Как выполнять ежедневную практику 10 — Медитация на весь день (1998, Нью-Йорк), занятие 1

[Speaker 1]
Okay, we'll start. We pretty much finished how to do a meditation, but in between meditations there's a certain kind of lifestyle that you have to keep up, unless the meditations don't work. So, it's one thing to do a daily practice, but you have to maintain a certain kind of lifestyle in order to make the practice good.

In other words, you have to pretty much be doing meditation all day long. And that doesn't mean that when you get to work that you cross your legs on your chair and close your eyes. There's a certain kind of meditative state of mind that you want to keep at work all day long.

And Nagarjuna taught this. This was taught 17 centuries ago by Nagarjuna. And he listed some basic faults of meditation that I'm going to talk about tonight.

Those include how to do a book. So, we're going to talk about both of those things. There are five basic obstacles, but they can be divided up a little bit more.

Say gupa. Gupa. Gupa is basically a state of mind where during your meditation you're always thinking about something else.

And during the day you fill up your mind with too many plans and too much to do. People come and ask me, are Buddhists supposed to be busy or not? I mean, you get mixed messages, right?

Sometimes they say you should stay in a cave and never meet anybody and never think about anything. And then you meet His Holiness, who seems to be a pretty fantastic Buddhist, and he's really busy. So, what's the right thing to do?

Generally speaking, you have to check your capacity. If your capacity is not too much, if you can't handle too much stuff in your mind, then it's important as a Buddhist that you keep your activities fewer. And that's the idea of being a monk or a nun.

One of the ideas is that your activities and your thoughts are kept less. One of the methods of achieving that is not to own too many things. That's one way of achieving that.

Not to have much money, which is not a problem for most of us. And not to own too much stuff. Just clear out your room, try to get rid of a lot of stuff that you have.

Try to get rid of things that you're not really using. Even if it's big stuff like a car or stuff like that. If you're not really using it, just get rid of it.

Some percentage of your mind is trying to remember where all your stuff is. If I ask you, where's your car park tonight? Left side of the street or right side of the street?

You can say because you've committed some part of your short term memory to that. A part of your mind, even if it's a tiny part, is constantly having to remember where the car is. And that applies to all the other possessions and friends and everything else that you have.

It's constantly having to remember where the car is. And that applies to all the other possessions and friends and everything else that you have. Try to simplify your life.

And it leaves more room for your mind. One of the ideas of becoming a monk or a nun is that you don't have too many possessions, which means you have more... And you don't have possessions of people either.

You don't have families. Your mind is freed up to think about other things. So try to possess as few things as possible.

And try not to think of too many thoughts and plans. Plans have to be divided into the ones that matter and the ones that don't matter. Generally speaking, you should try to focus on a few plans.

It's good to be a... As a Buddhist, you can have plans. You should have plans.

You should be planning how to help lots of people. And that can be on your mind. But make sure these are real plans and things that you really intend to do and don't have a lot of thoughts on your mind.

It's inevitable when people go on long retreats that they start a business afterwards. And I'm asking them, how did you think to start this business? And they say, well, I know.

I was sitting in meditation and thought about this business opportunity. It's not like that. So you kind of try to limit those.

If your capacity grows, and as your capacity is more, then you should, as a bodhisattva, you have to start making more plans. There's a joke in the bodhisattva teachings that bodhisattvas are busier than other people. And their minds are thinking of more plans and how to help other people.

And that's okay. But your mind has to have that capacity. If you're overloaded, you won't be able to meditate properly.

So if you're not sure, see if your meditation is going well. See if these thoughts and plans come up in your meditation. If they do, then it's too much.

Say gyepa. Gyepa. Gyepa means regret, but in this case it means thinking about the good old days.

Inability to be here now. Inability to be present. You're always thinking about that day when you were a teenager and you became the school president, or the day you met that girl that you really liked, and what happened to this relationship you used to have, and maybe I could meet this person next year, or maybe I'll study this subject, or maybe I'll study that subject, or things that are future and past and you can't do anything about, and you're not really going to do anything about them, and you're just refusing to live in the present. So all through the day, if you're going to have a good morning practice, you have to prepare for it all day long.

You have to take care of your mental state all day long. Jetsun Kapha and Arya Nagarjuna are very strict about that. They say, meditation isn't just something you turn on and turn off in 45 minutes in the morning.

You have to be in a meditative state all day long. By avoiding the habit of not being present where you are now. You got to this place.

You're this age. You're not a teenager anymore. You're not 25 anymore.

At least I'm not. Give up on that stuff. Let it go.

Forget it. Forget what you were, and concentrate on what you're going to be and what you are now, and put your mind in the present moment. That's another clue.

That's another activity. Now we're not talking about meditation period, are we? We're talking about what we call tun sam, which means between meditation periods.

How do you behave from 8.30 when you finish your meditation until the next morning at 7? What kind of state of mind should you be in to help your meditation for the next day? Say nyi.

[Speaker 2]
Nyi.

[Speaker 1]
Nyi.

[Speaker 2]
Nyi.

[Speaker 1]
I remember coming back from India after studying near His Holiness for, I don't know, close to a year. I was sitting in deep meditation, and something was wrong. I examined my mind, and I examined every corner of my mind, and I checked everything, my position, my posture, my breathing, my ears, everything.

Suddenly I realized I was just sleepy. I didn't get enough sleep the night before. That's one of the obstacles that you have to watch out for.

If your daily practice is going to be good, you have to take care of your body. You have to take care of getting enough sleep. You have to exercise.

Your body has to be fit. You can't sit in good meditation. You can't maintain a good meditation.

You can't maintain a good posture if your body is not well, and if you didn't get enough sleep. Different people have different requirements for sleep. As your meditation gets really good, then maybe you don't need that much sleep.

But don't fool yourself. If you don't get enough sleep, it's very, very bad for your meditation, and it's also bad for your mental afflictions. One of the main causes of bad emotions among people, collecting bad karma through your mind, is just simply not getting enough sleep and not getting enough fresh air.

It's your responsibility as a Buddhist. If you're going to have a good practice, if you're going to help other people, you have to get enough sleep. If you have to take care of your body, it's not an attachment to take good care of your health so that you can take good care of other people.

That's normal and that's fine. That's neat. Say mukpa.

Mukpa. Mukpa. I'm not sure if I spelled it right.

I might have a saw on it, but I'll check. Mukpa means fog in Tibetan, but this means the feeling you get when you ate too much, or you had too many micro-zoy speed shakes. It's pretty much, it's obviously hopeless if you have a big meal and then you try to go meditate.

If you don't know by now, it means you're not even trying to meditate. But it just doesn't work. If you eat too much, and then try to, if you eat anything, for me, I've been trying to meditate for 20 years, and still I have to be careful in the morning not to eat anything before my meditation.

I have a nice coffee, or I have a juice or something, or water before my meditation, but I still haven't got to the point where I can eat anything and then meditate. Probably it's not good to try, I think. But this applies to the whole day.

All day long, throughout the day, and forget your morning practice. The whole day you have to watch your intake of food. You have to regulate how much food you intake if you're going to be a good Buddhist meditator.

All day long. It's not like you're careful with food in the morning and then you meditate and then you go pig out or something like that. It doesn't work that way.

You have to be careful all day long about judging what amount of food does your body need. Arya Nagarjuna said, ,GZHAN MED DAG DRA BA'I RIGS PA YID, means think of your food as medicine and that you're taking just the right amount, not too much, not too little. Don't be fanatical about food either.

Be happy with whatever you get. Eat it. Try to eat as much as you need.

Don't eat more. Don't eat less. Don't hurt yourself.

Make your body healthy and then you'll be a good meditator. You have psychic channels. You have these special channels running throughout your body.

They very much depend on your mental health and your physical health. Your mental health has to be good and your physical health has to be good for those channels to be in correct alignment. If you ignore that then you can't meditate well.

You have to take care of yourself. Say, DOD PA LA DOD PA DOD PA normally means desire. In this case it means the objects of the senses.

Things you smell, things you look at, things you touch. Dumbha means attraction, being overly attracted. This boils down to sex, music, food, etc.

These things are not wrong and they're not bad in Buddhism. But if you get too attracted to them, if you get too attached to them during the day, your mind won't be able to meditate the next morning. So you have to control your attraction to the senses.

Especially in New York City, it's very difficult to watch the eyes. It's very difficult not to be looking all over the place. There's a Buddhist practice where you concentrate on the sidewalk about 15 feet ahead.

You keep your eyes down. You might want to try something like that sometimes. I'm not saying it's bad to look at other people, or it's evil to have sex, or it's wrong to like ice cream, or something like that.

That's not the point. Enjoy those things, but enjoy them in moderation and properly. And don't go wild with them.

Or music. It'll go through your mind when you're trying to meditate. You'll be thinking about stuff like that all the time.

You'll be thinking about the next snack you're going to have. You'll be thinking about some girl you knew, or something like that. And you won't be able to meditate nicely.

So, all during the day you have to watch your sense powers and control them. You be the master of them and don't let them master you. Don't let your desire for food or those other objects get the better of you and ruin your morning meditation.

They'll ruin your practice. Enjoy them in a nice, responsible way, and then let them go and concentrate on your practice. That's really important.

Again, this is the art of maintaining a meditative state of mind throughout the day, so that when you go into your morning practice, your mind is already pretty level, pretty smooth, pretty meditative. These are all tricks to make it that way all day long. By the way, Forbes magazine interviewed me yesterday.

They said, we want to know how to incorporate Buddhism into business. Because I really did run a, I helped build a $100 million company with Buddhist principles. Ethics, exchanging self and others, all those things.

And you'll find out that if your mind is, if you watch these things, your worldly life will go much better also. This is not a goal that's very important, but it's nice that if you keep your mind in this place, then you'll be able to concentrate on anything. If you're an artist, your art will get better.

If you're a musician, your music will get better. If you're a dancer, you'll make those moves that you could never make before. If you're a businessman, an honest businessman, you can concentrate on your business and do good business and use the money for helping people.

And those are all okay. Those are all fine. And keeps your state of mind focused.

It's the ability to keep yourself focused no matter what you're doing. Yeah.

[Speaker 2]
Sai? We're getting there. That's nice.

Anila has one more to add.

[Speaker 1]
Say nesam. Nesam. Sometimes called sewa.

This is the worst one for meditation. If you're trying to meditate and you're thinking about somebody else that you don't like. If your mind gets on a roll about someone you don't like, it can ruin your meditation for weeks.

You see what I mean? At least for a few days. This is the worst of all of them.

You can be attached to pizza, you can get over it in about a day. But if you start thinking about someone you don't like during your meditation time and between meditation times, it takes all the energy out of your meditation. Suddenly it's like all the vitality of the meditation is sucked out by these doubts about other people or unhappiness or anything like that.

It's a very dangerous state of mind if you want to ruin your meditation. And you see, it's not enough to not think bad thoughts during the 45 minutes that you're practicing. There's another 22 hours and 15 minutes that you have to watch.

Because if you're having a lot of negative thoughts about other people during the rest of the day, it'll inevitably take the energy out of your meditation. The energy of your meditation will be drained. This is especially important to try to avoid the negative thoughts of another person.

Those are some of the mental habits that you want to keep between meditations, okay? During the day, between meditations. I know a lot of Americans who have tried to meditate.

I think any person in the East Village, you walk up to them on the street, you say, did you ever try to meditate? And they say, yeah, yeah, I went to Joe Schmo Yoga Center for a couple times and they taught me how to meditate. And I tried and not much happened.

I sat there and it was kind of uncomfortable. And I kind of thought I saw some green light, but I wasn't sure. And that's, most people stop there.

A lot of the reason is, as we said, you don't know how to warm up during the meditation. But another reason a lot of Americans fail is that they don't take care of their mind in between meditations. So you have to work on that.

You have to be aware of that, okay? Did somebody have a question? Yeah.

He says, you know, you start getting, I can speak from experience, like the last 24 hours, right? When you start having negative thoughts about some other person, it's easy for you to stand up there and say, oh, just stop it, you know? It doesn't work, you know?

You can't just stop it. If you're really on a roll about somebody, it's almost impossible to stop it. Buddhism says in a negative way, you can do negative reinforcement and positive reinforcement, okay?

Negative reinforcement is, as it's coming up, understand that this is going to ruin your meditation. This is going to ruin your spiritual life and your spiritual practice. I mean, as the thought starts coming into your head, realize that you are ruining your meditation for the next few days.

If you've studied Tantra, there's a physical basis to this. Those thoughts are creating actual physical disturbances in your body. You will not be able to meditate for the next day or two, okay?

Every time you have a negative thought like that, it's actually causing some kind of physical reaction in your body that you can't meditate very well after that. So, I mean, in a negative way, as it's coming up, say, look, is it more important for me to be pissed off at this person that I could care less about, really? Or would I rather have a good meditation tomorrow?

You can't have both. So, I think I'd rather have a good meditation. So, you shut up for a while.

You tell your mind to shut up for a while. That's negative reinforcement. Positive reinforcement puts your mind on some of the incredible things you can do if you learn to meditate.

If you learn to meditate properly, if you reach a certain level like tonglam, you can see your future lives directly. You can see enlightened beings directly. Later on, you can come to meet them, talk to them, be with them.

All these things, there's a point at which you can turn this into gold. You can perform miracles. I mean, all these things, you can read other people's minds.

Anything you want, basically, if you learn to meditate. According to Buddhism, all promotion through different Buddhist levels is done during deep states of meditation. Like you go from tonglam to jolam, jolam to tonglam, tonglam to gomlam.

Those are all done. Moving up through the ladder of Buddhist realizations is all done in deep meditation. When you're starting to get irritated at somebody and it's starting to obsess you, you're becoming obsessive about it, realize you're trading off all of those things for a few minutes of what?

Pleasure? At being angry or upset at somebody? It's not a very pleasant trade.

Put your mind on the sweet things you're going to get if you can meditate properly. It's really a good motivation. I find, personally, it's better than the negative.

I like to concentrate on the beautiful things that I know are possible if I meditate well, because I've had some taste of them. So I try to concentrate on all those good things I ever felt, all those good things I ever saw, and I realize if I continue to be angry or upset at this person, I'm disqualifying myself from those things, and I don't want that. So I just decide it's a trade-off.

You can't have both. I say, okay, I'll get mad tomorrow. Let me have some good meditation today.

Something like that. There's also a distraction called doubts, stupid doubts. You can have doubts about things like, is there hungry ghosts?

I don't know. I can't see them. The Buddha said that there's hungry ghosts.

There's these ghosts running around with no food. Can I show them to you? No.

Should you sit and worry about it? I don't think so. Try to prove them in your mind.

If you can't, shelve it for a while. Don't reject it. Don't reject it because an enlightened being said it, and they don't lie too often.

But just let it go for now. Say, okay, maybe there are, maybe there aren't. It doesn't matter.

I want to be happy. But there's other kinds of doubts that you shouldn't have. You shouldn't have this struggle every morning, like maybe I should meditate, or maybe I should go out for a good breakfast.

I don't know. You're fighting with yourself, and you're saying, I don't know, maybe it'd be better if I just meditated tomorrow. That's the kind of thing, those kind of doubts you have to choke right away.

You have to face them and deal with them right away. You have to, it's called decisiveness. It's a good asset for meditators, decisiveness.

You can decide quickly and clearly. It's better if I stay and meditate. You don't sit and debate it for half an hour.

You'll say, look, you've been eating for 20 years, 30 years, 40 years. All you did was waste a bunch of money. You didn't get anywhere with the eating.

Try and meditate for a couple weeks. Maybe you can eat later. Just talk to yourself like that.

But be decisive. Don't be wishy-washy about your spiritual practice. Decide, I'm going to reach enlightenment.

I'm going to help other people. I'm going to be a bodhisattva. I'm going to reach these high levels that this guy keeps saying exist.

I want to find out. I'll sacrifice a little bit. I'll sacrifice that latte today.

I'll go for the big time. Decisiveness is very important in meditation. Decide, I'm going to practice.

I'm going to do it every day. It's like, boom, boom, decide. Don't have these old party of minds saying, come on, please, let's go to breakfast.

Just tell them to shut up. Decide, no, we're going to do this today. We're not waiting until tomorrow.

That's the other thing about meditation. Don't ever put it off. It has to be a daily thing.

Same time. Every day at the same time. Unless you have some really weird work schedule.

Try to do it every day at the same time. Then it'll be like lunch or dinner or going to the bathroom. At a certain moment, your mind will say, ding, time to meditate.

It's very, very good if you do it at the same time every day. The only way you'll ever ruin your practice is if you take one day off. That's how you lose it.

Don't ever take one day off. Forget it. If you weren't going to die, take a day off.

But you are going to die, so you can't take a day off. Every day, decide. Your mind will fight you, and then you'll go good for six months, and then your mind will start fighting you again.

Oh, hey, we did it for six months. Now, come on, you can take a day off. You got to get down to so-and-so.

No, it has to be every day. Meditation does not work twice a week or three times a week, period. You might as well forget it.

Just stay out all night and forget meditating. If you're going to try it once or twice or three times a week, don't even try. It doesn't work.

It has to be every day. It has to be a habit that you do every day. If you get good at most days, they work, because all the other mental problems will start to come up on those days.

Jealousy, irritation with other people, desire for things, they all come up on the days that you don't meditate. So, you'll start to get used to it. The last and most important thing for meditation, the most important thing for your daily practice, is to live a truly ethical life all day long.

That's what we're going to talk about. That's the main subject tonight. It's to watch your behavior.

At its crudest and most raw form, it's are you hurting other people all day long? All day long, do you do any single thing which hurts another person? This has to become some kind of a...

This has to become the theme of your life. Otherwise, you will not meditate well. You will not change.

You have to find the way. You have to become a master of the art of watching your behavior all day long. Is anything I'm doing going to hurt another living creature?

This is called bok jimba. Say bok. Bok.

Jimba.

[Speaker 2]
Jimba.

[Speaker 1]
Bok jimba. Bok jimba is very hard to translate. We were working on it early this morning.

The only thing I can think of is turbo jet. It means your practice is going powerful. Then you bok jimba.

Bok jimba means you turn on the turbo. It means the afterburner. It was already going fast, but if you bok jimba, the thing goes twice as fast.

It's like extra rockets or something. Bok jimba means that. It's a word that means...

It combines words for magic and flame and stuff like that. You got to find an English word. I don't know.

But bok jimba for your practice. If your meditation is going pretty well, if you want to bok jimba, then you have to start watching your actions during the day. Am I hurting other people all day long?

You have to get very, very good at watching your behavior. Because every time you hurt another person, you set your meditation back a lot. That's very subtle.

It's not just if you eat all day or don't get any sleep or you're constantly obsessed by listening to music all day or something like that. But if you ever, every time you do something to hurt another person, even say some small thing, do some small thing, brush somebody on the street, something like that, it hurts your meditation for days and you'll never know. You see, this is a principle that the Buddha talked about and it's a special principle of meditation.

And if you don't watch it, you'll just never know. You'll never figure it out. And you'll be trying to meditate and you'll be one of those poor people that says, I don't know why, but my meditation is no good.

I can't concentrate. Did you hurt anybody yesterday? I don't know.

I don't hurt people. I'm not like the kind of person that goes and looking around New York City for somebody to hurt. I'm not like that.

Maybe I bump into somebody once in a while. Maybe I put that other employee in his place once in a while. But it's not like I'm a mean person.

I'm a normal person. I'm pretty nice to everybody. I'm not talking about that.

If you're a Buddhist and if you want your meditation to get really high, you have to track even the little tiny things you say to other people, even the little tiny things you do, and even the little tiny thoughts you have, all through the day, you have to get good at that. Then suddenly your meditation takes off. Bok chen pa.

And you can blame your behavior. And suddenly your meditation goes wild. And you start seeing all these things you never thought you'd see.

People come to me, there's these disappointing people come to me and they say, nothing's happening in my life. Nothing's happening with my practice. Nothing's happening with my meditation.

I just feel like I fell 10 years ago. I'm not making any progress. So I say, are you checking what you eat?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Are you getting enough sleep? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Do you listen to the radio too much? Have too much sex? Think about it too much?

Stuff like that. No, no, everything's fine. Do you watch your mind and your speech and what you're doing to other people all day long?

Do you watch that you haven't hurt anybody all day long? You say, I don't have to watch it. I'm not the kind of person that goes yelling at people.

I don't yell at people. I don't get angry. I'm not chasing girls down the street.

I'm a normal person. I say, no, no, I want to know if you're keeping everything strictly or not. You see what I mean?

And they say, no, I'm not. I say, did I teach you about how to keep a book? And they say, yeah, yeah, I went to one of your classes about that.

I went to two of them. I say, but are you keeping your book? They say, no.

I say, so why do you come to me? Stop coming to me. Stop telling me how bad your practice is.

Really, it breaks my heart. I don't even want to know. Don't even come and tell me.

Don't come and tell me how lousy your practice is. Don't tell me you're not having any success in your meditation. And then tell me that you're not keeping a book after I told you to keep a book 10,000 times.

So, just don't come to me. It's a waste of your time. It's a waste of my time.

I'm really busy. And it breaks my heart. It makes me upset.

People come and say, nothing's happening in my meditation. Did I have all these other people coming to me? I saw this thing.

This thing happened to me. You wouldn't believe it. And I say, yeah, tell me.

And they say, this happened, this happened, this happened. I was meditating. I saw this thing.

Is that for real? I say, that's for real. They say, wow, where's that coming from?

I say, are you keeping your book? And they say, yeah, I keep it very strictly. I say, okay, so keep it up.

And that's the whole key. And then I don't want to hear about it from anybody. I just don't want to hear about it.

Come and tell me the good stuff after you kept your book. I'd love to hear that stuff. Yeah.

I'm going to teach you how to do a book. There's this guy named Subuti. It used to be Amy Krantz, but she went to India.

Subuti always had a deal with this tantric deity. And the deity would always come to class disguised as a normal person and ask the right question at the right time. And that was Subuti.

Okay. First you get a book. You get any kind of little diary book, okay?

It doesn't matter. Get any kind of journal. Any kind of diary.

Something with a page on this side and a page on this side.

[Speaker 2]
So that's the middle of the book. And that's like opened up. That's a book opened up.

The purpose of this book, it's like a diary.

[Speaker 1]
But it's a diary that you write in every two and a half hours. Every two to three hours you are making an entry in this journal. You are writing down something about your life every two to three hours.

And you cannot skip. And you cannot pile them up at the end of the day. It don't work that way.

There's a... I'm going to break the rules, okay? I'm telling you now, when you take a tantric empowerment you are required to keep a very similar book.

When you take a secret initiation you are required to keep a very similar record. Every two to three hours you are required to stop and check a list of all the commitments you've made. Yeah.

[Speaker 2]
Yeah. Yeah. We'll talk about it.

We're going to get to that.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah. We'll get there. We'll get there.

I'll get there tonight. I'll cover it tonight. I have to cover it tonight.

What are you going to check? Everybody here is supposed to be keeping ten good deeds of a Buddhist. And I'll write them down right now very quickly, okay?

You have to check those. And I'll teach you there's a special system. I swear, okay?

It doesn't take more than one minute. It does not take more than one minute, okay? I'm not asking for much time.

It gets you enlightened. It gets you to a Buddha paradise in this life. It does not take more than one minute.

I don't ask you to take more than one minute. I have people, they just start their book, and they write for 15 minutes, and they show it to me, and they say, is this what you want? I say, no, this is wrong.

I want it done in one minute. One to one and a half minutes. So don't come to me and say, I couldn't do my book.

I didn't have time. Did you have time to poop? Yes.

Pooping isn't going to get you to a Buddha paradise, okay? All right. Very basically, if you took refuge, vows, commitments, how many do you have?

Twelve, please. Where were we? Right?

Anyone who ever took Buddhist refuge, which I think is most of the people in this room, you have twelve commitments already. They're written on that little card you got. At this place you get a card.

Some places you don't get a card, okay? If you lost your card, do we have any extra? Talk to her if you lost your card.

You'll get a card in the mail, okay? You have already twelve commitments that you made. If you don't know what they are, I have a suspicion you broke them last week, okay?

By the way, the best way to break commitments is not to know what they are. Very famous method. Okay, number one is, this is better.

I'm going to list ten commitments that every single Buddhist has. And every single human being should have anyway. Every Christian has.

Every Jew who keeps the Ten Commandments, every Christian keeps the Ten Commandments. You have them already. Killing.

Cannot kill another creature. Any living creature. Period.

Stealing. Cannot steal. I mean, the limit is something like ten cents, okay?

But mainly anything of value that another person would miss. What's the big deal? Hang on one sec.

What's the big deal about all this stuff? I just told you some secrets, all right? Every time you do one of these, you ruin your meditation.

Every time you do one of these, something happens in your own spiritual body, inside, and it chokes something, and that's what makes you get old. I'm not kidding, okay? That's what makes you die, okay?

If you're tired of all that, change it, okay? Something inside of you, later, something inside of you will change forever if you can stick to these things. I'm not talking, be Mr. Nice Guy. This is what Moses said to do. This is nice things to do. Forget it.

I'm talking survival. I'm talking, you don't have to die. You don't have to get old.

You don't have to live in a world where things go wrong if you change these things, okay? Forget what you heard in Sunday school, you know what I mean? I'm not talking about that.

This stuff really works. If you keep it strictly, the aging process can be reversed, okay? You don't have to live in this kind of a world.

It will change. Things will change. Oh, but I never saw anybody do that.

Yeah, right, why? You're not close to it, okay? If you're close to it, you can see it happening to other people.

If you're not, you won't see it. If you tell me it's wrong because I never saw it, Dharmakirti, who was the greatest logician in Buddhism, said, if you tell me it doesn't exist because you didn't see it, I take it as a reason why it should exist. You know?

Mato wale ni me mayin. Just because you say you haven't seen it doesn't mean I should say it doesn't exist. Given your spiritual level, I should say the opposite.

Okay? You know what I mean? You're not keeping your vows.

You didn't keep your commitments last week. You don't even know what they are. You didn't even bother to learn what they are.

So tell me you didn't see somebody get younger who was old. Or tell me you didn't see somebody move to a Buddha paradise in your neighborhood. To me, that's proof that it very well might have happened.

You see what I mean? Unless you are close to it, you won't see it. Okay?

If you are close to it, you will see it, and it's very encouraging. Yeah. Yeah.

He said, what about roaches, mice, other animals that bother your life? What about those creatures? In Buddhism, you can't kill any living thing.

When you crush an insect, pretend. What if it was the case that when you crushed their ribs, your own ribs started to break? Would you ask me this question?

You see, if it was the case that every time a mouse got killed in your house, your own neck broke, if it was the case that every time they got stuck on that sticky stuff, your fingers got ripped off in the door or something, if it happened every time within five minutes after you set the trap, after they got stuck, that your own fingers got ripped off, or that every time you crushed a roach, within five minutes, your own ribs broke, two of them or three of them, would you ask me this question? You see, Buddhism says, except for the time gap, except for the time gap that karma takes, that's really what's going on.

If you really understood karma, it's a moot point. You would never ask me that. If karma moved faster, and if within five minutes after cheating someone, your own bank account dropped by $100, everyone would be honest.

Everyone would be compassionate. We would find other ways to deal with roaches and mice. We would find ways to house them nicely in other places.

Really, we would find ways. If it hurt you as much as it hurt them. There's this movie called, Deer Slayer, was it?

What's it called? What was it? What's it where the kid can feel the, no, it was called something else.

Powder, yeah, yeah, yeah. Powder, and the kid does something to these hunters where they can feel what it feels like to the deer as they're shooting it. That's the really way it is.

That's the way it really is. If you could feel it, then the whole world would be kind to each other immediately. If you could feel what it feels like to that thing, you wouldn't ask me this question.

All right, what do you do in practical terms? You got to deal with it. My lama picked them up one by one and took them outside for two years.

We have never had a roach come back to the house since then. Never, not one. So you tell me.

We had six mice and one day he caught them in a live trap, took them out in the forest, took care of them. Never had a mouse in our house again. This is how you really get rid of them, if you want to know.

[Speaker 2]
All right, sexual misconduct.

[Speaker 1]
There's nothing wrong with sex in Buddhism. I know Buddhists are supposed to be very stoic and all that and not care about anything and like that. Sex is fine.

It's a joy. It's a happy thing. It's fine for people who have not sworn not to do it.

No problem with it. But you cannot commit sexual misconduct. The worst of this is adultery, with another person's wife, with another person's husband, and by extension to anyone close to another person where they have some kind of agreement or some kind of understanding.

And then you try to take one of them away from the other. This is the main form of sexual misconduct. And then also any kind of other kind of sexual misconduct, I'm not going to go into it in much detail.

Monks and nuns can't have any kind of sex at all, etc. But mainly you have to be careful of things that would hurt other people. And you have to be very sensitive about it.

Lying is defined as giving anyone else a false impression by your words. That's a lot harder than not lying. I mean, in business it would be very difficult.

Anyway, the big lies are about your spiritual life. Not allowed to say you've seen something that you haven't seen. Not allowed to talk about something that you haven't reached, like that.

Very bad even to hint or imply it. Divisive talk is very subtle hints or direct words that you drop throughout the day to make sure that other people stay close to you and don't stay close to the people you're jealous of. Like all day long you're saying, oh, you know, you got to watch out for so-and-so.

I heard something about him. I can't tell you any details, but I heard her talking to the boss about it. Oh, well, never mind.

It's stuff like that. We do it all day long. All of these 10, we do some kind of form of them all day long.

[Speaker 2]
Scripture says harsh words can be four-letter words.

[Speaker 1]
And with the right motivation and the right tone in your voice, have a nice day. It can be a harsh word. And you know that.

Scripture says that. Anything that the other person would take as a hard word. And it's really true that you can hurt someone much worse with a few words than with any kind of physical beating.

Idle talk, wasting time, blabbing about stuff that doesn't matter. We do it all day long. It doesn't mean that if you're at work and you want to make other people...

This, by the way, chakpa chemitam latten, for those of you who memorized this sojong, chakpa chemitam latten. Chakpa means because you like it, because you're attached to it. Idle talk, because you personally are attached to it.

But if you're at work, and there's a group of people, and it's normal and expected that you participate to a little level in the conversation, it doesn't mean that as a Buddhist you should piss other people off. As a Buddhist, you should try to accommodate other people. You talk about that movie a little bit, and then you just try not to sit next to them next time.

Or you excuse yourself and go to the bathroom or something. But if the goal is to make other people feel comfortable, fine. But if the goal is just to blab, just to talk, to talk about things that don't matter and won't matter tomorrow, and you won't remember what you said tomorrow or five minutes later, then stop it.

New York Times is in this category. Sunday Times is at the top of this category. Two to three hours of your life in a week is a lot.

Okay? Two to three hours of free time in your life is a lot. It's just idle talk.

We have a game that we play. We go out in the morning, we study scripture, we come back, and we always stop and look at the New York Times headlines, just so we know what's going on in the world. And then we have this game that two blocks later we try to quiz each other to see if anybody remembers what was on it.

And oftentimes you can't. You can't say, you know, forget what you read two days ago. We're talking about something from just a few minutes before.

That's idle talk, in your own brain. A special form of idle talk is to sit and do a prayer or a ritual, especially a sadhana, and to let your mind wander. That's the supreme idle talk.

Okay? To do a prayer and to think about dinner or something like that. To let those holy words come out of your mouth unexamined and unthoughtfully.

And just recite something and your mind is totally someplace else. That's called the supreme form of idle talk. In the Bible it's called, what's it called?

Coveting. Coveting seems kind of complicated. Anyway, this is this.

You're always thinking about what other people have. You're always worried about what somebody else has. Never happy with what you have.

Never satisfied with what you have. Never reflecting on how fortunate you are to have what you have. You're always focusing on what somebody else has and worrying about, why don't you have that?

And why do they have that? And it makes you unhappy all day long. You are lucky.

If you're in this room, you are one person in a million in the United States. You've got lots to be thankful for. And your mind goes out and all you can think about is something else that somebody else has that you want.

This obviously doesn't refer to the spiritual knowledge of His Holiness the Dalai Lama or something like that. That you can be jealous of. That you can covet.

We're talking about money, girlfriends, houses, cars, positions, attention from other people, stuff like that. Stuff that can never make you satisfied. I had a very sweet Mongolian lama, Geshe Calvin, who said, you should be jealous of your fellow students.

If it's about what they know. If it's about their spiritual knowledge. Go ahead, be jealous as you want.

Then you'll work harder. And then as soon as you get to where you're going, you won't be jealous anymore. You'll realize how stupid it is.

To want more understanding. To want to love more. To want to help other people more.

Those are great. That's not number eight. It's called ill will.

It's called nirvana. That's nirvana. You know, there's 84,000 negative states of consciousness.

Abhidharmakosha. Fourth chapter. And the Buddha said, there's ten actions that we do so frequently that let's just make the top ten.

I'll teach you the other 83,990, I'll teach you later. These are the ones you're doing all day long. These are the ones you do every hour of the day.

And there's this very subtle happiness when other people screw up. And this very subtle interest. OJ Simpson case.

This obsession with someone who is successful and happy and rich and doing well and then suddenly they've done something horrible. And it engrosses people. It transfixes people.

They can't get enough of it. They want to know more about it. And it's this kind of human thing about being very interested in the misfortunes of other people and not being sad at all.

Wanting to talk about it more. I saw one in the New York Times yesterday. Never mind.

It was about a boxer who made $80 million and he was indicted yesterday for threatening his wife. And he'll be in jail for two years. And it was like they couldn't get enough of it.

It was all over the newspaper. It was continued onto another page. All the gory details about what he did to his wife and all this stuff.

And it's just because people are obsessed by the idea of someone else who was doing well in their life and now they're just ruined. And people love to hear about it. It's always in the newspaper.

It's a human nature thing and you have to try to catch yourself doing it. You do it all day long in little ways. Try to catch yourself being not so sad when you see other people mess up.

[Speaker 2]
It could also be wishing that someone else would screw up.

[Speaker 1]
And not being sad. The normal reaction is to be somehow interested and somehow curious but not sad. And that's a problem that we have.

[Speaker 2]
Oh, world. Stupid worldviews. What's the stupidest worldview I can think of?

[Speaker 1]
New York Times worldview. Really, stupidest. You guys all go out, get famous, get a good job, work six to seven days a week, do overtime, get famous, get a position, get a six-figure salary, get a house in New Jersey, buy three washers, make sure you have a Lexus, make sure you have tickets to the Nets games, make sure you have a pretty wife, make sure you have four kids, and make sure you do all these things.

And then you have the honor of being in our obituary. Because people who don't go through all that don't get to be in the New York Times obituary. And that's all you're going to get out of it.

That's all you're going to get. It's insane. It's crazy.

Work 50 weeks a year so you can have two weeks a year to live your own life. Work six days a week so you can spend the seventh day washing your clothes and getting ready for Monday. It's a lie.

It's a big lie. It's a big... I don't know how to say it.

It's a scam. It's a scam to sell newspapers, I guess. I don't know.

But it's not true. They're making you ruin your life. That American lifestyle is a lie.

And it's a scam. And it hurts people. It kills people.

And they spend their whole life and they die with nothing. Literally nothing. They go into that next life with nothing.

Nothing. You can't take it. None of that is worth anything.

You can't take it. Trust me, your kids will waste it within two years. They always do.

I did. It's a lie. It doesn't work.

That thing doesn't work. And it's just stupid. It's stupid.

I'm not saying you shouldn't be responsible. You should be responsible. I'm not saying you shouldn't have a job.

You should have a job. But your spiritual life comes first. And your spiritual health comes first.

And helping other people comes first. And having enough time left after work to do all the spiritual things you need to do to get ready to die right comes first. And not the other way around.

Benjamin Franklin said, don't let your job drive you. You drive it. Don't let your occupation tell you what to do.

You tell you what. He refused to come to work before 11 o'clock. He said, the world will have to get used to the fact that Benjamin Franklin's printing shop doesn't open until 11.

Because I'm doing my experiments. I'm doing my contemplations. He kept a book.

If you read his autobiography, he kept a book of his virtues every day. And he had a system of marking. He had these checks.

And we still have copies of his books. And some of them were worn out. He liked to eat.

And the place where he put his marks for overeating were like worn through the paper. But he actually kept the book. He was a vegetarian.

He determined to become a vegetarian because he knew it hurt the animals and stuff like that. But he just said, I'm not going to obey the world's rule that you have to work from 9 to 5. He says, I'm coming in at 11.

And Benjamin Franklin's printing shop doesn't open until 11. And people just have to get used to it. And that's the way he lived his life.

And then at 40, he told these apprentices, you can have this business in 10 years. Run it for me for 10 years. Send me half the profits.

And then you can keep it. And then he retired. And he invented electricity and all that stuff.

Post office, fire department, public libraries. Saved the revolution in France. He had time to think.

And he refused to live by that lie. That's a lousiest worldview. Then other worldviews, you know, like to think that karma doesn't come back to you.

To think that anything is lost. To think that you can do some bad things if nobody knows. And maybe you can get away with it.

Or something like that. Stupid ideas like that. Why are those stupid?

They will make you do the other 9. These are the worst. If you're doing number 10, you're automatically going to do the other 9.

There you have something to check all day. Now how do you check?

[Speaker 2]
And then we'll stop, okay? Yeah?

[Speaker 1]
He said, is it ill will if you want the Atlanta Braves to lose to the Yankees? It's okay. You see, that's the advantage of living close to a high lama.

Ken Rinpoche supports the Mets and the Yankees. And all other teams are supposed to lose. It's fine.

That's fine. Don't get into any fights or anything. But it's true that the Mets should win.

If you read the front page of the New York Times today in the bottom left-hand corner, what did it say about the Yankees? A combination of talent and good karma. Check it out.

There's probably still some for sale. It was like, some of what they do is because they know how to play. And some of what they do has no explanation except for good karma.

I'm not kidding, okay? Things are changing. Okay, on the left side of your book, divide it into six boxes.

[Speaker 2]
Well, let me see. Here's a typical list.

[Speaker 1]
If you have refuge commitments and these 10, then you already have 22 commitments. She's showing her copy of her commitments. If you're a full Buddhist monk with a tantric initiation, you have 484 commitments.

If you're just a normal old person with bodhisattva vows and tantric vows, you have 258 different commitments. If you're just a bodhisattva vow person with no other commitments, you have 142 different commitments. 142.

Well, whatever. Around 140 to 150. Anybody in this room who ever went to Mama X and took an initiation over the weekend, you have already 250-something commitments, whether you know it or not.

But if you don't keep them, you'll find out, okay? That's why don't take initiations lightly. Don't go unless you're ready to learn them and keep them because they don't work.

All right. Let's say that you're a normal person in this room. You didn't take bodhisattva vows yet.

By the way, if anybody wants to take them, they are very cool, very heavy good karma. They make your life very, very happy, very quickly. You can take them in November.

We'll have a bodhisattva ceremony in November. But I will not give them to anyone who has not completed that course. Okay?

You cannot take them from me unless you've studied them thoroughly. And to do that, just talk to Aura or call this number and just order the course or go to the Three Jewels and pick one up in the basement, okay? But I won't give them to you unless you have completed that course.

That'll take you about a month or a month and a half, so you might want to start now, okay? Anyway, every normal person in this room has 22 commitments. If you took refuge, if you took refuge.

You have those 10 that I just did, and you have 12 from the refuge ceremony that you may have forgotten already. If you want a copy, talk to Aura or talk to one of the other people here. So 22 divided by 6 is like roughly 4, okay?

So the idea is six times during every single day, you are going to check every fourth commitment that you have, okay? So we'll start with 1, 5, 9, 13, 17, and 21. This is if just a normal person in this room who took refuge last week.

[Speaker 2]
You have to keep record of your commitments.

[Speaker 1]
You have to learn them and track them. This is a principle I learned in business, okay? We have a diamond factory.

We make diamonds and we make diamond rings. A diamond ring has only one moving part, you know? Diamond jewelry has only two parts, you know, and it's amazing in a factory, 30% of them will be made wrong, defective.

By the time they come out, 30% of them have to be thrown away or otherwise melted down or something like that. It's not like a car with 5,000 parts in it. I don't know why, but this seems to be the level of work in New York City.

So we would find out that some department was doing it wrong. Their job is to make it shiny and the rings would be coming out with scratches on them. There's two ways to deal with that.

One is to go to that department, stand over every person and find out who's putting scratches on them. The other thing was to call up the manager and say, could you count how many scratch rings are coming out of your department next week, every day. Just count them.

We don't want to know who's doing it. We're not going to fire everybody. Just count them for us.

Two weeks later, all the scratch rings have stopped. Why? It's just watching that does it.

You see what I mean? It's just watching that stops it. All you have to do is watch your valves and you will stop doing anything wrong and everything will change.

Your whole life will change. By the way, do you think that just coming to a Buddhist class would change your life? Forget it.

Forget it. You can sit in Buddhist classes for 20, 30 years and you can learn everything. Nothing will change.

Not one thing. Sitting in a Buddhist class doesn't do anything. Why should it change anything?

You see what I mean? You have to change your behavior. You have to change what you do.

That's what the changes come from. I meet so many sad people. How many years have you gone to classes?

20 years. Are you noticeably happier, feeling younger, more energy, seeing daddies? Nothing like that.

Did you change in 20 years? No, but I came to all those classes. Why would you expect anything to happen?

You see what I mean? You have to change or nothing will happen. It's good to know in a class you learned some stuff, but if you don't personally change something, what did you expect?

What are you doing different than you did five years ago? If you can't list like 22 things that you're doing different, then what did you expect would change? Do you think sitting in a class gives you some kind of blessing?

Like Michael Roach's spit landing on your head once in a while somehow changes your life? It doesn't happen that way. You have to change.

You have to do something different. Or don't expect something different. It's nice that you come to class.

It will not change you. You have to act differently. And then things change.

Things really change.

[Speaker 2]
Let's take number one.

[Speaker 1]
I mean you can make them short, okay? In the morning, get up, have your teeth, brush your teeth, get your meditation room together, sit down, take out your book, and load it. We call loading the book.

Every morning, you make this chart on the left side of the book. And you fill in your vowels. Fill them in.

By the way, the next morning, what are the vowels going to be? Two, six, ten, fourteen, like that. And you rotate.

Like I rotate every three months or something. I get to the vowels, I start over again. I'm very excited.

If you keep this up after a while, you'll get really good at your vowels, which is the whole point. Know worldly refuge. It means don't expect that money or position or fame or other people's approbation, other people thinking good of you, is going to change anything in your life.

I had a student who was having a bad day. They called me up. They said, I'm coming over.

I need your help. I want to know what to do. I said, okay, come over.

And they get here, they're all depressed. I said, what should I do? I said, take refuge.

I said, what kind of refuge? I said, take refuge in food. Go buy a brownie.

And go eat something. And come back. You'll feel better.

And they laughed at me. They said, no, you're joking. I said, no, really, take refuge in food.

Food will help you. Food calms you down. You feel much better if you had a brownie.

That's worldly refuge. Okay? I mean, we do it, right?

We do it. You don't feel well, so you go drink a coffee or eat something. So, what you do in your book, you make three marks like this.

[Speaker 2]
Plus, minus, and to do. Okay, plus, minus, and to do.

[Speaker 1]
First think of something you did right. Okay? Some people said, this is a confession book.

I said, I don't want it called a confession book. I don't want you calling it a bad karma book. You know, I had a good student from Canada who used to do that.

You know. I got my book to show you. It's got all my bad deeds in it.

I didn't ask you to do a bad deed book. You're supposed to do a book that shows me your good deeds and your bad deeds. And you're supposed to do the good deeds first.

Okay? This is not a confession book. This is not a confession, uh, what do they call those things in the Catholic that thing you go into to get grilled.

It's not a confessional, okay? This is not a beating yourself up book. I'm sorry those of you who have low self-esteem and want to keep it that way.

Don't blame my book. This is not, the purpose of this book is to take joy. First object is to take joy about what you're doing good.

Everybody's doing good. Everybody's doing something right. This is not a negative book.

This is a tracking book. You are required by Buddhist teachings to find something you're doing right about this thing. Any little thing you did today.

What did you do today that was right about taking refuge? Uh, I went to, I got up and meditated.

[Speaker 2]
And by the way, I don't care if the entry is only that big. It doesn't matter.

[Speaker 1]
Got up and meditated. But it must be specific. This stuff doesn't work unless it's specific.

Make the entries tiny, but make them for real. Make something specific. At 8.05 this morning, I meditated for six minutes. I was distracted for five of them. But I got one minute of good meditation in. I can honestly say, something specific, okay?

Don't say, you know, I'm feeling better nowadays or something like that. That's not the point. Something specific.

This principle of this tantric practice doesn't work unless it's specific. It has to be specific. I got up and meditated this morning at 8 a.m. That took me five seconds to write. That's enough, okay? Negative.

[Speaker 2]
Jealous of Z. About their salary.

[Speaker 1]
What's that got to do with taking refuge? Implicitly, you are taking refuge in money. You see what I mean?

You can get jealous about Z because they're getting paid more than you. You're not jealous of Annie's children because her meditation seems better than yours. That means you're taking refuge in meditation, right?

You're taking refuge in money. And you're jealous because you're worried about money. You're jealous about money because you're thinking about money because you judge protection or refuge in terms of salary.

You think that if you had more salary you'd be happier or something like that. That's a negative refuge. That's a wrong act of refuge.

You're taking refuge in something stupid that can't help you. And this is the answer to Nina's question, okay? For example, in my Bodhisattva vows, there's a vow that I cannot destroy cities.

I'm not allowed to destroy Cincinnati, okay? Even if they're playing the Yankees, okay? Now, when you get to that vow and it's time to check that vow, it can be very frustrating.

It's like, positive, didn't destroy Cincinnati today. Negative, felt like destroying Cincinnati today. It's not like that, okay?

This is the idea of free association. You have to free associate. Free association means take that thing in your mind.

I had this vow come up today, Nina. I was on the same vow today. Yesterday or today, destroying cities.

And I was thinking, what was the closest I came to destroying a city? And what was the closest I came to not destroying a city? You see what I mean?

And I thought about it. This is the hardest one, right? It really is the hardest one.

What's the closest thing I did today to destroying a city? And a lot of times I come up with something environmental like I thought that the recycling thing was stupid or I drove a car when I could have taken a bus or I wasted food when I could have shared this dinner with somebody in a restaurant but I ordered my own and we wasted half of it. This is like destroying the earth.

The one I put was that I allowed myself to stay jealous at so-and-so because I'm destroying the city of happiness. I really thought that. If I could stop my jealousy, I could live in a different realm.

And in a way I've destroyed that today. You know what I mean? I did damage to my future Buddha realm.

So I was thinking that's kind of close. But you're allowed to free associate. Free associate means just think about anything similar.

Anything in the same line. And keep going until you hit something specific. That's all.

Last thing. A to do. What am I going to do about taking worldly refuge?

I will study five minutes of emptiness at 7.15 tonight. We want specifics. We don't want to see in your book I'll try to be a better person.

That's not the point of the book at all. We want a specific, exactly specific thing. And make it tiny, tiny, tiny thing.

Don't say, I'm never going to hate this person again. You're going to hate this person again. Don't say, I'll never talk bad to my boss again.

You are going to talk bad to your boss again. Make it specific. From 3 o'clock to 3.30, even if he yells at me, I will not say a negative thing to that guy at work. After 3.30, I'm free. I'll say this stuff twice as much. All the stuff I saved up, I'll say to him.

But for that half hour, I will keep my Buddhism clean. Make it very specific. That's the to do.

By the way, up here, put the time.

[Speaker 2]
8 a.m. 8.07 a.m. This should be spaced out throughout the day.

[Speaker 1]
If you're awake for 16, 17 hours, every 2 to 3 hours. You should be checking it every 2 to 3 hours. It does not work if you cram it up at the end of the day.

It doesn't work. By the way, one thing. What's the principle behind this thing?

There will come a day when you are doing this book. And this one, you will never fill out because you died between here and here. And I'm not kidding.

This one was filled out at 4.30 p.m. And then that one was never filled out because you died at 5 o'clock. It must happen. It will happen.

It's going to happen. If you keep this book well, you don't have to die. But if you don't keep it very well, there will come a day when there will be an entry here and no entry here.

What's the most important thing at that moment as you die? Absolutely the most important thing when you die. That your conscience is clear.

The Catholic thing about giving you final purification or last rites is beautiful. It's totally correct. In Buddhism as well, you want to die with a clear conscience.

This is a really good method to die right. Within the last two hours, you checked your conscience. You're ready to die.

A person who keeps their book well is like, okay, I'm ready to die. You get hit by a car. Believe me, when you get hit by a car, immediately you start to regret all the things you did.

It all does come back to you. You really do think about all those things. A good Buddhist has already taken care of that about 45 minutes ago.

At any given moment of the day, you already took care of that 45 minutes ago. And you're ready. And you die very nice.

And then after death, very easy. Everything cool. Everything taken care of.

Everything ready. Is it better to read the New York Times or is it better to do this book? The other one is a lie.

It's a lie. It can't help you. It really can't help you.

You'll regret it the day you die. You'll regret every New York Times you ever read. Seriously.

But if you die with this, if you die between here and here, you're ready. And everything goes smooth. Everything is clean.

If you really got in the habit of cleaning your heart every two hours, piece of cake.

[Speaker 2]
Piece of cake. Did you have a question? Yeah.

[Speaker 1]
We'll talk about it. My suggestion is stick to these vows for the six. Every two hours when you're checking, stick to these vows.

Do not go out of these vows. That's what we got over here.

[Speaker 2]
On the other side of the page, like when did you do it? We'll talk about it.

[Speaker 1]
We'll talk about it. Okay, first thing Jay said, what time period? When I get to here, am I only supposed to check the last two hours?

What period am I checking for? It's open-ended. It's open-ended.

The best thing is something specific in the last 24 hours. That's the best thing. It's better to find something specific in the last 24 hours that is almost insignificant than to keep beating yourself up about something you did when you were 23.

You see what I mean? Don't keep repeating you had an abortion when you were 23. Forget it.

Confess it a few times. Clean it a few times. Do what you have to do.

But this book is for the last 24 hours. We're trying to micromanage your ethics. Trying to micromanage your thoughts and your words and your activities.

That's what gets you to a Buddha paradise. Even if it's something insignificant, it's something specific in the last 24 hours. Now if you did a really bad thing last Friday, you can take credit for that too.

You can put that here. That's fine. If the same thing comes up like twice, that's alright too.

But generally try to think of something fresh. If you did a very bad thing like an abortion 10 years ago, 15 years ago, work on it. Do the purifications.

Bring it up once in a while. Deal with it. And then move on to something fresh.

Move on to the minor events of the day. You're not... This is very important to realize.

You are not in this death realm because of the big bad deeds you did. You're in this death realm because of the little thoughts you have every 5 minutes. That's what keeps you here.

And you will not get to a Buddha Paradise by confessing the one bad thing you did when you were 16. You get to a Buddha Paradise by purifying the little thoughts every 5 minutes. It's the little things that get you to a Buddha Paradise.

It's not some brave heart getting his guts cut out on the cross. It's not like that. It's the little things that get you to heaven or hell, really.

It's every 5 minutes where your mind is at. Did you get irritated when they burnt your toast? That's what's going to get you to Buddha Paradise, really, honestly.

It's the little things. That's what keeps you here. So you fill that out.

The end of the day, before you go to bed, if I die before I wake, I better get... Suppose you committed adultery at 3 o'clock today, but it didn't happen to come in the vows today. You got to have someplace to put it.

At the end of the day, three worst and three best. Committed adultery, and so and so. And that should go under the worst.

That's the worst column. So it's the best three and the worst three. And this is an opportunity to think, it's a good time at the end of the day.

This is a very important Buddhist practice. We're supposed to empty out our water bowls and turn them over. That means I might die tonight.

Everything's ready. If people have to come in and clean up tomorrow, the bowls will be dry. That's a Buddhist custom.

Empty them out, turn them over. They'll be dry for the person who cleans up your room tomorrow if you die. That's really what we're supposed to do.

And your bad deeds and your good deeds, you've checked everything. And then you can die. If you die and you sleep, fine.

And that's enough. Last thing, it's good to put your meditation. Make a note about your meditation.

Some little note about your meditation. The meditation you had that day. Here you're checking if you did your meditation that day or not.

Make a few notes about it. If you keep making notes, it'll get better and better. Your meditation every day, try to improve your meditation.

Say, I was having a good meditation until I thought about so-and-so at work. Then I noticed the thing fell down. And I got up angry.

I got up off my cushion angry. And make a note about it. Then when you have a good one, say, you know, I was able to think about my six perfections and it's going pretty well.

Make some note about your meditation. That's it. This is a ticket to heaven.

You do not change just by sitting in a Buddhist class. You really don't. You will not necessarily be happier six months later if you keep taking these courses over and over again.

It doesn't happen. You must keep a book. You must.

And that really works. It really, really works. The Buddha, an enlightened being, has identified these 22 things.

If you keep them, your whole world will change. Everything around you will change. And you can actually stop the death process of your body.

I feel weird sometimes. I've told everybody how to do it. And then I have to sit and watch half the people not even do it.

It makes me feel really weird. I'm standing up here and saying, you don't have to die. Keep this.

Keep this book. You don't have to die. You don't ever have to have bad things happen to you.

Just keep this. And then I have to go through this weird thing of watching people ignore it or not do it. I don't know why.

It's just that you don't believe it or something. Try it. Give it a try.

It's amazing. It's incredible. The Judeo-Christian thing is correct.

It's correct. The Ten Commandments work. But you have to track them.

Basically, they're very good. And they work. And somebody figured it out in the Middle East and somebody figured it out in India.

And it's true. It works. And you really can change your being.

You really do go to heaven. We say you can do it in six months or a year or whatever. Will you look different to me?

Not necessarily. Will you look different to your wife? Maybe not.

Will you look different to your boss? Maybe not. Will you look different to yourself?

Definitely. Will you be in this world or a different world? You'll be in a different world.

Will they notice it? Maybe not. You got to get used to that.

That's the emptiness of the change. That's emptiness. If you're a monk or nun, I suggest you also make a little section up here and go through one or two of your ordination vows every day.

So, that's a separate deal that you made with the Buddha. And I divide this page into three and I check one of my monk's vows every day. The heavy vows.

And then when you get to the 112 minor vows, you know, did I wear my thing crooked? Then I do maybe two a day or something like that. But it's very, very good to know all your vows like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

That's your ticket to heaven. That's what gets you enlightened. It's really, really good.

It really works. Better be a good question, Sabuddhi.

[Speaker 2]
You sure? Sure? Alright.

[Speaker 1]
She says, suppose there's an emergency and you missed the time to do it. Do you miss your poops? I'm not kidding.

I'm not kidding. There's a natural thing in your body. You must pee-pee.

You must poo-poo at a certain time. Your body will let you go another 20 minutes, maybe half hour. Some people less, some people more.

But it's a natural bodily function. Your body will demand it. Your spiritual body demands it much more strictly.

You must do it. It's not an option. There's nothing more important.

There is nothing more important. And I always tell people, even in the worst moments at work, 25 people on the phone, boss is standing in front of my face, screaming. Executive board meeting in the executive board office with the bankers, you know, and everybody's standing there and they want to know you about that number and that sales statistic.

Michael Roach, what is it? And I say, sorry, I gotta go to the bathroom. And I never had, even my boss never stopped me.

He's like, I gotta go to the bathroom. I'll catch you in five minutes, okay? I gotta go to the bathroom.

Then you go in the bathroom and you do your thing. I have students who are executives in large corporations. We have developed, in fact, I even have a person who's a multimillionaire.

They don't want to be seen doing this book. So they have this daily planner thing. It's disguised as a daily planner, okay?

And they go in the bathroom and they open up their daily planner and they check their balance. And it works, okay? I'm just saying, if you tell me you've never missed a meal for the last six months, if you tell me you haven't missed a poop in the last six months, it means if you think it's important, you find the time, you see?

You don't forget to poop. You don't forget to eat breakfast. You're just making excuses.

You really don't understand what this is about. You don't believe in it if you say that. You really don't believe in it.

And the reason you're doing it is wrong. If you're doing it because Michael Roach said so or you're doing it because you feel guilty because if you don't do it, forget all that crap. I don't care whether you do it.

And I don't care whether you feel guilty if you do it or not. It's not the point. This gets you to Buddha paradise.

This is the only way to get there. It's up to you. I don't care.

Don't come to me and tell me you didn't do it. It just means I have to watch you suffer more. It doesn't make me...

I can't give you approval or disapproval. I can't say, oh, poor you. It's okay.

Don't do your book. I understand. It doesn't matter what I say.

Karma is like gravity. Michael Roach, I can't exempt you from... If you're in an airplane and the engines turn off, you fall down.

You can't go to some lama and say, can you make me not fall down if the engines turn off? You can't. You can't do it.

I couldn't do my book. Is everything still okay? No, everything's not still okay.

I didn't have time to meditate. Is it all right? I apologize.

Don't apologize to me. You're ruining your own life. I'm sad to see it happen, but I can't do anything.

It's like gravity. You'll get sucked down by gravity. I can't stop that.

I can't do anything. Don't tell me. Just do it.

And then the positive reinforcement. Within a short time, if you keep this well, oh man, amazing things happen in your life. Amazing things that you never dreamed of.

You want to get rich? Try this. You want to find friends and happiness?

Try this. You want to be healthy physically? Do this.

If you want your mind to stop being depressed or upset, or you want your mind to be high energy and focused and happy all the time, it comes from this. You can get everything. You can do everything.

Just try it. It's really great. It's really amazing.

By the way, you won't be able to do it. And every time you quit, then get your rear end back to it as soon as you can. You'll find times when you're too busy and you'll quit for a week or two weeks.

Don't be shy. Go back to it. You have to be good at going back to it because it will happen.

And I tell you honestly, it will happen. And then don't be shy. Just get back to it as soon as you can.

Yeah? She said, can you just do two boxes on the next session? This kind of thinking led to the creation of a thing called tunduk in Tibet.

And tunduk was a special practice. It was a prayer that they were supposed to do six times a day to check their vows. And then somebody said to their lama, I'm really busy.

Could I just do it three times a day? And he said, okay, I know you're retarded. By the way, the end of that book says, this practice has been allowed for retarded people.

I'm not kidding. The end of the short tunduk says, I have written this to keep retarded and elderly people out of the diamond hells. Please don't use it.

So that has become the practice in Tibet. And I'm not ashamed to say to my brother Tibetan Buddhists, that's a big mistake. That's a corruption.

And I'm not ashamed to say it. To think that you can recite something for 15 minutes only twice a day and somehow that's going to do what this does is just a straight corruption. It doesn't work.

It won't work. You have to space it out. I would rather say do one and then do another one an hour later.

How about that? Don't pile them up at the end of the day and do them all at the end of the day. It will not work.

You see? I'm just saying it doesn't work. This stuff, spacing it out, oh man, wait till you see what happens.

[Speaker 2]
And it makes sense.

[Speaker 1]
I mean, 2,000 years of Christians and Jews can't be totally wrong. I mean, we'd like to think so, right? But that thing about the Ten Commandments is very holy and very correct.

It just wasn't implemented. And it works. Most of them are the same.

You notice that. But you just have to check it every couple hours. Of course it's a beautiful thing.

You just have to do it.

[Speaker 2]
Yeah. Special what? You mean secret commitments or something?

[Speaker 1]
Okay, secret commitments. If you have secret commitments or bodhisattva vows, if you have all the bodhisattva vows and if you took a Vajrayogini initiation, these will be 43 apart. You'll be doing number one, number 44, number 77, I'm sorry, 87, and it goes like that.

So you're cycling. There's a big cycle done every 43 days or something. You come back to the first one.

That's if you make all the bodhisattva vows into separate vows and all the tantric vows into separate tantric vows. Yeah, it doesn't quite work, mathematically. But it's good to spread it out like that.

Because then you're doing two, you're doing one refuge vow, you're doing two Pratyamoksha vows, you're doing a bodhisattva vow, and you're doing two secret vows. And that's a very nice way to do it. Then you get a good variety.

Don't just do one, two, three, four, five, six. You know what I mean? Take one or two from each thing.

The real tundra, the real succession is to check all of your vows six times a day. I tried it once. I got up at 4 o'clock.

I checked vows until 11.30. I couldn't finish once. It doesn't really... I don't know how they did it in the old days.

I can't do it. By the way, last thing. Take a lot of time on the positive one.

You grew up in the Judeo-Christian trip. You grew up in the guilt trip thing. It's a lie also.

You are required in Buddhism to identify the good things you did today. You're required to dwell on them. You're required to worry about them all day.

You're required to think about them all day. You are required by Buddhism to think all day happy thoughts about all the good stuff you're doing. Equal air time.

Equal air time. I don't want to hear a confession book. If you want to call it a rejoicing book, okay.

If you want to build Buddhist temples with little closets in them where you go to tell the priest what you did right, that's okay. I would like to see that. A rejoicinal.

I'm not kidding. Please don't be a victim of that kind of thinking. You must acknowledge and own the good karmas you have.

You must. That makes them much more powerful. You must sit there and dwell on all the things you did right.

You have to. And very powerful. That's a mistake in the Judeo-Christian thing.

Go home and think about out of 200 million Americans, I went to a lecture tonight about karma. I must be someone special. And it's true.

What are the odds that in America you bumped into some pure Lama teaching? What are the odds against that? How did you get here?

You talked to somebody. There was some accident. And you got here.

That's amazing. Go home and think about it and take joy. Because this stuff really does work.

You should be freaking out. Go home and try it. It works.

It really works. It's really cool. And also thank you for coming to this class because it makes me think about it.

It's very hard to get up and describe it if I'm not doing it. And it helps me a lot when I teach. And I want to thank you for that.

It's a great kindness to me that you come. And I thank you for that also. So we'll do a short dedication and then see you in...

There's a very nice class tomorrow if you want to catch it at the Quaker House. Very special Lojong tomorrow. And then see you from time to time and then please come and meditate together off and on.

We'll see you in October. Did you have an announcement?

[Speaker 2]
Yeah.

[Speaker 1]
Oh, Tibetan knaves. If you took refuge, I'll mail them to you, okay? I normally consult with some high lamas and sometimes they're slow.

And I'm not kidding. Sometimes they say later. They tell me later.

They need the right time. Sometimes it takes a long time. Sometimes it takes a week.

So, we'll have to wait and see when they say. Sorry? I think, he says, why do you get a new name?

Or why do you need a Tibetan name? It could be an English name. By the way, they usually give them to me and I usually put the English and the Tibetan.

It's a new identity. You can take on a new identity. It's very cool to start thinking of yourself with that name and stop thinking of yourself with your old name.

Like, I didn't change my name legally and I don't... I thought it would be... I didn't think it would be effective as a teacher if people had to say Lobo Zanga Geshe Aos Chunzin.

You know? No, I'm going to Michael Roach's class. But in your own mind, think that you have a new identity.

You have a different name and you are a different person. That's the goal of the... If you don't act different, then the name doesn't help you at all.

But if you decide that I have a new identity, I'm going to be a different person now, then it helps you a lot. And you start, in your own mind, call yourself that name. When you think about yourself, use that name.

How's Lobsang doing today? How's Dorje so-and-so doing today? You know what I mean?

All right, we'll do a short prayer. Dedicate all this incredible good karma. Dedicate it to...

that all the Buddhists in the world can keep their vows well. And all the Christians and Jews and everybody else too. The vows that are good, that are sweet.

Let's dedicate it to that purpose.