Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. The Marianne Williamson line — “our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure, not that we are inadequate” — anchors Ven Jampa Gendun’s nearly two-and-a-half-hour session on Buddha nature and the mind’s capacity for change. Gendun revisits the previous day’s definition of mind as “mere clarity and knowing,” emphasising that afflictive emotions are not woven into mind’s fabric and that the mind is genuinely workable. He then examines why real self-belief remains so difficult: neuroscience research on neuroplasticity, a Jungian concept of “gold in the shadow,” and a comic about a boy who fully accepts his C-student identity all illustrate how self-confirming attention patterns keep people trapped. A guided meditation invites participants to linger on small personal moments of wisdom and kindness rather than dismissing them. The session ends with group discussion and a brief period of open, non-directed sitting.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 05 MP 2011 07 10.mp3
UUID: bfe452b8-8769-4121-b91c-924d92c9dc73
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: DB Mind and its Potential (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 2011-07-10
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 145.8 minutes
Words: ~12,352
So welcome back. How is everybody? Good. Okay. Didn’t have any bad dreams because of yesterday’s Concerned about the nature of your mind.
We have yesterday we we people this is you’re at a disadvantage here. Try and construct the template too. Okay. Did you bring a note, by the way? Did you bring a note?
Right. If you can tell from my talk that I wasn’t very honest. Okay. So yesterday, just to very briefly go over some of the ideas that we went through, we, you know, this is the mind and its potential, looking at the nature of mind, which I find rather mysterious, to be quite frank with you. I still haven’t gotten a handle on it even though it’s my most immediate experience.
In a way it’s almost like what, fish trying to understand water. It’s the medium in which we exist, in which we view the world, out of which we view the world. It’s so close to us that it’s difficult to see, to get a perspective on it. So as I mentioned, there’s a particular text and there’s a number of excellent English translations called Awareness and Knowledge, Lo Rig in Tibetan, which classify mind from various points of view. What do you say?
Are you okay, Lily? Just drop me down. Okay. Make yourself comfortable. Trying to, you know, if we can come at it from many different points of view, I mean, we sort of get a sense of a feeling for it.
I guess, you know, we went through the the definition of mind, which is what is the definition of mind? Great. You’re a gold star. Mere clarity and knowing. Went through some of the explanations of what we mean by the word clarity.
Do you remember one of them? Anybody? Without looking at your notes. Clarity. The word clarity.
Spaciousness. Not ignorant. So, it’s not the various afflictions aren’t inherent to the mind itself. It’s not woven into the very fabric of the mind. So you know, is, know, as I said, I think I mentioned yesterday, it sounds like almost a very simple-minded notion.
I think many of the notions of Buddhism sound very simple minded but they have some profound implications. That because as also mentioned yesterday, I think it’s useful to become aware that there’s a distinction we have to begin to become aware of and acknowledge between how we reasonably and rationally view ourselves and the world and the way we operate and how we emotionally operate and how we emotionally look at the world. There’s sometimes it doesn’t make sense when we look at our emotional life rationally, but nonetheless we we behave and relate emotionally in very in irrational ways. I I don’t mean irrational. It’s just that our emotional life runs on a different train of way of being than I think our reason.
Actually I read a very interesting article. It’s called The Science of How We Don’t Accept Science. How, you know, I always wondered, and I hope you don’t mind if I just kind of waffle on here, you know, how, like in politics. And like, you know, I’m an American so I’m quite interested in, still interested in American politics. Obama would make a speech.
Not at all, you know, that’s quite a very intelligent and profound speech or, you know, very meaningful. And other republicans say, oh, this is stupid and it’s all wrong. People could have such a diverse opinion about the same experience. Republicans and Democrats, they’re talking about the same issue but completely seeing it from different points of view. And this article, The Science of How We Don’t Accept Science, is trying to point out that our reasoning, our rational explanations come after our emotional response.
We’re very much emotional creatures more than we would like to acknowledge and admit about ourselves or feel about ourselves. That a great deal of it’s only after we’ve made an emotional response that we begin to justify our response in terms of reason and rationale. Well, the reason I said this, the reason I did is because X, Y, Z. But in fact that justification and that reason and rational explanation has come after the fact. It’s more of an emotional response.
Most of the time we aren’t even aware of it, where we’re coming from. We are, we quite often are aware of our reasonable and rational explanations and we try to be very clever about those. But I don’t, you know, I think it, I think a lot of our, at least I think we have to become aware of where we’re coming from. You know, we were talking about and this has become a very interesting area for me personally in my life but also in my studies in Buddhism in the last, I guess, last number of years, maybe seven, eight years. I’ve become much more interested in emotions and becoming aware of the fact of how out of touch, quite to a large extent, I am personally or I have been with my emotions and how emotions are scary aren’t they?
We don’t we can’t rationally control our emotions you might say. They aren’t rational. They’re irrational. I’m not saying they’re irrational. They’re irrational.
They don’t go along a rational train of behaving or thinking. They have their own internal logic, you might say. And I think I’ve become interested in the fact that we can’t I don’t think for myself personally, we don’t have to be as afraid of it. And I’m saying I guess this would apply to most people, maybe to some people, they can begin to question it. We don’t have to be as afraid of our emotions as we might.
I’ve got all kinds of buzzers going on. Thought it was mine. Is that yours? I thought it was mine. No.
We don’t, it’s safe to feel is when I’m becoming more convinced of it. The reason I’m beginning to see this and kind of work with this idea is that it was something that, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the work, with Jeffrey Hopkins. Jeffrey Hopkins is probably one of the leading western scholars of Tibetan Buddhism in the world. And he was the Dalai Lama’s translator for, quite a number of years. And he once said that, you know, that the Dalai Lama would, you know, be giving a talk and at the beginning of the talk that he would pause to adjust to his motivation.
He would think about other sentient beings and their problems and their suffering. And that quite often tears would begin to flow. He was, let us say, was very moved. He was willing to feel very deeply. And I think that models something for us that it’s healthy to feel very deeply.
And I don’t think in a way that we can, you know, it’s like trying to say, well okay, I’ll feel certain emotions and I won’t feel others. You know, trying, you know, there’s certain emotions which are quite scary. Anger is one of them. There’s a sense of why you may lose control. You do something stupid.
I don’t think that’s the case for most of us. And I think moreover, if we want to feel the feelings of life deeply, and I think we are essentially feeling these as human beings, then we’re going to have to be able to, get in touch with and begin to work with the entire emotional life. We have to take both sides of the coin. We can’t, you know, if you aren’t willing to feel your anger, you’re not going to be able to feel your compassion as well or your love. That, you know, we like to be selective about this, wouldn’t we?
But in the end, we end up not feeling much at all in that process. I don’t know. This is kind of I’m just sharing some of my thinking with you. And I think it’s not to say that we are to act on our anger, but for example, but I think it’s useful to, you know, I mentioned yesterday how we view our emotions very much determines of those we allow to arise that we are willing to come in contact with, those we will constantly cultivate and those which we naturally resist, that we avoid, that we suppress. If you our overall view of emotion, how we feel about emotions in general.
And and my thinking around that has changed me over the years because I I I would like to become a more compassionate, loving person. But I think if I’m going to do that then I’m going to have to begin to acknowledge and become more aware of the shadow side of my all of these feelings and emotions as well. I don’t think you can’t have you have to take both sides of the coin together. Where was I going with all that? Where did I?
Anyway, was just sharing that clarity. Oh yeah, okay, good. Thanks for that. That’s why somebody is keeping track. So, there was a time when, you know, this notions of mind as it’s presented in the West is relatively new.
I mean one hundred and fifty years ago there was no notion of consciousness or unconsciousness. These are relatively new and sophisticated ideas and that are the traits of an individual. You know, he’s a bad character. These were inherent in individuals. They were from birth and you couldn’t do much if you were with who you were.
I think that that was very much the mindset and this is what I’m thinking of is particularly is Victorian England and the way that the class distinctions and the way that they viewed others. But so this is kind of a revolutionary thought which that we can change. We can change very deeply. And moreover, there was a view in neuroscience which I’ve been doing a little bit of reading lately, seems like you can’t avoid it. That there was a sense that there’s not, you know after a certain age the mind was pretty fixed, the patterns of the mind.
So this was also a certain materialistic approach to our consciousness that, there’s not all that much possibility for change. But now they know that that’s not the case. They have this idea of neuroplasticity or neuroplasticity, what I called it yesterday, that the mind can be radically altered. That it changes itself constantly, in fact. And that we can actually alter constantly our brain structure.
There’s a good book by Rick Hanson called The Buddha’s Brain, a good title I think, The Buddha’s Brain. And how we can through conscious practices actually alter the various areas of our brain. He’s looking at it from that point of view. So the clarity of mind is something that the mind is workable. That these characteristics and these traits are not in the fabric of mind, they’re not inherent in the mind.
The reason I kind of emphasize this is because I think at some level emotionally and I touched on that this morning. I think, you know, give me some feedback on this because maybe I’m talking in a vacuum here. Maybe it’s my own neurosis talking here, which I quite often take into consideration, is that we can’t change. That I’m stuck. I’m this kind of person.
I’m going to talk about that a little bit more. I’m this way. And there’s a feeling that as if that were I wouldn’t be me if I wasn’t this way. This who I am at the depth of my being. I think there is that sense of bombers.
I don’t know, but how do people feel about that? Maybe I’m making this up. That’s right. That’s right. Yeah.
How you access your emotions? Yeah. Yeah. That’s a good I think Anybody have some? I think I’ve always thought there’s an essence of newness.
Yeah. But I think this new concept changed. Yeah. There’s kind of there’s kind of things that change and things that stay the same. Yeah.
You, I personally almost knew that as a grounding, and that gives me the confidence to then change. Okay. So you need some degree of coherence and stability amongst change. That’s a good point. Think I shouldn’t be dealing with this.
Shouldn’t. Where did you where do you suppose you learned that? Oh, I think it’s a conditioning for over the years. Yeah. Get hold of yourself.
Something, sweetness touched something and you responded. You’re beneath your rational level of thinking then. I’m thinking that, I mean, I think we can one way, which I’ve been experimenting with, is just if you can just sit with it. And the sitting and being aware and allowing. And without sometimes, you know, a concentration practice, sometimes meditation can be a very focused practice.
And there’s a certain degree of suppression involved in concentration. You’re not allowing certain other distracting, what we’re calling distracting elements to arise in the mind. And you’re forcing them out of your conscious awareness and you’re forcing your attention to stay on another, on a particular level. But simply, and we can experiment with this in our meditation. Simply sitting and just allowing.
And then you might begin to notice that certain feelings begin to bubble up that you are always being distracted from in the busyness of your life or even in your meditation that you didn’t you didn’t allow to, your attention to move to. And just becoming, allowing the mind to, the mind is always displaying itself. It’s always, It’s always telling us its condition. I mean, it’s always telling us a story about itself and where it’s at and allow our minds to naturally begin to tell the story about ourselves. And anyway, I think notice your body sensations, but you don’t have to it’s not a matter of directing it.
Just allow yourself to you don’t have to do anything. But only a great master can do nothing. Always have to impose some kind of will. But just being able to sit and allow. And I think then our mind first there’s the busyness of our life.
I’ve got to do this, I’ve got to do this. And pretty soon those stories will begin to play themselves out. And then other levels of thought will begin to arise in the mind. You know, maybe memories from childhood. Then the image was not even words, but just images.
And then maybe feelings, emotions, sensations of the body. And the mind just allowing the mind to, you know, any agenda, just being with the mind itself. And you begin to work down the levels of emotion, feeling, and body sensations which maybe we haven’t really allowed ourselves to become aware of. I think there’s process of working in that way that we can do. I think it’s very, I think it helps teach us a lot.
I think a lot of healing goes on beneath not having to do much about it as it were to control the process. Simply allowing and being aware in a very curious and warm hearted open fashion. So I think, I mean, as I said, I think our mind can really teach us a lot. Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s manifest. And if you can begin to yeah, just allow these feelings to present themselves without having to react. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Maybe that’s right. This is mean, in in there is I’ve been talking about my from my own experience. I mean by that I mean my own hang ups.
Experience sounds like it sounds like you might know something. There is like in the development of compassion. Compassion, I’ll just take this as an example. I’ve been thinking about it for the last few months. There’s a sad feeling.
You know generally in the West, we, you know I talked about, mentioned, touched on this yesterday, that the way we distinguish emotions is positive emotions feel good, negative emotions feel bad. And that’s the popular notion of emotions. So we try to avoid negative emotions because we don’t want to feel bad. And we always try to feel good. And that doesn’t work for us.
That doesn’t serve ourselves very well because there are in fact some very healthy emotions which are associated with sad feelings or uncomfortable feelings. Certain types of I mentioned, regret. You you hurt somebody. You feel, I’m really sorry I did that. That would be good.
It’s a healthy emotion, but it doesn’t feel very good. A psychopath wouldn’t feel that. They don’t feel much of anything. So, sociopath. So in the case of compassion, compassion in the Sanskrit is the word karuna.
And the way that this word is explained, not its meaning but its etymology, is the inability to experience happiness. When we’re experiencing compassion, at that moment we aren’t able to, it destroys our ability to feel happy. We can’t. When you’re compassionate, when you’re experiencing compassion you cannot feel happy in the face of suffering. Okay?
What, There’s a sadness. But what we can do is But that sad the word sad is associated with comes from the same root as satiety. That is say, we’re full. It’s like the tears are in our eyes and they’re going to spill over any moment and trickle down our cheek. The heart is full.
It’s a sad feeling, but it’s a very it’s almost like a sacred feeling. It goes to the very depths of our being in our life. So I think, and this touches on what Katherine was talking about, if we always are trying to feel good, if that’s our main objective in terms of the feeling quality of our life, we’re never going to go near many of these very healthy emotions quite naturally. Now we can talk about compassion, but when it comes to actually cultivating, we’re not going to go near those feelings, that quality of sadness or unhappiness or uncomfortable feeling. And I think we have been habituated to always having the notion we should feel good.
I mean that’s why most people medicate, in order to feel good. And there’s a certain rationale that sounds good in a way. But it’s not that would be limiting the possibilities of what we could do with our meditation in a really way. So I think we have to educate ourselves to allow ourselves to have to almost allow ourselves to feel all of what we feel and including difficult feelings, uncomfortable feelings. And if you can do that in your meditation, just allow yourself to feel what it is that you’re feeling, wherever it’s taking.
I think with the case of compassion, and I think many of these kinds of feelings, there’s a sense that maybe it’s going to be too much. There’s a fear of regressing to maybe a childhood state where you feel powerless in in the face of, like, suffering. Or or or you’re going to do something or you’re gonna become a blithering idiot. You’re gonna You’re to do something stupid. You’re going to lose it.
Control. But I don’t think that’s the case. I think we learn that somewhere along the line. But I think that’s why referring to referring to the Dalai Lama previously. He allows himself to feel very deeply.
I’m quite sure of that. But he’s he’s not an idiot. He doesn’t do stupid things. I think we do need to have there has to be a cognitive wisdom element. We are adults, I mean in the case of compassion, and we can determine for ourselves what is a beneficial and appropriate way to respond out of our compassion.
We don’t have to be under the control of others, we can choose. You know like for example, it’s not beneficial to give an alcoholic a drink even though they might ask you for money to buy go buy some a drink. That’s not beneficial. You can choose no I’ll go buy you a meal. I’m not going to buy you a drink.
Or it wouldn’t be appropriate to maybe it might be helpful to give all the money to somebody, but it probably is not appropriate. If you give away your coat in the summer and you’re going to be cold in the winter and so forth. So I think we do need some wisdom or some discriminating awareness coupled with our compassion. But I don’t think we have to be as afraid of our emotional life as we feel. And I think, you know, your experience, you know, maybe you have to make a judgment call here.
You know, in certain situations it’s definitely probably not appropriate to talk about, Oh, I just felt this this this sadness arising. But maybe there are times when you hesitated to do that. Really is might open up really some communication and a wellspring of feelings for you and and for the other person. That somebody is willing to talk to me and communicate with you on that kind of level. It could be very inspiring for both of you that you can break out of this conditioning that someone mentioned that we’ve learned about.
It’s the correct social way of relating. I think it’s a very emotionally enriching experience for us all. And I think very much our life is about emotion and feeling very deeply. Okay. I don’t know where all that came from.
Yeah. Please, Ganesh. Mean it’s a good question. Mean think evolutionarily speaking, think evolutionary biologists say it’s survival mechanism, emotions in life. I think I try to, you know, we’re going to talk about Buddha nature today, I hope.
And what is I haven’t I have a sense. You know I in my studies and I to figure out these things. I try to access them in a way that there’s some meaningful way for me. Sometimes I can’t and they’re just kind of doctrine that I hear and okay I put them on the shelf and I take them down once in a while and I look at them. But somehow, you know, some way I can make them meaningful for me and that I haven’t they’re not too overly laid with my projections and my neurosis and my hang ups and my misinformation and my ignorance and so forth.
But, okay, to address what you’re talking about, I have a sense that what is essential to life or mind? I think it is the very fact of approach and avoidance. And the mind, there’s what I call intelligence. And by intelligence I don’t mean being clever. That’s not what I mean.
There’s a cognitive quality and an emotional intelligence. And the way that, I mean this, I’m talking about as simple as I can think of in how I look at this. Even in terms of a single celled organism. And by how does this play out? There necessarily has to be some discriminative awareness.
Another word for intelligence is discriminative awareness. That is, it’s able to discriminate. This is going to enhance my life. This is going to this is a danger to my life. If it doesn’t have that discrimination, it’s not going to continue to exist.
It has to say this is food, this is poison. It has to be it’s almost, you know, it’s like it can’t get much simpler than that if you’re going to remain alive. And that expresses a certain caring about itself. It doesn’t go after poison. It tries to avoid poison.
It goes toward that which isn’t going to enhance its existence. That’s what’s going to cause it to keep it surviving, keep it going. It seems that life wants to keep moving. Life force wants to keep continuing on. And that’s like an intelligence.
You know what I mean? There’s a discriminative awareness in how it’s going to relate and how it’s going to be. And this we can call caring. So I think what is essential to life is this factor of discriminative awareness and caring. I’m just using the word caring.
Now this is my own speculation. So you can throw it away when we walk out here, okay? But I think that’s basic to life. And then the rest of it is built upon this. And what we call this discriminated awareness or intelligence, our cognitive ability.
We develop theories and doctrines and this caring. We go on to develop love and compassion. Eventually can be distorted. Loving can and one’s ability to view the world turn into, due to ignorance can be distorted and perverted. And we develop all these various afflictive emotions.
Anger is the way that we’ve you know, it’s a learned pattern of mind which we’ve developed as a means of we see us protecting ourselves. It’s not an effective way. It’s not a skillful way to go about that. But it’s something that we’ve learned somewhere along. It’s a strategy that organisms ourselves have worked out.
How do we protect ourselves? Hatred. Keep that away. Get away from me. We see that as danger.
Maybe it’s not really danger, but we perceive it at least at that moment as dangerous to our well-being somewhat. So it’s a protective mechanism that we worked on. It doesn’t work well. In fact, it works against our better interests. But nonetheless, they’re all evolving out of this kind of, it’s a misuse of our intelligence.
Misuse of our caring that’s been perverted somewhere along the line. I don’t know that. Okay. We talked about the factor of being clarity as non physical. I mean these are difficult issues, aren’t they?
It’s hard to, you know, the brain research is really doing some great things. They’re learning a lot. And so how do we, how do we, I think Buddhism is going to be challenged. There’s some really good thinkers. I’m thinking of. I’m thinking of Alan Wallace, also Stephen Batchelor.
There’s some really good Western Buddhist thinkers who are really trying to accept the challenge of Western science and Western thinking how Buddhism is going to have to change. We can’t keep dragging up these old doctrines which don’t quite fit anymore. It’s going to have to evolve. Mean one of the most glaring examples is not Mount Meru as the center of the universe. Yeah.
Even the Dalai Lama says science. Going to, we can’t, we can’t, I mean, when people landed on Mars, not on Mars, on the moon, which was back when, in nineteen sixty nine, Some of the Geshes said, Oh, that was just an appearance. That was just an appearance. They really didn’t land on the moon because the moon was thought of as a sentient being. And it’s like, you know, we have we can’t, know, a very respectful and intelligent way, we have to begin to take into consideration a lot of our new understanding of what we actually see as being the case.
You know, as I tried to emphasize the morning meditation when it comes to the Dharma, the Dharma is the truth of things. We don’t want to learn a doctrine. We want to learn what is reality and begin to accord our way of being with the way things actually are. If it, just more doctrine in and of itself isn’t the solution. It could be a method, but it’s not the solution.
So the mind is being immaterial, one of the words for clarity. And we went into areas that, you know, they stopped proving past and future life. You know there’s a great debate in Buddhism. I don’t know if you’ve followed this between can you be a Buddhist and not believe in past and future life? What that mean?
Obviously you can it would seem that you can make use of many of the techniques, meditation methods and so forth. And you can enhance your life. You can lead a much better life, more compassionate, more intelligent. But so is that what is that you know there’s quite a lively debate going on to a number of Western scholars around this. Then there is the we talked about knowing.
Knowing is quite difficult. I don’t know much about it. The very fact of the mind arising in the image of the object. In a way this is what, is in keeping, part of this is in keeping with what Western science would be saying that, you know, we don’t actually see an object. What we see is, you know, we see an image on the retina of our eye.
That image, you know, the light hits the cup and it’s reflected back and activates certain receptor cells in the back of our retina and forms an image and that’s what we see. That’s what we come to know as a cup. And Buddhism, Buddhism, think, I mean they don’t have that worked out in that particular way. But they’re saying the rising of the image in the mind is the knowing of the object. That’s what we call knowing.
That’s what we call seeing the cup, the rising of this image on the retina of our eye. And Buddhism, I think, would say very much the same thing. And we talked about how we talked about thought and, you know, how we take thought as reality. You know we take our thoughts as reality. And this is again, you know when I talk to people about many of these issues for the first time they say, oh no I don’t think that.
But that lemon experiment kind of demonstrates that maybe in fact they do. That what is simply something existing in our imagination is part of our mind is taking as being reality, as real. And we, in the case of imagining a lemon, we react physiologically as if it were in fact a lemon. And this is one of the problems with and one of the advantages also of rumination, but also directing our thoughts, reflecting particularly is that if you simulate moments of anger when you’ve argued with someone, know, he said this. Right.
It’s as if you actually part of your mind is actually experiencing the reality of that and has a physiological The heart gets pumping. And it simply ingrains those patterns that much more deeper in our mind. Another, but this can be taken advantage of in a way if we’re more skillful with it and many therapies are actually working with it is that we can heal many of our own wounds. There are times when we were a child when we needed somebody to be there, there wasn’t somebody there for us. And we may carry a sense that there’s never going to be somebody there for us.
And if we’re willing to get in touch with our feelings, for example, around these times, and be with that, perhaps that little hurt child, for example, and say, I’m here for you. You know, I’m an adult. I can take care of you. It can be in the human process because part of our mind believes, ah, there’s somebody there for That person that wasn’t it, somebody’s actually there for me. I’m not alone in this.
So we can work both ways. We can with it in our favor. This notion of thought being taken as reality. I think most of our thinking, and I don’t have any statistics on this, but this is my own observation. Probably seventy percent of my thinking is probably not productive.
It’s just kind of rumination. Machine just gets going. Something like that. And there are you know if we can begin to work with that. And I think developing that skill of mind to be able not to react to our thoughts.
And you can choose to think by all means. Being able to perhaps set that aside and get on with enjoying whatever is present for you. And we went through how the fundamental source of our difficulties in terms of our emotional life or our suffering in general is ignorance. And this is in terms of discovering Buddhism, this going to be one of the important modules that you’re discovering, that you’re discovering, that you’ll be studying is that the wisdom of emptiness, selflessness if you like. And this again is sometimes when I talk about this that we we have a belief in a in a unitary unchanging independent self.
I said, oh I don’t I never thought that in my life. I don’t have that belief. But the very fact that that anger arises, the very fact that attachment arises, jealousy, pride, and so forth, They are indications that you do hold such a belief. I mean, we have a hierarchy of beliefs. Just like an archaeological dig.
And from the most at the at the foundation level, there’s a sense of being a solid concrete self that we have to foster, that we have to protect. When it becomes our life, all our struggles, our energies, and all our resources go into enhancing and protecting what is in fact simply a fabrication of our imagination. It doesn’t exist at all. But we believe at the depth of our being, this is who I am. We identify with this model of the self.
And it becomes difficult for us to change because we hold this to be permanent and we protect So, this becomes in all of the various, based upon this, this core belief, we develop aversion for that which is seen as a threat to the self. We develop attachment which is approach avoidance. That’s what you see as enhancing this cell. So all of our various affective, what we call afflictive emotions, set of what we call negative emotions and so forth, they all arise in dependence upon basic ignorance. And all of the criteria that we use for emotions in terms of positive and negative is whether the emotion is beneficial and appropriate.
Beneficial in the sense that it brings you some well-being immediately and moreover it has positive consequences in the future and benefits it brings about others as well. And by that I mean positive emotions such as compassion and love and faith. Opposed to hatred, jealousy. The moment you become angered, you know, we call them afflictive emotions because they afflict the mind, they disturb the very peace of the mind at that very moment. Moreover, therefore, and they have negative consequences in the future.
And they bring about harm to others. Therefore, they’re said to be not beneficial. And they’re not appropriate because they emphasize the fact that all the objects of our afflicted emotions, negative emotions, the object does not exist the way it’s appeared. That person that you’re angry at does not exist the way they appear to. They appear at that very moment to have only negative qualities.
At that moment your mind is out of balance. You have to do, one thing you can do in working with anger to help you bring your mind to a balance is begin to focus your attention on what positive qualities they may have. How they’ve benefited you. Some kindness. Look for something that’s right about that person.
This will bring the mind to a balanced state. It might, if you can have that presence in mind, you may be able to do that in the first place. So then you’re looking at the object more appropriately in its actual nature. What I’d like to, okay, so that’s some of the things that we talked about yesterday. Any questions or any comments that people would like to make?
What I want to go into these are kind of meaningful areas for myself. Guess, yeah. So I hope it’s meaningful for you. And as it said, it said that the Buddha, the Buddha was really a great teacher. He taught the student, not the subject.
All his teachings were contextual. That is to say, they were aimed for a particular person at a particular time, at a particular place along the path. That’s why many of the, you know, he taught for forty five years. And because he was always tailoring his teachings for a particular individual, he would say yes to this question and to that same question he might say no to another person because that would fit for that person. So sometimes it’s one of the difficult, one of the complex areas of the study is hermeneutics, which is the study how do you reconcile any of these conflicting teachings and this great value Buddhist teaching?
It’s always discourse. Well he said, Well he said yes to this person because in this context XYZ. And he said no to the same question to this person because in this context ABC. So you know, I can’t do that. I only have one thing to say.
So sometimes it might fit and sometimes it might not. That’s the nature of the situation for me. I want to talk so having gotten a sense of mind, I want to talk about what we call Buddha nature. And you know this idea of there’s a saying, and I think it’s a very meaningful saying for me. If you believe you can, or if you believe you can’t, you’re right.
Buddhism is about change. And my experience and what I’ve seen with students over the years is it’s difficult to change. And part of that difficulty is at some basic level we don’t believe we can. And you’re right. If you believe that, you can’t.
So how do we begin to really believe in ourselves that I can change, that I can become the best person I can possibly become, I can envision another really fantastic way of being. I can dream and I can begin to live, like the popular saying, live the dream in some way, in a really significant way. That I’m not stuck. I don’t have to be this insufficient, inadequate person that I’ve always conceived myself to be. Really believing in this.
That’s not an easy proposition, I don’t think. So this is, I think this is part of the basis of the path. And this is, I think, what teaching of Buddha nature is trying to get across to ourselves. And over and above that, we’re both sort of talking about not only do I have the potential to change, but I have everything I need. I don’t have to wait for permission.
I don’t have to wait for some other circumstances. You know, no one can stop us from practicing Dharma. No circumstance, no situation, no person. It’s purely an exercise of our individual free will internal to our own minds. The mind that’s in its place can make a heaven of hell, hell of heaven.
The mind has that ability, that potential. If we exercise it, we have that freedom. If we don’t exercise it, we don’t have that freedom. Freedom is not something you can just store in a bank and feel, you know, sit back and say, Oh, I’ve all this freedom. It only exists when it’s being exercised and making choices.
Taking responsibility. Acting out the kind of, like we talked about in the morning meditation. Just touched on it. You know, I think Buddhism is very much an education and values. Is important getting in touch?
What is really important to myself? And beginning to find some work out some strategies for realizing those values in your daily life. That’s your exercise of freedom and taking that responsibility. And it’s only ourselves as individuals who can do that. No one else can do it for us.
There’s a there’s a verse by the way it says that the Buddhists do not wash away sins with water nor do they remove suffering with their hands nor do they transfer their realizations to the mind of others. But by the showing of the truth, they make others to be free. That’s all the Buddha can do for us. That’s all our teachers can do for us. Just try to show us the way things are.
It’s up to us to bring about the kinds of changes that we want for ourselves. It’s very much our responsibility. So I want to look at contemplating our Buddha nature and our opportunity to recognize, our opportunity to actualize that opportunity, to overcome our sense of inadequacy about ourselves, that there’s something missing in ourselves, in the circumstances of our life. As long as that’s not there, I really can’t change in one way or another. Find some escape clause that we don’t have to be able to accept responsibility for our predicament.
We no longer are victims. We become the author of our life. We have to empower ourselves. And Buddhism is very much about self empowering. Believing in ourselves.
So I want to talk about Buddha nature. So, think it’s something that it’s difficult, you know especially in Australia I think. I’m from I was born and raised in the United States. I noticed what we call in Australia tall poppy syndrome. You don’t want to get too big for your riches.
Somebody’s going to cut you down. I think there’s something going on there. Anyway, Somehow how can we believe in ourselves? That we are brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous people. You know, there were a number of years ago, think it’s when I first came to Adelaide, about fourteen.
Anyway, an American Jungian analyst by the name of Robert Johnson came to Adelaide and he spoke at the Jung Society. And he gave a talk on owning your own shadow. And the shadow is a part of our unconscious personality. It represents to a large extent, unknown or little known attributes about ourselves, qualities about ourselves. And more than not, to a large extent, these attributes or features of ourselves are seen as reprehensible or the darkest part of ourselves.
Kind of those parts of ourselves that we’d rather not know about ourselves. And they get disowned. They get pushed back into the shadow. Things that we would not we don’t want to feel are a part of who we are. We don’t want to identify with ourselves.
All the kind of our mental laziness or our weakness, know, our shortcomings, unreal fantasies, our schemes, our love of money, our kind of fetishes that we all have in one way or another. Kind of nasty little sort of things about ourselves that we’d rather not see as a part of ourselves. So Johnson was Robert Johnson was talking about that over a number of years in building up a trusting relationship with the client. Eventually they’re willing to let the skeletons out of the closet. They’re willing to begin to get in touch with and reveal some of these reprehensible parts of themselves that they normally disown in one way or another.
But he went on to say that though these people will begin to readily let the skeleton out of the closet, as it were, they put up a terrific fight against acknowledging the gold. That is, within the shadow lies not only the dark, the base of the nasty parts of ourselves, but as well as golden qualities of ourselves, noble qualities, almost what we call divine qualities. So, you know, these are the qualities, you might say, that are the seed of our creativity. They represent the true spirit of our life. But we fight against acknowledging them in the gold within ourselves, to admit the gold of ourselves.
You know what I’m talking about, there’s something special about me. Sometimes we almost feel it. But it’s not unique to me. Everybody’s special in that same way. So, it’s not a matter of egotism or pride or setting myself up.
We get in touch with something inside of ourselves. And if we do that, we have to begin to respond. We have to, as it were, begin to take responsibility for living that out. The weight of our own divinity. Sometimes we can’t quite bear The weight that goes with owning the golden element that’s inside of our shadow is to begin to assume a greater responsibility that goes with growth.
To become the kind of person we want. To live this almost unimaginable life, the kind of person we could be. There’s a beautiful quote. It used to be attributed to Nelson Mandela, but it’s not. It’s by a woman by the name of Marianne Williamson.
This idea about getting in touch with this golden element within us, inside of ourselves. Our worst fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be? It is not just some of us, it is in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. So I think you know, we’ve kind of set the thermostat of who we conceive of ourselves to be to a kind of comfort zone. You know, we want to be neither too wretched nor too fantastic.
We don’t want to experience too much failure, but we don’t want to experience too much success as well. Think in a way one would be as difficult to bear as the other. Being too successful or too much of a failure, being too wretched or too fantastic. Robert Johnson, the Jungian analyst I just mentioned. We can look at the geography of the psyche and understand the religious life in a new way.
It is the same religious faculty but approached with a different language. We see that this ego, this so called conscious mind, is like an island in the vast ocean of psyche. Out there in the ocean of being, outside of the limits of ego’s world and beyond what is known or it can see, are the missing parts of our total selves. We are psychological beings. The greater portion of our totality is not physical but the psyche, and most of it lies most of it of that is in the unconscious.
Contrary to our popular notion of psychology, the unknown and the unconscious parts of our totality greatly exceed the conscious parts. We are not to find our sentient beings, wholeness, or fulfillment within the tiny ego world. We sense that there is more, much more out there, Although we know neither where to look nor what it is we are searching for. So, now what is the main obstacle to appreciating the potential of our mind and our chance to actualize it. There’s a tendency to begin to ignore, to devalue ourselves, to contract, to restrain.
All we see are the reflections of our own ego. That’s what we take as being our reality. There’s nothing more than that and there’s nothing more that I can become than that. We cannot see that the displays and the patterns of our own ego cannot even begin to capture all, in fact, of who we are. We cannot begin to see the possibilities of transcending them.
We cannot see that ego has got a corner of our psyche, corner of our mind, and not our totality. Not all that who we really are. You know, I don’t know. This is a me, maybe it’s a tough notion to get across. How we perpetuate our patterns.
How we remain stuck in them. I mentioned yesterday how we selectively what we pay attention to is our reality. And that seems to be the only appropriate, realistic, rational way of approaching our life Is that in accordance with that reality? But that reality is a construct and that is dependent upon how we have learned to focus our attention. The rules and the strategies that we’ve looked at.
We tend to perpetuate our patterns and which keeps us stuck in them. Tend to notice and dwell upon that data which confirms our patterns. You know, someone who thinks of themselves as being bad or unkind, has that self image of themselves and thinks of themselves in that way. It’s to dwell on, it’s going to selectively focus on those times when they let people down and when they hurt others. That confirms who they see themselves as being.
They will find some way of not noticing or ignoring those times when they actually acted kindly, when they acted caringly toward others. Even when that’s pointed out to them, they say, Oh, that’s not really That’s not really me. They’ll be able to find some way to discount it, to dismiss it. I’m not really like that. As if they had some kind of essence to who they were.
That this wasn’t an actual portrayal when some caring act was pointed out to them. It doesn’t resonate. It’s in conflict is the word I’m looking for. There’s a cognitive dissonance between that and how they conceive of themselves. And it’s very uncomfortable.
And they want to escape that uncomfortable feeling, so they just simply ignore it. They push it away. We’re likely to misinterpret data to fit our patterns. Someone who has a conception of them for example, somebody who has a pattern of Nobody likes me consistently interprets other behavior to fit that. They can see that that other person frowning over there that they’re being disapproved of.
That’s the way they’re interpreting. It’s not because that person may in fact in reality have a headache. It’s because they’re being disapproved of. You know, people three hundred years ago, they saw the sun revolve around the earth. But in fact, that was an interpretation, a misinterpretation of the data.
The sun does not revolve around the earth. But that’s the way we interpreted the data. That’s the way we saw it. We yeah. Yeah, probably so.
Probably so. Yeah, yeah. So you’re misinterpreting data, seeing that that person’s frowning as you’re being disapproved of because you have a self image that you aren’t worthy of, that you don’t feel good about yourself. And this confirms that. So we have a self image of ourselves.
And we are selectively interpreting our reality, paying attention to that which seems to confirm that self image about ourselves. And that’s what keeps pushing us back into the same grooves, the same ways of behaving and thinking. Seems to be the only plausible explanation because I’m being disapproved of. We can’t step back and say, Oh, I have a pattern of being of a sense that I’m inadequate. I’m always being disapproved of.
Maybe we buy into appearances. And maybe we could begin to question like we did yesterday that simply because something appears to us doesn’t mean it’s true. It appears he may be frowning at me, but maybe because of being disapproved of or that he’s frowning at me, but maybe that’s not the case. So we don’t to buy into that and react because we can begin to create some kind of doubt around that. Maybe we can talk about that.
We also, I’m pointing out ways in which it makes it difficult for us to change. Ways in which we’re continually forcing ourselves back into the same patterns. The ways of thinking and behaving. Another example, people set up relationships, the dynamics. You can quite often see this in couples that seem to confirm who they are.
Someone who has a pattern of it’s all your fault and someone who is always finding fault with others. It’s all your fault. He’s going to be attracted to someone who has the pattern of, I cause a lot of trouble, don’t I? Their patterns fit. There’s a certain codependency, isn’t it?
Or another example, someone who has a pattern, I just don’t have what it takes, is intrigued with someone who has a pattern, You’re not much, are you? You we set up these dynamics of our relationships which seem to confirm who we are. You know, this is something that goes back for me very personally when I remember when I was younger. The fact that if you have a sense of unlovability about yourself, And you create these situations. For example, I’m not saying this is my case, but anyway, it resonates with me.
A feeling of being unlovable. There’s something about me nobody could love. And they’re in the midst of creating a new relationship, a romantic relationship with another person. And they say to the other person, Do you love me? Yeah, I love you.
Do you really love me? Yeah, I really love you. No? I really mean is, Do you really, really love I’ve said three times that I love you. What does it take to convince you?
See, I knew you really didn’t love me. So, we create situations which confirms our expectations. And that reconfirms our sense of what reality is. That on one level we create situations which tend to prove what we expect about ourselves and what we expect of life. Our world begins and ends within these limiting conceptions of our own ego in isolation from reality, the way things actually are.
To a great extent, all we ever see is our own projections reflecting back at us in one way or another. I like to, you know, there’s, you know, it’s like, I don’t know, one of my great inspirations was Lama Yeshe. Lama Yeshe, this golden photo there. He’s the founder of what became Buddha House, in a rather angelic place there. And talking about this, he was great communicator.
The main dealing, the problem. What is the problem? It is the ordinary recognition that I am poor man, poor woman. Do you understand? Perceiving, holding a poor one, poor object, poor quality.
And perceiving also that such poor acting ugly, having lower opinion of our body, lower opinion of our quality, that is the worst symptom to be healthy, to be liberated. That is the main problem to eradicate, to cut. As long as you decided, had preconception that I am the poor one, you decided. You already decided that you are the bad guy. You already decided already.
So when you decide you are the bad guy, you always do bad actions. Anyway, I’m worthless. I’m a bad guy. So, I do bad one. Of course, that’s the way it is.
That’s true. And in this way, know, life becomes a self perpetuating, self fulfilling prophecy. We already know who we are and what we can expect and we simply are acting that out in one way or another. We can’t expect any more than that. We can pretend, but that’s just a pretense.
One way or another, who we really are is going to show through and other people are going to see through our disguise in one way or another. I wanted to share a comic with you, if I can find it. I’ve lost it. It’s, I don’t think, perhaps you can’t see this. It’s kind of, it’s a simple comic.
It’s called Hi and Lois. And there’s two boys walking home from school. And there’s one boy, he’s just got back his test result. Okay? And he’s carrying his test result.
Says in the first box, he says to the other boy, That new teacher really did a number on me. And the second box he says, I thought I’d get a B on that test, and he gave me a C. And the third boxer says, How did he know I was a C student? So it was a new teacher, maybe a substitute teacher, he thought, I can pull one over this teacher’s eyes. I can pretend I’m a B student.
But this teacher was too sharp. He saw through this disguise. There’s something about him. Kind of had a C-ness oozing through his skin that, you know, any discriminating teacher would easily be able to recognize and say, Don’t kid me. You’re really a C student.
And this kid goes on to get a C grade job, marry a C grade wife, have C grade kids and teach them how to be C grade people as well. And everything becomes this kind of self fulfilling, self defeating C grade prophecy that we kind of worked out for ourselves. And that’s kind of where we’re at, that we’re stuck in very much that same way. This thermostat that we work out for ourselves and what’s comfortable for ourselves. The range of what we’re willing to experience.
As I mentioned this morning, change, the unusual, with the unexpected, the unaccustomed is always frightening. And we circumscribe our lives so we don’t come across the unknown or the unfamiliar or the unexpected too often. They help keep ourselves feeling safe and secure. And therefore the unknown is never explored. We don’t have to push the envelope to move out against what isn’t familiar to ourselves at present.
So Buddhism isn’t asking us to perform some kind of mental gymnastics in order to conform to some prescribed way of being or to kind of tyrannize ourselves into some sort of believing ourselves about ourselves something that we in fact aren’t. You know Buddhism would never ask us to see black as white or white as black. But I think what it is doing is asking us, is to open up the possibility that we could be mistaken about ourselves. Even a little doubt. I could be so much the genuine possibility I could be so much more than I’ve ever known myself to be in the past.
That could be revolutionary, I think. Just that little bit I would have doubt about who we might in fact be. I am not all the fluctuating self identities that I cling to over the course of my life. I am not always the highs and lows and self affirmations and self denigration and ups and downs of my mind. None of them totally encompass who I can be in my potential.
Even if they’re accurate, which they aren’t. Again, quoting Lama Yeshe, Don’t think the Guru is somewhere outside there. You are the Guru. You are the wisdom. To liberate yourself, that is what Buddha says.
I think Westerners want sometimes too much to see the outside guru and not see the inner guru. Sometimes that also becomes concept, too concrete, and sometimes becomes a problem. Now I want you to think clearly about this one. I truly believe that fundamentally my inner guru is totally responsible for whether I become a good or bad person. And I am responsible for the entire journey from the beginning up to the end to enlightenment.
Now, I am sure you are thinking that this sounds too confident. I make an example. Milarepa is a good example. First, started meditation and these things. Afterward, he had to give up his books, he had to give up his guru.
He went by himself. So who is his guru? He himself is his guru. That is a good example. At a certain point you are truly responsible for liberating yourself.
I think so really. Maybe I am too, maybe I am deluded, maybe I am selfish, but somehow I feel that I cannot rely on outside objects to be my guru. They already show us, they already explain everything from the beginning to the end. They verbally told us already. So to actualize it from beginning to end is somehow up to me.
It seems that I cannot have the relative guru with me all the time. I am not married to him. I am not his husband. Communicating or not. Therefore, being, I truly believe this.
If we let go and allow our inner wisdom to function, we know something. You cannot say I don’t know. You do know. We have to come to recognize that there’s a more basic ground to our being than ego’s ground. That there’s more in the ocean of our own mind out there outside the island of ego that we come to identify ourselves with.
That the missing parts to ourselves. That there’s some real brilliance out there. There’s something which is really which a wisdom and a caring. The traditional analogy for this, which is traditionally explained in terms of our Buddha nature going unnoticed, is a poor man living in a hovel, a shack. And all the time beneath, buried beneath earth is an inexhaustible vein of gold.
But this individual searches without and all the time experiences poverty. Well, all the time within their own home are all the riches they could ever hope to imagine. I think it was Ralph Waldo Emerson who said, you know, what lies ahead of us and behind us and what lies outside of ourselves is of tiny matters compared to what lies within ourselves. So, the point is that we ourselves are the basis of the path. That we are the beginning and end of the journey.
It’s within our own mind. At the bottom most, there is a wakefulness about ourselves. You know, the very fact that you’re here, the very fact that to be normal in a sane society is not to be very healthy. Our very fact that we’re dissatisfied is a reflection of our very wisdom. That we’re not content with normalcy.
That’s not enough. There’s something that’s driving us to saying that there’s something more to our life. We might not quite know how to envision it or where to find it or how to go about getting it, but we have a sense that there must be more to what I’ve experienced in life than what I’ve known up to now. That’s our guru trying to get in touch with ourselves, trying to tell ourselves something about ourselves. That, you know, that can we begin to kind of pay more conscious attention to those instances when we are brilliant, when we are gorgeous, when we are talented, when we are fabulous, when we act with real, you know, wisely, when we act kindly, when we act with great strength, with the courage of our heart.
You know, paying attention to those. We habitually pay attention more than to what we’re doing wrong, to normality, to the average, to what confirms our expectations about who we are and what we can do with our lives. But there are these moments of brilliance in our life when we act with the wisdom of the Buddha, when we’re tremendously compassionate, when we are courageous. Can we begin to pay attention to those and begin to somewhat have belief that this is a reflection of more of who we in fact are. And open up to some eye, the door just a little bit to other possibilities of who we can be.
We can meditate on this a little bit. We’ve been talking quite a lot, haven’t we? Would you like to stand up and stretch? You’re cold? So I mean one way, you know, I think these are yeah, I think what we’re going to do is reflect and really acknowledge and give proper recognition to those times when we do act wisely.
When we do act with great caring and really take the time to feel and to appreciate. If we don’t, then we miss then we miss those moments. And we don’t integrate those possibilities into a more accurate picture of who in fact we are. Just like this, our selectivity of what we pay attention to. So you know, I don’t think this is a matter, it’s not a pride.
Sometimes there’s this notion of pride which I think can be misconceived. The word pride, the Sanskrit comes from mana, which means measure. Pride, with pride we exceed the measure of ourselves. We add something onto ourselves which in fact is not there. We’re puffed up.
We’re blown up out of proportion. So in looking at what we do right there’s moments when we do act with great wisdom, when we do act with great courage and compassion. It’s an act of reflection because of what we actually do do. It’s not so there’s not a matter of pride involved. So I wouldn’t let that you know there’s a sense that, well, if I draw on these things, somehow there’s something wrong.
Know? Or we have this tall poppy syndrome, like, somebody will cut me down and the gods will hear me and they’re gonna cause me problems or something. So I don’t think we should feel that way. I think we have to go out of our way to recognize and appreciate this gold within the shadow that expresses itself from time to time. Otherwise, the predominance of our ways of thinking, what we do pay attention to just keeps us pretty much stuck.
Does that make any sense? So we’re going to actually, there’s not so much direction in this meditation. I’m going to, at a point, I’m going to ask you to reflect. And it doesn’t have to be, when I say, when you act wisely, it could just make you made a little, you made an intelligent decision. You’re really used to some discrimination or you acted very kindly.
Maybe you just picked up somebody dropped something and you gave it to them very instinctively. You weren’t being a good Buddhist. You just picked up and did somebody a small favor. Just an act of kindness. You’re beginning to appreciate those small acts of kindness and those small acts of wisdom.
Sometimes when you did act with courage, you took a chance, you took a risk. Whether you succeed or not maybe is beside the point. But beginning to appreciate those qualities about ourselves and find a space in our self image which allows for those. Okay, so taking a comfortable firm posture. I invite you just to become aware of your breath and how are you experiencing the breath in terms of bodily sensations And bring your attention to rest.
Wherever that sensation is most clear and obvious to yourself. So I invite you to reflect in those times when even if they seem very minor, when you did act with wisdom, intelligence. Those times when you did act spontaneously with kindness, caring. When you were fabulous, gorgeous, brilliant. And just even if they’re minor instances, don’t view them as insignificant.
Actually put just kind of allow yourself to savor them. Like putting on a like being out in the sun feeling the warmth of the sun and your body pervading your body and mind. Savor these little small instances. Now I’d like to invite you to just allow the mind to rest. Now this is you don’t have to do anything, something very unusual.
If your mind wants to focus on the breath naturally, then do that. If it wants to think, allow it to think. If feelings come up, allow it to feel. Just have a curiosity but also an openness and a warmth and gentle quality toward your mind, toward yourself. There’s nothing that you have to do.
There’s no volition, no effort necessary. Just be with whatever happens with gentleness, with friendliness, openness, and curiosity. There’s nothing that you have to do at all. I wonder if we could divide up into three groups. I think we’ll have two groups of four and one group of five.
And sort of clump together. And if you could just talk about whatever came up for you in the course of the morning or in the course of your meditation. Just discuss it and then we’ll come back to a larger group and discuss it together. Okay? So just whatever came up in the course of your, what we’re discussing this morning or in your meditation.
So it’s good if you talk from your own experience or what’s going on for you rather than a doctrinal point of view. So if you could wind up your discussion. I think his mother I think his mother’s gonna yeah. So I’d just like to invite you to continue discussion in the larger group with some of the ideas that might have been talked about. Do you like to share them with the larger group?
Any response around the ease or difficulty of change? What do people think? So for you, this awareness and being able to reflect upon what you’re doing has helped you bring about the changes Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you’re quite right. It’s quite easy to remember back in the sixties and seventies when people were going to India and they were free and liberated.
And then they went back home and, you know, in many cases people studied Buddhism in the West and they thought that in the East and they became saints. And they came back home and they began yelling at their mother. Where’d it all go? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, please.
The evolution of your own self. Could you tease that out a little bit? Yeah. Do you ever revert back to when you were a kid? Occasions when things happen when you feel like a kid?
You act like a kid? TS Eliot says, where’s the where’s the knowledge we’ve lost in information? Where’s the wisdom we’ve lost in knowledge? I I I remember when I when I was little, I used to think old people must be very wise. But it’s proven not to be the case.
Yeah. Yeah. So where we’re can we kind of dig into that and see what would help you to recognize what needs to be changed if there’s something that’s not right? How would you go about recognizing? Any ideas?
I mean, it’s open. Yeah. Beginning to see how maybe some childhood, some patterns have carried over into your adulthood. Yeah. So as was mentioned, it requires a lot of awareness, doesn’t it?
I mean, way in which you not only how your past is impacting upon your present. So because it’s extremely complicated, isn’t it? All the forces that are at play, not only internal but also in terms of your dynamics and your social situations. I’m curious how people at the final two things. One was if people found it useful or possible to reflect upon those times when you did something wise and caring and so forth.
First thought, did people find that? Were people able to come up with something and was it useful? Yeah. Difficult, yeah. What do you suppose that is?
There’s a resistance, the feeling there. I mean to become aware of that’s important, that resistance. What’s behind that resistance? Too big for your britches. What do suppose that is?
Oh, that. Yes. Humility is one of my greatest traits, I think. Yeah. I think, yeah, that’s I agree with that.
Especially in Tibet tradition, the elements there. So, it’s kind of teasing these overlays that we’ve learned around these emotions. Which perhaps prevent us in some way actually feeling a lot of the measure of who in fact we are and the things that we do do because it doesn’t feel right. There’s something uneasiness and uncomfortableness around it. That’s interesting around there.
The view of our emotions has a tremendous effect on how we experience our emotions. I’m also curious about, I realized we didn’t spend much time with it. Just the last I think maybe five minutes or so. How you experienced simply sitting. Yeah, what was your experience?
I’m kind of curious. Did I say don’t do it again? You don’t have to do anything. Anybody else? Any other reaction?
I’m very lucid, and I don’t know about my body or anything. And I’m what I imagine to myself being really on the borderline of not that I think I’m about to sleep Yeah. But my mind is just random thoughts Yeah. Very, very quickly. And and not anything that necessarily seems to to mean a lot, you know, on the surface anymore.
K. Do you find that interesting? I do. Yeah. Interesting.
I find it interesting that I’m not asleep, but I’m pretty well, you know, I’m pretty well there. Yeah. I think I think, yeah, people the people’s reaction, especially people who have been meditating for some time and applying particular instructions to their meditation. Of our instructions usually are to that there is the object of our focus and there is distractions. And you have to make that distinction and you’ve got to get back to whatever it is you’re meditating on.
And to meditate in allowing fashion as some people experience, that’s a very liberating experience. I don’t have to do anything. I mean, how many times do you give yourself that permission? You know? I mean, you don’t even have to, you know, if you’re confused, that’s okay.
If you’re feeling uncomfortable, that’s okay. If your mind is drifting, that’s okay. If you’re falling asleep, that’s okay. I think there’s a lot of learning that can take place in that context. Sometimes the instructions of meditation can get in the way of meditating perhaps in some way.
Anyway, I just present it as an experiment and maybe we can try it again. So shall we have lunch? It’s about five to one. Shall we go to, say, forty minutes for lunch? So that’s when the big hand gets to the seven.