Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. The rope-and-snake image anchors this 45-minute session by Ven Jampa Gendun from his series on the Dalai Lama’s Opening the Eye of New Awareness. He uses it to distinguish three responses to suffering: the unexamined life that simply denies any problem exists; psychotherapy and basic practice that work with fear while accepting the snake’s appearance as real; and deep Buddhist practice that dissolves fear entirely by seeing the snake was never there. Building to that image, Gendun explains how neurotic beliefs and self-grasping lock us in repetitive patterns, and why afflictive emotions — desire, hatred, ignorance — always distort their objects rather than see them clearly. He then presents the Dalai Lama’s three-stage method of listening, reflecting, and meditating as the direct route to transforming the mind, alongside indirect supports such as nature, meaningful work, and serving others. Accessible to anyone beginning a sustained study of Buddhist psychology.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 04 OtE 1991 08 21.mp3
UUID: 759d3da6-c763-4a21-b21a-d987f35adab9
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: 45.3 minutes
Words: ~4,513
We have a story that we make use of, to try to find some secure place in the world, to secure a place in the world for ourselves, to find some security, to cope with our hopes and fears, to as means to find happiness and eliminate our suffering, to go about the business of life. That’s all we have to work with is what we know. These are our tools which we’re trying to cope with life with, which we’re trying to work with the problem of suffering with the problem of finding happiness. And this is all we have to work with no matter how primitive our tools might be, how damaged they might be, inadequate they might be, that’s all we have to work with, our beliefs, our ideas, our assumptions, our views. Dependent upon this, we try to make sense of our world, to deal with it in the best way we can.
Without opening our eye of new awareness and the coincidental change which awareness will bring about, we will perpetuate and remain in these reoccurring compulsive neurotic patterns which very much constitute our lives. Nothing’s going to change basically. You know, as I mentioned previously, we may change our location, we may change our jobs, we may change our spouse, but the themes of our life, the patterns of our existence remain untouched, unmodified. And by neurotic, I mean ways of thinking, modes of thinking and behaving which are inappropriate, which are in conflict with the way things are with reality. And this coupled with a demand, an irrational demand that reality conform to our wants.
There’s this basic dishonesty. That the world should follow certain lines according to our demand. And it’s doomed to failure. It’s doomed to frustration, disappointment, and dissatisfaction. You know, as long as our expectations and demands are not in accord with the way things are, we can only experience frustration, disappointment, and dissatisfaction.
Buddhism makes use of the concept of the afflictive emotion. By afflictive emotions I mean such types of emotions as desire, hatred, miserliness, spite, jealousy, ignorance. There’s set of eighty four thousand afflicted emotions. And it is the nature of all afflicted emotions that they either exaggerate or depreciate the nature of their object. That none see the object as it actually is.
Now I mentioned at the very beginning, wisdom is that which knows directly without error, without mistake. With wisdom, based upon wisdom, thinking based upon wisdom, behavior based upon wisdom, there is a possibility. There is a potential that our expectations, hopes, our dreams can be fulfilled, that we can experience contentment. Because those ways of thinking, those ways of behaving are in accordance with the way things are, the reality of our situation. Any type of behavior, any mode of thinking which is based upon the afflictive emotions, which is based upon any type of belief, view, assumptions, idea which is in discord is doomed to failure.
It’s simply going to be another source of suffering for ourselves. No matter how many times we try to satisfy our neurotic needs, they’re always going to remain unfulfilled. It becomes very much like drinking salt water. And we are forever stuck in these perpetually seeking to satisfy our unrealistic needs, demands. And we can have healthy needs, healthy ones, healthy desires, that is the existential needs.
Those which can be fulfilled which are in accordance with the way things are or we can have neurotic needs. Those in which there’s no hope to ever be fulfilled. You may not have been loved when you were little. That’s sad, but it’s quite often true. And you may have an a neurotic need to find that love that you didn’t have when you were a child.
There’s no possibility of it ever being fulfilled, that love that was needed by that child because we’re no longer children or adults. So no matter based upon that neurotic need, we search. You know, we have these chronic patterns and they can never be satisfied. We can never find the love that we didn’t receive as a child. But we can have health needs which can be satisfied, which can be fulfilled.
You know, to become aware, to grow, is to begin to step out of these neurotic patterns, to go beyond our egocentric demands that reality be the way that we want it to be, the way that it should be. You know, to give up our cocoons and determine to deal with people, with real people in real situations as they actually are. The idea of awareness is to diagnose. And the first step in diagnosis is the first step in intervention. You know, it’s not like first we become aware and then we change.
The very fact of awareness is change itself. To become aware is the change. To open our eyes is to be another person than you once were. And we become aware, if we change, then there’s a real possibility to find fulfillment and satisfaction, contentment, whatever. A real possibility to have our rational needs met, To have our reasonable desires fulfilled.
And there’s a real possibility to find some kind of harmony, some kind of, a new kind of oneness with ourselves, with the world. A real possibility to go beyond the primary division of our own. To a very large extent, men and women are products of how they define themselves. As a result of a combination of innate ideas and the intimate influence of the culture and environment we grew up in, we come to have beliefs about the nature of being human. These beliefs penetrate to a very deep level of our psychosomatic systems, our minds and brains, our nervous systems, our endocrine systems, and even our blood and sinews.
We speak, act, and think according to these deeply held beliefs and belief systems. So to become aware, to grow, is to transform our erroneous ideas, our wrong conceptions, our mistaken beliefs, our crooked assumptions. The fictional element of the story by which we are leading our lives. The fictional element of our story finds its expression in all of our neurotic patterns. So we’re going to transform these, bring them to awareness, into beliefs and assumptions and ideas which accurately reflect the way things are.
The way things are, the suchness of things, this reality free of all our fabrications, free of all our limiting projection which we place upon reality, upon other people and situations. And this is experienced as freedom, wholeness, and bliss. You know, with this idea of I’ve been talking about beliefs and ideas and assumptions. We all have them. Most, and they all, based upon them, we conduct our lives.
And we seldom realize how irrational our beliefs are. How they completely divorced from the reality of our situations. We believe, for example, we believe ourselves to be limited, insufficient, incomplete. We act as if we’re going to live forever. And even if we acknowledge that someday I’m going to die, it’s not going to be soon.
It’s going to be some far and distant future, not anytime soon. We’re sure it’s going to be in some day, distant time. We feel as if we are victims of society, of our family. That somehow we have no choice in the matter. That our happiness is not in our own hands.
In fact, our happiness is not our own responsibility. We hold that which is unsatisfactory as having the potential to bring complete satisfaction and contentment. We hold that which is impermanent as permanent. We believe that this me first exaggerated self concern is an effective way to find happiness and avoid harm. And we believe that we can secure a self which cannot be secured.
We believe in an unchanging, permanent, independent self when in fact there is no independent, unchanging, independent self. So these are we have all of these errors. It’s like a layer upon layer, one depending upon one more primitive, primal, more basic, which leave various levels of awareness, wrong assumptions, wrong ideas, wrong belief. The two most primal epistemological areas upon which we base our lives are self centeredness and self grasping. So this is what we have to begin to work down and bring to awareness these mistaken ideas and begin to, in the light of our wisdom and our own experience, begin to transform them into types of beliefs, ideas, and assumptions which accord with reality.
Using this as our tool, beliefs, these ideas, these thoughts as a way of viewing, as a way of securing ourselves, as a way of finding happiness, solving our problems, then there’s a real possibility that we can become healthy because we have sound tools. We have the means. Otherwise, we don’t have no matter what we might do, all we know is what is in our own mind, all we have is our conditioning.
All we have is our beliefs, our ideas, our view. And if our view and ideals and beliefs are wrong, then what hope is that? To be able to act appropriately, skillfully, to find some kind of optimum mode of being. So all of these wrong ideas, these are the narratives by which we lead our life. These are some of the beliefs and assumptions upon which we base our life.
And because they don’t accord with the way things are, we inevitably must meet with disappointment, frustration, and dissatisfaction. So in the idea of a spiritual practice, in his first chapter of his book, Opening the Eye of New Awareness, the Dalai Lama talks about the need for religious practice, spiritual practice. It is trying to help us to come to a new order of being in the sense that it’s trying to help us to solve our problems inherent in unskillful lives, a life based upon distorted premises, which our lives are. It’s like any good therapy. It has to help us to become first aware of our problem.
It has this opening our eyes to the inappropriateness of our action. The beginning of wisdom is to become aware of our ignorance. If someone is acting inappropriately and they’re not aware of it, then there’s no hope for a cure. It’s only upon becoming aware of the inappropriateness of our thinking, of our belief, of our behavior, that we can ever hope to make adjustments, that we can ever hope to transform them. And we have to become aware to begin to see the inappropriateness of the way of our thinking, many of our beliefs.
The unskillfulness of our present mode of thinking and modes of behavior. Any type of therapy, any type of spiritual practice has to help us to overcome our stubborn refusal to ignore anything which might threaten our security. It has to give us some confidence that we can change. It has to give us, it has to inspire toward that change, to make effort. And it has to offer us a means to solve our problems.
It has to give us some means to grow above all. So there’s a saying in Buddhism that self nature is Buddha nature and Buddha nature is no nature. You know, the self as we presently conceive of it, the self as we presently conceive of it does not exist. This is not to say the self does not exist. The I does not exist, it does.
But as the I, the self, as we presently conceive of it does not exist. This non existence of the misconceived self is our very Buddha nature. Buddha nature is our inherent potential to become anything that we want to be. The freedom to be somebody, anybody, or nobody in any situation, in any place. We aren’t our pattern, in other words.
We never have been. These patterns can be altered. They can be changed. We have that ability, the potential. We have the means and the potential to solve our problems.
But on this road, to be somebody, anybody, to be nobody, on the road to becoming nobody. You know we all think we’re somebody. On the road to becoming the Buddha doesn’t think he’s anybody. On the road to becoming nobody, it’s necessary to be somebody in the sense that before we can begin to transcend our ego, it’s necessary that we evolve, that we develop a coherent, stable, healthy ego. You know, we have to be somebody before we can be nobody, before we can go beyond all our views, all our egocentric demands which we impose upon reality.
And we have to be somebody before we can be nobody. So this is the idea of the remedial measures of which, the remedial means which we have to make use of in transforming ourselves and the ultimate means to transform ourselves. There’s an example which is quite often used in Buddhism in that we’re walking along in the evening on a path. And along the path there’s a coiled striped rope. And because it’s slightly dark, one might see that striped rope as a snake.
And seeing a snake or what appears to be a snake one becomes afraid. That snake exists for a distorted awareness. For that mistaken consciousness that snake exists. It doesn’t exist in reality for wisdom consciousness. That snake exists for a distorted awareness, for a mistaken consciousness.
And that fear is very real. We can’t deny the experience. So the unexamined life, the life lived in total unawareness, unconsciously denies that there is even the appearance of a snake. It tries to ignore the existence of the snake. It tries to distract itself.
It pretends as if it weren’t there. Distracting, denying, ignoring. Even so, the fear still remains. There is a snake which appears to have distorted awareness. The unexamined life tries to deny the very existence of that appearance.
It tries to ignore it. It tries to continually, you know, the speed by which we lead our lives, by which we seek to distract ourselves in the hope that the appearance of a snake will not arise through our consciousness, to our awareness. But still the fear is there. Still we experience the pain. Psychotherapy and some levels of spiritual practice acknowledge the existence of the snake and the fear that’s surrounding it.
And they devote themselves to working with fear by developing a healthy way of relating with the snake. The appearance of the snake is not examined. What is examined is our fear and how to work with that fear with regard to that snake. There is a tacit acceptance that the appearance of the snake is real. And this is as far as perhaps psychotherapy and some levels of spiritual practice go in helping us to work to get along with snakes.
And helping us to adjust, to become well adjusted to the snake, become well adjusted individuals. So it’s only at the deeper most profound levels of spiritual practice that the existence of the snake is brought into question. That is that the ultimate nature of our world is examined. The illusory nature of the snake is understood that it only exists for a mistaken consciousness. With that awareness, the fear dissolves on itself.
Like a mist upon the rising of the the morning sun, the fear is gone because it was based upon a mistaken premise, a wrong belief because we didn’t understand. One experiences freedom from fear. One experiences peace. So it’s the province of psychotherapy and some levels of spiritual practice to help us to become well adjusted individuals, to develop healthy egos. But it’s the province of the profound levels of spiritual practice which help us to go beyond individuality and experience totality to help us to transcend the ego.
And to work through our distorted premises upon which we’re leading our lives. And thereby to experience well-being. What this might mean, well-being. Well-being means to be fully born, to become what one potentially is. It means to have full capacity for joy and for sadness or, to put it still differently, to awake from the half slumber the average man lives in and to be fully awake.
If it is all that, it means also to be creative. That is to react and respond to myself, to others, to everything that exists. To react and to respond as the real total man I am, to the reality of everybody and everything as he or it is. In this act of true response lies the area of creativity, of seeing the world as it is and experiencing it as my world. The world created and transformed by my creative grasp of it so that the world ceases to be a strange world over there and becomes my world.
Well-being means finally to drop one’s ego, to give up greed, to cease chasing after preservation and the aggrandizement of the ego, To be and to experience oneself in the act of being, not in having, preserving, coveting, using. You know to put it perhaps to put it most simply, it’s the function any valid religion to help us to solve our problems both temporally and ultimate, to find both temporal and ultimate happiness. And in the first chapter of Opening the Eye of New Awareness, the Need for Religious Practice, The Dalai Lama says, all beings are equal in that they want happiness and do not want suffering. This does not apply merely to us humans of brightest intelligence, all even dumb and obscured creatures from the tiniest insect on up only want happiness and do not want suffering. Therefore everyone, ourselves and others, must find a method to cause happiness to arise and to keep suffering from arising.
Without it, it is impossible for happiness to rise and for suffering to be eliminated merely by wanting it with great hope. How nice it would be if I had happiness and did not have suffering. Merely wishing for happiness, merely wishing not to suffer is not sufficient. We have to create the causes for happiness. We have to create the causes to alleviate our problem.
Consequently, we must establish the causes from which happiness arises and abandon the basis of arising of suffering. The means for establishing the causes of benefit and happiness and for abandoning harm and suffering cannot be gained by any other way as fully and completely as they are through religious practice. So this is, you know whatever religion might be, whatever spirituality might be, however we might define it, it is a system, a means by which we can deal with our problems on their deepest most level, both our temporal and ultimate problem, to find a means, a way to find both temporal and ultimate happiness. You know the Buddhist, we’re talking about Buddhist spiritual practice. It is centered around raising the level of awareness, raising the level of our wisdom, the deepening of our love and compassion, the fostering of creative, skillful activities in benefiting others.
And all of this essentially consists in development of our mind. This development is central to Buddhism and it takes place both directly and indirectly. You know the indirect method of developing our mind, raising the level of our consciousness, becoming more aware, can take various forms. For example, you know Buddhism doesn’t have the market cornered on methods to be happy. Just simply going out into the countryside can raise the level, the quality of our mind.
Being close to nature for example, just for a few days. The type of work that we do. The type of work which is productive, which is useful, making a good product with a sense of pride. Or even more skillful, working in an occupation which directly benefits others. Indirect methods to help us to raise the level of our awareness, our consciousness.
Food that we’re eating nutritious food, having you know at regular times for example, having regular work, study, times of relaxation, times of silence, times of exercise, you know, hatha yoga, tai chi, all have a beneficial effect upon the mind. The enjoyment of good music, art, literature all have the possibility of raising the level of our consciousness if these works are reflections of the artist’s higher levels of consciousness. In a practical way, there’s the helping of others, you know, doing voluntary work with little or no selfishness. It’s helpful to associate with people who are spiritually orientated, spiritually minded individuals and teachers who are more spiritually advanced than we are. Even the offering of a few flowers at an image, offering a candle at an altar, doing prostrations, chanting, various rituals all have some beneficial effect on the mind.
All of these indirect methods are combined with each other in various ways to raise the level of our awareness, to raise the level of our consciousness. But they by themselves cannot carry us through all the necessary levels. It’s necessary that as part of our complete spiritual practice that we make use of a direct method in dealing with the mind. This direct method is meditation. The way the mind is transformed.
The method of meditation involves three stages of training. It involves the stages of listening, reflecting, and then meditating. It’s said that meditation without listening and reflecting is like being blind. And listening and reflecting without meditation is like having eyes but no legs. In either case, we don’t get very far.
So the first stage in this direct method of meditation is the stage of listening. And this involves listening or studying the various teachings with an open receptive mind. That type of mind that’s not distorting what’s being heard or what’s being read. This is the initial stage. You know we’re gathering information, something to go on.
We’re gaining some understanding. You know the terms, the categories, the basic structure of the teaching. And then we reflect upon it. We contemplate it. This involves carefully thinking about what one has heard in order to clarify its meaning, its significance.
One examines what one has heard in light of one’s reasoning and one’s experience. Is this teaching true or is it false? Does it accord with my experience or does it not? And two, are my methods of reasoning and my experience, are they valid or not? Through this questioning process doubt is going to be created.
And doubt is the precursor to knowledge. There are two types of doubt, afflictive doubt and what we would call healthy doubt. Healthy doubt is a powerful state of mind. It is said that if one has doubt with respect to the nature of cyclic existence, has doubt as with respect to whether things truly exist or not, that very doubt shakes the very foundations of the ego structure of cyclic existence. Thinking for yourself in terms of your own reasoning and experiencing, questioning, doubting.
Then the third stage is meditating. And this is the integrating the newly acquired understanding into one’s being, into one’s character. It is actually, in a way it’s like putting it into practice. We be. We be love.
We be wisdom. Rather than thinking about love, rather than thinking about what might be wise, Actually doing it, becoming it as opposed to just thinking about it. So at the listening stage we gather all the bare facts together and how the information fits together, beginning to see the structure. Then in the reflecting stage, our reasoning, using our experience, we begin to gain some kind of certitude, certainty with respect to what is being said because we see it accords with our experience. It accords with our reasoning.
This process of creating, clarifying doubts. Through clarifying our doubts we gain knowledge, we gain confidence and conviction. And with this confidence we embark on the third stage, meditation. All doubts and hesitations are removed. One experiences the teachings directly, the true meaning of the teachings, the significance.
One actually experiences them. Through this one accustoms oneself to this newfound experience again and again and again. And the level of our consciousness is raised. We never give over ourselves to anything or anyone. We’re always holding back out of fear.
So the process, we have to, the process which is being described here places great demands upon us. That we use all of our faculties, our potential, our imagination, and intelligence as means to transform our mind and thereby to transform our life and our world. We do everything fragmentedly, half heartedly. We have a kind of schizophrenia. It’s very much, you know, there’s a quotation by the Buddha in which he says, the Buddhas do not wash away sins with water.
They do not remove suffering by their hands nor do they transfer their realizations to the minds of others. But by their showing of the truth, all will be made free. And that’s, you know, all the qualities of realized beings. All they can do is to show us what they have discovered. And then it’s pretty much our own responsibility to take recourse to all our faculty of wisdom and love and acumen to take that truth and make it and discover it for ourselves, to make it our truth and to integrate it and thereby to change.
That’s very much our responsibility. No one else can do it for us. It’s our work. It’s for the sake of helping us in this stage of listening that the Dalai Lama wrote in the book that we’re going to be looking at, Opening the Eye of New Awareness. It’s as he says in the first chapter, In the Buddhist way, internal culture is achieved through thought and meditation.
And for that it is necessary to know how to think and how to meditate. Therefore, in accordance with the merit of those beings who do not have the leisure to study the great texts profound and full of impact, I write this opening the eye of new awareness, a treatise of few words, primarily for easy comprehension, expanding the illumination of the wisdom that thoroughly differentiates phenomena. So we’re going to involve ourselves with this stage of listening. We’re going to be gathering information, new ways of looking at things. And then the rest is up to us individually, that we take what we have heard, what we study and begin to view it, to exercise, to place it up to the light of our own wisdom to see if it accords with our experience, to see if it stands to reason, to create doubts and begin to transform and hopefully to change.
Substance is the way things are divorced of our conceptions about them. The way that things are in and of themselves Apart from our view of them. Our concepts about them. Our thoughts which we use to understand them. So it’s quite difficult to comprehend the way things actually are.
We can know it directly. Yeah.