Махамудра: мысли и ветры (2005, Нью-Йорк), занятие 5

[Говорящий 1]
Stay still, relax your shoulders, close your eyes, focus for a minute on the tip of your nose, watching the air flow out and in. Then get in touch again with how you are feeling in this moment. Go through briefly the first two steps, that it's changing moment to moment, and that there is no one behind it running the show.

This is you, these moment to moment changing feelings. And so now here is the mistake for the third meditation, that these feelings are coming out of control, they are totally random, that because I don't have control of them in the present moment, that I don't have control of them at all, and I'm not responsible for them. Something else is inflicting them on me.

Like we always blame the weather, or our boss, or the person who just made us angry, that kind of thing. It's a common mistake, it's completely false. So now we're going to break that idea apart by employing the wisdom of the third meditation, which is that all of these moment to moment feelings are coming from karmic seeds that we planted in the past, from our behavior towards other people.

We are not in control of the present moment, but we are in control of them through our past actions, and we are in control of what we experience in the future. So take a minute and think about the karmic seed you must have planted in the past to get the feeling that you are feeling right now. Just guess what it might have been.

There is a second part to this third meditation, that the karmic seed which you experience in the present moment, it's one seed, and when it ripens, it divides, so that you experience a subjective state of mind yourself, and the object you are perceiving, which is your feelings, but it's coming from the same seed. This is another way to chip away at this false conception of a me that we cling on to so tightly and hurt ourselves so much by believing. Try to picture how that's happening, how your experience is being divided into the person watching you feeling and the feeling, both coming from the same seed.

All right, you can open your eyes now. Here, that gotcha, the thing that we believe that's not true, it's pretty clear, right, from that meditation, that we're not responsible for how we're feeling, that we're blaming someone else or something else for what we're feeling in the present moment. And that doesn't do us any good, because that's not the right source of our feelings, right?

The source of our feelings is our own past actions, so we should point the finger at the right person to blame. These meditations, of course, we can't master sitting here for five minutes together in a church. You have to go home and, you know, write them down when class ends or at some stage, you know, it's a different thing, and then go practice them over and over again, because only by getting deeper and deeper into these meditations by yourself, in some quiet place, can you ever actually make progress and start to see for yourself the lie that you've been believing.

Each lie, each successive lie, each successive thing we believe that's not true, in the six stages. Because we can sit here and talk to you and say, oh, this is the lie and this is the truth, and you can say, oh, I believe you, but until you really experience it for yourself when you're sitting in meditation, it won't be real for you. You know, that's why everyone has to learn how to meditate and take it very seriously.

We don't have that much time, as Geshe-la was talking about recently.