«Дар освобождения», курс 12 «Ретрит «Главный магнит»», занятие 1

[Говорящий 1] (0:00 - 0:04)
Okay, so we'll jump in. I'm going to need a little clock eventually.

[Говорящий 2] (0:05 - 0:05)
Do I?

[Говорящий 1] (0:08 - 22:39)
That's good. I usually sell them on the street afterward. Okay.

So just to review where we are, we're studying a text called nam duk lak chung. Say nam duk. Lak chung.

Nam duk. Lak chung. Nam duk means moksha, okay?

Freedom. And then lak, lak is hand. Lakpa.

Chung means to thrust something into someone's hand. The full form is lak chung su duppa, which means to thrust something into your hand. So there's been some, I think there's been some tame translations of the title.

The title is a gift of liberation thrust into your hands, like take it. Okay, I like it. It should be strong.

The title should be strong. It's a lam rim. Lam rim means steps to Buddhahood from A to Z.

Idiot's Guide to Buddhahood. And basically the Tibetans, well, early when Buddhism came from India to Tibet, the five great books, the five great subjects, which are studied in the Geshe course. So the Geshe course is 20 to 25 years, and you will study the five great books.

Those five books were condensed into the lam rim. So in Tibet, you were either a Geshe track or you were a lam rim track. And I'd like you to learn both, okay?

So I've taught the Geshe track a lot in the ACI courses. But the lam rim is a very beautiful compilation of all the Geshe subjects, 25 years of study in a flow, which is supposed to get you enlightened by the time you get to the last page, okay? So it's like A to Z, and it's a very carefully constructed logical flow, very beautiful.

So it became popular as a genre of literature a thousand years ago, exactly a thousand years ago, with Lord Atisha, who came to Tibet from India. And it has developed, and it has gotten more and more exquisite as centuries have gone on. Je Tsongkapa, 400 years after Lord Atisha wrote the Lam Rim Chemo, which is probably the greatest book I've written in Tibet, I don't know.

But it's a thousand page lam rim, mostly based on the classics of India. And then most recently, Pabongka Rinpoche, who is the teacher of the teacher of the current Dalai Lama. So the current Dalai Lama has two tutors since his childhood, and one of those two tutors is Trijang Rinpoche, who was my teacher's root Lama.

And his root Lama was Pabongka Rinpoche. And so Trijang Rinpoche was a young man, a reincarnated Lama, Lama? Chukku?

We call him Chukku. He was a reincarnated Lama, and he was in the audience in the 1920s, I think, when Pabongka Rinpoche taught the Lam Rim in a public series of teachings. I think it's 24 days or something.

And then he took notes. And you have to realize that there was no electricity, and they were, you know, Pabongka Rinpoche was projecting to four or five thousand people, his voice, and Trijang Rinpoche was taking notes. And then Trijang Rinpoche spent many years perfecting the notes and working with Pabongka Rinpoche to write the text that we're studying.

So I think it's the greatest book ever written in the Tibetan language. It's extraordinary. I was sitting around lunch with some people not long ago, and Mrs. Hancock, my old lady, and we were talking about what's the greatest book you ever read, you know, and somebody said the Bible, and somebody said Shakespeare, and I said, you know, liberation in the far ground, you know. And I think it's the most precious piece of literature on this planet. I believe that. And we're in the business of saving old books, right?

Two hundred thousand old books. This takes the cake, you know. So I really, really strongly encourage you to come to these courses, okay?

I was taught this lamrim three times over a course of 30 years, because I was my teacher's attendant and driver and slave. And so I got to hear it every time he taught it. He taught it in different cities.

And I desperately want to pass on that lineage. I want to pass on a living transmission of it. And I need people who are cops that I can pour it into, you know what I mean?

And I was very disturbed. I got a very disturbing email a couple of days ago, and it was someone said, I've already studied the lamrim, and I'm kind of more interested in your emptiness teaching, or something like that. And the word has come in my mind every hour or so since then, the word idiot.

And I'm sorry to say, I know it's not polite to say that, but it just screams in my mind, idiot. It's like the stupidest thing I can think of, you know. It's like, I don't know how to say it.

It's like saying, I want to go to Chicago, but I don't want to sit in a car, or something like that. I don't know how to say that. It's a tragedy.

It feels like a tragedy to me, and I don't know what to do about it. But if you have the time, I don't know, for me it would be very wrong not to urge you to finish this course, especially if you have to die. Okay, that's what I'm saying.

I'm not kidding. And I just feel like, I remember one day, we were sitting in the monastery, the board of directors were having a meeting, and I was trying to sell them on the idea of the computer project. And they listened very politely, and then and there's this one cranky old abbot called Gyalwan Kenser Rinpoche, who just passed away, and everyone was excited, and then he was like this, you know, and then he said, listen, you can have some young monks for two, three hours a day, four hours a day, that's okay, but you can't have them for eight hours a day.

And I said, I'm not taking the good ones, I'm taking the flakes, I'm taking the ones that can't do anything. And he's like, no, no, if I were to agree to it, I would feel that I was killing them, that I was killing their chances for enlightenment. He said, I can't, I can't agree.

You can have them for half a day, but you can't take them for a whole day. And they don't know enough to know what I know, which is that you would kill their chances for enlightenment, or something like that, you know, if they didn't study, even if they didn't try to study or meditate. And so, so I feel like I have to give that warning, like on the cigarette pack, I have to say, people will ignore it, but it's my job to put it on the cigarette pack.

If you care about other people, and you care about life and the world, then you should finish this course, and you shouldn't miss any of it. Christine Walsh had to leave last night, her mother might have an operation today in Chicago. That's fine, that's lamrim.

Okay, got it? She's doing lamrim in Chicago. Okay, all right.

So, we started at the back of the text, which is very tantric, and we did the last section of the text about meditation and emptiness first, and I'll explain more about why shortly. And then we went back to the beginning of the text, which begins with the best presentation of the traditional preliminaries to meditation. And then we've been working through those preliminaries, and we're almost done with them.

And I think during this week, I can't guarantee, because we never know how long Geshe Michael will go on for, but I think we will reach the lamrim, and we'll start the lamrim. So it's been, I think, three years, I don't know. Yeah, and I'm going through it very carefully, very slowly.

Every time he quotes somebody, I go find it, I read about it, I want to do that. So I have to go around the world and teach these pseudo-business success courses all the time, which is very like, gives me a headache. And then this is my chance to really teach hardcore Buddhism, and so I'm going to take the time and do it the old way.

So I don't, you know, if only three people show up, I'm still going to do it, and we're going to do it the old way. Okay, which means many hours of sitting in hot rooms and trying to concentrate as he drones on. This is the old way.

Okay, at least it's not, well it's kind of like a monsoon. I think we're going to have to, do we have our conditioners? I think in the afternoon we're going to need something.

I think so. I'm predicting. Okay, and it's really, really hard to concentrate when you're sleepy and when it's warm.

I once had a whole first row in a talk in Shanghai in a theater. The whole first row was asleep before I got there, okay, before I started talking. And they looked like dominoes, you know.

In China there's a law against turning on the air conditioner until it's like 85 or 90 or something like that, to save energy, which is probably what we should do. But anyway, there are six preliminary practices. I thought we would review them.

You can find me, you guys, if you go search for class space five, okay, class space five on the document, on the Word document. Just search for the words class space five. Yeah, wait, yeah, stop there.

Good, bring that up. Just raise the whole screen a bit. No, I mean, scroll up the other way.

Yeah, down. Okay, all right, stop. Okay, so this is, I just thought it would be nice to review what we went through, the six practices, right, before meditation, which means before the Lam Rim.

Before meditation on the Lam Rim, there are six practices. And it's up there in Tibetan, so I cheated. Wait, what's happening here?

Yeah, we drank Tibetan beer this morning. It's, go down one more class five. That's it, okay.

Yeah, you see the numbers? One, two, three, four, yeah. Okay, good.

SBYOR BA'I PHYIR DANG PO GANG GNAS GANG PHYI MDOR BYAS LA, KUS GSUNGS THUGS KYI BRTEN DRANG MA What is that first one? Just guess. What's the first step to doing a meditation session?

Yeah, clean your room. Straighten up your room. It gets you up and moving.

And then KUS GSUNGS THUGS is what? Yeah, set up your altar. Set up your images and put out a nice piece of fresh fruit or some water or something like that.

We're very blessed that someone from China offered a statue of Je Tsongkapa. I don't know if you can see it, but he flew in yesterday or the day before. And I promised to keep feeding him rice.

And man, it's a beautiful statue. And we'll talk about it. Second, GNYIS PA CHOS PA YOD MED CING, GOS PA RDZAS PAR BSHAMS PA means what?

Make offerings. Something. And the offering should be YOD MED.

Say again? Yeah, rightfully obtained. Honestly obtained.

The money or the fruit or whatever. I once was with one of my teachers, Ngon Thu Dup Ngakyi, and we were walking down a street in Hao, and there was a mimosa tree that went over someone's fence. And they have little tiny pink flowers.

And I just picked one and I said, I'll put this on my altar. And he got so angry with me. He got really angry.

And he said, that's not YOD MED. You don't have permission to take this person's flower. And I'm like, okay.

YOD MED CING, GOS PA RDZAS PAR means what? RDZAS PAR. Yeah, attractive.

The arrangement of the stuff on the altar should be pleasing to the eye. Third one. SUM PA BSTAN DE BA LA LUS NAM NANG GI PHYIR BDUN LDAN DUG KHRAD DE DGE SEMS KHYAD PA CHEN GYI NGANG NAS BSKYAMS SEMS SOGS PA BYA BA What's that?

What's BSTAN DE BA? BSTAN means a seat. Your meditation seat.

DE BA, on a comfortable meditation seat. LUS NAM NANG GI PHYIR BDUN. NAM NANG.

What's NAM NANG? Number Noah. BA'I RO CHEN NA.

BA'I RO CHEN NA. You should take the seven-point posture at BA'I RO CHEN NA. Which just means like straighten up your body and loosen up your eyelids and all that stuff.

Good stuff. KHRAD DE DGE SEMS KHYAD PA CHEN Then try to put your mind in a good place. We're still on number three.

Try to put your mind in a good place and then go for refuge, etc., meaning bodhichitta. Think about bodhichitta. Most often I think for a well-trained Buddhist, refuge means how you're dealing with problems in your life.

So you have a problem in your life, which is most often a person which is a problem in your life. Then to take refuge means you think about emptiness and you think about how this person is coming from you. And then that's protection.

That protects you. So taking refuge or protection in Buddhism means you realize the person that you're having problem with is coming from you and rather than struggling against them, you look inside of yourself to remove the cause because they're a mirror of you. And then bodhichitta, it's very simple.

I mean, if you keep doing that, other people will notice you. You will be calm. You will be responding sweetly to people who hassle you and other people will notice it and it will spread.

And if you keep it up long enough and if it spreads far enough, the world will become a mandala. So every time you take refuge, meaning when some irritating person's in your face and you think about how they're coming from you, if you can sustain that practice over years, then you become a virus. You set off a virus and you can change the world.

And that's bodhichitta. That's love. That's real love.

It's not some mushy thing when you're and you start crying or something like that. It's kind of more practical. I will be ground zero for a virus of people who don't get pissed off at irritating people.

Okay, and that's love because that changes the world. That changes the whole world. You can make the world a better place.

Okay, number four. SOGS SHING SEMS BDAG PA What's that? Yeah, you picture the lamas of the lineage.

So, Nick's been working really hard. We've been working really, really hard for about a year, I guess, on the traditional poster of the teachers of the lineages. The Lam Rim combines all the great lineages of ancient times and especially the lineages of love and wisdom.

And then you visualize those lamas and you you ask them for help. And they are called the garden. Those lamas are called the garden because you plant your good karma in them.

Okay, number five. SNGA PA SOGS BYANG GYI GNAS DU PA YIN LA BDUN PA MANG DANG LAM BYAS PA BUD BA What's that? SOGS BYANG.

What's SOGS BYANG? Yeah, BYANG means to clean up, but SOGS means to collect. So SOGS BYANG means, just before you do a meditation session, you take a very strong effort at collecting some heavy good karma.

When I come back from one of those exhausting tours and I'm dying, the first few days back are very euphoric. Weird cool stuff happens to me for three days because of all the karma I did on the tour. And then I revert to normal.

Then I think, oh, I got to go on another tour. Or after I do a lay room, I go somewhere and everything's incredible. I go into a mall and it's like heaven.

And then a week later, it's like hell. And so I mean, the idea is that just before you go into meditation, you collect some heavy good karma. And then you meditate really fast while it's still going.

And then you try to clean out some negative karma. Something on your conscience. If something's on your conscience, you can't meditate.

Instead of trying to bury it and meditating quietly, it'll keep making noise. So you clean out the stuff on your conscience, stuff on your heart. That involves, that process of collecting good karma and cleaning out bad karma has seven steps in itself.

So there are six preparations for meditation, but the fifth one has seven steps in itself. And I've typed them in for you. After you close your eyes, you go through these seven.

Number one, you bow mentally to your teacher. The best way to bow to your teacher is to think of something about them that you would like to learn. If they're your teacher, there's something about them that you want to learn.

So think about that. The second one is offering. So you've already done offering on your altar, but now you offer in your mind.

And the best offering is what? Yeah, some attempt. I always like to call it an attempt to practice.

So like, I'm not perfect. I mess up all the time. But I did do my yoga yesterday.

Or I did, you know, I tried to be nice to somebody. Then I got mad after that. Which is number three, confession.

So then mentally, you tell your teacher mentally, you know, I got angry at someone yesterday and I said things I shouldn't have said. And you just tell, you get things off your chest. Number four, rejoicing.

Buddhism puts equal weight on confession and rejoicing. For every time you think of something you've done wrong, you are required to think of something you've done right. So you're supposed to be happy.

Bring up things that you did yesterday that were noble and nice. And if you can't think of anything from yesterday, you can go back 10 years, 20 years. You must have done something nice.

Okay, all right. By the way, in my experience teaching all over the world constantly, frankly 5,000 people came in the last three weeks to our programs. But my experience is that people have a problem with rejoicing about themselves especially.

People have a problem with admitting that they've done some nice things to themselves. It seems to be the most difficult part. You can get people to confess after a couple of minutes, but to get them to rejoice takes like a couple weeks, you know.

So I don't know why we have some resistance to thinking about the good things we're doing and the good things. We want to beat ourselves up for, you know, I only did yoga for 59 minutes. I turned off Bob Harper a minute early, which I did yesterday.

I didn't want to do the last pose. I just turned him off. And so instead of being happy about 59 minutes of hard work, I was like, oh, I turned off Bob Harper for a minute, you know.

And that's how we are. That's who we are. All right.

Five, ask your teacher to teach.

[Говорящий 2] (22:39 - 22:39)
Okay.

[Говорящий 1] (22:41 - 23:23)
And there's a joke in Tibet that says if you do step five in your meditation and you meet an asshole today, you can't complain because you asked for teaching. I'm sorry to use bad language. I shouldn't do that.

But, you know, anyone who does their meditation in the morning can't complain about whoever they meet in the afternoon because you asked for teaching. And most of the good teaching comes from people who hurt you, right? So that's just an unfortunate thing.

Number six, ask your teachers to stay.

[Говорящий 2] (23:23 - 23:23)
Okay.

[Говорящий 1] (23:24 - 35:57)
And we had a heartbreaking, we ended last session in Phoenix with a heartbreaking story about Lord Buddha himself, that one of his disciples, he indicated to a disciple that he might pass away. And the disciple didn't ask him immediately to stay. And then he passed, and he could have stayed.

And so that's important to ask, you know. It's never out of, what do you call it? It's never bad manners to interrupt your mom and say, please stay.

Okay. All right. Number seven, dedicate to good karma.

So we're in number seven now, okay, which is banking the good karma, which means that after you collect good karma, if you get angry, okay, if you have a spell of good, honest anger, which I had yesterday. I mean, there's kind of irritation and then there's anger, right? And anger is like, I don't know, it's like a coating of metal.

It's like hard and it's like five minutes of real anger, you know it. You know how it feels. There's a strange thing of justification in your mind, like you say, oh finally I'm telling this person how I feel, you know.

And then you know you're really off. But those five minutes have the power to destroy days of good work. They have the power to destroy days of good karma.

So five minutes, three minutes of real deep fury at someone in your inside. I'm very good at not, you know, blowing up or screaming. But inside, that's what destroys the seed, is the inside, the anger.

So if right after you do something good, you should sit down and dedicate it to some higher purpose, okay. And then it's kind of sent away from you, so when the fire goes, it's protected, right? You sent the kids away.

In London, right, in the war they would send all the kids to the countryside and then the Germans would bomb London. So you're kind of sending the kids away to, you know, you go, you'll be safe, you know. I'm probably going to get angry in the next 10 minutes, you know.

And you send your kids to a safe place, okay. So that's, we are in the middle of that and we have to finish that and then we have to do the last of the six big steps and then we're ready to start the Lam Rim by the end of the week, I think, okay. What's the last of the six big steps?

GRUB PA GSUNG BA'ANG BDE PA MED NGAG BZHIN GYIS SDUG BSNGAL DE NYES SU BYA BA What's that? Yeah, asking for blessings. I used to call it supplication and then I realized nobody knew what the heck I was talking about.

Because I went to an Episcopal church when I was a kid and they would always supplicate. And it means begging for help. It means, I need help, man.

I got to have help. The last thing before you start your meditation is, you like call your mom on the phone and say, you know, in the end, the only thing I really need is help. I need help from you.

You know, in this meditation and in my life, I need help. And then that's how you start your meditation, on the Lam Rim, which is why we're doing all this. Then you start the first of the Lam Rim, in a meditation.

What is the first part of the Lam Rim? Yeah, say GZHIN YIN, BSTAN TSUL. GZHIN YIN, BSTAN TSUL.

How to find a Lama, how to choose a Lama, how to view your Lama, how to behave around your Lama, how to serve your Lama. Like that. Especially how to choose them carefully and spend a lot.

In Tibet it was a tradition to wait for 12 years. You found a Lama and then you waited for 12 years before you committed. But once you commit, you have to really commit.

Like that. So there's a lot about what makes a good Lama, how do you know a good Lama, and stuff like that. Okay, so we'll be working on that.

Let's do another meditation. Okay, I'm going to try to do more meditations. Tahiya sent me a very impassioned email which really changed my heart and I realized I was talking too much and we weren't doing enough practice.

She was talking about keeping silence, but let's try to do a little more meditation. Okay, now we're back to the text. We're in the middle of the fifth, what is it?

Sorry, seventh sub-preliminary within the preliminaries, which is dedicating to good karma. Sending the kids away from London before you get angry, okay? Before you ruin those good seeds that you worked so hard to collect, okay?

So I love this particular section. It's very, very important. And so let's read it together.

Oh, he doesn't have the whole thing. So I put the whole thing for you. So he's quoting a book called Abhisamalankara.

Say Abhi. Samaya. Alankara.

I like the word alankara. Alam is an old Sanskrit word that means to be ready and kara means to do. So alankara means to put on your jewelry before a ball in India 2,000 years ago, okay?

So sometimes they call books alankara because it's a jewel. So this book is called Abhisamalankara Alankara. Wintokgen in Tibetan, which means the ornament of realizations.

Just before you have a major breakthrough in your meditation, you're like putting on this jewelry, okay, for the big ball. That's what it means, literally. So let's read it together, okay?

He only gave the lines in, he didn't even give those. He referred to the first three lines and I added the rest because I thought it's a wonderful subject and we have to make this program last another 12 years and 14 years. So here we go.

One, two, three. YONGS SU MO'I KHYAD PA CHEN DE'I PHYIR PA CHOG YIN NO DE NI MIG MED RNAMS PA CHEN CHEN PHYI MA RLOG MTSAN NYID DO I think we better stop there. It's going to take too long.

So saying, what's it called? DNGOS DGOMS RLAM DNGOS DGOMS RLAM So DNGOS means to dedicate your good deeds, your good seeds, bank your good seeds, put them in a safe place. And there are three classical places to put them and we'll talk about it later.

But the important part here is DGOMS RLAM. What's DGOMS RLAM? Yeah, path of habituation.

by the way, who wrote this book? Who wrote the Abhisamavankara? Yeah, Maitreya.

Who is Maitreya? The next Buddha in this world. We're on number three.

Gautama is the third. And Maitreya is the next Buddha in this world. Coming.

Very close. But there was a sage in India named Asanga, Arya Asanga, who had a meditational experience with a dog. And met Maitreya and took dictation from Maitreya.

And there are five great books of Maitreya. And this is one of them. We spent 12 years on this book in the monastery.

It's 75 pages. Okay, and I memorized it. We memorized it and we spent 12 years on it.

And it's unbelievable. To have Maitreya talking in your head is something cool. So anyway, So DGOMS RLAM means how do you dedicate your good karma before you see emptiness directly?

And how do you dedicate your good karma just after you see emptiness directly? So after you have a direct experience of emptiness, which we call what path? Yeah, path of seeing or DGOMS RLAM.

So briefly, there are five stages in every person's spiritual evolution. Every person on this planet will go through five stages of spiritual evolution. Number one is that, I'm just going to describe them.

Number one is a tragedy in your life. A mess up in your life. Something really bad happens.

And my best students had the greatest tragedies in their lives. The ones who are really superstars had the super tragedies early in their life. They were lucky enough to have it early in their life.

Number one, tragedy. Number two, somebody explains the pen thing to you. Somebody explains to you why a pen is coming from you.

And it's not coming from itself. It's coming from you. And I'm not going to do that because you'll fall asleep.

And then the third step is the direct perception of emptiness, which you can say direct communion with God or something. I think that's the closest idea in the West. Is Moses before the burning bush, on his face in the presence of God, meeting God.

You can call it meeting God or something like that. Step number three. Then step number four is called the path of habituation.

And then step number five is enlightenment or nirvana. But why do they call it habituation? What are you getting habituated to?

The thing you saw at three, okay? The direct experience you had of God or emptiness. It takes time to process that.

About 500 years. Seriously, okay? About 500 years.

Normally. It's seven lifetimes. It takes to process that experience.

So that's called path of habituation. Getting used to what you saw. Okay, now question is how does a person who saw God act differently when they dedicate their good karma than a person who didn't see God yet?

You see what I mean? How do they differ? And that's the subject of these lines.

It's very sexy. It's very beautiful. If you have seen God directly, how differently do you dedicate your good karma?

How differently do you take care of your good seeds than a person who didn't yet see? So that's the subject of this text. That's the subject of those lines.

Now, when he says it in the Lam Rim, Pabongka Rinpoche, he just says from that word up to that word. He doesn't even give you the lines. Because every kid in the monastery has already memorized it.

By the time you're 12 or 13, you've memorized it. So he just says, you know, the lines that start with that and they go up to that. And then he, those lines are the first three numbers here, okay?

He refers to those lines. But the quotation continues. The idea, the concept continues for another, I don't know, it's got 12 elements in it, okay?

So I thought you'd like to hear all 12. So we're going to go on a major, what do you call that, digression? Is there a better word?

Yeah, like a deeper journey. Thanks, Jeff. So we're going to go a little deeper into that.

And I want to do all 12 of the ideas associated with how is it that a person who has seen God dedicates their good karma, okay? Because that to me is a pretty cool subject. I think that would be a pretty cool subject.