Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. The “enemy hidden in your own house” is Geshe Pema Tsering’s image for subtle dullness — a state so close to calm abiding that a meditator can stop breathing for a day and a half and still have achieved nothing of value. In this 45-minute retreat session, he works through the two main obstacles to calm abiding: subtle dullness and excitement. For each he distinguishes gross from subtle forms, then introduces the “self watcher” — a mind-spy that must be deployed sparingly, since over-reliance on it destroys the very focus it is meant to protect. A hot-cup-of-tea analogy and a guitar-string teaching attributed to the Buddha clarify the balance between tight and loose concentration. He closes with practical remedies for tiredness mid-session: relax slightly, then shift attention to the benefits of refuge, bodhicitta, or calm abiding itself.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 07 CAR 2002 10 06.mp3
UUID: 91f6e5b7-ca48-40cb-b040-571b69d859cd
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: Calm Abiding Retreat (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2002-10-06
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 44.7 minutes
Words: ~2,835
So how we can explain it in terms of the weather is that if it’s a really bright day, then we can easily have the clarity. Clarity. We can see everything we’re looking at and we can fix on things. It’s easy to do that. So we’d have the steadfastness and the clarity.
But if we’re just casually looking around and we’re not concentrating on anything in particular, we wouldn’t have the brilliance, we wouldn’t notice all the details in everything we see. It wouldn’t stand out to us as much. It would just be something we were generally looking at. But if we concentrated on something and saw the details and got a real idea of what it was like, then that’s what we’re talking about by the vividness of something. It would stand out to us.
So the both because both this subtle dullness and calm abiding both have this aspect of steadfastness and this aspect of clarity, it’s very difficult to differentiate between the two. So it’s very easy for people to make mistakes and think that they have developed calm abiding when, in fact, all they’ve really developed is a subtle dullness. So you can even have such good subtle dullness that you can stop breathing for a day and a half and stay concentrated on one object and it’s still not calm abiding. It’s still subtle dullness. But because it is still such a strong concentration, you actually don’t have to breathe, but you still haven’t achieved it.
So doing this, actually practicing subtle dullness instead of practicing calm abiding, even though it’s so easy to mix up the two, it doesn’t actually help you very much. It can’t even become a cause to be born in the formless formless realms, which are part of So because it so the form and formless realms are part of the Hindu cosmology where Samsarics go, when they develop concentration. So if you develop this subtle dullness, it doesn’t even become a cause to be born in the formless realms. And in this life as well, it can make you absent minded and lose make you lose attention. And your faculties, your intelligence becomes foggier.
So it’s really of no benefit. So just in the last bit of what mental sinking is, it also says that mental sinking has absolutely no benefit for you. It is similar to doing a meditation practice or a sadhana, which is based on an animal deity and its cause is to be reborn as an animal, that kind of dullness. And then it goes on to describe the second aspect of this, which is excitement. Excitement is described as an attachment to outside objects and a part in the mind that becomes excited about this and acts as a stop to calm abiding.
It’s like an attraction at a mind that is distracted by outside attractive objects. Geshe-la said that we should think about it in this way: if sinking is an inward sinking, then excitement is our mind being distracted outwards. So if our mind and our mind being distracted outwards would be from things like from watching a soccer game or watching a Tibetan opera, which is supposed to make you excited. Then you watch these things and if you’re thinking about it at night when you’re going to sleep you think, that was a really good show, you know, and then this is what we’re talking about, excitement. The mind is becoming very excited about the different things we see.
So he said if you’re sitting there meditating and you start thinking about soccer, that’s what we’re talking about. That’s that’s excitement. So this excitement is the mind being distracted and running after things that it finds attractive, but it’s not exactly the same thing. Excitement and this what they call distraction. These aren’t aren’t exactly the same thing.
So the difference between distraction and excitement is that although excitement is a kind of distraction, distraction doesn’t necessarily have to be excitement. For example, if people we we come into contact with our enemies or we think think about something good we’ve done or our mind goes after anything. If it was one of the five omnipresent factors in our mind or if they work in conjunction with the mental factors and then these things come together, then we can get excitement pretty easily. Sorry. We can get distraction pretty easily from any of these.
But this is a bit different to excitement because excitement necessarily has to be about an attraction to something. It’s about something we like, and a distraction doesn’t necessarily have to be about that. So even though all of these things any time that our mind gets distracted, it’s harmful to our meditation. They tend to in this text, they tend to concentrate on the excitement caused by being attracted to things because they think that we don’t tend to spend most of our time thinking about how we can do something negative we don’t about how much we don’t like people and we don’t tend to spend most of our time thinking about how many virtuous things we’ve done and how good it is that we did them. But we do tend to spend most of our time thinking of things we want, things we like, things we need to have.
And so therefore they concentrate on this one, this attraction to things, because they say the others don’t last as long and they don’t come up as frequently. So in terms of doing our meditation and on calm abiding, it doesn’t matter what type of distraction it is, whether it’s excitement itself or the other types of distraction, if we want to achieve calm abiding, we have to chop them all off. We can’t get distracted by anything. Otherwise, if we get distracted, we can’t achieve calm abiding. So there is also a division into two of the different types excitement we can have.
There is gross excitement and subtle excitement. And gross excitement is actually when we lose our concentration on the object. We lose it completely because we’re so excited. The second one, subtle excitement, is likened to water going under ice. So it says that we don’t see this in our conscious mind.
In our conceptual mind we don’t see it, but in our sub conceptual mind there’s one little part of our mind that gets distracted to something, but it’s more difficult to to see that we’re distracted with this. The actual antidote to this excitement is what they call mental suppleness, which actually only comes about after we’ve achieved calm abiding. So we can’t use it as a direct antidote because we don’t have calm abiding. To generate calm abiding we can’t use the result of calm abiding as an antidote. It’s illogical.
But what we have instead of that is a thing called a self watcher, which is like it helps. They say it acts like a scout and Geshe-la says it’s like a spy going around looking at people’s windows to see what they’re doing. So we’re using this like a spy on our mind to see in our mind when this excitement is coming up. And this acts as a partial antidote. It’s like a subset of the antidote even though it’s not the direct antidote to this excitement.
So we have to be careful with this self watcher, though, because if we use it all the time, we actually lose our stable focus on the object because we’re using it so much that we start to not be concentrated on the thing we’re concentrating on. We’re concentrating on our self watcher instead. So if we don’t use it then we get excitement and if we do use it all the time we lose our stable concentration. Therefore we have to use our own experience. We have to feel our way through it.
And if the excitement’s coming up, we have to know to put on it to use our self watcher in order to dispel the excitement. And if we’re using our self watcher too much, then relying on our own experience, we have to let go of our self watcher and concentrate onto the object again. So then there is a quote from the Bodhicaryāvatāra that says our self watcher come up again and again. We shouldn’t concentrate on it again and again in our minds, we shouldn’t rely on it completely. Otherwise, we lose our object.
Then it says the nature of this self watcher is like a sentry. There are people that stand outside watching who’s going in and out out of places. Yeah. Okay, so there’s an example here. The way that we’re using our mind in this instance when we’re trying to develop calm abiding is the same as when we hold a cup full of really hot tea.
So for starters, we hold the cup, but we don’t just hold the cup, we hold it tight. And then on top of holding the cup tight, we make sure that it’s stable, that it’s not tipping from side to side so the tea can’t fall out. And this is the same with what we’re doing in our minds when we’re meditating. Because first of all we’re holding the object and then we’re holding it tight, which is the brilliance, the vividness that we were talking about before. And then at the same time we’re watching to see neither dullness or agitation come up in our mind.
And that’s the same as making sure that none of the tea spills out of the cup by going backwards and forwards or tilting. So this watching, whether the tea is coming out of the cup, is the self watcher. And this self watcher by its nature is intelligence. If we don’t have intelligence, we have to use our intelligence the whole time to make sure that our mind isn’t slipping into one of these pitfalls. And so it’s intelligence that we’re actually relying on in terms of when we use our self watcher.
Okay. So we’re now up to okay. We’re going to aim for a little bit of mental gymnastics. But the fourth pitfall is actually when. So when excitement and dullness actually come up, if we don’t apply our antidotes to the dullness immediately, this itself becomes a pitfall.
So not only are the actual excitement and dullness themselves a pitfall but not applying the antidote to them immediately is another pitfall. This is the seventh how we stop this pitfall is by using the seventh out of the eight mental adjustments which is called direct mental adjustment. So by directly adjusting our mind, by using this when they come up, then we avoid the fourth pitfall. And the thing that we actually use, that we rely on, in order to directly adjust our mind and stop dullness and agitation is actually a mental factor. In minds, Tibetan Buddhists say that there’s a main mind and mental factors.
And mental factors go with main mind, so it’s like a bit to the side of your mind. And this is actually called intention. So we use this power in our mind of intention that when we see this dullness and agitation coming up, not only once we’ve watched it, then we use the concept of intention to stop them going any further. So this stopping is the actual mental adjustment and is the direct antidote to not adjusting. So we have to actually know how we’re supposed to rely on this antidote of intention in order to stop this pitfall of not adjusting our mind.
So the first thing that is explained is that when we talk about dullness in our mind, we’re actually talking about a sense of deflating as well. So sometimes they say deflating and sometimes they say dullness. But it’s explaining here that they’re actually the same thing. They have the same substance and the same same energy, I guess. Yeah.
It’s it’s yeah. Mind, so it’s energy, not substance. Yeah. So they have So so the the it’s it’s it’s a deflating. The actual word in Tibetan means deflate.
Like, when you let out a balloon, you deflate it. It’s like that sense of a verb. So So if we get this sense of deflation in our session, it’s not necessary to abandon the session because if we can tighten up our mind a little bit, then we can continue on as we were with the session and it ends up a good response to the situation. So it’s the same way as there’s a quote from the Buddha Śākyamūni who was talking to a I think they’re called It’s like a guitar. It’s a guitar.
He was talking to a guitar player. And he was talking to the guitar player, he said, it’s the same as with your instrument. If you tighten the strings too tight, then you don’t get a nice sound. And if you let the string too loose, you don’t get nice sound. And Geshe-la says the same thing with our concentration on this object.
If we tighten our concentration too tight, then it’s not a good concentration. And if we let it too loose, it’s not a good concentration. So then he said it’s very difficult then. It has to be a matter of experience. Then we have a quote from a man who seems like a bit of a legend to me, Acharya Chandragomin.
And he says funny name, but anyway, he says, so if I put in heaps of effort, then I get excitement. And if I let and if I relax a little bit, then I get dullness. And although if I try and work with my mind when I’m in when if I’ve got if to try and get mental absorption seems like a very difficult thing, all that happens to me when I do try is that I confuse my mind, so why am I bothering? So and then Geshe-la says so this points out to us that It says if you’re meditating and you have these experiences of excitement and dullness, then this is a good experience because you know what they are. So then it says that the it gives an example that they they I guess it must have been Tibet that they had many enemies who were trying to kill them everywhere.
But the enemies that were the most difficult to spot were the enemies in your house. Geshe-la said, ‘When you’re in your house, you relax and so you’re not expecting people to harm you. So if there’s an enemy planted in your house as part of your family, then they’re the ones who can do you the most damage.’ And in the same way, if we’re talking about subtle dullness, subtle dullness and calm abiding are actually really similar. So if we can’t distinguish between them, it’s the same way as trying to distinguish between our friends and our enemies in our house if someone’s hidden in our house because it’s very difficult to get. So therefore it becomes the most important thing for us to concentrate on because developing subtle dullness doesn’t help us so we need to be very clear that what we are developing is calm abiding and not subtle dullness.
And so if we’re meditating and we get a slight excitement, then what we should do, sir, is relax our mind a little bit. We don’t need to abandon the meditation, but we should just relax our mind a little bit and just only like, it’s only keep it at a gentle level. Yeah. So if we actually get really tired and we So if if we’ve tried to clear up our mind a little bit and we’re still too tired, then we have to take our concentration off the object and try and cheer ourselves up by concentrating on things like the benefits of the benefits of refuge and the benefits of bodhicitta and the benefits of actually achieving calm abiding and the qualities that we can get from this concept of mental suppleness that comes from calm abiding. And if we think about these things, then hopefully that they will cheer us up a little bit so we can continue with our meditation.
And if it still isn’t working and we still don’t feel like we’re we we have been lifted up, then we should try and think about the qualities of people who have achieved great realizations and concentrate on how easy it is for them to do things or do positive things. So if we can achieve calm abiding, then how easy it will be for us to concentrate on things. And if we think like this, then hopefully we will.