We’d like to discuss tonight what we have discussed following on what we discussed last night. The question of what happens after acceptance of that particular type of discipline has gone through and students being tested with hell, tried or countless levels, next situation that comes up is true meaning of discipline and devotion. Meaning of devotion here is sense of surrendering, sense of opening to what happens into the situation that you are not trying to cook up something extra so that you can win over against the command of the teacher, the guru, that you accept everything that has been said, but at the same time it is very questionable that we heard the stories in the past up to this point that certain teachers would tell their students there is no room to have any doubts known whatsoever. Either they should get into it or they should get out of it. And at this point, the question on Milarepa and the Kagyu tradition is concerned, it’s a different one.
You can get in if there’s more critical attitude to the situation. More questions there is much better, much more realistic and fertile. Whereas, if there’s less questions and then just purely submission, commitment alone, that is regarded as a very tricky and dangerous person. Very dangerous. For wanting that you are just taking things by word-of-mouth, face value as they say.
It’s very dangerous, extremely dangerous. And it doesn’t work in the long run. The main important part is having all kinds of critical attitude to the situation of learning and studying process, but at the same time, diligently seeking to practice study. Seek to practice study. Milarepa sat in his cave for a long time, and he had attained enlightenment in his lifetime.
But at the same time, the process that he’s gone through was very painful and arduous, extremely extremely arduous and painful. Reason why it is arduous and painful is because that he is examining every speck of his neurosis as part of the working basis. It is like that shit is being served for breakfast and lunch as well as for dinner. Again, again, again, and again, all along. To begin with, you don’t like your own shit.
But then it’s too much to be served as three times as meal. It’s not so nice. It’s terrible. But that seems to be the only way. To appreciate, realize, work with, your own particular output and that becomes input of your own particular world.
That you create the fragrance of air air around your world, under your own out of your own armpit smell. It seems to be very ghastly in some sense, unpleasant, but nevertheless, it is very workable. If you are not willing to work with what you have, what you are on the spot, There’s no other way to work with oneself on whatsoever. Absolutely not. The situation becomes very fake at some point.
The discipline part of this is sit for morning, sit for midday, sit for evening. In fact, there’s no actually boundary between the two, three of them. Sit all the time. Constantly sit, sit, sit. Practice, practice, practice all the time.
Interestingly, that the beginning point that your shit in the morning is regarded as breakfast, and sitting in the midday is regarded as lunch, Shit in the end of the day is look out at the dinner. Then you begin to lose all kinds of perspectives that that shit all over. It’s everywhere. So you begin to begin to get some kind of feeling to the fact that the continuity of facing one’s own neurosis is a flow. Not big deal.
Discipline is more of appreciation of your own shortcomings, feasting on your own shit rather than punishing yourself all the time. In some traditions, Catholics have we’re beating themselves up. What other traditions have that kind of style of making yourself starve, beat yourself to the blood, make yourself completely thirsty, all kinds of theistic tricks that you develop. In those cases appear in the name of God, not in the name of your own sanity. Unfortunately.
But if we begin to lay a trip on in the name of God, trying to go through this process, that’s gonna breed further insanity rather than sanity, which is not actually intended. So way to relate it with the god would bring sanity at the same time. Somehow that didn’t happen. That didn’t take place. Milarepa’s display was very powerful, extraordinarily unyielding.
He sat and sat sat on this rock seat without any cushions, and fundamentally that his buttock, his bottom is completely ingrown into the shape of individual curves that rock exists. He become completely one with the rock. He become one with the moss of the rock and drew blood out of his bottom, but that could be healed finally, and he become part of the rock. His rock statue is completely. That’s not regarded as a particular exaggeration.
It’s the same as things discussed in in the Catholic traditions, punishing oneself. Milarepa never sat for meditation or sitting on a rock as punishment that he should purify his sin, but he should meditate a lot. That’s why he sat on his rock, seat bottom. Nothing to do with the punishment, nothing to do with the condemning of the human beings who fell falling away from divine principles at all.
It’s just purely need for basic sanity. In order to have basic sanity, you’re related with the earth, rock, sit. Practice a lot. That doesn’t mean to say, of course, you should put the rocks inside your cushion. I’m not sure if you suffer.
Discipline is very important from their point of view for sanity. The Western theistic philosophy of discipline is the more you suffer, the more you catch yourself constantly in judgment, sanity is gonna be granted, but in the Buddhist tradition, nontheistic tradition, more disciplines that that’s gonna develop more sanity. It’s not so much a punishment as such particularly at all. Very simple and straightforward. If you have any questions, you’re welcome.
Could you say how discipline relates to sanity in more detail? Well, discipline is sanity in some sense. Sanity is a sense of seeing what is happening around your world and going along with that particular pattern. And wherever there’s need for this, you do it. Discipline in this point meaning having a sense of relaxation as well as having a sense of control situation at the same time.
Would that sense of control be a sense of no controller also? I don’t think so. Never. Never. Wouldn’t wouldn’t the sense of of a controller imply a self that’s controlling?
I don’t think so. It’s just my situation. The message coming from outside. If you put your finger on burning ring on your stove, You didn’t do it. They still did it.
They got the message to it, but you mismanaged your stove. Comprendo. Mhmm. Do you wanna say something? Pardon?
Yeah. I still feel confused because I I think that release from the sense of an ego implies that there’s no one to experience anything. You mean jellyfish? Petrified individuality? There’s furthermore intelligence taking place beyond that.
You kinda ignore your intelligence, your thought patterns. Even suicide doesn’t work. You can what? Suicide doesn’t work either. The patterns of self punishment that you described in the theistic traditions, does that represent, in your opinion, a distortion from within the institution or from the original teachings?
Predominant institutions, but that have begun to become also spokesman for the original teachings as well, these days. Okay. It’s very simple actually. Then it’s almost primarily or completely the responsibility of the institution to promote a practice. Yeah.
Yeah. So therefore, they’re very well In other words, what I’m saying is that individual mystics faded away, faded out. That that theistic tradition is concerned. They’re more concerned about the family hierarchy, individuality very much so because of the norm of theism. So they wouldn’t include someone like Naropa, you know, as part of the family because they’re not respectable.
They already have the established original family. Already established an individual family. Already, and they need everybody to eat Abrahamic food or whatever you have, you know, we go through the whole line and everything. And I think the reason why Buddhism is so bad in its purity is because it didn’t have any kosher food. Anything like that, in the Tantric Buddhism particularly, I would say.
And it didn’t have any particular lines of thinking of that nature, of that people should stick to certain particular trend of things all the time. If you have become the Buddha, you are regarded as heritage. The symbolism in these schools, to my mind, are somewhat compatible with, are similar in the types of symbolism that Buddhism seems to generate. And there seems to be the possibility of a bridge in terms of real real communication, workability and communication. Yeah.
At some point. At some point, yeah. Well, that seemed to be slowly taking place, that as far as Buddhism is concerned, it’s an encompassing space. It doesn’t believe in God. In any case, you can’t encourage your Buddhists to believe in God at all.
Yeah. But on the other hand, the Buddhist tradition do believe in the sense of principles that’s working in the phenomenal energy, that the theistic tradition had to bend down to Buddhism from that point of view, as far as that situation is concerned, which is beginning to happen actually, that a lot of the theistic traditions begin to at least the Christianity, People speak more of the terms of Godhead rather than Jehovah, you know, per se. People begin to talk about, you know, kingdom of heaven is in your in you. So it’s an intellectual problem. But they begin to realize their problems, you know, and on the other hand, Buddhist traditions never said that we believe you are God.
We stay as Buddhists. And there’s historical changes that begin to take place that the theologians of the theistic tradition begin to surrender slowly and slowly, and slowly. And that I never heard any Buddhist theologians talking that we shall worship with some God at all. Continued at this point on side two.