«Дар освобождения», курс 39 «Ускорь своё сострадание», занятие 15

[Говорящий 1]
We're back to DE LTAR, right? DE LTAR RANG... Okay, good.

DE LTAR RANG CAN GZHAN MA BSTOD NA GYIS MIN BYUNG BA'I If you don't at least think about taking care of yourself first, and if you don't at least try to put up a little fight sometimes, DE'I NGON RANG LA SDUG BSNGAL BYUNG BA'I LEN TSAD ZIN MA BYAS PAS you got to get in the habit of thinking about the big mess-ups in your life. And as you get older, you will collect them. Trust me.

There will be big mess-ups, big, big mistakes you made in your life. And if you don't have a meditation object, you can meditate on all the big mess-ups in your life. I've got major exciting ones that I don't want to talk about.

But it's fun to meditate on the major disasters in your life and try to identify what was the moment of self-cherishing that triggered it. Like what was the... Every major disaster in your life goes back to a decision that was made in a moment of self-interest where you took care of yourself instead of somebody else.

You can go back, think about all the major problems you had in your life, and somewhere in there you will find a day that you decided that you were more important to take care of than other people. And that's a great meditation to do. LEN SA MA BYAS PA'I LEN PAR DU He keeps repeating here LEN.

There's three LENs in Tibetan. One means SDONG LEN, to take other people's pain. That's L-E-N, LA DANG PO LAS NA LEN.

Then there's a LEN, LA NA LEN, which means to give an answer. Like Q&A in Tibetan is T-LEN. T means question, LEN means answer.

But there's a rare use of LEN which is all over Seiji's Lojong text and it's called, Whose Fault Was It? Who's to Blame? If you trace this back, who made the bad decision that created this disaster?

It's a favorite corporate activity, right? Hanley's worked in corporations. So do I.

Finding LEN is a major corporate activity. Who made this stupid decision to sell this jewelry? The trace back blame is a major corporate function.

I worked in a corporation for 19 years, so I know. Or the military, right? So LEN, you got to find LEN.

Who's to LEN? So here, finding LEN, finding out who's, ultimately who started the problem. Where did the problem start?

It's a big meditator's skill. And it's a very fruitful and depressing meditation you can do. Pick out major disasters in your life.

Go LEN, look for the LEN. And then hopefully you learn from your bad experiences. I think Joe can agree.

I call 60 the age of wisdom. Until you get to 60, you can identify LEN, but you don't do anything about it. And then when you hit 60, suddenly you realize, then you identify who's at fault, which is my self-cherishing.

And then you're in the mood to do something about it. But you can start now. And when you hit 60, a light will go on.

Probably because there's less things to block the light. John Brady's on his way. We're brothers in that way.

I was in Varanasi. I went to the Ganges to stick my head under that filthy water as arms floated by of people who were supposed to be burned, but the guy doing the burnings stole the money and there wasn't enough wood. So the arm is floating by.

Understand? So anyway, I was out there swimming, trying to do the holy thing, and I crawl back on this, it's called a ghat. Ghat means the stone steps that go down into the Ganges.

So I climb up the ghat, sit down. Some chubby Indian guy comes down, sits next to me. He looks at me and says, Welcome back, Mr. John Brady. I'm like, what? He says, Welcome back, Mr. John. You don't remember me?

I own the pizza shop. This is the only pizza shop in the city of like 8 million people. And I'm like, I'm not John Brady.

He says, Oh, you look just like him. I said, Not all bald Americans are John Brady. I'm kidding.

All right, anyway. LEN TSAR TSE MA BYAS PA'I LEN PAR DU BDAG CHEN PHYIR LEN TSAR TSE CHOS PA'I RANG CHEN GYI DANG BRAL TE NAS Recognize the enemy and then treat him as an enemy. Your habit of taking care of yourself.

So in general, a good Buddhist is supposed to get to a point where they don't hate anybody. But you're allowed to hate one thing, which is your habit of taking care of yourself first. A good Buddhist should have a sworn enemy, one sworn enemy in their life, which is their habit of taking care of yourself.

And as we mentioned previously in the Ukraine TV talk, I think, it's very important not to misidentify an enemy who has infiltrated your family. A spy who's in your own house. So generally, an enemy who stands across the street and you can shoot at them is one thing.

But the enemy who pretends to be your friend and sits with you at dinner and eats with you and then screws you is a real enemy. And that's self-cherishing. That's the worst kind of enemy who ingratiates themselves into your life and you think they're your friend.

That's the worst kind of enemy. So there's a big lojong tradition of trying to recognize the enemy in the family, who snuck into your family, who snuck into your company, and who's sitting next to you like a friend, who's saying, look, that's the whole devil angel talk, right? Look, without me, where would you be?

If you didn't have self-cherishing, you wouldn't have clothes, you wouldn't have money, you wouldn't have anything. And you got to recognize that he's a liar. And all the self-cherishing you ever did reduced your clothes, reduced your income, reduced your happiness.

He's a liar, and he's trying to pose as your friend. So you're allowed to hate this one thing, which is your habit of taking care of yourself. SPONG THAB BYA RGOS Try to get rid of him.

Here's what it feels like when you discover your real enemy. Duh! You can even hit the enemy here.

Duh! This is a, who does that? One of our friends.

Petra was good at that. Who was that? Oh yeah, it's like, ah, God, you know, the enemy was in my own head the whole time, you know, duh!

Okay, slapping your head. This is a thing in, I don't know, they do in China? It means I just figured something out that I should have figured out a year ago.

It's like duh, duh, okay. You can say duh at the same time. Duh, practice.

Duh! It might be useful sometimes. Duh!

Okay. All right. Let's keep going.

GSUM PA GZHAN CHEN CING GI YON TAN DGOS DU MA NAS SANGS PA NI We have finished, thank goodness, the long depressing list of stupid things we've been doing because we tried to take care of me first. We finished tracing back every single problem in our life to some point in time when we made a decision to take care of myself before other people. By the way, it's just before which is the problem.

It's not taking care of yourself is a problem. That's not a problem. You have to take care of yourself to take care of others, but it should be equal right, right?

Equal right. You don't take care of yourself more than others, but you also don't go to the other extreme, man. Ignore your own needs.

You got to take care of yourself because you can't take care of others if you don't take care of yourself. You got to eat the meat. You have to take care of yourself or you can't take care of others, but it should be equal right.

Equal right. So we're into equal rights. We're not into denying the self.

We're not into denying that you need things, and you have to take good care of yourself. We're not saying that. You should get exercise.

You should eat donuts. You know. But you should share them.

Got it? Okay, now we're to the next big section, which is, well, if those are all the problems of taking care of myself first, then what's the cool things going to happen to me if I can achieve equal rights? Okay?

If I can start recognizing that other people have needs, and that I have an equal responsibility to take care of their needs, as well as my own, then what does that feel like? Okay? So now we got over the depressing part, and we're entering the happy part.

Ready? Here we go. SEMS PA GZHAN GZHAN ZIN GYI YONGS PA'I DGOS DU MA NAS SANGS PA NI This is a long rim.

$100. Tell me why. This is a long rim.

This is a long rim.

[Говорящий 2]
Good.

[Говорящий 1]
God, you're cleaning up. $100 more, Jigme. What's he going to do with all that money?

Stun him. Hit him up for a donation.

[Говорящий 2]
Yeah.

[Говорящий 1]
Oh, Daniel's doing his own stupa? Just kidding. Yeah, this is a long rim, which means the whole book is called Long Rim, which means Steps on the Path.

But as a practice, long rim consists of separate practices. And this is a separate practice. Sit down, think about how fun and happy it is to recognize other people's equal right, how fun it is to treat other people equally, and how satisfying it is in your heart.

So GZHAN GZHAN ZIN GYI YONGS PA'I DGOS DU MA NAS SANGS PA It's a separate meditation practice. You can spend six months on it. You don't have to think of all the depressing mess ups you had in your life.

My wife gets mad when I curse during teaching. No one's going to tell her I use bad language, right? Oh, he never says stuff like that.

DGOS DU MA NAS SANGS PA. I don't think she even knows those words. But anyway, her worst curse is, what does she say, Jigme?

She says, Oh fudge! Or something like that. Worse than that.

Shocks. Anyway, ZHI BA LAS. Who's ZHI BA LA?

Shantideva, Master Shantideva. JIG RTEN BDE BA JI NI BA DE KUN ZHIN DE'I BRAL BA'I CHUNG Every single happy thing in the world came from somebody thinking about somebody else. First, every happy thing in the world has come, if you trace those back, at some point someone has done something for somebody else.

If you trace back all the good things in the world, like Diamond Mountain, then it traces back to, and by the way, I'm very proud of Diamond Mountain. I got to say, we had a board meeting yesterday and we've been working for 20 years on this place. 20 hard years, and some of those years we had really hard things happen here.

It's been 20 years of really hard work, and now it's really beautiful. We have a great, great team here, and they are doing amazing things. I think it's the best retreat center in America that I'm aware of.

Because you not only have 30 or so really nice meditation cabins built for retreat, but you have a real tradition here. You have real teachings. You have thousands of hours of authentic teachings here, and it's a tradition.

You can't sneeze without getting a teaching here from a thousand years. So I'm just really, really happy with this place. Again, Hanley and Sunim and all the team, Kat, I'm just really happy.

Joe, you guys have been here from the beginning. Thank you. It's amazing.

It's everything I was dreaming about. Sachi, thank you. Okay, all right, here we go.

And then he says, look, just something like Netanya, serving someone a glass of juice. Not green drink, okay? Something delicious.

No, just kidding. But just the act of serving someone a juice or something. Those tiny acts, two-minute acts of serving someone else, if you trace back every good thing in this planet, you can find someone offering someone a juice at the beginning.

If you trace, trace, trace, trace, trace, you're going to find that. It's very... Now, that's a fun meditation.

If you get depressed by doing the other one, then spend some time on handing someone a juice meditation. Because every sweet thing anywhere traces back to someone doing something nice for somebody else and fighting the habit of selfishness. LA SPYOD LAS, LAM PA SPYOD PA LAS, MA RNAMS CAN GCOD DE LA DGOS PA'I LO THA'I YONDAN BYUNG BA'I DGOR MTHONG NAS Yeah, next picture.

I like this picture because they're not young people, okay? But they're acting young. They're having fun.

Me and Veronica, we bought these nice bikes. We bought bike rack. We took them to San Diego, 800 miles on the back of the car.

We got to San Diego. We unloaded the bikes, which is not a small thing. We got on the bikes and she fell over and hit her head.

You know, it's funny. By the way, she's fine. We had a lot of fun.

We have special tires that you can ride on the beach. For many miles you can ride down the beach. It's very nice.

So anyway, this habit of taking care of other people is a lifetime thing, okay? You can enjoy it your whole life. You can just keep, if you get the habit, then you sort of are funny and happy even at the advanced age.

So you just keep having fun. So it's a nice way to live. It's something you can carry for your whole life.

So I think most people, they get into their 60s, it starts hurting. Parts start hurting. You know, you meet your 60-year-old friends.

What do you talk about? Doctors, and then don't ask a 60-year-old what's hurting. Ask them what's not hurting.

You know, and so it's kind of common to meet grumpy older people because they're in pain somehow. They're not grumpy. Just something hurts all the time.

But if you do this, if you pick up the habit of taking care of other people first, it's not that your body doesn't hurt as you get older. It does hurt. But you don't notice it so much, and you're having fun all the time.

And I don't know, we got people like that around here. Right? Kind of.

No, we really do have. So I mean it's a lifetime. It's a way to be young and excited and happy and productive to very old age.

My mom is, how old? 95. My stepmother is 95, 94.

Then you visited her, you're supposed to know. 94. She's so cool.

She's so fun. She only takes care of other people. We sat down, she said, I said, what are you up to mom?

She says, I was just counting all the money I made last year. And I'm like, well, how much was it? And she said, $400,000.

She's 94. And I'm like, oh my god. And she says, you remember you gave me $10,000 to invest for you?

I said, yeah. She said, well, it's $110,000 now. I'm like, you know, that's why I can donate to that mom.

But she always takes over half of it and donates it. She always, for many, many years, she donates to many, many beautiful charities. So she gets excited about what she's going to do with the money and who she's going to take care of.

It's such a nice anti-samsara. It's such a nice cycle. She keeps making more money because she's giving it away.

And then she makes more money and she's having a lot of fun, right? She's really fun. They went and visited her.

She's really having fun at 94. So I really advise you to make it a lifetime thing. Make it a lifetime habit to take care of other people.

All right, we're going to take a break there, 10 minutes, and we'll see you when we get back, okay?