«Дар освобождения», курс 1 «Глубочайшая медитация», занятие 10

[Говорящий 1] (0:00 - 27:17)
So, the purpose of this particular class, we are trying to go, we're trying to get through a text which was taught by my teacher's teacher. So my teacher's teacher was Thich Nhat Hanh, who was the Dalai Lama's teacher. And then Thich Nhat Hanh's teacher was Pabongkha Rinpoche, and he gave this teaching in Tibet in 1921, 24-day teaching.

And then Pabongkha Rinpoche, the Dalai Lama's tutor, spent most of his life turning it into a really, I believe, for me, it's the most beautiful book I've ever read, and I live with books, right? And then my teacher spent over 20 years teaching it to us. And then I thought it would be a shame if I didn't pass this on in my lifetime sometime.

So we've been, it's an outline of the steps to enlightenment. So it's a very traditional Tibetan and Indian Buddhist teaching, whereby you learn the steps to enlightenment one by one as you go through the book. And then there's a custom called nyam chi, where you, it's the fifth Dalai Lama I was very keen on, where you study one of the steps of the, maybe there are 20 steps, okay?

So you study one of the 20 steps to enlightenment, and then you go out in the forest with everybody, and you meditate on it for like 10 days together, and you try to go deep into it, and try to get an experience of that path. So I'm just giving you the driver's manual, and then in January, we'll start driving, okay? So I'm reading you the driver's manual, which is kind of in itself kind of weird, right?

Sit and talk about meditation, it's like talking about yoga day after day. And then after that, you've got to go do it, right? So we'll go driving in January.

And the idea is that we will continue that way for 10, and it will take 10 years to finish this book, if we stick to my original schedule, which we're already behind. But anyway, let's call it 10 years, and it will take two study sessions of 10 days a year, like this one, and then two 10-day retreats a year, in which we try to internalize and actually gain a spiritual experience of that step. So we thought we would go to the end of the book, cover the last great two steps, which are how to get into the deepest state of meditation you need to see ultimate reality, and then a discussion of what that ultimate reality is like.

So we thought we would go to the end of the book, cover those two subjects, and then go to the beginning of the book in our next 10-day session in April, and start from the beginning, applying our knowledge of meditation, and applying our knowledge of ultimate reality to each subject. So for example, one of the earliest steps of the steps to enlightenment is a meditation about your death. We're trained in the monastery, when you go to bed, you do a meditation on your death.

You actually take yourself through the, they call it the domino collapse, the collapse of your body as you go through the death process, and what it will look like, what it will feel like. We practice it every night in the monastery. You lay your head on the pillow, you start your death meditation.

That has a profound effect on you in your life. You don't waste time. You get very sensitive to your mortality, and your fragility, and then everything you do is, what do you call it?

It has more intensity to it, your life. Everything you do, you get very good at thinking this is your last day, and then whether you're making out with your spiritual partner, or whether you are building your cabin, or whether you are meditating, everything takes on a much, much deeper intensity, and a sweetness, like I'm leaving you tomorrow. Let's put a good door on this cabin, or you get very intense in a beautiful way.

In a soft, gentle, beautiful way, you become very intense. You don't waste your time. Even if you go out for a movie, it's intense, and you get into the movie, because if it was the last movie you ever saw, you'd want it to be a good one, and you're more choosy about your movies.

But to do that death meditation with a deep capacity for meditation, if you could go deep, deep, deep into your own death in meditation, and if you could apply the principles of emptiness to your mortality, you could overcome that mortality itself. You would not die. So rather than going through the book in a normal order, we've gone to the back of the book, which is how to go into a state of deep meditation, and how to manipulate reality itself.

The $158,000 chair coming on the first day that ATI opened is not an accident. It was a reality-tweaking exercise. By the way, we should thank Harry Goodman, right?

Good man, who passed away, not thanking who passed away, but he passed away. I didn't know him personally, but he donated that money to us to start these teachings, okay? And it came on the day we started.

If you would like to, if you understand emptiness deeply, and if you learn to meditate in a powerful way, you can affect the events of your world. And if enough people were working on it, we could remove hunger, and we could remove poverty, by understanding the source code for life itself. The events of history, you can tweak them, and you can send them off in a different direction at will, and checks will show up on the day you start the center in Phoenix, all right?

But, from somebody you never met, okay? And you can, then you can use that to help the people in the world, and that's the point. That's the point of what we're doing.

Can you learn to tweak reality and history itself in such a way that poverty, hunger, war, and death itself in this world becomes something that used to happen, and not something that happens anymore? People will teach it in history books. People used to die, people used to kill each other.

There used to be people die from hunger. People used to get a thing called cancer. And it will all be past tense, you know?

There are places like that, and then we just have to work on it a bit here. And you will be the ones to do it, okay? So anyway, here we go.

He was using different arguments to prove that you, yourself, are not who you thought you were. Whether your name is Rob, or Natalie, or Darren, or Rebecca, whatever your name is. It doesn't matter who you are.

He was going into arguments that would demonstrate to ourselves that we are not who we thought we were. If you are who you thought you were, if you exist out there as a solid thing, which is coming this way and not this way, if you are not coming from your own seeds in your mind, but if rather you were born from your mother's womb, and you walk through this life in the way we think, then you must die. And there's no cure for the world, the world's pain.

If things exist that way, then we can't really change anything, right? If rather the world and ourself are coming from seeds in our mind that we plant there by taking care of other people, then all things are possible. Then you can make changes in the world, right?

Then you can plant different... The fourth chapter of the Yoga Sutra, the Padmashetaka Vata, right? We must become farmers or gardeners, right?

If the world is really deriving from seeds in our own mind, which are planted by how well we take care of others, then everything is doable, everything is changeable. Your own mortality is coming from... Actually, your mortality is coming from the...

What do you call it? The... What do you call it when you're expending of the seeds, right?

You are expending seeds by living, and those seeds wear out, and then you die. So if you knew a way to... What do you call it?

To replant the seeds. Like reinvest, but is there some other word? Yeah, regenerate the seeds.

Yeah, regenerate the seeds. If you knew how to plant more seeds for life itself, rather than simply using up your old seeds. It's like you start life with a credit card and you're always growing on it.

If you knew how to make a deposit to that credit card, you wouldn't die, right? We just don't know how to do that. We are, by living, by the act of living, we are using up the seeds in our mind, which make us see ourselves as alive.

And unless we plant more seeds consciously in our mind, then we will die. And if you do plant more seeds consciously in your mind, you won't. So there are many arguments for why you are not who you thought you were, right?

Like I have to convince you that you are coming from seeds in your mind, which means I have to convince you that you're not who you thought you were. And then one of those arguments is called nam-don-gi-rikpa, okay? Say, nam-don- nam-don- gi- gi- rikpa.

rikpa. Okay, so he mentions nam-don-gi-rikpa, but he doesn't explain it. And I thought maybe you'd like to have a good explanation of it.

It's very, very, very difficult proof of why you're not who you thought you were. And I'm going to give you, this is from an ancient Indian teacher named Jayananda, probably around 6th or 7th century. But he gave a good explanation of it, okay?

So in the back of the car when Nyingbo's driving us around, because of the kindness, because of the hard work of the Tibetan women refugees, I can ask the computer, where's the best explanation of this weird ancient proof that you're not yourself? And it will go through a million pages in about 10 seconds. And spit out to me the best explanation, okay?

So here it is. And we have to keep going on that. dey-nam shing-dey-nam-je-che-pe nam-don-yu-min-shin-she-ja-wa-ni So this comes, as I said last night, from a very ancient discussion, very beautiful discussion between a king named Menander, who was one of the Greek kings who took over Bactria, Afghanistan and India.

And he was left there by Alexander the Great, right? And then there was a custom in ancient times, very, very beautiful custom, that kings would seek out the advice of yogis. And it's very, very beautiful.

Alexander the Great himself met a delegation of yogis in a place called Taxila, which the Tibetans call Dojo. And it's very beautiful. So outside of Taxila, there's a beautiful record of Alexander the Great meeting the yogis, and he took one back with him.

He died on the way, Alexander died, I think, in London. But the yogi made it back to Greece, and it affected Western thinking. So this Greek king named Menander met a Buddhist monk, an Indian Buddhist monk in 200 B.C., right? And then they started to, they have a discussion which was recorded, and exists still in Nepali, in Sri Lanka. And we have that text, and we've taught that text for a while. And that set the scene for Thomas, the disciple Thomas, to come to Taxila also.

He was brought to Taxila by another king named, the Greeks call him Gondophoros, which is one of the three kings who greeted the birth of Jesus, okay? So he's one of the three wise men who came to make offerings at the gate of Greece. He went back to Taxila, he needed an architect, and you know the story, Thomas ended up in India.

He died in Chennai, Madras, he was martyred in Madras. So anyway, this conversation continued in Taxila for a long time. If Christianity affected Buddhist thinking, it could well be that Jesus' teachings helped trigger the Middle Way, sorry, the Mahayana movement of compassion in Buddhism.

And so this teaching comes from that time period when there was a lot of interaction, okay? So here it is. The idea is that you have to examine the impossibility of a chariot, okay?

They say a chariot, or you can call it a car, all right? I think a car would be more comfortable for us. In examining whether or not you've always been making a tragic mistake about who you are, you can examine a car and how you perceive a car.

And if you, once you figure it out with a car, you can apply it to Michael, okay? So nam-dung-gi-rik-pa means we look at the relationship between a car and its parts in seven different ways. I'll just give you an overview, all right?

When you look at a car, when you go out in the parking lot and your eyes turn left and you see something called a car, right, to, what do you call it, to identify it as an automobile, you have to be able to see a few, what do you call it, crucial parts, or what do you call it, definitive parts of an automobile, all right? There has to be a decent number of classical automobile pieces there for you to call it a car, okay? Like, it should have four wheels.

Traditionally, I mean normally. If you glance at it and it doesn't have four wheels, we can, I'm calling it a working car, okay? I'm not saying a car in a junkyard.

A working car, you know, a car in normal condition. You glance at the object and you glance away. If your eye catches four round black things and a hood and a top, and especially if you look through the window and you see a driving wheel, driving wheel?

Steering wheel, sorry. Then you're, based on those parts, you know, I'm just talking, it's a very, very deep subject. This is what Dharmakirti writes about.

How did you know it was a car? You glance to the left, coming out of the church, you saw an object in the parking lot. I mean, the clue that it's in the parking lot is already a clue, right?

I mean, it could be, I don't know, anything. It could be an elephant, but you look over and you see four black round shapes. Your eye, understand one thing.

Your eye is not capable of seeing objects, things. The eye only records colors and shapes. The rods and cones of the eye are not capable in and of themselves of deciding what an object is.

They simply transmit colors and shapes to the mind, to the brain, okay? They can't, the decision on what the lumpy thing is in the parking lot is not made in the back of the eyeball because it's not equipped to do that. If only the rods and cones are changed by the image of the car hitting the front of the eye, and then the rods and cones, the chemicals changes, information is sent to the mind.

This is all the information that can be sent to the mind when you glance left at the thing in the parking lot. Black, four, round, about two, three feet high. Like there's something on the phone from the back of your eyeball to your brain.

And they can't, the only information they can transmit is numbers or colors or how many shapes. Round blacks, four round blacks. We got four round blacks down here.

There's a thinner round thing behind the transparent thing. And the front is stretched out in a certain way and there's a certain cockpit look to it. He doesn't say cockpit, okay?

And then there are white flashes. These are bumpers, right? But he doesn't know.

There's white flashes in the front and white long flashes in the front and silver long flashes in the front and the back, okay? That information is all that the eye can see. That goes to the mind.

Then the mind has to synthesize a whole from the heart. The mind has to piece together a picture of what we're seeing based on the information we see. So we're in a parking lot.

We're in what we know to be a parking lot. There's four blacks, they're around. There's another round inside and there's two silver long flashes front and back.

Let's see, I think it must be a car, right? And then the mind, you see a car, you see a whole car, right? So is it possible to see the car without seeing the pieces of the car?

Is it possible to? No, you can't see a whole car. If you glanced left and saw a whole car, you wouldn't see the tires and you wouldn't see the bumpers and you wouldn't see the steering wheel, okay?

If you glanced to the left and saw a car, you would, by definition, you'd have to be seeing the whole thing, am I right? I mean, otherwise you'd say I'm seeing wheels, you see? If you focus on the black round thing, wheel, and you turn away, all you can say is I saw a wheel, all right?

So somehow when you glance left, you see a whole thing. You have to see a whole thing or you don't see a car. Otherwise you're seeing a bumper or a wheel or a steering wheel, that's all.

You don't see a whole car. When you are looking at the wheels, you don't see a whole car. When you are looking at the steering wheel, you don't see a whole car.

But can you see the whole car if you don't see those things? No, because you can't recognize it as a car. You must see a whole thing and then you must focus in on different pieces that are indicative, I almost said indicative, in here, indicative of a car.

You cannot see a whole car unless you see the parts of the car, all right? You can't see a whole wheel unless you see the left and right side of the wheel, all right? You can't see the left side of the wheel unless you see the top of the left side of the wheel and the bottom of the right side of the wheel.

It's not possible. It's not possible. To confirm that it's a car, you must be able to detect visually indicators of a car, things which indicate a car, all right?

You cannot see the whole car unless you see the parts of the car. When you see the parts of the car, do you see the car? It's not possible.

It's not possible. If you're looking at the tire, you're not seeing the car. Am I right?

If you're staring at the tire, you're not seeing the car. Right? Am I right?

Yeah, if you're staring at the tire, you can't see the car. It's not possible. You can't see the whole car without staring at the tire.

If you stare at the tire, you can't see the whole car. I'll say it again. You can't see the whole car unless you see tire.

If you see a tire, you can't be seeing the whole car. And this is what I'm trying to say. It sounds like I'm just making some joke or something.

I'll say it one more time. You can't tell it's a car unless you look at the wheels. Tires.

If you do look at the tires, you're not looking at the car anymore. All right? Can't see the car unless you see the tires, and if you are seeing the tires, you can't see the car.

But you do it somehow, okay? So, understand one thing. Just get one thing and that's enough for today, all right?

We're close to five, and we've got 10 more minutes or so. Just understand, try to grasp one thing. When you think you're seeing a car, it's not possible what you think you're doing, all right?

You cannot be seeing a car. It's not possible. That little, what do you call it, conundrum that I just stated, which was, you can't see the whole car unless you, you can't identify it unless you look at the tires.

If you do look at the tires, you can't see the whole car. By definition, you can't see the whole car. Can't see the car unless you see the tires, and if you do see the tires, you can't see the car.

What you think you're looking at is not possible. What you think is going on is not possible. This is just one of a thousand arguments for emptiness, all right?

It's just one. You can do the pen thing, you can do the Ashton thing. This is nothing new at all.

This is very, very ancient. From just at the time of Alexander the Great, I knew a teacher named Aristotle, who sent a guy along with Alexander to keep an eye on him, and Alexander killed him, that's what it said. That's a way to get rid of irritating teachers.

So, but try to struggle, okay? You go home today, at least for one or two days, try to struggle with this, okay? You cannot be seeing what you think you're seeing.

Not possible. You cannot be seeing a car, or a vehicle, or a church, and most importantly, you cannot be seeing yourself in the mirror. It's not possible.

You can't be who you thought you were. It's not possible. You're just lucky, because if you were who you thought you were, death would be inevitable, and you could not change your nature.

If you were who you think you are from inside yourself, then if a car was a car from the car's side, everything can't be changed, you know? The only way you can change a thing that's out there is to take a sledgehammer and bang on it, you know? Like that, but that's not how a car exists.

Here's the real poop, okay? You come out of the, and this is extremely profound. I gave this talk at Princeton University a couple weeks ago, and these two physicists freaked out.

They were like, ah! So anyway, I was gonna show that quantum mechanics thing, and maybe next time. It's kind of distracting.

But this is very profound, and it can change your mind. You can get 158,000 R-checks at the last minute when you need them. You can change bones in your body.

You can see emptiness directly. You can save the world. You can become the person who contributes to this world moving beyond war and hunger, okay?

You can do those things if you understand what I'm about to say, right?

[Говорящий 2] (27:18 - 27:19)
Where? I'm gonna try.

[Говорящий 1] (27:23 - 30:24)
When you come out of the church and you glance at a clock, what's really happening is that you see, your eye does see certain indicators, okay? Four black rounds, two long silvers front and back, and a thinner round thing behind some clear squares called windows, right? You do see those indicators.

Your eye passes over the things, and you do see those indicators in the normal. That is true. But everything from then on is not true, okay?

What happens then? The information is sent to your mind, and your mind synthesizes a car. Your mind makes a picture of a car, an impossibly perfect picture of a car, because you can see four wheels.

You feel like you see four wheels, can you? You can, really, you can see pieces of them, maybe if you get down low enough. Anyway, your mind fashions the image of a car, right?

And you're not looking at a car. From that moment, from that point in the process on, you are watching an image in your own head. You are looking at an image in your own mind, okay?

That's not meant to freak you out, okay? Can you drive that image to the store? Yes, that's extremely important to understand that.

When I say that perfect car that you think you see is an image in your own mind, don't make the mistake of thinking it's not real. That's what makes it real, because there was never any other kind of car, because the other kind of car was impossible. We already talked about that.

The car you thought was there was not possible. There has never been any car like that in the parking lot, and there couldn't be, okay? The way you think cars are, it's not possible.

The cars you've ever seen in your life were all pictures in your mind, and your mind was projecting it out. What's the car outside of you? Yes, because your mind was projecting it outside of you, all right?

Is the car outside of your mind? Yes. Is it an image of your mind?

Yes. Can you drive it to the store? Yes, okay?

Why? Because it is coming from your mind, all right? You've got to feel comfortable with that, because if it wasn't coming from your mind, there wouldn't be a car, because there's no such thing.

It's not possible. We already talked about that. Didn't we already talk about that?

Say yes.

[Говорящий 2] (30:24 - 30:24)
Yes.

[Говорящий 1] (30:25 - 36:13)
Then you can get home. Then, you know, a lot of teachers stop there, and they say, okay, that's all in the crowd, that's emptiness, see you next week, you know? But you've got to, you've got to talk about something.

You've got to talk about, how do you use that in your life, you know? Okay, so I thought the car was out there. Now, Geshe-la, you've proved that the car is coming from my mind, so what's that do for me?

Why should I, you know, invest years of my life studying these things if I can't use it for anything? What's the point of saying that the car's coming from your mind? Now, why do you, why, even if it's true, what's the point?

I mean, why, what do I care, you know? I don't care if $100 is coming from out there or in here. I just want the $100, you know?

If it's coming from inside your mind, you can control the process. If it's coming from inside your mind, you can create the things you want, a world without war, a world without hunger. You see, if the world is coming from inside your mind, if it's being sent out by your mind, then you can solve the problems of the world.

This is why we're learning this, okay? It's not just some philosophy class at Princeton, you know? I knew those guys.

They sit around, you can't even talk to them. They're like, uh, you say, is the sky blue? And they say, well, we'll have to think about that, you know, and you couldn't talk to them.

I tried to hire one one time. I had a little company. It didn't work.

He couldn't drive a truck. He kept running into trees. And then he discussed the tree.

It's not philosophy. It's life or death for six billion people. It's life or death.

It's life or death for six billion people. If you get it, you can change things. If you don't, you can't, okay?

If the poverty and hunger of the world is coming from economic events or lack of material resources, then it's hopeless. If the hunger and poverty of the world is coming from us, then we can tweak things and remove it, right? So, why does your mind draw the conclusion that these parts are a car?

This is the crux of the talk and we'll stop, okay? Get this and we'll stop. Why does your mind conclude?

Why does your mind synthesize from those black rounds and those silver lungs? Why does it synthesize a car that you can use to go to a teaching that could change the world? Huh?

Yeah, you have been kind to some of them. With all you planted the seed for your mind to see a car, you planted the seed for your mind to throw forth an image of a car to fit the indicators of four black rounds, two long silvers. Your mind chose that image, which is a reasonable image, okay, tsema, pramana, it's a reasonable image.

Your mind chose that image from among many other images because you had a seed for seeing a car in your mind, because you had a seed for seeing a car that you could use in your mind. How was that seed planted in your mind? And then we can stop, I promise.

How was that seed planted in your mind? You gave people rides, especially the poor, especially the elderly, especially the helpless people of the world, right? The people who get on the buses, right?

You gave them a ride. You stopped, you said, hey, you need a ride? And you took them somewhere.

That kindness, right? Kindness runs the images of the entire world, right? Kindness is the real substance of the world, right?

It's not physical. It's you have done something good for someone else and that could have seen in your mind. Your mind chooses car.

Your mind chooses a picture of a car. So put on those pieces because you did kindness to someone with a car, right? You used a car to serve someone and then your mind chose for the image of a car.

It's very, very beautiful. So your kindness is creating all the objects around you. So you have to be kind.

You don't have a choice. You have to be kind. And then if everyone learned to be kind, everybody had a car, okay?

Okay. I was in Germany recently, you know, and then this guy raises his hand and says, there's a lot of problems. I said, what?

He says, can you imagine the pollution? And then I said, no, no, you don't know where the pollution's coming from. And he was okay with that.

So we made a really good car. I mean, that's London, Europe, but we made a really, really, well, that's not, that's one of the seven, okay? But anyway.

Meanwhile, you have to remember where we stopped for next example, okay?

[Говорящий 2] (36:15 - 36:16)
Huh? Yeah.

[Говорящий 1] (36:32 - 38:45)
Well, that was a hard point. So, no, I could just roll over that point, and people do, right? But you should know what it is, okay?

Okay, anyway. We did a really good karma. You know?

We talked about things that could change the whole world. And as I mentioned before, the world is changing. You are changing the world.

Weird things are happening. British Airways called, $12 billion company called, could you teach 43,000 employees about this stuff? You know?

Like, if British Airways is willing to try it, you should be willing to try it, okay? And you will be the people who bring these ideas to the world, okay? You will be the people.

Whether you're going into a retreat, and they did you well, yeah. Or whether you're staying outside and serving people in the other way, if you really learn these things well, then you can change this world. And what I'm saying is that British Airways thing shows that.

It shows that it's possible. We can affect thousands of people. They carry 37 million passengers a year.

If we affect those 43,000 workers, then strange things can happen. When you start going into the core of your mind with the meditation instructions that we studied all week, and at the core of your mind, you can make very weird changes to reality. And the world will change, okay?

Because it's coming from the core of your mind. So make a decision that you will learn this teaching, right? It will take 10 years.

The good things take time. And then you will pass it on to other people in your own time. You will carry it to the next generation.

Okay, my girl? You have to try it, okay? You have to make a commitment to learn it, and then pass it on to others.

Then we can change the world. Then we can help the world, okay? Mazal?

I'm asking you one more time, because it wasn't very good. Mazal?

[Говорящий 2] (38:46 - 38:48)
Mazal! Okay.

[Говорящий 1] (38:49 - 38:50)
Okay. Okay.