«Дар освобождения», курс 6 «Ретрит страсти», занятие 2

[Говорящий 1] (0:00 - 0:01)
Yes, please, loud, okay.

[Говорящий 2] (0:02 - 0:14)
You were talking this morning in the yoga class about the central channel, and it attacks really well the side channels as well as the central channel.

[Говорящий 1] (0:14 - 0:14)
Yeah.

[Говорящий 2] (0:17 - 0:33)
And if I understood correctly, then that would be negative emotional afflictions going away. I'm wondering how that relates to nirvana, which is also the removal of negative afflictions, very important, but it makes sense.

[Говорящий 1] (0:33 - 0:33)
Yeah.

[Говорящий 2] (0:33 - 0:35)
More automatically than the other?

[Говорящий 1] (0:35 - 8:29)
Yeah. Did everybody hear the question okay? So this morning in the Naguma class, we were talking about how she designed her series partly with the intention of causing the two side channels to withdraw into the central channel.

In fact, in Sanskrit, one of the names for the central channel is avadhuti. So ava means off, dhuti means to throw off. The idea is that you have these two side channels that are...

You know that medical symbol? Some people say that that was a depiction of the channels. I don't know.

I don't think that's the original historical idea of it, but it's possible. On the left side, you have a channel. When prana flows in that channel called ida, then you want things unreasonably.

We gave the example of second and third biscotti in one trip to Starbucks. The first biscotti, you feel happy and you have hot chocolate and biscotti. I go to Starbucks almost every day because I like to hang out there because I like to watch people while I work.

I have a hot chocolate and a biscotti. I enjoy them. I'm hungry, I'm thirsty, I sip them and chew on them slowly and I translate.

It's fun and I have a good time and I feel at ease. After an hour and a half, it's too much computer. I start to get nervous and overworked and agitated from the vibes of the computer.

Then I feel unhappy. I start to feel unhappy. Then I think another biscotti and another hot chocolate would make me feel better.

So I go have another one. Then we say the prana has moved from this channel, the central channel, to the ida. The prana has shifted.

When the prana is running in this channel, you want things that you don't need. Yesterday we said it was okay to want things and it is okay to want things. You want to have a nice car, have a nice car.

It's okay. You want to have a nice house that you can practice in, that's okay. You want to have a nice partner, that's okay also.

It's not okay to steal other people's money to get your house or steal other people's partner to get your partner. You see what I mean? That's the difference.

When the prana moves to this side, this central channel, when prana is moving in the central channel, you are amenable and you are open to believing that the world is coming from how you treat other people. When the prana moves to here, you lose that. Then you're taking things from other people.

You want things and you take them. That prana has moved to this side channel. Then the other side for anger.

We gave the example in the yoga class of... No, you've got to tell the whole story. You have your second biscotti and then you're like, God, this is going to make me fat.

Then you feel upset. Because you think, well, I'm upset. Maybe I'd feel better if I had a third one.

Then you go to get a third one and they say, we don't have any more. Then you're like... Unreasonable desire goes quickly to anger.

I don't know what you mean. Then you get angry. Then the prana is flowing in the right side.

Then the ultimate purpose of all yoga is to cause those two side channels to atrophy. Those of you who know the Vajrayogini sadhana. GSUNGS RDZIN THEG SHING SBYONG GSUNGS RDZIN, say GSUNGS RDZIN.

THEG SHING SBYONG GSUNGS means the right-hand channel. RDZIN, it's a code word. RDZIN is the left-hand channel.

THEG SHING means a vine of ivy. They say destroy the two vines of ivy. CHUNG means to destroy.

It's in the Vajrayogini sadhana. The goal of yoga is to destroy the two side channels and rip them off of the central channel. Like ivy.

Like I have morning, what do you call it, morning glories. They take over your garden. They twine around all the other plants and they slowly choke them.

I love morning glory flowers. In fact, in Arizona, it's illegal to plant them. It's illegal to sell the seeds in Arizona.

But you can go and you rip them off the roses and you rip them off the jasmine and you rip them off the juniper trees. We seek to do the same with the two side channels. Then they withdraw into the central channel.

Then you are only a central channel. Then the body changes into light because the knots created by the two side channels create the material flesh of the body. When you are the duty, when you tear them off, with yoga and with meditation, PHYI NON THAB LA TSOR BAD means you can destroy them from the inside or you can rip them off from the outside.

You can put your body in certain positions and it will start to loosen them from the main channel, from the central channel. Then from the inside, you struggle. CITTA BHARTI NIR RO DA CITTA BHARTI NIR RO DA I went crazy.

You got to tell Janice Stone. Where is that guy? She's like, stop your CITTA BHARTI.

Stop thinking about everything. I'm like, ouch. The class was so good up till now.

CITTA BHARTI doesn't mean random thoughts in your mind. CITTA BHARTI means looking at things BHARTI, the wrong way. Normally, like you want a boyfriend and you struggle.

You go get new clothes. You go on a new diet. You go on a new exercise program.

You throw out your old cosmetics and you go to Sephora. That causes so much confusion to go to Sephora. There's too many choices.

You're like, damn. Then after a while you get tired and you just buy whatever you can. That's CITTA BHARTI.

That's a misunderstanding of how the world works. Your perception is skewed. BHARTI means skewed.

The word weird comes from BHARTI. Philologically. If you see that the way to get a boyfriend is to go to a nursing home or help a lonely person, then you plant the seed.

Then you can go to Sephora or not go to Sephora. It doesn't matter. The boyfriend will come.

It's 100% sure he will come. If you want to go to Sephora, you can. If you want to buy some new clothes, you can.

You don't have to. He will come anyway. Because that's not what causes him.

That's still nice to have some nice clothes. It's okay. Anyway, then you would only have understanding left.

If the prana were always flowing in the central channel, you wouldn't have CITTA BHARTI. You wouldn't misunderstand how to get a boyfriend. Then you would become enlightened.

That's enlightenment. You would become enlightened. What was your question?

I don't remember.

[Говорящий 2] (8:30 - 8:37)
You just said it was a trick to get the overwhelming, the automatic nirvana, the connection between the two.

[Говорящий 1] (8:37 - 13:16)
Oh yeah, then that would be nirvana. So what is nirvana? Nirvana happens before enlightenment.

Nirvana is defined as? NYON DRIN MA LUNG PO'I PHAM SU TSANGS RGYAS So what it means is, nirvana is the end of your negative emotions. Nirvana is before enlightenment.

In most cases. Nirvana means you are incapable. You cannot be made upset by another person.

It's not possible. If a person were like a demon, like your ex-boyfriend or your boss, and they decided, I'm going to upset her. I'm going to find a way to upset her.

And they tried everything they knew. If you had already reached nirvana, they couldn't do it. They couldn't upset you.

So how does seeing emptiness help you reach nirvana? Supposedly nirvana is defined as getting rid of your obstacles because you saw emptiness directly. Getting rid of your negative emotions forever because you saw emptiness directly.

How does understanding emptiness help you overcome, for example, anger? And then the classic example is the boss screams at you or your ex-boyfriend says something about you and you hear it. And then human nature, which is samsaric nature, is to respond with the same.

They said, oh yeah? Oh yeah, he said that about our relationship three years ago? That was private between us?

Well, I'll tell you something about him. So you respond with the same. You thereby plant another seed.

And then the next boyfriend you have is doing the same thing. So it becomes a cycle. A person who has understood emptiness understands that the world is being created by seeds which are planted by what they do and say and think.

So when it comes out that the boyfriend said such and such about them, about something private from three years ago, then they just let it go. They break the cycle. Not because the boyfriend was doing a good thing.

He was doing a bad thing. But they understand that it's coming from them. They understand that what the boyfriend is doing is coming from them, the ex-boyfriend.

They don't perpetuate it because they understand that what he said was coming from something they said before. So the last thing you'd want to do is say another thing about the ex-boyfriend. You'd want to just stop the cycle and say, okay, it's true he's a schmuck but let it go.

And then you break the cycle. And then you reach nirvana. That's nirvana.

You say, I'm not going to get angry because what he said was coming from me. And if I get angry, I'll just create another schmuck like him. Then slowly you don't have anger.

No one can piss you off. Nobody. Impossible.

That's nirvana. And you can only reach it by understanding where things are coming from. We say it's not possible to remove anger from the human soul without that understanding.

There's no other method or power that can remove anger from the human being. It's not possible. Only if you understand that the crap is coming from you can you stop it.

Because otherwise you'll keep responding to violence with violence. It's cool. It's very cool.

So that's the connection. The more prana you got into the central channel, the more clear it would become to you that the boyfriend is coming from you. The ex-boyfriend.

And then you would stop responding. And that's nirvana. And then eventually that would lead to enlightenment.

Nirvana is triggered by the condition of your inner wings. And to do yoga and to get more prana into the sushumna enables you more clearly not to respond to the boyfriend. And then that's nirvana.

So yoga is what they call outer aid. A partner and yoga are considered two forms of outer... They call outer aid in the search for nirvana.

Like that. Cool. All right.

Yes, ma'am.

[Говорящий 2] (13:17 - 13:45)
Okay, so I have a question about meditation that I think maybe everyone will understand. So in terms of working with the breath, if your intention is really to distract yourself from the point of focus, it has a simplicity and accessibility, and it lacks bromance, and it lacks doubt. I know it's just your breath.

And so there's a sutra, right, on the... I don't know.

[Говорящий 1] (13:46 - 13:47)
Say again?

[Говорящий 2] (13:47 - 15:01)
On a sati or something, sutra? I don't know. But there's a whole book about how to practice the breath.

This Theravada teacher talks about this whole process. His teachers said, you know, you could see emptiness if you just work on the breath. And you're always standing out of your mind.

So I think I just have a couple of questions about that. First of all, is there a way to feel that the breath is holy? Very holy.

And two, because of this simplicity, is there a time and a place to just practice that single point of focus with the breath? Because it does seem to be helping you reach a deeper peace in life, like a kind of a different place, you know? Okay.

Then you can then use, you know. Yeah. And then the other thing is, if a lower school person uses the breath to see, there must be a different, there must be something different, right?

And we talked about that when we were teaching emptiness, object and subject are the same. But there must be something different. I'm just wondering, you know, if that seems to be about the bodhicitta.

[Говорящий 1] (15:03 - 22:16)
Okay. There's a book called Abhidharma. There's a whole series of books called Abhidharma.

Seven books of Abhidharma, I think. Only one of which is widely used anymore, which is called the Abhidharma Kosha, right? So it's written in the 4th century by Asanga's half-brother Vasubandhu.

Then in there, when he teaches meditation, he says, start by watching your breath, which is called uke. In Tibetan, it's called uke jungu. Uke means breath, jungu means the exhalation, and nuk means the inhalation.

So uke jungu is a practice that comes from the Abhidharma. Abhidharma is one of the five great subjects of Buddhism. What are the rest?

You can say Prajnaparamita, which is lower middle way. Abhidharma, which is second school. Sorry, first school.

Which is called Vaibhashika. Then there's Soutrantika, which are the logic schools. Then there's Madhyamika, which are the middle way, higher emptiness schools.

Then there's a school on Vinaya, which is ethics. So these are the five great subjects of ancient India and of Buddhism. In Tantra, you can consider it sixth.

Historically, only two of them made it to southern Asia. Three of the schools weren't... The lineage was never passed on to Sri Lanka, Thailand, Burma, the southern schools.

I've been there. I've studied in Thailand and Sri Lanka. I think what happened was they got stuck on the breath thing because it was presented in one of those two schools.

It's considered, in the whole frame of the five schools, to be a useful preliminary to meditation. You use it to sharpen the mind and to focus the mind. Then you move on to another meditation with content.

We would say that the mind is like a mirror. Then you place objects before it. Then the mind absorbs the content of those objects.

For example, if you meditate on the Dalai Lama, then you place a person's personality in front of the mirror of your mind. Then that personality is reflected in your mind. The word meditation in Sanskrit is bhavana.

In Tibetan, it's gom. Bhavana means become. Na means to make you.

Bhavana means that which makes you become that thing, which you place before the mind. It's interesting. The word for meditation is a technique to become that thing.

If you place an image of the Dalai Lama before your mind, the mirror of your mind, and if that image is reflected in the mirror of your mind often enough, and consistently enough, day after day, you become that person. It's what do you call it? Osmosis.

What's the other word? Anyway, you become that thing which you meditate upon. That's the meaning of the word meditation.

Breath is good, but you don't want to become breath. Breath is good to get into a groove. It's very, very powerful.

It's very, very beautiful. It's very, very good. I do it constantly, and we are trained to do that.

But then you're encouraged to go on to something with more content. Because whatever you place before the mind, you will become that. Then you have to go on to other more important objects.

Without any other background, could a person who only meditated on the breath come to see emptiness by only meditating on the breath? No, not possible. If a person had studied emptiness extensively in their past life and then meditated on the breath in this life, could it trigger the perception of emptiness?

Yes. But if you're assuming a zero start point or something, it's better to get a lot of teachings on emptiness, then use breath meditation, and then go on to meditate on those teachings. That's how it happens.

That's how it really happens. It is possible someone meditated on the breath and saw emptiness, but that's because they already had those teachings in their mind. I think for us it's safer to do BOA.

Do the breath meditation, and then go on to what you've learned. Rinpoche used to say 3,000 hours. He used to say the number 3,000 hours of meditation teachings.

Classroom hours on emptiness. To see emptiness. You need that.

You really do need that. It works. It happens.

Yoga opens the central channel and speeds the process. When you see emptiness directly, large amounts of prana are injected into the central channel and they cause you to see emptiness directly. You can speed it up by doing physical practices which are carefully designed to inject more prana into the central channel.

To see emptiness you need to samgong. You need to study. You have to think about it.

Argue with other people. Then you have to go sit in your room and meditate on it. It's not going to happen just through watching the breath.

But watching the breath is beautiful. It's there with you all the time until you die. It's always there to meditate on.

It's a beautiful practice. It's a wonderful practice. Everybody uses it.

But then they use it as a tool. It's like a microscope. It's like developing a very fine microscope.

But then you have to train the microscope on something. You see what I mean? Meditation is a tool.

It's not a goal. And then you need content. It's like having a really fast web connection with no content.

Really. Seriously.

[Говорящий 2] (22:17 - 22:52)
It's hard to figure out how to structure it. I can see that in this book. Helping me rest my mind in one place.

Whereas my ears are long-choking. I take a lot of rides. I don't know that I know.

And then you taught us in the first part about single-pointedness. This level of meditation that we want. And so it's very specific.

So would you say that you spend half of your time doing that and then move on to the next step? Or do you separate the times that you do?

[Говорящий 1] (22:53 - 30:46)
That's the function of your personal teacher. That's why you need a heart lama. You need someone.

If you're going to be good at yoga, you need to be in the yoga studio with your teacher every day for years. If you're going to be good at meditation, you've got to be under the guidance of a meditation teacher constantly, daily. That means you have to find one.

And then you have to make the commitment to stay near them. We don't talk much about that. I don't talk much about that.

But if you want to be good at yoga, you have to go move to New York and be in Dharmitra's class every day for a couple years. That's the commitment you make. And it's the same with meditation.

Each person is different. Someone might need half breath, half emptiness. Somebody might...

Then the teacher might slap you on the head and say, forget the emptiness and the breath. I want bodhichitta. But it's like you need to be in the sphere of a qualified teacher.

And there's no other... I can't give you a rule without being with you frequently and like that. I'd say in general it's good to...

I've always used it a lot, breath meditation. I've used it up to a quarter of the meditation time and then go on to something else. I think that might be a good rule of thumb for you.

Okay. All right. Maybe one more quick question.

Okay. Did everybody hear? So classically, there are...

What do you call them? MUN TSAMS SEMS and RJES PAGS SEMS In the Yoga Sutra, Pratyakshanumanagama, first chapter. Classically, you begin your comprehension of emptiness in a classroom situation.

There's a qualified teacher, preferably who has seen emptiness directly. And then they start to describe how to do it. And they take you through a lot of classical presentations.

And that's THOD, right? SHUGTI, that's listening. And then SAM means you take that home and you...

On long walks and on car drives and waiting for dentists, you think about it. And then GO'EM means you meditate on it. And then you have your...

There's a stage called GYOR LAM, path of preparation. During GYOR LAM, you begin to have intense intellectual understandings of emptiness. This is like a process that happens to everybody.

With enough teaching, with enough practice, you enter GYOR LAM. It's a spiritual milestone that everyone goes through who sees emptiness. And then you start to have intense intellectual understandings of emptiness.

They culminate in GYOR LAM CHUD CHOG, which is only maybe an hour long or a half hour long. And you directly perceive how your mind is creating the objects around you. Not intellectually.

You directly perceive how your mind is creating an object, such as a computer or a table or a pot. You catch karmic seeds opening in your mind, creating tiny images which then fly out and are imposed upon objects in the world. And you catch yourself doing it for the first time.

After the intellectual breakthroughs, you have an experiential breakthrough, which is not in meditation. You're standing around and you suddenly see how, oh, this thing is an image emerging from a karmic seed in my mind. And that's why I see this thing today.

And you actually catch the image being produced by the mind. And that's earth shaking. That's dependent origination.

That's the real meaning of dependent origination. You see how your own mind is creating the objects around you as seeds open in the mind which were planted there by how you treated other people. But you catch your mind doing it.

Then that's the first time you perceive dependent origination directly, rather than as a concept. You catch your mind doing it. That's called DRO LAM CHOD CHOG.

That's called the highest seeing in the world. Except for seeing emptiness directly. Then in the next few hours, you always see emptiness directly.

In the following next few hours, you have a direct perception of emptiness. And that perception in no way differs from the way emptiness is perceived by a Buddha. It's not qualitatively different than the way an enlightened being sees emptiness.

The way you see emptiness the first time yourself, long before your Buddhahood, and the way an existing Buddha is seeing emptiness are exactly the same. There's no difference. That's very interesting.

That's the answer to your question. 100% nothing exists which is not coming from seeds in my mind. You can't be more or less that.

You see what I mean? It's 100% not coming from anything else. And it never gets bigger or more than that.

Then there's another debate after that. You want that one? What do you call the ambiance, the milieu of the mind which is perceiving that emptiness in exactly the same way?

It can be different. Because an enlightened person's mind is simultaneously seeing every other object in the universe. But the quality of their emptiness perception doesn't differ from the...

what do you call it? The setting or the context is different. They're also perceiving every other event in the universe.

But how they're seeing emptiness doesn't differ. Because it either is or it isn't completely devoid of not coming from a seed. Got it?

It's very beautiful. And that's a big subject in the scriptures. It's a very interesting subject.

We debated it firstly in the monastery. Then they got into this argument of among Buddhas, people who got enlightened earlier, they're seeing it differently. I took that position one night.

If somebody got enlightened like a trillion years ago and somebody got enlightened a billion years ago, are they seeing emptiness the same? That's another question. And I was like, well, anytime you see something that you've already seen before again, you see it in a deeper way.

And they're like, no, no. It got really hot.