Ник Лашо — Книга 2: «Ратнамала», вопросы и ответы 06 — стенограмма

[Speaker 1]
Hey, everybody. We're going to start in like one minute. We're going to start now.

Can you hear me? Can anybody hear me? Is anybody there?

Yay. Okay, Gina, gracias. Okay, Aisha, gracias.

Maybe all your questions have been answered at this point, which is fine. We can just hang out. There's my dog.

Sorry, I'm not looking directly at you, but my monitor broke the day the term started. I bought an external monitor, so I'm just using that until I can get my laptop fixed after the term. I just moved into a new house this afternoon.

It was just beautiful and awesome. I'm super happy. My dog seems happy.

My baby's excited. My wife's definitely excited. It's really nice.

Now we have an office. Check it out. It's empty right now, but it's kind of cool.

I'm Nick. I'll be leading the Q&A today. I'm the director of the Diamond Cutter Classics Translation Program, or the Mixed Nuts, and also a translator.

Honored to be part of it. I've been a little tired this term, but I can still try to answer your questions. If you have any, feel free to unmute and ask a question or paste in the chat.

If you're feeling shy, don't. Hey, Nick. Hey.

Who's that? Cameron?

[Speaker 2]
Yeah.

[Speaker 1]
Hi. Hey.

[Speaker 2]
I've been asking everybody, what advice do you have for someone trying to become a translator who's in the early stage of doing so?

[Speaker 1]
Okay. That's a great question. Like I told you the other day, I haven't been checking your email, but I will respond to it.

[Speaker 2]
No worries.

[Speaker 1]
I'll respond to that now, and I'll also try to get back to you to give you some more specific ways to get involved with us. If you want to be a translator of Tibetan, I recommend that you start with the alphabet and learning the Tibetan language, of course, and learning to read Tibetan, and just keep pushing, like just try to do things that are beyond your skill level. That's what I do.

I started by, I mean, I translated very simple things working. I was fortunate to have Geshe Michael guide me from the beginning, because I've always been into languages, and then he just kind of picked up on that and just started helping me learn Tibetan, but I would say I just started doing stuff on my own. I just started translating a text, and then I gave it to him, and I was like, look, I translated this book, and he was like, okay, now let's redo it, because this is ridiculous, like your attempt, but it was a nice try, and it was short.

It was something really short, so I just did it on my own, and then he took me back through it. He didn't correct what I did that time, because it just wasn't good enough, but we just went back through it line by line, and then by the time it was done, I had done something. I had finished the translation, and so I think like, I don't know, for me, learning languages in general is mostly about not being shy, you know, just go ahead and try.

It's only going to unlock itself more and more, so it's pointless to be shy. I learned Spanish in like a few months just by talking to people and not being afraid to sound like a three-year-old, like I don't care. It's okay.

It's all right. Just not having an agenda of like people respecting my abilities always, like I just know I'm a beginner, like now I'm surfing, and I'm a beginner. I'm from New York.

I'm not a surfer, and I live in California, and now I'm surfing, and I'm 42, and I'm out here with a bunch of high school kids who are amazing, and I just have to like be a beginner, and I don't have any choice, and so I just embrace it and just be super humble, and of course, with the ocean, you have no choice but to be humble, but I think that like people talk about beginner's mind, and I think it's a useful approach to anything is to just be inquisitive, be humble, and just approach, even when you get good, just to not let your ego start propping you up because then you start to build walls to progress, you know, so with translating, I think it's a great opportunity to stay a beginner because there's always going to be more to learn.

Tibetan philosophy is so complex, and you know, it's just, it's more than a lifetime's worth of work, and when I look at Geshe Michael doing it, he's still, you know, you can see him during the term sometimes, like I didn't know what this meant. I had to like look it up, like let's search for it. What do you think, and he kind of acknowledges that it's always a puzzle, and we're all just doing our best to put it together.

I will slow down. Thank you. I'm sorry, and thank you for the reminder.

If you want to get involved with the Mixed Nuts, we could use volunteers right now, and you know, eventually we'll be able to have more paid positions as well, but that's, and we have things that we need help with right away though, so you know, we always talk about seeds and karma, so how to become a translator karmically, I would say, you know, support people who are trying to learn new things, support people in, because specifically, you know, you got to, whenever you want to find like the seeds or the karma for something, this is my understanding, you really got to go into the depths of yourself, into like what do you, what are some of the things that you're trying to achieve, like is it because, why do you want to translate?

Do you just love learning and love languages? Do you want to help a deeper understanding of these profound concepts? You know, it's probably many things, but just encourage people in those pursuits and help people to, you know, understand deep philosophy or to develop themselves around, you know, learning languages or something, and share what you know about Tibetan for sure, like as soon as you understand something, don't be shy if somebody else is trying to learn, just share everything you know, and I think when it's about learning, you always, and with Dharma, this is more with Dharma, but with Tibetan too, like don't be afraid to share as much as you feel like someone's able to absorb, never hold out, never feel like you need to stay above them, you know, like they, if they can surpass you, God bless, you know, that's how I feel, like please surpass me, you know, I don't know what my problem is, but I'm doing my best, but you know, if you can go faster, if you can learn faster, I'll give you everything that I know, and I hope that you can learn even faster than I can, so just kind of having that attitude helps too, I think, yeah. Thanks, Nick.

That's what came to mind just now. That's really good advice. And I'll try to email you more, and you know, we think you're cool, so we're going to engage you.

You're not the only person I've been bugging either, so you know, everyone's been very supportive, and that's just like, I know that I couldn't do this alone, and that's why I just feel super supported by you guys. We're a good group for that, I mean, we have resources, we have Geshe Michael, who is, you know, probably the best, you know, translator of this stuff. You know, he knows it, and he's a Geshe, and his understanding, he's a genius, I mean, you know, his understanding is vast of these things, and he's wrestled with these ideas and translated them for 40 years, so you know, he's really got it down, more than 40 years, like 50.

I'll slow down again, sorry. And easy questions like that are awesome. I love to just talk about easy stuff.

I also, I'm happy to talk about dharma, and philosophy questions if you want, but it's fun. But I like to talk about practice, and opening your heart, and really nice, gooey things like that. So let's see.

Sometimes it takes one person to step up, and then we engage a topic, and then other people, it kind of starts flowing. We are at the end of the term, so I know everybody's probably tired, I am, and it's been a long day. Somebody think of a question, I'm going to prop my computer up so I can get a better angle.

[Speaker 2]
I have a question.

[Speaker 1]
All right, whoops, I just lost signal. Okay, go ahead.

[Speaker 2]
So sometimes I hear that it is used to explain the existence of emptiness as it pops out into existence at the same time that the object pops into existence. Not out, I'm sorry, into existence.

[Speaker 1]
I understand.

[Speaker 2]
But I was thinking about it, I guess I was debating. We were talking about it with someone, and how can it be that an absence pops into existence? How can we say that an absence exists?

And I was thinking that maybe that only works in the higher school, because as a concept, anything can exist. Absolutely anything. But in the other schools where there is some kind of true existence, how could an absence exist?

[Speaker 1]
That's a fun topic. Yeah, I don't know, I'll just give you my perspective on that. It's a good observation, and it kind of relates to a lot of other questions that I often get when doing these.

Yeah, I think you're right, like an absence isn't a thing in the way that we think of like a phone is a thing, and the emptiness of this phone is not a thing. It's an absence of a phone that comes from its own side. And I'm sorry, we just have to talk about it from the beginning.

So it's very different. And I think you kind of answered your own question, at least the way that I would answer it. Yeah, we can talk about a concept as a thing.

Does the emptiness pop into existence? I mean, I would say yes and no. Yes, the emptiness pops into existence in the sense that as soon as there's a phone, there is emptiness of a phone.

It's just a quality of the phone, you could say. It's a fact about the phone, emptiness. So there is no qualities of the phone until there's a phone.

So in that way, it arises or comes into being. But if you start thinking about now emptiness exists, it's not like that. It's not like the emptiness of the phone all of a sudden is like this existing thing in the universe.

It's just like a fact about this. It's a fact about the thing that does exist. But the fact that it's empty is true.

So to say that emptiness doesn't exist can sound wrong. The words are hard when you're talking about absences. The words are hard when you're talking about emptiness.

It's difficult to find the language that would say it correctly. So we just do our best. So I think that remembering that you're talking about a quality of the phone or remembering that you're talking about a concept when you're thinking about this kind of thing is a good idea.

You know, that's a really good way to approach it. But it is good also to remember, and this isn't what you asked, but it's good to remember that emptiness is a quality of the phone or whatever, of everything. But it's not that there is some big thing called emptiness that just exists.

People start to think like that. But it's more like it's in relation to something. Something has to be empty.

So there is only emptiness in relation to something that you're thinking of. It's not this thing that's out there just waiting for you to see it. It's an aspect of the phone.

It's a thing that's true to say about the phone is what emptiness is. But it's not really a thing. So it's slippery.

It's tricky. Tricky, you know what I mean?

[Speaker 2]
Yes. But in the logic schools, we kind of do have absences as one of the things that exist in the universe. In the classification, we have empty space.

We have absences as something that exists in there.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, it's a thing that exists. It's kind of because of the concept.

It's a thing that exists. But it's not a positive. It's still a negative thing.

It's an absence. It's just a concept. Empty space is a concept, which doesn't change.

And it doesn't come from any causes.

[Speaker 2]
So you're right.

[Speaker 1]
So the logic school— You don't have to go away but agree with that. It's just that you have to be careful about what you think a thing is.

[Speaker 2]
Yeah, so it appears to be that the logic school and other schools and middleweight school and the higher middleweight school are more in the same page about emptiness than what it looks like in the sense that there is also a concept. The logic school maybe speaks about absences like things that exist in a different way. But they still think there are concepts, not things that exist.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, the difference between the schools is more about what is being denied. What are things empty of? How much self-existence do they actually have?

The middle way is denying that anything exists that's not coming from the seeds in your mind. But the Abhidharma school, for example— And I'm going to oversimplify this just for the sake of time. You know, they talk about all different kinds of causes for things.

There's some stuff out there, and your mind is interpreting it, and it's empty of the interpretation that your mind is putting. Some of the lower schools talk about it like that. And then the higher school is saying, oh yeah, sure, but the stuff is also coming from a seed.

If you break it down, it breaks down infinitely. And that's kind of the progression through the schools. Way oversimplified.

But just with respect to your question, the difference between them is not whether or not things are empty, or whether or not emptiness is a negative quality. It's just what is emptiness? What are things empty of?

You know, what's not there is like the difference. What the schools are debating is what's not there? What does it mean to be empty?

You know.

[Speaker 2]
Thank you.

[Speaker 1]
Sure, I hope that helps. Cool, thanks for the question. Thank you.

Nice to see you, by the way. It's been a long time. I hope all the food you're still making— cooking and everything, I'm sure.

Let's see. Another question. Somebody said— I don't know if I understand it.

This is from Laya. Entirely understanding the whole universe, see emptiness directly. What's the gap?

Any related to how much understand the real meaning of emptiness? If somebody can help her translate or something, I'll be happy to try to answer her question, because she asked before some of the other ones. But I don't understand what you're asking.

So, when you see emptiness directly, do you entirely understand the whole universe? I don't think so. I think we talk about different things.

So I'll do my best. We talk about omniscience, meaning knowing every single thing in the whole universe. You know, an awareness of every single thing in the universe.

This is tanche kyempa, or kunshepa, omniscience. And then we talk about seeing emptiness directly, which is just an experience— it's not small, but it's just an experience— where you see, in your meditation, you go directly into this absence of a self, where you thought there was a self. So it unwinds.

It releases the grasp that your mind has on reality. So in a sense, you could say it's understanding the whole universe. In a sense, because for the first time, you're understanding more deeply how the universe exists and how the role that your mind is really playing in creating the universe that you're experiencing.

And you're understanding it directly. So you're experiencing it directly. You're experiencing directly the fact that everything that you thought was real isn't real the way you thought it was.

So you understand the universe in a new way, but you don't know everything. So I don't know what you mean exactly, but I'll just make that distinction. When you see emptiness, it doesn't mean you know everything.

It does mean you understand the universe deeper and in a new way. And then when you have that experience, it's changing you to a Buddha. It just takes a little bit more time.

That's the idea. And I don't know what you mean by the gap or the real. Oh, maybe that's what you mean.

I see. So when you see emptiness, that starts the process of you turning into a Buddha and getting rid of all the misunderstanding in your mind. So how do I explain it?

From a karmic perspective, you still have all this negative karma in your mind from a infinite past of having seen things wrong. So like in Su Geng's book, we're always talking about the wheel of life. So you've done all this stuff according to those 12 links.

So your mind is still stuck in experiencing the world incorrectly, even though you saw it correctly for the first time. But it takes time to undo all the negativity, all the wrong way of seeing the world and adopt this new viewpoint. So it takes, as Michael says, it takes time for the old seeds to wear out.

Takes time for the old seeds to wear out and eventually you will achieve nirvana if you see emptiness, but it could take a while. It could take like hundreds of years. So they say seven lifetimes if you believe in reincarnation and you can think of it like that.

So I think that's what you mean by the gap. Yeah, it's not that you do... Yeah, you have to...

The next path is the path of habituation. So you get used to what you saw and you restructure your mind based on this new understanding. And then it just, that takes time, basically.

I haven't had these experiences myself, but that's what they say. It takes time to rewire your circuitry to experience the world correctly and then everything becomes super happy. I'd like to ask a question about vinaya, about food.

I heard that onions, ginger, and garlic are not allowed. How should we look at this? I never heard of ginger, but I'm not surprised.

I like those things. I mean, it's kind of up to you. Experiment with them and see if they help your practice.

Is ginger, is onions or garlic disrupting your meditation practice? Some of these things you become more sensitive to when you go into a long retreat or just any retreat. You start, you keep silence.

You're in a retreat for several days or weeks. You start to become more sensitive to all the things that you put in your body. And you might notice if garlic or ginger or onions are affecting the way that you feel.

I've heard, and I don't know if it's true, but I've heard that garlic increases your desire and onions increase your aversion or your anger. And I don't know about ginger. I think ginger just improves your circulation.

So I don't know. But I don't know. I think it depends on the person.

There's another way you can think about it too. If you're a teacher, it's good to avoid things like onion and garlic before you teach. Because people will be turned off if you have really bad breath and then they might not want to study.

I used to teach in a prison for like three years. And I would teach in two prisons and they were next to each other. And then I had a break in between.

So I would go teach. Then I would go like eat a burrito, which is like American Mexican food, which has tons of onions and stuff in it and beans and whatever. They're awesome.

And then I would go back to teach again in a different prison. And I'm sure my breath was horrible. And I remember one time, and the prisoners are very sensitive to these kinds of things because they have no control over anything.

So their environment, their personal cleanliness, their clothing, their smell, their breath, these are the only things they have control of in their life. So they're very sensitive to other people's smells and breath. And they get angry if you don't smell good.

But they commented to me, they're like, damn, bro, what'd you have for lunch? After that, I was more careful about what I ate. So that's just another way to think about it.

If we're bodhisattvas, we think about how we're affecting other people also with our choices in terms of can we help them or not? And if it seems less likely that you'd be able to help students because you have onion breath, I guess eat it at the right time. Let's see.

Do I know if there are any classics related to human memory, human brain and thinking mode? Yes, definitely. Like the South Trantica School or the Dodepa School talks about that stuff extensively.

And Adam and Ben are working on texts that will deal with that. It may come up in some other books too, but it's going to be dealt with in the books that they're working on, Adam and Ben. So you can listen to those classes.

Make sure you catch those classes. Buddhism has a whole lot of work in psychology and on memory. The database is thousands and thousands of books.

So this is definitely topics that are coming up. And we talk about memory extensively in the Dodepa School and whether or not a memory is considered a direct perception or a valid perception. So things like that.

And that varies by school. So it's really interesting. And it's a topic that I'm not qualified to just dive into right now, but I would have to study.

Like any class that I ever give, I study a lot that topic right before I teach it so that my memory is refreshed because I have a bad memory. Let's see. That's a cool question though.

Thinking. How the mind works. We are talking about it also.

We're talking about it in all the books right now. How the mind conceives of things. Or at least we have.

So if you want to learn a bit about that, go back through the old Mixed Nuts videos. They're all on YouTube. So if you have access to YouTube, you can go back and see.

Look at these questions in words classes and Utpala's classes and in Adam's classes. It's a lot of commitment to watch all those videos, but I do suggest doing it if you can just put them on sometime. Oh, I like this question.

How do the scriptures guide us to deal with the jealousy and fear behind? What do you mean, fear behind jealousy? Can somebody read that Chinese and tell me what if they mean the fear that forces us to be jealous?

All right. Well, if anybody wants to read the Chinese and speaks English, please tell me.

[Speaker 3]
Yes, Nick. Actually, she's asking according to the scripture or according to the text or sutra or something like that, the classics. So is there any teaching that could guide us or teach us how to deal with the jealousy and the fear?

[Speaker 1]
Oh, OK, OK, OK. I saw the word behind. So this is interesting to see what they meant.

[Speaker 3]
The behind is actually means the fear is behind the jealousy is hidden, right?

[Speaker 1]
That's cool. Yeah, I like that. That's what I thought.

OK, cool. Yeah, there are a lot. Totally.

Especially Lojong is probably my favorite. Topics to study in all of this, because it helps us really practically. It helps us really directly to fight our jealousy and the fear behind it.

And Lojong's approach is really radical. And it's not necessarily always ideas that we should all put into practice right away, because some of it's, you know, I'll talk about it. So a big part of the Lojong teachings is to understand.

By the way, Seiji's book that we just are finishing, like maybe today, is has been an amazing set of classes on Lojong. So there's five years of classes online that you can watch. And a lot of it is about fighting your jealousy.

You know, and it's amazing. So mostly, it's using the idea of emptiness to fight your jealousy. So it's like.

It's to take the idea that everything is coming from you, everything is coming from the karmic seeds that you plant and use that idea to fight for, fight against every moment of jealousy. And it's like some of the practices that it describes are like to put everyone else's needs above your own, you know, like to always to see others as important and see yourself as beneath them. You know, this is not always a safe practice for everybody, because, you know, if you tend toward like low self-esteem or, you know, or being a martyr, or like martyr means like, you know, you just squash your own needs because you have some mental problems, which is common in the US and probably everywhere.

Low charm could be a dangerous practice. But the idea is that if you truly understand karma and emptiness, then it would be your logical, it would be natural to put others ahead of you, put their needs ahead of you. And so if somebody gets something that you want, you would react to be like, yes, yes, take it.

Like, I'm so excited. I'm so happy for you, you know, and just because in your mind, you remember that in that moment, the only thing you can do is make seeds, you know, whether they're bad seeds or good seeds is going to depend on, you know, what you do. So if somebody gets something that you want, the only thing, the only choice to make is to help them have more, help them have everything that they want.

And if they're taking something from you, just give it to them, you know, so that they can have it, you know, fine, take it, just take it, you know, because you know that you're planting seeds to really get what you want. That said, do not just let people walk all over you or rob you or something, unless you have mastered this mentality and you can stay super happy through the whole process. If you can't stay happy, if you can't keep your mind on emptiness and stay happy to give somebody what you want, to give somebody your belongings or, you know, then don't do it, you know, but if you really have your mind so deep in this attitude that you're able to give it away, do it.

But we start by practicing little things, like rejoicing in the things that other people get, just retraining our mind. So it's just baby steps of retraining our mind. And for me, Lojong has helped immensely.

Lojong and the practice of keeping a book. If you don't know how to do this practice, ask somebody. It's basically like you keep a little journal and you write down every day six times, you stop six times a day and you write down something good that you did with respect to a particular commitment or vow and then something negative, some negative way that you interacted with it and then something to do and you stop six times a day and do that.

And, you know, I or somebody can give you a more clear explanation if you want to do that practice. That helps me a lot to learn to watch my mind and then just baby steps of just retraining the mind again and again, catching the mind. So meditation will help you too.

Meditation will help you to catch the mind when it starts to feel jealous and then you get better at being mindful than stopping and then questioning it. And the only thing that's going to get rid of the fear behind the jealousy at the end of the day is understanding karma and emptiness, according to Buddhism. Because if you understand that helping people is going to make them happy and you happy, and then there will be no fear because you know you've got nothing to lose.

You have only to gain. I like to tell a story that like I used to feel before I got into dharma, actually I had this one moment of a very clear and we say palpable, like a very obvious transition of my own mind and it never went back. So when I was younger, I always had a hard time talking to girls.

I was shy, I was nervous. And then I was very jealous when I would see other people together and happy. I was jealous of the guys.

I was like, whatever, he's probably a loser. This is the kind of things I was thinking. I would think low of that person in my mind because I was jealous.

I was so shy or whatever. And so one day I was pretty new to dharma and I was learning about lojong. I was studying that topic in New York.

I'm from New York. And then shortly after that Geshe Michael came with his entourage and I went to a yoga class with them. I'm probably confusing the timeline here, but I went to a yoga class with them and I had a phone call before the class started.

So I stepped out. I was hanging out with Geshe Michael for one of the first times. And then I walked out of the studio to be on the phone and I saw a very attractive couple walk by and I felt my natural reactions, just as jealousy and judgment start to come up in my mind.

And then I caught it and I was like, what's your problem? Why can't you just look at that and see that there is happiness and there is love? He's happy, she's happy, they are happy.

There's something beautiful happening there. And just shift your mindset because why not see the world that way? Why not make the world a magical place by pushing yourself to see it that way?

So I kind of just had this moment of shifting and I just was like, oh, love, beauty, people together. That's awesome. And it just flipped it and then the jealousy went away and it's never come back.

So I don't know. I mean, it was a divine thing that happened from some good scenes, but I think sometimes it can ripen as you learning to catch your mind and learning to train your mind. So catching it.

And then even if you can just spend five seconds to be like, okay, jealousy, just wait. Let me just be happy for this person for just a moment. Then you can come back and then just hold the jealousy off for like five seconds and just say, just wait and let me be happy for them.

And then that rejoicing will plant very powerful seeds that you will be less jealous in the future. Then you can let the jealousy come. You don't have to fight it too hard.

Just take steps. Does that make sense? Because I'm tired, I'm genuinely checking if that made sense.

I can see Gina. Gina, did that make sense to you? Okay.

Okay. Tell me if not. Somebody wants to know how far it is it from seeing emptiness to total realization.

Yeah, up to seven lifetimes. Could be one lifetime, could be seven. That's what they say.

Here, this person, Rocio says, hope my question is not so strange. Okay. Understanding that time is empty, then a karma that I will make in the next week, could it have a result today?

I have tried to argue this. No, it can't. I don't know how else to tell you.

Yes, time is empty. And yet, in our current state of being, we are stuck in linear time. Maybe when we're a Buddha, when we can change something about our minds, we can experience time differently.

But right now, as humans, we experience time in a linear fashion. And so any result has to have a cause. And if there is no cause, this is just the laws of karma.

If there is no cause in your mind, then the result cannot come. So you can't get a result now from something you'll do in the future because the cause is not there. And I love to talk about time.

So I'll just leave it here for now. My guess is that a Buddha is not stuck in linear time the way we are. My guess is that we will experience things completely differently.

And my guess is that all moments will be at the same time for us at that point. And there will be no more of this experience of time being like this. But it's impossible to say what that looks like or what that means.

So it's not too much to talk about. And it's also just my own thoughts. I read a lot of science fiction and studied a lot of science when I was in college.

I studied engineering. But yeah, no. The answer to your question is no.

The four laws of karma, everything's empty. And the four laws of karma function within the reality that we live in. And given our current state of mind, things function a certain way.

And it is based on our seeds. And that's how it is. If you're a human, you're getting older.

It's empty and it can be changed. But that kind of means you're changing into something other than a human once you stop aging, once you stop the aging process or something like that. And karma functions, cause and effect functions as long as we're in this state.

And I think for Buddhas too, cause and effect, it functions. So the four laws of karma, probably the most important thing to learn because they, according to Buddhism, are the guiding principles of how the world functions. And so they're kind of like, yeah, they're one of the most important things to understand, the four laws.

Cause that's how it works. That's why we're in that situation until we're not anymore. Not a bad question.

It's a great question. The result next week will determine the cause today. No, I think I answered at least my opinion about that.

So this is the last question we have. So we have like 15 more minutes. So if anybody wants to ask another question or if you want to hear me talk further about a question that we've already been discussing, I'm happy to.

So you can just ask in the chat. You can also just unmute and ask me. I'm happy to hear voices.

Let's see, is the emptiness seen at the direct perception of emptiness and the emptiness realized by full enlightenment the same level of emptiness? Yeah, yeah. There is no, there, this is a big debate between the higher middle way school and the lower middle way school.

And you can find classes about it, maybe on the knowledge base called Umachieden. Anyway, the point is the highest school says that emptiness is emptiness. It is the lack of anything that is empty.

The lack of anything having any nature of its own. The lack of anything being a thing independent of the seeds that you have planted. And that's all.

Like, so you see that absence. You see the pure potential of all things or the absence of any fixed nature of all things. And that's true.

The first time you see emptiness directly and that's the same truth that a Buddha is experiencing. Something different that they say that a Buddha can do. They say that a Buddha can see the emptiness of all things and the way that they're functioning, the way that they're interdependent at the same moment.

They can see that, they can experience that at the same time. And a person in the direct experience of emptiness for the first time or until you're a Buddha, you're only, when you see emptiness, that's all you're saying. You can only go into this deep state of meditation, you know, perfect focus with perfect wisdom, shamatang vipashyana.

And you reach this state where you can see the ultimate nature of things, which is, I like to say pure potential or the ultimate nature. It's ultimate, ultimate nature, which is that it's not fixed. Nothing is fixed as being any one thing.

Nothing is fixed as being any one particular way. So it's completely available. And when you meditate and go into that experience, that's all you're experiencing, just that.

And when you're a Buddha, you're just seeing that pure potential all the time. You don't need to be in meditation to see it. So you're seeing that pure potential, you're seeing that lack of fixed nature at the same time as you're seeing the way that it's performing a function.

So like, if I were a Buddha, I would see the absence of Nick, like of the Nick that I thought was there, you know, the lack of any fixed nature of Nick. I would see the infinite potential of Nick. At the same time, I would see me going like this, giving a Q&A session and waving my hand.

You know, I can see, oh, there's a guy there who's based on certain seeds that I've planted in the past. You know, he shaved today. You know, his hair is this long, whatever.

So a Buddha can see both at the same time. That's the difference. But the emptiness is the same.

There is no varying degrees of emptiness. When you see emptiness, you see... That's why we say it's the ultimate nature of all things.

That's it, it's the highest. It's the... You can't break things down any further than that.

It's the end of analysis. So there couldn't be... It couldn't be something deeper.

That's it. That's how I understand it. I guess we have like five or six minutes left until this is over.

So...

[Speaker 2]
I have a question if there is any other one. In the Lady Nygma series, we start practicing with the first chakra, the Muladhara chakra, the one at the bottom, let's say. And I hear that it is safer to start in that chakra, to work in that chakra, but I don't know why.

[Speaker 1]
Okay, okay, that's the question? Yeah.

[Speaker 2]
Yes, why?

[Speaker 1]
Here, let me think about it for a minute. I think there's a few things that can happen when you start working with unlocking the energy in your body. And it's great and it's amazing.

And if you're, you know... If you're practicing, it's great. You know, if you let too much energy flow into certain regions of your body too fast, or like at the wrong time, it can make you feel this sense of panic or nervousness or anxiety.

And it can be, I mean, that can happen and that can be really bad, but that's not going to happen from the Nyinguma series. But like, you can hurt your channels, you know, with too much prana focused or concentrated at one place or another, or allowing too much to rush in when you're not ready for it. So I think that, you know, it's not like a danger.

I wouldn't worry. I just want to say, like, first of all, I wouldn't worry, like doing the Nyinguma series. I think it's a very, very, very safe series.

Some people, their yoga practice is like so much heart openers. It's like all backbending. You know, it's just all working on the anahata chakra.

It's all just working on the heart. And yeah, it can be a little bit loony. Like their life can become a little bit loony.

Do you know what I mean? Loony? I mean, like for those of you who don't know, it's like you get ungrounded.

You can easily get ungrounded if that's your main practice all the time. You know, so I know a lot of yogis and then just always backbends. Everything is just, oh, my heart.

And then you become very ungrounded. My personal opinion is that the best practitioners, you know, who are going to last the longest, find a lot of balance. A lot of, you have grounding.

I mean, I should get Erin to talk about this more because she has studied a lot about this stuff. But you want grounding and opening and lifting and expansion. So, you know, pranavayu and apanavayu, you know, both equally kind of working on those aspects of the human being, of the human body, you know, and all the winds, of course.

But I think that those are two complementary ones. But one is really rooting and grounding into the earth. And the other is like very heart opening and just like expansive.

And, you know, sometimes if people are just too much focused on the expansiveness, they become ungrounded. And that's, you know, it can make people weird for lack of a better way to put it and do weird things. Or at the very least, you know, you could get anxiety.

I personally have had some experiences where I felt like I got really looming. And I think it lasted like six months. And I think it was just from like meditating so much and doing so much yoga and so much service.

And I kind of just became ungrounded. And I started doing the Niguma series backwards. And that helped me.

I started starting with headstands and then working my way down the chakras. And I did that. But, and I'll leave you guys with this and then we can take a break.

I think that the thing that really cured me of this kind of terrible loomy condition that I was experiencing for a while was dancing. I just, we had a big party at the temple at DM. And I just danced for like 10 hours.

And then all of a sudden I felt all this like you know, Prana, like come together at my chest. And then it's just like whoosh, like went up and was gone. So I think, you know, if you start to experience some condition like that, my advice is that physical exercise and physical activity can be very, very helpful.

Sitting too much can be, can build up like too much tension, especially when you're focusing so much and meditating or watching classes on the computer so much. So is it better to start with the lower chakras? Yeah, probably.

I think it's probably not the best to just work on the heart and the higher ones. It's good to have the, I think a balanced practice is best. And I think that my understanding about the Meguma series is that it's beneficial to work your way up because you're allowing the chakra to flow from the bottom all the way up.

So like ultimately we need, we need to release the whole central channel, you know, and the central channel is blocked everywhere. So if you want the prana to be flowing evenly through the central channel, you've got to work on all the chakras. And it makes sense to work from the bottom up and then you're bringing the prana upward as you do your practice.

But just my real advice is do it in a way that's like relaxed, steady over a long period of time. Don't try to do things to like force some kind of result in one day or something. Everything comes from like slow, steady practice.

All benefits are going to come from that. And trying to like force things or like, you know, that's where people run into trouble or dangers. And I know people that have, has happened to and it's, you know, you have to be really careful when you don't, don't force it.

It's time for a break. Thank you guys so much for coming and asking really amazing questions. I'm grateful to get to participate in this.

And take a, we only have a four minute break. So take a break. And then I don't know, maybe Gipsy Michael will probably come a few minutes late, but let's see.

Thank you. Thanks Nick. Absolutely.

Yeah. I hope those answers were helpful.