Серия «Сутра Алмазного огранщика» — Мастер Камалашила: медитации на «Сутру Алмазного огранщика», часть первая (Аризона, 2016), занятие 9

[Speaker 1]
Okay, let's start. This envelope from Michael, someone just donated $1,500 for the walls of the temple. If it's extra, maybe we can do this one.

Okay, all right, let's do... Oh, already, when is Vietnam? Can you look it up?

What dates do you know? You can tell Kim. Kim is here.

She wants to know. Okay, let's do Kamla Shilang. Okay, now that we have 12 minutes.

So Lord Buddha said, do your giving but don't stay in it, right? Actually, I don't need it. It's okay.

Do giving, but don't stay in anything while you're giving, okay? And we covered already the emptiness of people, okay, in three parts. One was the person who was in samsara and got out of samsara.

One was the person who made the karma and then ate the karma. And one was the person who was a kid and then remembered their mom afterwards. So we had three kinds of people.

Then we covered people one more time when we said, do you have happiness, or are you happy, or do you get happy? We covered that yesterday. Those four examples cover the emptiness of people.

Those are the people who don't reach nirvana, okay? So don't be confused. Of course somebody reaches nirvana.

In your kitchen, there is a husband yelling at you. But the one who's... Not my fault.

For no reason at all. That husband is not there, okay? That's all, okay?

There's a husband who does yell at you, and there's a husband who's not there. That's the one who's not your fault, okay? And of course somebody goes to nirvana, but not the one you think, okay?

The one who goes to nirvana, the person you say it, is coming from you. And the misunderstanding they had that kept them out of nirvana was coming from you. That's why you have to meet them, okay?

But a person that you have to teach where things are coming from, and then they will reach nirvana, who's not coming from you, that one doesn't reach nirvana, okay? Understand? If you see a person who yells back at their husband, that's coming from you, okay?

And that person you cannot... If you think they don't come from you, you cannot take them to nirvana. It's not possible, okay?

Got it? So now Buddha's going to talk about... Then he finished the nirvana thing, now he's talking about being a bodhisattva, how to give to other people, how to share things with other people.

Then he says, don't misunderstand what's going on when you share things with other people. You make brownies for somebody, and you hand them out, and then he says, the look of the brownies, the color of the brownies, the smell of the brownies, how they sound when you crunch into those walnuts, and then how it tastes, and then how you think about them, okay? Those are all coming from you, okay?

So bodhisattva, when they get brownies, they're very aware of that, okay? The six... He covers the six objects, right?

Five physical, one is the object of your mind, your thoughts. Then he jumps in the mind, okay? Then he jumps in the mind, the emptiness of the mind, okay?

And it's a difficult subject, so I'm going to just lay it on you, okay? It helps if you know a thing called tsung deng nga, tsung deng deng nga. So we had the word tsung earlier today, and I told you it was going to come again, right?

So tsung means equal, okay? It's equal. Like we had tawa tsumba, the people you meditate with should be tawa tsumba.

They should share your viewpoints, generally, okay? Tawa tsumba. It's easier to meditate in a group with people who have generally the same values, okay?

Tawa tsumba. But tsung deng nga is a term used in Buddhist psychology. So there's a very sophisticated Buddhist psychology.

It comes in two different schools, Abhidharma school and, you can say, like mind-only school. But it defines functions of the mind, the different functions within the mind. Usually 51, 52 functions of the mind.

And then it describes how the main mind relates to functions of the mind. So for example, according to Buddhism, the feeling never stops. You're always feeling.

A conscious being, insect, bird, fish, they are always feeling all the time, okay? So the feeling, it morphs between good, neutral, and bad. But you're always feeling, okay?

You know that, okay? Even when you're not thinking about it, you're feeling something, okay? And it may be neutral, but the capacity of feeling is still functioning, okay?

So to have a feeling requires two things. One is the capacity of feeling, and one is the mind itself, which means the capacity to know, the capacity of consciousness, okay? We are conscious all our life, from the time we're born to the day we die and after.

We are conscious, but we don't know it. It's hard to be aware of it, because it's all the time. But it's a kind of light, you know?

In ancient Sanskrit the word is loka, right? Lochana. And they believed that the mind was illuminating the world.

So your mind is aware all the time, and you don't even know it. You're just aware, you know? And then sometimes you meet a boxer, or you get in a car accident, and a car hits you really hard, and you hit your head on the dashboard, and you lose consciousness, and everything goes black.

And then you wake up, and slowly this consciousness comes back, and then the world is bright again. So it's that brightness of the world. It's your mind, your main mind.

We call it main mind. So the main mind is selshin rikpa. The definition of mind in Buddhism is selshin rikpa.

It's clear like a crystal, and it is knowing, it is aware. So to isolate your awareness is very difficult, because you're having it all the time, okay? Like, in Mahamudra meditation, what do you do?

What's the object of Mahamudra meditation? Yeah, you're just watching your mind. And it takes practice to watch your mind, because you're so in the mind, you know?

It's very hard to isolate your general awareness of the world, you know? The fact that you're not unconscious. The fact that someone didn't knock you out.

It's very hard to get in touch with. You're doing it all the time, okay? So feeling is running all the time.

It never stops. From the time you come out of your mom, to the time you breathe your last breath, you're always feeling something. And it's just going like this.

It's oscillating. Good, bad, medium, not too good, not too bad, stomach ache, tired, like, you know, pretty good, happy, got a kiss, you know? Like that.

It just keeps oscillating like that, but you always have it, okay? So one is the general awareness, and then in this case, we're taking one of the 52 mental functions, which is feeling. And it's running all the time, okay?

So they are running at the same time. General awareness of the world and how I feel about the world are running at the same time. One is a particular function of the mind.

One is the whole mind. The whole general awareness, okay? The feeling and the mind are tsumba.

They are linked. In psychology, in Buddhist psychology, it means the mind and the workings of the mind, the functions of the mind, are linked together in five different ways, okay? They're linked together in five different ways, okay?

Let's take feeling about a brownie, how you feel about a brownie, okay? So, you know, you come to Seichu and there's a white plate and there's a brownie on it, you know, and you look at the brownie. General awareness is going on, it allows you to be aware of the brownie, okay?

And then there's how you feel about the brownie. Like, she's asking, does it have gluten or not? You know, if it has gluten, I'm like, I don't feel so happy about it, you know?

If it doesn't have gluten, I'm like, do we eat during the tsog or after? I think they do have gluten, right? I'll have to eat it for you.

So, the capacity of feeling and the general awareness are linked together in five different ways, and that's an important principle of Buddhist psychology. And so I'll tell you how they're linked, okay? Five ways.

First one is mikpa. Mikpa is focusing. Mikpa is the object.

How are the general awareness and the capacity of feeling, they are linked towards the same object. What's the object in this case? The brownie.

Good. The brownie. So they have the same object.

Got it? Without general awareness, you couldn't see the brownie. And the feeling is one aspect of how you experience the brownie, which is good feel or bad feel, okay?

So they are linked by object. They're also linked by duration, which means what? For the whole time you're staring at the brownie while you're supposed to be focusing on the prayer, from the moment your eye sets on the brownie until you look away from the brownie, the two are linked.

You must be having a general awareness, and you must be having a feeling about it. And the feeling may be oscillating. You know, oh, that looks really good, maybe it's a lot of calories, does it have sugar, is it walnuts or pecans?

And the feeling is floating around. But the duration is the same. When you look away, they both end for that brownie, towards the brownie, okay?

Duration. Dze. Dze means what?

Dze means substance, the stuff. The stuff of which both are made of is mental stuff. It's not chemicals, it's not physical, it's not conceptual, it's not an idea, like John is an idea.

It's mental stuff. Clear and knowing. Clear and knowing.

And aware. Both the feeling and the general consciousness share the same stuff.

[Speaker 2]
So when you look away, it's mental now?

[Speaker 1]
No, when you look away, they're not linked anymore towards the brownie. But they're still linked. Got it?

[Speaker 2]
I do, but what happens when you look away?

[Speaker 1]
You still have general awareness, but now it's towards the wall or towards somebody. Then that's a memory of a brownie. Yeah, that's a different mental function.

So you still have general awareness, but it's linked with memory and not with feeling.

[Speaker 2]
Why is the concept of John not mental stuff?

[Speaker 1]
The concept of John is experienced by mental stuff, but the idea, John is experiencing is a concept. It can only be arrived at by imagination. It's an object of imagination.

The imagining is mental, but the object of the imagination is a concept. Because the idea John, or the person John, is not feeling, is not aware. It's not sucking in the world.

It's just John. It's actually a combination of John's body and John's mind, stuck together by somebody. There's John's body, and there's John's mind.

And then somebody puts them together and calls it Mr. Brady.

[Speaker 2]
It just seems like it's a mental assumption.

[Speaker 1]
Well, then he doesn't have a body. You see what I mean?

[Speaker 2]
It's mental on my part, I'm projecting it.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, you're imagining it, but it's the object of the imagination and not the imagining mind, which is yours. The tem, the basis or the support for both of them is your eyeball, your visual consciousness. So both of them are resting on the capacity of sight, on the optic nerve.

So they're both using the same window to get to the brownie. The feeling and the general awareness has to use the same window to focus on the brownie. So their window is the same, which happens to be the eye consciousness.

That's called tem. No, it could be thought. It could be the capacity of thought.

How many we got? I always come up with four. Oh, nampa, which is why we're on this subject.

Nampa is an extremely difficult idea. So here's a smart, here's a telephone, okay? I don't know whose it is, I'm sorry.

When I have my hand in front of it, you don't see blue. When I move my hand, then you see blue, okay? And there's a concept in Buddhism, a psychological concept that comes here, which means that when I move my hand and you see blue, it's as if, and it comes in the Yoga Sutra, it's as if you had a piece of blue cloth, blue velvet, and you put a piece of a gemstone on it, a clear gemstone, a white, a clear, like a diamond or something.

And there's a blue piece of cloth, and when you put the stone on it, it takes the nampa of blue, it gets bluish. The crystal takes on a bluishness, a blue hue, or a blue tint, and in Buddhism that's called nampa or aspect, a bluish aspect, okay? So that's what I'm trying to get to.

This is a long story to get to bluish aspect. When I move my hand, a part of the crystal of your consciousness gets bluish. Like only part though, right?

So it's like the way that the blue of the cloth infects a piece of glass that you put over the blue. It imbues the glass with bluishness, okay? It takes on a bluish aspect.

It's called nampa in Tibetan. That's the fifth of the tsung den. It means the feeling gets a little blue, and the general awareness gets a little blue.

It takes on a bluish tint or hue or aspect, okay? In that case, in Buddhism we can think of the mind like a mirror, and when you put blue in front of the mirror, the mirror gets bluey, okay? It takes on a bluishness, okay?

And that's called nampa. And it's a difficult idea, okay? But it's just like, here's a white handkerchief.

It used to be white. And I'm not looking at the handkerchief. Then it impinges on my consciousness, you see?

And then a certain amount of my mind gets whitish, and then it shrinks and shrinks and shrinks, and then a certain amount, then it's not there anymore, okay? And in the theory of main mind and function of the mind, when it gets to here, I have a feeling about it because I'm aware of it. Those two are linked, you know?

Ew, icky, wet, you know? I have a feeling about it. But it makes my mind whitish, and it makes my feelings whitish, and they are both kind of infected with a whiteness until I take it out of my sight.

Okay, Garnet? Did you have a question?

[Speaker 2]
And that implies the whiteness is coming from it.

[Speaker 1]
It does imply that. Yeah, this lower score. Okay.

Or you can say, my mind is projecting a whiteness which infects my mind. That's okay. We're going to talk about it.

Okay, you ready? Here's why it comes up now. Because we're talking about the emptiness of mind.

Okay, and that's the next photo on your paper. It's the next meditation. The guy is looking at the sky, which is making his consciousness a little bluish.

And if he's enjoying the sky, his enjoyment is getting a little bluish. Okay? Now, ready?

This is the emptiness of your mind. Your eyes were looking at the ground. And then Geshe-la said, look out the window at the blue sky.

Okay? And you went like this. You turned your head, and you caught the first part of blue.

And then you got a lot of blue. Okay? First there was a touch of blue, and more blue, more blue, more blue, more blue.

Very blue. My mind is imbued with blue. I have a bluish aspect.

Okay? Very bluish aspect. Then I say, wait, look back at the class.

And you go like that. And the bluish kind of goes out, and then it disappears. Okay?

Where's the line between when the blue started and when the blue didn't start? It's very hard. You know?

Like, you can go very slow. Oh, little blue. Very blue.

Total blue. Less blue. No blue.

Okay? Like, when did it start? You know?

How much of your mind was blue? Five percent? Six percent?

If it was five percent blue, the first time you caught the blue. But five is made of one. Right?

Maybe you weren't aware of it, but there must have been a fifth of the five. One percent blue. Two percent blue.

Okay? Like, how do you catch, how does it happen, how can it happen that your mind goes from no blue to a little blue? Where's the line?

Where's the line between the two? And if, now, this is very difficult, okay? You can't find the line.

You can try a thousand times. You can sit here all day. If you want to, stay here in the dome all day.

You can. Blue sky dome. And you can try to catch when did the first blue come.

And you never will. Okay? In one millisecond, there's no blue.

In the next millisecond, there's impossibly more blue. There is no gradation. Gradation?

You don't get one percent blue, then two percent blue, then three percent. It's just no blue, and then sixty-fifth of a second later, five percent blue. It doesn't come one, two, three, four percent.

You go from no blue, no aspect of blue, to five percent blue in two adjoining milliseconds. How is that possible? It's not coming from there.

It's coming from here. Okay? A seed open.

A karma seed open, okay? You didn't, like Susan said, Sarasvati said, you didn't look at the blue. Your mind's throwing a brown.

Your mind's throwing karmas opening and throwing forth brown wall, brown wall, brown wall. And then suddenly, one second later, the mind is throwing forth mountain with lots of blue. Okay?

And it didn't get like this. It didn't get more, more, more, more, more, more, more. It just was no blue, then suddenly there's quarter blue.

Okay? How's that possible? Only if it's coming from you.

That's evidence. The way your mind gets bluey is evidence that things are coming from you. And that's the emptiness of your mind.

And we covered the emptiness of the person already. How can I be getting the letters that I wrote to myself? You see what I mean?

We did that already. Who made the cocoons? We did that already.

Now we're talking about mind. Okay, got it? That's the hardest meditation of all of them, I think.

Okay? How can it be that I go from no blue to like quarter blue? Why doesn't it get more and more?

That's evidence that your mind is just picture number one and picture number two by your mind. That's why things don't grow nicely. Same thing when you talk about elephants.

Okay? The next picture is an elephant. This is not the elephant of your dull mind.

That's a different elephant. It's not the elephant in the poster. Okay?

If you look at the elephant in the picture, he's a big elephant. He's not a small elephant. This is the kind of elephant that's like, I don't know, ten meters high.

Okay? Thirty feet high. When Alexander the Great attacked India, they used elephants.

Because they're so scary. And they tie swords on their trunks. And they tie swords on their feet.

And they just crush people. You know? Huge.

Nobody can stop them. It's huge. It was like an elephant nuclear weapon in those days.

That's how he conquered parts of India. And they stayed for five hundred years. The Greeks stayed there for five hundred years.

It may be why Buddhism has logic. Because his teacher was Aristotle. Anyway.

So you look at an elephant that's as big as this building, and according to science, he's made of atoms. What does an atom mean? If you're interested, there's a Sanskrit root tam.

T-O-M. And it means to divide. So a place that was set aside from the rest of the village was called a temple.

Yeah. Because it was set aside by a fence. It was called temple.

Atom means no division. It means the smallest you can get of elephant stuff before it doesn't, it's not elephant anymore. Okay?

That's called an atom. The oxygen atom means if you break it further, it loses the qualities of oxygen. It becomes leptoids and electrons and neutrons and protons.

And those don't have anything similar to oxygen. So when you split too far, it loses the qualities of oxygen as an element. So element, atom means the smallest piece of an element.

And it still maintains its unique qualities, its chemical properties. So science believes that an elephant is made of atoms of stuff. And I don't know, the calcium makes the trunk hard.

What do you call it? The tusk hard. And the carbon along with the water element makes the skin kind of soft.

And these are the atoms of the elephant. Can you see an atom with your naked eye?

[Speaker 2]
No.

[Speaker 1]
No, so... You ready? It's the skin of the elephant made of atoms.

[Speaker 2]
Yeah.

[Speaker 1]
So go to the very edge of the skin, okay? To where a single atom, the edge, the outside corner of a single atom is at the outside of the elephant's skin. Okay?

Right? Some of that atom is facing into the skin. And you can't see it because there's other atoms.

You can't see the inside half. But the outside half of the atom is what separates the skin of the elephant from the sky in the photo. Okay?

So the reason you can see the elephant is that your eye is concentrating on the outer edge of atoms. The line of outer edges of atoms is what divides the elephant from the sky. When an elephant's running towards you, then some of the...

The last atom of skin on the outside, the inside half of that atom is covered because it's facing the inside of the elephant's skin. But the outside half of that atom is what separates the sky from the skin. And that's why you can see the outline of the elephant running at you.

Okay, got it? But that's too small to see. It can't be happening.

It cannot be out there because half an atom, a whole atom is too small to see. You're looking at the outside half of the atom because that's... There's a whole bunch of them in a row makes his skin.

But what separates him, the outside skin from the sky and gives him his shape is one atom plus one atom plus one atom plus one atom. But you can't see that. It's too small.

So the meaning is, you cannot be seeing what you think you see. It cannot be out there. It must be coming from you.

It must be coming from you. It's not possible what you're seeing because you cannot see the edge. The edge is made of half of an atom.

But it's too small to see. You can't be doing what you think you're doing, okay? And that's the emptiness of physical stuff.

Did you have a question, Sarah? No? Okay, good, because it's hard to explain.

You have to sit with it. You have to sit with it, okay? You have to sit with it.

If you see the edge of the elephant skin, against the sky, it can only be that you're seeing half an atom. And you can't. So it cannot be out there.

It's coming from you. Things don't exist of atoms. It's coming from you.

It must be coming from you. It's not possible to see an elephant. Why did I choose an elephant?

Because they're so big.

[Speaker 2]
People would argue that there's a whole bunch of half of atoms next to each other, making a whole lot of...

[Speaker 1]
Not on the very edge, like on the curve of his muscle, like for the example of that. It's got to be that the last corner, I admit you can't see the back, but right here, that is one half an atom away from the other half an atom away, as you go around the back, right? So it's got to be, it's got to...

I know what you mean. People are going to say, I admit you can't see a single atom, but when you get a hundred of them together, it's a molecule, you can almost see that. I understand that.

[Speaker 2]
Or I can only see so small, so it's only seeing more than just half of one atom.

[Speaker 1]
You cannot see a molecule or a clump of elephant skin, okay? You could say, Geshe-la, I understand I cannot see a single atom, I understand that. But what I'm looking at is a patch that has a few million atoms.

I agree I'm not looking at a single atom, but the patch has to have a width. The patch has to have width to be visible, okay? And that width must be two divisible.

You cannot, your eye cannot detect a length of color without jumping from the left to the right, okay? When you look at a, they do this thing, they hook up people's eyeballs to, and then they show them pictures from a Playboy magazine, and then they show them a picture of a fruit or something, and the eye, they can see where the eye is focusing, on which parts of the picture, you know? And you can't see a line unless your eye jumps from left to right.

You cannot see a line from a single impression. You need to have comparison. You need to have a fix, a triangulate.

That's why bugs can't see right, they've got two eyes over here. They can't triangulate. So your eye has to jump from left to right to see distance.

But there gets a point to where the left and the right are so small you can't see them, but you are. It's impossible. You've got to get the, I know it's not very clear, and it's a difficult idea.

The bottom line is you can't be doing what you think you do. The bottom line is it can't be coming this way. It's not possible, you know?

Your eye has to go left to right to get width. If there's no width, there's no elephant. And there's not even, to get an inch of elephant, you have to see the left side of the inch and the right side of the inch.

To get half an inch of elephant, you have to see the left side of the half inch and you've got to see the right hand of the elephant. When you get down to the smallest width that the human eye can see, you still have to go left and right to see that width, and you can't. Because it's the smallest width your eye can see.

But you still can't process it unless you're going left to right. It means it's not coming from you. I'm sorry, it's not coming this way.

It's just a picture your mind is making. Somebody asked me a nice question. When I reach for my alarm clock in the morning, it goes off, and I reach for the alarm clock and I touch it, but immediately I have a feeling of a whole clock, you see?

My hand only touches two or three spots, but in my mind I feel a circle, you know? That's also emptiness. That's also evidence of emptiness.

When you, look at this apple, okay? It's very profound. Apple is much easier.

Eww. That's just exactly what I wanted.

[Speaker 2]
Okay.

[Speaker 1]
So it looks like a great apple. It's got all that wax on it. It's been insecticided until nothing could eat it.

Okay? It looks like a nice apple, you see? You're actually only seeing the front, the top, right?

You can only see this much. You don't know what's back here. Like, maybe it's totally rotten, okay?

Maybe it's totally rotten in the back, but your mind, based on what you can see, your mind fills in the rest. That's another evidence that the apple is coming from you. By the way, it is rotten on the other side.

It's totally rotten on the other side, okay? Now, that's a really important example. It's in How Yoga Works, I think.

Based on what you see, your mind fills in the rest. You don't know what's on the other side. Come on.

It could be, I don't know, a spaceship or something. You don't know what's on the other side. Your mind fills in the back from the front, but all you see is this, you see?

It's coming from you. The feeling of a whole apple is coming from you. Okay, we're past the two hard ones.

I think there's one more about the mind. He comes back to the mind, emptiness in the mind, okay? What's the picture?

It's laundry on a line and it's laundry in a basket, okay? Laundry on a line and laundry in a basket. It took me so long to find that photo.

And it's perfect. It's perfect. It's exactly what I wanted.

Why? Because Kamalashila says, is your mind a string of thoughts over time? You see what I mean?

Like you have one thought, then you have another thought, then you have another thought, then you have another thought, then you have another thought. Is your mind all those thoughts over time? Or is your mind all the stuff going on in your mind in any one second?

Like, me the future Buddha, my attention span, you know? Is your mind a laundry basket, or is your mind a laundry line? That's the basket, okay?

What do you think? Is your mind a laundry basket? Is your mind a laundry basket?

It's both, okay? Why? It's your mind tying it together.

You're making cocoons again. You're making cocoons again, okay? You can talk about your mind as the mind right now with the different functions in it, attention, intelligence, feelings, you know?

You can talk about the mind as a static thing in a single moment, or you can talk about the mind as a line of laundry. Many thoughts. Vivian's mind from the time she was a teenager up to now.

But who made it? Who ties it together? I do.

I do, okay? That's why I can have—remember my feelings from when I was a kid, or I—there's a continuity. But who ties it all together?

This is this Buddhist thing. I'll get to you. This is this Buddhist thing, okay?

Be careful. And teachers blow this all the time. It drives me crazy.

I get really upset. My teacher was teaching emptiness, the parts and the whole, whole and the parts, right? And there was a nun in the room, Chunyi La.

She's a good nun. Good Buddhist nun. But before she became a nun, she had a child.

So she has a child. Her mother had the gall to name her Carmen from the opera. So to get back at her mother, she named her child Janice after Janice Joplin.

So Carmen was there and Janice was there. And Janice was like seven years old. And my lama took a break, which was a Tibetan tea break.

And I was messing with Janice. I'm like, so am I my hand or am I not? And she's like, no, you're not your hand.

And I'm like, am I my hand and my foot? And she says, no, you're not your hand and your foot. And I'm like, am I everything together?

She says, well yeah. Then I'm like, oh. Because Buddhism says no.

Buddhism says you're not your parts and you're not your parts together. And that takes some explanation. So it's easy to understand and people mis-explain it all the time.

If I have a new Toyota RAV4 and I take it apart and I put all the parts in the dome here on the floor, is that a car? Is it all the parts? So what's missing?

Putting it together. The last thing you need to get all the things of a thing together into a whole is thinking of it as a car. If Eskimo walks in and sees all these parts, they're like, well, yeah.

It doesn't mean anything to them. Your mind has to glue it together. Why does your mind glue it together into a car and not into separate mountain ranges?

Because you share cars with somebody else in the past. Otherwise, it'll just be a bunch of mountain ranges to an ant. An ant walks in, they're not like, oh, Toyota RAV4.

For them, it's just a bunch of mountains. Oh, I have to climb over this mountain and get, oh, there's another one. It's a steering wheel, but for them it's like, oh my God.

Okay? Because they don't have the concept that glues all the parts together. That concept comes out of your karmic seeds because you gave other people rides in the past.

That's the only reason you can see a car. Okay? If you didn't give people rides in the past, you would walk in here and just see a bunch of junk laying around the floor.

You wouldn't see it as a car. Got it? The same parts.

So what's the final part in every hole? The seed that glues it together into a hole. Okay?

And different people can see different parts in different ways, right? The notes of the scale that make up a Neil Young song are parts of the song. If you've spoken sweetly to other people, when those notes are put together, you will say, oh, that's brilliant.

That's like Cal Girl and the Sound is the best piece of music ever written. My college roommate said, I would put on Cal Girl and the Sound, which I think is maybe the greatest song ever written, and he'd say, oh, turn off that screaming eunuch. He calls Neil Young the screaming eunuch.

So, same parts, same parts, same notes, same order, same melody, but the thing that glues it together is what comes out of your karmic seed. Okay? And that applies to your mind.

Whether you're talking about Vivian's mind over 20 years, or you're talking about somebody's mind in the present moment, whether you treat the mind as a laundry basket, or a string of laundry on a line, who ties it together is your karma. It'd be interesting to discuss what's the karma to have an organic feeling of having a mind, like a holistic, what is it that, what do you call it? Integral.

An integral mind. You know, what's the karma to have a healthy mind, or to have a healthy sense of your mind, you see? And what's the karma to have a chaotic, experience your mind as something chaotic and, you know?

I think so. It must be, yeah? I don't know.

You have to think about it. But different people experience the parts of their minds in different ways. I met a heroin addict, and I asked him, why you do that?

And he said, my mind is painful. To be in my mind is painful. The heroin shuts it off for a while.

Just shuts it off, you know? But my mind is chaos. My mind is World War III going all the time, you know?

And other people have a quite integrated mind, and they're comfortable in their mind, and okay? So, that's another sign that the mind is coming from how you treat other people. Your mind.

So now we have the emptiness of people who didn't get to Nirvana. We have the emptiness of the aspect of the mind. Good luck on that one.

We have the emptiness of the atoms of the elephant. And now we went back to the mind, we discussed the flow of the mind, or the mind as a whole basket. And either way, it's coming from you.

Your own mind is coming from you. And how do you work with that in a practical sense? Then Christine Walsh, and we went to Guangzhou I guess, and we went to a mental hospital, and we were working on treatments for people.

And I believe that any future treatment, for example for depression—they had hundreds of serious heroin addicts and depressed people—and I think that any future treatment of mental disease with Buddhist ideas will involve trying to get people to understand that the thoughts you hear in your own mind are coming out of karmic seeds in your mind you have absolutely no control. Which means if you're depressed, you're going to be depressed. Like, depression means you were mean to somebody, you made other people sad last week, last month, you planted seeds, those seeds are opening, and you are hearing depressed thoughts.

You can't have the thoughts and hear them at the same time. Either you are the talker or you are the listener. But you can't be both.

In Buddhism you're the listener. You're just hearing what's coming out of karmic seeds that you planted last week. It's too late to be not depressed today.

Maybe you can be not depressed next week, if you try really hard to make other people happy, but that's the last thing a depressed person wants to do. So it tends to sansara, right? Okay?

But if you can get into mental illness or the study of creativity for business people, new ideas are popping out of karmic seeds. You can't make yourself more creative in the present moment. You can for next week, how?

What's the karma to be creative? Congratulate other people for their ideas. Oh, that's so cool.

You have the idea. I salute you. We were talking about it at a trade show.

I don't know what business you may be in. If you're into fashion, you've got to go to these terrible trade shows. And the Javits Center charges you $20,000 to put up a tiny little booth, and it's all union.

And then everybody hates everybody. You go from booth to booth, and you're supposed to spy on people without looking like you're spying. You're supposed to go like, and see all their new ideas.

And then you run home and back to your office, and everybody says, what did you see? And it's like, did you see booth number 14? Yeah.

How do you think they do that? And I got in it. So in a Buddhist world, you would go from booth to booth and say, oh my god, that's so cool, that idea you had.

Congratulations. I'll take you to dinner, to your competition. Because that's where the seeds come from.

So we finished the laundry basket. Let's do 22 and stop. Then I'll cover three tomorrow.

I just threw 22 in there. I mean, he's already finished proving the emptiness of the mind. He finished proving the emptiness of material things.

We're not going to get to the emptiness of unchanging things until tomorrow. But we've covered all the people. So we've covered all changing things.

Physical, mental, and conceptual. We finished those three. Now he throws in a chikdurdao.

He throws in a chikdurdao. So that's just for dessert. It's just dessert.

And chik means one. Tu means tuma, which means many. And many, many people mistook that for a laden.

What's a laden? So in Tibetan, when you say in the house, the word in is spelled according to how house is spelled. So after a g, chikdurdao, it must be a t.

You can't use d. So many people have corrected this spelling to chikdurdao, which is a mistake. It's a big mistake.

Because this tu is not a laden. It's tuma, which means many. So chikdurdao means what?

So there's a famous Buddhist proof of emptiness. And he just throws it in for dessert. It's not serious.

Don't freak out. We should stop. But it's this.

Okay, two girls, okay? When your girlfriend irritates you on the couch, they're sitting on the couch together. And one of them is really irritating.

So I'm one of the ladies, and there's another lady sitting next to me. How many ladies are sitting next to me? One or plural?

Is it singular or plural? Chikdurdao. Neither.

It's neither. There's not one irritating friend sitting next to me, and there's not two irritating friends sitting next to me. Then that's a Buddhist koan.

It's an old, old, old proof of emptiness. There's not one irritating friend sitting next to you, and there's not two irritating friends sitting next to you. There can't be one because what?

She's not irritating you. You're making her. Okay?

Don't call her irritating. She's coming from you. Why?

Because you irritated somebody else last week. Did you irritate them to the same degree? No, second law of karma.

Karma multiplies. You were slightly irritating last week, which is why you have to meet a supremely irritating person this week. Okay, got it?

That's easy. Okay? So why are there not two irritating friends sitting next to you?

Yeah, because there's not one. Two means you got to have one plus one, but there's zero. Zero plus zero is zero.

Okay? So you got to work with that. That's an old Buddhist proof of emptiness.

You say, someone's bugging you. Your husband's bothering you, or your boss is bothering you. I don't know why, but bosses seem to bother people.

And then you got to ask yourself in your mind, how many bosses are bugging me? And you say, is it two? You say, no, it's just one.

Why isn't it two? Because it's not even one. Because two is made of two ones, and there's no one.

Got it? There's not two irritating bosses or two irritating husbands. There's zero.

There can't be two, because two is made of one plus one. Okay? Do you have two husbands?

No. Why? I don't have one.

But you do have. No, you don't understand. I don't have one husband that's not coming from me, which means I can't have two.

Okay? So the next time somebody says, my husband bothers me, you can say, which one? And they'll say, what?

And you say, which of your husbands bother you? And they'll say, no, no, of course I only have one husband. You can say, no, but you don't have one.

How can you have one if you... I understand you don't have two, because you don't have... I understand you don't have two.

How many do you think you have? They say one. You say, no, you're wrong.

The reason you don't have two is you don't have any. That's an old Buddhist thing. I'll say it again.

You ready? I'll say it slow. Your friend says, my husband's really bothering me.

Then you have to say, which one? Which husband? And then they say, no, you don't understand.

I mean, my husband. You say, well, which one? And they say, no, of course I only have one husband.

You say, I thought you had two. They say, no, I don't have two, I have one. Then you say, well, you can't have one, because you don't have two.

But I don't have two. Yeah, because you don't have any. No, I don't have two, because I have one.

No, you don't have one, that's why you don't have two. Then they say, but I do have a husband. They say, well, is it the one who's your fault?

No. He decided to yell at me. I didn't ask him to yell at me.

He decided to yell at me. But in Buddhism you can't say that. He decided to yell at me.

You can't say that in Buddhism. Okay? You created him.

That's why he's yelling at you. Okay, got it? That's called ciktu-dra.

It's a very, very famous Buddhist argument. Okay? My husband bothers me.

Which one? No, I only have one. No, you don't have two, because you don't have any.

No, but I do have one. No, you don't have one. Yes, I do have one.

No, is the husband you have coming from you, or coming from himself? Does he decide to yell at you, or did you ask him to yell at you? Well, of course I didn't ask him to yell at me.

Yes, you did. No, he decided to yell at me. No, no, no, no.

You asked him to yell at you. Well, how? You yelled at your kids last week.

You're begging him to yell at you. Okay, got it? That's how you have a conversation with your friends about your husband.

Okay? We have three more meditations tomorrow. They're like dessert.

They're really fun. By the way, between—somebody asked me to correlate the meditations to the sutra, and I will tomorrow. I promise I will tomorrow, so you can't die tonight.

Okay? By the way, what the Buddha says next, if you want to know, between 22 and 23? Between 22 and 23, Lord Buddha says, when a bodhisattva gives something to somebody, right?

They don't stay in things. They don't stay in how the brownie looks, in how it smells, in how it looks—here, how it sounds, and how it tastes, and how you think about it. The bodhisattva, when they give a brownie, they don't stay in the brownie.

But then Buddha says two more things. They don't stay in anything. Like, he goes crazy.

He's like, they don't stay in anything. He gets really adamant. He says, they don't stay in anything, and that's why when a bodhisattva gives something, the result is infinite.

So he says two things. He says, they don't stay in anything, and that's why when they give something, there's this unbelievable result. So we got to talk about that tomorrow.

Then the last thing he says, between 24 and 25, is the result of their giving is infinite. So between 22 and 23, he's going to say, they don't stay anywhere, and their giving is very effective. And then between 24 and 25, he says, it can only be compared to the infinity of space.

So that's how far we have to go. If you meditate on these, if you do the meditations and the photos, for some reason you can remember the whole thing. Like, I'm not using notes.

You can grasp the whole sutra in your mind. And it's really awesome to walk around with the sutra in your mind. It's awesome.

So just get familiar with the photos, and then the sutra will be part of your ... you just can recite the whole thing. You can recite the whole mini-art for five days and not look at it, if you meditate on it.

Then you have to teach it to other people. That would be really sexy.