Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute session on sadhana practice theory, Alex Berzin walks through the foundational mental work needed before formal visualization practice begins. He covers the refuge meditation, which involves reviewing your actual limitations—physical tiredness, poor communication, emotional instability, confused mind—and visualizing a Buddha representing the freedom and clarity you aspire toward. He then addresses the two main obstacles to building concentration: mental wandering, where the mind leaves the object entirely, and dullness, where it stays on the object but loses clarity or becomes spaced-out. Using vivid metaphors (a mother bird and her nest), he explains how to recognize and gently redirect each state. He emphasizes keeping meditation sessions short and stopping while still wanting more, so practice becomes a joy rather than a burden. For practitioners working with the preciousness of human life or refuge, Berzin shows how to make these meditations experiential rather than intellectual—seeing and feeling genuine freedom from restriction, then using that understanding as an antidote to self-pity or despair when difficulties arise. The talk emphasizes building beneficial mental habits through understanding the mechanics of attachment, identity, and the causes of recurring relational and existential problems.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 02 SP.mp3
UUID: e9532c2c-8515-44ba-84ef-ab2ba73010f7
Teacher: Alex Berzin
Collection: Theory of Sadhana practice (Alex Berzin)
Date: 1987 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.0 minutes
Words: ~7,412
So this is going to, shift as we go through the, process of, you know, becoming more and more familiar with these, techniques. Then, you know, you’ll put more emphasis on, the seeing, more on the feeling, you know, these sort of things, and it’ll take less time to be able to review it. Alright. Yeah? Well, on refuge, it would be, you know, in having the safe direction, you would visualize Buddha in front of you that symbolizes the direction that we want to go in.
And then in your mind, you would review, you know, well, if I look at my physical qualities, you know, my body is very limited in what I can do. I get tired all the time. Time. Look at the qualities of a Buddha. If I were to, you know, become like a Buddha, Buddha is somebody whose energy is completely clear, never gets tired, is always able to, you know, have their energy together to go out to help everybody in all different ways, appear in all ways.
If I could do that, that would be really great because I dread things getting worse and not being able to handle it at all myself. Same thing with communication abilities. I’m very limited, cause a lot of misunderstanding, people don’t understand what I say, cause confusion. If I could become like a Buddha, you know, with, if I could clear out all the, you know, all the crap in the way that I speak, you know, become like a Buddha, someone who can communicate clearly, that would be great. My heart’s limited.
I’m on an emotional roller coaster, up and down all the time. If my heart could be open, clear towards everybody, that would be great. Help me to overcome my problems. Help me to help others. Same thing with my mind.
It’s limited. I don’t understand things. I don’t understand other people. I don’t understand my kids. I don’t understand, you know, my for the people around me.
If I could become like a Buddha and, you know, the mind is clear, all these sort of things, that would be great. You review that. This is the direction that I want to go into. Work to overcome my limitations, realize my potentials. That’s what the word Buddha means.
Buddha is someone who’s clear. limitations, cleared out all this garbage so that everything is clear about them. Their body, the energy is clear. Their speech is clear. Their hearts are clear.
Their minds are clear. And they are evolved to the fullest state possible. So all the energies go out towards others. All the potentials are realized. Come like that.
Take the safe direction with the preventive measures. Become like those who have done it already, the Buddhas, those who are on the path to doing that, the Sangha. That would be great to review that. Then to, actually just focus on seeing that, this is what I want to achieve. You know, looking, seeing that.
Right? It doesn’t mean just staring at your visualization. It means seeing this is direction that I want to go in. You’ve considered these things before. Look at the direction that I’m going in now.
What happens when I get depressed? What happens when I have difficulties? I turn to getting drink or turning on, smoking a joint. I turn to, my friends or I turn to, the television, you know, when I’m feeling depressed. Is this really a direction which is going to take me the furthest in my life?
Is this something which is really satisfying, can give me the answers to my things? Or what is the direction that I have in my life? You know, if I’m so, you know, preoccupied with, you know, being successful in my job or, you know, finding more and more lovers or these sort of things. If that’s the most important direction in my life, really does that satisfy my problems? Does it solve things?
Said, Look what direction I’m going in. What direction do I turn to in crisis times? Then try to see that if I went on this direction of working to overcome my limitations and realize my potentials, well, that’s something that really can take me all the way. Think in those terms and then to see. Once you’ve gone through all of this in a review process, see this is the direction that I want to go in and focus on seeing it and then on feeling it.
Now, it’s like in any meditation process. The meditation process, building up something that’s a beneficial habit, we’re going to have to deal with all the faults in concentrating. And so, this is the issues that you’re going to deal with here. These are the issues, it’s probably helpful to go through it a little bit. We have two sides.
There’s the side of mental wandering and there’s the side of dullness. These are the things that we’re going to have to deal with to try to bring the mind back to what we’re trying to focus on, which is either seeing or feeling. Now, often like to use the example of a mother bird sitting on her nest for concentrating on a certain object, seeing or feeling, or, if it’s an mahamudra type of technique, just, you know, on having a certain state of mind. Now, the you know, first of all, we have mental wandering. Mental wandering is if the mother bird leaves the nest and she just goes on and on and on and on and doesn’t come back.
That’s mental wandering. What we need to do is to recognize more and more quickly that the mind has gone off and bring it back. So that’s what’s the big issue that we’re going to be involved with in the beginning, probably for a very long time. We’re going be involved with that when the mind goes off to bring it back and to catch it more more quickly, to be more mindful, more aware of when it’s going off. Of course, we’re gonna have to deal with the issues of overcoming our laziness of not wanting to correct it.
That we do by, first of all, thinking of the benefits of, gaining concentration in terms of, you know, well, if I’m trying to help people and somebody comes to me and, you know, tells me their problem and, you know, I just sit there and then after a few moments I say, what did you say? I’m sorry. I missed that. Then they feel rotten. They think that we don’t care about them.
It really is going to be a severe limitation to our ability to help others. There are many, many advantages gained by being able to concentrate. Yet alone all the big ones that we can talk about for really being able to focus on wisdom to overcome deepest causes of our problems. We think of the advantages of it, then we set a strong intention. It’s the next force, the intention.
Well, I’m gonna try to do this. It’s important not to get into the habit of just our mind wandering on and on when we meditate. Because if we’ve gotten into that habit, then it’s going be very hard to break. From the beginning, to set an intention that I’m going to try to concentrate as much as possible and bring my mind back. Then we rely on what’s usually called flexibility of the mind, which is really, you know, pliancy.
That word is translated as, mental and physical ecstasy and bliss. Again, a weird translation. What it’s talking about is a sense of fitness. You know, the fitness is like, you know, when you feel physically fit, then, you know, you feel that, your body, you know, you can do whatever you want to. You can go out there, run and so on.
This is a sense of fitness with the mind. My mind is fit. It is capable of being. I can bring it back. I can concentrate.
I can focus. If you think about a small child, an eight year old, nine year old child, they might not be able to sit for one moment in class, but they do have this ability, this fitness of the mind because you put them in front of a video game, Space Invaders, and they’re able to concentrate perfectly. The sense of fitness that we have, my mind is capable of concentrating, you reaffirm that. Develop some positive enthusiasm for it based again on thinking of the benefits and so on. With all of that, that’ll help us overcome the laziness with which we don’t want to correct the mind.
Concentrating. Okay. So we bring it back. That’s, mental wandering. The mother bird flying on and on and on.
Then, the next thing is, when it’s called, flightiness of mind. It’s usually translated as mental agitation. It’s not the best translation. Agitation sounds as though you’re nervous, and upset. It’s not that.
What it’s talking about is flightiness. The mind, it’s the mother bird just flying off the nest. Right? It’s not that she goes on and on and on. It’s just the problem now of her leaving the nest in the first place.
Her leaving the nest can be in several situations. Either she gets tired, she’s a little bit annoyed, she just goes to another branch. That’s not so serious as if she saw a worm on the ground and, she flies off to get the worm. Flightiness of mind is talking about when the mind flies off to something which is desirable. Right?
You know, like, what am I going to, eat, you know, now? Or, flies off to thinking about your lover or to, thinking about, you know, what I’m going to do today, my work. These sort of things, you know, much more compelling type of, object than just you’re doing a mantra and, you know, your mind goes off to doing another mantra instead. Or you get a little bit pain and, you know, you think of shifting your leg. You know, it’s less compelling.
So this is flightiness of mind. You know, another bird flying off to get the to get the Now, there’s subtle flightiness of mind. The subtle flightiness of mind is that the mother bird doesn’t actually leave her nest, but she’s sitting there and in the corner of her eye, she sees that worm on the ground and she’s itching to go. Doesn’t actually leave though. That’s subtle flightiness of mind.
That’s something which most of us do quite easily when instance, we’re doing a mantra practice or something like that, it’s very easy to stay with a mantra yet in the corner of our mind to have all sorts of thoughts going on. Then again, this can carry out the whole spectrum of mental wandering within a subgroup here, so the mind just goes on and on and on. Or just that it leaves, one corner of our mind leaves the object, or just that it’s itching to leave. It’s unnerved. We have all the, you know, this whole spectrum of, you know, mental wandering that we want to, you know, we need to work to bring the mind back to the object.
Now on the side of dullness, we have, first of all, foggy mindedness. Foggy mindedness is that nothing appears, nothing is going. The mother bird can’t even find the nest. Right? So Foggy mindedness very easily can slip over into falling asleep, sleepiness.
Then, there’s mental dullness. Mental dullness is when the mother bird’s found the nest but she doesn’t know what the hell she’s doing there. Alright, so, you found the thing, know, you’re able to stay with the get the object but it’s completely unclear, you know, what’s going on. That’s a coarse dullness. Subtle dullness is, when, the mother bird’s sitting there, but she’s completely spaced out.
And so spaced out, she could fall off or anything could happen. She’s really not paying attention. And, this is the biggest problem, really. It’s described as you have placement on the object and you have clarity, but you’re not quite with it. You’re not there fresh each moment.
It’s like you’re driving your car. Your mind is on the road. You have placement. You have clarity. But you drive right past where you’re supposed to turn.
And so the best English way of describing that is being spaced out. That’s subtle mental dullness. And that’s the biggest problem to meditation because it’s very easy to just sit there and be spaced out and to think that, you know, wow, this is fantastic. You know, you’ve really got it going. Whereas you’ve accomplished absolutely nothing.
So, these are the issues that you deal with in the meditation session. You know, you focus on, you know, once you’ve done this review, seeing and feeling and trying to bring the mind back to seeing and feeling it when it either goes off into dullness or into some sort of flightiness or mental wandering. It’s important with the sessions not to have your sessions too long. Especially when you’re doing concentration type of practices. It’s said that the example is used like if you’re with a friend.
If you’re with a friend and you stay, you, part from your friend, when you still are in the feeling of, you know, in the mood that you wanna be with this friend more, then you’re gonna be very happy to go back with this friend again. But if you, stay too too long so that you start to get on each other’s knowers, then when you part you’re gonna say, Thank goodness this person has left. You’re not gonna be so happy or anxious to see them again. It’s the same thing here with meditation. If we meditate just for a short period of time, go for quality rather than quantity, and you stop when you still want to continue, then you’re going to be happy to go back to it.
But, if you’ve made it into an ordeal, which you just get sick of it at the end, then you’re going to say, Thank God, it’s over. You’re not going to be very anxious at all to sit down again. This is an important piece of advice. They say that you set a certain period of time. It could be five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes at the most in the beginning.
As you get more and more used to it, you can extend that. In the beginning, for a short period of time, when you get to the end of that, whether it’s going good or not, you stop. If it’s going good, don’t feel, Well, it’s going great. Why don’t I continue? Just end it.
If it’s going lousy, don’t feel that, Well, if I meditate some more, it’s going to get better. Again, just stop it. Then, we’re going to not get discouraged. We’re not going to get burnt out by it. We’ll be more willing to go back to it.
So, they’re these sort of points. Anyhow, so we have, this process of building up something as a beneficial habit. Can be done with taking this safe direction in our life or it can be done with precious human life. The precious human life is in terms of the way that that’s done would be, for instance, you imagine yourself in a concentration camp being tortured tortured and then being liberated from that concentration camp. If that’s difficult to imagine, then just imagine yourself being in the dentist chair having your tooth drilled and how during that period of time, your mind is totally preoccupied with the pain.
The only thought that you have is when when is this going to end. When it actually is finished, then when you get up, this great feeling of relief, this burden is off your back and now you can get on with your life. This is sort of what you want to do in the precious human life type of meditation. To see and feel this type of freedom, this type of absence of this big heavy limitation or restriction. Really, what is the difference between somebody who’s just been liberated from the concentration camp and me right now?
Both of us have this equal freedom from being tortured, from being in a situation in which there’s no leisure, no ability to be able to work on myself and to try to not just think about that, go blah blah blah, that’s the review, but to actually try to see that, to see that I am free of being in the concentration camp. I’m free of starving to death. I’m free of being mentally retarded. I’m free of being in a totalitarian regime in which there’s no possibility for me to be able to grow, to be able to do anything and to feel that, to see that and feel that. I mean, that’s the way that it’s built up as something which becomes part of you.
Yeah, because that’s what meditation is. It’s a process to make something part of you, to integrate it. You can see how when you’ve done that, when that’s made a big impression on you, then when we’re situation in which normally we would be feeling sorry for ourselves, Oh, poor me. I can’t do this. I can’t do that.
Then that impulse will come to our head of, Well, look what I have going for me in life. I’m not in a concentration camp. I’m not retarded. I’m not this. I’m not that.
It will have made an impression on us. And then it acts as an actual remedy or antidote to self pity, which is what the whole point of the precious human life thing is, to overcome this problem. All the practices are like that. It’s done in that type of procedure. We have precious human life.
We think about death, that it’s not going to last forever. For sure I’m going to die. Time of death is completely uncertain. Could be hit by a truck at any time. The only thing that’s going to be of help is the beneficial habits that I’ve built up, the tendencies and so on, the preventive measures that I’ve taken.
It’s dharma. What preventive measures have I taken to avoid being just going more and more downhill in the future? We think of that, how future lives can go either a better or worse situation. Then think in terms of, I dread that. Dread is very different from fear.
We’re not talking about fear here. Fear Fear of going to hell, this sort of thing. Again, we can use a lot of different terminology. When you think of hells, it’s a very heavy term. We look at the Sanskrit, the Tibetan for it.
The Tibetan has the connotation of a place in which there’s no joy, no happiness. So it’s a joyless realm. And the ones who are there, from the Sanskrit connotation, it’s difficult to get out. Not the Sanskrit, the Tibetan connotation. It’s difficult to get out.
And so they’re trapped. It’s like trapped beings in a joyless realm. Or a hungry ghost, again that’s coming from the Chinese, has absolutely nothing to do with the Sanskrit or the Tibetan. It’s from the Chinese idea of the spirits of the ancestors who have not been given the sacrificial offerings. Therefore, they go hungry.
Therefore, that’s a terrible state. We get hungry ghosts. So it has nothing to do with the original concept. But rather, the Tibetan idea of it is one whose mind is completely clutched, completely grasping, tied up literally. And so it’s a clutching ghost, you know, clutching to desperately clutching ghosts.
Clutching to, you know, this or that, not wanting to share. You can see how it comes out of this whole mind state of being miserly. You know, just clutching. They can’t get anything inside them. They don’t want to let go of anything.
They’re just, you know, like a haunting type of clutching. Or animals. You don’t want to think of animals because animals is again, makes us think of my pet poodle, my pussy cat, Bambi, this sort of thing. That’s not at all the connotation that we want to have of this life state because we can idealize it and say, Well, what’s so bad about being Bambi? Or my pet poodle?
The connotation of the Tibetan word is something that goes creeping, crawling on the ground, bent over. I use instead a creeping creature because although a lot of them don’t creep, they fly and so on, but the whole connotation that we want to evoke from it, the image that want to evoke, is a cockroach, a yuck crawling on the ground. You really don’t want to be that. You don’t want to be a life form that anybody who sees you, their first reaction is to just want to step on you, squash you. These sort of ways of translating, same thing for the better realms.
Again, instead of higher and lower, there are so much better states of rebirth, so much worse. It tends to take this higher and lower connotation off. For the gods, again, god realms heavens, that’s too, again, loaded, but, with other connotations. But, rather, I think I I use, divine beings, and I use divine in the Vogue magazine sense of, Oh, darling, how divine. What a divine dress you’re wearing.
This is such divine food. And, you know, like that, it’s totally mindless. Right? And that’s the connotation that we want to have. Lovely, beautiful, divine, but mindless.
You know, complete waste of time. Then you have, the instead of demigods, you have the would be divine. Those who are reading Vogue magazine and completely jealous and wanna be like all the beautiful divine people in the magazine. So, the would be divine, and then we have humans. So, like this, you know, we can relate a little bit differently to these realms.
But, in any case, the point that I was wanting to make was that we dread being in one of these worst situations. Dread is different from fear. Fear is putting a big black line around it, freak out, upset, you know, and this sort of scenario. Whereas dread is just, I really don’t want this to happen. Would dread having to make a thousand telephone calls.
I’m not afraid of it. You’re not fearful of it. You would dread it. It’s just a drag type of thing. There’s a big difference in the emotional quality between dread and fear.
We dread this and then we direction is going to How can I get out of this? How can I avoid this? I can avoid this by taking the preventive measure of putting a safe direction in my life. Specifically, how do I put that safe direction in my life? It’s by following the whole procedures of cause and effect.
If I restrain from acting destructively, which is what refraining from acting destructively means, then I can avoid creating these type of problems. If I avoid or I restrain myself from destructive type of actions of killing, stealing, lying, these sort of things, things will go better. I can avoid the problems that result from that. As I said, it’s much lighter if we don’t think of it in terms of these heavy moralistic, judgmental of terms, but just in matter of fact things. Okay.
Now, the next point is in terms of Well, there are these type of problems that we’re thinking about in terms of getting a better future. No matter what type of situation we’re in, we have all sorts of uncontrollably recurring types of, problems that, occur. Like, I was describing this a little bit on Friday night of, you know, you’re in a difficult situation, you know, with a partner, you’re nagging and so on, you know, and because of that, then, you know, the other person feels very uptight, you know, always making these demands. Where did you go last night? What did you you know, why didn’t you call me?
Why don’t you say you love me? And That makes the other person very uptight. They say, Give me more room. Give me space. Get off my back.
Then become even more insecure, more demanding. Relationship, breaks up, you know, because of that. Get into another relationship. The same problem recurs. Where did you go?
Why didn’t you call me? Again, it breaks up an uncontrollably recurring situation. That’s Samsāra. You know, rather than cyclic existence, which I don’t think communicates very much, it’s an uncontrollably recurring situation. It recurs and we have no control over it.
Now, there’s big types of problems like that. How can we Well, what’s the cause of it? The cause is our lack of awareness. We’re unaware of how we exist, of who we are. Unaware, again, is a little bit of a better term than ignorant because if you go around, you are all ignorant.
It sounds like somebody on a pulpit saying that we’re all stupid, which is not the case. In Buddhism, there’s always a great deal of respect for everybody based on Buddha-nature. We all have the factors that will allow us to be able to grow, to evolve, and so on. It’s not that we’re all stupid and ignorant, but rather we’re just unaware. We lack awareness of who we are, how we exist.
Because of that, we experience that as insecurity. It’s the experiential factor of it. As a result of that, what we do is we grasp for a certain type of identity to try to make ourselves secure. We can grasp at our body, a young body. I’m young person, healthy person.
I can do athletics and things like that as our identity. This is the way we are. This is way we’re always going to be. We have to go out and if our hair starts to turn white then we freak out. We have to diet.
We have to go out jogging when we get older, have a love affair with a young person, all these sort of things to prove that we’re still young. Of course, it produces a lot of anxiety. We can identify with our profession. I am a physician. I am a train driver.
Something like that. Then again, when we’re made redundant, you get into an awful lot of difficulty because we put a big black line around who we are and that’s our identity. If we’re made redundant, well, it doesn’t even occur to us that we could do something else or train in a different way. You know, we’re just stuck with this concept of who we are. Identify with a certain set of political beliefs or a certain diet.
I am a vegetarian. Then you get very uptight with other people who eat in a different way and so on. Very self righteous about it. There are many different, identities that we, cling to, that we grasp for. You know, you identify with a football team or a, cricket team.
You know, again, everybody else who, you know, is into any other team, well, they’re the enemy. Now, what happens with grasping for these types of identities, the big black line around them, is that we’re still insecure about it, so we feel threatened about it. We have to assert it, we have to prove these identities, and so on. We get all sorts of disturbing attitudes which are ways with which we think we can make that identity secure. Desire, attachment, infatuation, these sort of things, which would be if I can get certain things around me and accumulate them to myself, this attachment, attraction, then that’s going to make me secure.
So, my identity is going to make my identity secure, so if my identity is as an intellectual, then you become infatuated with books like a fanatic towards a pop star. That’s the same attitude towards the books. And, if I can just get, you know, all these books around me, you know, in my library, then, you know, it doesn’t matter if I’ve never read any of them, but as long as whoever walks into my house can see them on the shelf, they will know that I am an intellectual. Alright? And so that, you know, but you never feel secure about that.
You never have enough. You always have to have more books and so on. Or, you can have it with, my identity is as a dharma practitioner. If I can just get all the paraphernalia around me, all the paintings, the thangkas, the bell, and the vajra, always have the incense going and always have the candles and these sort of things that, you know, that’s going to, you know, make this identity secure. People will see that when they walk into my room.
You know, so we always have to get more and more paraphernalia, all these sort of things. Or it could be, that same type of, you know, Trungpa used to call that spiritual materialism. Or if we can, get, you know, if our identity is as a mod dresser, then, you know, if I always get the latest fashions, that’s gonna make that identity secure. If my identity is as somebody who is, into, you know, on top of the music scene, then, you know, if I can always have the latest records, latest cassettes, and so on, that’s gonna make me secure or, as a member of the modern affluent society, if that’s my identity, then if I could always have the latest gadgets, the latest model car, that’s going to make me secure. We can see that that, of course, doesn’t make you secure because you always have to get more and more and more.
It never satisfies. But that’s this mechanism to try to make it secure. It could be that we feel Well, another disturbing attitude Disturbing attitude, by the way, is how I’m translating what’s usually translated as delusion or mental defilements. That’s a terrible term. Sounds like some dirt in your head.
afflictive emotions or emotional afflictions, these sort of things. It sounds like cerebral palsy or something. We’re not talking about emotions here. Emotions. That’s there’s no Tibetan word for emotion, by the way.
You can, talk positive states of mind. You can talk about certain disturbing states of mind, but there’s no word that covers both of those in Tibetan. Just like we had the word, there’s no word in English that covers both heart and mind. In Tibetan, we don’t have a word that covers both positive and negative states, would be included in the English word emotion. You get into a really screwy way of thinking when you start working with the English word emotion.
It’s disturbing attitudes. These are defined as a state of mind which, when it develops, we feel very disturbed. We feel uneasy. We feel uncomfortable. It’s not only a type of emotion which could be like attachment or closed mindedness, but also it could be a certain attitude about who we are.
These sort of things, that is not only a type of emotion. We have these disturbing attitudes. This is a very helpful definition by the way because, if in our dealings with others, you know, we’re not stupid. I mean, you can tell when you feel uneasy. You know, we know when we’re uneasy.
We know when we’re uncomfortable in that interaction. That’s a very good indication that there’s some disturbing attitude, something screwy going on, something fishy going on underneath the surface. Either I’m trying to make this person, I’m trying to somehow seduce this person for this or that person purpose, try to get something out of them, or I’m feeling hostile towards them, or I’m feeling, closed towards them, or I’m feeling jealous of them, or arrogant towards them. You know, all these sort of things is causing me to feel upset, uneasy. It’s a disturbing attitude.
It’s a very good guideline, the definition. Another disturbing attitude that we can have would be one of hostility. Hostile. You want to get something away from us that is threatening us. If our identity is as a perfect housekeeper, if I can only get all the dirt and disorder out of my house, that’s going to make me secure.
We have these people who have this constant war on dirt in their house. If there’s a spray can and there’s a dust cloth, they’re so uneasy waiting for the dirt or the insects or whatever it is to invade their house. Or we can have this attitude, If I can just get away from anybody who has a different opinion from myself or does things in a different way or a different religion, different color skin, you know, because all these things are threatening my identity of, you know, whatever beliefs I have, then that’s going to make me secure. So there’s or anybody who roots for a different football team, you know, because, my identity is as a member, a rooter of, you don’t use that word here, do you? You use, barracking?
Barracking. Right. I’m sorry that was pointed out to me that you don’t use that word here in Australia. It’s an American word. Barracking.
A barracker? A barracker. God, I’ve never heard. How do you spell that? Fan.
A footy fan. Anyway, barracking. Anyway, if I can just get rid of anybody else who’s barracking for a different team, then that’s going to make me secure. Anyway, we have that type of mechanism or we have the mechanism of closed mindedness which is that mechanism of putting up walls around us. Anything that’s threatening us, our identity, if we pretend it doesn’t exist, we put walls around us, then that’s going to make us secure.
For instance, you have problems at work, problems with your family, you come home, you just put the TV on, sit down, drink some beer, this sort of thing. Pretend these problems don’t exist. You just wanna shut them out and avoid them. This type of attitude purposely making the mind unclear. So Or we can have the identity that I come from a good family and respectable family.
Your child comes with a drinking problem, a drug problem, an unwanted pregnancy. Well, that doesn’t happen in our family. We have a good family. So you kick them out. Your heart is completely closed to them.
So you have all these different types of mechanisms. Then with these disturbing attitudes what happens then impulses come to our mind. That’s karma. We act out these impulses. We have impulsive behavior.
The impulse to go out and buy another record or another book or to clean the house yet again or to turn on the TV, whatever it is, to yell at the person who has a different idea from our own. Then that produces a lot of problems. This This is the general syndrome that we have here and the general cause of our uncontrollably recurring problems. What would be a stopping of that? A stopping of it would be a situation in which we were released from these type of troubles.
That would be nirvana. nirvana means release from these troubles or liberation. The way to achieve that is to, first of all, we have have to have a, what’s called, well, it’s usually translated as renunciation. That’s probably the worst of all the offending terms which have been, used in English. So much misunderstanding has come because of that word.
Renunciation in English means to give up everything and go live in a cave. We’re not talking about that at all. You know, you read the books about, and OK, did that.. There is another Tibetan word which refers to what did, but that’s not the word renunciation. Renunciation here, what we’re talking about is a determination determination to be free of your problems.
It’s based on being completely disgusted, completely fed up with it. Enough already. It’s like you go through the stages of you’re in your problem, try to use discipline discipline to overcome it. That doesn’t really work. It’s hard to just I will not smoke type of thing.
The discipline doesn’t work. What happens is then you get angry with yourself because you still are smoking. You know that intellectually you shouldn’t but you get angry with yourself then. That spills over into guilt. Guilt is a strong identification with being a naughty child.
Mommy and daddy aren’t going to like me. I blew it type of thing. Nobody is able to really change in either a state of anger with themselves or guilt. It’s just a trap. What we have to do is instead of feeling angry and guilty, you know, that I nagged again, you know, I blew this relationship, you have to go one step beyond guilt and that’s the step of boredom.
And, boredom, you’re just completely bored and fed up with, you know, the situation of nagging your partner, them getting upset, and the relationship breaking up. You’re bored with this enough already. You know, I’m bored with all the hassles with smoking and the buying the cigarettes and the ashtrays and the cleaning of it and the, you know, having to be hassled in the restaurants and, you know, all these sort of things. And enough already. That’s the framework of mind within which we develop this determination to be free.
Boredom, disgust, you know, enough already. Then we have this strong determination, I’m going to get out of it. That’s what we’re talking about and that we have to develop. We discuss this as the three principal paths, one of them is renunciation, it’s talking about is this determination to be free. We decide, you know, it’s what will get you off your rear end to actually do something.
Right? So that’s very, very important. Then we need to have what’s called the three higher trainings which is first of all we have to have basically wisdom which is discriminating awareness which is to see what’s usually translated as voidness or emptiness. Again, a bit of a misleading term because the connotation is nothingness. Nihilism which is not at all what it’s speaking about but rather what we’re talking about is an absence.
It’s an absence of fantasized ways of existing. A fantasized way of existing, there are many, many different levels of that. So you have all the Buddhist theories and schools that define more and more precisely what a fantasized way is. But basically what we need to do is on a really gross level is to see that what is a fantasized way of existing? Is that I have a big black line around some identity?
This is who I am. A big black line around it. I am a vegetarian. This is who I am. You know, then you feel threatened by that.
And so, you know, Oh, you eat meat. You eat this. You eat that. You know, you come on very heavy towards others. If we were secure in that identity, what difference does it make?
What anybody else, eats or what they do? You know, they may have their their purposes reasons for it. There’s a big black line around it. This is who I am. To see that I am a gardener or I am this or I am that.
Whatever type of identity we might have to see that there’s an absence of this. We don’t exist. I am a monster. I’m short, fat, and ugly. Nobody loves me.
I’m no good. I’m a shit. This type of identity, the big black line around it, which is ridiculous. It’s something which just condemns us to having to act like that. I am a shy person.
Big black line around it and then you walk into a room and you condemn yourself to being like that. You walk into the because you’re convinced that you’re shy, you don’t have anything to say. Then everybody else sees you in the corner and they’ll agree. We’re stuck in this uncontrollably recurring type of problem to realize that there’s an absence of this. You don’t exist like that.
That’s ridiculous. Obviously, sometimes you are affable with others and so on. It makes a much more open situation. It’s not that I don’t exist. That’s not saying that either.
It’s saying that we don’t exist with a fixed type of set concrete identity with a big black line around it. This is who I am, always will be, and there’s there’s no way of ever changing that. We have to see the absence of that. The absence of these fantasized ways of existing. Let’s avoid this.
Now, in order to be able to focus on that, that’s like the axe to chop down the tree. If we don’t have good aim, then we’re not going to be able to cut down the tree even if we have the sharp axe. For that, we need concentration. If we don’t have the strength to pick up the axe, even if we have the aim, we’re not gonna be able to use it. We gain that strength by ethical self discipline.
I use ethical rather than moral because again it’s a more neutral term. And, so this is the self discipline not the discipline that’s gained by just being able to stand on one foot all day, but, rather, it’s ethical in the sense of being able to discriminate between what’s constructive and what’s destructive in our gross behavior. You know, if we’re not able to differentiate between, you know, what’s a constructive and destructive action with our body and our speech, then, how are we going to be able to differentiate in terms of our mind? You know, so you gain the strength from being able to differentiate on this physical and verbal level to then be able to do that on a mental level between, you know, what is a destructive state of mind in terms of dullness and mental wandering and what would be be more constructive in terms of concentration. So, it gives us the strength to be able to make that differentiation and correct deviations from it.
That ability to discriminate on this level in terms concentration will give us this the, you know, the aim and so on to be able to then make the differentiation, the discrimination between reality and fantasy, which is necessary in terms of gaining the view of reality of this absence. You know? Because what we’re learning to be able to differentiate is reality from fantasy. You know, our fantasized ways that we imagine things to exist in. As I say, it doesn’t mean that, nothing exists.
It’s sort of like, you know, we can imagine that, this this room is, well, I mean, you can you can think in terms of, this, glass. You know, mean, how do you how do you meditate on emptiness, on voidness, on these absences? Well, we can think in terms of this glass. You can focus on or see the presence of this glass here in my hand. But now you can also focus on the absence.
You can know the absence of the glass from my hand, can’t you? It’s not there. It’s the absence of it. So we’re focusing on an absence. So it’s an absence not of a glass, of something that was there and that exists, but, of something that never existed.
So for instance, monsters in this room. You know, we could imagine you could have this, fantasy that this room exists haunted by monsters. Because of that, that fantasy is going to exist. Because you think that. It can cripple you in terms of causing a great deal of fear and prevent us from being able to use the room because we think it’s haunted by monsters.
Now, we could come into the room.