«Дар освобождения», курс 1 «Глубочайшая медитация», занятие 7

[Говорящий 1] (0:00 - 26:48)
So we were describing shunjang, which is an added feature to the ninth level, which makes you feel as if you had sunk into the object. And if you have leveled mind with shunjang, it will become shamatha. It will become the deep state of meditation that you need to see emptiness directly.

Then he says, DE NAS SEMS SHIN BYANG GI RGA YOD YOD BA DE CHUNG SANG NAS He says, when you get this feeling of mental and physical bliss in a deep state of meditation, when your body feels light and strong as if it's going to float up... By the way, at this point, your back is straight all the time, like West Point guy or something. It's just, you can't help it.

You're always sitting on the edge of the chair, is it four inches or something, and you're always, your back is completely straight, and it's just automatic and it feels great. It's just a physical ecstasy from that. And then he says, Pabongkha Rinpoche says, it could get out of hand, right?

Like, don't get caught up in the good feeling of it. He says, RGA YOD YOD DE CHUNG SANG NAS Let it go a little bit. Don't get all lost in the good feeling of it.

Like, let that go. Let the bliss go a little bit. DE BA CHUNG DU SONG YANG NA LTA BUG NANG NAS And then it will feel like someone tuned down the bliss slightly.

SEMS MED PA LA BRTEN PAR MED PAS THING MIN TSEN DANG JE SU BSTEN PA'I BZHIN BYANG MI YOD BA THOB PA Then go into like a standard ecstasy and stay one point a day on the object. Your meditation on that. MI YOD DANG ZHIG NYAM DU SAMS NEN DANG PO NYER TO MI CHOG MED KYIS BZHIN PA'I BZHIN NAS THOB PA YIN Then you will have achieved shamatha.

Shamatha. And as we said this afternoon, there's an entire spectrum. Like the spectrum of light.

If you've ever studied the light spectrum, there's a huge spectrum of meditational states. And you can think of them as small stripes on a very long ruler. We call them yardstick.

And there are tiny, tiny stripes on the yardstick of different colors. And what we want to do is get up past level nine, push it a little bit further into physical and mental ecstasy, and stay there. And park the mind there.

And don't go higher. There are higher states, you don't go higher. Stay there.

You're out of this realm. You're out of the current realm. You're not in this world anymore.

Your mind is out. You're into a meditation so deep that if you passed away at that moment, you would actually go to another realm. You're not at all aware of, if someone banged a window, a gong, in your ear, you wouldn't hear anything.

If someone waved McDonald's French fries in front of your nose, you wouldn't smell it. You are pratyahara, right? You are withdrawn from your sense objects completely.

Senses. Totally immersed in deep meditation. And physically, if you get there, this is just a personal advice, okay?

If you get, it's not in the text. If you get there, you feel as if you are rising. You feel like you're in a, you are physically rising to a different realm.

And that's called samten dampa nirdo mitong ne. Well, samten dampa means, samten here, dhyana here, refers to the form realm, okay? A place, a paradisiacal place you would go if you died at that moment, okay?

So the meditation itself is called form realm or dhyana meditation. But it doesn't mean you're in the form realm, okay? It means that if you died at that moment, that meditation would throw you into a higher paradise realm, okay?

A temporary realm, not a good place to go permanently. Nirdo means you don't even get to the first of the form realm levels. There are four form realm meditations.

Nirdo means you don't even get to the real first one, right? The first job Rinpoche gave me when I met him in 1974, he gave me a text, he told me, you're going to work on this text to translate it. It's called Abhidharmakosha.

It was the commentary about the first nine levels. I spent 12 years on that text, okay? In the first year, I had no idea what anything was about.

He would explain the words to me and they would be saying, there's a form realm, there's four levels to the form realm, you're not even getting to level one, you are in the preliminary level to stage one of the form realm. And it all meant nothing to me. So, I don't know what the four form realm meditations are.

I don't know what they feel like. And therefore, it could hardly matter to me whether I'm in the preliminary part or the first one or the main stage, what they call main stage. Nushi means main stage, nirdo means the preliminary part.

But the whole book for a year was about things which I couldn't have any experience of at all. And it was very frustrating. Then we got to the third chapter and they started talking about how the sun was created and then I felt comfortable.

But the whole first section, it was all about stuff that I couldn't relate to at all because they are making distinctions between things that I have no experience of at all. So anyway, that's how it's gonna be for you. There's four realm levels, meditations.

At this point, when you've just got this ecstasy of body and mind, you haven't even gotten to the first form realm. You are at the preliminary, they call the preliminary stage before the main stage of the first form realm. You're in a tiny slot of a bar.

If you've seen, what do they call those things that measure the spectrum? Spectrometer, yeah. We had to use them in gemology school.

You have a spectrometer, and they have all these lines, right, of different color. You are in one tiny section of the entire spectrum of meditation called the preliminary to the first form realm level meditation. It's called mi chok me.

Say mi chok me. Mi chok me. Mi chok me.

It's a double negative. Mi means not, me means isn't. Sorry, mi means isn't, me means it isn't.

You don't, okay? You don't, it's not, all right? What's that mean?

Chok means to have time to do something. Mi chok means I don't have time to do something. Mi chok me means I don't not have time to do anything.

All right? It's not that I don't have time to do anything, all right? The level of meditation has a very specific name called it's not that I don't have time.

All right? Mi chok me. Only in that slight sliver of the entire range of thousands of meditations and meditation objects can you see emptiness directly.

Only from that platform can you see emptiness directly. Only from that platform, that specific platform, can you ever get the mind still enough, but not over still, to see emptiness directly. If you see emptiness directly, then within a short time, you can change the planet.

You can change the entire planet. You can stop the pain of entire planets, all right? You have that power.

If you just get to that meditation, so what we're talking about this whole week's class on meditation has nothing to do with the actual goal, right? The goal is to use that meditation to see a certain object. You cannot see ultimate reality unless you can get to this particular level of meditation.

You have to. You must, all right? And that's the point of studying all the 11 levels and the five problems of the eight antidotes and the six powers of the four states of mind, okay?

That's the reason to do a retreat. It's only for that. That's the only goal.

If you see it directly, for 20 minutes, you will have the power to transform the entire planet. It's beautiful. It's very beautiful.

That's what you really want to do, okay? What are the most popular movies around? Spider-Man, Iron Man, Transformers, Batman.

Batman Returns, you know? It's people who save the world, right? It's people who save the world.

Why do they keep making movies about people who save the world? Because that's what you really want to do with your life. Like, okay, you want to eat.

You want to have a house. You want to sleep. You want to have sex.

You want to have a job. You want money. Those are all true.

Everybody would like those things. But deep, deep down inside, and the reason why people are so often unhappy is that you want to save the world. You want to make this world a better place.

That's your deepest fantasy, and that's what keeps you going, okay? In the back of your mind, you know it's useless to collect money because you will just lose it all. You know it's useless to eat because you can only eat so much, right?

And you know that death is coming. And so in the back of your heart, you know the only meaningful thing to do would be to change the world, help the world. If you get to this stage of meditation, you can do it.

A single person can transform the world, has the power to transform the world, if you can reach this state of meditation and see emptiness, okay? So what would be the natural place to go now in our discussion? I mean, we just reached samdhen namo nirvana mitambe.

We reached that level. What do you want to talk about now? When are you going to focus that state of mind on, you see?

You can focus it on baseballs, or oranges, or, you know, anything. It's just a tool. You can focus it on anything.

Yes, ma'am? Oh yeah, good, okay. It's a good question.

She said there must have been people who studied these books, got these teachings, did these kinds of meditations, and why do we still see the world having pain, right? Why are there still wars and pain? Were you here for the pen thing?

Did you see when we talked about the pen? No? Oh, okay.

So the human being saw the pen as a pen, and the dog saw the pen as something to chew, right? So one level of being, one level of being saw something to chew on. Another level of being saw a pen.

Maybe there's a third level of being who could see a pen, and they don't even think of it as a pen. They think of it as something to change the world or save the world. To them, it looks like an instrument for saving a world.

I could write something and save a world with it, you see? So today, in this room, for example, it's possible that there are those kinds of people who saw emptiness that way, okay? And they see the world as a pen, and we see it as a dog toy, okay?

So it's the same, it's the same. In their world, hunger has been stopped, and war has been stopped. They don't see Iraq that we see.

They don't see the Afghanistan that we see. They don't see people hungry in Africa that we see, okay? We're in the same world, and we see different things, okay?

The dog and the human are in the same room, but there's two realities in the room, okay? So they see the world differently, but to save the world, they have to get us to see the world differently, right? Okay.

And for a dog who graduated to being a human, can you imagine how difficult it is for them to convince the other dogs that the pen is a pen? You see? You imagine how much work it would take for a super dog to talk to the other dogs, and say, look, you could use this thing in another way.

This is not just a chew toy. You can do other things with this, but it would take years of patient work for the dog who figured out the pen to explain it to the other dogs. You see, it would take a lot of work, many years of work, to explain it, because the other dogs never experienced it, you see?

SHIN BYANG THOB PA DUS NYAM DANG SANG NYID DANG BAR NUS DANG MI BYAMS PA'I DUS PA'I ZHIG NAS THOB PA YIN That's shamatha. When you reach that level, that's shamatha. And now you can turn it towards emptiness.

YIN NI JI RTEN DANG JI RTEN LAS DE PA'I THOB PA MANG PO THOB PA LA ME DKA' BAS PA'I LAM YIN PAS MI BYA'O MA'I SRED This is the only book I've ever seen an explanation of the name of the level. And the level is called, in English? It's not that I don't have time.

It's not that I don't have time. Like, why do they call the level that? Why is it called that?

He says, this state of meditation is something which you cannot do without, if you hope to gain infinite numbers of realizations, which are both of this world and beyond this world. So there are realizations of this world, and there are realizations beyond this world. And you can't get to them unless you have this state of mind.

So he says, therefore we call it MI BYA'O MA'I, which would mean I don't have time not to try to get this. I don't have, it's not that I don't have time to try to develop this meditation. That's why he, you need it.

DE NAS NYER DOG CI MA RNAMS GRUB NAS RIM GYI SANG SU DGE SKABS GRUB NA THOB NUS MUR I admit, says Pabongka Rinpoche, that if you kept working on your meditation, you could go through the four form realm meditations, and you could go through the four formless realm meditations, which are just even deeper states of meditation. They are more calm, more focused than the other ones. I admit that you could do that, but MA RNAMS KYANG DGOS PA CHOS BA'I RANG RE DGE'I KHYER BAM PYIN But there wouldn't be any point to it.

Just to get deeper into meditation, there's no higher goal than to see emptiness directly. There's no reason to go higher in the form and formless realm meditations. Why do they exist?

Yeah, they weren't designed by anybody. They just are there. If you reach them, you get born in more temporary happiness.

So they're actually considered an obstacle. But why they're there, it's just, if you go deeper, you can get a higher rebirth. CI ROL PA'I NI CI YANG MED ZHES KYIS NYON MONGS ROL GYUR THAMS CAD PHANG STE ZHIG TSE SEMS THOB NAS THAR PA THOB PA ZIN GYEL There's a weird thing about these meditations.

The higher ones are the ones you need to see emptiness. The four form realm and the four formless realm meditations. There's a weird thing about them.

As you move up through those eight, the mind becomes more and more subtle. So, is a cup of coffee made with three scoops of coffee and two spoons of sugar, is it strong or not? Well, you can say it depends, right?

It's strong compared to tea. It's not strong compared to coffee made with five scoops of coffee. So, what happens as you move up through these eight is that, let's say, if you're watching your breath, it gets quieter and quieter and quieter and quieter.

You start out, I said it the other day, right? You start out where you can block out the noise of the traffic outside. And then it seems subtle to not have noise of traffic.

Then you block out the noise of people sniffing in the room, slurping. What do they do? It's a meditation demon.

They go, in the middle of meditation, you know? In a hundred people, everyone's silent for 10 minutes and then somebody goes, just let it drip, it won't hurt you. Anyway, then that becomes subtle, right?

Then people stop and then it's all silent and suddenly you can hear your breath moving through the hairs of your nose. It's a slight whistling sound, like you hear this. Whistle.

Really, now if you get subtle, if you get quiet enough, it becomes quite noticeable, right? Then you go deeper and then all you can hear is this, ta-ka, ta-ka, ta-ka, ta-ka. What's that?

That's your heartbeat. Then your heartbeat gets really loud. It becomes like somebody's banging a drum in your ear.

It's like, ta-ka, ta-ka, ta-ka, ta-ka. And then you get past that, you go deeper. And then you can hear this.

What's that? It's air hitting your eardrums. You can hear discrete molecules of air hitting your eardrums.

Like that, okay? As you move deeper into meditation, as you go one step deeper from the traffic noise down to the air molecules hitting your eardrum, your mind gets more calm and less likely to get angry. Okay?

Your mind gets more calm. People can't upset you. You don't feel as jealous.

You don't feel like you need three pieces of pizza right now. Your mind, your mental afflictions steadily start to fade. But, but it's not because they're gone.

It's because you feel a little bit calmer. And you cannot stay there. It's not possible to stay there.

You must come out sooner or later. You got to get back in your car. People are going to kick you out of the church.

You got to get back in your car. Then you move quickly back through all the levels, right? You go back, oh, now I can hear my ears.

Now I can hear my heart. Now I can hear my knuckle hairs. Now I can hear the person slurping next to me.

And now I can hear the traffic. Your mind comes out very quickly. So that kind of meditation is considered not so useful.

Just to get your mind deeper and quieter and then come back out without any other option is considered a mistake. There's no benefit to it. You will have to get back in your car and back home.

And then that meditation is over and you haven't gotten anything out of it, all right? THOG PA ZIG GYAG DE TZAM GYI'I KHOR BA LAS MA BRUL BAR You can go all the way up to the top of the eight levels of meditation, but it will not stop you from suffering, okay? You still have to get in your car, you still have to go home, and you still have to get old while you're in your car.

It doesn't stop anything, right? GYUR GYI, then he quotes from a text called, we had it before, LHAG DGOS LHAG BSTOD means the praise of those who are worthy of praise, okay? The praise of those who are worthy of praise.

GYUR GYI CHOS LA MI CHOG TE SKYE BA'I STI MO GYI SDONG PA SRID SRE BAR DU SONG NAS KYANG SDUG BSNGAL YANG YUL SRID PAR BRUL Those who practice meditation without getting into worldview, SKYE BA'I STI MO GYI SDONG PA Those who are blinded by ignorance, okay? SRID SRE BAR DU SONG NAS KYANG They can go to the top of the formless realm, okay? Which is called the peak of existence.

It's the peak of satsaric existence. SRID SRE BAR DU SONG NAS KYANG SDUG BSNGAL YANG CHUNG Their suffering will come back. Their suffering will come back.

SRID BAR BRUL So their whole meditation practice has only served to bring them back into the circle of suffering, right? That's an ancient scripture about that. MDOR LA'I JI RTEN BDAG NI SDIM TSUN BSGOM BYAS KYANG DE NI BDAG TU DU SHES JI MI BYAS DE NI MYUR BUM PHYIR ZHING RAB CHOK STE BAG CHOS KYIS NI SDIM TSUN GYUR GONG BZHIN Then Lord Buddha recounted a story about a yogi who got into trying to get into those higher meditative states without using them for any big purpose.

JI RTEN BDAG NI SDIM TSUN BSGOM BYAS KYANG People who don't understand how things work, they can go to high states of meditation. DE NI BDAG TU DU SHES JI MI BYAS JI MI BYAS But they aren't doing anything to stop their view that aspirin works, all right? They believe that aspirin works.

They have reached high levels of meditation, but they still think that aspirin has something, what? In it that takes away a headache. They still believe that, right?

They can meditate, they can go to extremely high levels of meditation, but they still believe there's something inside an aspirin which can take away a headache, all right? They believe that. DE NI BDAG TU DU SHES JI MI BYAS They haven't lost their belief in a dhag, okay?

Dhag means atman, means self. That just means an aspirin that has something in it that works. There's no such thing, okay?

Dhag, when Buddhists say there's no self, what they mean is an aspirin is not an aspirin. Why? There's nothing in it that works to take away your headache.

Infinite, infinite. Is a stone an aspirin? Is a piece of gravel from the parking lot an aspirin?

Why not? Why not? It doesn't take away a headache.

It's not aspirin. People don't go out of the parking lot and pick up a piece of gravel either when they have a headache, okay? It doesn't have anything in it that takes away a headache, right?

But aspirin does.

[Говорящий 2] (26:50 - 26:50)
No.

[Говорящий 1] (26:51 - 1:02:03)
No. Which planet are you on? All right.

DE NYID MYONG BA'O'I PHYIR BZHIN RAG TUG TE So if you get really good at meditation, but you don't use it to understand why aspirin works, right, you don't apply it to anything, you just go on thinking the way you did before and you get very, very good at meditation. RAG TUG TE MYONG BA'O'I PHYIR That's like purposely trying to screw up your mind. That's like purposely trying to disturb your mind.

It will simply disturb your mind. TUG TE And RAG TUG means it will stir up your mind. RAG TUG TE LHAG BCOD KYI NI DING ZHIG DER GONG BZHIN That's like the story of the Uddhaka, okay?

There was a meditator in India called Uddhaka. LHAG BCOD Tibetan LHAG BCOD, Uddhaka. I think he tells the story here.

Let me see. Yeah, here it is. ZHIG LHAG BCOD KYI This yogi, TSIS TSE MYONG BZHAG LA LO MANG POR MED He got to the highest of the eight formless realms, right?

Called peak of existence. He spent many years on that, meditating on that, that one. And MED KA REL Then, what did he say?

He didn't have time to go to a barber because he was in meditation all the time. So, he got this really long hair. He got really long hair.

They call it REL PA. REL PA means dreadlocks. His hair started to tie up in dreadlocks.

But he was actually sort of proud of it. Because he said, oh, people will think I'm a great meditator. If I have these long, unwilling dreadlocks, then everybody will be impressed.

He was happy about that. Then, CHU CHI WE SUK CHI WE SUK CHI WE means a rat. SU means started chewing on his, what do you call it?

Bob Marley. Bob Marley? On his Bob Marley dreadlocks.

But he was so proud of it. Then rats started to use him in meditation and they were chewing off his dreadlocks, okay? SU PA CHI TONG ME CHOD DE Then, you know, one day he got out of his meditation, he went down to the stream, he didn't drink water, he looked in the stream and his dreadlocks were out of order.

You know, this side didn't match this side, you know? And he got really upset, right? He said, then people will laugh at me, you know?

People are supposed to be impressed by my dreadlocks. Now, it's all off, you know, okay? Split ends, too.

SANG DE YANG NI NGAN SONG DU SO BAR SU Then they, there's a story, I don't know if it's true, they say that that, his anger was so powerful that it sent him to a hell realm. He was so upset that his anger created a bad karma and when he died, he went to a hell realm, okay? NGAN SONG DU SO BAR TANG BA YIN SUNG So the point is not that we simply get into a more and more relatively subtle state of mind, okay?

It's not that you get to your breath from the car noises. And it's not that you go from your breath to the heart noises. And it's not that you go from the heart noises to the ear noises.

It's not progress, all right? Get to a point, get to that one sliver of meditation, stop. Because the point is not to meditate more deeply.

The point is to use the very silent state of mind to see emptiness directly, okay? LAS PAR BZHIN NAS LAS PAR BRGYUD NA TSIG PA LA SOGS PA'I GRUB PHRAG LA BRTZON KYANG BYANG RGYEN PA'I PHYIR GYI SEMS BSAL YANG DANG If you get to this state of samatha, deep state of samatha, you will get to a point where it feels as though you could count the atoms in the wall of the church, that you could look at the wall of the church and you could count the atoms out, all right? You feel like that.

CIG SU LA SOGS PA'I YUNG NAS TSE MA RANG DANG DUG GSUM KYI TSE MA GSUM DANG KHYAD PAR BUR MED DE TSE MA CHUG GANG RANG YANG DE NYID MED DRAN NAS NI DGA' BA DANG This is a very, very difficult section. So, in a deep state of meditation, will there even come to you fleeting images? We can say fleeting images, okay?

Of an apple, or a piece of a song, or a similar object, okay? Will a fleeting image even come to your mind of a red color? Or, they give other examples like a fleeting, sense of wanting something, or a fleeting sense of disliking something.

Tiny, tiny, fleeting senses of things. And they say other example would be a boy or a girl. Thinking about a boy, or thinking about a girl.

A slight, fleeting image crosses your mind, right? In a very deep state of meditation, you are able to even hold the mind back from touching those images as they fly through your mind. So, an image is flying through your mind at the rate of, what is it, 65 per second.

In a single second, 65 discreet images will pass through your mind. Occasionally, red. Occasionally, girl.

Occasionally, I don't like. Occasionally, I wish I had. Very fleeting, immediate images will fly through your mind, right?

And a yogi, at this stage, they are able to just ignore them. They ni-mi-ta. They even consider them, what do you call it?

Potential problem. They are aware of 1 65th of a second's fleeting thought of a color, and they are able in the 65th of a second to avoid it. DRAN NAS MI DKA' BA DANG NYON MONGS KYI BA SNYUNG ZHING SKYES BYANG ZHUGS BZHIN PA DANG So therefore, they don't get problems like jealousy or anger or things like that.

And if they do, they don't have any power. GNAS BYANG THUB PA'I NYID KYANG STING NYIN ZHING DANG BDEG DOR BA MYANG CHE SOGS KYI YIN LEN CHUNG Then, just when you fall asleep, like you close your eyes and you fall off to sleep, you automatically go into deep meditation. You cannot withdraw from your senses without going into a deep meditation.

So these kinds of things are happening when you have sabbath time. THENG SOR CHUNG CHEN PO'I DAG LA MAR BSTAN PA STING NYIN ZHING LAS LA BA ZHIG GIS CHAG RDZO SOGS KYI DANG TSUL LA MONGS PA DAR MA There are foolish people, nowadays we see in Tibet, they don't want to spend the effort and time it takes to go through the instructions, the real instructions. They would like some little, you know, I did that, what do they call it?

I remember a meeting at Doubleday. We were having a big meeting at Doubleday on the 53rd floor of their building on just south of Central Park. And they looked at me, you know, and they said, do you have any books in mind?

You know, what are your next five books? And I said, well, I want to do one about how to improve science, you know, physics. I want to write about how to improve physics.

And they're like, no, no, no, I won't sell. And then, and we went through a whole list. And then they said, Geshe-la, could you do a candy book?

You know, I said, what's a candy book? They said, a book you can digest on a short plane flight. A book you can read the whole thing through on a short plane flight.

That's called a candy book. Can you write a candy book? And I'm like, he's saying, Pabongka Rinpoche is saying, that people in Tibet nowadays, they want a candy book.

They want somebody to give them a candy book. And it better be talking about Zogrin, okay? I did an examination recently.

I taught Plato a long-rimmed text for a week, and then on two days, I taught this Tantric subject. I was just curious to see how many people would come to the Tantric one and skip the long-rimmed one. So, you know, give me something interesting.

Give me some inner body chakra stuff, Zogrin. Or give me, chak, chak means chakchen, means Mahamudra. You know, give me some mysterious, almost incomprehensible Mahamudra text, you know?

That will turn me on, you know? Give me something like that. A candy book about Mahamudra, or inner body.

Okay? So, tsao tso lomba tsao. And then people are attracted to that kind of thing.

They want something sensational. tum mo wey shi ne kyang shung chamo le sumpa tabu nyel ma shig jung ka He said, in Tibet, in modern times, which was what? 1921?

He said, it's very difficult to find a person who has shamo. It's very difficult to find a person who has shamo. As it's described in these texts.

chakchen tsao le chakchen tsao le kyang Then there's a real text on Mahamudra. Mahamudra is a very high, sexy meditation on meditating on your mind, okay? The real text was written by His Holiness the First Panchen Lama, okay?

sem lo tawa sok ne sem kyi kun tsok pi mong chud tsam yinpar sum His Holiness the First Panchen Lama said, don't study my Mahamudra text. Be careful studying my Mahamudra text. Why?

It explains, I mean, don't study it on a surface level. That text teaches you how to meditate upon your mind. What are you watching when you do Mahamudra?

Your own mind. Is your mind emptiness? Hopefully not, okay?

All right. Can you check, it's got to be, can you check it, yeah? They're getting sleepy.

We got to crank it up. So, you know, the purpose of Mahamudra meditation as Jason just said, the purpose is to see the emptiness of your mind. The purpose is to see the ultimate nature of your mind, okay?

But His Holiness the First Panchen Lama said, almost everybody in Tibet who is trying to study Mahamudra is focusing on the mind itself and not on the nature of the mind, okay? So they are focusing on a thing which is deceptive, illusory. They are focusing on something which will hurt them.

They are looking at the mind of the wrong part of the mind. And he's complaining about the state of meditators in Tibet. They are not using their meditation for the right purpose.

They are focusing the meditation on the wrong thing. Even those who are trying to explore the nature of the mind end up looking at just the mind, just watching their thoughts and not trying to explore where those thoughts came from. DE NA DE DAG LA RANG GI GONG SANG PO YIN SANG KYANG Those kinds of people think they're doing great meditation.

RANG GI GONG PO'I SER DU GONG PA BZHIN They are meditating on a, what do you call it? A ball of, what's it, bronze? Bronze?

Not quite copper. Bronze? What's cheaper than bronze?

Brass, yeah, that's it. They are meditating on brass and thinking it's gold. They are meditating on brass and thinking it's gold.

SEMS SU, LAM KUL LAM LOG CIG TU CHEN PO'I RGYUR BA LAS CHEN PO'I RGYUR BA LAS They are doing no more than traveling a path which leads to nowhere. The spiritual path they have chosen leads to nowhere. GYUR ZHIG CHING BA SAG PA LA BSGOM DU CHU NI Most of them are mistaking subtle dullness for meditation.

I would guess that 90% of the people who are able to meditate on a regular basis, even among people we know, if they're doing it for more than five or 10 minutes, are just engaged in subtle dullness. No more. All of us.

If you're meditating, if you're trying to meditate for more than five or 10 minutes, if you say you're on the object for an hour or half an hour, very, very likely you are in subtle dullness. SAG PA LA BSGOM DU CHU NI BSGOM RIN PAS KHAM KHO MA YANG PHAN MI GNYIS SHING That's not even a formless meditation or formless meditation. That's nothing.

Subtle dullness doesn't get you anywhere. Long, protracted meditations in which you wander or space out, they don't even get you to a higher rebirth. Nothing.

They have no effect at all. KHAM KHO MA YANG PHAN MI GNYIS CHUN GROG GYUR GYUR PA LTA BU'I GYUR BA YIN TE Maybe if you meditate on those for a long time, you can set up yourself a rebirth as a dog. No, because the state of mind is similar.

Or like a cat, right? A cat has great attention. Cats have great capacity for attention, focus, but that's all.

They live short, violent lives and then they're finished. They're not capable of ethical breakthroughs or something like that. They eat, they kill birds, and then they're killed.

And that's the end of their life. But they're capable of great attention. STOP THINKING SNGON PA'I PHYAG RGYA CHEN PO'O BA'O PHYAG CHEN PO'O BA'O PHYAG CHEN PO'O BA'O PHYAG CHEN PO'O BA'O PHYAG CHEN PO'O BA'O YANG NA SU MYIN GANG SU SKYE Sakyapandita, one of the great wise men of all time, said, NGON DUN CHAGS KYA CHEN PO'O CHE GOM PA There are fools who meditate on Mahamudra.

They think they are meditating on the mind. PHYAG CHEN DON DU RGYUR DU RGYUR The majority of them are collecting causes to become born as animals. YANG NA YIN CHEN DGOS PAR DUNG Or else, at best, they could fall into a lower nirvana.

What's a lower nirvana? What's nirvana? You permanently remove negative states of mind.

No more anger. No more jealousy. No more desire.

You're not capable of being upset. It's worth it, right? Nobody can upset me.

It's not possible for someone to upset me. That's nirvana. It's not possible to want to eat too much.

It's not possible to feel jealous of your ex-partner's boyfriend, or something like that. You don't have the capacity to have those thoughts. You just don't have the capacity.

What makes that lower? If it's lower, what makes it lower? It doesn't help anybody else.

It's not serving anybody else. It's good for you. It makes you happy.

And your mind is clear. And you don't have any more problems. But it doesn't do anything to help the rest of the world.

That's what makes it a lower nirvana. At the best, mistaken meditation will get you to a lower nirvana. Or a birth in the formless realm.

DE NA LAM GYI RTZO BA DANG GSUM GANG ROL GYI MA SEMS PAR SEMS KYI NGO BO DANG YOD SU MED PAR BTAG NAS Okay, so in Mahamudra meditation, which is very sexy, why? It's very powerful, why? As far as the nine levels, why is Mahamudra meditation a good one?

Yeah, you're using the mind to watch the mind, right? When you get dullness, what do you do? You just watch the dullness and then you're not dull anymore.

Okay? You get bright and bushy-tailed towards your dullness. You observe your dullness, which makes you undull.

So it's very efficient. Mahamudra is very efficient. And then the great Mamas, like the first Pachamama, he said, don't stop there.

Use that meditation to explore the nature of your mind. Don't just watch your mind, explore the nature of your mind. So then there were these guys, they went and did Mahamudra meditation, and they reported back to their Lama, I have seen the nature of the mind.

He said, what is it? They said, you know, the mind doesn't have any colors at all. And it also has no shapes.

You can't say the mind is square or round or oblong. And you can't say the mind is red or blue or green. I have grasped the nature of the mind.

Okay? They call it face-to-face, right? In Mahamudra they say face-to-face.

I went face-to-face with the mind and I understood its nature. What is its nature? Hey, it's not physical.

Is that the nature of the mind? Yes, it's a nature of the mind. The mind is not physical.

If you meditate on the mind and you conclude that it's not polka dot, you are correct. Okay? But that's not its ultimate nature.

You have explored one of the natures of the mind. It's not polka dot. But you didn't understand the deep nature of the mind.

So, you can do Mahamudra meditation. By the way, that yoga post today called Mahamudra, you take a retention, you stretch out the central channel, and it was meant to trigger a perception of the real nature of the mind. You see?

It is called Mahamudra for a reason. What is the real nature of the mind? What are you supposed to think about when you watch the mind in Mahamudra meditation?

Huh? Yeah, that it has no meaning. Let's compare it to a meditation on the emptiness of your screaming boss or spouse.

Okay? Your boss picking on you or your spouse picking on you. Alright?

Saying bad things about you or to you. Let's compare the mind to that. When you're having a problem and your spouse or your boss is criticizing you, what's the natural reaction?

You want to yell back. What will happen if you yell back? You will put new seeds in your mind and then next week you'll see them yelling again.

Right? If you get angry and yell back at a person who's criticizing you, you're only perpetuating that person in your life. So let's put it a different way.

If someone criticizes you or yells at you and you have to choose the one most stupid thing to do, what would it be? To yell back. Next question.

What is the single most natural thing for a human being who's criticized to do? Criticize back. That's why you're a human being and not an angel already.

That's why you're stuck in this room already. If you can't grasp all of the ideas or you can't really relate closely to all the nine levels of meditation and it's difficult for you to grasp, what's he talking about the first four level and what would that feel like and what's that list thing? I mean he's been going on for four or five days now about all these things.

If you find it difficult to wrap your head around it, how is that similar to a yelling boss? Yeah, it's coming from you. Meeting a yelling boss and meeting a mind in your own head which doesn't get the book completely, it's the same thing.

It's the same thing. You've planted seeds in your mind before by failing to help people who didn't understand something. Maybe they were trying to get into the Paradise Cafe and you were busy and you said, look, I don't have time right now to tell you.

Google it. You'll find it sooner or later. It's the one nearby and you take off.

You don't give them understanding. You've planted a seed in your mind not to understand this book. You've planted a seed in your mind not to understand the levels of meditation.

Meeting lousy things in your head is the same as meeting lousy people in your life. They both come from seeds in your mind. They're both coming from seeds in your mind.

So in a Mahamudra meditation, in a real one, you focus on the mind and you think about where did that thought come from? What was the karma that I collected? What did I do to someone else for me to have to hear that thought inside my head?

That's a real Mahamudra meditation. That's the real nature of your mind. The stuff that comes up in your mind, the stuff that comes up in your mind, good or bad, is also coming from seeds that you planted before.

It's the same as the people you meet at work. It's not different. That's a real Mahamudra meditation, on your own mind.

It's not to look at your mind and say, gee, it's not visible. That's true, but that's not the ultimate nature of the mind. Got it?

You guys feel sleepy to me. I don't know. Let's keep going.

DE TZAM GOS KHO CHEN GYI DE TZAM GOS KHO CHEN GYI Some foolish people said I meditated on the mind and I figured out that it's poked out. Not poked out. Not poked out.

DE TZAM GOS KHO CHEN GYI DE TZAM GOS KHO CHEN GYI So there was a famous... There's a little line in the Mahamudra scriptures, by the First Pentagon. It's misspelled here.

It's R-D. It looks like R-N. Is it R-D-U-N?

It's supposed to be S-D-U-N. And both words are both words are like one page in a million. You never see this word.

Even if it's spelled correctly, you don't see it. And they misspelled it. NA MA'I BYAS MI BYAS MO MI BDUN MA SU SA BDUN S-D-U-N Just be here now.

Be here now. Don't try to... What do you call it?

Don't cut the flow of your mind from from the past. Your mind is flowing from the past, right? Your mind is flowing into the present from the past.

Don't mess with it. Don't mess with the mind flowing to the present from the past. And MO'ONG BA'I BDUN MA SU And don't anticipate the flow of the mind into the future.

Don't mess with the mind flowing from the past. Don't try to anticipate where the mind is going to go next. That's a Mahamudra saying.

That means be in the present moment. Don't fool around with what your mind was doing yesterday. And don't worry about where your mind is going to be tomorrow.

Stay in the present moment of the mind. That was a famous Mahamudra statement. Would that be useful?

Is it the ultimate? No. I mean, you have to stay in the present moment and examine the nature of your mind as we just described it.

You would have to examine the mind in the present moment but think, you know, what did I do last week to make my mind sound like this right now? That's a weird meditation, right? Because you're divorcing yourself from the mind.

You're watching the mind and saying, who made it like that? What's the mind thinking at that moment? You're watching your mind think some weird thing, right?

Like your mind is distracted during meditation and it upsets you. And you're watching your mind and you're saying, why am I always distracted? Who made your mind distracted?

But when you're looking at it and thinking about who made it distracted, are you distracted? Not anymore. You can say not anymore.

Who said not anymore? You said not anymore. So anyway, His Holiness the First Penchant Lama, in his Mahamudra text he says, stick to the present moment.

Stick to the mind of the present moment. Don't worry about what was happening before. Don't worry about what's going to come.

Stick to the mind of the present moment. But it means examine the nature of the mind of the present moment. It doesn't mean just space out in the present moment.

DE TZAM GONG KHUL BYAS PA'I There are people who thought, oh, I'm going to do Mahamudra meditation, and they thought, oh, I'm going to stay in the present moment. MI TSE DRIN ME STONG ZEG KYI RGYUD BAR ZHIG TU DROR ME That meditation accomplished nothing more than to waste their life. The attempt to stay in the present moment accomplished nothing more than to waste all the moments of their life.

He's making a joke, get it? The attempt to stay in the present moment, without examining what's going on in the present moment, why your mind is thinking that in the present moment, just to watch your mind to stay in the present moment is to waste all the moments of your life. Because it doesn't take you anywhere.

BAR ZHIG TU DROR ME SA RANG GANG YANG DRIN ME NYID It won't take you to any spiritual path of love. BYANG SEM DANG YIN ZHING DANG I will go a few more minutes and then we'll take a small break. BYANG SEM DANG YIN ZHING DANG YANG RAB PA'I DANG BA DANG KYANG GYUR ZIN NA RIM SHIN THEG CHEN GYI NYAM RIM DANG DRAG PA'I NYAM RIM DANG RANG PA'I PHYIR SU BRAL BA'I SNAR MA NOG PA DANG DANG RANG PA'I DRUG DGOS PA If you want to make your meditation into a spiritual practice, if you want your practice of meditation to take you somewhere in this life, then join to that meditation some high ideal.

Join some high ideal to that meditation. He gives three examples. He gives three examples.

One is BYANG SEM. BYANG SEM means Chantsa means bodhichitta, means I would like to be the one who turns this world on and makes people understand where things are coming from and then ends poverty and suffering in this world. I would like to be the one.

I would like to save this world. And you can do. You can really do.

Honestly, you, you individually can do it, okay, chantsa. Nyan jul. I'm tired of seeing people suffer in my life.

I'm tired of it. How much do you have to see before you do something? How many people have to die in your life before you do something?

How many people do you have, how many big people do you have to see fall? How many small people do you have to see get cancer and just die? How many good friends do you have to see go through aging, right, and forgetfulness and the gradual corruption of the body, you know, how many do you have to see before you, before you want to try to do something, right?

Nyan jul. Yantapitawa. Or join your meditation to an examination of where things are really coming from.

Why is my mind distracted today? I hurt somebody last week. Like that, right?

Gyakuro senna, rimshin, or at least try to seek some higher, what do you call it, protection in your life. At least try to seek some kind of protection in your life. Police can't help you when you get cancer.

Neither can doctors, okay? Nobody can help you when you get old, right? As you get old, as you go through the process of aging, no one can help you.

There's no protection. Try to find some real protection. Gyakuro senna, rimshin, techen, and nyam rinpa.

If you do, if you take your meditation practice, right, you're trying to work to the nine levels, you're trying to apply the eight antidotes to the five powers. As you do so, do it with a motivation of wanting to help the world. Then that meditation becomes a higher practice, right?

So what he's saying is that he's complaining, what do you call it, he's attacking meditation for meditation's sake. He's attacking meditation for meditation's sake. Meditation is a tool that has no benefit in and of itself.

Join it with a wish to save the world, it becomes the highest spiritual practice. Join it with a concern for the pain of the world, and it becomes a cause for nirvana. Join your meditation with, okay, I've got to tie two of them together.

Your meditation will bring you to nirvana if you do it with an appreciation for people's pain and a correct understanding of where things are coming from. Manpe chusudora. If you meditate with the thought that there might be something there that can protect you and other people, then it becomes dharma.

It becomes a spiritual practice. But meditation for the sake of meditation, meditation for the sake of watching your breath or something like that, meditation for the purpose of just getting a calm mind, it's not a reason to meditate. DRO BA'I LHAG PA LA BA DE DAG LA GYUR GOS DE DAG MED PA SEM GYI NGO BO SA THOB BYIN MED SO THOB PA TSAM GYIS NI DANG GYI LA CHI'ANG LHAD MI NIR PA There were two mistakes in ancient Tibet about Mahamudra.

The practice of meditating on the mind can be done mistakenly in two different ways. Okay? So if you're interested in doing it mistakenly, I'll give you the two different ways.

What is called sel-tong? Sel-tong. Sel-tong is some weird practice where...

Is this a clock? Now think of everything in the world that's not the clock, okay? Everything on this planet which is not this clock.

Just get it in your head. Tell me when you're ready.

[Говорящий 2] (1:02:05 - 1:02:06)
Roughly.

[Говорящий 1] (1:02:07 - 1:05:14)
You ready? Okay. This clock, everything except this clock, okay?

Got it in your mind? Now think of everything which is the opposite of those things. That's a clock.

Okay? Now, when you perceive a clock, your mind is doing something similar to that. That's one way of looking at how your mind sees a clock.

Your mind sees a clock by eliminating other possibilities. Is it a banana? No.

Is it a football field? No. Is it President Obama's left ear?

No. And then you keep going and then finally you say, well then it must be a clock because that's the only thing left. Actually your mind does that to some extent.

Your mind perceives objects by cancelling what the object is not. Your mind perceives objects by cancelling what the object is not. But that's not really emptiness, okay?

People mistook that for emptiness. Shentong. Seltong.

People thought that was emptiness. You will hear hundreds of weird versions of what emptiness is. The test of whether they are weird is do they help anybody?

It doesn't really help anybody to say the clock is the opposite of everything that's not the clock. It's true but it's not emptiness. Is it a negation?

Yeah. Is it a negation of something that doesn't exist? Is it refusing something which doesn't exist?

No, so it's not emptiness. It's just an interesting fact, alright? That's not emptiness.

Jinmei. Jinmei means try to meditate without... What do you call it?

You hear people say that. You buy a new age tape from, I don't know, Sounds Great or something. Right?

Sounds True. And you know the guy gets on the tape and says, just let the thoughts run through your mind and don't think about anything. Let them flow through your mind.

And then the worst thing they say, don't attach to it. And then I keep asking them, what do you mean don't attach to it? Don't own it.

Don't own the thought. Let the thought go through your mind. That's called jinmei.

It has no practical benefit at all. DANG DZIN LA JI'ANG LEN MI NIR PA Those kinds of meditation will do nothing to... They will do nothing to help stop your misunderstanding of the world.

They won't help. What do I mean you have to stop your misunderstanding of the world? What do I mean in the sense of your boss?

[Говорящий 2] (1:05:16 - 1:05:17)
I think so.

[Говорящий 1] (1:05:18 - 1:06:56)
But how does the wrong... How does the misunderstanding of your boss perpetuate your suffering? Yeah, you yell back.

If you don't realize that the boss is coming from yelling at people, then you will yell back. And then that misunderstanding will bring the boss back next week. That's sansara.

That's a cycle. You get yelled at, you yell back. You get yelled at, you yell back.

Thinking that the clock is everything is the opposite of what's not the clock. Or trying to look at your thoughts in your mind and not attach to them. They don't do anything to help you with your boss.

You see? They have no effect on your boss. You can thank them, but it doesn't help you with the real problems of life.

So they're worthless. Those are worthless. tantric lachika nirvigipay People don't know me very well.

They bring me a book from Barnes & Noble. They bring me the latest book about not attaching to your thoughts from Barnes & Noble. And I'm like, thank you very much, I really appreciate it.

Then I go home and I just... Sometimes I throw it out the window of their car on the way home. Okay, that's a diminutive.

ratna-mūrtekha-lakṣa-tārgyur-jñeñya The best you can do with those kinds of lousy meditations are that you will end up like the guy with the dreadlocks. That's the best that can happen. What happened to him?

[Говорящий 2] (1:06:57 - 1:06:58)
Yeah, okay.

[Говорящий 1] (1:06:59 - 1:13:41)
That's the best. All right. Oh, cool.

One more lightning, we'll get to emptiness. You ready? We will take a break, okay?

No, I mean we'll finish the lightning, we'll take a break, and then we can start on emptiness. Yay! Because now you know how to meditate perfectly.

The problem with the practice text is that it takes like a day to teach it, and then it takes like 20 years to try to do it. Anyway. deitār mēnmey lāṃ lāsāṃ mūrmin zimba Don't get attracted to worthless paths.

Don't get attracted to worthless paths. Don't get attracted to some worthless New Age thing that tells you, you know, watch the thoughts float in your mind like clouds and don't relate to them or something. It doesn't help with your boss.

The test of a viewpoint is will it help you with your boss or your spouse. nāmyāṇḍaṃ yāṅgārṭaṃ tārmaṃ je śepa gosu This is beautiful, okay? It's not being sectarian to learn to distinguish between a path which will benefit you and a path which will not.

It's not being sectarian to say, you know, I respect your book. I respect your work. I respect that you want to help people.

I'm sure that it has some benefit for you, right? But then if you're dealing with a few years of help, right? A normal human being, it takes 20, as your parents know, it takes 20 years to eject someone from the home, you know?

I mean, they're no use to anybody for 20 years, right? And then the last 20 years of life are a bust, right? You're too old to think straight.

You're looking for your car keys all the time. I took, you know, an older person out the other day. I said, let's go to lunch.

I was trying to cheer them up, you know? Let's go to lunch, you know? They said, yeah, yeah, let's go to lunch, you know?

So, we got in the car, you know? We got in the car. We went out of the driveway.

We hit the Thomas Road, right? And then she said, I have to go to the bathroom. And I'm like, the restaurant's only like 10 minutes.

I gotta go now. And I'm like, I turned off at a coffee shop, you know? Okay, let's rush in, you know?

I mean, how much you can rush at that age? So, you know, we couldn't wait. We couldn't drive to the restaurant.

We laugh, but that's us, right? The last 20 years of our life, we're just too tired to do anything. The first 20 years are, you're too dumb to do anything, okay?

So, that means like about 40, I'm sorry, 20 useful years in between, okay? You got about 20 years to do whatever you're going to do in your life, you got to do it in the middle. And then there's this joke in Tibet, you know?

You're going to sleep half of those 20 years, you know? So, cut it to 10 years, you know? You have 10 years of intelligent life in here, right?

You have 10 years of energy and intelligence to play with. You don't have time to read New Age books about not thinking about the thoughts as they fall to your head. It's not that those people are evil, okay?

And it's not that we should burn them at the stake. But... But, I'm just kidding, okay?

But it's a waste of irreplaceable, precious moments of your life, of the age of your life when you are clear-thinking, and you got out of the house, you know? You have 10, 15 years of real life to live. Are you going to spend a month of it on some book that's about don't think about your thoughts?

Concentrate on not thinking about your thoughts. You know? You don't have time, you know?

You don't have time. Try to develop the capacity to detect fluff, all right? Try to develop the capacity to detect fluff.

And if it's fluff, then leave it for later, you know? If I live to 80, I'll read your book, you know? Okay?

While your mind is strong, you're not too old yet, you have time, you can meditate, you know? You're not a crazy teenager. Those years of your life, reserve them for something of substance, okay?

The other thing they always say I don't do, they say, anything you write will publish, Geshe-la, anything. I say, why? They say, content, content, content.

You know, they're like, you got content. And it's not fluff, you have real content, you know? And so look for things of substance, and look for things which can really help you in your life.

Don't waste your time. Learn to distinguish between fluff and non-fluff, all right? Cool?

Especially with your meditation. The time spent in the core of your mind is precious. In the core of your mind is very fragile.

In the core of your mind is very vulnerable. And you have to reserve the highest teachings. When you get close to the core of your mind in meditation, you want to have something powerful and substantial to use when you get there, okay?

You don't want fluff around the core of your mind. If you work hard to get close to the core of your mind, you better have something cool you can do with it. And don't just bring some garbage to the core of your mind, okay?

Bring something life-saving and planet-changing to the core of your mind, okay?