if you have a bald spot or grey
hair, if the bones are getting more brittle, if you’re getting more tired when you
walk down the street, this is all evidence of the failure of a spiritual practice. If
your spiritual practice was good, you’d be going the other way, frankly. You
know, you would actually be feeling younger. And you’ll start to be…your
body would start to change and…and so if you’re…if you’re in a normal aging
process and if the world around you seems to be getting worse and worse and
you’re more and more tired as you get older, this is evidence, and get this okay,
this is the most important thing tonight. That’s evidence that the way you’re
approaching life doesn’t work, okay. Getting old, having your body change,
losing friends, losing family, people dying, you dying, is proof that you’re not
approaching life the right way. I mean, according to Buddhism you can reverse
all that. And the key is to stop worrying about yourself alone and start being
concerned about other people. The most generous person you can find, all the
Mother Theresa’s in the world, are still, according to Buddhism, mostly
concentrating on what they like. They may like helping others, you see what I
mean, or something like that. Or they may like the attention they get or
something like that. But according to Buddhism it’s extremely rare to find a
person who truly is devoting their life to what other people need. Who’s truly
giving up their whole life to help other people. And all their resources to help
other people. Extremely rare. And that kind of person would be getting
healthier, younger, more intelligent, like that, as the years go by. And entering
another realm, a sacred realm. And you wouldn’t even be aware of it. I mean
they could be next to you all day long and you wouldn’t know. You wouldn’t
see it because you’re not doing it. And the key is giving up the approach to life
of watching out for the things you need before you watch out for the things that
other people need. And that’s very difficult. But as long as you continue that
behavior you’ll suffer. So if you’re suffering it’s a sign that you are continuing
the behavior, see what I mean. So the {penpa} means, when you wake up in the
morning you say … the {b: Lama Chupa} says, god damn it now I found out
who my real enemy is, and I…now I know who to lay the blame on, and it’s my
tendency to cherish myself first. And after all these years, forty five years of
human life, now I’ve figured it out: you’re the one who’s giving me all my
troubles and I’m going to stop you. You are now my enemy. You wake up
thinking, today what can I do to destroy that tendency in myself? That’s called
{penpa}. So every morning when you wake up, it’s a life or death thing. Your
life is at stake. Your life is truly at stake and you can fix it. I am only teaching this
class for that reason. I have no other motivation for teaching this class. I don’t
care if you’re calm. I don’t care if you’re friendly to people. I don’t care if you’re
whatever you know … you’re seeing red or green lights in your meditation it
doesn’t matter, you know. The {penpa} is to get you out of this realm and into a
higher re…into an enlightened realm. That’s the whole reason to be in this class.
And the only thing that is between you and that is your tendency to watch out
for yourself first. And if you can overcome that, you got it made. And that’s
{penpa}.
So every morning you wake up and you say, you know Blank you, I know who
my enemy is and I’m going to work … today I devote my day to overcoming
that tendency which has served me so badly so far in my lifetime, you know
which has gotten me into so much misery in my lifetime.’ It just doesn’t work. It
literally doesn’t work. And that’s why we’re getting older. And that’s why you
feel less energy than you did 5 years ago or something. It’s that single state of
mind is responsible for all the lousy things in this life, okay. So every morning
you wake up and say, ‘f’’ you, you know. I’m going after you today. I’m tired, I
don’t want to live like this and I don’t want to die like this. That’s {penpa}. Still
think it might be misspelt but we’ll get to it okay.{Top} number two. {goms pa}.
Say {gompa} [repeat] {gompa} [repeat]. There’s a word in Tibetan that means
meditation and that’s {gom} {sgom}. {Gompa}, {gompa}, this is a different
pronunciation. {Kompa}, okay. There’s {ka, kha, ga, nga rga ‘ga}… and we’re on
number five or something. {Gompa}, is related to the word for meditation and
this {gompa} means to get used to something or to get accustomed to
something. Habituation. Making a habit out of something, {gompa}, {gompa}.
And {gompa} means in this case, getting used to the idea of what I just talked
about, okay. And running it in through your mind in all the different situations
of the day. {Penpa} is in the morning right. {Penpa} is before you actually sit up
and it’s a very beautiful, typical kadampa practice. You do it in secret. Nobody
knows. They think you’re still asleep. That means you can sleep in til noon and
people think you’re practising okay (laughs) (laughter) all right. It’s like a very
good kadampa practice. You’re sitting there … you’re doing … {gompa} means
then you carry that throughout the day. You carry that, and you get used to
thinking like that throughout the day. And they say check in with yourself
every time you change position. Meaning every time you go from sitting to
walking, check in with yourself. I’m not going to spend my … from the time I
just stood up at the Quaker House pew, until the time I get home and sit down
on my chair at home, I will use this time to fight my main enemy. And, and
that’s called {gompa} and it’s connected to the four stations of the body, you see
what I mean. When you get up, think about it. When you sit down, think about
it. When you lay down, think about it. When you start walking somewhere
from stationary position, think about it, you see. And so every change in your
location is supposed to set off these thoughts. Now if you’re sleeping all day
that’s hard okay. I guess when you go to the bathroom or something okay. But
every time … it’s like a trick, it’s a kadampa trick to get you to think about it.
Every time you change positions think again of what your main job is. My main
job is to start learning to think about what other people want and worry less
about what I want, okay, because it has not served me. It didn’t work so far. I
tried it for forty years, it didn’t work. Let’s try the other one. Let’s try it for six
weeks. If it doesn’t work we can always go back to the other one okay,
something like that. Okay number three. {dkar po sa bon} Those of you who
know Tibetan, you have to add {top} on the end of each one. This would be
{karpo sabun kyi top}; and the other one would be {penpa top} and {gompa top}.
I like to make them as short as possible so you don’t suffer on your homework
okay. Say {karpo} [repeat], {sabun} [repeat], {kyi top} [repeat], {karpo} [repeat],
{sabun} [repeat], {kyi} [repeat], {top} [repeat]. Okay. {karpo} means white Okay,
{karpo} means white. White, like the color white. And in Buddhism it refers to
virtue, goodness. {sabun} means seed, like a mental seed, karmic seed. So {karpo
sabun kyi top} means I call it the force of pure white seeds okay. The force of
pure white seeds. This just refers to two practices. You know every day for the
rest of your life you have to concentrate also … I mean frankly, I’ll tell you some
secret stuff okay. The reason you’re dying, the reason you’re getting old, is
related to your inner energies okay. Every time you have a bad thought about
someone else, even if it’s a moment’s irritation in traffic, even if it’s being slightly
upset that you can’t find a parking space, even if it’s slightly disliking the rain
outside, much less being angry at another person you know even those tiny
irritations accumulate. They’re like low-level radiation. Every time you have a
small negative thought about anything, it effects your inner channels. And they
get a little more constricted. The effect of that on your body is that you start to
age. And every time you do the opposite it loosens them, it opens them slightly
and you…your body begins to open up and change. And that is how you reach
tantric enlightenment.      Eventually, that process frees you in one lifetime.
Changes your body into the body of an enlightened being, within one lifetime,
okay. It takes extraordinary attempts in two directions, and that’s what ‘white
seeds’ means. White seeds means first of all you have to collect some really
powerful good karma okay. That’s the first part of this. White seeds means you
have to figure out what are the most powerful ways to collect good karma. You
have to study karma. And here we get into the idea of {dom}. We talked about it
last Friday, for those of you who were here at the Friday night class. People in
this room, if you’re faced with screaming at your boss or being patient, you
don’t have a moral dilemma to worry about. You know five minutes after you
scream that you shouldn’t have done it, you know. You’re aware that you just
did some bad karma. But I think most people in this room who are on a spiritual
path and who are serious about a spiritual path, your quandary or you dilemma
becomes something else. What is more powerful virtue than other virtues? You
have to go into the virtue- comparison shopping market. You have to, you
know, it’s not enough for you to be a nice person anymore. Once you
understand the amount of good karma it takes to change your very body into
an enlightened being’s body, you have to now get into the art and the science of
figuring out what are the most powerful karmas you can do because you don’t
have time to fool around with the little ones, you know. My boss, when we
started our company, three people, $50,000. He got all these calls from these
small jewelry retailing chains, you know and they said we want to buy diamonds
from you. And he said, well how much can you afford to pay on the first order?
They said, $40,000. He said, I’m not interested, you know. He said, I want 20
customers and I want the minimum order to be $ 100,000. I don’t want to have
an order under a $100,000. He’s still doing that. Now he’s sells 100 million
dollars a year. He has 900 employees now. And this was his policy; I’m not
going to screw around with the paper work and the trouble, I’m going to
concentrate on the 20 largest companies in the United States. And that’s what he
did. You have to be the same. You have to be a virtue pig, you know. You
have to decide what are the most powerful ones because you don’t have time to
fool around with the little mom and pops. You have to figure out what’s the
most powerful karma you can find and then you have to go after it. And then
you must start collecting that now. Yeah. [student: Is there a list?] Can’t hear
you. The list is hard you know because it seems…it seems self-serving okay.
Most powerful one is towards a lama, is helping a lama in the mission of teaching
this to other people, period okay. I don’t like to say it because it seems like, yeah
I’d like to have a limousine okay and I want a brown one … It’s not like that.
The other thing is serving the Dharma in any way you can, most powerful. You
know like buy a house and fill the basement full of correspondence course
notebooks, spend all your free time stuffing them, and…you know stuff like
that. That would be a good idea. Serve the Dharma. Take the two rooms….two
floors of your brownstone and go move into a tiny corner of one of the floors
and then give one floor to a bunch of monks and make the rest into a temple,
something like that. Serving the Dharma is by far the most powerful. Serving,
facilitating that this knowledge should reach other human minds is the most
powerful karma you can do, period, by far, okay. And most of that is mental,
you know in your motivation. You may not be in a position to give away two
floors in a brownstone, but mentally you have to be willing to give away
everything you can to help that effort you know. According to your ability.
That’s the thing about the lady with the penny, right. Like that. Okay. The
second half of {karpo sabun} is … By the way, studying emptiness of course,
right. That’s the other great virtue retailer, okay. Study emptiness. That’s a for
sure extremely powerful karma, the study of emptiness. And then of course
something like tonglen meditation, trying to develop compassion. If you had to
name the big three or four, the J.C Penny’s of the virtue business (laughs) you
know, it would be helping a person or an organization who’s trying to spread
this knowledge, and then…and then studying emptiness, and then studying
compassion, especially tonglen meditation. That would be the top things to
work on. And most of those things are worked on in private okay. Second half
of {karpo sabun} is to figure out ways of wiping out your old bad karma okay.
Those of you who know the Four Forces, you already know how to do it. But
basically it’s the art of keeping your vows and thereby … I mean the main art of
wiping out old bad karma is watching yourself in the future, right. And that’s
your book, okay. That’s keeping your book. So keeping your book and doing
powerful good karma. Wiping out your old bad karma, making sure you don’t
collect new bad karma, everything’s there okay. And that is force number three.
You have to do that. In the monastery, I repeat, we spend twelve years studying
the Perfection of Wisdom. We study a little 50 page book called [b: Abhisamaya
Alamkara] for twelve years. After the twelve years, we stop and they tell us to
leave the monastery and we go for three or six months we travel around and we
try to do some good deeds because the next subject in the curriculum is
emptiness, is Madhyamika, it’s {uma}, okay. And they actually send you out of
the monastery and they say, you go and find some powerful good karma to do
and you come back when you got it, you know. Some people are gone for six
months, some people are gone for up to a year. And they go do some special
practices that would collect incredible good karma because you can’t get it, you
won’t understand emptiness without that good karma. Rinpoche went into a
cave and meditated and almost died in the cave before he started his
Madhyamika class. That was…he did this incredible purification and then he
could understand it when he got out, you see. So that’s the purpose of that.
Number four. {sun ‘byin pa}. Again, this is throughout the day, okay Throughout
the day you’re looking for the most powerful karmas you can create and
throughout the day you’re looking foe purification of your old bad karmas.
Number four is called {sunjinpa}. Say {sunjinpa} [repeat]. {sunjinpa} [repeat].
Not the same as the one in the Four Forces, okay they have the same name,
different things.
{Sunjinpa} means to rip something out from the heart. If you saw the film ‘The
last of the Mohicans’, you know okay. They like rip the guy’s heart out, it’s
really cool. {Sunjinpa} means to rip something out from the very heart okay. It
means like to waste something, all right. Here it means, throughout the day,
when a thought comes into your mind about what you want and it starts to get
strong, you know, people aren’t paying attention to what I want, you know,
people aren’t giving me what I want, this situation is not good, every one is
getting the kind of food they like and I’m not getting what I want, you know.
When the ‘I want’ comes, smash it. Smash the… you know. You know it, smash
him. The minute he raises his … it says {kon yonpa}, means , the minute he raises
his ugly head, bash it. That’s called {sunjinpa} okay and it takes great sensitivity
because he slips up on you very quickly. He comes up in a few seconds, you
know. Wait a minute, we didn’t get what we wanted, you know. Look, they’re
getting what they want. And when you…when you catch him, then bam, hit
him on the head. {Sunjinpa} means that. And that’s the practice throughout the
day. And if you’re going to be a great lojong practitioner, you have to get good
at that. These are the five activities to spend the rest of your life on, day by day.
That’s the beauty of lojong. Lojong is hour by hour, day by day, okay. Here’s
number five. {smon lam}. Say {munlam} [repeat], {munlam} [repeat] {Munlam}
means prayer, prayer. And again, this is as you go to sleep at night, okay. We
just went through the whole day. You spent your day doing those things.
When you woke up, you stayed on your back on the bed and you thought about
how today you’re going to go after your main enemy, you’re going to devote
the day to going after your main enemy. And then you went to the other
practices. You thought about the other three practices. You spent you whole
day on them no matter where you were, every time you move, every time you
change positions, you’re thinking about doing something for other people okay.
Every time you had a chance, you went after the biggest karma you could do
and tried to avoid bad karma. And every time you had a…every time you had a
thought about, oh, wait a minute we want this, you know, then you smashed
him. And you spent the whole day like that. Now at the end of the day,
{munlam}, as you go to bed, lay down on your bed, close your eyes and think
about, okay that was a great day, I made great strides. I caught myself three
times worrying about what I wanted and not thinking about what the people
around me wanted, and that was a pretty cool day. So I dedicate that. I make a
prayer that I be able to get bodhichitta okay.        Bodhichitta. The wish for
enlightenment. And don’t forget that the whole lojong, the whole seven-step
lojong, as you saw from what we call the main event, the main practice, there are
two kinds of bodhichitta here, right. The normal one and the special one.
Normal one is what? I would love to save everybody in this room from getting
old and dying, that would be some achievement you know. I may write books
or not write books, I may become a famous business man or not, doesn’t matter.
If I could get this many people not to die and to enter another realm, now that
would be something. That would be the achievement of a lifetime. If I could
help one person do that, you know, that would make my whole life worthwhile.
So you think that. I pray I can do that someday. You know and you pray when
you go to sleep.
The other one I pray I can see emptiness directly. It’s very important to see
emptiness directly because on that day, you confirm that everything you ever
heard about in this class was 100% right. And everything you ever heard outside
of this class was just about 100% wrong, okay. I mean on that day, and I’m not
just trying to get you to donate to our box out there ok (laughter) … it doesn’t
happen anyway. It’s not the point (laughs) The point is this: on the day that you
see emptiness directly, you yourself will meet the Dharmakaya of the Buddha
directly. You yourself will see your future lives directly. You yourself will see
your own enlightenment directly. You yourself will confirm the truth of every
thing you ever heard in this class directly, you know. You will see those things.
And you have this other experience that you know you’re not crazy, which helps
a lot okay. Alright. So all those things, directly.
You don’t need Michael Roach any more after that. You don’t need anything.
You don’t need anything in the world after that. They call it {kang le chik gyu
me wa} Nagarjuna called it, you don’t have to worry about anything. You’re
totally…you’ve reached the state of total fearlessness. You know everything
that’s going to happen. You see your future lives, you know what’s going to
happen. So who can do anything for you after that? What do you need after
that, you see what I mean? You confirmed everything directly. You want to get
to that state where that happens to you. You really want to get to that state. So
every night when you go to bed you say, I pray that I could … ten people that I
know closely I could save them from dying, (a); (b) I pray that I could see
emptiness directly. And I dedicate all those wimpy attempts I did today, to stop
my own habit of watching out for myself first. I dedicate all that to those two
goals. To those two kinds of bodhichitta; regular bodhichitta and ultimate
bodhichitta. I dedicate it to that. And that is the Five Powers. Those are the Five
Powers. Five Powers, meaning that’s how to spend everyday of the rest of your
life. If you’re going to be a good kadampa they say, I think I wrote it down here
actually, I like the expression so much. No, I don’t have it here. Anyway, it’s like
the idea of taking a butter lamp and getting a big Indian pot and hiding it, you
know. Like you light it and you hide it inside and cover it and nobody ever
knows that you’re doing it, okay. I pray, I hope, you know that some percent of
the people in this room, just start it from tonight and do it for the rest of your life
and never tell anybody, you know. I hope that a certain number of people in
this room just do it. That’s a perfect kadampa practice you know. Nobody ever
knows. You know you seem to be getting much happier, your face changes,
your body changes and your attitude’s changed, the lines in your face change.
Nobody’s quite sure what’s going on. They don’t need to know. That’s all, like
that, okay. The last two lines, by the way, that whole thing that I taught you is
called … it’s in two lines. I’ll read you the two lines in English. Okay. It’s in…it’s
in your reading: ‘The brief essentials of this instruction are combined within Five
Powers.’ And that’s it. You can spend the rest of your life doing that. He gave
you a lifetime’s practice. But then he says two more lines and these are a little
weird: ‘In the Great Way these same Five are the advices for sending your mind.
Cherish the act.’ These are the advices for sending your mind. Cherish the act.
That’s all. They don’t tell you anything. I mean this is why the lojong was
carried on almost secretly for so long. It was more or less just a few short lines
to remind them what their teacher taught them for twelve years or something,
you know what I mean. It was just like little secret reminders, secret post-its,
spiritual post-its, okay. That’s what lojong is. That’s all it is. What does it mean?
In the Great Way, means Mahayana. He’s going to teach you {powa}. Here is
the hidden instruction for real {powa}, you know. I mean frankly, I hear all this
other stuff about {powa}, and I’m not afraid to say and I’m not breaking
bodhisattva vow number one, okay, I’m not afraid to say they are mostly
wrong. And they mostly probably would not help anyone very much in their
last moments okay. If you don’t prepare Mahayana {powa} now, so good that
you could do it anytime, it’s doubtful that at the moment of death, which is the
most frightening and most confusing moment of your life, he mind itself is
breaking down. The building blocks of the mind itself are breaking down like
dominoes, and you start to go into a standard set of like five hallucinations. It’s
very unlikely that at that point you can sit there and do some special weird
practice. It’s extremely unlikely that you could do it okay. The real {powa}… I
just don’t have patience for those…there are special ones that are extremely
effective, very secret, very difficult, have to be trained personally by a lama for a
long time. That’s a different thing. But just to go on a weekend and teach
somebody something and then go away, frankly, forget it, okay. What’s the real
{powa}, Mahayana {powa}? It’s here okay. And, and after you hear it you’ll say,
Yeah, that makes sense, okay. It fits what you’ve learned for fourteen classes,
for fourteen courses over seven years, it fits. And you’ll feel good. You’ll say, Oh
yeah, that’s {powa}. So here it is. He says, In the Great Way, these same five.
What five? The Five Powers. He says, take those five and convert them to a
death…what’s it…to a dying method, okay. Convert them to dying instructions.
How to die right. That’s {powa}. He says, ‘send your mind’. ‘Send your mind’
means, send your mind into death, okay. Deliver your mind to death with these
five instructions. And now they take on a different meaning. Each one of the
five takes on a new meaning, okay. So frankly, if you know you have a bad
disease, if you know you might die soon, if you see that that’s coming to you … I
mean in America the doctors tell you, you know, you got six months maybe a
year. I mean if you’re lucky you’ll know a little ahead of time. There are special
practices you can do, even if you don’t know, to figure out when you’re going to
die, okay. There are special practices. I don’t care how you find out. If you find
out, here’s what to do. Here’s how to send your mind into death properly. And
they…they are the same Five Powers with a totally different meaning to each
power. So we’ll go back. Same five. There’s number one. {Penpa}. Remember
what {penpa} was? {Pempa} was to sit there in the morning and think about
how you were going to spend the day and the month and the rest of your life,
you know. Penpa means, projecting, making a resolution about the future,
okay. This is how I’m going to do it. {Penpa} in the death {powa}, in sending
your mind into death, is this one. I’m about to die, okay … this is to be done on
your death bed. This is the most precious thing you can learn tonight. This is
what to do as you’re dying. Each person in this room, unless you practice well,
and I hope you do, will be faced with this moment. Get ready now. Know what
to do, okay. These are very, very important and they will help you a lot. People
ask me will you come to the hospital and wait around you know, it looks like
student so and-so is going to die this week. And I’m like, okay, but I can’t really
do much you see. I can’t do much. People ask me to go visit people in hospital. I
can comfort them slightly, but the main thing is in your own mind. I cannot
collect karma for you. You must collect your own karma. You must know these
instructions on how to die well, how to die properly. And they have to be in
your mind ready for when you get hit by a car, when the least you expect … it
always comes at a time when you don’t expect it, right? So the first one, {penpa},
means I’m about to die, I can see I’m about to die. I will go into death itself, I will
pass into the {bardo}, and I will go beyond that, but I will not lose one thing, and
that’s my wish to help other people, okay. I will not go into that experience... I
will not lose that one thought. I will keep that thought as I go through it. I’m
about to go through death, I’m about to go through the {bardo} and I will not
lose this thought that I would like to help other people. Let me serve other
people, somehow, you know what I mean? And don’t lose the thought – the
best {powa} you can do. Most powerful. Very best thing to die with. No one
can give you anything more mystical than that, okay. And you know it in your
heart. You know that, okay. So be ready. When the time comes I will not lose
my intention to become an enlightened being to help other people, okay. And
that’s {penpa}. {Penpa} means to plan ahead, right, as you die. Okay {Gompa},
number two. {Gompa}, means what? Yeah, get used to something, get
accustomed to something. This is during your life and as you begin to be aware
that you’re going to die, that you get so used to thinking about other people,
that it becomes very natural at the moment of death that you’re not even
worried about yourself at that moment, okay. And that’s called, you’re really
used to this idea. It’s so strong in your mind that even as you start on this very
frightening process, which is frightening for almost everybody. I don’t care
what they say about nice peaceful looks on people’s faces, forget it. Inside the
mind – chaos. The mind is breaking down. The energies are breaking down.
There’s a standard set of very frightening hallucinations that every human being
goes through. And you will not be able to think clearly.
You have to go into that experience already accustomed or already totally
imbued with this desire to help other people, okay. It has to be part of your
nature before you start the death process, okay. The idea that you could turn on
some special practice at the last minute is…is cheating people. It’s cheating them.
It doesn’t work. You can’t think about it. If you haven’t been doing it your
whole life from moment to moment, keeping your book from hour to hour,
you’re not going to be able to turn it on at the last moment. Why should you be
able to do it? It’s not….it doesn’t work that way. It’s like, you’ll be able to learn
down-hill skiing in the last five minutes, you know. It’s not like that It takes
practice. It takes constant practice for years to die right. And you have to start
now. Don’t wait for some special downhill skiing miracle to happen. It’s not
going to happen. You have to get ready now. And, you’re so used to thinking
about other people, you’re so used to the dream, the vision that I could be
responsible for teaching other people how not to die and how to go to a Buddha
realm; that vision, that you die with that vision in your mind. Beautiful, perfect
way to die. I could do it. These are instructions that work. If I tried really hard, I
could help other people do that, you know. If I really got my act together I
could do it. That vision in your mind that you could do that, you have to die
with that in your mind. And you have to get used to it by thinking about it now.
{Powa} instruction number three. What did it mean in the day to day stuff,
remember? See we got this whole day to day thing, sixty nine years, three
hundred sixty four days, right. You did the Five powers for that. The first five.
Now we got the second five which is happening on the day you die or a few
weeks before you die. As you’re aware that you’re going to die. What is {karpo
sabun}? White seeds. Pure white seeds. What are the white seeds for dying
right? How do you die right? Give away everything you have, mentally. Give
away everything you have. Very important. If you die with any kind of
attachment to what you used to own or to what you used to be, especially to
your body, it’s extremely bad karma when you die. It has all these horrible
results when you die. You have to die free of possessions. So you practice the
white seeds. The pure white seeds practice for {powa}, for sending your mind
into death properly and effectively. You know this is a whole exercise. It’s like
anything else you ever learned how to do like sailing a boat or something like
that. You’ve got to get used to it. You’ve got to practice it over and over again.
And when the moment comes you turn on the white seeds power, which means,
I give it all away, in your mind. Everything I used to own, god bless, let them
use it. Let all sentient beings use it. I hope they use my bank account. I hope
they…God bless whoever lives in my house. My body is going to be gone, I
hope the worms like it. I’m not attached to it. It was useful, it got me to class at
the Quaker House for all those years, and now it’s broken. And goodbye, it’s
been nice knowing you, you served me well. The important thing is to give it
up. And whatever virtues you have, whatever good thoughts you have, offer
them to the high beings. I offer all the good things I ever did in my life to the
lamas, to the high lamas and to the holy beings, I offer everything. Die with
nothing. Die clean, you see. All my possessions I give them up. Let people use
them, you know. And all the good things I did with my life, I offer them to the
Buddhas and the bodhisattvas of the universe, you know. All the bad things I
did, I’m sorry. We can throw those out, you know what I mean. But you die
totally free of any kind of possessiveness about anything. Everything you were,
everything you owned, is gone and you die free, clean. And that’s another
excellent thought to die with. If you have any kind of attachment to your house,
to your body, to your family, to your money, as you die, it’s extremely
dangerous. Karmically, it’s extremely dangerous. Wrong karmic seeds are
activated as you die, okay. And they force your mind to see bad things as you
die. Those thoughts, if you want it stated in tantric terms, secret okay, don’t tell
anybody, constricts your channels at the wrong time and at the wrong place. It
has an effect on your channels in the wrong time and in the wrong place and
certain kinds of negative emotions will start. And they’re very bad to die that
way, okay. You have to die clean, happy, I don’t own anything, use it. And all
my goodness, I dedicate everything to the holy beings. Die right. Clean, okay.
That’s number three. {Sunjinpa}, what did it mean?        Destruction. Smashing.
Destroying. Bashing. Ripping out from the heart. Last of the Mohicans thing,
okay. {Sunjinpa}. As you die, very important … you know my father had lung
cancer. They told him six months. I went to my lama, I said what should I tell
him, he doesn’t believe in anything. I mean he doesn’t seem to. He said, teach
him to die clean of any bad deeds he did. Make him talk about the worst things
he did in his life and make him believe that they are finished and that he’s clean.
He has to die clean. So number four refers to dying, smashing or destroying all
the negative imprints in your mind from the negative things you did in your life.
Review your life as you die. Say, here’s the three things I couldn’t tell anybody.
That was a mistake, you know. I should’ve just cleaned it all. But now I clean it
out. The whole thing about the Catholics and having a priest there to take
confession is very good according to Buddhism. Very, very good.               That
someone is there at the last moment and you say, look here’s three more things
I never told anybody and I want to die without them. And you destroy them,
you wipe them out, you see. Very important, especially if you’re aware of
having broken your vows knowingly, you know what I mean? Especially your
secret vows or your bodhisattva vows and your Pratimoksha vows, your
monk’s vows, nun’s vows, etc. That you say, okay, it’s all gone now.
You have to die with the belief … you have to die with a clear conscious. Very
important. You review them, you examine them and you remove them. And
then the most important thing, you believe they’re removed, okay. The most
important thing, even if you’re just confessing to yourself, like if you’re
unconscious at that time. Okay I’m going to go over the really bad things in my
life and I don’t own them anymore. It’s a disowning process. Okay, I don’t own
that anymore, I’m clean. I’m done with that. I’m dying with a pure heart. I’m
dying with a pure conscience. Very important to do that. Very important to go
into death that way.
My lama was very adamant. He said make sure your father believes he is clean,
And that’s ninety percent of being clean, you know; that he…that he told
somebody everything terrible about his life. And he cleaned it, you know. And
you have to die with this…with this knowledge that you’re clean, okay.
Number five. One more thing about number four. The text says, if you are a
person who has taken a tantric initiation, then during those final hours do a
{dang juk} okay. Do a {dang juk} into the {king kor}. If you don’t know what
that is you have to get an initiation. You have to do a {dang juk} into the {king
kor}. If you are conscious enough to do so, you should ask a qualified lama for
an empowerment, to give you a re-empowerment, okay. Like if you were a
{Vajrayogini} practitioner during your life, the very best thing for number four,
would be to have a lama there redoing the {wang} as you die. That just before
you die you have a new set of tantric vows, a new clean set of bodhisattva vows.
okay. And someone is there making sure that you have a fresh new clean
empowerment in the final hours. okay. If you’re doing tantric practice, very
important to do that. You enter that world as you’re dying. Very important to
die there, in the {seng dor re king kor}. Try to die there okay. Number five,
{munlam}. It’s the sweetest part of {powa} okay (cries) You know this is the real
{powa}, right. As you die, you say, I’m going…about to die. This is going to
hurt a lot. It does hurt a lot. There’s a special physical pain to dying. That’s why
nobody wants to die. Deep down inside you remember it from your past lives.
It hurts a lot. The moment of death is very painful, physically quite painful,
special pain.

And at that moment you say, okay I’m about to die. Could be a week later,
could be six months later, could be an hour from now. I know I’m dying. It’s
going to hurt.
And then you do the special tonglen. You say, as I die, I pray that all the bad
deeds, all the suffering mental and physical of the entire world, should come into
me and die with me. Okay, most important. Most important part of powa. I
dedicate my death to destroying the suffering of other people. All their bad
deeds, all their bad karma, all their pain, suck it into me and die that way. My
mind will go that way. I ’ll die, I’ll take it away from them, okay. I dedicate my
death to that. And when the pain comes, remember it, okay. Like that. Then last
line says, cherish the act. Cherish the act. It means when Lord Buddha died
himself, pretended to die okay. It wasn’t this big screaming and crying and
wailing. He quietly lay down on his right side okay, the ‘lion’s posture’, you
know , try to get, if you can move okay, try and get down on your right side.
Like that, down on your right side and try to die peacefully. And that’s what
cherish… ‘Act’ here means the behavior of a Buddha. The final physical posture
of a Buddha, just quietly lying down on your right side, you know like that, and
thinking about helping other people, okay. Quietly, peacefully, serenely. Try to
die like that. That’s what the second half of the last line means, okay. Cherish the
Act. So there’s a whole {powa}. Come back in five, ten minutes okay and we’ll
do the fun part okay. Okay, we’ll start again. You don’t have to write all this
down in Tibetan but I think it’s kind of cool. There’s the spelling of {powa},
okay.     Sending your mind properly into your death.              It’s a sign of the
degeneration of our realm that they don’t have schools for learning how to die
because it’s the one thing you have to do. You don’t have to pay your taxes, I
didn’t do mine (laughs) okay, no kidding, okay. This is a beautiful quotation. As
Geshe Chekawa himself was dying, he blurted out these words                As he was
dying, I mean they recorded … he sort of screamed out these words. I think it
shows he was doing {powa} himself. {ngas sems can thams cad kyi don du mnar med
du ‘gro bar smon par byas kyang. mi ‘gro bar ‘dug. dag zhing gi snang ba shar byungI}.
{nga semchen tamche kyi dondu narme du drowar munpar je kyang,mindrowar
duk, darshing gi nangwa shar jung}. Means: I was praying that I could pass on to
the lowest hell for the sake of helping every living being. It’s not working. I
can’t go. All I see before me now, is the Paradise of Enlightenment. He was
upset, you know. He was trying to go to hell to help sentient beings. He was
praying. That was his last prayer. And he was praying that he could go down to
the … {narme} is the lowest hell. And he’s like frustrated it’s not working. The
more I think like that the more clearly I see the Paradise of the Buddhas before
my eyes. And then he died. Nice {powa}, okay (laughs) [student: question] In
English?
I was praying that I could pass on to the lowest hell for the sake of helping every
living being. It’s not working. I can’t go. All I can see before me now is the
Paradise of Enlightenment.
Okay, we’ll leave that up there. It’s sort of auspicious. I’m going to go through a
few of the points that come later. We’re into part five. The fifth of the seven-
points okay. It’s on page seven, towards the bottom. I think you got the
reading, right? Some of the lines are a little difficult to understand unless you get
an explanation. So I’d like to give you some brief explanation. The verse…by the
way this is the.. part five is, how do you know when you’ve got the lojong in
your mind? You know. How do you know that you’ve done it, okay? What’s
the {tse}? What’s the point at which you can say, I got it. I know how to do
lojong. I ‘lojonged’, you know, okay. First of all it’s when you get it, that all the
Dharma that was ever spoken boils down to one thing, okay. And that’s
fighting your tendency to take care of yourself and to ignore other people okay.
That all…all the Dharma that was ever spoken by the Buddha ..you know we are
in the business of putting it on the computer. We know it’s going to take a
hundred and fifty more years to do the Gelugpa tradition, okay. To finish that, is
going to take us a hundred and fifty more years. We’re trying to train young
people who can train other young people because I’m not going to be around
when it’s…when it’s even a tenth of the way finished, you see what I mean.
We’re trying to get a lineage going, you know of different ages of people so that
they can carry the work on. It’s going to take about a hundred and fifty years
just to put in the basic things, okay. All of those scriptures boil down to one
thing: try to fight your tendency to care about yourself and ignore other people,
okay. The next line says: There are two judges. Keep the main one. He talks
about judge in three different ways and I like it. By the way, if you’re studying
Tibetan, {pangpo} {dpang po} literally means witness. There’s only two…only
two people can witness to the success of your Dharma practice. One of the
witnesses or one of the judges are the people around you, okay. I’m very
suspicious when someone comes up to me and says, I became a Buddhist and
now my whole family hates me, you know.(laughs) It probably means you
didn’t do it very well.(laughter) (laughs)

If you’re doing lojong well, you know, you should come and say, I became a
Buddhist, I got into lojong and now aunt so-and-so who hated my guts likes me,
cousin so-and-so who I didn’t speak to for ten years talks to me, and my parents
are quite happy with me because I changed, you know. I’m a better person, you
know. Probably if I get that kind of report it’s better, you see what I mean? It
doesn’t mean, by the way, that there won’t be temporary political problems.
That’s a different thing. You know that. The other judge is yourself, okay. And
the lojong here is saying, Keep the main one means, look, the main judge of
whether or not you’re successful in your Dharma practice will always be
yourself, okay. Now you can fool yourself very well and we are very good at
that. But the only person who can really judge your practice is yourself. Don’t
worry too much about what other people say. Don’t try to impress other
people. Whether or not your practice is going well, ultimately only you can say,
okay. And you have to judge. And you have to be a witness to yourself about
whether or not you’re succeeding. You are close to succeeding in lojonging, you
are close to lojonging well if that inner judge is active and sensitive and can
honestly say, you’re doing good, you know. Okay, three other people don’t
think so, but that’s okay. Maybe no one knows what I’m doing personally,
privately, in my own heart about my lojong practice, but I am succeeding. And I
know it. My mind has sweetened. My life has sweetened. I feel more love inside
myself.
I know I’m doing better. Ultimately, that’s the main judge, okay. He mentions
two other judges in this…in the commentary to this. The main judge of whether
something is the Dharma or not, is whether it is helping to fix your mental
afflictions or not. I like that. The reverse of that, or the converse of that is,
anything that helps lower your negative emotions, is Dharma. And if something
is not having that effect on you, it’s not Dharma for you, okay. You have to get
used to that. Is the thing you’re studying now, lowering your tendency of
jealousy, anger, emotions like that? Is it getting better? Then, what you’re doing
is Dharma, okay. If it’s increasing those emotions, like competitiveness, I
memorized these three prayers but she didn’t, Ooh I’m so smart. Then it’s not
Dharma, you see. Then you have changed Dharma into something else. And
this was the sweetest thing that my first Lama ever said, Geshe Ngawang
Dhargye, holy Lama. He said the judge of whether your practice of Dharma is
successful or not is whether or not your own mental afflictions are getting less,
okay. Are you becoming happier? Do you have less negative thoughts than you
used to have? Then, you can say that your lojong is successful, okay. It does not
relate to how many Tibetan verbs you know okay. It does not relate to how
many ACI courses you’ve completed. It doesn’t relate to the grade that Puntsok
gave you, okay. I mean the real test of whether you’re successful, whether you
know Tibetan or not, whether you look like you’re successful or not, is are your
negative thoughts getting less and are you a happier person than you were a
year ago, okay. Then you can say your Dharma is succeeding. Doesn’t have to
be perfect because ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day’, and you don’t clean out a mind
of 84,000 different mental afflictions that have been there for a million years, in
one year. But you should be increasingly, more deeply happy than you were the
year before, okay, generally. You can have a bad year, but at least okay two
years, okay. Something like that. The next line says: Be joy alone in an
unbroken stream. Very briefly, it means this - if things are going well don’t get
too happy. If things are going bad don’t get too sad. As long as your practice is
good … this is a key to lojong and you have to get this, okay. Karma doesn’t
work immediately. There’s no such thing, except for tantra. It doesn’t work
right away, okay. What is happening to you now probably has no connection to
your spiritual work, okay. That’s crap from your old crap. And the good stuff is
going to make new good stuff, you see what I mean. So don’t get too excited if
something’s going wrong. Don’t get too amazed if something’s going right
because it’ll probably flip-flop within the next 24 hours and that’s all being driven
by your past karma, okay. It’s not connected to your current spiritual efforts.
You have to learn to disconnect them. You have to learn to not get too thrown
off balance if things look screwy for a while, because it takes time for karma to
kick in, okay. And the laws of karma say good spiritual practice cannot result in
something bad. If something bad is happening to you, it’s not related to your
practice, okay. That’s something else. That’s coming from the past. Over the
average, over a length of time, things will get better and better and better, okay.
And there will be occasional explosions caused by that deep pocket of old bad
karma that you have. And don’t get too excited about it and don’t get too
depressed about it. Just keep your joy, all the time. Be happy all the time. It’s
very hard especially it’s difficult with the people closest to you, okay. With the
people very, very close to you. The people who are right around you. When
things aren’t going well, that you lose your joy or something like that, ignore it.
Don’t believe it. T hat’s coming from the past. Any problems you’re having now
are coming from before you started practicing, probably. And then just keep
planting good seeds for the future. And don’t get distracted by what’s going on
now that’s coming from the past. You have to learn not to take it too seriously
because that’s coming from the past. You have to concentrate on keeping a
happy state of mind, even when ‘the crap is hitting the fan’. You have to
concentrate on staying happy because that will create a good future, okay.
That’s planting the right seeds. The last line here says: It’s there when you can
keep it unthinking.
‘It’s there’, means you got lojong in your head when you can keep it even when
you’re not thinking about it. Okay and here the text says think about people
who learn to ride horses and there’s two kinds, you know. One kind of person
who’s just learning to ride a horse, if they get distracted, if they see something
that distracts them, if they wave to somebody, they fall off the horse. okay. And
then there’s other people who are so used to riding a horse, they can talk to
somebody, the horse can move and they just move, you know it’s all automatic
for them and they don’t get thrown off the horse. The point is, when your
lojong … I call it the reaction time. What is the reaction time between when
somebody yells at you or somebody pushes you on the street, or somebody
does something to you at work, how quickly can you catch yourself getting
angry? What is the lag time between a bad emotion starting and your lojong
kicks in? And that’s the measure of your success. There’s a lag time. Somebody
pisses you off, if it takes five minutes to catch your self getting angry, your
lojong is no good. We want to reduce the reaction time to zero. As soon as
anger starts to come up, lojong starts to handle it, you see. That’s lojong. Then
you got lojong. And you don’t get thrown off the horse, get it? You’ve been
doing it so often, so long, that you’re just like these people who can ride bare-
back without even thinking about it. They can talk to somebody, they can look
at the trees, and every time the horse does something weird their body just
automatically adjusts to it. Every time somebody does something to you, every
time somebody says something to you, the lojong just goes ‘woop’ and the
lojong is there to handle it. And you’re not, like ‘urhh’, with positive things and
with negative things, you know. Like something good happens and you’re not
like ‘oh, wow whoppee, you know that’s fantastic …’ and you get all excited.
And then half an hour later the boss tells you, Oh, Oh, that was the other guy’s
raise, we made a mistake that wasn’t your raise (laughs) (laughter) and then
you’re like all shattered, you know. I mean a lojong person has to be riding this
horse and the horse goes… whatever way the horse goes they just adjust
immediately. It’s the ability to adjust immediately. My boss went from zero to a
hundred and fifty million dollars a year. The one quality about him that is
amazing, is that as soon as something doesn’t make sense, he changes,
immediately. You see what I mean? He doesn’t get attached to his plans. We
built a building, fifteen million dollars. He went through six architects. He went
through a hundred twenty changes, you know. Change throughout the whole
building. Market conditions changed, we didn’t need that department any more,
he ripped up the plans. He paid off the architect and hired a new one, you know
what I mean. He just wasn’t attached to it. We’ve made plans to go on business
trips, six weeks, twenty four stops, thirteen countries, eighty four days you
know \, and then he’s like, Hey that doesn’t make sense any more. We’re
leaving for the airport and he says, conditions have changed, cancel it. (laughs)
(laughter). Ane he has this adaptability, immediate adaptability. And a lojong
person has to be the same.
Something goes wrong, you’re already adjusted to it. Something goes right,
you’re already looking at it and saying, yeah maybe it’ll be good, maybe it
won’t, you know. Let’s see. I’m not going to get too excited about it. Right.
That’s lojong. I thought number…the next question…the next thing in the
reading that’s not too clear is part six on page eight, okay.
In part six there are like eighteen little rules of the game for lojong people, okay
Eighteen little rules of the game for lojong people. Some of them are clear.
Some of them are not. The ones that are clear are probably not what you think.
Somebody has to go through them with you. I’m going to save that, okay. If
we get to it tonight we’ll start it and we’ll continue in the next class if we have to.
But I don’t want to rush them because they’re so sweet. So we’ll skip part six
and start at part seven, okay. Part seven starts on … well let me make sure…
where is that? I’m going to start on page eleven, okay. Most of them are pretty
easy up to page eleven. The verse on page eleven says: Act now. Do the most
important thing. The most important thing is, obviously, crush your tendency to
watch out for yourself. Don’t get it backwards, is a long story. I’m not going to
talk about it. I’ll do it when we go through the eighteen. The one I did want to
talk about is : Figure out both and free yourself. Okay.
Figure out both and free yourself. He doesn’t tell you what the both are, so I
want to go over what ‘both’ means. Figure out both means this. Number 1 of
the both is you study what got you upset in the past. You study your mental
afflictions of the past and you concentrate on the biggest one first. So mine is
jealousy, all right. I’m a jealousy expert. I can get jealous about things that
happened ten years ago, you know what I mean. Really, okay. So you identify
what’s your own personal one. Everybody has their own. Your and mine may
be the same or may not be the same. If you are living in this realm, and if you
are not an emanation of a tantric deity, you have a major mental affliction and
you have to identify it, okay. So identify the one that gave you the most trouble
– jealousy. Then they say study the object which triggers it. Study that object,
okay. Do an analysis of your favourite mental affliction. Who is it, Art Engle,
that gets you most jealous, okay (laughter).             Figure out, what is it, like
somebody at work, somebody … whatever it is. Figure out the object towards
which you get most of your jealousy, or whatever it is. But first you have to
figure out what the object is. Then you figure out, under what conditions does
this happen, okay? When is it that I start to get jealous? And it’s like very often
when you’re tired. Very often when you have too much to do. Very often
when you ate too much. Any kind of activity that would lower your ability to
deal with a mental affliction. Too busy, too many things going on, didn’t get
enough sleep, not getting exercise, stuff like that. Just in general you haven’t
been treating yourself well and then you’re more likely to have a mental
affliction, okay. So you’ve identified the mental affliction, you’ve identified the
object that most commonly triggers it in the past and you’ve identified the ways
of thinking that promote that mental affliction; being tired, maybe it’s eating too
much food, maybe it’s having too much to do, maybe it’s being under too much
stress, whatever, okay. And what is it that the mental affliction consists of? Why
is it sick? Oh Michael Roach swore to be a bodhisattva forever, you know
seeking the happiness of all sentient beings. Person (b) has got some happiness –
I don’t like it. (laughs) It’s sick, you know. You have to analyze the state of
mind. So you’re analysing the mental affliction. First, you identify the biggest
one. Then you analyse who is it that triggers it in you. What are the conditions,
like not having enough sleep, not eating well, not exercising or whatever, that
promote it in your mind? And then, what is the problem with that mental
affliction? You know why is it stupid? It takes about two minutes to figure out
why it’s stupid. Mental afflictions are indefensible. You try. Yeah, I’m jealous
because of blah, blah, blah, Yeah, right, you know what I mean? It takes about
two minutes to talk yourself out of it, if you’re honest. They’re just sick. They’re
just stupid. They’re dysfunctional, okay. And you can identify that. You
analyze the mental afflictions of the past, that’s number one of ‘both’. When he
says figure out both, that’s how to figure out number one. Now, what’s number
two? Figure out how to stop them in the future, you see what I mean? The first
figuring out, figure out what made you get them in the past and now, make a
plan for the future. I know I have jealousy towards these particular objects, now
let me work on them. I know that if I don’t get enough sleep or I’m too busy,
they’re more likely to come up, let me take care of that. I know this way of
thinking about people is wrong and I should examine it, let me work on that.
And they say for the future one you have to go for the smallest form of that
mental affliction, you see. For the past, you’re trying to work out your worst
mental affliction. For the future, you are planning how to prevent even the
smallest form of that mental affliction, get it? So for the past you’re working
about, what was my grossest mental affliction. For the future, you’re like
designing how to get away from even the smallest version of that. So it’s big
going to small and it’s past going into future. And that’s what the ‘both’ means.
Figure out both means that. And free yourself, okay. Free yourself means you
don’t have to think like that anymore if you do a good job, okay. The next one
says: Stop thinking all the time about how wonderful you are.(laughter) (laughs)
You know, Americans with their low self-esteem tradition, they relate to this
one. I don’t want you to relate to it that way. That’s not what they mean, okay.
If you’re here, in this class, in New York City, tonight, you are one in a million. I
mean the people in this room are extraordinary. Each of you has the capacity to
become a major spiritual guide for other people or you wouldn’t be here. You
wouldn’t have the karma to be here. Each person in this room has the {kelwa},
or the core of spiritual energy in them to become a very important person in the
transmission of this knowledge. Each one of you has that seed or you would not
be here. You are literally one in a million. You should be thinking about how
wonderful you are. You are wonderful. And a certain number of people here, I
suspect more than half, will become important spiritual guides for other people.
That’s not what the book means, okay. This line means, don’t…when you finally
go out and do something to help other living beings in a concrete way, don’t get
too enamoured with yourself, okay. And he says for two reasons. Here’s the
two reasons; (a) They really need you, they are suffering big time, they are
dying. All of their mental afflictions are killing them, literally. They will die
unless you do something. (b) You took bodhisattva vows. You swore to help
them, okay. These are the two conditions. They are literally dying before you
eyes like flies. Secondly, you solemnly swore to help them. So what’s the big
deal that you finally did something to help them? Why are you taking such
credit for it? (laughs) Don’t get so excited about it. Just keep doing it. Just do it,
okay. They need it, you swore to do it, that’s all. Don’t go and say, Oh
congratulations, you’re so wonderful, all right. You are wonderful. The last line
there, in that verse says: Don’t expect any thanks. (laughs) Don’t expect any
thanks. Here’s what it means. He says it refers to three things, it’s actually four
things. First of all, if you get into spiritual practice in a good way, in a deep way,
I mean it’s almost universal at the beginning especially, no one’s going to thank
you. Don’t expect it, don’t wait for it, don’t hope for it, you know. I can tell you
many stories okay. Like you could go to work for fifteen years, twelve to
sixteen hours a day, commute for three to four hours, give all the money away
for Dharma purposes, and still have people coming to you and criticizing you for
something, you know. Why didn’t you arrange that last ten dollars for me? Did
you notice I gave you a million dollars for the last fifteen years? Yeah, but I want
to know where the ten dollars is. And you can’t get discouraged. Don’t expect
any credit. Don’t expect any thanks. Don’t expect anything like that. It might
not come at all and it doesn’t effect you. You have to do it anyway. It’s your
honor to do it. You took a vow to do it. (b) Don’t expect any help from others.
You could be paying for a new house for your lama; he could have plenty of
students you could be building that house stick by stick by yourself as they
watch you. You could be up on a ladder with a can of paint, dangerously trying
to paint this thing because there’s nobody to hold the bottom, and someone
come up to you and say, why aren’t you over at my house painting my house,
you know, something like that. These kind of things could happen and don’t
expect any help. Just forget it. You’re a lojong practitioner. You’re a secret
kamikaze, spiritual kamikaze, you know. Whether any one helps you or not,
you’re going to do it, okay. And it’s very liberating to get to the point where I
don’t care if anyone thanks me, I don’t care if anyone helps me, I’m going to do
it anyway. Last one, or third one, don’t expect anyone to say anything nice to
you. Any good words you know. Like, hey you’re doing a good job. I mean it’s
very conceivable that you could do this stuff for twenty five years and never
have anyone… let’s say, like if you were a student of Khen Rinpoche or
something (laughter) it’s very possible that they could never in twenty five years
say, thanks that was great you know or something like that you know what I
mean. It’s very possible. It’s extremely possible (laughter) Or that was a good
job you did last fifteen years. Don’t worry about it. You have to go on and do it.
And you have to do it independent of whether people thank you, or say you’re a
nice guy or a good guy or whatever they say about you. Most likely people will
say all sorts of things about you and you have to do what’s virtuous. You have
to do what’s right and what helps other people, okay and not worry about those
other things. Last thing, you ruin the whole thing if you want any kind of
reputation or fame out of it. The whole thing gets ruined. The classic` kadampa
behavior, lojong behavior, is just to do it quietly and don’t make a big schmiel
out of it. A lot of the energy is ruined if you’re concerned about whether your
good deeds are public or not, okay. We have a few minutes. I’ll start on the
eighteen pledges because you’re supposed to be meditating on a few of them.
It’s page … what page is that? How about page eight. Actually the one of the
eight, actually the first line … if you count the lines, there’s only sixteen lines
okay. How you get eighteen lojong laws out of sixteen lines? Line one has
three. Line one says: Keep to the three laws. What are the three laws? It’s not
the three sets of vows okay. The Tibetan commentator on page nine gives you a
clue. At the end of the dark part, there’s a note from the Tibetan commentator.
By the way, this is not a major commentary. He’s just throwing in a few little
comments here and there in this text that you have, okay. This is the root text of
the seven-points as it was written down two hundred years after Chekawa,
okay. I mean for a long time I thought that was the author, was {Tokme
Sangbo}, later {Gyalsay}. But he wasn’t. He was just like one of the first people
to ever write it down. And this is not even him I don’t think. This is somebody
later that I don’t know who it is. But anyway, it’s a great commentary. He says
the three laws are, never acting in a way that contradicts what you have
committed yourself to; never placing yourself in a dangerous situation; and
never falling into the habit of discriminating between others. Now here is what
those three really mean okay. Here’s what the three laws really are. Not acting
in a way that contradicts what you have committed yourself to, means most
people in this room before they came into this class, have committed themselves
to some kind of vows. Lifetime laymen’s vows, monk’s vows, nun’s vows, some
kind of vows, tantric vows, bodhisattva vows. Lots of vows running around in
this room. At least, if you’re some kind of Buddhist in this room, you promised
to keep a moral guide, a code of ten different rules: no killing, no stealing, no
adultery, etc. At least that, each person in this room. Now you get to lojong.
Now you get to these extraordinary, special … these are very cool. I mean
you’re going to see these eighteen are very cool. You get to do little crazy yogi
stuff, stuff like that. He says law number one, rule number one, don’t get excited
about the lojong and diss your other vows, okay. Don’t say, now I’m a crazy
yogi, now I’m a lojonger, I don’t need those other vows. Mistake number one.
Rule number one is, you can’t do that. You can’t use the lojong … you can’t
grasp onto the lojong, this crazy wisdom stuff and say, who needs those ten
those are boring.. These are sexy. He says, forget that. That’s rule number one.
Rule number one is that these rules don’t make your other rules irrelevant,
okay. You should not diss them okay.
Rule number two. Never placing yourself in a dangerous situation, means the
lojong says, stop cherishing yourself and apparently people who got those
instructions started to act in these very exciting ways, like okay I can sleep out in
the streets, I’m a yogi. I can sleep out in the streets tonight, no fear. Lojong is
my protection you know. And and…or you don’t eat anything for three weeks
or you don’t wash your clothes for a month. Now I’m a crazy yogi, I don’t need
all that stuff. He says, forget it. Anything which endangers your holy human
body is not lojong. That is not cherishing yourself to take care of yourself, you
have to take care of yourself. You duty as a crazy yogi… lojong yogi is to take
very good care of your body. Do not expose it to a New York City street for a
night. Don’t, don’t play this game that now you’re this great yogi, so you’re
going to disrespect your body or your health. You need it. You have to take
care of it. I’ve seen many students, in the last thirty years, of Khen Rinpoche,
they went out into the Howell woods and said they were going to live like
Milerepa. They came straggling back after three days and they’re all cold and
wet, you know. He says rule number two for lojong is, you don’t hurt yourself.
That it’s not ‘cherishing yourself’ to live in a comfortable place where you can
meditate well, you have to, okay. To see emptiness directly, frankly, you have
to be in a fairly comfortable situation. You have to be able to sit there for four or
five hours, quietly, without someone banging you on the head, okay. You have
to be fairly well fed, not over fed. And you have to be healthy. You have to be
able to sit properly. You have to take good care of this holy vessel and then you
have to dump it. That’s the process. But in the beginning you have to take care
of it. Rule number three
Don’t make your lojong selective. I will practice the perfection of patience with
those people whom I like (laughs) (laughter) and I will not practice the perfection
of patience with people who get on my nerves, you know what I mean. And
that’s exactly what the text says. Don’t be selective in your practice of the
perfections. You have to practice patience towards the assholes as well as you do
towards the people who are these nice, holy, spiritual friends of yours. Equal air-
time for your perfections. I’ll do one more then we’ll stop. Number four
It says, Change your mind and stay the same. Change your mind and stay the
same.
‘Change your mind’ means, inside of yourself you must undergo major change,
major reconstruction, with the three principal paths, okay.              He says…
commentary says, understand that you do not want to live in this realm and die
in this realm the way every one else is dying in this realm. You are beyond that
now. At least you know you have to try to get out of it Understanding number
one. Understanding number two you now know that taking care of yourself
and ignoring other people doesn’t work. Understanding number three, you
know where this world comes from. If the future is going to be bright, it’s going
to be because you practiced well. If the future is crappy, because you didn’t
practice well. And you have to take responsibility for the future now. It comes
from your karma. It comes from your actions. Whether you keep your book or
not will totally determine every detail of your future. And those three thoughts
have to cause a major change within your mind. Those three understandings
have to make major changes on the inside. So why does it say, Stay the same?
On the outside you should look like Joe Schmoe, okay. Joe Schmoe. I mean the
original monk’s clothes, to be frank, if they were done today, would be a
normal…it’d be like the way Winston is dresses or something. I mean it would
be a normal old shirt and normal old pants and you would look like normal old
Joe. And that’s what the goal was. It was to be…you were supposed to take
them out of the garbage and wear them over and over again, … I’m not saying
that but …(laughter) (laughs). But you know, you’d just be dressed in a tee-shirt,
you would have a normal old tee-shirt, and have some normal old jeans on and
you would be happy with that and satisfied with that and that’s…on the outside,
you would look like a plain old east village person, and nobody has any clue that
you’re this … that internally, you’re undergoing this yogic transformation. On
the outside you just look like a normal person and you act like a normal person.
You’re a little more helpful, kind, patient with people, but on the outside,
physically, no one can tell what you’re up to. It’s all going on in the inside. Those
are the first four. We’ll cop a little time from next week and do the next
fourteen, so we’ll stop there okay.

[prayer: short mandala]
[prayer: dedication]