«Дар освобождения», курс 2 «Прорыв к высшей реальности», занятие 29

[Говорящий 2] (0:03 - 10:26)
Please watch your breath. Come to the golden room. Today will be a challenge.

I'm tired from last night. And lots of things to think about in the evening. So, tune up your shishin.

Watch your mind. If we don't learn anything else this week, we have to learn how to detect when the mind is off. Watch the blue sky out the window.

Blue sky. Let your eye go from one horizon to another of blue sky. Drop your gaze down to the mountains on the horizon in the valley between yourself and the mountain.

Covered in light. Come back to the golden room. Ask your teacher to come.

Sit with you in the sunlight. Place their hands on your head. Stay there on a single point.

The touch of their hands. Watch your mind. Catch it if it leaves.

[Говорящий 1] (10:30 - 10:39)
Feel a strong sense of enjoyment and contentment to be sitting in the golden room with your teacher and the touch of their hands.

[Говорящий 2] (15:47 - 15:52)
Please come back to this room. Relax.

[Говорящий 1] (15:54 - 42:46)
Okay, this is just sort of dessert from the... We didn't finish the whole section on meditation from the original scripture. This is kind of...

Again, they say that in a retreat you should go in light. In Tibet, they call it a barley seed. A barley grain is shaped like this.

And then they say that's how you should go into a retreat. Like you should go in slow. And then the middle should be kind of intense.

And then you should take time to come out slow. Equal time to come out slow. Again, if you've been writing or you have ideas about your life, this is a time in a retreat, the last two days or so, of this type of retreat, that you might have new ideas about how to conduct your life.

And you'll come up with some ideas about what you should do and maybe some new ideas. Those are born from the clarity of cell phone and laptoplessness. And before you start back on your electronics, you should review those little inspirations you had and write them down somewhere because you won't remember them in a few days.

And you should go for them. This kind of clarity is the time to take a chance and jump into new patterns of your life. They say, I read this thing, I don't know why it sticks with me, that the only time people change their hairstyle in a major way is when their wife dies or they get divorced.

You know what I mean? People only make a big change under extreme circumstances. So if you've had some inspirations about what to do with yourself during the week, write them down and then trust them and try to implement them.

If you get scared, then implement them in a small way and leave your old options there. You know what I mean? Ride the fence for a while and then see how the new one feels.

And probably you'll just want to go with the new one, I think. Okay. Becky, I was thinking that...

I forgot we had a third class today. So we could actually do it between 12 and 1. Yeah.

You want to do that? Okay. If it could be ready by 12.

Okay. So I encourage you to go for it. If you had some brave breakthroughs, don't limp out, okay?

Because your mind will get back in about four or five hours. Your mind will be back in the self alignment. Then you'll doubt the wisdom of those little decisions you made about your life.

Don't doubt them, okay? Trust them. All right.

,THEG SANG ZHUNG CHEN PO DAG LA MA BSTAN PA, ,SIG NYUN ZHING LAS LA BA ZHIG GIS, ,CHAG RDZO SOGS KYI LTA BA TSUL, ,OR LOM DAG DAG LA, Then he's going off on... In Tibet, these great texts on meditation came to Tibet by Kamalashila Bhavanakrama, the levels of meditation, and a song called Shravaka Bhumi, which is, I don't know, a thousand pages. Later there came Je Tsongkapa's Lama Chamo, which is about 500 years before this text.

There were great classical explanations of how to meditate and why you meditate. There were great classics on how to meditate. ,ZHUGS BDAG LA MA BSTAN PA, But then people, I don't know, literacy was not big in Tibet.

I mean, very few people could write. Ken Rinpoche lived in Gyerong House. In Tibet, Gyerong House had 500 members.

There are 12 colleges of ceremony. Gyerong was one of them. Rinpoche was from Gyerong College.

I'm from Gyerong College. You enter the college of your teacher. Pabongka Rinpoche was from Gyerong College.

Of course. And still is. The third one is there now.

He was my classmate. But anyway, out of 500 monks in Gyerong College in Tibet, only two could write. Like they could debate.

And they had memorized thousands of pages. But they just never learned to write. And then there were no, that I'm aware of, public schools.

If you didn't become a monk, you didn't learn to read. Even the nuns weren't encouraged to read. They had to sit and do Tara prayers or something.

So the study of real classics on meditation was restricted to maybe a few geshes or things like that. And then people began to, which I hope we are reversing. I hope we're doing the opposite.

That's been my hope. That lay people pass on this wisdom in a normal setting. They have normal jobs.

They have normal families. And they spend four hours a day practicing and reading the great scriptures. So anyway, Sigmund, so there came to be little meditation manuals.

And they were bogus. A lot of bogus little meditation manuals. Dag-la-ma-tenpa.

Sigmund, Xing-le-la-wa. They were short and they were easy. Chag-zo-so-ki-ta-wa-tsu-wa-long-pa.

And then people claimed that you could use them to reach Mahamudra, which is a high tantric practice or Dzog-rim, which is also a high tantric practice. So they thought, there came to be this little quirky, what do you call it? Like quirky.

Little quirky things. People said they found under a rock or things like that. Ta-wa-tsu-wa-long-pa-ta-la.

Tung-mo-way-shi-ne-kyang shim-chen-mo-ne sim-pa-ta-lo-nyang-ma-shi-jung-ka. Even to reach a state of shamatha, which you don't use for emptiness. Even to reach like the form realm meditations.

To reach them in the way described in the great classics in accurate presentations in Tibet became hard to find. Chak-chen-tsawa-le-kyang. The first Panchen Lama described that situation in the 15th century in a book called The Root Text on Mahamudra.

Mahamudra is a deep meditative practice with many levels. There's Mahamudra yoga poses. There are Mahamudra secret practices with a partner.

And then there are Mahamudra meditations which are characterized by the object of meditation is your own mind. So you take your own mind as an object. Rather than...

Like when I said try to isolate your watchfulness or try to isolate your agitation or try to isolate your own nar in your own mind and you are watching your own mind. That would be like the first step in a Mahamudra meditation. You take your own mind as an object.

So the great original text in our tradition for Mahamudra practice was by the first Panchen Lama, Losang Chekyi Gyentsen. Very, very, very famous. SEM NGO LTA BA SONG NI SEM KUN SROD PA'I NGO DROD TZAM YIN PAR SUNG So people misunderstood the point of Mahamudra meditation.

They understood it as far as saying that the purpose of Mahamudra meditation was to watch your own mind. But then they just got stuck on watching their mind and they didn't examine their own mind to find NIK. Nik, you thought I was done with you, but you're not.

Somebody did a beautiful drawing. Where did that go? Where is that?

Huh? I'll bring it next class. Someone did a...

Who did that? Oh yeah, he did a beautiful drawing. Nik and...

Anyway. I'll pass it around. It can distract you during the next class.

But they didn't use Mahamudra meditation to watch their mind, to try to find the Gakja. Try to find the mind that didn't exist. Which means a mind that was coming from your own side.

For example, an example of that wouldn't be Nik, right? It would be your own depression, or your own doubts, or your own anxiety, right? And if you approach those objects as coming from their own side, then you can't really deal with them.

You can try. Take drugs, do therapy, read self-help books, and then they are like aspirin. They are exactly the same as aspirin.

If an approach doesn't work all the time, then it must not be addressing the real root of the problem. It's probably addressing some manifestation of the root of the problem. But if aspirin only works sometimes, if cars only start 99.5% of the time, if money can only get you grandma's pastries a certain amount of the time, then they are not the causes of those things. You see? They are not the root causes of those things. And you have to go deeper.

You have to find what's under money. You have to find what's under therapy, and what's under the self-help books. And that's how you treat other people.

It's the seeds in your own mind. So, he said, first Panchen Lama said, people who watch the mind, I guess it would be like therapy, most forms of therapy. They are just addressing the apparent nature of the mind.

And they are not addressing the cause of the mind, which is the seeds in your own mind, which you have put there according to how you treat other people. If you have depression, for example, then in this system, the only way to overcome it would be to address the seeds of it. You have somehow depressed other people, or you have somehow made other people sad.

And until you go after those seeds, until you go after that behavior, the depression won't stop. You can't stop it. You can take drugs, it will go away for a while, and then it will come back.

So, he said, even in Tibet, people who thought they were doing Mahamudra meditation, but who didn't really study carefully, and didn't get a good lineage, then they were just dealing with what we call the deceptive nature of the mind, the deceptive mind, the mind which looks to be coming from its own side. DE NA BDE LTA BA RANG GI BSGOM SANG PO YIN SANG KYANG We may think that that kind of meditation on the mind is a really good meditation, but RANG GI BSGOM PO SRED DU BSGOM PA BZHIN It's rather like meditating on a ball of a brass, a lump of brass, and trying to pretend it's gold. So, if you choose to take your mind as the object of a meditation, you can work on an apparent level.

You can do that. You can watch to see if your watchfulness comes up. You can watch to see if you have agitation or dullness.

That's okay, but that's not dealing with the sources of those things. The sources of those things lie in how you treat other people. LAM GUL LAM LOG CIG TU CHEN PAR GYUR PA LAS GZHAN BA ME And then you'll just sort of wander around without ever getting to the point.

And the point will always be to recognize that everything that's happening around you, even if it's in your mind, is coming from how you treat other people. Everything that happens around you, even the condition of your own mind, is coming from how you treat other people. PHYI BA SA PA LA BSGOM DU CHU NAS BSGOM PA'I NI This is interesting.

He says, those who mistake the exercise of accumulating hours of subtle dullness for meditation. That's a nice name for a book, maybe. Those who mistake the exercise of accumulating hours of subtle dullness for meditation.

GANG KHO MA YANG PHAN MI GNYUD Those practices won't even get them into one of the four realms or something like that. It won't even have that effect because it's not even good enough to do that. And again, I would guess that, I don't know.

In my early years, I went to a lot of programs and we did different kinds of meditation programs. A lot of them involved impossible hours of sitting. And I had breakthroughs.

We got up very early and we meditated 12-14 hours. I did have breakthroughs, but they didn't involve shamatha. They were more like long, rambling self-examinations of my life and people I had known.

And why did they get mad at me? Why did that girlfriend do that? You know?

And then it wasn't really... It was just subtle dullness. Or maybe not subtle dullness.

And it changed my life in some good ways, but it wasn't shamatha. It wasn't focused. So again, try to keep discussions short.

And then one day you'll just come out of meditation and the clock will be an hour ahead or two hours ahead and you'll say, wow, you know. So you'll get there. But it's like anything.

Like you learn... When I learned to write in high school, I had a teacher who insisted that we just write a few pages every day. And she checked them every day.

She was very old. She was like 70. She had a...

What do you call it? A wristband like this that went around her wrist and she could hardly write. It hurt herself to write, but she would check and she required that we write two pages every day rather than a 50-page thing or something.

She made us write two pages a day. She must have had several hundred students over the course of the day and she checked them all every night. And she gave you one grade for content and she gave you a grade for format.

And the format included spelling. And if you misspelled a single word, she took a whole grade point off. Like you went from an A to a B.

So if you misspelled three words... If you misspelled four words, you failed the class. You failed the...

You got an F, you see? And then... So you learn to write one or two pages well.

You know? And perfectly well and with no mistakes. And I hated her.

I really hated her. Now I remember my... I had two great teachers in my life.

Her name was Katrin. So I called her Katrin. Katrin means...

In Tibetan, Katrin means the kindness of your lover. And I always thought it was kind of suspicious. But then later I really...

I was really grateful to her. So anyway, start with just a small meditation, which is done perfectly. Executed perfectly.

And then you can get into longer ones. They will come automatically. Just do small, perfectly executed meditations.

And then the time will come. The length will come. It will come...

Actually, it will come much more quickly than if you did a big, long, sloppy, rambling meditation. And again, those long, sloppy, rambling meditations are addictive. Pernicious.

They stick with you. You can't get out of that habit. Again, it's like learning a language wrong.

We had a man came... He's the Dalai Lama's biographer. He...

Thank you. He... I think it's okay.

He came to stay at our temple in New Jersey. He stayed for a year or two. He was a very, very elderly, great scholar.

And then I asked him to teach me while he was there. Because he learned classical writing. There are special scribes in the Potala Palace who just write the Dalai Lama's letters.

I saw one that was written to Truman after World War II by the Dalai Lama. And they're this big. The letter's this big.

And there's this flowing thing. And you have to be trained. So I asked him to teach me some exotic thing.

And then he looked at me and he said, How long have you been studying Tibetan? And I said, I don't know, 15 years or something. He said, Why don't we start with the alphabet?

After 15 years. And after learning all these scriptures and stuff, he was like, Let's start with the alphabet. Let's start...

Because you're mispronouncing the alphabet. You can't say A, B, C correctly. Your accent's wrong.

And then he... I was very upset. And he took me in a room and he made me learn those columns and rows thing.

He taught me that. He's a great linguist. It took months to correct my accent because I had learned it wrong from the beginning.

So meditations like that, if you learn it wrong, if you learn the basics wrong and you get used to it, then it's hard to fix. I'd much rather teach Tibetan to people who don't know any than to people who know a little and learned it wrong. Or especially Dharma.

If you teach Dharma to someone, a fresh mind, an open mind, a tabula rasa, a blank mind is better than someone who went to some weird thing and then you have to try to clean that out. And it's a lot more work. So just make the meditation short, clean, perfect, concentrated.

Then the time will come. The duration will come. Much better than if you did it poorly.

Actually, he says, if you consider the karmic seeds of long periods spent on your meditation cushion in subtle dullness, you would have to say that you are flirting with the danger of being reborn as an animal. So, not even that you would be projected into some temporary paradise by having a good meditation. If you continually practiced a dull, semi-focused state of mind, that kind of seed could grow into a huge twisted tree.

You have to think of small things you do in this life, the potential of them growing into huge twisted trees after the passage of death, after you pass through death. Tiny seeds in this life grow into huge things. You know?

Like acorns in this life grow into oak trees after you die. And if there's a small defect in the thought, or a small defect in the meditation, it gets exaggerated thousands of times by the time it ripens. So he's saying you're flirting with an animal rebirth.

Sapendi, the Sakya Pandita, who was one of the greatest namas of all Tibet, he brought Buddhism to China and to Mongolia. NGON PA'I CHAGS RGYA' CHE BSGOM PA PHAL CHER DON DU RGYUR DU RGYUR YANG NA NYIN TU GOG PAR DU YANG NA SU MED GAM SU SKYE ZHES SUM He said most people who try to meditate... He put it a little stronger.

He said fools who try to meditate on their mind, most of them end up going to an animal rebirth. Or else they fall into a lesser nirvana. Lesser nirvana means you stop your own negative emotions, but that's it.

You can't help other people. YANG NA SU MED GAM SU SKYE Or they get reborn in the formless realm. That's all.

ZHES SUM DE NA LAM GYI TSO'O NAMSUM GANG RUNG GI MA GSUM PAR SEMS KYI NGO'O DKA' DO DANG YID SU MED PAR BTAG NAS NGA MA'I BYAS MI PHYIR MA'ONG BA'I BDUN MA GSUM ZHES SUGS SU NGO BRAS TE DE NA LAM GYI TSO'O NAMSUM In our tradition, any meditation practice and any spiritual practice at all should be influenced by three attitudes. Anything you do, which you hope to be a spiritual practice, should be influenced by one of three attitudes. And those are called the three principal paths.

Path in this tradition, in path in classical India, marga is a word for realization. So three principal paths means the three basic attitudes that if you have them, then what you do becomes spiritual. And if you don't have them, then what you do is not.

So the first one is called NGES BYUNG. NGES BYUNG means do you recognize the pain of the world? Like everybody...

I've been having private appointments. I'm sorry I couldn't do as many as I'd like to do. They're supposed to take 10 minutes.

They end at 15, and then I stay for half an hour because I can't tell somebody to leave the room when they're in the middle of telling me how their brother died when he fell off a ship and the ship went down. That's why I can't finish them all. But there are terrible stories.

You sit in a room of normal people, like 150 normal people, normally there's a tragedy that got people here. Otherwise they would be watching Super Bowl soon. Is it too late?

[Говорящий 2] (42:47 - 42:48)
When is it?

[Говорящий 1] (42:50 - 42:51)
What day?

[Говорящий 2] (42:52 - 42:53)
In February?

[Говорящий 1] (42:55 - 57:08)
That's my retreat month. Oh, College National Championship. And Ohio's not in, right?

But they're not in, right? Neither is Navy, right? Okay, but anyway.

Let's, yeah, let's... We're having that meeting tomorrow. We'll have the TV on.

Why didn't I talk about that? You got me distracted. Oh yeah, everybody has a tragedy.

Like terrible, terrible, terrible tragedies. In this room, there are like 100 unbelievable stories. I won't tell you because you'll get depressed.

I have to hear all of them. But I'm here too for the same reason. So the first of the three great spiritual motivators is a tragedy in your life.

You come to recognize what terrible things can happen in a human life. And then you... Every living being, every human on this planet, I think, has a deep-seated wish to help the people who are undergoing that.

And that's the second attitude. They come to a personal tragedy and then they realize that everyone else is having those. And then they seek to stop that.

And I believe strongly that that's why we are so obsessed with movies, superhero movies. Like Ningbo and me watched X-Men 2 in Guangzhou. It was really cool.

Like, you know, Cyclops, is it? I don't know. He was like, You know?

And then that angel lady with the blonde hair, you know, she's like... And then we were trying to recognize the characters. They had the characters running at the bottom.

And we recognized every hundredth character. We were all excited. But the reason we're so...

The reason we're so obsessed with superheroes is that we would like to be one. Everybody would like to be one. I think Transformers was one of the best.

Because he not only saved the world, but he got the best girl in the high school. And the Camaro. So that's pretty much...

That's the three principal paths right there. We would all like to save the world. We really would.

And then to do that, you're going to have to have a radically different view of the world, which is number three. You have to have a radically different view of where the world's coming from. If the world exists out there the way it looks, things are hopeless.

You cannot change it. What, you're going to walk through Afghanistan and Iraq and stop every soldier? It's not possible.

If all those things are coming from us, what is it? Ahimsa Pratishtha and Tatsa Nidha Vajratyaga. Very beautiful in the Yoga Sutra.

Ahimsa Pratishtha. If you can make it a way of life, if you can make nonviolence a personal practice in your own life, Tatsa Nidha, then there's the... What do you call it?

Pinch? There's the rub. What do you call it?

Anyway, Tatsa Nidha, in your presence, which is kind of depressing, in your presence, Vajratyaga, violence will be... Tyaga means it will be... Tyaga means to throw out.

It'll be discarded, almost. Almost like that. So violence doesn't exist in the world of a person who is practicing ahimsa regularly, nonviolence regularly, on a personal basis, you see.

That's a recognition of how we can change the world. I love that line. I think it's maybe the greatest line in the Yoga Sutra because it's a brief expression of how we can change the world, you see.

The world will change for you if you become nonviolent, okay? The world will become a world of peace for those who practice nonviolence, you know. And I had a Christian friend who did a retreat with me once.

He's a very devout Christian, and he's a good Christian, and he's been my friend since third grade. And we're still friends. It's not Scott, it's Charlie.

And then he said... He had a problem with that. He said, but Mike, you know...

So basically what you're saying is that some people will be experiencing the world as violent, while at the same time other people are experiencing it as blissful. And in the way that the pen and the chew tart, okay? In the way of the pen and the chew tart.

And then that disturbed him very greatly, you know. And he said, well, how are you going to... What are you going to do about the people who are perceiving the world as violent?

You know, and... And we say you can't put your seeds in another person's mind, right? If you could, we wouldn't be perceiving violence, because the people before who had achieved the goal would be...

They would just loan us... They would hand out seeds, and everyone... No, I mean, there's a...

The classical Buddhist proof that you cannot transfer seeds is that we're still suffering, okay? Because if it were possible, then all the enlightened beings who have come before would have already put the seeds in our mind. So, the third great realization is what makes saving the world possible, okay?

namsah karung gi ma simpar If your mind is not imbued with those three attitudes, okay? sem gi nguwa kardo do yi sem me par tag le Then if you go off on some examination of what the mind is not, okay? You haven't been trained properly.

You heard that emptiness is an absence of something, okay? You haven't been trained properly. You heard that emptiness is an absence of something.

So you do a meditation, and you take the mind as the object of the meditation, and you go looking for what it's not. And you come up with this very profound thing that my mind has no shape, and my mind has no color. And then people take that to be emptiness, okay?

It's called, what do they call that? There's some word for it. It's a lousy Mahamudra meditation.

You can find books on that. There are books on that, you know? Your mind is, oh, oh, your mind is not what is not your mind.

No. Your mind is everything that isn't what isn't your mind. Okay?

SEM MA YIN PA'I LO PA Okay? Cancel, consider all things which are not your mind, okay? You can imagine trucks, cars, countries, you know, indigestion, all the things that are not your mind.

And then cancel those, and what's left? The mind, okay? Cancel everything that's not your mind.

And then you come to your mind, which is simply a way of thinking how the mind exists. It's not the true nature of the mind, okay? That's just a way of thinking about the mind.

In a second school, South Toronto, right? But it's not the mind. It's not emptiness, okay?

So people have written great books, and people have developed very sophisticated meditation practices where you examine your mind, and you come to the conclusion that it's not red, or it's not blue, you know? And then because you have reached something that the mind is not, they take it to be emptiness, okay? All right?

So he says, BDAG NAS NGA MA'I BYAS MI CHOD MA'ONG BA'I BDUN MA SU SHES SOGS KYI SNGOR BRAS TE People, they call it meeting the mind. That meditation, in some schools, Mahamudra is called the meditation on meeting your mind, meeting the naked mind. GEN CHER BRAL BA Then there's a...

He's quoting some unusual expression, so I had to go use the database, right? And look it up, okay? Because nobody knows what it means anymore, and it was even misspelled in the text.

The crucial word was misspelled in the text, okay? So here we go. YANG LA LA NI NGANG DE KYI SHES PA'I BYAS MI CHOD MA'ONG BA'I SHES PA'I BDUN MA SU DA LTAR KYI SHES PA SONG BAR CHOD PAS DE'I NGANG DU LHAN NAS ZHAGS PA SEMS RGYUN NGO BO GYEN CHER GYI NGON GSUM DU MTHONG NA So there's the word I just said.

SEMS RGYUN NGO BO GYEN CHER GYI NGON GSUM DU MTHONG To meet the mind directly, the naked mind directly face-to-face. SEMS GYEN CHER So GYEN CHER means... We also say that in English, right?

Like a naked... You see that? Like raw.

A raw perception of the mind. Okay? GYEN CHER They say, DE'I DE'I SHES PA'I BYAS MI CHOD MA'ONG BA'I SHES PA'I BDUN MA SU Don't...

How do you say it? Don't anticipate where the mind is going. Don't get hung up on where the mind was.

Just meet the naked mind of the moment face-to-face. Don't get hung up on what the mind may become. Don't...

What was that? Don't anticipate what the mind may become. Don't get hung up on where the mind was.

Be in the present moment. Be here now. Be here now in the naked presence of the mind.

DE'I SEMS DGAR TSAR BA'I PHYIR ZHING SEMS RGYUN LOB TU DE And then they thought that that was coming to the real nature of the mind. Being here now in the mind was perceiving the real nature of the mind. Being here now in the mind is a good exercise.

Being here now in the mind is a kind of single-pointedness. I think the expression, Be here now, is a very, very powerful and beautiful expression. But it's not a recognition of the true nature of the mind.

It's just a single-pointedness about where your mind is right now. That's helpful as a platform from which to have other realizations. But it's not the goal.

It's just a very good telescope on the rifle. But it's not the rifle. To be here now is good.

But then you have to know what to do after you're here now. And for that, you have to... You need an authentic tradition.

And you have to know the classics. And you have to have a teacher who can take you to the classics. That's why we call it Asian Classics.

DE TZAM DGOS KU BYAS PA'I NI MI TSE DUS ME STONG ZAD KYI RGYU BA ZHIG TU BRAL BA LAS SA LAM GANG YANG DUS MI NUS Just getting to know the naked mind. Naked awareness in the now. Let's call it that.

That will be the next book. Naked awareness in the now. And there should be a lady on the front, and people will buy it.

We'll trick them. DE TZAM DGOS KU BYAS PA'I You can pretend to meditate like that. MI TSE DUS ME You will spend an entire human life wasted.

You will waste an entire human life. Then he says STONG ZAD You could waste a thousand human lives that way. STONG ZAD RGYU BA ZHIG BA ZHIG You would just be wandering.

BA ZHIG means Kevala. Like Kevala, Kumbhaka. Kevala is what?

The last chapter of the Kaivalya. You can waste your... It's just.

Kevala means just. And nothing more. Just that and nothing more.

So you can just waste your time. BA ZHIG DU DRUNG BA LAS SA LANG GANG DU DRUM DU You won't reach any spiritual levels. They won't become a path for you.

CHANG SEM DANG NYEN CHUNG DANG YANG DAG PA'I LTA BA DANG KHYAM DU SIN NA RIM BZHIN THEG CHEN GYI NYAM LEN DANG But rather, if your meditation is imbued with certain intentions and motivations, meditation is a tool. If it is imbued with certain noble intentions, it transforms it, like alchemy. That meditation becomes something higher if there are just several motivations present.

Number one, CHANG SEM I would like to save the world with this meditation. Then it becomes what we call higher way, right? Higher way.

It becomes noble. NYEN CHUNG If you can't get that far, at least imbue your meditation with an awareness of the suffering of humanity.

[Говорящий 2] (57:09 - 57:09)
Okay?

[Говорящий 1] (57:09 - 1:05:19)
At least imbue your meditation with an awareness of the suffering of humanity. Then it will become a cause for your own liberation, if not enlightenment. YANG DAG PA'I LTA BA If you can imbue your meditation with an awareness of where things are really coming from, which is how you treat other people.

Then if you can go for refuge. Okay, so go for refuge is a, you know, what is it? SARAM BUDDHA YANG GACCHAMI I went to...

I stayed in a Sri Lankan temple for a while. There it all is. DHARMA YANG CHARANAM GACCHAMI This is I go for refuge to the Dharma.

I go for refuge in Pali, I guess. What does that mean? What does it mean to take shelter or take refuge in something?

Which is a very... That's supposed to be in Buddhism what makes you a Buddhist. If you take refuge, you're a Buddhist.

If you don't take refuge, you're not a Buddhist. I like to trick all kinds of people all over the world into taking refuge. Then they are Buddhists and they won't know it their whole life, which is okay.

They don't have any pictures in their house. But in their heart they're Buddhists. So what does it mean to take refuge?

I'll describe an act of refuge. It is not sitting in a temple on your knees and saying, DHARMA YANG CHARANAM GACCHAMI It's not that. It's not the expression of taking refuge.

The verbal obsession of it. It's... Nick goes to the staff, the retreat staff debrief.

Right, John? We're doing it. It's really good.

He teaches that in his seminars. But anyway, he goes to the debrief, which is going to happen today from 7 to 9 o'clock, required of all staff. And then they're going to mention how he stole the poster tubes, which is why you didn't get one.

Okay? They're going to get... Everyone's going to go around and say the good things that happened and the bad things that happened.

And they're going to say, glad to be here. And then they're going to say, but probably the fifth person is going to say, but I thought the retreat went pretty well except that we didn't get our poster tubes because Nick stole them. And then Nick's going to...

Some kind of dim memory will surface through Grandma's pastries. And then he'll say, I was supposed to think something when they accused me. Oh, it was that no accusation could ever be truly unjust.

It must be coming from something I did. I must have accused someone in the past. There must be some root of it in my own behavior.

That is an act of refuge. That's taking refuge. Why?

It protects you. It protects you. That's an act of refuge.

It's not the, you know, wear a yellow robe and burn incense holes in your head and say gajami. So centuries and centuries of people have not understood what it is to take refuge. It has been corrupted into a formula that you recite with incense and some picture.

The ancient explanation, Lord Buddha's version, Lord Buddha's own version of what it is to take refuge. And what constitutes a Buddhist act is to restrain yourself when you are criticized by understanding where it came from. And that's an act of refuge because it protects you.

Why? Then the last thing he'll want to do is criticize the person back. The human natural reaction will be overcome by wisdom.

Wisdom will overcome the human reaction and he will refuse to answer back negatively. And then he has protected himself from future criticism. And that's refuge.

So it's beautiful. It's a beautiful thing. It's a beautiful act.

And anyone who's doing that, you know, anyone who comes to a talk in Shanghai and, you know, grew up on 75 years of secular life and then goes home and doesn't respond to their mother who criticizes them, they just became a Buddhist. Insight. Alright, it's kind of sneaky, right?

Can I say that? I don't know. NAM MA'I PHYUS PA'I DOR BA'I NAM MA NAR BU DEN DAG MED PAR SEMS KYI NGO'I SEL SONG KHYEN Oh wow, we're just about to finish.

Then any lesser kind of Mahamudra meditation, right? Any lesser kind of meditation where you... For example, there's a corrupt version of Mahamudra that says you should just observe how the mind is ineffable.

And that's emptiness, okay? You see, if you just practice that, he says then you might end up like Uddhaka, like the guy with the dreadlocks. Okay.

And it wouldn't hurt your tendency to misunderstand reality at all. It wouldn't have any effect on your tendency to misunderstand reality, to see that your mind is ineffable. GYON YON YON Wow, last sentence of the meditation part.

That's cool. DE LTAR MED MED LAM LA SANG PO MIN ZIN PAR LAM YANG BDAG DANG LTAR NANG PHYIR ZHUGS Then our Lama concluded his discussion of meditation by saying we must gain the capacity to distinguish between what's real meditation and what's not. So all the meditations going on in the world, we have to be able to distinguish which one will damage our tendency to misunderstand the world.

Avidya. And which one has no effect on that tendency. Because that's the only thing that can really help you or anybody else.

The only way to save the world, if you want to be Spiderman, okay? If you really want to be Spiderman. I really like it.

And I'm quite frankly trying to be. You know, I'm not shy about it. I want to go all over the world and, you know, save people like Spiderman.

I, I, I, what do you call it? I boldly, baldly say that I would like to be Spiderman, you know? And I would like to go around the world and help people and make them happy and save the world, you know?

So to do that, you've got to have a meditation which can understand where things are coming from. The meditation should support your attempt to understand where things are coming from. Or else you can't save it.

You can't really do anything. You can't help anybody.