So the Buddha has said, the mind is the forerunner. Where the mind goes all the rest of our life follows. It’s like the horse and the cart. If we improve the mind everything in life improves. If we harm the mind everything in life is harmed.
The way we look at things, the eyes with which we see things make a much bigger difference than the actual things we see. Two people, five people, ten people walk into a room. Each of them have their own individual experience based on the way they look, based on a way they see. All happiness, all suffering in life are essentially flow from our own mind. The external conditions that we experience largely are brought to us through the expressions of our own mind.
Even when two people get identical happy experiences or identical difficult experiences both experience them differently. One looking at something happy feels unhappy, feels dissatisfied. The other even looking at something somewhat difficult remains at peace, remains happy. If we can only fix one thing in our life the best thing to fix is our own mind. Basically there’s fixing within the mind, two levels of conditioning within our own mind.
One is the genetic input, the way our body is puts out certain energy, predisposes our mind to move in particular ways. In Buddhism we call this karma or process. The other is conditioning from the time we entered the womb until now, until this present moment where our mind has been conditioned by the environment in which it has been fostered. So when we try to improve ourselves, when we try to improve or repair the mind it’s essentially these two dimensions on which we are working. Both of those are impermanent.
Both of those are always in states of change. So this means that essentially we have the power to transform the two. The principal technique we use for that work is meditation. It’s been used I think in spiritual traditions the world over. Some traditions have emphasized it more and with some traditions it’s come and gone in widespread use in the various centuries.
Certainly Buddhism has come into the present era with one of the stronger traditions. So if you travel in Japan you’ll see monks sitting in temples meditating, Korea, any of the freer parts of China and certainly Tibet, Mongolia, Siberia. There people do two things or three things. One is they try to do daily meditation practice. When you do daily meditation practice you see the present state of the mind.
You see today’s comings and goings reflected. You see your unconscious feelings to those comings and goings very clearly. Secondly, once a year they try to do a retreat a week, two weeks, maybe a month where you simply cut off your ordinary life activity, stay in a quiet place, eat simple foods, reevaluate the unfolding events of your life. And thirdly, once in their lifetime they try to do an extended retreat. For us in the West it’s, the daily practice is easy.
Trying to once a year or so do a week or two or a month not so difficult. Trying to do the longer retreats, three or four years, well, only in Australia do you have enough time. But all three are beneficial. If one cannot do the third then at least, the first two. If one cannot do the second or third then at least the first one is very, very good.
What is meditation? What does meditation mean? In the Buddhist world we speak of two types of methods or techniques based on the object. One type, based on the contemplation of that subject, your mind becomes more like it.
It’s sort of like an immersion or a marination process. Put your mind in a particular space and just hold it there. The mind becomes more like the object. Put your mind in thoughts of love and compassion, your mind becomes more loving, more compassionate. Put your mind in thoughts of positive frameworks, your mind becomes more positive.
The other type is when you place the mind in the presence of the object of contemplation, the mind doesn’t become more like that but has a response to it, a desired response. Subjects on those lines are things like impermanence. Normally we think impermanence easy, we understand impermanence but if you put your mind there once or twice a day you notice that you actually don’t really live in accordance with awareness of impermanence. So this kind, don’t become more impermanent by putting the mind on a thought of impermanence or watching impermanence. You’re already completely impermanent.
You don’t have to become more impermanent. But contemplating impermanence enhances the presence of our awareness. Most people live as though things were actually permanent. A friend dies, a wife dies, a neighbor dies, it’s almost like a shock, like a therapy is required or counseling is required. Actually the need for therapy or the need for counseling shouldn’t actually be present.
If we contemplated impermanence and change every moment of our lives, we would know that every person we meet will one day die. It wouldn’t at all be a cause of shock or suffering or surprise. It would simply be a natural flow of our life events. Similarly, with the infinite nature, what we call in Buddhism, the emptiness nature of things. When we contemplate that, we do not become more infinite or more emptiness nature.
We are already one with infinity, immersed in infinity. We are already completely emptiness as the traditional text put it. That’s one way to speak of meditation from point of view of the object. From point of view of the meditating subject, the mind, and we speak of two. One is when we look at a subject and move the mind through the subject, you could say a kind of reflective meditation or a cursive meditation, Sometimes with a particular idea or a particular thought or a particular aspect of reality, the meditation manuals will suggest that we contemplate the subject by moving the mind through four ways or six points or eight points.
We call that cursive meditation, Qigong, a reflective meditation. The other we call Chug Gang. We just take one point and we put the mind there, one thought, one image and we hold the mind to it. Another way to look, to speak of meditation is in terms of its function. A very common meditation technique is simply quiet is simply the quieting of the mind.
The creation of inner quiet, inner peace, inner relaxation. It’s like, we apply a method that forces us to unwind, forces us to let everything in the body, the emotion and the spirit, the spirit forces it to relax, that takes all the anxious energies, all the stress, all the tension and simply disperses it. For many meditators this is a technique they do at the beginning of each meditation session and then later in the meditation session apply another technique to bring a little bit of stress, tension and intensity back. A second function of meditation is to enhance our self awareness. Most people have pretty low levels of self awareness.
We tend to put our minds very much on sensory data or on thoughts of yesterday or hopes, plans, fears or expectations for tomorrow. The awareness does not sit simply in the hearer and now and watch what’s going on right here, right now. Self awareness in the untrained person is quite low. I think married people are luckier in that regard because they’ve got someone who is walking around always correcting them and pointing out their faults. In a way they have a self awareness through another vicariously.
If you have a nagging wife or husband it’s actually a good thing. It means you’ve got to you didn’t notice that there’s room for improvement. But they noticed. But if you practice meditation your self awareness increases. So then no need for that other person to nag.
So then if you improve and improve and improve and they’re still nagging you can very quietly point out to them that their nagging is actually a bad habit. But don’t do that, don’t point that out before you’ve actually improved to the correct degree or you lose your partner. Tibetans have a saying, it’s more difficult to find one fault in yourself than it is to find a hundred faults in someone else. But much more valuable to find one fault in yourself than to find a hundred in someone else. That person who occasionally notices our bad habits and reminds us of them, we should like carry around little tip money in our pocket.
Whip out like a of those little two dollar coins you’ve got down here. Say thanks a lot. Encourage that entrepreneurial spirit. By means of meditation we enhance our self awareness. We notice what we’re doing.
We become more aware of the body, more aware of the emotions, more aware of spirit. When we become more aware we can correct, we can strengthen what is already strong, we can uproot what is diseased. We can rejuvenate all areas of body, of emotion, of spirit. Without that self awareness the only way we can improve is if someone walks around behind us with a stick. If we had a world of meditators actually we wouldn’t be able to retire most of the people that our government has to pay.
We wouldn’t need policemen, wouldn’t need soldiers, wouldn’t need counselors, even doctors. Ninety percent of our illnesses come from the way we live and our lack of self awareness. People falling down stairs and getting run over by trucks and such. Simply lack of self awareness. Insurance companies should put a special clause in there.
If you meditate for five years your insurance drops by like ten percent, twenty percent. Every year you get one percent or two percent off your insurance for enhanced self awareness meaning you’re less of an accident disease risk person. So a second function is that it enhances our self awareness. A third function is that through this enhanced self awareness, able to understand the nature of the mind and how it works, we can essentially get at the very root of our own psychology. We can be in the quiet of our home professionals counseling ourselves shrinking ourselves when we need a little shrinking, expanding ourselves when we need a little expansion.
That by means of meditation we sit quietly, examine the corridors of our psyche for a few moments or half hour or an hour, look at what’s going on, face our problems and basically chitchat to ourselves until we resolve them. You know we’re all always chitchatting to ourselves all the time anyway. It’d be wonderful if we could develop a kind of a tape recorder recorder that would have all the kind of mental chitchat that’s going on in there. Yesterday someone insulted us and today we’re still like talking about it in our mind. I should have said this, I should have done that.
We’re like making love to wife, husband, girlfriend, boyfriend and we’re sitting there chit chatting, Yes, and when that person yesterday said this, I should have. And when we go to meditation courses at the end of the meditation session we should have someone in the back listening to all those conversations being able to and play them all back to the crowd. One lama I know when he does Vipassana retreats he puts people in a room in various little places in the room with microphones on the tables and makes them for four hours just continually talk. Sort of a forced chitchat. We’re always doing it inside our own mind but we just don’t notice.
And then when they’re sitting quietly he’ll play the tapes kind of in the background. So he would take what you had said two hours and thirty five minutes into your chit chat and play it for five or ten minutes and then take what you had said and play that for ten or fifteen minutes. And he’ll always try and take what will be the most embarrassing to that person. Because of course he doesn’t do the taping himself of his own chitchat. So he gets great joy out of doing it to others.
So the second thing that happens, in terms of function, third thing that happens is that we get to watch all this chitchat that’s going on, get to explore the recesses of our psyche, get to understand where the things come from that eventually either come out of our mouths or come out in our lives by way of actions or even if we never do express them physically or verbally essentially find their expression somewhere in our body through stress, tension, illness, in our emotions through scarring and fear, insecurity, anxiety, or find it in the spirit simply through obscuration or obscurity. I think, most of you have been coming to Buddha House for a long time. Some of you may be somewhat new but, I think they do provide wonderful facility in giving some instruction in the west. Well, west, deep south. I was traveling through the states one time.
I was down in Louisiana and a fellow was there from New Zealand someone said to him, Where are you from? He said, I’m from the deep south. Because I looked at the south in America, Louisiana, they often call it the deep south, but he was from New Zealand. So when the Louisiana meant, asked him where he was from, said, I’m from the really deep south. So it’s wonderful that they provide a kind of a facility whereby peoples can learn to meditate.
I think in our western society it’s something extremely valuable as a tool and sometimes we think, well, to meditate you should be like kind of a laid back person, lots of extra time, maybe like artists and painters or musicians or something like that. But actually the peoples who need the meditation the most, really are peoples who are exactly the opposite. The Wall Street bankers, peoples running ninety miles an hour for ten or twelve hours a day. I mean it benefits everyone but an artist sitting there in front of his thing is kind of like meditation anyway, isn’t it? It’s kind of like someone drops a pin three blocks down and he sort of jumps.
Things get so quiet in his life. But busy peoples, intense peoples, career peoples really need a technique whereby they can look into themselves, see from the inside out rather than what’s been happening all day is seeing from the outside in a little bit. Where they can unwind, relax, contextualize and get a deeper take on the events that happen so rapidly in their life. So I think it’s a good idea we can sit and meditate for a little while together. That’d be fun.
Let’s see. There’s all these kind of meditation, different meditation techniques. Well, when I was here over the weekend almost everyone had some experience before but I noticed some extremely sloppy sitters. The Zen tradition is nice. You get one person with a very big stick.
Yes, and they walk around and they walk up behind you with a stick and they lay it on the floor at the base and straighten you up like this. And they do that twice, and the third time they come by they stand behind you and they put your head to the side like this, then they take the stick and the stick has got like a slit down the middle so that when it’s when it goes through the air it kind of whistles because little air passes through you you can hear it coming like and then when it hits the two things clap together like this, so it’s like a firecracker going off right beside your air. And I was once in Bodh Gaya and a friend of mine was there with me and he used to do transcendental meditation, this Maharishi Mahesh Yogi stuff. Well, you know, TM Maharishi produced probably the sloppiest meditators position wise the world has ever seen. So this friend of mine said, well, know, I better not go to that Zen sitting because definitely I’ll get hit.
I said, no, no, know the Zen master is very sweet and I’ve been going there for months and he never ever hits a white person. And it was true, mostly you know just the Japanese people who were in he knew that like know westerners we didn’t know, we don’t know much about that sort of thing. Someone may like jump up and hit them back, right? I mean, it’s like would you walk up to someone on the street and clunk them? It’s like dangerous.
Well anyway, as it has never ever hit anyone westerner in all those times I saw, so don’t worry about it. You’re definitely safe. And so we went and we’re all sitting. In the Zen tradition you sit the other everyone sits facing the wall. Basically just because the founder of the school sat facing the wall so ever since that they’ve all sat facing the wall.
It’s true Bodhidharma when it came to trying to put his seat facing a wall. I think it’s because he was from India, know, and Indians are quite handsome people. You know, big noses, long faces and stuff. When he got to China, I think he thought those Chinese people weren’t like so handsome. They’re like shorter and stockier.
So he sat facing the wall when he was meditating. So everyone else ever since in Zen has had to sit facing the wall. But it makes it good because the Zen master can just walk up the lines of people around the wall like this, and if anyone’s not sitting well correct them, and after the second correction, thump. But they do it with two hands in style. So they were all sitting there and we suddenly we hear after about fifteen or twenty minutes we hear, quack and then thunk we hear this body hit the floor.
But in Zen it doesn’t matter what happens you cannot look up. You know Japanese Zen was kind of brought in by the military so like soldiers need to learn to meditate. Now otherwise like all that stuff out in the battlefield can get upsetting. So of all the different forms of Zen, Japanese is like the most militant. So you definitely do not look up.
Doesn’t matter what you wear. Earth quake, just hope you’re gonna live through it. Do not look up. So when the session finished, we all got up to leave out afterwards and my friend’s seat was empty, I wondered what had happened. But he had sort of been like Australian meditators.
He had been sitting like this and with the Maharishi, the TM after about doing that for about ten minutes, his head went straight back like this, and he started snoring. Now in the TM tradition they call that a particular level of meditative absorption. Anyway the Zen master just considered us a plain old snorer and not only a snorer but while sitting in a bad position. And unfortunately for him that day three younger monks had arrived from Japan. So it wasn’t the Zen master who walked around with a stick who was very accurate, but it was one of the younger students.
And when they put your head to the side they try to hit you right on this muscle because it sends a nice choke through your whole body. But if you miss the parateres which he did and he hit him on the shoulder bone it sends a very sharp pain as opposed to just a kind of a pain with a sharp jolt. But anyway it was so intense it knocked him unconscious. He fell unconscious on the floor. Then when I got to town he said, Glenn, please don’t ever ever ever invite me anywhere again.
But anyway, today we took a lot of effort, but I phoned around, I managed to find that same young student. And he’s become a better shot with his stick. So he’ll come in and correct all your sitting. Now for how we sit, the Buddhist tradition generally, most important is comfort. That’s first, should be comfortable.
The second most important is the back should be straight. People who have bad backs should lie flat on the ground. Anyone with a bad back you lie flat on the ground without using a pillow and you put your arms either right beside you or just over your tummy like that. And if you’re really really chubby put a couple of pillows under your elbows to hold them up. Of Buddha’s first five disciples which is kind of famous five disciples because they were a group that he’d been with one was a one of them had a very bad back.
So right from the beginning of Buddhist history we have the example of how the posture essentially should be just comfortable. And if the most comfortable is lying down you lie down but if you do that in the Buddhist tradition you never point your feet at the teacher or at the altar or someone is bound to get mad at you. You can be sure you’re gonna get a scolding. So comfortable, back straight. Generally for people who meditate, if you’re gonna meditate for a long ish session you cross your legs and either you cross them like this or you bring them fully into the Lotus posture by putting one on top of one and the other on top of the other.
But it doesn’t matter which you do. This is best when you do long meditations simply because one foot cuts off the little bit of blood to this foot leg and the other foot cuts off a little bit of blood to this leg. And if you’re doing a short meditation it doesn’t matter but if you’re doing long meditation, cutting off a bit of the blood flow down here means the heart really has to just pump blood to this part of the body so it keeps your Keeps your vital and vessel organs more fresh. And of course in meditation, certain kinds of meditations you slow the heart down quite a bit and you slow breathing quite a bit. So in that way by crossing the legs in any way at all it helps.
Most Western meditators simply do like this rather than the cross thing, fully crossed thing. You get the same essential benefit. This in Buddhist tradition is called the half diamond position, the other one fully crossed is called the full diamond position. So usually we say seven points. Legs crossed, because they always sat on cushions in the east because no one ever figured out how to build a decent chair.
You know once you leave Europe, traveling East, the minute you cross the gulf separating Asia from Europe you hit Istanbul. Do not expect to see one more comfortable chair till you come out the other side. That’s just not a tradition. They like, like in India, they like to lay on beds, or they like to squat on their feet like they can sit, they kind of just kind of drape down and you know sort of standing on their feet like this with their arms around like this, up not with their bum on the ground. It’s amazing when you travel overland across because right from Turkey that’s essentially the thing.
But generally you put something behind like one of these kinds of cushions to raise the spine. If you haven’t got a cushion you can just put a brick. Well you know we Westerners, we’ve kind of got a Calvinistic tradition, no pain no gain. Take away those comfortable meditation cushions, put in a brick. Well, France was Francis Was it Saint Francis of Assisi or Saint Thomas used to wear it?
No, Thomas Aquinas. Used to always wear a horsehair. Horsehair vest inside out so he wouldn’t be too comfy. So if you’re in that tradition just use a brick. But the cushion shouldn’t be too soft or you kind of sink into it.
People who like to meditate at home and don’t have this kind of thing actually bean bags are really good because you kind of shape them to the contours of your whole lower body. The legs crossed, usually we put the hands in the lap like this and we touch the thumbs. Touching the thumbs we think completes the electromagnetic circuitry of the body so your aura or your electromagnetic field is made to flow more freely or completely. Some Buddhist tantric traditions you actually put your hands into fists like this and you sit like this. But that’s not very rare and usually you just do that during your retreats because when you do it like this it means you’re kind of like really a super macho meditator.
And in Buddhism we kind of take a precept of humility so you shouldn’t show off in public. But if you meditate like this in public people say, Wow, that guy’s really gonna do something, let’s watch him meditate. Sort of like the Olympic meditators. Let’s see where he goes in his mind. So hands like that in the lap.
Usually the arms you leave a little bit away from the body so that they don’t develop like a lot of perspiration and get a lot of kind of Don’t laugh, it’s not funny. It’s a billion dollar industry that you’re laughing at. And we make the shoulders relaxed but not soggy over, like relaxed but back just a tad. Back straight. The head we move ahead, we put ahead just like five degrees straight up.
We cast the eyes down at the angle of the nose but not like cross eyeing yourself. So choose a point on the floor just in front. People who read these kind of instructions in books, I spent about six or seven months a year traveling, teaching, doing workshops in places. See some great things. Eyes, I have.
Usually we keep our eyes half open cause I think it’s half they do that because you know during Buddhist lifetime when they were meditating once some robbers came along and ran away with all their begging bowls. That tradition has continued. You know we say anything that happened during Buddha’s life that led to making of rules wasn’t by accident. Accident. Those beings who did these things were all emanations of gods.
So Buddha himself of course had clairvoyance so in his mediteachings no one could ever have stolen anything from him. But he knew that long in the future, people would not be so meditation teachers would not be so alert. See he orchestrated a robbery of the monks begging bowls so that they would realize that meditating with the eyes slightly open was a wise thing to do. Anyway those gods still are around there. They still occasionally manifest as once in Dharmasala.
And we all had our weekly meditation session, we’re all sitting there meditating. And someone like they like to take all the things out of their pocket and put it in front because when you’re meditating it’s kind of uncomfortable. Uncomfortable. And sure enough end of the meditation their wallet is gone. They hadn’t kept their eyes half open.
The other thing if you it’s not mentioned as one of the meditation techniques in the standard manuals but a Tibetan practice is when you come into a Dharma center you put one shoe in front of the front door and one in front of the back door so if there’s someone out collecting shoes they won’t be tempted to take yours. These are all useful meditation tips I’m trying to give you guys. Don’t laugh at them now. You’ll discourage me if you laugh at my useful tips. Okay, where were we?
Okay, eyes down. Mouth closed. It’s important to close the mouth because sometimes like you go into deeps and muddy and like you know a week passes, a month passes, a year passes and you’re still there meditating. And it just happened that that day you went home and meditated and started meditating like that was the same day that your husband decided to run away. And so no one comes home that night and notices that you’re there meditating and meditating.
And a week passes, a month passes, a year passes, and your mouth is open, and all the flies in the house are building nests in your mouth. Or birds. Birds build nests in meditators’ mouths. Did you know that? You say there’s so many things I know that you don’t know.
So you keep the mouths closed. I just started to think, this maybe opens okay. And then with the tongue, you keep it generally rest against the upper palate, top of the mouth. If you keep it like normal, sometimes meditating you start like swallowing and swallowing and then like the person sitting next to you is going like trying to get you to kind of shut up so they can meditate. So if you sit like that generally you’re very comfortable and if you sit for a short time, you very quickly get very relaxed in the body.
When the body relaxes the emotions tend to naturally relax and when the body and emotions both relax and spirit tends to become a little more luminous or a little more present, little more obvious within you. So those are often called the seven points, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. And the eighth is sometimes added is simply to watch the breath for a while. When you sit down, it’s often said that when you first sit to put a number with the breath for the first several minutes of sitting because your mind is kind of running running running running from all the day’s activity. So if you just sit down and watch the breath it’ll keep running running running running while you’re watching the breath because just watching is kind of a something of a subtle application.
And so what you do is you actually count. As you breathe in one, you say one. As you breathe out on the first breath you say one. So with each in, one. With each out and in, two.
Second out, two. Second in, three. Third in, three. Third out, three. You do that for five, and you repeat it several cycles.
So you’re always thinking of a number plus watching the breath, and that immediately quiets the mind and arrests thoughts of the daily activity. Then after a couple of minutes of doing that you stop the counting and simply watch the breath. Different techniques, usually we say the four satipatthanas, the four ways of watching, but for beginners the most useful is to begin with the body because the emotions are reflected in the body and the spirit is reflected in the body. So you get all dimensions of yourself, have a bodily presence. You start at the crown of your head with watching, so you’re watching the breath coming and going while having this sense that you’re at the top of your head coming down through your body slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly, And as you come down you think, I’m at the crown of my head, what’s it look like here, what’s it feel like here?
And you try and look and feel, get a sense of looking and feeling as though you were like a little feather or a little tiny sun the size of perhaps a chickpea or something, or even a smaller sesame seed or something like that coming down the body. And at that point of the body you just look at the body, what’s there, like brain muscle. As you come down the face you try to feel the facial muscles, tense or relax, and if they feel a little you can’t tell if they’re tense or relaxed, you purposely you sort of say to them relax, relax, and you’ll notice that even if looking you thought they were relaxed, when you say relax they actually further relax, meaning that they weren’t really that relaxed in the first place. Then you come down the body very very slowly going through all parts and down the back you can look relaxed, and sometimes it helps as you go down the trunk area of the body, you kind of just move the muscles a little bit to get a feel for if you’ve got tensions building up, stress building up. Now in Buddhism we’re not really that interested in physical stress, physical tension itself.
What we’re more interested in is what that reflects, where it’s coming from. Usually it’s coming from your mind, not from having pulled a muscle while taking a shower after making love on your lunch break. It’s like it comes from something in your mind that’s slightly tense. So you go up and down like that very slowly and just simply watch. And in beginning meditation in the Kadampa tradition which is one of the most important in Central Asia, every meditation session begins with this.
Beginning meditators usually practice it for a few weeks or a few months on a daily routine before going on to other meditative techniques. And then later you go into other things like contemplations of impermanence and love, compassion, emptiness, tantric applications, levitation, walking through walls. What was that? You know, last time I saw Dalai Lama because he’s working so hard for independence of Tibet, and we were preparing an art exhibit for the Olympics, Tibetan art exhibit, so at least Tibet would have a presence at the Olympics basically to irritate communist China. Anyway, said to his people, you know, guys should ask for some special dispensation to have one or two athletes come to the Olympics.
And he said, well, what do you think we could do without like losing? Because you know Tibetans don’t like have a lot of fast runners or high jumpers, they don’t cultivate that kind of thing. I said, well, let’s let’s send a couple of your levitators for the high jump. And his whole head says, really? Do you think they’ll let us they’ll let us enter levitators?
Anyway, we checked it out in Atlanta, and they said, no, Tibet is no country. We can’t have levitating monks coming from Tibet. You’ll have to get them from some other country. So usually one starts with this kind of simple breath thing for either every session. You should start every session with a simple breath thing like that, and then after the first couple of months of meditating you should, for the first couple of months of meditating you do it several times a day as the actual practice.
Then after you reduce it to just doing it as a preliminary to the formal meditation session. So I guess we’ll meditate for, what is it, three hours? Time, time, what is time? So I should look at my watch and ring this thing in twenty minutes? Okay.
She said no. Three hours. Can I go to the bathroom then? No, no, that’s the important aspect of the meditation. Not going to the bathroom.
One of my gurus in India, he could drink two hundred cups of tea during a daily discourse, eight, ten hour discourse, without leaving to go to the washroom once. Not bad, Pretty great guru, too could master that skill. That could get you a little bit going. You know how much how many millions or billions of dollars it would save us in the west just through, like, wasting water with all those flushes. The other thing is, you know, Tibetans have these great heat mediteachings, you know, so like it’s freezing you just heat your body.
No. Billions of dollars in the oil industry. Fasting things where you just eat one little pill a day. A friend of mine did that, he got fat. Because when you do it, you visualize, you meditate, the pill gets really big, it’s like an enormous feast.
And for the first like two months he lost weight, he lost weight, he lost weight, then once you get the power of it, you know, kind of like, what size, right, what volume? It’s all relative, we know that Einstein told us that, right? This little pill, and he blew right up. Got enormous, but after three years he was like way out like that. But we’d save trillions in the food industry, But we’ll start with the levitation.
Once you get a little bit into doing daily practice, it’s good that after you do the, first the calming by means of counting the breath and then you do the observance and watching, depending on what you see when you’re watching, to apply a growth orientated technique. So if you feel that the mind is overly irritated with something that’s really getting on your nerves. You sat and you’re watching and you’re mostly seeing yourself punching someone out and someone in specific, and you try to look at that issue specifically and in a positive way. If something causing fear, insecurity, you try to analyze what’s going on in your try to take a note what’s going on in your life and in your mind. And the old Kadampa said a saying, look at the worst problem and fix that one first.
So whatever is going on in your mind, you try to look at what was the if there was one aspect predominating causing a problem, something to do with fear, attachments, clingings, desires, angers, unresolved issues, and then try to contemplate that specific issue with a very positive way. And if you can’t kind of come to a conclusion looking at your mind or get a specific take on any actual issue, it’s kind of like a lot of different things floating around and you’re not sure which one to grab onto or depend on. And simply do something like do a happy kind of meditation, like there’s one in Tibetan called. Most people translate it as rejoicing, but it means something like noticing, sharing joy, sharing joy. So if you’re just kind of feeling a little burnt out and down and depressed, sharing joy.
Like in Tsongkhapa says, founder of the Gelug School, he says if someone does a hundred thousand prostrations there’s great merit. If someone else noticing him doing that, rejoices. That person gets equal merit. But if we look at the causes of joy in life, and people so often get caught up in a little, you know, it’s like you’ve got ten thousand good things going on in your life and three or four irritating things. But the nature of some people’s minds, not mine, not mine, is that they just look at those two or three things that are irritating them.
They forget all their blessings and all the good things going on in their life in life in general, and in their life in particular, and they get hung up on those two or three little irritants. So if you don’t notice anything in particular that you can work on at the end of the meditation to kind of bring a more upbeat feel to your life. Simply look at the simply engage in the rejoicing. You try and think of all the good things like, oh, Tommy down the street won three million dollars in the lottery last week. Very nice.
Oh, Bob next door just bought a new Mercedes Benz. Great. So Gompopa says, look at all the happy things past up to three times, past, present, and future. So like in the past so many beings achieved enlightenment, so many be beings achieved great things, so many great poets, so many great musicians, so many great artists. In the past in human history we have ten billion examples of greatness and wonder.
In the present, ten billion greatnesses and wonders, and in the future ten billion greatnesses and wonders. So doing it from kind of an external side first, thinking of all the greatnesses and wonders that there are in life generally, and then within one’s own life all the wonderful things. So you may think, some things aren’t going so well, but if you sit back and look, Tibetans have an expression. If you’re feeling so low that even water couldn’t run under you. Look around and you’ll notice that there’s a whole bunch of people even worse off than you are.
And if you’re feeling so jubilant that it seems you’re gonna hit your head on the sky, look around. There’s no need for pride. There’s tons and tons of beings past, present, and future actually doing better. So balance the emotion at the end. If you don’t come on anything specific, look emotional state.
Try and bring a little bit of upbeatness to it without getting kind of like a to notice the good things in your life essentially. The good things in life in general first, and then the good things in your life in particular secondly, because often what happens with people is they kind of get so focused on the things that aren’t working that they forget that anyway almost everything eventually passes, even like something not working, big deal, all you have to do is outlive it. But essentially, if you look at the positive things in your life, that immediately brings a better energy to the resolution of those problematic areas. So Tsongkhapa always suggests that conclude each meditation session with a kind of a positive upbeat kind an energy that doesn’t matter what it is. So either something like this or doing some kind of mantra where you visualize, start at your heart and you visualize light going out and filling your body, and you feel physically every joy, every luminosity, and it heals every illness, and it purifies every negative karma or negative instinct.
And then within the mind it removes all obscurations, all distortions, and it goes out from your body and in your life brings happiness, success everywhere. That’s upbeat. So you choose a little thing at the end to make it kind of very very positive energy so that when you get up from your meditation chair and you walk around, you’re not just walking around saying, oh, learned a lot of great things about my life, but you’re actually doing that in a very positive energy way. So anyway, thank you very much for coming and wonderful to meet all of you. I hadn’t known I was going to be speaking here tonight, but Tony gave a call and said that seeing as how I’m in town.
And I’m such a famous writer. And being Irish, you know, we cannot refuse the opportunity of a microphone. And good luck to all of you in your lives, your mediteachings, your practices, and your spiritual fulfillments.