Дебаты дьявола с ангелом, часть 16: Церемония обетов бодхисаттвы (2022, Аризона), занятие 1

[Speaker 1]
Hi, welcome to the Angel Debates the Devil. This is an ancient book. It was written about 500 years ago, four or 500 years ago by His Holiness, the first Panchen Lama, Losang Chukyi Gyeltsen.

And I really enjoy him personally. Usually the first lama of a long line is kind of special. And I think the first thing I think about when I think about him is he was an extraordinary poet.

And we've translated some of his secret poems, which were meant to be kept secret. And some guy named, what's his name? John Stilwell published them.

I hope to get a copy someday. And they're very, very, very beautiful poems. And so I really appreciate his poetry.

He was also a great writer of Lam Rim, which is the steps of the path to enlightenment presented almost for the common person, for common man. And I think most of you, many of you have studied his Lam Rim. We take, it's three courses.

So it would take about a year and a half to study that. And it goes from A to Z, Buddhism from A to Z. And by the way, it's a little, I'm not used to speaking about Buddhism.

So usually we have to convert it to something else for various reasons, but I'll try to go back into that mode. I like the story that I usually tell, which you heard me tell a lot, that he was also an activist in a time when it was dangerous to be an activist. And there's a beautiful story that he was in retreat one time.

And, oh, I see it like diamond mountain, like a mountain over a valley. And two armies were approaching each other in the valley. And he was in retreat and someone finally interrupted him and said, you got to, we got to leave.

There's going to be a battle here in the next few hours. And he said, what do you mean a battle? And they said, well, these two armies are approaching each other.

So he said, get me a bag of gold. And he got a bag of gold and he went down in the valley. He walked down and he stood between the two armies.

And he said, if you're going to fight, you have to kill me first. And then he said, I'd like to invite the two generals to have a little conference. And they came forward and then he said, look, if you guys just call it off today, I'll give you each half a bag of gold.

And they said, yeah, that sounds great. And so they never had the war that they were supposed to have. So I just like him for that reason.

Philosophically, he's a genius. He's a philosophical genius. And as far as spiritual, inner spiritual wisdom, Tim told me to slow down because we're being translated.

As far as inner, sorry Anai. As far as inner spiritual wisdom, he's extraordinary. He's an extraordinary writer.

So for me, it's very pleasant to teach his book. We started this book, I think in 2017 or something. And it's a very interesting book.

The short name is DANG RDZIN ZHANG BDEBS. Say DANG RDZIN. ZHANG BDEBS And DANG RDZIN means to look at an object or look at a person and believe they are coming this way.

So we call it grasping to a self nature. But I think it's more easy to describe it. And it's more accurate to say that it's the feeling in your heart that when you look at someone or you look at something, it's coming from its side and it's not coming from you in any way.

And that's especially important in personal relationships. If you have a partner, you know about it. Right, Gibi?

And someone criticizes you or somebody says something to you. And then if you can remember that it's coming from you, that what you see and what you hear is actually coming from you, then that's pretty much the path to enlightenment. And the fact that they don't come from themselves is emptiness.

That is emptiness. So emptiness is not very difficult. It just means there's nobody in your house that you live with who isn't coming from you in every single detail, good or bad.

And there's no such person who doesn't come from you. And it's not true that every single word they say to you is not coming from you. And the fact that there's no person in the whole world that you haven't created with your seeds, that is emptiness.

That's what emptiness means. We just finished a new book this week. We've been working on it for six years and we have 27 books in process.

And it's a book about mental images. It's translated by Adam Andrade in the glorious state of Colorado. And it talks about the images that come out of a karmic seed in your mind and float out and then land on other people.

So when you're having an argument with somebody, what's really happening is karmic seeds in your mind are opening. Mental pictures are coming out and they're kind of landing on the person. And so what you see is always seen through the filter of your own past behavior towards other people.

And that's what we mean when we say it comes back to you. How you treat others comes back to you. Actually, when you interact with others, you hear yourself, you see yourself, that's recorded.

That recording in the subconscious becomes a karmic seed. And then, I don't know, a week later or a year later, that karmic seed opens. And that's where Adam's new book picks up.

And it's not quite available yet. It'll be available, I think, not too long from now. And we talk a lot about karmic seeds, how karmic seeds are planted, how you feel, how strong your emotions are, how good is the person you're speaking to.

Those all determine how strong is the seed. But I haven't seen a lot of books about what's the picture like. When a picture comes out of a karma in your mind, and then floats out to a person and kind of covers them, and then you see them in a certain way.

And that's why we say it's coming from you. What you see around you is coming from you. So, the nature of that picture is a very, very interesting, and there's been a whole school of philosophy dedicated to that, the Sautrantika, the Sutras.

And Adam's book is 640 pages about that picture. And it's beautiful. It's really beautiful.

So anyway, we're going to be talking about how those pictures work and how you create the people around you. And in this book, DANG ZIN ZHANG BDEBS, ZHANG BDEBS means almost a violent argument between two parts of one person's mind. So the part of your mind, especially under duress, under pressure, in a personal relationship or a business relationship, and someone attacks you, or someone causes you a problem, or someone just criticizes you.

And then a part of your mind wants to blame the other person. ,'WO MED YOD FAN GTONG, How do you say? ,'WO FAN GTONG MED YOD, MED YOD ,MED YOD FAN GTONG I'm not stupid.

How do you say? ,GNYIS FAN GTONG ,GNYIS FAN GTONG I'm not stupid. I'm not an idiot.

You're an idiot. And we tend to want to do that. So that reaction in the human heart is the devil here.

In this book, in this long poem, and I've been working on it for five years, in this long, long poem, the devil is the part of your mind that says, my wife or my husband or my friend criticized me and I'm not to blame. It's not my fault. But you actually created them to criticize you.

So the devil is the part of your mind that doesn't want to believe that things are coming from you. That is the devil in Buddhism. There's no other guy.

That is the devil. I'm not stupid. You're stupid.

So that's the devil. Then the angel, in this case, which we call wisdom, is a quiet and very convincing and very funny part of your mind that says, come on, you've been studying Buddhism for 25 years, 30 years now. How can you get upset?

You know this is coming from you. You know you created this. So just fix it.

Just calm down and fix it. So we have a beautiful debate. SHANG BDEB means almost like a raucous debate between wisdom and misunderstanding things.

We're in a part where the first Panchen Lama, he goes a very interesting way. He doesn't talk about how you misunderstand a person in your life that you live with or someone that you work with. He doesn't talk about that.

He wants to talk about misunderstanding your world. He's famous. If you take ACI courses, if you took the 18 foundation courses and you pass them and then you entered the 18 Diamond Way courses, I think it's the first three courses are his, which could take a year and a half to study or two years, are his famous book on the steps to the path, which is called?

Yeah, Delong, Path to Bliss. By the way, there's a debate about how to translate it. Why?

Delong. It could mean a path to bliss or it could mean a blissful path. The Panchen Lama, in my opinion, would say a blissful path to bliss.

He would say both. Don't forget that's his state of mind. He's going to discuss, and right now we're recording, in the last five days we're recording a DCI Lama about relationships and how to use these ideas in relationships.

But where he's going to use them, where we are now, which is 252 verses into the poem, he's going to apply them to rebirth. How does wisdom apply to rebirth? How do our mental pictures create the fact of rebirth?

The fact that we die and we move on. Yesterday we lost a very dear Sangha member, Jeff Eddy, young. I don't know how old he was.

40 maybe? 43. He has a three-year-old baby.

He's somewhere else now. We all have to face this question of where do we go and what happens to us. He's going to debate emptiness, but he's not going to talk about the emptiness of a relationship in the kitchen.

He's going to talk about the emptiness of rebirth itself. How is rebirth a product of your mental images coming out of your karmic seeds? How is that a product?

By the way, we can say up front that it's not true that because something is a mental image, it's not true that because something is a mental image, it's somehow not real. It is reality. Reality is a mental image.

There's no other reality. The reality of pictures coming out of your karmic seeds is what's real. It's not that there's some other reality and the pictures change it or the pictures affect it or something like that.

The only reality is the one that's flowing out of your karmic seeds. He's going to discuss rebirth. I wrote four manuals this month.

Some of them are two or three hundred pages. It's all about business, success, personal relationships, things like that. But now we're on a different level.

This class is a totally different thing. We're discussing, where is Jeff Eddy? What happened to him?

The person who died yesterday. Very dear student. Very, very dear student.

He ran our prison project and he bravely kept it going for many years. It's a difficult project because the prison is three and a half hours from here. It takes three and a half hours to get there and then you have to get into prison, which can take a couple hours also.

Then sometimes somebody has a knife fight and you have to come home and you don't get to teach anything. But he kept that up for a long time. So, where is he?

What's happening to him now, today? It's a question that's important for all of us. Maybe as important as what happens in the kitchen.

Here we go. I'm going to read the Tibetan just for good luck. He's a great poet and his writing is extraordinary.

Oh, make it bigger. How's that? Okay.

I'll do the first verse then maybe I'll call on people to embarrass you. Right, Hasso? ,'CHOS DU GYUD LA GCOD BA MED, ,'KHYAD PAR GYUD LA SKYE BA MED, ,GAL TE LHA LAS TSE POS NAS, ,LHA MA YIN DU SKAD PA'I TSE, ,LHA'I PHUNG PO LA DMIGS NAS, ,SNGA'O SNYAM DU DZIN PA'I, ,RDAN CING DE NI MI RGYUR BA'I, ,LHA MA YIN GYI MI DE NA, ,MIGS NAS SNGA'O SNYAM PA'I, ,BLO DE NYID PA ZHIG CIG TU ,DU BA MED KYANG RDU PA NI, ,DAN PAR DU PA NI, ,DU BYED PA'I RGYUN YIN MI, ,DU LUG CING DA'I BA GCIG MI, Okay. In general, we can say, by the way, who's talking here? In this poem, you have to know who's talking.

And because we took five years to get this far, it's not uncommon to forget who's talking. So I remind you, it's the angel. And the angel is kind of a tough lady, and she's like waving her finger at the devil.

Who's the devil? It's your tendency to blame other people for your problems, basically. And she's like, in general terms, we can say that if we stick to your system, nothing could ever die.

So that already, we have a problem here. We're supposed to be discussing what happens to you after you die. And the angel starts out by saying, you couldn't die anyway.

So why are we having this conversation? She accuses the devil of misunderstanding things so badly that you couldn't die anyway. Connie, you got to sit down.

You have something? But if you need to, let me know. You could sit here or something.

There's a chair here. But if you need. So if devil thinks are the way you think, then we could not have a conversation about rebirth because there would be no death in the first place.

And then the devil says, why do you say that? And the angel says, because if things are not coming from you, you could not die. If life is not coming from how you treat life, if life itself is not a product of respecting life, then life could never die.

Which means, if life had no real causes, then you couldn't die and we can't have this discussion about rebirth. If life were caused by chemicals or medicines or oxygen, if this is what really caused life to exist, then it could never die. You could never die.

The fact that you die and the fact that you get older is a reflection, if you think about it, of something wearing out. The fact that you die, it's kind of obvious actually that there's some energy or some power in your body is wearing out. I asked Jeff's caretakers, did he pass peacefully?

What happened? How was the last few days? Kendra Rickert, Ben Kramer's wife, went to help take care of him.

She said, well, the day I got here, he was normal. He was lucid. He was in bed, but he was lucid.

He got cancer. He was saying, let's see how it goes. Then by the second day, he became unconscious, but he seemed to be in great pain.

Then the third day, he was just leaving. So something is, some energy in Jeff's body and some energy in our body is wearing out. Something's wearing out.

The angel's position is that, by the way, we're supposed to be talking about rebirth, but we got to die first. The angel's position is that when a tree grows from a seed, it kills the seed. Again, we're running a course this week about relationships.

We discuss in the course, why do relationships fail? Why does a relationship tend towards failure? What's entropy?

The opposite? I don't know. Things tend towards chaos in a physical system.

The atoms will spread out until they are equidistant from each other in the universe. Heat death of the universe. Then nothing will move and there'll be no communication and life is impossible.

Things tend towards chaos. When a tree grows from a seed, by definition, what happens to the seed is it dies. The energy that pushed the tree into existence is asserted.

Then like a billiard ball, it starts to slow down. That's the nature of all motion in the universe where things are going to end up, all the dust particles in the universe are going to end up equally spaced from each other and nothing can happen anymore. That's happening on a smaller level with us, with your body and with your mind.

Certain energies pushed it into being. A seed grew. A body came out.

A mind came out. Then over the course of your life, you age. Those energies slow down.

Then finally they die. Now, if the human body existed from its own side and was not being caused by the seeds of how I treated others, if the human body were somehow surviving off of chemicals or oxygen or things in the atmosphere or things in the food, if that's what keeps people alive, then in theory we should be able to stay alive indefinitely. You just eat the same food, same input, same output.

If the reason you're alive, your body, is food, oxygen, medicines, things like nutrition, if those are the real causes of a human body, then in theory you should be able to keep it going indefinitely. You just keep feeding it the same causes. In the angel system, what gave you a body, what gave you life, was protecting life.

What gives human beings life is that we protected the life of other beings. When you protect the life of a being, you plant a seed in your mind, karma. Then when the seed opens, a picture comes out of life.

But if the devil's position is correct, then no one would ever die. If the reason you're alive is food, oxygen, liquids, whatever, then in theory you could keep someone alive forever. You just keep feeding them Cheerios.

But that's not what created life. What created life is protecting life. That's a very beautiful idea.

Here she says, if we stick to your system, who's you? The devil. According to your system, then nobody could ever die.

More particularly, we have to say that nothing could ever be born. If things are not coming from another force that causes life itself. By the way, in all these years of science, I keep watching the economist science section to see if they will ever claim to have created life.

Not cells, but actual life. They have not. Consciousness.

No scientist has ever created consciousness from physical matter. We would say it's not possible. We would say that's not where life comes from.

We would say it will never happen. He's saying, if we accept your system, that the body is sustained by food, oxygen, liquids, etc., then life itself would not be possible. Birth itself would not be possible.

If something didn't exist, if something wasn't alive, it couldn't become alive according to your system. It should have been alive before because the water and the oxygen and food are there. So why does it start to live at some point?

I'll say it again. If life comes from oxygen, food, liquids, whatever, if life is created from those things, then anytime you have those things in a room, somebody should be born. Life should be created.

He said, but no, it doesn't happen like that. Then he starts to discuss the different permutations of where Jeff Eddy is now. Where is Jeff now?

Where is our friend today? Where did he go? Then he starts to discuss that.

He says, suppose you were born as a pleasure being. Pleasure being is, what's the Sanskrit? Deva.

Which in Latin is deus, a god or a deity. I always say you can think of Marvel movie characters like Thor, Iron Man, all those guys, Wonder Woman. There's a realm in the universe that we cannot directly see normally where beings are just like that.

I have the opinion that when Marvel movie makers make movies of special beings, on some level they are remembering what they saw before. All creativity has to come from some earlier source. It's not that they can just make up a new Iron Man or a new Superwoman from nothing.

There's some kind of influence in their mind that gave them the idea. Stan, what's his name? The main Marvel guy who invented Marvel.

I think he's 99 now or something. I would say he's remembering something. When he creates a new character, he's not making it up.

Actually, nothing can be made up from nothing. He must have had some influence. That's another realm that we cannot see and all the people look like those Marvel characters.

Part of it is called the form realm, which just means a place where people have extraordinary physical bodies. That's all. It doesn't mean anything else.

It doesn't mean physical realm. Form realm is a deceptive word. It means Iron Man form, Superman form, Super Lady form.

There are beings who are born like that. Are they Buddhists? No.

They are not Buddhists. You just look at a Marvel movie. They fight with each other and they can't resolve their differences.

There's always some emotional trauma that's going on. They are strong, but they're not wise necessarily. They're not Buddhists, but they're powerful.

There's a joke in Buddhism that they use planets as marbles. Like that. They're that powerful.

They are that big and strong. There's two brands of these powerful Marvel beings. There's two brands.

One is called a 100% version and one is called a 50% version. One is called Deva and one is called Asura, which means like a half Deva. They're kind of like Iron Man with low batteries or something.

They're not full powerful beings. They're kind of like half powerful. When you die, and actually the main karmic cause of becoming one of those beings is what?

Meditation. Yeah, it's excellent meditation. High quality meditation.

High quality constant meditation. Probably only possible at Diamond Mountain. Right, Kat?

Then if your meditation was good but not that good, you get born as Iron Man with half batteries. Those are called half deities. There's half Devas, half pleasure beings, and then there's full pleasure beings.

Anytime someone is very powerful and someone else is pretty powerful, what do you get? Jealousy. That's the main interaction between these two versions of a pleasure being.

A full pleasure being and a half pleasure being. When you discuss... Get what the Panchen Lama is doing here.

He was supposed to be discussing how our mind creates the objects around us. He was supposed to be talking about how our karma creates the things around us. He was supposed to be going there.

Instead, he turned it into a side conversation on rebirth and the different kinds of rebirth. He's supposed to be talking about why the cup comes from me and the cup doesn't come from the cup or the pen. But he doesn't want to use a pen and he doesn't want to use a cup.

He wants to use rebirth because he wants us to be scared. By the way, the main task he set for himself is to put wisdom into our hearts, but he also wants to put fear into our hearts, renunciation. He doesn't discuss pens and cups.

He discusses hell and hungry spirits and these other kinds of future. Where is Jeff at? He was discussing that.

Then, here, he turns it into a discussion of one of the kleshas. What's a klesha? Like a negative emotion.

You can call it mental affliction. It does not pass the waiter test. What's the waiter test?

We have a Mixed Nuts translation team. We have 12 translators. They've been working six years now on their respective books.

We have what we call the waiter test. What's that? Do you want to explain it?

If a waiter, if a normal waiter in a novelist understands that particular thing, does that make it understandable? Yeah, when you choose words to translate ancient philosophy, you should choose words, according to our system, that a waiter in a cafe would understand. If you use words that would sound strange to a normal person, you've mistranslated the book.

It's a bad translation. Mental affliction. Try mental affliction on a waiter today.

There's a little Mexican restaurant right here, two doors down. I'd like to have a mental affliction. Wow, we don't serve those.

We can say negative thought, or upset, or something like that. You don't need to use these weird words. Anyway, in discussing where things come from and in discussing emptiness, he has twisted the conversation to rebirth and tried to put the fear of God into us.

He's trying to get us thinking about where Jeff Eddy is today. He's trying to get us to think about it. Then he twists it to jealousy.

He takes the excuse of these two types of beings who are classically driven by jealousy for each other and he takes it as an opportunity to have a discussion about jealousy, which is really skillful. If you're sensitive, he's done three things in two lines. Let's talk about emptiness.

Let's talk about mental images. Let's talk about rebirth. Let's talk about your jealousy.

He's like that. He's very amazing. If you really sit down.

That's why it's taken five years to get through these few verses. He says, suppose a pleasure being, a deva, dies and they are reborn as one of their lesser cousins. What really happened?

The seeds they had for great personal power, which were probably created by a perfect meditation, the seeds for great huge personal power, deva, which were created by very, very high quality meditation, they wore out. But he still had some seeds left over from all the retreats he did where he was half concentrating, which makes you into a semi-deva, half-deva. So he says, suppose a full pleasure being dies and is born as one of their lesser cousins.

What's a lesser cousin here? You can say a demigod or something like that. Half-deva.

Half-pleasure being. Not quite so glorious. Not quite so powerful.

It's the nature of, say, politics that the person who has the most power, and there are all these other people under them, that the people under them are very jealous of the person in power and they're always trying to topple the person they're supposed to be serving. So anyway. Now he says, suppose you were the most powerful politician or whatever and then suppose you died and suppose your crummy meditation seeds took over and you were born as a demigod.

Suppose you were born a dem. When they, in their life before, when they were a full pleasure being who was playing with planets like marbles, they looked at their body and mind and they said, that's me. They looked at their body and they thought about their mind and they said, that's Michael.

They said, that's Michael. My body and my mind, that's me. It's interesting, we have a young child running around, right Vivian?

Downstairs filming. Seiji and Nora's son, Maitri, who's, how old is he? Two years old?

Not quite two. Not quite, one point something. He's running around and it's interesting to watch him learning that he is his body and his mind.

Like he'll stand in front of the mirror, right? And he'll go, then he'll say, baby. That's what he calls himself right now.

He's learning that that body and that mind is me. He's learning that. So we all, all of us, there's actually three parts to a human being.

There's your body, and then there's your mind, and then there's the name that you give to your body and mind, Michael. And they are separate. The name, the person, is separate from the body and the mind.

DEM DUS CI It's a changing thing that has no physical or mental qualities. It's a concept. Michael, John, Hasso, Rossa.

These are ideas. So actually, John is made of three parts. John's body, John's mind, and John.

And John is just an idea put on the body and the mind. So back when they were a full deva, they looked at their body and mind and said, hey, that's me. Don't forget that the devil thinks that the body was created from chemicals.

And I don't know, consciousness is a lucky electrification of chemicals. That's what the devil thinks. The devil thinks that's what created the person.

The devil doesn't believe that Michael is a product of how I treated people before. The devil doesn't believe that Michael comes from how I treated people before. That idea is completely foreign to the devil.

The devil never would even consider that idea. That my existence comes from how I treated people before. He wouldn't even think of that.

So they would look at the body and mind and say, Michael, and before you died, when you were a full powerful being, you looked at the full, what do you call it? Tony Stark's armor? And you said, Iron Man.

Iron Man. And then you died, and now you have, I don't know, green lanterns, green cap, and green kind of half-wave. I would rather be Iron Man.

I don't want to wear this little kind of fairy cap. So he says, back when they had the body and mind of a pleasure being, they looked at their body, they looked at their mind, and they said, Michael, this is Michael. Now according to you, if that body and mind was coming from the body and mind, and not from my seeds, if the body and mind were created, for example, by chemicals which created a body and then at some point were imbued with consciousness because there were great chemicals, like lots of vitamins, then according to you, they couldn't die and go into another body and mind.

That could not happen. That exists from their side. So when you die and you become a lesser form of yourself in the new body and the new mind, and they're not quite as special as the old one, if you are coming from the body and mind, you shouldn't be lesser than you were before.

If you is coming this way from the body and the mind, then you shouldn't be less, you shouldn't die and become something less than you were because you're not coming from seeds. You're coming from the same chemicals that were there last week. Why should you get weaker?

Why should you age? Why should you get wrinkles if the body is coming from chemicals? You just put the same chemicals there and the body would stay young if that's where life comes from.

If that's where life comes from. Then he says, let me ask you, when you die and you're reborn as somebody less than you were, which one is me? The one before or the one now?

Which one is me? Which one is me? Do you still think the old one was me?

Do you say I was a deva? Can you say I was a deva? No, you cannot if it's coming from its own side.

You cannot say I was a deva because now I'm a semi-deva. You can't say I was a deva. Either you're a deva or you're a semi-deva.

You can't change from the other side. If you are a product of chemicals and oxygen and vitamins and electricity or whatever, then you're always done. They haven't gone away.

Jeff Eddy died. The chemicals are still here. The rocks in Sedona are still here.

The rocks didn't change. The rocks didn't lose their iron or copper. The vitamins, the elements are still there.

If he came from, if his life came from chemicals, he should still be alive. If you die and you become something else, then how can you call that new thing you if you is the old thing? Because the old thing stuff is still around.

You can't be the old thing and the new thing at the same time. You cannot. But why should you be a new thing if the chemicals are still around?

Which one are you going to be? The one you used to be or the one you are? So according to you, if me is coming from the chemicals, if me is coming this way from the outside and you say, that's me.

What? That body, that mind, it's me. Okay, so there's two that's me's.

How many that's me's we got running around? Two. What do you mean we got two that's me's?

Well, there was a that's me that you used to be and there's a that's me that you are now. We got two that's me's. Where?

Right now. We got two that's me's. So you're going to be who you were before you died and you're going to be who you were after you died at the same time.

Okay, according to you. You all right? Hang in there.

We didn't get anywhere. We're not even through one verse. I thought it was two verses.

Of course, no such thing is possible. You can't be that's me who you used to be. And by the way, this applies to yesterday's Connie and today's Connie.

Which one is Connie? Can you say that's me about both? They're different things.

So which one you want to be? And then human being wants to say, I'm both. I was here yesterday also.

Was I here yesterday filming? I was here. That's me.

I went to the gym. We did running and stuff together. That's me.

And now I'm here. That's me. There's two that's me's running around.

Then he says, of course, this angel is still talking. Of course, it's not possible that there's two that's me's. I also agree it's not possible.

Either yesterday's me is me or today's me is me. But there's no two me's running around. There's only one me running around.

Either it's one. So it's not possible. The devil says, this whole discussion is weird.

That's me yesterday and this is me today. Well, then there's two this is me's in the room right now. Then there's two this is me's in the room right now.

The devil says, I don't get it. I don't know what you're talking about. The angel says, if things are coming from their side and not from your side, then there is two that's me's in the room right now.

That's not possible. You either are who you were or you are who you are. But you can't be both.

But we say, Connie was here yesterday. We do say that. By the way, and I'll tell you something weird.

Human language is based on thinking the wrong way. Human language, all languages in this world were created by a state of mind that thinks, that doesn't understand that the world is coming from me. All human minds and all animal minds on this planet don't understand that we are coming from how we treated people yesterday.

We don't understand that. Therefore, all minds on this planet, except for a few of you guys, all minds on this planet are thinking in a fundamentally mistaken way. All languages reflect that.

So we have the word I and we have the word you. We have to say, I came to the building in Jigme's car. You came to the building in your funky electrical problem car.

She's got an oil problem car, just so you feel better. We use these words I and you, but actually there's no big difference. We're not I and you, but we don't have the language to say it.

We drink I-me, I-me made coffee, I-me drank. So I-me, I-me, I-you, I-you made coffee this morning and you, I drank it, thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. And if you, I mean, human languages are broken. All human languages are broken.

You cannot say the truth in a human language. It's very difficult. It's really weird.

So anyway, he says, there's all these problems. So tell me then, what's really going to happen when those two things come together? The person you used to be before you died, Jeff Eddy last week and Jeff Eddy this week, which one are they?

Well, he used to be that and now he's this. Was he 100% that from his own side? Yeah.

Is he 100% whatever he is now from his own side? Yes. So he's both then.

And he's dead and alive at the same time. He's dead alive. He lived, died.

His seed wore out, started. Got it? It's crazy.

Now, his holiness, the penchant lama, and I am watching the time. By the way, in 14 minutes, right Tim? We will start a question and answer.

So please get some tough questions ready. And I don't care what they're about. In the Geshe course for 25 years, there'll be a thousand monks in the temple and they'll say, stand up, Mike, and here's your debate question.

And you got to debate it immediately. So you're trained to think on your feet. You're trained to respond to a sudden question.

We're trained for 25 years to respond to a sudden question. I like it. I like it when you ask a weird question that has nothing to do with the class.

So you're very welcome to ask any kind of question. I don't care. Now he's going to shift the conversation.

We were supposed to be talking about does the cup come from the cup or does the cup come from me? He twisted it into a rebirth talk and now he's twisting it into a talk about jealousy. Because he went from that rebirth of deva to semi-deva to now he's going to twist the talk to jealousy.

He's getting the whole lam rim in in a discussion about emptiness. He's sneaky. Sneaky Penchen Lama.

Now you got to understand the people we got in this room here. We got Michael Moore and Cindy. Michael Moore took the original ACI course 100 years ago.

No. Back in the 1980s and 1990s. Then he agreed, he's a physician from Colorado and his wife Cindy.

They're visiting today. He agreed to check the homeworks of prisoners. He's checked many hundreds of prisoners, thousands of homeworks and he's still doing it after 25, 30 years.

He's still... In many prisons you're not allowed to use the internet. You have to write it out.

You have to use CD-ROMs or tapes. Nothing that you could make into a knife. Michael, I think we should give him a hand.

He's been helping the prisoners and he never stopped. He's one of those volunteers who never stopped doing it. So I bow to you.

He's also a great doctor. I think he's a doctor of everybody in Tsingtao. We're grateful for that.

He's also a very generous sponsor for many projects. Many things exist in ACI only because of him. He's the only one who had a good job for a long time.

All right. I want to brag about Hasso because I took him to a meeting with one of my teachers, Geshe Lothar. He has two of his disciples who are Geshe candidates.

High Geshe candidates. I was in the room with him and these two Geshe candidates and Orit Vesak and Hasso. Juan Hasso.

They had a debate and I was the translator. So it's these two high Geshes. One is a Harambe Geshe.

We had Hasso and Orit. He kicked their ass. I was really happy.

I was like, yeah. The Geshes were like, uh, uh, uh. Hasso's like, hmm.

He's very polite. So anyway, Hasso, now that I've bragged about you, can you read these lines, please? And don't make a mistake.

[Speaker 2]
Okay. All you did was mess with Jay. All you did was mess with Jay.

Nice.

[Speaker 1]
Thank you. LHA MA YIN GYI BLO DE NI What's the state of mind of a half-god? LHA'I PHAL CHER DU YIN LA They look at all the cool stuff that Iron Man has.

What does Green Lantern feel about Iron Man? He looks at all the cool body armor that Iron Man has and he gets PHRAG RTOG and BRTAN SEMS. PHRAG RTOG means jealousy and BRTAN SEMS means competitive state of mind. They start to feel, they want to compete.

So these are two brothers, jealousy and competitiveness. I would say that the idea of competition, for example, the competition for resources, for oil, for iron, nowadays for cobalt from Congo to make batteries. There's a world competition for resources.

It's very serious and it's a deadly game. If you get them, your country survives. If you don't, your people go hungry.

There's a competitiveness. If people understood this poem, if people understood where things come from, they would not compete. They would offer the things to other people.

I had a... I like to say I had a... I addressed a group of business people in Florida, like a thousand.

They each had their own desk. It was in a stadium. I spoke to them.

During that week, there was a fight in the US Congress about selling, I think it's called Creston, I'm not sure. It's an oil company in Colorado, I think. It was for sale.

The Chinese government said, okay, we'll buy it. In America, it's legal for anybody to buy something. That's legal.

It's fine. It's okay. Then Congress got worried about it, that if the government in China controlled the oil supply of America, that's not a great idea.

They actually started discussing would they allow the company to be sold. I gave the talk that week. These people were into energy resources.

I taught them. They all had sunburn on their neck. Do you know what it means?

Deep south. It was deep south. We say red night.

We say very conservative people. I taught them for an hour about seeds. How you put seeds in your mind.

If you want something, you should help someone else get it because that plants a seed in your mind. That seed, if you read Adam's book, opens into a mental picture of what you want. By sharing what you have with others, you create more.

If you understood that, you would always be financially fine and have more than you ever need. I talked to them for an hour like that. They're very conservative people.

Then I said, okay, the Congress right now this week, they are deciding whether to share an oil company with another country. What do you guys think they should do? Should they allow China to buy an American oil company or should they refuse?

It was really cool. There were a thousand people there. I said, who votes for selling it?

A thousand people raised their hand. A thousand people raised their hand. They understood.

They got it. It was very beautiful. They all said, yeah, if what you said is true, then we should share what we have.

Then America will always have enough oil. What happened after that? In the following year, fracking was discovered.

Okay, I don't like the process, but who's the largest producer of oil in the world right now? Who's the number one producer of oil in the world? It's the United States.

By barrel, number of barrels per day. Number one is the United States. We lost our oil fields 80 years ago, 70 years ago.

Texas ran out of oil. Oklahoma ran out of oil. Alaska is almost dry.

By sharing, something happened. We became the number one oil supplier. We export oil now.

Remember the 70s? You remember the 70s. You were alive.

I was alive. We were struggling to have oil. So anyway, GZHAN SEMS GZHAN SEMS here.

GZHAN SEMS means that spirit of competition. That spirit of stinginess, which doesn't want to share. Sometimes I think the first perfection, I don't like the word generosity.

It has other connotations of giving lavishly or something like that. I think it's a bad translation. Donna Paramita.

Giving, the perfection of giving is a good translation. But I like, nowadays I'm tending towards sharing. The perfection of sharing.

Share what you have with other people. That's the opposite of the way that the full gods and the half gods treat each other. They have intense jealousy, intense feeling of competition.

They would never share an oil company with another country. So that's called GZHAN SEMS. Now, they are possessive of something. We can say oil.

We can say your oil in your land that came from your land. Then if you're a deva and a sura, half deva, then you are possessive towards your star. That's their whole life.

Their whole life is defined by possessiveness of their star. He's taking the example. Suppose you're a demigod.

Suppose you're like a lesser worldly god. You look at the stuff that the next level up has. You're jealous.

Those people who have BMWs are jealous of those people who have, what's that nice British car? I don't want one. Bentley, yeah.

Those BMW guys, right? Somebody in this room. They are jealous of the Bentley people.

They look at the Bentley and they wish they had it. They feel jealous. They look upon the Bentley and covet it.

They would like to have it. So we're setting up the next class. One person has a Bentley.

That's why I like to go to San Diego. It's not the ocean. It's to see all the good cars that you don't see in Rim Rat.

Somebody offered me a Tesla S something. I said, nah, they can't fix it around here. It was $157,000.

They offered me one. I said, give the money to the translation program. Now we got the two new translators covered.

That was cool. By the way, John Brady's project, he's here today. ALL, Asian Legacy Library.

They just got three major grants. I've been waiting for them to get one grant. Suddenly they got three major grants.

There's a library. There's two great libraries in Mongolia. There are four great libraries in the world of ancient Asian books.

St. Petersburg, two in Mongolia, and one in Tibet. 25 years ago, we got permission to catalog all the books in the National Library, which is 150,000 titles, something like that. More.

When we've been working for 14 years, if you don't include the gaps that were imposed by the government. John, it's the Holy Grail. Right, Grail?

It's the goal of our project to get permission to see what's in the second library. I tried for 25 years. John did it two weeks ago.

He got the contract. He came home with the contract. Then the money appeared.

We have enough money to start. We have a friend in Colorado. Not this one.

Janice sold a house that she owned and she offered part of the money to start the project at the... Then the embassy, the American embassy, gave a major grant to John. John talked to them for a couple of years.

Finally, his persuasiveness has extracted some help. Christina Kasica was the person who helped get it started, I think. Many other people.

Jeff and Mark and other people. Anyway, congratulations. We look forward to this.

It'll probably take 15 or 20 years. I think we'll lose this hair also by then. We're going to take questions and answers, too.

Then we'll get back to this question of the Bentley and the Tesla. Really, congratulations. That's the last great library that we have a hope of cataloging.

Cool, Geshe-la. We'll do question and answer for 15 minutes. Then we'll take a break.

If you have to go to the bathroom, you're welcome. There's one right there. Don't be shy.

But don't stick your head in the camera.

[Speaker 2]
Thank you, Geshe-la. The first question comes from an eight-year-old. The eight-year-old asks...

[Speaker 1]
We're on the same level. What's that? We're on the same level.

[Speaker 2]
They ask, what seeds are made if you kill a person to save the life of another person? Or, for example, if you have to kill an animal, for example a bear, to save a human life?

[Speaker 1]
Yeah. I'll repeat the question. Let's say one person is attacking another person.

There's going on now, right? Internationally. Let's say one person is attacking another person.

That person is threatening the second person. If you don't know about seeds, this is a difficult question. If someone attacks my mom, for example, should I kill them?

If someone tries to kill my mom, do I have the right to kill this person? I mean, that's a question. That's the main question.

Or a bear attacks a person. If things are coming this way, if the devil is correct, if the devil is correct, and if that violence is not coming from me, then I have to think about should I kill the person? Then there's a question.

If you think like the devil thinks, and you think things are coming this way, then that's a moral question. Should you kill a person who is threatening you or your family? If you understand where things are really coming from, then the question that this person is asking me is, if your house starts to burn, do you have the right to throw gasoline on it or not?

If your house starts to burn, is it morally correct to throw gasoline on it? I'd say no. Dumb.

Going to cause more fire. Got it? It's the same question.

To respond to violence with violence is to say, is it okay, Geshe-la, to put out a major fire with a bucket of gasoline? Geshe-la says, I don't know, if you want to try, it's okay, but it's a bad idea. Now that said, there's the mom with a knife principle.

There's the mom with a knife principle. It comes from a story that happened. Me and Veronica, I went to visit her mother.

Her mother was 93 at the time. She was supposed to, we thought she could take her own medications. We even put them in special boxes for her.

We said, okay, Tuesday, you got it? It says Tuesday, take that one. There's a point at which you shouldn't do that anymore.

Someone has to come to the house and give the people their medicine because they will take all of them. So that happened. She overtook the medicine.

Then suppose, just suppose, that it made her temporarily insane. We came at an hour of the day that she didn't expect us. We were trying to open the door because she didn't close it right.

She broke the door. She also broke the toilet bowl with her head. She fell down, hit her head on the toilet bowl.

This is the Hancock family, my wife's family. She broke the toilet bowl with her head and it flooded the whole house. She was fine.

She went to bed. I'm not saying anything about my wife, but anyway. Her mom picked up a knife because she thought someone is breaking into the house.

If your mom is running at you with a knife, what will you do? Are you going to ask me this question about your mom who accidentally took too much medicine and she's a little bit crazy and she's going at you with a knife. Now ask me the question.

Now ask me the same question. Should you kill her? Is it a right thing to kill her?

Would you kill her? What would you do? We all know what you would do.

You would try to knock her down, try to hug her, and she'll stab your arm. You're like, okay, that's worth it. I'm not going to kill my own mom.

That's the Buddhist answer. If someone threatens your life or the life of someone you love, what's the right thing to do? First of all, don't throw gasoline on a fire.

That's a wrong idea of how to stop a fire. That's what happens if you kill a person who's trying to kill you. You are throwing gasoline on a fire.

If you need to respond, then respond as you would to your mother and do everything in your power to stop this person by peaceful means. That's our responsibility and that's the best thing to do. That's pouring water on fire.

Cool. Next, Timothy. Thank you, Geshe-la, for that beautiful answer.

Let me see here. I had the question and it got lost. I'm kidding.

All right, Geshe-la. I like to make fun of jinns. It's like a pastime for 20 years.

It's mutual. What? You were talking about Marvel sci-fi movies coming from our memories.

Oh, I got to say something. I'm sorry to interrupt you. A hundred people wrote me a month ago and said Marvel Comics used a pen story in the middle of a Marvel movie.

Someone tells the pen story. I didn't sue them. I said it was okay.

Okay, Tim. But I just want to say cool stuff is happening. Tim.

[Speaker 2]
All right, so you're saying that the sci-fi movies are coming from our memories of maybe our past lives. This seems true to me and I also heard that in these recent movies that they're talking about the multiverse and things happening simultaneously and these movies can also be predictions of what's to come. Could you give us a little insight on that concept of the multiverse and what Buddhism might say about that?

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, cool. I like it. The idea of the multiverse is very popular right now.

One of the primary concepts of the idea of the multiverse is that there's different versions of this event taking place on different planes right now. This class is being held in a thousand different planes right now. Here's the opinion of classical Buddhism about this question.

This building is swimming in classical Buddhism. We translate more classical Buddhism I think than anywhere in the world by far and more accurately. Here's the classical Buddhist answer.

If you ask how many planets are there? If you ask how many beings live on those planets? There's no number.

It is truly infinite. There are infinite numbers of beings and there are infinite numbers of planets. If you take a pair of dice with twelve numbers on them and you shake it and you throw it infinite times, then what are the odds that you will get among infinite times twelve different numbers?

It's infinite. By definition it will be infinite. How many times does the exact or nearly exact version of kāṇi, I mean kāṇi is special.

Let's take somebody else. How many times has kāṇi happened in the last ten years in the metaverse, in the universe? We have to say logically, if we do it logically, there are infinite kāṇis.

There are very common, beautiful descriptions in Buddhist scripture such as the 8,000 verses of Bodo Bonamita, Prajnaparamita. There are many descriptions of the same class taking place on thousands of planets and the same handsome guy saying the exact same words at the exact same time and the people smiling back at the same, just the same. Because the odds are infinite.

So this idea of a metaverse where this same class is taking place, if the odds are infinite, it's not just that there's two different classes like this in the universe. There's countless classes just like this with the people who look just the same and are thinking just the same at the same time. So metaverse is something that certainly Buddhists would say is true just because of the odds.

If you throw the dice a billion times, you're going to get 333 million this and 333 million this. Now, so the odds are infinite. The odds are countless that this same stuff is going on right now.

But, but, but, DANG ZHIG Is it possible for a human mind to see all of those people at the same time? Is it possible? I'm not talking a billion.

I'm not talking ten billion. I'm talking countless metaverses. Countless, countless classes going on with the same people in it.

Is it possible for a human mind to witness all of them at the same time when there's no end? There's no edge. You can't say, okay, I reached Kansas now.

There's no line. There's no state border. It's infinite.

And the interesting thing about Buddhism is we say the nature, the natural state of the human mind is that it's not only possible but everyone can do it. Everybody in this room, everybody in this class already has the ability to witness the entire universe at the same time. You have that capacity.

And the last thing I said to Jeff Eddy was to tell him that. That's the last thing I ever said to Jeff Eddy. I said, you can do that.

You can, you have that capacity. And you do. Every person here has that capacity.

Not only to see them but to help them. Every human being has the capacity to see infinite planets and help infinite people at the same time. And that's what we're trying to do.

That's what these classes are for. That's what this building was built by John and Connie for. Thank you.

It's that you do have that. It is your natural capacity. We just didn't use it.

We just haven't unlocked it yet. But you have it already.