«Дар освобождения», курс 32 «Пустое приходящее, ментальные бомбы», занятие 1

[Speaker 1]
I think it's good when you're teaching meditation to a group, or you're meditating with a group, is to remind everyone that two things, and you've heard me say it many times, my first teacher Geshe Ngoan Dagye, 1973, before you were born, he used to take a pencil and he would break it, you know, and then he would take ten pencils and he couldn't break it, and then he'd say people meditating together is like ten pencils, you know, stronger, okay?

People meditating on their own is like one pencil. So, meditating in a group can be very powerful, and it can help you a lot, okay? What's the downside?

What's the problem meditating in a group? Somebody makes noise, okay? DRAG NI BSGOM PA'I DRAG, the word for sound in Tibetan is DRAG, the word for enemy is also DRAG, different spelling, but ...

how many? Sounds the same. So, there's a joke that sound is the enemy of meditation.

So, when you're meditating in a group, or when you teach a meditation to a group, then it's a big thing, you know, do the pencil thing first, talk about the pencil thing first, and then ... it's always good to talk about positive things first, and then say look, if you move in this meditation you're gonna disturb all these other people, you know, you're gonna shake them out of their meditation, okay? So, you have to try to be extremely quiet during a group meditation, and qi and the mind are connected right?

LUNG SEMS SGRUB PA'I GCIG PA. So, if you move your body, your mind has to move, your meditation will be disturbed. So, you have to try to get in the habit of sitting like a statue, sitting like a stone, and look, your mind's full of seeds right?

65 are opening every second, and we all have a mixture of good seeds and bad seeds, okay? That's why we're still here in this world, okay? We're the stupid kids in the class who never got to go to the next class.

So, if you're here, and I'm here also, you have good seeds and bad seeds, or you wouldn't be here, you'd be somewhere else. So, as you meditate, bad seeds are gonna open also, and you're gonna feel something's gonna happen, okay? A fly is gonna land on your nose, or you know, you're gonna start to have some pain that you never had before, or you're gonna start thinking about the boyfriend in high school that you didn't think about for 30 years, and who hurt you, you know, something's gonna happen.

So, a big part of meditation is just being tough, okay? Just being tough. Try not to ...

bad seeds are gonna open, okay? And just ... nobody has a perfect meditation, okay?

You think I do, I don't. You think the person next to you does, they don't either, okay? But you have to fight with it, okay?

And you have to be tough, alright? Don't move. If that boyfriend comes for half an hour, just try to kick him out again, okay?

And ... okay? But don't give up, okay?

And ... we talked about the three goals of ACI, and the big one was, you know, go out and look at the stars. How many people looked at the stars last night?

Yeah, pretty cool. We had some moon, the moon blanks them out a little bit, but ... you know, the big goal is to help billions of planets, okay?

And you will never see them if you don't meditate, and you will die without knowing what's going on in the world, okay? So, you don't have much choice. The only way to see those things is to meditate, okay?

And you will, if you meditate, you will see those things, and that changes you forever, okay? Then you become a fanatic, non-fanatic ACI teacher, okay? And it would be a shame in your life if you didn't see those things, and you could have, just because you didn't want to sit down every day, you know what I mean?

So, your phone's important, WeChat is very important, you know, ponchiks are important. What's ponchik? Russian donut, okay?

Churro, yo chow, why I know this word in every language? Okay, those are important things, but to see billions of planets, and billions of beings, and to love them, to have that experience once in your life, it's worth it right? So, let's try.

Okay, let's go. And the meditation we're going to do connects to the teaching you're going to get this week, the next section in the Lam Rim, okay? Here we go.

So, your eyes are lightly closed. If you're super sleepy, you're trying to meditate in the afternoon, you can crack your eyes open a little bit, but don't look at anything, and it's useful to meditate in front of something that is plain, like a wall that's colored all the same color, or in front of a sheet. If you choose to crack your eyes open, that'll keep you from focusing on anything.

They say watch your nose, but it doesn't mean to look cross-eyed, it doesn't mean to actually look at the tip of your nose, it means to focus your eyes on the plane, the distance of your nose away from your eyes. So actually, you're looking at nothing, if you choose to crack your eyes open. So, if you get sleepy, you might experiment with cracking your eyes open, but not looking at anything.

It's important when you teach meditation to try to get people to relax their face. It's very natural when the mind focuses, that we tighten our face, especially between your eyebrows. It's called the BRUVOR MAGYAM in Sanskrit, and it's important to keep that place wrinkle-free.

So, check the spot between your eyebrows, loosen it up, and another place where all of us get tension is in the corners of your mouth. So, relax the corners of your mouth. I like to say a little Mona Lisa smile.

If you smile slightly, that channels IDA and PINGALA in your ... on either side of your nose. Loosen, and then the meditation goes better, because the chi is flowing.

Check your fingers. Are they clenched? Are your hands tight?

Or are they relaxed? In general, there's two ways to hold your stomach your whole life. You can just let it stick out naturally, or you can slightly, very slightly tighten it, and get in this habit of slightly tightening the muscles of your stomach.

When you're sitting in meditation, that loosens the lower back. It loosens the corresponding muscles on the backside of the body. Shoulders are a big place of tension in a human being, and you might experiment with, instead of holding your hands on your knees, you can pull them back a middle of your thighs, and that opens up your shoulders.

Try to check if the shoulders are ... if one shoulder is tighter than another. Almost all human beings have alignment problems, partly because we are right-handed or left-handed, so your whole life you tend to use one arm more than the other, and then it twists your spine.

So, try to make your shoulders equal, and press them back just a little bit. That's easier if you pull your hands back on your thighs just slightly. If you have your hands on your knees or over your knees, there's a tendency for the shoulders to collapse.

In yoga, if you keep your eyes thirsty right, your gaze slightly above the horizon as often as you can during the yoga session, it affects how clearly you think, and it affects how you move. So, you can experiment with that even with your eyes closed. Where are you putting your eyes after you close your eyes?

So, you have a choice. You can look down with your eyes closed, but when you do that it tends to darken the mind, and the mind gets sleepy. If you look way up, it's gonna move prana in a way that gets you a little bit agitated, but if you look slightly above the horizon, like you're looking, you know, you're driving and you're looking for something in the distance, if the eyes are slightly raised above level, you'll find that it makes your mind more positive.

So, in yoga or even in meditation with your eyes closed, it's a big difference, big breakthrough if you keep your eyes slightly raised. Do one last check. Is the face relaxed?

Are the hands relaxed? Is my stomach just released, hanging out, or is it slightly tucked in? Last check before you start meditating.

Look for tension in the mouth, in the eyes, between the eyebrows, and then we go to breathing. So, it's traditional to go to breathing. From the Abhidharmakosha, exhale.

Then inhale. So, start watching your breath. In general, it's good if you can breathe through your nose, but if you have a cold, or if it's difficult, it's fine to breathe through your mouth.

As you breathe through your nose, there's a little trick you can do, which is to try to draw the breath up higher. So, of course the breath goes through your nostrils, down to your lungs, through your throat, but how much of the breath goes up into your sinus cavities will make a difference in your focus. So, see if you can, as you breathe in, draw the breath higher in the head, and it opens up cavities.

It gives you more oxygen, it gives you more breath. It's traditional to count ten breaths, and it's very important to do it starting from the exhale. There's extra breath in your lungs, there's extra air in your lungs, unused oxygen called tidal air, and if you're going to meditate successfully, it's important to get all the air out when you breathe.

So, during these ten breaths, we could take the opportunity to confirm that we are exhaling all the air. The lungs will naturally pause twice during your breath, pretty long after the exhale, and then for a shorter time after the inhale. During the exhale, for successful meditation, try to breathe past the pause.

So, the lungs will pause on the exhale at the end of the exhale, and then try to push out a little tiny bit more air. So, be conscious of your breathing. Breathing is autonomic, we don't think about it, but as you meditate, the meditation will go much better if you learn to push out the tidal air, push out the extra air that would stay in your lungs on the exhale.

So, I like to tell people don't worry much about the inhale. Your body will take care of that, it's automatic. If we had to think to inhale, we'd be dead already.

So, don't worry about the inhale, but be very conscious of the exhale. The Yoga Sutra says, long and fine, sukshma, tamo, and we'll start counting breaths on the exhale one, and then on the inhale pause counting, and then on the exhale two. Tradition is that you count to ten without thinking of anything else.

Now, mental seeds are ripening at a rate of 65 per second. To keep all 65 seeds, thinking just about exhales and breathing is probably impossible for a human being, but see if in general you can think about the breathing, and try to start shutting out the outside world. Okay, here we go, ten breaths.

Traditionally, if you get to like five, and that boyfriend from high school comes back in your mind, then you're supposed to start over, and if you're very honest with yourself you may never get to your meditation. So, try a the prana flows better in your body, and you won't get lung, lung condition. Lung means the tidal air build-up, because of the focusing of the mind, will start to affect your heart, you'll feel nervous, you'll feel distracted, you'll get a dry headache, and so if you get these symptoms because of your meditation, slight anxiety in the heart, or slight pain in the heart, or your breathing is erratic, or fingers start shaking, or you feel agitated because of meditation, you can fix most of these problems just by exhaling properly throughout the meditation. So, that's a good solution for these nervous problems that come from meditating for long periods of time. If you don't address that problem, it will get worse and worse.

So, nice long happy exhales, conscious exhales. Face is soft. Fingers are soft.

Stomach is not soft. Keep the eyes soft. I worked 19 years in Manhattan, in diamond company, and we had a big boss in the company, a woman, and she would often be agitated or angry, and there was a joke in the company.

I think she was the only one who didn't know about it. We had about 800 people in the building, and outside her office, if you're going to see her, people would say how's the weather today? Can you give me a weather report?

And it was a joke, it meant is she in a bad mood or good mood? And then people would say, oh I heard on the radio that it might rain today, it's a little stormy, and it was a secret way of all the employees to say don't go in her office right now. So, let's take a weather report about my own mind.

Is it, how's it look this morning? You know, did I get a good sleep? Is my jet lag doing okay?

How's my mental weather report this morning? Before I start meditating, after the breath, let's get a weather report on our own mind. So, spend a few minutes, just relax, have fun, watch the mind, and get a weather report.

How's the mind this morning? How peaceful is my mind this morning? Here we go, a couple of minutes okay?

You might think of other things, that's part of the weather report, and then come back. Let's see, how's my mind this morning? How quiet is my mind this morning?

Don't try to do anything about it, just get a weather report. Now the subject of the Lamrim, the steps of the path to enlightenment for this session, this week, is called klesha. Klesha is a Sanskrit word.

It's the root of one English word called holly, which is a plant. You can see it around here, and it has spines, prickly leaves. They don't stick into your hand like cactus, but they feel bad, sharp.

If you hold the leaf in your hand and it pokes your hand, it's not like a wound in your hand, but it's uncomfortable. And so klesha means negative thought in your mind, some negative thought in your mind, and we're going to study them for a week. And the definition of a klesha is RANG RGYUN DENG KYI GANG ZAG GIS SEMS RGYUD MA ZHIG BAR BYED PA'I SEMS BYUNG SEMS PA NYON MONG GI TSIN GYI, the definition of a negative emotion in Buddhism is a thought that goes to the mind and which disturbs the peace of mind of the person who has it.

So it's like the weather inside is very very quiet and calm, and then some wind starts to blow. You can think of a lake, the surface of a lake, and your mind's natural condition is like a quiet lake, and the surface of the lake is like a mirror. I used to surf a lot in the early morning, just after dawn, the ocean is like that.

We call it glassy. It looks like glass because there's no wind yet, the earth hasn't heated up faster than the ocean, so there's no winds, and we call it glassy. So the natural condition of the mind is glassy, it's smooth and clear.

And then when a klesha comes, when a negative emotion comes, then it stirs up glassy water, and then you get ... we call it chop in English, choppy waves, small waves on the water. It hurts the surfing.

So we're gonna do an experiment this morning, and then we'll take a break okay? So we're not gonna go too long. But look at your mind now.

We took a weather report, and it's glassy. Normally when we wake up, if we've had a good sleep, the mind is glassy. It's kind of neutral, smooth, and that's why it's good time to meditate in the morning, because the mind is naturally more glassy, smooth.

But then we think of things we have to do during the day, and inevitably of course, we start to think of challenges in our life. So we're gonna do an experiment this morning. We're gonna focus on the glassy mind, mind as it is, smooth, undisturbed.

And then purposely we're gonna bring in a windstorm, and I'll help you with that okay? I'll help you to ruin the peace of your mind. So here we go.

Focus on the mind. Stay inside, and it's quiet. Quiet water, smooth, glassy.

Enjoy the mind and feel the peace and calm of the glassy mind, just for a few minutes. Stomach is still slightly tightened. Inhales are still going higher in the head.

Faces and fingers are still soft. Exhales are still conscious. Look at the glassy water of the mind, natural, smooth mind.

Try not to move, because when we move we disturb the other people around us. Now, maybe for the first time in your life, let's purposely cause a storm in the mind. Let's purposely disturb the glassy water.

So, all of us in our life, each week, some challenge comes up. Maybe it's a person in your life who is giving you some problems okay? Maybe it's a situation in your health.

Maybe it's a problem with your husband or wife or people you work with. I'd like you to purposely go to an uncomfortable place and ruin the glassy, peaceful water purposely. So, now you're going to do meditation, single-pointed, ek agra.

Single-pointedly focus on someone who's giving you trouble nowadays. It changes from week to week, year to year. Different people give us trouble.

It seems very, very important at the time. One year later we can't remember anything about it. What's your bad weather this week, this month?

Who's giving you trouble? And let's focus on them, and let's destroy the peace of mind. Let's bring a windstorm across the water, and don't let it go.

If you start thinking about breakfast or lunch, bring back your focus. We're not meditating on our lama. We're not meditating on Amitabha.

We're meditating on someone who really irritates me. Make a list of all the things they did to bother you. Don't stop.

There must be a few more things they did to you. Now I'd like you to come back to your breath. Observe the breath.

Three long exhales. Don't open your eyes. Don't move.

Keep your discipline in meditation until the last moment. Then slowly open your eyes. Take a stretch.

I'm gonna take questions, if anybody has questions about meditation. And if someone has to pee-pee, go ahead, okay? So, I'd like to not take a longer break.

So, if you have to pee-pee, just go ahead. Maybe I'll go. And then in the meantime, we'll do some questions, okay?

You got ... Joel has a microphone, and Joel's gonna pick the person. So, it's his fault if he doesn't pick you.

Hang on, hang on. Here we go. Try, try again.

Good, that's fine. Oh, whoever irritates you most, okay? If it's yourself, that's great, okay?

So, no problem. By the way, it could also be a situation, you know, it could be the weather at Diamond Mountain, or it could be the hot water you don't have in your shower, and stuff like that, okay? The point of the meditation was to observe a klesha.

We want to see what does a klesha do to me? And it's been our whole life, we've been having them every few hours, and we just never noticed what they do, and they stir up the mind, okay? That's all.

So, in this meditation, your goal is to find something irritating, and if it's a problem to find them, you're a very special person, okay? But yourself is fine. I want you guys to observe what a klesha does to you, you know, because you've had it your whole life, me too, but you didn't notice what it does to you, okay?

Okay, other question? Thank you for making me uncomfortable. Yeah, it's just something I've been working on, and when you teach, okay, this is a teacher training.

It's a rich source of things to talk about if you've been working on yourself, you know, like you can share with your students little breakthroughs or little discoveries you made yourself, and in my opinion, as a teacher, it'll be more passionate and more interesting for your students if you talk about your own troubles, your own problems, your own challenges. Honestly, not in a ... you know, if you've been working on something this week, bring it up in your class, you know, find a way to bring it up in your class, because you're going to be more passionate about it.

So, I've just been working on that. I came back from China with a bad head cold, and then I was observing, and you have little stacks, it's like the hell realms, you have little stacks here of sinus cavity, and you can either bypass them, right? Or you can consciously try to breathe up, and it's like in yoga, some of the yoga texts said that the palate is an important part of the body.

There's whole schools of yoga that think the palate is very important somehow, and I'm curious about that. So, I was just checking it out, and I think if your sinus cavities are totally free, and if you're consciously ventilating into them, it affects your prana up here. So, check it out.

So, sometimes you just tell your students, I've been messing around with that, I think there's something there, I'm not sure yet, right? And then it's more fun for everybody. So, I'm just working on it.

Okay, other question? I do believe more oxygen will get to your brain somehow. Check it out.

Louder. Oh, eat the microphone. Yeah, cool.

So, the question was, you know, chronic pain, like a steady pain in your back, steady pain in your lower back, steady pain in your hips, pain that seems to stay with you for long periods of time. In most ... okay, you're learning to be a teacher right?

You can always answer a question on two levels. One is what we call shallow causes. You know, I could tell you to take hydrocodone just before you meditate, you know, some opioid, that's a shallow cause.

Or I could say, look at the seeds that are causing the pain. And you know, as a ... what do you call it?

You're catching me at a good time in my life, because I've not seen that one yet, I don't think. But of course, you never know. Because once you get there, you don't realize it.

But I've had 40 years of teaching, 40, 45 years of teaching. So, in my opinion, as a teacher, to help you give answers right? Mix it up.

Mix up the shallow cause and the deep cause. Talk about both okay? Why?

It's not very satisfying to a student if you just keep saying, work on your seeds, you know? Like they're like, yeah Geshe-la I know, but I have a chronic pain, you know? So, in my opinion, an effective answer should ...

you know, from many years of trying to answer questions, mix it up, you know? Give the person an answer on a shallow level, and give the person an answer on a deep level, and try to connect them. Because in the end, the opioid was created by your karma also, by your seeds.

You see what I mean? So, the shallow causes also come from the deep causes okay? So, connect them.

When you give an answer, connect them. So, I would work on your chronic pain on two levels. Number one, there's a whole support system for your body, how you eat, how you sit, whether you do some kind of exercise every day, and those are ...

those are something we do here, you know? We're going to do yoga after meditation, and every ... the old people, me and John, we just do it every day okay?

We just do our yoga every day. He just got back from, I don't know, he traveled around the world like three times last month. He's 70 right?

71 now, and my doctor, one of my doctors gave him a checkup, and not long ago, and said he has the healthiest human body I've ever seen. And it's just from daily practice, you know? He doesn't let go of his ...

he's like a dog that won't let go of his ... you try to take his meditation away, he's like ... you know?

John, let's go out for breakfast. Alright, I got to do my meditation. Okay, so, I think just a normal, relaxed habit of stretching every day.

We have a program, Connie's in charge of it in Mexico right? Some of you guys are here. We kind of got permission from the Congress to teach our stuff to 23 million kids, which may be the biggest thing we ever did.

And so, we've been struggling for a name for the program, and we had 23 names already, and the latest name okay, I'm not sure it's gonna stick or not, is Green Stretch Pen, GSP. So, here's the green. The green is just getting in the habit of having a green drink every morning, okay?

Stretch means, don't even do yoga, just stretch. We don't want to call it yoga. Yoga has all these connotations of Hindu, you know, om om om, you know, just stretch your body every day.

The pen? Yeah, is think about seeds, that's all. The whole program for 23 million kids is Green Stretch Pen, right?

It kind of rolls off your mouth Connie, I keep trying to sell it to her. Those three things okay, green, stretch, and pen. Really, have a green drink every morning.

From the—me and JB are really, what do you call, advocates of a green drink. It does something to you, it really, it really does something to you, and it's not so hard, I mean it tastes like crap, and not that I ever ate crap, but okay, just drink one, and stretch every day. You know, we had a yoga class on the way down here, we always stop and rent a yoga room on the way from our house to Diamond Mountain, because it's such a long drive, and we had all kinds of people in the room, some people just had a hip operation, you know.

Okay, you don't have to do a headstand, you know, somebody else can do the headstand, just stretch, just stretch your body, because blood will get into—okay, those are, those are shallow causes, right? Green and stretch. And then there's, what was the third one?

Yeah, pen, okay, and then you know, help other people with chronic pain, okay? Like, serve them, and really serve them, don't do it in a half-assed way, okay? Like, choose one person who has chronic pain, and become their chronic pain buddy, and talk about chronic pain, and talk about new kinds of crappy green drinks, and you know, just become their buddy, you know, and not, not visit them once every two weeks, that's what I tell DCI people, because they're not serious, okay?

So, you know, be a resource for them, be someone they can depend on, be someone who cares about their chronic pain. What happens when you have chronic pain is, you tell people three times and then they don't want to hear, they don't want to hear about it, you know? So, be the person who's gonna follow up on their chronic pain.

We had a, one of our group burned their hand very badly last week, very badly, it may have to be cut off, and and Jigme just keeps helping her, and she's busy. Jigme's trying to run a retreat, etc, teacher training, and she's really busy, but she decided I'm gonna be responsible, I'm gonna take care of this person, I don't care, you know, I'm busy, I'm crazy busy, but this person is gonna lose their hand if I don't help, you know, and nobody else wants to, because the person's a little cranky, okay? So, so don't let it go, don't let the person go either, you know, like don't let your dream girl go, and don't let your daily stretch go, some kind of stretching, okay?

Even if you can't do yoga, and then find a person to latch on to, and be their go-to person, okay? Be the person who takes care of them. Cool?

That's deep causes and shallow causes, which are deep? Pen, okay? Which are shallow?

Mm-hmm. It's gonna work Connie, see it sticks in people's mind. Okay, one more question.

Nope. Is it sad tears, or happy tears, or just water? KAI SHING, that's good.

Oh man. You know, so I keep telling you I'm an old man, and I've seen a lot of things in my life, and generally there's an ancient Roman saying that tears are very precious, like pearls, okay? So, if you can cry sometimes it's a very good sign, it's a very good thing.

Sad or happy. Pearls. Are you translating?

Oh, somebody else is translating, okay. Like pearls, precious like pearls. There's an old Roman saying, they are like precious like pearls.

It means you have feelings, and you care about people, and so I think it's a beautiful thing, and just drink a lot of water. Okay, here we go. We're in the desert word, you can't lose a lot of water.

Okay, Tim, we're gonna go to the Lamrim. Okay, do you want to take a pee-pee break? Let's take it, let's take an official pee-pee break, okay?

15 minutes, come back at 8.55. I'm gonna start at 8.55, if you're not here, I don't care.