Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. A chocolate cake that looks delicious before eating but disgusting after four pieces — same cake, unchanged — is Geshe Pema Tsering’s central proof that attachment is a mental projection, not a physical fact. In this 45-minute retreat session, he uses that image alongside the contrast between an angry and a patient driver at a red light to argue that all deluded emotions are thought-based habits, not fixed states, and therefore changeable. After a quick review of first-scope Lamrim topics — precious human rebirth, impermanence, karma — he works through how attachment and anger project exaggerated qualities onto objects, why we mistake those projections for reality, and what this means for personal transformation. The talk closes by introducing the compassion wing of practice: equanimity as the foundation for impartial love, great compassion, and bodhicitta. Suited for practitioners already following a Lamrim-based retreat.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 12 Retreat.mp3
UUID: 50b35cb4-21b7-470f-b081-a3c762874f84
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: Retreat Jan (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2002 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.2 minutes
Words: ~9,237
So, if we now remember our motivation, even if it feels a bit artificial for us, is to get used to this idea, which actually we’re doing all the time anyway, but we don’t really notice it, you know? Which is that we do have a motivation for everything we do but because most of the time, and this sounds cruel, but we have to look, most of the time it’s just me, I, what I want even if we’re miserable, you know? So that’s what our motivation is all the time, it’s sort of this desperate motivation to try and be happy. So that’s our motivation for everything we do mostly. So we’re trying to expand our mind, you know?
Expand our mind. I mean, even to change our motivation to do whatever we’re going to do in order to develop our qualities, we’d immediately radically change if this is our motivation conscious effort, you know so that means we wouldn’t just go here and go there and look at the television and turn it off and go this and have a sleep and wake up and eat something and go to work and watch a movie and go to a friend and bring somebody up and put the CD on it’s like this constant sort of filling our life with things in this wish to be happy thinking this is how it’s going to do, with all these different things we keep doing them so our motivation all the time is self centered, know. It sounds cruel but it’s kind of the irony it is why suffering, you know. So we’re trying to expand our motivation to even think, may I do whatever I do in order to develop my qualities? Develop my kindness and my compassion and my patience and my love and my generosity and my contentment and my fulfillment and my joy and all this, my good qualities And then we’re to expand it even more and think, and why I’m doing that, is so I can really develop this other part of me, the compassion wing, you know, which we’ll talk about today, which is the ability to benefit others, which all sounds so holy and high, and it is, it’s actually kind of outrageous.
But what Buddha is saying is our capability. So for this reason, we’re sitting here, listening to this stuff of Buddha’s teachings to see if there’s something useful for our own minds. So, so far, what we’ve done is look at this mind of ours. We have this amazing potential, this Buddha nature, as Buddha calls it. This natural capacity to be fully developed, to develop the two wings of the bird, our own qualities and the capacity to benefit others.
This is our natural state. This is who we really are, Buddha says. We’ve looked at how this does not come from anyone else. Our mind is our own. It comes from previous moments of itself.
Our mother and father didn’t make us. Our mother and father didn’t give us our problems. Our mother and father didn’t give us our good qualities. God or Buddha didn’t either. They’re ours.
We talked very briefly about the necessity to find a teacher. If it really is some kind of sincere job we want to do, we really feel this is a reasonable job to do, then we need to find someone to show us how to do it. And we ought to check very carefully. Spiritual Paths, there are plenty of them. We can get very excited about them.
Can get very vague and kind of but we need to be very precise, check carefully what the path is saying, what that is saying, can achieve, how we do it, how we go about it. Check up once we find what we want, we need to find a teacher. Check carefully, not just trust our emotions. Then having found, commit ourselves, put our money where our mouth is, do the job, get the result. And then, Atisha, this Indian great saint and scholar in the eleventh century who wrote this sort of text that this presentation of the teachings of Buddha is based on.
He said that we should really contemplate again and again and again the preciousness of this life which is something that we don’t really think especially if we’ve got a tendency for depression or anger. We don’t think this life is precious. We think it’s a pain in the bum, isn’t it? Excuse me. Always complaining about it, not being mean about it, it’s always miserable, always think we’re hopeless, always think everything’s no good, always think everybody else is better than we are, or we’re very jealous of everybody.
I mean, it’s like these unhappy minds we have, you know? Not having any understanding that we’re sitting on this gold mine, our own self. It really takes thinking about to see how this is true. And actually, you’ve to have great courage to think this because our old habits, we’re so addicted, aren’t we, to these old, kind of useless, hopeless me views. So it takes a lot of courage to really want to try and see, okay, is this true or not?
Just because I feel this way, is it true what I’m thinking? Am I a creep? Am I no good? Am I hopeless? Is everybody else mean and nasty?
Is the world a really horrible place? There’s ways we talk, there’s all kind of broken records inside us. We’ve really listen to them, and see if they’re valid. So, yes, the world is a miserable place. Yes, we’re not the best in the world, but we have amazing potential.
This is what we have to see. We need great courage and humility. It’s not arrogance. It’s sort of like a mixture, it’s almost like arrogant the way we always think we’re so horrible, the way we’re sort of caught up in ourselves, you know. It’s like the flip side of ego, it’s not very comfortable to hear this.
We tend to think of ego as being a person who’s very egotistical, as being very strong and arrogant and able to do everything and better than everybody, you know? But actually, thinking I’m a hopeless creep is the flip side of that. It’s like looking in the mirror and saying I’m so fantastic or looking in the mirror and saying Oh, I’m so hopeless. Same problem, you know? The emphasis is I.
Not being mean about us, just looking at how we are. So it’s not helpful, doesn’t help us, doesn’t help others. Our vision is about as big as a pinhead, you know. No sense of other beings, no sense of our interdependence with others, no sense of our amazing potential, our incredible qualities that we have got, that we have worked so hard to get, no sense of how fortunate we are because we worked so hard, no one gave it to us. This life didn’t come from our mother and father, not in this sense we’re talking.
And from another perspective, we can look at the kindness of the mother and father and everybody, and that’s what we’ll do in the compassion wing. From a different perspective, we can say how people have been so kind to us, which we don’t think also, we’ll look at that. But here we’re looking at just this preciousness of this opportunity, this life, this body, this mind, these feelings, this situation that I have that’s mine. You really have to really look at it. This is just a comparison thing, it’s nothing deep, it’s just a question of comparing with other humans, not even mentioning comparing with dogs and scorpions, we’d recognize in two seconds that we’re more fortunate than a scorpion, that it’s staring us in the face every day or more fortunate than a Rat or a Dog, but we can’t even see that, you know, we can’t even see that we’re more fortunate than most humans, and this is just a numbers thing, it’s not meant to bring arrogance in this, it’s meant to bring incredible kind of of wow, what can I do with this incredible opportunity that I worked so hard to get, you know?
Just to compare with most humans. But it shows how, this is the pain of our minds, it shows even though we can see by looking at the television and reading the newspapers every day, that we are more fortunate than people in Afghanistan, more fortunate than starving people, more fortunate than people who are overwhelmed by craving and grasping and violence and jealousy and killing or whatever, you know? Just look at the world, it’s so clear. But we don’t, because we’re locked into ourselves with our pain and suffering, and we’re not criticizing us, we can’t see, as our mothers told us, past our own nose, you know. And then it’s like this broken record inside us, we all know this.
This is why we’re suffering, you know. But all the thoughts that go on in our head, This is really talking in the second scope where we look into our minds more deeply, you know, this is helping us with the idea of this perfect human rebirth right here. It’s like a broken record, isn’t it? Okay, we’ll talk about that in a minute, that’s the thoughts, that’s how the mind works, I’ll go on to that. So anyway, this perfect human rebirth.
Appreciating it, so it gives us some energy to think, okay, what can I do with it? Gives some sense of action, you know? That’s why Tārā meditation, the one we did this morning is very good, kind of action energy. It kind of opens us up, action energy. We need it, you know.
Then we contemplated death and impermanence. Buddha has very extensive teachings on impermanence in general, things are impermanent at very subtle levels as well, in the grosser level of just changing. But the one Atisha gets to here is to talk particularly, to get us to meditate particularly, on the impermanence of our own life, so it’s like a gross level of our own death, in order to again increase the waking up to not want to waste this precious opportunity, as we talked. Then we thought about the suffering of all the countless other beings in the universe who are having extra suffering lives and having a strong aspiration to not waste this life, to use it to avoid creating causes for more of that suffering, fed up with suffering. We looked at refuge, turning to the Buddha, whose methods we want to use to help us put ourselves together.
And then we started looking at karma, which is the essence of the first scope. The actual essence of the first scope is abiding by the laws of karma, understanding what it is that we need to avoid to do in order to prevent our future suffering and what we need to do in order to guarantee future happiness. And this is talking at a very basic level, again and again don’t underestimate this, don’t think that that’s not spiritual. I mean, if we got this one, we would all be amazing beings, know. Don’t worry about all the high-falutin’ compassion.
Then we move to the second scope, is where we start, we’re gonna go more deeply into our minds and become more sophisticated level of really looking at ourselves. Here, in a sense, we’re looking at how even, what we have at the moment, in comparison with say, the scorpion’s life, now, is actually even in the nature of suffering. So we’re looking at more deeply what really suffering means. This is where we really are being more of our own therapist, like I said. We learn, when we look at the second noble truth, the one of causes of suffering, it helps us understand the causes of suffering as we discussed in Buddha’s terms of the past karma and the present neurotic states of mind.
These are why we suffer. This is what we have to really see. Once we can begin to see this, then there’s some space to move, you know. But as long as we’re addicted to this view and these views, as they’re called delusions, are all in our own head, we have to see that, that’s what’s most fascinating. We have to start changing the way we think.
Now, what’s totally interesting about this, like yesterday we already talked about how the mind works, we talked about how it’s already very difficult for us to recognize the difference between the senses and the mental consciousness. We all think it’s the same thing, because it all happens like that. So for example, for us to know, as Lama Yeshe said, that desire is not a function of our senses, it’s already a shocking idea. Right? We analyze even the chocolate cake.
If you think about that, if attachment is a function of your senses, you’ve got to analyze which sense. Is it your eyes, is it your ears, it your nose, your taste, maybe it’s your taste in terms of a chocolate cake. So if attachment is a function of your taste buds, your tongue, then it doesn’t give us much hope, is it? What are supposed to do, cut it out? Stop eating chocolate cake.
We’ve got to analyze, we think it, it feels like this energy excitement and the taste that seems to be the prevalent experience, we assume that’s the problem. But we’re not analyzing our mind deeply enough, we’ve to look more carefully at other parts of our mind, and the part that’s having the problem isn’t the tongue. Isn’t, as I said, even the thing of Oh, I like chocolate cake, that’s a completely appropriate thing. I mean, Tibetans would say No, I prefer yak cheese please. So it’s a cultural thing.
Or we Australians like Vegemite but Americans would say How disgusting, isn’t it? You know what I mean, it’s like they’re cultural, your tongue and certain things get used to each other. That’s completely nothing wrong, that’s not deluded, that’s just being human, come on. Liking chocolate cake, nothing wrong. You know?
All those things, so we’ve got to separate all that out. And then we now finally to the part that is the source of our problems. And that part is called attachment. Our mind has many facets, many parts, all working together, you know? Just like a hand, it is correct to say I am picking up a microphone then you get more analytical when you say which part of I?
Oh, it’s my hand, my hand is picking up a microphone okay, let’s be more precise how? Which part of your hand? My thumb does this, my finger does that you can be very analytical, very precise, can’t you? Well, that’s what we have to do with our mind. Yes, I am miserable.
It might be true, it’s not enough, I’m sorry. You can’t just look at I am miserable. Which part of I? Is it my nose or is it my mind or what? Okay, it’s my mind, we break it down, get rid of the body.
So it’s my mind that’s feeling miserable, which part of my mind is feeling it, we have to analyze the parts. So here we’re using Buddha’s model of the mind, you know, that’s up to each one of us, which one we use. So, the way I’m talking about the mind here is according to how Buddha talks about the mind. So like I said, we have the sensory consciousness, which is the gateway to all of our experiences, just by the nature of what we are, and we give them all the power, they’re the gateway to the problems, but they’re not the actual source of the problems. They’re not the problem, the problem is and then we go to the mental consciousness, where our thoughts and feelings and emotions are.
Okay, now which part of our thoughts and feelings and emotions have the problem? To say I like chocolate cake, that is an appropriate statement. To say I prefer chocolate cake to carrot cake, nothing wrong with that. So where does the problems come? Where do I feel miserable and I’ll never get enough and always wanting more and getting angry if I don’t get the chocolate cake?
Where does all that come? From? That is because of attachment. That’s why we have to recognize it, how it functions, what it is, what it feels like. How do we do this?
By listening first. You can’t distinguish a weed from herb until you learn about in botany school, then once you’ve learned the words, you then apply it to your own self, to your own garden, that’s where you get the experience. So like I said, attachment is within the mental consciousness, we have positive states of mind and we have negative states of mind. The positive ones are those that bring us happiness and help us make others happy. The negative ones are the ones that are tight and miserable and separate and lonely and neurotic and anxious and worried and up and down like yo yos that make us suffer and cause us to harm others.
So if this is true, we have to isolate them, and this is the hardest job in the world, because they all come like that together in one split second. So, that’s why we have to slow the mind down in meditation, and with much familiarity, observing and observing. Observing. So like I said, attachment, just for example, the default mode of the mind, basically. Okay, this is one point that I mentioned yesterday, let me go into it more and it’s very difficult to really see it, but let’s hear it, okay?
What is most fascinating about all what we call emotions here, emotions, isn’t it? When we say thoughts, we point here, right? And they’re like completely separate, aren’t they? Thoughts, emotions. What Buddha is saying is, they are all, all of them, the whole deal, are all thought based.
Now, is surprising, isn’t it? To think that anger is thoughts sounds a very shocking idea to us, because why? Because we feel it physically and emotionally, we feel the heart thumping, the blood racing, the thoughts going crazy, we feel all that so it’s a very strong emotion and a strong physical feeling so of course we assume that it must be physical. This is why it’s so shocking to hear Lama Yeshe says that attachment is not physical, it’s not to do with the senses, it’s not an experience of the senses. But obviously the body is involved, because the body and mind have this intimate relationship.
Mean, interesting in the more esoteric Buddhist teachings, and which is very much what Tibetan medicine is based on, it’s all the wind energies and the subtle energies internally and the body. So they even talk about the subtle nervous system and all these wind energies, all the winds that course around these different channels in the body. They have this intimate relationship with the mind, so when the mind this is how that functions, when the mental consciousness has angry thoughts, and let’s say angry thoughts are a very strong habit and they come like that, then it sort of like activates the wind energy and causes this huge storm in the body. So the body of course is involved, but it’s not the anger itself. The same with attachment, I mean look at what happens when you have sexual desire, to say that that’s not physical is like the biggest joke of all time, right?
It’s the most intense physical experience, but we have to be analytical, the desire isn’t physical, the desire is in the mind and that too is thought based, and I’ll describe that, and it activates, once it starts happening, it activates the winds to all go a certain way in the body that causes all the bliss and all the busyness, you know? I mean, they have very detailed explanations in Buddhist Tantra about the subtle physiology. So when you start to understand it in this way, it’s most fascinating, you start to get some kind of sanity, or realize you can find the sanity when you start to work with your energies and start to control. Right now, everything happens like that, as I said. So the only reason, for example, there is this strong energy in the body, and it whooshes up strongly, say anger, whooshes up strongly if that’s one of our main problems.
It’s because, this is the point, those set of thoughts, and that’s what they are and I’ll describe it, are simply so deep and so habitual as we’ve been talking, we’ve had them for so long, we’ve brought them with us from the past so strongly that it just goes immediately into action and then the body just goes boom boom boom and everything takes over, you know? It’s just because of habit, that’s all. It’s just because of habit, that’s all. So how are anger and attachment, etc, thought based? How are they a bunch of thoughts?
This is the most surprising idea. But when we start to work with our mind and really become clear about it and investigate it and be our own therapist, we can actually see this is true. So you analyze, and this is depression or anything, you check, you check. Let’s say you’ve got two people driving on the road and the red lights come. And one person is called an angry person and one person is called a patient person.
Even sitting in the same car, right? So let’s look at the difference. So okay, the usual kind of vision we have, an angry person is tight and they’re cursing and how dare these lights, how dare they blah blah blah blah blah, right? That’s angry person. So we see all this kind of energy, you know?
And a patient person is kind of sitting there, you know, oh yes, it’s okay, I can’t get the weather, fine, no problem, they look like they’re kind of quiet and peaceful, right? So we see it as physical. What’s going on? What’s going on? Check.
What’s the patient person thinking? Well, the thoughts in the mind of a patient person are well that’s okay, don’t mind, green, or they might not even notice it’s red, they’re sitting there, they’re being quite comfortable with who they are, and so the fact that the car has to stop for a moment, they’re not worried, even if they’re late for work, they’re sort of probably thinking that’s okay, I don’t mind, couple of minutes won’t hurt, and anyway the sky’s present, and the green light is this, and the people over there look at that, and they’re very comfortable. So they’re thoughts, patience is the capacity to see things from a different perspective, patience is seeing well it’s okay that it’s like this, and it’s not too bad, and that doesn’t really matter, know, but the angry person is saying how dare the lights be red, who do they think they are, what right have they got, I’m late, these blah blah blah, it’s like this panic mind that cannot bear anything that you get, that you don’t want. So it is the response when attachment is thwarted. And attachment, like I said, is this default mode that definitely wants what I want all the time.
It’s got to get it all the time or otherwise it’s panic. So it’s thoughts, it’s all thoughts, but the thoughts are so deep and so habitual and have been there for so long. So they’re thoughts. And because they’re habitual and very deep then how come therefore is when the energy comes and all the strong, what we call emotion comes and the physical experience comes. It’s just the result, that’s all, of having angry thoughts, that’s all.
So that’s why in our culture when we think it’s emotional, just a feeling, we never analyze it past that. We don’t think we can change feelings, do we? This is our problem with this concrete sense of who we think we are. We think, like I said, I’m born this way, I’ve been dealt this hand of cards by somebody else, excuse me, God, Buddha, Mummy, deity, somebody did it to me, what could I do about it? That’s how we all instinctively feel, which causes me paralyzed, you know?
And then we think it’s emotion, what can I do about emotion? We don’t even notice its thoughts, right? We hear them racing day and night, but we just don’t kind of analyze accurately, therefore we are stuck with it. Isn’t it? I mean, look at this, you know, like I said, since we’re tiny kids we know we can learn to do this, and learn to read and write, and learn to ride bicycles, but we don’t realize we can learn to be less depressed, learn to be more kind, learn to be less angry.
I mean, it’s amazing if we do, you know. That’s the point, that’s the job, that’s all the job we’re talking about The essential job we’re talking about here is changing our own minds. Why? To be more happy, and to benefit others. How fantastic, how simple, you know.
The same with any thoughts, jealousy, you know, depression, you name them, they’re just a series of assumptions held deeply in our mind, which we have brought with us, this is why they’re so automatic, a series of assumptions all based on I, the proud thoughts, the person who’s kind of cock of the walk, you know, they’ve got a series of thoughts about how they’re so important, how they’re better, and how they’re better than everybody else, and they’re also very threatened, you know, a person all these delusions, they’re all based on I and they’re very fearful, all the delusions in their nature are fearful, the attachment is panic stricken to get what I want, anger is outraged when it doesn’t, pride is finding it unbearable that some other eye will be better than this eye, depression is this eye is so horrible and disgusting, jealousy is how dare that eye have what belongs to my eye and I hope they suffer, you name them, they’re all based on I, which is the assumption of the universe, which Buddha says even basically that fundamentally is mistaken. And this is why we suffer, you know, this is the point.
Let’s criticize ourselves, we’re so used to guilt and criticism, we’ve got to hear it in a different way, that these are why we suffer. So, all these things are thoughts, just that they’re very ancient thoughts, and so they’ve caused the body to be a certain way and they rise up all this huge kind of energy inside us. It’s just because the thoughts are now very deep inside us. That is all, you know? So we have to change our thoughts, that’s the job.
And it’s very clear to this point I made before, it is so clear to us all the time from our own experience that actually, for example, attachment is not physical. It’s really clear, but we don’t get it every time, you know. So, for example, the chocolate cake. We all know perfectly when we’re hungry and we like chocolate cake, and we set up this thing with it, we have attachment so it dumps on chocolate cake, and all this excitement comes, and you start shoving the chocolate cake, and it’s all looking so divine and so delicious, and as I’ve said, we believe it is delicious, we believe it’s out there, from its own side, vibrating deliciousness at me, like as if it’s got nothing to do with my mind, whereas that’s the point Buddha says attachment is making it look delicious, my attachment in my mind makes it look delicious, this is very shocking, you know, this is why, as they say, our mind makes it up Buddha is not joking when he says that, our mind makes it up. As Lama Zopa says, because attachment is in the mind, this kind of colors our view of the thing there, and attachment decorates on top of the cake qualities that it just doesn’t possess, and we get sucked into believing it, Or anger, anger, horrible, mean person, you know?
The person looks ugly vibrating ugliness at us, know, like as if ugliness is coursing in their veins along with their blood, isn’t it? Like real ugly, out there ugly, mean, nasty. But we don’t realise, and this is again shocking, that our anger, our aversion, our bitterness, our hurt is what pains the picture of an ugly person, and then we believe the person is ugly. This is what’s so outrageous. It’s in this way that Buddha says everything is illusory in a simple way.
It isn’t what we think it is. Not saying the person didn’t harm us, not saying the cake isn’t delicious, this is the difficulty, but the way we interpret it is a gross exaggeration every time. So what I’m trying to get here is to show how it’s true from our own experience every day that attachment is not physical, it’s not a function of the senses. So the cake looks delicious, but excuse me, after four pieces, how does it look now? Looks disgusting, right?
So if the cake so now it looks disgusting, and now we believe disgustingness is vibrating at us, we now think the cake is disgusting, but excuse me, five minutes before, when it was still it’s not even cold yet, it looked delicious. How come cake changed? Objective, scientifically speaking, it hasn’t changed. It’s not even cold yet, really, five minutes, hasn’t turned into mold yet. You see my point, it’s the same delicious, warm, lovely, dripping chocolate cake, but because your stomach is stuffed and your mind is now dissatisfied and has turned from happiness into suffering, now the cake looks disgusting.
Your aversion in mind now, which has replaced the attachment, now causes the cake to look disgusting. So, we fall into the trap every time, don’t we? And we never question our views, that’s what’s so astonishing. It’s the same with a gorgeous, handsome person, a beautiful body, let’s say you’re really attached to bodies, you know? And the one thing we definitely feel we can never possibly change is if it’s called sexual desire, especially you poor men, isn’t it?
Poor men have no chance, isn’t it? You know what I’m trying to say, it’s just iconic, all these views we have in our culture, they just can’t help in men, right? I mean, it’s ridiculous, okay, because we’ve all these bodies that do all these things, okay, but we just assume it’s a physical thing. But again, it’s exactly the same, it’s just an ancient habit of a series of views about certain objects, in this case a certain shape, let’s say a female body. Ancient, ancient habits that you’ve brought with us for many, many lives, that just boom, the sight of a certain shape, everything just happens, and the body doesn’t think.
So, of course, we can be mistaken for thinking that attachment is physical, and that therefore we can’t possibly change it, and that it’s an energy that we just have to have, otherwise we go mad, Buddha says a lot of rubbish, not being moralistic about it, just seeing that we’ve got the power to change our own minds, when your mind changes, then your body does what you want, you know. But this is where, and this again is absolute proof, you check that body that was so divine you fainted every time and having all these sorts of things going on your body which you couldn’t control, then excuse me, six months later you can’t stand her, your body is frozen cold, right? It does exactly what you want, because you can’t bear the sight of her anymore. Well, it shows, therefore it proves attachment is not physical, it’s the mind, it’s obvious, you know. It always reminds me of this story of one of my friends in Greece, Greece.
Told me what he’s really anyway, I hope he doesn’t hear these tapes, I tell this story everywhere. I haven’t said his name, it’s okay. He told me he was really into sex, was a little boy he said, when he was six, he was walking along with his mummy in Athens and saw this gorgeous poster of this naked lady outside a cinema and he turned to his mummy and he said, mommy, why is my penis standing up? And his mummy was completely embarrassed, but he remembers it because the cinema lady heard and she makes some joke about what a lady killer is going to be, you know? But this is interesting, in a way with our Western view, indicates, proves to us that actually it’s all physical because you think, what does a little six year old know, you know?
But this is the Buddhist view, that this energy of attachment to certain shapes was so strong in the mind from before before before, the time a kid remembers his little mind, automatically all the conditions just came together, boom, everything he would have to do, you know? It doesn’t mean it’s easier to change, and we have to see why we would want to change, to have control over our minds, because it’s for our own sake, you know. Especially my friends in prison, these young boys, sixteen years old, they’ve been in prison sometimes since they were thirteen, and that’s for the rest of their life. So, you can imagine if you have the usual views about sexual desire, most people go mad, basically, live in a complete fantasy world, never knowing how they can change because they can never have what they want, stuck in a little cell. So, Claus is a recipe for insanity for most people, but if you can find space in your mind to know that your mind can change, sanity.
And then people, I can tell you the number of examples I can tell you, people living in their cells twenty three hours a day until day they die. Finding happiness, you know, it’s the most hard job in the world, it’s because they don’t have a choice, because they know it’s their mind, they can change their mind. Once you change your mind, your body, everything follows automatically. The mind has the power, not the body, but we give it the other way around. So these delusions, these deluded states of mind, the one that causes so much pain and suffering, the ones that we’re so addicted to, are the ones we have to change, and we have to identify them.
That’s why we’re talking like this, to be precise and analytical, to be able to identify them. First intellectually, then as mere theory, then experientially, which is what we have to do through our own meditation, and looking in our own lives every moment we have an experience, that’s what practice is. You don’t just practice sitting there and holding your meditation, and you shove the cake in and learn about it later, you look at your mind WHILE you’re shoving the cake in, to see what’s working, you analyse it, it’s like your workshop, you observe your mind when you’re in love with somebody, you learn to really begin to identify attachment, identify fears and all the other business that come as a result. Don’t be scared, have the relationship, but learn from it. Once you’re in a relationship and you’re learning, and you make mistakes, you adjust, then you’re really doing well, you you just kind of fall into the same old traps, then it’s no good at all.
So, like I said, what love is, is the wish that another person be happy, it’s altruistic, it’s joyful, it’s light, it’s spacious, it’s interconnected, it’s relaxing. Attachment is fearful, it’s separate, it’s eyes lonely, it’s needy, it’s neurotic, it’s grasping, and then causes anger and jealousy and all the others to come. That’s what poisons everything. So, you know, we don’t know any relationship, especially if we’re in love, that doesn’t have both, and depending on how strong which one is, is depending on the way the relationship goes, determines the way the relationship goes. Why seventy percent of what they even call marriage in America, I’ve heard, break down if I don’t know what the figures are in Australia it’s because of attachment, not because of love, for God’s sake you don’t suffer because of love, but we interpret love wrongly, don’t we?
I mean, Buddha’s views here we mean by love, mean attachment, we mean all this whole junk together like one big sort of blob, you know? We’ve to be precise, there’s some poison in there, and there’s some good stuff in there, we’ve to not mix, we’ve to separate them, and then develop the good stuff, get rid of the bad stuff. But because when we hear attachment, we think our happiness comes from that, it’s scary to give it up, you know? Well, Buddha says, you know, when you get up attachment to cake, your tongue doesn’t fall out, you don’t become kind of cold and boring, you actually enjoy cake all the more. That’s the irony.
When you have less grasping at the cake when you have less really frantic grasping, you actually can savour it more and enjoy it more, be more relaxed about it. That’s what pleasure is. Same with sex, let’s face it, you know, when you’re really grasping, like hungry, like a vampire, you don’t even remember the experience. Even just eating the cake, don’t even remember if you even ate it now, did I eat it or not? You’re so overwhelmed by this attachment, there’s like this entity that’s so intense.
When the mind is more spacious, that’s when it’s more virtuous. Virtuous meaning appropriate, that’s all, don’t get all holy, you know. When the mind’s deluded, it’s not spacious. So, you have to learn to see it. All these delusions are thought based, they’re thought based, and they’re wrong thoughts, they’re like liars, it’s like seeing a red cup and saying it’s a green cup.
That’s a lie, it’s not a green cup, it’s a red cup. So, Buddha is saying we’re seeing cake as more delicious than it really is, it’s a lie, we’re exaggerating it, distorting it, you know, we say when we’re in love, put a person on a pedestal, don’t we? When we’re in love, put a person on a pedestal you’re seeing them as more than they really are, like this goddess up there and then eventually when your attachment gets bored and it becomes kind of boredom or anger, you can’t believe. Then you blame the other person for daring not to be a goddess anymore, excuse me, you made them a goddess, don’t be so insulting, you know? It’s we who create the picture, and then we demand that they act according to our picture.
No wonder we get so mad at them. You can see when you hear about people, let’s say, men in this case, let’s say men who get raped and have all these kind of fantasies, extreme, you hear it when you read how they talk, everything, when they’ve actually been arrested or something they talk with this kind of anger that people don’t do what they want, so this is the way that projections work when your projections are really strong, I mean, more than just the usual way, we all have projections, and this is what the delusions do, all project our own needs onto the object. So the more you project, I mean I’m always thinking about this one of people who rape, know, they get this anger, like this person belongs to them and they actually behaved the wrong way, so they deserve this, because their projections are so deluded, they’re so strongly onto the outside object, they feel they’re right. Do you understand what I’m saying? Can you hear what I’m saying?
Thank you, I just want to make sure, every now and again. So, that’s what the projections do, and we’ve all got them, it’s just a question of degree. So, that’s how we come up with attachment. Attachment is our own neediness, right? Therefore, expectations.
So, it writes a story, the head’s going, If I do this, and I’ll do this, I’ll this, and I’ll have this, and I’ll But we don’t realise that it’s our story that we demanded that they be like, you know. So when it’s really extreme, like a person is really mentally suffering, going around killing or raping, they sort of projected ALL their neurotic needs obsessively, day and night, onto this person. So it’s as if it’s like an extension of themselves. They have the right to do what they want, you know. That’s what attachment thinks.
That’s why when you’ve two of us very attached, it’s like we’re glued to each other. It’s so unhealthy, you know. I can think even in our family, when we had lot of kids, a lot of emotional chaos and everything. And therefore, because of the strong karmic connection between these nine human beings, and a lot of attachment, and that’s naturally, because that’s the nature of families, and all those therefore all the other emotions, it was really the experience when I looked back on it, it was really like we were this nine headed person, That as soon as one person felt something, the other eight of us all kind of jumped in with our own little stories and all experienced it, you know, there was no ability at all, I remember this myself, to have any sense of being separate. That’s attachment, you know, But it’s an unhealthy one.
So as soon as I’m feeling a certain thing or somebody else does something, boom, in there, we’re all jumping in, all doing our thing because we can’t separate, there’s no ability when you’ve a strong attachment like that, even between two people, to have a separate sense of yourself in a healthy way. Because everything the other person does, you’re identifying with it, so you’re looking like this laser light all the time, just looking, looking, checking everything they’re doing to make sure it’s just right, the right response, the right word, the right smile, to reinforce you. And as soon as they do the slightly wrong thing, as far as you’re concerned, freak out, blame, resentment, panic, depression, anxiety, you know? This is how delusions work. They are so unhealthy, they are so sick, not being mean about us, we’ve all got them, you know?
This is what Buddha is talking about. So our job is to learn, to look at the hell in our own minds, start to identify, you know? I remember when I first left, I I love my family, we’re all really close friends, right? But this intensity of the closeness and inability to even know your own mind, because we’re not taught about our own minds just follow these enormous emotions. When I started to leave my family, and go, I’m gonna go to England.
It was like this conscious effort to sort of find out whatever I thought I thought, throw it out, because I didn’t know if it was Janet’s thought, or Mummy’s thought, Daddy’s thought, or Polly’s thought, or Julie’s, because as a family, you all wear each other’s stuff, you know, you defend each other and support each other, because there’s all this kind of co what do we call it? What’s that word again? Co dependent stuff in family Thinking it’s all to do with love, but it’s not, it’s like insanity, you know? So we have to separate, I felt this feeling of throwing out all these thoughts to try out what the hell Robina thought, Robina thought, could build up something constructive. That’s all we have to do.
Nothing mean about anybody else. It’s just the nature of the human being, that’s all. We’ve all got it. To find some sanity, to find out clarity, and then to be responsible, and to be our own person, and then we can start in a healthy way connecting with others, you know. But the way we connect now is this gluey, yucky, dependent way, which is attachment.
Of course, causes pain, it causes nightmares of pain, it causes us to be completely out of our brains for suffering, you know? Anyway. So we can talk all sorts of more things about the mind. Maybe that’ll do. And now we go on to the third scope.
I’m only just touching brief points in each one, okay, but getting the essence. The essence in this second scope is to go more deeply into the mind, really understand even a more subtle level of suffering, really see the causes of suffering, and really want to get the help out of suffering. Stop the causes of suffering, stop the suffering. And how you do this is by changing your mind. Eventually, the radical way to completely change the mind, the complete way is, as I said, to remove even the ego grasping, the deepest level of all of the delusions, the one that’s so primordial, this very basis of this sense of I in the first place.
This is presented if we just did the first wing only, up until now I’ve completed, roughly speaking, all the practices in terms of the first wing, the first two scopes of practice, which is the wisdom wing, which is all the work you do in order to develop yourself. Already amazing. And the indirect beneficiaries of this, of course, are other people, there’s no question. When you become better, they all get more happy too. If we completed this wing in and of itself, just like that, then we would then complete it by the fourth Noble Truth by learning to do the job through meditation, investigating our mind as we’ve been talking, and changing, removing the various delusions, and so on and so forth.
And then the root one by realizing emptiness, removing the root delusion, which we’ll talk about in this case, we’ll talk about it in the second wing of the bird when we discuss the compassion practices. And it’s presented in a particular point there. So we’ll discuss emptiness there. So let’s move to the third scope then: the second wing, the compassion one. So all the work here we’re doing, as I said, is mainly the direct beneficiary of all this stuff is oneself and the indirect beneficiary is others.
Now the second scope, the third scope, the direct beneficiary is others now, and we are the indirect beneficiaries, obviously. The emphasis is now others. So the logic being in the first scope, the emphasis is yourself because you’ve to put yourself together first before you can do anything reasonable for others. You’ve got to sort out this person, become this amazing person we have the potential to become. So on the basis of whatever success is that one, we can now start to do the work for others.
Because as long as you can understand yourself and your mind, what Buddha says is can understand others, because we’re all just various shapes of the same principles, you know, we’re all the same delusions, there’s no new delusion, everyone’s got the same, we’re all kind of in the same mold, broadly speaking, just variations, that’s all. So once I understand my mind, I can then understand someone else’s mind. I can’t possibly understand someone else’s if I’m seeing them through the filter of my own pollution. I just project my own junk onto them, but to get some objectivity to see another person, I’ve got to develop that objectivity inside here first. Remove the pollution, then I have clarity, then I can see, then I can be useful.
So this compassion wing is all these series of, again, of different analytical meditations and teachings and teachings and teachings and teachings and teachings that one does that allow one first to develop essentially this gradual development of what they call love, which is the genuine wish that others be happy, which eventually with familiarity develops into enormous affection for all beings, which then eventually becomes enormous compassion, which is the wish that others don’t suffer, which eventually becomes what they call great compassion, which is only may you not suffer, but like we say in the prayer in the morning, I will make it happen. This is the unique characteristic of the compassion of the bodhisattva wing. A person on the first wing already develops extraordinary love and compassion, there’s no as a sort of a byproduct from removing your delusions. As you remove attachment, anger, pride, jealousy, depression and all the rest, naturally you become more loving, kind, generous and all the rest. It’s just natural.
But it’s the byproduct, it’s not the direct result, it’s not the thing that you’re directly working on. What you’re directly working on is removing the pollution. What’s left is the good quality, so naturally you’re loving and more kind. But in this compassion wing, you’re actively working on increasing the good qualities now, you’re learning to make the water even more pure. The first job is to remove the pollution, to allow the water to come to its true nature, to allow the waterness to be there evident.
In the second wing, you’re actively increasing bliss and the purity of the water, like that. So it’s this gradual process of first developing. Well, even the very basis, we’ll discuss each one, the basis, the root of all of these is what they call equanimity, which has a very particular meaning here, is the development of this, once we’ve achieved equanimity we have this genuine recognition that enemy, friend and stranger are absolutely identical. We’ll discuss them all. On the basis of this, can have genuine love for living beings.
Equal love. Wishing they’d happy. Whether they harm us or help us, doesn’t matter then that can become then great compassion, our first compassion, which is to wish they don’t suffer then we have great compassion, which is, as I said, this unique compassion you’ve already got compassion in this first wing, but this compassion we’re developing into the one that says I am responsible. Dalai Lama calls it universal responsibility, that’s what he means by it. And it’s like the compassion of a mother, you know, she’s sitting on the beach and her kids swimming, and suddenly she sees the kid drowning.
So, you wouldn’t even use the word compassion, it’s just her nature to have this unbearable pain for that child, right? But unbelievable compassion, the child drowning, herself, the kid’s suffering. But the mother doesn’t look around saying, wonder who’s going to save my kid. You see my point? She’s in the water in one second, because she knows it’s her job.
Well, that’s this great compassion of the bodhisattva. The bodhisattva, the continual aspiration of the person on this path is I want to benefit others, it’s my job to benefit others, in a very wholesome, profound way, not in the kind of codependent way we do it now, you know, like Richard mentioned the first day. So this great compassion is extraordinary. I mean, we’re talking levels of love and compassion now that we probably have never experienced. We’re talking levels that are way beyond what we would normally think is possible with our usual Western way of understanding the mind, which is most interesting.
Because love and compassion we’re talking about are eventually expressed in the context of no delusions at all, when you’ve really developed, you get to the point where you have no delusions at all. It’s not as if you’ve suppressed them, or worked with them, or kind of trained yourself, you literally have gone beyond attachment, pride, depression, anger, jealousy, which, like I say, is not a conceivable notion in our culture, or in our religions with great respect, they don’t talk like that. I mean, they mean it in other ways, it’s true, though they do, I beg your pardon, but this is just, excuse me, that was not an appropriate statement. But the Buddhist approach is we all have the potential to do it, and there are all these step by step methods for doing it, you know? It’s attainable, it’s not just something you cross your fingers and hope you’ll get, it’s attainable.
The methods are all there, you know? Then eventually this great compassion culminates in what’s called bodhicitta, a Sanskrit word that means like bodhi meaning awakening, chitta meaning mind, but realizes the only thing to do is to become a Buddha as quickly as possible, to fully develop all my own qualities as quickly as possible, because then only then am I capable of actually benefiting. Until then, I don’t have the capability. So that’s what bodhicitta is. And then eventually the perfection of bodhicitta from life to life, working with sentient beings on the one side, and then the perfection of wisdom in your meditation, realizing emptiness on the other, eventually brings the culmination of both these wings, and you become what they call a Buddha.
So let’s look at the various practices of the compassion wing, starting with equanimity. It’s the first one. It’s like grade one, you know, when you go up. So equanimity, as I said, is a state of mind from much analytical contemplation, much thinking, like we’re discussing, in your meditation, in your daily life, shifting the way your mind sees things. Equanimity is this attitude that really knows in the heart, from much thinking and contemplating, that enemy, friend, stranger are actually equal.
Equal from one point of view only. I mean, are millions of ways that they’re equal. Most of them have got some legs, some eyes, and some noses, in that sense you can say we’re all equal, we’re all equal in wanting to breathe in and out, there are many ways we can say we’re equal. But this particular basis for this equality is simply that we all wish to be happy. I mean, it almost sounds so kind of cute almost, but it’s sort of primordially, profoundly just naturally true.
You don’t have to be taught to want to be happy, it’s just the natural drive within every living being. And what’s interesting is Buddha says, because we do have the potential to be happy, we are actually looking for what we have got the potential to be having, happiness.