Пустота и алмазы (2005, Аризона), занятие 1

[Говорящий 1]
Something happened last week or the week before, but I got a message from Tucson, from a lady named Ellen, who I'd like to welcome here. And she said, it's a long story, but anyway, she needs to know about this diamond thing. Because she's working on a book about it.

And it just came at the right time, right? Because today, we talk about the very last step of the Lamrim. So it's been ten years, and today is the last class of that process.

And we come to the last lines of the Daylam, Path to Bliss, First Panchen Lama. 1570, 1662. And he says, you must enter the diamond way, and you must do it quickly.

And then he just goes on. Then he closes the book, and there's all these prayers, and I translated them. It's tempting to leave them out.

They accumulate over the centuries. Everybody sticks another prayer on at the end. I don't know exactly where his writing stops and someone else's starts, but just in case I might cut out something important, and I translated the whole thing.

But the first sentence is all there is to the reading, really. And it's, you must enter the diamond way quickly. The way of the diamond.

And that's Vajrayana, right? Vajrayana. So traditionally, they say there are three yanas.

There are three ways, three roads, right? And they are called Hinayana, Mahayana, and Vajrayana. Then Hinayana is called the lower way.

Take men. And literally yana means capacity. So take men means lower capacity.

People who can only think for their own, to get out of pain for themselves. Hinayana. And a person in a Mahayana monastery could be Hinayana mind, right?

And a person in a Hinayana country could be a Vajrayana mind. It's up to the people. It's not a religion or a sect, right?

Then Mahayana is the desire to become an enlightened angel who can go to all worlds and help all people. And then Vajrayana really is a sub-category of Mahayana. So it's not really separate from Mahayana.

Vajrayana is a diamond path. You have the same motivation, the same capacity as a person who is, wants to become this angel. But you undertake, your motivation is so strong, you so much can't bear to see people in pain that you sort of throw yourself into a very fast path which is also a very difficult path.

Not that it's, not that they burn things on your head or stuff like that. I saw it in Singapore. But it's hard emotionally and it's hard to maintain that level of faith.

You know, we spoke about it last night. I think those of you who were there last night, you got a sense of what could be. And I think this morning you got a sense of fighting now with that state of mind that says, no, no, it can't be like that.

And so in a way it's a harder path. And if you fail, it's very dangerous. So I'm going to talk about Vajrayana, path of diamond, and why they call it the path of diamond, right?

And why is diamond important? Why is that stone important? So really if you boil all the great experiences that can happen to a person, all that you ever hope for in your life, there are two, right?

Just two great experiences. One would be to see ultimate reality directly. It's a higher reality.

It's really there. In the scriptures they say it's defined by its power. If you see this object for even like 10 or 20 minutes, then within seven lifetimes you will become a being who can stand on all worlds and help all people.

You can become the Jesus of countless planets, countless worlds in the whole universe, no limitations anymore, not restricted to one planet anymore, and totally compassionate and totally helping other people, doing the ultimate thing to help other people. That's kind of what I used to think of as God when I was a kid. If Jesus is an emanation of God, then that's what I was...

When I tried to imagine that when I was a kid, it's like that, it's like what you imagine. This being doesn't create the worlds because no loving being would create pain. And many worlds are in pain.

But this being has the power to come to each world and show people how to stop the pain because the pain is created by themselves through their own karma, by hurting other people. So this being will come to countless planets and just to see this emptiness, therefore, becomes the goal of a lifetime. To spend the ten or twenty minutes in the presence of this object becomes the goal of a lifetime.

And it's very doable and that's what the path is for, that's why it's been taught for two and a half thousand years. It's the only reason for the path is to help people enter that ten or twenty minute experience. Then that experience is similar to a diamond and that's why Vajra or diamond is so important in the Buddhist teachings.

How does that connect to the second great experience? The second great experience that we all want to achieve in our practice is, we talked a lot about it last night, perhaps we came close last night. It's to experience, it's to meet or make contact with angels, divine beings.

It's to try to make contact with them, called dupta sadhana, reach them, right? Make contact with them and then become them, right? So make contact, dupta sadhana, means reach them physically and then reach them in the sense of become them, right?

So tantric sadhana means reach them in the sense of make contact with them and then reach them in the sense of become them, right? Become one of them. So that's the second great experience that all of us would like to have, right?

And that's the way of the diamond, that's Vajrayana. So what's the connection between those two great goals, right? If all you do in your life is those two things, I don't know, it probably takes 45 minutes if you add them together.

You can have 15 minutes for a coffee break in between. But if that's all you did with your life, then your life would be better spent than any life on this planet has been spent up to now. If you could achieve those two things, see ultimate reality which is like a diamond for 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes and then follow the path of diamond, reach angels and then become them, then your life is finished and the purpose of your being alive is completed.

That's the destiny of every one of us, is to do those two things. Sooner or later, we will all do those two things. So why is the diamond shared?

Why has diamond come up in the meaning of ultimate reality? Why is ultimate reality compared to a diamond? And why is Vajrayana, why is the higher teaching, why is the secret teaching called the way of the diamond?

What's the connection? So, I thought I'd talk about diamonds today. You study about ultimate reality for years.

It's also called emptiness. Ultimate reality, higher reality and emptiness are the same thing. Completely the same thing.

Then you study it. If somebody had seen it for 15, 20 minutes, if they knew they would become that angel on a billion planets, if they knew, if someone in this room had done it, then why can't they just tell us? Just sit down for an hour.

If it takes two hours, I've got time. Just tell me how to do it. Just tell me how to do it and I'll do it.

And if it's what is cracked up to me, I'm happy. If it's not, I'm still... Two hours is not so bad to lose.

But it takes training, right? It takes training. We have a bodhisattva vow today that we cover.

It's to give up the practice of study and contemplation. Like you break this vow if you ever stop studying. Not only that, if you ever stop taking what you heard in a class and go home and review it and debate it and contemplate it and meditate on it, then you break that vow.

You see, you break that bodhisattva vow. So it takes a lot of training. But the cool thing is that the path has been so well passed on and the lineage is so pure that the instructions are there.

They're complete. All that we need is to get them and then practice them. So it's really up to us.

The teaching is there. There's a joke in Tibetan. You may fail the teaching, but the teaching will never fail you.

Maybe from your lack of effort or your lack of devotion or our lack of understanding, we might fail the path, but the path won't fail you. If you stick to it, stick at it, keep at it, you will reach this vision of something of a higher reality. And just to be in its presence, just to commune with it for 10, 20 minutes, is enough to assure that you will become this angel very quickly.

The Jesus of a billion planets. So how is that like a diet? It has to be perceived in deep meditation.

There are traditions which say somebody was chopping wood and saw it was sattva or something like that. That's not correct. Just flatly not correct.

It has to be seen in a deep state of meditation. All the scriptures say that. All the ancient scriptures agree.

And that's the way it is. So you have to be able to reach a deep state of meditation. That means a state of meditation that's so deep that you're not aware of anything else around you.

You're single-pointed. Samadhi. So to get that, you have to practice.

And I always tell people like at least an hour a day. Does it mean you have to sit down and try to meditate for an hour? Probably not.

Most people after 36 minutes start to get tired or distracted. You have your own limit. Try to build it up every day.

Try to stretch it every day. But frankly, 15, 20 minutes on the object is extraordinary. If you're honest.

We do this 10-breath thing, right? Can I take 10 breaths without thinking of something else? If you think of something else, you have to go back to 1.

I'm still at 3.

[Говорящий 2]
I don't know about you.

[Говорящий 1]
I'm still at 3. If you're very honest with yourself. So really then 15, 20 minutes becomes an achievement.

But you have to be able to get up to about an hour before you can see emptiness. So if you want to assure that you will never join the club of angels who are running around on billions of planets, just find reasons not to meditate every morning. Find different excuses.

You have a lot to do. Gandhiji said what? I'm busy today.

I really don't have time to meditate today. So I will double my session. I'll do it for 2 hours today.

Because I don't have time. And if you want to disqualify yourself automatically, if you never want these things to happen to you, like we spoke about last night, if you never want those things to happen to you, it's very easy. Just find reasons why you can't do your practice every day.

There's thousands of reasons. You can pick any one. I'm busy.

I don't feel well. It's too hot, too cold. The floor is too hard.

The cushion is too soft. I don't have time. I'm sick.

You can find any one. You can have any one. There's a thousand.

We'll make a list someday. You can just pick one. And then you don't have to worry.

You'll never help other people. It's easier, in a way. So then you go into this deep meditation and you see ultimate reality.

And it's like a diamond. You can't think it's like a diamond while you're perceiving it because you can't think of any normal thing. And a thought, a sentence, saying to yourself, oh, it's like a diamond, or wow, I finally did it, that would kick you out of the meditation because that's not ultimate reality.

So while you're in communion with this ultimate reality, you can have no other thoughts. You can have no other experiences. You can't even be aware of yourself.

And that's what they mean by chula chusakpa. Chula chusakpa means water poured into water. And you're just there and you're in communion with this thing.

That's what they mean by non-duality. It doesn't mean there's nothing there. It doesn't mean you're not there.

It doesn't mean you melt into one. There's an object, there's a subject. But it's so single-pointed that you can have no other object.

Then you come out of that experience and then what they call the four noble truths or the four truths for a higher being. Noble means higher being, someone who has seen emptiness directly. You go through these 16 experiences or whatever.

You go through a certain list of experiences. One of them, oh, one of the experiences, I mean the coolest experience of all, obviously, well, there's a couple, but one is that you see ahead. You see ahead.

You gain sort of a clairvoyance for about 24 hours. You can read other people's minds, but you see ahead to your own enlightenment. So you perceive directly the day that you will become that angel.

And you also perceive, you have an experience of ultimate love, ultimate compassion. You perceive the face of every living creature that exists in the universe at the same moment. So your mind's limitations are released during that 24 hours and you can see the future.

And you clearly see the day that you will become this angel, this being. Then there comes a, I don't know, a juncture in your life. It's a kind of a juncture.

And you're saying, well, I can't sit here forever. I'm going to have to get up and go back to the house and make dinner. Things are going to...

I still have, what, seven lifetimes or something. I have to go through them. I have to get up, I have to go.

How can I remember what happened to me today? What can I use to remember? And then every Arya of every century, on every world, thinks of the same thing, which is a diamond.

So the person who has seen emptiness, struggling for a way to remember, struggling for a mnemonic device never to forget what happened to them, struggling to find in this world the closest thing to ultimate reality, struggling to find in this world the closest thing to ultimate reality that they saw, that they can keep with them, they always come up with a diamond. It's always a diamond. And a person who had seen ultimate reality, they, for example, might go and work in a diamond company for the rest of their life, you know.

In a business they have no interest in, with people they have no connection with, and no regard for the money involved, nothing. They might very well spend much of the rest of their life devoted to a diamond business, just so they could be around a diamond all day, just so they would never forget. It's worth it.

You see, how many hours, 15,000, 20,000, 100,000 hours of schmuck work, picking up little rocks, throwing them into piles, struggling with dealers about the price of them, and, you know, contracts and lawyers and traveling around the world. They would do all of that just to remember once a day what had happened to them. You see, they would spend the rest of their life, they would be willing to spend the rest of their life at some place they felt no connection to, just to be around a diamond during the day, just to be near a diamond, you know, to remember what had happened to them for 10 minutes, 20 minutes, right?

So, how is a diamond similar to ultimate reality? How does a diamond... You know, Vajra, in Sanskrit, Vajra, right?

I like Vajra. I remember the day, we were in three-year retreat, we were working on the Yoga Sutra, we came to Vajrasahana-dvani, describing the diamond body in the third chapter, and we looked up the root for Vajra, and it was Vaj, is it Vaj? Vaj, Vaj, Vaj, which means to be lively, in the sense of to have abundant life, abundant energy, abundant force.

So, Vaj. Then the English cognate is what? Vegetable, okay?

Yeah, vegetable comes directly from the root for Vajra, because it's pure life. Like the ancients understood what Anatole has always known. Where is he?

Like abundant life, this is source of life, this is life itself. Vegetable, you know, vegan comes from that, and vigor, vigor or strength comes from that, because of life, strength, pure life, and meaning also indestructible, okay? Such power of life that can never die, a kind of life which will never die.

So Vajra, the diamond, the word for diamond became that. The English word diamond is nice too, it's not so bad. It comes from Adamas in the Greek, Adamas.

So the A dropped off, but Adamas comes ultimately from Sanskrit also. Dham, D-A-M means to be conquered, or to be beaten, Dham. Like Damayanti is a famous princess in ancient India, you know, the one who defeated all the guys.

She's so pretty, she's Damayanti, right? So Dham means to defeat something. Then A, A, privative, initial A, means negative, not, like agnostic or atheist or whatever, apathetic.

So Adamas means cannot be defeated. Nothing can beat the diamond. And that's the first quality of a diamond.

And then the A dropped off in English, just became diamond. So the first quality of a diamond that makes it similar to ultimate reality is that nothing can scratch a diamond. I know, I was in the business, right?

I learned to cut diamonds. I paid. They won't teach you.

The cutters won't teach you. It's a secret thing. It's a secret.

It's like a cult or something. It's a, I don't know what you call it, a society. Diamond cutting society is always passed on to children of the family.

And if you, I tried, I tried for years to learn to cut. No one would teach me. And then finally, a very close friend, Rachel Schmoyla, she was my right-hand man, lady, in the diamond for many years, right?

I don't know, 12 years. And then because we were so close, she said, my husband is a cutter and he'll teach you, right? And it cost me a lot of money.

Okay? I won't even tell you how much it cost me. I mean, it's an unbelievable amount of money.

And so I went at night to this, it's these weird rooms up in the skyscrapers in 47th Street in New York. The bottom floors are all for the tourists. There are all these counters filled with jewelry and diamonds and people, sharpies.

People go out on the street, hook you, bring you in, sell you a yellow diamond for more money. And then, but on the upper floors, there are these like high security blacked out rooms. Black, all the windows are blacked out.

The rooms are blacked out because diamonds, when you cut them, they make a dust. They make a diamond dust. It's like soot.

And it just covers everything. So the rooms are blacked out because they don't want light coming in. And it's really weird.

And then the, the room sounds like, if you've been in New York on the subway and the brakes aren't working very well and there's this screeching sounding, Kwaaa! The whole room sounds like that. Every wheel is making that sound.

So it's like being in a room with like 50 subway brakes going at the same time. Because as you press the diamond down to the cutting wheel, it screams. It makes this screaming sound.

And it's very disconcerting. When you first start, you're like, you can't take it. You know, you leave after 20 minutes.

You're like, whoa. You know, and like if 20 guys are cutting at the same time, it's like unbearable. And the wheel is a steel wheel and you scour it with the Brillo pads or something to put scored lines into it.

And then you, every cutter has a secret formula for their cutting powder. Because nothing can cut a diamond except another diamond. You see what I mean?

And diamonds have grains like wood. So if you try to cut a diamond against the grain, nothing can cut it. If you have a diamond on a holder, they call a dock, like these pinchers that hold the diamond, these steel pinchers.

And then you screw it in the stone, right? Raw stone. And then you set it down on the wheel.

And if you have it in the wrong direction, it will just go through the wheel. It'll just cut the wheel. Like through the steel, hardest steel there is, it'll just slice right through the wheel.

Then you got this useless, you know, you just lost a couple hundred bucks and your teacher's really mad at you. You know, and so you have to get really good at judging the crystal and which way the grain is going. Then when you set it down, the powder, the powder, they crush old diamonds that some apprentice broke.

And you crush it. See, nothing can scratch a diamond. But if you hit it right, you can split it.

And you've seen that on TV, the guy splitting diamonds, right? So you can split them. They have this grain, right?

If you find the grain, if you're a master and you pluck it just right, it'll split into two. So they do that and then they make dust out of it. And then they mix it with, everybody has their secret thing.

If you're Italian, it's olive oil. You know, everyone has their own oil. Their wife usually keeps the secret recipe, you know.

In India, it's a big deal. It's like, the wives keep the masala recipe and the diamond cutting recipe. And then you spread it on the wheel and you hold the stone, you touch the stone very lightly and you find the grain.

And then it, the powder, some part of the powder lines up against the grain and starts to cut the stone. Then the stone does this thing, it starts to screech and then it turns red-hot. Like in the room, it's dark, right?

And you can just see these red-hot glows around the room. like fluorescent red glows of the stone. It's just red-hot.

If you touch it, you really burn yourself badly. so you're cutting. Nothing can cut, nothing in the universe can cut a diamond against the grain.

Nothing. Not even another diamond. Nothing.

You see? So the first quality of diamond that makes it like an ultimate reality is that it's ultimate. It's the most of something.

Okay? It's the mostest hard thing in the universe. Period.

There's nothing harder. There never will be. It's the hardest physical substance there is.

Because there are no ultimates in our life. What's the longest thing in the world? You see?

You can always add another inch. You know? What's the oldest thing?

I don't know. You can always go back another five minutes. You see?

What's the newest thing? I don't know. You can always split that microsecond.

You see? There's always something newer. You see what I mean?

There is no ultimate. What's the reddest thing? What's the hottest thing?

There is no such thing. You can always make it one degree hotter. You see what I mean?

It's very important that you try to grasp the idea of something that's ultimate. You see? Something that's the most of anything.

There is no such thing in our experience. In your normal experience, there is no thing which is the most of anything. Because you can always add a little more.

You can't even conceive ultimate. It's like infinity. It's very similar to infinity.

Like human mind can't really conceive it. When you think of infinity, you think of like two light years or something. It's nothing.

You see what I mean? No, you have a limit. You're thinking from here to New York or something.

Then a little farther. You know? But human mind can't grasp the most of anything.

That's ultimate. That's ultimate reality. So diamond comes very close.

Among physical things, it's the hardest. Second quality of a diamond. Diamond has this...

The reason it's hard is just plain old carbon. It's the same stuff that's in a pencil lead. That's the same stuff that's in a diamond.

It's just pure carbon. Pencil lead is diamond that didn't quite make it. So how is diamond formed?

It has to be in a... It has to be... They've made diamond.

1959, General Electric made the first one carat artificial diamond. It took enough electricity to power a city for like a day. You know?

And they had these pistons, like 16 pistons with hydraulics. And they took a little piece of pencil lead and they put it in the middle. And then they got all this heat.

They directed all the electricity into this chamber. And all the hydraulics pushed it once. And it took like 24 hours.

It was enough electricity to like run Denver for a day. Not really. They just tried to see if they could do it.

And then they opened it up and there's a pure one carat diamond. They cut it into a diamond. They made it into a nice diamond.

And so... So a diamond is just carbon, like lead in a pencil, that formed differently under intense heat. They form in volcanic...

What do you call it? Pipes. Kimberlite.

It's called kimberlite. And they form there. And under pressure.

Under the pressure that you can only get under the mantle of the earth. Then when there's a volcano, they're brought up to the surface like that. And then after a couple million years, a stream will wash them down.

Like in Brazil, all the stones are stream diamonds, river diamonds, that were washed out of the volcanoes in South Africa when the two continents were connected. And then they split again. And then the river diamonds got left in Brazil.

And then the pipes got left in South Africa. And that's why they match. If you push the world back together, like that.

So anyway, diamond has this perfect atomic configuration. Carbon in a perfect lattice structure. In every direction, the bonds are equally powerful.

That's why you can't break it. That's why you can't scratch it. Carbon formed the same way, but in sheets.

And when you write with a pencil, sheets are sliding off onto the paper. Sheets of lead or sheets of carbon are sliding off, sloughing off onto the paper. So what's that got to do with ultimate reality?

Every diamond is equal. Every diamond has the same structure. Every diamond is perfectly equivalent to every other diamond.

Period. They just have carbon in a perfect lattice. So every diamond you find, Russia, Canada, Botswana, doesn't matter.

They all have the same, absolutely perfect structure. And emptiness is the same. You see, that's another reason why diamond is used for emptiness, ultimate reality.

Every object in this room has its own emptiness. How many emptinesses in this room? Like, I gotta see this thing.

If I see it for 10 minutes, I'll become the Jesus of a billion planets. Where can I find this thing? It's right here.

Where? Every single definable object in this room has its own emptiness. Every single definable thing in this room has its own emptiness.

What is that? To put it simply, emptiness means that nothing is coming from its side. Nothing is coming from its side.

You believe all these things are coming from their side, but really they're coming from you. Your mind, your mind is assembling your reality on the fly, like a computer program, right? On the fly.

As you walk, your mind is creating the road. As you drive the buoy, your mind is creating each foot of asphalt as you go. It's unbelievable.

The speed and the smoothness. It's like 128 frames per second. 128.

Scripture says what? 250? What was it?

265. 265 discreet karmas. What was it?

[Говорящий 2]
Sorry.

[Говорящий 1]
65? 65. Discreet karmas.

It's about the speed of a good film. Yeah, yeah. It's getting faster.

65 karmas ripening. They timed it in the old days. Yeah.

[Говорящий 2]
They timed it in the old days.

[Говорящий 1]
Like yogis timed it before clocks, right? And they said in the space of a finger snap, 65 discreet karmas are ripening and they create your... As we speak, as I speak, your mind is creating me, right?

But you hold that your normal state of mind is that oh, no, no, I'm not creating that. It's happening to me, right? There's all these verbs in like in Russian and other languages.

Reflexive verbs. In Russian it's you know, which means it's happening to me. You see, reflexive, the idea that the world is happening to you.

And that's wrong. Your mind holds to that. One day you'll see that your mind is is projecting all of those things.

Your mind is creating on the fly. Your life is just a string of movie coming out of your mind, you see? And then you walk on the road that your mind is creating.

And your mind creates another foot every time you move your leg, you see? And then you think the road is... You think you're moving down the road but you're creating the road to flow past you, right?

That understanding you get directly just before you see emptiness. Just before you see ultimate reality. In the hours before you see ultimate reality, you finally grasp this thing about what your mind is doing.

How does that differ from emptiness then? The fact that nothing else is any other way is emptiness, you see? Emptiness is always a negative thing.

Emptiness is always the absence of something, right? So it's not like my mind is creating everything. That's a positive thing.

That's an understanding. Emptiness is different. Like an hour after you get that one understanding deeply, I'm creating my reality.

Then you suddenly sit down and say, well, how much stuff around me, including me, is not created by me? So you check. And then suddenly you go off a cliff.

Suddenly you're like pushed into this void, right? Because there's nothing. There's nothing around you that isn't created by you.

To perceive that nothing is emptiness, right? That's what the diamond refers to. So how many things in this room are being created by your mind at this moment?

Everything. And every detail of everything, right? So how many things in this room are not being created by your mind?

Point to me one thing in this room that's not being created by your mind. You see? That's a kind of emptiness.

You get an intellectual understanding. That's different from the direct understanding. But it leads to that.

If you keep doing it over and over, it keeps leading. So anything I can point to, the fan, the ceiling, the walls, the doorway, they must have their own emptiness. They must have their own ultimate reality.

Because each one of them has a quality of not being, not made by my mind. That's their emptiness. So how many chances you got to see emptiness in this room?

Thousands. Tens of thousands of chances. And they're all the same.

Just like diamonds. They're all the same. You get to the emptiness of one thing, you'll understand the emptiness of all things.

All you need to see is once. All you need to do is get it once. You see?

Then you can apply it to everything else. So in that way too, emptiness is like a diamond. Ultimate reality is like a diamond.

All examples of emptiness in the world are totally equivalent. Like you take a diamond, you can cut, you can smash them, right? Every little splinter that comes out, in Tibetan it's called dorje segma.

Every little, it's like broken glass, right? Every tiny shard, that's segma. Every tiny shard is totally equivalent.

The day that you see ultimate reality directly, you will see the same thing that Lord Buddha sees all the time. There's no being in the universe who sees anything more than you see. You'll see it.

And that's it. You see it 100% as well as they do. That's it.

You've seen it. You either see it or you don't see it. And there's no degrees.

That's the second way in which diamond is similar. Okay, what's the third way? It's a really cool thing.

When they had to send, it was Explorer, the satellite that they sent to Mars. I was in the diamond business at that time. And the US government sent a contract to a firm, and I know the firm.

And they said, we need a diamond window for the satellite. Cut out a diamond. We need a window.

And we're like, what? And they said, we need like an, I don't know, eight carat window. And they sent like a spec.

You can imagine the army sending a spec. It's like 14 pages long. The contract is 83 pages.

You have to supply a diamond cut into a window. And it has to be like, and it was like 10 centimeters across, which in the stone business is big. I mean, 10 millimeters.

So it's like big. You know, it's like about this big. I don't know, quarter of an inch or something.

So they wanted a window that wouldn't burn up less than 2,500 degrees. You see what I mean? And there's no transparent substance in the world except the diamond that won't melt on the heat of entry to Mars.

So then they got another letter. They said, and in case we drop the first one or lose it, we need two. And I talked to the guy.

I said, so why don't you charge him? He says, well, I'm not really going to tell you. And I said, come on.

He said, well, 60 grand each. You know, in like 1980 money, this is, you know, they bought an extra one for like, you know, I don't know. Nowadays it would be maybe a million dollars for the two or something like that.

And so the point is that diamond is perfectly colorless, a pure diamond. When you talk about a blue diamond like the Hope diamond, it has iron in it, which sucks out the green and the yellow from the spectrum and the red, and you get blue, right? So a pure diamond has no other chemicals in it.

So it's colorless. It's limpid. So if there was a wall of diamond between me and you, that was six feet wide, you couldn't see it.

You wouldn't be able to see it. You see, if light wasn't reflecting off of it or something, if there was a wall of diamond between me and you, you wouldn't be able to see it. It's so pure.

And so that's the other way in which diamond is like emptiness. You just can't see it, right? It's around you all the time.

Your eyes have emptiness. Your fingers have emptiness. The person sitting next to you has their own emptiness, right?

Your toes have their own emptiness. Your car has its own emptiness. Everything you use, every part of you has its own emptiness, and you can't see it.

If you saw it for five or ten minutes, you'd be Jesus on a billion planets. It's so weird. It's so weird to think that something is around you all the time.

Something is at hand. Something could liberate you and countless other beings. Something could take away the pain of the entire world.

And you can't see it. You're sitting on it. It's on the tip of your nose, you know?

You can't see it. That's another quality that it has. Those qualities.

Think about those qualities. That's why diamond or vajra... And there's a thunderbolt.

I don't know. Anybody have a vajra here? I don't know.

You see that thing that people use during tantric ceremonies? That's a vajra. Can I borrow it?

Absolutely. So usually a vajra for a tantric ceremony has... This is half, right?

And then there's a corresponding half. And it's four sides like that. And that's a twin diamond crystal.

It came from a twin diamond crystal. That's an octagon. Octahedron crystal.

It goes like that. And they often go twinned. So, you know, somebody in India, I don't know when...

India has its own alluvial diamonds. It was also connected to South Africa on the other side. So when Brazil split off and got their independence, India went the other way.

When the continents split. And there are river diamonds in India. The Gahop diamond came from India.

Some of the great diamonds, Kohinoor came from India. They were found in the rivers in India. So somebody must have found a twin diamond crystal and then they realized that it could cut anything.

You scratch it, you scratch glass. I had DJ, DJ Lali's son. He's over one day.

I said, look, diamonds are so cool. You can cut glass. He said, you sure?

I said, here, take this. Write your name on the window. And he did.

And like Rinpoche is mad at me for like 10 years. You know, because here's his name on the window that he can't get off. It cuts through anything.

So somebody must have figured it out. And then they made this. It became a symbol for Tantra, right?

The Vajra. The twin diamond crystal, octahedron. Became a symbol for, the Vajra became a symbol for Adamas.

Undefeatable. Cannot be beaten by anything. Cannot be scratched.

So what's that got to do with Tantra? What's all this got to do with Tantra? We have to move on to Tantra.

Then you get to have a break. You don't have to listen to me rant and rave about diamonds anymore, right? So, why did they call the most important method in our entire lineage two and a half thousand years?

Why is it called the way of the diamond? Why is the secret teaching called the way of the diamond? What's the connection?

It's very simple. Like, if you truly want to stop the pain of the world, right? If you truly want to help people, which is all people really want to do, right?

Nobody wants to do anything else. People are bored to death. People are bored to death.

Life is a drag, you know? Life is just a drag. You're doing something.

What's that Annie DeFranco song? Everything I do is something I... How is it going?

[Говорящий 2]
I do instead of something I want to do more.

[Говорящий 1]
Yeah, everything I do. What song is that? I do instead of something I want to do more.

And I like that. Everything we do, we do instead of something we want to do more. What is that song?

[Говорящий 2]
Joyful Girl.

[Говорящий 1]
Joyful Girl. I'm a joyful girl. You know, something like that.

And it's this beautiful, beautiful song. Everything I do is... I do instead of something I really want to do.

Want to do more. So we're all like that. That's why people go crazy.

That's why people are bored with life. That's why people are... deep down are unhappy.

Because they're all un... What do you call it? They're not living up to their potential.

What they really want to do is be an angel on a billion planets. That's all anybody wants to do. You know?

You don't want to feed yourself ice cream for the next 20 years. It could be part of your life, but... But you...

You want something more, deep down. You know, it's just like Einstein locked in a room with a bunch of kids. You know what?

You want to do your thing. You want to express who you are. You want to...

You want to... be who you really can be, right? And everything else is like boring and unsatisfying and the divorce rate is high and the prison rate is high and people are miserable with each other and there's wars and...

People don't want to be here like this. People don't want to spend their life like going to some stupid job and making money and spending it so they can get a house so when they die, the kids can sell it the next week, you know, and waste all the money in three weeks. It's just...

What's the purpose? You know? So...

It's the emptiness that allows you to reach your destiny. It's the diamond that allows you to reach your destiny. You know?

If this body, if this arm, if this flesh and blood were really flesh and blood, then things are hopeless. Kill yourself. My brother killed himself.

I couldn't fault him. We found him with a hole in his hand and a gun in his hand, you know? I couldn't fault him.

You know? He's honest. He reached the point of honesty.

He reached the deep point of honesty. Nothing here. You know?

If this is all there is, if it's just flesh like this, if you just work all day, you work and work and work and then you die, what's the point? You know? The struggle.

All the stress and anxiety to be here, to live here. What's the point of it? You know?

What are you trying to achieve? There's nothing ahead of you. You know?

There's nothing to reach. If this blood and flesh comes from itself, then life is meaningless. You should kill yourself.

Any intelligent person should be an alcoholic or a drug addict or in an insane asylum. Really. Any intelligent person.

Those people are not like problem people. They're honest people. They see what's happening.

They're reacting to the truth. The other people are all fooling themselves. I'll get a job.

Things will be better next year. I'll start exercising. You know?

What's the point? What are you going to get? Where is it going to go?

You know? So, if this were flesh and blood from its own side, nothing makes any sense. There's no reason to be here.

But it's not. It's empty. What's that mean?

It has a color. It has a shape. In my mind, under the influence of the amount that I took care of others in the past, and nothing more, and nothing less, totally under the influence of how did I take care of others in the past, I see it as something good or bad.

That's all. So, it's empty. But it's content that the movie on the empty screen is determined only by the degree to which I have devoted myself to caring for others.

So, a human arm having the capacity to become an angel's arm is a huge good karma. It's a huge beautiful projection. I have the vehicle.

I have the equipment, the tool with which to become that angel. I have a human arm. I have an arm.

And it's empty. And because it's not coming from its side, because it's not flesh and blood from its side, because it's not mortal from its side, because it's like the diamond, then I can become an angel. I can change it.

I have the power to change it. I will change it. I will see that object that's like a diamond, and then my body will become like a diamond.

Sahanadvani. Bala? What's it called?

Sahanadvani. Kaya sampat. The perfect body of diamond, right?

Vajra Sahanadvani. In the Yoga Sutra. I will reach that.

So, it's only emptiness of the diamond that makes it possible. That's why it's the diamond way. Okay?

Vajrayana. That's the whole point. Right?

You gotta have the emptiness or you cannot become a tantric angel.

[Говорящий 2]
Right?

[Говорящий 1]
There must be emptiness or you cannot become a tantric angel. So, it's the way of the diamond. You can use the diamond to reach that body.

Then you can serve people. You can be what you're supposed to be and not shmucking around this stupid little life. Right?

Fighting with other people for scraps of worthless things. You know? You can become what you're supposed to be.

Right? You can become what you were born to be. Because of the diamond.

Because of those two diamonds. That's all I have to say. Thank you, Alan, for asking that question.

That's the end of the tantric course. No, we have a little homework stuff. Sorry.

Yeah, sure. One thing I'm not clear on. You know, for example, there's a proof of emptiness where you look at an object and you analyze its parts down level after level and you never get to the point where you don't find more parts.

You never find an indivisible part. So I understand that that's an intellectual proof of emptiness. And you get to an appearance of emptiness when you do that.

But from what I've read and from your descriptions as well, apparently the direct experience of that is the appearance of sheer emptiness. The appearance of a sheer voidness, which is different than that. I mean, it seems like one is just finer and finer degrees of definitive origination whereas the direct perception of that emptiness is something where apparently the world has disappeared, right?

The normal world. There's awareness content to it apparently, but you're not actually perceiving any... Anything other than ultimate reality.

Yeah. Yeah. I think what you're saying, the point that you're making is that any time you use a mental exercise to arrive at an intellectual understanding of emptiness, point to me a thing in this room that is not coming from your mind, you do reach a kind of emptiness, or an absence, but it's not the one that will turn you to an angel within a certain amount of time, right?

What's the difference? It's still a kind of projection that you're taking as coming from its own side. Okay?

Even that absence you reach, intellectually, there's a part of your mind that still believes that it's coming from its side and not from your side. And then therefore you're not seeing the real thing yet. So it's a model.

The diamond is like that. By the way... Apparently in the direct perception of any kind of parts, gone.

No. You wouldn't do that. Nothing like that.

No, nothing like that. But it's lucid, right? I mean, you're aware.

You're aware. But you're not aware that you're aware. No awareness of me.

At all. Because I'm not ultimate reality. Last thing I want to say about the diamond.

Why diamond cutter? You know, I always... It's one of my pet peeves, right?

What? The first translation of the diamond cutter sutra, and the one that became popular in the West, they've named it the diamond sutra. And that's not at all the name of the sutra, right?

It's Dorje Cipa. It's Dorje Cedaka. Which means to cut the diamond.

Diamond cutter. Why would someone name a book? Why would...

That's the oldest book in the world. Probably the... It's the oldest printed book in the world.

It's probably the most influential sutra there ever was. I don't know. Mexico Heart Sutra maybe.

But... Why is it so important to call it diamond cutter instead of diamond? Diamond sutra.

Diamond cutter is a big deal. Cedaka. Dorje Cedaka.

Cutting the diamond. And you know, and I'll just tell you, and then we can have refreshments. The diamond is close.

The diamond is the closest image I can give you to emptiness. Ever. I can never give you a better image than the diamond.

The diamond is ultimate. The diamond is... is pure.

The diamond is invisible. So how close is diamond to emptiness? Nothing.

Nothing. Not even close. Nothing.

A billion degrees away. Nothing. You know?

They say the light of a match compared to the light of the sun. You know? Nothing.

What is the... I don't know. Billions levels degrees more light.

Right? You can't even think of how much more light. All the stars, all the suns in the universe compared to a...

to a... a flashlight. Diamond Mountain flashlight on a bad day.

You know? There's no comparison. Nothing close.

Ultimate reality cuts all lower realities. Even the diamond. You know?

So diamond cutter. So use a diamond. Think about a diamond.

Call your place Diamond Mountain. Call your place in L.A. Diamond something. You know?

But... Just to remind yourself. And don't ever think it's anything.

It's nothing. It's nothing in comparison. It's nothing.

It's just another schmuck normal reality. And ultimate reality is infinitely higher. Infinitely.

Infinite in the end. Okay? That's all.

Yeah?

[Говорящий 2]
Awareness of yourself. Is it the experience of the four arya truths that let you know that you have the experiences?

[Говорящий 1]
One of the first thoughts that comes after you come down out of that experience is that I saw emptiness.

[Говорящий 2]
It's from the four arya truths?

[Говорящий 1]
Yeah. It's one of the four arya truths. It's one of the four normal truths.

It's a component of one of the four normal truths. I saw emptiness. Because you can't think that while you're in it.

You can't think anything else. I think it's only because your mind has changed that you can recognize that you saw emptiness. You come down...

A normal human mind can only perceive one or the other. And when you get enlightened, you can be in both realities at the same time. So that's another...

You cannot... You have a memory. It's really a memory, right?

I saw emptiness. It's a memory. If you want the details of how that memory works, you've got to study Shantideva's refutation of rang-rik, our perception.

And the bear that got bitten by the mouse during the winter.

[Говорящий 2]
So it's only because your mind has changed that you can... Sure.

[Говорящий 1]
In a way. Dr. Singh?

[Говорящий 2]
All Buddhist teachings on emptiness are like conceptualizations. They're like intellectual pursuits. But the direct perception of emptiness is non-conceptual.

It's a deep state of meditation. So how does that rectify? Like how...

[Говорящий 1]
That's a beautiful question. And I'll give you a very simple answer. We talked about it.

We were talking about it. Kristi and I were talking about it. We were on the plane.

And you know how they got so cheap now that when they play the safety movie, it's a cartoon. Like they didn't even want to hire three people to sit in the seats and buckle their seatbelt for you. You know?

And we were saying, it's funny, you know? Like, they're so cheap now. Everything's cheap.

Everything's like that. But anyway, everybody's saving money. But you see the...

And they used to have... Like the plane we were on before, it was an older plane. And they had this really handsome guy, you know, the British accent.

And he's like, well, you must maintain your safety. And the guy's not real. You see, the guy's just plastic or digital on a CD somewhere in the back of the plane.

Right? Like how come planes always work but the movies never work? Like I always get nervous on a plane.

They say, the movie's not working. Well, how do I know the radar's working? You know, how do I...

If you can't get the movie to work, how do you get the radar to work? But you know... So there...

It's just a CD back in the back in some box that the stewardess hit a button and it's playing. There's no guy up there on the screen, right? There's no guy there.

But he can save your life. You see? If you do what this guy says, who's not real, right?

He's just a flat... Flat colors on a flat screen. But if he's buttoned up now, the stewardess will be looking under your blanket.

[Говорящий 2]
You know?

[Говорящий 1]
And you're like, I don't want the stewardess waking me up. So you buckle. And then if there's a crash, you say, he saved your life.

But he's not there. There's nobody there.

[Говорящий 2]
It's still functioning. Given the numbers of people surviving plane crashes, I have to ask this...

[Говорящий 1]
Now you're getting silly on me. What about karma? You throw karma in that.

Like, say if you happen to be the particular sentient being that has countless lifetimes of really, really, really bad karma, what's even the chances? Oh, no, no. Yeah, you can...

You can be one of the bodies they found because your seat fell out of the plane with the buckle.

[Говорящий 2]
Oh, we're talking about that.

[Говорящий 1]
You know? Yeah.

[Говорящий 2]
In reference to actually perceiving things directly. Because you can intellectually study all you want. But how can you jump into the direct perception that means from intellectual pursuit?

[Говорящий 1]
How do you... Yeah, that's a beautiful question. And then we gotta have refreshments.

What is it that pushes you over the border? You know? What is it that pushes you over the border?

I'm trying to decide which of the two things. Anyway, two things, okay? You have to have a lama.

You have to have a lama. You have to have a teacher. And you have to serve them.

And I'm not asking you to know that. I don't... We don't need anything.

We really don't need anything. We experimented with eating more breakfast than we do and it didn't work. And, you know, I really don't need anything.

Absolutely don't need anything from anybody. We have a box for trinkets and we just throw everything in there. But serve a teacher.

Doesn't matter which teacher, right? Just serve your teacher. That's one big cause.

And the other cause is to take care of other people, right? Have to take care of other people. You will never see emptiness.

You'll never pass from the book study to the experience. If you're just not nice to the people around you, it has to be part of your life, right? Constantly taking care of the people around you.

In little ways, make them a cup of tea. Pat them on the back, you know. Smile at the lady in the...

What's it called? Stopping... Stop...

Storing more... Smile at the lady in the storing more... in buoy, you know.

It's all that. That's what kicks it over. That's what kicks you over.

Those two things. You need those two things. Okay, we'll stop there.