Лучшая история времени (Геше Майкл Роуч), занятие 1

[Speaker 2]
On behalf of the Three Jewels New York City Outreach Center, I'd like to welcome all of you to tonight's talk, A Better History of Time with Geshe Michael Roach. Just a quick, brief introduction from me. My name is Hector Marcel.

I volunteer at the Three Jewels, and I was trying to think how do I introduce the concept for so many of you who have been there and some of you who have not, what this thing, the Three Jewels, that is putting on this event is. And I can only do it in relation to Geshe Michael Roach. About 18 years ago, the Three Jewels was founded on a basis that began with Geshe Michael Roach in his 20s going to Asia where it was impossible to go, learning a foreign language, two or three foreign languages, in order to translate the Tibetan Buddhist teachings into English.

And not just into the English language, but into English concepts. So I tried to think what it would take for a 20-something year old today to go to a land far, far away, transform the way they think and conceive about the world, and then bring that back to a country where people only speak English. And for me, it was an introduction that transformed my life.

Based on meeting Geshe Michael and the teachings of Tibetan Buddhist philosophy at this place called the Three Jewels, a trajectory was born for myself and many, many other people that transformed the way I looked at the world. And I can say that if it wasn't for that man that traveled halfway across the world, the Three Jewels would not be here thriving today. We offer free of charge meditation, Dharma, yoga, and a few other bizarre little beautiful things.

We have a lot of fun there. We have a great time there. But people are doing that out of the kindness of their heart, with generous donations of time and energy and money.

Many of you here today. So I invite you for the next three nights or three days to take yourself on a journey and enjoy the beautiful, beautiful thing that comes from Geshe Michael Roach, who translated so much of this philosophy into a practical reality for us today. I welcome you and I hope that you have a great time.

Geshe Michael Roach.

[Speaker 1]
Hi, thank you for coming. Many old friends, some new friends I guess. And it's good to see you all.

Especially I see some of the three year retreatants who finished in April. Would you guys mind standing up if you just finished a three year retreat in April? Are you shy?

Yeah. It's sort of amazing to have that many people who spent a thousand days. I hope it wasn't a deep retreat.

I think it was. And we're very grateful that you're here. We're grateful that you're teaching.

They're all teaching in different ways. And it's a pleasure to see you in the world, out in the world. And I'd also like to thank the Three Jewels and especially Hector.

Can you stand up? Nancy Karen, are you here yet? And Michael Wick, the indomitable.

I don't know if Stilwell's here. He has so many children. Where are you?

So, they've been keeping the place going for, I don't know, close to 20 years. And they've been teaching steadily the courses of the Asian Classics Institute. 18 courses, free courses.

The whole cycle takes about five or six years, and they've done, they're into two and a half cycles, I think. And I'm very grateful for that, and very honored that you are carrying on that tradition of wisdom from the East. Nowadays, I've been, I kind of see my life as three big periods in my life, like somebody else.

And one was New York, and I don't know, I taught here for like six or seven years, and we finished the ACI courses, 18 courses, which is basically the Geshe course that Geshes finish in the monastery. I was going to show you, is that okay? This is showing off, okay, which I never do.

But I found recently the video of my Geshe exam, and they cut out, it was a three hour video, and they cut out the last few minutes. And I think it's Geshe Duterinjan is examining me, the final questions, and I thought you might like to see it, because I really like to see it. I look really scared out of my mind, and then afterwards I look very happy.

There's a trick to keeping the hat on. You have strings that you tie around your ears. It's a secret.

Jai Guru. Jai Guru. Jai Guru.

[Speaker 2]
Jai Guru. Jai Guru.

[Speaker 1]
Then after I came back to New York, basically I started teaching the 18 courses. Then I did a three-year retreat like these guys. Mine was much harder.

Just kidding. Yours was harder. And then after that I spent I think six or seven years teaching advanced Buddhism to a small group of people, I think 134 people.

Because I wanted to translate those teachings. So those two periods in my life, it was 20,000 pages of translation, and I feel like we covered the traditions of Buddhism, and they have been, in my feeling, transmitted to the West in an authentic way. So those courses are there, you can take them, you can start at the three jewels, it's free.

You have these two beautiful teachers teaching there, and very, very nice, fine teachers there, and beautiful people keeping it going. It's not easy to keep it going, you know, rents in New York are expensive. And like many other places, we are just, I feel like the people on NPR, when you listen to NPR, and they have the fundraising night.

But you know, we stay open, we just, we all squeak by, we all stretch it, and we all help out, and it's still going. So that was like the second period was in Arizona. And then recently for the last, I don't know, five years, I've been doing a thing called Diamond Cutter Institute, which is that we go to, mostly to other countries, we teach business people, and just regular people who are not necessarily interested in Buddhism.

We teach them about ways to be successful in their life, using the principles of karma, and then we explain the principles of karma without talking about karma, and without talking about Buddhism. And it's just meant for general audiences. We just got back from nine days in Mexico, and three and a half thousand people came to the talks.

In one talk in Mexico City, 1,300 people came. And they're never going to be Buddhists, and I've learned to not expect that, or even think it's desirable. I don't think people in Mexico are going to enjoy, you know, worshiping a god with an elephant nose, or 13 arms, or something, and who's blue.

They're going to get married in a Catholic church, and that's fine, and they should. But anybody in the world, what we've learned in 35 countries, is that anybody in the world appreciates the ideas of where things really come from, how the way that you treat others determines what happens to you, and what happens in your life. So, it gives you a structure by which to live your life, and it gives you a way to give your life meaning, and it gives you a way to make your life successful.

And that, I think every year, more than 10,000 people are coming to those teachings, and then I have to struggle to—before that we were in Moscow, Warsaw, Vienna, Geneva, Bucharest, Kuala Lumpur, Johor Bahru, and Singapore, and Tokyo, like that. It doesn't matter where you go. People—it makes sense to people that the way they treat other people might have something to do with what happens to them.

It appeals to the sense of justice in people's hearts, and in the end it gives them a framework by which to live their life, and to have a happy life, have a successful life. So, in this period in my life, maybe the third long period in my life of teaching, I've kind of come to realize that the benefit—I'm glad for the first two periods, because you need that foundation of understanding. I think it's really good.

My Lama used to say, when you go to the dollar store, which I have two in my town, that's all I have in my town, when you go to the dollar store, take a hundred dollars. And I think when you're going to be a Buddhist teacher, like these three-year retreatants, you should have those, like, 12, 14 years of training. You should have those 36 courses under your belt, 20,000 pages, you should understand them.

But when you go to teach a group of normal people, you should be able to speak in their language, and you should train yourself not to speak in Buddhist language, you see what I mean? And which is difficult for a lot of my friends. If you really want to help the general public, then you have to retrain yourself to present ideas and speak in terms that everyone can understand.

And that's a Buddhist tradition in the debate ground, for example. We're not allowed to use terms that the opponent doesn't accept. When you are presenting ideas for the general public, then it's sort of your responsibility to try to speak in their language, right?

So, that effort, we continue to do the deep Buddhist stuff, we have four Lam Rim retreats a year, ten days each. We do one of them every year in Guadalajara, near Guadalajara, in a town called, unfortunately, Tequila, in a Catholic monastery in Tequila, okay? And we do one retreat there every year, because many foreign guests would like to come and participate, and they can't get into the United States because of the rules after 9-11.

So, we do one long retreat there every year, free, free retreat, and then we do three ten-day retreats in Arizona. We used to do them in a little town called Prescott, which had a Boy Scout camp. The first day we went there, people slept in, what do you call it?

Bunk beds. The first day, one guy woke up and sat up and gashed his head open on the little bunk beds, because they're built for children. And, and so, last, I forget when it was, two months ago, we, because of the three-year retreatants, they not only completed a three-year retreat, but each one of them built their own cabin.

So, they paid for their own cabin, they worked to raise the money for their own cabin. Each one of them, of the 31 retreatants who came out, they built their own cabin, and with the understanding, with the agreement, that after the three-year retreat, they would donate it to Diamond Mountain Retreat Center. So, now we have, I don't know, something like 28 or something, because some of them were couples.

We have, we have some really, really, really beautiful cottages, and just as an experiment, we did our first deep retreat there, ten-day retreat, with a group of about a hundred people, two months ago, I think, a month ago, I don't remember, before Mexico, and it was unbelievable, it was just unbelievable. So, I'd like to thank the three-year retreatants for that also, yeah. And those are green cottages, they all run on solar power, most, almost all of them, and they have compost toilets, which grow all kinds of things.

Now, it's an experiment in being responsible to the earth. I believe that the way the retreatants lived those last three years, it will be the way we all have to live by the time your children grow up. There will be no more, enough, in California, for example, there won't be enough water for running water toilets, everything will have to be compost, and it's better for the earth anyway.

So, we're ahead of the times at Diamond Mountain, and the cabins are just really, really exquisite and beautiful inside. They have a very beautiful energy of very palpable patina on the walls, and the floors, and the ceilings, and very beautiful energy, and I'd like to thank you for that. It was a beautiful retreat, and so we canceled all the retreats in Prescott, and we're moving them all to Diamond Mountain, just because it's so beautiful, and so I'd like to thank you for that, it was a good job.

So, as I struggle to teach people around the world who are not Buddhist, and who will never be Buddhist, in a talk of a thousand people, what we've learned, say, in Singapore, a hundred will come to the retreat that we usually hold after the public talks, and then of those hundred, maybe ten will undergo deeper studies, deeper Buddhist studies, so they will end up coming to Guadalajara, and we have a beautiful mix of people, it's about 200 people, and they're all from all different countries, and everybody sings their own songs, and dances their own dances, and we do flamenco together, and it's very, very beautiful.

So, what I've learned is that, there's only about, in a group of a thousand people, maybe 1% will end up going as deep as these people did. So, how do you, what do you do with the other 990 people, you know? What is their belief system, and how can we help them, right?

Because they are suffering. Inevitably, people are born, they have difficulties in their life, making a living, they have difficulties having a family, having a partner, then they have difficulties with their health, many of us have internal difficulties, depression or addiction, things like that. Like, how do you help a person who's never going to be a Buddhist, and maybe they don't need to be a Buddhist, you know?

How can you give them something beautiful for their life, to share what you have yourself, what you've learned yourself, how do you share that with other people? And so, I've been struggling to understand what is the worldview of normal people, you know? Because to help someone, you have to understand how they think, right?

So, I kind of have to project my mind into the idea that, of someone who watches, the average American watches five hours of television a day, I've never owned a television, I don't think I've seen a television for many, many years, and how do I speak to those people, how do I relate to those people, you see? So, I've spent a lot of time thinking about it. On the DCI tours, two of the VPs are here, Scott and Arit Vesic, I'd like to thank them also.

I have to struggle on those tours, like how, I do experiments, you know? I was in Spain, and I talked about, I tried to relate it to Jesus and the teachings in the Bible, and then at the break, they came up and told me, don't do that, you know? I'm sorry, I'm sorry, you know?

Because I thought maybe that was the prevailing viewpoint of these people, you know? But what I came to understand, is that really, we run our lives by the viewpoints of science, you see? We are all, you can say I'm Muslim or I'm Buddhist or I'm Christian or I'm Jewish, but at heart, deeper than that, we all believe in a system which can blow up a city, or which can send a rocket to the moon, or land on a comet, right?

It just seems like if somebody could do that, then they must have their act together, you know? And they must understand something, and then in the end, we all believe things. Nowadays, especially in America where you've had education, there's not many countries left in the world where you don't believe most deeply in science, you see?

Your viewpoints, how, if I want to prove something to you, really, in the end, I have to use the scientific method. It doesn't work in America anymore to say Jesus said so, or the Bible says so, or George Washington said so, or like that. People believe something if it makes sense according to the principles of what we call scientific method.

Like, can you prove it to me that what you say is true? Do you have an idea? Have you done experiments?

Can you show results? Are they replicable? Can other people get the same results from the system that you're talking about?

And I think that's a good thing, and it took a long time for mankind to crawl out of superstition, you know? Like, belief in ghosts and devils, and it took a long time to come to this point where, really, it's scientific method is ruling the world as far as viewpoint. Whether you're Jewish or Christian or Muslim, it doesn't matter.

All of those groups believe in cell phones, you know? All of them. It doesn't, it doesn't matter, you know?

Okay, believe what you want about heaven or hell, but it's Apple or Samsung that makes the cell phone, and they are scientists, you see what I mean? So, in the end, we use science, we believe in science. So, I believe that we have to talk about science.

We have to, we have to, what do you call it? We have to show that how we think fits science, right? But I would like to go, I propose to go one more step further.

Like, a lot of Buddhist teachers are struggling to prove that Buddhism is okay with science, right? In my opinion, in my vision, science is good, science is very, very helpful, very, very powerful, but it's not, it's incomplete. It's still incomplete.

Scientific ideas are still incomplete, for, I think, two reasons, okay? So, the three teachings that we spend together tonight, tomorrow, and Sunday, which are, which are going to build on each other, they are really meant to address two incomplete things in science. One is just a factual problem, information problem, and the second is a, is what you could call a moral problem, you know?

Science, I'll give you a quotation from Stephen Hawking. I'm giving these talks on this, I've wanted to write a book about, called A Better History of Time for a long time, because he wrote a book called A Brief History of Time. It was one of the best-selling books in history, it was 250 weeks on the London Times bestseller list, and it's not complete, the book is not complete, the ideas are not complete, the ideas could be better, okay?

So, I like to call, I'm thinking about a book called A Better History of Time, I don't know if he'll sue me or not, he'd probably just ignore me, because it only sell a couple hundred copies, but, but I was thinking, this month a film comes out about his early life. Is it in New York yet? I don't know, maybe we should go see it tomorrow night or something, or Sunday, that'd be fun to have a field trip, like an excuse to eat popcorn and drink Coke.

I was, after I go to those movies, I get agitated afterwards, and then I finally figured out it was the Coke. So, we should, I thought, well, since his movie's coming about, about his early life, it would be nice to talk about his ideas while we're here in New York. So, that's what I propose to do.

I, I think, in the first case, science is incomplete because of certain paradoxes in its ideas. There are certain very severe paradoxes in science that we'll talk about. There are unsolved riddles in science that are solvable, I believe, if you go deeper with the tools that Lord Buddha taught.

And, and then secondly, and maybe more importantly, there's a quotation here from, I put it on the first page, okay, did you all get a reading? If you didn't get a reading, could you put your hand up and keep it up until the people sitting next to you beg you to put it down? No.

And then, these guys are quickly going to give you some readings. So, on page, what is it, page two, probably, it says science has a world belief which is still incomplete, okay. Number one, science is a world belief.

The whole world believes in science. If you ask a Muslim, you know, are you, in the Middle East, are you a Muslim or a scientist? They'll say Muslim.

But in the end, they all believe more in cell phones than in the teachings of Muhammad, you see. And then incomplete means there's still things to do. Science is still, has paradoxes inside of it about the most important things of science.

And then, here's a quotation from Stephen Hawking's famous book. It has certainly been true in the past that what we call intelligence and scientific discovery have conveyed a survival advantage. Meaning, the more we learn about science, the better able we are to feed the world or to treat the sick, okay.

So, in the past, the more scientific knowledge we've had, the more people survive in the world, the longer people live, healthier they are, okay. But, it is not so clear that this is still the case. Our scientific discoveries may well destroy us all.

And, that's an important part of science, I think. In a Buddhist viewpoint, a system is incomplete if it doesn't serve the welfare of living creatures, okay. A system is incomplete if it doesn't help humankind.

Then, it's an incomplete system. Especially because, according to Buddhism, if science were made complete, it would necessarily be compassionate. You see what I mean?

If we give the extra information to the scientists that can resolve problems like the wave-particle duality problem, okay. If we could supply that information, it would also necessarily make science something that always must serve people, people's ends, cannot destroy. A scientist who understood science perfectly would never make an atom bomb, okay.

That's the—if you understood your own system correctly, you would never wish, and you could never make a nuclear weapon. You see what I mean? As a weapon.

So, those are the two big bites I'd like to bite in these three days, okay. The first bite is what? We can give you more information for your system which makes it complete.

Your system is not complete. Your system has fundamental problems in it. You don't even know how light reaches us from the sun, and you admit it.

We don't know whether it's particles or waves, okay. No scientific explanation. Einstein tackled the problem, he said I can't solve it, okay.

Nagarjuna can, okay. We'll talk about it. And not in some, what do you call it, new age way, okay.

I'm not patient with new age stuff. I would rather have ideas that I can use in my real life to be happy and successful and get the things I want, you know. Physically and spiritually, I would like that.

So, I'm not proposing some hippie solution to Newton's problems, okay. It doesn't matter to me, you know. I'm not delivering opinions.

I would like to slowly prove to you that there are better ways to conduct the science of science, okay. That we can improve on science, okay. And I had some good news yesterday morning.

This came out of the blue, quote. A physicist from Germany wrote me, who I've never met and never heard from, and he sent me a photo of him with Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, who's probably the greatest leader in the world right now, I think. One of the greatest leaders in the world.

He's giving her a copy of the Diamond Cutter, okay, at his observatory in Germany, you know. And he wrote me and said, I just wanted you to know that the Chancellor, I hope the Chancellor's reading it tonight, you know. And so, in my, what I would like to see is that these ideas enter not only the community of scientists, but also the general world culture, you know, civilization itself.

These ideas, if they are correct, they would solve serious questions, scientific questions in the world. For example, what is the, what's the correct structure of an atom, you know, because we still don't know that. By solving that, okay, this is the trick, okay, by solving that, we take the second big bite, which is that if science understood science correctly, it would have to be compassionate.

It would have to serve living beings. It could never harm people, okay. A car invented by a scientist who truly understands science would never kill somebody.

An airplane designed by a true scientist could never crash, okay. Try to imagine, okay, try to imagine a science taken to that level, to where the products of science, a car or an airplane, could no longer hurt a human being, okay, because of the way they were made, okay, because of a higher way they were produced. There's a trick in the factory that if they do it, a car cannot kill someone, okay.

My friend hit a black cow on a dark night on the road from Berlin to Darmstadt. I almost hit one the other night. Probably it was the same one, or his kid.

He almost died in the car. My, my, what do you call it, what I'd like to propose is something very, very grand, and I think true, that if a car were produced by science correctly, it would never hurt a person. No one would ever die in a car, okay.

Then you're like, Gersh Michael, I could see you like patching up atomic theory with the Gartner, but, but saying that you're gonna teach people how to make cars that would never hurt anybody, that's going a little too far, but I like to do that kind of stuff. So, and I think it's true, okay, and I want you to start thinking like that, especially those of you who are senior teachers, senior practitioners, who are going to help normal people, right, not necessarily Buddhist people. And I don't, you know, I'm getting to this old age where I'm like, I was sitting with the Mexicans.

We have a wonderful sangha there in many cities, and they are very mature now. They have, they've finished, I think, 12 courses. Alejandro has taken them through 12 ACI courses.

When we had, we usually have question and answer on the stage, 1,300 people, we had eight people answer the questions. They were all from Mexico. They were all speaking in Spanish, and that was, that was awesome, you know, and we're sitting there, and we had a pep talk before the, the question and answer, you know, and I said, don't forget, you know, you don't have to be Tibetan, you're Mexican, you know, and they said, hey, you're not Tibetan either, Geshe Michael.

I said, you're right, you know, I'm American, you know, we can, I can teach like an American, you know, and that's the way it should be, okay. We should address the higher questions of our culture, of science, okay, so we're gonna jump into science, okay, and it's not a hippie thing. I would like to see it implemented.

The first night, we'll talk about causality, and you know, I've learned that when you talk about science, you have to use big words that don't mean anything different than the low words, but to get there, I gave a talk to the physicists at Princeton, and I learned you had to, you had to say causality rather than why does stuff happen, okay, so the first night, we'll do why does stuff happen, you know, why does one thing make another thing happen, okay, because that's important if you're gonna make a car that will never kill somebody, okay. If you could, I was reading the traffic fatalities statistics, I had somebody working on it for me.

I think 275,000 people died in China last year from car accidents, okay, in one year, and it's like that in the world. Nigeria is the worst, okay, don't go to Nigeria and drive, and is it possible, what, what would you have to do to cause a car that never killed a person, that never hurt a person, okay, that's the first night, which is tonight. I'll have to keep going a little faster.

Secondly, tomorrow we'll talk about atomic theory, or what, what is stuff made of. First night is why does stuff happen, second stuff is, second night is what is stuff made of, you know, like what's inside you that makes you work, and why does, why are the pianos work, and you know, why are your shoes protecting your feet from the sidewalk, what is it in your shoes that are making them work, so that's tomorrow night, we'll talk about this, the little things inside of stuff, okay, the periodic element, table of the elements, okay, with atomic numbers and stuff, electron shells, okay, and then the third night, I didn't work out the third day yet, I think it's, it's gonna be, yeah, scientific method, I think the coolest thing about science is scientific method, okay, like the, if you want me to believe something Geshe Michael, you have to give me an idea, you have to do an experiment, you have to prove that it works, I have to be able to replicate the experiment, if you say I can make a 250 million dollar company using the principles of karma, and that you did it, I understand, I can look them up on the web, but it has to be replicable, what's that mean?

I mean, if I do the same thing, I should get the same result, okay, if I do the same thing, I should get the, then there should be peer review, there should be publication, archival, other parts of the scientific method, so we'll be going through, we'll be, is it possible to apply the scientific method, the stringent requirements of science, to the, to the advanced ideas of Buddhism, okay, because that part is cool, that part of science is cool, for example, part of scientific method is that you, you have to examine your pre-existing beliefs, preconceptions, expectations about what's going to happen during the experiment, it's very important even not to have a hindsight bias, like you can't be looking at the success of this experiment in other cases, you have to approach the experiment as if it was the first time it was done, okay, we can learn a lot in Buddhism from that approach, I think, we should be trying out the ideas on ourselves, right, and then we should be proving them, and if they don't prove out, we should be changing them, okay, we should improve them, part of the scientific method is a constant improvement of the quality, they call it quantitative, there should be improvement of the results, the more years that go by, the more success by the senior students, right, something like that, the more their act is together, okay, that would be the expectation, okay, if we're following a scientific method, all right, so those are the three nights, those are the layout of the three nights, first night is causality, let's go to the second part here, what I thought to do during this series of talks, you know, I like to stand up here and talk about theory, it's very interesting for me, but I've learned through the three periods of my teaching career, that it's important to relate things to people's real life, okay, like how is all this stuff going to affect your relationship with your partner, with challenges that you're having with your partner, or challenges that you're having with your health, or what do you call it, chinks in your happiness level, or your credit card, what do you call, disaster, right, like if I'm able to relate what I say to your real life, then you'll take something home, and I will achieve my goal, which is that you remember the ideas, but you'll remember them by applying them to your real life, so gradually, if you go through this education in these ideas from ancient times, your life should become easier, and more beautiful, and more successful, okay, if you're really aware of these ideas, and if you really understand them, then your own life should go through this constant process of upgrading to, what do you call that, economy plus, and then business, and then finally first class, we went higher than first class, how is that, last month we did it, they invited us into the cockpit, really, all the DCI team, right, well, they asked us to come up and sit in the cockpit, I thought it was illegal, but I have a video of us taking off, it's kind of cool, and it's scary, but what I'm saying is that, in theory, if you learn the Buddhist concepts well, they should be applied to your real life, because if they're not, they don't mean anything, what's it mean if they sit in a book, in a library, or a database, on a website, where you can't get them yet, almost can get them, so what does it mean if we just put them there, I mean, it's a lot more fun to try to take this little candy and run and try to use it, you know, eat it yourself, and have your life upgrade steadily, and that's the process that you should see, okay, if you understand, if you study these ideas well, if you practice well, if you teach them well, then your life should be on a steady upward course, okay, so I'm gonna try to relate the whole three days to some common events in your life, the first one being, coming home in the evening from work exhausted, and you open the door, and your partner's standing there, and they start criticizing you, okay, which has never happened to anybody in this room, okay, like, let's take a common challenge that everybody has had, if, unless you've lived in a single room your whole life, when you come home, whether it's your partner, or somebody else that you're living with, or someone you know, it's so common that someone starts criticizing you, okay, so let's take that example and discuss it in terms of scientific theory, atomic theory, causality, and scientific method, okay, let's look at a real part of your life, hopefully by Sunday night you would gain some new information that you could use to stop your partner from ever criticizing you again, is that worth three days of free talks? Yes, okay, so that's my goal, let's take a common example, why? Because if you understand how galaxies work, okay, if you understand the creation of all matter and energy correctly, which is called, you know, the general theory of relativity, if you understand that, okay, and if you, and it should apply also to what we call quantum mechanics, right, it should apply to atomic particles and subatomic particles, whatever you learn about black holes, you know, 100,000 light years from the earth, should also apply to the atoms that make up your eyebrow, okay, that's a hundred million carbon atoms thick, by the way, okay, your, each hair on your eyebrow is a hundred million carbon atoms wide, okay, so whatever you understand about how the universe came to be, this is what, this is a big breakthrough in science, it should also apply to the way that electrons orbit the nucleus of an atom, you see, it should be the, the principles should be the same, okay, from biggest, biggest to smallest, smallest, in between there is what?

Your partner criticizing you, okay, don't lose sight of that, okay, don't lose sight of that, somewhere between quarks and, you know, black death, heat death of the universe, which is the end of the universe, somewhere between those two is your partner criticizing you last night, okay, whatever applies to the black holes, whatever information we have that explains them, and explains the way that the six quarks in a proton behave, right, then it should apply also to your partner, if you understand how quarks work, or even roughly, okay, my understanding is called Wikipedia, and then, I mean, I have to say, having read the Buddhist articles in Wikipedia, I'm afraid of what the science articles say, the Buddhist articles in Wikipedia are totally ridiculous and incorrect, okay, I hope the science articles are better, but, you know, given that level of knowledge, can we explore, can we fill in the gaps in quantum theory, quantum mechanics, up to general theory of relativity, can we fill in the blanks, and in between there, the whole purpose of studying atoms and galaxies is your partner, okay, understand why your partner's acting so quirky today, okay, all right, that's my goal, because that's a big insight of modern science, whatever applies to the huge things in the universe, it should apply equally to the tiny things in the universe, including your tete-a-tete with your partner last night, okay, when you walked in the kitchen, my goal is that by the end of the three days, you understand your universe better, and you understand your partner better, and then you can have a happier life, that's the goal, and that, those of you who are teaching, you're coming out of a three-year retreat, you think everybody wants to spend a thousand days in retreat, no, you gotta think of stuff that relates to their real life, and you can't get too Buddhist on them, you can have special Buddhist classes in El Salvador, and invite the six people who care, but, but in general, you're gonna have to give presentation in a way that matters in people's real lives, and use your massive hundred dollars when you go to the dollar store, okay, okay, so now we go to page, I think it's page three in your reading, it's called models evolve, I think, right, I wanted to do this section because I would like to assert that the present state of science, our knowledge of science, is not complete, okay, we're not finished, okay, every generation thinks they got it right, you know, every generation thinks they understand it finally, and that nothing will ever be learned that's better than that, okay, the classic example, I started with 300 BC, but Stephen Hawking in his book starts with a lecture that he thinks was given by Bertrand Russell to a group of people in London or something, and he said, okay, can anybody tell me what the universe is physically based on, and this elderly lady said, raised her hand and said, everybody knows the universe is resting on the back of a turtle, then he's like, okay, he says, but what's holding up the turtle, and then she raised her hand, she said, young man, he's like 75 already, young man, everyone knows it's turtles all the way down, you know, and you laugh, okay, and you laugh, okay, but the presentation by Hawking and Einstein will be laughed at in a hundred years, okay, they will say, turtles, piles of turtles, general theory of relativity, give me a break, he didn't know about Nagarjuna, give me a break, you know, are you kidding me, you know, atoms have something in them that makes them hard, and if you break them down to a certain point, they don't have that anymore, does that tell you anything, okay, same as turtles, by the end of the three days, you should feel like Einstein is just another turtle guy, okay, that's my belief, okay, all right, models evolve, so I'm not starting at turtles, I'm starting 300, before 300 BC, it was thought that the world was flat, okay, and that if you crawled too far, your head would poke through the ether, and you would suffocate, okay, and then finally, if you've got, if for some reason you survived that and could crawl far enough, you would fall off the earth, and that happens to be the carving that's on the front of your reading, okay, that's a real carving of an unfortunate guy whose head is already poked through the ether, and he's about to suffocate, even if he could crawl further, he would fall off the edge of the earth, which as you can see is flat, okay, so that's a real carving, you know, from medieval times, and that's what people believed, okay, then around 350 BC, I'm not trying to, you know, convince you how the world is shaped, okay, I'm just trying to convince you that models change, and models evolve, and it wouldn't be weird if the current model got improved a little bit, okay, if it worked better, what would be the sign that the current model worked better? What would happen to automobiles? No one would ever be killed in an automobile, okay, if it were produced correctly, it's what I'm trying to say, okay, so I'm proposing a big leap in what science produces, what science makes, and how science serves humanity, okay, I don't agree with his statement that the further science goes, the more likely they'll kill ourselves, that's not correct, okay, that is, that is correct according to current thinking, and current thinking is wrong, okay, so 350 BC, Aristotle proposed that the world is round, do you know why he proposed it? One of the reasons, you heard this story, oh, the Greeks had lots of ships, ships would go down the Mediterranean, they would stand on the shore, watch the ships, first the hull would disappear, then the bottom of the mast would disappear, and finally the top of the mast would disappear, so people like, you know, Aristotle, he actually estimated the diameter of the world in stadia, which nobody knows how big those are, but it was 20,000 stadia, 200, it's not bad, he took a good guess, okay, but he decided that the world was round, but he also decided that Earth should still be the center of the universe, why? It makes more sense, okay, it makes more, it feels more comfortable, we are the most important thing in the universe, okay, and that, what do you call, when you call that, when somebody has a belief that blocks them, an assumption, starts with pre, I think, preconception, okay, that assumption or preconception that mankind must be at the center, right, what do they call that in Chinese? Zhongguo, zhongguo, center, central land, middle of the universe, okay, that we are at the middle of the universe, why?

Because it's me, okay, got it? So, he believed that, for no better reason, okay, he thought it was more elegant that Earth should be at the center of the universe, okay. Next, 100 AD in Egypt, so Ptolemy was trained in Greek and Roman traditions, but he lived in Egypt, they don't know actually if he's Egyptian or Greek, but he said, I believe the world is round, and the center of the universe, and I believe that other, other heavenly bodies, they spin around the earth linked to layers of spheres, and that explains why, how the moon looks through its phases, you know, and it was an attempt to say why Venus shows up at different parts of the sky in different parts of the year, so it seemed to him that things were turning around something, and that they must be glued on to transparent spheres that were spinning, and he made that very complicated thing in his hand there to explain it, and it was better than Aristotle, okay, it made more sense than Aristotle, okay. Then came along Copernicus, who was Polish, and he said, you know, if you assume that the Sun is the center of the universe, and that the Earth and the other planets and the stars are orbiting around it, it makes more sense, that it fits the data better if we say Earth is not the center of the universe, but the Sun is the center of the universe, it fits the, it fits the data better. He published his findings under another name, why?

He was afraid of the death penalty for saying that, he was afraid the church would kill him, okay, which had happened, stuff like that happens, okay, so he, he published it under a pseudonym, okay, and only much later he admitted that he had written it, okay, but he, he pointed out, Copernicus made a big leap, he said it would make more sense to say that Earth is not the center of the universe, the Sun is, and it would fit the data better if we believe that, okay. Shortly after, in Italy, Galileo, he's like, sorry, yeah, Galileo invented one of the first telescopes, his telescope still exists, it's, it's very primitive, it's like a bamboo stick with two little poorly ground lenses on either side, okay, but it was good enough for him to see the moons of Jupiter, okay, so he could observe the moons of Jupiter crossing across the face of Jupiter with the big red spot, and he, he identified some of the moons of Jupiter, and he saw what? That they were orbiting Jupiter and not, and not the Sun or the Earth, so therefore, he said, I think Copernicus might be right, it may be correct that, that, that not every heavenly body, star, and planet is, is revolving around our planet, and that we're the most important things in the universe, so it was a big leap of humility to say we're not the most important creatures in the, in the universe, the Sun, I believe the Sun is the center of the universe, and things are, could be circling around other things, because I can see moons circling around Jupiter, and they're not circling around the Earth, okay, they're not, they're not concentrated around the Earth, therefore, I believe Copernicus that maybe the Sun is the center of the universe, okay, let's keep, I'm gonna make you go through all these theories before you get refreshments, but there is hope on the horizon, the event horizon, there's a singularity, there's more than a single, there are multiplicities of, of dessert, refreshments, okay, 1605, Johannes Kepler, Germany, I, it doesn't fit the evidence to say that the planets are circling in a circle around the Sun, they must be on an ellipsis, which is like a stretched out circle, that, that's the only way to explain the way they are moving, and the times they show up in the sky, and things like that, it must be the case that we have to improve on Copernicus, and say that these, the planets, like Earth, they are circling the Sun, but it's not a perfect circle, that was a big step, okay, why? It was a church thing, you know, it's inelegant to say God has to make less than a perfect circle, okay, so there was a big preconception block, okay, there was a big block in everybody's mind, everybody, every scientist in the world had a block in their mind, thinking it's not elegant to have planets moving in ellipses, imperfect circles, God wouldn't do such a thing, so they couldn't see it for a long time, got it? Maybe it applies in the present time, okay, 1687, Isaac Newton, why is it that they have those elliptical orbits, what's happening, what keeps things spinning around the Sun, what, what keeps it all going, why doesn't it all just collapse into one, why do all the stars in the sky, if, if our Sun is also a star, why don't they all just fall into each other, and create one big ball of light, and destroy life in the universe, okay, then he said there's a force called gravity, which is keeping the universe in a static position, okay, so our, our solar system's being pulled by some massive bodies on one, on the left, and it's being pulled in the opposite way by more massive bodies on the right, and that was all decided a long time ago, and what was gonna fall, fell, and now everything's in this big balance, all the, all the planets, all the stars have gravity, the fat ones are sucking the small ones, but if there's a fat one on the other side, it's sucking it the other way, and it's kind of stuck between two fat people on a bus, okay, and that's why things don't fall into other things, and that's why all the stars can just be where they are, you know, the firmament, right, what's it mean, it doesn't change, it's firm, the firmament, the sky, the stars, they will always be like they are, that will always be this far from that, these planets will fall towards the Sun, but they will overshoot it because of gravity, and they'll spin around again, and things are in a beautiful state of permanent balance in the universe, otherwise it would all smush into one before humanity started, we wouldn't be here, it would have smushed already, okay, it would have killed us before we were born, got it?

That's Newton, okay, then along comes this guy named Albert, Einstein, okay, he's taking very careful measurements of Mercury, how Mercury spins around the Sun, and he says there are problems, and, and like, everybody's like, what's the problem? He says they don't fit Newton's theory, okay, if Newton's mathematics are correct, as presented in his book, which you should all read, and it's available on Kindle for its true value, which is 99 cents, okay, but you have to pay $7.99 for like dumb and dumber movie, anyway, Newton's, Newton's predictions don't quite fit how Mercury rotates around the Sun, something else is happening, there are small, minute, like down to a few seconds a year, but very obvious and observable by many people, there are problems, Newton's ideas don't apply to how Mercury is orbiting around the Sun, because the Sun is really big and fat and heavy, and Mercury is really tiny and close to this big, fat and heavy guy, so he's doing something different, something is happening about Mercury that Newton's ideas of a static universe don't fit, and then, and then Einstein comes up with this thing that maybe the presence of really fat planets and stars twists space, and twist, bends space, and bends time, okay, so maybe when light comes to us from Mercury, between, say the Sun is between Earth and Mercury on a particular day, then when light is reflected off of Mercury and heads towards Earth, maybe it's bent slightly by the weight of the Sun, and then maybe it takes longer to get here, and our calculations are messed up, and maybe that's why Mercury doesn't behave properly, okay, that was his idea, the special theory of relativity and the general theory of relativity, he corrected himself later with the general theory of relativity, so maybe the presence of great mass can actually bend light, and make it, make it travel in, in other than a direct line, which means that perhaps the universe is curved, like major parts of space are curved, okay, so then he came up with the curving of time and space, okay, and, and, and it fits the calculations, it explains what happens to Mercury perfectly, okay, so people bought into Einstein, what was the other big reason they bought into Einstein, because he wrote Franklin Roosevelt and said, he got caught in the US when World War II broke out, he was Jewish, and he had criticized Hitler, so he couldn't go home, luckily, why?

He wrote a letter to Roosevelt saying, I think we could use these ideas to make a bomb, okay, I think we could use these ideas to make a weapon that would finish the war, okay, he wrote this letter and they started the Manhattan Project, okay, part of it took place at Princeton, at the Institute for Advanced Study, so, with Oppenheimer, so, I think two things happened, he explained a second inconsistency in the measurements of Mercury, and he helped blow up two cities, one of those convinced people that he was correct, that his calculations were correct, that his ideas were correct, okay, so since that time, budgets for science have blossomed, okay, like, try to get a grant for Isaac Newton, he had to go work in the Mint, he was made the head of the English Mint, because he couldn't get a job, the greatest scientist in history couldn't get a job, okay, and then, you know, post World War II, now, I think, Scott did a study for me, I think 40% of all, of all federal spending in universities is for, is for weapons, okay, is for physics, for weapons, okay, okay, are you bored yet? I don't care, New York people are a little, you know, some of you people, I told my friend this morning, I told Jing-Mei, you know, being in New York is like being on an archaeological dig, if I go deeper, I can find someone who was my student five years ago, and then I can find somebody who's my student ten years ago, and way down at the bottom are people who've been my student for 25, 30 years, you know, so I figure there's people like Michael Wick in this room who've heard everything, so I'm trying to say something new, okay, 1929, America, a guy named Edwin Hubble, he figured out this way of measuring, of telling, and if you care, it's about spectroscope and the red, shift in the red side of the spectrum, he figured out that you could observe other galaxies outside of our galaxy. We're on the edge of a galaxy called the Milky Way, okay, we can't see the galaxy, but we believe it's a spiral, and we're way out at the edge, that that galaxy is within 0.4% error margin, flat, totally flat, it's a mandala, it's a disc, it's a flat disc, which is what Buddhism says, but that's another story, okay, and we're at the edge of that, and there are about a hundred thousand visible galaxies from here, okay, visible from here, a hundred thousand galaxies, how many stars in a galaxy?

About 200 billion in our galaxy, okay, 200 billion stars is just one little clump in a universe of lots of clumps, okay, not the kind of clumps at Diamond Mountain, okay, like billions, hundreds of billions of clumps, okay, and Edwin Hubble is measuring them with spectroscope, and he's observing that the ones that are, that they are moving away from the earth, and the ones farther away are moving faster, got it?

All other galaxies are moving away, and the farthest ones are moving faster, which implies, and then he was simultaneous with a Catholic priest named Georges Lemaître from Belgium, who decided that working backwards with Hubble's data and other data, that there must have been a time when all of the matter and energy existing in the universe now was a single point, it all existed in a single point, and then it blew up.

Lemaître called it the cosmic egg, then later on he was criticized by another scientist who said, this guy is like talking about some crazy Big Bang, and then the Big Bang one got accepted by everybody, the word Big Bang got accepted by everybody, so people started to call that the Big Bang. If Hubble's measurements are correct, which they seem to be, then necessarily the universe was born 13.8 billion years ago in an explosion. Unless there's something wrong with physics itself, and I believe it, there was an explosion from a single point, all matter was compressed into a single point, and 13.8 billion years ago it blew up. And we, not only are we not the center of the universe, now we're just a little star on the edge of one of the galaxies, like we don't matter at all, okay? And not only that, we're still moving, okay? Nothing is stationary.

Newton was wrong, okay? It's not true that everything is like balanced, okay? We're in the middle of a big, somebody spilled yogurt, a cup of yogurt, and we're in the splash, you know?

We're like halfway through the splash across the floor, you know, on the cup of yogurt, and there's nothing special about us at all. So it took a great effort of scientific logic to overcome the feeling that we should be the most important thing in the universe, okay? We all have that feeling, okay?

We should be the most important country, or I should be the most important person, okay? And to come up with a theory which says that you're just another little piece of crap flying across the floor with the other yogurt, to come up with a theory like that takes a lot of courage in your mind, and say, I'm, we're not the center of the universe, we're just another piece of dust flying off from some explosion, okay? That was a big step forward.

Started with Einstein, went through Hubble, and to the Met, the Met. Okay, 1974, England, this guy, okay, we're almost finished, okay? The break is, is within minutes now, a few minutes.

Then came Stephen Hawking, and then he said, you know, if this keeps up, if the universe keeps, if the, what happens when the yogurt lands, you know, what happens to the universe when the yogurt lands? Then energy will start to dissipate, and black holes will start, you know, places where mass is so dense that light itself is pulled in. Light particles cannot escape from the mass, and, and then slowly the world, the universe will disappear.

Black holes will start to spread as they consume more matter, and then heat will be lost until finally we're at absolute zero. The universe will be absolutely cold. And he points out an interesting thing, which is that what they call information processing, or information exchange, is impossible in the absence of differences in heat.

You can't think if your mind is all at absolute zero, and, and I cannot convey information to you, which means that life cannot exist in conditions of what we call the heat death of the universe, so that, what do you call it? We're on a career track? We're on a, what do you call that?

Trajectory to die. The universe will die, okay, necessarily, because even those black holes will leak what radiation they have, and that radiation that they leak is called Hawking radiation, after Stephen Hawking, and it's measurable. It's tiny, but it's measurable, okay?

And then the universe will die, okay? So there, in a nutshell, is the Western theory of how the universe came to be. Why did I go through all that?

Why did I waste an hour of your time on the history of science? Because I want you to get in the mood just before your refreshments that it's possible that we're not done yet, and maybe the ideas of science can be made more complete, and more correct, and more accurate. There are observations of the way atoms act, and the way mass bodies act, that don't fit current ideas of science.

There's a problem. There are some problems, and we're at a very crucial point in science where outer events cannot be reconciled. The way that, and we're going to talk about it tomorrow, okay?

The way that atoms behave, electrons behave, cannot be described as particles, and cannot be described as waves. They act in both contradictory ways. So we're at the, we're at the edge of what science can explain through current thinking.

And that, what do you call that paradox that's existed in science since the time of Einstein? He recognized it. He said we can't, we can't resolve it, okay?

It's called a unified theory. We cannot reach a unified theory. We can't reach one theory which explains contradictions or paradoxes in the, in the behavior of physical things, okay?

What that means is that even science admits that science is incomplete. There's, they need to know something more, okay? I propose that what is incomplete in science also makes it incompassionate, okay?

Allows it to create objects which kill people, okay? Like you can say a bomb we can decide not to make, Geshe Michael, but a car, it's not that we design cars to kill people, it's just that they, there are accidents, there are car accidents, and we had a friend die two days ago. The guy in the other lane coming towards her had a heart attack, and he just ran into her and killed her.

She's a yoga teacher, she's a bright, young, beautiful woman from Ukraine, right? And she just died, you know? So is there a way, is there a way to change that?

Is there a way to fix that? Is that, are accidents necessary? Could it be that if there were a higher method of producing cars and airplanes, that people could never die in them, okay?

That's my proposal. We should, if it's even close to being true, you should come for three nights to hear about it, because it might change the world, okay? Angela Merkel might get a hold of it, and do something with it, okay?

Okay, quick thing, could, I do this nowadays, DCI teachers, are there enough here to stand up and come to the front quickly? Can you come? I don't think there's that many.

Yeah, not enough. ACI teachers, three-year retreatants, please come to the front, if you don't mind, if you're not too shy, okay? Quick, quick, quick, they want refreshments.

Okay, these dudes and dudesses have had, I think, average about 15 years of training, and especially with the DCI programs, they've been through, they've visited many, many places, they've helped thousands of people, and what they do is they help people with the karma that they need to do two things. Number one, solve the challenges in your life right now. It could be your partner, I mean 90% are partners, okay?

10% are health problems, etc, okay? If you're having either kind of challenge in your life, you can't get a job, or you're not getting raises or promotion, etc, then talk to them, okay? They are practical health experts.

They can explain to you how to plant the karma to change your life, so if you don't ask them a question, you're either omniscient or you're dumb. And then secondly, if you have some magic goal in mind in your life, if there's some kind of, you know, magical dream that you have in mind, something you could never do. I always wanted to be, to play jazz, I always wanted to play in a jazz band, and so I went to them and asked them, what's the karmic seed to get in a jazz band?

And I'm happy to say that several years ago I played in the Paris Jazz Festival, in a basement near the jazz festival. But no, what I'm saying is, if you have some dream, really that was always a dream of mine, the big bass thing, boom boom boom, fast, you know, boom boom boom boom boom, and talk to them, okay? They understand karma, they understand very sophisticated ways of using karma that can help you get over your challenges, and they can help you achieve some kind of dream that you have in your life.

So, they're gonna stay up near here, they don't get refreshments, you might bring them some refreshments and ask them a question, okay? So, they're gonna hang out up here, come and talk to them, okay? Like, the reason I asked them all to come up is, it's like McDonald's, you can choose which one you like, like, already you're thinking you have a karmic connection with one or two of them, she looks like french fries to me, he looks like a strawberry milkshake to me, and come up and ask them, you know, you do have a karmic connection with one or another, so come up and talk to them, okay?

Americans, strangely, are the least likely to come up, I don't know what it is. If we're in Mexico, like, 300 people will come up and talk to them, but just don't be shy, don't be so New York-y, okay? If you have a dream in your life, just don't waste your time, get some refreshments fast, and come up and ask them a question, okay?

I'm not gonna hit you up for three jewels until tomorrow, is that okay? Tomorrow I'll sound like an NPR fundraiser night, and I'll start whining and begging you for money to keep the three jewels open, but we'll save that for tomorrow, okay? If you are so inclined, there's tables in the back, and the teachings there are free, they have been going on for 20 years, and the landlord doesn't take smiles as rent, therefore you should help, okay?

Help us out a little bit. There's also a program, there's a 108 project, Project 108, which assists school children in Nepal, homeless children, to go to school in Nepal, and there's another table selling unhealthy sweet things, which I want one. And that money goes to send young people to my monastery.

Every year we send five or ten young people to study at the monastery for a month, and we pay all their expenses. And that, we've raised about a hundred thousand dollars just by selling unhealthy stuff, and so if you want to pay ten or twenty dollars for a cookie, that would not be inappropriate. I'm excited to tell you that five of the group this year are coming from Mexico, okay?

So, a big group of our students in Mexico, yeah. I have this dream about what will happen if Mexicans all and Tibetans hooked up with each other, like what would happen to Mexico if they got all this wisdom? So, it's a dream of mine, and we have a good group of five people going from Mexico.

Okay, so please have a nice break. We'll start at 9.15, and I'll go over, which is very unusual. Okay, thank you.

I'll be up here too, if you want to just come up and say hi, or sign a book, or something like that, okay.

[Speaker 2]
So, we're going to start at 9.15, and I'll be up here too, if you want to come up and We'll be going 15 minutes over tonight, 9.45. If you want to walk out at 9.30, that's okay, I won't be offended.

[Speaker 1]
Maybe sit on the edge of the aisle, so you can get out smoothly. We're going to go through different kinds of causes that are accepted in Buddhism, and different kinds of causes that are accepted in the West, and that will set us up tomorrow for getting into how stuff can make other stuff happen, okay. So, I'd like to segue in—oh, and by the way, tomorrow night, and the next day, we'll have question and answer, okay.

So, please try to have your questions ready. I might pull up some of the teachers on the stage, and we'll answer questions together, how's that? Okay.

But, we have a tradition in Buddhism that we don't like boring, easy questions, we want hard ones. So, try to think of some, and write them down, and have them ready for tomorrow, and we'll give you some paper as you come in tomorrow, right Hector? And you—yeah, or you can text questions, that's even better.

Okay. Alright, then I can say I didn't get the ones that I don't like. Okay, I'm going to end that last section, which was about how models can change, okay.

Don't think it's impossible that modern science, like the physicist in Germany this week, don't think it's impossible that physics can't incorporate good ideas that Buddhism has, okay. It's possible, but we have to present them well, cogently, intelligently, and we have to prove them, okay. We shouldn't demand— we shouldn't accept less, okay.

Alright, Stephen Hawking, Brief History of Time. Recent breakthroughs in physics, made possible in part by fantastic new technologies, suggest answers to some of these long-standing questions. Some day these answers may seem as obvious to us as the Earth orbiting the Sun, or perhaps as ridiculous as a tower of tortoises, okay, meaning we can improve on what we know now.

If you want to have some fun, go get a Scientific American from 1930 and read it, and it's just, it's so funny because they talk so authoritatively, and what they say is completely ridiculous by what we know now, okay. So, let's try to recognize that science is not finished yet, and maybe we can help it along. Each one of us can help it, okay.

Because the experiments have to be done in your daily life, right? By the end of Sunday's talk you should be in a position to attempt a new causality with your partner, okay. Otherwise this stuff doesn't mean anything, okay.

Real Buddhists should be employed, they should be earning a living successfully, they should be net givers, not net takers, and they should have nice, beautiful relationships, and they should be happy people, okay. Because otherwise the experiments haven't been done, or they haven't worked, okay. All right, causality.

The question, and I put that on page, I say, why does my partner criticize me? And the photo there, if you've ever had a partner you've had that, okay. Unless it was only for 15 minutes or something, okay.

And we're going to start through Aristotle's four causes, okay. So, we're going to go from the West to the East, and we'll make some comparisons, we'll talk about why does one thing make another thing happen, okay. I'm not just talking some philosophy.

When I studied this Abhidharma for 12 years in the monastery, it was so boring, you couldn't believe it. But now I appreciate it, okay. I think the trick is to apply it to your partner, or to your personal relationships, okay.

So, let's go through Aristotle first, which is the basis of all ideas about what makes stuff happen in the West, and then we'll compare it to the ideas in Buddhism, okay. And then tomorrow we'll fix them, both. Okay, here we go.

Oh, because these ideas on causes come from the lower schools of Buddhism, we have to go to the higher schools. By Sunday, you'll be in the higher, floating in the higher schools of Buddhism, okay. So, we have about 20 minutes to cover all theories of causation around the globe.

Okay, Aristotle, number one, material cause. Those of you who studied Buddhism, this is called a nir...leng gi gyu, good. The stuff which transforms into a new form, like you take an ingot of silver or gold, and you create a statue from it.

So, I put a statue, these are two statues that are on my altar. Ken Rinpoche gave me the Tara statue when I was in my three-year retreat, and it had diamonds studding the crown, real diamonds, and I was like, I asked him later, where'd you get those diamonds? He says, you gave them to me when you were studying cutting diamonds, and I gave them back to you, and he glued them into the crown.

And then the Jetsun Kappa came from, I don't remember, anyway, those statues are made of brass or something. So, you start with the cause of the statue, material cause according to Aristotle, is a piece, a chunk of brass, a piece of brass, an ingot of brass, and then you melt it, and you form it into a statue, and that's the stuff that turns into the new thing. In Buddhism we also say a nir...leng gi gyu example would be a seed and a tree that comes out of the seed, okay? The stuff that turns into the tree is contained inside the seed, and that's called a material cause. The stuff that's in the seed becomes the stuff of the result, okay? That's a material cause.

Let's take it to your partner in the kitchen last night. My husband doesn't respect me, and this is just the latest expression of that disrespect. So, the disrespect is like the bronze, and his criticism of me last night is just one more, what do you call that?

Version of that disrespect, one more manifestation of that disrespect. He has a general ongoing disrespect for me, and he pours it into different molds every couple of nights, okay? That's called nir...leng gi gyu, and Aristotle called it material cause. Of the four causes of Aristotle, this is the first. Second, formal cause, if you just call it formal cause, you can't understand it very well, I think you should call it a form...o cause. It's a cause which relates to the form of something, and the idea is that if the subject under question is a human body, the fact that Will...Bill, sorry Captain Bill, has a...William, has a body, means that he has four arms and a head, okay? So, the cause of his four arms and a head is the fact that he has a body. A body assumes a certain form...act, format, okay? So, like a car would be a formal cause of, four wheels, steering wheel, okay?

So, it's not really a cause in the sense of one thing happened first, and then another thing happened. In Buddhism, we would call this a chi and a chedar, right? Rigchi, a general and a detail of that class.

A class and a subclass, okay? What do you call that? A set and a subset, okay?

The wheels and the tires, those are a kind of...having those is a subset of having a body, okay? So, there's not really causation in that sense, okay? In the case of your husband, okay, we're going to keep coming back to your partner, alright?

It's that men are always disrespectful in a relationship, and my husband is a...man, okay? So, just men in general, you've heard this, men, from ladies. We also say stuff in the bathroom that you don't know about.

But, you know, men are disrespectful, and so therefore my husband is disrespectful. I mean, all men are, you know, you hear people say that, all men are blah blah blah. All men have this problem, you know, and then that's a form, is man, and then a formal...it's a formal cause of the fact that my partner has this problem, because all men have this problem of not respecting their partners enough, okay? That's...or criticizing their partner, okay? That's Aristotle's second cause, okay? It's not really a cause, because it's simultaneous, we'll talk about that, okay?

If something doesn't happen before something else, it's not technically a cause, okay? You can't say because, or maybe you can. He's disrespectful because he's a man.

Okay, third is efficient cause. This is what we think, efficient in this meaning, in Aristotle, efficient doesn't mean not wasteful, it just means active, an action, the cause of an action. And the example is something which triggers another thing, or which motivates a thing, impels a thing.

So, the classic example in Aristotle is someone picking up a large rock, okay? Then the person, the presence of the person is what causes the rock to move. It's the mover, it's called an efficient cause in Aristotle.

In the case of my husband, what has moved him to be critical of me tonight, is that he didn't get enough sleep last night. He had trouble sleeping last night, he's in a grumpy mood, and that was the efficient cause which impelled him to criticize me tonight. So, I'm trying to relate all these things to your real life.

Start getting a feeling, okay? Try to have a feeling. I'm going to cover all the causes that have been described in the world, Eastern and Western, by these major thinkers.

They are all incomplete, okay? They are all incomplete, okay? But get a feeling, because these causes I'm listing explain how you feel your husband's problem is, okay?

Either you think he's critical because he's a man, or you think he's critical because he didn't get enough sleep last night, or you think he's critical because that's his state of mind and this is just another casting of it, okay? You believe one of these causes about your husband. If you believe one of these four causes of Aristotle, six causes of Abhidharmakosha, four causes of Dharmakirti, which we're going to cover in record time of 13 minutes, you're wrong, okay?

There's something wrong, and you are as wrong as science is. Your thinking is incomplete, okay? If we can complete your thinking, you can fix your partner.

Sound good? Okay. So, be aware, be sensitive as we go that I'm describing causes, one of which you believe relates to your relationship or more, and you're wrong.

You're not wrong you're just incomplete. We have to add a little spice and you'll be fine, and then you can have a beautiful relationship, okay? What's the indication that a person understands these principles?

They have a beautiful relationship, okay? Duh. What's the indication that they don't understand these causes very well?

They don't have a nice relationship, there's something, they're always messing up, okay? There's something going wrong in the relationship, okay? Okay, here we go, which means that if you're going to be a teacher, you have to understand these things and put them into practice in a way that other people can see, because there's no better teaching than an example, okay?

People don't believe what you say, they only believe what they see, and they will copy what they see regardless of what you say, which means I don't really have to say anything, but I'm gonna anyway. Okay, I like to talk. Okay, number four, final cause.

Final cause is the last kind of cause by Aristotle, we wouldn't really call it a cause, but it is an answer to a because question, which is, you know, why do you go to work every day? And you say, well I want to make a living, or I have to support my kids, or something like that. So, the goal of an activity in Aristotle is called the final cause, meaning this is the reason why I do the thing, because this is what I want.

The classic example in Aristotle is that Socrates, which was his teacher's teacher, Plato's teacher, takes a walk in the evening because he wants to have good health, okay? So, the cause of the walk is what? You ready?

Let's do all four. I have four. What's the material cause of the walk?

I don't know, his legs or something? Okay, what's the formal cause of the walk? The idea that if you walk you get healthy.

What's the efficient cause of the walk? He put on his shoes and decided to move, okay? What's the final cause of the walk?

He was hoping that after the walk, and by walking, he would be healthy, okay? Meaning the goal of the walk is one of the causes for the walk, got it? We call final cause.

Okay, you just learned Aristotle. All Western science comes through Aristotle, okay? Maybe not exactly in the form of Aristotle, but the patterns of thinking, the prejudices of modern science, the preconceptions, all come from the Greeks, okay?

They all come from the Western models of science, okay? So, keep in mind those four causes. How does the fourth one relate to your husband?

He had something, what do you call it? He had another motive in mind for criticizing me, and I gave a sort of a negative example, and I'm sorry for it. You know, he wants to divorce me, he's just finding one more reason to hit me on the head with that, you know?

He's criticizing me for the cooking I did last night, or for something I said to the kids, and he's just, he's, the reason or the cause for his behavior in the kitchen tonight was a bigger goal than he has in mind, okay? That would be a, what kind of Aristotelian cause? Final cause, okay?

That's the end game he's playing, okay? Alright, let's go to the Abhidharma. I threw this in mainly because the ancient students here would find it sexy, because I never taught it before, okay?

So, here we go. I don't think so, I can't remember what I taught. People come up to me all the time, you taught a tantra in 2003 in Tucson, why did you—I'm like, I can't remember what happened last week.

Okay, so the Abhidharma, which is the lowest school of Buddhism, which is closest to science, gives six kinds of causes. And I'm gonna go through those in, let's say I'll finish them in eight minutes, okay? This will be a record.

I might go over what I said I was going over, but Hector will cover for me. Okay, the first one is called a creation cause. These are really fun!

Creation cause means everything in the world that didn't prevent your husband from criticizing you tonight. How much stuff is that? Tell me quick, you can't get out of here unless you answer me.

Everything, okay? Everything in the world. I put a picture of a yellow fin tuna albacore, you know, 80 feet below the surface of the water, 200 miles off of San Diego, okay?

That was the cause of your husband getting upset tonight, got it? Abhidharma says all conditions in the world which don't act to prevent your husband from getting angry are contributing to your husband's anger, okay? In English I put it, the entire universe is conspiring to have my husband criticize me, and it's true, okay?

The universe hasn't set things up in such a way that your husband was late, had to work late, and didn't get home to criticize you. The universe somehow allowed this thing to happen, including the yellow fin tunas under the water 200 miles off of San Diego, okay? By the way, if you're interested, which you're not, but I don't care, there are two kinds of such causes.

We call qigyu, right? Qigyu means creation cause. A, things that could have stopped your husband from criticizing you, and B, things that couldn't have stopped him anyway, such as the fact that the North Pole has its own emptiness, okay?

Like, that couldn't have stopped him in any case, but it didn't, did it? So, let's count it as a cause, got it? It sounds silly, but one day maybe you'll appreciate it, okay?

Alright. Number two is called a mutual cause. Tlenchik chepay gyu in Tibetan.

A very difficult idea. We'll study later that all physical matter according to Abhidharma has four elements active in it. Four, what science calls fundamental forces.

Science recognizes four. If you can name two of them, I'll give you this apple pie. Weak nuclear forces, strong nuclear forces, electromagnetism and gravitation, okay?

Buddhism recognizes four also. They call them the four elements, but they don't mean the four elements. They mean four fundamental forces of matter, okay?

They are said in the Abhidharma school to support each other. So, the fundamental force called fire, which is what gives things heat and keeps them from being absolute cold, interacts with the force of wind, which is called motion or motility, and in any substance, in this computer, they are balancing. In Ayurveda also, they are balancing.

If the wind gets too strong, you get pneumonia, okay? If the fire gets too strong, you get a fever. But these forces are balanced in all physical matter, okay?

And so in that sense, they are causing each other at the same time. The fire is causing the wind, and the wind is causing the fire. That's not accepted by the higher schools, because they say it's not possible for a cause to happen at the same time as its result.

It takes time for the result to come out of the cause, okay? So, this kind of cause is not accepted by the higher schools, but it's a useful kind of cause because, if your husband is in general jealous about how you speak to other men or something like that, okay, which I never heard of such a husband, but if there were such a thing, that negative emotion in his mind would be a supporting cause for his criticism of you, for his feeling critical of you, okay? In one human head, the emotion of jealousy and the emotion of being critical support each other, they feed each other. So, in a sense, you can say they are simultaneous.

They are not really, they are going more like, what do you call it, they are cycling, staggered, okay? But it feels like your jealousy is feeding your critical state of mind at the same moment. In the same head, those forces are feeding each other, and that's a second kind of cause in the Abhidharma system, okay?

I'll stop in three minutes, however many we finish, I will do the rest tomorrow. And in this manner, we will never get to the final result by Sunday. Homogeneous cause.

It means the cause is of the same class as the result, ethically, karmically, okay? Meaning, virtuous, harmful, or sweet, okay? So that's another thing that's going on in people's minds, okay?

The continuation of a motivation which is noble is called a homogeneous cause and result relationship, okay? So, being noble at six o'clock supports you being noble at seven o'clock, okay? So that's called a, in Buddhism, that's called a homogeneous cause.

And those are considered important enough to treat them separately, okay? The ethical content of your mind, the motivational content of your mind is so crucial for your happiness, because of karma, because that's karma, that we should track, are you having repeated thoughts of goodness, or are you having repeated thoughts of negativity, or are they even alternating in the same mind? And the next section in Abhidharma, if we ever get to that in some future twenty year class, it gives a whole breakdown of how many of the six causes can interleave with the others in a normal person's head, and the dynamo of that is how do you trigger the moment before DPE, the direct perception emptiness.

The whole subject of causation in the Abhidharma is what causes do you have to set up in your head to have this transcendent experience that changes your life forever, okay? Like, how can I set up a mystical experience in my mind using these six causes? You know, how many does it take together to get me into heaven, okay?

Something like that. That's the goal of, that's why they discuss this stuff in Abhidharma. We're not talking about, you know, how to kick a football further, or something like that.

Other important American questions, okay. So my husband's critical attitude is a result of the general negativity that's been flowing through his life for some time now. It's just more virtue, or bad karma, or good karma flowing in his mind, okay?

Let's do, let's do one more, okay, and then we'll stop. This is called a mentally linked cause, and this is getting a little bit exotic, but I don't care. At least I can say I taught it somewhere one day.

In a human mind there are two basic divisions of human mind. One is the mind itself, the general awareness, which is kind of what you lose if a good boxer punches you hard in the head, okay? Ken Rinpoche did that to me once.

That general awareness that you lose at that moment is called mind, sem, citta, okay? And then there are functions of the mind. There are activities going in the mind like attention, or memory, or intellect, or things like that, okay?

These kinds of thoughts are flowing through the mind as subsets of the general mind. They're called citta, or sem chung, mental functions, okay? So, let's say I'm really angry at my partner, right?

Let's bring it back to the real thing, okay? And then we'll stop. I'm really angry at my partner, so my awareness of the world, this thing called life, or awareness, consciousness is directed at my partner, okay?

My mind is directed at my partner, but so is my anger, which is a function that's running in the mind at the same time. So, the general mind you can think of as your head, your skull, and then the anger is over, I don't know which part of those cortex, okay? The anger is over here, and it's running at the same time, and it's linked to the mind in five ways, okay?

That's what you have to learn. These are called sung den gyi gyu. They're called linked causes.

So, your anger and your general awareness are linked in five different ways. Number one, ten. Ten means foundation, but it means they are both using my eye consciousness to do their thing, okay?

They are relying on the eyeglasses of my eyes to see my partner. My awareness of my girlfriend and my anger at my girlfriend are both using my eyes, okay? So, they are linked.

They're both using the same eyeballs, got it? Eye consciousness, okay? Ten.

Mikpa means they are both linked because they are focused on the same object, which is what? Outer object. My girlfriend, my partner, okay?

So, they are linked that way, which is called mikpa, okay? The thing they're focused on. They are both dunyam, they're dukkhala in Sanskrit.

They are linked by time, they start and stop at the same moment. The anger, the arisal of the anger and the finishing of the anger and the consciousness have to be going on at the same time on the clock, okay? It doesn't help if I'm aware in the morning and I'm angry in the evening.

If I don't have awareness in the evening, it doesn't help. So, I gotta have, the time has to be concomitant, has to be linked by time. Another is called ze, what is ze?

Ze, stuff, substance, okay? What's the substance? Mind, mental stuff, okay?

Mental stuff, alright? Shepa, selshin rikpa shepa tseni, that which is invisible and knowing. That applies to both the mind and the anger, okay?

They both share this one quality of being transparent or invisible and knowing, okay? And then finally they have to be—what was the last one? Nambatsumba.

Namba means very difficult. When you look at your partner's face and you are criticizing them, your mind is like a mirror, and their face is reflected where? In your mind, okay?

You are seeing an image of their face. When you stare at your partner's face, especially if you have a strong emotion running, their face, the image of their face is in your mind. We call aspect, okay?

Partner's face is in your mind, and it's also in your feeling of anger, okay? So, the mind, the general mind and the anger are linked by aspect. They are both holding the picture of your partner's face in the mind, okay?

In these five ways, mind and its functions are linked, okay? And those are mutual causes. If you tell me whether that's accepted by higher schools or not, you can go home.

No, why? They go on at the same time, okay? There has to be a time gap between the cause and the effect, okay?

The higher schools say, okay? Maybe, okay? Now, why are we talking about all this?

I'm trying to give you all the possible reasons why your partner has criticized you tonight, and what am I trying to prove? I wouldn't say wrong, let's say incomplete, okay? They all sound pretty good, I mean, it's reasonable.

He was jealous, so he got angry. He didn't have enough sleep, so he got angry. He's having angriest thoughts because he's been negative on a string.

He had a hard day at work, and he's stressed out at work nowadays, and those are all causes, but they are incomplete, okay? They are incomplete. Why?

Because you can know about all those causes and still not have a perfect relationship, okay? You can be thinking, my husband didn't get enough sleep, or my husband had a bad day at work, or my husband's been negative for a couple weeks now. They can help you understand your husband's behavior, but they don't cure it, okay?

A final understanding of why things cause other things should lead to perfection, should lead to a perfect relationship, to a perfect world. If you're not having a perfect relationship, or a perfect world, you don't understand the world enough yet, okay? By Sunday you will, okay?

Alright, good night, thank you very much. Oh, tomorrow night we start at 7, not 7.30. If you show up at 7.30, you'll miss a couple of obscure Tibetan causes.