Серия ежедневной практики, курс 09 — Пустота ума (махамудра) (1999, Сокел), занятие 8

[Speaker 2]
Session five.

[Speaker 1]
Okay, we'll do a meditation, so get ready. Blow your nose if you have to blow your nose. Do your coughs.

Scratch your last itch. We did a retreat last week, and there were like 50 people blowing their nose. Okay, we'll do the preliminaries.

You should always do the preliminaries. So, first watch your breath. I find it helpful to listen, to try to hear the air hitting my eardrum, and then it brings my breath down too.

You can try it. And take refuge. The ultimate refuge is emptiness.

If you study refuge carefully, all three of the refuge objects have intimately to do with emptiness. Aryas, or the Sangha, are people who have seen emptiness directly. The main Buddha jewel is the Dharmakaya, or the emptiness of the Buddha.

And then the main Dharma is the direct perception of emptiness. So really, the main refuge is emptiness. So think about what you know about emptiness, and take refuge in it.

It will protect you. Then think about bodhicitta. Think about the difference between giving someone money, and then teaching them to make money.

And that's the distinction between giving people material needs, and then teaching them Dharma. So think about the difference. Invite your Lama, and mentally bow down to them by thinking of one of their very fine qualities that you'd like to have.

Make an offering to them, especially of your practice. Something specific. And think of the most negative thing you've done or thought or said to someone in the last 24 hours.

And play it back a few times. And just observing how unhelpful it is. It helps to purify the karma.

Then think of something you did very nice for someone. Something you did that was virtuous. Rejoice.

Take pleasure in it. And then after that, think about the great deeds of the great Lamas, like Lama Tsongkhapa, His Holiness, and Ken Rinpoche. Think about what they're doing, and take some pleasure in that.

Ask for teachings, and ask for the blessings of your Lamas and Je Tsongkhapa to understand the teachings. And then do a small prayer that your Lamas stay in your life, and that the people who really have a good effect on you, whether they're Buddhist or not, that they stay close to you. And we'll start the meditation.

If you have to move, move now, slightly. You can do that after a preliminary. Okay, then go back and counting your breaths.

Three rounds of ten is good. The way we count them is, the out-breath is the first half, and then the in-breath is the second half. So it's not like holding your breath when you go underwater or something.

Out is the first half, and in is the second half. Do three rounds of ten. Try to make it calm.

Try to make the in-breath as long as the out-breath. You get to a point where you can feel your heartbeat, you can time it like that, like three or four heartbeats out, three or four heartbeats back. But don't force it.

Never force the breathing. Don't try to force your breath to do something, but try to sort of nudge it that way. If you can, try to hear the air hitting your eardrums, and it'll take your breath down automatically.

Okay, this time we're going to start real Mahamudra meditation, which means we have to take as our object the mind. And among all the separate functions of the mind, we'll take the feeling. Your mind is always in one of three modes.

It's either feeling good or neutral or bad. And that applies all the way up through Buddhahood. Your mind will never stop, and your mind never stops feeling.

It's feeling all the time. When it's feeling neutral, you may not be aware of it, but it's feeling. So try to capture where your mind is right now.

Look at how your mind is feeling. Is it happy, or is it mildly happy, or is it mildly sad? Try to get in touch with that object right now.

How is your mind feeling right now? This is a little bit difficult to watch your own mind, and try to get used to it. Now try to be sensitive to your natural feeling that there's some kind of lasting nature to that feeling that you're having now, that it's going to stay for a while, and that it might not change in a moment.

Try to be aware of that flavor of ignorance that you have about your own feeling, your own feelings, that they're going to last for a while, that if you're feeling sort of good now, it's going to last for more than a few minutes. Now strip that away and look at your feeling. The feeling that you're having right now is something fleeting, something that won't stay very long, and you'll almost be totally unaware when it flip-flops.

Somebody will say something to you, you'll see something you don't like, and suddenly it'll be on to another track. See how short-lived your feelings are. Now emptiness flavor two.

Go back to just observing the feeling you have right now. Mine happens to be mildly good mood, because I had a nice tea in the morning. Check how yours is.

This is a really good place to look at ignorance number two. Ignorance number two is the ownership kind of mind, and you think that you own your feelings, or that you can control them. The word in Tibetan is rare.

It's called je-wo, and it means like you're the master of your feelings. You direct where they go, you boss them around. Look at it in that light, with those colored glasses, and look at your feeling that you're having right now, and get in touch with that emotion you have that, oh, you could make your feeling go either way if you wanted, you know, you could feel better if you wanted to, or you could feel worse if you wanted to, and that false sense that you're in charge of your emotions.

And then strip away that gakja, that non-existent, self-existent thing, and then see your feelings for what they are. You don't own them. You don't control them.

You get angry uncontrollably. When you feel good, it's often just good luck, and see that that's the real way your emotions, your feelings go throughout the day. And then go back to your feeling, just watching the feeling.

Mine's changing a little bit because my knee's hurt. Now it's a little more subtle. Try to get in touch with your sense that feelings are happening to you.

Like in most languages, the words for feelings are reflexive. They have endings on them that mean this sadness is happening to me, this happiness is happening to me, like some kind of accident. Try to see, look at your feeling with that flavor of ignorance that says I'm separate from that feeling, and that feeling's happening to me, and it's sort of an accident.

It's not something that I caused or something that I brought about. I and the feeling are meeting each other randomly. Feelings come up, and I'm the victim of my feelings.

Now strip away that false sense and see the reality, which is that you've been brought to this mind, and that feeling has been brought to this mind. You've been brought here to feel it, and it's been brought here to be felt by one karma that you did in the past. Karma never misses a beat.

Karma is airtight. You never have a feeling appear in your head and you to be there in your head to feel it, but that you did something to someone or you thought something, and everything is perfectly, it's a perfect ecology. Everything is happening exactly as it should.

That feeling was created by something you said or did or thought about someone else, and then you're there to feel it, and you've brought both of them to this head to have this meeting, and see it that way. And so there are no accidents, and you always get exactly what you deserve, and you're always having the feeling that you deserve. Now go back to the feeling, and then get in touch with your judgment about that feeling.

This is a good feeling. This is a bad feeling. It's a good thing I'm having this feeling.

It's a bad thing I'm having this feeling. And then strip away the gaccha, meaning the sense that that judgment is automatic or necessarily the case, and look at the feeling again and try to see it in a different light. See that your judgments about your feeling are constructs.

They're not inherently correct or incorrect. It's a construct. So look at your feeling again, but this time try to see it in a different light, like maybe this feeling could be a very useful thing.

What can I use this feeling for? I won't automatically judge it one way or the other. It's not necessarily one way or the other.

I could use this feeling for something else. And now we're up to Madhyamika. Go back to the feeling, just the feeling.

See if it's changed in the last few minutes. Now try to get the sense that lower Madhyamika school would say how ignorance feels about that feeling. Ignorance looks at that feeling and says that feeling is out there from its own side.

It's occurring from its own side. I cannot affect that feeling. It is occurring from its own side.

The way it's occurring, and none of it is due to my participation. That feeling is independently existing from its own side, and whether or not I feel it doesn't depend on my efforts or my state of mind. It exists from its own side.

In the lower Madhyamika way, lower Madhyamika school, the independent group, this is ignorance about that feeling, that it has some existence from its own side exclusively. So try to get that sense of, try to pretend to have that kind of ignorance that looks at that feeling and says this thing is coming from its own side, and it must feel that way. Then strip away that gaccha, that self-existent idea, and go to what they consider wisdom, which is that half of that feeling is coming from its side, and half of it depends on how I look at it.

This is the state of mind that says if you do lojong, you can transform problems. And look at your state of mind and purposely take it up a notch. Like if you're having a neutral feeling or a slightly good feeling, try to take it up a notch to a solid good feeling.

Think of your favorite cookie, or think of your favorite song, or try to move it up a notch. Move it up another notch. Think of the one person you've loved the most in this world, and try to picture them very clearly and try to feel that emotion for them.

So consciously and purposely move it up another notch. And then consciously move it up another notch, like try to remember the most pleasurable minute or two minutes you've ever had in your life. Try to consciously examine your life and find the one or two minutes of greatest pleasure you ever had, and bring your mind up to that.

Okay, then go back to normal, okay? Go back to if we're ready to go into number six. I imagine it like glasses, and you know those clip-on sunglasses, like now clip-on ignorance number six, okay?

And you're still looking at the same object, so the glasses are still there, but now you've got a different color clip-on filter, and that's going to be ignorance flavor six. Ignorance flavor six is just about the same as number five. In other words, both the Madhyamika schools are basically denying the same thing, that a thing could come from its own side.

So try to, again, imagine that your feelings are coming from their own side, and they don't depend on anything else, that you couldn't change them. Very important here, try to imagine that your feelings are a product of external causes. You know, whether you're having a good feeling right now depends on what you had for breakfast, or whether you have a good feeling now depends on whether LMB has a good cooling system or heating system, or whether you're having a good feeling now depends on whether the people around you were nice to you this morning.

That's a kind of ignorance, and try to focus on that. It's what you really believe, that your feelings are being produced and affected by the conditions or the circumstances around you at the present moment, and that's why you're having this feeling. You're having this feeling because your body's in pretty good shape today, and your back's not hurting so much, and you had a good breakfast, and everyone was pretty nice to you this morning.

So that's an ignorant belief, and focus on that. Now, here's the real truth. You strip away that gākjā, strip away that perception that that's why you're having the feeling you're having, and then now go to the truth.

And this is the highest truth, this is the ultimate truth, this is the one you use for all your practice of Buddhism, and especially Tantra. So you look at your feeling as a projection. Remember the pen, the cylinder and the pen, and the chewable thing?

Focus on your feelings as if they were the cylinder. They're just neutral, they're blank. And then whether or not you're having a good day today has nothing to do with the people around you, has nothing to do with what you had for breakfast, has nothing to do with whether your back hurts.

It's only a projection, a perception that's being forced on you by what you did in the past. So, independent of what's going on around you, you're going to feel good or bad depending on what you did in the past, whether you kept your vows in the past, whether you kept your ethical way of life. There's no other cause for the way you're feeling right now except the good or bad that you did to others in the past.

And that ends the meditation. Then you... It's considered very inauspicious to leave that lama hanging in front of you so you bring him or her up into the air and they get smaller and they rotate around so they're facing the same way as you and they come down onto your head.

And you bring them down to the level of your heart just in front of your backbone. And they're in like a little capsule, like a pea. Again, if you look at it from the outside, it's about quarter inch across or even less.

But if you put your mind inside, it's this big, spacious, beautiful meditation chamber, beautiful light, beautiful scent, beautiful lotus and lama sitting on that, on top of a brilliant moon disk and very happy with you, very pleased that you're finally getting it right. And thinking about emptiness is probably the highest virtue you can collect. So, then dedicate it and see light going out of your lama's heart, like golden light, and then the golden light coming out of your chest and then spreading understanding of emptiness in the world.

Okay, and then relax for a minute.

[Speaker 2]
Session 5 continues on the next CD.