«Дар освобождения», курс 1 «Глубочайшая медитация», занятие 8

[Говорящий 1] (0:00 - 12:57)
So, just to bring you back up to date, we were thinking to do this little teaching here. And my teacher, it took him 20 years to finish it for us. And we were thinking to have that time.

Since we're Americans, we can do things fastly. So, we thought maybe 10 years would be enough. And we had a plan to cover...

This is a book called Lamrim, Chanting Lamrim Rinpoche, which means the steps of the path to enlightenment. So, the theory... The theory is that you study, one by one, certain spiritual realizations.

Like, for example, a meditation on the fact that you will have to die one day. Or a meditation on loving every living creature in this world. And those meditations are arranged in a special order.

And the idea is that if someone takes you through them slowly, properly, then you can learn all the steps to becoming an enlightened being. Then there's a custom called Nyamji, where you study each meditation, but then you don't go on until you all get it. Until you all internalize it.

And so, I've known some Lamrim teachers who started on step number one, and then 30 years later, all their students are still on step number one, and the teacher passed away in that. But the idea for this series of teachings is that we would learn one step at a time, from the steps of the path to enlightenment, and then we would go on a retreat together in some quiet place out in the forest for 10 days and try to internalize that teaching. So the plan is, twice a year, to do the theory book in a setting like this one, and then twice a year following that, maybe a month or two months later, to go together on a silent retreat for 10 days and work really hard on internalizing that teaching.

To really appreciate each of the steps, or to internalize them, requires that you meditate. The section on meditation is one of the last sections of the whole book, because in Tibet it would be assumed that you were pretty good at meditating already. So what we are planning for this series of classes, which will take 10 years, is that we'll go to the back first, study the detailed instructions there on how to meditate, and then the next section after that, which is very famous, it's a section about how reality really works, how things really work, where do the people and things around you really come from, and how can you help the world, change the world, bring peace to the world, remove poverty, illness, war from the world, by tweaking reality.

So there's a section on tweaking reality. I like to think of The Makers, where Keanu Reeves, who's never figured out anything, he figures out that the world is like a computer program. And then he tweaks it.

And I enjoy the scene at the end where he just figured out how to tweak reality. Somebody shoots a gun at him, and then instead of ducking, he just pulls out his hand. And I guess he does something with the binary code, the program that's running his world, and then the bullets just drop to the ground.

So we're trying to do something similar. Actually, we're doing something extremely similar. We're trying to use deep states of meditation to be able to see into the code that underlies reality itself, and then do tweaking of that reality to stop war, hunger, illness, and death itself.

That's the idea, okay? So a small undertaking. So we are going to be studying in this course the meditation part, which you need to access the code, right?

To get deep down enough into the world to see the code, you have to be in deep meditation. You can't break the code, really, unless you can go very deeply into meditation. So we are going to study that first, and then we are going to study the code itself and how to manipulate the code of reality.

And then after that, we are going to go back and start the book. Step one to the last step, and apply the meditation and the tweaking of reality to each of the steps of the path to enlightenment. So we're starting at the back first, and then we'll go back to the beginning.

And then, you know, eight years from now, or six years from now, we'll be out of the back of the book. The back of the book will have been done already. So then we're going to skip to another text, which was written in 1409, something like that, by the teacher of His Holiness the First Dalai Lama.

And in that book, he gives much greater detail about how to tweak the reality. So we'll, you know, six, seven years from now when we're done with this book, having already been through the last part about tweaking, we'll switch to an even more famous book on tweaking. And that will be 400 pages of tweaking.

So that will take a while. And I just think it's a nice way to spend your life for ten years. The whole book is full of beautiful, beautiful practices for conducting your life and helping other people.

You know, things like patience, and how to live an ethical life, how to be generous to other people, things like that, how to generate joy, how to generate compassion. So all of those subjects we'll be studying under the microscope of deep meditation and an understanding of how reality works. So there are a lot of people who are just flying into the teaching on the weekends.

I think there were about 50 people more or something, I don't know. And then they, I sort of wanted them to hear all of the meditation part uninterruptedly. So we did half of it last weekend.

We'll be doing the other half of it next weekend. We did not cover any of homework for those of you who've been struggling with it. All right, sorry.

I should have told you, right? But I hope you figured it out. Maybe you just had some great time at the cafe.

So tonight we're going to skip to class 6. So 4 and 5 will get on the weekend in the other yards to learn more about how to meditate. So what we're going to do while they're away is start the final section on tweaking reality.

How to tweak reality. I'd like to give, I talked about it the other day but I'd like to repeat it. Was it Monday?

Yesterday. We did like, I don't know, 5 hours of a very very advanced book. It's the text from my own monastery that was written 500 years ago.

It was an advanced manual on tweaking. And I've been doing that book for 7 years with some of my students and I think it will take another 10 or 14 years. So we were working on that text just because we have to do that every 2 months or they're never going to finish.

And we had an extra day on Monday. And so during those classes, I did a short demonstration and I talked about the idea of tweaking. I'd like to just do it again for 5 minutes and then we'll jump into this explanation which is by, which was written, it was taught orally in 1921 over a 24 day period by Pabongkha Rinpoche who is the teacher of Chitra Rinpoche who is the teacher of the current Dalai Lama.

And Chitra Rinpoche was also the teacher of my teacher. My teacher also met Pabongkha Rinpoche when he was a teenager. And there's a beautiful story that my teacher had just been appointed the Nirbhaga of Girong Khamsa.

So Girong is one of the colleges, like Oxford has colleges, right? Girong is one of the colleges of Sereme Monastery. Sere is one of the greatest, it's one of the big 3 monasteries of Tibet.

It had about 10,000 monks. Then it has 12 colleges and Girong College is my college and it's my teacher's college and it was Pabongkha Rinpoche's college. So we own Pabongkha Rinpoche.

And he came to give a talk like this at Girong Khamsa, you know, spot today in the late 1930s. And my teacher was a teenager at the time. And then there's a beautiful story that my teacher was at the time very young.

For example, in Tibet the monks took their shoes off at the door of the monastery. The monastery was a small city. It had 10,000 people in it.

But the monks would take their shoes off at the door of the monastery, at the front gate of the monastery. So one of the typical things my teacher enjoyed doing was spreading thumbtacks all over the opening of the day. And then he had a special skill and a thing called pangda.

Say pangda. Pangda is two words, pak and mda. Pak and mda.

Pak means dough, like cookie dough. Pak means dough. Mda means a sphere or a projectile.

So my teacher, Pabongkha Rinpoche, he was known for his skill at pangda. Pangda means you're sitting in a huge assembly of monks with like 3,000 monks from your college. And everyone's chanting these deep chants, you know.

And then he would wait until the guy's mouth was open, and then he'd go pangda. And there'd be this contest to see if you could, if the guy was like over there, like if you could hit him right in the mouth, and then he'd be choking on it. And he was like number one in pangda.

And he was really good at acting innocent. So the people around him would always get in trouble. And he wouldn't get in trouble.

And then he was headed towards being a cook in the monastery, which is what happens to pangda at first. It's probably some kind of karma. To be a cook at our monastery is no small thing.

I mean, the pot, you could climb into the pot. If they put you to cleaning that pot, it takes like four or five hours. And so he was on his way to being a cook.

[Говорящий 2] (12:57 - 12:59)
Then he met Pabongkha Rinpoche.

[Говорящий 1] (13:07 - 17:25)
And Pabongkha Rinpoche came to his house. And my teacher was Nyerpa. Nyerpa means he got stuck being corner master of the house.

Like he has to watch over how many bags of yak butter they have. He has to keep count of them, like that. So he was Nyerpa.

But that means he got to meet Pabongkha Rinpoche, who came to check out the refreshments before he gave the talk. And then there's a story that he held my teacher's head in his hands. And he said, I think this one will turn out well.

I think this one will be good. He just held his head like that. And then he went on and gave his teaching.

And then from that day, something happened in Rinpoche's life. And he became, when they had the final debates, when he graduated with his geshe, out of 10,000 monks, he was number one. He defeated 10,000 monks in the debate.

And in the final debate, it's held in the Dalai Lama's personal quarters. So he did meet Pabongkha Rinpoche, and he got his blessing, and he received teachings on this. So I just want to demonstrate, just one small demonstration from, which pretty much summarizes everything you're going to hear for the next five days.

Because I struggled with emptiness for a long time in the monastery. And, you know, I told a story the other day that my teacher challenged me to meditate about emptiness. And I had read all these books about emptiness, none of which was correct.

And they're still not correct in English. And one of them said emptiness was just close your eyes and everything is black. One of them said emptiness means don't think about anything.

One of them said emptiness means everything is an illusion and it doesn't matter whether you're nice to people or you hurt people. And these are all very serious mistakes about the nature of the computer program. It's not true that the ultimate meaning of life is a black hole.

And it's not true that you get to the ultimate meaning of life by sitting and thinking about nothing and staring at a wall. And it's not true that the ultimate meaning of life is everything is an illusion and it doesn't matter. In fact, quite the opposite.

Everything depends on how kind you are to other people. So, really, the big leap that you have to make is how do you tie an understanding of the ultimate reality of all things to kindness towards other people? Why is there a connection between the way reality really works and kindness towards other people?

Where do compassion and ultimate reality meet? And you can understand it in like five minutes. And then we'll go through this beautiful text and you'll understand it again at the end, alright?

So, here we go again. What is this thing? Yeah, it's a pen.

If a dog came into this room, and I was picturing him at this moment, a little puppy dog. My teacher loved dogs. He always had puppies running around.

Because he wasn't allowed to have one in the monastery, so he had many. And if the puppy dog comes up and we wave this pen, what will the dog do? So, he will take it in his mouth and he'll chew on it.

So, to the dog, this is not a pen. You can call it a chew toy, okay? It's something to chew on.

To the human, it's a pen. So then some philosophical questions arise. Who's right?

Yeah, I think you have to say both. You can't say the human is more right than the dog. In the end, you know?

Humans like to say the dog ruined my pen. But I imagine the dog is thinking, that guy's wasting a perfectly good chew toy.

[Говорящий 2] (17:25 - 17:26)
You know?

[Говорящий 1] (17:27 - 18:24)
You can't really say that one is more right than the other. Obviously, you can't say that one of them is wrong. One is seeing one thing according to their own context.

And one is seeing a different thing. In the same room, at the same time, with the same thing. You see?

You can almost, well not almost, you can say that there are two realities running in the room at the same time. There's a dog's reality running in the room. Parallel universes.

Physicists are up to what? 17 now, I think, or something. But actually there are as many worlds in this room, there are as many rooms in this room as there are people.

Because each person is seeing a different room. So, another question for you. If I put this object down on the stage, and if we all leave the room, and if there are no dogs in the room, then what is it?

[Говорящий 2] (18:28 - 18:29)
Somebody said nothing.

[Говорящий 1] (18:29 - 19:06)
I mean, you can say it's just a black cylinder or something like that. But it's not either one of those other things by itself. When the human walks in and they kind of lay a trip on it, it becomes a pen.

When the dog comes in and chews on it, it becomes a chew toy. If there's no humans and no dogs and you just set it on the steps here, then it's not really anything until someone comes in. So, next question for you.

Is the pen coming this way or is the pen coming this way?

[Говорящий 2] (19:09 - 19:12)
Sorry? Yeah.

[Говорящий 1] (19:13 - 19:20)
Are you from us? Yeah, it's coming from us, right? Can we agree?

You've got to nod or you can't go home.

[Говорящий 2] (19:21 - 19:21)
All right.

[Говорящий 1] (19:22 - 26:24)
My teacher said if you don't nod, you don't get home. All right. It must be coming this way, all right?

Because the dog sees a chew toy validly and the human sees a pen validly. So, it must be coming this way. If it were coming this way, then either the human would be salivating or the dog would be writing, right?

If it were either a chew toy or a pen this way from its own side, then the dog would write with it or else both of them would chew on it, you see? If it were something in itself coming this way. So, its existence as a pen depends on my mind making it into a pen, okay?

Next question. Is that a conscious process? When I held this up, did you think, oh, let me think of it as a pen and then I can write with it?

Did you have to think that way? No, you didn't have to think that way. If you really wanted it to be something else, could you close your eyes, think hard, wish hard?

If you wanted it to be a stick of diamond, right? Could you just close your eyes and wish real hard and then you want to try it? Here we go.

Close your eyes. Wish that it was a big diamond. I'll split it with you, the proper way.

Okay, open your eyes. What do you see? So, it is coming from your mind, but that's not under your current conscious control.

It is coming from your mind, but you can't say to yourself, oh, I want it to be a diamond, or I want it to be a gold stick, or something like that, all right? It is coming from your mind, but there's some kind of, you're forced to see it in a certain way. Now, how do we explain that?

How do we explain that? How did Lord Buddha explain it? Karma, okay?

We explain it like, what does karma mean? Let's say Rebecca needs a pen, all right? You need a pen, right?

She really needs a pen, because she's from God, so bring her a pen to take notes apparently. And so, I want to help her, all right? I want her to have a pen.

I like these pens, you know? I actually, these are hard to find. I really like them, you know?

So, but I'm going to give it away to her because I love them, and I want her to be happy, right? So then I reach out to get her a pen. The mind is like a video camera.

The mind records everything you say, everything you think, everything you ever do in your whole life is permanently recorded in your mind, all right? Like a huge harvest. That's why people get confused and sing out late in their life because there's so much data in there, all right?

It's built up, overbuilt up. So when I release the pen with the intention to help her, a seed is planted in my mind, all right? You can say a karmic seed is planted in my mind.

In the recesses of the mind, within the subconscious, that seed, like all other seeds, grows exponentially. Its power multiplies exponentially, right? Like an acorn, right?

We just consider that an acorn which weighs one gram in time produces an oak tree which weighs tons, right? Its extraordinary ability to replicate itself under the ground, from under the ground. Mental seeds are no less powerful.

In fact, they're more powerful. So within the subconscious, the perception and the imprint made by offering her a pen exponentially multiplies under the ground of the conscious mind. And then I'm able to see many pens later.

If you offer someone one pen, a gift of one pen, you will receive many pens back. You will see many pens. That's why you see a pen when I hold up that thing.

I need a pen, sorry. It's an Indian pen. So the reason you saw a pen when I held it up was that there was a seed in your mind for a pen.

That seed was planted by offering a writing instrument to another person who needed one or some similar kind of kindness, right? That's true of every person you ever met and that's true of every object you ever saw. In every church you ever sat in, in every carpet you ever sat on, in every air conditioner that blew on you.

Is it all cranked down by the way? Everything that you experience in your life, around you, each different object and each different person has been produced by a separate seed. They are coming this way, right?

They are coming this way. And whether you like them, whether they're nice or they're not nice, whether the place is hot or cold, whether the carpet is soft or hard, it's all coming from you. It's all coming from how much kindness you've paid to other people.

So we can see that compassion and the world are actually linked together. How you treat other people has created every detail of the world around you and of your own body and mind. You see?

If I'm blessed with a healthy body, if I'm blessed to see this body is healthy, it's because I've served other people, sick people. The whole world is like that. So, emptiness means if you took away all the seeds in my mind and if you took away all the kindnesses I have paid to other people, what would this be?

It would just be a black stick, you see? I wouldn't see it as a pen. It can only be a pen if I have been kind to other people.

By itself, it's like a blank white screen and everything in the world is the same. Every person you ever met wasn't nice and they weren't mean either. They were just blank white screens.

They were neutral. If you experience them as kind, it's because you've been kind to other people. Seeds are ripening in your mind to see them as kind.

And if you see them as unpleasant, then that's because you've been unpleasant to other people. Last thing, then we can go to the book which just tells you all this in 100 pages.

[Говорящий 2] (26:28 - 26:39)
How do you get to heaven? There. How do you get to heaven?

Huh?

[Говорящий 1] (26:40 - 28:56)
Yeah, you just go crazy taking care of other people. You consciously plant wildly huge amounts of seeds from being kind to other people. If you have a person in your life that you don't like, which most of us do, at least one, right?

If there's someone in your life who's bothering you or hurting you, then you can change that by removing the seed in your mind which was planted there when you were not nice to somebody else. Right? So there is such a method of removing negative seeds from your mind.

If you removed all the negative seeds from your mind that cause you to see people and places as unpleasant, then every single place and every single person you ever met would be pleasant. If you were as kind as God to every living being, if you planted seeds on that level, then you would start to see the people around you as angelic. And you would be in heaven right here.

You don't have to go somewhere... There's a joke in Tibet that heaven is not like three miles past the back of the moon or something. You would just be seeing pens instead of dog...

what do you call it? Chew toys. You would graduate from seeing chew toys to seeing pens.

You would graduate from seeing normal people to seeing angels. And then you wouldn't be in heaven. Alright?

That's the reason we're studying reality tweaking methods is to reach heaven and bring other people there. In the process, hunger, poverty, war, death itself are erased from this earth. It's cool.

And that's why we're here. And that's what we're trying to achieve. Here we go.

Ready? So, this begins class six. We'll go back to class four and five on Friday and Sunday.

You've got to do your homework, please.

[Говорящий 2] (28:57 - 28:57)
Okay?

[Говорящий 1] (28:57 - 29:20)
If you're one or two behind, catch up in the next... tomorrow you have a day off, please catch up. Alright?

I don't feel comfortable with people teaching if they haven't completed all their work. And I won't give you a certificate if you don't complete all your work. Because I don't feel comfortable with you knowing half of it or three-quarters of it or something like that.

Or not being able to express it to someone.

[Говорящий 2] (29:20 - 29:20)
Okay?

[Говорящий 1] (29:21 - 34:44)
All the text is there. The teaching is there. People have spent hundreds and hundreds of dollars to get you here.

The bears have... their whole congregation has sweated to make this place ready for you. And all these people are putting out all this effort.

You can do a little bit of homework. And then you'll be qualified to teach it. The reason for me to teach it, personally, I have a thousand other things I'd like to be teaching.

But I felt like if my teacher spent 20 years loading this into me, I would like to offload it. I would like to download it to other people. And I would like you to become vessels of the same teaching.

And then I would like to see you create other vessels of the same teaching. So I'm just really physically pouring it into you. And then what has to happen is you have to pour it into somebody else, or the whole exercise is useless.

You know, this book has been passed on, the lottery has been passed on for 918 years. Are you going to mess it up? No?

You know, are you going to be the person who doesn't do their homework and doesn't pass it on? Do you want to be responsible for breaking a 918 year tradition? I don't think so.

My work is done when I teach you the last page. Then your work begins, actually, next week to pass it on to other people. And I beg you to pass it on to other people.

That's why we're here. So you have to get it straight, and you must pass it on to other people, because that's what we're doing. Then we can help the world.

Okay, here we go. You keep saying, here we go. So I'm reading the Tibetan text out loud as a blessing, which is a, you know, a 10th century blessing that you will get it into your heart.

And at the most unexpected moments, these things will come into your mind, because you have the oral blessing from the lineage, okay? Nibbā shirṅkī hārtana bhūtsu lā sun. So, are we okay?

Yeah, wow. Good job. All right.

He's working really hard to get this ready for you, so you should thank him someday. All right. Part two, meaning now that we've finished how to achieve perfect meditation, which we'll continue on Friday and Saturday, right?

Now that you know how to meditate perfectly, I am going to teach you, he says, the essence of wisdom itself, which is called hāk-tong. Say hāk-tong. Hāk-tong.

Hāk-tong. Hāk means special. Tong means to see.

Hāk-tong is a special kind of insight into how reality works. It's Keanu Reeves in The Corridor, just before he holds his hand up. He gets hāk-tong.

He sees into the program and he sees how he can make the bullets come, okay? That's called hāk-tong. In Sanskrit, hāk is the.

Tong is pashyana. So, this in Sanskrit is called vipashyana. Say vipashyana.

It's not vipassana. I don't know. That's a corruption that happened about 18 centuries ago.

Okay. There are three sections to this explanation of how to get into the guts of the program that's running your world. Kāsakhi dhāgne tenpa-dhepa.

I will explain to you why you personally don't exist in the way you thought. Number two. Kāsakhi dhāgne tenpa-dhepa.

Then I will explain to you why all the other stuff around you doesn't exist in the way you thought. This is not some philosophical exercise. If you could understand how you really are, you could change everything about you.

And if you understood how other things in the world, why they happen, really, you could change them. War, hunger, poverty, death itself, you could change them. If you understood the program.

De me hakto ketsu lo. And then I'm going to lead you into how to apply that in a deep state of meditation. The way you get into the program can only be through deep meditation.

You go into deep meditation, you fool around with the program, you come out, and weird stuff happens. Cool stuff happens. My teacher asked me to do an experiment to see if I had really reached the code.

And it was just an artificial experiment. He said, Mike, I want you to prove to yourself that you have unlocked this code. I said, okay, Rinpoche, what do you want me to do?

You like fly in the sky? Or, you know, what would you like me to do? He says, you go to Manhattan and start a million dollar business.

I'm like, Rinpoche, that's like the worst thing to do to me.

[Говорящий 2] (34:45 - 34:45)
You know?

[Говорящий 1] (34:45 - 50:42)
I have no interest in business. I don't like business people. I don't like money.

I don't need money. I don't want money. I don't want to have those things.

I'm happy in the monastery. I have a tiny little room. I've lived here for 10, 20 years.

I don't need anything. I don't want it. He says, yeah, but you have to prove to yourself that you really understood the code.

And then you're going to teach it to other people, and they're going to ask you, have you understood the code? And then you're going to say yes, and then they're going to say, prove it. And then you're going to say, well, I can't.

So he said, you go to New York. He started a million dollar company by tweaking the code. Just to prove to yourself and other people later on.

Then maybe they'll listen to you. So I went to Manhattan with no experience, no training, no knowledge. I didn't even know how to get to Manhattan.

And we started a company, and we gave away the money to refugees, right? The company reached a quarter billion dollars last year. It's the fastest growing company in the history of New York City.

It doubled every year for 15 years. And I worked half-time. I worked six months a year, three days a week.

Right? Just tweaking. Go in, deep meditation, go into the code, tweak it.

And then go home and relax and do your yashi stance, you see? So you can do it. Anything you want.

You can use it. I think it's good to use it to do some kind of experiment in your own life, tweak something that you want to happen. I had a birth defect in my home.

I fixed it. I tweaked that also. Right?

Now I do ballet. I couldn't walk on that part. And stuff like that.

Prove to yourself that it worked, sometime. That's the point. And then use it to fix Iraq and Afghanistan and hunger in Africa and things like that.

Do a little experiment and then do a big experiment. Do something that means more in the world. Okay.

Okay. Dabo Danyi, Nyamsak Nyamkata Gyozo. Very, very beautiful.

He divides his explanation of how reality works into two parts. He says, there's reality that you encounter in deep, deep meditation. In extremely deep meditation.

There's the code of reality that you encounter there. Nyamsak, it's called like the sky. It's called sky meditation.

It's called sky meditation. And you, Nyamkata, you, it's the direct perception of ultimate reality. It's called like like the crystal sky in front of your eyes.

Something like that. Then, Jeton Kimata Gyozo. Jeton means after you see the real workings of reality deeply for the first time.

It takes maybe 20 minutes, right? When you come out, all these cool things happen to you. You can see 500 years into the future.

You can be angels. You have ultimate love for every creature. You see every living being on all planets.

Just for a few starters. That's called Jeton. The next 24 hours after you see the program directly for the first time is called Jeton.

Kimata means illusory, and that's a long story. But basically it means that after that, you realize that nothing was the way you thought it was. After that, you realize that nothing was the way you thought it was.

Now when you look at a pen, you almost directly see the day you gave a pen to Rebecca. You see? So your whole experience of your life is much different.

You don't think, oh, I have to order some more of these on the internet. Or, you know, I hope the factory in Japan hasn't closed. Or, I wonder if that stationery store in Manhattan is still selling boxes of these so I can get some more.

You don't think like that. You look at the pen and automatically it comes into your mind, I should be more generous to keep these pens going. You see what I mean?

You don't see it as the way that you used to see it. And then, when you come out of the direct perception, you go back to seeing less than ultimately wrong. But you know you're not seeing ultimately wrong.

You know you're wrong. You go back to seeing things slightly wrong. Because you can't help yourself.

But you know you're wrong. It's like the difference between not knowing you're wrong when you're wrong and knowing you're wrong when you're wrong. In gentle, you know you're wrong when you're wrong.

And then you spend the next 500 years or so getting it right. Which involves deep insights into how things work, and many, many experiments like that come into you. And then your mind changes.

And then, later on, you're into ultimate reality directly all the time. But it takes some time. And during that time, it's cool because you have all these cool insights for example that nothing works, etc.

You know it? And weird things start to happen. We were talking about it the other night.

Cool stuff starts to happen. British Airways calls you. British Airways has 43,000 employees, 12 billion dollar company.

They call you. They say, Could you come teach this stuff to our employees? You know?

And you're like, What? They're like, Come to London. We'll fly you in.

Bring a couple people with you. We'll teach it to our staff. This reality-tweaking thing.

Because we want to be successful. And we get you in, right? You're starting.

You're teaching it. It's cool. So, things start happening.

Weird stuff starts to happen. Cool stuff. Happy stuff.

All right. Number one. In order to understand how we go into that sky meditation.

Where you see all things. Ultimate reality. Ultimate reality is not a positive thing.

Ultimate reality is the lack of something. Ultimate reality is the lack of something. Is there an African elephant sitting in this church right now?

No. So, that's the lack of elephant reality in this church right now. Is it a positive thing or a negative thing?

It's the absence of something. Is the thing which isn't here something which, generally speaking, exists in this world or not? I mean, if I say, is there a lack of elephant in this room?

Yes. Do elephants exist, generally speaking, in our world? Yes.

Now I'll ask you another question. Is there a two-headed purple, 23 and a half foot elephant rampaging through this church at this moment? No.

Kat, you didn't turn around to check, okay? I was watching her, okay? She's got the best view of the aisle, you know?

I mean, if we had a trouble with an elephant in the church, you'd want her to at least check, right? Why didn't you turn around to check if there was a two-headed purple, 23 and a half foot elephant rampaging through the church? Yeah, because they just aren't something that we have to worry about.

They don't exist in this world, generally speaking, all right? There's no such thing, all right? You didn't have to turn around to see if there was one in this church, because no such thing exists, all right?

That's the same way with ultimate reality, right? Ultimate reality is the absence of something in the world that never could have been here anyway. Right?

What's that? What's an example of one of those things? What's an example of one of those things that never could have been in the room anyway?

A pen that... Yeah, a pen that was coming this way. Point to the pen.

Point to the pen. Ready? Point to the pen.

Everybody point to the pen. Right, now put your arm down. Now point to the pen which was not created by my kindness to other people.

That's emptiness, and that's ultimate reality. Was it cool? Got it?

Where is the pen? How many pens are there in the world that didn't come from being nice to other people? Zero.

Yeah, zero, all right? Those kinds of pens that never existed and never could exist are what we call gākja. Say gākja.

Gākja means the thing that was never there and actually couldn't be there that you always thought was there. The thing that couldn't be there that you always thought was there. If you believe that you can only get pens by being kind and sharing them with others, would you fight with someone else about a pen?

Would it be possible to fight with someone else for a pen if you believed, truly believed, that the only way to get a pen is to share it with other people? Could you fight for oil supplies in the world with China, right? Could you have a war, which is coming, right?

Very possible. There are generals in China who said we could blow... There are generals in China who have already calculated that there are not enough bullets in all the American army's reserves to shoot the amount of Chinese they could send to California.

There are generals in China who have already calculated that. Even if every bullet hit a person and killed them, there wouldn't be enough bullets in the United States to stop their whole army, okay? It could come, right?

It could come. This thing could come. And you know the Americans that have warships off their coast now, South China Sea, are exercises.

That's like putting a Chinese warship off the St. Ingo. I mean, it's a little bit belligerent, right? So, it's very possible that a war could happen over oil supplies.

It's a very possible thing, right? It's a scary possible thing. What's the only way to get oil supplies for your country?

Share them with other people. It's the same with pens. You just gotta go to another scale, right?

You gotta go to a larger scale. The only way to get new supplies of renewable energy for your country are to share the current supplies of energy with other countries in need. That's the only way, right?

If everybody in the United States and China understood that, could there be a war over oil between the two countries? It's not possible, right? So, we have stuff.

I mean, December we're going from month to China, right? We've been working in China for five years or something. And we're working in the United States for a little bit more.

But if we could change the understanding of all the people in each country, and if they understood that oil only came from sharing energy with other countries in need, then a war would not be possible. You see? So, these ideas are very powerful.

And these ideas are not just some kind of, what do you call it? New Age discussion, you know? These are powerful ideas.

You will get more supplies of renewable energy for your country the more you share what you have with other countries. That's all. Oil, whichever came to your country without helping another country, is...

It doesn't even exist. There's no such thing. Alright?

When you fight with another country over oil supplies, do those oil supplies ever exist? The oil supplies that you perceive. When you fight with another country over oil supplies, do those oil supplies exist in the way you think they do?

No. There's no such oil supplies. That's the weird thing.

People have wars over... There's 23 and a half foot, two-headed purple elephants. Really, people have wars over things that don't exist.

That's gacca. That's gacca. Gacca means something bizarre was there that wasn't there all along.

And the entire pain, suffering, anxiety, trouble of six billion human creatures is an accident all directed towards things which never even existed. Phantoms. Just phantoms.

Everything the world is worried about, and everything the world works for, and especially everything the world fights over, never existed in the first place. That's the huge irony of our life. It's bad that people are suffering in the world, getting old, dying, fighting, going hungry.

That's a bad thing. The fact that it's all a mistake and unnecessary is a thousand times worse, right? Some guy breaks through a plate glass window at Scottsdale Mall to hug a lady in a fur coat and slashes his body with a glass.

You know, out of intense love for the lady in the fur coat, he breaks through the plate glass window, cups himself up to hug this beautiful lady in a fur coat who is a mannequin. And when he gets through the glass with all that pain, I don't know, I don't think it's so much fun with a mannequin. All right.

That's what's happening. CHEN GYI DANG GYI DENG GYI DENG KHYAB DANG GYI DENG GYI DENG GYI KHYAB DANG GYI DENG GYI DENG GYI means ascertaining that it must be a certain way. We'll get to it later.

DENG MA CHI CHENG GYI DENG GYI DENG MA CHI CHENG DENG MA CHI CHENG DENG MA CHI CHENG GYI DENG GYI The last two points are ways of proving that things don't exist the way you thought. You will find out that things were not one thing the way you thought, and you will find out that things were not plural things the way you thought. That's all.

Those are the things we're going to discuss this week. Those are the things we're going to discuss to get to an understanding of where reality really comes from.

[Говорящий 2] (50:48 - 50:50)
We'll go for a few more minutes, then we'll take a break.

[Говорящий 1] (50:50 - 57:33)
Because I know it's been a while. DENG MA CHI CHENG GYI We actually got to half a page. A big part of the reason to learn how reality works at its foundation is to remove negative emotions from the human mind permanently.

That's called in Sanskrit nirvana. Nir means out. Van means blow.

Van came into ventilation, wind, words like that. They all come from van. Nirvana means to blow out something.

And what you're blowing out is your negative emotions. Desire, anger, jealousy, all of those feelings, negative feelings that you have. What he's saying, SHI RAKI NAMBA CHENG here is a very...

JIG RTEN DE LAM SHI RAKI NAMBA CHENG means the path of the world. The path of the world. SHI RAKI NAMBA CHENG means we talked about it the other day.

You want to make your mind calmer. So you decide rather than having coffee with four scoops of coffee in it, you will have coffee with three scoops of coffee in it. And then you give up, you drop the four scoop coffee and you go for the three scoop coffee.

And you start to feel a little calmer. Then if you want to get more calm, what do you do? Two scoops.

Then you get down to one scoop. Then you go to decaf. Then you could go to what do you call it in British tea?

Earl Grey. You go to Earl Grey. Then you go to green tea.

Then you go to decaf green tea with steamed soy milk. Then you go to the next step normally for me is what's that like spicy Indian tea? Rubeus chai.

Rubeus has no caffeine in it. You go to Rubeus chai. But it still gives you a little kick.

I mean, not much. Then you go to peppermint. And then you go to water.

I mean, eventually you end up at water, right? Does drinking the water feel more calm than drinking the four scoop coffee? Did you feel progressively more calm as you dropped caffeine?

I mean, normally you feel more relaxed. You sleep much better. Even drinking one cup of coffee a day screws up most people's sleep and they never get it.

They say, I can't sleep. I say, do you drink coffee? They say, yes.

I say, just go away. Don't ask me that. You know.

But the point is that kind of approach, we just call relatively happier. Relatively happier is a good translation of shiraki number 10. You feel more calm with three scoops coffee than you did with four scoops coffee, but you're still a nervous person.

You didn't solve anything. Relatively speaking, you're only 90% as nervous as you were before. And you were a rat before.

So now you're 90% of a rat, but you feel better. Just going through this thing where you cut down on the caffeine, but you don't get rid of the caffeine. As long as you don't get rid of the caffeine, your mind is still disturbed by the caffeine.

It's just less disturbed than it was before. So you feel better. That's called shiraki number 10.

jikten me lang means, this is the world's approach to things. nyong mong lun gyur gong numba means, all you're doing is suppressing your negative emotions. You're not dealing with them.

You're not stopping them. You drink less coffee, you'll get less upset in traffic. But the minute you start with more coffee, you'll get more upset again.

It's only a temporary fix. Gong numba means, you're just suppressing your negative emotions. You are not stopping them at the root.

You're not cutting the root out of them. If you do a nice meditation for a half hour on your breath, then when you get up, you will be less likely to get angry for the next hour. Three hours later, you'll probably get as angry as you ever got before.

It's not the ultimate meditation. Ultimately, it's not helpful. It just suppresses the negative emotions temporarily.

It doesn't treat the root of the negative emotions, and the negative emotions come back with the meditation marathon. We are looking for a meditation which would permanently change the very capacity of anger to grow in the human mind. And that's a different meditation.

Here we go. NI THAG PA YIN PAS KHO BA'I TSAR CHU BYING DRAG PA YIN GYUR NA CHUG PA'I GYI RGYUR NA CHUG PA'I GYUR NA CHUG PA'I GYUR NA We are looking for a style of meditating which would actually get into the very foundation of our negative emotions and destroy them at the root. We don't want a meditation which makes us less likely to get angry, or which makes us less angry for a few hours, or less capable of anger for a few hours.

We would like a meditation which destroys the very seeds of anger within the human mind. We would like a meditation which, after we got good at it, we would be incapable of being irritated by other people.

[Говорящий 2] (57:34 - 57:34)
Okay?

[Говорящий 1] (57:35 - 1:03:20)
Yeah. Alright? That, I mean, we're talking something much deeper.

We would like to make a fundamental change in the human mind, which no longer allows you to get angry, even under compelling circumstances. Someone could be cutting your hand with a razor blade, and you wouldn't get upset. We would like to find...

By the way, that doesn't mean that you shouldn't take steps to stop them from cutting your hand with a razor blade. But you would be calm and happy and peaceful. You wouldn't feel upset or angry.

And actually, you'd be better at stopping them than if you were upset and angry. So, GOSHING. DE SKYE NA PHOR MED NGUR ZHIG SOG PHYIR MA GONG KYANG RIN PAS SI DE NYES PA RTOG PA RGYUR BA RAK LAS I want you to talk to me, okay?

I'm going to give you a break. There are deeper states of meditation than the level of meditation you require to tweak reality. Got it?

Alright? I'll say it again. There's a certain level of meditation you have to get to, to tweak the program that runs your world, reality itself.

There are even deeper states of meditation than that, okay? But we don't need them. Alright?

There's no reason to go to them. Alright? There's a certain reachable, like medium level of meditation you can get to.

If you get to that, you have access to the program. A certain stillness of mind will grant you access to the program. There are deeper levels of meditation where the mind becomes even more still.

But we don't need them. We just need to get to the point of stillness where we can access the program and change reality. You don't need to go through the thousand levels of deeper meditation that there are because there's no function of those.

They don't do anything. Get to the amount of deep meditation that you need to remove anger permanently from your mind. That's enough.

That's enough. That level of meditation, by the way, is extremely difficult to reach in one lifetime. But just so you know, there are deeper ones.

I'll say this quote and then we'll stop and we'll take a break. GYUL GYIS BSTAN PA BYEN DANG BAR SEM DENG NGO ZHIG MA THOB KYANG DUG GI MI KHREG SA BZHIN DU SRIB PA DANG GI ROL PAR GYI This is an ancient text called the praise of those things which are worthy of praise. The praise of those things which are worthy of praise.

GYUL GYIS BSTAN PA BYEN DANG BAR SEM DENG NGO ZHIG MA THOB KYANG GYUL GYIS BSTAN PA BYEN DANG BAR SEM DENG NGO ZHIG MA THOB KYANG People who follow your teaching. Whose teaching? The Buddha.

It's the Buddha. This ancient, ancient book. GYUL GYIS BSTAN PA BYEN DANG BAR SEM DENG NGO ZHIG MA THOB KYANG They don't even achieve the actual level of the first jhāna stage, okay?

There's eight stages of deep meditation, four called form realm, four called formless realm, and the first one is divided into mūṣī, which means the actual first one, and then there's sort of a little preliminary, the first one called saṃdhen, dambho, mūṣī, nirgau, nirgau, nirjau, nirjau me. saṃdhen, dambho, nirgau, nirgau, nirjau me. Say it, saṃdhen, dambho, nirgau, nirgau, nirjau, nirjau me.

It's not even the first of the eight levels of deep meditation. It's the preliminary to that. But that's the level you need to get to to tweak the program.

That's all you need to get to. You don't even need to get to the actual stage number one, much less the other seven. That's what he's saying.

saṃdhen, mūṣī, māṭhukāra. They don't even achieve the main level of level number one, much less the other seven. But, durgī, mīṭhī, tsaḥ, shindū.

But, what do you call that? I'll give you the circumstance, you tell me what we call it. I don't know what to call it.

You are... What's that guy that played James Bond that I didn't like so much? Actor Sean Connery.

Yeah, Roger Moore. Anyway. So, you know, there's a huge diamond in a museum somewhere.

He did some movie that came with it. The Thomas Crown Affair. Right?

Yeah, he's worse, right? Just like effeminate James Bond. Anyway.

So, he and this lady decide to steal this big diamond or something like that. I don't remember. It was not a memorable movie.

But anyway, they decide to steal this diamond. And then there's all these cameras on the diamond, right? And there's all these guards, security guards, watching the diamond.

So, mīṭhī, mīṭhī, mīṭhī, and they steal it, right? They get it. Mīṭhī tā shindhu means...

How do you say that in English? Under the eyes of all the guards and the cameras. It means under the eyes.

[Говорящий 2] (1:03:20 - 1:03:22)
Out from under their nose.

[Говорящий 1] (1:03:22 - 1:04:16)
Yeah, out from under their nose. That's good. Who said that?

Yeah. From under the nose of the guards and the security cameras. So, this scripture says, From under the nose of the demons who would stop people from reaching enlightenment, you steal enlightenment.

Right? They're all watching you. And out from under their noses, you get enlightenment.

Right? How's that? Sīdhā-bhāgavad-gītā.

You stop the pain of the world. You stop the pain of the world, sneaking under the noses of all the demons in the world. Without reaching the higher states of meditation.

Just reaching the preliminary level of the first-form realm of meditation, which is not a very high meditation. But it's enough to access the problem. Okay, you just earned a break from under the eyes of the guards.

[Говорящий 2] (1:04:17 - 1:04:18)
Okay.

[Говорящий 1] (1:04:18 - 1:04:21)
We're doing a bake sale? We're not doing a bake sale.

[Говорящий 2] (1:04:23 - 1:04:23)
Huh?

[Говорящий 1] (1:04:25 - 1:04:27)
There may be a bake sale? I mean, that's lame.

[Говорящий 2] (1:04:29 - 1:04:34)
Okay. Yeah, I know, I know.

[Говорящий 1] (1:04:35 - 1:08:20)
Anyway, there's a bake sale. We do bake sales during these teachings. The money goes to send young people to Tibetan monasteries for a month to study.

And then they come back and teach people cool stuff like this. When they get old. Rebecca, who's in charge of the bake sale, says, please overpay for all the things.

So, like, it's not a problem if you pay $20 for a single cookie. And give half of it to me. Okay.

Have a nice break. If you'd like to say hi or you have a personal question, I'll be sitting here. We'll take about a ten-minute break.

There's a sign here that I'm supposed to announce something. Wow. Who did that?

Yeah, anyway. Bliss Machine is an album that was done by students at our university. Quite a group, Johnny O mainly.

It's a nice album. I actually listened to the first few songs. I got to that cowboy song and I tried to give up.

Anyway. It's $10. All the money is going to support the...

We have 40 people going into a three-year silent retreat at the end of December. They are building their own cabins with their own money. And then they are donating those cabins to future generations of meditators.

They won't be living in them. They're donating them. She's like the farthest behind of anybody.

Except for these other two people. All that she's got are these four plywood walls. And she's got to get moving in the next month.

So the proceeds from this spectacular album, which is only $10, are going to Coco's Meditation Cabin. Okay. DE LA SAMO TONG PA NYID KYI DON That's not very good.

If you want to swipe liberation out from under the nose of all obstructing demons, you're going to have to define to yourself what is the real nature of things. Okay? You're going to have to come to an understanding of it.

All right? GYI NGAR PO NA THAR PA PO NGAR THAR PA BYED CHING If you don't come to an understanding of the way reality works, you will never be able to stop your negative emotions. It's not possible.

GYAL SING GI CHOK PAR SHIN NAM CHANG TSIM TSIM DANG CHEN PHANG DRO We have a teaching on the six perfections, right? These are the six activities of a bodhisattva. The first one is giving.

The second one is living an ethical life. The third one is not getting mad when you should. The fourth is being happy about very good things.

The fifth is the ability to meditate deeply. And the sixth is understanding reality. All right?

So, he says, if you don't learn about emptiness and how things really work, then if you do the other perfections, the first five, right? If you are a generous person, or you try to be ethical, or you try to stop your anger, TSIM TSIM DANG CHEN PHANG DRO means you will be doing so without understanding how things really work. For example, in the case of the art of not getting angry when you should have, right?

The art of not getting angry when you should have. Somebody cuts you off in traffic, right?

[Говорящий 2] (1:08:21 - 1:08:24)
Or somebody else at your work, right?

[Говорящий 1] (1:08:29 - 1:17:46)
TSIM TSIM DANG CHEN PHANG means there's a way to practice patience about a person who hurts you, which is ignorant, right? There's a way to be good towards a person who has hurt you, which is ignorant, right? You go to them, you're calm, you say, you know, you hurt me, and I really would like to ask you not to do that, right?

And you're reasonable, and you're calm, and you don't yell at them, and you're sweet, and all that, okay? And maybe it works and maybe it doesn't work, okay? That's the problem.

Maybe it works and maybe it doesn't work. That's the problem. Because you have not approached the person who's hurting you with an understanding of the deeper sources of reality, right?

You haven't, in your own mind, approached this person who's hurting you with an understanding of where they came from. So that the patience demonstrated by a person who understands where the world is coming from is different from the patience demonstrated by a person who doesn't know where the world is coming from. The patience of a person who doesn't understand where the world is coming from will always break down at some point.

It cannot be maintained past a certain level of abuse. Someone cuts you off once, you can be patient. Someone cuts you off twice, you can be patient.

Someone cuts you off, bumps your offender, turns around and hits you in the back. At some point, your patience will break if you don't understand the deeper reality of this person who's bothering you, right? What's the deeper reality?

I have produced this person. This person is coming because of some behavior of my own. The whole focus of a well-trained spiritual person turns away from the world to themselves.

The whole focus of correcting things turns away from negotiating with the people who are hurting you to examining yourself and seeing how did I do something like that before. And that exercise makes you an extremely mentally healthy and happy person, right? The exercise.

Someone is constantly complaining to you, okay? All the time. And it bothers you and it's unpleasant.

And you don't have a well-educated practitioner doesn't even think about talking to them or negotiating with them or explaining to them how much their complaining is hurting them. They don't even have to. They don't even think about it.

They think, oh, where did this person come from? Oh, they're complaining. They must come from complaining in some way.

And that was done by me. So, who do I complain to and who can I stop complaining to and then it will just shut them down like a faucet being turned off, you know? Like people are trying to plug a hole in the faucet and they could go under the sink and just turn it off, you see?

They're standing there with 23 towels and pushing the faucet and trying to stop it. And just open the little door to there and turn the valve and it's off, you see? The valve is your complaint.

So, go to the source and turn it off and then the person will stop complaining, you see? It's very beautiful. A well-trained spiritual person who understands where reality comes from, their patience is on a different level from the patience of other people because their patience is infinite.

It cannot be shaken. The worse things get, the more they check themselves out. The worse the other person gets, the more they examine their own heart and make themselves sweeter.

So, the worse the world gets, the sweeter they get. It's cool and it's fun. No negotiation, no discussions, no confrontations, no tension, no...

You don't have to talk to them. Just find out what you're doing that's similar and stop it. And then they will change.

Or they'll go away and have a hard time. Okay. I love this metaphor.

This is one of the most beautiful images in all of Scripture. By the way, we're going to go half an hour over, get used to it. 9.30, we still won't finish tonight's lesson. But at least we'll do like one or two homework questions and you'll feel better and I will too. If you come to a homework question on number six that I didn't explain, just leave it blank for now, alright? Because we're not going to finish it.

He compares the journey to enlightenment to a bird flying in the sky, to an eagle flying in the sky. He compares your journey to enlightenment to an eagle flying through the sky. And he says that eagle needs two wings.

A glorious phoenix bird with one wing don't count for much. They can't go anywhere. So he says you need two wings.

What are they? One is called tap which means method which means all the kindnesses that you are going to be doing. Generosity to others.

Serving others. Being patient with others. Being joyful about serving others.

Even meditation. These are all the things you're going to be doing to help other people. That's one wing.

It's called method. Doing stuff. That's one wing.

Then the other wing is called understanding what's going on. You know? And we gave the example of patience with a complaining person around you.

Patience with a person around you who's complaining about you. How can you change that? Change your own complaining.

Examine yourself for what are you complaining about, alright? This powerful left, sorry, this powerful right hand wing of what you call conventional patience is like a single wing and it can't get you anywhere. You need the other wing where you understand the nature of the person who is complaining to you that you are being patient about.

That they are coming to you. You cannot solve the problem without understanding that the complaining person is coming and you're complaining. That understanding is the other wing.

You need both wings. You need patience, yes, but you've got to know what the heck is going on with the happy faces. And those are two wings.

Understanding and then stuff that you do called, they're called method and wisdom, alright? In Chökrei way, with any one of the two wings, by the way, there are people who have this wing without this wing. They are like deep into emptiness.

They understand the void. You know, they go into the void regularly. But they get around a slightly irritating person and it breaks down immediately.

You see? Or they don't do anything to help other people really, they just kind of talk about emptiness all the time. They have this wing and not this wing, got it?

Some people have this wing and not this wing, alright. To get to enlightenment, you've got to have both wings. Dŏngyīn thabtsaṭṭhika-senpa.

You need... He calls the method compassion. Acts of compassion.

But they must be united with the understanding of where stuff is coming from. Yama-dara-loka-bhut. You cannot separate the two.

You cannot train yourself in compassion without training yourself in where the world is coming from. And you can't train yourself in where the world is coming from unless you train yourself in compassion. Be like a beautiful phoenix bird.

The only one I've seen recently was in Harry Potter. I mean, the phoenix flying and all that. I mean, try to imagine them flying with one bird.

There's some joke about a duck with one leg in water. What is that?

[Говорящий 2] (1:17:47 - 1:17:51)
What is a duck with one leg in water? Does a one-legged duck swim in circles?

[Говорящий 1] (1:17:51 - 1:21:12)
Oh yeah, somebody says, Geshe-la, do you want a hot chocolate? And then I either say, does a pup wear a beanie? Or...

My dad used to say, does a bear poop in the woods? But I heard this other one the other day. It's, does a one-legged duck swim in circles?

Anyway, you don't want to be like a a phoenix with one wing. All right? James Landis.

Neglect doctors. Sharon, remember that. We need to change some of that.

Go take care of that. See that. Some of that stuff.

We need that. They should stand up and talk about that. What is that?

Do you think I know? Lam-tsun, lam-tsun. Lam-tsun, lam-tsun?

Three minutes will pass. Okay? Maybe the most famous short piece that Jatakata ever wrote.

Fourteen verses. That's one of the verses. Devah tovah shirah min denla.

If you don't possess the wisdom which understands why and how things are happening. Nge ching chah drisem la kol che kyang. You can meditate and master the attitudes of renunciation and love.

You can master renunciation and compassion. But, kyang means but. Sikhe tsawa chupar min yukpe.

You will not be able to cut the root of the pain of the world. You will not be able to stop the pain of the world. You will not be able to cut its source.

Therefore, ne ching chah drisem la kol che kyang. Those of you who know Tibetan, why he has two instrumentals is interesting. He says min yukpe, because you will not be able to cut it.

Therefore, like it's redundant. It's a fault of composition. It's not allowed in Buddhist scripture.

Why has he written two different words for therefore? You think about it. Devah tovah tapah ved.

You must come to, you must seek the means of grasping dependent origination. Dependent origination is a fancy, long-winded word for how stuff happens. Let's change it.

To how stuff happens. Seek the knowledge of why things, how things happen. Tapah ved.

That's what Je Tsongkhapa said, and we have to try to do that. Shen yat, tovah nila dun yukpe. I love this.

I really love this next part. All right. Shen yat, it's like Jenny going, what does she do?

She gets up here and she starts screaming. What does she do? All rise.

Yes, yes, yes. I hate it. I love this one.

Shen yat, tovah nila dun yukpe. That's a sepe kyam. Danzin gi shupo.

Say, sorry. Danzin, say kuh. Shupo.

Is it up there somewhere? Yeah, where is that? Yeah, the second line in the middle.

Say, shupo. You never heard of that, right? Shupo.

[Говорящий 2] (1:21:14 - 1:21:16)
This is cool.

[Говорящий 1] (1:21:22 - 1:24:57)
If you really get it, when I say, the person who's complaining about you or to you all the time has only come from your own complaining. Right? When I say that thing, you know, and you're sort of like attracted to it.

You're not even sure about it. Tetzon. Is there a tetzon up there somewhere?

At the end of the first line. Tetzon means you get a little suspicion that I might be right. You're not even sure.

Okay? You're not even sure and you haven't accepted it yet. Tetzon means a little suspicion that it might be true.

If you just get a little tiny suspicion that it might be true that every negative thing that ever happened to you and every negative person you ever met was a mirror of your own behavior. If you just get a little taste of that and begin to think it might be possible, that's tetzon. Tsun means to eat the doubt.

It means to entertain the possibility that the last irritating person you met and the 3,000 before him all came from the way you are behaving. Then, shlupo. Shlupo means slender shlupo.

Okay, listen carefully. That's shlup. Got it?

It's on another peak. Here we go again. Sorry, Kat.

Okay. You gave it up for shlupo. You can always remember.

Shlupo means you tear the fabric of reality. You tear the fabric of suffering. You put an irreparable tear into the reality of the suffering of the world around you.

And that can only get bigger. You tear a little, you put a little tear into the network of suffering around you. The fabric, the very fabric of the reality of the suffering of the world.

You put a little tear, irreparable tear, and it can only get bigger. And then you will rip the suffering of the world apart. It's very beautiful.

Just if you suspect that I might be right. You don't even have to believe me. Just if you start saying shlupo.

Okay? If you only get shlupo, then shlupo. Got it?

Shlupo goes to shlupo. Alright. I love it.

You start a tear, you start a rent, rent, rent, in the fabric of reality that is never again the same. You will never again be the same. You can never...

I'm putting a curse on you today. I'm putting a curse on you. You can never really believe that any bad thing or bad person you ever meet in the future is not a mirror of your own behavior again.

I curse you tonight, now. I curse you. You can never fully hate another person again.

You can never fully blame another person again. I curse you. I curse you with that.

Okay? You always have this little doubt that maybe it's something you did. Hmm.

[Говорящий 2] (1:24:58 - 1:25:02)
Alright. Let's continue.

[Говорящий 1] (1:25:02 - 1:40:16)
Do you have a better answer? Memory. That's a kind of shlupo here.

Oh, yes. Serwe chongbe loko shindu. Anytime Ser will come to destroy the loko, okay?

Where does the name of Serwe Monastery come from? What's Serwe mean? Yeah.

Serwe means hail. Hail... Hailstones?

Big hailstones. And we debate with the other great monasteries, Ganden and Degon, right? What does Deg Pung mean?

It means a pile of rice. Deg means rice. Pung means pile.

It means their monastery was nestled on this white mountain before it got destroyed. It was called Deg Pung. So when we debate with them in the inter- monastic debates, we say, we are Serwe.

You are Deg. We are a hailstorm that crushes the rice pattern. And then they say, yes, but then the hail always melts away.

And the rice remains. So anyway, Serwe Chong means, Motok means crops which have been destroyed by hail. If you live in a country like Tibet, where the, what do you call it?

The amount of food is very fragile. It's 20,000 feet high or 18,000 feet high. To grow a crop is difficult.

And just when you get the barley growing, you know, then there's this big hailstorm and it destroys everything. Hearing me say once that the person who most irritates you in your life right now is a direct result of your own behavior, will in time be a hailstorm that destroys all your suffering. Like a rice crop under these huge stones of hail.

Ceparsante, Shigyagale, Sunamchunghe, Chigyela, Tatsongsawa, Yorlingyo, Tatsongsephe, Tsamdikyan, Sipa, there it is again. Sipa, Shonkor, Chepa, Gyorshe, Sungale. This is beautiful.

Shigyapa is the 400 verses written by Arya Nagarjuna's dear student, Aryadeva. And he said, Sunamchunghe, Chigyela, Tatsongsawa, Yorlingyo, those who lack sufficient goodness will not even get the suspicion that Geshe Michael might have said something correct. You see?

Those who lack extremely heavy good karma. You get up and say, look, the last person that you who complained to you all the time came from your complaining. Just to hear those words and to give them, what do you call it, to entertain any truth to them is a sign that you have extraordinary good deeds.

You have higher good karma than hundreds of thousands of other people. Yorlingyo, Tatsongsawa, Yorlingyo means people without extraordinary good karma will not even entertain the possibility that I was speaking the truth. Got it?

Tatsongsawa, Yorlingyo. Tatsongsawa, Tsangyikyo. But even if you have a little doubt that it might be correct, if you have the least suspicion that I might be saying something true, when I say that every bad thing that I ever have to do is coming from you, sipa-shupo-gyur, you are tearing a ring, a ring, you are ridding the fabric of suffering itself.

And it will never be the same. It will never come back to the way it was before I said those words. So in the Shinsengbi, dena dina-ang, sanglan ne gobe, dena dina-ang, sanglan ne gobe, sung-yang din ne, ching-ching ma-lok-pa-khen-di, gyibu dha-pa-na-the-ne, tong-yi dön-je-gi dang-pa-kho-pa, dena dina-ang, sanglan ne gobe, sung-yang din ne, ching-ching ma-lok-pa-khen-di, gyibu dha-pa-na-the-ne, tong-yi dön-je-gi dang-pa-kho-pa, sok-sok-gyu-jung-che-pa, nama-yi-dan-ye-re-du-che-ne, SUMU DEG PA SOG THA LAM DAG GYI LA GYI RIG GYI THO LAM TZAM DGOS There was a thing called SOG with regard to developing meditation. That was the six things you needed before you even sat down.

SOG means you have to gather together these things. Why is a religious ceremony called a SOG? You gather together the offerings and you gather together the people.

The offerings themselves are called SOG. You offered the SOG. SOG means a gathering.

Before you even try to meditate on a question, you must gather together certain conditions. And we listed them. There were six and there were five.

For example, the right kind of place. And the right kind of friends. And the right kind of instructions.

You need to gather these things together. Preconditions that need to be gathered together. He says, for wisdom, you're also going to have to gather together certain conditions.

DI LA'ARM, for this as well. SOG THA LAM DGOS You're going to have to gather together certain things. SUMU DEG PA SOG THA LAM DGOS You are going to have to find a person who truly grasps the meaning of the teachings on emptiness in the scriptures.

Through personal experience. You're going to have to find a person who doesn't only know what the books say, but has had a personal experience of those things. You're going to have to find a person like that.

DE NI, DONG NI DONG BYED KYI DANG DUG PA And then you're going to have to go to them and listen to them teach it. You need the DANG PA. DANG PA means...

Like KAM DANG PA, it means instructions, advice, teaching. SOG SOG DREG BYONG CHE PA This is a very beautiful thing, okay? In the monastery, you don't study the highest teachings on emptiness for 12 years.

It takes 12 years before you're allowed to study Madhyamika, higher Madhyamika. You spend the first 12 years on lower Madhyamika, Ganesha Parameetha, Muthukhyam, Abhisaraka. The first 12 years of your monastic career are 12 years spent on a 50-page book called the Ornament of Realizations by Arya Sangha.

You can memorize it in about a year or so. And then you spend 12 years on 50 pages. Four pages a year.

You spend 12 years. Then you're allowed to go to the real teachings on emptiness. In between the 12 years of lower Madhyamika and the 4 years of higher Madhyamika, there's a tradition to go on retreat.

You go on... Ken Rinpoche went to a cave and did a retreat, and he almost died there. There's a beautiful story.

He almost died in that cave. He came very close to dying. But in that experience, he cleaned away the negative seeds he had in his mind before he opened the book on emptiness.

So the idea is you go off on a long retreat before you're allowed to open the... Before you're even allowed to look at the book, you have to do a special retreat to get rid of all bad karma seeds in your mind and to collect new good karmic seeds. You cannot approach the subject of emptiness without undertaking very deep activities and projects to serve other people.

If you want to approach the subject of emptiness, go teaching yoga in a prison, which you're going to learn about on Sunday. It looks like the chaplain of the prison where we work is going to give us a small talk on Sunday. Or go raise money for the three-year retreat with food, which is our next problem.

Or go raise some funds for the people who are typing inscriptions. Before you approach the subject of emptiness, you will have to do some powerful good karma collection and some powerful bad karma removal. In Tibet, it was a retreat.

Nowadays, in the monastery, my class, when we got to Madhyamika, we were required to leave the monastery for three months and go do some charitable project. Hands-on service of sick people or poor people. We were allowed to touch this book until we had done three months of service for other people.

It's beautiful, man. It's a nice custom. So, sok sok jip jung means collect new good karma, purify your old bad karma, then study emptiness.

This is a precondition to studying emptiness as much as finding a good meditation place is a prerequisite for studying shantung. Got it? OK.

Lama Yida Mya Men, kye kye che ni suwa daga sok. Also, you are going to have to do a lot of asking of help from holy beings. That's a prerequisite for studying emptiness.

Go home, just in your... This is all done in your mind, right? In the privacy of your own mind.

And it's fun to talk to holy beings in your own mind. Don't think you're crazy. You're not like Sunna Sam or anything.

go home, just talk to them. You know, when I found out with Bella, where's Bella? Like, when you need her, she's not here.

Okay, that's Bella, in Lama Orang's head. Okay, like, I found out this thing with Bella. You know, like, I was there the night, the three nights she was born.

And, you know, and then for months I was going up to her and saying, Hello, Bella. And I'm trying to get her to smile, and she's just like, you know. And then one day I just went up to her and I said, Bella, you have to smile at me, you know.

Like, I'm not going to do this baby talk to you anymore. Let's just talk man to man, you know. Like, I want you to smile at me once in a while.

So, you have to go home with her. And she goes. And then, it's the same with the holy beings, okay.

Like, just talk to them. Just talk. They can read your mind, right?

They can read your mind. So, just sit down and say, look, Geshe-la is starting to, hopefully he'll get to the subject. He's going to be teaching emptiness.

And I just want to put in a word. Can you put in a good word for me? You know, like, I'm going to be studying emptiness.

And I would appreciate it if you would bless my mind right now, tonight. You know, because he might start tomorrow or the next day. Okay, just like that.

Have a rational, don't do the goo-goo-goo-goo thing. Don't say, oh, I'm a vegetarian, I'm a vegetarian, I'm a vegetarian. That's like goo-goo-goo-goo, you know.

Just talk to them rationally in your head. Say, you know, I love you very much, you're the most... They're talking about your lama, okay.

Lama da yidam yirme, it means, you're lama indivisible from your guardian angel. Lama da yidam yirme, you're lama indivisible from your guardian angel. One and the same meaning, you know.

I'm asking my holy, sweet, precious, incalculable, most beautiful thing in the universe, lama, inseparable from my guardian angel, I'm asking you right now, in front of all these people, to bless my mind, to teach this thing beautifully, okay? Like, just talk to them rationally, like that. Sometimes our vow is fun too, in the hotel room, but you've got to close the door.

Okay. Now I'll give that keyword. Give something good.

You will need all the necessary preconditions. Don't ignore these things. Don't jump into the book and say, I don't have to ask anybody anything, and I don't need to derby tree, and I don't need to serve the poor with my hands, or I don't need to go to a prison and waste my time.

Just tell me what the book says. He says, dey ga gansana tohi nu. If you do that, you'll never get it.

You can come to the teachings, you can sit there, Geshe Michael can say the same words to you that he's saying to the person who went to the prison, and that person will get it, and you won't get it. And you'll be in the same room, and you'll be sitting next to each other, and you'll be eating the same cookies from Rebecca's bake sale, but you won't get it, and they will. Okay?

There's something about the causes. We call it tso, the preconditions. We're going to stop there, okay?

He's about to talk about why did Lord Buddha teach different kinds of energy, and which version should we buy. That's sort of the difference of it. Do as much of the homework as you can.

Number six, don't stress about it. Please, please do the homework. All these people spending hundreds of hours to help you become a teacher of some other people, you know?

A thousand years of lineage. Don't let it stop here tonight. Don't be lazy, okay?

One little homework paper with, like, what, three questions on it? I mean, are you going to be the one who stops a thousand-year lineage because you didn't want to do three questions on a Tuesday night when you had the whole day from Oxford on? Okay?

All right? Just do it. And then teach it, all right?

Promise? Yes. Mazah.

Mazah.

[Говорящий 2] (1:40:16 - 1:40:17)
Say mazah. Mazah.

[Говорящий 1] (1:40:17 - 1:40:22)
Mazah means I swear. In the diamond business, it means I swear. Say mazah.

[Говорящий 2] (1:40:23 - 1:40:23)
Mazah.

[Говорящий 1] (1:40:23 - 1:40:25)
Will you teach this to other people?

[Говорящий 2] (1:40:25 - 1:40:26)
Mazah.

[Говорящий 1] (1:40:26 - 1:40:28)
Okay, but you have to do your homework.