«Дар освобождения», курс 11 «Искусство ценить себя и свою жизнь», занятие 9

[Говорящий 1] (0:00 - 31:10)
We're in the middle of a section, we're studying a scripture which is a very ancient type of scripture, which is called Lam Rim, which is the steps to enlightenment from A to Z. Start from A, go to Z. Do these simple steps, one by one, just focus one by one on these steps, and by the time you get to the end, you will be a Buddha.

So that's a pretty extreme claim, right? It's probably the greatest contribution of Tibetan culture to the world. It's called Lam Rim.

This is a kind of literature where they trace the steps to enlightenment one by one in an experiential way. We are on a project. It's probably about a 14 or 15 year project.

I think we're in our third year now to study one of the greatest Lam Rims, which is a series of lectures. It's a transcript of a series of lectures given by Pabongka Rinpoche, who's the teacher of T. John Rinpoche, who is the teacher of the current Dalai Lama.

And T. John Rinpoche was my teacher's root teacher also. So we're studying seven steps that we should try to do before a meditation session to prepare our minds for a meditation session.

We're halfway through the last of the seven steps, which is dedicating the good karma of the meditation session. And actually that step of a meditation session would be done at the end of the meditation session, just before you leap up and run to work, right Rosa? So just to repeat the seven, first we bow down to whatever holy beings, whoever we consider holy, especially we consider what it is about them that we want to learn and we honor them for that quality.

For example, my heart teacher has a peculiar capacity for silence, real silence, not like three-year retreat in silence. Just kidding. Like real appreciation for silence and stillness.

And then I need that. I know I don't have it very well. And when I think of my teacher, I think, oh, I'd like to learn that, or that's something I wish would rub off on me.

And that's why I hang around my teacher, for example. So the first of the seven steps is to appreciate your teacher. Think about what it is, why are they your teacher and what do you want to learn from them?

Piano teacher, it's clear, I want to learn piano from you. But I think sometimes with a spiritual teacher you forget the process is supposed to be you want to learn piano or you want to learn something that they are already and you want to be like that. So then in the first step of a meditation preparation you think about what it is, what quality is it that you would like to learn from your teacher.

Secondly, you make them an offering. You can imagine a zillion dollars or you can fill the sky with roses. These are all traditional offerings.

You can picture the world as a mandala, which is what we do before class, and offer a completely peaceful world without war, without hunger or death. And those are traditional offerings. But the highest offering to a teacher is called DRUG PA'I PHYIR PA, which is your own kindness towards other people, your own success in being a good person and a nice person.

And that's the offering that they prefer. It doesn't do any good to raise a lot of money and offer a teacher something expensive or make lots of big offerings. And then if you fail in your personal practice, if you're not kind to each other especially, then that hurts the teacher.

That hurts their heart. We say in Buddhism it hurts their health. So we make the offering of our practice, successful practice.

Successful practice is often failed practice, right? It means I tried to be patient with that other student that I was supposed to work with on this project. I was actually patient for two days.

What's the implication? On the third day I blew it and got angry. But the two days you can offer your teacher, and that's a good offering.

That's a nice offering. There's rarely any final successes in spiritual practice. I reached a place where I'll never be angry at this irritating other student again.

We can rarely say, right? But we can say, I'm trying. And that's a very lovely offering, appropriate offering.

The third step is to clear your conscience. Think of anybody you've hurt in your life or anything you've done that's been hurtful and clear that from your conscience. Unless you go through that step you can't meditate.

There will be a subtle block to meditation. Deep in meditation you will get hung up like a boat going down a river, get stuck on a tree limb or something. You'll get hung up suddenly and you won't be able to get past a certain point.

Your conscience has to be clear. Think about the people you've had trouble with. Admit it.

Confess it. Clean it. And that's a lot towards working it out.

The fourth preparation is to appreciate yourself and other people. It's been the focus of this ten-day teaching. It is considered the most important practice for karma.

To get enlightened. To help the world. The most important practice you can do is before you sleep, as you lay your head down on the pillow, reflect on the kind things you've done in your life and the kind things you've done today and the kindness deep inside you.

Everybody has a, at their deepest place, even the most supposedly evil people in the world, there is a deep well of kindness. Everybody has it. You have to appreciate that you have it.

Before you sleep you have to come up with things that you did that were nice during the day. Kind things that you did. And there are many.

It's like you're not in the habit of doing it. But once you start, if you get a start, then it's cool. You lay down and these thoughts flood into your mind.

Oh, at 8 o'clock we did such a nice thing and at 9 o'clock, ooh, that was even better. At 10 o'clock we were so sweet to so-and-so. And your mind will start to remember all the kind things you're doing.

If you make it a habit, it will come to you. The first few days are hard. I didn't do anything good this week.

Then what should you do? You can think about things you did in the past that you don't even remember. Why?

How? You look at the repercussions of them. You can see the repercussions in the current moment of good things you must have done in the past.

If you're in a human body with two legs, you're already a saint in your past life. According to Buddhism, you wouldn't have the karma to have a functioning body and mind unless you had been an extraordinary person in your past life. So, assuming your mind is functioning, which it must be if you're laying your head down on the pillow, you can take joy in what you must have done to get this far.

Everyone has come this far and you must have worked, according to Buddhism, you have worked for thousands of lifetimes to get to where you are now. You have worked tirelessly and deeply and sincerely for thousands of lifetimes to get to this room, to hear these things. So, if you can't remember anything kind you did today, you can look down at your toes, pull the sheet up, and there's a story in Arizona about the guy who, there used to be a ghost who would come every day and stare at him from the end of the bed in the moonlight.

And then one day he got really irritated, he got a shotgun, and when he saw the two eyes, he shot them and then he blew his toes off. They were his toenails reflecting in the moonlight. Anyway, that's an old Arizona book.

But you can pull your sheets up and look at your toenails and just think about how you created your body, healthy, relatively healthy human body, and appreciate the good karma you must have done. There's always something to appreciate about yourself. And then there's all the things you see other people doing and saying, and there's thousands of...

Once you get in the habit of noticing the nice things going on around you, it becomes a game. It becomes a very pleasant, sleepy time game to think about all the nice things you saw people do today. We could do thank yous all day, right?

I mean Esther could sit up here and really thank each person for all the nice things they're doing and we wouldn't have a class. But maybe that would be the class, right? So anyway, that's the fourth preparation.

Fifth one is asking for teachings, asking the holy beings around you to teach you. It can be formal teachings. You can get an auditorium ready and get the seats ready and you can ask a teacher to come and teach.

But you could also ask for informal teachings, both positive and negative. So, I don't know. I learned from Anatole today, as usual, his grapefruit juice is better than mine.

And I'm like, how'd you do that? And then he taught me over there in the corner. It's a special thing.

It's really cool. Like you don't peel the whole white part off, you peel the yellow part off. But you don't peel the white part off and then you mush the whole thing and it has a different consistency.

Very smooth, good aftertaste. The rosé is really fine. And I learned something.

That's a positive lesson and that can really affect your health. And then the negative lessons, people get mad at you or people criticize you or you see nervous people around you or you see people fighting around you and then those are all coming from you and those are lessons for us. And the negative lessons, maybe they're more powerful.

We can learn more about ourselves. In preparing for meditation, the fifth preparation is to ask for lessons, both positive and negative. Formal and informal.

And then, as I said before, you can't get upset when the negative ones come because you asked for them this morning. Preparation number six, ask your teachers and your spiritual friends, good friends, good influences to stay in your life. Ask them not to pass away.

Ask them not to move away. Ask them not to leave you. Stay in my life.

Keep influencing me. I need your good influence. I think people in our particular sangha, our community, have learned that they learn almost more from the people around them than in the formal teacher.

So we've learned in our own life that we learn much more from the people around us. So it's important to consciously search out. When I meet a nice person, I try to glom on them and make sure they're around me because maybe it will rub off.

And don't do the opposite. If you have a friend who is not a very nice person, I mean, look at your friends and if they're really not a very nice person, they're not kind to others, they're not a good example, then be careful. Don't be too close.

Don't keep around them. They will burn you sooner or later. In the diamond business, there was a...

What was it? In our company, we had a rule. We had 800 employees in New York.

We had... Daniel's wife worked for me. I don't know how many years.

Five years? Ten years? But we had 800 employees in New York.

We had 10,000 internationally. And we just had a policy that a manager could not ask a worker to do something that was dishonest or immoral or unethical. We had a rule that you couldn't ask someone working for you to do something like to lie to a customer or something like that.

Why? Because sooner... If you teach them to lie, sooner or later they will lie to you.

Or if you teach them to cheat a customer, then sooner or later they will cheat the company. If they get in the habit, if you teach someone to do something wrong, sooner or later they will do it to you. So it's better to surround yourself by people who are good people.

If you have a friend who's being unkind to someone else or unfair to someone else or unpleasant to someone else, then be careful. Because sooner or later they will do it to you. As long as they're your friend, it's okay.

But that will always switch. So surround yourself by people who are kind to others no matter what. They are kind to stupid people.

They are kind to old people. They are kind to sick people. They are kind to people who are hopeless.

They are kind to everybody. Surround yourself by that kind of person. Because then they'll be nice to you when you're not so handsome or beautiful or smart.

Surround yourself by a friend, by friends who will serve everyone. Because then sooner or later they'll be serving you. That's the way it goes.

Don't make friends with people who won't make friends with everybody. Because sooner or later it will turn towards you. So you ask those people to stay in your life.

It's nice if you have a good friend, a nice person, tell them sometimes. Ask them sometimes. I'm not talking the guru.

Oh guru, please stay in my life. I'm not talking about that lama. I'm talking about the good friends you have who are influencing you well.

Then sometimes on the plane to Guadalajara you should turn to them and say, I'm really lucky that I met you. And since I met you I've been a better person. And I'd really appreciate it if you stayed with me.

Stay near me. When I'm stupid, tell me I'm stupid. Okay, Alejandro?

Okay, he'll write it to me. Give me a reality check sometimes. Ask your friends to help you.

And say, I love you and I want you to stay in my life. Because we don't say those things enough. Okay, then preparation number six was, was that?

That was six. Then you do your meditation and it goes sweetly because your mind is so sweet by then. And then after the meditation you take all the good karma you made by all those six steps and by the meditation and you give it away, which is the way in Buddhism that we protect good karma, good karmic seeds.

We safeguard them by offering them to some higher purpose. By sending them to some higher purpose. It's called dedication.

So we're in the middle of dedication. We're in the middle of a discussion. By the way, we're not having a break.

Okay, I'm sorry. We have like 45 minutes. Is that okay?

We just use the time. It's easy for me to say I'm talking. All right, so we've been discussing if you say the way to protect your good karma is to offer it to a higher purpose, what are you protecting the good karma from?

If I plant a good karmic seed in my mind by being there when I did something good, by hearing myself, by watching myself, by thinking about myself, when I did something good it planted a good seed in my mind. So why do I have to give those seeds away to other people or dedicate them to some higher purpose? What could endanger those seeds?

And the answer is anger. Every time we get upset at somebody, every time we entertain strong feelings of anger, then according to Buddhist belief, that anger can go deep into your subconscious and spoil good karmic seeds. It can spoil, ruin them.

Then we've been talking about quotations from Master Shantideva from the 700s, and we've been looking at quotations from Master Chandrakirti from around the same time, 650, something like that. And we've been hearing their opinion on how that process works. How is it that anger destroys your good karma?

And we're continuing now. So if you want to follow the Tibetan, you got it? Okay, it's right up there.

And I like to teach from the Tibetan. I prefer to teach from authentic scriptures. Even when I do a general talk, in my own head I'm going from the scripture, but I'm just not imposing the Tibetan people.

But you, I'm imposing. ,GZHAN GAL PO RGYAL ZAGS PA'I, ,SKYE BA RGYAS TSA BRJOM PAR GSUM PA, ,KHONG DRO CHE KHYEN DANG, By the way, you will notice there's a lot of silent prefix letters in Tibetan. I know that the two wo of you are going to the sutra.

They pronounce the... There are silent letters. So just hang in there.

You can do good deeds for millions of years, but they can be destroyed by anger. How much is destroyed depends on some certain factors which you should know about. ,KHONG DRO CHE KHYEN, means the person who's getting angry, which is us.

,BYA YOD NYID, means the person that you're angry at. ,RTOG PA THO MEN GYI BSKYED PAR GYI, Depending upon the difference in their spiritual levels. Depending on the difference in their spiritual levels.

What's a typical difference? One person might have reached certain meditation levels. They might have reached certain levels of compassion or love.

They might have reached certain levels of understanding emptiness. Like that. So people are at different levels.

,BYA YOD NYID RTOG PA THO MEN GYI BSKYED PAR GYI, ,RTOG PA RGYAL DANG STONG GI RGYAS SA BYOMS TE, Depending on the relative spiritual level of the angerer and the angeree, you can destroy either RGYAL or STONG. Either a hundred eons of hard work or a thousand. So it's good to know, well, teach me what's...

I only want to lose a hundred and not a thousand eons of work. Could you help me out? Who do I have to not get angry at?

Okay, here it is. ,DE YANG BYANG SEMS MA YIN PAS BYANG SEMS LA PHRO NA, ,RGAL PA STONG DU BSAGS PA, If a person who is not a bodhisattva gets angry at a person who is a bodhisattva, then the person who is not a bodhisattva loses a thousand eons of hard work. Good karma.

So there's a very common thing in Buddhism where if there's a person who really is... High Lama doesn't mean you have a red suit on. It's in your head, right?

You could be a High Lama and look like anybody and you can have a red suit and be a schmuck. So it's not the suit, right? But if you are a High Lama in your mind and if you've reached certain levels, then they're kind of going out of their way not to get into situations where someone could get angry at them.

You see what I mean? If someone's close to getting angry or saying something inappropriate or doing something inappropriate, out of concern for that person's seeds, the bodhisattva will avoid the confrontation. They will sidestep that person or sidestep that situation.

If they feel that they corrected the person and the person would get worse, then they just sidestep the person. They try to avoid the person and they don't defend themselves because if the person didn't listen and they got worse, then they would destroy more good karma. So there's a lot of bodhisattva, what do you call it, sidestepping going on in the world.

BYANG SEMS STOBS CHE BA'I CHUNG BA LA GROS NA If a bodhisattva of a higher power gets angry at a bodhisattva of lesser power, can bodhisattvas get angry? Yes. Because you can become a bodhisattva long before you reach nirvana.

Nirvana, after you reach nirvana, you can't get mad anymore. But you can be a bodhisattva a long time before that. If a bodhisattva who is more powerful gets angry at one which is less powerful, by the way, if a bodhisattva can't sidestep, then there would be disastrous consequences to the other person.

You see? Really terrible consequences can happen if the bodhisattva doesn't avoid that situation. BYANG SEMS STOBS CHE BA'I CHUNG BA LA GROS NA RGYAL PA RGYAL SOGS PA'I DGE RTZA SBYONG Then that bodhisattva who's more powerful gets angry at a bodhisattva who's less powerful.

The more powerful bodhisattva loses a hundred eons of good karma and not a thousand. Got it? Nod your head.

If you don't nod your head, you probably won't be able to go home on time. PHYIR NA SKABS PA RGYAL SOGS PA'I DGE RTZA SBYONG PAR GSUM PA YIN GSUM PA YIN at the end of a sentence means the buddhas have said that, not me. I'm just telling you what the buddhas have said.

It says they said in the scriptures. GONG CHUD DGE RTZA MI SBYONG PA'I THABS NI How can we protect our good karmas from being destroyed by, what do you call it? Uncontrollable acts of anger that we have.

We can't predict when we're going to get angry, right? We can have a perfectly good ten days, a great yoga class, and Anatole makes us healthy food, and we get sung to extraordinarily by Danny and Marie. Donnie.

And let's call Michael and Janet. Okay. That was my generation.

But suppose all these beautiful things happen and then we can't guarantee that we're not going to get angry in the parking lot. Someone backs into our car, or the car is too hot. We can go through ten days of extraordinary, beautiful teachings, and I can't promise you I won't get angry in this hallway on the way out if something happens that I don't like.

So we have, how do we protect our karma? How do we deposit it in the bank? Then here's his answer.

LO GRUB RGYA TSO'I ZHUGS PA'I DOR LO GRUB RGYA TSO'I is a personal name of a person in ancient times. ZHUGS means, by the way, the name means ocean of wisdom. And then ZHUGS PA means requested by.

DOR means sutra. So very often a sutra is named by the person who asked the question in class. By the new Nick who kept asking questions in class.

And then they'll say, okay, let's call this the sutra requested by Nick because he kept asking that question over and over. Then there are beautiful stories in Tibet about these people who asked the questions. And the most irritating people in the classes, the Tibetans decided they were tantric angels.

They must have been Buddhas. People always complained to me about the early ACI recordings from New York. Certain students are attacking me all the time.

I said, well, you never know. You never know who they could be. So you have to be careful.

LO GRUB RGYA TSO'I ZHUGS PA'I DOR In that sutra, DOR, he said, JI LTAR RGYA TSO'I PHYED NAG CHU THIG LUNG RGYA TSO'I MA ZAD BAR DU DE MIN ZAD DE BZHIN BYANG CHUB YON NGU'OD DGE BA YANG BYANG CHUB MA THO BAR DU DE MIN ZAD JI LTAR RGYA TSO'I PHYED NAG CHU THIG LUNG means if you're standing in a cruise ship in the middle of the Pacific and you take, what do you call it? Eye dropper? Is it called eye dropper?

And you take one drop of water out of the ship's water supply, right? You have a glass of water on the ship and you drop a single drop into the Pacific Ocean from that bottle. That drop will stay in the ocean, according to the sutra, until the ocean itself dries up.

There will be some part of that drop in the ocean until the day the ocean dries up. And Abhidharma, third chapter, describes how this earth will end and there will be a great war and there will be a ball of fire from a certain weapon and it will destroy the atmosphere. And then the sun itself, much later, will supernova and it will slowly burn the vegetation and the atmosphere from the planet and then the oceans themselves will evaporate.

And that will be the end of the planet. So, in Buddhist belief, there's a timeline, there's a date on which this world will end. And on that day, the last drop of water in the ocean evaporates.

Until that day, the drop you put in the ocean from the cruise ship is in the ocean. Some tiny atoms from that drop of water will remain in the ocean until the day millions of years from now when that ocean finally dries up. The last drop of water dries from the oceans of earth.

That one drop will stay. JI LTAR RGYA TSOG CHEN PO'I CHU CHU STIG means one drop of water. ZHUNG means if you drop it.

RGYA TSOG MA ZAD PAR DU DE MIN ZAD Until the ocean itself dries up in the end of time for this world, then the effects of that drop are there. Tiny little atoms of that drop are still there. DE BZHIN, in the same way, BYAMS SBYUNG RNGUB DGE BA DANG BYAMS SBYUNG MA RTOG PA DU DE MIN ZAD If you dedicate every little good thing you do to your enlightenment, every little good thing I do, I want it to make me a Buddha.

I want to have my own planet. Don't settle for one subway restaurant. I have a friend, people say, do you know anybody influential in the Verde Valley?

I said, yeah, man, I'm in. They say, who do you know? I say, I know the lady who owns the Taco Bell in Kottman.

That's the level where I am. But anyway, you will have your own planet, not just your own Taco Bell. You will own a planet.

You will be in charge of a planet. In charge means you have to take care of everybody on the planet. And what you can do to protect your karma is when you have a good day and you finally do some nice things, say, I send that karma to my enlightenment.

I send that karma to Mike the Buddha. And send it to Mike the Buddha. Mike the Buddha is watching you right now, by the way.

Mike the Buddha is... whenever he's going to happen, I don't know.

[Говорящий 2] (31:13 - 31:19)
Well, let's say he's watching from the future.

[Говорящий 1] (31:20 - 42:08)
Then you can talk to yourself, the future Buddha that you will be. Ravi, the future Buddha. You can talk to yourself.

I used to sit in the bathroom and talk to Mike the Buddha from the future. I really try hard. I know it's taking a long time.

And you give them the karma. You say, here, take care of this karma until I get to you, to be you. Got it?

You take care of this karma until I get there, until I come back. Take care of this karma. BYANG CHUB MA THOB PA DU DE MIN TSE And then that karma is protected and it will never be destroyed until the day you become a Buddha.

It's very nice. Very nice. So practice.

Talk to yourself. You are watching now. You are watching yourself.

You're probably cheering. You probably have those pom-pom things, like, good job, that was a good week. You did all the good things to help people.

Okay. By the way, I went and looked for that quotation. That was a long story.

I spent a couple hours on that. I'm just going to... I'll talk to it about...

I'll tell you. He's going to talk about it. RANG GIS RGYAS TSA CHU THIG LTA BU DE, RGYAL BA SRED BYED KYI RGYAL TSO RGYAS TSA RGYAL TSO DANG, BRAL BAR DNGOS BA SREL BAR BYED NA If you throw the little drops of your good deeds into the ocean of the good deeds of all the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, which is what you're doing when you're dedicated to future Buddha, Kim Khorba, future Buddha.

When you offer it to them or send it to them, take care of that karma for me, will you? Then in a sense, you are adding your tiny little drops to an ocean, a vast sea, thousands, billions of tons of virtue, of more powerful beings. So, you see what I mean?

You're mixing your karma in with extraordinary karmas of more powerful beings, which if they took physical form, would exceed the limits of physical space in the universe. You're throwing in your drop. Here's my drop.

It's not a ton. It's not a pound. It's just a drop.

But you're adding it to the, what do you call, central bank account. You're putting it in a credit union. And you're just a little tiny person and your virtues are tiny, but you're putting into the big credit union.

Okay, got it? DGE MTSA RGYA MTSA DON DANG NGOR SRE BAR BYED NA BYANG CHUB MA THOB PAR DU Until the day you reach enlightenment, MI'I MDZAD This MDZAD, those of you studying Tibetan, M-D-Z-A-D, is a very common word. It's the honorific form of to do and it's prenasal.

Say MDZAD. MDZAD. So MDZAD is different from MDZAD.

So say MDZAD. So unfortunately, this spelling is also prenasal. MDZAD, it's a different spelling.

This one is much more rare and it means to wear out. MDZAD, possibly D-Z-A-D. It means to wear out.

So if you throw your little tiny virtues at the end of each day, when you are happy about yourself, when you appreciate what you've done at Diamond Mountain, helping the retreatants selflessly, and they do appreciate it by the way, and they tell me every time, they're always crying, and anyway, so we did little good karmas, throw them in the cosmic ocean of all the good karmas of all the holy beings, and then MDZAD means they'll never wear out.

They're protected. Until the day you become enlightened. PHANG CHEN PA GNYIS GYIS TZAM PA SRE BA'I SPA'I BYED GSUNGS The Buddha, it has been stated that then it's like the two...

say PHANG CHEN. PHANG CHEN is an ancient synonym for PHO NYA. What's a PHO NYA?

Yeah, PHO NYA is a tantric word for a messenger. Like a messenger from God, right? That's called a PHO NYA.

PHANG CHEN is a similar word. PHANG CHEN has... what do you call it?

Connotations of pony express riders. Messenger, but the old kind, that would ride a horse for a hundred miles as hard as they could and then fall off the horse and the horse dies and they hand the message to the next guy. That's a PHANG CHEN.

One day two PHANG CHENs met up on the road and they were going the same way and they were running short on food, but they had to get... There's a nice PHANG CHEN station near the Dragoons, right? It's still there.

A pony express stop. There are some wild stories about stuff that happened there. The walls are still there, adobe.

Anyway, they met up on the road. One of them had a lot of TSAM PA. TSAM PA is roasted ground barley flour and it's the Tibetan national food, especially for monks because then you don't have to cook.

You roast it ahead of time. You have it ground barley and then you can just mix it with some Tibetan tea and you can live on that for years. You don't have to eat anything else.

It's super nutritious. It's like chia seed paste. One of them had a big bag of white barley TSAM PA.

That flour is called TSAM PA. It tastes just like Cheerios if you're interested. I mean, I was freaked out because then I started eating it for many years.

You can't eat more than a cup because you get diarrhea, so be careful. But I ate it for years in the monastery. So anyway, one of them had a big bag of white TSAM PA and then one of them had a little bag of black TSAM PA which is crushed from roasted beans, like what they call pinto beans, black pinto beans.

So one guy has a little bag of black bean flour which is pretty powerful and nutritious and the other guy has a bigger bag of barley flour which is also nutritious but not as much as the little black bag. So the guy with the white bag of flour which is much bigger decides it's worth it to mix his in with the other guy's little black bag of flour and they'll share it until they get to the next Pony Express dump. So they agree to share, we consolidate their TSAM PA bags and they mix it all up.

And then there's a story that they were riding and riding and riding and then the guy who threw in the white TSAM PA was getting irritated because he figured the black TSAM PA must be gone by now because he only put in a cup and I had a huge 50-pound bag. So he's telling the other guy, I think your share is used up by now. And the other guy was really smart and he said, let's check.

And they look inside the bag and there's little black spots everywhere, right? Mixed in with the white. Every 10 tablespoons of white has a little tiny black spot in it.

He says, see, my TSAM PA is still there. Get it? So if you throw in your little karmas in with the credit union of all the enlightened beings, if you dedicate every little nice thing you do at the end of the day to your enlightenment, you are putting it in a huge galactic credit union of enlightened beings.

And it will last there until the last withdrawal is made from that bank. It will stay there, like in the ocean, like a drop of water in the ocean. He doesn't explain that image, but I got it from another book.

We got another 20 minutes, hang in there, okay? ,RDO LUNG DI, ,THEG SANG GI RDO YONGS DRAG NA MED KYANG, He said, by the way, that quotation about the ocean and the drop of water, I cannot locate it in any sutra that's available to us right now in our monastery. But in the sutras commonly known to us in our monastery, I can't find that quotation.

It's famous, but I can't find it. ,SANGS RGYAS KYI GSUNGS KYI RDO BZHIN TU MANG BA'I, But as we all know, there are many sutras. ,RDO ZHIG TU BLO DU RGYAL TSUL ZHUGS PA ZHIG YIN NGES GSUNGS, There must be a sutra which has that quotation in it.

So of course, I took that as a personal challenge because our project over the last 25 years has completed all of the sutras. All the sutras from India are complete. We've input all of them.

So I was in the car and I'm like, I can find this thing. And I looked and looked and looked. It's not there.

There is a sutra called that name and it's not in there. And then I found another older book from Tibet that said this quotation has been, these four verses of poetry have been, they summarize the sutra. They're not from the sutra.

A Tibetan wrote the poem to pass on the teaching in the sutra and you can't find it in the sutra, so don't try. Then somebody else said it was from Lhapta. This is a famous book by, there's two Lhaptas, but a famous book by, Shantideva wrote on Lhapta, for example.

ZHIG GZHIR SANG MO CHAD LHAG PA KUN LAS GDUG PA in Tibetan. So I checked them and I can't find it in there either. So the bottom line is it's a very nice verse and it probably comes from somewhere.

RGYEN LAS Am I on RGYEN LAS?

[Говорящий 2] (42:09 - 42:19)
Are we? Where am I? Okay, let me go find Gita.

[Говорящий 1] (42:20 - 46:49)
Sorry. I have pages and pages of research on this sutra. Oh yeah, okay.

JI LTAR DNGOS BA RTOG LAS How you should do your dedication is described in the sutras. SEMS CAN THAMS CAD DANG THU MONGS DU BYAS TE SHES PA DANG Then he says it should be held in common with all living beings. It's like a credit union.

The funds should be held in common. What are the funds here? Your good karma.

Your good karma. They should be held in, what do you call, in common. Then I went and looked.

I tried to see if I could find the whole, if I could find that whole quotation in the sutra and I did and that's a very long story and I think I will spare you. If you're interested someday in the future, the sutra is called CHOS YANG DRAG PA GDUG PA which means the Excellent Summary of the Dharma. It's a sutra, one of the sutras.

Let's just go over it briefly. It says, MNGON LAM GYI LOM SEMS MED PAS MNGON LAM GYI BAR DOG TU CHIN PA BSTAN What does it mean the perfection of prayer? How do you perfect the act of prayer?

And he says dedication without LOM SEMS. What's LOM SEMS? Yeah, LOM SEMS is, by the way, LOM is a very particular idiom and it means delusions of grandeur. Like, I'm Napoleon, would be LOM SEMS. I'm a great saint. Or something like that. That would be LOM SEMS. In the tantric vows, there's a vow, GNAL SBYAR BAR LOM, what is that? GNAL SBYAR BAR LOM.

DE MED SEMS CAN BYIN DE BSTAN SEMS CAN BYIN Yeah, delusions that I am a master practitioner is breaking a vow in the higher teachings. All right, MNGON LAM GYI LOM SEMS MED PAS MNGON LAM GYI BAR DOG CHIN PAS SEMS CAN THAMS CAD KYI RGYAS BA'I RTZA BA DANG I take all the good karma ever done by any person, normal person, BDAG GIS RGYAS BA'I RTZA BA NA MTSOGS KYI SGO NAS and I bank it along, not only with the karma of the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, but with everyone's good deeds. And I imagine that we put them all in the bank.

So, that's even sweeter, right? All the good deeds you saw today, anybody do, you can imagine that they're being put in the bank with yours and you're banking them for everybody. You're putting them in the bank.

You are mixing the two SEMS PAS yours and other people's. SEMS PAS And that's the line that he quotes and he doesn't say more. That's the little line that he quotes.

Bank them together. LA RNAMS MED PA'I YANG DAG PA RDZOGS PA'I BYANG CHUB DU YONGS SU MNGOL BA MA YIN NO And then we dedicate them to the Buddhahood of all of us, that we all become a Buddha. RTOGS KYI LOM SEMS MED PA'I RTOGS KYI And then he goes on with another one.

RGYEN LAS YONGS SU MNGOL BAR BSKYED PAR CHEN NAS CHIN GYI MA LO TSE NYID DO ZHES GSUM PA LTAR Then he quotes RGYEN. He quotes Alankara. What's Alankara?

What's RGYEN mean? An ornament, yeah. In Tibetan, RGYEN.

RGYEN means, it's not the same as RGYEN. RGYEN means a piece of jewelry. I like the word.

I studied it in Princeton when I was studying Sanskrit. My teacher really liked the Sanskrit. It's called Alankara.

ALANG means ready to go to the party. KARA means to make somebody. So Alankara means ready to go to the party.

And it's the Sanskrit word for a piece of jewelry, like a necklace or a bracelet, is Alankara. There's a famous book called Alankara. Abhisamaya Alankara.

YONGS SUM LO BAR SKYES PA CHEN He quotes two lines from it, the first one and the last one, and he doesn't give us the rest. So, what do we do? I have like a six-page explanation of it by Choney Lama.

We have 16 minutes.

[Говорящий 2] (46:52 - 47:23)
Let me think about it. Say again? I never do that.

Oh, you mean over time? I thought you, yeah. I'm going to...

Okay, let's do that.

[Говорящий 1] (47:24 - 1:02:00)
I'll just go straight. We run out of time. I was looking for something more sexy, but it's all sexy.

Okay. So he quotes very briefly a line that every young monk would know. So most people join the monastery at age seven or eight, and when you get there, they don't trust you to go to debate ground.

You have to memorize three books before you get to go to the... So you might not be allowed to debate until you're 15 or something like that. So between the age of seven and 15, normally you memorize these three books that you have no idea what they're saying.

It's like memorizing a physics book when you're seven years old, but it helps later. I did the same thing. I memorized the Abhidharmakosha, the first four chapters, three and a half, and I didn't know what a word meant.

It was before I knew Tibetan. So it's considered very useful, and it was. So anyway, he's going to...

I got you an explanation of these lines from the Abhisalamankara written by Choney Lama, who wrote the commentary to the Diamond Cutter. He was a great lama from Tibet, West East Tibet, who lived in the 1700s. I really love him.

He's a great writer. His books were burned. All his books were burned.

All the copies were lost. We found some of them in Russia, near the Hermitage Museum. I found, after five years of research, we found some of them.

Then later we found some in Beijing, and later we found some in Mongolia. We pieced together his collected works. It's like trying to recover Shakespeare or something.

Then I was missing a couple of pages. So I decided, what the hell, I'll call Choney Lama monastery in Tibet. I'll just cold call Choney Monastery, see if they have the few missing pages.

It was just bizarre, because in the old days we weren't allowed to call Tibet. So anyway, I just get the phone number and call Choney Monastery. I say, Hi, who are you guys?

Does anybody there know about Choney Lama? They're like, we don't speak Tibetan. They said, pok kye ma she, ma she, ma she, we don't speak Tibetan.

I'm like, does anybody speak Tibetan there? Then they said, there's one guy, mi jig, mi jig. I said, get him, get him.

They got this old man and they put him on the phone and he spoke Tibetan and nobody else did. It was very sad. Anyway, so we completed his collected works and we have them and the ACIP has published them and now everyone has them.

So anyway, it's a great writer. He's like Shakespeare. Here we go.

Ngo-way gom lam ni. So, this is all a huge tangent and we won't finish today. Gom lam means that period in your life after you see emptiness directly is called gom lam.

So, it's the fourth path, the fourth of the five paths, path of habituation, meaning you get used to what you saw when you saw emptiness directly. So this is a very sweet period of your life. How does it go?

There are five stages of spiritual evolution recognized by Buddhism. Every person goes through five stages in their spiritual evolution. Number one, you have a tragedy in your life.

Something goes very wrong. You lose someone you love. Something terrible happens.

I've had students with terrible, terrible stories. The students who are most serious had the greatest tragedies in their younger life and it makes them good students and Buddhism recognizes that process and we say that a good tragedy often puts you on the spiritual path. If your life's going smooth, you don't question things.

If you have a terrible tragedy in your family or your life, then you start questioning and those people are good Dharma practitioners. People have had some tragedies in their life. These are the best students.

The others are a little too comfortable and they have a pretty good car and nice job and things are going okay. They won't get serious until they get their first stroke or cancer or something like that. But if you're lucky, then when you're young, you have a tragedy and that puts you on the path.

Number two, someone clearly explains the pen thing to you. That's all. Nothing more sophisticated than that.

Someone teaches you about the pen. In your life, if you are lucky, you will meet someone who tells you about the pen. If you don't know about the pen, you must have been in Alaska.

Anybody got a pen? You can loan me? I can do it in two minutes, okay?

Then you reach level two. Everybody's had a tragedy, right? If you haven't, I can probably supply one.

All right. Quick, what is this thing? It's a pen.

If a dog comes in here, is Bodhi his name? Yeah, okay. So I'm not talking about your grandchild, okay?

We have another Bodhi. Somebody named their grandchild Bodhi. If a young puppy comes here and I wave this thing in front of his face, what will he do?

He will chew on it. Does he see this object as a pen? No.

What does he see it as? You can say a chew toy. Who's correct, the human or the dog?

Both, okay? Human... Wait, animal rights, right?

Humans are funny. They will get angry at the dog and say, why are you chewing my pen? Pen.

It's a pen, don't chew it. And then you can imagine the dog looking up and saying, well, why are you riding with my chew toy? You see what I mean?

I mean, it's the same thing, right? So it's valid that they see it as a chew toy and it's valid that I see it as a pen. Who's correct?

Both. Next question. If I take this thing, object, and I set it on this table and all of us leave the room on time, we have to be cleaned up and out of here at five, right?

Or we get charged a zillion dollars overtime, probably. If I put this on the table and all the animals go out and all the humans go out, at that time, which one is it, a pen or a chew toy? Neither.

You can say neither. That neither is the meaning of the Buddhist term emptiness. That neither is the only meaning of the Buddhist term emptiness.

If you understand that neither, you understand emptiness and you saved yourself like ten years of struggle in the monastery or a hundred years of struggle with New Age books. It's no more... All the other ideas about emptiness are wrong and stupid and useless.

And I'm not afraid to say it. It's called menjikpa shi. It's called fearlessness to say the truth.

They're all bullshit. That's the only meaning of emptiness. Period.

So, if I see a pen, if I happen to see a pen, could it be coming from the pen? No, because then the dog would see it as a pen. So, if it's not coming from the pen, where is it coming from?

It must be coming from me. There's no question. You don't have to be Einstein or Tsongkhapa.

It's obvious. If you think about it for three minutes, it's obvious. The pen must be somehow coming from my mind.

The pen cannot be coming from the pen. If the pen were coming from the pen, the dog would write poetry, right? Or the human would uncontrollably chew.

I controllably chew, okay? Sometimes. Sorry, Jeff.

So, that's the emptiness of a pen, okay? Everything in your life is the same. Every person you ever met was coming from you.

Every situation you ever had was coming from you. The thoughts you hear in your own mind are born from how you treated people last week, okay? You cannot stop them, and you cannot change them in the present, okay?

You can only plant seeds for next week by being kind to people this week. You create everything week by week, okay? It's you.

Everything is coming from you, okay? That's step two. That's path number two.

If you work on that for a long time and you learn to meditate, then you have a deep meditational breakthrough. It's called the path of seeing. And you see directly the truth of neither, okay?

You perceive neither. Is it a pen or a chew toy if all the people and the dogs leave the room? It's neither.

At that time, it's neither. When you see that directly in a deep state of meditation, it's a breakthrough. It's a breakthrough in becoming enlightened, okay?

God bless. Salute. After that, okay?

What do you do? I mean, okay, I saw emptiness directly. I came out.

Now what do I do? Oh, it's about a 500-year process. Seriously, okay?

Seven lifetimes is normal. There will be seven lifetimes are required to process that 20 minutes. To process that 20-minute experience takes more than the rest of your life, normally.

If you don't practice tantra, then it will take more than the rest of your life to process that experience, okay? During that processing, you eliminate all your negative emotions, permanently, okay? No one can upset you.

No one, no situation can get you upset, okay? Try to imagine, your car blows a tire, three people hit your car, your dog runs away from the car, all this stuff, and you just come out smiling, and nothing can upset you. That's path number four.

The process of going through that, using what you saw about the pen, not to get angry anymore or upset, takes more than one lifetime. It's called gomla, okay? Path of habituation.

We are about to embark, and we used up our time, we're about to embark on a discussion of how people on the fourth path do their dedication. How do they protect their karma? How do they dedicate their karma to a higher purpose?

And that process is described in the Abhisamalankara. So that's a very rich subject. He only gives the first line and the last line.

We're going to go deeper into it. How does a person who already saw emptiness dedicate their good karma and protect their good karma? And how is that different from a normal person's dedication?

If I haven't seen emptiness so far, directly, then am I supposed to be dedicating it some other way? Because they dedicate it a different way. That's called ngowa gomlam.

Sorry, ngowa gomlam. Say ngowa gomlam. Oh, sorry, it's not up there.

Ngowa gomlam. How do people who have already seen emptiness send their karma to a higher goal? Because it's different.

They do it better. And to get that, you got to come back to the next course, which is happening in August. We'll be in the pines of Prescott, Arizona.

It's extremely pleasant there. Everyone from Phoenix, I grew up in Phoenix. No fool stays here in the summer.

You're learning that. All my students from New York, they're like, maybe I shouldn't stay here in the summer. I'm like, duh.

We all went to Prescott or San Diego or Rocky Point. But anyway, right? We don't stay here in the summer.

We'll dedicate the good karma. We got a call from the credit union. Sorry.

So Rob, you ready? We're going to dedicate the good karma. Rob also worked really hard on this event.

I'd like to thank him. It's a terrible job. Him and Esther, the job was terrible, terrible, terrible job.

Try to find a church that has nothing going on for 10 days and wants nothing for the church. They're not going to charge you an arm and a leg. It's a hopeless task.

If you want to do it next time, let me know. I'm happy to give you a shot. Okay.

All right, go for it.