«Дар освобождения», курс 25 «Совершенное прибежище», занятие 13

[Speaker 1]
Alright, number thirteen, I'm not going to explain much. We have twenty-seven to go, I mean, twenty-seven total to do. We're only half way through, you're starting tomorrow evening.

Number thirteen is basically... we co— what was the guy with the umbrella? Somebody tell me.

Nah... Protection from huge... mess-ups.

Adam got it... in the past, okay? Protection from huge boo-boos you made when...

I mean, most of my boo-boos I made when I was seventeen, I don't know what it is. They were all packed into one year... in college, okay?

Okay, that was the umbrella guy. What meditation was that? Eleven, okay.

Thirteen is almost the same, okay? Thirteen means... bad stuff that's going to happen to you, okay?

Bad stuff that's going to happen to you right now, in the next few weeks, okay? Like it didn't come from twenty years ago, it came from last week, okay? Just steady flow bad crap coming to you, okay?

From crappy week last week, okay? That kind of day-to-day crap, okay, excuse me, but it's a good word. That kind of bad things can't touch you.

If you're taking refuge regularly, if you're using, just using the four steps, it gets you your goals, but it has a side effect, it infects the rest of your karmas, even your immediate karmas. So, things you did last week, don't ripen. And you just...

we talk about it in DCI, you know, just weird stuff happens to us. We live in this bubble, you know? Somebody sent a Bentley to pick us up, and you know, I was telling Nick, Nick, somebody sent a Bentley to pick me up, he says, well Geshe-la, they did a program in a different city that night, he says, we went in a Rolls Royce.

I'm like, hey, you know, you know, so, right? Yeah. I didn't get a Rolls Royce yet.

Oops, wait. Save this live. Okay.

Okay, so, this one is immediate problems, okay? Won't mess with you, you know, subway breakdowns, stuff like that, okay? Like, snow, just when you get out of the subway, and stops when you get to the Three Jewels.

Stuff like that, immediate unhappy things. Untouchable means... and the word in Tibetan is untouchable, they cannot touch you.

Who's the last people the Buddha met before he became enlightened? Yeah, demons. What'd they do?

They threw spears and they shot arrows at him, because they were upset, they saw he's about to get enlightened, and they're like, we got to get to the Buddha tree. Why? Right now!

Just go, take your arrows, take your spears. Why? He's going to get enlightened, we got to distract him, you know?

And they ran to the Buddha tree. I sat there once, it's cool. And they put their arrows and they threw their spears, the girls took off their clothes, you know?

And the spears turned into flowers in the air, and the arrows turned into flowers, and they just come down flowers, you know? And then he became enlightened, okay? So, this is number thirteen.

Think about the problems you have. I don't know, legal problems, tax problems, wife problems, you know, rent problems, job problems. And if you take refuge, use refuge to deal with your problems.

And then it's like armor. The problems come and they're like, ding, ding, ding. Okay, they just go, boing, boing, boing.

And they don't touch you, they can't hurt you. Yes sir, Jerome?

[Speaker 2]
So, we're using the Four Steps, you're saying that it's forging the seeds from the past?

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, it helps too, you know.

[Speaker 2]
Can you comment on how we're able to bring that into existence?

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, if you think about the Four Powers. Let's say I... lied to people, right?

So, what's the actual antidote, what's the third of the Four Powers? Huh? Make a promise not to do it again, okay?

And what's the fourth? Do the opposite. You see, number three is a negative promise, I won't do it again.

Number four is a positive promise, I promise to do the opposite for a while. I'll tell absolute truth to everybody, I don't like your dress today. Not the whole truth, okay?

But, if you think about it, that's the same as doing... If you do the Four Steps, it's the same as the Four Powers. That's the point, okay?

It's the same. We struggle with that in DCI, you know? Do we tell them the Four Powers or we just tell them the Four Steps again?

I don't make enough money. Do we tell them, use the Four Powers to remove your negative seeds? Or, do we tell them, share things with other people?

The positive one is more...fits people. Most people prefer to share things with others to fix their poverty, than to beat themselves up for six weeks about how cheap they were. Got it?

So, when you're teaching people, you can teach them the Four Powers, which we do, but that's emphasis is negative, you know? You're a bad person, you collected bad seeds, you're poor, you don't have enough money, it's because you were mean to other people. Go home and confess, okay?

Or...you know, now what you have, anything you get, please share it with other people. And then that...that also acts to purify. Because it's step number four, it's power number four.

[Speaker 2]
Yeah. Yeah.

[Speaker 1]
But the one that creates a new good seed also stops the old bad seeds from ripening. That's what we talked about this morning. You see?

So, you killed... you feed two fish with one worm. No.

No. That's not vegetarian. Okay.

Okay. So, we finish number thirteen.