Учения Великого ретрита, часть 1: Ветры медитации (2011, Боуи), занятие 3

[Говорящий 1]
Okay, we'll do a silent mandala, so imagine a perfect world, and then offer that picture in your mind in exchange for this teaching, okay? Okay, then we'll start. So I'd like to start with a meditation, and we'll go quickly through the traditional preliminaries.

So first please picture your heart lama, heart teacher, has come and is sitting in front of you, and don't make it just a picture, make it real. Feel their breath, feel their breath coming from their nose and mouth, your breath on your chest, and the sweet fragrance of the breath, and the warmth of knowing that someone is close in front of you, but with your eyes closed you can feel their warmth. So make it a living teacher in front of you, your own personal teacher.

Then traditionally we bow down to our teacher, namas, and a nice way to bow down to your heart lama is to think about one of the beautiful qualities that they have, and bow down to that beautiful quality. Why did you make them your teacher, and what is it about them that you love and that you would like to learn from them? Then make them an offering.

Sometimes it's a single flower, sometimes it's a sky filled with flowers, and maybe, as Lama Marut said today, the sound of the ocean or the sky. A very pleasing gift for them is something good that you've done for someone else in the last few days, so think about making that kind of gift. Then in order to have a clear meditation, in order to have the mind clear, the conscience has to be clear, and so think of maybe the one negativity in your own heart that you feel might be blocking you the most from making progress inside, and tell your teacher about that.

Be honest with yourself and be frank with them. Then next, whisper in their ear the best thing you've done, the one thing you're most proud of, maybe in the last few weeks. Watch a smile form on their face as you describe to them what you did to help someone else.

Then think about the sweetest thing you've seen someone else do, or heard about someone else doing in the last few weeks. What special goodness have you witnessed in the last few weeks? Then be happy.

This will prepare your mind for meditation. Then I like, personally I like to try to imagine what I would like to be, how I would like to change, what I would like to change about myself, how I would like to be in a month or six months, maybe just tonight. I try to picture how I will look after I've changed, how my face will change, how my manner will change, and my level of happiness will change.

So try to bring up a clear picture of what you would like to be, and then ask your teacher to help you reach that. Then ask your teacher to stay close, even when you can't be with them physically, that they stay close with their powers that they have to be close, even when we can't see them. Ask them to stay close and guide us.

Then we'll start the actual meditation. Again, it's a practice called Sarva Drama Nirsat. It's an examination of the state of our own mind.

That will be the theme for today's teaching, learning to watch our own mind, examine the state of our own mind. Lord Buddha taught that one of the easiest ways to watch the mind is to watch the feelings, to focus on how do I feel right now. So right now, I really pray that in these four days, what I would like to contribute to your life is that ability to step back from the mind, and be able to separate a watcher from the mind, step back behind the mind, and I pray that you can appreciate and learn this skill of stepping back from the mind, and then watching the mind.

Try to now, in this meditation, try to feel the difference between having a feeling, and being in that feeling, and then stepping away from it, and watching yourself having the feeling. So, in our lives, if we can learn to come out of the feeling that we're in, and step back, and observe ourselves having that feeling, then we can make great progress in our meditation and in our life. Because most of us are not aware of the content of our mind while we're in it.

So right now, step back from your mind, and observe. How do you feel? If someone asks you, what kind of mood are you in?

What kind of mood are you in right now? This hour, what is your mood? How do you feel?

Step back from the mind. Look at your mood. Try to observe subtle shifts in your mood.

Going from a good mood to a bad mood doesn't happen all of a sudden. It's very gradual. Try to observe, even in the next two or three minutes, how your mood swings and shifts as new thoughts come up.

Then slowly release the meditation, and slowly open your eyes. So today, I thought I would talk about ... I came to Dime Mountain a few weeks ago, I don't know, a month ago, and met some of the retreatants.

Then I went home and I was thinking, what would be the most beneficial thing I could teach for them? What would be most helpful for their journey right now? There's a lot of things.

But I was thinking, it came down to trying to find a balance, some kind of balance. I think in a three-year retreat, and in a life, in your life, it's a struggle to maintain a balance. In the sense of retreat, it's a balance between ...

I think all the retreatants are challenged by the same thing, which is, I don't want to be too busy, because that's why I came to retreat. I came into the boundary of the retreat because I wanted to be less busy, and I wanted to have some quiet time to further my spiritual realizations. But then you get into retreat, especially a three-year retreat, especially the first six months of a three-year retreat, and you've got so much time ahead of you that you don't feel any particular urgency.

You know you have a thousand days. You can blow a couple of days at the beginning. So you fix your porch and you do stuff like that.

You figure you'll get deep in later. Then you start feeling guilty because you heard they're spending so much money for you to be here. And then you start to have this internal, what do you call it, crisis.

Part of you thinks you're eating all this food, and all these people are ... probably there's 8,000 people over there in the university section growing corn for me and stuff like that. And then you start to feel guilty, or you feel like, I'm not working hard enough, right?

So our particular batch of retreatants, being hardcore, I think the main challenge is that they're pushing themselves so hard that that becomes a problem, right? So there's this balance. There's this struggle to stay in a balance between not doing enough and doing too much, right?

And then I feel the tension of the attempt to keep that balance, right? And we all have that in our lives, right? So I was thinking what would help with that.

Really what you're talking about is chinga on a grand scale, you see? Really you're talking about dullness and agitation on a grand scale, like not in the half hour that you do single-pointed meditation in the morning. You're talking the whole thousand days, every hour.

Are you going to be distracted and too busy? Or are you going to be dull and not busy enough, right? So I'm talking also during meals and while you're relaxing, and you're going to have these two demons in your head, you're going to have this challenge to not be not busy enough and not be too busy.

And then on top of that, you're all sort of very moral people and you're going to, probably you can't find a balance because you think you're not moving fast enough. And then you just get, what do you call it, schizophrenic or something, I don't know. No, it's very hard, it's very difficult.

So I thought to talk a little bit about that kind of balance, or the balance between being too busy, scheduling it too tight, and then not scheduling it tight enough, and then the conflicted feelings you get either way. Whatever you do, you're going to feel conflicted anyway. So I thought we should talk about that, because I think, in your case, being too busy, meaning scheduling too tight, is maybe the most serious problem.

And then the opposite problem, which is not doing enough, is not a problem. You don't have that problem so much, but you can always get there. And then there's this conflicted feeling, either way, you see?

You lighten up on your schedule and suddenly you feel guilty, and then you add stuff to your schedule and suddenly you feel like loony. So I think we have to talk about the conflicted feeling, which really, if you think about it, is a kind of sheshan, okay? So now I'm talking about sheshan.

Sheshan means, in the practice of meditation, the ability to watch your mind, whether it's getting dull or agitated, whether you're thinking about lunch, or whether you're getting spaced out, they're supposed to be, in your meditation practice, a kind of watcher mind called sheshan, okay? She means to know or to watch, right? And then shin means present participle.

It means watching mind, the watching state of mind, okay? Shimba means in the act of. So sheshan means, it's a cool name because it means in the act of watching, all the time, right?

So then I'm trying to talk about your sheshan that you have during your meditation, right? The main job of sheshan is to detect problems in the meditation and to ring an alarm. And then the mind is supposed to, you're supposed to be trained what to do if certain problems come up.

But the first job is to know that the problem has come up, right? So I want to talk about sheshan, right? Sheshan means the ability to detect a problem in your meditation, okay?

So your meditation is flowing and then a problem pops up. And then sheshan is supposed to, what do you, you know, like a fire alarm in your house? Like when it detects smoke, then it rings the alarm, right?

So sheshan is supposed to be inside your mind. It's supposed to be a smoke detector inside your mind. And then when the meditation goes awry somehow, then sheshan is supposed to go off, right?

And you're supposed to develop this capacity for sheshan, a self-awareness, in a sense, okay? But I thought I would take it from the teaching on jenpa nirshak si, shi. Jenpa nirshak, shi is a special practice, ancient practice that was carried on in all the schools of Buddhism, okay?

It's taught in the Abhidharma, which is the lowest school, and you find it all the way up to the Madhyamika schools. So in all the ancient schools of Buddhism, there's a practice called jenpa nirshak, shi. This is translated as, you can say, I've seen four close recollections, okay?

Four close recollections. Nir means close, shak means to stay, jenpa means recollection, okay? So it's a meditation practice called jenpa nirshak, shi, the four close recollections, all right?

And it stretches from the Theravadan countries of the south all the way to Tibet in the north. It's practiced by all Buddhists, okay? It's slightly different according to the school you're in.

So because we don't have a lot of time, I thought we would just go to school number four, the middle way school, right? And describe what jenpa nirshak is, okay? So there are four kinds, there's four and there's three, but I'm going to talk about the four.

There's four kinds of close recollection. There's four kinds of meditation, four steps of close recollection, okay? First one is called lu jenpa nirshak, okay?

Lu means sharir, means your body, okay? The close recollection of your mind. And then there's the close recollection of your feelings.

And then there's the close recollection of all the stuff in the world, okay? So there's four kinds. In Tibet they're called lu kyi denpa nirshak, sem kyi denpa nirshak, sorwa denpa nirshak, and then chö kyi denpa nirshak, okay?

There are four kinds. Why did the Buddha teach them and what's their role in our practice? In the Prajnaparamita there are 37 practices that are advised.

They're called canchok sodun, the 37 practices that are on the enlightened side of things, okay? They're very famous. They're divided into three sections.

One is practices that came from the lower way, that are practiced from the lower way, and you can say in common with the higher way. Then practices of the higher way, and then there are practices that only a Buddha does, okay? So there are three categories.

They're called the 37 practices, okay? The four close recollections are one of them, and they are shared with ... they're four of the 37, and they're shared with people of the lowest school.

So they're common for all of Buddha's schools, okay? Why did the Buddha choose four meditations on your body, on your mind, on your feelings, and on the world at large? You see, everything in the world.

Why did he design this kind of meditation? They say we have a natural tendency to think of our body as the place where I live, okay? So we're going to be talking a lot about I.

In Tibetan it's dak, in Sanskrit atman, right? So we're going to talk a lot about me, or I. And in the first of the four recollections, the practice is to examine how I live in my body, all right?

To examine how it is that I live in my body. Dak lu la ne, right? I live in my body.

I reside in my body. That's the first object of meditation. How do I live in my body, okay?

The second one is called dak gi ngo. Dak gi ngo means my mind is who I am, okay? My mind is the essence of who I am, all right?

That's called sem dharma nirshak. That's the meditation on your mind. The body is the place where I live.

The mind is, in a sense, who I am. It's the essence of who I am, okay? And it stays in the body.

Me, who is essentially a mental creature, is residing in a flesh body, all right? Like that. The third dharma nirshak is sorwa, okay?

Sorwa dharma nirshak. And it means dak kang lung jupa, means what is it that I experience, or what do I experience in the body? When I, the mind, comes into the body, what is it that I experience, right?

And that's my feelings. I mean, the most, the rawest form of all experience is your feelings, right? Like you can experience the tent, or you can experience the car, or the road, or your cabin, but in the end, most of your internal time is spent on your feelings.

How do I feel right now, right? And that's what motivates most of our actions. I don't like this coconut water because it doesn't make me feel good, you know?

And I like that song because it makes me feel good, especially the saxophone part. So like that, I have feelings, and they are the essence of my experience. So now we've covered where I stay.

Then we've covered who I am. And then we've covered what am I experiencing, okay? Those are the first three dharma nirshaks, okay?

The fourth one is, it's called, what's it called? nyonmong choky chodang nam jang choky chod la long nyongwa means the world at large, all the stuff in the world, right? Like, how do I relate to all the objects and people and thoughts in the world?

Which one of them are useful for getting enlightened, and which ones of them keep me in suffering, okay? So the whole world, all the people, all the things, is the object of number four, okay? And the mind divides them and says, some of these are useful for helping people, and some of these cause people suffering.

And it divides all things into those two, nyonmong choky chodang nam jang choky chod. Okay, very famous, okay? So, so far there's no big problem, right?

Do you inhabit your body? And then, you know, if you matagma chepa, if you don't look too much, you can say, yeah, I inhabit my body, you know? That guy's in that guy's body, and this guy's in this guy's body, and that's reasonable, okay?

I'm not in your body right now, I'm in this body, right? So there's no problem with that, okay? In the beginning, roughly there's no problem, okay?

Number two, you know, is it wrong to say, my awareness is who I am, you see? I'm like, Michael is Michael's awareness. Michael is Michael's ability to perceive the world.

That's the essence of Michael. They call it the essence of Michael. And that's not a problem.

There is such a Michael. There is a Michael who lives in his body. And there is a Michael whose essence is his awareness, okay?

We can say that. The liver in the body, right? I mean, living person in the body is, the liver in the body is your mind, mainly.

Your mind is in your body, okay? We can say that. That's okay, that's not a problem, okay?

Number three, I mean, do you have feelings? Are they what you spend most of your time on? They are.

I mean, you're almost constantly aware of your feelings. They call it in Abhidharma, they call, sem gyi tsam mang. Sem gyi tsam mang means a mental function which is constantly present in the mind.

It never leaves the mind. The mind is always feeling. The mind is never not feeling.

Even when the mind is knocked out or the mind is deep into drugs or something, there is some sensation, okay? There is some feeling. Even in your dreams you feel, okay?

So, the third idea is that this is what I experience. This is my experience. I, Michael, am a thinking being who lives in a body and has certain experiences.

So far, no problem, okay? And then I undertake a spiritual path. I go through the world.

I go through the supermarket of the world. I go down the aisles of the supermarket in the world. I can talk about that, right?

You remember that. Maybe they still exist, maybe not. But I go down the aisles of the supermarket of the world, and I select those things which are beneficial and wholesome for people.

And I reject those brands which cause problems for people, okay? So that, the whole scene is no problem. So far, no problem, okay?

Then comes into play, I mean, Lord Buddha in the beginning, at the lower levels, he said, but we're dealing with, what did he call it? De, what is it? Tak, tak.

Oh, tsang de tak tak, okay? Don't say, tsang de tak tak, okay? Uh, this is weird.

I mean, usually the audience helps me with words that I forget in my old age. So tsang means, these are the problems related to the four objects of the recollection, of the meditation, okay? They are tsang, de, tak, and dak, okay?

Tsang means, and they're in the Yoga Sutra. They're like cinji lok tu. They're the, uh, I forget what they're called.

Anyway, they're in the Yoga Sutra. There are four ways in which we misinterpret things, okay? Tsang means, I take my body to be something clean, okay?

I think this bag of pus and blood and urine and feces and, you know, uh, what do you call it? Phlegm is clean. I take it to be something desirable, okay?

I take it to be, you know, I don't know, especially, I mean, that's the task of people who do magazines. The big task is to make a man or a woman look whole, right? Like you would never have a little piece of snot coming out of their nose or, you know.

They just don't do that in fashion photography, right? It would break the, I don't know how you say, it would break the image of wholeness or of some kind of vigor and youth and beauty, you know, if there was like a big booger that they didn't photoshop out, you know. So, we have this feeling that I'm clean and it's very difficult, like you go to a party and everyone's dressed up and then, you know, somebody's got a booger hanging on there.

I usually have toothpaste marks here and people come up to me and tell me I need vitamin E. And it's very hard to maintain the illusion of a body being like really beautiful, you know what I mean? So, for very long.

So, tsang means, we tend to think of our bodies as whole and healthy, hale and, you know, un-boogered, you know. But really we're just a big bag of boogers and that's another story, okay? You can quote me on that.

Okay, that's tsang. So, now we got a different level of awareness of our body. In this level, we are meant to look at our body and consider how it's not very pure, okay?

How it's not very clean. And there's a specific meditation for that, okay? And that meditation is recommended in all the Lamrim scriptures for our retreatant who's having trouble keeping their mind in the tsang.

Lama Kristi and I went to Ken Rinpoche before our first three-year retreat and, you know, we set aside like five hours and we asked him for a big appointment and we got all ready and we went there and we went up to his room and we said, please, Holy Lama, give us advice for our three-year retreat in our yurt, you know. And he said, keep your mind in the yurt. And then he wouldn't say, he refused to say anything else.

He just gave us tea and sent us out, you know. So, we're talking now about the tendency of the mind in meditation to think about, what am I going to eat this afternoon? Or, you know, is today, I don't know what's the delivery day, Wednesday?

Is today Wednesday? How many days we got till Wednesday? You know, stuff like that, you know.

Could they find, you know, coco nib organic Ecuadorian, you know. You know, and then you start to think about it. That's gupa, right?

That's distraction, all right? That's distraction. When you get to distraction in your meditation, talking about the nine levels of meditation, when you get to that place, you're supposed to, now we get to the guts, okay?

You're supposed to tune the mind down. It's like a toilet float, or I have a float in my tank of my gas tank in my ancient car, and it doesn't work because they would have to cut open the gas tank to fix it, and they said it's not worth it. So, I never know how much gas I have.

And there's this float in the tank, right? And as the fuel goes down, the float goes down. So, you're supposed to keep your mind, your mind is on a float system in meditation, and you're supposed to keep it not too high and not too low, okay?

So, it's supposed to be that the most, one of the beginning problems is distraction. You start thinking about delivery day, okay? How are you going to stop it?

What is a traditional meditation on how to bring the float down slightly? Like, you don't want to crash, right? You don't want to get all depressed or something.

You just want to bring it down a reasonable, I was in a dangerous small private plane recently, and the pilot, to descend, I never saw this. If I had known, you know, to go down, he has a knob, a tiny plastic knob over his head, and he's holding on to the wheel, I guess that steers it left or right, I don't know. But then he, when he wants to go down, he turns this thing over his head, and it's just a little knob, you know?

And I was thinking, my life depends on this little plastic knob, you know? And he was turning it down, and then he would turn it up, and it was very fine. Like, he would move just a fraction of an inch, you know?

And then the plane would go down, you know? And so, in meditation, you want to do that. You don't want to crank the knob and the meditation crashes, you know what I mean?

So, we're going to, I thought we would do the first jambanirshan, okay? So, this is a meditation to bring your mind down when you're thinking about lunch, okay? It's a purposeful, it's an intentional, what do you call it?

Downer, okay? To bring your mind, to calm your mind down, to get it to calm down a bit, all right? If it's going too much about delivery day, okay?

So, let's try, all right? I think some of you know this meditation. It's very, very ancient, and I like it.

I think it's very beautiful. It brings my mind down quite well, okay? So, here we go.

Sit up straight. Let's watch ten breaths, in and out, first on the out, then on the in. Push your mind up against the breath like an ice skate on the ice.

It's moving, the mind is moving, but the ice is not moving. The breath is a stationary object for you, and your mind is rolling against it. It's moving, but the mind never loses contact with the breath.

It's like, think about it as an ice skate on the ice. Then please think about what you're going to have for dinner tonight. So, we're trying to simulate distraction, okay?

Assuming you don't meditate on dinner normally. Think about what are you having for dinner tonight. You're supposed to be meditating, but you're thinking about what you're having for dinner.

Now simulate, session catches you thinking about dinner, okay? Some part of your mind, watching your mind, catches you thinking about dinner. But the mind is very unruly, difficult to tame like an elephant, and you decide, I better bring my mind down a little bit.

So, I'll do Drampa Nirshap. I'll do a meditation that brings the mind down. In the middle of your forehead, picture a small pimple, okay?

A small pimple has formed in the middle of your forehead. It gets infected. It forms like a big, red, lumpy pimple like you used to get just before the high school dance.

The pimple gets larger, the pimple breaks open, and there's an open wound on your forehead. There's an open space of red, wet flesh on your forehead. More pus is coming out.

It starts to get infected, badly infected. Then, almost some kind of green, almost like gangrene, the flesh itself is rotting around the edge of the hole in your forehead. It's so bad now, the hole widens to about the size of a coin, and deep down through the hole you can see, you start to be able to see the white bone of your skull.

You can see a small little patch of the white bone of your skull showing through the skin of your forehead. It gets worse, it widens to the whole forehead. The whole forehead is stripped of skin.

The rest of your body is all right. The forehead is stripped of skin and flesh, and you can see the glistening bone of the skull, white glistening. The flesh peels from the entire skull.

Your entire skull is stripped of flesh. The rest of your body is normal. There's a whole skull of glistening white bone.

Slowly the flesh drops from the rest of your body. Then, for a moment, there's a skeleton sitting in meditation posture, just a skeleton of white glistening wet bone, and then it collapses into a pile. Then, radiating out from you like a shockwave from an explosion, radiating out from the pile of bones, the gangrene or rotting continues.

It reaches the edges of your meditation cabin. You see the cabin as it will be in 20 years, in 30 years. The doors are rotted.

The roof is caved in. Some of the walls are broken. Animals come and go at will.

People are gone. The bones have turned to dust. You spread the vision out to the neighboring communities and the highways.

Wilcox is a ghost town. It used to be a human habitation. The people are gone.

The town has died. The buildings have collapsed. Bowie was already that way.

The highway is gone. It's just overgrown with weeds. Then expand the area of ruin to the oceans, all the way to New York in the east, all the way to Los Angeles in the west, the whole country, the whole surface of the country, as it will be and as it must be in time.

Overgrown, the old forest coming back, the people dead, skeletons everywhere, half-eaten, flesh, a whole country of death, which it is now. Slowly bring it back. Let the coasts recover.

Let life begin again. See cities springing up again, lights turning on. Bring the destruction and the ruin back towards this land, this sacred land.

The highway has trucks running again. The local towns still have people. The walls of your cabin have suddenly come back.

The paint is fresh on the walls. The dust on the floor shapes into bone again. The bone stacks itself, bone stacked upon bone.

There's a skeleton sitting in meditation before an altar, and then skin begins to cover the bone. Living skin, flesh, warm, blood. Then you come back to your forehead.

The skin closes around the forehead, and right in the middle of the forehead, again, there's still a little tiny patch of bone. And you watch the last tiny patch of bone close up, the skin closes up, and then you're sitting in your room, you're meditating, and your mind has been nicely brought down, and you're not thinking about dinner anymore, okay? And that's Luddhima nirshak, okay?

Slowly come out of the meditation. Slowly come back out. And then open your eyes, okay?

So that's the first level of Luddhima nirshak, okay? I'm mentioning it because if you are, what do you call it, afflicted on a certain day by distraction, if you just can't get over distraction, you can try it, okay? And it brings you down.

It brings the mind down. It's that little knob and it brings the mind down, okay? It brings the mind down a little.

That's Luddhima nirshak, all right? So what is samdhama nirshak? How do we do the mind, right?

What is the next step? When the mind, the problem with the mind, right? We said tsang, dak, what was it?

Tsang, dak, dak, tsang de dak dak, okay? Tsang de dak dak. So let's go to feelings then, okay?

And the traditional meditation is that in the end, all of your feelings, even the good feelings, are suffering, right? Even when you have a nice dinner, even when something you're trying to do goes well, even if people are praising you, it will die, right? It will always pass.

So then you think of suffering, okay? That's sorba. That's the awareness of your feelings, all right?

The awareness of your mind is to see that your mind is changing instant by instant, okay? You examine your mind, you see that it's changing instant by instant, which can be a good thing because you know that it's changeable, okay? You can change it into something good, all right?

Then the supermarket of things in the world, whether they're going to help you and other people or whether they're not helpful for you and other people, that doesn't need explaining. You can do that yourself, all right? The basic thing is that if something contributes to the welfare of others, it's useful, and if it doesn't, it's not useful, no matter how good it looks, okay?

That's the basic level of the four awarenesses. There's a higher level, okay? There's a higher level.

So what I'd like you to concentrate on is sorwa jambanirsat, where you gain the ability to step back and watch your mind, okay? So that's all. If there's nothing else from this teaching, gain the ability to step back and watch your mind, all right?

In a higher level, okay, I'd like to go to a higher version, all right? We could call it mahamudra, okay? In Tibetan, chakyatimbo, all right?

There's a higher version of watching your mind. There's a higher version of observing your mind, of bringing it up or down, and that's called mahamudra, okay? So I'd like to talk about mahamudra.

There are two levels of mahamudra, and I'm talking about the mahamudra taught in the tradition of the Dalai Lamas, okay? There are two levels of it. One is a very interesting exercise.

You can't name anything. Let's talk about a problem. Let's talk about the tent is noisy, okay?

The wind is too strong. It was really strong this morning, I mean, at five. I didn't think the tent was going to survive, but let's say you're unhappy because the wind is too strong, okay?

There's some problem with your cabin, okay? There's some problem with your cabin, right? You don't have propane, or the toilet's not working right, all these ecological things are all crummy, okay?

Don't ask them. The solar's not working right. The compost toilet is not working.

The compost toilet turned into a fly factory. The solar thing doesn't work whenever there's darkness or cloud, and that's when you're usually eating, okay? So you feel upset, right?

Something's wrong with your cabin and you feel upset, or they messed up the delivery and the coconut nibs are from Guatemala instead of Ecuador, and, you know, something big. So then you feel sort of, you feel irritated, okay? You feel irritated.

Then the mind starts to assign blame, okay? This is human nature. This is the nature of the mind.

Don't forget we're watching the mind, okay? We're watching the mind assign blame, okay? I would say probably, I can't name names because I'm not supposed to name names.

So let's say Sam, the director of Dyer Mountain, didn't go to the right health food store in the town that used to be called Tucson, okay? It's probably his fault. The guy, let's call him Joe, who collects the notes at the mailbox and breaks them down with his dear partner Jane.

They don't have their act together. They didn't get the notes right, okay? I wrote a note last week about the Ecuador thing, and probably he messed it up or she messed it up, or maybe he didn't mess it up and Sam didn't mess up the purchasing, but Jane didn't get it into the box to be delivered, okay?

Like you examine, right? That's nature. I imagine that you do it sometimes when you don't get what you asked for, right?

I did. I remember. So that's a natural state of mind, and you have to watch your mind thinking like that, okay?

You have to watch your mind thinking like that. Mahamudra, first-level Mahamudra, is to introduce a counter-voice into your mind, okay? You can call it the devil and the angel, okay?

So first-level Mahamudra means introduce into your mind another voice, a second voice, a second opinion, all right? Introduce into your own mind consciously, purposely, as a meditation skill. Introduce into your own mind a counter-voice.

That counter-voice is going to be the voice of wisdom, which understands karma and emptiness, all right? And that counter-voice is going to whisper. The counter-voice is very weak at the beginning.

It can only whisper, all right? Oftentimes the whisper is not heard, all right? But the counter-voice is going to say, you know, have you met all your commitments this week, you know?

But it's going to say it like, have you met all your commitments? Then you're going to try to brush it off your shoulder, like a little angel, right? Like this little fairy, what do you call, looks like a dragonfly, you know, like that little Peter Pan thing.

So she's like saying, well, have you met all your commitments this week? Are you doing your five times book? And then you're like, you're trying to brush it off, right?

You're trying to brush the angel out. It's giving a second opinion. The angel is suggesting that the bad things that happen to you in your life, the things that cause you to be unhappy, are a direct mirror of how you've been behaving recently, okay?

And nothing else, okay? And then Mahamudra meditation means start a fight, pick a fight, okay? Purposely pick a fight.

Introduce, what do you call it, a second dissenting opinion in your mind, okay? Purposely let your mind, where are you by the way? While the little fairy tale Peter Pan angel is saying, well, maybe you didn't meet your commitments last week, and while the 99.9% of your mind is blaming Sam and Jane and Joe, right?

Right? Where are you? You've stepped back, okay?

You must step back. To do Mahamudra, you must step back, okay? To meditate, to read Geshe-la, you have to step back and watch the mind.

To do Drama Nirshak, you have to step back and watch the feelings, right? In Mahamudra, you have to step back and watch the debate in your mind, okay? In most people, there's no debate, okay?

Because that little fairy dragonfly girl got squashed a long time ago, okay? Sorry, some of them are all upset. Okay?

So, you're introducing a magical being into your head, right? Small as she is, and then there's this big clunky evil, what do you call that guy? Transformer guy in the other part of your head, right?

And they're going to punch it out, and then you step back, okay? You don't want to be between Peter Pan and Transformers when it gets hot, okay? So, you step back and you're watching, okay?

You must learn to do it, okay? Your whole life will go smooth. Your whole life will change, okay?

The people who are stuck in their meditation practice, or I'm not making any progress, just consciously try to step back and watch the rest of the mind, and then you're like 90 miles ahead, you know? Just to do that, step back. You're standing there making dinner, you know?

You spill something. The 8,000 ants are already on it, and you're like, no, and you're like, how do I feel right now, you know? No, you're watching how you feel, and let it become a reflex, you see, to watch, step out of your mind, step behind your mind, and watch it.

The most important debate you can have is the blame debate, right? And you've got to pull it, you've got to, what do you call it? You've got to pick a fight, and you've got to get the debate going, you know?

Push that little Peter Pan thing into your ear, and say, go at him, you know? And then watch the fight, watch it as it goes. Listen to the fight, okay?

And she will try to convince you, you know? Don't you remember last week, you were going to get up at 3.30, and you just like slept in and read a science fiction novel, which got snuck into that psalm somehow? And then you're like, then like 90% of your mind is like, yeah, yeah, I read a science fiction novel, what's the problem?

Geshe Michael said we had to relax a little bit, you know? And then, but you made a commitment, you know? The little fairy, Peter Pan is saying, but you made a commitment, you know?

And you say, yeah, I made a commitment, but I changed it, you know? It became inconvenient, you know? So anyway, then you, the little Peter Pan thing is like, you got to introduce her into the mind, let her start the fight.

What happens if you do this over a long period of time? You can see good Buddhists walking through bus terminals talking to themselves, you know? Because the mind is talking to itself, you know?

Part of the mind is constantly judging others, unhappy with the situation, not enjoying itself, not having fun, nothing's magical, part of the mind is living like that. And then if you're following this path, you try to introduce into the equation a dissenting voice, okay? So like you're blaming Joe and Jane and Sam, right?

And then you try to introduce a dissenting voice, okay? That's all. Then you must step back and watch, and that's enough to win the fight, okay?

That's enough. Peter Pan can win if she can just get in, okay? Why?

Because she's right, okay? Put Peter Pan in the ring with blaming Sam and Joe and Jane, and Peter Pan's going to win. She just has to get in the ring, okay?

If you can get her into the mind—Mahamudra, right? If you can get her into the mind saying what? Maybe it's what you did last week, okay?

Let her come into the mind, let her suggest that everything that's happening to you is coming from you. And it's exactly, it's perfect justice, you know? Everything that happens to you is 100% perfect ecology of the universe.

Everything you do to others comes back in spades, right? Amplified. And let her whisper that to you over and over, okay?

And then gain the skill of stepping back and watching her whisper, and you're home free. You can't fail after that, okay? If you could just give her a voice, let her say those things, what?

Something bad is happening and she's whispering, it's because you did something last week. You did the same thing to somebody else last week, you know? Just let her fight it.

Let her fight the other state of mind, okay? Then you'll never be unhappy. It's not possible, okay?

You can't be unhappy. If Peter Pan is in your head, you can't be unhappy, okay? That's all, okay?

That's the essence. In the higher schools, in Mahamudra, Peter Pan is... Let Peter Pan in your head, okay?

And watch her. Learn to step back and watch her. So we've learned some different ways of watching the mind today, okay?

We've learned, like, you could watch the mind with sheshin in a meditation to see if you're too busy or you're not active enough, right? We could watch your mind during meditation to see if you're busy, too busy, or not active enough. And you could expand it to your entire life, to each week in your life, and say, was I active enough this week or was I too active this week?

Was I, like, scattered and was I trying to do too many things? Am I just, like, trying to keep myself busy till I die? You see, a lot of people are doing that, right?

They know what's going on and they're trying to stay busy so they don't think about it, right? Am I just trying to keep myself busy or am I just indolent, you know? I should be learning the courses, I should be learning how to teach yoga, you know, I should be meditating, and I'm just not doing it.

Where am I? So, we're talking sheshin, right? Watching chingwa or guppa.

Am I too active or am I not active enough, okay? Then we have another state of mind that we talked about, right? Am I blaming or am I understanding, you see?

Watch the mind, watch the mind to see what is deciding about that. Am I blaming or am I understanding the way things are, okay? Learn to step back from the mind and watch this dichotomy, okay?

These two extremes, right? Either I'm blaming, either things are coming from me, or it's all Sam and Joe's fault, okay? It's a choice, right?

Either I'm too active or I'm not active enough, it's a choice. And it goes on like that. There are many, many kinds of those feelings, you know?

Am I selfish or am I serving, you see? Am I thinking about me or am I thinking about others? Like, that's a dichotomy.

The mind draws these dichotomies. Watch the dichotomies. If you don't watch them, if you don't learn to step back and watch your mind, take those extremes.

Am I doing this for myself or am I doing this for other people's good, you see? Am I not busy enough or am I too busy? Am I blaming the condition of my life on other people or am I looking into what I might have done to make it this way?

You see what I mean? So then, when you learn to step back, you can call it Mahamudra, you can call it Geshe-hin, you can call it Chödram and Nirshak, it doesn't matter. When you learn to step back and look at the dichotomy, a unification takes place, a grand unification takes place, okay?

Something happens inside of you. A unification of division takes place, all right? We talked yesterday about the most basic type of division or dualism, right?

Division in your life, which was what? It was me and you, okay? We were talking about two people's mouths, right?

And we decided that if karma is true, the only way I'm going to get a donut, which didn't happen by the way, the only way I'm going to get... I mean, they all begged me something, but I guess they don't have donut. Maybe they need donut.

That could go on the list, okay, Joe? Probably three or four of them need big donut-making machines, okay? But that's the most basic dichotomy, right?

It's between me and you. So you have your mind, you split off a part of your mind, a part of your mind is watching you and me, okay? Can you unify you and me, you see?

Can you bring them together? Is there a way to unify them? And why are they split in the first place, okay?

Why are they split in the first place? Can you hear me? Hello, hello, hello.

Maybe just enjoy. Okay, let's try. So it seems like all the kinds of watching your mind that we've talked about, the mind is watching two things in some kind of conflict, right?

Peter Pan is trying to say that the delivery problem was your fault, and the other part of your mind is saying it was somebody else's fault, right? You can't collect karma unless there's somebody else, you see? You can't make a karma without someone else to do it towards.

So the very foundation of what creates our world is based upon difference between me and you, right? I can't make a karma without doing something to you, good or bad, and that creates my world, you see? So then there's another dichotomy going on.

In some texts they have a beautiful thing about what's going on, what makes the great divisions of the world between me and you, and then they say it's the two side channels, okay? It's the two channels in the inner body, all right? It's the ida and the pingala, okay?

So Prana moves through the two side channels in the body, the ida and the pingala, and then there's this dichotomy created between you and me, you see? Between the seer and what is seen, okay? And then Je Tsongkapa has a beautiful piece about it.

He has several, two tantric books he wrote about it, and on the right-hand side of your body in the back, right, is the pingala. It's a certain channel in the inner body, right? And sometimes Prana flows through it.

If Prana flows through the right-hand channel, then you feel angry or you feel upset. It's a red channel. In the Yoga Sutra it's called surya, right?

The sun channel, okay? And then on the left there's ida, the sheep channel, or the chandra, the moon channel, all right? And then Je Tsongkapa has an interesting discussion of why do we see these divisions between things, you know?

Why does there have to be a Peter Pan fighting with Transformer? Why does there have to be me against you, you see? Why does there have to be a choice between two different things, right?

And then he says a beautiful thing. He says it's called jungwa and jukpa, okay? Jungwa means something is coming out.

Jungwa means something is coming out. And jukpa means something is entering or engaging, okay? Then he calls the pingala jungwa.

He says the right-hand channel is where something is coming out. And then ida is jukpa. The left-hand channel is where something is entering in, okay?

And so what's coming out of the right-hand channel and what's entering into the left-hand channel? He says when you first start to see something, let's say the rain, okay? There was a first moment that the rain came, right?

Before that there was no rain, and then the rain started, right? So in the first moments of the rain coming, a seed opened in your mind, and then out of your right-hand channel, jungwa, out of the right-hand channel comes the birth of a perception, okay? Out of the right-hand channel comes the birth of a perception of the rain, okay?

It flows. The way he writes it, it feels like he's saying, the rain is flowing out of your right-hand channel, and your perception of the rain is flowing out of, the beginning of the perception of the rain is flowing out of the right-hand channel. The right-hand channel throws forth the rain.

Then he says the prana shifts over to the ida, and you have a perception of the rain. He calls it dok simpa, che simpa, and che shimpa. So when the prana enters the ida, then you start to perceive the rain.

By the way, it just left the ida, okay? Got it? It's kind of beautiful, you see?

You have a perception. Out of the right-hand channel comes the birth of a perception, because the right-hand channel throws forth, from karmic seeds, the rain, to seem like an object. And then the prana moves to the left-hand channel, and then you perceive what was thrown, you engage, right?

Jukpa. You engage in the object which was thrown forth by your right-hand channel, okay? And then later there got to be a lot of confusion about which channel was responsible for misunderstanding me, and which channel was responsible for misunderstanding stuff, okay?

And it comes from, it's a little bit delicate, okay? So you can say that the tendency to split things into you and me, or the tendency to split things into the seer and what is seen, right? You and me.

You can say that you are hardwired for that, you see? It's hardwired into a human body. And by the way, the fact that you are, what do you call it?

I wish you could help me. That the shape of the right side is a reflection of the shape of the left side of your body. You can't say it.

Anyway, symmetrical. The fact that you are symmetrical, you know that you have one arm over here and one arm over here, and they kind of match? And one leg over here and one leg over here.

It's supposed to be because of the ida and the pingala, okay? The two channels flow through your body, and they are responsible for the symmetry of your body. Your body itself is dualistic.

Your body itself is like those kids' papers, they fold it in half and they cut it and then they open it up and the right side looks like the left side. Your body is a reflection of the fact that you are hardwired to see the world wrong, okay? You are built to see the world wrong, and it's expressed in your arms and legs, okay?

And your two eyes and your two nostrils and your two ears, got it? It's very interesting. So Tsongkhapa is saying, the dichotomy between me and you, what sees and what is seen, right?

They say it in the Dhakye, right? The vines of grasping and what is grasped, right? Tsikshin, Tsongkzin Tsikshin, jomba, I should destroy them, you see what I mean?

Those are the source of the dichotomy, all right? So something is interesting when you're in the practice that we're going to be doing. When you step back from your mind, when you step away from your mind, you'll be watching the dichotomy, right?

Whether it's Peter Pan or Transformers, whether it's thinking about me or thinking about others, right? Whether it's being aware of objects or being aware of subjects, you're going to step away from your mind and you are going to observe the duality which you were built to create, okay? Which your mind and body create by their very nature.

You know, somebody who's not a Buddhist would ask, well, when did it start? Because if you can't pinpoint when it starts, it doesn't have a cause. A Buddhist or a Hindu would say, if you can pinpoint where it starts, it didn't have a cause, okay?

We would say, when did this habit begin that people had two arms and two legs, right? When did left side, right side symmetry begin? And we would say, it's a reflection of your channels.

And they'd say, when did the channels, what started the channels? And we would say, misunderstanding. And then they, ne ngen len, right?

Subtle negative seeds, ne ngen len, which you carry from life to life. They are responsible for the symmetry of your body. The fact that you are split, okay?

And that your body is, your inner body is split, all right? It, it, it didn't have any beginning. You've always been that way, okay?

In the last life, you had a vidya. To put it in Yoga Sutra terms, in the last life, you had a vidya. It woke up in this life as asmita.

Because of them, you started doing raga devesha. Because you're under the influence of abhinivesha, of misunderstanding in the moment, right? So this has been going on forever.

And you've always had that. What, what we're suggesting is very cool. If you can step back out of the, get out of the two boxers, what do you call it?

Step away from the two guys fighting in your mind all the time, right? Always two choices, right? Should I do more or should I do less?

Should my schedule be more strict? Should my schedule be less strict? You know, like that.

Should I go to the stuff during the break or should I, or is it a distraction? You see, your mind is constantly presenting you with choices, two choices, right? A dichotomy.

And what's cool is, what I'm suggesting, and then I'll stop, okay? What I'm suggesting is, learn to step away from the dichotomy. Learn to step back and watch it going on, you see?

Watch, watch Peter Pan debate with the Transformers whether, you know, your delivery was screwed up by Joe, Jane, or you, okay? And step back and watch your mind get distracted or get dull, you see? That's another dichotomy.

Step back and watch, watch your mind to see if it's going to get, think of too much stuff or think of not enough stuff during your meditation. It's going to get spaced or it's going to get distracted. Learn to step back and watch.

Learn to step back and watch whether you are here and doing what you're doing for some personal reasons or is it really to serve others, right? This is this dichotomy in the mind. If you learn to step back and watch the two choices, you unify.

That's the end of the choices, got it? You, that destroys them. That's a higher mahamudra, okay?

That's very interesting in the Panchen Lama. It's a higher kind of mahamudra. By stepping back and watching the many choices your mind presents you with, you overcome those choices and you end them.

It's very beautiful. It's very beautiful, okay? You can, if you learn to step back, there will be no more distraction or dullness, you see?

If you learn to step back, you won't be selfish anymore. And if you learn to step back, you won't separate me and you anymore, because those are all false. Those were made by the ida and the pingala, which was made by the habit of just splitting things, which was made by the ida and pingala last time, which was made by its own habit of splitting, you got it?

So, what I'm suggesting is not just a means of watching your mind. It's a way to unify the two great forces in the universe that keep you from getting enlightened, okay? It's a way to unify things, okay?

Step back and watch the mind. Take choices and you will unify them, and you will overcome the division between you and me, okay? Why...then I'll stop, okay? Why would it end it, okay? And that gets into this very basic thing. It's also treated in the Mahamudra text, okay?

There's a debate about why...so why should observing it end it, right? Why should stepping back and watching it end it, right? And it's a very beautiful...some of you heard it already. It's in the...it's in one of the Penchen Lama's works of Mahamudra called Dangsang Shanda, right? The Devil Debates the Angel, right? And then there's a question comes up.

A very beautiful...the debate is raging between understanding your world and not understanding your world. The devil and the angel, the debate between them is raging in this poem. It's like a 50-page poem.

And the debate is raging quite well, you know? It's going very well. And then, I don't know, how much of it do you want?

I mean, let's...we'll stop. It's kind of entertaining, okay? It starts out with the angel entering the person's mind.

The angel enters a person's mind and says, what should I say? They say, look, it's possible in life that you...your mind has misunderstood things forever, okay? That's your basic condition.

Your mind has always misunderstood things, okay? At some point in your life, you meet somebody who tells you, the mistake in your delivery was your fault because you didn't meet your commitments last week, okay? The problem with your delivery is coming from you.

You meet somebody. That's called the path. That's called mahamudra at the path.

The state of your mind misunderstanding the delivery since forever is called the original mahamudra, okay? Mahamudra of the path is when you start to get it, and Peter Pan starts whispering in your ear, okay? Then you've reached mahamudra of the path.

If you can keep up the Peter Pan thoughts, right, then sooner or later you will have a direct experience of emptiness, okay? Then you will start to work on your mental afflictions. You'll use that knowledge to address your own negative emotions, like jealousy, okay?

Who are you jealous of? I'm jealous of Joe because he's interested in my girlfriend, right? So where did Joe come from?

Joe came from Nebraska. And then, you know, the little, what do you call it? Peter Pan says, no, Joe didn't come from Nebraska.

Joe came because you were messing around with so-and-so's girlfriend last year, you don't remember? What do you expect, you know? Then it's very hard to be jealous of Joe because you know it's coming from what you did, okay?

It's just coming from you. So then, gradually, you overcome your negative emotions because Peter Pan keeps telling you it's your fault, okay? Then you reach nirvana, and then you wipe out your neng-ngen-len-bakchaks, your subtle shadows of former misunderstanding, and you become enlightened, and you take on a form which can serve billions of beings, and that's the mahamudra of the result.

So there are three levels of mahamudra, right? Then the angel says, in closing her description of your enlightenment, she says, but after you get your angel's body, don't think that it's not coming from you, got it? That the angel says, don't ever think that when you reach your Buddha body, that it was coming from anybody else.

It's coming from how you treated people, got it? If you were to slip and think that your Buddha body came from somewhere else other than how you treated others, as you were on the path, right? Then ignorance would enter your mind, the devil would enter your mind, and then you would not be enlightened, okay?

Therefore, the devil cannot stay in your mind, misunderstanding your messed-up delivery. We cannot allow it to stay in the mind. And then starts the war.

Then the war starts. Okay, I'm taking you back to the beginning of the war, and then I answer the question, because I'm going to time it to end at six o'clock, okay? So then the devil says, listen, you can't kick me out of the mind.

And the angel says, why? And the devil says, I've been here forever. I've been taking care of you forever.

If it wasn't for me, where would you be? I keep you fed, I keep you clothed, I keep number one on top, I keep you watching out for number one. What would you do without me?

You need me in the mind. I have been your companion forever. I have been the mind's companion forever.

You can't say I got to leave the mind so I don't screw up your enlightenment. Got it? At the end.

Got it? So then wisdom has this beautiful answer. The angel says, Peter Pan says, excuse me, but for two people to accompany each other, they both have to exist.

You know, like you can't say I have a pair of oranges if one of them doesn't exist, right? You can't say, ignorance can't say I've accompanied the mind forever if one of the two of them doesn't exist, the mind or ignorance, okay? Got it?

The devil, if one of the two doesn't exist, you cannot have had a partnership, okay? Then ignorance, okay, this is cool, okay? I'm getting to your question.

Eventually. Then ignorance is very savvy and slick. That's how he stayed in your mind so long.

And he says, listen, you know, what are you saying, I don't exist, or are you saying the mind doesn't exist? And the angel says, I'm suggesting you don't exist, okay? And then the devil has a very cool answer.

He says, oh gee whiz, I thought Peter Pan was high school. You know, I thought Peter Pan was Madhyamika, Middle Way, you know? And the angel says, well, I am, you know?

And he says, oh, you know, I thought Peter Pan would never fall into the extreme of thinking things don't exist, just if they're not self-existent. This is a very slick answer. You know, he's not dumb.

He responds to the angel and says, are you accusing me of not existing? Why are you accusing me of not existing? Because I come from you?

Because I'm an illusion? You thought I didn't come from you, and you just figured out I came from you, and now you think I don't exist? Is that why you say I could not have accompanied the mind from beginningless time?

Got it? So, the devil attempts to correct the angel. The devil says, rather, if you were a good Madhyamika, you should have said, ultimately speaking, I don't exist.

You shouldn't have accused me of not existing. You shouldn't have accused me of being part of a partnership that couldn't exist because I didn't exist. Got it?

You can't have a marriage if the wife, the bride, has left town. Okay? He says, so I'm assuming you mean I don't exist in an ultimate sense.

Is that what you mean? And wisdom says, no. Wisdom says, you don't even exist in a relative sense.

You don't exist as a projection of my own mind. You don't exist as a creation of my past kindness towards others, or my past deeds towards others. You are not that.

Okay? Like, it gets very sophisticated. I'm getting to your answer within five minutes, within nine minutes.

Then, it's very cool, then ignorance says, so you're suggesting that I don't even exist as your projection, right? And never did. And wisdom says, right.

Okay? And then the devil says, well, could you explain yourself a little bit, you know? And then wisdom says, I don't exist nominally in the way you, sorry, you don't exist nominally in the way you think nominally means.

I'll say it again. You don't exist, relatively speaking, in the way you think it means to exist, relatively speaking. Therefore, you don't exist.

Got it? Should we just skip that part? Okay.

Where did your misunderstanding come from, right? We've been talking about your whole world is split. You're seeing you and me's.

You're going to have a miserable life forever until you unify them. Do I exist? Do I inhabit my body?

Yes, relatively speaking. What's that mean, relatively speaking? I inhabit a body which is being projected by my mind.

Okay, you got to get that. Okay? I inhabit a body which is being projected from my head.

All right? That's the highest form of Dharmanirsa, by the way. Do you inhabit a body?

Yes. Is Michael in Michael's body? Yes.

Who put Michael's body there? Michael did. How did Michael put Michael's body there?

He fed the poor. Got it? So, can we say Michael inhabits his body?

Yes. Can we say Michael exists the way you thought he did? No.

Can you say his body is the production of organic food and herbal supplements? No, you can't say that. His body is a production of his kindness towards others.

He has served the sick. Therefore, he deserves to have a body, and he has gotten a body. Got it?

So, can you say the body is not what you thought it was? Yes. Can you say there's no body?

No. Can you say there's a body there which is the result of his feeding the poor in the past? Yes.

Can you say there's a body there which is the result of feeding the poor in the past in the way that ignorance thought it was going on? No. Got it?

Does the body exist relatively? Does the body exist as a ripening of your kindness towards others? Yeah, but not in the way ignorance thinks it exists as a ripening of your kindness towards others.

Got it? Ignorance himself doesn't exist as a ripening of some evil in the past in the way he thinks. Got it?

So it's okay for the angel to say, you never existed anyway. How could you have accompanied my mind since the beginning of this time? Get out!

Got it? How does that answer your question? Oh, okay.

I'm getting there. I got this time perfectly. Then the devil comes back very slick, very, very slick.

He's been there so long, don't think he can be pushed out easily. He says, look, can we both agree that what put me in your mind is karma? And then Peter Pan's going to say, what?

You can show me with your head, it's all right. He's going to say, yeah, you got into my head from karma. It must have been some karma, right?

In the Yoga Sutra, in the treatment of the five kleshas, it says avidyā, past life. Past life ignorance is what put current life ignorance into my mind. Got it?

Can we say that karma put the devil into my mind? Yes. In the moment that a karma is ripening, is there any force in the universe which can prevent it?

You see? In the moment that a karma ripens in your mind, is there any force in the universe which can stop it? Can you push a tree back into the ground?

Okay? Can you push a tree back into the ground? It's not possible, okay?

It's not possible. You cannot stop a karma once it's rising. Heyam dukham anāgātam.

You can only deal with future. That which has not come yet, anāgātam. You can only deal with things that are not here yet.

You can't change the karma right now, of this present moment. You can change, if you're really skilled, you can change the karma in an hour, or in two hours, right? But you can't stop a karmic event which is already in place, okay?

It's already, the seed has opened and the seed is coming out, the thing is coming out. The devil says to the angel, look, if karma put me here, not even a Buddha could remove me. I'm a result of karma.

I'm a result of the present karma, okay? Got it? I'm answering your question, it's coming.

Then, I got four minutes. Then wisdom says a very cool thing, punggul gāla shun, punggul mātung. Don't say, punggul gāla shun, punggul mātung.

Then that's that story about the guy who has fifty mules, and he's got them out to pasture, and then he has to bring them in in the evening, and he gets on his mule and he rides out, and he counts them. You know, you can't come home until he's got all fifty, and he keeps coming up with forty-nine, you know? So he rides there, and he rides there, and he counts again, and he, he's like, god damn, I've only got forty-nine of them, you know?

You got it? He forgot to count the one he's on, okay? So, the angel, in this text, the angel says to the devil, punggul gāla shun, punggul mātung, okay?

You're riding on the donkey that you lost, okay? Like, you don't understand. Saying that your karma put you here is why you have to leave, and not why you can stay.

Got it? Okay? Saying that karma put you here isn't a reason why you get to stay in the mind.

Saying that karma put you here is the reason why you have to leave, okay? Then the devil says, why, okay? Then the wisdom says, well, sooner or later, the mind will figure it out, you see?

Figure out what? That the mistake in the delivery was my fault, you know? Sooner or later, the mind will stumble upon the truth, right?

I failed to keep my commitments last week. I didn't get my cocoa organic nibs this week, okay? Like that.

Sooner or later, Shakespeare said, the truth will out, right? The truth will be revealed sooner or later. Sooner or later, you will understand who's really hurting you, and it's yourself.

Sooner or later, you will understand who put the seed in your mind not to get your delivery, and it's yourself. Sooner or later, you will make the connection that you didn't fulfill your sadhana commitment last week, and then you didn't get your groceries this week. Sooner or later, you will draw the connection.

After hearing it 3,000 times, you will draw the connection, right? You will draw the necessary connection, and that's the truth. Why is it the truth?

Check it out. I mean, you can do a positive experiment. Take something you want.

Think up something you want. I got one minute. Think up something you want.

Make a big, honest, compassionate effort to provide it to someone else, and see if it comes, okay? I had somebody today, I was talking to somebody today, and they said, I was telling them that their partner, it seems like a really beautiful partner, you know, this, who is that? Jane.

And, you know, I was saying, you know, you did pretty good for yourself, Joe. You know, this Jane is pretty cool, you know. And Joe told me, well, guess what, I just, do you remember I didn't have a partner, and then I asked you what to do, and you told me what to do?

And I was one of those very odd students who did what you asked me. And so, yeah, I made her. And you can do an experiment, okay?

Just do an experiment to see if you can make something good happen in your life by making something good happen in someone else's life. When you see the correlation, when you see the connection, then bring it back to the devil in your head, and say, you know, we don't need you anymore. You know, what do you call it?

You give them a, in my company they used to give you a diamond pin, and then they'd say, we don't need you anymore. They would retire you, you know. They'd say, okay, thank you for your 20 years of service, here's a $98 diamond, you know.

And they will retire you, right? So then you can tell the devil, now you have to go. You know, I don't need you anymore.

I can take care of myself. You weren't taking care of me, you were hurting me, right? You claimed that you were helping me watch out for number one, but that's why I had all the trouble I ever had, was because of you.

Okay? Then you kick him out. He must leave, because the truth is stronger than a lie, okay?

He represents a lie, okay? All right, time's up. Let's do a silent mandala, okay?

So, the end of the story is, watch your mind, invite Peter Pan into your mind. What's Peter Pan? Peter Pan is saying, all the stuff that's happening to you is coming from you.

That's all, okay? It's not enough to bring Peter Pan into your head. Bring Peter Pan into your head, and then step back, and let Peter Pan fight it out with the devil, okay?

And encourage them to fight, okay? Encourage the conflict within your own mind. And then she will win, sooner or later.

She always does, because she's so cool. Okay, let's do a mandala to offer that knowledge to all beings, that what comes to them is coming from how they treat others, and that's all, okay? Okay, so please, before tomorrow, at least once or twice, just as you're walking around, try to step out of your mind, see how you're feeling.

Try to at least observe how you feel, okay? That's all. See you tomorrow.