«Дар освобождения», курс 20 «Ретрит непревзойдённой жизни», занятие 8

[Speaker 1]
Okay, we're going to do the ... oh, can you show Debu back again? Do you have him around?

No. Okay, and anyway, that jazz guy yesterday, in the photo, black and white photo, he passed away this week. 92 years old.

But that song that me and Yohai played, where's Yohai? Yeah, that was the most famous jazz song in history. And first jazz song to sell one million copies.

I think 1950-something. Who can tell me the name of that song? Yeah, take five.

Say, take five. Understand? Yeah, five minute meditation.

Okay? So now, when we're going to do a five minute meditation, I just say, take five. It means take five minutes of your day.

You're not too busy to take five. Yohai can take five. Okay, ready to take five?

Okay, let's take five. That's the guy, the piano player. But the bass player is always the best.

Okay, sit up straight. Let's do five breaths. Then Joe did a great job.

He or she practiced very hard, and gave me this chance. Beautiful body, beautiful mind, beautiful country, place. By doing those seven perfections, her giving gave me all the things in my life.

Her morality gave me all the happiness in this life. Her patience gave me all the beauty in this life. Her fun created all the cooperation and harmony I see in this life.

Her meditation created moments of peace. Her understanding of the pen gave me all my freedoms. And then her love for other people tied it all together.

And now we're going to do a meditation. How am I doing with those seven things? Am I doing good enough to create another body like this?

And another chance like this? It's important I think to say, it's not that you have to do more things. It's that the things you are doing, you have to do with great love and great fun.

You are busy enough to create a new good life, but the quality has to be deep, with a lot of love, and a lot of pen, and a lot of fun. Okay, so we're going to start five minutes, and check your life. Are you having enough fun and wisdom to create this body again?

In three slow breaths. And then you can stretch. Take a good yawn.

There's a nice custom in America. It's called guerrilla gardening, and many people are doing it now. Guerrilla means a secret army guy.

Not gorilla. Like Che Guevara, like Che Guevara. And because the highways are so ugly, so guerrilla gardeners, we take a big bag of flower seeds.

And we drive down the highway, and the person next to the driver, they throw flower seeds out the window. And they grow very good because the rain catches on the highway, and then the water goes to the side of the road. So if you go from East Sedona to West Sedona, in the spring, there's a lot of beautiful flowers.

And those are guerrilla gardeners. So you should try it, okay? Also, ugly places in the city, like in the park, there's nothing there, and throwing flowers.

Then sometimes the seed lands on the highway. And I mean, one, it will die. But one out of a thousand start to grow in the middle of the highway.

And there's a big flower grows there, in the highway. And every day thousands of cars are going like this, and somehow the flower survives. That's the next meditation.

Your life is like accident flower on the highway. It's one out of a million. And the cars can kill it very easily.

Just one car hits it, it's finished. Then during this next meditation, I want you to think of an example like that. Something almost impossible.

Like in my life, I think two times, I have coins in my pocket, and when I get home I throw them on the desk, and one will stay up like this on the side. It's like one in a whole life. You throw the coin on the desk and it lands this way, not this way.

So we're going to do five minutes. We're going to take five. And you think of one, and then tell us afterwards.

In your life, something impossible thing happens. Ready? So five minutes, you have to ...

I gave you two in my life. The flower in the middle of the highway, and the coin that landed on the side and stayed there. Ready?

Then I'm going to ask several people. So you can't just think about lunch. That's not very rare.

Okay, here we go. Take three deep breaths. Take a stretch.

Stretch. Next picture is the life ring. My father liked to fish.

And he took me many times, ever since I was six or years old, and we would catch fish. Then when you cook them, you have to cut out all the heart, and the lungs, and the stomach. And he also liked to shoot deer.

And he taught me how to do that. And the deer I only did one time. Then after you shoot them, you have to cut with a knife from here up to here.

And you have to reach in and pull out all of the stomach, and the heart, and everything. Still warm. Still warm.

Heart is still going like that. Then I told him, I was about sixteen. And I told him, I cannot do this anymore.

Then later he had a heart problem. And the doctor said we have to operate. He cut him from here to here.

Same cut. Then I was like, wow, karma. Then one day we went fishing in the ocean.

And I caught something. I was just a little kid. And I fight and pulling, pulling, pulling.

And a very strange fish came. He's about this big. Okay, all fishermen, they make the fish bigger when they tell the story.

They go like this. He's about, but he was about this big. And he's flat, like this flat.

And he swam like this. Then I pulled him up to the side of the boat. He was too big.

We couldn't get him in the boat. And then finally he went like this, and he broke the string and he just swam away. Then I asked my father, what kind of fish is that?

They call halibut. You know halibut? They live on the bottom of the ocean.

In the dust of the ocean. And it's really strange because the two eyes are here. And this side is flat.

And they spend their whole life in the darkness. And they just eat the junk that comes to the bottom of the ocean. Like the other fish's poopoo.

And sometimes in the darkness they touch each other and then they ... We are like that, okay? We spend most of our lifetime in the bottom realm.

Like an animal. Hell. Ghost.

And then in the whole ocean, in one day some young boy with his father will catch one. And pull him up to the top. Then I was looking at those two eyes.

They are really strange. They are like this. And I wonder what he ...

He saw the sun for the first time. Blue sky. Then to be like that, to be here, human, it's like that.

Once in a thousand years someone pulled you up to the top. Then you break the line and you go back down. Like that.

Our life is like that. Who has some good example for me? For a rare flower in the highway.

Coin on the edge. Osiris, that's one. We were in the ocean, Oaxaca, Mexico, when I was like 16.

The day before six kids died. They drowned in the ocean.

[Speaker 2]
They were jumping from the rocks.

[Speaker 1]
They were about our same age. We couldn't help them. My mom, my brothers, they all died.

The next day we went swimming. And my brother, he was like 12. And then his friend, they took on a little boat, like a plastic boat, a kid's boat.

And then the current started to take them further and further and further. Somehow the boat broke and they started just hanging from the plastic. So I started swimming in my surfboard.

I was starting to learn to surf and I just kept swimming, swimming, swimming. So it got to a point when the waves were so big that I also lost my board. And I just reached their boat, right?

In my mind I thought I could take them back. But it was too much. It was too far away.

And I just kept swimming, just pulling. They were so tired, they were drowning, right? They were like dragging me down also.

And it got to a point when I felt like I could stand on something. So I tried to wake them up, like, come on, come on, there's a rock. Step on the rock.

[Speaker 2]
And I don't know what happened, but suddenly the rock was moving.

[Speaker 1]
And it wasn't a rock, it wasn't a turtle. A huge kawama. She saved us.

Sophie has one, Sophie has one. My mom and my dad like to take honeymoon breaks. So once they were in a very nice hotel in Chapala.

And my dad had to go to the reception to ask for something. And he saw a flyer with an invitation to a conference, a talk, about how to make money following ethical principles. So my mom, she had a business at that moment, and I was starting a business.

So I went with her to that talk, thinking that I was going to learn how to make a good business. And I totally forgot about that when I heard a story about the pen. And that has been the most extraordinary moment in my life.

I'll tell one. Scott was cleaning out his car. Then somebody threw papers and junk in there.

And he found one piece of paper crumpled up. And he's throwing it out. And he opened it.

And he said, at some bookstore, some American monk is coming to talk. That's the story I was going to tell. One more.

James Connor, who did three year retreat. He was on the subway in New York. He has his own advertising business.

He was the president. Then he saw a cute girl. Under her arm is a book.

Then he's looking at the girl, but he also looked at the book. Her arm is covering the name of the book. But here there's a red mandala.

Then he got a strange idea. He went to the bookstore. He couldn't talk to the girl.

But he went to the bookstore. He checked every book in the bookstore for this red mandala. And he found it.

And that's a diamond cutter book. He did three year retreat. Oops, sorry.

There is a little town just nearby my hometown city, called Bama. It's famous for there's some long life human there. Somebody said it's because about their cooking, their cuisine.

There is some restaurant in my city. One of them, I see it's an interesting name, Obama. It's similar like Obama, American president.

And they cook the same dishes in that town. I haven't been there yet, but I saw a video on the TV. Most of the long life human are women.

They can live a hundred years older. And this is very rare. And most rare thing is one of them is about 104 years old.

She's begun to grow some black hair again. I have a tooth just growing up. Cool.

Thanks. I'm almost sure that in New Year's Eve of 2011 me and some friends went on a trip to the beaches of, as they call Michoacan here in Mexico. And we went camping.

And we were sleeping and it was midnight. And we heard the sound of somebody piercing through the tent with a knife. And we all jumped because we thought there was a bandito, a thief that wanted to rob us.

And we went out of the tent to see what was going on. And then we just realized it was a big, huge turtle called Tawama that was just putting her eggs next to her tent. And with the movement of her legs when she's putting the eggs she pierced and broke the tent.

[Speaker 2]
In October I went back to my hometown, Lanzhou. There's a temple in the top of a mountain in my hometown and I brought my younger brother there. In my memory, I went there 20 years ago.

I couldn't remember what the monastery was like. But this time when I went there, I realized that it was a Tibetan monastery. The first time I went there, I didn't know it was a Tibetan monastery.

[Speaker 1]
The first time I went there, I didn't know it was a Tibetan monastery.

[Speaker 2]
When my younger brother and I were offering the incense and I saw that in the middle there was a statue of Amitabha. On the right side there was a room and there was a statue of Je Tsongkhapa and his two great disciples. I didn't notice it on my first visit.

I felt very amazing. The first time I didn't pay any attention to it but this time as soon as I entered there I noticed the statue of Je Tsongkhapa. When I was prostrating, I noticed that the face of Je Tsongkhapa looks like Geshe-la's face.

[Speaker 1]
When I was prostrating, I noticed that the face of Je Tsongkhapa looks like Geshe-la's face.

[Speaker 2]
That's all. Thank you.

[Speaker 1]
One more. Stanley. So, there are two three-year-old children from Diamond Mountain.

I'm not going to name them. they traveled to China to teach yoga and then one day I was driving them back to their hotel and then I was going to Diamond Mountain for the first time. So they were telling me just get ready.

It's a very rough place. There are some challenges there. We were never sure that we have the courage to come back again.

Then I got a little bit scared. I've never been to Diamond Mountain before. So I was driving.

It's the first time I drove on that road. Then we passed by some strange restaurant. It's in Chinese.

It's called Jinggangshan Restaurant. Jinggangshan Restaurant. Jinggang means diamond.

Shan means mountain. Jinggangshan. Then they were like, oh my god.

That's so intense. Incident. Okay.

I think everybody in this room has some story like that because you are special people. Very rare people who want to spend ten days thinking about how rare they are. Okay, let's do some book.

I'll do about twenty, twenty-five minutes. Then we have a song by Jasmine. And then Don Jesus, the shaman, he's going to give us just five minute talk to us.

Okay, we're at Potoway. P-O-T-O-B-A apostrophe I. That's it.

Okay. So we are getting more examples for rare. And we're in the same ancient book by Potowa from one thousand years ago.

And it says LO DING BU ZHES PA So LO DING is a place in Tibet. BU means young man. DROM LO DING PAS BU ZER KHO BA ZHES PA ZER KHO BA means gold miner.

ZHI RGYUD PA GZHAN ZHES He decided to go to a place called ZHES. So he lives in a place called LO DING. That place has a lot of gold under the ground.

We have a place like that near Sedona. It's called, what's it called? Jerome.

Jerome, yeah. It's about 45 minutes from our place. And if you dig there, you can find precious metals.

There's places like that in Brazil. I used to go there to buy stones. I took my lama there.

I was in one diamond dealer's house. He doesn't know I'm a monk. He has lots of Buddhist books on his shelf.

Then I said, are you interested in Buddhism? He said, yes. He said, I go to a center in the mountain near Rio de Janeiro.

I said, what's the name of the center? He said, the director of our center's name is Stanley. He's a businessman.

One day he had a dream. It said, you must build a center in the mountains for Buddhism. He saw the sign on the front of the center.

Tsongkapa. Tsongkapa. Then he said, do you know what Tsongkapa is?

They didn't know what Tsongkapa is. They put the name on the center. Later I took my lama there to Brazil.

He taught them. He opened the Tsongkapa center for them. But on the way, in that area, there are gemstones everywhere.

My lama said, I have to go pee-pee. He stopped the car. I will go in the tree.

He sit down and there's gemstones everywhere. He just picked them up. So there are places like that.

Sri Lanka is like that. So this boy in Lodeng, if you just dig there, you can find gold. But he wants to try to do business in another place.

Called She. He's not satisfied. He wants to do some other business.

So he went to the place called She. Then he went to a restaurant. All the people are very excited.

We are going on a trip. Where are you going? We are going to a place called Lodeng.

There's gold everywhere. You just dig, you find gold. Then the boy's like, yeah, I also want to go.

But he came from Lodeng. He didn't appreciate it until he went to the other place. Why are they telling this story?

Then he said, DE BA CHEN GYI BYANG CHUB SEMS KYI MUN YOD DE THOB NAS BDUN MED DU LTA BA PHANG SOB BYED TSUL Those bodhisattvas who pray to be born in the paradise of Amitabha, when they get there, everybody's talking about, we're so lucky. He's like, why? Very soon we are going to get out of this paradise and go to the human place.

Because there you can make real progress. Not like this Amitabha heaven. Understand?

So they call it Lodeng. You are sitting in the place that has gold everywhere, just under the ground. And you always think you have to go someplace else.

Your life is amazing. Where you live is amazing. You have people all around you.

If you just be nice to them, you are making gold. Then many, many people think they have to go somewhere else to do spiritual life. I cannot do spiritual life in Shanghai or Singapore.

I don't know. I don't know. I wanted to find a good yoga teacher, and a good Sanskrit teacher.

I went to Varanasi in India. I rented an apartment there for the whole year. This is the cultural capital of India.

John has an office there for Sanskrit. Nicole runs it. I went there.

I interviewed like 30 yoga teachers. None of them is as good as Jivamukti. In New York.

I went back to New York. I did yoga there. I found the greatest Sanskrit teacher in Varanasi.

He was teaching me Sanskrit. Like the second day, he said, I don't know what this thing means. Then he said, let me check.

Then under his table he has a dictionary from England, which I also used since I was a student in the college. He looked up all the words in the dictionary. I remember one was called Ruru.

Ruru is just a famous kind of deer that the Buddha used to be born as. He's like, Ruru, I don't know what's a Ruru. Let me see.

Then I'm like, oh boy. I went back to Princeton because the Sanskrit teacher is much better. So, maybe where you are now is like Lodin.

Maybe you have everything you need to become a Buddha where you live. Maybe your husband or your wife or your daughter Tara is already Buddha. Or maybe the next one, or maybe both, I don't know.

Maybe you have everything you need where you are and you just have to use it. The gold is just under the ground everywhere. Okay, next one.

YANG SANGS PA'I NYA DANG Geshe Potowa gave another example. It's called SANGS PA'I NYA SANGS is one state like Jalisco in north of Lhasa. SANGS PA means a person from SANGS.

NGAR SANGS PA ZHIG DUS SU YONG NAS So one guy from SANGS came down to U. U is another state of Tibet. NYA'I SHA SOS SKABS In his home place he cannot get delicious fish.

But in U they sell delicious fish. Then he ate a big one. HA BRYAN GSOS BYAS PAS But he ate too much of the super delicious fish.

Like mahi-mahi or something. Okay. Then he's almost throw up.

So if you want a new exciting word, you can say GYUG PA. Okay, say GYUG PA. GYUG PA Star Dictionary Entry BSAG CA THEG CA YOD TE RGYAL ZHUGS KYI RGYU GANG ZHAG GYUG GYUG PA GYUG PA means to throw up.

Okay. Then it's a very useful word in the monastery. Because anything you don't like, you can say some kind of word that has GYUG PA in it.

You want some? Okay. So people ask me, do you like eggplant?

I don't think eggplant should be a food. Then they say, why don't you like it? I said, when you put it in your mouth, it feels like Golaga GYUG PA.

Golaga is a big mythical bird like, what do you call those guys? Like a Garuda. It's like a Garuda.

It looks a lot like a bald eagle, big American eagle. Then when they feed their kids, they will catch a mouse or something. Then they will chew it, and they swallow halfway.

Then they go to their nest on the mountain. The babies, like Tara, the babies are, wah, wah. And then they go, and they GYUG PA.

And they feed their babies. So to me, eggplant is Golaga GYUG PA. There are some mushrooms in China that are very similar.

Okay, now you got the GYUG PA transmission. So he almost GYUG PA that delicious fish. Then he thought, if I lose that delicious fish, it's such a loss, it's such a waste.

It's expensive, and it's hard to find. We don't have it in Tsang. So he tied a rope around his neck to keep the fish down.

Understand? What's it mean? Okay, I bought a shirt.

Someone gave me a shirt recently. My Lama gave me a shirt. I really like it.

It's that pink shirt. I wore it in Mexico. Mexico City.

First time I wore it, the pin broke and ruined the shirt. Then I'm like, oh man, I ruined the shirt. First time I wore it.

I really liked this shirt. Oh man, it's such a beautiful shirt. Now I wasted this shirt.

And you get very upset. But every hour of your life you are wasting your human body worse than that. For one hour you try not to throw up the good fish.

I don't want to waste this fantastic fish. But all day you're on the internet, on YouTube, wasting your time with these stupid videos.

[Speaker 2]
No.

[Speaker 1]
And you don't think you lost anything. Then at the end of the day you lost, what? One million good seeds.

How did you spend them? All right, REG ZHIG TSE BZHIN PA GYUR PA LA PHANGS If you feel like throwing up some good fish is a big loss, RGYAL PA MANG PO NYES SKA BA'I BSTAN LEN CING THOB PA'I DI DON MED DU SONG NA CI PHYIR MI SPANGS Why don't you feel upset that you lost a few hours of this body which took you a million years to create? Okay, last example.

So, if you're a gardener and you're digging to plant some new flowers, sometimes you hit a worm. You dig out the dirt and the worm is like, like that. Then, so there's a famous example.

The Buddha, the Buddha was like digging to make a flower, and he hit a worm. And the worm's like, then he got all this good karma by prostrating to the Buddha. Then we are like that.

Why? We spend a million years in the dark, in the dark realms, like the fish at the bottom of the sea. Then just by accident, the Buddha's digging there.

And we come up, and we get this good karma. Who's the prostrating worm? Yeah, I am, I am.

Just one chance, by accident, I came up from the darkness under the ground. And I'm like, then by accident, I bow to the Buddha. So the Tibetan here says, ZING PO'I CHAGS ZAL ZHES PA SDUG GI SA'O NAS ZING PO'I MAR BRJAN ZHIG MTHON NAS SANGS RGYAS LA CHAGS ZAL LO ZHES ZER BA MI SRID PA So it's impossible for a worm to come up purposely and say, I would like to make a prostration today to the Buddha.

Then we are like that. RANG CHAGS MYAN SONG GI SA'O NAS MTHON NAS For us to come out of the hell realms, and our worm body, and he says MI GZUGS. What's MI GZUGS mean?

This MI is a noun. Yeah. Why his name is word, I don't know.

MI SRID DU CHOS LA LTOS BSAMS RGYAS Then we got a human body. And we are LTOS and we are BSAM. So LTOS means listening to the teacher in the class.

BSAM means think about what the teacher said after you get home. What's NOR BU? Jewel.

What's LING? Yeah. NOR BU LING means Jewel Island.

And that means Sri Lanka. And if you just go anywhere Sri Lanka, you dig one foot, you can find a jewel. It's unbelievable.

I went there many times to buy gemstones. Then what's the real name of Seramei Monastery? In Tibetan LTOS BSAMS NOR BU LING Say LTOS BSAMS NOR BU LING The Jewel Island of Learning and Meditating.

That's the real name of Sera. Sera is a nickname. What's Sera mean?

Hailstone. The snow, hard snow, falls down. Then I felt very happy.

Last time at Diamond Mountain, the first day we did the retreat, big hailstorm in the middle of the good weather. Then I thought, ah, this is a good sign. Okay, one more joke, okay?

There are three great monasteries in Tibet. We call DENG SA GSUM DENG SA GSUM DENG SA means Seat of Higher Learning. DENG SA means Seat of Higher Learning.

There's a GANG LDAN which is translation of Tushita. It means heaven. Like of Maitreya's heaven.

That was Je Tsongkapa's headquarters. It used to have 10,000 monks. How did they start that monastery?

Yeah, Je Tsongkapa and five students. In the middle of the desert. And they are like, hey, you want to build a monastery, man?

Yeah, let's build a monastery. Okay, who's got some money? Then they say, okay, now everybody gives something.

Then everybody's like, they collect all their money. Six dollars. Okay, then they start.

Okay, so you can do it. Anybody can do it. That monastery 500 years glorious history.

Tens of thousands of great monks and tens of thousands of great monks. The other two are Sera and Drebu. Sera means hail.

DRE PHUNG DRE means rice. PHUNG means a big pile. Because their monastery is on a mountain and it looks like a pile of rice.

Then in the winter, for one month every year, we have debate Olympics. And each monastery sends their number one guys. And we debate.

All day and sometimes all night. You know, we have to fight. I think I went four times.

It's a big honor. It's like, go to the Olympics four times. I invited myself.

And don't tell anybody. So we will say to the DRE PHUNG guy, be careful, Mr. Little Rice Pile. The Sera is coming down hard.

The hail is coming down on the little rice pile. They're like, yeah, yeah, Mr. Sera. The hail comes, it comes into the rice pile.

And then it melts. Understand? You're supposed to laugh.

Okay.