Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 44-minute session from a Calm Abiding Retreat, Geshe Pema Tsering opens a toolkit for managing dullness and distraction, anchored by a striking story: King Suddhodana, Buddha’s father, missed his chance to become a stream-enterer because excitement at seeing his son overwhelmed the teaching being offered. Geshe Pema works through remedies for both hindrances — white-light visualisation and the syllable “pet” for mental fog; breath-counting for agitation, with reaching 21 unbroken breaths marking the first of nine levels toward calm abiding. He advises short sessions built up gradually so practitioners never grow to resent the cushion. A Q&A section then explores meditating on mind itself: its definition as “clear and knowing,” why it is not simply like the open sky, and how resting on the mind’s emptiness becomes a direct antidote to saṃsāra. Suited to practitioners already on a formal calm abiding retreat.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 08 CAR 2002 10 06.mp3
UUID: a92340ca-f4f9-4329-b437-7c5a197c8857
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: Calm Abiding Retreat (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2002-10-06
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 44.8 minutes
Words: ~2,315
Uplifted enough to continue with our meditation. So we should also think about how difficult it is to get an opportunity to do meditation and practice and how how lucky we are to have received this opportunity, and this may try and cheer us up. So if this so if this still doesn’t work, we need need to employ a a more powerful means of trying to clear up our mind. And the first way that’s given as a a means for doing this is to imagine that there’s white light coming out of your heart, and it’s going out in into into space. And this and this can this can clear up.
So it goes out and comes back in, and this can be like a way of clearing up your your mind. Or the and when you’re doing this, you can say the syllable pet, which is supposed to clear away clear away things from your mind. And then at at the same time or in a different way, you can imagine that from the top of your head, your consciousness goes out and becomes inseparable from the the sky around you. It becomes part of the, yeah, the circle of the sky around you. What was that?
Yeah. And it becomes inseparable from it becomes inseparable from the from the sky, so your your consciousness becomes, I guess, freer. But it’s yeah. It’s hard to describe because it comes out of your head, your consciousness, Yeah. And it becomes in it becomes inseparable from the sky above your head.
So then there’s a list of other things you can do if this doesn’t work. But if that if the things with the light and this inseparable mind, they don’t work, You actually have to stop your meditation session because there’s no point continuing. And at this stage, you should because if you continue with the meditation session, it becomes a cause for for dullness and for fog. So you should stop it at this time, and you should do things like sleep. If if sleep doesn’t work, then also you you can go outside and get some fresh air.
That’s one of the things they say. Or you can go up to a high place where you can see for a long way. This can help. Or you can splash water on your face or go for a walk. And if you do these things, then it’s supposed to clear your mind so you can get back to your meditation session.
So then if we move on we’re moving on to we’re moving on to excitement. So if we have subtle excitement and we haven’t lost focus on the object, then if we tighten up our mind a little bit, we should be able to refocus on the object. If this doesn’t work, if that doesn’t benefit us, then we should think about the the bad points about getting excited, what’s bad about being excited. And an example that’s given about what’s bad about giving being excited is that there was a king who was oh, Buddha’s Buddha’s father. He was a a king in India.
His name was Gyobo Suddhodana, apparently, Suddhodana. And then he had the ability to become a stream-enterer, to become someone who understood reality as it really is. But because he was so excited about seeing his son and he was so happy to see him when Buddha came to see him to give him teachings, he didn’t actually achieve this goal because he was too caught up in the idea of seeing his son and how exciting that was. So if we think about examples like this, then hopefully that will quieten our excitement a little bit. So if that doesn’t work, if we don’t get the if we if we don’t if we’re not able to bring our mind away from being distracted because of the negativities about distraction, we should also that we should start take our mind off the object and start meditating on impermanence and the other reasons why we should develop renunciation, like, death and impermanence or the shortcomings of saṃsāra or, suffering and the all the faults of these.
So once we start thinking about these, hopefully, our mind will be turned away from these objects that are attracting us and causing us to get excited. So if this doesn’t work, then we have to employ a more powerful means of trying to chop away at our excitement. And the first method that is is explained here is to concentrate on the breath and to concentrate on our breath going and coming in. And Geshe-la said to start counting when you’re breathing in and breathing out, and try and keep your mind on the counting of the in and out breath. So at the beginning, you may only be able to count two or three or four breaths in and out.
It may you may only get to three or four and then lose your concentration and have to go back to start counting again. And if you can actually count up to twenty one when you’re breathing in and out, then you’ve actually reached the first level of the nine levels of that that you develop in order to achieve calm abiding. So that’s a a very important step. That’s a very, you know, profound insight if you can count up to twenty one breaths. So at the start, they give you example here that our relation to our cushion that we’re sitting on should be the same as our relation to some friends, that we should part ways with them before we end up not liking them.
So it’s at the beginning, when we’re starting to do this meditation, we we start to get very tired. And if we’re getting really tired and frustrated, then we should do lots of short meditations and not try and sit on the cushion for long periods of time. Otherwise, we get really frustrated with it. And if we do it for one hour, perhaps if we can work our way up to one hour, right, but starting with something we feel comfortable at, then work up to one hour, and then from one hour, go to two hours and like this instead of trying to start off by doing it all at once because we just end up not liking a cushion. Yes, so we should stop before we don’t like it.
Otherwise, next year, we won’t wanna come back to Kangaroo Island. And and we can stop here and and we can stop here and if people have any questions. Yeah. So in the same way that if we’re looking at if we’re taking a cup as a meditation tool, as our object of meditation, then we think about the a generalized image of the cup in our mind. And or if we’re taking an image of the Buddha, then we think of all the different characteristics of the Buddha’s image when we bring this image to mind.
It’s the same with our mind. We think of a generalized image of what mind is. And he said in this case, it’s also helpful to remember the definition of mind, which is clear and knowing. So if we concentrate on a generalized image of mind embracing this concept of clear and knowing, then this is how we should do it. Like like the sky?
Is it like a clear sky? You know, he said it’s not quite like the the clear sky because the clear sky is actually formed, and our consciousness isn’t formed. Our consciousness is called clear because it takes on the aspect of whatever is in the mind. So, for example, if there is a mind that is bodhicitta, then it becomes bodhicitta. And this is what they mean by clear, in the concept of clear and knowing mind.
And it knows what it is comprehending, so it has those two aspects in it. But he said the idea of the sky comes in when we actually get tired. Alright? So then when we are tired, then we can bring this because the sky is so vast, then we can concentrate on the vastness of the sky, and this can lift our mind. But the sky is form, and our consciousness is not form, our mind is consciousness, so therefore, it isn’t like the sky.
Okay. It just seems So it it that in all things, we have to make a distinction between the thoughts that we have to abandon and the thoughts that we have to make into our practice. So even if we’re talking about trying to achieve Buddhahood, there’s certain thoughts, discursive thoughts, we have to get rid of and other thoughts that we have to cultivate and other conceptual ideas that we have to cultivate. So And then in terms of meditating on calm abiding, if our object is a conceptual thought, then we only concentrate on that conceptual thought. We only have one conceptual thought, and that becomes our practice.
That becomes thing that we don’t abandon. That’s the thing that we take into our practice. And every other thought that we have becomes the the things that we have to abandon. But you can take a conceptual object as your object. Yeah.
We’re going backwards and forwards a bit because he kept talking about. Yeah. Is that okay? Mhmm. Okay.
Sorry. Yeah. So no. There was two people on so you can go in. Just carry on from that So he said if you know what your mind is, if you know the qualities of your mind and what it actually is in substance, then to meditate on that can be very beneficial.
And if you don’t know that, it can be very difficult. So I’ll ask the second question. That was an answer to whether it’s more difficult. I shouldn’t take this off long time. Hang on one second.
Sorry. I think a bow. Is it oh. So Just be careful. So he said if we actually know the nature of our mind, then the object of our focus when we’re meditating on the mind actually becomes the mind’s emptiness.
It becomes the way it actually is, which is empty. So therefore, meditating on the mind’s emptiness as our objective concentration in calm abiding meditation becomes incredibly helpful for a lot of reasons. He said there’s, like, many different practices in Mahāmudrā. It’s a it’s, like, a really wide variety of practices that start with our motivation and end up with our understanding of emptiness. But if we’re doing if we are meditating on meditating on our mind’s emptiness, then this also becomes a cause for us to develop an understanding of emptiness.
And an understanding of emptiness becomes an antidote to saṃsāra and therefore a cause for liberation. So it has all these different components into it and becomes very powerful. Yeah. Hold up. Do you know how the mind is neutral, yet for a calm abiding object?
Mhmm. He said it doesn’t necessarily become a positive aspect, but it depends on our motivation. If if if all objects in the room have an emptiness to them, but our trying to understand that emptiness can either be a negative action, it can be a positive action, and it can be a neutral action. But if our motivation is good, if we think I want to achieve calm abiding in order to achieve Buddhahood to help people, then that becomes a very, very positive action. But it doesn’t necessarily become a positive action.
It depends on our motivation. So anytime we have a motivation of trying to achieve liberation or trying to achieve Buddhahood for the sake of all sentient beings, it becomes a positive action. You need to I was just gonna ask you if because it seemed like your question was from the side of the object is positive. Is that what you mean? Yeah.
So He said that meditating on emptiness can by itself be a positive thing because emptiness is the antidote to grasping at true existence. And true existence or a concept of true existence in our mind is the reason that we’re in saṃsāra. So most of the time when we concentrate on emptiness, it’s a positive thing because it becomes a cause for getting out of saṃsāra. But I didn’t get to answer that other question. So, yeah, it becomes it’s positive from its own side because it’s the emptiness of the object, and emptiness is a a is a direct antidote to self grasping if we if we meditate on it.
Oh, I was talking about relative. Relative. So he said even if we have a doubt that emptiness may exist, it shakes the whole of saṃsāra. So there’s that’s a very powerful thought. But that wasn’t your question?
Mhmm. Is that Is that possible? Yeah. I’m just neutral. Right.
Okay. So it itself is neutral. It’s a the the emptiness of self, the ultimate nature of of mind is positive, but the relative nature of mind, which is clear and knowing, is is neutral. Yeah. They they they can the relative nature of mind can either be is is can is new is neutral, but it can come as virtue, non virtue, or neutral.
It can be all three depending on how it’s used. Yeah. But Yeah. But it’s it itself is is neutral. So we’ll do dedication prayers, and then all three are in the back of the book after the Vajrasattva section where we were last met.
And we wanna do number one and two and six over the page. Yeah. That was your pen. Thank you. I actually found it when I lost the mic.
It’s under my leg.