«Дар освобождения», курс 2 «Прорыв к высшей реальности», занятие 19

[Говорящий 2] (0:02 - 9:52)
Okay, we'll do a short meditation and then get to the class. Start with your breath. Single object, just your breath.

There's nothing else in the world, just your breath. Then come to a golden moon. It's on the side of the mountain.

Sunlight pouring in. Covering the room with a deep gold color. All the objects in the room are covered in a deep golden color, sunlight.

If your mind leaves the golden color and brings it back, relax into the golden color. Feel a sense of contentment to stay just there without planning anything or being aware of this moon. Just be satisfied to be on the golden color coming through the window.

Look at the sky, look out the window, see the sky, be the sky and the sky. Don't think of anything else. Be content to stay in the sky.

Have not relaxed into the sky. Then drop your view down from the sky to the mountains. These mountains are distant and they are separated from the window, from your house, by a large valley also covered in the light afternoon light.

Try to focus on the feeling of expansiveness. It will help you meditate in about three or four minutes. Check your face for any tension.

Especially the corners of the mouth and forehead between the eyebrows. Try to pay attention to the top of your eyelids. Is there any tension there?

At least bring the mind back in the golden room. Be aware of yourself sitting in the deep golden light and then request your heart teacher, whoever that may be, to come and sit in front of you, very close, like knees touching knees. Try to feel their presence not as a visualization but as a real person.

Their chest is moving up and down with the breath. You can feel the warmth of their body on the front of your body. You can smell that subtle fragrance that comes from the skin.

When they look at you, they're blinking sometimes. Relax into the teacher. Try to bring up a sense of contentment to stay in this room quietly, just you two, silent, warm in the golden light.

Just try very hard to just be contented to stay there, looking at their face, looking into their eyes, and just stay there.

[Говорящий 1] (9:53 - 9:59)
You don't have anything else to do. You don't need to worry about anything else right now.

[Говорящий 2] (9:59 - 13:06)
Just look into their eyes, feel the mutual love, and surrender quietly into it. Check and see if any of the classical problems of meditation are coming up. Does the mind feel dull or unclear?

Maybe a little sleepy or tired? You're losing the freshness of your attention. Or watch for the opposite problem.

Your mind is a little bit yancy. It wants to think about lunch or your plans for this evening. You can circumnavigate those classical problems of meditation simply by bringing up the sensation of nirvana.

Nirvana is that contentment to stay with the object, and enjoyment of the object, which is your teacher's eyes. Try to bring up an emotion of contentment with staying on your teacher's eyes.

[Говорящий 1] (13:08 - 13:21)
Then you won't have the two famous problems of either feeling that the mind is not fresh, or thinking about your plans for this evening or tomorrow.

[Говорящий 2] (13:28 - 16:47)
A sense of contentment to stay on your teacher's eyes. And slowly come back to the scene, and you can open your eyes gently.

[Говорящий 1] (16:54 - 24:10)
So, where did Nick go? We were examining Nick. We're on the subject of emptiness, which by the end of the week, we're going to have a great, what do you call it?

There's going to be a great confluence of the two subjects, meditation and emptiness. By the end of the week, there will be a great joining of these two subjects. Probably tomorrow sometime.

But we were saying, you know, the Buddhists have this idea of emptiness, or no self, and then we were exploring what that means. And we were trying very hard to make it practical. Is it something you could actually use in your life to make your life more successful and happy?

So, we were examining Nick for a bunch of days now, and we were trying to locate the Nick which does exist. We call it yu-gyu-dok. And then the Nick which doesn't exist, which is called me-gyu-dok.

So, whenever you're looking at Nick, or anybody else, by the way, you're supposed to turn this on yourself, right? So, Chelsea turns it on Chelsea, Ritesh turns it on Ritesh. Anytime you look at Nick, or especially when Nick looks at Nick, there are two Nicks appearing to his mind.

And they are mixed like water and milk. One of the Nicks exists, and anything he does with regard to that Nick is successful and meaningful. And then there's another Nick mixed in there which doesn't exist.

And then anytime he's relating to that Nick, he's open to emotional, you know, getting upset or getting angry or getting jealous. All negative emotions of the mind depend upon the Nick that doesn't exist to come up. If you didn't have mixed in with your perceptions of Nick, a Nick who didn't exist, then you wouldn't have negative emotions.

Negative emotions depend for their very existence upon avidya, or ignorance, about who Nick is. And they rely upon the perception of a Nick that doesn't exist at all. So, if we could identify that Nick, which we call gaccha, right?

If we could identify that Nick, gaccha means the thing that was never there. If we could identify the part of Nick that appears to us, but which doesn't really exist, then you would never have a negative emotion again. And that's the Buddhist definition of nirvana.

Nirvana is not where you disappear and you go off somewhere or something like that. You simply come to a very sensitive awareness of the Nick that was never there. And if you reach that awareness, you can't have a negative emotion anymore.

And that's nirvana. That's the meaning of nirvana. Much later you get to enlightenment, but nirvana comes before.

And you don't go anywhere and you don't look any different to other people. It's not like you just blink out of existence or something like that. It's that you can never be angry or jealous or upset again.

It's not possible. All of those are dependent upon the Nick that doesn't exist. So once you get good at identifying that Nick that doesn't exist, the measure of your understanding of emptiness is that your negative emotions will start to lessen.

So if you want to know if you're on the right track as far as emptiness, there should be a corresponding lessening of your negative emotions. If your negative emotions are getting more, then your emptiness view is getting less. Let's give a real example.

Some books go missing, to use a Vancouverism, some books go missing in the bookstore. Let's say Nick was supposed to manage the bookstore. Somebody comes in, Rebecca and her lesser chieftains.

They come in to the bookstore and they're discussing. They don't notice that Nick is there. And then they're discussing, do you know we have some books missing?

And then somebody says, do you think we can really trust Nick? And then Nick hears it. And then immediately arises, in the heart is a tiny fire, or a tiny burning in the heart.

Which relates to your heart chakra actually, and the movement of prana in your heart chakra. But anyway, in real terms it feels like your heart jerks, or your heart twists a little bit. And then you start to feel upset.

And you start to think, I don't deserve to be, first of all I didn't steal the books. But the main thing is I don't deserve to be blamed for that. I don't deserve to be blamed for that.

Then we were saying that in this system of thinking, which you can call Buddhism, but I don't think it matters. We were in communist China, we taught it to thousands of people. We didn't mention it was Buddhism.

We wore business suits. We looked like Mormon missionaries. And then, you know, we were just regular people who had a new way of thinking.

And I don't think it matters what you call it. To me it doesn't matter, if you keep a picture of Buddha, or Mahatma, or Jesus, I don't care. I don't care what's on there.

I absolutely don't care what picture is hanging on your wall. I personally don't keep a lot of pictures. People give me dozens of them.

I give them away. I have one picture that I like to hang. I like to hang that one.

But some artist in Mongolia painted it for me. So it means a lot to me. And sometimes I let Tsongkhapa be there.

Because I like him. But that's all. I don't really care.

It doesn't matter to me. So this is not a Buddhist thing. It's just a thing everybody can use.

And then you keep your own pictures, and that's okay. We went to Ireland. We went to a cathedral in Galway.

And this guy had a big conversion. And he said, oh, I'm going to become a Buddhist. And I said, between you and me, when your daughter gets married, are you going to have like a six-star blue guy there?

Or are you going to take her to a nice Irish cathedral and have some organ music? And he's like, yeah, I guess you're right.

[Говорящий 2] (24:11 - 24:11)
You know.

[Говорящий 1] (24:13 - 27:35)
So anyway, can you use this? According to this system of thinking, all objects in the world are coming from seeds within our own minds. Everything we see, everybody we see, and everything anyone ever says to us is flowing from seeds in our own mind, which were planted there when we did the same thing to somebody else.

That's all. There's no inexplicable object in the world. There's no object in the world that doesn't have a cause.

And there's no object in the world which doesn't have a cause in how we're treating other people. Absolutely. Even the Geshe Dargye used to say, the slightest breeze coming into the window and you feel a little brush on your cheek, that also has a cause from something you did to somebody.

Everything around you. Every detail of the carpet, every grain of the wood, the placement of every knot on the wood, they each have a cause in something we did to somebody else. And then we see those things.

So it's absolutely, positively untrue that Nick could ever be blamed unjustly. It's true that he didn't steal the books. But in the moment of being censured by somebody else, in the moment of being criticized by somebody else, if he follows this system, his natural reaction to being criticized should be only to think, why is my mind projecting a person criticizing?

What criticism have I given to others in the last few weeks? That's all. By the way, you should feel better that seeds are always smaller than their results.

Seeds are way, way smaller than their results. If you get to the point where you're standing in the bookstore offering to manage it as a volunteer and the big chief of the retreat is blaming you for something, you can take comfort in the fact that the criticism you gave to someone else must have been much less. Because it increases a hundredfold as it ripens in the ground of the mind.

So you don't have to go looking for the last time you shot somebody or something like that. You can think, I must be, in a small way, in my own small way, I must be critical of someone else, even mentally. Then you just go after that criticism and you wipe it out and you stop it.

And then Rebecca comes in and says, you know, I'm sorry, we found out that the money was dropped and it wasn't your fault at all. And actually you're doing a great job in the bookstore and we hope you'll do it for the next three years. You know, like that, okay?

But what we've been exploring is that, is that Nick that comes up when he's first blamed. That Nick who didn't deserve to be blamed. Because in this system, there's no such thing.

You deserve everything that happens to you, even if it's unjust. You know, even if you didn't steal anything, you deserve to be accused because you accused somebody else of something similar.

[Говорящий 2] (27:36 - 27:36)
Okay?

[Говорящий 1] (27:37 - 42:12)
But it's not a kind of a fatalistic understanding of being blamed. It's not like you sit there and let people blame you forever, you know? It's not, that's not the point of it.

The point is that you go after your own tendency of criticizing others. And that makes you a better person. It's not that you sit there and say, okay, it's okay for Rebecca to blame me.

And it's also not necessary to stay quiet. You can speak up and say, you know, I didn't steal anything, you know? It may or may not work according to your seeds, okay?

Be aware. But it's okay to say something. Ultimately, the only way to fix the situation is to go after your own criticism.

Going after the seeds doesn't disallow taking normal actions, okay? Just be aware that they may not work. Going after the seeds always works.

Going after the seeds always works. But in the meantime, you can also tell Rebecca I didn't steal anything. Whether she'll believe you or not is uncertain because that method is uncertain.

Personally, I like to say, you know, Becky, I didn't steal anything, and I'm going to work on my seeds of criticism, you know? And then she may say you're stupid or smart. But be aware that clarifying things to her is not a cause for her to stop criticizing you, okay?

As you know, from all the years of negotiating with your partner or anybody else, it may work, it may not work. It's not the cause. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't try.

It's okay to try. Just be aware it may not work. Ultimately, you have to go after the seeds.

You have to examine yourself if you've been critical of someone else. That's all. And then Becky will discover the money.

It's very profound. Okay. So we're back to the text now.

So we were talking about a magician who had cast a spell on an audience with mantra, which is the original meaning of mantra. The original function of mantras was for casting spells. And then he'd throw some substance, powders, on the people.

Maybe they were psychotropics, I don't know. But then people would see a cow or they would see a horse. And the magician also sees a cow or a horse.

But their relationship to the cow or the horse is different because they don't believe in it, okay? They see it but they know it's a phantasm or a magical trick. RIGS MI NGAN GZOGS PA'I RNAMS NI NGES PAR BZHIN DU RTAG LA'ANG GI RGO'ANG LA SOGS PA'I BYA BA BYED PA MUN GSUM DU NYON MED DU MTHONG BA LTAR This is interesting, okay?

Even though it's illusory, the horse can walk around. Even though it's illusory, the horse can walk around the circle. We were giving the example of a longhorn steer and the crowd was a little nervous because it was, what do you call it, snorting and going like this.

So even though it's imaginary, it can do things. It can walk. It can threaten the crowd.

It can do that. RTAG LA'ANG GI RGO'ANG LA SOGS PA'I BYA BA BYED MUN GSUM DU Now there's a very important word for those of you studying Tibetan. It's NYON MED DU MTHONG BA.

NYON MED DU MTHONG BA NYON is related to NYON. This spelling is different, okay? Those of you who care, BAO SA NYON LA NYON And then the spelling of the other one, SA MA TA MA YA TA NYON LA NYON They both mean crazy, okay?

They're both Tibetan words for crazy. Sometimes they drop off the N and they say NYON. For example, NYO CHE, crazy maker, is a scriptural word for drugs and alcohol.

So NYO CHE, that which makes you stupid and crazy, is the scriptural word for alcohol and drugs. So here, NYON MED DU, NYON MED DU is a very important word for those of you who care about learning about Tibetan. NYON MED DU means, literally it means I'm crazy, not crazy.

It means, despite the fact that everything is coming from our own minds, from seeds planted there by how we treat others, it still functions NYON MED. It's not like cuckoo or anything. It still functions perfectly rationally.

So NYON MED means like perfectly rationally. The fact that seeds grow plants and the fact that gasoline makes a car run, these are all perfectly rational. There's nothing weird about them.

You have to reconcile the fact that everything is flowing from your mind and the fact that everything works perfectly rationally. Gasoline does make cars go. Aspirin can stop a headache.

Yoga can make you thin and strong. Those are all... NYON MED means perfectly rational.

It literally means not cuckoo. NYON MED DU MTHONG BA LTAR We see that. RANG BZHIN GYIS MED PA MIN KYANG DAG TZAM YOD TZAM GYIS Sorry.

Yeah, that's okay. MIN TZAM GYIS TSAR GYIS MI DAM ZHIN DU LAS SO MIN KYANG DAG YOD TZAM MIN KYANG DAG YOD TZAM Very famous. MING DE ZHAG TSAM It means the things around you in the world are only projections from your mind.

In Majjhimika, they use the word nominal. They are flowing from names. Don't think of it as names.

That's a little tricky. Don't think of that. When they say name only or everything exists only NAMAN NAMAN name, right?

NAMAN NALI don't get hung up on the nominal thing. I think it's the wrong way to go. What name means in the study of emptiness is the little images that your mind makes and puts on things.

Nick, you go like this with your fingers. Nick, Nick. When you go like Nick, that's a picture in your head.

You're referring to a picture in your head. You can call it a name, that's the real name. That's what names really are.

Names are not verbalizations. The Abhidharma goes into that. Names are not, sorry.

Names are not syllables and tones and sounds. The real names are the images in your own mind. And the real names are, they flower from the seeds planted in your mind when you were either good or bad to others.

So your actions towards others plant seeds in your mind, which flower into what are called words or names. And those names you apply to different objects, Nick, or camera, or carpet. So start thinking, Abhidharma says, start thinking of name as a sound.

Start thinking of the word name as that little picture which is born from the seeds in your mind, which were planted by how well you took care of others. That's names. So when we say everything exists in name only, what we really mean is all the people around you are just images coming up from in your mind, depending on the seeds you planted before.

Very important. Minkyak Tagyutsam Mi Den Shindu And therefore they are not real. In what sense are they not real?

They're not what you thought. The appearance and the reality are different. It looked like those things existed out there, independent of your mind.

But the reality is that everyone around you and everything around you is flowing from your own mind. You see? Then people, don't freak out, okay?

Don't go to some extreme. Don't say, I'm living in my head. That's also not true, okay?

Is everything coming from your mind? Yes. Are you living inside your head and there's nobody else in the universe?

No. Why? Because your mind is projecting other people outside of you, and that makes them real people outside of you, okay?

Are they projections of your mind? Yes. Are you stuck in your head?

No. Why? The seeds are projecting them as outside people, and that makes them outside people.

So you can relate to them, that's fine, okay? Don't freak out. Don't think there's nobody to have a friendship with, or that you're stuck in the whole universe by yourself.

It's not true. People around you are coming from you, but they're real people outside of you, got it? Okay.

La tene, sorry. La tene. So the Nick, who is coming from Nick's mind, he can do all the normal stuff.

He does collect karma. He's either nice or bad to other people. De duk ngel, he does experience the consequences of his actions.

He projects a doer, and he projects an experiencer of the consequences of his actions, okay? He projects a Nick who's an actor, and he projects the Nick who experiences the consequences of his actions. Di ten duk ja je, ten duk nyun le duk te.

So we can say that the whole working of things is nyun le, it's perfectly rational. Everything is okay. People do stuff, and people get the results of what they're doing.

That's all, that whole system is fine. Is it coming from your mind? Yes.

Is it still real? Excuse me, that's what makes it real. Don't ask me, is it still real?

Much less. It's not only real, it couldn't have been real if it existed out there without your mind, all right? You gotta get used to that.

The way you thought it always was, that's unreal, okay? A car that could run on gas without your giving other people rides is unreal. There's no such thing.

There's no such thing. You could put gas in a car. I borrowed Darcy's truck yesterday.

It was full. I don't know, I think she drove it somewhere and got it full of gas. When I got into it, I was in Prescott, and I'm like, click, click, click.

Even the battery seemed to be working, because it did click, but nothing happened. You can have gas. It doesn't make a car go.

Does that mean gas doesn't make a car go? No. Gas, which is imbued with my goodness by giving other people rides on a regular basis, will make my car go.

If it's not imbued with the same goodness, it won't make my car go. I can even have an extra tank of that kind of gas, and it still won't start, all right? You understand?

Things imbued with your goodness work. Things not imbued with your goodness don't work. They are the same things.

The gas is the same. All right. DE'I RTEN DU BYA BYAS RTEN DU NYON MED DU THEG PA'I MTHONG NAS SNANG BA BZHIN DU STONG PA DANG STONG ZHUGS DU SNANG BA Now he's going into a beautiful, beautiful place, okay?

It's a completely new idea. It's a new kind of thought. It's difficult if you haven't had a good explanation of goodness, and it's easy if you have had a good explanation of emptiness.

It's a no-brainer if someone's been guiding you the right way on the study of emptiness. Otherwise, it's a challenge. But for you guys, it's going to be a no-brainer.

Here's the issue. What's the relationship between emptiness and causation? What's the relationship between emptiness and the way the seeds work in your mind?

What's the relationship between emptiness and what they call dependent origination? Okay, I have a beef with that. Now, I have a beef with that whole thing.

First of all, it's too long. The word is too long. Dependent origination.

It's eight syllables, eight syllables. So, Buddha just said, de chung wei na de chung. Stuff happens from other stuff.

That's all he said. He didn't say eight syllables. Stuff happens from, anyway.

He just said, stuff happens from other stuff. De chung wei na de chung. Very famous.

There's a sutra called the Sutra on Dependent Origination. It just consists of one sentence. Lord Buddha said, hey, stuff happens because of other stuff.

So, can we reconcile the fact that things are empty with the fact that stuff happens from other stuff? Do we have a problem here? And then teachers are constantly going the wrong way with stuff happens from other stuff.

People say, what does dependent origination mean, master?