«Дар освобождения», курс 4 «Ретрит об энергиях», занятие 2

[Говорящий 2] (0:00 - 21:07)
Okay, let's start with the meditation. Stand up straight. Just during the meditation.

And then it's your duty to put it back on. Okay. Please come to your breath.

Watch your breath. Please ask your heart teacher to come to this place. If you haven't found them yet, picture an ideal teacher.

Invite them to your teacher by thinking of one quality they have that you would like to have. The reason we go to our teachers is because we believe that they have something that we would like to be. So, bring to mind the one quality about your teacher that you most admire, your heart teacher.

Make an offering to your teacher. The best offering is the offering of your practice, which may not refer so much to your meditation, but to maybe reconciling the person you have a problem with. Offer your teacher the sweetest thing you've done in the past few days.

Then clean your conscience before you meditate. Think of the most magnificent thing you've thought and said or done in the last few days. And tell it to your teacher.

Make a decision to try not to do it again, at least for a few days. Then think of the best thing you've done in the last few days. Tell your teacher.

Be happy. See that they are happy. Think about something you saw someone else do which is inspiring in the last few days.

And celebrate that. Be divine. Then ask your teacher to teach you.

Put into mind something. I like to think of something I'd like to be by tonight. Maybe some change in my feelings.

Maybe more cheerful. More understanding of other people. And ask your teacher to help you become that.

Ask your teacher to stay with you today, throughout the day. Seen or unseen. And guide us.

Protect us. Come back to your breath. Then we'll do a very short meditation called the present moment.

Staying in the present moment. First I'd like you to remove a small part of your mind. Take a small part of your mind away from your mind.

Step back. I like to step back, but a little tiny piece of my mind steps back. And then that little piece of my mind, which I imagine in the back of my skull, is going to watch the rest of my mind.

Just observe your mind this morning. What's your mind thinking? We're just starting a retreat.

The mind will be a little unsettled. It's a new environment. You don't have your usual fridge and iPhone.

Step back. Observe the state of the mind. Try to observe what kind of thoughts are occurring there.

What are you thinking about? Watch the mind thinking the thoughts. Don't be in the thoughts.

Watch the mind thinking the thoughts. From a distance. One more time.

Watch the thoughts in your mind. Watch your mind thinking those thoughts. And I'd like you to observe for just a minute, two minutes.

Are those thoughts about what's going to happen today or tomorrow, next week? Or are those thoughts about the past? How you got here?

What work you do for me? What somebody said to you last week? Or are those thoughts about the present?

So check the thoughts. Are they past, future, or present? What's the theme?

There might be a mixture, but what's the name? What kind of thoughts take the most time in your mind in the next few minutes? Past, present, or future?

Just observe. Don't try to control. Come back again.

Now I'd like you to... I like to think of it as a wall. Like I guess that's what a firewall is.

There's a wall in front of my forehead or in front of my skull, which is clear. It's like an energy field or a wall. And that wall is going to block any thoughts of the future, meaning even later this morning or later next year, any thought about the future will be blocked by the wall.

I can still think about the past. Or I can be in this present mood. But at all costs, I must not think about the future.

Watch your thoughts. Watch your mind thinking your thoughts. And for the first time, try to control those thoughts.

Don't allow any thoughts beyond now. Now a second wall behind your mind. A clear wall.

It blocks any thoughts of the past. Last night, leaving your home, what your boss said to you last week, what your partner said to you the week before, or what your ex-partner said to you last year. All thoughts of the past are blocked.

All thoughts of the future are blocked. Settle in to this room, the present moment of our life. Surrender to this present moment.

Block. When you start to think of something after this moment, block it. When you start to think of something that happened before this moment, block it.

Relax into the relief of being in the present moment. No worries. No expectations.

And ask your teacher who is in front of you, ask them to come into your heart. Park in your heart for the day. For the future.

And when you're ready, you can open your eyes, stretch them.

[Говорящий 1] (21:08 - 30:51)
So this is part of a larger course. I spent about seven years in New York teaching the Geshe course, which is the ACI courses. So those are 18 courses and those are done.

And now people are passing them on to other people. And then we spent seven years at Dun & Melton doing the tantric courses, the secret teachings. And we did a good job on that and miraculously we got through it.

There's about 20,000 pages of translation for those 14 years. And it's good. And it's really, you know, it's something you can pass on to other people.

It's all finished. Then I thought it would be nice to give a transmission of this text. This is a text that was spoken by my teacher's teacher's teacher, Pabongka Rinpoche.

Then he gave this teaching, I think it was 1921. And he gave this teaching for 24 days in Lhasa. And then one of the monks in the audience was Chidam Rinpoche, the young Chidam Rinpoche.

He was 20 at the time. But his lama, Pabongka Rinpoche, asked him to take notes. And he did.

And he was talking, you know, by hand. And then he took very good notes. And then his lama asked him to organize, you know, to make a book out of the notes.

And then I think he spent 20 years on making this text. And I think Chidam Rinpoche was the greatest poet and writer of modern times in Tibet. So he took those transcripts and they came out as a piece of, I think, the highest piece of literature I've ever read.

It's extraordinary. It will never be left. Tibetan is now becoming a lost language.

And it's exquisite. Just as a piece of literature, it's exquisite. On top of that, it's like the most meaningful piece of literature I've ever read.

So I thought, yeah. My teacher taught it to us three times. Twice in New Jersey and once in Washington, D.C. So I was lucky because I was his driver. And his crook and his bonding man. And his recalcitrant guardian. So I got to hear all three.

So I thought it would be... They say in Tibetan, shindu pangban means... It would be a shame if I didn't pass it on.

The oral lineage. So I thought, let's do that next, you know? So it's like the third cycle of teachings.

And that will take ten years. Without thinking about ten years. We'll go through this book.

And then I thought if we deserved it, we would do the emptiness and meditation section from Je Tsongkhapa's Very Lonely. Which is a very fine reprise. Which is probably the greatest presentation of emptiness and meditation ever.

And that will be the third at the end. So the whole thing will take... I'm saying ten years, maybe longer, I don't know.

So this is the second of twenty or more installments, okay? We did that meditation and the emptiness part first already from this book. Because we thought when we went back and started from the beginning.

We would have that tool, those tools with which to practice the rest of the teaching. And so now we're going from the beginning. What I'm hoping to do is start a session in Phoenix of ten days twice a year.

Followed by a session in Prescott twice a year. This is more of a silent retreat. We'll start on Sunday in the silent pub.

And then... So you get ten days of instruction in Phoenix twice a year. And then twice a year we come here to, what do you call it?

Digestive. And try to put it into practice. The way it's working out is that ten days in Phoenix is not enough for me to cover all the materials.

We'll cover half of the new material here. So I'll be giving teachings. And then we'll be meditating on those Sundays.

And that's the way it's going to be. Why to finish the course? Why should you finish the course?

Why should you do all the homeworks and all that? We went to Eastern Europe just two weeks ago. We went to Detroit first to warm up.

And it was good. Pete was there. He's one of the gang leaders there.

And then we got invited to Bulgaria and Kiev, Ukraine. And we were sort of nervous because we had never been there. And we didn't really know.

We call it ground team. The ground team we didn't know very well. So you never know.

Like you're going to show up and they put you in some freezing place with no food. And you know, it happens. So we were like, oh this is going to be a rough trip.

We were getting used to it. We went to, we got to Kiev. They said, well, you have to have a lunch meeting before the talk.

And I'm like, with whom? And they said, these guys are from, it's called Uralsir. It's a Russian conglomerate or whatever you call them.

It's a Russian company. So they said they have sponsored the thing. You have to have lunch with them.

So I'm like, go to this restaurant. And it's like, Kiev is full of mafia restaurants. And it's like very slick.

One dinner costs two weeks pay. So we went in there and we got our private room. And there's these guys, these big corporate guys from Uralsir.

And I'm like, well, tell me about your company. And they're like, you don't know Uralsir? And I'm like, no, are you from Uralsir?

And they're like, Uralsir is the biggest corporation in the world. And I'm like, oh really? We have 30,000 workers.

We own all the banks in Russia. We own the petroleum production in Russia. People know about us, usually.

I'm like, okay. So I put up my corporate thing. Tell me about your profits and your budgets.

And then the weirdest thing happened. Really strange thing happened. I said, tell me about your, what do you want to achieve in your profits and how do you want to reorganize your company and what kind of contract disputes are you having or anything like that.

And then they're like, there's this guy. He turns out to run all of the real estate operations in the world, thousands and thousands of buildings and banks. And I'm like, hi.

And he's like, you don't know me? I'm like, no, I'm sorry. He like throws all these cards at me.

So what can I do for you? He's like, in Earl Sid, we are required to read your book for the last five years. All Earl Sid employees are required to read Ben Cutler in Russia.

I said, cut? That's a lot of copies. And it's all black market.

I never saw a penny in this book. And then he tried, yes, and we understand the book and we're using the book. This is why it's so successful.

Now we're going global. We're controlling the world.

[Говорящий 2] (30:52 - 30:53)
And I'm like, okay.

[Говорящий 1] (30:56 - 33:01)
But then he said, but we don't want to know from you how to make money. We finished that. We all have money.

All of us, every other manager, the owner, he's a multi-billionaire. We have money. We don't need money now.

Now we want peace. We finished with the money already. We all have misdeeds.

We all fight against privatization. Now we want peace. And he was very beautiful, he said.

Mainly we want peace for our children. We want to know, can you teach us how to bring peace to our children? Because we care about, we're worried about our children.

And he was beautiful. He was beautiful. So then I thought, in my perception, you know, traveling constantly, the dream that we all had of, oh, you know, we can change the world or something like that, it's happening.

It's a very, very unexpected thing, quickly. People, 30,000 people in a former marketing company in Moscow that I'd never heard of, you know, and I'm like, you know, what's in here can be transmitted to the world at large. And they want it.

They really want it. And everywhere we go, more and more people come and get constantly immunizations to new countries and we can't do it. We can't physically, we're trying and it's crazy.

You know, we're in Paris for two days and then in Montreal for one day and then in Vancouver and it's like 30,000 miles of travel in a week and we can't do it.

[Говорящий 2] (33:02 - 33:18)
It's not enough people. So we need more help. So we need, you know, Uncle Sam needs you.

[Говорящий 1] (33:21 - 34:30)
So, you know, I take a lot of teachers. We had like 10 really fine teachers on the last tour and we have a list of 20 teachers for Taiwan and Singapore on the next trip. And it's not enough.

We don't have enough people. And then I don't want to send people who are not ready. You know, like I tried.

We snuck in a few like semi-trained people and then we had discussion groups, you know, and it was scary. You know, like they were, they weren't going to worldview. They were off on, I think the girl's going to grow up.

You know, I'm like, how? It's not important, you know? And so we need people who are trained.

Desperately, we need people. There are hundreds of cities that want help. You can go to Krasnodar.

I had a delegation came from Krasnodar. I said, you know, excuse me, where is Krasnodar? They said, you don't know Krasnodar?

[Говорящий 2] (34:30 - 34:32)
I said, no.

[Говорящий 1] (34:32 - 36:52)
They said, in Southern Russia, we have this city. Everyone reading your book there, use hand-grip. I'm like, I don't have enough people, you know?

And there's everywhere. Like Lisbon, Krasnodar, and Santiago. In one day, they asked, the French ambassador to Chile, the head of a business school in Lisbon, and the former Cossack warrior regiment leaders from Krasnodar, they all wanted this town.

Now, you probably have to do the Cossack words because they're kind of more violent. And so, but finish the courses, okay? Do the courses.

Do the homework and get ready because we need you. Okay? We need you.

And I need to draw from you. I need fresh meat, you know? I need people to send on this one to Sofia.

Sofia means rhythm, right? And they were awesome. They were totally awesome.

But we don't have enough people to follow up. So, and I can't send people who are not trained. And I can't send people who did the first three classes but didn't do the rest of the other seven.

You know what I mean? So I'm watching the, what do you call it? Michael Moore and Marty Moore and Chavez.

I mean, I contact them and I say, who's done the courses? And they say, the people traveling where you haven't done the courses. And I'm like, you got to finish the courses, okay?

And you got to do the homeworks and you got to do what you got to. And I'm not going to take people who don't. And I need people.

We need desperate, we need people. Okay, so try it, okay? Do this homeworks.

It takes like what? It's stupid. It takes like half an hour.

Just write anything, you'll pass. You know? Copy any part of this week's Time Magazine and see if anyone notices.

[Говорящий 2] (36:53 - 36:54)
You know, it's okay.

[Говорящий 1] (36:56 - 37:19)
We need, really, they need you. Everyone, everywhere, yeah. But you know, the mafia in Russia is dying for you.

And no, really. And the fact that you can change 30,000 people in a couple of weeks, that's pretty cool. And think about it, okay?

[Говорящий 2] (37:19 - 37:21)
That's what you're here for.

[Говорящий 1] (37:24 - 37:46)
So I'm going to review the first class that we had. But I think first I'd like to do another meditation. I'm going to do more meditations than last time.

We'll do a bunch of small meditations today. So it's time to do another meditation.

[Говорящий 2] (37:48 - 44:01)
Sit up straight. Close your eyes. Come to your bed.

And I'd like you just simply, quietly, in a relaxed way, examine why you came here to this retreat for these 10 days. And I'd like you to mosey on around the idea that you could learn something here that develops you internally and in your knowledge, but mostly in your heart, that could actually, in a short time, become vital and life-saving to people around the globe. Imagine that what you learned here this week would enable you to save people's lives around the entire world.

So spend some time with that thought and that vision of yourself. Please come back to your bed. And slowly open your eyes.

Stretch.

[Говорящий 1] (44:02 - 44:22)
I'd like you to keep drinking a lot during these classes so we're importing some bottles of water. But they're not here yet. Normally, in a class, we don't encourage eating or drinking.

But you're new to this part of the world. It's very dry. And you will learn better if you keep hydrated.

[Говорящий 2] (44:22 - 44:29)
So keep drinking, OK? OK. All right, we've got to cruise through here kind of fast.

[Говорящий 1] (44:30 - 1:08:40)
I think it's my clock. Yeah. I'm going to cover quickly the items on the first homework that some of you may not have done.

And now that you're all excited about finishing the whole course, it would be a shame if I didn't cover all of them. So the very first thing is the title of the book. Now, I had embarrassing situations in India where I didn't know the book I was studying.

And I was asked by his point as a senior tutor. And it was a bad minute of my life. So you should know the name of the book that you are studying.

I say, Namdo. Namdo. Lakshan.

Lakshan. Namdo. Namdo.

Lakshan. Namdo means namdo means vimukti, right? It means liberation.

Liberation. You should take notes, okay? I get frustrated when people don't take notes.

All right. Namdo means you got a notebook. It has pictures in it.

Okay? You're all set up. You got pens.

You got hands. Namdo means liberation. Lak means hand.

Lakpa. Chang means to trust a gift into somebody's hand. So the name of this book is A Gift of Liberation Thrust into Your Hands.

It's like you're just standing on a street corner minding your own business. And some llama on a spine shoves liberation into your hand. And you're like, what was that?

And then you're like, cool. The implication is that even if you don't do much work, you're going to get liberation. They just shove it in your hands.

So I don't like the other translations. Liberation in the palm of your hand or something like that. It doesn't, right?

The idea is that someone's like, here, take it. And they jam it into your hand. Liberation jammed into your hand.

Okay? That's the meaning of the part. I'm going to read you the whole time.

NANG NGON LAG CHANG SURGYOD PA'I ME NGANG SANG NGO SANG NGON LANG NGON TSUN LAS CHOS KYI RGYAL PO CHOS GYUR CHANG GYI NGON GYUR RIN PA'I NGON CHOS KYI SONG GYI SUNG RAB KUN GYIS CHOS GYI DANG LANG DU TSUL NGON PA SHES BYA BA ZHUG SO So technically the name of the book is... You don't have to... I mean, I'm just going to go over each piece at the long time.

Every Tibetan book has a long time and a short time. So you don't... Somebody says, once you're studying, you don't have to say, NANG NGON LAG CHANG SURGYOD PA'I ME NGANG SANG NGON LANG NGON You don't have to do that.

You can just say NANG NGON LAG CHANG SURGYOD PA'I ME NGANG SANG NGON LANG NGON But there's a long title and it has an important meaning. First of all, it's called DU TSUL NGON I mean, the main title of this book, long title, is DU TSUL NGON DU TSUL means Amrita. Amrita means deathless.

A means not. Amrita means mortuary. Amrita means the nectar of deathlessness.

Nectar itself is a Greek word for passing beyond death. Nect means death, like necrophilia. Tar means like as in Tara or in transportation.

It means to cross over. So Nectar means to cross over death. And it's Amrita.

So the name of the book is DU TSUL NGON The Essence of Amrita The essential food of deathlessness is the real name of the book. DU TSUL NGON It is NANG NGON LAG CHANG SURGYOD PA'I ME NGANG These are instructions which accomplish the jamming of liberation into your hands. They are profound.

Probably meaning that they conquer emptiness. And emptiness is no more than You can explain emptiness to a big crowd of uncooperative Ukrainian and Russian guys in two days. You don't have to go to the monastery for 28 years or something.

It's just that what you see around you is coming from seeds in your mind. And that's coming from how you treat other people. That's all.

So that's TSANG MA To understand that's the way the world works is TSANG MA. That's profound. And that's all we do.

We just go around the world teaching people that. And they... It's cool.

Because they become extremely successful and happy. TSANG MA TSANG MA means complete. Nothing was left out.

There are steps to enlightenment. There are certain steps you have to take. There's an instruction manual.

It's like a lawnmower manual. It has 18 things you have to do. If you don't do one of the 18 things your lawnmower won't start.

And it will be a useless hunk of metal in your front yard. And liberation is the same. There are certain steps you have to take.

You have to be in the right order and you have to do all of them. TSANG means they're all here. MA LO MA means nobody screwed them up.

Like they are pure. They're authentic. Nobody added like some dumb thing that you don't need to start your lawnmower.

Or that's wrong. So it's MA LO MA means it's all here and it's complete. And it's correct.

It's authentic. TSUN ME CHEN GYI YANG RO THUB CHER It is the heart essence of the incomparable king of the dharma. Who would that be?

Je Tsongkhapa. He was the teacher of the first dharma. Who was really incomparable.

And really you know I don't know how to say it. The Einstein of dharma. It unmatched.

Nobody comes close. And just practical stuff you can take to Bulgaria and in two days everybody's like life is suddenly changed. It's cool.

CHANG CHUD YANG RIN PA These are the steps of the path to enlightenment. You should know that LAM RIN Say LAM RIN. It's like one of the only words in Tibetan that's easy to pronounce.

LAM means path. RIN means step. So LAM RIN means steps to the path.

It has two distinct and completely different meanings. LAM RIN means a type of literature which gives you all the steps to enlightenment. So you can say what kind of book are you reading nowadays?

You say it's a LAM RIN text. What kind of meditations are you doing? I'm doing LAM RIN meditation.

That's like a generic term. Genre, right? Then LAM GYI RIN LAM means each one of the steps is also called LAM RIN.

The whole thing is called LAM RIN and each step is called LAM RIN. The first step of all LAM RIN is how to find your heart teacher and how to serve them. And that's the first LAM RIN of the LAM RIN.

And then the second LAM RIN is something else. Like that. NYAM GYI means a teaching based on someone's personal experience.

So Pabongka Rinpoche who was the teacher of the teacher of the present-day LAM RIN and who was the teacher of the future teacher of the future of my teachings teacher Anyway. He gave this teaching based on his own personal experience. So he went through the traditional LAM RIN but he threw in a lot of his personal experience which is called a NYAM GYI.

He's SUM GYI. SUM GYI means notes. Somebody took notes.

These are the notes of the 24 days of teaching in Tibet in 1921. Inside this book you can find a cream of 200,000 scriptures. So you know you could sing a lot of time.

It's all in here. To GYI. And you DAM NAR.

And it was presented in the form of DAM NAR. DAM NAR means like your Lama gives you You go into the room with your Lama and they say, Look, you've been eating too much. And they don't say it in front of everybody else.

DAM NAR is like personal messages from your Lama. So this is a personal message from Lama. That's the whole title of the book.

And that's one of your homework questions. And GYI GYAR RINPOCHE We call him Khyabje. Khyabje is a name for a high Lama, especially for one of the tutors of the Dalai Lama at any given time.

So in our current historical study, His Holiness the current Dalai Lama had two tutors. Khyabje LING RINPOCHE and Khyabje GYI GYAR RINPOCHE Khyabje LING RINPOCHE made it to America. I was his driver for a while.

He gave us Yamantaka. It was far off. GYI GYAR RINPOCHE passed away in 1981.

And he was my teacher's heart teacher. So he spent a large part of his life making this book. And then I believe the karma of making this book.

There were, in Hassa alone there were 30,000 monks who you know, any of whom might have been qualified to some extent to teach the Dalai Lama. He was chosen out of 30,000 monks to be the Dalai Lama's teacher. I think because of the karma of serving his own teacher.

He could have been famous on his own, and he was later. But he chose to devote his time to creating this record of his teachers, spending many years of his life. And I think the karma of that is he became the teacher of the Dalai Lama.

Then he explained something about the teaching that they went to. What I wanted to skip to was, and it's a homework question. Yeah, I like this part.

He talks about the style with which Pabongka Rinpoche delivered his teaching, and I like it. And I think it's something we should learn. So you're going to end up in some obscure village in Bulgaria as the DPR realm.

These are some clues about how you should teach. This is how I'd like to see you teach. Pabongka Rinpoche was very unusual.

He broke out of the monastic mold, and he took the Dharma to the people of Tibet. See, normally the monks studied in their walled monasteries. They rarely saw the lay people.

They got very ivory tower. They would discuss small points, fine points of philosophy. And then right outside the wall, in their fields, the peasants would be laboring, and they were never taught anything, and they never went to school, and the fields were owned by the monasteries.

They would just work all day, and they would come home and eat a little bit, and then go back the next day and work. And that's why there was a communist revolution in Tibet. So Pabongka Rinpoche broke out of that mold, and he tried to bring the Dharma to the people, and he got in trouble for it.

He was criticized. But he, Chitra Rinpoche at the very beginning, speaks a little bit about his style, about Pabongka Rinpoche's style, and I kind of like it. He would always use stories of real life.

When he taught, he wouldn't just sit there and say, this is the first moment, this is the second moment. He's constantly going off on stories about this naughty monk, or this government official who's corrupt. He would go off on these really fun stories, and we're going to do a lot of them.

We'll talk about a lot of the stories. I like the stories. I think he remembered things better with stories.

If you can imagine sitting in a Mafia restaurant in Kia, with a slick silk-suited Mafioso oil tycoon from Moscow, and he's crying and asking for peace for his children. It stays in your head. I could say, oh, you should bring but it's a real picture, and it happened.

He was there. It's more powerful, I think. In your teaching, you're going to be different.

Your life experiences are different, and those are valuable to the people you teach. They want to know real experiences from your life. They don't want you to just sit there and repeat the text, or get you Michael's experience.

They want to know your experience, and that makes it real for them. Okay? Duke Cheikh and he proves stuff logically, okay?

He proves stuff reasonably. We were in Ukraine. We were in Kia.

We went on retreat. There were 50 people from Moscow, 50 people from Kia. I don't know how they get along.

I don't think it's stupid given that the Russians killed a couple millions of Ukrainians, but there's a little tension in the room, and everybody's like this, you know, and they're all staring at me, you know, and then they're not ready. They don't want to listen to this stuff, and then I think it's important that you just prove stuff logically. I mean, if you go through the campaign, and you go through emptiness, and aspirin, why aspirin doesn't work, you force them to think logically about what you say.

Everyone responds to logic. Logic is not so stupid as I think. The beautiful thing about what you have to sell, I'm going to send you out to make sales jobs, right?

The beautiful thing about the product I'm asking you to sell is that it makes 100% pure goddamn sense. Every detail of it makes sense, and nobody can sit there for two days and not get it. By Saturday night, they're all crying, and by Sunday all these old Russian ladies are kissing you, and you know, these top corporate financial heads and stuff, really tough people, and they're all like, because there's no logical flaw in what you're presenting, it all makes perfect sense.

It's perfect. The system is perfect. We may not present it very well sometimes, but it's logical.

You explain for two days to any human being who has two legs and two arms, mostly, and they'll get it because it just makes sense, and it explains everything in the world. And then you can try it, and you get what you want. And it's just cool.

So he used, don't be ashamed to use proof stuff for that. That's insane, you know. I always start with the pen thing, and then ever after that, they can't give me any kind of crap.

I can just say, look, I pull out the pen, and I weigh it, and it's like, pen. And they're like, oh yeah, I agreed to that already. I agreed that it was coming from me.

I make them hold up their hand, like nowadays on the tours. I say, hold up your hand. At a certain point, lots of guys, okay, is it coming from you, or is it coming from its own side?

And you know, 300 people go. Even if they're like Russians, they don't want to be there. They have to go.

And then after that, you've got them. And they come, and they say, I hate my husband. I say, why?

I'm criticizing you all the time. And I just... And then they just shut up.

And then they start having a better marriage. And then you gain something. So logic is good.

Logic is beautiful. True stuff. Mozart with Don Quixote.

Tell wild stories. I'm good at that. Lots of funny stories and amazing stories, okay?

You can tell stories about the lady who made a billion dollars or the lady who found... The story about how Jessica found Stefan gets elaborated every time. Now it's a beautiful thing.

Okay. Yi Che Teng Nung. Know your scripture and be able to pull it out when you need it.

ACI course number six. Homework number six. Question number three.

Directly quoted from the Nightwing Cutter scripture. It's right here. Are you from Shanghai or not?

They're like, yeah. Okay, so you're Chinese, right? Yeah.

So it's what do you want? I didn't make it up. It's the Buddha's side.

And then you pull out the scripture and you say, this is it. This is what they said. The Heart Sutra said it.

I didn't say it. What applies to the pen applies to your mortality. I didn't make it up.

Buddha said it. In Sanskrit, Chinese, Tibetan. But you've got to know your stuff.

You've got to be able to pull it out when some lady from the restaurant in New York in Chinatown is asking you about the stuff and you just pull out the Heart Sutra and you say, I didn't say it. I didn't make it up. And then you're there.

But you've got to work hard. At least you've got to do the courses. You've got to know your stuff.

And then he talked it off. What do you call it? You put it on the icing?

He put the icing on the cake by giving us very private and personal instructions from the oil millage. Things that were never written down. That had been passed on from Lama to Lama.

Like stuff that Alistair said to you one day in a class, after the class. Like you had your class in Costa Rica or whatever it is in the restaurant and then you're you were all hanging out afterwards and he said some things when they were hanging out in the restaurant after the class one day. And you quote the oil tradition.

And it's not stuff anyone's ever been hired at. But that means you have to have an oil tradition. That means you have to invent a lot of classes.

Again? Again means to ornament. Like if you're already dressed up to go out and then you put on a fur coat.

That's like again. Again, alankara. Alan means ready.

Kara means to make. Alankara is the Sanskrit word for get. Alankara means to doll yourself up before you go out.

So again means that. It means the finishing touch is what Alistair said in the restaurant one day when we were all hanging out after class. The finishing touch which is maybe the most important and the sweetest touch, right?

This is what my teacher told me in Howard Johnson's at the Delaware Bridge in 1982. You know? Like that.

You need oil tradition from your teachers. You need to. Veda bhova nama kote.

He was careful not to He was careful to fit the teaching to the people in the audience who were beginners. He was careful to make it to adjust the level to the audience. So you will find as a teacher that you go into.

I was in Singapore and we advertised it as a heart sutra, you know, in-depth heart sutra. 600 people showed up at the trade union hall. And I said, I got up there and I saw 300 of them that weren't ready.

That was the first time I ever came to a class where I'm going to go up from five points of emptiness to at least 300 people. So I dumped it down. I went straight down.

In five minutes I went down. Then all the older students were like OK Geshe-la, the next time you come to Singapore we need a real heart sutra class. You know?

So you gotta take it to the level of the people. Deshing. Ram ding thala sung gi lor thamba.

But you're still going to have to satisfy the people who have heard all that stuff before and need something higher. You have to satisfy both. You have to satisfy the new people.

You have to come down to the level of the new people. But you have to keep feeding the older people more stuff that makes their presentation more sophisticated. So you're in a it's difficult since 300 new people and 300 people have been studying for five years.

But he had that skill. He could do it. Nyam nyam gyu tok to kyal wa.

Nyam nyam gyu tok to kyal wa. He taught it in such a way that he was constantly asking you to apply it to your own circumstance. So like this whole week we're going to be talking mainly about the life of Atisha.

Lord Atisha. Who brought the Lamrim to Tibet. He brought the Lamrim to Tibet.

And we're going to spend days and days on the history of his life. Like how he took his sea voyage to Indonesia. How the Tibetan king died to try to get Atisha to Tibet.

Steal him from the Abbot of Vikramashila Monastery. Like this. Pabongkha Rinpoche teaches something like that in such a way that he is demanding that you apply it to your own life.

So some guy a thousand years ago made a sea voyage to Indonesia to pick up a few lines of mojo. Risked his life many times to get a few lines of mojo. Well maybe we could put up with some lousy mattresses.

[Говорящий 2] (1:08:41 - 1:08:43)
You know what I mean?

[Говорящий 1] (1:08:44 - 1:14:12)
He's always like, apply it right away. A book in 1000 AD was 8 logs strapped together. He went from India to Indonesia on 8 logs strapped together.

It was a little less comfortable than these mattresses. I would guess. I saw the carving in Indonesia of the boat.

It's carved on the panel at Borobudur. I saw an Atisha's boat. It was 8 logs strapped together.

I'm sure it's a little harder than probably you'd rather have harder than those bowls. But anyway, okay. After listening to him we found it easy to be inspired to try to do something ourselves.

Kailashe. Semla Pedla. He didn't say anything that he hadn't thought about carefully.

My lama, okay? My heart lama. I always ask her, what should I do tomorrow?

Why should I emphasize? She's always the same answer. Yeah.

Before you get up there, think about what would help you. That's different, right? Like, oh, I wanted to teach this obscure emptiness thing.

She's like, yeah, but you gotta help it. You're supposed to get up and before you get up to talk, think about what will help those people. What will help their life?

And then say what will help their life. So I guess that's the last thing you mentioned, Semla Pedla. Oh, no, it's not the last thing.

Say something that will help their life. And continually examine as a teacher if you are saying stuff that helps people's lives. Or are you just repeating some obscure book that you heard, you know?

I always laugh when I read this. I was in the car yesterday, and whenever I read this line, I start laughing. When we started to get sleepy and spacing out, he would tell a joke and make everybody roar with laughter.

He would tell a really good joke and get everybody refreshed. I think it's so important. We were in Toronto and this newspaper came and they did almost a full-page article about the talk, but what impressed them was that everybody was laughing and smiling.

They kept mentioning everybody in the audience was laughing and smiling and the teachers were laughing and smiling, and this is what they thought was important, the Toronto Star. And I liked that. I was proud of our group and I was proud of our class because a newspaper reporter, what struck them was that everyone was having a good time.

And if your class is that fun, then I think it's kind of, what did Richard say? No pain, no gain. No fun, no yoga.

He tells it very dramatically. He goes, no pain. He's got you in some pose and you're dying.

And he says, no pain, no gain. And then he pauses and then he says, no fun, no yoga. And then he does some silly thing with you.

And so, if you're not having a good time, I think it's all suspicious. The whole class is suspicious, the teaching is suspicious, the presentation is suspicious. We're in P.M. and the teachers on tour are required to have their own yoga class. So one of the teachers teaches the other teachers. After all the teachers have taught the yoga, because what happens as a teacher is you start teaching and you stop doing it. You say, did you do yoga today?

I taught a class. No, but did you do yoga today? No.

I thought I was too busy, I taught a class. Well, how can you be a teacher and you don't do yoga? How can you teach yoga without teaching, without doing everything?

So then we had a yoga class with the teachers. Ningbo taught the class. So then some really tough Russian guy, you didn't see him.

He wandered into the room and he saw the class and he sat down in the corner. So Ningbo's up there and he says, okay, 100 jumping jacks. We're all like, what?

And he's like, 100 jumping jacks. And we're all like, oh god, this is some Ohio State football team. And then we're all like, we stopped at like 60 and started joking around.

And he's like, okay, karate kids, everybody kick their neighbor. You know? And we're all roaring and this Russian guy, this really grumpy old guy, he's like, you know, and then he felt this thing like he got turned on because he saw we were having fun.

So if you're not having fun, like who wants to study what you know if you're not having fun? If you're like this grumpy person and you know the secret to the universe.

[Говорящий 2] (1:14:14 - 1:14:15)
Okay.

[Говорящий 1] (1:14:18 - 1:18:36)
I got more. Okay, I'm being responsible. Oh, and then sometimes he made us cry.

Uncontrollably. Wang made the gym. The tears flowed uncontrollably.

We couldn't stop. Shen died to jinx you. Then at other times he scared the poop out of us.

When he started describing the or you know, he had this ability to scare the poop out of you too. That's all. Okay?

So then the purpose of this retreat, special purpose of this retreat, is I think you can say it's threefold. You can say there are three things we're trying to accomplish this week. Number one.

What is the big picture in your life? What is it you would like to put energy into? You know?

What is it that you really want in your whole life to accomplish? You know, what do you want on your gravestone or your enlightenment stone or whatever? What are they going to write on your gravestone?

Is it, you know, this person accomplished this in their life? You know? You know?

What's the big thing you want to do in your life? I mean, in this week you've got to figure it out. Have some kind of less fuzzy picture about what you want to do in your life in a big way.

Where do you want to put your energy? What's the one big thing you want to accomplish in your life? What do you want to do in your life?

It can be two, okay? But it's got to be at least something. That's first thing.

Second thing. What are the short-term things you need to do to get there? I'm going to have to finish my homework if I want to be the greatest teacher in the cosmos of art.

You know? The short-term tasks that you have trouble finishing or getting to. Like, I know, Girslan, you asked me 38 times to finish my homework.

You know, since 1998 you've told me to finish my homework. But I just can't get around to it. I start and I stop and I don't feel the energy to do it.

I don't feel the energy to do it. So, what's the big picture? Where are you going to put the energy of your entire life?

What's the smaller components? What kind of energy do you need? What short-term stuff do you need to get done?

I've got to feed myself. I need a house. I've got to take care of my cat.

I've got to finish grading the homework. What are the short-term stuff you've got to do? Then the first thing to supply that, where am I going to get that personal energy?

I'm losing energy. I don't have anything. I sleep a lot.

I watch TV. I'm on the Internet all day. I'm looking at stupid, useless things that I don't really need to look at.

I don't have energy. I get tired easily. I start yoga and I feel like I can't do yoga.

I eat too much. I feel indolent. I just don't have pizazz.

So, how do I get it back? So, I'd say those are the three goals for this week. On an immediate level, how do I have more energy?

And what's keeping me from having more energy? How can I get more energy? Second, what are the immediate things in my life I've got to put that energy in?

And then thirdly, how is that all going to contribute to the big goal of my life? And how do I identify that goal? How do I know, is it Krasnodar or is it Lisbon?

You know? Where am I going to go? What am I supposed to do?

Like that, right? That's what we're going to do this week. Okay.