Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute session, Ven Jampa Gendun opens with a sharp observation: people who follow every social script — right university, right spouse, right job, right car — still end up profoundly unhappy, because they have never questioned whether those external goals actually deliver. He argues that working directly with the mind must rank alongside relationships and meaningful work as a central method for living well, and cautions against ego-driven over-practice as just another form of spiritual materialism. A psychiatrist’s definition of love — the will to extend oneself to nourish oneself or another — anchors his treatment of understanding as the very basis of compassion, illustrated by the practice of meditating on a difficult son rather than on an abstract doctrine. The second half leads a guided choiceless-awareness meditation using a noting technique, then continues a commentary on the Dalai Lama’s text, examining the five hindrances and reframing their purpose: working through obstacles is itself the transformative learning, not a prelude to it. Accessible to newcomers and experienced practitioners alike.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 13 OtE 1991 11 27.mp3
UUID: 5898e3e8-e8a4-4945-b73c-52376606dd09
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Opening the Eye of New Awareness 1991-1992 (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1991-11-27
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.7 minutes
Words: ~4,089
We’ll begin with adjusting our motivation. Getting in touch with what’s happening within ourselves is we’re continually being forced to externalize ourselves, our orientation is such that we often don’t know what we want, what we’re doing, what’s going on within ourselves. So in adjusting our motivation, getting back in touch with some of our central values, some of our principles, what has meaning, what gives my life a sense of purpose, what brings me contentment. Something which works very uniquely for you. It’s something very unique to each one of us.
Each one of us has a very unique history. Not what we think will bring us happiness, not what we’ve been told will bring us happiness, but what in fact works out of our own experience, own reason, our own intuition. One of the sad things that you see happening to people is that they do all the right things over the course of their life. All the right things according to the social norms that we’ve been taught, that we’ve been conditioned by, that have been implanted and instilled in us. I know in the United States where I came from, it was much the thing to go to the right school, the right university.
And having gone to the right university you married the right wife or the right husband and you went with the right firm, got the right kind of job, and you got the right health, and the right number of kids, and the right number of dogs, and the right car. But sometimes for many people, and it’s coming to be more and more the case, they’ve done everything right but they look at themselves if they’re willing to stop and confront the quality of their life. They’ve done everything right but they’re very unhappy people. They have all the trappings of the good life but they’re going through a lot of pain, a lot of dissatisfaction, frustration and disappointment. So if we can learn by our experiences then we don’t have to keep making the same mistakes, we don’t have to come to the end of our life and ask ourselves what was it all for.
I didn’t really have much fun. It really wasn’t a very satisfying, a very fulfilling experience. I struggled and I sweated and I cried a lot and I tried to do all the right things that I thought would work, but in fact none of them brought to me the expected happiness, the hope for achievements. But none of the promises were ever delivered. We’ve all had the experiences but we missed the lesson.
You know like water running off a duck’s back. It can be raining reality, but we stick to our fantasy. We stick to our preconceptions, our ideas about how things should be, how we think, how we’ve been told they should be, or how we would like them to be. And we’re very unwilling to confront the real issues of our life and the real hollowness and the real chaos of our existence. So this all sounds pretty pessimistic doesn’t it?
But there’s hope. The hope is that we can do something if we’re willing to confront issues. If we’re not, then there’s no hope. And there’s only the repetition of what has gone in the past, the playing out of these patterns of you get a new wife or a new spouse, husband, new job, new degree, another degree, another car, another, you move to another town, but the same problems seem to be cropping up wherever you go, whatever you do. These reoccurring dissatisfactions and frustrations, disappointments.
You change the external surroundings, get everything exactly as you would like it, as you think it should be, and still it hasn’t delivered the goods, it hasn’t paid off, there’s still something wrong. Sooner or later we have to begin to question, And the question involves a reorientation. Making the quality of one’s internal life, that which you bring to all of these external situations and relationships, a very important component amongst your array of methods getting the good life that we all want. Amongst all of these methods, we can have a vast variety of methods if we’re skillful of dealing with the world and finding our place in it. Amongst these should be one in which we’re working directly with the mind, working directly with our attitudes, our views, our ideas, our beliefs about the world, our beliefs about ourselves and how I am to relate with that world.
This is really skillful. This should be one of the important components, one of the important methods. It should be like this is important as the food that we eat, the relationships that we have, the finding meaningful vocation, interesting work, pleasurable hobbies, going on vacation, all of these fulfilling, meaningful means by which we find the happiness that we’re looking for amongst these. And it doesn’t have to be, we don’t have to think, we should always keep some kind of balance, we should be relaxed. You know I always question when somebody’s burning both ends of the candle.
It looks nice in terms of their Dharma practice, and it’s been my experience over the few years that I’ve been hanging out with Dharma people that it doesn’t last very long. It’s ego driven, it’s just another facet of taking in their ambition, their competitiveness and bringing it into their Dharma practice. It’s just another facet or manifestation of spiritual materialism. So trying to lead a balanced life, a good life. You know with all of the important things which you find meaningful.
But amongst these ensuring that you create some time, give some energy, some space to working directly with your mind. Listening, reflecting, meditating, trying to lead an ethical life, trying to get in touch with your basic sanity, trying to develop love and compassion, and grow in wisdom, seeing deeply into the nature of reality. Then you can’t live. Things will go well. You can sort of relax.
If you want to solve the world’s problems you have to put your own household, your own individual life in order first. That is somewhat a paradox. People have a genuine desire to go beyond their individual cramped lives to benefit the world, but if you do not start at home then you have no hope of helping the world. So the first step in learning how to rule is learning how to rule your household, your immediate world. There is no doubt that if you do so, then the next step will come naturally.
If you fail to do so, then your contribution to the world will be further chaos. You know, we’re trying to develop, increase our perspective, trying to open up our narrow world that we combine ourselves to, trying to open up our hearts. We take as the central inner focus of our life, growth. We take as the paradigm of that growth Buddha, the model, a happy, loving, healthy, sane human being. And the means, the techniques by which we realize, actualize Buddha within ourselves is the Dharma.
And this all operates, this works within the social context of a spiritual community. So it’s this changing of allegiance from our normal value systems which are totally based upon hope and fear to one of growth. And but we try to expand our horizons to adjust our motivation not only to grow from my own piece of chocolate cake, But it’s a means to be able to help others. There’s a very good definition of love, which an American psychiatrist of all things came up with, which I like. The will to extend oneself for the purpose of nourishing one’s own or another’s spiritual well-being.
The will to extend oneself. Will. Love is not a feeling, it’s not some kind of warm, cozy feeling that you have. It’s a choice that you make, a matter of will. One must extend, that is to say go beyond our normal boundaries, our normal patterns.
It requires some kind of work, some kind of exertion. To choose to work in order to help oneself or another person is what is love. Many parents do this every day of their life. Spouses do it to one another, lovers do it to one another. And we want to try to be able to develop that first toward ourselves, to love ourselves, to work, to nourish ourselves, but to not stop there, to open our hearts and to begin to work for the benefit of others, to nourish them.
So we can actually meditate, we can do any activity with the motivation that I’m doing this, this is my work for others. So if we can do this, if we can begin to change the reorientation away from self centeredness to other centeredness, And whatever we do, we’re not only helping ourselves, but we’re helping others. It may not be directly apparent and it may not be directly beneficial at the present moment, But we can’t be confined to we have to get our own house in order. And if we say, I’m getting my own house in order to be able to benefit others, then getting your own house in order is benefiting others eventually somewhere down the line. Love is very much to understand yourself and others.
And if Buddhism is anything, it is simply and very profoundly a means to understand ourselves, the way our minds operate, the way we relate with others and the nature of our world around us. And we take what we learn and we apply it to our everyday activities to help us to solve our problems and to be able to help others to solve theirs. You know talking about love as understanding. It has a component of of seeing the actual situation which we’re all in, and it’s not so very good. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but even this last week I’m again and again amazed at the isolation all of us live in, the separation between us and amongst us, the silent lives of desperation which the vast majority of people live within.
You know, understanding this in my own terms, understanding this in terms of others. Because one doesn’t have to be ashamed to feel guilt as if somehow you would there was some unique problem about you. But in fact it’s the case of ego based existence. We’re all in the very same situation. We’ve all conditioned we’ve all been conditioned to think and to believe and to view the world as we do and it’s completely dissatisfactory, disappointing and frustrating, isolating, lonely, inauthentic, fragmented schizoid, you know whatever you want to say about it.
Suppose we have a son who becomes an unbearable young man. It may be hard for us to love him, that is natural. In order to be loved a person should be lovable. If our son has become difficult to love, we will be very unhappy. We wish we could love him, but the only way we can is to understand him, to understand his situation.
We have to take our son as the subject of our meditation. Instead of taking the concept of emptiness or some other subject, we can take our son as the concrete subject of our meditation. We don’t blame our son, we just want to understand why he has become like that. Through this method of meditation we find out all the causes near and far that have led to our son’s present state of being. The more we see, the more we understand.
The more we understand, the easier it is for us to have compassion and love. Understanding is the source of love. Understanding is love itself. Understanding is another name for love. Love is another name for understanding.
So understanding ourselves, what we’re about, we’re willing to extend ourselves, to nourish ourselves. And understanding others, we’re willing to extend ourselves to nourish them. So whether we call it love, whether we call it understanding wisdom, very little difference. And if we begin to see that in helping others that we ourselves are helped, That all of our the blood, sweat and tears that we’ve expended over the course of our lives, what has it gotten us? What has it achieved?
Has it delivered the goods. But maybe there’s another way, another orientation, though it might be quite, it might seem at present rather otherworldly or revolutionary. When, for example, Christ said, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, and pray for those who maltreat you. Give to those who beg from you. Be compassionate as your father in heaven is compassionate.
And he didn’t say that, I would suppose, because he was either a romantic or he was under some sort of delusion. But he saw it as a real method to become perfect as your father in heaven is perfect. That is to say, as a real profound means to grow. And this is the way we can express our love. We can express our love for ourselves and express our self love for others.
Adjusting our motivation such that getting back in touch with some of our central values, our central principle. We get lost over the course of our everyday life, the various activities that we quite understandably and justifiably become involved in, the practical nature of our existence. But we have to, we can’t, we have to get back in touch with what is meaningful, is purposeful, what works for us and begin to act, try to integrate that into our everyday life. So what is our inner being and our outer being are not disparate, they’re split in our being. And so we can begin to express our basic sanity.
We can begin to reorientate ourselves towards becoming that happy, loving, healthy, sane human beings. We can take inspiration from the path Buddhas and we can take refuge in our own future Buddhahood, our own future ability to completely solve our problems. And taking refuge in the means, making the Dharma, the techniques, the methods, the realizations as a central component amongst our array of methods to solve our problems. And to take refuge in one another, we’re social beings. We need each other.
Know, mental health is a social activity. Know, inspiration from one another, guiding one another, teaching one another, working with one another, listening to one another. And we raise the level of our motivation to a sense of love. That we’re doing all this, extending our, you know making this choice to will ourselves, to extend ourselves, to develop ourselves. To nourish both oneself and others.
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’m enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, the highest assembly. From 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 a refuge until I’m enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, 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. Meditation, and we’ll begin usually with mindfulness of breathing. If it’s helpful, making use of the techniques of noting, counting, And then we’re going to, again as we did last week, practice choiceless awareness. We’re going to note whatever our mind is involved in from moment to moment, mentally noting, for example thinking, thinking, hearing, pain. We’re not going to try to focus the mind, we’re going to allow the mind to become absorbed in any object which it naturally tends towards.
Just allow the mind, whatever is most stimulating in your environment, it might be an external object, a sound, color, it might be an internal object, thoughts, feelings, emotions, but we want to maintain our awareness from moment to moment. And to help us to maintain our awareness we’re going to note. You you may become aware of your knee, the pain in your knee. Pain, pain. When somebody moves you hear a sound, hearing, hearing, you feel the pressure of the cushion on your buttocks.
Touch, touch, touch. Thoughts arise, thinking, thinking, hearing, hearing, thinking, pain, hearing, hearing, thinking, thinking, thinking, whatever. Just allow the mind to be directed toward whatever object it naturally tends toward. And then we’re going to focus on the mental consciousness. The object of mental consciousness is thoughts and please picture it, the movies that keep running through our minds.
Mental images. You can just noting, thinking, thinking, thinking. Try to focus upon the mental consciousness and the objects in mental consciousness. So if you take a firm but comfortable posture, one that you feel comfortable in, but one which you have a sense of purpose from this, a sense of stability, a groundedness, a feeling of confidence. So again, if it’s useful using the techniques of counting and noting, the natural breath.
So we can begin with perhaps getting in touch with the body, any tensions or tightnesses. Bringing your awareness to those places and consciously relaxing and softening. There’s almost a sense of a physical sensation of the tension moving down and out of your body. Relaxing, softening the body becoming comfortable. And then bring the mind to the breath, natural, even, gentle in and out flow of the breath.
Nowhere to go, nothing to do, just resting your mind and body. Rest your mind upon the breath. Bring the mind back to the breath. Soft body, gentle breath, and a quiet mind. If you’re counting, stop counting, but continue to note or begin to note the breath, noting the in and out of the breath.
And then allow the mind to become involved with any object that it naturally tends towards. But continue to note, maintain your awareness. What is the object of your mind? Maintain your awareness, keep noting. And then focus on the mental consciousness itself, the thoughts, the pictures, thinking, thinking, focus upon objects and mental consciousness.
And come back to the breath. Even gentle flow of the breath. Talking about the three higher trainings, or the three special trainings as they refer to in this book, the text that we’re looking at, the opening of the eye of new awareness by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. And amongst the three, looking at the second, the first being higher training in ethics, and dependent upon higher training of ethics then we engage in higher training or special training in meditative stabilization, Concentration, meditative concentration. Last week we began a discussion of the five hindrances to meditation.
Does anybody remember what the five hindrances to meditation are? Aside from the guy next door? That’s great. What was that? So we talked about the nature of these five hindrances to meditation.
This is a very general presentation which is quite often presented in terms of the Theravadan teachings. And His Holiness will go on to present a method for development of calm abiding, is a very thoroughgoing, very detailed method for developing meditative concentration. But I thought it would be of use to have these general impressions of meditation and the way to work with difficulties in the course of meditation. And the difficulties that we’re going to encounter are these five hindrances. In a way, when we discuss these five hindrances we are talking about our whole attitude toward meditation.
If we keep in mind that the ultimate purpose of meditation is to transform our mind, not to have pleasant experiences, then whatever happens during the course of our meditation can be of use, can be beneficial. The main purpose of our meditation is to raise the level of our consciousness, to go from unskillful states to skillful states, from destructive to constructive, to go from miserliness to generosity, from hatred to love, from attachment to openness, from ignorance to wisdom. It involves we can make use of both direct and indirect methods. Indirect methods such as just going out into the country, having a day out near nature improves the quality of our mind. It raises the level of our consciousness to some degree.
Useful productive work, making a product which is of use to people, directly being a benefit to them in the sense of working as a teacher, as a therapist, in a healing profession. Doing tai chi, hatha yoga. You know there’s a great variety of indirect methods which help to raise the level of our consciousness. That is to say help us to transform our mind, to produce a stream of uninterrupted skillful states of mind. But the most direct method is meditation And the purpose of meditation is to transform our mind, to change our mind.
Our minds aren’t quite operating as they could, as skillfully, as efficiently, as effectively, as productively, as constructively as they could. So the purpose of meditation is simply not. And we’re not saying this doesn’t have to be taken to the other extreme of asceticism, but the main emphasis, the purpose of meditation is not to have pleasant experiences while one is meditating. If it happens, all well and good. You don’t have to think, well I’m doing something wrong because I’m enjoying this.
But it is to help us to learn about ourselves, to change our mind, to see Our minds don’t operate very well because we don’t know how to operate them very well, and we don’t operate them very well because we don’t know how they operate. And we can learn about ourselves through meditation. We can learn the key to productive state, skillful state, we can begin to change our mind. It’s the most direct effective method because we’re dealing with the mind directly itself. You know we learn from our challenges, from obstacles, we learn from difficulties.
There’s a quotation by Kahlil Gibran in which he says, I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant and kindness from the unkind. Yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers. So learning involves challenge, it involves some difficulty. Something new is happening. So we have some challenges.
I’m talking about perhaps developing some more all encompassing view of what meditation might be about, to expand our attitude, our view of it. By working with the challenges of, for example, desire, hatred, we learn about what it is to let go, with working with the hindrances of restlessness, anxiety, sloth and torpor. We learn about energy, how it’s operating within our body and mind. With learning, with working with the challenge indecisiveness, doubt, we learn about confidence, clarity of mind. So this working through, the working through of difficulties is a learning process.
This working through difficulty and the learning that this entails is the transforming process. It’s not as if something else will come along, that we work through these and we learn and then on top of that we gain some kind of insight. This is the gaining of insight, working through the problem. Know, the washing machine doesn’t work properly and you get in and you bang around and you see the belts and the bolts and you try to work with them. And very working is the learning process of how to fix a washing machine.
That working with and the learning occur at the same time. They’re not two different activities. So we’re trying to learn, therefore working through these challenges is the learning process. For example, I had a very good Hatha yoga teacher when I was in India, a woman from Canada. She pointed out the fact that some people are quite naturally flexible, kind of easy to get angry towards those kind of people.
So they’re rubber, They can get in any position, can bend themselves, twist themselves around, but here I am and there’s a few other people like me, straining, stretching their muscles, stretching their ligaments slowly, slowly. But the interesting thing about this, and this is what my yoga teacher taught.