Что такое нирвана и как её достичь? (2011, Багамы), занятие 2

[Говорящий 2]
Tonight we continue with the program with Geshe Michael Rauch on What is Nirvana and how do we get there? And like yesterday, we will start with some music. So we welcome Geshe Michael Rauch and Mercedes.

Let us welcome them.

[Говорящий 1]
Hello. Can you hear? So we're going to play a little song.

It's a very ancient song from Israel. It's a song of mourning. But the center is a song of mourning just before a grave.

A grave is like this. Okay.

[Говорящий 2]
Lonely, the little tiny child My, my, darling, lonely Lonely, the little tiny child My, my, darling, lonely Oh, sisters too, how may we go For to prison this way Restore your name for whom you serve My, my, darling, lonely Then walk with me, poor child, for thee And all the mourners sing For thy parting, Lord, say you'll sing My, my, darling, lonely Lonely, the little tiny child My, my, darling, lonely Lonely, the little tiny child My, my, darling, lonely Hi.

[Говорящий 1]
So this is the second night on the road. Last night we talked. Oh, there's a reading.

I'm taking selections from many, many scriptures and sort of translating them and putting them into the readings. But Geshe Michael always does it at the last minute, so we didn't quite get them all printed for tonight, but you'll get it tomorrow. We'll get each day a little bit late, because we're doing it as we have free time.

But there are hundreds of pages about Nirvana in the Tibetan scriptures, and they're very beautiful. So it's kind of a hard... It's a difficult thing to choose which things to share.

So last night we talked about Nirvana as having three different meanings, the word having three different meanings. Nir means not, or down, or out. And van, we talked about va, three meanings of va last night.

One was nirva in the sense of blowing out a candle, or extinguishing all of our negative thoughts. Did you guys meditate about what's your worst negative thought? I mean, one person told me, but they got angry while they were telling me.

No, just kidding. But I almost got jealous of them. Anybody want to share?

Us here? Or too shy? I told mine, you should tell yours.

Ten. Ming, Ming that's so shy. Anger.

That's not very original. Any other? Desire for what?

Pringles? Say again?

[Говорящий 2]
Yeah, good.

[Говорящий 1]
That's good. Two more and then I'll start. I'm holding out.

Say again?

[Говорящий 2]
Impatience. In what sense?

[Говорящий 1]
Fear of death? Yeah? Impatience.

One more, one more. Expectation of klesha? Expectation of klesha.

Is the word expectation, is that a klesha? He asked is expectation a negative emotion? I don't think.

I think it could be, and it could not be, right? I think expectation of becoming nirvana is okay. And then expectation that you're going to get a promotion that you don't deserve.

That can turn into a klesha.

[Говорящий 2]
No, expectations of other people that let you down.

[Говорящий 1]
Oh, in the sense that other people might let you down. I think that can be a klesha. I think so.

It depends on how you perceive the other person. If you perceive that they're coming from you, and they let you down, then you wouldn't get upset. Then it's not a klesha.

You see? But if you thought they were letting you down from their own side, not due to anything you've ever done, then the upset feeling would tend to be amplified, because it's based on? Ignorance.

Ignorance, okay. So, then that would qualify as a klesha. Did anybody have any questions from yesterday?

About anything? Do you remember? Then I don't feel bad, I didn't give you any time.

Can nirvana be a temporary experience? Very beautiful question. He said, can nirvana be a temporary experience?

And there's a debate about it, and I'm going to cover it. Hopefully. Some people say you can drop down out of nirvana.

Okay? Some people say... I just have a question.

Yesterday you never used the word equanimity, and yet the entire time we were talking, it sounded like you were talking about a state of perfect equanimity. Is that a definition of nirvana? Okay.

Then he asked about equanimity. So about dropping down out of nirvana, there's two schools of thought, and some lower schools of Buddhism say it is possible to drop down out of nirvana. And then the higher schools say that, yeah, you have to say that, because the reason you guys think you can get to nirvana is mistaken.

And I'll go into it briefly. I mean, the lower schools believe that nirvana is achieved through something called shirakinamacchan, which means In the Yoga Sutra, it's I don't know. Anyway, in Tibetan it means if you reach a place where you have overcome your anger, simply because you're getting more and more deep into your meditation, progressively more deep, without content, so you're just becoming more peaceful because you are breathing slower, or you're trying not to think about anything, or like that.

You're just trying to calm the mind. The process of progressively calming the mind until it becomes deeper and deeper into a stillness is not enough to stop your anger forever. And you will drop back down.

So that's considered a trap. To think that just finding, finally, a house where the neighbors are quiet. No, I mean, these are all temporary things, right?

I found a house where the neighbors are quiet. I got my children to leave. You know, I...

And I stopped coffee, and then I stopped tea, and then I stopped green tea, and then I stopped decaf, and I'm down to water. No, there's a feeling that you're making progress, and your mind is more and more calm. But those are dependent on other circumstances.

That's not... You haven't addressed the root of anger. So, a stopping of anger, which comes about through only deep meditation.

In yoga sutra terms, in nishtanga terms, I think you could say, dharana and jnana without samadhi. You see? So, not talking about the content, but simply the focus and the duration of the focus.

Dharana and jnana. It would feel like you're overcoming your anger, but then the first time the kids come back, you get angry again. You see, you haven't addressed the root of the problem, which is avidya, using the meditation to stop avidya.

And then that stops anger permanently, and you cannot drop out of that. So, that's a good question. Second question was equanimity.

Upaksha. Upaksha is used in the teachings on nirvana in a beautiful teaching called The Difference Between Personal Nirvana and Enlightened Nirvana. And we'll talk about that.

So, there are two different kinds of nirvana. And according to the highest schools of Buddhism, it is possible to reach nirvana, which is everlasting, permanent, and not have compassion. It's possible.

There are people who can do that. So, just by raw understanding of ultimate reality, and without a burning concern for other people, it's possible to stop your anger forever. It is possible.

And then you become sort of a selfish little grub nirvana. There's a word for it like that. It's called suratabu.

Suratabu means... They call it rhinoceros-like nirvana. And then you ask the lama, what do you mean?

It's an old Sanskrit term. And you say, what's a rhinoceros-like nirvana? And they say, rhinoceroses don't like to hang out with other rhinoceroses.

They just want to be by themselves. So, that kind of nirvana is... The technical term is suratabu, which means rhinoceros-like nirvana.

So, it is possible, technically, to reach... What happens then is, you go into some kind of a spaced out, personal happiness nirvana. And then there's a beautiful description in scripture about how the buddhas of the ten directions are watching you space out in your little personal rhinoceros-like nirvana.

And they come and they tap you on the shoulder. They actually enter your mind. And they almost mentally tap you on the shoulder and say, hey, we've got to move on from here.

Because otherwise you would stay there forever. And one of the things they teach you then is the four immeasurables. Madri, Karuna, Mudita Upaksha.

They teach you those four... We call them causes for compassion. They teach you four attitudes that you can find in the Yoga Sutra.

Which is based... Maitri, meaning the desire that others be happy. Karuna, the desire that they not have pain.

Mudita, the desire that they find a higher happiness of liberation. And then Upaksha, meaning equanimity in the sense that the first three are directed towards all people without prejudice. Which is very beautiful.

So number four is the first three directed at all living creatures without prejudice. So in that sense, Upaksha would come up. The equanimity would come up.

That eventually you would want to share that nirvana with all other beings equally. And that's the meaning of equanimity in nirvana. It's a very beautiful question.

I hope you get that. The tapping process is a very interesting thing. So we'll talk about that.

Okay, let's move on. So we talked about nirvana in the sense of blowing out of it. And I didn't say, but you already know that the English words fan and ventilation come from van, right?

A in Sanskrit often changes to an E in English. And a V is interchangeable with an F or a P. So you get fan, or you get ventilation, meaning to blow, to blow out nirvana.

Then we talked about nirvana as unleaving something, va va. The unleaving of the illusion, which is what enables you to blow out the camera. So the two vas are related.

You unleave the illusion, which is nirva, and then you reach nirvana, blowing out of your negative emotions. And that is to destroy the enemy, which is nirvana. So van means to vanquish.

It came into the word vanquish. And those are the three vas we had last night. So this is an interesting thing, I mean, for me, I think for Swamiji, for people who spend their lives with this sort of thing, which I feel happy to be here, because I don't get to meet many people like Swamiji, who really enjoy these things.

But the Chinese struggled, the Tibetans and the Chinese both struggled with how to translate the word nirvana. We'll talk about it later, but Xuanzong, who is the Chinese translator of many of the early Buddhist virtues, he said there are five different reasons not to translate a foreign word into your current language, you know? Whether you're speaking Hebrew or English or Spanish.

This Xuanzong said, you know, there are five kinds of words that you should not translate. And because the Chinese decided to translate nirvana as nirbun, they didn't translate it. They just made a sound.

The two characters just mean ni and bun. And they're just the sounds of nirvana. It would be as if in English we chose to keep the words nirvana, rather than saying, did you achieve blowing out yet?

You see what I mean? And in English we have made that decision, I think, already. They have chosen, in English, I don't know about the situation in Brazil, but in English we have chosen to not translate it.

And then he gives some guidelines on when not to translate a word. And I think they might be interesting. He said, when the word is used in a mantra and it's secret, then you shouldn't translate it.

You see, I wrote the rest of it down. Then he said, if the word has so many different connotations in Sanskrit, that it would be a shame to restrict it to a single meaning by using the translation. And he gives the example of Bhagavan, which in traditional Buddhist literature is said to have 16 different meanings.

So it would be a shame to pick one of them and translate it. So he said, leave it alone. And nirvana is like that, I think.

Nirvana has so many sweet meanings that it would be a shame to call it blowing out and messy, unweaving. Then he said, if everyone got used to the foreign word and it would upset people. Like sansara is a mispronunciation.

It's wrong. It's like Moscow, which is Moscow, right? And it should be sansara, is the correct Sanskrit.

But if people are so used to it that it would confuse everybody if I used sansara all night. So then he said, in that case you should just leave it. The way people are mispronouncing it, if it has become general usage then leave it alone because you just confuse people.

And then the other one was where a use of a foreign word would lend the idea a sense of mystery, which is desirable. Like when you say nirvana, it has a certain sexy mystery to it. And then to nail it down as blowing out, it would not be so sexy.

So that is a beautiful idea that they had. So in Chinese they just call it nirvana. But then they define it as nye, which means the ending of suffering, the cessation of suffering.

So I think we'll get into that later. But the Tibetans, they chose to translate it. And they had two choices.

They could have done what they call a meaning translation or they could have done a word translation. So were they going to just call it blowing out? Or should they call it liberation?

See the difference? And they chose to they chose to use a literal translation. So they call it nyan nyan, like deva.

Try to say nyan. Nyan.

[Говорящий 2]
Le.

[Говорящий 1]
Deva. Nyan nyan.

[Говорящий 2]
Le. Deva.

[Говорящий 1]
Then the word nirvana is so used in Tibet constantly. Every moment. It got shortened.

We don't say do not in English anymore. We say don't. And in Tibetan they don't say nyan nyan le deva.

They say nyan de. So it got smushed into a single sound. Because everyone is talking about nirvana all the time.

And they don't have time to say nyan nyan le deva. They say nyan de. So but it's a beautiful word and I thought to start tonight with that.

Nyan nyan means grief. Like that kind of fit the song. I kind of thought the song would be nice.

It's a song of grief. And you can feel it even if you don't know the song. You feel in the melody.

It's a song of sadness and grief. And then le deva means to go beyond grief. To transcend grief.

So the Tibetans chose to translate each part of the word nirvana as going beyond grief. Then I thought to give you over the centuries how people have defined the grief in nirvana. Okay.

So here we go. I'm going to read some. There's a lama, a very close lama in our lineage called Kutso who lived in the 18th century.

And he said grief is how a mother feels when she has only one child. And she loves that child. I just had a friend she's a teacher at our university who had a baby Ora.

You know Ora. She came here long ago. So she just had a baby and I saw her.

Me and Jigme saw her the other day. You try to talk to her but it's hopeless. She's got this little chubby thing on her mouth.

She's like one year old now. And she talks she says three words and then she kisses the child on the head. And then she looks back up at you and she forgot what you were talking about.

And it's really frustrating. I thought I just took the baby away from her. And we had a conversation.

But you try to think about a woman like that who that's her only child. And how she can't stop from kissing the child every few minutes. Every less than a minute the child gets a kiss.

I don't know what she's going to do later. But if the child died suddenly, which happens right? I mean children don't wake up or something.

It happens. And then how the mother feels is nyange. That's the first meaning of the grief that you go beyond when you reach the mother.

That's the first meaning. Second one. This is a commentary called The Joys of Confession.

Proper confession to your own guru for example. That used to be my favorite unfavorite thing to do. I had to go tell my guru the bad things that I had done.

It was incredibly embarrassing and shameful. And it's very healthy. It's very good.

So this is a book called The Praise of Confessing in front of your guru. I'm not suggesting that you do it. And he says real grief.

We talked yesterday about the most stupid thing you could do when somebody called you stupid, right? What was it?

[Говорящий 2]
Yeah, you called him stupid.

[Говорящий 1]
Because that creates a mini-samsara. That's a good example of the meaning of the word samsara. So samsara doesn't have to be this global thing of suffering.

Mini-samsaras are being thrown into motion all the time. Meaning a downward cycle or a self-perpetuating cycle of pain. Someone calls you stupid because you called someone stupid last week.

And then you get angry and you say, no, you're stupid. And then you stupidly plant another person next week to come back and call you stupid. So that's a samsara.

That's the meaning of samsara. You started a cycle, a self-perpetuating cycle in motion. So in that commentary it said, you want to know what grief is?

Grief is having to watch the people of the world throw their samsaras into motion constantly. Grief is having to watch people respond to other people with violence constantly and know they will suffer in a week. The same injury.

You see, that's grief. If you want to know what grief is. You see, in this theory that Swamiji has been teaching us, Lord Krishna, and what we've been saying for years.

The whole theory is that everything bad that happens to you is coming because you hurt somebody else. So then the implication of that is that every suffering in the world was avoidable. Every single war, every single famine, every single unkind word said by one person to another in the history of this planet was unnecessary.

It was just a booboo. You see, it was a vidya. We just didn't know what to do.

And every single small pain of someone calling you stupid up to a nuclear blast over Hiroshima or something. These were all caused unnecessarily. They could have been avoided if people had known what to do.

You see, and then grief young in is to watch the world continue to suffer unnecessarily. If it was necessary, if it was unavoidable it wouldn't be so bad. But if it was all a mistake, if it was just all wrong thinking, that's a sad thing.

That's a tragedy. That's a tragedy of human history. That's...

Maybe tragedy would be a good word from young in. See, get that feeling. Okay, third way.

This is Master Vasubandhu who wrote the Abhidharmakosha, which is one of our most famous... It's one of the five great books that we study. Grief is part of the painful process of getting old and then dying, and we feel it when we are torn from those we love, or even when we must encounter those whom we dislike.

Okay. So he's from the 4th century. He's defining grief in nirvana as the innate condition of humankind that all people must die, and all must die, unless they overcome Abhidharmakosha.

They must die. If a person is not in this ashram or a similar place of study, they must get old and die. There's no choice.

They must get old and die. And I speak a lot at yoga studios. I'm called on a lot to speak at yoga studios, and then I can't help but feel bad.

I went to a very famous yoga studio in New York. The teacher is very beautiful, Dharmamitra. He's a very, very kind and very, very extraordinary yogi who does Niralambana, or what do you call it?

Headstand with no arms. His balance is so great, he does a headstand with no arms. There's a photo of him in Vogue or something.

[Говорящий 2]
Yeah.

[Говорящий 1]
On top of a sewer, what do you call it?

[Говорящий 2]
Metal cover.

[Говорящий 1]
In downtown New York, like this, upside down. And when he got old, he just had an operation, and he's the person that you would think is the healthiest yogi in the world. He doesn't eat anything bad.

And he got old. And that's all. He got old while he was doing yoga.

If you have two hours in yoga, you're two hours closer to your death.

[Говорящий 2]
You are.

[Говорящий 1]
And your bones are two hours more brittle. And that's how they break, finally. Enough of those yoga classes and then finally...

No, it's always like that. So anyway, he says that's grief. If you want to know what grief is, it's the condition that unless we are able to undertake extraordinary spiritual practices, which are learning in this life, the higher means of the deep yoga practices, then you must die.

Then you must die. Okay. Prajnavarman, another ancient Indian Buddhist, he said, passing beyond grief simply means to stop all your suffering.

And we'll talk more about that. Kalyanamitra, who's another Buddhist scholar, he said, passing beyond grief is to destroy all the impurities within you. Vinita Deva.

I like his. He said, passing beyond grief is reaching happiness and gaining the ability to stay there without ever losing it. And in the reading, the first page, it has a quotation from Lord Buddha.

He said, he was asked, he was called upon to define nirvana in a sutra called The Sutra of the Great Nirvana, which is the book which explains nirvana more than anything. And there he starts out and he just says nirvana means happiness. If you want to know what nirvana is, it's just to be happy.

And he doesn't say, you know, that's all he says. Vinita Deva adds, and to be able to stay there. Then Choney Lama, who's probably the best of all of these masters because he comes from a monastery called Surabay, which is my monastery, he, in the 1600s, he wrote a beautiful commentary on the Diamond Cutter Sutra, which is the only, it's the only commentary in existence in Tibet on the Diamond Cutter.

And he said, the grief that we transcend when we speak of going beyond grief in nirvana, is first of all the grief of our past karma and kleshas. And it is the grief of all of our pain. So he says, nirvana means going beyond suffering, but he's more precise.

And all of the great schools of Buddhism follow that. It's not just to go beyond suffering, it's to transcend the causes of suffering, which are, which is our misunderstanding things. So nirvana, for him, means to stop your suffering, because you finally understand what it's coming from.

So that's his version of going beyond grief. Then I put in two selections from the Buddha himself. Because I like them.

And it's too long to read. But I'll, one is, one is, I'll read one quickly. The other one's too long to read, I think.

And you have it, alright? But I'll read the one. It says, we crave the six objects of the senses, like ice cream from the boutique.

And we throw ourselves into the pain of the six different kinds of craving. The terror that this brings us is the grief which we call grief. Craving the objects of the senses is grief.

That grief is passed beyond when we no longer misperceive the objects of our senses. And then we are no longer born in the realms of pain. And thus do we pass beyond all grief, thus do we reach nirvana.

So he, it's very interesting, he wants to apply the word grief to the objects of our senses. And it's not wrong to say one of them is ice cream. And then, you know, it's a very personal subject for me.

Is it wrong to enjoy an ice cream? Are we not yogis if we enjoy an occasional ice cream? I'm talking you're not overeating, you're fairly hungry, you don't go to get an ice cream every day, it's like once a week.

You did a couple of yoga classes, it'll balance out the calories. You know, and is it alright to enjoy an ice cream? You see, and in this condition we say yes, it's fine.

You should enjoy your life. I mean your life is so short and violent and you know, hard, that if you get a chance to have a you know, vanilla ice cream or something, then go for it. You know, it's alright, that's a pleasure.

Then what would make it craving? You see, what's the difference between enjoying an ice cream and craving an ice cream? Like I saw, I always tell people I had dinner with the Dalai Lama, you know, and they said, really?

I said, yeah, with Harrison Ford too, in Washington D.C. And then they said, well how many other people were there? And I said, 600. And then but I was close enough to his table that I could watch him eating dinner and I don't know, probably everybody in the room was curious how the Dalai Lama looks when he's eating, you know.

And you know, does he just kick out at it like he, you know. And no, he goes for it. He was like, you know, he was smiling, he was taking huge bites, and then he was looking around for more.

And the weird thing was he seemed to be enjoying his dinner more than anyone. He was really enjoying the food more than anyone. So I think a person who has made good progress on the spiritual path, they have an ability to enjoy things which is even higher than other people.

You see? And yet they crave them less. You see?

They have less craving for it. So they crave them less, and they enjoy them more. So, but there's a deeper meaning of craving.

I mean, a basic craving, a gross craving, August craving, is where you want, it's a cringle craving. You know, I mean, you open that little thing there. You're smart, you sell it in little tubes.

But usually we can't fit it in the big tubes. And then you just tear off the top. And I don't know why they put that tin foil thing on.

It's like a spiritual obstacle, right? No, I mean, it's like eating your way. And you should just take off the plastic top and go right to the peanuts, you know.

And then you pull off the top, pull off the foil. I have friends who can pick out one and they break it and they eat it. I don't know.

I can't understand what they're doing, you know.

[Говорящий 2]
I try to get them to swallow. Sometimes they get stuck.

[Говорящий 1]
They get stuck in the opening and you have to open it. And that's a gross craving, right? You don't need more.

You're not hungry. You're not hungry at all. You know, because you just had an ice cream.

No, I mean, gross craving is when you keep eating. There's no possible reason to keep eating. Except that you feel nervous or something.

You know, you feel like, just nervous and you want to eat more. So that's a gross craving. But that's not what he's talking about.

That's not the craving for the six cents he's talking about. He says when you misperceive them. He says when you don't understand them.

So what does it mean to not understand an ice cream? Because that's really the important question. It means it basically means if you're wanting it, would be strong enough that you would hurt someone else to get it, then that's craving.

If you're wanting it, it's strong enough to not share it with someone else who wanted it, then that would be craving. Why? Because you couldn't do that if you understood where the ice cream came from.

You see, it's not possible to not share an ice cream if you understand how to get it. Got it? Okay?

It's not possible not to share an ice cream if you understand where the ice cream came from. The ice cream is a projection of your mind from a seed that was planted in your subconscious from a time in the past when you shared ice cream with somebody. If you understood that the ice cream came from planting a seed in your mind for ice cream, from sharing the ice cream, you couldn't not share the ice cream.

Got it? You would never not share ice cream. Why?

You want it. You want more. If you like ice cream, you have to give it away.

Understand? You have to. You don't have a choice.

If you are a real ice cream freak, like me, you must give it away. Whenever you get a chance, you have to give it away because that's how you get more. That's the only way you got the one to give away anyway.

Do you understand? So, that's understanding ice cream. And that's not craving.

It's not craving. It's understanding. So, what Lord Buddha is saying is that grief.

He's defining grief as misunderstanding where things come from. Okay? Why?

In the case of ice cream, why? What would be grief? Taking your ice cream away.

It would be not having any. And how do you get that? You don't share.

Why don't you share? Because you have a vidya. What does a vidya tell you?

If I don't eat it myself, I won't get it. What does vidya tell you? The only reason I can get it is if I share it.

Understand? Got it? It's not wrong to want this object of the senses.

It's wrong to crave them. And craving means to misunderstand them. Okay?

It's very interesting. It's not bad to eat ice cream. It doesn't hurt your soul.

It doesn't ruin your chances for Nirvana. To misunderstand an ice cream, it hurts your chances for Nirvana, whether you eat it or not. Swamiji said that today.

He was talking about doing something or not doing something. It's the same thing if you misunderstand it. Anyway, that's grief.

To go beyond grief for Lord Buddha and the way he defined it in that sutra was misunderstanding where the stuff around you comes from is grief. Because it is of the nature of grief and it perpetuates grief. Okay?

Got it? Alright. Okay, I'll do one more thing and if you have questions, I'll take questions.

So I'd like you to continue the meditation in the next 24 hours. What we were working on yesterday was to admit to ourselves our worst mental affliction, klesha. Okay?

I have a weird experience. I figured out something. Lots of people come to me with their problems and lots of people come to me to confess things, right?

Then they tell me, I say, okay, just tell me what happened. And they'll tell me something. And I know it's not the worst thing.

I know it's the second worst thing. You know? So I'll say, you know, they'll say, I gotta confess to you because I have jealousy.

I know that their worst problem is anger. And there's this thing where we can't admit the number one. We tell everybody it's the number two.

You see what I mean? If jealousy is your second worst emotion and your lama asks you what is your worst emotion, you'll say jealousy. Because no one wants to admit their first one.

We don't want to admit to ourselves our worst klesha. Because it's so much a part of our being. You see?

And without it, we would be like someone Remember when you were a kid and you picked your pimple out so the girls wouldn't think you were so ugly? And then it left a big crater? For like four days, right?

It's like that. If you tore out your number one mental fiction, 80% of your mind might be gone. You'd be all lonely in there.

You know? So pick your worst one and be honest. It's refreshing.

It's so refreshing to admit. Admitting your worst klesha is half of the war of defeating it. You know?

You're halfway done if you can admit it. If you can admit your worst habit to yourself, then you're halfway through overcoming it. So that process is done.

You have chosen with great honesty in the last 24 hours the one negative emotion that you have which is your most serious one. So we finished that meditation. Now I want you to try a different meditation.

Try to remember in the last few days the times that you have done. So, okay? You still have a chance to have it a few times before tomorrow morning when you meditate, right?

Sometimes I even have it during the meditation that I start thinking, what's my worst emotion? I think jealousy. And then I think about what?

And I think about that other Buddhist teacher. And then I start getting jealous of him again during the confession. So, you still have time to have it before your meditation session in the morning, right?

And then, what I want you to explore, really from my heart, what I want you to explore is how it makes you feel. Just explore how it makes you feel. Like, I've been doing this practice, you know, and then I was like examining my jealousy.

And then I isolated a few jealousy attacks that I had in the last few days, right? And, you know, and normally I just have them and I don't notice that I'm having them. But I think what I'm asking you is to try to notice that you're having an attack of your worst klesha, mental negative emotion, right?

But what I want you to explore is how it makes your mind feel when you're having it. Okay? How it makes your mind feel when you're having it.

And I wrote in the reading, I had an interesting experience the other day. Somebody asked me to do a video, like a three-minute video for some charity. I did like eight in one day.

Right, you were there? Day and a half, we did eight videos for different charities. So in the middle of talking about one of the worthy causes, I thought of this person that I'm jealous of.

And I actually stumbled when I was speaking, because I was speaking about this person that I'm jealous of, and I forgot what I was saying. You know, and then I then I came back. You know how you come back and then I just continue, you know, and please give money.

And then, uh... And then, uh... No, but then I played it back to myself a few times.

When I got home. I had the video and I played it back and I observed myself having my favorite klesha. And it was disgusting.

You know, it was really sad. You know, so here's this guy he's saying, he's very reasonable, he's saying, you know, we have this great need, these people really need your...

[Говорящий 2]
You know, and it was just...

[Говорящий 1]
And I was watching myself. It was really sad. Because only I knew what was...

Probably people thought I dropped a pen or something. But I, uh... But I was just thinking for a moment somewhere I don't live.

And then I came back. You know, and so what I want you to do is I want you to explore how it makes you feel when you have it. So now you have two jobs.

Try to remember a time in the last few days when you had your favorite klesha. But then I want you to try to get in touch with how it felt. And how bad it felt.

And how it threw you off balance, right? The definition of a klesha. It upsets the peace of mind of a person while they are entertaining it.

So I want you to try just to you know, remember one time in the last few days when you had a klesha and then try to repaint a picture of how it felt in your mind. How your mind felt during those few moments. And how bad it...

because that is grief. Got it? That's the grief.

And it feels really bad. And I don't want you to do anything about it. I just want you to feel it.

If you can't remember having your favorite mental friction, you can just bring one up. Like, think of someone you know, like get upset and then observe how it feels. Okay?

No, you can do that. I do that. Sometimes just for fun.

To observe how bad it is. Okay, any questions? We have a few minutes.

No. Can I? You had one already.

He didn't get one yet. Okay. I very rarely call anyone stupid.

But on occasion I myself think that someone is at least incomparable as stupid. Yeah, good, good, good. Opening lines of the fourth chapter of the Vasubandhi's Abhidharmakosha that we just talked about, which is the chakra on where the world came from.

Created. But in response to the question of is there a creator, he opens his chapter by saying, all the planets of the universe came from the karma of the people who live on them. Raw karma is thought.

Next line. Raw karma is thought. And what we say and what we do is only secondary.

So thinking strongly and clearly that another person is stupid is a karma and it's very close to the core. Karma shaya. It's very close to the core in which the karma is stored.

So it's much worse than calling them stupid. Which is bad news. Because I'm discreet.

But I think things a lot. And yeah, it's raw karma. It's the heaviest kind of karma.

And it's immediately stored. So we have to try to work with our mind and not even criticize people mentally. Did you have another question?

[Говорящий 2]
Okay.

[Говорящий 1]
One more then I think. Did you have one more? I didn't catch it.

[Говорящий 2]
Envy.

[Говорящий 1]
Oh, envy. Oh, no. To admire someone and wish they had their qualities.

Like that. That's the definition of faith in Buddhism. Shraddha.

Faith in Buddhism. We call it Deva. And it's called Tami Deva.

It has three kinds of Shraddha. But the most famous one is Tami Deva. Which means Prasadana Shraddha.

It means a clear faith. But what it means in scripture is that you admire the qualities of a person. Especially a person who is more spiritually advanced than you are.

And then you aspire to the qualities that they have. And that's considered the highest kind of faith. And the root of all right effort.

Because that kind of faith must precede the effort required to get those qualities. So they call Deva, Dungma, Tsonwa, Shinjam. Deva.

Say Deva. Dungma. Tsonwa.

Shinjam. These are the four steps, for example, for developing a meditation practice. If you have trouble.

You have people come to me and say, I've been trying for 10 years and my meditation practice sucks and I can't get it. It's just not happening. And then they would say in the Buddhist tradition you need four pre-practices.

Deva, Dungma, Tsonwa, Shinjam. So that's the same thing. Deva means you have to become convinced of all the cool things that are going to happen to you if you learn to meditate.

That's Deva. You cultivate a jealousy of people who can meditate. Which is a good jealousy.

I want that. Then Dungma means, I want that. You get a burning desire.

What did you call that? Mumukshutva? Mumukshutva.

I love that word. I mean, I don't know anything about it but every time Swamiji says it, I'm like, oh, mumukshutva. It's like a burning desire.

Like, I want that thing. That's number two. Deva, Dungma, Tsonwa means you work hard.

Because you want it so bad, you're willing to do the hard work. And you wouldn't want it if you didn't feel jealous of someone who had it already. Deva, Dungma, Tsonwa.

Then Shinjam means you get god damn good at it. You just get really good at it. I don't know.

At anything. Like the way Swamiji can teach scripture. That's Shinjam.

Shinjam means you're just really good at it. Because you worked at it. Because you wanted it.

Because you were jealous in a good way of people who already had it. So that's a virtue. That's considered a virtue.

To wish that they didn't have it is a non-virtue. That's different. If it doesn't sink into them, it's okay.

Let's stop there. I'm going to do a small prayer to give away the karma. It's a pleasure to teach here because these people are so right.

Thank you.