Базовый курс ACI 3: Прикладная медитация (2019, Аризона), занятие 1

[Speaker 1]
Welcome to Diamond Mountain. It's very exciting to see friends from many, many countries. It's kind of strange to see you here in the desert, especially Singaporeans.

It doesn't rain here, okay? There's no Orchard Road. But it's beautiful to see you here, Mr. Moon. Welcome from Guangzhou. Good to see you guys. Yao Li from Taiwan, who's been avoiding coming here.

She and her group have been a big supporter of ACI, and we love you, and everyone. There's many, many countries here, many people. Thank you for coming.

We have a busy night, so I won't talk too much, which is unusual. We're going to do the first class of ACI, number three. Are your earphones work okay?

How am I? Okay. And then we'll, so we'll do the first class of ACI, number three, and then we'll do Lama Chodpa.

Lama Chodpa is probably the most famous prayer in Tibet. I remember the first time I met Tibetans, I walked into a Lama Chodpa by accident, and it was, you know, it's amazing. And so, we're going to do this special prayer.

It's a long prayer, the poetry is very beautiful, it's very old, maybe we should rewrite it, I don't know. But the main thing is to think about all your teachers in your life, okay? And we're all very, very lucky, you're still alive, you can still walk, you had beautiful parents who taught you to speak, how to dress, how to not bite other people, and we don't think about it, but your parents taught you many, many things.

Your first teachers. And then in the school, people taught you how to read. Without reading you would be like a blind person, and they taught you how to behave.

We didn't like those teachers, but they were good. And then we had our, later our college teachers, and we had religious teachers, many of us our whole life. Priests, or rabbis, or imams.

So, we are lucky that we've had such beautiful teachers. And the prayer tonight is to honor all the teachers in your life. One man told me his dog was his teacher.

That's okay, my dog taught me a lot, so it could be a dog, okay? But, I think the most important teacher is the people you don't like, and they help you practice Buddhism. Just imagine if everybody was very sweet, you couldn't practice anything.

So, we are lucky to have all these teachers, okay? So, tonight we will honor them. And it's a long prayer, and there's a lot of complicated things, and don't worry much about it, okay?

Just keep that mood that you wouldn't be here without your parents and your other teachers. We are really very lucky, we are all very very lucky. I had great teachers.

I still have great teachers, so we are lucky. So, think about your teachers. That's how we start a retreat at Diamond Mountain, we always do the prayer to the teachers, okay?

And it's always a good thing to do, when you start something important, okay? During that prayer we hand out tsok. Tsok means, it's an emptiness meditation.

They will hand you a glass of, I don't know what it is, alcohol. Don't drink the whole thing, that's not allowed for Buddhists, but it's traditional to take one, left hand, third finger, take one drop and put it on your tongue. Then there's a small dish of, we call bala, special substance, and you can take one piece and bite half, and keep half, okay?

If you don't understand why to do it, and you don't feel like doing it, you don't have to, okay? But it's meat, and the other is alcohol. We make a special prayer during the Lama Chöpa.

We pray that these things are not available in the world in the future. Like right now, even in Arizona, if you go to buy a human finger, they will not sell to you. But they will sell you everyone else's finger.

Then I think in the future nobody will sell anybody's fingers, you know? So, we make a prayer that these things that shouldn't exist in the future. Alcohol killed my mother, killed my father, and it's a terrible stupid thing, like marijuana, and it will hurt you for the rest of your life.

So, we take it, we take those two things and we think about a prayer that we wish these things will not be sold anywhere in the future, okay? They're going to give you a cookie. The cookie is good to eat.

I will take three or four. Just kidding. But these three items, they represent thinking about emptiness.

All things have emptiness. Terrible things have emptiness, like meat or alcohol. Sweet things have emptiness.

Cookies, they all have emptiness. In one way, all things have the same thing, are the same thing, okay? That doesn't mean you can do bad things, okay?

It just means everything has its own emptiness, and we'll talk about it, okay? Then I guess, I hope there's some music, huh? Tim?

Is there music during that? No? Yeah, okay.

No music. And so, we'll have that prayer. So, first I'll teach the class, and because after the prayer, we invite you to eat all the offerings, and no one will pay attention to the class.

So, we do the class first, then you get the refreshments, okay? Alright, so we are studying ... this retreat is divided into two parts.

One is a Nagarjuna training. You have jet lag, I don't eat. She's showing me her dentist work.

Just kidding. But it's nice that you have jet lag and I don't. It never happens.

So, first we'll be studying Arya Nagarjuna. Very, very, very famous mother book of all emptiness teachings. It's the most important book of emptiness ever written.

And we've been going through a commentary, it's going to take five years. This is the second year, okay? So, we will do it five times, and it's an amazing text.

Very, very difficult. Extremely difficult. And so, I like hard things, except churros should be soft, right?

Mostly. But it's a beautiful, beautiful text, and we're going to go very deep into it, okay? So, you're lucky to be here.

Very few people have gotten that teaching. And then secondly, in the evenings we'll be doing the ACI teacher training. We are training people to be teachers of ACI, and you're welcome to participate in that training if you like, okay?

You don't have to. If you'd rather meditate in your cabin in the evening, that's also very good, okay? But if you'd like to be an ACI teacher, you can join that teacher training.

Just talk to Tim about it, if you didn't sign up already. We're going to be covering Asian Classics Institute, course number three. There are 36 courses of ACI.

There are 18 open courses, and there are 18 secret courses. And it took about 12 or 13 years to teach it, the first time. I started in New York in 1936, and the whole course took about 14 years.

And we transferred, the first 18 courses are the Geshe course, okay? It's the essence of the Geshe course. So, of course we do much deeper in the monastery, but if you study the 18, the first 18 ACI courses, then we can say you have studied all the subjects that a Geshe studies, okay?

We call baby Geshe. And then the 18 Diamond Way courses, Vajrayana, these are advanced Buddhism for people who would like to become enlightened in one lifetime. And those we taught here, when we first started Diamond Mountain, it took seven years.

It's about, I don't know how many pages, Jigme, do you know? How many pages of translation? I don't know.

Ten thousand, something like that. It's about 10,000 pages of the high secret teachings. And I think it's the first time that they were organized into a really clear course in history.

So, it's an amazing course. If you have time, it would be nice to learn it, okay? You have to finish the first 18 courses before you can do the second 18 courses.

And don't ask to do the second 18 courses before you do the first 18 courses, because that's like driving a car without ever practicing driving a car, and there will be a crash. Okay? Understand?

So, finish the first 18 courses and then negotiate with John Brady, or Jigme, or other people, Anatole, I don't know. Okay? So, we are studying course number three of the open courses, and that's called Applied Meditation.

When I first designed the course, which is probably around 1992 or something, before you were born, Jenny. And I wanted some kind of meditation that people could do at home and at work, you know? I wanted some kind of meditation that people could do at business.

At the time, people thought either you're a business person, or you're a family person, or you're a meditator in a cave, you know? So, that was the three choices, and I felt very strongly that we should unify people's family life and their meditation life. And this was an ancient custom in India about a thousand years ago, and the most successful meditators were the politicians, and the very leading business people.

And Buddha taught Vajrayana for them, like the Kalachakra Diamond Way was taught originally for kings, only for kings, and busy people, business people. So, I felt strongly that people used to ask me, do you want to be a business person, or you want to be a meditator? And I said, well, I want to be both, you know?

I want to be successful in my life, and I want to be successful inside, you know? I don't want to choose between those two. So, I called the course Applied Meditation.

Applied means you don't just meditate in a cave or in your house, you use it at work, and you use it on your husband when he's bad, okay? So, this is Applied Meditation, something you can use in your real life. So, that's the name of the course, course number three.

Because it's a teacher training, every night when I teach this course, and we will finish the course this week, in these nine days I think, we will finish that course. So, you might as well get certified, then you can teach it to people, you know, legally. There's a lot of illegal teachers, that's okay, but they make mistakes.

So, anyway, we're going to go through that every night, and I'll teach you how to teach it, you see what I mean? So, I'm not just teaching you the course, I'd like to add my comments about how to teach it, because that's also important, and it's not the same as taking the course as teaching it, okay? Xochitl knows from teaching computers.

Yes, how many people in your class, a thousand? Just 500. Just 900.

He teaches computers in Singapore. He tried to teach me, but it was hopeless. Okay, so, different teaching it and knowing it, right?

So, let's learn how to teach it. Okay, I'm going to be going through your homework, because the first night I have to sort of ... I have to actually talk about the subject, and not tell stories that I enjoy.

So, let's go to the actual subject, okay? We're going to go through homework number one. There's Rob Russiger, who's the king of Diamond Mountain.

He squeezes money from rocks, and keeps the place going. God bless you. Okay, so our study ...

I'm going to go through the homework with you, okay? And talk about teaching it. We're going to study meditation.

The first thing I'd like to say is the course is designed in five major steps, okay? There are five major parts to the study of meditation. Those of you who have taken DCI course, level three is it?

It's the same. You've learned a lot of this already, but in this case it's more religious content, okay? Using it for religion.

So, first subject of the five is we'll study how to get ready for a meditation. What are the practical ... how to set up your room, how to set up your altar, how to set up your seat, things like that, okay?

And that's an important step in meditation, is to create a beautiful space for meditation in your home. I've been to people's homes in New York City, and they're tiny, tiny apartments. Even that is extremely expensive in New York, more expensive in Hong Kong and Singapore, but ...

the people have a screen, Japanese screen, and then behind that it looks like a temple, you know? So, the apartment looks like it has three kids, because it does, but the corner is very beautiful and very peaceful. When you just peek behind the screen, you feel ...

already you feel very peaceful, okay? So, it's a ... we're going to talk about how to create a sacred space in your house.

The biggest job of a meditation teacher, okay? The most difficult job of a meditation teacher is what? To get people to meditate.

No, it's almost impossible. I've been trying for 45 years, it's almost impossible. I have a new trick, okay?

I'll tell you right now. It's a good night to tell you, okay? If you don't remember anything from this course, remember this.

And we developed it in DCI for 10 years, and now when we teach people to meditate, the first thing we say is, don't meditate for too long. You will quit, okay? Because you are busy.

You are busy people, okay? You don't get paid to meditate. No one's going to give you a raise, you know?

Your wife or husband's going to be irritated that you meditate. So, how to find time to meditate, okay? This is the big, big, big thing about a meditation teacher.

It doesn't matter that you have 200 meditations from 2,000 years ago, which we do. It doesn't matter. It's just time.

Try to get people to spend the time to meditate, and it's almost impossible. So, here's a new trick that we use in DCI, I think an ACI teacher should use it. Tell people, look, and I did a three-year retreat not far from here, in the desert, and it was hard.

In one room. Extremely difficult. Hot, cold, lots of strange animals.

One night we had seven rattlesnakes inside the yurt area. Seven, you know? Deadly, you know?

And it was hard, very hard. And I learned something in 1,000 days of meditation. You cannot meditate more than three hours in a day.

I don't care who you are. So, the other, you know, 15 hours we used to just, I don't know, we learned to sew, and...trying not to talk. We didn't talk, we were tough, we didn't talk for three years.

And, so anyway, three hours of good meditation is very, very difficult. And there are many people in the room who've done three-year retreat and they can tell you, okay? So, what we encourage people, just meditate for 10 minutes a day, okay?

You want to be an ACI teacher? You want to be an ACI meditation teacher? Learn to say that sentence.

Just meditate for 10 minutes a day. Don't try to do more. You will quit.

You will certainly quit. Within three weeks you will quit, okay? I don't care who you are, you will quit, okay?

Everybody's busy, okay? And the phone, the internet that was supposed to save you time is now stealing all of your time. Nobody has any time.

I know this very brilliant man in my neighborhood, he discovered the atmosphere of Pluto recently. He's a brilliant astronomer, very famous, and he owned a cafe, and so I've got to know him. But, he refuses to have a cell phone, okay?

And he's one of the greatest astronomers in the world, and he refuses to have a cell phone. He says, I need my time, I refused it, I won't have that, you know? It's very strange, okay?

Anyway, get people to meditate for 10 minutes, then say, look, every Sunday, or whatever is your day off, the Israelis told me, it's not Sunday Geshe-la, it's Saturday. Okay, Saturday. Or wherever you live, your day off, increase it one minute, okay?

So, next week you're doing 11 minutes, and the next week you're doing 12 minutes, and you won't feel it, you'll get used to it, okay? It doesn't feel ... 10 minutes, come on, you poop longer than 10 minutes every day, you know?

You can do 10 minutes to get enlightened, the other thing is just a waste of time, okay? So, one more minute every week, and you won't notice it. It's a trick, okay?

It's a very good trick, because in one year they will be meditating one hour and two minutes, okay? And you need one hour to see emptiness, you need one hour to see emptiness. The only thing you have to do in this life is to see emptiness directly, the rest is dessert, okay?

The only thing you have to do in this life is to see emptiness directly, then everything is taken care of for this life and forever lives. Just 20 minutes, okay? But you can't do it if you don't meditate for an hour every day, so trick yourself, okay?

If it takes a year to get to one hour, that's fine, you will be strong, you'll be a good meditator. Like, if you try to lift 200 pounds the first day, you will break your head, and then you will quit, okay? Just do 5 pounds, then do 6 pounds, and then do ...

The guy who taught me to do yoga, in my three-year retreat, we had a special teacher come twice a year, very famous yoga teacher, David Swenson. He said, okay Geshe-la, touch your toes. He could talk, we couldn't talk.

Touch your toes. I touched my knees, you know. He said, go lower.

I said, I can't, I can't do it. So, the next day he came into the retreat, Kevin, with a 10 phone book, telephone books, old telephone books before internet, okay? And they had very thin pages, and he had 10 telephone books.

He said, he put them on top of each other. He said, touch the top one. I'm like, I can do that.

He said, okay, tomorrow rip out one page, okay? Then, you know, it took like three years to finish the last phone book, but I did it, okay? And you can do it, if you learn to meditate like that, okay?

So, as a meditation teacher, the most important thing to teach your students, don't try to meditate too long, you will quit, okay? If a new person meditates for more than 10 minutes, they are thinking about nothing, and they are wasting their time, okay? Nobody can meditate for an hour without years of training.

Not possible, okay? Forget it. If they sit there for three hours, trust me, they're thinking about yo chows, and churros, and ponchics, okay?

Right? Trust me, they are. I don't care how they look on the outside.

They're not meditating, trust me, okay? I did it for three years, I know, okay? It's not possible, okay?

It's all a fake, okay? Give me 10 good minutes, then give me 11 good minutes, okay? So, when you teach it, that's the most important thing you have to do, how to get people on their cushion.

It's the big fight, okay? My yoga teacher said, look, roll out the mat, get on, touch it. Roll out the mat and touch it.

Then you're going to do yoga every day. Just roll out the mat and touch it, then you'll do yoga. Just put the butt on the cushion.

The butt has to touch the cushion. Only once I got, I rolled out the mat, I stood on it, and then I rolled it back up, and I had a big breakfast, okay? That's how you know.

So, you know, just make contact. The pigu and the meditation cushion, okay? Then you're okay, then you're okay.

Okay, first, how to prepare for meditation. Second, there are six conditions for an ideal meditation environment. So, you have to set up your meditation environment, okay?

That's number two. Number three, there's a correct posture for meditation. It has eight details, and it was taught originally connected to Vajracana, which is a special meditation Buddha, okay?

Vajracana's main quality is the ability to appear in whatever way that makes people comfortable, okay? So, Vajracana maybe looked like a rock and roll star, right Stanley? Right Yali?

Mayday? So, that's Vajracana's special ability, is to look any way that's comfortable for people, okay? Like a disguise, or change the outfit for a different audience, okay?

Sometimes a suit, extremely uncomfortable. What's the two worst business karma? Tie and high-heeled shoes.

You saw the two worst business karma, okay? Okay, that's number three. A correct posture.

Number four, how do you control your mind during meditation, okay? What is the mental process during meditation? Okay, that's the fourth thing we're going to study.

How to keep the mind in meditation, okay? Fifth thing, which sometimes meditation teachers don't talk about, is what are you going to meditate about, okay? The object of your meditation.

So, it's not true, and by the way, as a meditation teacher, the biggest war you have to fight is to get the student to meditate, okay? And not too long. The second hardest war you have to fight is against all the stupid meditation being taught in yoga studios around the world, okay?

People are teaching really, really dumb meditation. Mainly, try to think about nothing, okay? Whenever you see meditation in the movies, the guy is like trying to think about nothing, okay?

And that's the worst meditation you can do, okay? That's worse than not meditating, okay? So, you're going to have to fight against, what do you call it?

A huge river, like flood of the Yangtze River, and you're one person, try to stop the river. It's going to be a challenge, okay? People think meditation means close your eyes and think about nothing, and people right now all over the world are teaching that.

Tonight, I'm sure, somewhere, and you have to fight that. Meditation has an object, meditation has many objects, you have to choose the object, you have to learn to stay on the object, that's meditation, okay? And there are many kinds of objects, and you have to learn what are the most powerful, okay?

So, your whole meditation career as a teacher of meditation, you're going to have to fight against this wrong idea of thinking about nothing, okay? By the way, the karmic result of thinking about nothing is just that, okay? And you become kind of forgetful, okay?

You can't remember things. If you try to meditate about nothing for a year or two, you become the person who is ... you know the lost my phone dance?

Where, oh, where did I leave it? If you meditate about nothing, the karma is that you will become, you will become a phone loser person, okay? Seriously, it's very famous in the scriptures, but people don't know.

Okay, so those are the five subjects we're going to study in our study of meditation. Now, I'd like to introduce to you some words, famous ancient words about meditation, for two reasons. Number one, each one gives a different flavor of what meditation is.

Number two, you can impress your student if you have a lot of foreign words, especially Sanskrit, okay? The first Dalai Lama said that in his commentary, learn some Sanskrit so you can impress your students. Trust me, it works, okay?

Okay, so I'm going to teach you, how many words? One, two, three, four. I'm going to teach you five, sorry, six important words for meditation, okay?

Each one has a slightly different flavor, okay? Here's the first one, and I'm going to give you the Tibetan first, say gompa, gompa, okay? There's a Tibetan word that means monastery, they call gompa, that's not this word, this is a different word.

Gompa means to meditate, okay? The Sanskrit for gompa is bhavana, bhavana, okay? Bhavana, yeah.

Bhava means to be, and the word to be comes from bhava, okay? Ana means makes, maker, like plumber, teacher, talker, okay? Procrastinator.

So, ana means er in Sanskrit, bhava means to become. So, bhavana means you repeat a mental picture over and over and over and over, and then you will become that thing, okay? You repeat a mental picture over and over and over, and then you will become that thing.

So, if you talk about meditation objects, a good one for bhavana would be a Buddha, okay? Just keep thinking about them, you know, just keep bringing them into your mind, and your mind will get used to it, and then you will become that thing, okay? You will become that thing which you daydream about all the time, okay?

And you will become that thing. That's the flavor of the bhavana, meditation. They all can be translated as meditation, but this one means makes you become-er.

It makes you become-er, okay? It says mental process which makes you turn into something, okay? That you want, okay?

Second one, say samten. Samten. The Sanskrit here is ...

what is the ... dhyana I think. Yeah, you can say dhyana.

Dhyana. I think you know, but the word dhyana used to be pronounced syana in ancient India, and then when it came to China they said it chan, chan, and when it moved to Japan dhyana became jen, zen. So, this zen comes from the word dhyana, okay?

Dhyana means meditation, okay? It's another kind of meditation. We're going to be studying a special meditation called the lion's dance.

There are ... the first four levels that we do are all called samten. So, dhyana, dhyani level, dhyana level, level of meditation, okay?

You can say that the emphasis of dhyana is the ability to hold the mind on a single object. We call ekagra, okay? Say ekagra.

Eka means one, like ek, do, din, jar, pan, sat, je. This is Indian language, okay? Eka means one.

I have some friends, ekayana, right? One path. The eka means one.

Agra means a tip. So, ekagra means the single-pointed mind. So, dhyana emphasis of the meaning of the word is that you can keep your mind on a single object.

Single point, single-pointed and single object. In English, we say the guy is very single-pointed, why? He just thinks about his business, he doesn't think about his wife, his kids, anything else.

He's single-pointed mind, okay? And it's a kind of meditation. Single point means you are able to hold your mind on a single object without moving, okay?

Without thinking about other things. I was taught meditation, my first meditation teacher was Goenka. He's from Burma, a businessman from Burma, and he invented vipassana, okay?

And he was my first meditation teacher, and he used to talk about, when he first came in to, it would be a ten-day retreat, and you can't speak for ten days, you can't go anywhere for ten days, and he would say, the first thing he'd say every time, he'd say, okay, I want to talk to you about meditation, okay? First thing, during these ten days, don't think about monkeys, don't think about monkeys. Then for ten days we're like, why he say don't think about monkey?

What's he mean don't think about monkey? Then he's playing with us, but it was very cruel, because ten days we can only think about monkeys, okay? It means that don't think about monkeys.

Now you're going to think about monkeys all week. When you meditate, choose one object, stay on that object, okay? Don't think about monkeys.

I hate that. I shouldn't say it. By the way, it was a very good introduction to meditation, but I wouldn't encourage people to just to do vipassana if you have other kinds of med, if you have learned more important kinds of meditation, I wouldn't get stuck watching your breath, okay?

That's a not a very important object, okay? Alright, you can learn much deeper objects here, okay? But I understand the other system and I like it, I enjoyed it, and I learned a lot.

But I wouldn't encourage you to do it. You have higher places to go and you don't have time, you don't have much time, okay? Alright.

The Tibetan is samten, okay? Now, third one in Tibetan is called nyom juk, say nyom juk. Nyom means equal, like scale, right?

Two pounds of gold and two pounds of potatoes. It means equal, okay? Juk means stay, stay equal.

So, it's another word for meditation, okay? I think I have them here. And, what is that?

Samapatti. It means stay in a balance between two things. Anybody know?

Thinking about too busy and jet lag, too sleepy, okay? Then these are the two extremes. Your mind is too busy thinking about too many things, and then over here is, you know, getting sleepy.

So, by the way, in my opinion, nyom juk, samapatti, is very, very good for business people, okay? Like, any kind of business, alright? People say you could learn to meditate, or you could be a business person.

I say both, you know? Be successful in your life. Why not?

You can help more people. I bought a restaurant. This guy said, you want to buy my restaurant?

I said, yeah, okay. He takes a lot of, he takes care of a lot of poor people, you know? And then, we're going to make Thanksgiving dinner for all the poor people, for free.

We're going to lose money. And that's an astronomer guy who just discovered the atmosphere of a planet. He works for the observatory which discovered Pluto, and he discovered the atmosphere of Pluto recently, okay?

And he's amazing, and he runs a restaurant, you see? So, half the day he's discovering planets, and half the day he's serving coffee. But the way he serves coffee, it's amazing to watch him, you know?

He's extremely happy, his mind is well-balanced, his life is well-balanced, his mental life is beautiful to watch, and how gracefully he pours the coffee. It's like the tea ceremony in China or Japan. If someone really knows how to do it, this is meditation, you know?

And he's like pouring coffee with total focus, not sleepy and not busy, just focused on the customer and the coffee, you know? And it's so, he's so elegant. He's 75 and he's you know, and he's, I guess he's thinking about, he's tracking 2300 asteroids that might hit the earth.

That's one of his jobs. He figured out how to measure them, you know? But he's pouring coffee, you see what I mean?

So, that's kind of sammāpatti, okay? Nyom du. Balanced state of mind.

Not busy and not bored. Focused, okay? So, for me that one is more—see, each word has a different flavor in the Sanskrit.

We are balanced between too busy and too sleepy. We are in that rare, focused state of mind, pouring the coffee for the people, okay? Alright, next one is called nyam shak, say nyam shak.

I lost the Sanskrit, it's samahita I think, samahita. And this is the one that's often related to the direct perception of emptiness, okay? The flavor is, again it's balanced meditation, samahita, but it means on a high object.

Sometimes it's called cessation meditation, because in this meditation you can stop all negative states of mind. You can stop the ultimate negative states of mind in this meditation. They're all words for meditation.

You can use them for meditation, all of them. I heard in Eskimo language, they have 17 words for the color of white snow. And in Russian they have these words for dark sky, it's always snowing, cold, and dark.

In Singapore there must be 24 words for jungle rain. Yeah, yeah, okay. So, anyway, if you're thinking about meditation all the time, there's six different words, and they all have different flavor.

It's a good sign that when a language has six different flavors of words for meditation, okay? It's a good sign. Alright, next one, say shi ne, this is shamatha, okay, shamatha.

And the word sham means peace, and you're in a yoga class, you say shanti, shanti, shanti, that's the same root, okay? The ancient word's root is kshanti, kshanti, kshanti. And that came to be the word for patience, because you have a peaceful mind.

And all K-S-H's in Sanskrit came into English as Q-U-I, quiet, calm, quietude, okay? All these words come from shamatha. It means peaceful mind.

So, the emphasis there is on a peaceful mind, like a calm lake or pond, calm water, okay? Super, super calm water of a lake without any wind in the morning, this is like shamatha. And the idea is that if your mind is calm enough, without ripples, you can see emptiness directly.

Emptiness can reflect in the mirror of your mind, but only if it's perfect calm, perfect calm shamatha, okay? So, shamatha means perfect, calm mind that you use to see emptiness, okay? It's always, it's a twin, okay?

Gemini, it's always joined with vipashyana. You say vipashyana, okay? That's the real word.

Vipashyana is corruption, okay? It's like, how you doing man? How you doing man?

What's up? What's up man? How you doing?

Okay, vipashyana. Okay, the word is vipashyana, and pashyana means to see. V means super well, super good, okay?

It comes from DVI, which means double, and that's why the English word two has a W, it came from the V, okay? It means double strong, double deep. V means super, super seeing, okay?

Super seeing, vipashyana, okay? So, that's a, what is that? Five, right?

Shamatha, okay? I got one more for you, here we go. Say, DING NGES ZIN, DING NGES ZIN.

It's a Tibetan word, the flavor is vivid, okay? Vivid, and the way I learned the word, my teacher, we were driving past some rice fields, and he said, DING NGES, DING NGES. It means super blue, super green.

DING NGES means, I don't know, like the diamond mountain sky during the day. Like, we call DING, you know DING DING? DING DING?

It means super blue, you know? Super blue, okay? So, DING NGES ZIN means super, I don't know, the whole mind is like the blue sky.

Super blue, but it means a super sweet meditation, okay? DING NGES ZIN. Like, when you're listening to music that you really like, and you're like, you know, that's DING NGES ZIN.

And your mom says, or your wife says, dinner's ready, and you're like, you know, that's DING NGES ZIN, okay? I don't know how you say it. The mind is into the object.

The mind melts into the object. How's that? Okay, so those are six words for meditation.

Each one has a different flavor, okay? Each one has a different flavor, okay? Alright, now I'm going to talk about homework question number three, which is, that's how I get people to take notes.

Chinese take notes anyway, they probably take notes about my jokes also, but Westerners don't take any notes. Anyway, take notes. Six preliminaries to a meditation.

Six things you have to do before you start to meditate, okay? Six things you have to do before you start to meditate. Number one, create a clean and sacred space with an altar, okay?

And it can be a small table, put a nice cloth on it, okay? I feel weird when I'm at home, I spend about two hours a day cooking. When I'm cooking dinner, it's like a two-hour thing.

When I'm washing the dishes, it's like an hour, or it feels like three hours. Then I think, why don't I spend this time on my altar, you know? So, if you want to have good meditation, treat your altar like you treat your stove, or your refrigerator, okay?

It's also important. You have three important things in your house, refrigerator, stove, and altar. And the altar is the most important, okay?

So, try to give it equal time, okay? You spend at least an hour a day on the stove, you know? Then spend some time on the altar.

Make it nice, and change it every day. No Buddha wants to come to get your three-day-old cookies, or the fruit is already spoiled, or the flower looks like... Like, make it pretty.

You're trying to attract these bees, right? These Buddha bees. Then it should be pretty, and fresh, and beautiful.

So, spend time on your altar. That's a sign of whether you think meditation is important or not, if you have a nice altar or not. If your altar is dusty, and the water's got green stuff floating on it, then it means you're not very serious about your meditation.

Who wants to visit...what Buddha wants to visit when the water bowls are full of green stuff? And the flowers are like a week old, and they smell funny. Alright, so make it beautiful.

Make it attractive. You're trying to attract enlightened beings to your house. So, make it nice, okay?

Spend time on your altar. Make it sweet. We spend more time on our food than we do on our altar.

It should be similar, okay? Alright, second, every morning put out some beautiful offerings, okay? Put out some beautiful offerings.

There's a custom in Tibet to offer water in a bowl, maybe seven bowls, eight bowls. It should be high-quality water. Buy some Perrier for your Buddhas, okay?

Cheapo shwei. Nice cheapo shwei. Expensive.

And offer nice water to your Buddhas. They don't want to drink old water, okay? Stinky water.

Okay, alright. And something you love, flowers, or you know, I like cookies, I like to put out cookies. I like churros, yo chow, try to put a fresh yo chow out, okay?

By the way, it's a lot of fun when you go to a restaurant, buy extra dessert or buy extra stuff and put it in the middle of the table and offer it to your Buddha. They like it a lot. They really like it.

One day we were in, DCI was in Sofia, Bulgaria, and we went out and I think there were five of us and we ordered six dinners. And then the lady said, well, is there another person coming? We said, yes.

And she said, well, where should I put the dinner? We said, put it in the middle. And she looked at us and she said, I know what you're doing.

And we're like, what? She says, this is for God, right? And we said, mm, that's pretty good.

So, offer them sweet things, okay? Don't give them chintzy, what do you call them, tchotchkes, cheap gifts. They don't like plastic flowers, for example.

We had the Dalai Lama's senior teacher, Yamantaka, came to our temple. And we put him on the throne. He was very old and he was very severe and a very great, great teacher of tantra.

And somebody put plastic grapes on a dish next to him. And he was talking and he goes like, and I'm like, he's reaching for the grapes and I'm like, and he's like, don't put plastic stuff on your altar, okay? It was embarrassing.

Okay. I'm glad he couldn't get it off. Okay.

Step number three. Go through taking refuge. Go through bodhichitta.

Go through those two. SANGS RGYAS CHOS NA, RTOGS RGYAS CHOS NA, MA BYAG CHE BA, NYIN DAG NYID NYID NA, YIN NYID ROL LA, DANG PO'I SANGS RGYAS GNOD PA, Who doesn't know? Okay.

So, we're supposed to take refuge every day, right? Sambal. Sambal?

In the Three Jewels, right? But the real place to take refuge is in the kitchen. Who said?

Wait till I offer money. Yeah, somebody said, you always talk about the kitchen. Talk about sutra.

I said, everything in the sutra is in the kitchen. And everything in the kitchen is in the sutra. And if there's something in the kitchen that's not in the sutra, and something in the sutra that's not in the kitchen, it doesn't belong in the sutra.

Because the sutra was made for kitchen. The sutra was made for people. The sutra wasn't made for temples.

The sutra was made for real people. If there's something in the sutra you can't use in the kitchen, we should take it out. Or change the kitchen.

So, refuge in the kitchen means, oh, my husband's yelling at me because I yelled at my kids. That's all. You just took refuge.

What does refuge mean? Refuge means protection. Why did you just protect yourself?

You didn't answer back harsh words to your husband. You didn't make new bad karma because you remembered about dependent origination with your kids and the emptiness of the husband who didn't come for you. I didn't do anything husband.

You just took refuge. Go to a temple, say refuge 10,000 times, wear out your rosary. It's not as good as using it in the kitchen.

There's no comparison. One minute in the kitchen is worth three years in Diamond Mountain doing mantras. Really.

If you understand. Then you took refuge. You took real refuge.

Namo Buddhaya Namo Sanggye. I forget it. I didn't do anything.

Ah, shut up. Oh, I got it. That's refuge.

Then bodhichitta. I would like to get rid of my anger in the kitchen so my sister can get rid of her anger and then her uncle can get rid of his anger and then his friend can get rid of his anger. I'm going to change the world by not getting upset in the kitchen.

That's bodhichitta. Forget all the rest. Forget those sutras about bodhisattvas.

Do it in the kitchen. That's bodhisattva. I'm going to be a good example for my children, for my friends, for my husband.

Alright. So anyway, just before meditation, think about refuge. Think about bodhichitta.

Why are you meditating? What do you want? You're going to die.

For sure you're going to die. You don't have time to fool around. I went to...

Okay, Tim, part of the reason I didn't do the reading on time. I spent... much of the week I spent with my old lady.

My old lady reached stage 3. Okay, what's stage 3? Stage 1 is when they take your car away.

Stage 2 is when they take your house away. And stage 3 is when they take away your walker. And she just reached stage 3.

It was a very hard week. Now she will lie down for the rest of the... I think.

I don't think she's going to make it back up. So, you don't have time. Okay, you don't have time.

Don't mess around. Okay, do your meditation. Prepare.

Think about bodhichitta. Do everything for bodhichitta. Do everything for other people.

Don't waste your time. Doing things for yourself is a waste of time. It's nothing.

It's worthless. You're going to take it, comb your hair, it's going to fall out. Okay?

Even the girls are going to lose their hair. Okay? Just takes longer.

Okay? Trust me. Okay?

So, stop taking care of yourself. Take care of other people. Then your life has some meaning.

Okay? That's bodhichitta. Okay?

Otherwise you're just wasting your time. And you will reach stage 3. Okay?

Reach stage 3 with bodhichitta. Then you're okay. Alright.

Number 4. Before you meditate, okay, fill up the room with holy beings. Okay?

At least one. At least your teacher. Okay?

So, I used to meditate in a small room. There wasn't space to get more people in my room. My teacher, when I went to meet him, 1975, in January, he said, I have a small tiny room for you.

It's for the attendant, you know. You can touch the walls like this. He said, don't worry.

I'm going to get you a better room soon. 30 years later, I'm still in the same room. Then there wasn't room to put all the Buddhas in there.

So, I used to put them up on the ceiling. I said, you guys stay up there. There's no room here.

So, put them in the room. Make them small. There's room for everybody.

So, invite lots of Buddhas. Make it a party. They can read your mind.

They knew 1,000 years ago that you were going to invite them this morning. They're already outside the door. All you have to do is say come in and boop, they're there.

If you think that's not possible, then why you want to become a Buddha? Buddha's definition can go everywhere. Can help everyone.

Can read everyone's mind. So, it's strange if you say I want to become a Buddha, but you believe the Buddhas cannot read your mind to come in the room. You're something crazy.

Illogical, right? You are supposed to become a Buddha so you can go everywhere to help everybody before they even want. So, of course, the minute you invite them, they're all going to crowd in the room.

Just tell them to stay up higher. Okay. Then you don't have to clean the room.

Okay, step A, B, C. I'm on it, Tim. Oh, I'm over.

A, B, C. You can't eat the offerings tonight. I'm sorry.

B, C, D. Fine, okay, fine. Sakyong, say Sakyong.

Do a quick practice to clean out the worst bad deeds from this week and do a quick good karma practice. It's called cleaning and collecting good energy. Cleaning bad energy, collecting...

Everybody in this room did something really stupid this week, okay? Then just remember one or two of them and clean your heart just before you meditate. Then meditate fast before you think of another one.

Okay. Alright. Number A, B, C, D, E, F.

Sixth, ask those holy beings for help. And never be afraid to ask a teacher for help. Just say, you know, I sent my Lama...

I just sent him a text with a picture of the sunset and I said, help me. Send me help. I'm teaching classes this week, you know.

So, ask. What is it? If you don't ask, they can't do it, right?

Alright. Ask for blessings for your meditation. I'm going to meditate, hey, give me some energy here.

I need energy. Give me a shot of energy, okay? Ask, okay?

It's not stupid. If it's stupid, you shouldn't be here because you're supposed to be here to become them. Understand?

Okay. So, it never hurts to ask. All the time.

I don't know. I'm going to vacuum the floor in the temple. Please bless me.

Okay. Just keep asking, okay? They always agree, okay?

No matter how stupid you are, how many bad things you did every day, they still bless you. That's how cool they are. Alright.