Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 37-minute talk, Geshe Dhawa Gyaltsen explores how distorted beliefs create suffering and how changing our mental frameworks can transform experience. He uses the metaphor of viewing a snow-capped mountain through sunglasses to illustrate how we overlay false projections onto reality, then explores the Buddhist assertion that knowing is organizing of the known—our beliefs and worldviews shape what we perceive. Geshe examines deep, often unconscious assumptions: that we’re independent unchanging selves, that impermanent things bring lasting contentment, that we’re victims rather than authors of our lives. He shifts to Buddhism’s forward-looking orientation, explaining how intention and awareness interrupt repetitive patterns and create new futures. The teaching concludes with how faith, constructive anxiety, and compassion motivate refuge and transformation. For serious practitioners interested in Buddhist philosophy.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 01 H and M of A.mp3
UUID: 9bd331de-3d94-42c0-8410-bfcb301ed408
Teacher: Geshe Dhawa Gyaltsen
Collection: The Heart and Mind of Awakening 1996 Jul-Sep (Geshe Dhawa Gyaltsen)
Date: 1996 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 37.1 minutes
Words: ~5,025
Lam. Lam means graduated path. So Lam — the actual, the most simple definition of the word Lam translated back into English is clear realization. So what does it mean to realize? You know, we all need these realizations, whatever they might be.
Well, what exactly does it mean to gain realization? So as far as Buddhism is concerned, to realize is to remove superimpositions with regard to an object. That is to say, to remove our fabricated ideas that come with distortion. The fantasy element. The illusory image that we layer upon some object — the way it exists, the way it is.
So the removal of that fantasy image, or that illusory image — that fabrication of our own mind from the way the object is or the way the object exists — is what we mean by gaining a realization. You know, it’s like seeing a snow mountain as green because you’re wearing sunglasses. That is to say, we’re superimposing a color upon the actual way that mountain exists, the actual color of being white. The moment we remove the sunglasses, we see the way the mountain actually exists in terms of its true color. So we gain a realization as to the true color of the mountain.
So this is what we mean by realization. This is what it means by traveling the path — to gain realization, to remove our fantasy in terms of the world, our illusory images that we’re continually projecting upon the world. You know, the psychology of suffering is very much a product of the dysfunctional ways that we view our world, how we come to know our world. And it’s the fundamental assertion of Buddhism that knowing is an organizing of the known. And this is really one of the most profound and essential assertions of all of Buddhism.
You know, that the world does not exist independent of our own minds, independent of our premises, our presuppositions, our assumptions, our beliefs, our ideas, our worldview about the world, the mental maps that we use to navigate, to travel the terrain of our lives. Now the point is that if our ideas and our beliefs and our worldview are in some way faulty, in some way mistaken or incorrect, confused, impaired in some way, then we’re going to come to only know pathology. That means there’s some degree of disease or neurosis or ill being. There’s a misfit between ourselves and our world. Our approach to life is going to be problematic.
You know, okay, simply — most — we’re going to experience suffering in some way. Our beliefs inform our perceptions. The world that we find ourselves in, the world around us that we perceive and experience, is appropriate to our system of beliefs about the world. You know, what we come to know is inseparable from how we know. How we know is dependent upon our beliefs, our premises, our assumptions, these mental maps, the codes, the way in which we organize our world.
It doesn’t exist independent of our own ideas about the world, the way the world appears to us, the way that we relate with it and thereby experience the world. Most of this organizing quality of the mind is going on unconsciously to ourselves. You know, if we experience our world as pathological — that is in some way unhealthy, dysfunctional, unworkable, problematic — that is because our beliefs about it unknowingly are also. We look at our world through dark glasses, just like these sunglasses.
We see the world in a confused manner, in a way in which we relate with it in inappropriate manners. A world of health and well-being is incompatible with a pathological worldview, with a mistaken, misconceived, dysfunctional way of approaching life. And this is one of the most basic premises of Buddhism, another premise in which we approach the practice of Buddhism. It’s for this reason that traveling a path — making effort in all these various activities we’re talking about, like reading, studying the teachings, reflecting upon them, meditating, practicing them — that they are important because they’re helpful in a way about learning of our situation. You know, how did our present situation evolve?
What’s its nature? Becoming aware of alternative possibilities for ourselves. And how we can actualize those possibilities and modify our beliefs, our ideas, most precisely our distorted ideas, our mistaken beliefs, our inaccurate maps. That is how we can go about eliminating the illusory images that we’re continually laying upon, projecting upon the world about us. That is to say, in other words, how we can gain realization.
To come to know what is real as opposed to — there’s a big word — epistemological fantasies. epistemological fantasies. It’s a terribly important word to Buddhism. It’s a terribly important word to our life, and we don’t have to become scholarly about it or intellectual about it. It just simply — epistemology just means how we come to know things.
You know, how do I know this person is an enemy? How do I know this person is my friend? How do I know what is going to bring me happiness? How do I know what is the nature of suffering? You know, I have ideas about this thing, beliefs about this thing.
I have a view of the world and how I’m going to deal with it, how I’m going to relate with it, how I’m going to get what I want out of it, how I’m going to get rid of what I don’t want. I have all these premises and assumptions about the world. And Buddhism is saying that many of our assumptions, many of our premises, and therefore beliefs which are based upon these premises and assumptions, are mistaken, they’re crooked, they’re wrong, and they can only bring about ill health, neurosis, suffering in the end. You know, we don’t have any choice. We need to begin to develop, relate with the world in ways which are fundamentally functional, more skillful, more appropriate to what it is that the world can actually give us, what it actually has the capacity to give us in terms of happiness and suffering.
The ultimate realization is the optimal way of knowing and being in the world, and that is awakening. And unsurpassed, perfect, complete awakening is what we mean by Buddhahood. So, you know, we’ve talked about, in terms of the three principal aspects of the path, many of these mistaken assumptions that we’re operating on the basis of, many of these inaccurate beliefs. You know, the most basic are what?
Ignorance, misconception as to the nature of the world about us in terms of how it exists. The world exists in interdependence upon our minds and interdependence upon causes and conditions upon its parts, etcetera, and interconnecting with other causes and conditions. A major cause of which is our own minds, our own ideas about it. But we misconceive of the world to exist independent of all external factors to itself. This glass, this table — all things including the I — ourselves exist as independent, unchanging, unitary entities.
That’s our misconception. And that’s our most basic misconception. And we have to work through that in order to come to an understanding of the way things actually exist so that we begin to relate with the world in more appropriate, more functional manner, more skillful ways of dealing with the world. There’s this dysfunctional pattern of self-centeredness, this tendency to evaluate and to think of everything and everyone in terms of what’s in it for me. You know, how can it serve my purposes?
This continual self-referencing, exaggerated self-concern, which we bring to all our relationships. But there are, you know, there are level upon level of misconceptions. Just like, you know, I’ve used the image of an archaeological dig where level upon level of civilizations, level upon level of mistaken ideas and beliefs, one built upon the other, are exposed. You know, we think, we act, and we speak according to these deeply held beliefs and views. We’re always in the grasp of our ideas about the world.
There’s no other way for us to be in the world except as an expression of the ideas and the beliefs that we hold. We hold, you know, for example, that at some level of awareness, most all of us harbor a deeply entrenched idea about ourselves — that we’re limited, that we’re somehow insufficient, that we’re incomplete — that we have, you know, that which we’re talking about presently in terms of our idea about ourselves — that we’re going to live forever. And perhaps if we were to even acknowledge the fact that we’re going to die, it’s always with an assumption that we’re going to die at some time in the far distant future, not anytime soon. You know, we believe that in some way that we are a victim of something. Maybe it’s our family.
Maybe it’s our economic or our social or our cultural background. Some historical circumstance. Something which is external to my own self and over which I have little control. You know, something about which I have no choice — that I don’t have to take in a way responsibility for. That somehow my happiness and my suffering are out of my hands.
Some level we believe that. You know, we believe that that which is by its very nature dissatisfactory has the capacity to bring us complete contentment, complete satisfaction. We believe that that which is impermanent is going to remain unchanging and last forever. We believe that that which has no self identity in fact has some kind of intrinsic nature to itself.
In other words, the point is, within our minds there presently exists a vast subterranean network of interconnected, erroneous premises and presuppositions, wrong beliefs, mistaken assumptions, some kind of distorted worldview. With such an inner world of what we might call epistemological fantasies — that is fantasy created out of misknowing, misunderstanding — when that type of worldview collides or comes in contact with the world as it is — you know, there inevitably must follow some type of conflict. Invariably, there must be some kind of disappointment, frustration, dissatisfaction, always some kind of flawed fundamental approach to life.
You know, it’s like someone who refuses to acknowledge that summer changes in the fall into autumn. It’s American English — into autumn. And they dress inappropriately, and they become sick. They refuse to acknowledge and recognize the nature of the situation.
So their action is somehow inappropriate to what would be most functional, what would be most in keeping with their own best interests. You know, we are aware of reality to the extent that our survival makes that awareness necessary — that much and no more. We all lie on a continuum somewhere between oblivion — which we’re all struggling for, it would appear — and awakening. And as long as we lie on that continuum, no matter what we do, regardless of what we do, we’re going to suffer. The psychological construct of our own egos — the primary delusion in which we live.
The display of our own egos is all that we see. And in that way, we’re alienated from reality, from the way things in fact are. This is what it means by the pathology of epistemology. That means an unhealthy way of knowing the world, therefore an unhealthy way of relating with the world, and therefore an experience of unhealth, of disease, of sickness, of suffering. And this is what Buddhism is very much aiming at.
This is what it means to travel a path — gaining realization, removing these superimpositions, removing these misconceptions, these fantasy images that we’re continually projecting upon the world. You know, it’s like — it is as if we believe the piece of chocolate cake. You know, it is as if we believe a photograph of a piece of chocolate cake to be the real thing. You know, there’s a disparity between our belief on the one hand and the reality of the object on the other. Its true nature, divorced of our ideas about it, our opinions about it. No matter how many photos we may be able to accumulate, no matter how many photos of that piece of chocolate cake we may be able to consume — you might be able to force down your throat in one way or another.
You’re never going to experience the pleasure and the level of satisfaction that you expect from it. We never get just what it is that we actually want. Now what is it that we want out of that piece of chocolate cake at a deeper level? What are we looking to that chocolate piece of cake to bring us? Some kind of final end to our craving, to our desiring, to having to search, to go on acquiring, having to go on endlessly consuming.
And that’s okay. There’s no end to our drive for consumption to find some kind of lasting satisfaction, something which really brings us contentment, satisfies this inner thirst, the search that we’re all involved in one way or another. We never find in that photograph the fulfillment, the contentment, the satisfaction of our psychological hunger — that which the chocolate cake was supposed to bring us. There’s always something missing, something not quite right.
Maybe we can’t even quite put our finger on what it is. Some inadequacy of our world and ourselves. Something doesn’t quite fit together. Either our world is inadequate to ourselves or we’re inadequate to our world. You know, we constantly experience it — if only subtly and if only at the extreme borders of our awareness.
Some kind of abrasive interface between the two. Can’t get it. There’s a sound you can make, a squeaking sound. You know, there’s a word. In other words, we experience dukkha.
Dukkha is generally translated as suffering, but it broadly refers to suffering. But in its actual, its original meaning, it meant a wheel that grinds on its axle. A wheel that grinds on its axle. You know, our life grinds on its axle. Grates on us.
It jars us. It hurts us. It wounds us. It doesn’t quite fit properly with ourselves. There’s some kind of misfit.
So the path beyond dukkha, beyond this misfit, this grinding upon ourselves, is necessarily a path of change. And that’s basically what we’re talking about — changing our minds in terms of changing our views, in terms of changing our beliefs and assumptions, changing our various false premises, our dysfunctional conceptions. They all have to change. This is what it means to be in terms of changing our mind, changing our worldview. We must necessarily look at the world in different ways than we do now, you know, through different eyes, through different ideas, more functional, more appropriate, more skillful ideas.
And therefore our world will then correspondingly appear in new and different ways. And I’ve talked about how ideals are the eyes out of which we see the world. By changing our ideas, we change our world. And we can begin to find some kind of fit in terms of our ideals with the world. Our world and ourselves become adequate for one another.
You know, things will change. The misfit of our life is gone. Our life flows more smoothly. We move about our world more freely with a greater sense of ease, a feeling of well-being. There’s a greater reassurance at the depths of our heart, a calm — a deep calm in our hearts.
You know, we’ve come home at last. There’s a sense of having — that we’ve given up the struggle. It’s like when you’ve come home after a hard day at work and you’ve accomplished your task. There’s no more that needs to be done and you can finally rest. Maybe the world begins to have a sense that the world actually is supportive of ourselves, that it’s no longer seen as hostile, alien to ourselves, that it’s in fact in tandem with what it is that we most want.
It seems supportive. It seems to be there for ourselves in some way. So the emphasis in Buddhism — there’s another word called teleological. Another good word. Teleological has the idea of forward-reaching instead of backward-looking, instead of cosmological — you know, looking at what’s happened to me, what, all the torma that I experienced as a child, one way or another.
All that went wrong, you know, the wrong parents or the difficulties that I had to go through when I was little. So there’s a — it’s necessary to look at both of these areas in our life — in terms of how I got to where I am, but also where it is that I want to go. You know, to begin to look forward, to begin to emphasize, to begin to conceptualize our present purposes. What are our intentions? What are our goals?
Buddhism is more concerned with the direction in which we are moving at present, where it is that we’re headed, where is it we want to go, than it is with where we have been and what we’ve done. It sees future events in some way, in some sense projecting calls of power backwards in time. And therefore, it needs to be taken into account in determining how the present moment is going to flow into the future. And not just in terms of predictability from out of the past. You know, if you only look at a person’s past — they’ve done this, this, this, this, this — therefore I can assume, I can project, I can predict they’re going to do this.
They’ve done a, b, c, I can predict they’re going to do d now. And that’s the way — generally the way most people will live their lives. But the Buddha was saying we have to take into account intention, purpose, that someone can radically change the pattern of their lives, that it doesn’t have to flow out from the past necessarily. That they can interrupt the pattern and begin to create a type of future that they might want for themselves. That they can achieve z if they wish, if they have the intention to do that.
Well, past experiences influence the present. They are not entirely determined unless we allow them to be. In our present moment of experience, we feel these past experiences in our own way, from our own point of view, from our own perspective, for our purposes. And we synthesize our past experiences into a kind of story. The past person — who I have been.
Most people are enslaved to the past, bound by the past rules, their inheritance, their continually repeating loop of inner self-talk that’s going on in our mind continuously, telling us who we are, telling us what we will and will not do, what we can expect out of life legitimately. But if we can begin to see the causality of our lives, how we arrived at where we are now, we can — once we recognize the patterns — the story becomes vulnerable to change. You know, to the degree that we’re aware, isn’t it to the same degree that we’re going to be less determined by our past, that we begin to create the space for free choice in our life? You know, Buddhism is asking us that we focus upon taking conscious possession of our life story. The story that each of us, either with awareness or unawareness, is telling ourselves about ourselves, which is our life, which very much determines the quality and outcomes of our life.
That we be forward-looking and begin to tell ourselves another possible story, another alternative of what we could be. And begin to assume the responsibility for making it come true. To make a kind of shift, a re-attuning of ourselves from who I have been to who I can become. There’s a great difference in that perspective, in that orientation. The emphasis in Buddhism is on what I am not — you know — what can I be?
And what can I now do to become that? Not on who I have been or what I have done or what has happened to me. You know, we are what we do and we are free to do what we choose. So the future person is seen as yet-to-be-actualized possibilities which exist within the present moment. The future is not determined.
The past only comes up to the present. With an awareness of alternatives and taking responsibility in terms of choices, we can begin to create another future for ourselves. In terms of the Buddhist path, we begin to create the future of becoming a Buddha. The inner focus of our life becomes Buddha. This is the person I choose to be.
And no matter what I’ve done in the past, no matter what are the reoccurring compulsive patterns which have brought me to where I am now — I can intend to be something radically different. I can change. You know, this is the great optimism, the great possibility which our humanity, our life, presents us with. And we can implement.
We can take responsibility and actually bring it about, in terms of the Dharma — the methods, the means, the truth, the way, the tools that we can work with to change, to bring about that Buddha. And this process all occurs within the social context of a spiritual community — those who assist us in the process. I’m proposing a description of human beings as given motivation by the new possibilities, the goals and ideals which attract and pull them toward the future. So we don’t have to allow ourselves to keep going through the same patterns, the same cycles, to keep staying with the same misconceptions, the wrong assumptions, the same dysfunctional premises.
We can change those. We can gain realization. We can become forward-looking. We can be someone else. We can create that someone else.
This does not omit the fact that we are all partially pushed from behind and determined by the past, but it unites this force with the other half. It gives us a causality in which reason why and purpose are united. The former is part of all human experience since we all participate in the finite natural world. In this respect, each of us, in making any important decision, needs to find out as much as we can about the objective facts of the situation. This realm is particularly relevant in the problem of neurosis, in which past events do exercise a compulsive, repetitive, chain-like, predictable effect upon the person’s actions.
Freud was right in this respect that rigid deterministic causality does work in neurosis and sickness. One of the main characteristics of neurosis is compulsive repetition — going through the same patterns over and over again. This is one of the resistant forces which we have to work with — the momentum of our present current thinking — to change, to create a new future for ourselves. But he was wrong in trying to carry this over to apply to all human experience. The aspect of purpose which comes into the process when an individual can become conscious of what he is doing opens him to new and different possibilities in the future and introduces the element of responsibility and freedom.
Now determining what it is that you want to become, to become forward-looking, to create a purpose and intention, begins to interrupt this pattern — this chain-like, predictable, repetitive quality about our lives. If we don’t, we’re going to simply repeat more of our history, more of the same mistakes, because nothing has changed basically in terms of our ideas, our premises, our worldview. And this determines the quality of our lives. Nothing out there — only in our own mind. So it is our faith — the positive meaning, the significance, energy, and the reality that we invest in these new possibilities.
Having faith in the possibility of becoming something radically other than who you are at present, and all that might hold for you in terms of the quality of your life. This — having that faith — which makes it real, the real possibility of being a Buddha, being a happy, healthy, loving, sane human being, which incites us to exercise our freedom, to wish — I want to become that, to admit that — really, that attracts me. That’s what I want for myself in the future. The world begins with a wish.
Who we are began with a wish. Another quality of neurosis is a sense of emptiness — that even if we did care, we really couldn’t — we don’t have the power to change, to make things any different. This is why nothing changes. This is why nothing is ever different — to overcome that sense of infancy, to begin to determine what it is that I want, to begin to orientate, preoccupy ourselves with, to choose, and begin to commit ourselves to something, to create some kind of direction in our lives. And it is constructive anxiety — this undercurrent of apprehensive concern about the fact that these past dysfunctional patterns are simply going to repeat themselves endlessly into the future — which induces us to change, to actually begin to take responsibility to bring about change in fact.
You know, through faith we overcome the paralysis of fear, the fear about the unknown, about the unaccustomed, the unfamiliar. Through constructive anxiety, we overcome the stagnation of our false hopes that things are going to get better somehow all by themselves. I really don’t need to do anything about it. I can simply hope that things will get better. But they won’t.
Things will repeat. They won’t get better. You have to give up this false hope that they will. The faith empowers us to positively wish. May it be so.
That’s what I want. And then this constructive anxiety — I’m talking about these two basic causes for going for refuge. Faith and constructive anxiety. Constructive anxiety moves wish for to the level of will to.
We actually exert. We overcome our impotency, our sense of insufficiency, and we do something. We act. It’s faith and constructive anxiety which causes us to go for refuge to new possibilities. Possibilities in this context are Buddha, Dharma, and the spiritual community.
You know, it is these — Buddha, Dharma, and spiritual community — by means of which will too become something is transformed into actually being what it is that we’re seeking. Now it is so. And it moves it over into an actuality, not merely a mental intention. It becomes real in our lives. You know, in terms of going for refuge, you mentioned that not only is there faith and constructive anxiety, but additionally for the bodhisattva there is the cause of great compassion.
You know, there’s great compassion which overcomes the bodhisattva’s fear of self-absorbed oblivion of his own or her own passive peace. And it is due to that combination of faith, constructive anxiety, and great compassion that the bodhisattva is moved, that the will to help others is moved to the level of unremitting, spontaneous, transcendent, altruistic activity. That his or her life is permeated with a dedication to the benefiting of others. So, these are the causes. We can create these causes and bring about that change.
The inner focus of our life becomes Buddha — the Buddha which is inside of ourselves. This becomes our refuge. This is — we’re trying to become forward-orientated, in a way goal-orientated, so that our life has intention. Our life has purpose. And this begins to interrupt these past patterns.
They no longer determine our future. We begin to take — the quality of attention enters into the evolution of our life and who we become. It becomes a part of our story. Who I want to be. I want to become a Buddha — that Buddha inside of myself.
I can begin to actualize. I can begin to take responsibility for bringing about that effect by means of the Dharma within the social context of the spiritual community — those who assist me in the process — in trying to raise the level of motivation again and again and again. Why we’re doing what we’re doing — to include an ever-widening circle of others. So this becomes our intention and motivation behind our various acts, why we do what we do, including what we’re doing tonight together. To the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Supreme Community, I go for refuge until awakening. Through the creative potential of my listening to the Dharma, may I achieve the state of a Buddha for the sake of all living beings. To the Buddha, the Dharma, and the supreme community, I go for refuge until awakening.
Through the creative potential of my listening to the Dharma, may I achieve the state of a Buddha for the sake of all living beings. To the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Supreme Community, I go for refuge until awakening. Through the creative potential of my listening to the Dharma, may I achieve the state of a Buddha for the sake of all living beings. Reverently, I pay homage with my body, speech, and mind and present clouds of every type of offering, those actual and imagined. I disclose all my destructive acts accumulated since time without beginning and rejoice in the skillful actions of holy and ordinary beings.
Please remain until cyclic existence has ended and turn the wheel of Dharma for living beings. I dedicate the skillful actions of myself and others to the great awakening. Maybe we can — would you like to stretch your legs and we’ll meditate?