«Дар освобождения», курс 2 «Прорыв к высшей реальности», занятие 28

[Говорящий 2] (0:02 - 3:35)
Watch your breath, please, and please come to the golden room. Please get in touch with your session. Isolate that part of your mind.

[Говорящий 1] (3:36 - 3:44)
Observe that part of your mind, which is observing your mind, to see what's going on, to see if you're still on the object.

[Говорящий 2] (3:46 - 3:49)
Isolate your watchfulness and watch it.

[Говорящий 1] (4:24 - 4:35)
Then watch your dharma, watch the mind that brings you back to your mind, brings you back to your object. Watch the part of your mind that brings you back to the object.

[Говорящий 2] (4:38 - 9:50)
Observe how it struggles to bring your mind back to the object. Look out the window and see the golden sky, blue sky, sorry. Relax into the blue of the sky.

Surrender to the blue of the sky. No plans. No feeling that you have to go somewhere else.

Just relax and be there with the sky. Come down to the mountains in the valley, covered in sunlight. Why?

Expensive. Unlock to the golden room. Ask your teacher to please come to sit with you in the sunlight and feel their hands on your hands.

[Говорящий 1] (9:51 - 10:04)
Take that as your meditation object, the feeling of their hands on your hands. Stay there with that meditation object. Relax.

You are free today.

[Говорящий 2] (10:04 - 14:42)
You don't have anything else to do. Enjoy the warmth of their hands on your hands. You can come slowly back to this room.

[Говорящий 1] (14:46 - 31:49)
Relax. I'm lucky. I got a love note from Grandma.

They went and bought pastries for tonight for the ceremony. It says, Dear Michael, my vocabulary is not adequate to thank you sincerely. Love, Grandma.

You're going to thank me later. Okay. So we got to Mitome.

Where's my little stick thing? I don't know. We got to Mitome up there, okay?

Okay, we got the first level of the format. There's a little bit to wrap up here, okay? It's not much.

Okay. DE NAS NYID RTOG PHYI MA RNAMS GRUB NAS RIM GYIS TZAM GSUG RGYAS KHA GRUB NANG THOB NUS MÖ You should learn Mö at the end of a sentence, right? Mö means admittedly.

I admit that you could go through the rest of the four realm levels, right? And achieve all eight of the TZAM GSUG. So TZAM GSUG is, you should also learn that.

TZAM GSUG means, TZAM means, TZAM TEN means Tjana, which refers to the four realm levels. GSUG means GSUG ME. So it's difficult.

It means the opposite. GSUG means Rupa, form. GSUG ME means formless.

So there's a scriptural nickname for the eight levels. The four form realm levels and the four formless realm levels are sometimes called thought forms. And you could have trouble there if you didn't know that, okay?

So TZAM GSUG. RGYAS KHA GRUB NANG, you could reach all eight of those levels. LIM KYANG DGOS PA CHUNG BA'I, there wouldn't be much point to do so.

RANG RE DE SKYE PA MIN ZHING, therefore us guys don't need to reach those levels. CI ROG PA NI CI YANG ME, MEN CHAD KYI MYO MO NGON GYUR THAMS CAD PHANG DE, ZHI TSE SEMS THOB ME, THAR PA THOB PAR, ZIN KYANG Now, difficult and important point about meditation, okay? There's a kind of meditation called CI ROG KYI NAM PA CHEN.

Say, CI ROG KYI NAM PA CHEN. CI ROG KYI NAM PA CHEN. CI means peace, right?

ROG means rough. NAM PA CHEN means aspect, having that aspect. What does it mean?

I like to compare it to my journey through, what do you call that? Stimulants, all right? So, you know, when I got to the monastery, Rinpoche, the first thing I ever had to do was drink a cup of Tibetan tea.

I had some in China. It was very moving for me because I hadn't had it for 15 years or something. And he said, you have to drink this tea.

So I drank it. It's black Chinese tea, boiled for a long time. And then you put in milk.

You have to ladle it. And then you put it in half and half. And then you dump in salt.

And then you dump in baking powder. And then you dump in nutmeg. And then you ladle it.

And it ends up like a yogurt or something. I mean, it almost doesn't flow. And then you drink that.

If you drink that, you pretty much don't have to eat. So in Tibet, the Geshes, you know, it was cold and they would have Tibetan tea. Sometimes you have Utsamba, which is powdered barley flour, which is parched over a fire.

So then you can live on that. You can pretty much live on that. And they do that.

But then they get out of Tibet and they try to drink it in India and it kills them. There's a lot of diabetes in the monastery. There's a lot of high blood pressure, overweight.

So anyway, so he got me drinking like 20 cups a day. And used to it, you know, like it wouldn't affect me much. And then I went on a business trip to Bangkok.

I had to open an office in Bangkok. And I got these terrible, terrible headaches. And I didn't know why.

And then I figured it out. I didn't have my 20 cups of tea every day. And then I went back to New York and I couldn't get tea in the office.

And then I started drinking coffee. And then I'd have like, I would have coffee next to me all day. I would just drink it all day.

Like 10 cups or something. And, you know, then I went on three or three. So it was really weird.

So I thought, well, let me see if I can get off of it. Mama Christy helped me. She said, let's see if we can get you off of stimulants, you know.

So I, you know, I started with Tibetan tea, coffee. Then I went to Tibetan tea. Then I went to English breakfast with milk, right?

Then I went to English breakfast without milk. Then I went to peppermint. That was a big, that was a big deal.

But it had to have like a half a cup of honey in it. They know, she was one of the caretakers. And it had to be almost all honey.

Or I wouldn't get enough of a kick out of it. And then, then I went to, what? Just the mint tea without the honey.

And then I went to, I got to water. I did agave in there somewhere. But pretty much now I'm at water.

Unless we go to Starbucks. Me and Ningbo like to have a hot chocolate. But it's pretty much water now.

Then it's just a matter of, what do you call it? Relativity, you know. Each one feels a little more peaceful than the last, right?

It's just that compared to the 20 cups of tea, 10 cups of coffee is less. And compared to the 10 cups of coffee, a lot of black tea with honey is, you see what I mean? It's all just by comparison.

But there's no change, I don't know how to say. It just feels better because it's more subtle than the last thing. That's shiraki nampa chen.

You go up through states of meditation and each one feels better than the last. In fact, what distinguishes the desire realm levels of meditation and the form realm levels of meditation and the formless realm levels of meditation is a nam chu dzung shik ni in the Abhidharma. In the Yoga Sutra they talk about it.

Kalpa, vikalpa. You move up through finer and finer distinctions of the conceptual state of the mind. Finer and finer distinctions of conceptual state of the mind.

Dzung shik ni means you are still in a conceptual state of mind, but it gets finer. So like in the beginning you are conceptualizing whole objects, whole thoughts. And then as you move up, what distinguishes the levels from each other is that you lose the capacity to have gross conceptual thoughts.

And then you can only have less... And in the Yoga Sutra they say you go up through ananda, you go to bliss. You see, you go through tokpa, chöpa and then ananda.

These are more and more subtle states of mind. But they are all still conceptual and they are all still holding to ni. There's no change in the content of the perception.

You're still believing in ni. The instrument is finer by comparison, but the content is still mistaken. There's still 100% avidya.

You're still misunderstanding everything. You just feel better. It feels more subtle.

You can also do it with music, okay? So you go into a grocery store and there's music playing and you barely notice it, unless they play one of your favorite songs. But you kind of just don't notice it.

I don't think you're meant to notice it. When we came out of the three-year retreat, Mama Christi's mom took us to Universal Studios. It was like three days out of retreat or five days out of retreat.

And then she, with all the relatives, and they brought us, they took us to a burger joint. And the people came out with a plate of french fries this big, for each person, you know? And then there was a mariachi band playing there and there was rock and roll on the loudspeakers and there was one of those bowls that you ride, a mechanical bowl, and these people were, drunk people were screaming and riding on the bowl.

And it was really overwhelming. It was like, no, I felt, we felt very, very sick. But you see, there's a kind of way of listening to music which is just sort of background noise.

And then you go home and you turn on a song and you kind of cook or something, you do your thing. And then they're sitting down to listen to a song and that's a different thing. Same song, in the grocery store, in the kitchen, in your bedroom.

And then you, then you decide, then your favorite song comes on and you start listening really carefully. And then if you've been a bass player for 25, 30 years, you know, you're listening to the bass line, you know? Nobody else is really aware, you know?

The other day I was in the car, I said, do you hear the bass line? And the person said, yes, yes, I hear the bass line. But I didn't really.

And then you go deeper and deeper into this song, right? But it's all still conceptual. It's all still infected by the misperception of the song.

You still believe that, by the way, favorite songs are a great example of emptiness. You have your favorite song and you can't really understand why people don't realize it's such a good song. You see what I mean?

They're obviously not hearing what you hear, you know? That's why you get into radio fights with your friends or iPod fights. Can we play, you know?

Then you end up, it's good nowadays because you can compromise on a shuffle, on a random thing, you know? But then they say, well, it's all your songs played at random. So you have to be careful about that.

Why? He mentions it here. CI ROL PA'I Some people who didn't understand meditation very well, CI YANG MA'I MAN CHAD KYI NYON MONGS RUNG GYUR THAMS CAD SPANG STE They were able to take their mind up to progressive states, those eight higher states of meditation, okay?

SPANG STE SI TSE SEMS THOB NAS They even reach a state called SI TSE. SI TSE means... That's the top of the formless realm.

It's called peak of suffering existence. An extremely, extremely subtle state of meditation. Extremely...

The mind is extremely peaceful, extremely quiet, extremely focused, okay? SI TSE SEMS THOB NAS THAR PA THOB PA DZIN GYUR And then they believe they have reached nirvana. Okay?

Because the mind has gotten quieter and quieter and quieter and quieter. But no change in the content of the ignorance. The ignorance is still 100% there, okay?

He's going to give an example of what happens to people like that, okay? Because you can't stay there. And you don't give up your negative emotions, you suppress them.

The meditation suppresses them. And then they come back with a vengeance when you come down, okay? So people mistake that for a spiritual goal, just to be more quiet, okay?

THAR PA THOB PA DZIN GYUR DE TZAM GYI KHOR BA LAS MI MDOR You're not free of suffering. SNGAGS ROL SNGAGS LTOS LAS There's a sutra, I believe, called In Praise of What is Praiseworthy. SNGAGS ROL SNGAGS LTOS LAS KHYOD KYI CHOS LA MI CHOG PAS KHYOD PO'I THING PO'I KYI SDOM PA SRID RJES PAR DU SONG NAS KYANG SDUG BSNGAL YANG SBYUNG SRID PAR DU People who don't understand your teaching, meaning Lord Buddha's teaching.

KHYOD PO'I THING PO'I KYI SDOM PA Those blinded by their avidya, by their ignorance. SRID RJES PAR DU SONG NAS KYANG They may be able to go as far as the peak, what's called the peak. It's a very subtle meditation.

PAR DU SONG NAS KYANG SDUG BSNGAL YANG SBYUNG Then they come back to suffering. They come out of that. They have to come out of that because there's no change in the seeds.

It's not changing the content of their mind. It's just changing the quietness. The relative quietness.

As if you had gone from coffee to tea to herbal tea to water, but you're still drinking. SRID RJES PAR DU SONG NAS KYANG SBYING RTEN DO LAS, SBYING RTEN DAG NI TING ZIN GOM BYAS KYANG DE NI DAG TU DU SHES GYIS MI BYAS DE NI NYON MONGS SHES SHING RAB THUGS TE LHAG BCOS KYIS NI TING ZIN GYUR GOM BZHIN Then this is a sutra, it says, SBYING RTEN DAG NI TING ZIN GOM BYAS KYANG Those of the world may engage in meditation. Meditations, all meditations are divided into two types.

There's a very broad division made of all meditations. They can be JIG RTEN GYI TING ZIN, or JIG RTEN LAS BDE PA'I TING ZIN. JIG RTEN GYI TING ZIN means the format of the mind is quieter and quieter and quieter, but the content hasn't changed.

You're still conceptual. The thoughts are still conceptual. When I say conceptual, it means they're still conceiving there's a Nick there who was never there.

And then there's JIG RTEN LAS BDE PA'I TING ZIN, which means a meditation which tends to destroy your wrong thinking. It's called transcendent meditation, transcends the world. Meditation which has content in it which would stop you from thinking that Nick came from his own side.

Because that takes you beyond the suffering world. Any kind of meditation which has some content of emptiness in it is going to take you beyond suffering. And any meditation which doesn't have that is not going to change your suffering.

PHRAG CHOG KYIS NI TING ZIN DE NI DAG TU DU SHES JI NI BYED It doesn't...worldly meditation doesn't affect your misperception of things. It doesn't change your misperception of things. DE NI NYAMUNG PHYIR SHING RAB DUG DE It just sort of...

It actually just sort of... What do you call it? What's the word when you cause a thing to continue?

[Говорящий 2] (31:50 - 31:50)
Perpetuate.

[Говорящий 1] (31:51 - 37:41)
Yeah, or sustain. It perpetuates or sustains your kleshas, your mental afflictions, your negative emotions. PHYIR SHING RAB DUG DE It's so nice to have my dictionary back.

RAB DUG DE And then your mind will eventually fall back. There's almost nothing worse than to have a very peaceful state of mind for a long time and then someone shakes you out of it. Someone pisses you off.

No, you have a long retreat which is just SHI RAG GI RNAM PA CHEN and then you get back in the car and somebody's honking at you and you get more angry than before because you are... You don't want someone to shake you out of your peace. But that peace is not...

That peace is not founded on understanding. That peace is just incidental to having meditated for a bunch of days. LHAG CHOG KYI NI TING ZIN GYUR GONG ZHIN For example, there's the case of Uddhaka.

So Uddhaka is a good example because he was a yogi in ancient India who reached Sita. He reached the highest form of meditation there is. Where we don't go, by the way, right?

We stopped seven steps before that. Seven levels before that. But he got all the way up to Sita.

Which means if he had done that on a regular basis and then died, he would be born into a bodiless rebirth of pleasure. No body to worry about. Pure intellectual pleasure without even a body.

You meet some professors who are like that, right? They don't eat. They don't think about anything.

What's his name, the physicist? Who wrote the worst history of time. Yeah, Stephen Hawking.

Like that. He's all in his head, right? In fact, his body is gone, right?

Okay. GONG ZHIN So you can do that. He got good at that.

LO MANG PO NAS KHAG Then he stayed there a long time. LO MANG PO NAS KHAG REL PA CHI BA'I SOD If you're translating this someday, don't mix up the NAS KHAG as a NAS KHAG divided into NAS and KHAG. REL PA CHI BA'I SOD PA He grew dreadlocks during his meditations because he was in them so many years.

And he became proud of his dreadlocks. Like they let you grow your hair in three-year retreat. So I was like, oh man, I'll come out with this really long hair and everybody will be impressed.

Because I can say I spent three years in meditation and I grew it for three years. You know what I mean? Like that.

You're like waiting to get out so you can tell people how cool you are. Then a mouse came during his meditation and chewed on his dreadlocks and made them all ragged. Like, you know, he wanted like really nice, Clairol, yogi's dreadlocks.

And it just ruined all the evenness of the dreadlocks. Then he got really upset and he got angry. SANG DEN GNYEN ME The anger popped him out of his meditative state.

NGAN SONG DU SONG BA After he died, he went to the lower realms. He went to a hell realm or something because the anger was so intense. It means that the meditation made him feel more peaceful but didn't address the ignorance which causes all negative emotions.

If you don't come to a realization that the person who's blaming you for stealing it wasn't the books by the way, it was the poster tubes. Okay? No matter how long you meditate and no matter how peaceful your meditation gets, if you can't understand that the person who's wrongly accusing you of stealing the poster tubes name is coming from you, then you'll never stop your anger.

You can't stop your anger. The only time you can stop your anger is if you get to the water on the bathroom floor phenomenon. Okay?

Water on the bathroom floor phenomenon. So you're in Prescott. You're in a retreat with a bunch of people.

You can't wash your clothes. You have one or two pair of socks. Jared wishes there were more.

And then you got your socks on and it's really cold the first day because you're not used to it. And you don't know if they're ever going to fix the heaters. And you walk into the bathroom on the second day and you walk into a puddle of water.

And then you're just like, you know, like, why couldn't my roommates... You know, there's a thing, you know. You learn at 20 or you learn at 60.

But 20 is better. Dry yourself off in the shower. Okay?

I'm just giving you a really good advice. Okay? Like put the towel near the shower.

You have to do that, okay? Otherwise you have to walk across the bathroom and get to the towel. And then reach out, take the towel, dry yourself off.

And as you step out, dry each foot. Okay? And then there's no water on the floor if you've closed the shower curtain.

Which is another good thing to do. If the shower curtain is on the inside of the shower, it'll keep the water in. If it's on the outside, it won't.

[Говорящий 2] (37:44 - 37:45)
You know, I'm just...

[Говорящий 1] (37:45 - 47:25)
They say you should learn everything in class. So anyway, you walk through this puddle and you're like... And then you go out in the common room, you know, and you say, okay, who was it?

You know, just tell me who it was so I can give you this lineage that I learned from Geshe Michael. And then you say... Everybody looks at you and says, well, it must have been somebody who took a shower like last night, because no one's been in there today.

And then everybody says, who took a shower last night? They say, it was Michael. And then suddenly you realize what?

You put the puddle on the floor last night. And you're walking in your own puddle. Okay?

You ruined your socks. Your only dry pair of socks that didn't smell bad. You ruined them on a puddle that you put there yourself, right?

Now, if someone else puts the puddle there, you go out in the kitchen table and you yell at somebody. You know, you give them this sarcastic lineage of how to take a shower or how to get out of a shower. And then...

And you might even yell at them. You might even say bad things. I mean, relationships with roommates have broken up over this thing.

You know that. You've moved out for that kind of thing. But then suppose it's yourself.

Do you get angry in the same way? Is there this righteous, injured anger? No, you just kind of go, shit.

You kind of just smile, right? You kind of just smile because you know it's your fault. And you don't like stand in front of the mirror and wave your toothbrush.

You don't do that, right? When there's a realization that you are doing this to yourself, the anger cannot come in the same way. That's emptiness.

If you don't have that realization, you will still get angry, even if you meditate all day. The antidote is not meditating. The antidote is not a peaceful state of mind.

The antidote is to realize you're doing it to yourself. All the angry people you ever met were coming from you. All the bad weather you ever encountered was coming from you.

Then you don't get upset. You don't get angry. That's the antidote for anger, okay?

Going up higher, higher, higher, more and more subtle, relatively subtle conceptual states of mind or mistaken states of mind is just a mistaken state of mind in another package. And then it will get upset sometimes. You will lose it.

All right. I'm going to go just a bit more. DE LTAR ZHIG NI LAS PAR GYUR NA If you can get to a high point of shamatha, CIG PA LA SOGS PA'I DU PHRA RAB ZUN BYAS KYANG DANG NUS PA'I TSOS KYI SEMS SEL NYAM DANG you will experience a very deep clarity of your awareness, of your attention, so high that you could even do things like count the molecules in a wall.

You could count the number of molecules in a wall. SEL NYAM DANG CIG SU LA SOGS PA'I YUL NGE'I TSE MA NGA'I DANG You would... You see the same things as far as your sense organs.

You see things, you hear things, you smell. RAT MIG MA'I NGA'O MA'I NGA'O MA'I TSE MA'I DU MA'I YI MA'I You see things, you hear things, you smell things, you taste things, you feel things. But you are no longer misinterpreting even the sense objects.

You taste a French fry and you understand where it came from. From sharing food with others. If you like French fries.

If you don't like French fries, it's from burning food and serving to others. NGA'I DANG DUG GSUM GYI TSE MA GSUM DANG And then the famous three poisons of the mind. RAGS PA'I DAG PA'I SHAR and AVIDYA in the Yoga Sutra.

They will no longer occur to you. SKYES PA BU ME DE TSE MA CHU GANG NANG YANG DE MI DKA' BA DANG NYON MONGS KYI BA MYUNG BZHIN SKYES KYANG ZHUGS SHEN PA All the negative emotions that used to come up in your mind when things didn't go right, etc., will slowly subside. And he mentions, I mean I hate to skip something that's difficult, but I'm going to.

He mentions certain kinds of conceptual thought that we don't have to talk about right now. But they're identifying distinctions between people and distinctions between objects. Those will also come down.

ZHUGS SHEN PA DANG NE CHAG THUG PA'I GNYIS KYANG THING YIN ZIN DANG DE DOR Your fixation on the object will be so good that even when you sleep, you will have fixation. Even when you're sleeping, you will have experiences of fixation. If you guys meditate in the way I hope you do, if your meditation becomes more or less an exercise of staying on a single object, if your meditation becomes the exercise of staying on a single object, no matter what it is, that's going to have certain effects on how you live.

It's going to affect everything you do. You will find much greater enjoyment in your whole life. You'll be able to really focus on everything you do.

And it feels so much better. It's so nice. So take the physical sensation you get in meditation of your mind being linked to the object, of your mind being tied to the object, glued to the object, over a number of like 10 minutes or 20 minutes.

Then you will find in your real life, you'll be sitting with your partner or you'll be sitting with some family member, and suddenly for the first time in your life, you're able to just sit and enjoy the time with them for 5-10 minutes. And it's a breakthrough. It's a huge breakthrough.

You're not looking at your cell phone. You're not thinking about your emails. You're sitting with a family member at the table.

They've been waiting for 20 years for you to just pay attention to them for 5 minutes. Yeah. And then suddenly there'll be this huge breakthrough in your personal relationships because you can really focus on somebody.

People say, you're not listening to me. I say, I'm listening to you. Yeah, but you're not paying attention to me.

And then suddenly you'll be in a room with your husband of 20 years or an old friend or your daughter, and then you'll really pay attention to them deeply for 5-10 minutes, and they'll feel it. And then you'll open up the Pringles. And instead of going like, you'll take one out and you'll bite it.

And you'll be like, mmm. And you'll really get into the Pringle. And when you eat 20, you're not into it.

It's the opposite. The more you eat, the less you're enjoying them. And then if you take one, and I have seen high lamas who, they can spend like a half hour eating a potato chip.

It drives you crazy. Because you're finishing off the can. And they're going like, mmm.

And their mind is on the taste. Their mind is really, your whole life will become more pleasurable. Your relationships, how you hear music, how you drive down a road, how you read a book, how you engage in a conversation with somebody, how you stand in a social security office and wait.

Really, waiting becomes a high pleasure. It's weird. You don't get all nervous and uptight waiting.

You're at the airport, they say the flight's delayed for a half hour, and you're just there. And you're enjoying being there. And you're enjoying the people.

And you're not like all wired up that you've got to get your flight, you've got to get out of here right away. So the meditation will flow over into your life. The capacity of staying on a single object will make your whole life much more enjoyable.

That's what he's saying here. Even your sleep will become a practice of staying on a single object. And the sleep will sustain you more.

You'll get more out of the sleep. Nyan ché gyi so yin ben ché. I think we'll stop there.

Okay? I'm a little bit late, right? That's okay.

Thank you.