Как выполнять ежедневную практику 12 — Увидеть пустоту напрямую и создать собственное просветление (1998, Нью-Йорк), занятие 1

[Speaker 1]
This class is called daily practice class, and it's different from the other classes. In our tradition, we think it's very important to study spiritual things and to learn a lot about them before you even try to do them. We emphasize a lot study.

The Dalai Lama, two weeks ago when he spoke in Washington, somebody asked him, how should I meditate in the morning? He said, study, study, study. Then he said, later start meditating on what you studied and only later start meditating one pointedly.

That's sort of the way that these classes here are going, the seven-year course that we have here. In our tradition, your meditations are more a personal thing that you do by yourself in the morning. In our tradition, meditation is most often something you do privately every day by yourself.

Although we do think that it's very good and powerful to meditate in groups. But when you start, or as a daily practice, it's mostly done by yourself in your home. It's important to learn how to do a daily practice in your own home and by yourself.

Self-governing, self-running, self-policed daily practice. We're going to go through. There's nothing new here.

It will be the same presentation as in previous months because it doesn't really change. This is how to do your daily practice. This is an ancient tradition.

What I'm going to teach you of how to do your daily practice is taught in the sutras two and a half thousand years ago. We still have them and we still use them. All of what I say will be based on, except jokes about ice cream and stuff, will be based on the actual sutras from about two and a half thousand years ago.

I'll go through how to do a daily practice. We'll make sure that we do some meditation, that we meditate at least half an hour or 45 minutes during this period. This will be a series of about four or five more Monday nights.

During that time we'll go through how to do your meditations and your daily practice. I often teach. I teach almost every night.

Then I do these classes for about three years. Then I always have somebody coming up to me and saying, what should I meditate on? How should I meditate?

It drives me a little crazy. I say, I just finished doing it on Monday night for a year. This is the time when you get your answer, how you should meditate.

Then you should do it. In our tradition, the real work of meditation is not something that a Lama can do for you. He can teach you how to do it, but you have to be disciplined enough to do it yourself.

People ask me how easy is it to see emptiness directly, which is the big goal of this meditation. It's about the same as learning to play piano very well. Like becoming a concert pianist or a concert dancer or something like that.

It takes about that much dedication. Even in the fields of music or dance, no teacher can do it for you. The students who succeed are the ones who learn to do their own scales and learn to do their own pirouettes over and over and over again by themselves.

No coach or teacher can push you to do it all day. You have to be self-motivating. What's the function or what's the purpose of doing a daily practice?

The main goal is to see emptiness directly and to develop compassion. What happens if you see emptiness directly? First of all, emptiness is some kind of ultimate reality that's been around you and is around you your whole life and you haven't seen it yet, if you're a normal person in this room.

If you're able in this lifetime before you die to see it directly, then on that same day, but the experience, as I've said many times, takes about 20 minutes. It takes many years of preparation to get ready for it. Or maybe less than many years if you're very serious.

Later in that day, you see directly your own enlightenment. You see the day that you will become a Buddha and you know what they will call you and what they won't call you when you become a Buddha. You see Buddhas.

You see the real nature of a Buddha. You meet the Buddhas directly. You know that you will have a future life and you know how many you will have.

You know what will happen roughly during those lives. You have a pretty clear perception of what will be going on during those lives. That's all some kind of amazing thing.

Imagine if you knew those things already. Imagine what it would be like if you knew what would happen beyond your death. Imagine what it would be like if you knew you would eventually become an enlightened being.

You knew pretty much the year in which it would happen. Imagine if you knew those things. You can only get to see those things if you learn to meditate deeply.

You can only learn to meditate deeply if you practice about an hour a day at it. At least an hour. An hour to two hours is good.

But those doors are closed to you if you don't have a daily practice. If you don't meditate every day, if you don't have a normal practice in which to meditate, you'll never see those things. I always say to me the most frustrating thing isn't...

It's almost not so frustrating that you don't see them. It's that you probably will die not believing in those things. You'll never know for sure if there are enlightened beings.

You'll never know for sure if you could have done it. You'll never know for sure if there really is a future life. You'll never know for sure if there is such a thing as a Buddha.

There could be people sitting next to you tonight who start the same time you do and who see all those things directly. Then you'll be one of those people that dies wondering if it was true or not. To me that's more frustrating than not getting there.

It's to die and not know that it was there and it was there all the time. You didn't have time to spend an hour a day on your meditation. It takes some kind of discipline.

In our tradition, the tradition of the Dalai Lamas, we don't enforce it. We don't have public meditations in Seram Monastery where everybody has to come. We don't do it that way.

Your Lama teaches you privately your daily practice and then it's up to you to do it. That's all they do in the monastery. They beat you for other things but not for not meditating.

We'll be going through how to do a basic meditation. By the way, that's the benefit of meditation. During that same experience of emptiness, most people have a parallel experience of bodhicitta or ultimate love, which would also be wonderful to have.

Everybody in the world would like to have the mind frame of a Jesus or a Mother Teresa or something like that. It's an attractive state of mind. You can imagine it but you can't quite have it.

On that day you will have it. On that day you do experience it. Most people during that experience, if you're trained properly, you also have an experience of the ultimate love that a Buddha has.

These are the goals of a daily practice. It's not so much to be calm. It's not so much to be more focused at work.

It's not so much to do your worldly work better. The real reason to have a daily practice is that all of these things that I've talked about happen to you. Then eventually, if you do it well, in this lifetime you can become some kind of an enlightened being or a holy being by practicing tantra during your private practice.

These are the real goals of a daily practice. This class is not a yoga class. This is not a class about watching your breath for the rest of your life or learning to be calm or something like that.

Those are side effects. They happen. This class is more a quite serious attempt to be able to meditate deeply and see your future life, see emptiness directly, create your own enlightenment.

Create the enlightened being that you will be. That's the goal of this class. It's not so much an intellectual class.

It's a class in the technique of doing this. The technique comes from the DBYOR BA'I PHYIR. The preliminaries to meditation come from texts that were written by the Buddha, by Lord Buddha.

We'll be going through those. That's my pitch for learning to meditate. If you do do it, you have a decent chance of seeing emptiness and of getting to nirvana in this lifetime.

If you don't do it, you cannot see emptiness and you cannot reach nirvana. It's impossible without practicing daily. Unless you get really good at meditating, to see those things I talked about is totally impossible.

The frustrating thing is you'll be one of those people that never knew that it was possible. You have to try. Second thing.

When we talk about meditation in our tradition and in Buddhism, I think what many people don't realize in the West is that the preparation for the meditation is as important as the meditation. Actually, the scriptures that teach meditation spend a lot more time on preparing how to meditate than the actual meditation. There are practices that we do to get ready for meditation.

Westerners, a certain percentage, try to meditate and give up within a week. Another percentage try for about a month and give up. Another percentage tries for year after year and doesn't get anywhere.

They don't see any tantric deities. They don't have any direct perceptions of emptiness. They just go from year to year kind of in a fuzzy state.

Nothing much changes in their life. This is a sign that they were not trained in the proper preliminaries. You have to know the warm-up to a proper meditation.

You have to get in the right frame of mind to meditate properly. If you just sit down on a couch after you got back from work and try to meditate, it won't work. It doesn't work.

According to our tradition, it's impossible. If you just sit there and watch your breath for two or three years, we also say it doesn't help you much. There are certain content of the meditation that you have to have.

We're going to go slowly through the preliminaries of meditation and then we'll do a little bit of meditation each time. But it will probably take two or three weeks just to go through how to prepare yourself for meditation. First preparation is that your environment should be good for meditation.

It's very important to have a special place in your house where you do your morning meditation. By the way, morning is a good time or if for you evening is better. I have some students who work late at night and they find evening is better for them.

Most people I know prefer the morning because it's quiet. But the important thing is to get up at the same time every day. The important thing is to have your meditation at the same time every day.

I worked for 15 years at this company and we had lunch at 1 o'clock. Ever since then, at 1 o'clock I get hungry. It doesn't matter how much I ate at 12 o'clock.

At 1 o'clock I get hungry. At 5 o'clock I fall asleep. That was when I was on the bus sleeping, commuting back to New Jersey.

For years it was like that. Meditation should be like that. There should be a particular time of the day that you choose for your meditation.

Morning is good because your mind is clear. You get your space ready. You get a space in your house where you're going to say, this is my meditation space.

If you live in a one-room apartment, which most people do, set aside a corner of it and make it a holy place. That's your sacred place. That should be just for your meditation.

Never try to meditate on your bed. Your bed has all these sleeping vibrations on it. As soon as you sit on it, then your mind gets dull.

Don't try to sit up in bed and meditate. It doesn't work. Have a place off to the side which you dedicate for your meditation.

Make sure that place is clean and beautiful. If someone came in your room, then they'd say, oh, they must be doing something special in this corner. This corner looks different.

It should be like that. Something special about that corner of the house. It's our tradition that when you wake up in the morning and your practice actually starts...

In Tantra, your practice starts just before you wake up and during waking up and then after that. I can't teach you that yet. We'll do that some other time.

But for a normal person doing personal daily practice, you get up. They say it's important to wash your mouth out or brush your teeth. They advise to have some kind of liquid, like juice.

Tibetans like tea or something like that. It's good for you. Some water or something like that.

Go in the bathroom and clean out your nose. In Tibetan monasteries, they teach you to just put your face down in the sink, turn on the water and blow as hard as you can out of your nose. They don't use toilet paper or paper or anything like that.

You get a lot more out. Your nostrils have to be clear to have a good meditation. If you have a bad cold, you can breathe through your mouth, but otherwise, normally we breathe through our nose.

When you do deeper practices, very, very deep tantric practices, it's very delicate how the air is coming in and out of your nose, which nostril you're using, like that. All sorts of different practices. It's good to get used to breathing through your nose.

They teach you in a monastery at 4 o'clock in the morning, everybody's clean. It sounds kind of weird, 2,000 guys blowing their nose. But you clear out everything you can from your nose.

Don't be shy about it. Make it clear. Then clean up the sink.

Then come back to your room. It's a custom to clean the floor and clean the room, even if it's already clean. If you do this every day, it's going to be clean already.

But just as an exercise, you clean it. While you're cleaning it, you imagine that you're cleaning your mind. Then you just clean it anyway.

You just make it clean. The exercise of standing up and bending over and sweeping and anything like that, it gets your body a little bit loose. Then you get a special cushion.

You find a cushion that is the kind you like. Everybody has their own butt. Everybody has their own thing that they feel sitting on.

You should experiment. You should try many different kinds of cushions. In general, the scriptures say that the most important thing is that the back of the cushion should be higher than the front of the cushion.

Right under your backbone, that should be slightly raised. Then as it comes down to your legs, it should start to slope down. Whatever you use should be higher in the back and then smaller in the front.

It should be a cushion where you're not wobbling. Sometimes you see these Zen cushions which are really hard and high. Then when you get on it, you feel like you might fall off or something like that.

Take out some of the filler. That's what I did. It works okay.

It's important and most people don't understand or realize that under your ankles you should have another cushion. That's what these flat cushions are for. These big ones, these big square ones.

A lot of people like to have two different cushions. There's one big rectangular or square one which keeps your knees and your ankles off the floor. When people have their legs fall asleep or their feet start to hurt, it's often because they don't have a cushion under their legs.

Like they're sitting on a cushion but their legs are on the bare floor on a thin carpet. They should be on a cushion. That way you'll find that you can meditate a lot longer because you know those knobs in your ankles?

I have very big ones. They don't grind into the floor and then your legs start to hurt or your legs fall asleep or something like that. So have a big cushion underneath and then a cushion under your butt that's raised in the back.

It's traditional in our lineage that you also have some kind of altar set up. You don't have to be a Buddhist. Yeah, it doesn't have to be a Buddhist altar if you're not ready for that.

But there should be some kind of altar that has some kind of holy beings image on it that you find inspiring. Someone who is holy or sacred for you. There should be an altar and there should be some holy being on that.

We say it's good to put a holy book there also because that represents the best part of a holy being which is that they teach us verbally. That they come to this planet and they say something. We always put a book up there to represent their speech.

Then we put a picture up there to represent their body. Then we put a little stupa sometimes to represent their mind. Like a little offering shrine or something like that.

In fact, the word for an altar in Tibetan is kusum tokten which means a platform for a holy body, holy speech, holy mind. So it should be something like that. In some traditions it's accustomed to stare at the picture of the holy being or something like that.

It's not a Buddhist tradition to do that. Meditation is a mental thing. Meditation, out of the six consciousnesses which are eye, ears, nose, tongue, body, and mind, meditation is only a mental consciousness.

We don't listen to music when we meditate. We don't stare at a picture while we meditate. We don't stare at a flame.

We don't try to breathe incense in or something like that. In ideal meditation you are withdrawn from your senses. You are gone deep inside.

You can't hear anything. You can't taste anything. You are not looking at anything.

Those are all very, very rough consciousnesses. To look at a picture or to listen to music or something is a hundred times more rough than the very subtle mind consciousness. The point of meditation is to bring all the mind deep into the heart and deep into the mind and remove yourself from the outer world.

So in our tradition we don't stare at a picture or something like that. In between meditation sessions you can, if you don't remember what your Lama's right eyebrow looks like, you can pull out a picture because you are having trouble visualizing it or something like that. But in our tradition during meditation you shut down your sense organs because they are so rough.

You can't concentrate while you are concentrating on your sense organs. That's not the point. Then you have an altar.

What I found is good is to have the images up high enough that if my eyes are slightly open I am not seeing them. Then I found useful is to put a cloth in front of the altar. Most people's rooms are so small that I think you are going to be pretty close to your altar.

A lot of my students are piled up two or three in a room. Then you have a nice plain cloth in front of the altar. If you have flower patterns or paisley or something like that it can just tend to distract you.

But it's nice to have one solid color in front of your eyes. Then you sit down on your cushion. In our tradition we bow to the holy image before you sit down.

We don't believe that Buddha or Jesus or anything else is living in that frame on that paper, in those chemicals. We don't believe that. We don't believe there is really a holy being hiding in that picture frame.

It's kind of flat in there. It would be uncomfortable. But we imagine that they are in the room and we imagine that they are standing there, for example, where the altar is.

Then we bow down to them. The minute you imagine that you are there, according to Buddhist scripture, they are there because they can read your mind. They knew about a million years ago you were going to ask.

They are just ready. They move at the speed of thought. The minute you think of them and wish they were there, they are there, whether you can see them or not.

Then you bow down and you do your prostrations there. If you know how to do prostrations, fine. If not, you can just make a bow.

But that's to acknowledge that there are other beings in the room, other beings in the universe. You may not know them. You may not be able to see them.

But they are there and they are going to help you. That's an important part of the meditation. Then you sit down on your cushion.

By the way, you should also make some kind of offering. Like a flower is beautiful, or some kind of fruit. I like Cheerios, so I try to put some Cheerios, something like that.

Cookies. Stuff like that. In the Tibetan tradition, we put out bowls of water because there is something pure about water and there is something about water that you'll never...

There is no money. There is no money connected with water. Water is totally free.

Water is totally clear. Water is totally pure. It's just a beautiful offering.

There is no money or other motivation involved. It's just a pure, beautiful thing that's all around the planet and everybody uses it every day. So we put out bowls of water.

Then you sit down straight. Your back bones. They say that your back should be like a stack of coins.

Like a stack of golden coins. There are seven... Some scriptures teach seven.

Some scriptures teach eight different parts of the posture. It's called the posture of vairagyana. This is a Buddha, a particular Buddha.

The first part of that posture is to sit up straight. This is very important later when you practice the secret teachings. In the non-secret teachings they make fun of being too much worried about your body.

Then when you get to the secret teachings they say, we were just kidding. You have to take good care of your body. It's very important to have good posture and to be healthy and to take good care of your body because you can get enlightenment in this life through certain inner channels and other parts of your inner spiritual body which is connected to your outer body.

Your outer body has to be straight and very healthy. Then your shoulders should be level. I have some students who start going like that during the meditation.

They start raising one shoulder and then pretty much like that. The plane should be straight. I have other students who end up meditating like that by the end of the session.

The head should be like this. The head should be straight out like your eyes if you were looking like that. Most people tend to put their chin down.

According to us it hurts your channels and you start getting sleepy. Make sure your head doesn't start drifting down. After you take your posture, because of gravity, your body will start slumping again.

Every few minutes you have to be aware of that and straighten back up, just slightly. Don't do it in one big motion like that, but just slowly straighten yourself up so it doesn't disturb you or the people around you. It's very important, eventually, that you learn not to move during meditation.

That you should not move during meditation. At the beginning, when you're first learning, it's okay to move a little bit. Those are the parts of the posture.

Your head should be like that. It helps a little bit to bend slightly forward at the waist. It helps keep you awake.

It's nice to imagine something right about here, like somebody's tied, glued some string to your head, and they're pulling it about like that. It keeps your body straight. Sometimes you just imagine that someone's got a lasso on your forehead and they're pulling just slightly.

It helps to sit just slightly forward. Then there's a trick of your head. By the way, it's not good to go back too far either.

That's not good, and that's not good. How do you keep your eyes? The scriptures say that you can close your eyes if it's not distracting to you.

Some people, if you didn't get enough sleep the night before, or if you ate too much in the last two hours, if you close your eyes, you'll get sleepy. Then keep them open. You don't keep them open like that.

You close them and then you crack them open just a touch. You keep them focused around here. The scriptures say at the level of your nose.

Then some Westerners mistranslated it and said stare at the tip of your nose. All these people I know cross-eyed because of that. It's not like that.

You just focus them loosely around here. I think for very long-term meditation, you'll find that you can meditate longer if you crack your eyes open slightly and look down. You're not focusing on anything.

Try not to have anything in your visual field that would distract you. Your head is like that and your eyes are down. Don't let your head go down when you turn your eyes down.

Some people, I say, open your eyes and crack, they go like that. And I say put your eyes down and they go like that. Don't do that.

The chin should be up. The head should be erect. Head shouldn't be tilted either way.

Then just open your eyes and crack and focus them down. If that becomes uncomfortable, like your eyes start to dry out or something, you can close them. Or if it's too distracting, you can close them.

The scripture is very clear that you can do either one, whichever is comfortable for you. A lot of meditation posture is a personal thing. Everybody's body is different.

So you have to find the posture which is correct for you. This is the classic posture. But if you have a problem with your knee, like you were in a skiing accident, or you have a problem with your back or something like that, and if it's really painful to sit in this posture, the scripture says, for God's sake, then don't sit like that.

It's very clear. Why? You'll start meditating on the pain in your knee, and you'll stop meditating on this holy object.

So the point is, if something about your body starts to cry out louder than the meditation object, then you should change your position. If your knees start making so much pain that you can't concentrate on your meditation, then the books are very clear. They say then stick your knees out or lean back on a couch or sit in an easy chair or whatever, but don't do gupa utsu.

Gupa utsu means don't do some stupid, foolish, obstinate thing. Find a position which is comfortable for you and that you can stay in meditation. What does good meditation feel like?

It's very similar to reading a good book or watching a good movie, and your mind is just sort of relaxed and happy, and you're paying attention to this thing, and it's not like somebody is forcing you, and it doesn't feel like an obligation, and it doesn't feel like a Zen thing where they're going to hit you on the back with a stick or something like that. You just enjoy this book or you enjoy this movie or you enjoy this music. The feeling that you have in your heart at the best part of a good book, when you've been into it for about an hour or a movie, that's exactly where you want to be.

That's called shin jang. It's mental and it's physical, and it's where we want to be. You have experienced concentration.

Just that the object was useless. You have to find a holy object, and then you have to get into that same happy, cool space, which is very happy about this object, very intent on it. And not some kind of thing where I don't want to meditate on this thing, and he said I had to do an hour, and I still got six minutes left, maybe I could just skip it.

Not this obligation thing. It should be a pleasure. As you get better at meditation, you'll find shin jang means your body and your mind start to change, and it becomes very, very pleasant to be there.

Is that a goal of meditation? No. You can get to there and you still don't get anywhere that's going to be spiritually meaningful.

But it is a byproduct of good meditation that your body will feel great and your mind will feel great. We're going to try a little bit of meditation. It's a custom to put in this school, and by the way, if you're going to do this school, do it right.

People come to me and say, do you teach XX kind of Buddhism? I say, no, I teach the Dalai Lama's lineage, exactly how it's back to the Buddha. Then they say, well, that's kind of, what do they call it?

Sectarian. I say, no, I just want to teach one thing perfectly, exactly the way it's been taught for 2,000 years. There are other traditions too that are wonderful, but I'm not going to mix them up.

My Lama's told me, you have to respect all the other traditions, but make sure you don't mix up your tradition. Make it pure. Do exactly what they've done for 2,000 years and you'll get a nice result from it.

Then if that doesn't fit you, go try another one. But don't mix up the one you're in. So anyway, put your left leg down first and then put your right leg on top of that.

That's this tradition. If you do a full lotus, which can be very painful and distracting, and so I don't do it, you put your left foot up first on your thigh and then you put your right foot up first. You go like this and you go like this.

But if you're doing a half lotus, which is what I suggest, you put your left leg down first and then you put your right leg over it like that. In this tradition, in this lineage. Then you put your hands like this.

Put your left hand down first, palm up, and then you put your right hand down over that, like that. And then you touch the thumbs like that, very lightly. And shift them around a little bit until it gets comfortable.

I find a lot of new students, and I used to find it very distracting to try to keep my thumbs up. It was like I wasn't meditating on the object because I was trying to keep my thumbs up. Because I thought maybe I'll go to hell if my thumbs fall down or something.

It's not like that. You might find it easier if you rotate your elbows out a little bit and then the thumbs come, they start to support each other a little bit. It also prevents heat from building up in your body.

Heat is a very big distraction. If you're trying to meditate in a room that's too warm, it's very bad. It's better to be a little chilly than too warm.

But it's not good to be so chilly you catch a cold. Because then you can't breathe, and if you can't breathe, you can't meditate well. So anyway, left hand down first, then right hand on top of that.

This is supposed to be that very comfortably, if you pushed your thumbs into your body, you would hit your belly button. Now everybody's belly button is in a different place, I hear. Most of my students find it helpful to put a piece of cloth under their palms, under their hands, just to get it up a little bit.

If you're doing a full lotus, the soles of your feet are holding up your hands at the right place. If you're doing a half lotus, your hands are in the wrong place usually. I usually just wrap up something and stick it there.

You can get something that's comfortable for you. We'll try a little bit. Last thing to tell you is pay attention to your lips and to your mouth.

The lips should be loose. Very, very loose. They say that the tongue should be just in a natural position.

They say don't try to breathe through your mouth unless you have a really stuffed up nose because your mouth will dry out and then you'll swallow and you'll disturb your meditation. They say just put your tongue lightly up to the top of your mouth. We're going to try about 10 minutes.

I'd like you to focus on your breath. They say watch your breath. In our lineage, watching your breath is a way to start a meditation.

It's not a meditation in itself. It's like when you want to back a car out of your garage. You put it in reverse, you back it out, and then you don't jam it into drive right away.

You stop, you go to neutral, and then you put it in drive. If you go from reverse to drive right away, it just grinds the gears. The point of breathing in Buddhism, the original scriptures, which I can show you if you'd like sometime, Abhidharmakosha, 350 AD, Vasubandhu, I think it's in the 7th chapter.

He teaches a thing called ukjumuk, which means watching your breath. Then I'm afraid that later in some traditions it became the reasoned detra. They forgot that it was just a preliminary and it became what you do for 10 years.

Which according to all the original books of Buddhism would be a waste of time. Because watching your breath by itself doesn't get you enlightened. It's just a way to calm your mind down.

Then you go on to some important meditation. But it is an important practice to calm your mind down, so we'll do it, and you should get good at it. Last thing to say about it, what it means to watch your breath is not to keep one eye open and see if there's any dust particles coming and going and stuff like that.

It's watching the tactile sense, it's the feel of the air hitting these two parts of your nose, the front of your nostrils. You're going to take your mind and move it down to the tip of your nose and then go down around here to these two doughnuts here, to these two rings. You're going to park your mind right there, like a guard at a movie theater.

You're going to watch people come in and out. You don't follow the breath down into your lungs, and you don't follow the breath out. You park your mind at the tip of your nostrils and you're just aware of the feel of the breath as it passes that particular area.

You don't move your mind beyond that. You'll find out that coming in it's a little cooler and then going out it's a little warmer. That's all.

There's no big deal. Park your mind there. Every time you catch your mind wandering, bring it back and park it there.

What will bring your mind off that is usually noise. If someone moves next to you and makes a noise, the mind automatically goes out. Then you have to bring it back in gently.

Don't freak out and say, Oh, I'm a bad person. I'm a sinful person. My mind has gone somewhere for two minutes.

Just, okay, bring it back. We'll try. Try about ten minutes.

Sit up straight. Take that position. Try to stay very quiet.

If not for yourself, then for the person next to you. Relax a little bit. Move your legs around.

I think everybody looked good. A couple people had very stiff mouths, like that. It tires you out after a while.

Keep your mouth, especially right here in the corners, it's a trick. If you keep those loose, it'll be good. Keep your forehead.

Try to relax it. Some people tend to, especially people who carry heavy briefcases around, they tend to be like that. Sometimes you can go like that and just knock your shoulders down a little bit before you start.

I noticed a few people had their mouths open. Your mouth gets dry and then you start to swallow, which will disturb your meditation. Or you'll slobber all over your clothes and that's not good either.

We'll talk a little bit about what you do after that. There's a specific preparation you do mentally for meditation. After you've got your breathing and you've been watching the breath for a while and you slow down your mind and slow down your breathing, then you go through a special meditation, pre-meditation.

According to our tradition, the meditation won't be successful unless you do this. If you just plop down on your seat and try to meditate immediately, you won't be able to meditate properly. You have to do breathing and then you have to go through some sort of a mental warm-up.

There's a special warm-up you do mentally. The first one is to think about what you're doing and why you're doing it. Why are you going to meditate?

Everyone came here with a different idea. I remember the first meditation I went to, I was like 18 and it sounded really interesting and I was going to go. I had all these expectations of what might happen if I closed my eyes and sat there for 20 minutes.

Maybe I would see God or something. You know what I mean? You have your own little expectations.

Everybody has an idea of why they came here. Everybody has a reason why they came here to this place tonight. It's important to go over your motivation before you start meditating.

We call it taking refuge. Taking refuge in this case means think about what you want the meditation to do. If you came in here thinking that somehow meditation would make you calmer, you might be disappointed.

If we did a good death meditation, everybody should go home shaking or very uncalm. The goal of meditation is not to just be calm. Does it help your body?

It does. You will be more concentrated at work. You will be physically more healthy if you meditate.

But that's not the main reason. You have to think of the main reason to meditate, which is this. If you divide your life, we did it last Friday, good things and bad things.

Everybody was giggling at the end, but it was just because everybody was depressed. You can divide your life into the good things and the bad things. The bad things we don't have to talk about.

It's having to go to work. It's having commitments that you don't want to have. It's getting sick when you don't want to.

It's losing your friends. It's losing your family. It's having your body change and get older.

It's becoming disillusioned with people and with life and with other things. And being depressed a lot or sad a lot or something like that. And as you get older, thinking more and more that maybe there's not any great thing to do with this life.

Those are the bad things and you don't need me to tell them. You have them. You think about them.

Buddhism said then there's a lot of good things that you have. So far you didn't get cancer, or maybe you did, I don't know. So far you're still walking.

So far you're still supporting yourself. So far you have had some good friends and some of them are still around. Maybe you did meet a nice spouse or something like that.

Maybe you have children. I had a woman call me yesterday. She's a very devoted student in these classes.

She's about, I don't know, 55 maybe. She had two children. One girl and one boy.

The girl died about eight years ago. It almost made her crazy. The boy was killed yesterday in a motorcycle accident.

So now she's completely crazy. She just called me and she couldn't even talk. She sounded like a person from another planet.

She couldn't even get the words out to tell me what happened. It really is like that. I was thinking, Buddhism says that even the nice things in your life will go away.

Even the nice things in your life. When he was young, the guy was young. Even the nice things that you get, which are unusual, they have to leave.

They will leave. Then you'll be in that situation. It will happen like that.

Every good thing that's happening to you is temporary and it goes away. When you sit down to meditate, after you do your breathing, you don't sit there and watch your breath for two hours. It doesn't help anything.

You watch your breath until your mind calms down, which is the point of watching your breath. Then the first thing you do is say to yourself, why am I doing this meditation? What do I want to get out of this meditation?

In Buddhism, in real Buddhism, you want to find out what's making those people die. She's such a sweet student. It's Linda Waldron who wrote the poem for the class.

Sweet, sweet, sweet lady. Very beautiful lady. Got up and did a poem in one of the last classes.

Brought her son to see if she could hook him up with one of the girls in class and stuff like that. They just died. It'll be like that.

When you meditate and when you sit down, you have to think, I'm meditating to see if there's some reason why these things happen to people. If there's something I can do to stop it. I put some kind of faith in this meditation for that.

Taking refuge means thinking about maybe there's a way to change those things. Real Buddhism is that. Real Buddhism means that according to Buddhism you can change those things.

She didn't have to lose her son and her daughter. She will not have to get old and die if she trains herself properly. It's about the same as learning to play piano.

You have to put the same effort into it and seriousness. You can change those things. You can find out why those things are happening in your life and what you can do about it before they happen.

Because after they happen it's too late. Now there's nothing to do about her son and her daughter. You can't change that now.

It got too late for her. She didn't practice enough. She didn't do what she had to do enough.

For that thing it's too late. The first thing when you sit down to meditate is to think, that's why I'm meditating. Am I suggesting that her son and daughter didn't have to die if she had been meditating properly?

Yes. Am I suggesting that she wouldn't have to die if she had been meditating properly? Yes.

That's what I'm suggesting. According to Buddhism all those things happen because of certain karma. Karma is something you can change and something you can affect.

You don't have to die. Your children don't have to die. But you have to change certain things.

Then people should be thinking, sounds good, sounds wonderful. New York Times never reported anybody who didn't die. There's an obituary page but there's not a non-obituary page where they list all the people who reached eternal life or something like that.

That's a reflection of the realm that we are in. If you live in the world of the New York Times, if you accept the world view of the New York Times, if you think what's important is what the New York Times think is fit to print, you will be in this realm and that's all you'll ever see. There are other beings in this place, on this planet, who have practiced these things and who have changed and who are in a different realm now.

They are experiencing life on a different plane that you cannot see right now. To you they look like normal people but they are already gone to someplace else. Because you haven't been meditating or practicing, they still look like normal people to you.

You can be sitting next to a person who has already reached nirvana and they can look the same to you. That's a reflection of your state of mind and not theirs. They can be already in a Buddha paradise and you might not be aware of it.

Don't think that because you haven't seen anybody there aren't people already doing it or people who have done it already who are sitting around you. It's not impossible. That's the real reason to meditate.

So first thing you do when you get down to meditate is to think about that possibility. If you accepted it just because I said so, you're not a very good Buddhist. Buddhists are not supposed to accept anything because somebody said so.

I'm just saying it's possible. You have to prove it on your own. And you can if you meditate well.

First thing you do in meditation is to think about why you're meditating. Think about what we've said. That's what your first meditation should be about.

We're going to practice that for a few minutes. We'll watch your breath for a while. Then when I do this, this is what they do in a Tibetan meditation when they meditate together.

The leader will go like that. That means now shift your mind to the first warm up for meditation, which is to think about why you're meditating. Think about what I said.

You don't have to believe it now. Try to think about the possibility that there are certain people, maybe people sitting around you, who have already gone to another plane, who are experiencing life on a different plane. Maybe you could use meditation to get there.

The first act of meditation after you watch your breath is to think about those things. When I snap my fingers, you're going to move your meditation from where? Those two donuts.

Very small. Your whole mind has been focused on the sensation of air touching these two rings right here. Your mind is parked down here.

Then take your mind into your heart and concentrate. Think about those things I said. Why did you come here to meditate?

Maybe you weren't planning on coming here to meditate on those things, but you're stuck. Think about it. Think about the possibility.

There are holy beings in Tibet and people that the Tibetans have taught that have reached very, very high things, very, very different places. Think about that that's why you would like to meditate. They are already in a place where they don't have their family dying around them and they aren't getting old.

Those things are not happening to them anymore. You have to think about it. Think about the possibility.

Think about that's why you're meditating. That's all we'll do tonight. After that, we'll stop.

We've got cookies downstairs, which are the sworn enemies of meditation. But since you already finished, you can have them. Start on your breath.

Make sure your posture is good. Watch your mouth. Don't let the corners get too tight.

Don't let it flop down open. It's really bad in the summer with flies and stuff. But don't make it too tight either.

Very natural, very loose. Like rubber. When I snap my fingers, go to thinking about the real reason to meditate.

We'll do about five minutes on each.

[Speaker 2]
Okay, relax a bit.

[Speaker 1]
The last thing in the meditation is always to... It's good karma to meditate. Because out of all the years of your life, you were at least thinking for a few minutes about the possibility of death and that maybe you don't have to die.

Maybe that didn't occur to you for more than ten minutes in this whole life. It's a very, very good karma just to have those thoughts. Thinking is karma also.

Not just lying or hitting somebody or things like that. Thinking very holy thoughts is extremely powerful karma. We dedicate the good karma.

You give that good karma away in your mind now. We'll do a prayer. Then while we do the prayer, you wish that that good karma could help other people.

That's a custom. Okay? Alright.