Бетси Грир — Книга 2: Интерлюдия о пустоте, занятие 66

[Speaker 1]
All right, everybody, take it away. Make those questions tough. Where is she?

Just kidding. Go ahead. You don't have to.

We can make it easy.

[Speaker 3]
Make it fun already.

[Speaker 1]
I think the last time I did this, it was really, boy, everyone was crying. Sometimes people are shy and they feel more comfortable to go in the chat, which is fine. Sometimes people are more comfortable in their native language, so hopefully our translators are available to help make those switches.

But I'll tell you one thing. Utpala has been studying for a long time. She is familiar with much more than just the books she's been working on translating.

No problem, Utpala, you're welcome. It looks like there's a question in Chinese, so hopefully someone is willing to translate it. I'm still in the English channel, I think.

Okay, cool. If that means anything, I have no idea. Otherwise, we can just continue the discussion.

[Speaker 2]
So there we go. Teacher, can you hear me? Maybe I can just speak to you.

All right, teacher. If the cause and effect is also empty, is it for some people that if I do something good, I get something good result? And then at the same time, when I do something bad, I also get something bad in return.

Does it work or not? So if that person says he has a very different set of seeds, will that person do something good, but in return get something bad as a result? Because I have already a set of very good seeds, so that doesn't work.

I do something bad, still I get a good result.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah.

[Speaker 2]
Thank you.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, thank you. Um, it's so hard to talk about the laws of karma, especially the emptiness of the laws of karma. Because we cannot.

So that's one thing to say about it. Another thing to maybe think about is it may seem that calling something the laws of karma, that doing things that are of benefit for others will result in an experience that is for us a positive thing. Doesn't that sound, oh, Seiji can't hear us.

So we need to tell Seiji that, oh no, that's Seiji's AI note taker. Never mind. Can you tell how I feel about AI?

Um, where was I? Oh, when we use the word law, it may seem that we're talking about something that's concrete, right? That is capital I, capital S, a particular way.

But think also that a law couldn't really, could, could actions have consequences without being empty of a self nature. And just because something is empty, doesn't mean it doesn't work. Just because something is empty means it can work.

So did I actually address the question? Let's see. And just to say about the question has something to do with like, it's from each of our, our own perception.

And yeah, that is the way reality works. We can really only talk about things from our own perspective. What, like the words that I hear coming out of my mouth, the sounds that I hear coming out of my mouth through the vibration of my vocal cords, I hear as words that have a particular meaning.

And none of that has any nature from its own side. And you are, I can, you know, say for certain are hearing something else, something different from what I'm hearing, which is kind of cool because, you know, if, if we, what we experienced is the result of our own actions in the past, right? That's what Buddhism says anyway.

And if that's true, and you have the desire to help somebody, basically all you have to do is something with that motivation to help somebody. If you want to teach someone the highest teachings, you have to have the motivation to, to teach the highest teachings, you know, based on your understanding and all of that. And people will have the karma to hear the highest teachings and understand them or not.

Like I've been in, I've given some teachings where, you know, I leave the teaching and I go, Oh my gosh, I, I, I really blew that. And, you know, I hope they don't leave the dharma. And, you know, like my perception was people sitting and sitting like this and watching me and, you know, and so I thought, Oh dear.

And that same person will come up to me later. That was such a profound class. Like, okay, the emptiness of, you know, all of it.

Anyway, I would start, I started rambling there, hopefully of benefit to somebody. Okay. There's another question from Sophie.

Okay. The people and things we see are from our seeds. And I understand the things in front of me are the projection of my seeds, but I don't quite understand that the person in front of me is the oops, things are jumping around for me.

That the person in front of me is the result of the opening of my seeds, because if the other person is the result of the opening of my seeds, then I am also the result of the opening of the other seed. And the person I see, it's like the relationship between the projector and the projection screen. So when two people are looking at each other, it's like two projectors shining at each other.

If people and things are the result of my seeds opening and projections, why are there so many projectors? How do we think about these projectors properly? So great.

All this, all these questions about karma. So like the metaphor of a projector, it is a really interesting one because it shows us some of what's going on, but we're also a camera, right? We're recording everything we do and say and think.

That's the, if we use the seed metaphor, that's the creation of a seed or the planting of a seed. So in every moment we're both projecting an experience, which is the result of the ripening of our karma. And we are recording.

So both things are going on. So it's not only that when you're with someone else that your two projectors are doing this, there's like this going on between two people. There's recording and projecting going on on both sides.

But the more we think about karma, the projector metaphor helps, but it's not like a, gosh, we sort of almost got to that today. We, I have to come up with a word, but it's, it's not like, it's a metaphor. It's not an exact description of precisely what is going on when we are creating potentials and experiencing the results of our past actions.

And each of the philosophical schools has a different idea about what's going on. So there's a lot for us to contemplate, and I think it would be, I'm just thinking now, it would be kind of great to do not only meditations on emptiness, how the different philosophical schools consider the nature of reality, what the differences are, and how do we get to their perfect understanding of what emptiness is, even if the Prasangika, the consequence branch doesn't agree. But if we also did meditations on what they see as karma, how karma works, you know, both sides, how do things arise?

How do experiences happen? What's going on? How does that school describe the, shall we say, the positive side of things, the thing we experience, as well as how do they think about how things don't exist, right?

I know I didn't give you really a good answer, but maybe, maybe there are some things to think about related to your question, Sophie. Thank you. So I see here another question.

In this life, in this life, I am a person and I have a mind. Is it possible for me to reincarnate as an unconscious stone in the next life? If I've been conscious since the beginning and have been reincarnated from a previous life, does that mean that there's a fixed amount of consciousness in this world and we have never created a new mind?

So living beings, the word is Sem Chen in Western Chinese and it's yoked together. I have heard some stories about, and I can't remember the exact stories, but I have heard stories, I'd have to go through all my notes, but of people, of some people, some living beings being born into a rock. So they must have a consciousness because consciousness can't be killed.

It can't end. There's no thing to stop, right? It's awareness.

You can't stop awareness. You can stop having, for a human being, you can stop having a brain that, shall we say, manages all the different input that comes in through the different eyes to the world. Our ears, our eyeballs, our nose, our tongue, our fingers.

If we didn't have a brain, the consciousness hasn't stopped. So there would be a consciousness, I guess, hanging out in a rock, not experiencing anything because there's no way to experience. If their body is a rock, you know, a rock isn't set up to perceive things or receive information from the outside world, outside world, to things outside of it.

So I suppose you could be born in a rock and then, you know, I don't know how it would pass on and how you would move over to another kind of suitcase for your consciousness. I don't know. I can't remember the story, but it was someone who did something nasty to somebody else and they were reborn into a rock.

That I know. If anyone remembers the story, that would be lovely to hear. So we can avoid doing that thing.

So we're not born into a rock. And in terms of there being a fixed amount of consciousness, I'm not sure that there's a fixed amount of anything, really. How would you create new consciousness?

I mean, we're having a heck of a time creating intelligence. So, you know, I'm not worried about us creating more consciousness. But I mean, we do talk about, you know, men and women copulate and they make new beings.

And so some consciousness goes from one kind of existence into another through that coming together and through that birth. When recording the six times book, should we focus on keeping the precepts or planting seeds or both together? So the six times book, I find is a wonderful tool.

And it, you know, to help keep the vows, to help us put attention on the vows that we have taken. And certainly, one of the main purposes of keeping a six times book is focusing on keeping those vows, on remembering them, and keeping them. And, you know, as I said in the, when we were talking about projectors, we're also cameras.

So when we're doing our six times book, and we're remembering our vows, and we're remembering our own behavior related to that vow, times we have kept the vow well, times we approached going to the edge of not keeping it or broke it entirely. We're contemplating our own behavior related to the vow. All of that is planting seeds.

And then when we rejoice about all of that, that's also planting seeds. So I think the whole, the whole practice of a six times book is all of those things together. You know, we're braiding all those things together.

B-R-A-I-D-I-N-G, braiding. And then also you can play with a six times book. Because sometimes the six times book can get, can become mundane, you know, can become sort of boring.

So you can play with it. What keeps it fresh for you? Maybe it would be focusing more on planting seeds versus remembering the vow.

Like just, just play with it. This is all, like the whole practice of Buddhism is like being a scientist of experience. What is it that's going on?

Oh, if I do this, then how does that affect my mind? How does that help me keep my vows? Like always play and see what you can do that will help you in your practice.

It's much, much more powerful than just like crossing the, the T's and dotting the I's. Besides Geshe Michael, many teachers also talk about the three spheres of emptiness and how to distinguish this huge amount of information. Yeah, there is a huge, huge amount of information in Buddhism.

And as someone who like in the first 30 some years of my life was taught information in a particular way in that someone sat up in front of me in a room told me stuff. I wrote it down and they told it to me in an order over time so that I like was building an understanding of something. And then when I came to start going to Buddhist teachings, it's like entirely different.

I had to just throw that out the window, that, that way, like that, that's the way to learn because that's at least for me, that's not the way my experience of learning Buddhism was, you know, that someone started me on whatever the ground floor might be. And then added information in me going, we talk about the Lam Rim and that is certainly a way Je Tsongkhapa organized the teachings in a way that really build up from, from, you know, finding a teacher to practicing Tantra. And that's beautiful.

But even so, this may sound kind of weird, but I'm weird, so there you have it. But to me, the Buddhist teachings are, they're, they're almost like a fractal. Do you know that word fractal?

There are mathematical equations that are expressed at graphically. And as you zoom in, in the graphic, it, you can go farther and farther and farther and farther. And then you can go the other way and you keep zooming out and zooming out and zooming out and zooming out.

And the patterns that are expressed by this mathematical equation have, they have some sort of a repetition to them, or at the very least, a connection to them so that it feels like you're getting more and more detail. But, but that more and more detail that you couldn't see when you first started, it was there. It was there.

And the Buddhist teachings are like that. You can get a teaching on how to make an offering to your teacher. Like someone asked that question earlier tonight.

And you can hear the advices that are given about how to make an offering. And then within that, if you go deeper and deeper and deeper, you know, there, there's more there to see. There's always more there to see.

So no matter where we, where we make our first step into the teachings, number one, it's perfect because who projected that first step anyway? We did. It's perfect.

And, and everything can be within that first step. Within that first step. Now I'm hearing myself echoing.

Oh, stop. Okay, good. Okay.

Where are we with questions? Or discussion topics? Or snacks?

No, we can't have snacks. Drafts.

[Speaker 2]
Okay, I know to see emptiness directly, there is a deeper cost is to serve the elderly. So I read DC IG level seven that I have to serve the elderly. So I have to think about every day I have to serve the sick or the old.

Is that correct?

[Speaker 1]
So with with karma, the many like laws and ideas around karma, one of them is that you can make particularly powerful seeds, but based on who it is that you're doing, whatever the action is. So in your example, um, you've been advised to, I'm taking it to feed the hungry and, and serve the elderly to be a to be maybe a companion or a friend or a helper to someone who doesn't have anyone else who can help them. And those, those are particularly powerful objects for creating karma.

And then also keeping in mind the highest view of the nature of reality as you can. The highest view you have, as you're doing that, so, you know, as you're feeding someone who's, who's hungry and doesn't have anyone else to rely on, you know, you can think about, may this be a cause for the end of all hunger experienced by everyone, all hunger, and not only for food, but for wisdom and for love, for the desire to help others. We, we can, we can use our like mundane activities and transform them through the way we think about them into something very powerful for our spiritual practice.

So that's one way to make it more powerful. Another way is, as we've talked about a couple of times, is about the thinking about the three spheres of emptiness, how in, in my act of providing food to someone who's hungry and doesn't have anyone else to rely on, I don't have any self-existence. I have no nature coming from my own side.

Who is this me and I am talking about anyway? And the giving of the food, watching it come from my possession to their possession, and the person who accepts that food, none of it has any, any nature of being a particular way from its own side. And because that's true, it can be a cause for seeing emptiness directly.

If it were not true, then not only would no one ever get fed, but like it wouldn't be a cause for anything. So you, you can, through applying your understand, your highest understanding of the way things are, no matter what that is, we, we're all improving our understanding of what emptiness is all the time, hopefully. But we do the best we can with our current understanding and dedicate that towards not only me, for example, having a direct perception of emptiness, but that everyone does that through this action may all misunderstanding disappear like that.

That would be pretty good cause. You can let us know. Okay.

Let's see. How can a shallow practice and a shallow motivation ensure the planting of seeds that can produce good results? So I think two things, well, many things can make a karmic act powerful.

There's our motivation. What is it that we intend to create by doing this thing, whatever it is, there's our understanding of how it is that karma works, our understanding of dependent arising. And, and keeping that understanding in our mind, as we do the act that makes it powerful, who our object is or what our object is can make it powerful.

Our parents, someone who is sick or elderly and has no one else to help them. Our teachers, particularly our teachers who teach us about how to see emptiness directly and how to become enlightened. Those are all powerful objects that can make an action more powerful.

And then there's like directing the energy of that action towards a particular goal. We call it dedication, you know, through, through my doing this thing, may it have a, have some results and the bigger you make that result. Well, let's put it this way.

You're, you can't get a big result out of something if you don't dedicate it towards a big result. The energy is, is going to go as you direct it. If you direct it towards, you know, oh, I'm hungry.

I'm going to eat some potato chips because I want to, I want to feel potato chips, but I'm going to eat some salad because I'm hungry and I need nutrients. And, you know, that's why I'm going to eat it. So then if I eat then, okay, there we go.

I've got my nutrients. I could think about, I'm hungry. Oh my gosh.

If I'm experiencing hunger, I bet there are countless other beings who are also experiencing hunger. And this is not a feeling that I want to have for very long. I need to do something about it.

And I can't, I can barely accept the idea that there are tens of billions of trillions of other people who are feeling this hunger. May this salad result in feeding all of their hunger, not only for nutrients for their body, but nutrients for their wisdom and nutrients for their love and nutrients for their compassion for others. So it really, it, and then it's, and then at the very end, it's like, I guess she, Michael calls it the coffee meditation, which I can't do as a coffee meditation, because if I drink coffee that late at night, I'm not sleeping.

So I do it as a pillow meditation. And I rejoice at what I've done. So those parts of karma are what can make it powerful.

And it's really, it's just up to us. That's all, as everything is. And that's, that's, I mean, thank goodness, right?

Because, you know, if it weren't, then we couldn't do anything about it. And, you know, some days we can be shallow and some days we can be really profound and that's okay. That's okay.

Sometimes you can, like, if you get up in the morning and even before you take your head off the pillow, think about, oh my God, I'm alive. I have another day. I have another day to practice the teachings.

May everything I do today result in me realizing the teachings in my heart so that I can be the best person I can be to help other people. You make that strong kind of motivation in the morning, that can, like, carry you through the day. And don't forget to rejoice at your coffee or pillow meditation at night.

Now, Christina says the coffee part, the coffee meditation came from when, you know, that you would meet someone at Starbucks and your karmic partner, and you would help them, you would help someone else with a situation that you have yourself. In helping someone else, you know, you're creating the seeds for, again, up to you, how big you make it. But for that, for your own problem to go away, you're helping someone else create the seeds for their problem to go away.

And then, you know, you take a sip of coffee and rejoice. But we would have to do that really early for me. Otherwise, it would have to be, you know, a glass of water.

Oh, that's cool. I'll do, I'll make mine a water meditation because I have to drink a lot of water. And so maybe that'll just be my little clue to be thinking about this more frequently throughout the day.

We have 22 more minutes. No, do we have 22 more minutes? No, we have 12 more minutes.

[Speaker 3]
There is a question, Venerable Utpala, about negative karma for unrequited love.

[Speaker 1]
Unrequited love? Oh, there it is. What seeds of negative karma for unrequited love are and how to cause it, how to plant seeds so that both parties can be in love with each other?

Okay, I have to do a little confession here. I'm a nun. And, well, I'll just tell you how things went for me.

I always wanted a Buddha boy. I always wanted a Buddha boyfriend, you know, that I could travel along the path to enlightenment with. And I, and try as I might, I didn't create him.

And I did create becoming ordained, of leaving the household life. And I will tell you that for me, anyway, this may not be what you want to hear. And that's fine.

I'll get to what you want to hear in a minute. But here's what I just want to say, that in taking those vows, I found that I, because I have these vows to avoid any kind of sexual energy with anyone, that it changed my relationship with everyone. And I feel a love that is, it was a bit surprising to me that it was, it felt much greater than any love I had ever felt for like a romantic partner, or my parents, or my cats.

It's, it's, it's like, I don't know, it's a really great feeling to feel safe, to feel not part of that game. But that's the monastic side. So if you want a partner, and you don't have a partner, I'm not sure about like, well, basically, they say Geshe Michael advises to, he calls it serving his old lady.

But you, you serve someone who is lonely, doesn't have to be an old lady, it can be, you know, a young cat lady, it can be, it can be a child who doesn't have any friends. But to find someone who is lonely, and, and be a companion for that person, and dedicated that action of being a companion, of putting that person, like, ahead of you, putting that person first, and being their companion, and dedicating that towards having a romantic companion, you can do that. And if there are two people who want to be in love, but they don't feel like they're in love.

And they're like, Oh, my gosh, what can we do? Because we want to be in love. It's just, there's no, there's no butter fluttering, butterfly fluttering going on in my in our hearts.

Um, you can, you can do the act together, you know, you can find other people who are missing a companion, who are missing some attention, who are missing some love and, and, and help give, give that to them. And dedicated towards the two of you. Can you make someone fall in love with you?

Yeah, that's not really how karma works. If it were possible to make someone else do something or feel something, you know, the Buddha would have gotten would have done whatever was required to get us enlightened eons ago. He wouldn't let us be suffering all this time.

Right? So we can't we can't make someone else feel anything. I don't know, I think that if you make it, I mean, if you get in the practice of, like making your dedication as big as possible, like, Oh, I want a partner, I'm going to go, I'm going to find a friend who also wants a partner, and I'm going to be a companion for them.

And I'm going to help them. And I'm doing it with all the the, you know, all the wisdom that I have to make it as powerful as possible. And I do my dedications, I do my coffee meditation.

But if you expand that to like, may be, may no one be lonely. May no one ever be without the companionship they desire. That would be really lovely.

And my guess is, you you kind of become an attractive person. When you do things with that thought in mind, when you have that thought, more people are going to be attracted to be around you, I think. Just physiological, physiologically, just just on a deceptive level.

You know, the more we're looking out to help others, the more attractive we are to other people. The more we are concerned about me, me, me, and do I have what I need? And hey, what about me?

The less attractive we are to people. It just that it just shows up. We're kind of fortunate that way.

It shows up that way. What what exercises can control sexual desire? Um, there are a couple things.

One to remember that sexual desire is just, it's really just an expression of a hormone in the body. It's and I don't know, eat a lot of pasta, maybe do a lot of heavy exercise and wear your body out. So it's fatigued.

I don't know. Does anyone have ideas? When I, I, I first took celibacy vows before I became ordained.

And, and it was very powerful to, to, to see just how much energy there was, that then I was able to use for other purposes. Like helping other people and meditating and studying. I don't know if that's helpful.

If people have ideas, that would be great. Exercise is great. Good.

Thank you. Yoga. Good.

Breath can also be good. Um, oh dear. Um, I've suffered from severe depression and anxiety for years.

What is the cause of this karma? What can I do to recover completely? I can sleep early and get up early now.

I only have a minute left. So, um, this having been someone who, who was suicidal before I met Buddhism, I'll just say that when I learned that the thoughts I was having, you know, you stupid so-and-so and you're an idiot and you'll never be able to do this and you can't do that. And that will never happen.

And on and on, all those negative thoughts, when I dissociated me from those thoughts, that those thoughts were just thoughts. That they come and go. Um, I started to be able to sort of turn, turn the page out of depression.

It's very difficult to do and it's certainly possible. It's certainly possible. Um, the Buddhist teachings literally saved my life.

Speak sweetly to yourself. When, when you find that your thoughts are like, oh, you idiot, or, you know, oh, there you go again, doing that stupid thing. If you say, oh, sweetheart, to yourself, oh, sweetheart, you're trying.

That's great. I started calling myself sweetheart, which when you're depressed, calling yourself sweetheart is the most inauthentic thing I could have done, right? It just sounded fake, insincere.

This will never work, but I kept doing it. I kept calling myself sweetheart in my mind, sweetheart. Uh, and that helped as well.

So there are different things you can do. And, and I hope we have the opportunity to speak more about this when we're not butting up and taking time away from Dr. Word and his Tibetan language class. So thank you very much for your interest in the practice and for being here and supporting each other the way you do.

And may we never end our support and practice. So have a great night. Are you here, Word?

[Speaker 3]
Thank you, Venerable Utpala. Dr. Word will not be here today. I will continue with the wet Chinese pronunciation class.

[Speaker 1]
Okay, great.

[Speaker 3]
Thank you so much for your beautiful answers.

[Speaker 1]
And thank you for what you're doing, Kim.

[Speaker 3]
Thank you so much.

[Speaker 1]
Bye-bye.