Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Using Robert Bly’s Iron John and a Don Juan warrior story as entry points, Ven Jampa Gendun opens this 46-minute session by asking what each person genuinely wants — a question, he argues, most people never consciously answer. He frames going for refuge as a personal realignment: away from the eight preoccupations of ego (hopes, fears, praise, blame, gain, loss) and toward wisdom, love, compassion, and energy — the seeds of enlightenment already present in everyone. A candid autobiographical detour about dropping out of university and moving to California gives the session an unusual immediacy before it moves into two guided meditations: mindfulness of breathing with counted breaths, then a visualization in which students imagine admired qualities in themselves and reflect on who they want to be in five to ten years.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 03 OtE 1991 08 21.mp3
UUID: 7fda83d8-8c88-4203-9240-30218411812d
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Opening the Eye of New Awareness 1991-1992 (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1991-08-21
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.9 minutes
Words: ~4,151
Jampa Gendun: Very little I know that the mistakes that I make in giving my talks and the confusion I may create in your mind is my problem. But from your side in the sense that if you have a beneficial intention, if you have a positive motivation to listen, then no matter how much confusion I may experience and how many mistakes I may make, can still be productive for you from your side. On the other hand, if there were another teacher sitting up here, a teacher per se, and no matter how skillful this teacher might be, even if the Buddha was sitting up here, for example, or the Dalai Lama, or even Mother Teresa. And if you had either a negative or indifferent motivation, no matter what, how the profundity of what may be said, how clearly, how eloquently it may be presented, it’s not going to be of any benefit. It’s very much each of our individual responsibilities to find some key, find some means to open up our mind and develop a positive motivation.
There are various possibilities of motivation. And we call this adjusting our motivation the idea of redirecting ourselves, reprioritizing, reorientating. Know traditionally called refuge, going for refuge. And I talked about this idea of going for refuge. Getting back in touch with some more central values within our life.
What is important to me? What is important to me? It’s quite easy to lose sight of what is important to me as a very unique individual in the course of our busy days, in the course of all the various activities that we have to engage in, our families and work, entertainment, whatever. But it’s necessary to take, to pause this for a moment. What is a worth to me?
What is a value to me? What works for me? What turns me on? Me as a unique individual. It’s typical.
I’ve been reading a book. It’s called Iron John by an American poet by the name of Robert Bly. And it’s about men’s groups. It’s about working with men and becoming a warrior. And one of the problems about becoming a warrior, and this applies both to males and females, is finding out what it is you want.
What is it that’s worth struggling for? What is it that’s worth committing yourself to? And then we find that we float about our life without commitment, without purpose, without meaning. Because we’ve gotten out of touch with our basic values, with what we actually desire, what means something for me very uniquely, personally, at a very deep level. The idea of going for refuge is to get back in touch with some of our more central values.
I talked about the paradigm of sanity which we make use of in Buddhism. We call this a Buddha. It’s simply a model of the human potential. A happy, loving, healthy, sane human being. We take that as the mind is dynamic in nature.
It will naturally flow toward that. We don’t have to force ourselves to be happy. We sometimes overlook this fact. What we conceive of as happiness, our mind is naturally inclined toward. It will naturally move toward that.
What we conceive of as distressful, suffering, the mind will naturally move away from that. So we begin to present ourselves a paradigm. This paradigm is very unique to each of us, what it might be, what it might be to be healthy, to be loving, to be sane, to be happy, actualized, fulfilled. All of these terms, these concepts, you have a very unique flavor to your own interpretation. And we begin to hold this up to ourselves as a central value, that which is a prime value to you.
We begin to take refuge in that. That is to say we begin to this is what’s going to solve my problem. This is what I want to commit myself to. This is how I’m going to be happy. Over and above all of the various peripheral conditions which contribute to our well-being.
The central factor of our own mind and what we make of it is the determinant factor of the quality of our life. You know, the mind is in its place and in its way. It can make a hell of heaven and a heaven of hell. I talked about the factor of going for refuge, the factor of going to refuge to enlightenment. Enlightenment.
The qualities of wisdom, knowing the way things are without error, without mistake, without misconception, without preconception, without wishing them to be otherwise as we think they might be. But actually as they are, the reality of our situation. The truth. And truth is therapeutic. Going for refuge to our own wisdom.
Going for refuge to love and compassion. The burning desire. And it’s active, overflowing quality of wanting others to be happy and taking responsibility, full responsibility to bring them that happiness. And it’s the quality of energy, spontaneous, creative, unconditional freedom. Exuberance for life.
And these become our central values and these are the embodiment of this paradigm. And we keep reminding ourselves that in terms of this, I can solve my problems. No matter what the vicissitudes of my life may be, I can find my way. It’s going to be okay. You you may want, what, A better car.
Another degree. You know, we have all these suspicious feelings. Something needs to be added. If only that, then we will be satisfied. You know, we change our spouses.
We change our jobs. We get to the other degree. We get the new house. And we begin to notice that though we’ve made these external changes, the same problems keep reoccurring. The same distressful themes begin to manifest themselves again and again through the course of our lives.
And so we have to take refuge within our own mind sooner rather than later. And in taking that refuge is simply presenting to our mind the values of wisdom, the values of love and compassion and creative spontaneous activity. You know, the idea of enlightenment is we can say, well that sounds nice. It Doesn’t it just sound like some kind of romanticism in some way?
I like to think in those kind of terms. Is it just a kind of fabrication, a romantic notion that we like to believe in like Santa Claus? But this quality of enlightenment which is the fulfillment and the solution, the fulfillment of our potential and the solution to our problems, is that quality? Is it simply nothing but that, a fantasy? Or is there something about us which suggests the possibility of enlightened, whatever this way of being?
We all have some wisdom no matter how obscure and how faint that wisdom might be. From time to time we know beyond words, beyond concepts, beyond mistake, actuality. We touch reality. We know. But we all have some love.
No matter how exclusive, no matter how mixed with attachment our love might be, it’s there. And by love I mean the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nourishing one’s own or another’s well-being. We have that. We all have some energy. No matter how unspontaneous, unrefined that energy might be, we all have that.
So what we’re saying is that we all have the seeds of enlightenment. Or another way of saying this that we have the seeds of a fulfillment, the seeds of the solutions to our problems within ourselves. This is existential in the fact that it’s something which our very being suggests the possibility of. And we simply are taking reminding ourselves, taking recourse, reorienting ourselves to these factors that we have within our own being, within our own mind. These factors of wisdom, love, compassion and exuberance energy.
These become our prime values, the development of these qualities. We begin to have faith that this is, are the real basic solutions to the problems of conditioned existence, to life in general. Over and above all of the fulfilling all our peripheral needs, wants, material obligations, desire. And if one gains some kind conviction that if I can develop my wisdom, that if I can develop my love and compassion and this zest for life, this exuberance, then no matter what may happen I’ll be okay. This is what we call the optimum mode of being.
And this becomes like a refuge. Know, a consistent reminding of ourselves again and again what is the ultimate solution to our own problem within our own mind. It’s a realignment of our allegiance. From a life passively led on the basis of pleasure and pain to one based upon wisdom, love, and compassion. You know, a realignment of our allegiance from a life based upon hopes, expectations, fears to a life according to a life based upon choosing growth.
You know, our life is, to a large extent whether we’re aware of it or conscious of it or not, is almost predominated, is dominated. Our fears and expectations, fears of pain, our fears of pleasure, our expectations of pleasure, our fears of loss, our expectations of gain, our fears of criticism, our expectations of hope for praise, our fears of blame, our expectations of fame. These are presently our prime values. These are the eight preoccupations of ego based existence. Out in this, there’s no freedom.
There’s no choice. There’s no growth. There’s only the vacillation between pleasure and pain, our fears and our hopes, our ups and downs. There’s no growth. There’s only the revolving in an eternal cycle.
In our finest moments We get a little taste of enlightenment on our tongue, what it might be like to be free, what it must be like to be an individual who no longer has to look at themselves, who feels complete within ourselves. We have all of these seeds. Is as if we have to commit ourselves to removing, to creating the space, pushing aside all the weeds of our fears and hope, to let them be the light of our own wisdom, to nourish, the light of our own love to be nourished. You know, I’m from the United States and while I was going to university, this was a number of years ago, I went through a divorce not by my choice but it was something that I was involuntarily forced into. And like most people then I dropped out of university and I went to California.
And California is like a spiritual supermarket. There’s everything that you could want twenty four hours a day on the shelves. But it was a very positive experience. They had this new idea which I’m from Ohio. Ohio is a great place to be from.
Had this great idea which it was a revolutionary idea for me to tell you, just to give you an idea of how unsophisticated I was, how backward I was in my, what I don’t know, spirituality, growth. The idea was there were people in California who were doing things that made them happy. And this may sound simple minded. But for me at that time it was like a revolutionary idea to do what made me happy. I never thought about that before.
People talked about this was back in in the early 70s, about how society is laying their trip on us and we have to revolt against society. And I think I’m doing what I want. I don’t feel any pressure from society. But I never really questioned it. I never really thought what made me happy?
What is it that worked for me? What turned me on? What unique values if any had I ever derived for myself? It’s like a fish swimming in water has no conception of what it might be like to be out of water because it’s the medium in which it exists. So I was probably so programmed that I didn’t know that I was programmed.
That was part of the program. Because it’s only when you step out of that context that you begin to say that I wasn’t living my life. I wasn’t living my life. I didn’t have any value but I had derived for myself. Autonomously developed creative value.
And so like most people having gone to California, dropped out, grew a beard, long haired, and I had a great cabin near Lake Tahoe in the mountains. It was it was really good. But then I began to notice that, you know, I experienced anger. And I didn’t want to be angry because it made me suffer. And developed jealousy and I didn’t want to develop jealousy because it made me suffer.
And I had attachment and I didn’t want to be attached because it made me suffer. So no matter how much freedom I may have gained from withdrawing physically, I still wasn’t free. There were still these factors which I was carrying around within my own mind. Until I was free of them, I was never really free. So, you know, that’s when I continued my search.
Now he’s talking about a warrior. It’s a nice concept. You know, the idea of taking refuge and becoming a warrior and traveling a path of heart. In Don Juan, a Yaqui Indian in northern Mexico, was talking to Carlos Castaneda, his student, about what it means to be a warrior. Years ago I told you that in his day to day life a warrior chooses to follow the path with heart.
It is the consistent choice of the path with heart which makes a warrior different from the average man. He knows that a path has heart when he is one with it, when he experiences a great peace, a pleasure traversing its length. So, it’s the consistent choice of a path with heart which is our real refuge. You know, a warrior is an individual who serves the king or serves the queen. And in the light of one’s own wisdom, in the light of one’s own love, one makes a choice.
And it’s the warrior who carries through that commitment to that choice. Regardless of all the vicissitudes, the difficulties, the doubts, the ups and downs of what that choice may entail. And it’s this using our wisdom, using our intelligence and seeing that the basic solution to our problems lies within our own mind in terms of our own growth and committing ourselves to a path of growth that we become a warrior, that we find a real path and a real way to solve our problems. This is the motivation. This is the way we can begin to, in a real way, solve our problems rather than continually vacillating between pleasure and pain or hopes and fears, the ups and downs.
There’s some movement. There’s some growth. There’s some change. So we take as our internal focus of our life Buddha. And that is achieved by means of the Dharma in the social context of a spiritual community.
And we try as best we can to raise the level of our motivation such that whatever I might be doing, I’m doing it for the sake of all sentient beings. Everyone wants to be happy. No one wants to suffer just like me. I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the highest assembly. From the virtuous merit that I collect by practicing giving and the other perfections may I attain the state of a Buddha to be able to benefit all sentient beings.
I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the highest assembly. And the virtuous merit that I collect by practicing giving and the other perfections, may I attain the state of the Buddha to be able to benefit all sentient beings. I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the highest assembly. From the virtuous merits that I collect by practicing giving and the other perfections, may I attain the state of a Buddha to be able to benefit all sentient beings. So we’re going to do a few minutes of meditation.
I’m going to begin with a simple practice of mindfulness of breathing. And then we’ll lead you through another meditation. And the practice of mindfulness of breathing. Perhaps each week I’ll just talk about it very shortly just to give a little bit of information on it. We’re focusing upon the breath, the various physical sensations associated with the breathing.
Whether it’s the expansion of the chest, the clothes touching the body, the rise and fall of the abdomen, the sensation of the air rushing in and out of the nostril or inside the nose. All of these various sensations taken together are the object of focus and it’s just natural breathing. We’re not trying to adjust the breath in any way. We’re going to repeatedly simply bring the mind back to the breath again and again. It’s a wonderful thing to you know, someone the essence of meditation is relaxation.
But the problem with relaxation is that the more we try to relax, the less relaxed we’ll become. You know, someone will you relax? Just relax. Take it easy. Relax.
The effort you put into trying to relax, the more agitated your mind will become. So all that we can do is create the condition where the natural reflex of the mind will be relaxation. And one way that we can create these conditions is simply again and again bringing the mind back to the breath. Again and again bringing the mind back to the breath. And we’re going to use various techniques.
The factors that we’re developing in the course of our meditation are mindfulness and awareness. Synonyms for mindfulness are recollection, memory. It is that factor which holds an object. Memory holds a telephone number, holds a picture, holds some kind of information. Mindfulness is that which is holding our mind to the breath.
It’s like holding the stick. Awareness is that which we know. Other synonyms, introspection, attention, sensitivity. It knows if I’m holding the stick or not, how tight I’m holding it, whether it’s just about to be released and whether it’s not there at all. So we want to develop these two factors of the mind: awareness and mindfulness.
To help us develop that mindfulness we’re going to count our breath. So it’s natural breathing. We’re going to breathe in and out. We’re simply going to count mentally, not verbally. Not going to say it but this would be counted mentally.
One and out two and out three and out four and out five. Come back down to one. One, two, three, four, five, six. Come back down to one. One, two, seven.
One, two, eight. One, two, nine. One through ten. And so you don’t try to get to the Guinness Book of Records for breath counting. If you get up to ten, then come back down to one through five again.
The idea of meditation, you know, this is why it’s necessary to readjust our motivation. Otherwise, you know, we’re going to be practicing spiritual materialism. Ego is very clever. It’s very intelligent. If it weren’t so intelligent, we would have been free of it by now.
Because it’s going to incorporate everything that we do into its own aggrandizing. Everything that we do, it’s going to seek to enhance its existence, to secure itself. It’s somehow going to be able to twist, to interpret everything that we do to incorporate it within its ego structure. We are quite ambitious people. We have this, the idea of meditation is to reroute our sense of identity from becoming, having, possessing, using, maintaining to one of being.
There’s not much in the world there’s not much demand for being these days. Have you noticed? You don’t see it advertised on television. It’s just that you’ve got to be doing something. What are you doing?
You have to be producing. Even the word creativity means we have to make some product. There’s no such thing as leading a creative life and finding a joyful way of existing, finding new ways to be, creativity, creative relationships. We always have to be making something. We have to show at the end of the day that we accomplish something so we can feel good about ourselves.
What did I do today? What did I make today? How much did I make? Just to be with your breath, just to be is enough. That we can survive beautifully by doing nothing.
We can survive beautifully by doing nothing. So this is why we have to adjust our motivation. If we’re going to go beyond the pleasure pain principle, go beyond these eight preoccupations of ego based existence, and simply find a new mode of being or a mode of being. So simply to be with the breath is enough. Nothing more needs to be done than that.
This is our practice to help us not to be distracted. The mind is going to it’s not used to being internalized. It’s used to being distracted toward the five sense objects, sight, sounds, smells, taste, touches. Eye, ear, nose, tongue. It’s going to begin to freak out.
What it’s going to do is it’s going to begin to create entertainment for itself. It’s going to go back to its old archive of memories and begin to rerun old film, past memories. Or it’s going to play with old images to create new fantasies. So you’re going to again and again be distracted, again and again bring the mind back to the breath. Without judgment, gentle patience, being kind to yourself, simply bring the mind back to the breath.
So if you take a firm, comfortable posture, just watching the natural breath, Counting the breath. In out one. In out two. Out two. Bring the mind back to the breath.
Now think of a female that you admire, that you respect. And what is it about them? What qualities that you admire and respect them very much? And then we’re going to play a role. Imagine that you yourself have the same quality.
And imagine a situation where you express that same quality which you now admire and respect so much in this female. Imagine they play a role expressing this admirable quality. Just give yourself over to expressing that quality and that into the situation. Now think of a male that you admire, that you respect. What quality?
What is it about them that you admire and respect so very much? And then imagine that you yourself have the same exact quality. And imagine a situation where you express this quality. And think of a negative quality that you now possess, something that you don’t like about yourself. And what would be the positive counterpart, the opposite quality?
Imagine that you now possess that. Imagine a situation where you express this positive counterpart to this previous negative quality. To play a role. Then consider what type of person would you like to be five years from now, ten years from now? What qualities would you like to express in your life?
Who would you like to be? What is stopping you from becoming the type of person that you want to be? What obstacles do you have? What are you doing in the course of your everyday life to become that person you want to be five years from now, ten years from now? Where is your life going?
Where is it taking And last week we began this series of talks on what it might mean to open our eye of new awareness. Essentially to change our present distorted and limited view. The need for to emphasize, the need for such a change not being is rooted in our actual experience. And it’s simply not an abstract theory. We have to change.
We have to. And what we change is our distorted and limited view. And if our experiences are determined by our views, We have various sets of ideas, belief systems, core assumptions upon which we base our life which determine our experience, how we see the world, how we see ourselves, and how we’re going to relate with that world. There’s a reason the way we act. There’s a reason that we experience what we experience.
It’s dependent upon our view, our ideas, our beliefs, our thinking, with our thoughts we make the world. The way we presently experience the world is appropriate to our way of making sense of it. Have to we are continually trying to make sense of our world. Sometimes it’s quite difficult. What do we all we have recourse to?