Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute talk, Ven Jampa Gendun opens by distinguishing existential anxiety — the reasonable recognition that life’s recurring disappointments will continue unless something changes — from neurotic anxiety, which is mere resistance to change. He then presents three levels of faith using a desert-thirst analogy: clear faith, longing faith, and convincing faith earned through direct experience. The session moves into guided meditation on the disadvantages of self-centeredness and the advantages of other-centeredness, inviting listeners to recall their most genuinely fulfilling moments. A memorable digression — the “trans hot dog” analysis, drawn from a baseball stadium scene — illustrates why meditators need not bite into every thought that passes through awareness. The talk closes with a brief introduction to the two truths and emptiness.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 11 OtE 1991 09 18.mp3
UUID: 0b5de289-af9d-4954-9bf2-aca618473125
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Opening the Eye of New Awareness 1991-1992 (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1991-09-18
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.6 minutes
Words: ~4,566
Not so much what we do, but as why we do it, which determines the quality of the result. And so, this constant process of re adjusting our motivation, re orientating ourselves, redirecting ourselves. What is important to me as a unique individual, what works for me? Getting in touch perhaps with some of our more central values that we have autonomously, hopefully, created for ourselves during the course of our life, in light of our own wisdom, our experience, our discrimination, judgment, our intuition. I said, in this process of reorientation, this redirecting of ourselves, there are two basic causes.
One is anxiety and the other is faith. And anxiety in the sense of beginning to see perhaps some of the reoccurring patterns of dissatisfaction, disappointment and frustration which predominate in our life, are sort of the ongoing themes in our life. Aside from perhaps the particular content, the overall quality of our life. And if we don’t change, then these patterns won’t change. We feel, we get a sense of distress, that no matter what we may do on the outside, no matter what partner we may find, job, material success, status, that pretty much aside from the differing particular contents of the experience, the qualities of our life are going to remain pretty much the same.
The same patterns are going to reoccur. And there’s a certain anxiety which begins to arise. And this anxiety must be strong enough. This is, as I mentioned, using perhaps not necessarily so, but a complicated term, existential anxiety. It’s something which is quite reasonable and is an expression of our actual situation as opposed to neurotic anxiety, which has no reasonable basis, which is purely a product of our hallucinations, our imagination.
It’s not imaginary that we’re suffering. That’s one of our basic realities. That’s our truth. Our suffering is, in a way, our truth. And it can tell us something.
You say that our pains are true, trying to speak to us if we’re willing to listen. And at some point, existential anxiety overcomes our neurotic anxiety. That is our existential fear, our fear of our reasonable fears, which begin to gain insight into the fact that our sufferings are going to continue very much the way they are unless we change. We are able to overcome our neurotic fears against change, against the legitimate suffering that change necessarily involves. Unless we develop this sense of distress at the recurring patterns of our life, begin to gain insight into the dissatisfactoriness, we’re never going to overcome this neurotic fear of change, of willingly undergoing legitimate suffering, confronting our difficulties and working with them in a realistic fashion.
We are always going to be at the mercy of the pleasure pain principle. The moment we begin to approach a painful situation, confront difficulties, begin to see things that we don’t like, we’re going to distract ourselves, we’re going to turn in another direction, and our problems remain untouched, unknown, unworked with, and therefore unsolved. One of the causes for this process of redirecting ourselves is gaining insight into the reoccurring dissatisfactory qualities of our lives and developing a sense of distress, anxiety about the future extended possibilities of what has gone in the past. The second is faith. It wouldn’t be enough just to say, oh, things are bad.
Unless one has faith that things could be better. And there’s some conviction that growth is possible, that there are methods to solve your problems. And I mentioned this, I think, in one talk a few weeks ago, that there are various types of faith. And one of the ways in which we look at faith it’s probably quite we use the same word in translation, but perhaps it’s very different than it’s conceived of in Christianity. There’s an analogy which is presented in giving the qualities of faith and the development of strengths of faith.
Initially we developed a clear faith. And there are three levels of faith: clear faith, longing faith, and convincing faith. Clear faith, longing faith, and convincing faith. And the analogy which is usually presented in explaining these three levels of faith is that someone is in the desert and they’re dying of thirst. They’re in pain, essentially.
And it becomes clear to them what their problem is. They need water. An idea arises in their mind. They get some insight into their situation. It’s not simply a dull dissatisfaction, but they have some discrimination as to what might be causing this situation, what is causing the pain.
It becomes clear to them if they had water. Maybe they’re not even sure, but they know they’re thirsty. They begin to search, walk through the desert. And they hear in the distance the sound of running water. And a longing arises in their mind.
They haven’t experienced the solution to their problem. All they’ve heard is maybe some explanation that solutions do in fact exist. But it appeals to them. It sounds reasonable. So at first it was just an assumption that maybe water was the solution to problem.
But then they hear an explanation. And appeals to their reason. And they develop a longing to actually gain that water that they only now hear. They don’t even see it. It’s off in the distance.
And then finally, they find the water. And they develop convincing faith because they actually experience the solution to their problem, the elimination of their thirst. And this is the most stable of all types of Another categorization of faith is in terms of faith based upon no reason, faith dependent upon wrong reasons, and faith dependent upon correct reasons, And then faith dependent or embedded within our own experience. And obviously there’s a difference in qualities of this faith in the sense of the stability, the amount of emotional energy which one will imbue them with, any objects of those faiths. Faith based upon no reason if it’s a sunny day, maybe you’ll practice.
If it’s not, you won’t. Faith based upon no wrong reason, somebody says another thing. I was wrong. Your faith is lost. But faith based upon reason is fairly stable.
It’s not going to be easily overturned. You’re going to be consistent in your practice. But faith based upon within your own experience can never be converted. You know beyond words, through your own experience, the ability to deliver the goods. There’s a payoff.
And likewise, of this sense of first we hear a talk. Someone points to our difficulties and says that we have dissatisfaction, disappointments, frustrations, and begins to talk about them and begins to elaborate them and begins to refine our sense of what our problems are. We begin to think, yeah, that sounds like my problem he’s talking about or she’s talking about. So we develop a sense of clear faith. Get a clear idea of what some of our basic problems are.
Perhaps we’ve never considered them, or perhaps we’ve considered been looking in the wrong place about what our problems are. But now we develop a clear idea of what our problems are. But that’s not enough. Perhaps the teacher or whomever begins to talk about some of the possible solutions to your problem. And at this point it’s mere words.
It sounds reasonable. Say, yeah, that sounds like it might work. Now if I told you that the basic root of your problem is ignorance, misknowledge, and I went on to explain how misknowledge or ignorance is the foundation for the rising of various afflictive emotions of attachment and hatred and that misknowledge can be overcome by wisdom. I work out the problem, I state the problem clearly, its source, its nature, its cause. I explain that it has a possibility of being removed And I go through the methods whereby it can be removed.
A very reasonable, clear cut explanation of a path. You think, yeah, that appeals to my reason. And a sense of longing arises to try to implement it in your life. You’re not sure but it sounds right. And then finally, maybe you work with the method somewhat and you do develop some degree of satisfaction.
You do eliminate some of your problems out of your own experience. It’s validated. And that’s convincing faith. You’ve gained conviction. You’re convinced.
So out of this arises a very stable faith. So in this process of redirecting ourselves, reorientating ourselves, first we have to have a reason for reorientating ourselves and that is our existential anxiety about the continuation of the dissatisfactory quality of our present mode of being. That these reoccurring patterns are going to persist unless we change, we do something. And this will overcome our neurotic anxiety about change, of confronting our problems, going through the difficulties and taking up the legitimate suffering involved. To think that traveling a spiritual path is simply the skillful avoidance of difficulties would be a great mistake.
It’s not. It means that we have to voluntarily take up difficult tasks, methods, means. You know, it’s not to say that it involves hairy shirts and laying on beds and nails. But either way, we’re going to suffer. But our suffering, our difficulty has some meaning.
If we voluntarily take up difficulties, if we voluntarily choose a path of growth, it’s going to be an ultimate solution to our problems. And if we don’t, we’re going to suffer anyway and that suffering will never end. And developing a sense of anxiety concerning our dissatisfaction. But additionally, and just as importantly, developing a sense of faith that I, as a unique individual, have this particular problem which can be worked with and solved. There is a solution.
Without this sense that there is a solution, there’s no sense in talking about the problem. You don’t even get depressed. It would just add more depression to your already difficult life. So a sense of anxiety and a conviction that there’s a way to work with the problem. Out of this, we direct ourselves, we reorientate ourselves.
And the central principle of our inner goal of life becomes growth as personified in the paradigm of sanity of a Buddha. And this is achieved through the Dharma and in the social context of a spiritual community. And we try to raise the level of motivation for this process of growth, for this process of developing ourselves such that I’m developing myself so that I can help others to do the same. By becoming a happy, loving, sane human being, I can help others to do the same. I go for refuge until I’m enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the highest assembly.
From the virtuous merit that I collect by practicing giving any 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, Buddharma, and highest assembly. And 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. From the virtuous merits that I collect by practicing giving in the other perfections, may I attain the state of a Buddha to be able to benefit all sentient beings.
So we’re going to begin with the meditation, first on mindfulness of breathing, and we’re going to continue our meditation, making use of the two meditational techniques for the development of an awakening heart. The first meditational technique is what is called the sevenfold cause and effect instruction, and the second is called exchange of self with others. And within the tradition of exchange of self with others, first we want to develop a sense of equality of self in others, that others — essentially the basic thing to be understood or to be integrated, to be experienced is — others are just like myself. Everybody wants to be happy. No one wants to suffer just like myself, no different.
We cease devaluing, objectifying others, and we see them as feeling beings, just like myself. Based upon this, then we begin to look at the disadvantages of self centeredness, all our various difficulties, all our various problems which are continued sense of I, I, I, me, me, me, me first, I first way of thinking, way of life or attitude has brought to us. It has brought us nothing but pain. We’re never more miserable than when we only think of ourselves. We’re never happier than when we begin to, in a healthy, productive way, be concerned about others.
This exaggerated self concern is the source of all our problems, all our suffering. And what I mean by self centeredness is not that we shouldn’t be concerned about ourselves, we have to be concerned about ourselves. But it’s seeking happiness for oneself at the expense and exclusion of others. It’s very isolating. We meditated last week on some of the disadvantages or drawbacks of self centeredness, the way it isolates ourselves, the loneliness that it creates, the sense of defensiveness, the feeling of it’s me against the world.
We have an adversary relationship and it’s one of the saddest things that I see, even amongst couples. If they’re both, what they’re doing is mutually beneficial, if it’s making them both happy, that’s fine. They’ll go together. But the moment it becomes difficult for one partner as opposed to the other, then there begins some adversary quality begins to arise in the relationship. And our constant manipulating, having to be on guard, keeping up our credentials and maintaining our self image, guarding our territory, having to control.
All are products of this self-cherishing or self centeredness. But on the other hand, there are the advantages of other centerednessedness which we’re going to meditate on. First, we’ll do mindfulness of breathing and then we’re going to meditate on the advantages of other centeredness. And again, when we say other centeredness, it’s in terms of for example, the Dalai Lama said maybe we should think fiftyfifty. It’s not that we neglect our problems.
That would serve no one. That would be of no use to anyone. It’s that we begin to put our problems in some perspective. If you use your wisdom and discrimination, then there’s no unnaturalness. There’s nothing that we have to force ourselves to do.
In this whole process of making use of the dharma, not as if we’re trying to — the dharma was made for human beings. human beings were not made for the dharma. It’s not as if we’re trying to fit ourselves into a straight jacket, trying to twist ourselves, our mind as if we’re trying to brainwash ourselves into believing something. But in fact, the essential quality of the dharma is that it is concordant with reality. It is a truth, a particular version of the way things are.
And it is experienced as happiness. And what more could one ask for than that? That it is self authenticating. It is internally consistent. What I mean is if we use our intelligence, then we don’t have to use our brute force.
You will change. These subjects and these meditations, if they’re done with intelligence, then your mind will change because it wants to be happy and because what is being stated is based within the reality of our situation. So it can’t be unreasonable. It can’t be contravened by your own experience. So the mind is dynamic in nature.
Presenting yourself, transforming your mind, you will change. You may not even notice. One day you may surprise yourself and realize that you have changed, even against your own trying to resist the change, that you have in fact changed, that you are a more loving person, a kinder person, a gentler person, that you are more concerned with others. It’s not that we’re saying it may have some artificiality about it, maybe. But maybe a little bit is okay.
But it’s not to say that we have to force ourselves to do anything which You should have no regret. There’s fifty one secondary mental factors and one categorization of mental factors into what I call the four changeables. And amongst these four changeables is a factor of regret. Regret is both negative and positive. It’s changeable.
There’s positive regret and negative regret. Positive regret would be, for example, if you killed something, you’d say, wish I hadn’t done that. On the other hand, negative regret is when you do something which was positive, which was skillful. You give somebody some money. And later on, I gave them too much money.
I wish I hadn’t done that. We don’t have to have any reason for regret if we use our intelligence because everything can be seen as if it’s just arising naturally. It is arising out of this change which is taking place within yourself. What we’re doing is appealing to our basic sanity, our basic intelligence, our Buddha nature. Presenting the ideas, the material, thinking about it deeply, analyzing in the light of our reason, our experience, our intuition, and our mind will change.
We will change. We will be different people. So we’re going to look at the advantages of other centeredness. It’s a new idea, that’s all. People talk about realizations as if they were earth shaking, mystical experiences.
But we have realizations, new ideas every day. Sometimes they go by unnoticed. Sometimes they’re quite trivial perhaps. But nonetheless, they build up over time. It’s a new idea, the idea of other centeredness.
It’s a radical revolutionary idea in the west. Mean, they write books about me first. There’s that one television commercial for the most important person in the world. They’re reinforcing a sense of self centeredness, exaggerated self centeredness. So this is going against the flow.
It’s a new idea but it’s really useful to be presented these ideas. Maybe we’ve never heard these ideas before. So our mind didn’t have a chance to work with them. And now it has. And now it will change.
If it sees within its own experience that this is useful, the mind’s always looking for a payoff quite naturally. That’s intelligent. And when the mind is in pain, it’s looking for a way to work with that pain, it’s distress. It’s going to use any skillful method that it can come up with. If we can come up with a more skillful method, it’s going to say fine, I’m going to set aside self centeredness because I see other centeredness in my own best self interest even more.
It’s like being wisely selfish. The more that we concern ourselves with others, the happier we’re going to be. But that takes some deep thinking and requires a great deal of small validations within your own experience. So you build up that confidence and that conviction. You develop convincing faith and you overcome this hesitancy of letting go.
So we’re going to meditate on mindfulness of breathing. And in terms of mindfulness of breathing, we’re making use of the two techniques of counting and noting. So counting the breaths, the natural breathing, in out one, in out two, in out three, in out four, in out five, one through six, through seven, through eight, through nine, one through ten as a means of helping the developmental factor of mindfulness and as a means of helping this developmental factor of awareness, noting, whatever the mind is from moment to moment. Theoretically, it may be involved in the breath. Breathing in, knowing that you’re breathing in, noting in, breathing out, knowing that you’re breathing out, breathing out.
If you find that your mind has been distracted, the moment you become aware that it has been distracted, perhaps an internal object such as thinking, simply note what it is, thinking, and return to the breath. Outside, external object, perhaps sound, hearing, come back to the breath. We can develop a real skill in this, making use of the ability to note. It helps to create some space between ourselves and objects. It helps to create some space between our mind and our thoughts.
We are not our thoughts. There’s what I call the do I call it? Trans hot dog analysis. A trans hot dog analysis. It’s a school of thought which I just made up.
Where this comes from is the idea that, you know, I’m from the States. In States, in a baseball game, people are sitting in these rows of seats. And it might be thirty people across. And there are these people walking up and down the aisle carrying these boxes full of hot dogs. And rather than walking down to the aisle, you might have to walk over fifteen people to get there, you just kind of wave your hand.
And the hot dog man, he takes notice of you and you do some mudras, sign gestures, he tells you, Do you want mustard and relish and pickle and onion? Rather than him coming down to give it to you, he hands your hot dog to the first person in a row. And the first person hands it to the second person. And the second person hands it to third, to the fourth, and the fourth, the fifth. And finally, it works its way down to you.
So, you know, the situation might arise during the course of the baseball game. You’re intently involved in the game. Anyway, I don’t know if you know baseball very well. The ninth inning, your team is down one run. There’s two outs.
A man on two outs, you’re behind. Anyway, it’s coming to this crucial moment in the game and you’re intently watching the game and someone taps you on the shoulder and they put this hot dog in your hand. And this is this is, you know, this soft, warm, fluffy bun with this juicy hot dog with mustard and relish. And you you get this huge desire rising in your mind. Just take a huge bite out of that hot dog.
You know, before you even know what hits you, you know, there’s this hot there’s this thing there. But it’s not your hot dog. If you want a hot dog, you can order a hot dog. All your job is to pass the hot dog on. So in the same way, making use of our thinking faculty, our intellect, It’s an extremely useful tool, but it’s not more than that.
It’s very necessary and we should train our intellect, hone it, sharpen it, but use it where it’s appropriate. Where it’s not appropriate, then we should be able to set it aside and make use of other faculties of the mind. We think we’re very important. We think every thought we have is very important because it’s our thought, as if I am my thoughts. Therefore my thoughts must be very important because I’m important.
But they aren’t. They are simply objects of mind. They arise, they abide and they will cease. We don’t have to bite into every thought that comes by no matter how juicy they might look if it’s not appropriate. We can develop the space, the ability simply to pass the thought.
You can even say to yourself, ‘pass’. And we don’t have to do anything with that hot dog. We have to do anything with that thought. It is impermanent. We neither have to indulge in it or repress it.
If we indulge in it, then we’re lost. We’re going to go off into some fantasy, some story. If we seek to repress it, that’s going to require another thought, conceptualization, to repress that first thought. And we’re simply going to proliferate thought. That very energy of seeking to repress that thought is going to bounce back at us.
So there’s only one position that we can take, and that is the situation of equanimity. We neither repress nor indulge. We simply acknowledge there is a thought. But we pass it, we let it go by. It’s not mine.
If you want to think about something, order a thought. If you don’t, then simply pass. Acknowledge. Thinking, thinking, thinking, guaranteed it will go away. It’s not permanent.
The thought will go away. The feeling will go away if you’re neither repressed nor indulged. And then go back to the breath. So let’s try that. If you take a comfortable but firm posture, we’ll begin with mindfulness of breathing, and then we’ll meditate on the advantages of other center.
Now we’re going to look at other centeredness. And just go back in your own experiences and try to remember those times when you really felt fulfilled, really at peace, And your life felt meaningful. There was a certain contentment, especially in relationship with others. From your most meaningful, fulfilling moments. Think of those experiences that you were drawn out of yourself, your normal boundaries of self were dissolved, and you seem to exist on a higher plane, aesthetic experiences like of music or art, beautiful performance, maybe listening to a teaching, some sort of inspirational moment.
When you went beyond the old bounds of self. Consider the experience of emotional or sexual union with the beloved, almost emerging with another being. A parent watching their child, sympathetic joy, and the happiness of another. Think of those moments when you had a sense of communion or sharing with others, the usual boundaries of ego dissolved, and either with another or a group, a sense of oneness, a sense of ease, Spontaneity. Enjoy.
The moment we become aware of another’s difficulties and share in them, that very moment our own problems lessen at once. So we’re discussing the two levels of reality. The two truths, conventional truth and ultimate truth. Conventional truth, relative truth, or truth for a concealer. Different ways of translating the same term.
Synonyms having very much the same meaning. Conventional truth, relative truth, truth for a concealer. These are the types of objects which have a superficial reality, that reality which lies at the surface of things, that which is conditioned by our culture, by language, concepts. There are such things as people, dogs, cats, tables, the dharma, houses, all of these types of objects. Conventional truths, all conventional truths.
And there is the ultimate truth. Truth for a wisdom consciousness which is analyzing for the deepest way that things exist, which is trying to go beneath the surface of appearances and wants to know what is behind those appearances. What is the way those objects exist? What is the way this table exists? What is the way the person exists?
What is the way the dharma exists, whatever the object might be? An analyzing consciousness, not consciousness which is working with names and terms, but one which is doing an analysis, performing an investigation of the nature, the deepest nature of the object. And that nature is emptiness. So emptiness, it has various classifications, whether it’s classified into twenty, eighteen, sixteen, four, or simply two. The simplest classification is the emptiness of person, people, and the emptiness of phenomena, everything other than people.