Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 13-minute session, Khensur Rinpoche describes what practitioners can expect when calm abiding is actually achieved — beginning with how the practice progressively suppresses the gross impure thoughts of the desire realm, whose complete removal requires the wisdom realizing selflessness. He then gives a detailed, surprisingly physical account of what happens at the threshold: a subtle air rises through the body to the brain, generating a warmth he compares to the glow of a freshly shaved head, which in turn floods the entire body with what tradition calls the bliss of physical pliancy. He closes by contrasting this goal with our familiar shortcomings — aching knees after prolonged sitting, habitual gossip, thoughts bent on harming others — making the aspiration concrete and motivating.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 05 CA 1994 06.mp3
UUID: b46a8cde-9aa2-4d3f-afb6-978fa565e157
Teacher: Khensur Rinpoche
Collection: Calm Abiding Retreat (Khensur Rinpoche)
Date: 1994 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 12.8 minutes
Words: ~745
So there is a lack of peace and there is disruptions and so forth with the mind of a desire realm. Now when one does a calm meditation and when one gradually gradually improves on calm abiding practice then the gross impure thoughts of desire realm get decreased and decreased and the time when one achieves calm abiding itself then the gross impure thoughts of desire which accompanies one’s mind, are are suppressed. Because here, the word suppressed in the sense they presently do not arise because the actual overcoming or suppression has to be through special insight, wisdom realizing selflessness. So it is a state of mind where because the mind is free of gross or impure thoughts, the mind is at a very special bliss, blissful state. Now and looking at its etymological meaning, the word in original languages or actually means training, pliancy training, complete training.
What that plant, yeah, complete. Yeah. Complete training. What that means is one has completely trained to overcome gross impure thoughts of desire. So in this way, yes, the gross impure thoughts of desire and are overcome, and practitioners state of mind can be explained as having elevated to the mental state of upper realms, which means form realms and formless realm.
And when the practitioner’s mental state elevates, the word actually is used is the practitioner’s mind actualizes instead of elevates. So the actual word used is when the practitioner’s mind actualizes the upper realm mind or mental state, then physiologically, what happens is inside the brain from below part of the body, a certain kind of air goes upward and hangs on the hangs on the brain. Now already at this stage, the mental or mental bliss has attained and that has caused the air to go upward and hang around the brain. And at that time, there is some kind of warmth on the brain. The warmth as if when someone has their hair shaven or haircut to a point of clean shave.
Instantly after the hair was shaved, if the hand is put, it feels unusually warm at that time and it feels as if the hand is cold and the head is warm. So like that there is a kind of warmth with the air coming up to the brain part and this then, in turn, brings about enormous bliss to the mental pliancy or mental bliss. So this bliss on the body is something which covers on the entire body and to use scriptural term, it covers the entire physical sense in the five senses. Includes it covers the entire physical sense, the body sense, and in that way, there is enormous bliss on the entire body, and that is called the bliss of physical pliancy. If one has attained even on physical level such pliancy then if one does meditation, remain seated on one sitting no matter how long, months, years, uninterruptedly, one would still have no weariness, discomfort at all.
It will all be bliss. Because of that there is no there’s no hardships at all even on mental basis no matter how long and whatever duration one does the meditation and so forth. So together there is pliancy or bliss even on the mind as well at that stage. At the moment, when we have not attained those pliancy on body and mind, there is physical shortcomings and mental shortcomings. For example with physical shortcoming if we do sit in trying to do prolonged practice or meditation, our knees ache, our legs hips ache.
So there is after a while, it becomes unbearable. It becomes unbearable. The word used was more funny, but I wouldn’t say it because it will involve long translation. Yeah. So it yeah.
So one becomes unbearable, so that is caused physical shortcoming. It goes like that. You pick up this knee, you pick up that knee. We also have verbal or speech shortcomings such as we, unwarily sometimes engage into meaningless singing, and utterances, gossip, and so forth. So these are verbal shortcomings.
And as far as mental shortcoming is concerned, we have it in the form of thinking about how to hurt a person, how to be nasty to the other person, and engaging into all sorts of what’s called harmful devices and as well thinking into wrong avenues of disruptive concepts. So when one attains the pliancy, the bliss, it looks like all these physical and mental shortcomings are overcome.