Серия ежедневной практики, курс 08 — Сутра сердца: медитация на пустоту (1998, Годстоу), занятие 11

[Speaker 2]
This is the continuation of session 10. Yeah.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, um, I had a dream last night and there was somebody that I got in an argument with that, um, that I had really been, uh, trying to, uh, to not argue with, to leash off with, you know, and, uh, and I got curious at this person, you know, and I was screaming. At the end of it, I kind of went, oh no, I blew it now, there's going to be 12 of our now.

[Speaker 2]
Yeah.

[Speaker 1]
And I'm just wondering, is that, would you, if you did a meditation on this, would it be like an antidote to it, how would just the karma affect that argument with somebody? Yeah. By the way, in a dream, the, because of the, uh, the fragility of the consciousness, you see, the consciousness at that point is not very, uh, stable.

And, and the karma collected, like if a monk dreams about breaking his vows, it's, it doesn't count, you see what I mean? And it is some bad karma because some perception, some kind of imprint is put on your mind, but, uh, but it's, it doesn't have anywhere near the karma of, of any single thought that you have during the day while you're awake, you see what I mean? It's a very feeble imprint on your mind, but it does have some imprint on your mind.

And when you keep your vows well, you'll have dreams about keeping your vows. And you'll be in situations where you're about to say something in a dream and you'll stop, and, and like that. So the imprint works.

Really, if you're going to have a good class about all this stuff, you should talk about the four powers, how to remove bad karma. The main method is to understand exactly what we've been talking about, you know, and decide you won't do it again for a certain period, you know. Like, you can say, I'll never get angry at my mother again.

And Geshe Dargye, God bless him, you know, used to say, don't do that because then you're going to get a pile of lying on top of, you know. He said, he would say, set a time period, you know. I won't yell at this lady at work for the next ten minutes, you know.

And that's an exercise that helps remove the karma. So I don't know who the person is, but say, make a resolution in your mind, the next person I, the next time I meet this person, I resolve that I will not, I will not say anything unkind to them, you know. And then you get ready and make it a short meeting, like a five-minute meeting, you know.

And no, get everything ready and carry it through successfully. And that helps to wipe out the karma completely. The most powerful antidote for all bad karma is to understand exactly what we've been talking about.

Because then, your perfection of wisdom knowledge, which you now have, will discourage you from doing bad things, you know. I mean, the more you understand, the less you want to do bad karma, you know. The more you understand about emptiness, you lose your appetite for bad karma, because you know exactly what's going to happen, you know.

And that's the sweetest, that's the most powerful antidote for all bad karma. You can remove bad karma. In a sense, Tantra is an exercise in the four powers.

We have huge amounts of karma that are creating a very dangerous body. You know, this body will kill itself. And we have huge amounts of karma that are maintaining that.

You know, millions and millions of karmas, discrete karmas, are maintaining my appearance of my body to me. And that's very solid. You see what I mean?

To change that is going to take a lot of good karma, you know. You could collect karma to reach a tantric paradise for years and only get a small spot on your arm or something like that. You see what I mean?

Seriously. A small spot of light or something on your arm. And we need to do much more than that.

We have to stop this solid thing. We have to convert it into a body of light before we die. All the karmas you've ever done in your life haven't made your little finger light yet.

You know, seriously. And so, you have to take care of the old karmas. Yeah, it's very important.

It's not enough to just take care of the new ones. You have to engage in the art of cleaning out your old karmas. And that's mainly done by understanding emptiness.

So, you're covered. You're covered for that. Decide you won't do it again for a certain time period.

And then, you already thought about the emptiness of it, how it's going to come back to you. And that's all. That helps to get rid of that old karma.

And we have to get good at that. This is going to be a big job, you know. Millions of karmas involved here, you know.

Did you have a question?

[Speaker 2]
I do. Perfect lead-in. Karma projection and the reversal of old age.

[Speaker 1]
Question. Oh, just what I just described, you know.

[Speaker 2]
What about the projection part?

[Speaker 1]
You will now start to project the reversal, you know. So, a continued good deeds... I mean, if you want to know the process, I'll tell you the process.

It's secret, okay. And it's not improper for me to describe it in very general terms. Your mind and certain inner energies, which are physical, move in tandem.

They say the mind is riding on those energies. When you are very upset, you get an ulcer. You get a heart attack.

You lose your hair or something like that. Now, over a long period of time, certain thoughts disturb your physical body and cause changes in your body. In fact, every single manifestation of aging, okay, the change in the bones, the change in the hair, the change in the sense powers, is directly attributable to the failure of pure thoughts to run in their proper places, channels, okay.

If you didn't have... If you could manage to have compassion and the understanding of emptiness be running in your brain all the time, the manifestations of age could not occur, okay. It's very interesting.

If you can start to replace your common thoughts and your normal thoughts that you have during the day with thoughts of intense compassion or understanding of emptiness, you can reverse the process. And it's very hard, but it's certainly possible. And like all other great achievements, it's done with the little things.

You see what I mean? It's done by a massive collection of little things, which is just tracking your behavior from moment to moment. And that's where the book comes in.

We have the book. Every hour or two you examine your mind to see how it's doing and you try to correct, on a gentle basis, some part of it. If you did that over a number of years, then your body would start to change.

And it's interesting that the body and the understanding of emptiness are deeply related. The more you understand emptiness, it actually improves your health. And the more your health improves and you undertake certain tantric practices with your body, then you can actually promote the perception of emptiness.

So, like all symbiotic relationships, they go like that. You improve the condition of the body by having pure thoughts. And then the improved condition of the body helps you think more pure thoughts.

It's an upward cycle, upward spiral. And at the end you don't manifest any of those problems. There are certain blockages occurring in your spiritual body that are due completely to your negative emotions and your ignorance.

And if you could stop them, none of those things can occur. They just would never occur. It's very interesting.

And that practice is the higher half of Tantra. And to engage in those practices fully, you need to prepare yourself properly. You have to get a proper initiation.

And then you need proper teaching in the first half of Tantra. And then you can start doing those. But anyway, now you can start by keeping your bodhisattva vows.

And that brings you very close to that. If you keep your bodhisattva code of life, code of behavior, then you're right up to those practices. Then you can easily slide into them.

TUM MONG LAM BYANG NUD DU RGYUR PA NA, DE LAG NYID DU GRUB PAR BYING GI LOB, May I slide into them easily. You know, this is Jetsun Kapha's prayer in the Yindexhi Gyurma, you know. May I, by keeping my bodhisattva vows, slide into those higher practices like a greased pig, you know.

DE LAG NYID DU, that's the NYID DU, okay? DE LAG NYID DU, you know. DE LAG NYID DU GRUB PAR BYING GI LOB, May I just zoom right in there, you know.

You have to learn bodhisattva code of behavior and you have to follow it. And Master Shantideva is best for that. And there are three ACIP courses that you can...

By the way, all those courses are free and all that stuff, okay? I'm not advertising anything. We had this picnic table meeting the other day to figure out how much we're in debt on it and whether we can keep giving it away, and we will.

And we have a lot of good help from people. I think there's 40 people whose garages are filled, like Winston and Mary Oberndorf, right? You know, whose houses have been partially taken over by...

And they mail them out and stuff like that. So, really, there are three courses to that and you can go through those. They're very good.

Yeah.

[Speaker 2]
In doing the meditation, I was keeping my eyes closed. I'm wondering if it would be... Would you advise training in keeping your eyes open during the meditation and getting good at that so throughout the day there could be a meditation going on?

[Speaker 1]
I see what you mean. Classic meditation. There was a debate about it in Tibet because there were people who said staring at a candle is meditation or staring at an image is meditation.

And it was examined. That idea was examined by the great masters of Tibet and rejected. They said, look, nowhere in the Buddha's teaching does it say that meditation is anything but the consciousness of your thoughts.

You see what I mean? Meditation is done in your mind and not with your physical senses. And that's just a decision.

That's classic samadhi or the development of advanced concentration is all done inside your mind. So, in general, no. In general, even if you keep your eyes open during meditation, you don't engage them.

And when you see emptiness for the first time directly, you will be in a meditation so deep that you're not even capable of a sense perception. So you have to get used to that. That's what meditation is for, to reach that day.

So you have to get used to that, of meditating out of your body. You shut down your body and you're concentrating on your mind. And that's meditation.

So when I say go from left to right in the room, it means in your mind. There are lots of other meditations you can do at work. And many of those are lojong.

And we're going to have a class on that in May. It'll start in May. It'll go till July, I think.

And those are sort of everyday meditations that you can do at work. And they don't involve classic meditative concentration. Those are more practices for developing a meditative awareness at work.

And when Je Tsongkhapa covers the Bodhisattva vow of avoiding the five obstacles to meditation, for example, eating too much, not getting enough sleep, thinking bad thoughts of other people, doubt about the path, things like that. When he discusses the five obstacles to meditation, he says, by the way, I'm not talking while you're on your cushion. I'm talking all day long.

I hear some people say, I don't have to eat well or follow that other stuff when I'm not in retreat. And Je Tsongkhapa would object to that. He'd say, you have to, you're under vows, Bodhisattva vows, to take care of your state of mind, your state of awareness, your state of, how do you call it, you know, being alert about the behavior of your mind and your thoughts and your speech at all times, even when you're asleep.

So you can't abuse your mind at any time during the day. You have to avoid the obstacles to meditation all the time. And even if you're not meditating, you see.

So in that sense, yeah, you should learn to meditate all day and keep your mind in a heightened sense of awareness and clarity. Clarity. You're not, as a Bodhisattva, you have a vow to maintain a state of mental clarity all the time.

You're not allowed to pig out, you know, even if you're just about to go to bed or something, because you won't have clarity as you go to sleep, you see. And that's a vow, that's a Bodhisattva vow. I don't want to make you feel guilty when you pig out, and I do it too.

But yeah, there can be a state of meditative awareness all day long, and you have to have that. And it's a kind of clarity. And yeah, you have to have that.

And there are practices for that. We'll do that in Lojong class. Okay, we'll be doing that.

I think one more and we'll stop, because I want you to get some rest and we'll have another class. In this, you led us to the first and the second meditation. If you get stuck and you overdo the second meditation, you're stuck with...

You are. ...the outside.

[Speaker 2]
Yeah, yeah.

[Speaker 1]
But you've always been there, so...

[Speaker 2]
How much... That was my question. How much do you spend each time?

[Speaker 1]
Yeah. Don't spend much time on number two, because it's dangerous. It's wrong.

It's what they call a ta. Ta means a cliff. You know, it's a yang-sa.

It's a chasm. Yeah, I just said... Don't make a mistake.

Get in touch with your normal tendency to do that. Observe it and get away from it. Reject it.

[Speaker 2]
Do you go back to number one? Because number one seemed helpful in that early wisdom course, in the ninth chapter. That was very helpful with the pen.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, those of you who were at the Friday night class, it's very good to jump through the modes. It's very, very useful. We had a pen in the...

You know, see it as a clock. Now see it as existing from its own side. Jump back to clock.

Jump ahead to something produced by your karma that's useful for you and you like it. Cancel everything. See number four.

Now jump back to number one. Now... It's called tsel in Tibetan.

It's gymnastics. It's called meditative gymnastics. It's called...

And you have to be able to do it. It's called palmar gomba in the Abhidharma. You know, when you get good at it...

And Muthu Dhammabhadra, who's the great lama in our Vajrayogini lineage, says, look, if you're an intelligent modern person in sixteen whatever, you know, you're going to get bored with this stuff. Lime it up. You know, he says, jump from meditation.

You know, let it go. Boom, boom, boom, you know. Okay, can I do five permutations in six minutes?

You know, okay. Cross it real hard on its coming from its own side. See its dependent origination.

Drop it. Emptiness. Go back to seeing it like the baby Kiernan sees it, you know.

And then jump. You know, and it keeps your meditation interesting. And it's called cell.

And it makes your mind very strong. It makes your concentration very strong. And yeah, they encourage you to do that.

After you're firm. When do you know to go to sleep if you're on your own at home? When you start thinking about breakfast, go to number three.

That means you have about ten minutes left. I'm speaking from experience. Okay, we'll stop there.

Chanting Okay, get ready to meditate. Okay, this will be very short, so try to concentrate hard. Be about half an hour.

Start by watching your breath. And lengthen the out-breath when you get to the end of the out-breath. Breathe a little more out.

Push a little more air out, gently. This, by the way, helps when you're sleepy, too. Make sure the in-breath is still slow.

And then do this step number one. Put your mind, move it from left to right in this room. And just observe them.

Enjoy them. It's a beautiful room. It's a beautiful view out the window.

And just enjoy them. Don't think about where they came from. Now look at them the old way, as if they existed out there on their own, independent of your state of mind.

Then number three, see everything in this room is happening because of what you did before. Every single event, like if you go back to New York tonight or tomorrow, because of the virtue you've done in this retreat, your reality will actually be different. It'll be slightly sweeter.

The colors will be slightly better. The people will be slightly kinder to you. The whole city will be slightly different because of the karma you collected this weekend.

And realize that that's the way everything is. And it's not just that you're in a good mood. The reality has actually changed.

Now go around to those objects. Each time you bump into one, look at it like number three, and then remove number three and see if there's anything left. And there won't be anything left.

And you can go around the room eliminating objects. And pretty soon there'll just be nothing. And then fix your mind on that nothing.

And we'll take some time doing this. Every time you get interrupted by a noise or another thought, then seize the opportunity and examine it like number three. Then take away the number three-ness and there won't be anything left.

And then go back to where you were. That takes you back to where you were. Go back to number one.

Skip to number three. Pretend number two could happen. Back to number three.

Number four. And fix your mind on number four. Use the interruptions and use the thoughts that come up and examine them to get back to the first place, to number four itself.

Then we did tremendous good karma and dedicate it to your own enlightenment. And try to envision yourself as a being who could help many other beings reach their own Buddha paradise. I'd like to do a dedication and also a long life prayer for Khen Rinpoche.

Is that on your schedule? You want to go ahead and do it? Okay, we'll do a short mandala and a dedication.

Bhagavad-gita-sambhavato namo Nirvana-sindhu nirvannam Sanghe sindhu nirvannam Bhagavad-gita-sambhavato namo Nirvana-sindhu nirvannam Bhagavad-gita-sambhavato namo Nadi Kevalam Samme Shreya Tato Shreya Samme Shreya Jaya Bhagavad-gita-sambhavato Shri Kambho Wadiyo Shanti Sachi I hope he lives another hundred thousand years or so. But I appreciate it, and when you see him, thank you.

[Speaker 2]
This is the end of session 10. You have been listening to Heart Sutra A Meditation on Emptiness with Geshe Michael Roach To contact us on other courses available or for further information please check our website at www.world-view.org