Базовый курс ACI 1: Основные учения буддизма (2019, Аризона), занятие 6

[Speaker 1]
Okay, thank you. So, like many Buddhist classes, this is a kind of a depressing class. The desire to stop our future lives and the anticipations of taking future lives.

There's a misperception or a misinterpretation in Buddhism about this subject. Regarding future lives, a lot of people come to this conclusion, well, this life isn't working out for me, it's just not working. The karmas are not really helping and I'll just bank on my next life and just project my actions toward my next life.

And that's in our, really in our philosophical thinking, incorrect. You want to get out of this future lifespan, this cycle. You want to remove yourself from this endless suffering of the sunsark circles that we create on an everyday basis.

And so, part of the idea of stopping the desire for future lives entails the three principal paths. And primarily, we can focus on the renunciation and the realization of we're tired, we must get out on this, this lifetime. We do not want to do this again.

It's almost like the disgust becomes an obsession and we prove everyday that life is suffering. And we prove that the aspects of the Four Arya Truths are real everyday when we get up. And so, I've read the reading, you know, I didn't know I was going to do this until today, so I did a fast track reading of the actual commentary.

And the verses are beautiful. I suggest that you read some of them. The reading is really lovely.

I'm going to read some of the verses and then we'll talk about it. And really, the crux of the course of this class is to stop the desire for having a future lives. And here we go.

So, think over and over how deeds and their fruits never fail. And the cycles of suffering never fail. We must stop the desire for our future lives.

So, in that context, right, the desire for the future, we normally think, you know, I hope my future births can really get into a realm that's going to be pleasurable. And we have this kind of understanding of, you know, the death in the realms. We know that there are different realms of existences, right?

How many know that course? Yeah. So, we're in the desire realm, correct?

And then there's a form and formless realm. And within the desire realm, we have different aspects that include lower than human and higher than human. And, you know, we're not animals.

We're not hungry ghosts. We're not in lower hell realms. Hot or cold hell realms.

We're not in demigod or pleasure realms, which are in this realm, but also invisible beings who live in those realms. But interesting in our context of wanting to be born in one of those realms is also this feeling that we're going to, in a sense, be removed from our suffering. We really want to be born in one of these realms in certain traditions.

We actually have meditations to actually design to be born in one of those higher realms. A lot of meditations are designed to go to what we call the form or formless realms, which are extremely pleasurable. And very, very, in life years, millions of years.

We kind of relate it sometimes to the Christian heaven. This idea of eternal heaven. But we know in our teachings, we know in the teachings of the wheel of life that these realms will completely end into a lower rebirth.

It's guaranteed. Because the amount of merit to stay in these realms is so enormous. And you're not truly creating a continuation of your merit to stay there.

And so, ultimately, you fall into a much lower realm. And then we say the human desire realm is probably the launch pad and the best instrument to get enlightened in one lifetime. To remove the suffering.

To remove the idea that future realms could potentially give me an advantage or more pleasure or more promise. But that's not the case. We don't want to go there.

So, to get this idea of I'm tired is the first major step. The first understanding that renunciation has to be the cornerstone to begin the work in this lifetime to get out in this lifetime. And so, in the process of karma, we must learn the correlations of karma and how it functions.

And I think Connie did a great job on the PowerPoint again. Thank you, love. So, the laws of karma.

Who can tell me the first one? Yeah, you can say like makes like. The idea that you plant a seed, you know, to find a partner and then you do the four steps.

And then, hopefully, with the right motivation and the fertilization of different rejoicing components brings you that partner. The male man delivers it. The male woman delivers it to you.

Guaranteed. Similar result. You take care of lonely people.

It's a component. It's the actual action that will create the seeds for you to find the partner. And it's not that simple.

There are very subtle parts to all of this. You know, what is your intention and what are the components of the intention that you're about to embark on in creating a seed. So, in that sense, you know, we keep it basic in DCI.

We say, you know, you plant watermelon seeds, you're going to get watermelons. You, you know, do a banana plantation, you get bananas. You're not going to get, you know, artichokes.

Like makes like. And it, you know, the function of karma. I said earlier today to a lot of you that were here that it's more subtle than understanding emptiness.

That the tapestry of weaving karmic seeds can be designed for your future. You can design what you want to walk into six months from now, a year from now, six years from now, twelve years from now. You are doing it whether you're conscious of it or not in this room right now.

So, let's do it consciously and create what we want and what we want to avoid. It's so important to kind of, I don't know, sit back and understand that your seeds got you in this room for countless lifetimes maybe. These seeds are so extraordinary in this room.

You found the Dharma in this room. Somehow or another you, you know, all of us should do this. Congratulations.

Thank you very much Josephine or Joe for my past karmic seeds. I finally got to the Diamond Mountain University School for, for the ultimate goal. For seeing emptiness directly and ultimate final enlightenment.

So, we must have planted remarkable seeds. Do we remember them? I don't know.

I, I, I don't, you know, I don't, I don't know my past lives. I don't spend much time thinking about them. We live in a town where there's more past life regression therapists than New York City.

You just go to the Whole Foods bulletin board and there's like six people that will hypnotically bring you back and give you some kind of like, you know, a moment of a past life. It doesn't interest me but people like it and it may help someone. I don't know.

So, like makes like and that is such a quintessential Eureka. Like it's a, okay, I get it. Watermelons make watermelons.

My God. That's simple and elegant and let's not complicate it. And then a four-step program or a four-step idea can guide you into the proof of that.

And we always say when we're on tour, how many people that show up in a 2,000 room auditorium will actually take this home and, and do the litmus test. Will actually try it. We think it's less than 10%.

That people hear it and like it but there's some other seed in their minds that don't allow them to actually embark on the adventure of seeing if it really works. And then you come back next year to the following city and at the break we're all standing there to answer questions and somebody will come up and say, like, I tried it. I have, I found my partner or I actually turned my business around or all of the above.

You know, in it, in that moment you've done your job. You know, they remember that you were in front of them the year before and they just want to tell you in this beautiful rejoicing way that, that karmic correlation of doing the four steps functioned and they got what they wanted. And in a way, that's the reward the teacher can really be, you know, in a good way proud of.

Because that, that was a life changing moment for that person and your seed saw them be happy about that. They're going to work it because if it worked once, it will work over and over and over. And these laws are a foundation to all of our lives, to consciously plant our future.

We gave you what the four forces yesterday or today, I'm sure, I'm losing track of time. Which is the antidote to lessen the results of our negative karma or remove the obstacles. Another cornerstone of fundamental Buddhist ideals and ideas and proofs.

So, yes, like makes like. Good results come from good deeds, bad results come from bad deeds. Comfort to know there are laws, who makes them.

Without laws chaos, farmer plants corn and pineapples come up. Next slide. So, karma increases exponentially.

Geshe-la likes to use this idea that, he calls it the waiter's test. If a waiter doesn't understand a word that you mention, don't use it. So, when I was looking at the word exponentially, I thought how many people, if you went to a restaurant next week and you basically said something like, can you exponentially scramble my eggs a little bit more quickly?

Will they understand that? And it's true, what would be a better word to say other than exponentially? Maybe expand, that's an easier word to, does it give the same explosive, explodes.

The idea, when we taught this course in 2017 of January, I think it was you Stanley, Geshe Michael said, okay, if karma expands every 24 hours twice, doubles, how many seeds will you plant in a four-step program? Like if you pull together an idea and you plant the seed, you do the first step, you find a person who wants the same thing, you just do it, you do, you're rejoicing. It should exponentially double every day.

And when, I don't know, when you did the numbers, it was 31 trillion at day 24. Some, you know, outrageous number of the exponential expansion of karmic seeds. The idea that our seeds right now are ripening at 65 a second, which is creating what?

Every aspect of your conscious reality, using the senses but also the mind. Everything you're thinking, everything you're seeing, smelling, tasting, touching, everything. Pleasant, unpleasant, neutral, indifferent, it's all happening in 65, like a movie.

And in a good meditation, what happens? You can slow the movie down really slowly. And potentially start to see moving and projecting out to watch the reality happen before your very eyes.

It's possible. It's one of the real reasons to meditate. Can you catch the seed opening and creating your reality?

It's possible. And all of you will do it someday. So the exponential factor of seeds makes the whole wonderful, remarkable, karmic possibility, what?

Possible. Now, think about it. If I plant a seed by giving, I don't know, maybe Judy, you know, Geshe Michael is giving tons of hundred dollar bills away.

Why is he doing that? I mean, word is a recipient of maybe, you know, a third of my annual income. I mean, because, you know, why?

Why is he doing this? What's his personal, you know, motivation? Well, he's showing us, number one, the exponential factor.

If he's giving a hundred dollars away in a DCI tour, he's guaranteeing in two to five weeks he'll get a thousand bucks. You know, he makes it very clearly simplified. But, I don't know, I would think, well, you know, basically what he's doing is really, we talk about endowments for our non-profits.

Like, in ten years, could we raise five or ten million dollars? You know, to make our Diamond Mountain secure, make ACIP secure, ACI having some kind of a wonderful, you know, nest egg that we don't worry about spending our precious time raising money. You know, theoretically, this is what I came up with, that that's one of his modus operandi.

And so, when he's on tour, he'll give thousands of dollars away. Now, he's giving three hundred dollars to people in the audience. And it is this idea that seeds will exponentially double every single day if you know what to do.

And, I don't know, the sky's the limit here. Like, what do you want? Well, I don't know, I want to stick around and see what happens for the next 25 years.

You know, come on, like, this is the most exciting thing on the planet to me. You know, our beautiful minds waking up to the possibility of changing exponentially the seeds of the planet. To perceive a much more, what, harmonious world.

It's not looking so good out there in my seed, you know, projected life. It feels a little bit threatening, as a matter of fact. And so, we as practitioners, if we understand the exponential factor of planting seeds that you're doing 65 a second, wow!

Think of the factor of change and possibility if we do it much more consciously. Much more, I don't know, for the benefit of others like. How do we begin the practice of planting the seeds for not just our own self-interest, but for the benefit of as many people as we can imagine.

For the benefit of those who are planting seeds in the wrong way. And getting results that are creating a lot of violence in our world. You get the idea, I think, right?

I mean, now we're talking nuclear power here. We're talking a small seed of a thought going through the mind every single, what, second. There's thoughts going through the mind.

What would happen if you begin to control that factor? Or you canceled out the thoughts that are creating negative possibilities in your reality. Because it's not like this big wheel going around, samsara, you know, this 12 links of dependent origination, you know.

It's just going around and you're caught in it. Well, yeah, we're all caught in it. We're definitely caught in it.

But it's these thousands of tiny little mini samsaras that we're creating on a daily basis. They're little tiny seeds that, you know, begin to manifest in unpleasant forms. Pick your flavor.

I don't know, I'm getting, we had a Pilates class today. It was like a tune-up for me. It was like fantastic.

Like my body was achy from the other two classes. But for some reason the Pilates things kicked in and I felt like I just got like a lube in an oil kind of, you know, checkup. And my God, some kind of beautiful seeds ripened in that class.

Where did that come from? Teaching, you know, tough-ass classes in different places. I love to teach yoga because I think it's one of the exponential factors for becoming a great meditator.

Because it's dealing with subtle mind and body. And so, you know, to have a result like that happen is so beautiful. You know, I can bank on that being a component of when I was teaching maybe a month and a half or two months ago at SCIM.

So, we have to learn this system and we have to begin to practice it. We have to begin to meditate on these karmic correlations. Next.

So, there's this idea also that if you didn't do karma you'll never get a result. This is interesting because it gets into expectations. The disappointments in life.

You know, the links that... How many disappointments have we had in the last, I don't know, year? I have a few.

Why? Why do we have like expectations that we assume will happen if we do certain things? But then we get disappointed when they don't.

Because we didn't plant the seed for it. It didn't work. As simplified as the four steps are, it's the most elegant, you know, formula.

It's almost like a mathematical theory of relativity. It functions and it's easy and it's uncomplicated. And it works.

And so, we can't be disappointed when we don't get what we want. We can't be disappointed when the expectation that should arrive and it doesn't happen. We shouldn't get disappointed because we didn't plant the seed.

And so, this is what comes about if you didn't do the karma, you'll never meet the result. And there's a debate in my mind about that because as we're doing 65 a second right now, right? Are we also creating karmas at the same time?

Sure we are. We're creating karmas right now. It's happening right now.

Result. More karmas. Right after.

There's only a tiny moment of change when another karma is created. We create karmas with body, speech and mind, right? We create karmas in our actions.

We create karmas with our speech. We create karmas with our thoughts. Which are the most powerful?

Yeah, our thinking. It gets us in the most trouble. And I don't know, three-year retreat was one of these like amazing eye-openers about how the functioning of patterns of thoughts in my mind were so hardwired into a subtle consciousness that they weren't in the front and format of my constant thinking process.

They were just behind it. They were just behind this veil. And it would be funny because I wouldn't be in deep, subtle mindfulness.

I'd be washing the dishes and then suddenly I would see the watcher's mind watching a pattern of thought systems that I've had for 50 years that was actually creating suffering in my life. It was like, oh my God, I've been judging that person for like 45 years. And it started when I was 17.

And I remember when that happened. You start to actually begin to unveil patterns of thinking that are always going on just behind the radar of your conscious mind. And that's cool.

Because when that begins to happen, you're beginning to erase that pattern for good because you just brought it to the conscious mind and you're seeing the results of suffering in a mini-samsaric cycle that's been going on for three or four decades. So, those were more important moments in a way in my three-year retreat than these deep, subtle other places that happen in meditation. But without the meditation, would I have that result?

I don't think so. You see, it's resulting in the so-called conventional world of ordinary things. Washing dishes, driving a car.

Having that Mahamudra watchdog meditation or a thought process is not something we just do for 45 minutes on the cushion. We do it in our world. We're always mindful of what the processes are of how we're interpreting our reality.

So, the third law of karma is this neutralizing aspect of if you don't plant the seed, you're just not ever going to get a result. And we've all been there many times of, you know, why didn't I get the promotion at work? Why can't I afford a two-week vacation in Bali?

Why can't, you know, I don't know, all the above? Just think of the things that we would like or expect to get or have that we don't get or have. There's something that we call oxygen money in the diamond cutter system.

It's a very beautiful idea. And it's about having money so the mind doesn't have to worry about it. That it's just in the background that you can sleep at night and know it's okay, I'm planting oxygen money.

You know, I'm not interested in making millions of dollars. I'm interested in being comfortably sound and not worry about financial burden. And I love that because if you're planting seeds, and Connie, my wife, is so good with this.

I'm always like, okay, we better double down over here. You know, we better give more. And I'm saying, we can't afford it, you know.

But she's right, just double down and just let it go and rejoice that you had enough cash to give to Diamond Mountain in your wallet because you want to keep the seeds going to be here. So oxygen money is cool. You can actually relieve the fact that the behind-the-scenes anxiety or the thing before you go to bed about not paying your bills is gone forever.

Because you're banking on a karmic level. You're planting the seeds and you're banking on a karmic level. It's no longer throwing money in a savings account.

And that is just a beautiful function of karma, if you know how to do it. So next, Jebuchu Misawa. Good news, you cannot avoid the results of your good deeds.

That's a nice thought, right? Good news, you cannot avoid the results of your good deeds. Well, not so good news because you can't avoid the results of your bad deeds either.

You know, we like to accentuate the positive, right? But we also have to realize that, you know, in the karmic course we talk about dirty white seeds or stained karmic seeds. There's always some aspect in our process of consciously creating karmic seeds that has, we grasp, we know we want some result, you know.

We want it, we want this, I don't know. Yeah, we can do all the, you know, there's something called the three spheres of giving. You know, the giver is empty and the action of giving is empty and the receiver is empty and, you know, we get profoundly involved in the emptiness of the three aspects of giving.

And that's great, you know, but in the back of your mind, at least mine is like, okay, six months I'll have another six thousand bucks, you know. I don't know, there's something there that makes the karma stained. There's still this interested grasping to know, yeah, you know, I'm going to get a result.

And it's stained. So, in that course we say, very few people can create perfect seeds. Arias and above.

That the idea of the essence of emptiness of everything that we do has to be exponentially very high with the actual practice of seed planting. Whether it's, you know, giving things away to get money or whatever the component is. We have to really understand emptiness.

That also is charging it, not just rejoicing in the process of doing it. If the higher you understand emptiness, the much more powerful the seed is going to be planted. And, yeah, it's a process that we learn.

What about the objects that we choose to generate seeds guaranteed to give us good results? Say it again. Yeah, give me an example of a high object.

Say it again. Okay, a teacher, an authentic teacher, yeah. What else would be a high object?

Say it. Parents, who said parents? Yeah, parents.

What about ACI or Diamond Mountain or ACIP? Yeah, remember, yeah. ACIP Russia especially.

Yeah, I mean, it's funny. We, you know, we don't, in our system of high karmic objects, people do their due diligence when they give money away. It's like an investment.

At least people that feel that if you give a dollar to ACIP a day, you're in some way saving some part of a system that's bringing the ancient manuscripts to an end result of a translation of a page of data that would normally be hidden for hundreds of years, but suddenly that dollar goes to India and a woman inputs that page and it ends up in Sedona and a translator takes that page and translates it and makes another commentary on karma. So that process is fascinating. You get the merit of that with your dollar, you see.

You get, you're indirectly getting 10% to guarantee that the wisdom of whatever that's gonna bring forth into the world in a language that you understand, you'll get that karma. You'll get the wisdom from that page that you paid for. A dollar, I think it's $1.29 a page I figured out for everything that we input from start to finish. And that's not including inflation of the Indian rupee, which is like 70 right now. Everybody's complaining about it and I'm like, okay, everybody gets raises. But you see, the investment you make with a conscious contribution or a service to your teacher, a service to some noble cause, it doesn't have to be about saving text.

It can be about, I don't know, doctors without borders. They do amazing work. Any component that's serving humanity has a high karmic relationship to your action to give if you want to give something.

And so, karmic objects we have to think about. I think the other thing that is very interesting karmically is the reluctance to pay taxes in our world is interesting, right? That we don't want to part with my money to pay taxes.

And there's a great talent of people that know how to create loopholes to avoid paying taxes. And, you know, that has to do also with the correlation of honesty with the integrity of knowing that you are responsible for every aspect that's legal in your system wherever you are in the world. Because, you know, the karma of creating an illicit system to avoid paying what the responsible aspect of a citizen should be doing for their country will bounce back and kick you in a way that is really serious.

So, we have to learn correlations of karma. We have to understand the components of the subtleties of how we actually think about doing the actions of these four amazing steps. So, let's keep going.

It's funny. There are certain times in life with karma also. Maria was telling me and telling us today about how all of these seeds ripened in her life.

She had no desire to become an ACI teacher. She had no desire to follow this path. But within a two-month period, millions of seeds ripened and suddenly her life is transformed in a single two-month period.

And that happens in many parts of our lives. We meet a partner and get married. Boom!

Change of life. We have a child. Change of life.

We get the job of our dreams. Change of life. These build-ups of beautiful karmic seeds that suddenly burst into your reality and change everything about what it is for you.

And it also has to do with the point of death. Because in the process of death, what happens to your seeds? What actually is going on?

What's happening inside karmically to your reality? Everything is running out. Seeds are popping like crazy.

Your world is actually being destroyed. Your senses are closing down. All the seeds to see, hear, taste, touch, feel and think are dying.

Running out in this lifetime. And so, this comes into the whole point of what seed will take you, what karma is going to take you into the process of what? Your next rebirth.

I mean, essentially. And this is where we have to really work hard on our karmic seeds. Why?

Yeah. Geshe Michael's teacher used to watch the New York State lottery on Wednesday nights because it used to be millions, I'm sure it's millions of dollars more. There used to be a beautiful girl in a short mini skirt and she would come out on the stage and smile and they'd play all this happy music.

And they had these air systems where these balls, like ping pong balls were rolling and then she'd push a button and a number would come up, right? And then the number would be read and they'd have like 45 million viewers waiting to hear the number. But he always said, that's what's going to happen.

When those seeds are finalizing and that last seed ripens, that's taking you to your next rebirth. Do you know where you're going? You see.

Where is that going to take you? And are you going to be fully engaged with the controlling of that at the point of the process of death? And that to me is probably one of the most fascinating things that I am obsessed about.

Maybe it has to do with my age, I don't know. But it had to do a lot with the three year retreat as well. So the karmas of the uncertainty now brings us to more depressing news.

And we have some slides to tell you about that. So the good news is there's only three questions to your homework today. So that's pretty easy.

And all the answers are being told to you right now. So life has no certainty or no security. Everything is totally unreliable.

No plan is fail safe. Well, that's depressing. Isn't it?

You should say no, because I know the four steps. I can design my future. Of course it's not.

I know exactly how to navigate that. I can do it. We have 18 courses and then another 18 courses and then we have other things that will guarantee that we can kill this idea.

We can kill it for this life and beyond. But for the meantime, do you agree that life has no certainty and no security? Yeah.

I don't know if I'm gonna wake up tomorrow morning. I'm not sure. I can't guarantee it.

I don't have any premonitional moments of clairvoyance to say, you know, tomorrow morning at 8 o'clock you're gonna have a heart attack after eating the fruit at the Jason Kappa Center. I don't have that. It would be great in a way, right, to know.

And there are meditations to say why don't you sit down on the cushion tomorrow morning at 8 and take a meditation to say, you know what, at 11 o'clock is my last breath. Why don't I do a meditation on my death? Why don't we give death some space of certainty in our practice?

Why don't we actually sit on the cushion and do a death meditation and say, you know what, what would happen if suddenly at 10.45 tonight is my last breath? It's fun to get, put the code on of death and start thinking about the possibility that it could happen much more realistically than how we perceive it conceptually. You know, I'm still thinking, you know, well, you know, I'm healthy, you know.

I can do a good yoga practice and we eat well, you know. I have Medicare. I can go to any doctor.

But come on. I have another 10 years. I know I do.

It's certain. It's not. We don't.

And we just have to get used to that and fit, put it on. Start to feel the sense that could it be possible that tomorrow morning at 8 a.m. I don't wake up. And practice with it.

And own it. And it's actually so liberating. It creates something.

It creates a mind space that is almost like a freedom that your fear or your back primal beginningless death birth system begins to be eliminated. It opens something up in your mind stream. It's very beautiful.

So, in your tool kit, you should have a really good death meditation. Or a couple. Because we don't know where we're going to go.

We might as well look at it now. There's something in our system called the fourth flower in the DCI system. And we have the four flowers.

And it's the results of our karmic seeds, right? And the last one is that we are literally designing what we're walking into after. In the future.

Which is implied because we don't talk about reincarnation. Our future life. And it's kind of beautiful in a way.

The fourth flower. The third flower is creating this beautiful reality here in this room. You're walking into your everyday existence by your seeds.

And it's an enormous beautiful possibility of what do I love about it and what I don't like about it. What I can change that I don't like about it with seed planting systems and the four forces. But about the future life.

Can we design it? Well we first want to get enlightened in one lifetime. We first want to have the direct perception of emptiness in this lifetime.

And if you're here in the room, I think you're more than 50% home. Honestly. I really believe that.

And I just, you know, I bought, I took the Kool-Aid and I bought the package. And I really believe it's possible that all of you in this room have the potential in this lifetime to get out of the wheel and have a few maybe future rebirths before you're completely gone and finished. It's possible.

We have to make space in our hearts for that. We have to understand that the habituation of countless beginning lives are pushing us against that. We don't believe it.

We're hardwired to think that's not possible. So it's cool to start redesigning, you know, your thinking that way. That none of us in this room don't have this possibility.

If you're here, and Geshe Michael has said it twice, I think, since we've taught the training and the teachings of Lam Rim, that if you're here, you're one in a million. Or one in ten million. And you gotta, like, you gotta take the Kool-Aid.

You gotta believe it. I believe it, and I think I want you to kind of think about it more. There's always, in my world, a hesitation to come to Diamond Mountain.

Even now. I mean, I lived here for three and a half years. But even now, there's this backwater mind of mine.

Seeds are popping to say, you know, it's always a bit of a gauntlet. You know what a gauntlet is? It's always, there's some karma that will ripen unexpectedly when I hit this land.

And there's some karma that is unpleasant that I begin to feel when I'm here. That I have to go through. And it's always been there.

Even after, you know, all of what I've done here and what we've done in Three Year Retreat. And that happened again when I arrived. I had just gotten off a plane and that I could excuse the discomfort of coming here and the jet lag.

But there are seeds that ripen here for me. I don't know if that's for you, but there are seeds that ripen here for me that feel uncomfortable because I'm going into this other aspect of myself and I don't know. The perception of seeds for Diamond Mountain is that it's extremely powerful for me.

And I can ripen things here that good, bad or indifferent, I will allow to happen. And those seeds are either extraordinary or something that I have to correct or fix. And maybe after the second day, it's just amazing.

Like something shifts and we're here together. We're hearing great teachings and I wouldn't want to be anywhere else on the planet. But there is something interesting how powerful this place, which I believe took 15 years to purify and has created something extraordinary just being here, karmically for all of us, can change your mind.

So take advantage of it. I'm just saying, karmically, you're at the right kind of place at the right time with the right components of your seeds to go deeper. And take advantage of that.

Bring yourself to the cushion more and more when you're here. I think things can ripen quicker. The time gap that we talked about earlier can just be quickened.

Things can ripen in certain places faster. And this is one of them, I believe. In order to escape the circle of life, one must take up beautiful white actions, plant good seeds and abandon black actions.

We must believe in the laws of actions and consequences all the time. And to do this, we must contemplate upon the actions and consequences. The four aspects of karma.

The four laws. There's another aspect that's the downside, that's depressing about negative seeds and deeds. And in the realms of existence there are lower realms.

And the whole philosophy of Buddhism talk about the hell realms, the cold realms of hell, the warm realms of hell, the animal realms, and of course the human and the demigod and the god realms. And it's not some self-existent place. It's right here in this room.

We're not talking about a place that is, you know, 180 kilometers down and 16 kilometers to the right and then make a short left and you'll enter that realm. But in the sense of this idea of karma and in the sense of what would it take for us to realize that renunciation is a foundation for getting free of the wheel. It might be a good idea to do a meditation on a lower realm.

It may be a nice idea to say, okay, you know, could I do a tonglen on the beings that are simultaneously at this moment suffering great, great pain. I used to do a lot of hot yoga, like Bikramish hot yoga. And so it's 105 degrees and it's like 102 or something and you you sweat.

And I used to do a tonglen and I would imagine all this like water pouring off my body would turn into like beautiful rain in the hot house and cool off the hot house and let those people rest from their agony and their, you know, just their innate suffering. In a way, we allow ourselves by admitting that there are these lower realms, these pleasure realms, in a way we can use the practice of extending our compassion and extending our renunciation to know that the uncertainty of karma can bring us to these realms. And so, if we could potentially start embracing the idea of doing a meditation for them, the seeds would be remarkable because our compassion would be off the charts to think that these beings are living simultaneously in the same moment but having a completely separate reality than us.

And it's, I don't know, it's a practice and it's in your reading and I thought I'd mention it because they suggest that. They suggest to do that. Give yourself a good meditation on one level of the hell realm in order to kind of bring that ultimate deep compassion for beings who are much less fortunate than us.

And so, you know, let's go through some of these last six aspects. I can't get no satisfaction. Always want more than we have.

Never satisfied. Yeah. So Mick Jagger had it right.

I can't get no satisfaction. It's pretty self-explanatory, right? We always want something else, right?

Say it again? Yeah, only the good things. Yeah.

Yeah, that's true. When's the last time you were unsatisfied? At dinner?

I don't know, like I took the wrong pasta. You know, there was the gluten-free soy macaroni and then there was the non-gluten pesto cheese macaroni and I didn't know the difference and I, you know, I was like anticipating. I love pesto and cheese, you know, and gluten and I, you know, and I took it and it's like, oh my God, that's not what I wanted.

It's the little things like that, you know, right? Little unsatisfaction. But the bigger things are in relationship to our materialistic reality.

You know, there's a statistic. China is 37% of luxury goods in the world. 30 of every Gucci or Louis Vuitton bag that gets sold in the world, a third of them or more gets sold in China.

You know, and a friend of ours had a bag and she said, see this bag? And she was just giving us an example. This cost $20,000 and I thought, my God, you know, that could pay for the ACIP input center for a year and a half in Nepal and it was like, I can't get over it, like it's a piece of leather and it has a nice handle and a little thing here that may be gold, I don't know, but it's fascinating that I find in China that they've reached a certain place of extraordinary wealth and materialism and it's, I can't get no satisfaction anymore. It's so cool because that's the beginning of what? The search.

The search for something different that's not going to disappoint them because you can only put so many of those in your closet and impress your friends and you get you could go to the black market and buy the fake Louis Vuitton for 29.95 and I don't, can people tell the difference? I'm not sure. But in any event, I think we are unsatisfied to some degree about ourselves and our personal life and that's a part of life but we can change that too, right?

Next. Yeah, this is a, another depressing moment. So we, yeah, we die over and over again and once we cross the veil we forget everything we ever learned.

Now that's depressing. Like all of the ACI training that we're about to embark on is going to like vanish at the point of the you know, last breath that we're going to have to re-navigate back to Diamond Mountain without a single trace of remembrance on how we got to this place. That's just so depressing.

What do we want to do? Get out now. Get out now.

As soon as possible. So, the other thing that's interesting is that we have such beginningless time experiences of our death. Right?

Hold on, Stephen. Like, we've died and shucked off bodies the size of these mountains. Piles of them.

Birth and rebirth. Every realm and of existence we've had some taste of it. We've experienced them.

And so, what can we do? Well, we certainly can learn and experience the three principal paths. That's the whole point.

The ultimate long rim, right? Get out and bring everybody with you. The whole game.

Get out and bring everyone with you. And come back and do it again if you want to. Or maybe you don't need to, but that's where we're going.

That's what we have to do. Stephen. Some people do.

I mean, I know people who have very clear distinctions of lives that they've had. You know, that they actually have the seeds to see them. I think you can develop that practice in your dreams.

A lot of people have lucid dream experiences of their past lives. And a lot of people in three year retreat had those experiences. It was quite clear that they could tap into the, I don't know, the hard drive of past lives.

The memories are there. But I think the other thing is that it's a protection device because if we actually experienced the hell realm that we were in 16 lives ago, it would be quite scary. So, you know, maybe it's also a protection device karmically to not want to know the last time we were, you know, I don't know, hacked away and then revived and done again.

So, but I think there's a real interesting in past lives in our time. And I think it's, you know, maybe it's valid. I don't know.

I'm not, I don't pursue it but I respect people who think that they could find an answer there. And there are people that are qualified to bring you back. I don't know anything about it but it doesn't matter really because this moment in time and the accumulation of beginningless karma is bringing you to this perfect moment which is awesome in Diamond Mountain.

The karmas you've accumulated are ripening right now in a tapestry of learning more Dharma. So, wherever you've been, God bless you, you're here. It's, you know, how many lifetimes did it take for you to get in this room is maybe the question.

You know, in the stories of the Buddha, you know, there's so many stories of how many lifetimes it took him to purify a karma. You know, like there's a story about a divisive speech thing that it took him 500 lifetimes being a monk to purify that karma. 500 lifetimes.

And that's something that the correlations get exponentially unfathomable. That, you know, if we did extremely bad karma, how many lifetimes would it take to finally purify that in the lower realm? It's much more kind of comforting to know that you design your future in this moment and you can design your future in any way you'd like.

That would be much more comforting. Why do we have to take our extension of our own deep compassion for others and swear that we want to save them? Why?

What's the correlation for us? Why do we want to just get ourselves out as opposed to bringing everyone else with us? We're all in it together, number one.

I mean, we're all in it together, right? There are only two kinds of beings according to our philosophy. Those who are out, Aryas, and those who are not.

If there's no other, or are hot, right, there are only two kinds of beings on our planet. According to us. And an Arya is on their way out.

An Arhat is even closer, if not on their last moment of life to get out. So, what does that say? We're in training to get out, but the component to get out is really to bring others with us mentally, you know, to think that for the benefit of others we must do it.

There's no other purpose, but for the benefit of others we must get out. We must. And that juice, that motivation will allow us the possibility of coming back and teaching it more and more and getting more and more people aware of the fact that they can get out as well.

But I, does anyone here, do you know your past life? Does anyone have an experience of it? Yeah?

Cool. Is it a good one? Yeah?

Crying. Ah. So it was a hard life?

Yeah. Okay. You see.

Okay. That's cool. Next.

We must take birth again and again. More depression. Yeah.

I mean, think of the pain of it. Let alone your mom. But, you know, it's just so painful.

I don't have memories of it, but, I don't know. It must be, you know, those memories are in there, but I don't remember. But, the process of going over and over and over having births and then dealing with this body, which is high maintenance, right?

Such high maintenance, this thing. Unbelievable how much we pour into this thing. You know, the consumption of it.

And we know a lot of beings that are friends of ours around the world don't have the privilege of having three meals a day. We don't. Everyone in this room, I can guarantee you, will have at least 10,000 meals in your fast forward over the next few years.

It's guaranteed. You're not thinking about next Friday's dinner, are you? Because you know, it's guaranteed.

You planted the seeds. That's not the case in lots of parts of the world. That just doesn't, it's not the case.

So, it's very beautiful. You know, we, we have the sustainability of also what? Leisure and fortune it's called.

We have it. It's part of who you are. You earned it.

You gained it. You did it. We're sitting in a room.

Beautiful beings are feeding us three meals a day. We have time to meditate and study and do yoga. It's just amazing.

It's a miracle actually. You know, it's totally a miracle. It's just, it's not ordinary or normal.

But we think it is. We take it as normal and it is not. It's extraordinarily amazing.

Amazing. So, yeah, we have to learn it again and again. Number five.

Yeah, relentlessly changing. Constantly changing status. Fortunes go up and down over and over again.

You probably heard this story but I, I'll tell it again. I told my, my students today we were kind of off, off course on some ideas. But in 2000 I quit my job and I was living in New York and I had worked for a company for 21 years.

I mean, that was one of my jobs but it was a career job and, and I, you know, it was a good company. I had a, what they call a pension plan or a retirement plan and I just threw money at it. You know, I just threw money in it and I thought, I met Geshe Michael and basically he said, you need to do this thing called ACIP and I said, okay, I'll do it.

And I quit at the age of 49. I'm like, that's it, I'm done. And so, the company said, oh, you know, you have all this money that you've accumulated and you need to move it and we can't manage it anymore and you take it and find somebody to invest it and I did and it was a student of mine in New York who was working for a financial house called Merrill Lynch who I think are gone now.

They're bought by some bank. And so, I was now in the process of doing a retreat and I, I had an opportunity to do a 30 day retreat and I, you know, closed my house in New York, went up to the Berkshires actually and did a beautiful 30 day retreat. It was my first real retreat and came home to like all my mail and I was going through my mail and I opened up the Merrill Lynch statement and there was like nothing left of my account.

Nothing. It was like about a thousand dollars out of this remarkable amount of money I thought, you know, I knew I had. And it was this bubble that burst in the tech companies in 2001.

Everything crashed and I owned all of those stocks. Every single one of them. I owned Worldwide Telecom and I owned Enron and I owned all of them and he put me into all these stocks and I'm looking at this thing and saying, you know what, I have to go back to work.

Like, oh my God. But I, something happened where I was not even upset. I was just like, okay, karma, I must have really screwed over people financially and he was waiting for me, you know, to come home and he called me and he just, he was devastated and I was, I was angry but I wasn't like, you know, okay, I'm a big boy.

I lost my whole pension plan and he apologized and I said, look, you know, that's just unbelievably, you know, just irresponsible. You put me into all these stocks. So did like 150,000 other people in New York lost everything.

It wasn't like I was the only one. Pension plans in California just died. It was just horrible and I just accepted it and I thought I can consult and take that but then he said, you know, I'm going to pay you back every penny and I said, forget it.

You don't have to. I, you know, I'm a big boy. I know what I did.

Don't worry. End of story but I'm not going to use you ever again. And so, so the karma was like, okay, you know, I got enough for a year but I better get my butt on the street and start looking for work and six months later I get a check in the mail for $70,000 and it's from my friend, Jay, and he just said, look, this will take a while but here's your first installment.

It will take about five years and I put it in the drawer and I called him and said, I'm not cashing that. That's ridiculous. You don't have to pay me a penny and he said, look, cash it.

I want you to have it and it's just what I want to do and he did that for five years every six months and that was a good karma, right? Boom. It was very cool and but there it is, right?

Right there. Like, voila. I, you know, I had to lose everything and then boom, back.

It came back in a different way, right? Karmically and I lived on that money for seven or eight years in New York and it allowed me to do ACIP so the ups and downs of life and the constant change of our health, the constant change of our emotional well-being or not well-being, the constant change of our relationships, come on. It's up and down and inside out all the time.

It's the fun house at the carnival when it comes to town so it's it's always changing. Next. Yeah.

So, John Lennon wrote a song called Instinct Karma, I think and one of the lines is like, you can't take nothing with you but your soul and it's the same thing, right? You must lose everything and you can only take your suitcase full of karmic seeds. You know, people that are in, you know, the I don't know, hospice care are really amazing because they see the process of dying and I've only done it a couple of times and I, my aunt was 95 and I went to to be with her.

I was kind of her, you know, she, she didn't have kids but I was very close to her and I stayed in her room for like five nights before finally she passed and I couldn't get over the neighbors who were in the same circumstances that were, had five or six or eight weeks to live or a month to live or whatever and there was so much, there was, the guy next to her was so angry, so angry that he was dying and he was yelling at his children and yelling at his wife and it was just, oh my gosh, you know, this is, this is horrible.

It was just such a reality check that that moment in time when when your seeds are just dropping your life away, your body is collapsing, your, you know, your mind is completely in a different state, um, is this kind of situation because there's nothing that you can take with you except your beautiful seeds you see and that's what we're here for. We want to create. You know, this is a projecting karma that's the ultimate important one of our careers.

And can we do it now? Yeah! We can do it now.

We know how to do it now. That's your next 18 courses. We'll teach you how to do it before you have to do it.

It's going to happen to you in your future. We, we figured it out and it'll work. And you can try it.

And Geshe Michael's already doing it to you. We did it a few years ago here. He gave you a great meditation practice on death.

So, um, yeah, that's the last one. Um, so, renunciation, I'm tired. Right?

It sprouts in a person's heart once he has meditated on the torments of life. Um, a sense of profound renunciation and comes only when you feel the total disgust, even for the supposedly good things of this revolving life. When you meditate, and when, when you've meditated thus and feel not even a moment's wish for the good things of this cyclic life, then you begin to think both night and day of achieving freedom, you've found renunciation.

And so, and it doesn't mean that you give your house and car away. It doesn't mean that. You have to, it's here and here.

It's in your heart. It's not about, you know, I don't know, giving everything away. You don't have to do that.

renunciation is a state of mind. It's a state of love. And it's a state of deep commitment to begin the process of getting out.

And renunciation is really the special cause that brings you to what we call great compassion. It's really the fully engaged aspect of the link to really open our hearts up. To the capacity we're at now and the capacity you will have in a year, five years, ten years.

Questions? Any questions? No.

Yes. Maybe. Yes?

No. Ah. Yes.

One has a question. Yeah, one. You got a suntan, man.

You look amazing. Mmm.

[Speaker 2]
Oh, you mean you don't matter?

[Speaker 1]
Like, you don't, you don't need to get in line because it's already taken care of and they've got the whole thing. Yeah, it's kind of like you're seeing them as self-existent Buddhas that are, you know, are basically in it, you know, for themselves in a way. Well, come on.

Well, let's relate it to our reality of this current, the current reality that you experience in the world. Does it look like you don't, you're not needed? Mmm-hmm.

I think so, right? I mean, you know, if, if that's the case and you're needed and there is the possibility that the only person who can do that is you for this particular, you know, moment in time, you must do it because I'm not seeing my world the way I ideally want to see it. And that to me is the ultimate, you know, example of changing my seeds, to change the world, to see it be essentially much more evolved.

You know, Geshe Michael says we're the last planet in the solar system, like they're waiting for us. Like, it's just like we're the candy cap children. We haven't gotten it yet.

And to some degree, the metaphor functions. I mean, I, I want to believe that we, you know, we have all the capabilities in this body and mind to do it. And if it's just doing it for the benefit of the current dilemma that we see, that I perceive in our world, that I must try, I must.

And they're waiting for you to help them. It's not like, you know, they know what you're, you know, if you're beginningless and they know your past and your present and your future, right? They know pretty, they probably know like, you know, give them another like 20 years, they'll be with us or something.

It's already, they already know that about you. We must, you know, become the fullest evolutionary possibility of this human body and mind. There's, there's nothing to do other than that.

Because then, you know, you know, the potential for you, the potential is exponentially impossible to even have our minds get around it. The idea that the possibility of an omniscient mind emanating countless bodies in, probably in this room, for us to perceive as people that are helping us get out, don't you want to be a part of that? Yeah.

I think so. And maybe, maybe you're suspicious enough to think that that question was for me to give some kind of an answer for everybody to hear or something. One of the things that I said earlier today was that in the sutra system, our enemy is to have things look self-existent.

It's the curse of our dilemma. But in the esoteric system, it's to see things as ordinary. It's the curse.

It's the thing we must remove. And, you know, we have to begin that practice. It's not something that is hardwired.

We have to change the seeds to get a taste of when it doesn't become normal. And that, you know, a question like that is not normal. You know, it gets you thinking that, you know, then do I sit back and there's really nothing that I have to do?

No. We must see the extraordinary possibility of a fully evolved mind. Of an enlightened being.

That's the peak of evolution for this human body and mind. And we know how to do it. So, we must say that ordinariness, it has to be killed.

We cannot allow it to be a part of our normal day of ordinary life. We must see the extraordinary nature of every day. The precious, beautiful nature of every single day of our life.

What can happen today? Who can I meet? What practice should I do this morning?

How can I apply it to my all-day mindful mind of meditation that I had in the morning? Can I bring it to the world? Can I practice it?

Can I help others skillfully? It's just the mission of what we're all about. So, I thank you Thank you.

Anybody else? Oh, boy. I only have eight minutes.

Yes.

[Speaker 2]
Yeah.

[Speaker 1]
Well, it's in correlation with the direct perception of emptiness. And it happens directly after. When the four Arya truths are self-realized, which are really sixteen, and they're all self-realized.

And you actually have the experience of this, you know, this great, these beautiful golden rays of light, you know, coming out of you, out of this deep, deep, beautiful love. And so, it's the other side of the coin when you come down off the direct perception of emptiness. And that's the second part, part B of the direct experience of bodhicitta.

Can you get tastes of it? Absolutely. There's definitely taste in deep meditation.

Real tastes, you know, that you can take bank on. It's not like it's just, but it's not, when you have that experience, it doesn't go away. That's the difference.

It doesn't go away. It's there for the rest of your life. So, there's so many different explanations of bodhicitta, you know, and I don't know them all, but I can say that in our practice of becoming practitioners and having the wish to gain bodhicitta and do that in our meditation, you should be feeling a subtle difference of how you express yourself to the world.

There should be, you know, an expression of, oh, my gosh, I am not the same person I was a year ago, and my possibility of expanding to others has gotten bigger. You know, it's wider, and my possibility that's part and parcel of the evolution of our practice. And it, you know, you get those tasted through your retreat.

It's very sweet. They say, it's like the, it cracks open. They say in some Buddhist systems, the iron vase cracks open, and it starts to pour out of you.

And you can have that in a good retreat. You can have a taste of it. And then you know how to navigate back to it.

You know how to go back and see if you can do it again and again and again. Okay. One more.

Two more, maybe. Oh, an aria. Yes, I think it's pretty clear that an aria may not really know in the early stages of their life.

Geshe Michael is very clear about that. He said, it's very interesting, when they choose the reincarnation of some great lama, the kid is spoiled. He's special.

And he's kind of royalty in the monastic system. So he gets spoiled. And it's questionable, is he really the reincarnation of so and so.

But Geshe Michael said that suddenly around the age of 15 or 16 it's like the massive amount of seeds start opening up. And they embody that being that they were. that they're actually, he said that about the most recent when he turned around 16, he was just a real character and a great jokester but then he just got serious and he became such a great debater and you saw that this enormous like ripening happened at the age of 15 or 16 and then it just took off and that was pretty much like the clarity that you know he you know the direct perception of emptiness can happen again and again to somebody who's seen it in each life it's not like it's just once the next life could jump put you back in there you see and also in the direct perception of emptiness you see when you're going to get enlightened you're actually you actually see that you actually experience that when it's going to be how many lifetimes in front of you it's going to happen yeah thank you then thank you very much oh one more okay yeah left what yeah yeah yeah yes yeah yeah I you know that's something that we're all dealing with how to bring up your bodhichitta and for me it's meditation it really is like you start with you know tong len start with one human being who is in pain and suffering and we all know that one human being who is in emotional pain or physical pain or mental pain you start there and you know you embody the feeling that you can help them deeply and you literally are in investing in imagining to take their pain away and destroying it that must give you a result of wanting to help the suffering of beings that must give you a full on seed to even see that person get better but even more so to have your heart open to the fact that you can help those and more than just one so that's just a single example right we underestimate the power of that practice it was a secret practice for many many years and it now is kind of open but it has the power to understand emptiness of the possibility of your seeds deeply wanting to help them your seeds changing to see them improve or get better and so that's a start and we start with potatoes and carrots don't start with you know you know I don't know you know thinking that you can save 6,000 people from starvation start small and then build on it and then use the practices that are related to bodhicitta in your meditation and then take it into the world do little things for people who you understand may have some problems little seeds matter and we must learn the rejoicing of the tiny seeds we do all day long that we don't accredit ourselves with giving somebody a cup of tea or opening up a door or any of these tiny little things we must make them bigger because they can generate something deeper in our hearts for bodhicitta thank you thank you so much