Серия ежедневной практики, курс 07 — Союз кармы и пустоты (1997, Центр Кадампа, Роли, Северная Каролина), занятие 2

[Speaker 1]
Yesterday we went through karma. We started out from the Abhidharmakosha, and there's the famous lines from the opening of the fourth chapter, and it talked about how karma creates planets and all the beings who live in the planets. And then we talked about the essence of karma was sambha.

What's sambha? The mind. It's just where the mind twitches.

Where the mind moves the slightest bit. That's sambha. That's the essence of karma.

That's yikile. Sambha, yikile, you know. That's the essence of karma.

Then because of that karma, that karma instigates two other kinds of karma. What are they? Oh boy, no reviewing here.

Do you want to Tibetan? No, I don't need Tibetan here. Body and speech.

Okay, these are body and speech. The drivers up here is sambha. And every time sambha goes like that, then your hand goes like that, and your mouth goes like that, you know.

Sambha instigates the other two. The essence of karma is sambha, that movement of the mind, the twitching of the mind. And in that much time, it's 64 different discrete movements of the mind can occur in that amount of time.

And that's how many karmas, that's the rate at which we are collecting karma. We went through that. And then we, it was sort of interesting, you have to know how karma is, how it, the example in the reading was when you leave a flower in a vase and then you take the flower out, or when you have butter on a paper towel and you take the butter off, and the scent of the flowers remains in the vase, and the stain of the butter remains on the paper towel.

And when you see yourself, the main thing is when you see yourself doing a good deed or a bad deed, that perception stains the person, if you want to get technical. But it puts a sort of a stain or it leaves a sort of a trace on the, you can say on the mind, on the stream of the mind. It leaves a trace.

And at that moment, just before that moment that the trace is left, the deed stops, the action stops, the thought stops, the words stop, the actions of your body stop. So where does the karma stay? I mean, the deed is finished.

The word that you said to somebody, you yelled at somebody, and your mouth closed, and you were finished saying it, and somehow that deed gets carried on. And then we talked about how the energy is transferred in the form of a, of a what, to the mind? Bhakti.

Bhakti. We don't have any good words for that. I'd say mental seed, maybe.

People struggle with that. But it leaves a, it leaves that trace of a scent, like a flower on a vase, in the mind stream. And that, that, from the first moment on, even though that bhaktyak is, is being destroyed like all changing things, instant by instant, it's in one finger snap that bhaktyak has gone through sixty-four discrete forms, and changed sixty-four times.

But the energy is transferred from each one to the next. So it's a, it's a long stream of, of bhaktyaks carried in your mind. For how long?

I mean, millions is sort of a... Millions is hard. It's kalpas.

Kalpa is very hard to measure. The third chapter of the Abhidharma also talks about how long is a kalpa. It's an eon, right?

It's very hard to calculate, because it's the time in which the world goes through a number of eighty different huge transformations. And I, I haven't really figured it out yet. I mean, I think Bhutan Rinpoche tried, and it was millions and millions and millions, okay?

A karmic bhaktyak can stay long, much longer than that. It's being, the energy is being transferred from, from moment to moment. Then it flowers.

The conditions occur, and suddenly this thing flowers. Where, where does it flower according to the mind-only scope? When the karma seed ripens, where does it ripen?

[Speaker 2]
In your perceptions.

[Speaker 1]
It's, it is in your perceptions. They say it's actually like ripening on a, on a screen. It's like a movie being projected onto a screen, and that screen is one of your consciousnesses.

It's one of, it's part of your mind. And according to mind-only scope, that part of your mind called kunshi, you're watching it, and every time you think you see somebody sitting in front of you talking, you're actually just watching your mind as the karmic seeds begin to ripen, and they are ripening, and you see the person's hand move, and his lips move, and his sounds are coming out, and you're actually watching one part of your own consciousness.

Does the higher school accept that? I mean, we're supposed to be higher school, majimika prasangika. What do we say?

Is that okay? Was that explanation okay? We say it's all right.

We don't say there has to be a separate consciousness called kunshi, but we say in the own stream of the mind, in your own stream of your mind, or your person, these images come up. You take data from the outside, you interpret it in a certain way, and you see things. You know, I see you, you see me, and you see things changing.

So you do get data, but you're interpreting it in a certain way, and each one of us interprets it differently. Is that a voluntary process? Can you decide how to interpret the data that's presented to you?

No, that's the whole point. It's forced on you by your karma. And that's the whole, that's in a nutshell what's going on.

We would like to be, I mean, when the dentist is drilling your teeth, I remember when it used to happen to me, and he hit the nerve, and I was, it's a she actually, and she would hit the nerve, and I would say, okay, let's meditate on emptiness and see if it helps. And it doesn't help. And I challenge you, give me anyone who says differently, and let me drill on their teeth.

And let me see if they jump, you know. And you know, I mean, you can hope or wish that there were people who weren't like that, but your instinct is that, you know, when you stick a needle into most people, they jump, or something hot, they're going to move. It's a reaction.

They are conceiving it that way. It's real. Madhyamika is very adamant, you know.

Okay, it's only a projection. It's only an interpretation of some data, but it works. I mean, Nagarjuna says, do you remember Woodstock where Max Wentz got up and said, I'm a farmer, you know.

You remember. Max Yasgur, right? And anyway, he gets up and says, I'm a farmer, and then everyone starts cheering, you know.

And Nagarjuna's famous statement, he says, I'm a farmer, you know. He says, whatever farmers believe, I believe, you know. You take your seeds, you put them in the field, you cover them up, you wait, plants grow.

What he's saying is that everything works. Even though everything is a projection, everything is absolutely real, and it works. And if you don't think so, then drill your teeth or stick a knife in your arm and see if that projection makes you jump, you know, and it will.

Or walk out in front of a projection of a car on the highway, you know, and it'll run you over, you know. So it's not, it is artificial, but it's real. It's artificial in the sense of being a projection.

It's real in the sense it's forced on you, and it does hurt, and it will hurt you, and it's not a voluntary thing. If it were, then it'd be easy. We'd all, you know, in the next moment from now, we'd all be living in a tantric paradise, and there'd be no more worries.

But it's not like that. You have to create the causes for it. You have to, creating a paradise is a, which we're going to talk about later today, is a, is a thing you have to do quite purposely and consciously, and it takes time.

Rome wasn't built in a day. We're going to, I thought, all of that is a summary of yesterday, and there's a very good reading in here. It's in the second section.

If you go to, it's in the, this is all very technical books from the monastery, and I don't think you have to, I don't think you have to necessarily master all of that. I mean, what I said is in there, but what I'd like to do is give you the reading so you can confirm that. I mean, I'm not making it up, or it's not my idea.

I like to stick straight to the original books. These are the original texts. So, if you go to the second, the second section, there's a second yellow page, and at the top it says Course Five, Reading Six, Karma and Emptiness, and it's page two, and at the bottom there's a reading from Gyu Lama.

Gyu Lama is, what's it? It's called Uttara Tantra. It's not a tantra, okay?

It's called Uttara Tantra. It means, it's a book by a sangha which is not secret. Tantra means secret.

This is not a tantric book. It's just part of the name. And it has a different meaning.

But it was written by, written down by a sangha who lived, I guess, around the 3rd century, something like that, 4th century, 350. And he had contact with with Maitreya. Who's Maitreya?

Teacher Buddha. Teacher Buddha. Is he a Buddha already or not?

There's a big debate, to be honest. If he was, then this book would be in the Kangyur. But it's in the Tengyur, which means it's a commentary, which means the author is not a Buddha.

so there's a big fight about it. Anyway, Maitreya basically dictated this book to a sangha along with four other books, very famous, the five books of Maitreya. And, this is like a little nutshell presentation.

It's a commentary to that text. And I like it because it's very short and it and it has everything in it. It has the steps to how samsara or how this circle of suffering begins and how it's maintained.

So I think if you just learn those few steps and you remember them, you'll see why you're here. So I'm going to put them one by one and then we'll we're coming in. Say Dangzin.

[Speaker 2]
Dangzin.

[Speaker 1]
Louder. You're sleepy. Dangzingi.

[Speaker 2]
Dangzingi. Bakchat. Bakchat.

Dangzingi. Dangzingi. Bakchat.

Bakchat.

[Speaker 1]
Okay, the trouble starts here, okay? This is the first problem. Dangzingi Bakchat is where the trouble starts.

According to a sangha a sangha is the what do you call it? He's taking dictation from from Maitreya up in where Maitreya's heaven. And, so this is basically Maitreya.

So we can buy it because it's spoken by a Buddha. He hasn't come yet but he's a Buddha. So Dangzingi Bakchat.

Dangzin means the the habit or the tendency to grasp to self-existence. Okay? It's the habit or the tendency to grasp to things as being self-existent.

An example would be looking at a glass of water and thinking that it has to be a glass of water. Okay? I mean, or a more real example for me and maybe for you too is the person at work that you don't like.

Okay? If you don't have one you're very unusual. But it's the person at work or maybe it's a relative of yours or something like that who just irritates you whenever you're around them.

They push your buttons. They know how to do it. You look at them and you grasp them as self-existent.

You believe that they are inherently something irritating and that therefore anyone who comes and contacts them with them must be experiencing them the way you are because of course you believe you are right. And you like it the more people who think that because it proves that you're right. And you even go about trying to impress on people how if they don't think that way they should think that way.

But the fact is that probably there's someone in the world you know, like the person's mother. You hear on TV all the time they interview the lady whose son just killed twelve people and they say, you know, is he a bad boy? No, no.

It's not him. I don't believe it. You know, I mean, someone in the world loves this person and someone in the world when they meet this person has this perception of them as being a very lovable object and you think the opposite.

So, that's dangzhen. If you think they are inherently a bad person you know, that they by themselves are must be bad. By the way, if you're right and if they are self-existent then every person who came in contact with them would have the same reaction.

If they are, if being irritating is an inherent quality of that person then everyone who met them would have the same reaction because that's an inherent quality of that person. But that's not the case. If the irritatingness is that, I don't know, if being irritating were an inherent quality of them then it's not coming from your side.

It's not a projection of yours. It's actually coming from them. And if it's, since that's the case then everyone who ever came in contact with them would have the same impression.

They would all see them as irritating. That's a self-existent irritating person at your office. Okay?

That's what it would be if it existed.

[Speaker 2]
Alright?

[Speaker 1]
So dangzhen, dangzhen is the tendency to think that way and we do think that way. We believe that. You don't, you won't go to work and tomorrow and change.

By the way, is the person irritating? Are you having a pramana? Are you having a correct perception?

Or are you crazy? Crazy. No, is the person irritating to you?

Yes. They are. It's a tsema, it's a pramana, it's a valid perception.

They are. And they really, I mean, except in cases where you're driven by extreme jealousy, which happens, or something else. But if you're just a normal person and someone comes in and they talk too loud or they say stupid things to you or they're trying to get your job or they're trying to make you look bad, they exist.

And they really are doing that. They truly are doing that. And to you, they are irritating.

All the data is there. And you're interpreting it in a way which is correct for you. In that sense, they are really irritating.

Truly, they are an irritating person. But not inherently. Because if somebody else is in the office and you know they're watching this go on and they're loving it, you know, and they're like, oh, Michael's finally getting it, you know, I've been waiting for this for a week, you know.

And if he were self-existent, irritating, then they would also feel as bad as you feel. But they don't because he's not self-existent. So, but our tendency, bhaktsak is what?

It's that mental seed. Okay, the trouble starts here. This bhaktsak comes along with every sentient being when they're born.

If you're not a Buddha, you have this bhaktsak in your mind when you're born. So, insects have it, amoebas have it, humans have it. Everybody has this dang jeng ki bhaktsak.

This is the, the mental seed for, for thinking that way. The mental seed for thinking of things as being self-existent. Or, that the guy at the office is self-existently or inherently irritating.

And everyone who ever met him should have the same reaction as I do. Because I'm right. Okay?

You are right, but not that way. Say, dang jeng?

[Speaker 2]
Ni.

[Speaker 1]
Dang jeng? Ni. So, by the way, if you want to put the English on the number one, it would be something like the seeds for holding things are self-existent.

The seeds for holding that things are self-existent. That would be...

[Speaker 2]
Are you going to talk anymore about how that, how that changes? I mean, I'm getting the picture like they're all there, but the thing to do might change all of them as I go on ahead.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah. We'll talk about it before the end of the day. Okay.

So, now say, dang jeng ni. Dang jeng means, again, that tendency to grasp things as being inherently existent. The tendency to grasp things as being existing from their own side.

And then ni means two. Number two. And there's two different versions of that tendency.

We have both of them. One of them is what we call inherent, and one of them is what we call learned. And the first one is sort of an...

What do you call it? When something... congenital?

I have all these doctors here. One is a congenital dang jeng. And...

really. And the other is... is intellectual.

Okay. So one is very deeply ingrained in the being of a person. And the other is intellectual.

You lose the second one at the path of... Can you guess? Seeing.

Okay, when you see emptiness directly for the first time, and you come back down out of that, you can never again believe that you were right. Okay? When you...

When you thought that the guy was irritating from his own side, and that you... you weren't projecting it. You know you're not right, but you go back into doing it.

And you have to do it, and you will do it, because you still have number two. You still have the other dang jeng, which is congenital. And it forces you to see things the wrong way.

So it's a weird situation. You're sort of a schizophrenic from the tonglam on. From the path of seeing on, your life is kind of schizophrenic.

You know you're seeing things wrong, and you can't stop yourself. So you don't have the intellectual belief in what's going on, but you can't stop it. The day that you can stop it, you're very close to reaching Buddhahood.

It's like Bodhisattva level number eight or nine. You're... The day that you can stop that, you've reached a very high level.

So these are the actual forms of that... of that tendency. So here's how trouble starts.

First of all, you have that seed in your mind. For thinking things exist from their own side. That guy is irritating.

It's not me that's doing it. It's him. It's coming from him.

And if anybody had a right mind, they would see it too. They just haven't figured it out yet. But he, from his own side, is an irritating person.

I'm not participating in it. I'm not causing it. He's self-existently irritating.

That belief, that belief which infects all your awarenesses is Dangsin Yi. That's the two Dangsins. So, so far we have two steps.

One is the seeds of this in your mind, and then the actual tendency itself comes out. And it's not that you're... Ignorance is like this.

Ignorance infects every perception you have. But it's not conscious all the time. In other words, you're not thinking to yourself.

And rarely do you think to yourself, in the heat of the moment of being irritated, oh, this guy is bad from his side. It's not my projection, you know. But that's implied in all your perceptions.

You don't say it to yourself, but you believe it. You believe that he is truly, inherently irritating from his side. And if he could get his act together, everything would be alright.

Okay, that's your... That's what inherent existence does to you. You believe that it's his fault and he should straighten things out, and then everything would be alright.

That's step number two. Step number three... This is how samsara runs, by the way.

This is how samsara gets started. According to Maitreya. So the first two...

What was the first of the first two? The mental seed for thinking that way. And then number two is when you actually start thinking that way.

This is explaining, by the way, how it comes from your past life. I mean, in your past life you had it. You died, but those seeds were planted in your mind, and then now in this life it starts to assert itself again at a very early age.

Then tsul min yi che. Say, tsul min... tsul min...

yi che.

[Speaker 2]
tsul min... tsul min... yi che.

[Speaker 1]
This is an abbreviation. Tibetan is cool, because if you can't remember the whole phrase, you can just cut out a bunch of syllables. It's...

tsu shi ma yin pa yi le che pa. And then you can say, ah, tsul min yi che. Okay.

This is very interesting. Tsul min yi che means to direct your mind in a mistaken way. Okay.

It's direct... It's a mistaken perception. Okay.

Mistaken perceptions. Yi che means to direct your mind at something, or focus something. Tsul min means against the rules, or against the real way it should be.

Your lama, who teaches here, is Geshe Tsul Ga. That tsul means the way in the sense of morality, I think. And then he's a tsultrim la gawa, which means he enjoys morality.

But this tsul means to think the wrong way. Okay. To think the wrong way.

And the object is very important, so I'm going to stick that in too. Let's say yi wong. Yi wong.

Yi mi yong.

[Speaker 2]
Yi mi yong. Yi wong. Yi wong.

[Speaker 1]
Yi mi yong.

[Speaker 2]
Yi mi yong.

[Speaker 1]
Okay. Yi yong is a nice word. Yi means what?

Mind. Tibetan has like 20 words for mind. Forget trying to find different words in English, you know.

Yi wong. Wong means to come. And yi wong means pleasant or pleasing to the mind.

It comes to the mind. Yi wong means like a beautiful flower is yi wong. Or this, we call ka pen.

This pillar cover is yi wong. It's very pleasing to the eye. It's very nice colors, pleasant, pretty.

And that's called yi wong. Yi mi yong is the opposite. So what's that?

Yi mi yong means unpleasant to the eye. Or unpleasant to the ear. Which pretty much describes this guy at your office.

Okay. That's yi mi yong. You know, I give this as an example in Dharma classes.

And then we talk about it week after week. And then invariably someone comes up to me after class and says and starts complaining about this other Dharma student or this guy at the office. And I say, wait a minute, this I've been talking about for two, three weeks.

I mean, they don't connect it with the whole class we've been having for a month or two, you know. This is the time came. You have to apply it now.

You met the guy, you know. And somehow we have this blindness. We're very interesting, you know.

So, yi wong means pleasing to the eye. And yi mi yong means unpleasing to the eye. And the tsu min yi che, this mistaken perception, focuses on nice things and things that aren't nice.

That's step number three. This messed up way of thinking which is triggered by what? What was number two?

The tendency to think of things as being self-existent. Which was triggered by the seed which came from your past life. So, you come into this life with a seed in your mind for it.

It starts to assert itself. And then you focus on nice things and you hold them to be self-existent. And you focus on those nasty things like that guy at work and you start to hold his badness as self-existent.

Something coming from him. Okay. That's tsu min yi che.

It's focused on nice things and bad things. Okay. What was number four?

Say du cha.

[Speaker 2]
Du cha. And she dang. She dang.

Du cha. She dang.

[Speaker 1]
She dang. Okay. In the Wheel of Life which is at the door entryway of your gongba here in the outside there which is required by Buddhist custom since the time of the Buddha that we should remember what one of his disciples saw when he sent him to hell to check things out.

He said, draw it when you get back and we'll put it on the door of every temple. People won't forget what it was like. That's one of the ways in which this painting was made.

There's another way also. At the very center there's three animals. Do you remember what are they?

Snake, pig, and a rooster. Snake, pig, and a rooster. Those represent what are called the three poisons.

Here you have two of them. Dvacak is desire. Shedang is hatred.

Desire is the rooster. Oh, yeah. And hatred is the snake.

And they're at the very center of the wheel of life. They run the wheel of life. You know, what's the last time you had desire or hatred?

[Speaker 2]
Again?

[Speaker 1]
No, I mean, I used to think, you know, desire, that's pretty strong. It's like, you know, I would have to have some really bad desires. Like probably have once a day or once a week or something.

Shedang, you know, anger or hatred or there's malice sometimes. I mean, I haven't had shedang, I mean, I haven't hated somebody for a couple days, you know. So, I don't know if those translations are useful.

I'll give you the definition. The definitions are in Maitreya's text here, the commentary here. The definition of dvacak is yon damindawa dvibhissam, which means you do not want to lose those nice objects, those yon objects, those pleasant objects.

It's the desire not to lose a pleasant object. So, I think sometimes it should even be translated as liking something. I mean, if you say, what was the last time you liked something, that was as recent as a few seconds ago.

You know, you liked what that person said or you didn't like what they said. I mean, liking and disliking go on moment by moment. It's not like passion or hatred or, you know.

And I believe, I mean, if you check it out, these two mental functions are going on constantly. You're constantly liking something or disliking something. So, I think those, the pig and the, what was it, the snake and the rooster, those are there all the time.

It's not like you have a blow-up of a rooster once a week or something. You know, these are constantly infecting our minds. And I think that's why they're called poisons.

They're running like poisons through our blood. We have them every moment of our lives. Dvacak, we are struggling not to lose the things which are yiwong to us, which are pleasant to us, which strike us in the least pleasing way.

Shedang is the opposite. It's yi mi onwa nandawa dubhe sam, which means you are struggling to get free of things you don't like. You're struggling to avoid the objects which are not pleasing to you.

The guy at work. It's like you hear he got sick or he was fired and you're like, oh, that's terrible, you know. That's the shedang.

So, shedang, I don't think it's as strong as anger. It's like this wish that you could get away from this object. And our lives are based on that.

Our whole lives are running on that. We constantly go through the day trying to hook up with things we like and trying to escape from things we don't like. And our whole day is spent doing that.

And then a lot of Buddhists get confused because, am I not supposed to do that, you know? Am I supposed to like something that's dislikable, unlikable? Am I supposed to dislike something which is likable?

You know, they get confused. They tell you that's wrong. And then you think, well, maybe I shouldn't eat ice cream.

I mean, you get confused about what it is you're supposed to be doing. And you get sort of schizophrenic also. You're not quite sure how you should be acting.

The goal of Buddhist practice is to reach a state of being where every object is yiwo, where every object is pleasant. But here we're talking about the wrong way to get there. So there's a distinction.

Obviously, the way that Buddha paradises are described, they have a lot of the characteristics of the beautiful things in your life now. You know, the relationship you have with people, the beauty in the world, the nice things that happen to you during your life. You can't say those are ugly or bad or stupid or things like that.

I mean, Buddha paradises have those things. They don't have the tail of the dog hooked on. They don't have the lousy ending that our pleasures have.

And that's just a distinction. It's not that the nature of a pleasant thing is bad. It's not bad.

Obviously, it's nice. And obviously, you come to Buddhism class because you're hoping to reach some place where everything would be like that and you wouldn't lose it. So there's a distinction between stupid desire and spiritual desire.

Here we're talking stupid desire. Why? Because this one came from those causes.

So we can go backwards, you know. Sometimes they do the wheel of life in reverse and sometimes they do it... they call it lung dok and lung jung.

You know, you get good where you can go both ways to explaining the wheel of life. Let's go backwards. This kind of desire or liking and this kind of disliking is triggered by what?

What was number three? Number three was what? It was a wrong way of looking at nice things and unpleasant things.

It was a wrong way of looking at pleasant things and unpleasant things. It was a wrong way of looking at pleasant things and unpleasant things. It was thinking they were self-existent.

So liking things and disliking things in a worldly sense is triggered by misperceiving nice things and bad things. It's triggered by a wrong idea about nice things and bad things. It thinks that those nice things and bad things come from their own side.

Okay? If you didn't have that, it wouldn't trigger this. We're seeing how you get in trouble, you know.

We're seeing how the downward spiral. So this kind of liking and this kind of disliking, which are dysfunctional and harmful and gonna cause other things, are triggered by not understanding objects. Not understanding where this irritating guy from the office came from.

Not understanding where this pleasant thing that you would like to have comes from and where its pleasantness comes from. It's not understanding where it's... you have a dysfunctional thing going on.

So liking and disliking in the normal sense are triggered by not understanding nice things and bad things. And that's triggered by what? The not understanding.

Triggered by... Triggered by the tendency to see them as self-existent. And that's triggered by the seeds.

So, cool, you know, you've got four steps here, it's very clear. My tray is pretty good, I guess. Say, le?

Sak.

[Speaker 2]
Le sak. Le sak.

[Speaker 1]
We had le yesterday, I don't know if you remember it. Lega. Remember le?

It meant work. In Tibetan it means karma. It's a Tibetan word for karma.

Sak means to collect karma. Accumulate karma. Collect karma.

In other words, you do a bad deed. How did that come from the last one? What was the last one?

Liking and disliking. Ignorantly. You can do it enlightened way, it's fine.

But, ignorantly, you see something you like, you'd never want to be separated from it, and you see something you don't like, and you'd love to be separated from it. Those lead you to le sak. Those lead you to collect karma.

Those lead you to do something wrong, harmful. Why? Very simple.

And you're going to undertake something to get the thing. If you like something, you're going to do something to get it. And if you dislike something, you're going to do something to get away from it.

And we're assuming that it's something improper. It's a bad karma, in a way. So, for example, if you like money or something, that you would be driven to cheat someone to get it.

Or if you dislike the person at the office, that you would be driven to do something to get away from this person. You would be driven to try to get them fired, or something like that. Or at least make them look bad.

We're Buddhists, we're not so bad like we're going to go try to get the guy fired. But if something we did made him look bad, we wouldn't mind. That's le sak, you just collected some karma.

I think it's between step four and five that the essence lies. If you wanted to get rid of this irritating guy at the office, what would be the best way? Yeah.

Yeah, it'd be nice. Like, if you could change your perception. But can you voluntarily, willingly change your perception?

You can't. And I don't mean a psychological... You have to distinguish between a psychological changing and a reality changing.

And there's a big difference. Psychological changing means, if you try really hard, you can try to control yourself and not feel bad about this guy. And most people are concentrating on that.

In Buddhism we tend to concentrate on that. You know, you feel bad that you don't like the guy. And you try to control your emotions.

And you use all the tricks that Shantideva mentions, you know. And that's one way to deal with this irritating guy. But there's a more fundamental way, which is simply to change the whole reality.

You know, where did he come from? Where did he come from? I mean, you have to think like that.

A Buddhist has to think like that. Don't deal with a band-aid, the present situation, try to feel good about a guy who's trying to get you, you know. Deal with the fundamental thing of the reality.

Where did this actual incident come from? Where did this person come from? Who created this person?

Your own past deeds. So if you want to avoid this person in the future, which is not a non-Buddhist thing, it's a very Buddhist thing. You're struggling to stop the truth of suffering.

He is the truth of suffering, you know. You're struggling to remove this truth of suffering. It doesn't mean you're going to hurt him or kill him or something like that.

How do you remove the person who's bad to you? Yeah. The main thing is to avoid repeating the mistake you did in the past, because the natural reaction to this guy is what?

The natural reaction is try to hurt him back. And that's precisely the karmic deed that would cause what? The same guy will come back.

You know, if you don't want to meet the guy again, just be good to him.

[Speaker 2]
You know.

[Speaker 1]
You know, if you don't want to see this object again. If you're tired of samsara, that's the only, that's the perfection of wisdom. You know, that's the perfection of wisdom.

At that moment you respond with kindness. Not because it's, you know, in some idealistic way the right thing to do. It's self-preservation.

It's self-interest. The Dalai Lama calls it enlightened self-interest. You know.

Stop reacting bad. Be good to the person. Be kind back to him.

By the way, it doesn't mean that a Buddhist has to be wimpy. You know, if somebody is out there harming someone else. We had the children, when they came yesterday, it was the second kind of giving was what?

Do you remember? Yeah, menjikpa jima, to give protection to someone. I mean, if you see someone harming someone else, even in your office, you are obligated by your bodhisattva vows to try to help that person.

You're obligated to try to contain that person, non-violently if you can. You know, you're obligated to try to stop the injury going on. You're required to do that.

So it doesn't mean being wimpy, but you're never allowed to hate the person. That would be a bad karma that would make you see the person again. Trying to stop them is a different thing, if they're truly harmful.

But hating them and disliking them is a different thing. That's a semba, that's a karma, and it's going to give you a bad result. So out of love and out of compassion, you might have to stop somebody.

But that's distinguished from hating them. That's a different thing. That's a bad karma.

So, the worst thing you can do when this person is hurting you, if all this stuff about karma and emptiness is true, is to react badly to them. And when you stop acting badly, you start collecting good karma, and you're not collecting bad karma anymore. So that's the trick between step number four and step number five.

If you don't know what you're doing, in order to get the things that you want and avoid the things that you don't want, you will undertake karma, and that's a big mistake. If you want to get rich, what's the best way? I like to, you know, I'm in business.

I spend half my year in a big corporation, and the boss hands out Forbes magazine every couple of months, and we're required to read these things. And in the first part of the magazine is this long explanation why so-and-so took a big risk and failed, and the company went under. And what a fool he was, like that guy in Hong Kong, that trader in Hong Kong.

I mean, he put under a huge bank by some stupid risk-taking. And if you flip to the back, there'll be an article about this other guy who took a lot of risks, and they came out right, and he's a genius, you know. And it's the same risk, you know, it's the same thing.

So, I mean, is there a... Is taking risk or not taking risk correct? Which one is the way to make money?

I ask you. Which is the proper financial strategy? Taking risk or not taking risk?

Which is proper? So is it true that everyone who takes risks becomes rich? So that's not the proper strategy.

So let's go to the other one. Is not taking risk the proper strategy? It's not, because people fail all the time who don't take risks, and they should have taken a risk, you know.

What it means is, it's almost a child's question. It's almost a fool's question. The fact is, that even under the same circumstances, neither taking risk nor not taking risk is the right financial strategy.

They don't create wealth. It's not the cause for wealth. That's not where the money is coming from.

You see stupid people get rich, and smart people go broke. You know, you see risk-takers get rich, and non-risk-takers get rich too. It's not what's causing wealth.

It's not what causes money. That's not what happens. So what's causing wealth?

I mean, it's very simple. Neither one is doing it. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to see.

That's not what's causing it. Something else is causing it. What?

Specifically what? Giving. Generosity.

It's very interesting. You can take investment strategy A or take investment strategy B, but if you don't have the karma of having given things to someone, neither one will work. And if you do have the karma of having given things to other people, they'll both work.

You know, you can have a low-risk account and a high-risk account, and they'll both work. And that's the truth. And you can see it.

You don't have to be a genius. It's so simple that you miss it. It's like you don't see the forest for the trees.

It's obvious. It's obvious. No one in 200 years of American history has figured out whether risk-taking is right or not risk-taking is right, because the answer is neither.

It's giving. Giving is what creates wealth. Yeah, you had a question.

[Speaker 2]
Are you going to let Forbes magazine know about this?

[Speaker 1]
You know, one time they contacted me. Inc. magazine contacted me one time and said they wanted to know how Buddhism relates to business.

And I wrote this thing, but they didn't publish it. So that's laysat. Now, ignorant good karma also.

That's sort of like where you're good but you don't know why, because it's just a habit from your past life. And if you don't learn why it's right to be good, most people lose it by the time they die. There's a lot of people who come into this life naturally pretty patient or kind or intelligent.

You know, spiritually nice. But if you don't know why, if it's just a habit from your past life, it's very dangerous. Because normally you lose it.

Normally it gets corrupted. At some point in your life you meet some bad friends. And, you know, you used to be a nice guy and then you get influenced by them.

It's easy to go downhill and hard to go up. Say korwa. Korwa.

Kor.

[Speaker 2]
Kor.

[Speaker 1]
Korwa. Korwa. Korwa.

Korwa. Korwa. That's step number six.

Because you've collected karma, then step number six happens. What is that? Korwa means what?

Wheel means, you know, korwa means, like secret cord is the wheel of life. And korwa, korwa means to spin in the wheel, to wheel around the wheel. So the minute you collect, start collecting karma, then that life, that wheel of life starts to spin.

And it goes, it starts to feed itself, it starts to perpetuate itself. Why? Let's take the case of the guy at work, irritating guy at work.

If you respond to your misperception of this irritating guy by trying to hurt him, then what? It's perpetuating. That's what korwa kor means.

It's perpetuating the same thing again. I think you could even translate it as perpetuating it. You know, you're just doing exactly the wrong thing.

If you had to pick out of a thousand options the worst thing to do that's going to make you go through this thing again, it would be responding to the guy in kind. By the way, your bodhisattva vows, they require that you don't. I mean, if you have bodhisattva vows, one of them is that you're not allowed to respond in kind to injury.

You know, if someone yells at you, you're not allowed to yell back, or you break your vow. If someone beats you, you're not allowed to beat them back. There's four different options in that vow.

And you're not allowed to do this. And there's a good reason why, because that would just perpetuate, that would just perpetuate the cycle. So this is Maitreya's example.

Let's go through all, let's say it's six. The first one was what? The first step.

We'll go lung-jung, and then we'll go lung-do. Okay? Lung-jung is, yeah, you have the seeds from your past life.

The tendency, the seeds for the tendency to think things exist from their own side. And then, and then the tendency itself asserts itself. At a very early age, I mean, even as an infant, you can see kids being ignorant.

The tendency asserts itself. Then you, that tendency causes you to mistake. You have mistaken perceptions.

You think that nice things come from their own side, and you think that bad things come from their own side. But the guy at work, that bad quality is part of him, and no participation on your part required. If you walked out of the office, he'd still be a bad guy.

Okay? That's the misperception of nice things and bad things. And then number four.

That causes what? That triggers something else. Oh, yeah.

Dvitakshina, yeah. Liking and not liking. Because you don't understand that object.

Because you think that the irritating quality of him is coming from him and not from you, you dislike him. You dislike him. Or you like something else.

And that causes you, because you dislike some things and like other things, you collect karma by reacting. By reacting stupidly. Ignorantly.

Okay? You react stupidly. And because you have responded with exactly the kind of action that will create this guy again, it perpetuates the cycle.

And that's samsara in a nutshell. Okay? That's samsara in a nutshell.

It's pretty cool. It's by Maitreya. If you want to know how you got in trouble, that's how it happened.

If you want to know how to stay there, just keep doing it. Okay? I'd like to take a break.

And then we'll come back and talk about what to do about it. And then we'll talk about purification.

[Speaker 2]
One moment.

[Speaker 1]
One question, then we'll take a break.

[Speaker 2]
Does the karma, the collect karma from the feeling of liking or disliking or the reaction to it? That confuses me.

[Speaker 1]
Oh yeah, it's a good question. You're asking, what you're really asking is, is semba the karma or are the deeds instigated by semba the karma? And what's the answer?

They're both. Yeah. The original emotion is a bad karma.

It's a twitching of the mind.

[Speaker 2]
It is.

[Speaker 1]
It is. You have to change the ignorance part. That's why everything...

And I missed... It's a good point. You brought up one more point.

There's two ways to draw those three animals in the middle of the wheel of life. Do you know the two ways? Have you seen them?

[Speaker 2]
Coming out of the mouth of the pig and then the other one in a circle.

[Speaker 1]
There's one way of drawing it where they're all... One's mouth is at the other's tail and all three of them are like that. Those are in the recent paintings.

In the ancient paintings, it's out of the pig's mouth is coming the rooster and the pig is ignorant. The pig is misperceiving pleasant objects and unpleasant objects. And that triggers the other two.

They are the source. It is the source of the other two. And that's actually the correct way to draw it.

That was the ancient way of drawing it. You'll see in very old Thangkas, you'll see that it's drawn that way. Okay, have a...

have a break. Some tea. What's a self-existent irritating guy at the office?

I mean, what would he look like? No, I mean it would be an irritating guy at the office who is irritating from his own side. And it's that simple.

That's all. That's the object of negation. And you grasp to it all day long.

You know, you grasp to it all day long. It's an irritating guy at the office who's irritating from his own side and not because you're projecting, not because your karma has forced you to project an irritating guy on a simple collection of colors and shapes. You know.

So, does that mean he's somehow unreal? No. Does that mean he's not yelling at you?

No. You know, does that mean that he's not an irritating guy? Not at all.

He is irritating to you. Because you're being forced to interpret those particular colors and shapes as an irritating fellow. And the self-existent object there, which never existed anyway, but if it did exist, it would be this guy who's out there and being irritating is some quality of his own.

And it's not dependent on your perceptions. Because that doesn't exist. There is no such person.

Is there an imagination of such a person? Yeah. Okay.

Big difference. It's a Gakcha and Gakche Dushe. Gakcha means the self-existent object, which doesn't exist.

But Gakche Dushe is where I do have a mental image of this guy. That certainly exists. Big difference.

So, that's a self-existent guy. So, what are you supposed to do then? And this is a very interesting question in Buddhism.

Are you supposed to not like anything then? Are you supposed to not dislike anything? Are you supposed to try to put up with all the bad things in this life?

And are you supposed to somehow not like the things you enjoy? And is that the right thing to do? I mean, sometimes as a Buddhist you're caught in this feeling that, you know, you hear about great lamas who didn't like anything or didn't dislike anything at all.

Is that what you're... I mean, is that correct? Is that you're supposed to not like anything and not dislike anything?

Are you just supposed to say, I don't care what comes to me. I'll just... I won't like anything and I won't dislike anything.

Is that Buddhist practice? It's true you don't have a choice about the karma coming back to you, but... What I mean is, what do you imagine how do the scriptures describe dakpa shinkam, Buddha Paradise?

What is Buddha Paradise going to be like? They say the word suffering doesn't exist in those places because there's no object for it to refer to it. There are the words bliss, ecstasy, happiness, purity, beauty.

I mean, you're not trying to avoid those things. You're trying to actually find them, but find them in a permanent way. That's all.

It's not wrong that human emotion or that human urge to go to some place which is happy, which is pure happiness, is why we're here. I mean, it would be stupid to... I mean, at the bottom of your heart, that's why you're in this class, hopefully.

You want to reach this place of total purity and beauty and ecstasy, and you want to do that, and that's okay. It's just a question of the means, you know. The old means is dysfunctional.

Getting mad at the guy is not the way to get away from him. It's being good to him. And running after the object you want is not the way to get it.

Give it away if you want it. If you want to get rich, be generous. That's the way to get rich.

It's very interesting. It's foolproof. How come people don't do it?

It's very hard to perceive. Okay? It's very hard to perceive.

It's the time lag that screws us up. You know, it's the time lag. And that's the big problem.

It's that time lag. There's this natural time lag between doing the karma and getting the result. The bhaksaks have to have a time and space to mature, to ripen.

And that time lag messes us up. As a normal human being, you're not capable of perceiving the connection between being generous and suddenly getting a raise at work six months later. You can't make that connection.

A normal human being cannot do that. That's why the rules of karma and their consequences are deeper than what? Harder to perceive than emptiness itself.

Okay, there's three levels of reality. One is called ngungyur. Ngungyur means evident reality, the reality that's sticking you in the face, obvious things.

This is red, this is yellow, this is square. That's called ngungyur. Kokyur means deep.

And that emptiness is in that category. If you perceive emptiness in this life once directly, it's fantastic. It'd be incredibly wonderful.

You'd be a stream-enterer. You'd be on your way out. You're on this conveyor belt out of samsara.

That's what stream-enterer means. You stepped on that conveyor belt. And no matter what you do now, you're on your way out.

Number three is sindhu-kokyur. And that's extremely subtle, deep. And that's the workings of karma.

You know, if you do this, you'll get that. Chimgyi-longju, what is it? Jimbe-longju, chimgyi-de, very famous from a sutra.

Jimbe-longju means if you give, you will get. If you give away things, you'll get rich. Chimgyi-de means if you keep your morality, you'll be happy.

Karmically, over a long period of time. But the only being who can see that is, guess who? Buddha.

Okay, ngungyur things you can check out on your own. Whether this pillar is purple or not, whether that kapen is yellow or not, you can check that out on your own. You don't need any great logic or teachings to catch that.

Kokyur, you need normally logic or some kind of reasoning. You have to think it out. You're not going to perceive emptiness unless somebody sits there and explains it to you and you contemplate it and then you perceive it.

So as human beings, normal human beings, we can see obvious reality with our eyes. Kokyur things, subtle things, we can only see by thinking carefully. And then we see them with our mind.

Shindukokyur, how do you guess? I mean, what other means are available to a normal person? Aside from your senses and your thoughts.

That comes under thoughts. That comes under logic. But what about something even deeper?

How are you going to perceive it? Scripture, okay. And that's a little tough for Americans especially.

What it means is, the only way you can see the connections between what you do and what you're going to get is by studying what the Buddha said. You cannot... It's very, very difficult to even figure it out logically.

Therefore the Buddha taught sixteen volumes of Vinaya. Ethical living. Vinaya is not just monk's vows.

It's eight different sets of vows. Three of them are for lay people. So you can study the parts that are for lay people.

And in those whole sixteen thousand pages, the Buddha is explaining, if you do this, you'll get that. It's not obvious to you. You can't figure it out on your own.

But I'm telling you. Because I'm omniscient. You know, I can see that if you are generous, you're going to get rich.

And I can see that if you keep your morality, you're going to be naturally a happy person later. But the connections are so... are so deep that a normal human being can't see them.

And you have to study them. You have to study them. That's the only way you can know what to do.

Or, keep your vows. Keep your... Take vows, learn vows, take them, keep them.

And that's... Then you're automatically doing the right things to get the right karmic results. Keep your vows.

Keep your... Take vows, learn vows, take them, keep them. And that's...

Then you're automatically doing the right things to get the right karmic results. There's three different sets of vows. Three different kinds of vows.

One are called Pratyamoksha vows. Pratyamoksha means individual liberation. And what it means is if you keep them, you personally will get free.

And anyone who doesn't keep them will personally not get free. Moksha means freedom. Pratyam means one by one.

So it's on an individual case-by-case basis. Anyone who keeps them is going to get liberated. Anyone who doesn't keep them is not going to get liberated.

There's eight different sets of vows. Five or four ordained people. Three or four lay people.

And you can take them. At the very minimum, you can take the five vows of a lay person until the time you die. And you should.

You should try to take them. And you should try to keep them. So, for example, no killing, no stealing, no sexual misconduct, things like that.

No lying. No drinking. No taking an intoxicant or something.

You can keep those five. You don't have to go study those 16,000 pages. I mean, if you take those vows, keep them, the Buddha who sees these things that we can't see has seen that if you keep those, you will get the result of enlightenment, liberation.

Those are, that's the first set of vows. You can call them like morality vows. The second set of vows are bodhisattva vows.

64 vows. 18 vows, 46 secondary vows. They're very, very beautiful.

They're completely different. I mean, the first one is praising yourself and putting down other people. That's breaking the first one.

That would be an example of the first one. So you can see that the taste of them is a little different. It's more aimed at being good with other people.

And they're very sweet vows. They're very fun to keep. The more you keep them, the happier you are.

And that's the second set of vows. Anyone can take those vows. You have to take some kind of Pratimoksha vow or be keeping at least the ten virtues to qualify for bodhisattva vows.

But you should learn them and you should take them. Bodhisattva vows, you're allowed to study them before you take them. Like monk's vows, you're not allowed to study them before you take them.

Okay? It's kind of dangerous. It's secret.

I mean, laymen are not allowed to look at them or study them. You have to be a monk to study them. But that's the second kind of vows.

And the third kind of vows are secret vows, tantric vows. They're very, very nice. They're very, very normal.

They're nothing exciting. And they're based on the morality vows and the bodhisattva vows. They're very, very closely related to them and they flow easily.

They flow very naturally from those vows. So, if you want to know how to stop the laysak, how to stop collecting karma, that's the main thing. You keep those vows.

You know, you keep them with knowledge. And in the case of someone who's yelling at you at work, the very first thing you should remember is emptiness. Okay?

And I always tell people, you know, if you don't remember anything else about this class, and I hate to do two-day stands, you know, because you usually forget everything by tonight. But if you don't remember anything else, then tomorrow when you're at work and someone yells at you, which they probably will, just remember, at that moment, remember emptiness. So, that's the whole point of this class, you know.

What's the point? How does that help you? If I'm looking at this guy's face and he's red and he's yelling at me and he's saying, you stupid, these are the orders I didn't fill on Friday because I left early for the airport.

And you're like, where's those diamonds, you know. And I'm going to say, gee, you know, I had to go to the airport, you know. And he's like, I told you to finish before you left for the airport and you couldn't do it.

And he's going to yell at me. And I'm going to remember emptiness. So what's the use?

What good does that do? That I'm supposed to imagine some black hole in front of me, you know, and then...

[Speaker 2]
Keep from reacting.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah. That's the main thing. I mean, the thought about emptiness should trigger the thought, where did he come from?

He's not coming from his own side. Emptiness means he's not coming from his own side. This experience, this event of a person yelling at me is not coming from its own side.

So just remember emptiness first. That should trigger that thought. This is not coming from him.

Where is it coming from? You tell me. It's a projection.

The data is there. There's a red face. There's an open mouth.

There's loud noises. Now I choose to interpret... I don't choose, sorry.

Something dictates, something forces me to interpret it as an unpleasant event. And already you know if it's an unpleasant event it must have been triggered by a bad karma. That's the definition of a bad karma.

So if something unpleasant is happening to you, by definition, it's a bad karma ripening. Where is it ripening? In your mind.

In your mind. The data is out there. There is a red face.

There is a loud noise. You know, there is an open mouth. And a tongue going, ah, you know.

But it's only in my mind that it's being unified into an image that hurts me. That's unpleasant to me. And that's the ripening of bad karma.

Where did the karma sit until it ripened? In my mind state. As a bhaktya.

Well how come the bhaktya just popped up then? Where did it stay between the time that I yelled at somebody many years ago and now he's yelling at me? It's replicated in the mind stream.

It stays in the mind. It stays with me. And then it ripens.

It flowers. Why did that one ripen then? The scriptures say it's like planes waiting at the runway.

Really? I mean... I'm kidding.

It's a prioritization basis. It's on a prioritization basis. I mean, stronger karmas, karmas that were particularly powerful, done towards a powerful object like a lama, you know, particularly powerful because I felt very strong at the day I got angry.

And those get moved up in the front of the line. And they ripen first. And then the other ones have to wait.

You know, the other ones are, they're going to come in priority basis. But it's a certain prioritization dependent on the object, dependent on the fierceness of your emotions at that time, dependent on whether you felt later any regret or not. All of those things factor in and create the priority of which thing ripens first.

And they have to ripen in order. They can't all ripen at the same time because sometimes the qualities are... You can't have a bad feeling and a good feeling at the same moment.

I mean, somebody has to wait. So, that's how they get prioritized. So, if when the guy is yelling at you, you turn on that wisdom.

That's the whole meaning of wisdom. That's the whole function of wisdom. Wisdom is for that.

That's the meaning of wisdom. That's the sixth perfection. And that's the moment that you've got to turn it on.

Under fire. At the moment of heat. That's the time to turn on wisdom.

And you think, emptiness. This guy is empty. And you won't be able to do it.

You'll screw up. I promise you. You'll think of it five minutes after he walks away.

[Speaker 2]
You know.

[Speaker 1]
After you yelled at him, you know. Oh, that guy's dead. You know.

But at least think of it and then keep doing it, you know. And it'll become natural. And it becomes more and more of a natural reaction.

It takes over that old natural reaction. And that's wisdom. So, wisdom says, this guy is empty.

It's not coming from him. Where is it coming from? Oh, it's my own karma ripening in my own mind.

And, and then the natural reaction then should be, oh boy, I don't want that anymore. Let me stop that. Let me cut this kind of behavior right now.

Let me be kind to him. If I have to be forceful, I will be. You know, if he's hurting other people, I can stop him.

That's different. But let me not be angry back. Because that creates the new karma.

That creates a new kind of karma. And then I'm going to have to what? Korowakor.

I'm going to have to meet him again. That's the last thing I want. So be intelligent about it.

That's wisdom. That's the main... Wisdom is intelligence to know that this is the right reaction.

Question back there.

[Speaker 2]
The person that's yelling at you, he's accumulating karma too, right?

[Speaker 1]
He is. He is, yeah. Someone's coming at him too.

It's not just all you, or else he wouldn't have any karma. Is that what you're saying? Ah, it's not...

You see, emptiness is very tricky. It's not contradictory. In Tibetan they say, gyalwa.

Gyalwa. Gyalwa means... It's not contradictory that one thing be acting on its own willpower in an evil way, and you experiencing a person being bad.

It's not contradictory at all. It's very interesting.

[Speaker 2]
He's collecting...

[Speaker 1]
Yeah. He is bad. I didn't say he wasn't real.

I said he was empty.

[Speaker 2]
Right. Right.

[Speaker 1]
He is bad, and he's real. He's as real as anything else, because he's a projection. Most people would say he's a projection, so he's not real.

I say he's real because he is a projection. And that's an important point. That's a very important point.

So, what happens when Mara comes up to the Buddha when he's sitting under... You saw Little Buddha, right? Was that it?

And the demons of Mara come up and throw spears at him. Do they intend to hurt the Buddha? Absolutely.

They would love to stab the Buddha. But the Buddha experiences what? It's a shower of flowers.

Halfway through the air, those spears turn to a shower of flowers. So, does that guy intend to hurt you? Yes.

Is he collecting bad karma? Yes. If you did not have the karma to see it that way, what would happen?

His words would turn to sweet praise halfway out of his mouth, and you would only experience the sweet praise. It's very weird. And that's not contradictory.

There's no contradiction there. That's exactly the way things happen. And you have to get used to that.

And then you start reacting the right way. And the truth of it is what happened to the Buddha under the Bodhi tree. That's the truth of it.

And that reflects the truth of it. So, you had a question? Yeah, you were talking about seeing the emptiness of...

when this person's yelling at you, you're seeing the emptiness of that person. But you didn't say anything about seeing the emptiness of yourself. I know you haven't gotten into that too much.

Do you find... which is more helpful?

[Speaker 2]
Or should you be working with both? You just grab the emptiness that you can get your hands on? Or should you look at the whole situation?

[Speaker 1]
Well, you can focus on different emptinesses at that point. I didn't talk about the other kinds of emptiness. I mean, there's emptiness of your own mind.

You know, you... When you reach the arhat's level, the day that you become an arhat, you will be being forced by your karma to perceive your own mind as no longer having any jealousy or anger or hatred. That's interesting.

It's also a... what? Projection.

It's very interesting. You know, you will be, on that day, forced by your past karma to see your own mind as a sweet, pure mind. That's very interesting.

You know, an arhat is watching his own mind being sweet to him because he's collected the karma to force himself to see that way. And he knows, by the way. I mean, he's on a level where he's totally conscious that this is an artificial projection created by his past karma, and he's enjoying it.

It's nice to have a mind that doesn't have anger or jealousy or desire in it, you know. And he's being forced by his past karma to experience his own mind this way. So, mind also is a projection.

And then the changing of things, the way that you will transform into a holy being or as an angel or whatever you want to say, that will also be a projection. And that distinguishes the higher school from the lower school. The whole situation changing, that eventually he becomes nice to you, if you keep this up for a while.

The old karmas wear out, the new karmas take hold, and you will think, suddenly this guy changed. Did he change? What changed?

Not you. Your projections changed. Very interesting.

Changes don't occur outside of you. You know, your projections changed. When the sun comes up in the morning and the world goes from dark to light, did the sun come up?

Your projections changed. And that's what distinguishes the lower schools from the higher schools, all the way up to Soutantrika. They can't handle that.

They can't get that. Lopo Sarva Rakshankirtupa, they say, changing things have to be self-existent. They can't handle the fact that something as monumental as the sun coming up in the morning is simply a shift in your own projections.

You know, they can't. It's too much. They can't.

So we got to be careful not to go too far. You know, concentrate on the guy at work, because that's where you're collecting. That's where you collect.

Don't worry about the sun, okay? That's where you're collecting bad karma. The present state is conditioned by the past.

Yeah, absolutely. And also the future, up to some extent, is conditioned by the past. We're going to talk about it.

We're going to talk about it. Is our will to change the future also conditioned by the past? We're going to...

Absolutely, we're going to get into that. We have to. We can't stop.

[Speaker 2]
What about as a small child, when someone took something away from me and I reacted by taking that stuff?

[Speaker 1]
Now, I didn't know anything about karma or Buddhism at the time. What do I do right now? It's a...

It's where does... It's what I'm going to talk about right now. I'll talk about it right now.

Because now you can see that Buddhist practice boils down to two things. You're interested in not perpetuating things. So, okay, we took care of that.

Let's suppose we all get perfectly wise as of this afternoon. And forever after in our office, we never react badly to people who yell at us. We understand that it's empty.

That's the first thing to remember, right? He's empty. Then you're going to say, Wait, wait, I don't remember what emptiness had to do with it.

And that's supposed to make you think, Oh, yeah, it's coming from my side and not from his side. It's not his fault, it's my fault. I will stop the circle now.

I will stop the cycle now. I won't respond badly. And His Holiness says, At least shut up.

You don't have to think kind thoughts of him, but at least shut your mouth. If you can't stop anything else, just don't say anything. And I would say, Go out in the hallway or get away from the person.

At the beginning, that's all you can do. Later, you'll be stronger. But at the beginning, at least don't respond.

Verbally. Mentally, you already did. So, we took care of which kind of karma?

Future karma or past karma? Future. You know, you have, you've handled future karma, theoretically, from that moment on.

And as you get better and better at it, and as it becomes an autonomic reaction, you won't, you won't respond anymore. You won't collect any new karmas. But her question is, and partly your question was, and it's a natural question, it's a great question, what do you do about the old karmas?

What do you do about your big pocket full of bak choks? And we're going to get into that. That's the last subject today.

And that's called the topshi. So, we'll go to that. All, all Buddhist practice boils down to sak jang.

What's sak jang? You know, you do it before the class. Sak jang.

Collecting and cleaning out. You're trying, you're collecting new good karma. Okay?

You're not, you're not doing any new bad karma. That comes in the collecting part. That's easy.

But we gotta clean out. Sak jang. We gotta jang.

How do you clean out the old bad karmas? According to Hinayana, what? You can't.

According to Hinayana, once that perception of yourself doing a bad deed has occurred, and the energy of the bad deed stops and is transferred into a bak chok, you're stuck. That bak chok is planted in your mind consciousness. Forget it.

It's gonna come back. You can't do anything about it. The boomerang was thrown perfectly.

It's already out towards Pluto. You know, it's gonna hit you on this side of the head. And, uh, there's nothing you can do about it.

They say there's nothing you can do about it. Mahayana says, use top shi, okay? Say top shi.

Top shi.

[Speaker 2]
Top shi. Top shi.

[Speaker 1]
If we cover top shi, then it's a complete circle. We finish, you know, that's all you need to become a Buddha, okay? Because you clean, you're cleaning out your future, you finish the future karma, you're not gonna do it anymore, because he's empty, which implies that it's coming from you.

If you only remember those two things tomorrow, you'll be alright. I gotta remember. Top shi.

Four forces. Top means force. Shi means four, okay?

Sometimes called the four opponent powers, or the four antidotes, or... But top means force. Force...

Top means power. Say shi top. Shi top.

Shi top means the... the basis force, okay? Basis force.

B-A-S-I-S. Basis, in its most basic meaning, means go back to the basics. Return to the basics of Buddhism.

So, you try... Now we're... we're talking about a very interesting subject.

How do you short-circuit old karmas? How do you de... What do they do to bombs?

Defuse... Like, defuse them, you know? It's a bomb, a bockjack waiting to explode.

How do you defuse it? You know, how do you... How do you render it...

I don't know, what do you call it? You know, it's not gonna blow up, you know? You're gonna mess around with the wiring, you know, like they do in the movies at the last minute, and...

and it's not gonna go off. In fact, they still stay there in your mind stream. But they are rendered ineffective.

They can't blow up anymore, if you apply the four opponent powers, those four forces. The first one is to go back to the basics. Basics mean you have it in your...

in your... in your preliminaries. Go back to taking refuge in Bodhicitta.

Okay? Go back to those two things. Go back to...

You know, go back and ground yourself. That's what she means. Go back and ground yourself in Buddhism, the basic Buddhist things.

Which are... Go back to putting your faith in the Buddhas, Dharma Sangha, you know. Go back to putting your faith in those objects, out of fear, you know.

And that's the definition of refuge, basically. And... And go back to thinking about other people.

You'll find that when you're doing bad deeds, the last thing you want is to think about other people. It's almost the nature of a bad deed, you know. That...

You can... You can stop a lot of bad deeds the minute you start... stop thinking about yourself and start thinking about others.

The bad deed just stops by itself. It's weird, you know. Or people get depressed.

The last thing you think about when you're depressed is helping other people. And the minute you can... you can push your mind over to thinking the least nice thought about somebody else or wanting to help somebody else, it sometimes pops you out of depression, you know.

Because depression is focused on yourself. And the last thing depression wants to hear about is helping somebody else. And the minute you can push this mind over to that, then the depression can start to go away.

So... basis... basis force is go back to the basics, you know.

Review refuge. Think about refuge. You know, go back to focusing on the Buddha.

You'd like to be like him. Dalai Lama, you'd like to be like them. Lama Sopa, you'd like to be like that.

You know, try to think of those objects of refuge. Again, I'd like to be like them. I'd like to be kind again.

I'd like to be thinking about other people again. Those... those thoughts of themselves take you back to the basics of Buddhism.

Those are called the basis force. It's a very fertile ground for the other three. You're kind of getting your mind plowed.

It's just making it, putting it back, grounding it, re-grounding it in the basics. And that's the first step. We're talking about what?

How to... short-circuit old bok chags. How to...

how to get them not to go off. They're ready to go off. How do you...

how do you remove their power to go off? And the first thing is to go back to the basics. They say that you have to...

when you fall down, what do you need to get back up? You got to have something to push against. You know, and that's how they explain shidom.

You got to have something to... there's got to be something hard under you to get back up, you know, to push your arms down and get back up. That's shidom.

That's number one. This is a meditation you can do, by the way. Actually, you're supposed to do it every morning.

If you're... if you're practicing Tantra and you're doing tunduk, you're supposed to do it six times a day. Say, nan bar...

sun jin bei... top. Nan bar...

sun jin bei... top. Nan bar sun jin bei is a really nasty idiom in Tibetan.

It means to rip something out from the root. It's like somebody taking a molar and... and the root rips out and the whole thing rips out.

It's also related to a word for raping, or something like that. It means to rip violently something out. And destruction force means...

there's a certain attitude that if you get it, it rips out the power of the bad karma. It will actually rip out the energy of the bad karma. It's a very beautiful, powerful word.

The key here is... is a thing called gyopa. Say gyopa.

[Speaker 2]
Gyopa.

[Speaker 1]
Gyopa. It's called intelligent regret. Okay.

Intelligent regret. This is the thing where... and I tell you, I have this experience.

I do something, you know, light, then I'm not... I suppose I'm a monk, I'm not supposed to look at girls. I look at a girl in the bus station, you know.

And then I catch myself. And... But in the time that I have looked, a karma has been completed.

I looked, the karma finished, the energy of the karma was transferred to the bhaktyak, and the bhaktyak is planted. It's in my mental consciousness now. It is now with me.

You know, the Abhidharma school says that it's like a saddle cinch. They call it topa. There's a topa created, and that cinch holds that bhaktyak in me.

And that's going to be glued to my mind stream until it gives its consequence, you know. I will undergo some painful thing. And what happens is, just after that moment, the karma's finished, the bhaktyak has been planted, and if you're an intelligent Buddhist, if you're a well-educated Buddhist, then you're like, oh no, you know.

And it's not a funny thing, it's a sad thing. It's like sort of this stupid... you feel stupid.

In the scripture, the example is, three guys are sitting at a bar. And the bartender says, what do you have? And they all order the same thing.

So he takes the bottle down and he pours it into the three cups. And the guys start drinking, and they're up on these barstools. And guy number one starts to shake.

And then he falls off the barstool dead. He's stone dead. And the third guy is looking.

And then guy number two just took the drink a few seconds later, and he goes... and he falls dead on the ground. And then the third guy is starting to feel...

he already downed the drink, and he's already starting to feel funny in his stomach. And he realizes that the bartender has made a mistake, and there's this highly toxic poison in these glasses. And he's already downed it.

And they say that's how you're supposed to feel. At the moment you catch yourself, right after you did the karma, the bokshak is planted. Now what are you going to do?

You've already swallowed it. You know, it's in your stomach. It's too late.

I think the thing works in 30 seconds. It's too late to do anything. Then how would you feel at that moment?

That's supposed to be gyupa. It's this, oh man, I did it again. You know, it's like...

It's knowingly... An educated Buddhist, understanding all the mechanism of how this karma is planted, understanding how it's going to stay there, understanding how it's going to reach the front of the runway and be prioritized and ripen. You know, and understanding all those things perfectly, you just did it again.

And it's that feeling you have. It's like this sick feeling of, oh man, you know, it's stupid. And so who did it hurt?

I mean, what's the definition of bad karma? It leads to an experience of suffering for yourself. So it's that, all that knowledge, it's all that Buddhist wisdom you have is making you feel very bad at that moment.

And it's not guilt. There's no word in Tibetan for guilt. I never came across a word for guilt.

There's no such word in Tibetan. Because it's not that idea of being guilty to whom. I mean, it's just this kind of intelligent, well thought out, clear awareness that you've just messed up again.

And it's going to hurt you. And that's gyupa. That's the force which can rip out the force of what you just did.

That's the energy which can rip out the power of what you did. Mainly why? What's its function?

What happens when you know you did something stupid? I mean, what's the next thing that's going to happen? Well, that and you won't do it again.

You'll try to clean it up and you won't do it again. I mean, the main thing is that you'll say, oh man, you know, now I probably... By the way, it's very hard to remove a bhakta completely.

I mean, the Hinayana is right from that point of view. It's extremely difficult to remove it completely. You know, you can do a lot towards minimizing it or reducing its power.

But once it's in the stomach, once that poison drink is in the stomach, you know, maybe you can have your stomach pumped out fast, but it's still going to make you very sick. You know, it's still going to have a very bad effect on you. Even, depending on how well you can do these things, you've got that regret of knowing that you've done something that's going to...

that's going to hurt you. And it's just that intelligent regret. It's not guilt.

Just think and regret things, okay? Number two. We'll do number three, and then we'll take a break.

I always promise people breaks, so they'll listen for the next five minutes. And then I don't take the break. Say, Nyepa le, Nyepa le, Larn Dope, Larn Dope, Top.

Nyepa le, Nyepa le, Larn Dope, Larn Dope, Top. Nyepa means bad deed. Nyepa le, Larn Dope means turning away from them, from doing them again.

So, it's the force of not doing it again. All the scriptures at this point, especially Je Tsongkhapa and Pabongka Rinpoche, they say, this is the guts of the four powers. You know, if you want to know what drives the four powers, it's this one.

It's the force of not doing it again. And then they get into an argument with the Hinayana. You know, and the Hinayana say, how does it work?

You know, how does all this work? Are you implying that a Buddhist can just go out and do whatever they want in the earlier part of the day, and then when the evening comes, they just do the four powers and everything starts over again. And then the next morning, they can just do whatever they want again.

You know, and Tsongkhapa says, no, that's crazy, because force number three is not doing it again. And without number three, the whole thing doesn't work. Okay, somebody asked me about Vajrasattva meditation.

It also states in many scriptures that it, this is the guts of Vajrasattva meditation. You must do it with these four powers. In and of itself, sitting and reciting these 21 syllables or whatever, it's not what really, it's very powerful, but what triggers, what gives it the energy is this one.

It's deciding not to do the thing again. And that would make sense. You know, if you're that guy sitting on the third bar stool, you know, and you say, I'm never coming in this bar again, you know, these people, you know, these people are crazy to put Drano next to the whiskey, you know, and, you know, I'm not coming in here again, you know.

It's that decision not to do it again. You know, and that is actually what protects you. That's actually what stops the old karma.

It's, this is the thing that, that, that, that takes the energy away from the bhakti. It's the decision not to do it again. And then there's an oral instruction of all the great lamas.

I mean, I got it from Geshe Dargye, who just passed away, Nalan Dargye, in New Zealand. And, he said, you set yourself a time limit. So you say, I won't do it again for a week, or a month, or an hour.

Okay? So, that's the third power. You try to set yourself a time limit.

So if it's a mental thing, I suggest you set a short time limit. Because if you set an unrealistic time limit, what will happen? And then you lied.

You know, you collected another bad deed on top of the other one. So, you collected the bad deed of breaking it, and you collected the bad deed of lying about it. And it's very good.

I mean, it's like, be realistic with yourself. It's like exercising, you know. Make it challenging.

Make it something that challenges you and makes you stronger. But don't go so far that it collapses and you hurt yourself. So, it's knowing the correct tension of the guitar string, they say, in the scriptures, you know.

Know how far you can go without breaking, and do it for that long. So set yourself a limit, you know. If it's something like gross, like screaming at someone at the top of your lungs, I think like three days is okay.

If it's something like having a certain thought, you might want to try it for ten minutes or an hour or something, depending on how fresh it is. What if you meet that time limit? Let's say, screaming at the top of your lungs and you said three days, and now three days have gone by and you haven't, can you then re-extend that?

[Speaker 2]
Yeah, yeah.

[Speaker 1]
You can do it again, or you can pick. Normally they say, pick on your worst one first. And there's this process of moving up through the path where you work with the grossest ones first, and then you work up to the very subtle ones.

And just before you reach Nirvana, you're working on the most subtle form of the most subtle bad thought. But start with the one that's most powerful for you. My own experience is that keep a daily log.

You know, track yourself once a day. Write it down in the evening. See how you did.

This is something very important. You know, you keep track of your bank account. You keep track of your expenses.

You know, you know when your phone bill is due. You know, people don't track their own inventory. It's very important.

It's much more important than your bank account. You better know where your karma, where your bagchaks are at at any given time. You better know your account status.

It's more important than all the other accounts you have. This is the only one that you'll take with you after you die. This is the only thing you'll take with you.

You lose your name, you lose your body, you lose your identity, you lose your friends, you lose your things, but you don't lose your bagchaks. You know. So you better know where they stand.

So you have to keep checking them. And in manufacturing, I work in a, we manufacture diamonds and things. And one of the principles of quality control is called where you just tell that if someone keeps messing up and they keep ruining the product at a certain stage, instead of yelling at them, you say, Could you just count how many products you ruined today?

And just by keeping track, they start to make less mistakes. You don't have to tell them make less mistakes. You just say, Could you please count for me how many mistakes you make?

I'm not going to punish you. Just tell me how many you make. And then automatically the quality gets better.

Because they're watching it. They start to track it. So tracking your bad deeds is very important.

So keep track and make a realistic commitment that you won't do it. My own experience is also that you work on it for a week or two weeks or a month. My limit is about two months.

Then I get stale about that particular bad habit, like interrupting other people with my own great ideas, you know, which I do all the time. So track it, track it, track it. And then after about two months, you just get so burned out on tracking it that it's time to move to a fresh one.

You can come back to that one later. But my own experience is it's good to, you know, pick bad deed number two and work on that for a while. Because you reach a certain point of improvement and then it's hard to do much more.

You get sort of tired of it. It's good to rotate them and go to a new one. If you have bodhisattva vows, know them, keep them.

We have a little card that we carry around, that we made. It has all the 64 vows on it. And it's good to check one or two a day.

According to the high secret practices, you're supposed to check it six times a day. Six times 64 is, I don't know. But it's hard if you're working and you've got other responsibilities.

Pick a couple a day, work on them. Maybe one. You know, concentrate.

Concentrate on your worst one. And track it. That's the third power.

Power number four is nyen buddho. Say nyen buddho. Nyen buddho.

Nyen buddho means... Nyen buddho is a hard word to translate. It means counteragent.

It means antidote. I think antidote might be a good one. It's the force of the antidote.

And this is where you do something to make up. You do something to make up for what you did. It's some kind of, you know, trying to make up for what you did.

I have a friend where I studied. He's Mongolian. He was sent to Vietnam.

You know, he didn't know what was going on. He just got to this country and they packed him up and sent him to Vietnam. And they gave him a gun and they said, you know...

And he got into a firefight. He shot into the jungle. He thinks he might have killed somebody.

So he came to my lama and he said, what should I do? So nyen buddho. He said, nyen buddho.

Mongolians like to eat sheep. They love mutton. And they keep sheep in their homes and in their backyards and they kill them for meat.

Even in New Jersey. I mean, they do that. And he said, I know your father happens to have two sheep that he's going to eat.

And I want you to buy them from your father and keep them in your backyard until they die. Until they die a natural death. Like, it turns out sheeps live like 70 years.

I mean, none of us knew that. He took care of that sheep for... He took care of those two for 15, 16 years.

And they finally passed away naturally. But that was a nyen buddho. So that's a very gross kind of nyen buddho.

To make up for having killed, you try to save life, you know. They say that... And then you could read scriptures.

You could do mantras. You could try to help other people. They say that the most powerful nyen buddho is the contemplation of emptiness.

The most powerful one is... And the book says, take whatever you understand, however much you understand. Like, if you've seen it directly, try to review what you saw.

If you haven't seen it directly, try to think about all the teachings you had on it. If you're just hearing about it for the first time, then go over some basic books on it, you know. But whatever your level is, study emptiness.

Why would that be a particularly effective nyen buddho for a bad deed? Why would that be a powerful force? Why is that the best one?

Well... Absolutely, you know. And knowing that...

I mean, we go back to the reason... Don asked me to come here. He said, talk about how emptiness relates to everyday life, you know.

And that's it, you know. That's the answer. What you're going to do...

You forgot what you're going to do tomorrow when the guy yells at you. You know. First thing, think about is emptiness.

What does that mean? He's not bad from his side. He's bad because of my own projections.

Oh, I'll just change them. He'll be a nice guy five minutes from now. Can't do it, because they're forced on you.

They're not a thing of will. They're not voluntary. They're forced on you by your past karma.

But all you can do is say, I won't hurt him back. At least I won't collect any new ones. We were talking about it.

She asked me a question. I said, you know, at that point, trying to make him a nice guy is like trying to push a tree back into the ground. You know, the result has come out already.

Very famous in Buddhism. You have to respect cause and effect. Cause and effect takes time.

Once the effect has come out, you can't wish the effect back into the ground. You know, once the tree has grown, you can't, you know, try to force it back into the ground. It doesn't work like that.

It's too late. Once the result has come out, very nasty thing about results, you know, once they come out, they're never going to go back to the seed. The seed is gone.

All you can do is be good with that result for as long as it takes for it to wear out. And then resolve not to do any more, not to plant any more seeds. That's why it takes time to become enlightened.

There's no way you can just do it like that. It's not going to work. It'll never work.

You have to plant the proper causes. And then the results will come out eventually. And in the meantime, please don't collect any bad, new bad ones.

And then what's going to happen to all the old bad ones that are sitting around? If they're in the form of bhaktyaks, this process, these four powers, destroys the energy of those bhaktyaks. And I don't want you to think that it's me saying that.

And that's why the last reading you have, and you can check it out, like the next to last reading, is from the Diamond Cutter Sutra. Diamond Cutter Sutra is spoken by the Buddha. It's maybe the most famous sutra.

Next to the Heart Sutra, I think it's the most famous sutra. It's the oldest book ever printed in the world, because it's important. When you see emptiness directly, when you come out of that experience, there are many realizations that occur to you.

Those are the realizations of the Four Arya Truths. All those Four Arya Truths, you're having a direct realization of them during those three or four hours after that event. For the rest of the day, you're having realizations of the Four Arya Truths.

One of the things you realize is that you just perceived an ultimate reality. It is totally removed and totally different from the reality we always are in. It's a higher reality.

It's a supreme reality. It is an ultimate reality. And it's totally different from the reality we're in now.

If you try to compare the two realities, that one is totally different. Totally different kind of thing. And then your natural reaction is to search for something in this world which is similar to that reality.

Because nothing is. And nothing comes close. But the diamond is very close.

That's why the diamond is so important in Buddhism. The diamond has three qualities that make it similar to ultimate reality. For one thing, it's invisible.

If I put a diamond wall between you and me right now, and if there were no lights reflecting off of it, you wouldn't see the wall. It's purely optically transparent. You can't...

You would see me exactly as if nothing was between us. And it doesn't matter if that wall was a thousand miles thick. You would see me on the other end as if there were nothing between us.

And maybe you wouldn't even know there was there. If you didn't reach out and touch it, you wouldn't see it. You know, I work in the diamond business.

Take my word for it. So, it's totally invisible. And ultimate reality is like that.

Every object in the universe, from the tip of your nose to the galaxy, has its own emptiness, has its own ultimate reality. And ultimate reality is attached to each object in the universe. There's countless numbers of that ultimate reality.

It's all around you all the time. It's always been there. You cannot see it.

So, that's the first quality of it. It's totally invisible. It's around you all the time.

Until you reach the first preliminary level of the first stage of the four stages of the form realm, and then see emptiness directly, you'll never know it was there. You'll never see it. You have to be at that level to see it.

That's the first quality of emptiness. So, it's like a diamond in that sense. Secondly, it's ultimate.

In meaning, I don't know if you know about diamonds, but anyway, nothing in the universe can scratch a diamond. There is no substance in the universe that can scratch a diamond. You can split a diamond.

Sometimes you do it by accident. I can tell you about that. The boss is real thrilled when you do that.

And you can drop it, and you can do certain things to it, but you cannot scratch a diamond. It's ultimately hard. So, in a sense, it's an ultimate.

You know, what is the thinnest thing in the world? What is the fattest thing in the world? What's the tallest thing in the world?

What's the shortest thing in the world? You can't say, because you can always cut it in half or add another brick. But diamond is ultimate in the sense that there is no other physical object in the universe which can scratch it.

So, in that sense, diamond is close to being an ultimate. It is not a real ultimate, but it's similar to ultimate reality in that it's ultimate in that sense. There's another thing called Dorje Segma.

Dorje Segma means if you took a diamond and smashed it, which you can do, each little tiny piece of that diamond is pure, perfect diamond. It's very interesting. There's no difference in quality between the tiniest piece of diamond and a diamond as big as a house.

I mean, each molecule of that diamond is perfectly formed diamond. And it's totally pure, and they're totally equal. All the emptinesses, all the sunyatas, all the ultimate realities of each object in the universe are totally the same.

The fact that the irritating guy is not self-existent or not irritating from his side, and the fact that my own mind is not one way or the other from its own side, and the fact that Raleigh, North Carolina is not a city from its own side, are all equally empty. The emptiness of them all is totally the same. There's no difference between those emptinesses.

They're attached to different bases, but they're totally the same. So diamond is very important in Buddhism. That's why Vajra and diamond, that's why the obsession with diamonds.

You know, if you saw emptiness directly, you would want to be around diamonds, you would want to work with diamonds, you'd want to be always thinking about that metaphor. So that's why we get into the Diamond Cutter Sutra. That's why it was called the Diamond Cutter Sutra.

And the Buddha spoke it, and it's a very, very beautiful sutra. It's a very important sutra. And there's a section in there where he starts explaining about what happens when you do these four.

You know, what happens if you, if you're able to do these four, what happens to the bhaktas? What do you guess? They just go away?

Yeah, Don said they get scorched. They get, like, damaged. And they can't give forth a full-fledged result.

But they can give some wimpy results. And they do. And the Diamond Sutra, the reason I brought this up is that I've put in here the section from the Diamond Cutter Sutra.

And it says this is possible. And that if you do it well, then you can short-circuit those bhaktas. And the example that always comes in the scriptures is, if you had a bhakta that was going to make you go to a lower birth, you know, go to a hell or an animal realm.

By the way, do you go anywhere? You have a perception. The mind shifts.

The perceptions shift. And you, and you, you think you're going to an animal realm. And then you see your body is four legs, and you know, yes you are.

But that's as good as being Yeshe. In fact, that is being Yeshe. You are an animal.

Do you go there? No, it's a shifting in your perceptions. It's the same thing as going there.

It doesn't really matter. And you are there. Suppose you've collected a bhakta for that.

Suppose you've been able to collect that kind of a bhakta. And you short-circuit it, what will happen to you? It says a headache.

It says a headache. What would be the judge of whether you've done it well or not, by the way? What would be the, I mean, if I said, hey, if I came back in six months and said, how have you guys been doing on your four powers?

And you'd say, yeah. Well, number three, what would number three be? You'd say, you know, I've really improved.

I used to do it a lot. And I set those time limits and I'm not doing it as much as I used to. I still do it, because I'm a human being and I still have these weaknesses.

But I'm doing it a lot less than I did before because I'm observing the four forces, you know. That's the test. And then, according to the Diamond Sutra, I mean, I'll read it to you.

It says, this is the Buddha talking to Subuddhi, one of his main disciples. O Subuddhi, any son or daughter of noble family, but that, by the way, means a bodhisattva, okay, who takes up a sutra like this or who holds it or reads it or comprehends it fully will suffer. They will suffer intensely, okay.

He's promising you will suffer if you're practicing well. You know, it's because you're short-circuiting those bhaktyaks, you know. If you read the Diamond Sutra, which main subject is what?

Emptiness, diamond. And you will, by understanding emptiness, you will, at the moment of, in the moment of, in the heavy moment at work, when the guy's screaming at you, and if you apply emptiness...

[Speaker 2]
My feeling from the heart that it would always be that way and it would spontaneously happen without effort. It would just arise. I would have to always remember to follow some formula to make sure I kept that in place in each chapter.

[Speaker 1]
More?

[Speaker 2]
It would be indistinguishable from some sorrow that you would just really enjoy it. You wouldn't see anybody as annoying.

[Speaker 1]
You wouldn't have that perception.

[Speaker 2]
You would just see, you know, people's basic good in nature. You'd see them as deities. You'd see everybody as being...

And you wouldn't have any focus on yourself at all. You'd have a...

[Speaker 1]
You know, your heart would be so broad that you would be turned into infinite beings with no self... no real self-interest.

[Speaker 2]
I would think there'd be no difference between self and others. It would be totally sort of a... sort of homogenous, but a nice form of homogenous.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah. No more perception. What's that?

No more perception? Just seeing reality all the time. Just seeing reality all the time.

Ultimate reality.

[Speaker 2]
Conceptually.

[Speaker 1]
Well, I mean, you have to get into the bodies of a Buddha, right? I mean, there are four bodies. One...

Two physical bodies, two non-physical bodies. That's... They're called bodies, but it's really just parts of a Buddha, right?

So the first part is sambhogakaya, in his or her own paradise. Total... Every single object is totally, ultimately beautiful.

And your interaction with each object in that place is total bliss. There's no other emotion that you have as you interact with each object in that universe, in that... No, it's the feeling you get from your parents, that's all.

I mean, it's interesting, because every corner, every little eighth of an inch of every single object is giving you total bliss. You know, like the... You're getting total bliss from millions of objects around you.

You know, every little corner of every single object is just... The only reaction you have to it is total bliss. Doesn't matter what it is, a flower, or a song, or a sky, or whatever.

And there are physical things there, but everything is only triggering in your mind total bliss. Every single object. And the point is, when you're...

when you're bad to one person, when you yell at one person, the normal karmic reaction, I mean, the normal karma that comes back is to have several, or actually quite a few people yell at you, okay? Because karma grows, okay? But what about good karma?

I mean, what if you had wisdom? And what if you collected karma intelligently? You know, you did all these things intelligently.

How many... I mean, karma, by the way, is collected always with other sentient beings. You know, I mean, 99% of all karma is relative to other people.

I mean, you can collect it by just... If you stub your toe, and you curse, and you're angry, you do collect a bad karma. But normally it's with...

with interaction with someone else. That's how you normally collect your karma. So, if you wanted to create a big pile of bok choks, that when they went off, they would make every single tiny atom of the world you lived in blissful, you know, how many sentient beings would you have to do that towards?

I mean, how many beings would you have to do that good karma towards? I mean, the result, remember, is infinite number of blissful objects. A whole world in which there is not one object which gives you anything less than total bliss.

Infinite. Infinite number. You know, I mean, it's illogical.

You know, and it's... What I'm saying is we got to... Do you want an ice cream cone or do you want a whole universe that's blissful, you know?

Do you want to restrict it to one object? Or do you want to live in a whole universe or a whole world which is blissful? I mean, a whole paradise.

I mean, what are you after, you know? Do you want to live in a world where like 10% of the things are blissful or 50% or would you rather have every atom of everything trigger bliss in you, you know? Which do you prefer, you know, of the above?

And what it implies is that you have to do that karma towards a limitless number of beings. You have to figure out a way to do your good deeds towards a limitless number of sentient beings. So, what's that called?

I mean, you do it in your... It's here, you know. It's here, it's in the reading.

It's the four immeasurables, okay? I mean, it's very important to have that... to have that scope.

And that's why they have that practice. I mean, the good deeds you're going to have to collect to get the karmic result of a whole paradise. It's going to have to be an infinite number of beings.

You're going to have to do your goodness towards many, many other people. So it's not enough to just be... to just be sort of nice or to be sort of good.

I mean, you have to have the scope of doing those good deeds towards an infinite number of beings. And that's... It's not to say you're not supposed to be nice to the guy next to you.

I mean, a lot of Buddhists say, I'm working for all sentient beings but I really hate this guy at work. I mean, that's the closest you're going to get to all sentient beings, you know, is the people around you. It's the people in your family.

It's those boring old people you spend your day with, you know. That is all sentient beings for you. I mean, right now you have to work...

That happens to be all sentient beings for you. But when you do your practices and especially when you do your meditations, you have to try to focus on every living being. And I think one important meditation there is tonglen.

And I'm not going to go into that. And I know Don is... I know that that's part of the program here.

And I know that in your meditations you do tonglen. And I just wanted to say that of all the meditations you could do, you know, that would be the best one for collecting that kind of karma, you know. Tonglen is most powerful for that.

And you can learn it here, you know. They're doing it here and they're teaching it here over a long period of time. So you have to...

You know, even if you're like an old Dharma student, you should come and do it. I mean, you should still come and sit together and try to practice it because that's the kind of karma that would create that paradise. And that's how you create a paradise.

If you read the last reading at the end, the Buddha is teaching Subuddhi how to create a paradise. And he says, if you don't understand emptiness, you can't. But if you do understand emptiness, you'll be able to.

And he goes into this long explanation of how to create your own paradise. But the rub is that you're going to have to want to do it for everyone. You know, you're going to have to have the motivation of doing it for everyone.

If you don't, you can't reach it. You can't get there. Where will it be?

Yeah. Both, both. I mean, they say samsara and paradise are the same.

It's not exactly true. I mean, go stand in front of a car. But in the sense that, you know, it's not really necessary that you'd have to go to a different place because it would become a different place.

You know, wherever you are would become that. And if it's not becoming that, you know, if you don't see your world changing over a period of practicing Dharma, then you're not doing it. You know, there's no problem with the teachings, they say.

You know, the teachings are not deficient. It's your own effort. You know, if your own life is not changing, and if over a period of time you don't perceive any...

if you don't perceive reality subtly changing into something else, then you're not doing it right. And you have to go back and learn more. You know, you have to concentrate.

And I'd say, like, doing tonglen, I mean, what it means is your tonglen is not really tonglen and you're not really doing it. You know, it should be changing. Things should be improving.

And not in the sense of just feeling better or something like that, but the actual reality around you should be shifting as your projections shift, as your karma forces them to shift, because you've done good things. So, you have to try tonglen and you have to try it in the right way. You have to get serious about it.

Because if things don't improve, then it's not... you're not doing it right. Or you're not really putting much...

you're not really putting your heart into it. You know, you're just sitting there and not doing it very well. The test of not doing it very well is that nothing will happen, okay?

You know. And the test of doing it well is that things will start to shift. The actual reality around you will start to shift and become more pure.

We'll do a few questions and then...

[Speaker 2]
Doing frustrations and mantras and noon day retreats and all of that, how does that work?

[Speaker 1]
It's mostly motivation. Like, you can be like me and do all these major projects to help Buddhism, blah, blah, blah. And if your motivation is not good, there's not much use to it, you know.

And I often get in that rut, you know. Like, I'm doing all these great things, but my own motivation is maybe mixed up with liking to be recognized and to be a teacher and things like that. You have to...

The main thing is your motivation, you know. If you're doing it with a good motivation, then it'll have a good result. And if your motivation is mixed up with something worldly, then you'll get a mixed up result.

So I think... And we just talked about mantras. We were talking about the fact that mantras...

Generally mantras are secret. They're tantric. But there is a book by Dharmakirti, which is not tantric, where he explains why they work.

And it's very beautiful. We were talking about it during the break. It's in the second chapter of his famous logic text, which is the last place you'd expect to find it.

And he says mantras work because of the holiness of the person who invented it. You know, the first person who spoke it, like Maitreya or Manjushri, whoever. And then there has to be an equal, powerful, good force coming from your side, and specifically morality.

If you're not living ethically, mantras don't work. And if you are being good, then the combination of your goodness and the holiness of the words makes them work. So, that's basically how mantras work.

And it's all basically motivation. I mean, the most important thing is motivation. If you're doing any spiritual practice for selfish reasons or self-centered reasons, which are always there.

You can't say they're not there. But you have to try to minimize them and try to have a good motivation. Then anything you do is powerful.

You know, so... That's... yeah.

It seems like tomorrow when that situation comes up...

[Speaker 2]
I wonder what time is going to happen. And, you know, and you kind of flash on emptiness and then, okay, and then there's some, like, space in the mind.

[Speaker 1]
Now, it seems like to me that it's real... you know, to sit there with... and wait for the next hour or so.

It seems like to me it's real helpful to do the thought transformation teachings to then go back and think, okay...

[Speaker 2]
You know, because... Usually, the emptiness thing does come later. It doesn't come at the moment that person is shouting it.

[Speaker 1]
So, going back and trying to look at this thing as a karmic fruition and this person is suffering and they wouldn't be behaving this way and they deserve compassion. They don't deserve to be, you know, harmed because of their behavior. You know, they're teaching me patience and all the kind of things that the Bhojan teachings are about.

It seems like that's real important. Actually, emptiness makes that possible because the person isn't inherently that way. Yeah.

I think both... I think it's not contradictory. I think...

I know, again, that situmbha, meaning... you're probably going to have to have both. You know?

And I agree. I mean, the ultimate antidote is very difficult at the moment. In the moment of under fire, it's very difficult to remember.

And I think the Buddha... I mean, the scriptures would say, do whatever you have to do, you know? If you find you can't use the emptiness antidote right away, at least, you know, try to use one of the other short-term antidotes where, you know, you just try to think that this person might be having a bad day.

Or, you know, normally, the person has a backache, or they didn't get enough sleep last night, the baby kept them up, you know? There's always some temporal reason why they blow up at you. And it's good to think of those things.

And then, if you can, try to remember the emptiness one, because that's the ultimate one. That's the one that actually removes mental afflictions, because that's part of the definition of nirvana. It's...

Nirvana is defined as the permanent removal of the mental afflictions because you perceive emptiness. And that's... Ultimately, you have to do that.

In an everyday sense, from moment to moment, you have to use... I mean, Shantideva wrote a whole book of short-term tricks for a reason. It's because we need them.

And you can use them both. You have to use them both. Because you...

You can't do an emptiness meditation every time someone at work says something bad to you. And if you're working in an office like mine, because you won't have time, you know. Any other?

[Speaker 2]
I'm still a little confused with desire. You're saying that you have a desire to an object. The way you show your desire to the object is giving its way.

You know, say, if you like money, you want to make money, give money. I still don't see the connection between how you are having a desire to something, how it is wrong, you know.

[Speaker 1]
I think it's a really good question, because normally Buddhists think that they shouldn't have any desires at all. And every time they want something, whether it's from an ice cream to a house, or to a race, they think they're somehow being dirty, you know, or somehow it's wrong to want something nice. And that's not the point, you know.

That's why we talked about paradise. Paradise is all nice things, you know. I mean, what drives you to practice Buddhism is the wish that you and all the people around you could reach some place where there was no more suffering, and where everything was blissful.

And you can get there, and that's the whole point of Buddhism. So what are you going to do when you're in that Buddha paradise and everything is blissful? Are you going to feel guilty about enjoying it, you know?

It's not like that. What drives us, what Don said at the beginning, what drives everyone is the wish for happiness. You're driven.

That's why you woke up this morning. That's why you bothered to get out of bed. That's why you put your legs on the floor, you know.

You were hoping that something would happen today that would bring you more happiness. That's... My lama used to say...

I had a Mongolian lama who... We would sit at the side of this busy highway in New Jersey, and he'd say, think about each person in each car driving to something they think is going to make them feel better than what they came from, you know. That's why they're going.

That's why there's this traffic on this highway. Every person is seeking something that makes them happier than where they're coming from, you know, and that's why they're traveling, you know. So everybody...

It's a real subtle thing between not desiring something in a wrong way and in wanting happiness. You should want happiness. You have to be driven.

Renunciation is being fed up with not being happy. But the only wrong kind of desire is what we talked about, you know, you misperceive the object. You think you can obtain that object by doing something harmful especially.

You know, if you want to obtain beautiful objects, give beauty to other people. It's the only way. Why?

As you see yourself giving beauty to other people, it plants a bak chak in your mind. It comes along and then finally it flowers and you see yourself receiving beauty. That's the nature of bak chak.

It's very interesting. You know, it's giving that makes you perceive getting. It's very interesting.

It's the perception of giving that creates a karmic seed that eventually forces you to see someone piling things on you. You know, and that's the whole trick. You know, it's the perception of giving or satisfying someone else's needs that plants the karma that gives you the ultimate perception of receiving.

It's very weird. And that's the only way to get rich. You know, it's the only way to get what you want.

You know, it's not just a way. The other ways don't work. I mean, if someone, a stewardess came up to you, I'm going to go to the airport in an hour, right?

And the stewardess stands at the top of the stairs and says, you know, Mr. Roach, I have to inform you before you get on the plane that we haven't figured out what makes it fly. You know, sometimes it flies, sometimes it flies, and sometimes it falls down. You know, we haven't really got it down yet.

I mean, we're really getting better at it, but, you know, like a certain percent of the time it's going to fall down. We didn't figure out what causes it yet to fly. Just come in and sit down and put on your seatbelt, you know, and you say, crazy, you say, I'm getting out of here, you know, and you run back to Don Brown's house, you know.

But the actions that we take in our everyday life to obtain what we want are exactly the same. They don't have any connection to getting them. There's no relation to getting them.

You know, the normal activities you undertake to get anything are totally deluded. They have no connection to getting them. And I always talk about the example, you know, I'm a diamond buyer.

So, as you buy a diamond, you're supposed to talk to the guy and say, he brings you a $1,000 diamond. And I do this all day, 30,000 diamonds a day. And the guy says, this diamond's worth $1,000.

And you know it's worth $1,000. And you say, it's only worth $600. You know, I'll give you $500.

And then he'll say, no, no, give me $800. And you say, no, no, I'll give you $750. And then he says, no, I say, no, it's not worth...

And there's this desire that you have to be very convincing with the guy, you know. Like, if you can convince him that there's something wrong with the diamond and it's not really worth $1,000, then ultimately he'll give it to you. Suppose he does.

You know, suppose I'm very convincing. And he gives up and he says, okay, okay, $800. You can have this $1,000 diamond for $800.

And I get it. And suddenly I've made $200 by lying. Okay?

I mean, I've lied convincingly. And that guy has given me a $1,000 diamond for $800. I just made $200.

The $64,000 question is, did the lie cause the profit? You know, did my convincing lies cause me to gain $200? Is this cause and effect?

It appears to be cause and effect. You know, is that cause and effect? Is it airtight?

By the way, science also agrees that every time I replicate an experiment exactly the same, the results should be exactly the same. Every time I have the same experimental conditions, I should get exactly the same result. That's a clue for the answer, okay?

That's a clue. Okay, did, I ask you again, did my convincing lies make me $200? No.

No, why not? They don't always work, okay? It's the plane that sometimes flies and doesn't fly.

It's not why it's flying. You know, if, if convincing lies were the cause of the $200, they should always work. I mean, no one would say anything else.

We live like that. We live in some kind of foolishness, you know. But, but, if convincing lies made me the $200, then, then the next day when that other guy comes, my convincing lie should make me exactly the same percentage, 20%, you know.

but, but what's your experience of lies? It's not true. Sometimes a convincing lie gets you a big punch in the head, you know.

You know, I mean, it's not cause and effect. It's that simple. It is not cause and effect.

Is it apparently cause and effect?

[Speaker 2]
So what you're saying basically is that making the $200 is not the result of a lie.

[Speaker 1]
Not at all.

[Speaker 2]
It's the result of past conflict.

[Speaker 1]
Absolutely.

[Speaker 2]
And, somewhere down the line, you're going to lose somewhere between $200 and $1,000 because of that convincing lie.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, really, that's it. Exactly.

They're going like this. You know, it's two things like this. They look to be cause and effect because they're simultaneous, but really they're two trains going different ways.

And, exactly what he said, you know, if you make $200 at anything, it's because you gave something before. And, if you lie, you can be sure that in the future people won't believe you. You know, people say true things and nobody believes them.

People say bald lies and everyone believes them. Why? You know.

[Speaker 2]
So, in the present, if you live ethically, is that the same result as if you lived unethically?

[Speaker 1]
Oh yeah, in the present. Yeah. Someone asked me that question.

They said, but isn't the lie acting as a contributing factor for receiving the $200? Isn't it true that without lying the guy would have walked out and you never would have got the diamond and you wouldn't make the $200? It's explained in the Abhidharmakosha.

If the conditions are not ripe for me to get the $200 right after I lie, I'll get the $200 some other way immediately. I'll find it on the ground. My boss will give me a raise.

You know, the equity of diamonds in the world will raise by a half percent and our stock will... You know, really, seriously, some condition... It's in the Abhidharmakosha.

It's explained very thoroughly in the fourth chapter. If the conditions are not there, the temporal conditions for that result to come to me in that way, they will come some other way immediately. You know, I'll look down and there'll be $200 on the ground.

But at least I haven't done a bad deed to get them, you know. It's a big difference. That's how the world works.

If you want anything, I mean, listen to the real causes of things. If those were the causes, they would always work, but they don't always work, so don't get in the play. Yeah.

Something must depend on how you use the $200. That's for future. That's for the future.

That's for the... By the way, that's fusion. Fusion means if I'm a good Buddhist and I understand what's going on and I know where I got the $200 from, and I'll give it away.

I'll give it to somebody important. And it's interesting, when you reach the path of seeing and you come out of the direct perception of emptiness, one of the things you perceive, it's in that Four Noble Truths thing, is that you will never suffer in your future lives. You will live seven more lives, for example.

You see them and you know you will always be born in a country where the Dharma is. You will always have good teachers. You will always be physically comfortable.

You will always be in the top 1% of the people in the world who have any money, as we are now. And you just perceive that. That's part of that experience.

It's the virtue of having done that is extraordinary. And you will never suffer physically again. And it's a very interesting feeling to...

What if you were like that? You'd know and you just weren't going to ever be short of cash again. I mean in a broad way.

I mean it might happen in short term, but you're always... Because of the virtue, the extraordinary virtue that you just did, that's the way your life is going to be for the next seven lives and then you become a Buddha. So that's...

Maybe good karma. I think that's enough and it's a good place to leave it. So...

Yeah, you're welcome. I think... You have some prayers to do?

Yeah. Okay.

[Speaker 2]
Satsang with Mooji and the Satsang Group of the Satsang Group of the Satsang Group www.mooji.org