Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Using public sentiment toward Osama bin Laden — this session was recorded in January 2002 — as a live illustration of how anger projects ugliness onto a person, Geshe Pema Tsering shows why the categories of enemy, friend, and stranger are artificial constructs driven by attachment and aversion rather than anything real. The central instruction is the equanimity meditation: visualize all three people simultaneously and reason through why each category is a mental projection rather than a fact about the other person. He then traces how ordinary love for friends, being rooted in attachment, collapses the moment circumstances shift, and argues that genuine compassion requires changing that basis to something more stable. A wide-ranging Q&A covers projection in the guru-student relationship, book recommendations for further study, the Buddhist view of depression and addiction alongside Western medicine, and how concentration and analytical meditation work together to change the mind.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 13 Retreat.mp3
UUID: cca6b7f3-d58c-4942-9f32-f75bd928009f
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: Retreat Jan (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2002 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.9 minutes
Words: ~9,602
Therefore, conclusion, you don’t like them. Therefore, you don’t love them. Therefore, you don’t want them to be happy. You don’t have compassion for them when they suffer. You even want them to suffer when it’s really strong anger.
You all can see that. That’s what an enemy is, isn’t it? But by definition, an enemy is a person who harms me. That’s it, me, it’s I centered, it’s obvious. Friend, by definition, is a person who benefits me to whatever extent.
Not my neighbor, you know, me. So, it’s again I sent it. So we want this person to be happy, etc. Then we look at strangers and who are they, which is ninety nine point nine nine percent of all the rest of the living universe. Strangers are beings neither harm nor help me, that’s so simple, who don’t touch my life.
So therefore, conclusion, we don’t care about them, we couldn’t care less. This is how it is, this is the world isn’t it? Giraffes are like it, dogs are like it, mosquitoes are like it, everyone is like it. It’s just the natural instinct, because of habit, of all sentient beings. So we’re trying to change this.
Why? Because in this compassion wing, a way of saying is we’re trying to expand, literally expand our consciousness to encompass others. In the first one we were trying to remove all the insanity to at least become our self to some extent. Now we’ve become our self to some extent, we can start to even become others now. First job first, In the first wing, mainly, we’re kind of removing all the weeds and the poison.
Here, we’re trying to develop the flowers, you know, trying to expand our mind to encompass others, to break down the barriers between self and other. Equanimity, how do you meditate upon it? What do you do? What kind of analytical meditation do you do? Every word I’ve been saying in the room this weekend, they are just simply the basis of how you do an analytical meditation.
Again, don’t mystify meditation. Like I said, there are two kinds, the first is concentration. The extent to which you have any concentration at all, is the extent to which you can do the second kind, which is developing insight. How do you develop insight? By thinking something through, it’s nothing mystical, you know?
Okay, when you’ve got subtler and subtler levels of mind, you deepen and deepen and deepen your insights, even eventually to the point where they’re non conceptual. It’s just like at a much subtler level in your mind. We’ve to start where we are, though, which is the gross level. So, you would imagine in front of you, and even as I’m talking, you do it, you know. Right in front of you, in front of you, eyeball to eyeball is your enemy, one person.
So maybe we sometimes think, well, excuse me, I haven’t got enemies, well, excuse me, check again. Even as a person who mildly irritates you, it’s good enough to put in the enemy category, okay? So the person right in front of you, the enemy, in front in the middle, looking, you know, they are with your face, your face, you know. Then to the left in front of you is your friend, dear friend. Actually for this meditation, when you do it, or even thinking now, the stronger you dislike the person, and the more you like the other person, the better.
Much more contrast, you know. And the third, over to the right here in front of you, you put a stranger, face of a person, even could be a person in the room who you haven’t had much to do with this weekend, but is a stranger to you, you can recognize their face. But About whom you are truly indifferent, okay, because they’ve neither harmed nor helped you. Those are three people. So what you do basically is there’s different ways of analysing.
Remember the key point here is to simply learn to break down the false view of enemy, therefore I don’t want them to be happy, friend I do want them to be happy, stranger I don’t care, to break these ones down to get to a point of this objectivity that is able to say genuinely they are the same, from the point of view of wanting to be happy. This alone, this is what equanimity is, then it’s the basis for being able to say, may you be happy, which is love. So, equanimity is the very first step. We wouldn’t even make this point normally, you just go straight into do I love them or do I not love them, how do I love them, how do I love them, you know? But we’re going to really see that they’re all the same in their wish to be happy, which is almost a subtle point, but it’s a very profound one, you know, because it brings a big shift in the mind when you can see this.
So how do we kind of what’s the analysis we do to break down the old views, that doesn’t see them as equal right now? Well, because, you know, again, of our delusions in the mind that project the different picture onto each of these people. Anger in the mind projects ugliness onto the enemy, attachment in the mind projects beauty onto the friend, and indifference in the mind, ignorance, projects indifference, nothingness, onto the stranger, isn’t it? And of course, like always, as we’ve discussed, when those pictures appear in our mind, we think the person is like that, so we look at the enemy, we think they are horrible. We don’t ever think that our own delusions in our own mind are the cause of why they look horrible.
We think they’re horrible because he did this to me, and this, and this, and this, we get this catalogue of reasons, don’t we? That’s the logic in our mind, isn’t it? He is horrible because he did these things to me. Therefore, I don’t love him, therefore, he’s different from my friend whom I adore. It’s just natural, it’s so natural in this, but we never analyze it.
But we’ve got to see the logic of why the ego does this, just all these false projections. Therefore we can’t see the enemy as a human being at all, can we? I mean, you can see how it really works in the world, you know all this talk these days with Osama bin Laden, he’s like, he’s a new Hitler for everybody, you know, everyone loves to dump all their kind of negative energy onto one person, and all feel comfortable. Get rid of him, the whole world will be better, I mean it’s like a big joke, you know? But also, look how we project so hugely.
When you read all the reports, I read all these different reports in the papers, in the magazines, even the good well written magazines, There’s always this language that’s used, kind of like he’s this slimy, creepy, evil person. But it’s such an exaggeration. It doesn’t mean that what he’s doing right, it doesn’t mean that, but it’s just this way we project, it’s so comfortable, you know, or by the words we use, and therefore it causes us to see that person in that way, so every time someone sees a picture of Osama bin Laden, you know, and you read the words, you see this slimy person, oh look at him, everybody talks this way, oh look at him, he’s got a creepy kind of look on his face, this creepy way he talks, so kind of quiet but another person who’s gorgeous, who’s very patient and talks like he does, you think aren’t they gorgeous, look how patient they are So we’re so all the time projecting, you know, using words that sort of it’s like all biased, we’re never really cleanly seeing what’s there. I mean if you show a bunch of pictures to somebody who’s never heard anything about Osama bin Laden and Hitler, and you show them these photos, excuse me, they’re not going to say they’re going to see evil people.
Okay, Hitler’s kind of dumb looking moustache and everything, you know, he looks a bit sort of ridiculous, but Osama bin Laden is like a reasonable human being, he’s his beard, he’s got his clothes on, he’s like a reasonable human being, he’s done many good things, he’s very generous with his money, he’s very humble, he lives a really basic life, he completely sacrifices all his happiness and pleasure, he really thinks about others, a lot of others, it’s true, not others, but we’re all like that, there’s no difference. George Bush is the same, you know? I’m sorry, I’m not being rude, okay, maybe he has got this kind of outrageous philosophy that really says it’s great to kill people, but many people think that, but they don’t dare say it, honestly, people who have wars think that, but they don’t dare ever admit it they’re all walking around thinking they’re so holy. So, mean, really analyse, you break it all down, you see it as life, you listen to it all, you start to see a more multifaceted thing happening there, you know? Not just this kind of one dimensional evil person, they say is this evil person.
It’s just so much emotion, so much kind of your own the anger in the mind that’s what’s causing it the anger in the mind of the people who don’t like Osama bin Laden there’s anger in their minds the same in America reading about Timothy McVeigh everyone talked about him, this cold hearted, evil person well, if you analyze him I’m not trying to defend these people, I’m just saying, you analyze it? You analyze Timothy McVeigh’s activities, he was very devoted and passionate about his cause, but just everybody who fights a war thinks exactly like he does: collateral damage, you know, children who die. He duly believed he was in a war, he had this determination to do what he had to do, just like a person in a war, but because the activity that he did wasn’t supported by anybody, therefore he’s seen as an evil person, so therefore people project this evilness onto him, they see this evil person. You can see how our mind is working, we’re so emotional, we’re so extreme, we’re so distorted. So it’s so, you know, it’s how we see our own enemy.
Okay, it’s not as strong as that, maybe, It’s the same type of approach. Because of various things that they have done, we then project this ugliness onto that person, and therefore, you check this one. It’s like the whole time he’s walking around, isn’t it? This person, as if he is a he. We think of them as an enemy all the time, they’re mean and nasty.
So even when they’re being kind to their wife, they’re mean and nasty. Oh, we know the real person, you know. Whatever they’re doing, even just sitting there looking at the sky, or having their breakfast, or relaxing, or having a cup of tea, they’re evil all the time, aren’t they? Because that’s our view of them. So we concretize, based on a few bits of logic, of ego, that the whole person is that all the time.
When the person whom you loved once has now left you and is living with somebody else. I mean, when you see them smiling, it’s like a stab in your heart, isn’t it? And you hate them, you know, or the pain is so horrible, because they’ve left you and now they love somebody else. So when they’re even smiling and happy, and you see that smiling in a very unhappy way, don’t you? It’s like so painful to see them being happy, When somebody else sees a smiling person, so we can see how whatever emotion is inside us, it distorts what we’re seeing.
We can see how that happens, you know? So with the enemy here, we can see this person looks ugly, is ugly all the time, is ugly from the tip of their head to the tip of their toes, it’s like they’re kind of this it’s all out there, inside them, all the time, solid, you know? Well, it’s clearly not true. But because of this view, we therefore definitely do not want them to be happy, do we? We see them as different.
We don’t ever think that that person wants to be happy, because as soon as we’re able to see a person wants to be happy, like me, or like my friend, it gives a great space, you know? But we can’t even bear to think they want to be happy. We don’t even want to think that. Therefore, of course, we don’t want them to be happy, you know? It’s reasonable.
So you look at the friend, you know? It’s the same kind of thing, you check, it’s the same thing, you know? Because they have done a few things good to you, indeed many but sometimes very few, but because of past karma you have this strong attachment to this person, so the person looks just incredibly beautiful to you, you can’t believe it. And they’re beautiful from the head to the toes, right? They’re beautiful all the time.
Whenever you think about them, sitting in their house, walking around, doing this, on the toilet, they’re always beautiful, your heart is sort of soft, you know? Wherever you think of them, your heart softens. So, of course, you’re just totally able to see that they want to be happy, and as soon as they’re not, your heart breaks, there’s this humanness there, it’s all kind of, okay, attachment helps it happen, but we can see there’s humanity there, you know? Because of attachment, we see them as more than they are, we therefore want them to be happy so much, but it’s based this is the point, as Lama Zopa says, the reason we want them to be happy now, which is to love them, is based on something unstable, it’s based on attachment. So all that openness and warmth and everything, and that is love we have, the love we have for them, the wish they’d be happy, it’s wonderful.
But it’s based on attachment. You take away the attachment, you just don’t care anymore, do you? You leave them, they become strange almost, or if they leave you or something, they become an enemy, don’t they? So we can see now, we even do have love, there’s no problem, we do have love, but it’s based on attachment. That person, before we fell in love with them, they wanted to be happy just as much as they do now, but we didn’t notice it, we didn’t care, did we?
Because they hadn’t touched us. As soon as they touched us, we want them to be happy. So we can say we want people to be happy, but it’s based on attachment. It’s the only way we know how to have love right now, for people we’re attached to. And all Buddha is saying is, we have the capability of having love, of wanting to be happy, every living being.
But we’ve got to change the basis of it, and this is the one of friend, enemy, and stranger, you know. The assumptions that friend, enemy, and stranger have are: we believe in one hundred percent, you know? That block us, therefore, profoundly limit us, therefore. You know, at stranger, exactly the same. Except this time, you don’t care, one way or the other.
Especially if you’re very attached to a person, you can’t even look at the stranger, it’s too hard for you to get your face to look at them, they’re so boring aren’t they? Enemies, can’t stop thinking about them, it’s almost like your enemy is your friend, you can’t stop thinking about them, just like the friend. The stranger, you can’t even get your mind to think about them, they’re so boring, because why? They have neither harmed nor helped you. So conclusion, you don’t care about them either way.
So, by getting a bit more objectivity here, recognising the basis which is attachment and aversion, we then can start to go beyond that and start to realise that actually, that’s got nothing to do with how they feel. They feel, you know, not just through my projections, which is one where there’s really extreme projections, you can’t see the other person at all as separate from you. Not possible. It is an extension of yourself. That’s attachment, know, or aversion.
When you lessen the attachment and aversion, you start to see that these three people are equal in wanting to be happy. And it’s easy to prove. You know yourself, you are the friend, the enemy, and the stranger for many people, right? And you know there’s no difference in how you feel from moment to moment, it doesn’t matter whether people see you this way or that way. You know, you might not even know they’re thinking it at this moment.
This is not affecting you at all. You know that consistently you want to be happy every moment. You’re the same every moment. Same for an enemy stranger, you know. I put up here my friend, my enemy, my stranger, I parade them in front of you, I don’t tell you who’s who, you’ve never met any of them.
You can’t tell the difference, can you? We don’t see horns coming out of the enemy’s head, wings out of the friend, you know, and boringness coming out of the, you know, might be three different pictures for you. So, where’s the real view? Know, it’s just our own projections, completely. And then that causes us to therefore not care about the strangers, to hate the enemy, and to love the friend.
So, they’re completely artificial. They’re not sound bases. Always, Lama Zopa says they’re unstable. So look what happens when the person you’re in love with stops loving you. It’s like death, isn’t it?
Because why? Because attachment is neediness, it’s dependent, it’s built up a huge story, a huge fantasy, huge expectations, so now they’re smashing your expectations, they’re not meeting them. That’s why even if the person’s five minutes late, you get mad at them, and you get jealous and freaked out, because massive expectations, you know. As if unless they do that, I am nothing. So you depend your whole life, your happiness is dependent upon this person doing what you want.
I mean, it is so scary if you think about it. It’s just unbearable. How can we bear it, you know? We just think it’s normal. So, you know, when so look at how you feel when the person stops loving you.
Okay. If we we we struggle with it, and that’s wonderful, that’s what practice is, and then we even when the person goes with someone else, it’s painful in the beginning, but eventually we can love them, continue to love them, that’s fantastic. That is amazing. And that’s the job, you know, that’s what we have to learn to do, go beyond the attachment. But most of the time, the ordinary world, animals, humans, when the attachment ceases, then there’s no love.
Love ceases too, the tap of love just turns off. You don’t care about them anymore. We can see that, you know. So it’s unstable right now. It’s artificial.
So we have to try and get some this this stability of this equanimity, which doesn’t mean you have to leave your friend and move in with your enemy. Okay, if you’re a great bodhisattva, you probably would. You know? But, you know, normal people the way we are, you stay with your friend, but you practice giving up the attachment. Don’t give up the love, you increase the love, but you practice giving up the attachment, the expectations, the neediness, the manipulation, all that stuff.
And you you know, when you’re with your enemy for five minutes, you practice. You practice just being kind of there, know? Not freaking out completely, attempting to sort of even know in your heart there’s a human being here. Or if you even have to keep away from it, that’s okay. But in your heart, you change.
And then the stranger, while you’re with that boring old stranger, you see them as a real human being. You keep your face in front of them, you listen to what they’re saying. But we can see even the impulse in us when there’s a lot of people around especially. You know, we’ve got some people we’re close to, some we don’t care about. It’s so easy just to gravitate like a magnet towards the friend.
Isn’t it? So easy, just go like a magnet, you never think about it. And to absolutely avoid the enemy, and just be bored by the stranger. So even if we’re going like in a group, to make the practice, to practice, your best friend could be there, practice sitting next to a stranger, you know? Practice sitting next to an enemy, listening to them, one you don’t like, who irritates you.
Hear them, you know? Listen to them. See them as a real human being, as separate from you, that is your own projections onto them, you know. This is hard stuff, isn’t it? Here we are, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty in our lives, just floating along following our usual delusions.
It might be Hitler delusions, you know? But that’s the instinct within us, just follow the feelings, you know? Follow the feelings. Follow the feelings. So equanimity, first step.
Then there’s a basis, then you’ve a genuine foundation for building up really stable love for sentient beings, which is the wish they’d be happy, you know? Like I said, you don’t have to leave your friend, you don’t have to leave your children, No one’s saying that. Just change the basis of the relationship, make it healthy, slowly, slowly. And when you lessen attachment for one person, you then automatically begin to help lessening the aversion for another. Lessening attachment meaning increasing the love, more stable.
You you lessen the the aversion, and therefore you lessen the indifference to this to the stranger. You’re more able to be with a stranger and actually enjoy their company, you know. I mean, the Dalai Lama says, whoever he meets is like his best friend, and everybody who meets him says the same thing. It’s amazing. I’ve interviewed for our magazine many different people, seen many different people over the years who’ve been around him.
Police, government officials, ordinary people, Christians, every kind of people. Everybody is in agreement. You know. So, you feel like journalists, so many people who’ve interviewed him. They will say, when you’re with him, it’s just the most natural thing in the world, he’s like your dearest friend.
Like you really feel he’s, not in an artificial way at all, just genuinely caring, genuinely just from the heart, like he’s close to you. Everybody says that. Sorry, we can see it’s possible, you know? Is there any questions about all that? Any questions?
Yes, go on. I understand. How do you deal with attachments and projections? How do you deal with that in the relationship with your teacher, your guru? Well, I think my observation, again not being mean about it, is looking at our minds, seeing the West, and hearing people talk, that this is a very difficult one for people.
It’s a very difficult one because the usual mode we have is for the mind to get very excited, and that’s called attachment, when the mind gets over excited. I don’t mean to be horrible about it, it’s got be all sort of boring, I don’t mean that. But the mind gets over exaggerating the qualities of somebody. So even if they are a holy being, let’s say, like someone who’s really got qualities in their own side, and doesn’t play all the ego games and hook into our rubbish, even if they’re capable of very amazing beings, still, can have huge, many people have huge projections onto their teachers, which is why, and again, keep quoting America, I’m not trying to be rude about America, I’m very happy to live there, people are amazing, you know, but there’s a lot of talk about spiritual stuff there, and a lot of people are suing their gurus. You know, I mean, I’m not joking.
Many people are suing their gurus because they feel they’ve been let down by them. Now, the problem in this is one, they have jumped in too quickly, because that’s our excited attached mind, you jump in too quickly and you haven’t checked carefully. That’s why the Buddhist approach is you have to check so carefully. I mean, it’s like there’s a supermarket of spiritual paths out there now, we know that, and so many people who are so called spiritual teachers. Now, okay, in Tibet it was interesting, was a very powerful system that you know, you’d never ever say you’re a teacher.
You’d be old before you became a teacher. And it’s only because other people called you a teacher and they constantly requested you to teach, you know. But here in the West, don’t even have that concept. We sort of to say I want to become a spiritual teacher, mean, that would be an outrageous concept, because it’s arrogant beyond belief, you know? A person a lama the word lama in Tibetan, as I said, is a term given out of respect to a person who’s considered a spiritual teacher.
So to say you’re a spiritual teacher yourself is at the height of arrogance. You don’t go and get a degree in being a lama. So there’s a certain term in Tibetan, for example, called Geshe, you know, at the Buddha house, it’s a Geshe. That is a term you get from simply passing exams in a monastery. Monastery, it’s pretty amazing, they’ve studied for twenty five years, they’re like a computer of knowledge, they’re extraordinary, and they very often are practitioners as well, but that you can say comfortably, yes, I’m a Geshe, but you’d never say I’m a Lama, you know?
So in the West, it’s a very common thing. So, of course, then we have all this emotion, all this attachment, we meet somebody and they say they’re quite charismatic and they say all these nice words, and we get all excited and like fall in love, really, it’s like falling in love, get all excited, you know? Then you have all these words, you hear all these pure teachings about guru devotion and doing what they say, so mix all that with all our attachment, not even looking into our minds, not realizing it’s like being in love, and then we have all these projections and expectations of this person. And then because that person, let’s say they are a very skillful teacher, and they’re really trying to work, mean, they’re very skillful therapists, one of my friends said that these lamas are like the best therapists she’s ever met, and I mean in the deepest of ways, because they really know the mind deeply, these holy beings, this is my own experience, they really know the mind, it’s astonishing. So, let’s say the person is a valid teacher, and a person who’s got attachment is hooking like crazy, isn’t it?
Hooking like that’s what attachment does, it gets you to hook and hook and manipulate and want them to love you, just like you do with a person who’s your boyfriend, you know? But this person is not going to be responding, they’re going be responding in a very clean way, in a very clean, un neurotic way. Now, that can be misinterpreted by a person with attachment as being rejection or, you understand my point? So then they can get angry and start projecting and go crazy, you know. I’ve heard many people go on and on and on and on.
Now, okay, the other scenario is if the person isn’t a valid spiritual teacher, then you’re in big trouble. If they’re not a valid spiritual teacher and haven’t really got qualities and have got a lot of ego, then the person jumps in and gets all excited and says this is my guru now, then you’re in big trouble, then you’ve a recipe for disaster, you know? Bad enough even if person’s holy, you’ve got your own projections. So this is why it is so important to check carefully, and really not and this is where, for us in the West, we talk about feelings and following feelings, it sounds like a good thing, and so there’s a very particular way we’re talking about it here, but when it’s not a good thing, because if we can see how we have strong delusions that lie to us, that cause us to project onto other people our own anger, our own harm, our own hurt, our own jealousy, you name it, Then it’s that’s what I mean by following feelings. We we right now in our life follow if it feels good, we figure the person must be good.
If we go to a person, we get all excited, we figure the person must be good. But look at the number of relationships, if the person turns into being a rapist or a liar, or they kill them. Look at all the people who love Hitler, they felt very good. Excuse me, they got led up a garden path, you know, he’s a maniac. So feeling good is not the criterion for something’s being good, that’s what’s so difficult for us, you know.
So just because we get all excited, and a lot of spiritual teachers are very charismatic, you know? Naturally, I mean, if they’re good or not good, if they’ve got qualities or not, they can be charismatic. A Dalai Lama, would say, is quite charismatic, but somehow, what a relief, he’s a good person too, phew, you know, we got the lottery there, he’s as clean as a whistle, you know, what a relief. But some people are not like that. So then, that’s why we’ve got to be so careful, so, so careful.
Especially you’ve got to have the really high level of practice where you’re starting to see the person as a Buddha. Again, even that, we can talk about that, say, we’re a Tibetan tradition, we’ve got Lamas. If we’ve got a lot of attachment, emotional, you know, deluded, and so projecting like crazy, and saying we see them as so pure, all that we see them as the Buddha, again, it’s like an emotional feeling, but then we see them picking their nose or something, you know, doing something that we think that they shouldn’t be doing, we get shocked and think, my god, how can a Buddha pick their nose? You know, so then we start having doubts, because again we’re basing it all on emotion, you know, whereas the real one, if we’ve really checked carefully, really got good, strong, good karmic connection with a good person, we’re so fortunate that we have, and really checked carefully, and really make many of the prayers and aspirations do the right thing and practice and all that, then we’re really, you know, we’re able, no matter what they do, because it’s so easy to project fault onto anybody, I mean, can project fault onto anybody all the time, that you don’t project your own faults, and when you’re starting to see a fault, you catch it and you know it’s your own mind, you see this is my own mind.
And one of the key practices when you really have a solid relationship with a guru is to see whatever they do as a teaching for you. And what this really is a practice in is learning to not believe in what you are seeing, because our mind is projecting all the time, we can’t separate now truth from fiction because our mind is so riddled with delusions. So the practice in seeing the person as pure isn’t just some kind of a holy thing, it really is actually learning to separate the deluded views from the truth. And if you see a person, let’s say, know, many people like some Lamas have a lot of students, so they can’t always be with every student, know, sometimes you might feel that you can’t get a meeting with your lama, you keep making appointments and they keep getting cancelled, so you can easily start getting paranoid, that they don’t love you, they prefer this person, I mean, the mind is just completely naturally like this, you know, with all our delusions. That’s the commonest thing you hear all the time.
So, when you’ve really got real devotion, whatever it is that arises, even if you don’t get an appointment for two years, you see it as a teaching for your mind, you’re completely content with it, you have projections, you know. That’s what pure view means. Now, that’s a tough job. That’s a really tough job to do. So, it’s not an easy thing, you know, to have a decent relationship with a teacher, even with one that’s a pure teacher, not to mention one that’s a bad teacher.
So, it’s not an easy job, but that’s what the job is. This is the job in general, is to have pure view, not dump our faults onto other people, but we’re really trying to practice it very powerfully onto the guru because it’s a very perfect one to very quickly. Do you see? This is why it’s not enough to say you’re a Buddhist, we don’t even know what attachment is. We say the word attachment, we say the word love, we get a vague notion, but until we are very precise and analytical in the way we’re trying to do here, like I’ve been saying, how can you learn to know the difference, you know?
You can’t possibly, until you hear the teachings, until you go to the teachings and hear exactly Buddha’s view of the mind and how it functions, and you debate about it, and think about it, and then you meditate on it. Until you do this, how on earth can you change your mind? You cannot, you know. So it’s not an easy thing. Anyone else here?
Yeah. Absolutely. Please do. Yes. I understand.
Yes. Okay. Now I meant to recommend books. The thing is, you know, there are many books, some written the ones written the written books that are transcriptions, edited translations of the Lama’s teachings, Then there are books that are edited translations of many western people, you know, western teachers. And so, the way I’m talking here, you know, is just the Dharma, but it’s sort of, you know, I’m trying to think of a book to talk about the way I’m talking about it.
I don’t know. There’s very western there’s one book. Okay. There’s many books. Of course, many books.
Any book like the Dalai Lama, okay, he doesn’t go too much about karma and saṃsāra, but he does. Dalai Lama’s books seem to range between two extremes, there are those that are the popular teachings, I’m not putting them down, they’re fantastic, know, The Art of Happiness and those kinds of books, that are really just very general, open, broad, wonderful, sort of non specific Buddhist books. Then there are the other books of the Dalai Lama because he’s an amazing scholar, and very detailed, very analytical, very precise. But it seems sometimes that when new readers are a bit complex, you can’t get your head around them unless you’ve had some teachings. So one should select, you know, which ones are appropriate.
Then there are all these other books, a whole range of them by, again, like I say, different authors. Oh, it just lured me. Let me think now. Well, the one that’s a kind of a classical presentation of what in a much more detailed form of what we’re discussing this weekend, like I mentioned already, is a book called Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand by Wisdom Publication. That’s a very traditional presentation of this path, the Lamrim.
Very traditional. And it lists all the things about karma, but doesn’t talk about it so much in the way that I’m talking about this kind of loose, easygoing way here. Then you’ve got lots of those little books, lots of books that are commentaries on what they call the Lamrim which present these various stages. The ones that go on about the mind and karma in this way, I just don’t I can’t say that I know too many, I’m afraid. There’s a book by an American called Alan Wallace, Buddhism from Tibetan Buddhism from the ground up.
It’s quite a practical presentation, I think. You know, kind of Western style of the of the path. Alan Wallace. I don’t know if you sell it here. Tibetan Buddhism from the ground up.
Oh, gosh. I should look in the bookstore anyway. Let me see what’s there. At lunchtime I’ll do that. And if there’s anything else that I recommend, otherwise I’ll think about some more.
I can’t say more than that right now. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. Okay.
Well, yeah, okay. I think the approach here is that the more we work on our mind, the more we less the delusions, the depression, the anxiety, the fears, the anger, the attachment, naturally we’re going to get a lot more energy, just natural. Why we don’t have much energy now? Okay, can be sometimes for some of us completely strongly physical, with physical problems, but for most of us why we get so exhausted, in Buddhist terms, is because our mind is full of all the pressures, and the delusions, and the stress, and the anxiety, and all the rest. So obviously as you develop your mind more and more, and you get rid of these, you just naturally get more and more clean, kind of strong energy, so you need less sleep, you can do more, you can achieve more, you have more stamina, more enthusiasm, more perseverance, more joy, more all these qualities, it’s just a natural thing, so Buddhism says very much coming from the mind.
So eventually when you get very advanced in your practice, you get to the point, like I said, yes, were the you know, you’re great one of these great practitioners. They don’t need sleep at all. Is that generally speaking? Is that what I’m is that enough? Is that what you mean?
How do we relate the idea, say for example, of being an alcoholic and you’re doing the twelve steps, where they talk about it as being a disease, with the Buddhist idea that it’s the mind. I think there’s no contradiction at all, it’s just a question of how you define disease, you know, I mean Buddha’s not saying it’s not a disease, of course it’s a disease, attachment’s a disease. The difference is we can see, you know, like I said before, when Buddha’s saying we’re all junkies, that’s just my phrase, he’s meaning it literally because desire is the problem, attachment is the junky mind it’s just a question of the extent of it and it’s a question sometimes of the object so we can see obviously certain objects are far more powerful it’s clear you usually don’t talk about being a carrot junkie Although we still approve that if you eat enough carrots you’re going to die and get very sick. It’s just that there are some objects obviously that are more strong that have a much more strong effect on the body. It’s just obvious.
So that’s clear. But the real emphasis in Buddhism is once you’ve gone beyond the object, so you remove yourself from certain objects, because you have to do that, now you begin the actual job of changing your mind, of seeing that it’s coming from the mind. The body is a part of it, of course it is, it’s clear. I mean, depression, for example, the common view in the West is that it’s a physical thing, it’s a chemical imbalance, so you take your Prozac or your serotonin or whatever to balance that. Well, doesn’t contradict anything.
That’s perfectly fine. Buddhism, Tibetan medicine says the same thing. Tibetan medicine has its way of describing using terms. They don’t talk about chemical imbalance, they talk about the imbalance of the elements. So, you know, the elements in the body are such a way of the imbalance of this and there’s too much of this, and so you’ve taken certain herbal medicines that adjust the elements of the body, so that then your mind can have space to start doing its job.
Well, there’s no contradiction, the body and mind are absolutely interdependent. The difference is in the West we tend to say it is all the body, because we don’t even recognize a thing called the mind that is not physical. And the Buddhist one says the mind is the source, and once we work on that with the help of working on the body we can then begin to change so even with depression as long as we fine take your serotonin no problem but as long as we believe it is only chemical we will always be enslaved But if we do recognize it’s still physical, take your serotonin, which helps the body calm itself down, helps the mind get out of the funk a little bit, and so then you’ve got some space to work on your mind. It’s not just a question of relying one hundred percent, that’s the junky mind again. When you think I’m happy when I have my piece of cake, then obviously, logically, when you haven’t got your cake, you’re not happy.
Well, Buddha is saying you can be happy whether you have cake. You can find a way to be happy, even eventually, without having to take serotonin. Because when you’ve worked on your mind, you’ve then purified even your subtler physical energy. That’s what Tibetan medicine works on, that you do certain practices. You know sickness, general, mean not even calling it mental things, just something like cancer, that comes from past karma, which is the mind.
The actions we did in a past life create the cause for us to be born of the body now, that has cells that go berserk. That’s due to our past karmic energy. We even created that. So even with practice now, you take certain medicines, Tibetan medicine, plus you combine it with certain practices, purification practices, practices on compassion, you can heal of the physical things. So it’s just a question of how you the perspective on it, what you see, you know, where the real source is.
It’s not just one or the other. Obviously everything is interdependent. Do you see what I’m saying? I know. Sure.
That’s it. No, I understand. So we have to, this is why in this tradition we have these visualization meditations and teachings and teachings and teachings and teachings and teachings. Were you here for the morning meditation? Okay.
So can you even imagine how those kinds of approaches can work or not? Because they’re not directly analytical, they’re visual, visualizing. They’re really working in the same They’re using a different tool to develop the same qualities. So you know, for us, a balanced meditation would be some concentration with no thoughts, or tempting to have no thoughts, some kind of a concentration mode, some analysis, some visualization, you get a nice balance. We all have to know, so at certain times it is inappropriate to analyse, because it’s like this train that’s running, as you just say, and it’s not effective analysis, it’s just going berserk, there’s no thermostat there.
And how do you get the silence? Where does the silence come in? Well, that’s in the first kind of meditation, concentration. We did the one this morning that was actually using the breath. But the were you here yesterday?
Morning. And we did the first, very first, just five minutes of watching the breath. Okay? Okay. Don’t expect your mind to be silent straight away, that’s fantasy.
But the aim of that meditation is to keep the attention on one thing, which implies not following the chattering. So that’s what you’re training your mind to do in those types of meditation, is to harness the mind so that we begin to have some control over what kind of thoughts arise, which seems insane to us now, because we have no control at the moment at all. But eventually when your mind is really advanced and you’ve got great concentration, the mind is this highly flexible thing that can think or not think thoughts at will. Can you imagine how amazing that would be? That’s what we’re training to do.
So first of all, we’re trying to there’s two different things. In the concentration of mind, you’re trying to harness it, focus it, so you’ve got some control, and you can start putting your thoughts in a direction that you want to go. And then secondly, the analysis, right, Buddha says now we’ve got this analytical mind, that’s on no thermostat, out of control, a hundred miles an hour, and it’s all the wrong thoughts. So it’s triple trouble. What we’re trying to do is still, given that we’ve got that, use it to begin to you know, by having concentration, you begin to hopefully get some control over it.
And then we get by thinking, by the analytical meditations and teachings and teachings and teachings and teachings and teachings, we’re starting to put in the correct thoughts, and that whether they’re correct or not, that’s up to you to decide if you want to follow the Buddhist way of thinking. Okay? If one decides the ones who wants to think the way Buddha does, we call those the correct thoughts just having thought about them, then we start to change the neurotic thoughts with the good thoughts. So when the mind, even if it’s analytical, is full of all the appropriate thoughts, it’s already a peaceful mind. The mind is un peaceful now, but not because it thinks too much, but because the mind is out of control, and because all the stuff we’re thinking is deluded, or much of it is deluded, that’s why we’re unhappy.
Do you see my point? Yes, absolutely. Yes, sometimes you do more visualization because you really just feel you need that, sometimes you do more analysis because you’ve got to really sort something out, sometimes you just do more concentration maybe, you know? There’s a way of even concentrating on using the form of the Buddha, and that’s up to whether oneself develops a Buddha’s practice. You’d visualise the Buddha in front, and you could then at some point, we did it this morning just using the lights and everything, but also you could set up the visualisation, and then you could just train yourself to concentrate just on the picture.
That’s used often as a basis, instead of the breath often one uses the image as the basis for concentration, when one begins to develop a practice. Does that make sense? Okay. In general though, a good intelligent mind is absolutely what’s necessary. We don’t have to use it well, that’s all.
Nothing wrong with a lot of thoughts. Nothing wrong with a lot of thoughts. You just have to control them and have appropriate thoughts. Does that make sense? Yes.
Often feel like I’m in an internal battle. Yes. Be selective. Yes. This may be the wrong approach.
Be selective. I’m the same kind of person, and even in the beginning when I first became a Buddhist, had so berserk energy, I couldn’t sit for the first seven years, I’d burst, couldn’t sit still. As soon as I had to sit down and do meditation, you know. So I just decided, okay, I’ll do my practices, I’m gonna do them on the walk, and when I’m walking, when I’m sitting, in the car, or whatever, and then using also using my energy to try and do useful things. So there’s various ways.
So we’ve a lot of mental energy, a lot of creative energy use it to be beneficial. Don’t just try and suffocate the energy. That’s what I started to do when I first got involved in being spiritual. I didn’t understand, and I was starting to suffocate my energy, was becoming like hopeless, all kind of internal, and all passive. I was completely mistaken.
Wrong understanding, you know. This approach especially, okay, different approaches, there are different Buddhist traditions that use different approaches. I’m using here this particular one that’s stressing the Mahāyāna, that it’s all within the mind. Find a skillful way to use, you know? Do you see what I mean?
Someone Maybe it’s tea time. Have a cup of tea, okay? See you at ten thirty or ten forty or something. Thank you very much. In the tradition there are two main packages of teachings, you know?
The that just that use different approaches, we’re saying different ways of analyzing, different approaches to how to develop these qualities, you know? So this very first one, the foundation of it, as I said, is this basis, this equanimity, this genuine recognition of the equality of all beings in terms of their wishing to be happy. It sounds a very fine point, but that’s the way all these contemplations go. They’re very precise, they’re very accurate, not broad based, getting a good feeling and hoping for the best. It really is working deeply with the way the mind sees things and changing gradually.
In one particular package of teachings, the next type of contemplation to do, which is a very odd one for us, but it’s just a way of expanding our minds, that is to think how all sentient beings have been our mother. This is a weird one for us because we think sort of Buddha’s trying to make us suffer, you know, because we don’t I mean, it sounds a bit of an odd one. What does this mean? Well, really, it’s a numbers thing. What we’re trying to do, remember what I said, is to expand the wish, we seem to have this tradition of not liking our mothers so much and blaming them for all the problems.
Isn’t it? So, it seems like a bit of weird contemplation to do, but there’s some logic to it. So, if you wanted us to use that use another term, then it’s fine. You know, as a Dalai Lama says, well, think someone who’s nurtured you. Well, here the main point, the very first step is to have some strong sense that that we’ve got this connection with all living beings from countless, countless lives.
And the logic here is, again, it’s not a way we think at all, but by contemplating again and again, it can expand our mind hugely. Some get to get some genuine sense that because we’ve all got beginningless mind, therefore we’ve had beginningless lives, so it follows logically we bumped into each other beginningless times. I mean, it doesn’t sound like something comfortable for us. It doesn’t seem something at all reasonable. It’s an outrageous idea, it follows logically fitting with Buddha’s explanation of there being a beginningless mind.
If we’ve bumped into countless sentient beings countless times, it follows logically they’ve been our mother, they’ve nurtured us in all kinds of lives, in all kinds of times. So this is something just a This is a way of thinking this way, to try and learn to think this way again and again, to get some genuine sense for this, some sense of the truth of this, you know. They say that the person who’s really contemplated this very deeply, doing all the other meditations and teachings and teachings and teachings and teachings and teachings as well, is a person who anytime they see any living being, an ant, a dog, roach, doesn’t matter, is like this sort of this spontaneous feeling of, oh, mother, you know, kind of kindness coming to the heart. And it sounds funny, doesn’t it? We don’t think this way at all.
So the next idea that comes from this one, all these are contemplated very deeply using many, many ways of looking and, you know, changing the mind, changing the usual assumptions about reality. Is to then think, well, you know, to how kind how mothers have been kind to us. So my feeling is we should add another meditation here about just how I mean, what does it mean they’ve been kind? Because we actually think the opposite sometimes. So I suppose if we look at some of our assumptions in the West, then it’s reasonable we think our mothers are to blame for our problems because obviously we think that our mother made us, don’t we?
So then, because there’s a strong assumption that if our mother made us, and then she’s a less than perfect person, well, it seems a bit shocking that she should dare go along and make us, isn’t it? She should have waited till she was at least a decent person before she made us. That’s how we feel, isn’t it? It’s very strong in us, and actually it’s the basis of a lot of our psychological models in the West. Because we’re all desperately trying to find the reason for something.
Well, the first person we can turn to, obviously, is the person who gave birth to us. It seems logical. Well, know, as we’ve been saying, the Buddha doesn’t have this view, you know. That our consciousness, if you like, you can say we chose our mom. Sorry, don’t blame your mom.
You know, that due to karma, strong karmic connection, there we were from the previous death, certain virtuous karma ripened. We’re on auto pilot by now, and then we go zapping, running like a magnet towards that mother’s womb. So who choose whom, know? Who choose whom? I mean, Buddha doesn’t say technically that we chose to have actual volition like you choose to walk out that door, that same thing, but our karma, the karma we created set us up to be yet again after countless lives together, being with that particular mother, or that particular father, or whatever you like to say.
So already, just this alone is a very profound point, know, can help us really shift the emphasis from this one of blame and all of the stuff that we tend to have, you know. Because yes, of course our mothers are deluded. I mean, we’re surprised, they’re in saṃsāra like us, know, come on. But when you have this shift of emphasis that you actually created the cause to have that mother, that father, that school, that scenario in your life, it’s a very different, different view. You can hear it even intellectually.
But it takes time to psychologically come around to this one, so then the experiential implication of this is eventually There’s a strong sense, as we’ve talked about of karma, a strong sense of ownership. Then immediately we can have So even let’s say we’ve got a mother who hasn’t been so kind to us, it’s very common, of course. Plenty of mothers are unkind to their babies. We know that. We’re definitely in the West.
But nevertheless, with this view of karma, with this view of karma, there are still many ways we can see that person’s been kind. So what it demands that we do is really, really redefine what we mean by kindness. You check this one. Right now, our view of when a person is kind to us is defined by our needs being met, isn’t it? It’s defined by attachment.
As long as a person gives you what you want, you call them kind. Do you see my point? We don’t ever think a person is kind when they don’t give us what we want. You go to a restaurant and you order chocolate cake and the person brings the wrong cake, or it’s a bad cake, or it’s a cold cake, or it’s a stale cake, or whatever, want. Even she worked just as hard as she would have if she brought you the right cake.
She wrote it in the pad, she walked away, she gave it to the cook, she thought about it, she presented you a plate and a serviette and a knife. Excuse me, she did just as hard at work. But because you didn’t get what you want, you don’t think she’s kind. You’re rude to