«Дар освобождения», курс 8 «Учимся быть тихими», занятие 5

[Говорящий 2] (0:00 - 0:13)
In the preliminaries, number three and number four, it seemed like the cleansing and filling of karma were reversed, and I was curious what you thought about that.

[Говорящий 1] (0:17 - 0:20)
Oh, that you cleanse first and then you fill?

[Говорящий 2] (0:20 - 0:24)
Yeah, that was in number three and then four, it seems like it's...

[Говорящий 1] (0:24 - 2:19)
Did we do it? Oh yeah, you're right. No?

Sok sok duk jang. Yeah, you're right. Yeah, it's reversed.

I don't know. When we get to it, let's see. It's a good question.

You're going to get another... Okay, so the seven steps we do, when I've been guiding you this week through seven steps, you invite your teacher, bow to your teacher, make them offerings, confess. That's another preliminary that's stuck inside the six.

And this is the best text that explains those. So you'll be doing the cleansing and the filling like three times before you start your meditation. And we'll get there.

We'll do that. Last chance. DMU, donation on one side.

ACIP, donation on the other side. I'm going to hand it around just to make you feel guilty if you have... People think in their sense, oh, I don't have to sign up.

Everyone else is signing up. Sign up, okay? I don't care if you give a dollar a month.

It's okay. Sign up for something. So I'm going to pass it around one more time.

If you're a holdout or if you just didn't get to you yet, please put your name down first. It's okay if you want to. But here's one more chance.

So just pass it around infinitely. Okay, other questions? Manny didn't get to ask.

Geshe, we're doing a lot of visualization. Is there something different about the karma from the visualization as opposed to a karma where I physically see me giving something?

[Говорящий 2] (2:20 - 2:28)
Or it seems like it's probably the same but practically different because it's so much more focused. But can you speak to the karma of the visualization? Yeah, it's a good question.

[Говорящий 1] (2:31 - 5:13)
There's a famous incident in scripture. It may be in this book. I think it is in this book somewhere.

But Lord Atisha had two attendants. And one of them became a master of the rituals, of closing his eyes and visualizing and doing all the steps. And he could see the 64 deities of Chakrasamvara, all the correct colors and their mudras and instruments in their hands.

And then he had another student who got stuck with the cooking all the time. And so the student who got stuck with the cooking all the time complained because he didn't get a chance to do all these exotic visualizations. And then Lord Atisha had a contest, a realization contest.

And it turned out that the cook had more realizations. So in my opinion, if you have a Lama, a heart Lama, then I'm of the old school, okay? And I'm not ashamed to say it.

I moved to New Jersey from a surf spot called Del Mar, north of San Diego. The best surf on the west coast. And the Dalai Lama said, go, he's your Lama, and you go to New Jersey.

And I was like, oh! It's the worst. I don't know about you, but when I was growing up, it was considered, in Arizona we considered it the worst, darkest place in America.

It's called the armpit of the nation. And it's all the gasoline refineries. Every day when I went to work for the monastery for 20 years, I drove through the gas refineries for two hours.

But to be near your Lama, first of all, is ideal. And then secondly, just to cook for them, or to make their bed. I did his lawn mowing.

I did his laundry for 20 years, 25 years. And I was busy most of the time doing his groundwork. I'll probably never mow your lawn, although I'm happy to.

[Говорящий 2] (5:13 - 5:14)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't have a lawn.

[Говорящий 1] (5:14 - 6:48)
I don't have a lawn, so it's okay. But what I'm saying is, and he had a lot of students. He had hundreds of students.

And I was busy all the time. He sent me to work. I worked for them for 20 years.

I was the only monk at Seramay who had a job and had to work for the monastery. And now strange things happen in my mind. I can read all these things.

I can read them as good as a toothpaste tube. You know what I mean? I don't have any questions about the most exotic texts or the most difficult Sanskrit.

It all just comes. And I translated 20,000 pages of these things, and it just came because I served him. You know what I mean?

So I think, yeah, like visualization is a backup. This whole preliminary practice is a backup. If you don't have a chance to do their laundry or fix their fuel oil heater, you know, other pleasant jobs, I believe that.

I believe you're right. If you have a chance to do something direct, Lord Atisha said, you don't need the visualization. There's no point.

More powerful. Pasha?

[Говорящий 2] (6:50 - 6:58)
I'm going to ask a non-romantic math question. Okay. You're saying that we're planting 65 seeds per second.

[Говорящий 1] (6:58 - 6:59)
Yeah.

[Говорящий 2] (6:59 - 7:01)
I kind of worked it out a little.

[Говорящий 1] (7:01 - 7:02)
Okay.

[Говорящий 2] (7:03 - 7:08)
It comes out to about roughly 65,000 seeds per day.

[Говорящий 1] (7:08 - 7:26)
Okay. And at the same time, you understand that consciously you can plant probably 10, 20, maybe 65 per day at most. So one out of a thousand seeds that gets planted is planted deliberately, purposefully.

[Говорящий 2] (7:26 - 7:26)
Yeah.

[Говорящий 1] (7:26 - 7:34)
And we can work probably on one a day, like seriously work. So that's like one out of 65,000.

[Говорящий 2] (7:35 - 7:52)
So there are another 64,999 seeds that are just... So how come the results we're expecting to get are from this one out of thousands of seeds that were actually planted consciously and the others are still planted and they're still growing?

[Говорящий 1] (7:53 - 17:51)
Yeah. It's a good question. There's a couple of answers.

One is called background seeds. Okay. So the seeds that you don't plant consciously and that you don't have a strong...

There's three things that make them strong, right? Motivation, conception, meaning are you fully aware of what you're doing? So one is motivation.

One is awareness of what you're doing. And one is your emotional state. Is it done in a strong feeling of devotion and love or a strong feeling of anger and jealousy?

So those three things have a strong effect on the seed. How aware you are of planting it, your intention in planting it, and then your emotional state as you're planting it. It's called kunmong, dushe, and nyomong.

And those of you who care, it's all part of sampa. Those are three divisions of sampa. In the shi sampa, jongwa, tartonga.

Step number two. So a single seed done consciously is probably worth 10,000 others. I'd say something like that.

Okay. If you're conscious. Conscious means two things when you're planting a seed.

One is I'm planting... I'm stirring her coffee because I want a boyfriend. Okay.

That's a conscious intention. I'm stirring her coffee because I want a boyfriend. The highest form of that first one is bodhicitta.

I hope that if I succeed, I will become an example for other people and this idea will spread and I will be the cause of happiness, boyfriend happiness, of thousands or tens of thousands of people. It will spread from me. That's the first kind of motivation.

The awareness that would make the seed say 10,000 times more powerful. The second one is more powerful. And that is how conscious are you of the process?

You see? How conscious are you of the process? Meaning how much do you understand that lipstick has no power?

Because the normal ways to get a boy is lipstick or cosmetics or website or a bar. I'm not making fun of those things. Everybody wants a partner.

Everyone would like to have a partner. I think it's a spiritual need also. People want to have a partner.

And people honestly try the best they can do. They go to a yoga class. They try to put their mat near the cutest guy.

There's only a few guys that come anyway. But you figure, well, he might be spiritual. You know what I mean?

You try to find places where you might find spiritual guys. It's hard. You know like that.

You have strategies. Maybe I should dress differently. Maybe I should wear my hair differently.

Maybe I should go to yoga. You know what I mean? Maybe I should try this online site or that online site.

You know what I mean? You have strategies. None of them has any effect on getting a boyfriend.

None of them has anything to do with getting a boyfriend. And that's logical because some people don't wear any makeup at all and they get a great boyfriend. And some people spend a lot of money on makeup and they don't get a boyfriend.

And some people go to a yoga class to find a boy and there's never a boy in the yoga class. And then some people don't go to yoga class and they do find a boy. And some people go to yoga class and do find a boy.

You see what I mean? It's all random. Anything you can think of to do to get a boyfriend is random because for some people it might work and for some people it might not work which means it doesn't work.

You have to understand that. Cosmetics don't do anything. Yoga doesn't do anything.

Scriptures don't do anything. It's all seeds. It's all seeds.

The more you understand that as you serve the old lady, the principles, the seed is a hundred thousand, a million times more powerful. That's the key. How aware are you that nothing works and that if you want it to work you have to plant a seed?

Plant the seed and you can do whatever you want. Should I invest in real estate or should I invest in stocks? It doesn't matter at all.

They did this thing in Wall Street. They had somebody throw a dart at the stocks on the wall and they invested in those and then they had an expert and then they got the same return. It doesn't matter.

Be generous to someone who needs help and then buy whatever you want. Buy stocks or invest in a house or don't do anything. It doesn't matter.

Something then will happen. The more you understand that nothing works, then that seed is like a hundred thousand. Then we have the four infinite thoughts.

Why are they called infinite? You imagine that thing about stirring the coffee cup. As you are serving the old lady you think, if this is a hit, if this works, if this weirdo philosophy works, then something big could happen in the world.

See what I mean? Car companies would be competing to give away cars to help their stock value and on purpose. They would have a board meeting and they'd say, is there any country left yet where people aren't giving away cars?

And they'd say, yeah, we found a new country. They don't understand anything. No one's giving away cars.

Oh, great, let's go there. Like that. Infinite means infinite karma.

You can actually turn a karma which is infinite, zero to infinite. If you intend to be at the center of a revolution or a virus, then that karma becomes infinite. The one seed collected stirring her coffee, imagining people in lines at the nursing home, is mathematically infinitely more powerful than all the other seeds in the day.

So it's possible to collect a seed in five minutes whose power exceeds all the power of the seeds you collect in your life, if you have the right intention, which is just easy. It's not a big mystical thing. I'm going to start a fad.

That's all. Just think like that. Then that seed is more powerful than all the other seeds you do during the day.

The other half of my answer is that there's a thing called background karma. Like there's stuff in this room that you don't care much about. Personally, I'm not too excited about the color of the walls, or the cement on the ground.

I'm really not excited about this green plastic lawn that I'm sitting on. Those are all called neutral karmas, like background white noise. That's the karmic result of most of the karma that you do during the day.

Because most of the karmas you do during the day are not strongly virtuous, nor are they strongly non-virtuous. They're just white noise. You walk through a room, it's not like you're angry at everybody.

Or you walk through a room and it's not like you're compassionately in love with everybody. You're mostly just neutral. Those are all karmas, and they all have a karmic result.

And they result in neutral karmas. You know, like purple cars on the street. You see what I mean?

Stuff you don't care about much. So those are weak. They're relatively weak karmas.

If you can pull off one karma a day, thinking that you could be at the center of a revolution, then that's worth all the other karmas you do during the day. It's more powerful. That one seed is more powerful.

I was at the drugstore yesterday. I saw a Spider-Man mask. I was going to buy it and wear it during the fire offering.

But it was kind of scary. So I didn't buy it. Just know I was thinking about you.

Okay, other questions? Yes, please. Emmanuel.

I have actually two questions.

[Говорящий 2] (17:52 - 17:53)
I'll charge you double.

[Говорящий 1] (17:55 - 24:41)
The first one is, we've been talking about Buddha Paradise and all this stuff. And also we're talking about the demons. They are trying to convince you not to go there or to keep you from studying.

Now, when we are actually going to those places, are we helping also those beings? Like, are the demons that are preventing us from going there are also getting enlightened? Because it looks like they are.

I mean, all these people are really good. They are here, Mahayana path. But those are collecting even worse karma because they are actually pulling people down.

And my second question is, by the fact that I need people to help, do I create the situation in them? Yeah, good. Good questions.

Two good questions. So a Buddhist ritual to stop demons, right? A Buddhist ritual to slay a demon consists of words of love.

Okay? Like, you talk to the demon. It's called dokpa.

It's a special kind of ritual. Let's say, somebody today was telling me about a house that they have, their parents' house, and it has some negative energy, which could be a spirit, a negative spirit. For example, we do believe that if you are very attached to your house in an unhealthy way and then you die, it's possible your spirit could hang around the house for 50 years or something.

There is such a thing as a haunted house. It's not uncommon. Okay?

Then how do you get a spirit out of your house? How do you clean the house? Or you have a sickness spirit, they call it nedun, who is causing you a strange chronic illness that doesn't respond to any kind of treatments.

How do you deal with these spirits? The scriptures say that the thing that stops them is love, to love them. Somebody told me, okay, this is a secret.

Rinpoche's other secret name for me was King of the Roaches. We had roaches in the house at some point. He called me King of the Roaches and he'd say, tell your subjects to leave.

By the way, the way he got rid of his roaches was he carried them out one by one. If the weather was cold, he took a towel or something outside and wrapped them in the towel. Then after that, we never had roaches, any.

They never ever came in the house. It was really supernatural. He took care of them.

Anyway, it's like this thing where people tell you to talk to the roaches and be nice to them and say, would you please leave? Like, I love you. Your antennas are really cool.

Would you please leave the house? Spirits are the same. Supposedly, when you deal with a spirit, you actually express love for them and concern for their welfare and things like that.

That's a better way to get them to leave. That's protection. The ultimate protection in Buddhism is to love your enemy or to take care of your enemy.

I read a thing. I was trying to do a prayer book for Buddhism. What do you call it?

Vajrayogini prayer book. I grew up in the Episcopal Church. We have a prayer book, which to me is awesome.

There was a rumor that it was written by Shakespeare. I went and studied it. I went to England.

I went to Oxford and I studied some Greek. Not that I was accepted. I just went there and studied Greek.

Then I found out that the 1926 prayer book was written by, I forget his name, but he was just a, what do you call it, like a bishop. There was a joke in England that if you wanted to live the rest of your life in comfort, become his enemy because he would take care of you. He would give you money and he would make sure you had a house.

Like that. He was some kind of really cool guy. It's like that.

In Buddhism, when there's an evil spirit, you actually try to comfort them and talk to them and do prayers for them. It's not like you're hurting them or you want to kill them or you want to burn them and they'll run away or something like that. You sweet talk them.

You set out offerings for them. Because oftentimes they want some kind of offerings. Nyingpo's really good at it.

If you want to learn how, maybe talk to him. There's an offering you can make, daily offering. You take care of them and you pamper them and then they turn to your side like that.

Anyway, that's the way. This whole argument about the protector, this whole argument among the Tibetans about the protector, it's so very wrong because people are being mean and hurting each other about a being who's supposed to be protecting you. The only way to protect anything is to love it.

The only way to protect yourself from anything evil is to love it and take care of them. So the whole thing about hurting each other about protectors is so crazy. You know what I mean?

It's really crazy. The second question I don't remember. By the fact that you need to help other people in order to follow this path and getting enlightenment and understanding that everything comes from us, are we actually creating people that are suffering so we can help them?

Okay, okay, okay. That's an interesting question. Because if you don't have any people to help, then it doesn't work.

[Говорящий 2] (24:41 - 24:42)
Yeah, you're in trouble.

[Говорящий 1] (24:42 - 52:14)
So I need people, right? I need to create people that I can help. That's called...

Well, okay, I'll tell you a couple of funny stories. One is, there's a guy in Detroit. I think I told you, he came to the talk one day.

He came to a weekend DCI seminar, one of the first ones. And then towards the end, he got all excited and he jumped up in class and he said, Geshe-la, I found it! You know what I'm like, what?

And he says, I found an old lady and she's also sick and she's also poor. She's lonely, sick, and poor. One lady.

So now I can get money, a girlfriend, and good health just helping one lady. And then we all laughed at him and then we were all, well, maybe he's right. Yes, it's true.

There's the eight verses. You know the eight verses? BDAG NI SEMS CAN THAMS CAD LA YID BZHIN NOG BU LAS LHAG PA'I DON CHOG DUS PA'I SEMS PA'I YID DAG DU BYED PA TSUN PA SHOG I should cherish other people because they are my ticket to heaven.

The more miserable they are, the more unhappy they are, the more mileage I can get out of them. You know what I mean? So I should feel lucky when I have really irritating people around me because I have a lot of material to work with.

So yeah, you need other people. I wouldn't say you're creating their suffering. There's an argument like that in Master Shantideva, but it's sort of a joke.

He doesn't mean it seriously. You know what I mean? That's sort of reversed.

He says, if you create bad karma and someone hits you, let's say you squash a bug, so therefore somebody has to hit you with a stick. Then there's a place in Master Shantideva where he says, therefore you have caused that person with the stick to make the bad karma. So it's your fault that he's hitting you.

And then it's your fault that he's collecting bad karma. That's not technically true. It's not technically true.

You're not responsible for him hitting you with a stick. He made a karma in the past. The second of the four ways in which karma ripens, habit, is responsible for him hitting you with a stick.

You need a guy to hit you with a stick. He needs to hit somebody with a stick. The fact that he needs to hit somebody with a stick comes from him.

The fact that you need someone to hit you with a stick comes from you. And the miracle of karma is that you will always meet each other. And just think, if it was a dance, or if it was a play with actors, if it was one of Balanchine's big productions with 38 people, doing ballroom dance in groups around the stage, that takes such coordination.

You have to turn to the left and someone's hand is out there. And that goes on for half an hour or something. Karma is much more complex, right?

You have to meet a guy to hit you with a stick at the same moment that he needs to hit somebody with a stick because of the second way that karma ripens. Because he created a habit of hitting people with a stick. So just imagine, every human interaction has to match every other human interaction.

Seven billion permutations. Seven to seven, you know what I mean? It's like a very complex dance.

The interaction of all human beings on this planet has to happen exactly as it happens. So karma is unthinkable, unthinkably powerful. When you need to get hit with a stick, he needs to hit somebody with a stick, etc.

Times seven billion, times every moment of the day. But did you create him? You created him for you, but you didn't create him for him.

So you didn't make people poor so that you could give them money and like that. The day that you are truly generous, there will be no more poor people to give to. Because the third law of how karma opens is the environment.

Poor people exist around you because you are not generous. You have not been generous, so you have to see poor people. When you become truly generous, there will be no more poor people.

To become truly generous, is it necessary that you financially support every person on the planet? And the Buddhism says no. Being truly generous is a state of mind.

You don't have to give $10,000 a year to every person on the planet. You just have to want to and give as much as you have. So we didn't make them poor.

But when they stop being poor, it means that we stop being stingy. At the same time, if you really think about it, the dance of karma in the world, seven billion people interacting is a miracle. It's unbelievable.

It's so cool. Okay, Rosa. Wait, microphone.

Someone asked in the seeds class, what is the cause for the gap between cause and effect? That's a weird, tough question. So what she means by the gap is that, I'll tell you how we usually speak about the gap.

For example, by the way, if there's heavy rain and we can't do the fire offering, I don't want you to go out and sit in the rain because I don't want you to get sick. So if it rains, seriously, we'll just have a class. And that's fine.

That's karma. And we just won't worry about it. We'll give the 40 pounds of melted butter to the camp.

Put it in Jigme's freezer. So I mean, don't stress about it. I mean, it's equal karma to have a fire order, to have a class.

It's equal karma. Don't stress. We just don't worry about it.

Normally the discussion of the gap comes up in, for example, we often visit, in the DCI programs, we often will intentionally choose countries that are poor. And that don't have a lot of dharma going on there. Like when we first went to Bulgaria or Ukraine or Vietnam, we choose countries that are poor.

And then we raise the money in another country and then we spend it ourselves. We lose money to go to Vietnam or Ukraine or Bulgaria. So anyway, then in a lot of those countries, the reason they're poor, one of the reasons they're poor is corruption.

So to do business in some of those countries, you have to bribe somebody. We have a guy, a business person comes to us in one of those countries, which I won't name, who has to give bribes constantly to run his business. So he's obsessed with the question of, there are so many guys I know, especially in the government, who have made so much money out of cheating people or bribery and corruption.

So he's like, he really cares about this stuff. He's deeply spiritual and he's a businessman. And he's like, I need to work this out, Geshe Michael.

You got to help me because otherwise I can't follow what you're saying. I can't do what you're saying. Why is it that there's guys in my country who are the most corrupt and then they have the big Mercedes Benz and they have the big house and they have three girlfriends and supermodels.

Why is that? How can you explain that in your system? And then we get into the gap.

So Rosa's talking about the gap. The time gap means the time between you plant the seed and the result comes to you. And the answer to the corruption question is that in, I don't know, two years ago, the guy loaned some money to his brother with deep feelings of affection and care.

Then the next year he paid off some government officials to build a bridge which never gets built. Or he charges three times the cost of the bridge. And one third of that goes to the government official who okayed the contract, which is the way it's done in some of those countries.

In the following year he got the girlfriends, the Mercedes and the luxury apartment. And it looks like the bribe caused his business to thrive. In the following years, after a few years, he starts to decline.

His business starts to decline, inevitably. All these creepy guys. It catches up to you.

I was in business for 20 years and I was in one of the most potentially corrupt businesses there are, diamonds. And I saw many, many, many people go up and down. There's a joke in the diamond business.

Be nice to everybody. And they say, why? And they say, the people you meet on the way up, you're also going to re-meet them on the way down.

You might have to ask him for a job next year. The guy who's begging you for a contract, you might need a job next year and then you have to ask him for a job. So be nice to everybody.

There's a joke. Be nice to everybody. Because you go up and then you go down.

Anyway, I saw in real practice that people who did a lot of corruption, they always fail. In the long run they always fail. So, when someone asks you this crucial question, which the Bible also asks.

I forget where it is. You can look it up. Why do the wicked prosper?

It's called, Why do the wicked prosper? Why, oh Lord, does someone who pays bribes, why are they successful? And then you have to talk about it in terms of the time gap.

They were nice three years ago. They paid a bribe one year ago. Their company's prospering this year because of the generosity they showed three years ago.

And the bribe in three years causes their company to fail. Got it? Then there's a time gap between the time that you do something and the time that you get it back.

Then there's this joke in, we have a joke in DCI. We take a pen, you know. This is fun if you want to do it.

If you're explaining the time gap to somebody or something like that. Like, why do the wicked prosper? And in the middle of the talk you can start irritating people.

Like, you keep talking, but you keep doing this. And they're all like, why the, is he doing that? And then you just keep talking like you don't know.

And then finally you say, does that irritate you? And they all say yes. And then you say, well, I'm sorry, but it's necessary.

And they're like, why is that necessary exactly? And you say, because I do it every day. I bang on the microphone with the pen every day.

I have to. And they're like, why? Could you just do it for the next group that you talk to?

And then you're like, no, no, I have to do it today. And they're like, why? And you say, because I make the sun come up every morning.

That's my job. And they're like, you make the sun come up every morning? And you're like, yeah.

And they're like, well, how? And I'm like, I bang on the microphone with a pen. Every afternoon around this time I have to bang on the microphone with a pen.

And they're like, that's so stupid. And I say, it's not stupid. Did the sun come up this morning?

They're like, yeah. Well, that's because I banged on the microphone yesterday. And they're like, no, no, that doesn't have anything to do with it.

And I say, what do you mean it doesn't have anything to do with it? Every time I bang on the microphone, the sun comes up the next morning. I'm the one who's doing it, you know?

And then they get like irritated and they're like, but that doesn't have anything to do with the sun coming up. Neither does the prime. Like, I get these mafiosos.

I actually teach the mafia in some countries, okay? Very interesting, delicate teachings. And I was in a restaurant with a bunch of them having this dinner with all these girls walking around.

And I'm like, okay. And they say, stop banging on the microphone. It doesn't cause the sun to come up.

And then I say, well, neither do the bribes. The bribes don't work, okay? Because there's a time gap.

The fact that one thing happens after another thing doesn't prove there's cause and effect, okay? Oh, I bribed the guy last month. I got the contract this month.

Not cause and effect. There's no cause and effect. There's no relationship between bribing them and getting the contract.

If you had done a one-month headstand, you still would have got the contract. You see what I mean? It's not coming from the bribe.

It's coming because you were generous like last year, okay? But there's this time gap. So Rosa didn't ask.

Her question had nothing to do with what I just talked about for 10 minutes. But I think some of these things are cool to teach. They're fun to teach.

Because the question should come up from your friends. Why do creepy people get successful? Why do cheap people have more money?

Why do people who are always mean to people succeed? Then you have to talk about the time gap. You better have that in your pocket to talk about because that's going to be one of the first objections to this sale.

Right? When you're a salesman, they teach you about objections. You're supposed to have five answers ready in your pocket.

This time it's a little yellow. Oh, you want a white one. Here.

This one has black spots in it. Oh, you want a clean one. Yes.

Here, take the yellow one. No black spots. You see what I mean?

And you're supposed to have answers ready. But her question wasn't that. Her question is, why is there a gap between the time that you plant the seed and the time that the result comes?

And in practical terms, we always answer it from an analogy to the natural world. We get out of the question by saying, well, that pine tree didn't pop out five minutes after the acorn fell down. Those squirrels are running around.

Did you see them? They're collecting acorns. And sometimes they trip and they drop one.

And then a tree grows there. It gets stuck in a crack and they can't get through it and then a tree grows there. So why doesn't a tree just pop out of an acorn in five minutes?

What is it then? Where does the time gap come from? I never thought about it.

I don't know. I mean, you can answer by analogy to the natural world, but it's not really an answer, is it? What do you think?

Yeah, that might be one good answer. Seeds are in a print queue. I think that's true.

Yeah, that's true too. Yeah, I think so. The queue or the order is like at an airport, the way the airplanes come out.

In accounting, they have a principle called first in, first out, or first in, last out, like that. Anyway, the first seed you make normally ripens before the second seed you make. Unless you're very angry when you do the second seed.

Then it gets to go ahead of the first seed. So it depends on the power. If you were equally angry with every seed and had equal ignorance about what was happening, they would just ripen in order.

If you got very angry, more angry, then that seed gets to come ahead like that. So Bani's proposed answer, which I think is valid, is that you always have a queue of earlier seeds that are waiting in line, so it would take some time for the most recent seed to get to the front. But then Alejandro's pointing out that if the speed with which seeds ripen is empty, like the pen, then it should be the case that a person could see them ripen in an hour, or something like that.

I'm not a big testimonial guy, but sometimes cool stuff happens. And I think it's cool. We had an example recently, like within the last few years.

So we went to China, and we gave a talk with someone we didn't know very well. They came to Hong Kong and asked us to come. We met them for an hour, and then we said, okay, we'll come to China, you arrange everything.

And we got to China, and it turned out they wanted money. They just wanted money. They were trying to get money off of us.

I was like a dancing monkey, and then they were seeing how much money they could get off the show. It was a little uncomfortable to be there, because they were just trying to get as much money as they could. So we did the whole DCI thing, five days of teaching.

At the end, I always tell the organizers, look, if you lost any money, just tell me, and we'll figure it out. We'll make it up for you. She said, okay, $30,000.

I'm like, well, I didn't really mean... She gave me a bill for $30,000, and it was like new furniture for the office last year. Like that.

I'm like, okay. We did an act of faith, because we just felt like China is important. So we agreed to pay the $30,000, which was hard for us, because we didn't have money.

It was like everything we had. So we gave her $30,000. But in good faith, we said, she can help us help Chinese people, so we'll pay the $30,000.

Then we got on the plane to go home. We were really sad. We just lost a year of work or something.

Then we stopped in Taiwan, and someone called us and said, would you meet us in the airport? One of our students' student runs the airport. So we got to go through the VIP thing, and we got to sit there.

I forget exactly what happened, but they gave us... Is that not completely accurate? I don't know.

Didn't they give us some money or something? Somebody gave us a donation. Wait, I'm getting to that part.

Okay, so they handed us $30,000 cash on the same morning. We didn't know we were going to see them. So anyway, by the way, the lady kept coming to class.

The last time we went, she refused any money. She never took the $30,000. She got changed.

Her mind changed. So it's kind of awesome. But anyway, what I was trying to say is, I think if you are well trained enough and your intention is strong enough that you could have a karmic result instantaneously within a day.

Something like that. If you get good at this system, then something that might take a year or five years to ripen, if you didn't know what you were doing, the more intentional it is, not just intention, but the more you believe the system and you work the system, then the faster it comes back. You can make it happen in a day.

There wouldn't be a gap. So I think what Alejandro said is true, that there is no inherent gap. The gap depends on your understanding.

The degree to which you understand what you are doing will shorten it to zero. So we can say that the gap is caused by ignorance? I think that's a good way to say it.

And you can say, on the other hand, that miracles are possible because of the emptiness of the gap. I got out of the question and it's 4.33. Everything's related. Okay, go ahead.

Yeah, that's an argument. Okay, that's a lower school argument that the conditions of the dance have to be appropriate for the karma to ripen. And until the 2,000 carousels line up, you're not going to be able to get your result.

That's an argument in the Abhidharma. In the higher schools, that argument is considered mistaken. It's called the groundhog argument.

The Abhidharma says, if you have the karma to be born as a dog, but it's not mating season, no, sorry, groundhog, but it's not mating season for groundhogs when you die, then you'll be born as a dog because dogs mate all the time. You don't have to wait longer than 49 days because you can't be in the bottom more than 49 days. So the Abhidharma says that.

That's the same argument, that the external conditions didn't line up yet so the karma can't ripen. But as I think Alhander would argue, you create the seasons. You create the carousels that are spinning and anything can happen anytime if you make the karma.

Well, you are creating the carousels to line up or the, what do you call it, in a slot machine? You're creating that so you don't have to wait for them to line up. You cause them to line up.

The need for you to be born as a dog or groundhog will change. There'll be a miracle. There'll be an immaculate conception with a groundhog, you know what I mean?

And you'll be born, you know what I mean? Because your seeds are creating the reality around you. It's not that your seeds have to wait for the lineup of the reality around you.

They are causing the reality around you. Let's do some tonight when it rains or something. If not, I'll do some questions tomorrow.

Because I think all of us learn maybe more by questions than just straight discourse. So I'll do some tomorrow. Let's do a prayer.

Who can I pick on? Gonzales, are you up for that? Do you have that prayer thing?

Nah. You want to do it? You just go...

Osiris, you got the right one? There's two pages you're going to have to have ready. You ready?

Out loud. Sanghe shindu mitte uwagi Dukkhu nantak shingla chepa shok Ilangur ratna nandala kammey atayami Dikhe wogun Sanam ishe tsotsok shi Sanam ishe nal chungway Nangpa guni topa shok Okay. Thanks.