«Дар освобождения», курс 4 «Ретрит об энергиях», занятие 6

[Говорящий 2] (0:00 - 3:07)
So, we'll do some meditation. Then relax your face and begin to watch your breath. Step back and watch your thoughts.

See the condition of your mind. Watch your mind thinking its thoughts. Try to block all thoughts of past or future.

Try to settle down, relax, be happy.

[Говорящий 1] (3:08 - 3:13)
Be here in this room now. Don't worry about tomorrow or tonight.

[Говорящий 2] (3:14 - 8:53)
Don't worry about last week. You're here now. If a nuclear war broke out, you had to stay here.

This is where you'd be. You're here. Just be here.

Then we're going to do some work at the Svadhisthana chakra. At the base of your spine, just above the crack in your bottom. And then work into the body, in front of the vertebra there.

Park your mind just at the front of the spine, down towards the very bottom, below your waist. Stay there, put your mind there. See if you can feel something, like a bump or a ball, just in front of the spine.

Then relax there. Don't go anywhere. If you think of something else, bring your mind back.

Find the little ball there. Keep your mind on it. Then come inside the ball.

Bring your mind inside the chakra. Then see some small vein of liquid glass cracking through the chakra from top to bottom. Clear, gleaming, liquid glass.

Focus on that glass for a while. See it dripping slowly through the crack in the chakra, up to down. Seeping through the crack in the chakra, in the middle.

[Говорящий 1] (9:27 - 10:11)
Then I'd like you to follow that seeping liquid glass from this chakra in a very fine vein of liquid glass flowing down to the chakra that we did before, the Muladhara, between your legs and in about an inch. So follow the flow of the glass trickling down from the base of your spine, Svadhishthana chakra, down to the chakra between your legs.

[Говорящий 2] (10:12 - 10:16)
Follow that trickle of liquid glass down.

[Говорящий 1] (10:17 - 10:24)
Then when you reach the bottom, bring your mind up to the higher chakra and follow it down again.

[Говорящий 2] (10:25 - 10:36)
So you're just watching the trickle of liquid glass down from the Svadhishthana chakra to the Muladhara chakra.

[Говорящий 1] (10:37 - 10:44)
When you reach the lower chakra, you bring your mind back up and follow more flow down.

[Говорящий 2] (10:52 - 14:15)
Do it visually, but also try to feel what it feels like in your body. How does it... What's the sensation, physical sensation of the liquid glass trickling down the lower part of your spine, your body?

In Tibetan, this flow is called sok, one of the translations of prana, but it means life force, life energy, like the sap flowing through a tree. Try to time the flows down with your exhales. Then when you're ready, come back to your breath and slowly open your eyes.

Stretch. Hear it out.

[Говорящий 1] (14:15 - 29:43)
The earlier you get it... My best students are the students whose parents died in some horrible way, or they saw somebody fall off a building. They got their eyes opened early.

You see what I mean? So the very first line, Abda Lam Rim, because the Three Principal Paths is a Lam Rim, the very first line is, how long will it take you to figure it out? You can buy clothes, you can go to Sephora, buy makeup, you can get famous at your job, you can be vice president, you can be a star athlete, you can be the best yoga guy in the room.

And then everybody loses it. And they lose it in a bad way. It's not like they come some day and they say, it's time to check out and they give you an injection or something.

It's like they stretch it out year after year. Slowly you lose your strength, you lose your friends, you lose your family, and then you lose your mind. And everybody goes through that.

So he's like, the first principal path is, just figure out what's going on. How long will it take you before you realize what's going on here? Okay, step number two.

RGYAL ZAD DANG PO'I SNAM GYI SNGAGS PA'I LAM The path which is praised or recommended by the bodhisattvas, which is what? Bodhichitta, right? The second principal path.

It's nothing more than taking the tiny step of saying, I'm in trouble and so is everybody else. That's all. My mom died a horrible death and so is everybody else's mom.

It's like making that little leap. It takes like 30 seconds, right? Oh, this is happening to everybody else also.

And we need to get out of here together. We need to help everybody. Everybody needs some help.

And then one day you have that happen to you. I don't know. I was on that plane.

The people know the story. I was on a plane, it was going to crash. Suddenly everybody who was complaining about the peanuts in the movie, they were hugging each other and crying and kissing each other.

Then the plane landed, it didn't crash. Everybody was fighting to get off. They said they had to make their connection.

But for like 30 minutes we had bodhicitta in the airplane. And the true nature of a human being came out, which is concern for the other people and love for each other. And it takes some kind of life-threatening thing for it to come out.

I see the movie of the Titanic and I... I mean, the better... I imagine that there were a lot of noble acts that night, like a lot of people sacrificing themselves for other people.

That's human nature. That's real human nature. So, step number two is just realize everybody else is in the same boat all the time.

,GAL LDAN THANG DANG RNAM GYI BYUNG LUNG STE, What's the best way to help people? What's the easiest place to enter? Got it?

The Ford, right? What's the key place where you could help people? What's the third of the path?

Yeah, just understand reality. Understand where things come from, okay? Understand where things are coming from.

I'm going to do the pen thing, okay? If you saw it before, you have... you have 3,000 of them, right?

That's the doctor's prescription. If you're on the DCI tours, you get like eight every tour or something. Thank you.

But it's good for you, okay? I'm just going to do it very quick. Then if you're new or you haven't seen it before, you can catch up in five minutes.

What's this thing? It's a pen. If a dog came in here...

I get so tired of doing this, but it's okay. I should have different dogs that I'd bring around with me. If a dog came in to the room and sat there and it was a puppy dog and it was playful and I waved this thing in front of it, what would it do?

It would grab the thing in its mouth. Does the dog see this as a pen for writing? No.

What do they see it as? Yeah, a chew toy. Then the next question is...

You should learn to teach it if you've heard it... just in case you've heard it before. Who's right, the dog or the human?

Both are right. You can't say it's more a pen than a chew toy. It just depends on who's looking at it.

Next question. If I took the pen and I left it here, up here, and then all the humans left the room and all the dogs left the room, then which one would it be at that time? Then your natural thought is correct.

You'd have to say neither. At that time, it's sort of, what do you call it, potential, right? If a person walks in the room, it will become a pen.

If a dog trots in the room, it will become a chew toy. But until they trot in or walk in, it's just kind of waiting to be something. That's the meaning of emptiness.

Emptiness doesn't mean close your eyes and everything's black. Emptiness doesn't mean try not to think about anything. Emptiness doesn't mean everything's an illusion and the oatmeal you had today was not really there.

It doesn't mean any of the above. They're useless. They don't help you.

You can't do anything with that. Okay, the oatmeal's not there. But tomorrow, can you make some?

It doesn't help anything. This kind of emptiness, how does this help you? The pen until anybody walks in is nothing yet.

You can say nothing yet. Maybe that's better than emptiness. I keep trying to find new words for emptiness because emptiness is so confusing.

Let's say nothing yet. Then you come in and you pick it up and you see it as a pen. Raise your right hand.

Okay. Show me with your hand. This is how I teach it nowadays.

It works, okay? Because then later you can go like this to people. Is the pen coming from you or is the pen coming from the pen?

Show me with your hand. Is it coming this way or is it coming this way? Yeah, okay.

Sometimes like the Ukrainians, I wasn't sure they were saying, just leave, you know. So anyway, it's coming from me, okay? If it was coming from the pen side, the dog would see it as a pen.

That's just simple. You don't need to be Einstein although Hawkins didn't figure it out yet but I'm going to fix it. So, it's coming from me, okay?

What was I going to say? Something else. Oh yeah, in Tibetan, people who don't understand reality, there's an unusual word.

Do you remember? They're called surtong. Say sur.

Surtong. It's a very strange word. Sur means this way.

Tong means they see. Like tonglam, path of seeing, right? Surtong means a person who goes around thinking that stuff is coming this way.

My girlfriend criticized me yesterday. It's because she wanted to. Got it?

Surtong. It's coming from her. And then a person who has studied reality correctly, their first reaction to getting criticized by their girlfriend is like, I got to fix this.

I got to fix her. And I don't have to talk to her. I just have to criticize people at work less.

That's their first reaction. They don't get angry and they don't get upset and they don't try to convince her that they're not stupid. They just say, in their mind, they kind of just don't even pay attention to her.

And they're like, okay honey. And then they're thinking, who did I criticize last week? Who should I stop criticizing?

And they don't even pay much attention to her criticizing them. Because they know where it's flowing from. They know where it's coming from.

And they don't get upset at her. It's like she's not under her own control. She's doing that because you're forcing her to do that.

She doesn't want to do that. The criticism is not coming from her will. It's coming because you said something to somebody else last week.

It's your fault. Then you're just like, okay, we don't react much because it's not worth it. There's nothing, no reason.

She's not sultang. It's not coming from her. I'd like to go here next because of all this people teaching positive thinking.

Like, oh, if it's coming from me, then I could make it into a piece of gold. If it's coming this... Show me again.

If it's coming this way, then let me make it something else. Which, what do you call it? Blanks the question.

Begs the question. It begs the question, if it's coming from you, is it a result of your will? As an act of will, could you make it something else?

It's important to address that to somebody new. If I was super positive thinker, and someone called me poophead, could I just turn it around by wishing, thinking positive thoughts to them. I'm not really a poophead.

And then I go through this exercise on tour. I say, close your eyes. 300 people close their eyes.

Ukrainian tough guys. And then I say, let's all wish it was a diamond. A big diamond.

And then we'll sell it, and we'll split the money. After we pay the government their bribes. Then everybody close their eyes.

And then we all wish, wish, wish, wish. I say, what is it? Nadieus.

I jelayu. I molitva. I want, I wish, and I pray.

I like that. I like to make it dramatic. I go like this.

It's still a pen. Which means it's coming from you, but not from your conscious desires. And you can't pray it into a diamond.

And you can't wish it into a diamond. And it doesn't matter how much you want. You can pray that your girlfriend would stop criticizing you.

You can want it. And you can wish it. But so didn't everybody else who ever had anything bad happen to them.

And it doesn't work. Nobody wants to have their girlfriend criticize them. Unless you're into S&M or something.

Then I stop asking questions, and I just start lecturing them. I haven't figured out a way to make the rest interactive. So I'm like, okay, we think you have a seed in your mind, and that seed opens, and that makes you see a pen.

And the dog has a different seed. They have a seed for something to chew. And when the seed opens in their mind, they see a chew toy.

So if the human and the dog look at this thing at the same time, two different seeds are opening, and two different creatures see two different things. Everybody can handle that. You kind of got to sneak it in without asking.

The seed thing. And then you say, here's the end of the story. How do you plant the seed?

Now then you get somebody up on the stage next to you. Hopefully it's a handsome guy or a pretty girl. And you say, okay, watch, I'm going to plant a seed.

And you have them hold out their hand. And then you go down real slow. And then you say, your mind is like, Jigme is always there with a camera.

And you say, your mind is like Jigme's video camera. And through the lens of your eyes, your mind is recording this event. Right?

The eyes are like a lens. The mind is like a movie camera. The mind records this event.

Then you took it down slowly. You hold it in their hand and you say, everybody look, everybody look. Pay attention.

You can sleep in a few minutes. And then you let go of the pen. You know, you go, and then you say, right then the seed was planted.

Right then at that moment the seed was planted. You just saw a pen seed planted. Then later you have to explain that when you plant one pen seed you get ten pens out of it.

Because otherwise to give a pen to get a pen is kind of stupid. You might as well just keep your pen. Got it?

I mean if there's not, if you don't collect interest there's not much point to it. I just told you the third principle path. In like four minutes.

I saved you 24 years, 11 months, 29 days. You don't have to be a Geshe now. You probably understand it better than most Geshes, honestly.

They know the wording and they know the quotations and they don't really get the pen thing. Which is why they're all struggling to get food and stuff like that. So, that's it.

You just entered the four at the easiest place. And you know how reality works. The rest is pretty much self-explanatory.

Anything you want, plant the seed. Anything you don't like, cut the seed out of your mental continuum. And then your girlfriend shapes up.

And your credit card is paid off. And you know, you can go to Cecile's class and it makes you feel like high. Because your body is strong and you have good prana.

You see what I mean? So, that's it. That's the opening lines of the class five.

So we'll do some meditation.

[Говорящий 2] (29:43 - 30:47)
Start by following your breath. Place the mind on the breath and keep it on the breath. I'd like you to bring your mind to the chakra at your navel, Manipura chakra.

[Говорящий 1] (30:49 - 30:52)
It's locate your belly button.

[Говорящий 2] (30:53 - 34:50)
Go straight backwards towards the spine. Try to place your mind at a spot in the front of your spine at the level of your belly button. Just relax there.

Place the mind there. Try to feel a bump or a ball of energy just in front of the spine. Just above your waist.

Just play around there for a while. See if you can find it. As much as you can, keep your mind there.

Now go inside the chakra. Bring your mind inside that small ball. Try to pierce it.

Bring the mind into the middle of it. In front of your spine. Just above your waist.

Now try to picture in the middle of the chakra that liquid glass, like a crystalline flowing energy like glass in the middle of the ball. Like a vein of gold through a stone behind your navel in front of the spine.

[Говорящий 1] (35:28 - 36:04)
Now as you exhale, feel a flow of liquid glass from the navel chakra in front of your spine down to between your legs. Then bring it back up with your inhale. Watch.

Feel. I think more feel than watch. Energy flowing down from behind your navel along the spine down to the place between your legs on your exhale and then coming back on the inhale.

[Говорящий 2] (36:05 - 38:58)
I'd like you to just follow that flow of a very subtle trickle, a vein of liquid glass for a few minutes. A liquid flow of glass up and down the lower half of your spine. Feel the sensation more than you watch it.

Bring your mind back to your breath and then slowly come out of the meditation. Stretch.

[Говорящий 1] (38:59 - 54:55)
Knock your neighbor. So in talking about the lam rim or the steps of the path, Pabongka Rinpoche, I'm reading your homework questions, okay? So you got to pay attention.

Pabongka Rinpoche starts talking about Tibetan tea. So I went to the monastery. I sat down.

Rinpoche interviewed me. That was an experience. Then he gave me a cup of tea.

So this is like... I had had it before, but it tastes like chicken soup. You use Chinese black tea, milk, half and half, cream, salt, baking powder, and nutmeg.

Then you have to add them in the pot in a certain order. Like you put the tea in and then it has to boil until it's super black, like Coca-Cola syrup or something. And then you throw it.

Then you have to add some of the milk and then you have to add the salt. Then you have to put it into a churn. It's a big tube.

And then you... The first lama I ever met was Sakya in Rajapur, in India. I think he was a very high...

He was like Sakya Trinjan's assistant or something. And he gave me a Tibetan tea churn. It was a really auspicious thing.

It was a travel churn. It's like this big. And you can put one cup in there and you can churn it.

And then you have to churn it for like, I don't know, like 10 minutes. And then it gets mixed in somehow. And then you have to strain the tea out.

And then you add the nutmeg. And then it has to sit. You have to cover the pot and sit for a while.

And then it's a whole thing. It tastes like kefir or something. It's thick.

And Tibetans drink 20 cups a day. And so I got addicted to it. Then I went traveling for business and I got these terrible headaches.

In Thailand, I remember. And I didn't know what was wrong. And then I realized I was addicted to Tibetan tea.

So anyway, it's a whole art. And in the monastery, if you have Tsampa... Tsampa means...

You take barley grain and you go out at night on a campfire like we're going to do it Monday. And you have a big metal thing like this. And then you throw the barley grain in.

And then you have these huge spatulas and you roast it. And then you sing barley roasting songs. In Tibetan.

That's how they work in Tibet. They are putting mud on your roof songs. Because it's like an eight-hour job.

And then you sing and you go like, First we slap the first. Then we slap the second. And then everybody's dancing.

And then it's fun. Then you grind the roasted barley powder. And then you...

Monks have a bag that they tie to their belt and they keep Tsampa. And then in the monastery you get free tea but you don't get free Tsampa. So you bring your own Tsampa to their prayers.

They hand out tea. Everybody mixes some Tsampa into their tea. And that's what you live on.

They don't eat much else. And it's really good. It's like, what do you call it?

Jolt? If you're a computer programmer. You can live on it.

And you don't disturb your studies. It takes five minutes to make a Tsampa. And you just eat it like this and then you keep reading.

So it's a big deal in a Tibetan teaching to talk about tea. And in talking about the Lam Rim Pabongkha Rinpoche says you would be insane to buy one big pot and keep all your tea ingredients in one big pot. Like melted soft butter, Chinese tea leaves, nutmegs, salt, cream and dump it all into one pot and keep it like that.

You'd be crazy. You have to keep them separately. And then you have to use them in the right order.

You have to store them separately and you have to use them in the right order. I like to use them when I'm teaching it and then maybe you could do it yourselves. When you're teaching Lam Rim I like to use the example of a car engine.

And I don't know, when I first went to the monastery we were really poor and we didn't have any money and we had one Volkswagen that had 200,000 miles on it. Beetle. And then it broke one day and Rinpoche looked at me and he said, you're American.

I said, yeah. He said, you invented the car in America. I said, where's this going to, Rinpoche?

And he's like, you fix the car. And I'm like, I don't know anything about cars. He said, I'm your lama.

That was his thing. He'd look at you. You'd say, I don't know how to fix the car.

He'd say, I'm your lama. And then you go to the library and you get a car. What's it called?

Volkswagen Repair for Idiots or something like that. It's a good book. And so, then I screwed up the engine.

I ruined it. But anyway, what I realized ruining it was that there's a certain order to the parts. And if you finish fixing the car and there's a bunch of bolts left over, that's not good.

Every part has a purpose. You can't just leave out bolts. You've got to take it apart again and find out where the bolt goes to.

You've got to have one left over. I don't know. Anyway, every part has a meaning.

And they have to fire in the right order. The spark plugs off. The injector sends in the fuel.

The piston explodes. It turns the crankshaft. And, you know, there's an order to everything.

And the carburetor has to work. And the Lam Rim is the same. Your spiritual path is the same.

The Tibetans say, the Lam Rim says, Lord Buddha said, you need certain parts to your path or it won't work. And if one of those parts is missing, it's not going to work. You could spend your whole lifetime trying that spiritual path and it won't work.

You need every Lam Rim. You need every part. It's like an engine.

And you can't mix them up. You can't learn them in the wrong order. Or they don't work so good.

There's an order. There's a logical order to your spiritual journey. And you save a lot of time if someone tells you that and tells you which things you need and which things you don't need.

So the Lam Rim is said to be all of the parts are essential and they're in the right order. Don't mix them up. Don't put all your tea ingredients in a single can and think the tea is going to come out good next week.

Don't mix up the topics. Don't mix up the meditations. Do them in a certain order.

And you will save yourself decades of hard work. And I propose you... So I'm with this mafioso guy in Kiev, right?

And he says, I have to talk to you after the class. I'm like, okay, okay. He comes to my hotel room.

He says, I have a big company. I make 500 million dollars a year. I'm like, okay.

And he says, but you know, I'm thinking maybe what you say is correct. And I'm like, yeah, maybe. And he's like, maybe I pay government too much money.

Maybe I bribe too many people. I'm like, maybe. And then he's like looking at me, could we do an experiment?

And I'm like, what do you mean? He says, I give you like 100 of my workers. I give you one division of my company.

We try to run it chisti. It means clean, right? We try to do chisti.

Just 100 people, not all 5,000. And then you come. You come to Ukraine.

We need you more than other countries. We have more problem here. And then he's like, let's do an experiment.

You can bring your people. You can have 100. You can have a division of my company.

You run it clean. You run it according to karmic seeds. And let's see.

And if it works, we'll change the rest of the company. If it doesn't, you leave Ukraine. And it was really a lot of pressure.

But that's what I'm saying with the Lam Rim. Just try it. Try it for a couple of weeks or something.

Try learning things in a certain order. Try doing certain meditations in a certain order. And see if it works or not.

It's like somebody tells you, I have a yoga series that's better than... Okay, I'll try it for a couple of weeks. And if it seems to work, then I'll keep going on.

And if it doesn't, then you leave Ukraine. You leave Ukraine. So we'll try it in a certain order.

And there are certain essential components and you got to have all of them. All Lam Rims have four basic parts. It's like the transmission engine, cooling system.

All Lam Rims have four parts. They always go through four parts. Number one, you study the person who brought it to you.

In this case, we're going to study Lord Atisha who brought it to Tibet. You study the life of the people who are selling this path. And in this case, we're going to do Lord Atisha who lived a thousand years ago.

If he seems like somebody, this person had special realizations or this person got to special stages, then maybe the Lam Rim is worth your time. In Buddhism, in Lam Rim, we say your mental space is very... your mental real estate is very precious.

They say you waste your first 20 years of life fooling around. You waste your last 20 years of life getting... you're too old to do anything.

And then you got 20 years left in between. And then half of that time you're asleep. You know?

And then you're cooking for a quarter of that time. And you know, the time you have to do your spiritual stuff is very limited. And don't waste the time.

Don't expose your mind to stuff which is dumb, because you don't have time. You know? Don't waste your mental space.

Find a path where the person who started it seems to have gotten to some extraordinary results. So therefore we must study the life of the person who started it. That's what we're going to do next.

That's step number one. Step number two. If you see that this person turned out special, or the people that they taught turned out special, such as the Dalai Lama.

He's a product of Atisha's training. Then you can think, well, maybe the instructions are special. So step two is come to appreciate that the instructions themselves are special.

The first step was the founder should be special. Second part should be if they're so special and all the people they affected, even down to the current Dalai Lama, are so special, maybe the instructions are special. Number three.

Supposing the founder was special, and supposing the teaching is special, what's the proper way to teach it? In this tradition, in this lineage, the process of the interaction between the teacher and the disciple, it should be done right. There's a certain way to do it, and if you don't do it right, it's not going to work.

It involves respecting the teacher to a high degree, the teacher respecting the disciple to a high degree. In Tibet, a teacher is required to pay for their disciple's needs. In the monastery, my monastery, the teacher feeds their student, and they clothe them, and they find them a place to stay.

And then the teacher treats the student, treats the teacher with great respect. And it's a respect born of affection, and not from some kind of rules or something like that. There's a respect that you feel throughout the monastery, which is born from a true affection between the disciple and their teachers.

Kids, they start at seven, right? A lot of the kids are brought there at seven. And I watched countless kids come there at seven.

And then their parents are, they're like crying, and they want to see mommy, and, you know, I don't know if it's a good custom. In the old days, you couldn't become a monk until you were 21. You still can't make a person a full monk until they're 21.

You're not allowed to give full vows to anyone under 21. At 21, in the monastery, you make a decision whether to stay or not. And that has to be your own decision.

Your parents can stick you there at seven, but at 21, you're required to make a decision whether you're going to stay or not. And I never saw anybody not stay. Out of thousands of monks, I never saw anybody not stay.

After a couple of years, they're like, you know, this is what I want to do. It's really cool. So anyway, there's this love.

There's a whole, what do you call it, culture of grace and affection and toughness and discipline and love between the teachers and their students. And it's beautiful. It's not enforced by anybody.

It's just there. And we need to retain that. We need to keep that.

It's not a false respect where in front of people, you're very respectful to the Lama and then you get home and you're like, you know, not like that. It's really from love. Then, number four, then you actually learn the Lama.

Step number four is learn the Lama. But step number three is very important, right? How are you going to, what's the etiquette for passing it on?

Step number two, respect the teaching itself. Step number one, establish that the people who are propagating this teaching are respectable and have integrity. Okay?

Like that, okay? Those are the four traditional divisions of the Lama. They come historically from a tradition at a monastery in India called Vikramalashila.

Forget trying to spell it. You can say Vikramalashila.