Does Milarepa have to do with the lack of self deception in his part? Not necessarily. But he honestly is just simply lacking personal aggrandizement. And we have to have a language here properly. I should ask you a question.
What do you mean by perception? Self perception. By ignoring something that’s very real, I guess. What is very real? Well, ignoring something.
Well, obviously, Milarepa is trying to ignore something. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have any journey to make at all. He had to go through and shedding all kinds of things shedding all kinds of things. But I think the question here is that he knows that he has to develop all these things that he had, but at the same time you just realize that that’s underway. So in some honesty, if you were being wholehearted, then then Wholehearted is human.
Rather than completely enlightened, which is a very, very difficult ask for people to do that. Anybody else? Let’s see. Is that mine? Coming.
When you said that Milarepa gained enlightenment in one lifetime, are you saying that he was not reincarnated from previous life? I I don’t really understand that. No. Somebody told him, asked him, he said that. He was he reincarnated before.
You know, he was just one little spot. Who taught in the Buddhist past and attained enlightenment in a one lifetime. Yeah. I don’t I don’t understand that. You don’t understand it?
No. Why not? What’s the problem? When you say one lifetime, right, I don’t understand that in connection with the incarnation. It’s this lifetime.
Just this last time. One go. You mean he wasn’t trying any other one? That’s right. Yeah.
But, usually, we get a kind of credentials by somebody who attained enlightenment that he was already a great person in the past, definitely doing so. This case, just starting as a very ordinary person, confused person, was able to enlightenment in that time, one last time. How do we know that? That’s one lifetime. We know that his early life, according to the history, is considered unsavory.
But the childhood of Milarepa himself was not particularly forceful. And when he actually begin to practice, he begin to change. He begin to turn nicely towards the end of his days. Like how you watch somebody’s face read his life story. Could not that have been due to, you know, con things in the past or whatever?
See, Milarepa had a very bad karmic situation. Yeah. In his early life he did. What? In his early life.
Know? His teachings, yes.. We have better conversations. It does make more hopeful to us in some case. How What?
On and so forth. No. He had to build his castle from scratch, and he had already humiliated himself a lot on top of that, which is in his mind. That seems to be the largest. Does negate that much karma in just that space of time?
How do you what? Negate that much, you know, that much, let’s call it bad merit, or karma or whatever in that space of time. But killing so many people and doing so many things. Well, because he it was very hard work for him, most of it was Marpa. Not not easy matter.
Very hard. Very difficult. What was for Marpa? What? I beg your pardon?
Who was it hard for? Well, Marpa didn’t have any problems. I would say that Marpa doing his teaching would have taken upon a lot of a lot of that that kind of activity. I don’t mean so he couldn’t care about it.
He could split. Marpa could split. What’s great effort in this context? What would right effort be? Right effort?
Right effort, yes. Well, of course. And that’s just an automatic process? Very personal. From what I’ve read, Milarepa’s, much of his practice was done alone and in the country, and a lot of it seemed very extreme.
And that he was to some extent an inspiration and an example. And yet it seems to me that you’ve also said that the idea of having to practice an extreme, in a lot of asceticism and in isolation and going away from other human beings and so on, that that’s not particularly the point. Is that mainly a matter of a particular cultural situation? Because also it seems to me that other examples and people’s inspiration in the lineage also practice away from people. I think the whole basic question is that practice is done individually.
The retreat situations and things like that. Also, mindful of appreciating one’s learning, intensive learning. And at the same time practicing that we conducted group situations also expresses such as kindness for one’s reality at the same time. And the hermit system will enable us to disappear. There’s no other choice than to practice by himself.
There’s no such thing, there’s no group to practice at all. He was just cast out in his home territory. The rest of the Kagyu tradition eventually, like his disciples and all the lamas, were around and practiced together, relating with the reality of the world at some time. Would you say something more about intellectual honesty, about not kidding oneself? That’s hard to say in the first day of speaking.
It’s very hard to say. It’s up to you. Is it hard to say because you’re using up to use words to say it? No. And then it becomes a trick.
I think individuals are gonna discover that. But, finally, I think it’s time to have a nice sleep. And once more, welcome to the path, and I’m learning again and again. This particular discipline here that we’re doing together depends on immense sitting practice of meditation, sitting practice of meditation, immense sitting practice of meditation, and sitting alone. The subject that we are discussing is part of the process that we can understand if there is enough sitting practice involved.
So I would like to encourage everyone of you to study a lot and if you have never studied before the meditation practice that we have developed, right, here, people willing to do that, and everybody is interested. So I worked with the teachers and there’s a lot, time is short. Otherwise, we are going to create intellectual garbage or some kind of garbage from the dirt all over the place. And we’re just slowly building this place up and you see construction is going up. We don’t want to further clutter here.
We will have to start with the clean stuff. And also you will like to start with the clean start sometimes. So please sit a lot and take part with the intention of contemplative discipline rather than having a conference or having intellectual feast of some kind, intellectual virtue of some kind. That’s the frame of reference to this point that encourages you to sit a lot and understand accordingly. We don’t provide those situations aggressively either.
We invite you to do so. So please come here, don’t be late. Thank you.