«Дар освобождения», курс 37 «Лучшее, что ты можешь сделать со своей жизнью», занятие 1

[Speaker 1]
Here we go. As usual, we'll try to relax your face, relax your mouth, relax your eyelids, sit up straight. One way to sit up straight is to push down, which forces your chest and head up.

It's always a good idea to tighten your lower abdomen. The way you do that is, on your exhales, you can use your exhales as an excuse to tighten your lower abdomen. That tightens your, that strengthens your back muscles, and you can sit up straight, you can meditate longer.

So let's take ten deep breaths, and the exhales are very, very long, much longer than usual. So at the end of the exhale, your tummy tightens, which strengthens your back, and you can sit for longer periods of time. Hands are any comfortable way.

The goal with the hands is to keep them out of the picture, keep them out of the way. Just park them. I don't mind the sun, it's good.

Now let's go through our five pictures. For me, I'm going to use my old high school, and I'm going to start on the tennis courts. Think of a young man who's happy because he just got a position on the tennis team.

What that represents is the first benefit of bodhichitta, which is you join the team of Mahayana people. Again, it's not a Mahayana Buddhist school. It's a group of extraordinary beings who have had the experience of leaping from planet to planet, and meeting people, every living being on each planet, tens of billions of beings on each planet.

It's a very, very special team, a very select group of people called bodhisattvas. If I could burn this bodhichitta meditation into my mind, I could join that team. How would that feel?

Next, go to a place that you remember that will remind you of a graduation. For me, I walk from the tennis courts of my old high school over to the football stadium, and that's where we had our graduation. What's the graduation picture mean?

It means that the second benefit of bodhichitta, they will give you a title. You'll have a new title. They will call you Bodhisattva Gyaltsen, Bodhisattva Alex, Bodhisattva Khadeng.

It's like a PhD title or a doctor title. Now, the beings in the universe who are extraordinary, they will always talk about you as that Bodhisattva Jigme or that Bodhisattva Tim. You will change your identity.

Personally, I like to spend about ten breaths, ten slow breaths, on each part of the path that I'd like to burn into my mind. The next idea we learned was that you get a second title, which is Gyaltsen, daughter or son of the Buddhas. For me, I'm thinking of a picture where my, after my graduation, my mom and my dad came and hugged me.

So, a picture of a father or mother Buddha coming to give me a hug and welcome me into their family. Now I'm their son or their daughter. Of course, the Buddhas love everybody, but once you have jumped between planets and met all the living beings and made this commitment to help them, directly to them, made the commitment directly to them, each one individually, then you sort of join a new family and you are welcomed into that new family.

It's a very tight-knit family and the Buddhas have a special feeling for you. Then in my high school picture, I go from the football field where my mom and dad hugged me after graduation over to a part of the high school where there were kids learning to be farmers and they had donkeys. That donkey reminds me that we don't have to be geniuses or moral geniuses to become a bodhisattva.

We don't have to be the smartest person. We don't have to be the best person. We can be ourselves.

We have lots of problems. We have lots of weaknesses. We have addictions that we have not been able to stop.

We have all kinds of bad habits. We treat other people sometimes not very nice, but still we can become a bodhisattva. It's independent of those things.

We can have that experience. We can have that dream. Maybe the worse we are, the better we can dream.

The text said even a donkey or a fish or a bird, someone without great intellectual qualities, someone who's a normal person who fails from day to day, week to week, even in our practice. But still that path is available to us. We can become a bodhisattva.

Then the last picture for me at my high school is I go to the gymnasium and they build an extra top outside the gymnasium. I imagine a skyscraper, people sitting on a piece of a skyscraper and that reminds me of this event in my life where it seemed like a whole building was moving, shaking, actually jumping from side to side. That reminds me of what happens when any person jumps from planet to planet and reaches bodhichitta, becomes a bodhisattva.

Then because the karma of the whole universe is linked together, the karma that created the physical galaxy, those karmas are all linked together. I'm also responsible for Mars. I'm responsible for the sun.

I'm responsible for Buddha paradises that I heard about. If my relationship with every living being changes suddenly, then that jolts the karma that created the galaxy and the galaxy jumps and trembles from the weight of this new kind of love that I found. The galaxy is the creation of my mind, my karma.

It serves all living beings. If I decide to serve those same beings, then the galaxy has to jump when I do. People on some level, all people, and especially all Buddhas are aware that one of us in the galaxy just became a bodhisattva.

Imagine the day that you become a bodhisattva and the galaxy trembles. Let's dedicate the good karma that everyone we know could become a bodhisattva. Then slowly open your eyes.

Take a stretch.