Серия ежедневной практики, курс 01 — Мандала шагов к просветлению (1999, Реддинг), занятие 1

[Speaker 2]
The Asian Classics Institute presents the Mandala of the Steps to Enlightenment Long-Rim Meditation with Geshe Michael Roach, recorded live at Godstow in March of 1999. Session one.

[Speaker 1]
Okay, we'll start then. The last six years in New York, five and a half years, the idea was to train teachers and to take a certain number of people through the whole essence of the Geshe course. And so we finished that in December.

We finished five years and did all the Geshe, the essence of the Geshe course, all the five great subjects and that's finished. And all of those were like packaged so that they could be passed on to other people with tapes and books and homeworks and quizzes and finals and things like that. And then this year is a review and also this year is a time that we're trying to turn over a lot of the duties to training teachers.

Actually, actually having, well we have 12 teachers now in the five-year course who are taking over about half of the duties during each class. And then a few people like John have been teaching the classes themselves. And I'd like to see that continue.

I think it's been going very well and I'm very happy about it. That's a lineage and that's the way it's supposed to be. Although it's a little hard for you guys because you know these guys and they're just normal people.

They're not teachers, right? You'd be surprised that in the monastery it works the same way. I mean my teacher in the monastery has been teaching 30 years without much of a break.

And his peers, the people his own age, still remember him as the little geek in the first debating class. So it's very hard for them to see him as a teacher. But that's the process and it's always been that way.

But you are well trained and you will be good teachers. Then I thought it was important to have five or six in addition to the courses which are the intellectual foundation for Buddhism which is very necessary. It's necessary to have two other components in my mind at least.

One is that you know five or six good meditation practices. I call it your toolbox, meditation toolbox. And I think everybody should have a toolbox in which they have five, six, seven, eight meditations that they're good at and that they understand well.

And I think some of the ones we've done so far, we're going to be doing death meditation in North Carolina. We've done Tonglen very thoroughly. What are some other ones?

We did Mahamudra very thoroughly. We did a Heart Sutra Emptiness Meditation very thoroughly and other meditations like that. And those are meditations now that have been written down carefully.

We translated all the original texts. Everyone has a book. People have gotten the oral instructions on how to do those.

The Ganden Hagyama also. The Jetsun Kappa mantra meditation and things like that. And I thought I would like to take this opportunity to do a Lamrim meditation.

I think it's very important that you have a Lamrim meditation in your toolbox so that when you need it you can pull it out and use it. So we have a reading already which is the Preparing for Tantra book. And I'm going to take you through that Lamrim as a meditation so that you can go ahead and use it.

People ask me, well, how do you do that? And in my experience, I meditate on one meditation for three or four months, something like that, until I get pretty good at it. And it goes up and down, you know, like I get busy for three days and can't do it.

So it goes down a little bit and then I do it real hard for a couple weeks and it goes up again. And then it starts to, so it goes like this, but it's still rising, you know what I mean? It's getting better and better.

And then it seems to peak out at some point and I get really good at it. And then it gets to be a little dry, you know, like I can't get any more inspiration out of it. And then I move on to a different meditation.

So I might be doing Dong Lin for three or four months and then switch to Mahamudra for three or four months and then go back to Lamrim for three or four months. And I think that's a good pattern. I think it's really good to insert a few long retreats in between those, because when you come back from a retreat you're very fresh and you can do that.

So I suggest you follow any one meditation for at least three or four months, okay? And not to skip around more often than that. If it's going well, keep it going, okay?

The idea is to move on before the last one gets dry. And you'll notice it because you'll start meditating on the same old things and you won't be making any progress. And it will be like that.

So I suggest you do a Lamrim meditation like that. We're going to do a special meditation. This is, I'm not going to say much about the background of this Lamrim, except to say that it's probably one of the most famous Lamrims in Tibet.

The name in Tibetan is Yindenshi Gyuma, which means the source of all my good qualities, the source of all my good spiritual qualities. And it refers to your Lama. The opening line of the Lamrim is, Yinden kundi shi gyur jin jin je, which is my kind Lama who is the source of all my good qualities, okay?

And that's how the book was named. It has another name, which is Jinla Pungshu, a mountain of blessings. And it's actually part of a much larger work.

It's actually only about a third of a larger work, which is the first work in Je Tsongkhapa's, what they call miscellaneous works. I don't like the word miscellaneous because it makes it sound minor. Like the Three Principle Paths is a miscellaneous work.

The short Lamrim, Dudun is a miscellaneous work. But anyway, in his shorter writings, it's the first. And it's very beautiful.

He was at a monastery, Raden. There's a big rock there and on top of that apparently is a statue of Atisha, Lord Atisha. And this is one of the first early monasteries in Tibet.

This is where Atisha was active. And Je Tsongkhapa went down there to try to get some blessings there. And he was constantly doing this.

I mean people know he was a great scholar and a great philosopher. He's also the greatest writer in Tibetan language. I mean when you read his writing, it's the most eloquent.

He's the Shakespeare and the Socrates of Tibet, okay, at the same time. But I don't think most people know that he was also a great Sanskritist. He was a great physician and he was a great artist.

And he didn't advertise it, okay. But if you read his biography, it's all there. The doctors who treated him in his later age used to ask him what kind of medicine they should give him.

And I think what most people don't realize is that, you know, this guy wrote 10,000 pages of philosophy, very difficult philosophy, very deep. And I think most people don't realize that he spent half his time doing Tsongkhapa. Tsongkhapa is some kind of practice, meditation practice, where you just sit down, you visualize your Lama and you ask them for help and you just beg them for help.

And this book, which is a long rim, is actually a Tsongkhapa. He was begging Lord Atisha for help to understand the teachings. So he goes to this place, he gets out.

You can see it up on the rock mountain somewhere. And he's like sitting down, he's by himself, he's meditating in front of this huge crag where there's an image of Lord Atisha. And then suddenly he goes into some kind of vision, like an LSD trip or something.

And this went on for about a month. I mean, he ate and he drank, but most of the time he was in this vision and he saw all the Lamas of all the lineages, the three great lineages, you know, like practice, emptiness and then bodhicitta activities, bodhisattva activities. And he had this vision going on for mostly, almost all day and night for a month.

And they're teaching him and they're giving him instructions and blessings. And so people think he was just a smart guy or something like that. He was like under some kind of divine, he was like taken over by these beings and wrote his books that way.

He came out of this vision and went and wrote the Lamrim Chemal, which is the greatest book ever written in Tibetan probably, the great Lamrim, the great book on the Lamrim. And those are the circumstances of this. This Lamrim you're going to study is a little piece of the Sundep that he was saying, oh please bless me to understand the first step of the Lamrim.

Please bless me to understand the second step of the Lamrim. And then by saying that he gives you a whole Lamrim. You see what I mean?

He goes through each of the steps of Lamrim by asking for blessings for each step of the Lamrim. Lamrim means steps on the path to enlightenment. And everybody should have a Lamrim meditation in their pocket, in their toolbox.

You really need to have one. It is a brief summary of everything you need to know to get enlightened. So it's just a how to do it.

And this is probably one of the shortest ones ever written. The commentary to this is by Pabongkha Rinpoche, who was the teacher of His Highness's teacher, the current Dalai Lama's teacher, and also the teacher of Khen Rinpoche, Chakrut Lama. And this commentary was lost and it wasn't published with Pabongkha Rinpoche's in his collected works.

And the third Pabongkha Rinpoche gave me a copy at Sara. He's a member of our college, General College. So that's how we got this book.

And it's very beautiful. We named it Preparing for Tantra because the occasion on which this teaching was given by Pabongkha Rinpoche was a tantric initiation. And he was giving this teaching as the required preliminary for a tantric initiation.

Also it's a sexy title and more people will order it if we put tantra in it. The Lamrim is special because they do allow you to speak a little bit about tantra, especially how to prepare for tantra in a Lamrim teaching. And this Lamrim in particular gives a few details about tantric practice, how to prepare for tantric practice.

So I think it's special for that reason. Okay. There's two ways to teach any Buddhist teaching.

One is called Lungjung and one is called Lungdok. Let's say Lungjung, Lungdok, Lungjung, Lungdok. Especially the Wheel of Life painting, we have 12 steps around the outside of the wheel.

They teach it Lungjung and they teach it Lungdok. Lungjung means how do we get into this mess, meaning you do it from one o'clock to twelve o'clock. Okay, from your viewpoint you go ignorance, karma, rebirth, you know, and you go around like that and it describes how you get into trouble and all the way up to the number 11, 12, 12 is what, junipa, gasshi, old age and death, aging and death.

Okay, so it describes how you get in trouble like this. And then when you teach the Wheel of Life, Lungdok, you teach it backwards. You see, I mean you say if you could cancel this, you could cancel this and if you cancel this, you'd cancel this and if you stop this, you'd stop this and if you stop that, you stop that.

You get back to stopping the whole thing. See, that's how to turn it off. You go backwards.

Okay, there's a tradition to teach Lamrim sometimes that way. So we're not going to go from A to Z, we're going to go from Z to A. Okay, and we're going to start backwards.

We're going to do the Lamrim by starting with the result and then working back to the very first Lamrim. Lamrim can mean the whole series of steps and then the word in Tibetan can also mean any individual step. So they'll say, what are you studying?

You say Lamrim. And they say, which Lamrim? And you say, I'm on the first one, I'm on the second one, I'm on the third one.

You see what I mean? So the whole book can be called a Lamrim and then each step can be called a Lamkirimba, okay, a Lamrim. So we're going to start from the last Lamkirimba, Lamrim, and work up to the first one in the next two days, okay, today and tomorrow.

In the monastery you're required to memorize a lot. When you memorize, they teach you how to do mnemonics, they teach you to make a visualization. Like when I memorized about half of the Abhidharmakosha and they taught it, this is before I knew Tibetan very well, and you just connect it to a picture.

And I connected it to my hometown in Phoenix, Arizona. And that way you can't get lost, you can't miss a chapter because you can't get from Glendale Avenue to Northern Avenue unless you go up 17th Street. So you know if you're losing anything or not.

You see, it's a good way to memorize a text, especially if you have no idea what it's talking about. You don't even know the words mean. So this is a method I'd like you to use for this Lamrim.

So we're going to start a visualization, okay. I just want you first to get the visualization straight. To do a visualization you have to do a meditation.

To do a meditation you have to do the preliminaries, okay. So we're going to do a real meditation. It'll be about 20 minutes of preliminaries.

I'll take you through the preliminaries, okay. These are the Dzogchen Dug, the six preliminaries, which have inside them the seven ingredients, Gelag Dun. And these are something you should always do before you meditate, okay.

So you know, hopefully you can also use this on a tape if you want to get the tape, and you can go through the preliminaries in the proper order, okay. So get comfortable, that's one of the first ones. Tradition is do a full lotus if you can.

Don't worry about it if you can't. The book says most people can't, so don't worry about it. If you do a half lotus, tradition is to put your right foot up, put your left down first, and put your right foot up on top of that.

If you do a full lotus, you put the left one in first and then the right one on top of that. I used to teach it backwards, okay. So Gustavo, maybe you got it wrong, I don't know.

I mean, it seems logical to me that half a lotus should be half of the lotus, full lotus, but it's not, okay. Then you take your left hand, put the palm down, then you put your right palm on top of that. This is the standard Vairocana position, okay.

Put your thumbs together. They say hold them up, to me it's very distracting because I'm concentrating on not having them fall down. Sometimes I spread my hands apart so that they're just touching like that maybe, okay.

Put your elbows out a little bit. To me, I get a little bit extra heat when I meditate, too much heat, and I think heat is very distracting. This room is going to get warmer as we sit here, so I would take off sweaters and stuff like that.

Personally, I get dull when I get too warm, okay. If you feel like you're getting too hot, then I sometimes do this, which is acceptable. You put your palms on your knees, and you put your fingers close together or together, and you'll find that very lightly, so they're almost touching, okay, like that.

And that is a position which is accepted and used in other parts of Buddhist practice, so both positions are okay. And you might want to see which one's more comfortable for you. Meditation is a very personal thing, and you should find out what's most comfortable for you.

Make sure your back is straight. There's this long essay on why to keep your back straight. I think we threw it into the meditation course, but it helps the winds move in your channels and keeps you from getting tired.

Don't crunch up one shoulder like this, okay. Have some students who meditate like this, okay. Keep your head straight.

Don't keep it up too high. Don't keep it down too low. If you want to open your eyes, open them.

If you get distracted, close them. A very good position is like halfway open, looking down, but don't put your head down, okay. Some people, you tell them to look down, and their chin goes down, okay.

So it should be looking straight ahead, and then drop the eyes down, but don't move the head. Okay, we'll start. The first of the preliminaries, I have to get seated properly.

Cushion should be higher in the back, lower in the front, okay, and there must be some kind of cushion under your ankles, those knobs on your ankles. Like some people have bigger ones, like me, than other people, but that's why your feet hurt. That's why your knees fall asleep.

You should have something under your calves and under your thighs, some kind of a good cushion, okay. Those red ones are fine. So really, if you're going to be a real serious meditator, you should go around with two cushions.

Some kind of one under your butt, which is up higher in the back, and then something under your legs. And I don't think a carpet is enough, personally. I think your legs will fall asleep.

I think if you try something as thick as what you have here, you'll find that your meditation is a lot better, okay. All right, here we go. Please don't move for the next 20 minutes, okay.

So get comfortable and then just decide you're not going to move. A lot of meditation is getting used to pain, okay, and just decide you're not going to move, okay. There's things more important than scratching.

You can meditate on the itch. They go away after about 30 seconds. Sometimes it takes two minutes or so.

Okay, here we go. Make sure your mouth is, like, comfortable. Very natural.

Not tight. People tend to make it tight in the corners. Very gentle.

Since it's invisible, it's hard to watch, okay. It means being aware of the sensation of the air touching your nose, especially the inside of your nose at the nostril. So I like to think of two donuts on the end of my nose, and I'm just aware of the tactile sense of those two places.

So just think that you're like a guard at the door. Your mind is going to park at the opening of your nostrils, and it's going to follow the feeling, the physical sensation of the breath going by. So watch it for a second.

Every time your mind wanders, bring it back to the opening of your nose, the two nostrils. Now it's a tradition to count your breaths. Try to count to 10 without losing the count, without being distracted.

The out-breath counts as the first half. The in-breath counts as the second half, okay. So out and then in counts as one.

Try to count to 10 without a major distraction of your mind. If you get distracted, you have to start over. If you're honest, you won't get past six.

You'll have to start over a bunch of times. The first preliminary is taking refuge, and a very, very brief act of taking refuge is to think about how every negative thing that happens to you, and I'm talking from someone who bothers you slightly all the way up to death itself, getting old and dying, that all of them are created by you, that you have created all of them, and that by reacting to them wrongly, you keep them going. So all the problems in your life, you perpetuate them by acting the wrong way when they happen to you.

If someone's angry with you and you get angry back to them, then you set up the karma to have another person be angry at you. So the ultimate act of refuge is to understand that, and that's protection. When you refuse to be angry because you don't want to meet angry people, then you have protected yourself, and that's an act of refuge.

So take an act of refuge now. Think about some problem you have, especially a person that you may be having a problem with, and do an act of refuge, which means I decide now that I'm not going to respond with anger towards this person the next time I see them, because this will protect me. That's an act of refuge.

Personally, I give each preliminary ten long breaths, and then I move on to the next preliminary. If you take too long in the preliminaries, you'll find that you get tired before you're ready to start meditating. If you don't do the preliminaries, you'll find that your meditation doesn't go well either.

So give it about ten breaths. If it's working or not working, then go on to the next one. Next preliminary is bodhicitta, thinking about bodhicitta.

This is a very good way of thinking about this, is to choose someone who's having a specific problem that you know, a physical problem or an emotional problem, and think about them, and think about having the ability to help them overcome it, and helping them out of it. So, you know, bodhicitta is aimed at all sentient beings, but you have to deal with the ones right around you, and choose somebody who's having a problem, and imagine having the ability to help them stop it. Make it specific.

Try to feel what they feel. Next step is to invite a holy being to be with you, to meditate with you, to help you. And if you have a root Lama, then choose root Lama.

If not, choose the holiest being you can think of. Maybe it's Holiness the Dalai Lama, or Khen Rinpoche, or Lama Soto, or some other great Lama. Or if you don't know any great Lamas, then maybe some holy being that you remember from when you were younger, maybe Jesus, or Moses, or something like that.

But it's okay, any kind of a holy being, to sit and meditate with you. So imagine them coming, and sitting in front of you, and being with you during the meditation. And bring them here.

Make them alive. Don't make them a painting. They're not flat.

They're not on a piece of canvas. They're three-dimensional. They're moving.

They're smiling. They're blinking. You can feel the heat from their bodies.

You can smell the scent of their bodies. You can feel them sinking near you. Make them alive, and ask them to come and help you with your meditation.

Next step is to bow down to them, mentally. You've already done one prostration before you meditated physically. Now you do one mentally.

And the real essence of prostration is not so much that you get down, or something like that. It's to think about some holy quality of that being, and bow down to that quality. So try to imagine some extraordinary, good quality that they have, that you've seen, good qualities that you can't even imagine.

Pick one of them, and then mentally honor them for it. Next step is to make them an offering. It can be anything, something you actually own, or something you imagine.

A very traditional offering is to fill the whole sky with flowers, and offer that. It's like clouds of offerings, huge masses of offerings covering the sky. This is an offering of Samantabhadra.

The highest kind of offering, if you're feeling like that, is to offer them something about your own spiritual practice. Some small success you've had in the last day or two, or some kind of resolution for the next few hours. Like, you know, I offer to you that I'm going to picture myself as a certain deity before the day is finished, and I make that offering to you.

Something like that. So think of an offering like that. Again, restrict it to ten breaths.

Don't go longer, because you'll be tired before you start to meditate. Even if it doesn't go too well, move on after ten breaths. The next preliminary is purification.

Think about the last 24 hours or so. Pin down specifically the most negative thing you've done, mentally or physically or verbally, and observe it, and think about why it was stupid or dumb. That's the essence of purification.

That's Nambarsinjumbetho. That's the realization that helps destroy the karma of that. So go back to the last 24 hours.

Maybe you said something to someone. Maybe you did something to someone. Maybe you even just had a thought.

Those are the hardest ones. But find something specific and purify yourself of it, and really examine whether it was wrong or not. Because if you don't get that feeling, then the purification won't work.

Whether or not it was unpleasant is easy to check. Whether or not you really think it was wrong and you don't want to do it anymore is a different thing. The next step is to rejoice in something good you've done.

So do the same process. Go back over the last 24 hours. Find the very best thing you've done.

Some kind word you said to someone. Some good spiritual practice you undertook, even though you didn't feel like it. Something good you did for someone.

Some good thought you had. World views are very powerful. I had the thought that maybe I could become a Buddha in this lifetime.

Something like that. And rejoice. Be happy about it.

I always say if you don't start grinning here, you're not visualizing it very well. We're almost to the end of the preliminaries. Then the next preliminary is to ask for teachings.

And what I like to do is I try to think of some formal teachings that I'm undergoing at the time. Like I know I'm going to be asking for certain teachings from a certain Lama. Or I know I'm going to be studying a certain book, which in a way is asking teachings from a Lama who's not physically here anymore.

And I'm asking for those teachings and asking them to teach me. Learning Buddhism without a teacher is about as impossible as learning to play concert piano without a piano teacher. And so you're asking that a teacher like that come into your life and teach you.

Then personally I like to move on to all the people who are bothering me at that particular time and ask them for teachings. Because these are the ones who really teach you. These are the ones who challenge you, who show you your faults and your weaknesses and your mental afflictions.

So I make a special prayer that during the day I should meet somebody like that and they should push my button somehow and teach me what I still have to clean up in my own mind. Then when it happens you can't complain, okay? The last preliminary is to ask the great teachers to stay in the world.

Pray that His Holiness the Dalai Lama lives a very, very long life. And Ken Rinpoche and the other great Lamas in the world, pray that they live a long time. Pray that they stay in this world.

And also all your own teachers. And then especially the Dharma friends that you have, the people around you who are a good influence on you, that they should stay close to you. I think personally when my mother passed away I had this intense impression that the greatest loss was that I wouldn't have this person near me affecting me.

She was very kind to many people. She gave away everything she had. Our house was open all the time.

We didn't lock it. Everyone ate at our house. Everyone slept at our house.

She would give everything to everyone. And then when she died I realized that the worst thing wasn't that I lost her, it was that I wouldn't have that influence on me nearby. So pray for the long life of people like that to stay, that you meet them, that you stay near them.

They don't have to be Buddhists. But just find people and noble people that you can be near them and they rub off on you. And pray for those kinds of teachers and for the great teachers to stay in the world, close to you.

That's the end of the preliminaries and I usually take a break here. I stretch, I shift my leg, I scratch my whatever's itching. Okay?

But this has purified your mind. Like your mind now should be very like soft and gentle. And then it's a good stage to take off from in meditation.

Okay? If you feel more comfortable with your feet out straight or you don't have to cross them, okay? If you feel more comfortable in a chair, sit in a chair.

The idea of meditation posture is not to torture yourself. It's to park the body in a position that you can leave it for a long time and not be bothered by it. Nobody cares how you look, right?

Because everyone has their eyes closed. Okay, here we go. This will be the actual start of the Lam Rim or the end of the Lam Rim.

So go back to your breath. Go back to counting your breath. Go up to ten.

Personally I do three rounds of ten. If I can get to ten. We won't go very long.

This will be about a 10-15 minute meditation. Then we'll take a break. Okay, first Lam Rim meditation and Lung Do going backwards.

Starting with the results. Personally, I'd like you to visualize a building and it has a courtyard in the center, an open courtyard. You're sitting there meditating in the center of the sunlight and there's green plants around and a nice fountain.

Very beautiful, quiet courtyard. You're sitting on the tiles of the courtyard, like earthen tiles, and there's nice columns around the edge of the courtyard and some shade there. And you're sitting there and do your own variation, but it should be the center of a building that's open to the sky.

And the sky is overhead, beautiful blue sky and the sun coming down. So get the building straight and the courtyard in the middle. Imagine that you're already an enlightened being and you're sitting there.

And I'd like you first to visualize your body. And the point of this body is that it's been created by trillions and trillions of good deeds, virtues, so it's pure. There's nothing wrong with it.

Even the most beautiful person you can see on this earth, in this desire realm, even the most beautiful person you can see in a magazine or in a movie or meet on the street has some flaw. What's her name? Cindy Crawford still has that mole.

And there's some kind of flaw on everybody that's produced by impartial or impure virtue. But try to imagine a perfect body. And it can be anything you want.

Normally young, healthy, 16, something like that, you don't have to be the same male or female that you are now. If you're attracted to Tara and you're a guy, you can be Tara. If you're attracted to Manjushri and you're a lady, you can be Manjushri.

You will be probably whatever you're attracted to now the most. And imagine being in that body, perfect body, beautiful, shining. Those bodies are not made of what we call physical matter.

They're made of physical form, meaning they have color, they have shape, but they're like a rainbow and they're made of light. They don't have internal organs. They are almost like hollow inside and they're perfectly exquisite.

Just try to imagine yourself that way. Try to imagine having a body and go over each detail. You know, how do you want your hair done today?

What kind of arms do you want? And what color will your complexion be? What kind of silk clothing?

And imagine a physically perfect being that you would like to be. It doesn't have to be oriental, okay? When they paint thangkas of the first Buddhists who became, first Americans who became Buddhists, they may not look oriental, okay?

So just whatever is most beautiful to you. Now try to imagine the mind of an enlightened being. I think the most difficult thing is to imagine what it would be like to be perfectly happy and to love everyone equally, totally.

And it's not necessarily the case, even for a Buddha, that everyone is loving you. I mean, many Buddhists have been killed or attempted murder towards Buddhas. It's not like necessarily that every being recognizes you or even likes you.

They might hate you. But I mean, I went to China, I saw in Beijing a poster, public enemy number one is the Dalai Lama. So it's not how other people feel about you.

It's you, from your side, your mind totally loves everyone around you. And try to imagine a mind that has no mental afflictions, no hatred, no jealousy, no selfishness, none of them. And try to imagine, just for a few minutes, what it feels like to be a Buddha mentally, to have that incredible peace and to love everything and everyone, no matter how they feel towards you.

Then lastly, in this visualization, in the middle of the courtyard, imagine what it's like to know that you are, at that moment, appearing in thousands or millions of other places, other planets, other stars, other galaxies, other places in your own world. And as you sit there enjoying your perfect mind and your exquisite body, that even as you are sitting there, you are appearing around the world, all over the world, in the strangest places. And you're helping people, and you're guiding people, and leading people.

And you can be someone's wife, or someone's child, or their grandfather, or the person on the bus next to them who's irritating them to teach them a lesson. But you're doing all of that simultaneously while you're sitting there. And just sit there and imagine what it's like to know that you're appearing in thousands or hundreds of thousands of other places, at the same moment, and helping people.

Yeah, that's good. I'd like to take a break, get up, stretch around, walk around, get something to drink, come back in five, ten minutes, and we'll finish the last lamrim. Okay?

Pull out page 90, okay? Okay, we're going to read this verse in English, okay? This is the last active verse of the lamrim.

There'll be two verses later that relate to special prayer or something, but this is the last of the instructions. And I'd like you to read it out loud with me, okay? On the count of three.

One, two, three. Bless me, next, to realize precisely the crucial points of both the stages, the essence of their secret ways. Grant me, then, to practice as only one has spoken, putting all my effort and never-never leaving off the practice of the four times, I ask that there is.

Okay, Gentsongkhapa is already into tantra here, okay? We're going backwards, right? And the idea is that we're trying to figure out what makes you get that body and mind, okay?

So we got to build, we got to go backwards and build up each step. So we're going to go back to the step that immediately proceeds getting that body and mind, and then we'll have to go back to the step that causes that one, and then we'll have to go back to the step that causes that one, and like that. This is lung dok, this is working backwards, okay?

So we want to get into the middle of the courtyard and get this body and this mind, okay? Much better than the current ones. And we have to figure out what to do to get there, what would trigger that body and mind, what would cause that, and the immediate cause of that, and then work backwards.

So I want you to imagine a room that's letting out into the courtyard, because the lamrims are like that, the steps on the path are like that. You can imagine going through successive rooms, going through successive doors, and I want you to visualize it that way. Getting to the inner courtyard is going to take a process of moving through a series of rooms, and you're going to be coming in the, let's call it the southwest door, or whatever you like, and you're going to be moving out the northeast door, you see, towards the center, towards the courtyard.

So each room is going to be a separate meditation, alright? And then for your own purposes, to remember the meditations, you fill up the room with whatever you want, okay? Like I'll describe the meditation, but you have to think of a room.

The first room is going to be immediately leading out onto the courtyard, okay? So imagine a room, it has a door on one side that opens into the courtyard, and it has a door on the opposite side that goes back to the lamrim before that, to the step before that, okay? And you can't get to the inner courtyard unless you go through all these rooms, one by one.

So this will be a way to visualize and remember all the steps to the path, all the lamrim, okay? And then when you go into your lamrim meditations, you can pick a room, you know, like I'm kind of weak on room number four, and you can't get to room number four unless you get to room number three. And imagine a series of rooms like that, so there's no hallway, okay?

It's just a bunch of rooms, like you got to go in, you got to get to this door, pass through the room, and get to the next door to get into the next room, okay? It's a series of rooms, and the lamrim is like that, you can't skip any of them, okay? And it's a good visualization, because that's the way it works, that's how lamrim works.

You got to go to the outermost room, then move in through each room into the center to get to the inside of the courtyard, to get to Buddhahood. You have to move through each of those rooms, and you have to know them. If you leave one out, it doesn't work, you don't get to the middle, you see what I mean?

So it's a good way to visualize it. So you're going to be moving in through rooms towards the middle courtyard, like you're going starting from the outside of the building, like maybe it opens onto a desert or something like that, and so like you're coming into the first door, moving across the room, looking around the room, and there's going to be some mnemonic devices, there's going to be some stuff in the room that reminds you of what meditation this is supposed to be. You can put what you want, okay?

And then you're going to get to the next room, and that's going to have a different stuff in the room, it's going to remind you of that meditation, okay? But remember we're working from the inside, we're working from the central courtyard back out, okay? So the first room that opens onto the courtyard is going to be Dzogrim.

Say Dzogrim. Dzogrim. Okay, this Dzogrim is called Completion Stage Tantra, Higher Tantra.

There's two levels to Tantra, and we're talking about what we call Completion Level, Completion Level, okay? And this is the level that happens just before you get enlightened, okay? These are the practices that you'll be doing that get you enlightened in this life.

By the way, this building is a Tantric building, okay? Forget the Sutra building. Sutra means open teachings, right?

That one would be too big. That takes millions and millions of years, okay? Forget it.

We're building a Tantric court, okay? Which means that in one lifetime, before you die, in this lifetime, you can move into the central courtyard, you can be the being sitting there in the sunlight, in the middle, okay? But you have to build a building this way.

That's why Je Tsongkhapa did it this way, okay? So the last verse, this is really the last verse of instruction. He mentions both the stages, you see, in the fourth line there, he just says both the stages, and that's all he says because it's secret, okay?

He doesn't say Creation Stage or Completion Stage, okay? But you have to imagine this is the final room that opens onto the courtyard. Now what's going to be in that room, okay?

Like you have to stop there and do something, right? These are Completion Stage practices. I can describe them roughly.

I can't describe them in detail, okay? There's two reasons for secrecy of Tantra. One is, you know, external.

It's just, oh, we don't show these books to people. We cover up these paintings. We're not supposed to tell these secrets to people.

I mean, it's not like the Freemasons or something like that. It's not like I can't tell you because I took a promise and there's some reason I can't tell you or something like that. Tantra is self-secret, meaning I could take you and show you.

We have input a thousand tantric texts into a computer already, literally a thousand, and I could take them, I could read them to you, you know, I could show you all these practices and you wouldn't get it. You see, I mean, it would look like something else to you. You'd say, I can't believe he's doing that or something like that.

You see, it would look different to you. It would look weird to you. It would look something improper maybe or you wouldn't understand it.

If you saw Lama Sky's crazy or something like that. I mean, there's a certain preparation you need and there's a certain level you have to get up to before your mind is pure enough that you see it the right way. And to show somebody those things before that would just be useless.

You see, they wouldn't get it. Maybe a lot of the things you've ever seen Lamas do are Tantra already and you just didn't get it. You see, I mean, your mind has to be prepared.

You show a kid an LSD cube on sugar, you know, not that I ever saw one, okay? And they just think you're eating candy. You see what I mean?

I mean, they see a person about to do this thing and they say, oh, he's eating candy, you know, and they would see it totally on their own level. You see, I mean, they would just interpret it totally on their own level. Like, this person likes candy.

You see what I mean? It has nothing to do with that. Absolutely nothing to do with that.

And the person himself wouldn't say, I'm taking candy to see a higher reality or something like that. I mean, he doesn't think of it that way. The whole practice of taking this thing has nothing to do with eating candy.

But it looks like eating candy to a kid and they can't interpret it any other way. You can sit there and try to tell a four-year-old, look, when you eat this, you go to a different reality and you can see things and they just wouldn't get it, you see? And it would be weird to try to give it to them, you know what I mean?

Or something like that. Something might happen to them or something might not happen to them, but definitely it's inappropriate. They wouldn't get it.

They just wouldn't get it. Their mind's not at a level where they would get it, you know? I had this student who came to me and said, my husband came home and I did his laundry and I found Playboy magazine pictures in his pockets.

And it really bothers me because I don't look like that, you know? And so I said, go buy me a Playboy magazine and bring it to my house, okay? And they're like, yeah, go.

So they brought it. And first I got this spider in a jar already, you know? And then I got a piece of meat, you know?

And then a prayer book or something like that. So I said, okay, pull out the pictures that you think are the nicest. They pulled them out, you know?

And then I get the meat and I wrap it up in the picture, you know? Then I said, go put it outside. There's this dog outside, you know?

And she puts it outside and this dog comes and this dog's always waiting outside for something to eat, you know? And rips through the picture and eats the meat and runs away, you know? And doesn't even see anything, you see what I mean?

You get it? Like, doesn't hesitate at all for the picture. It doesn't mean anything, you know?

And then I put the other picture on the ground and I let the spider out on it and it ran around and it ran away, you know? Like, it saw that this thing was gonna kill it, you know? Like, this picture was frightening.

This picture was life-threatening, you know what I mean? And then we were talking like more and more and I said, how do you know how your husband sees this thing, you know? I mean, you don't really know.

I mean, the Tantra is especially like that. I mean, for one person it can be a life-threatening thing, for the other person it can be something tasty to eat, for another person it can be something else. You don't know.

How did Jesus, when Jesus opens Plug My Magazine, what does he see? You know, they asked the Dalai Lama, I translated, CNN, you were at a French fashion show, we saw you. He says, yeah, I was, you know?

And they said, well, when those girls were walking by, what did you think, you know, what came in your mind? And he said, I had an immediate reaction, you know? And they said, well, what was it?

And he says, I can't imagine wasting all that money. You could give it to some refugees. And they wanted him to say something else, but it didn't even occur to him, you know?

So, I mean, it's a different level. You have to think of, I mean, it's a whole different level and until you're there, it's not appropriate to talk about that much. But when you're ready, when you've prepared from the room before that, then it's quite natural and quite perfect and everything is unbelievably beautiful and great and all kinds of amazing things.

I mean, those include practices. I can give one open example like Cham, Cham dancing, okay? Now it's very popular to dance in the United States.

These are secret, okay? My Lama, you know, they called him, they said, will you put up the dancers in the temple? He said, no.

He said, why not? It's making money for the monastery. He said, it's secret, you can't dance that, you know?

So why are monks dancing? You see what I mean? It looks wrong, it looks improper, you know?

What are they doing? I mean, the real thing is a Dzogrel meditation practice and it has some effect that Dzogrel's purpose is to work with your inner spiritual body. You have an inner spiritual body.

It has tubes and pipes going around like plumbing, okay? And it's all clogged up in certain places and these are these horrible knots that actually kill you. They're responsible for your death.

They make these pretty little patterns that are called chakras, okay? And people think, oh great, I have chakras. Chakras kill you, okay?

Chakras are these little petals that are formed by the tubes being tied up like a fish string, fish, what do you call it? If you ever were a fisherman, which my father was, you know, you get these big knots of the monofilament, like forget it, try to get it out, it's impossible. And your spiritual body like that is like that right now.

If you're in the desire realm and you are who you seem to be, your plumbing is all twisted up and tied up and in certain areas of your body and Dzogrel is the practice of untying them and transforming those, okay? The cool thing about Dzogrel is that the physical basis for your death is caused by your mind, you see what I mean? The physical reasons why you will die, which are those twists and knots in your spiritual body, are due to thinking the wrong way, you see what I mean?

So all you have to do is what? You have to reverse the thinking, you see, and then that clears out the knots. It's very interesting.

To me that's all very exciting, you see what I mean? So Dzogrel is the practice of primarily meditating in a certain way and that opens up those channels and then you don't have to die anymore. Then your body changes into the person in the courtyard, okay?

So we're talking about the final room of the Lam Rim, very important room. If you can learn to think correctly about emptiness and if you have Kerem, if you study, for example, the 11 stages of the room before that in Vajrayogini practice, okay? If you do all those things properly and you think the right way and if you're learning to see the world the right way, it actually opens up the channels and your body changes into this other body.

You see, that's the exciting thing, that you do it through a process of thought. Then you can do certain physical activities which also help correct the channels and make it easier to think that way, okay? You got it?

So, you know, that's one example of the why-cham, why is there Lama dancing, you know? It wouldn't be proper to do it until you were close to that stage, you see what I mean? But there's a process where external physical activities help you straighten up the channels enough to think straight, you see what I mean?

So you're working on the channels from both sides. You're working at them from thinking straight side and you're also working at them from certain physical activities that help straighten out the channels. Then the combination of those two enlightens you, okay?

So that's a long story and I can't tell you any more detail than that, but that's Dzogrim, okay? So the last room is going to be a little fuzzy, okay? But you put in there those ideas, okay?

You put them in those ideas that there's some trick about seeing the world in certain ways, understanding emptiness clearly, and then doing external activities which support the inner body and help you to see those things. So you're working on it from both ends and that's going to be the contents of the inside room. So I don't know, you see what you want to see.

Personally, I'd see some screwed-up plumbing in the outside edge of the room and then there'd be maybe some exercise equipment or something. Mega-mnemonic, you see? You got to remember what I just said.

So you make your last room whatever way you want, but it should have those elements in it. There's some kind of screwed-up plumbing on the outside edge of the door because towards the inside edge of the door it gets straightened out, right? And then there may be some books there that explain about emptiness or they explain about the tantric view of reality and all these things will be and then some kind of maybe some physical devices that would help you get your channel straightened out, begin the process, okay?

So you're going to need the mental part and the physical part in that room and something to remember the process, okay? When you complete that process, your mind is enlightened and your body is a rainbow body. It's a perfect body, okay?

So that's what Jetsun Kappa is saying. He says both the stages, he's talking about, first about completion stage, okay? We won't get to creation stage until after lunch because we're late for lunch, okay?

You won't need lunch after that, but, okay? All right, so go into that room, create that room in your mind. We'll meditate for like 10 minutes and just get that room straight.

It's very important to get the early room straight because we're going to build on them, okay? If you don't have the ABC straight, you'll never get to XYZ, okay? I'm sorry, XYZ straight, you'll never get to ABC.

So you have to have, the very first rooms we're talking about have to be very clear and you put in that room the element of what we talked about in a way which you can remember, okay? Personally I'm going to have, there's this plumbing downstairs that looks very similar, you know, it's going to be all messed up and then there's going to be maybe a, what are those things you do bench presses on, you know? And there's going to be a book open to some, you know, completion stage instructions and maybe a sweet Lama in there who will teach me and then, you know, so I can remember all the elements of it, okay?

And you can't get to this room unless you go through the other rooms that you haven't heard about yet, okay? So I don't want people running out during lunch and dancing around in there, okay? It's improper, it's wrong, it doesn't work.

I mean, the most wrong thing about it is it won't work, you know? There's not like anyone's going to lock you up for doing it, it just won't work, so without the other rooms, okay? So here we go.

Think about what I said about Dzogchen and don't forget the whole thing is a Sundab, so you're also praying, you know, may I learn Dzogchen, may someone teach me Dzogchen, okay? May I get my other rooms down so well that I can get to the last room. I would put the sugar cube there, okay?

To remember that, you know, it'd be very inappropriate to teach it to a person who wasn't ready to see that yet. You see? They'd think you were eating candy, they'd think you had a sugar problem, something like that, okay?

We'll stop there, okay? Satsang with Mooji www.mooji.org