Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. The image of a lone dog barking into a desert night — a man “shouting through his dogs” because his life has become a dull Sunday afternoon — opens Ven Jampa Gendun’s 46-minute talk and frames everything that follows. Drawing on a Castaneda passage, he diagnoses the low-grade existential tedium most people carry, then argues that this anxiety, paired with faith, can motivate a genuine shift: stop rearranging external circumstances (new job, new house, new partner) and work on the mind itself. The session then moves from the previous year’s topic, determination to awaken, into the second of three path-fundamentals: opening the heart to others. Gendun uses a diving-board image to describe the leap beyond self-concern, leads a loving-kindness meditation starting with oneself, and closes with a parent-child example showing that understanding and love are ultimately the same thing.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 01 HoM 1993 02 10.mp3
UUID: a2d051a3-1668-401e-96a7-12eb8a079c72
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: The Heart and Mind of Awakening (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1993-02-10
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 46.0 minutes
Words: ~4,510
Light shining faces. It’s like renewing some kind of heart connection. Begin by redirecting ourselves, trying to reorientate, reprioritize our values, back in touch with that which is most important to us, that which is during the course of our life we have found meaningful guidelines that perhaps we’ve set for ourselves and getting back in touch with our dreams, our noble aspirations, about the possibilities of ourselves and the possibilities of life. Can you hear me in the back okay? During the course of our meeting the practical necessities of our everyday life, we oftentimes get out of touch with what is important to ourselves.
And we have to continually remind ourselves, what works for me, what actually makes me happy in my own experience as a very unique self actualizing individual. That’s what we’re continuing, getting ourselves back on course, redirecting ourselves, following our bliss, however and however that takes. Traditionally, I think quite of necessity, this process entails two causes, which motivate us, which help us to, which reminds us, which brings our mind back to revaluing, reprioritizing our activities and our thoughts, what we’re up to in our lives. These are a sense of anxiety and a sense of faith. An anxiety about if I don’t follow my bliss, if I don’t seek to grow, if I don’t change, what can I expect of my life?
There’s a certain vague feeling of uncomfortableness, that these reoccurring themes which continue to repeat over the course of our life. We try our best with our various methods to achieve whatever our conception of happiness may be. Some of us get a new job, a new spouse, a new partner, a new house, another degree, move to another area, and hope that things are going to be better. And quite often they are better, more often than not, the same problems, the same difficulties seem to crop up again and again and again. And we change our surroundings, the material world, the things and the people around us.
That we forget that the essential determinant of the quality of our life is the mind itself. And we’re very much externally orientated. And so this process of redirecting necessitates that we take stock and we begin to see within our own experience that it is more than not the quality of our own mind which determines the quality of the experience. The attitude, the beliefs, the skillful ways of thinking and dealing with the situations and people about us. William Blake said, the mind is in its place and its way to make the heaven of hell, hell of heaven.
There are many people who have very little in the way of material necessities and all the goodies that our affluent society has to offer. But they have a great deal of peace and contentment. They’re happy people. On the other hand, as we all know from our own experience, looking at the majority of people around us, most of the people aren’t very happy, though they have a superfluity of material things. Compared to the majority of the world, we have a great deal, but we still aren’t very happy.
So one has to begin to think that perhaps there’s another way, another possibility, and begin to directing oneself to the development of one’s own mind. It’s not to say that we are to run off to the Himalayas, give up the world. We’re going to have to take our mind with it. And we’re just going to suffer not only mentally, but also physically. So that’s not a viable alternative.
We have to deal with our problems within the context of our karma as westerners in any particular social situation. This is the real training ground for us. This is where we belong. This is where our work is to be done. But we have to get on with the work, that which motivates us is to get in touch with the sense of anxiety.
I probably have read this quote, but it catches the the flavor, the mood, at least from my point of view. The sense of my life, the purpose of ego oriented existence. It’s a quotation from Journey to Ixtlan by Carlos Castaneda. Carlos Castaneda was, at the time he wrote these books, a PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of California at Los Angeles, UCLA. He was working with a Yaqui Indian by the name of Don Juan, who probably lived in northern Mexico.
And from all appearances, Don Juan was just a dirty old man living in the bush. In fact, he was a man of knowledge. He’s talking to Carlos Castaneda. Evening is drawing near, just like it is now. They’re off in the desert, perhaps on a high plateau.
And in the distance, there’s a village. The sun is setting, and they hear the barking of a lone dog. The wind is hissing softly. And Carlos Castaneda says, He paused, the silence around us was frightening. The wind hit softly, and then I heard the distant barking of a lone dog.
Listen to that barking, Don Juan went on, as the way my beloved Earth is helping me now to bring this last point to you. That barking is the saddest thing one can hear. We were quiet for a moment. The barking of that lone dog was so sad and the stillness around was so intense that I experienced a numbing anguish. It made me think of my own life, my sadness, my not knowing where to go or what to do.
That dog’s barking is the nocturnal voice of a man Don Juan said. It comes from a house in the valley towards the south. A man is shouting through his dogs since they are companion slaves for life, his sadness, his boredom. He’s begging his death to come and release him from the dull and dreary chains of life. Don Juan’s words had cut a most disturbing line in me.
I felt as if he was speaking directly to me. That barking in the loneliness it creates speaks of the feelings of men, he went on. Men for whom an entire life was like a Sunday afternoon, an afternoon which was not altogether miserable, but rather hot and dull and uncomfortable. They sweated and fussed a great deal. They didn’t know where to go or what to do.
That afternoon left them only with the memory of petty annoyances and tedium, and then suddenly it was over. It was already night. So life for most others is aren’t basket cases, we aren’t psychotics, we aren’t in acute pain. But I think it is something like a dull Sunday afternoon. There’s a sense of tedium, there’s a sense of not quite knowing what to do or where to go.
A sense of alienation, sense of fragmentation, a sense of aloneness and isolation. Continual undercurrent anxiety of struggling to find union with ourselves, with others, with nature. There’s a certain sense of unease and comfort. And we continually distract ourselves. Find new projects, new people, new ways to numb the pain.
But still it’s there, and somehow it’s influencing the way we think and the way we communicate, the way we live our life. It is necessary at some point to begin to confront this feeling, these issues, and begin to use them as a motivating force. To consider Questions of suffering and death don’t make us suffer anymore. They don’t make us die any quicker. They are there to help us to appreciate our life and to improve the quality of our life.
So we don’t live, we don’t die the many deaths of a coward. We can try to get back in touch with our dreams. Resonates with our soul at a very deep level of our being, that which brings us bliss. And to develop the courage to actualize. Our dreams are something like clothes, perhaps very special clothes.
If we never take them out and wear them, if we always hide them away in a chest or in a closet, they eventually rot and they’re then unwearable. So it’s important that we try to take them out once in a while. And maybe in privacy of our own home, try them out, try them on. And maybe once in a while when you find someone that you feel safe with, share them what how you look when you’re in your dreams. Because then that has mean that your heart will move.
Your life will change. You won’t be normal anymore. But to be normal in an insane society is not to be very healthy. So we have to be a little bit crazy, a little bit outrageous. We begin to However we may conceive of our goal, Whatever our dream, the conception of a good life may be for us, we have to create some space, exert some effort, to put aside some time when we’re living out of that deepest, most meaningful part of ourselves.
Otherwise life is very much like a Sunday afternoon, and then we die and it’s finished. And it’s not that we are to give up our homes and significant relationships, all the material great things of life. These are components, important assets of the quality of life. That they in themselves are not going to bring us the satisfaction and the fulfillment that all of us want at some level of our being. This is a need, just as we have to eat.
Our souls are starving, and we have to feed ourselves. As far as in the Buddhist context, the goal of our aspiration of the Buddhist life is a Buddha, and the Buddhahood inside of ourselves. The flowering, the bringing to consummation our dreams, of the potentialities of as a human being, the possibilities of our potential present to us of being a happy, healthy, loving, immensely sane human being, and this we call Buddha. This becomes the inner focus of our lives, to actualize Buddha. And we make use of the Dharma, which is the means.
We actually have to have some vehicle to help us to express our potential. Something which can serve as the conditions necessary to foster from this seed of Buddha within inside of ourselves, this seed of being a happy, healthy, loving human being. We have to make use of it. We have to take it down from the shelf and integrate it. We have to practice it, make it a part of ourselves.
The Dharma is the vehicle, it is the means by which we actually actualize Buddha. Now whatever the Dharma can be, the teachings, the techniques, the truth, anything, anything which is able to raise the level of our consciousness that fosters all our potentials of taking ourselves from ignorance to wisdom, from self centeredness to other sentient beings, from feelings of powerlessness to inner strength. That which facilitates that process of development is dharma. And this occurs within the social context of a spiritual community. Coming together of like minded individuals who have made a choice that their dreams are important to them, tremendously important to their lives, to give their lives meaning.
And that they want to share their dreams and want to help and need others’ help in actualizing their dreams, the human spirit. So they come together to support one another in whatever way they can, whatever they have to offer. And we try to raise the level of motivation such that we’re doing this, such that we’re trying to actualize our dreams, invigorate the human spirit within us. Not just for our own well-being, but we try to widen our scope of concern beyond our own self concern to include more and more of others, understanding that one of the most basic problems which we have to see through is that we are being wrapped up in our own problems and being wrapped up in our own spiritual journey. We actually inhibit our growth.
Being totally concerned about our own happiness precludes the possibility of real happiness. So our motivation for this process becomes more and more other centered, includes a greater and wider scope of others, ultimately to include all other living beings. But we have to begin somewhere. So the inner focus of our life is becoming Buddha, which is realized by means of the Dharma in the social context of a spiritual community. We raise the level of our motivation to improve all living beings.
I go for refuge until I’m enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, the highest assembly. From the virtuous merits 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, in the highest assembly. By the virtuous merit that I collect by practicing giving and other perfections, may I attain the state of the Buddha to be able to benefit all sentient beings. We’re going to begin with meditation, mindfulness of breathing, and then we’ll do the loving kindness meditation.
Do you like to stand up for a minute? No. Would you like to stand up? Okay. So we’ll begin with You take a comfortable firm position, and we’ll begin by adjusting our motivation for our meditation, the reason why we’re doing what we’re doing.
We’re going to develop a love and compassion. And we’re going to begin with our self tonight, which will change the object of the development of our love and compassion as the motivation behind our meditation. If we can’t begin with ourselves and have a sincere wish that we’d be happy, that we don’t have any problems, then how can we really develop sincere, stable, loving compassion for others? And knowing our own problems, our own suffering and difficulties immediately have their own lived experience. If we can’t have compassion for ourselves, how can we have real compassion for others’ difficulties when at best we only know their difficulties second handedly.
And to have compassion for yourself means to become sincere about solving your problem. The way that we can solve our problems in this most immediate moment, tonight, just here, is from our practice of meditation, listening and discussing the spiritual path. That’s the way we can work tonight. That becomes the motivation to find I’m doing this as a means to help me solve my problems. Meditating, listening, and discussing the Dharma is a way to change and to grow because I care about myself.
I deserve the best that life has to offer. So take in a comfortable firm position and begin with developing simply a friendly gentle thought towards yourself. It would be wonderful if I didn’t have any problems. Kind, caring thought for yourself. Try to feel that thought.
I will strengthen that. May I not have any problems. I wish I had no suffering whatsoever. I’m going to commit myself to solving my problems, take responsibility to eliminate my suffering. I like that very much.
May I be happy. I wish myself all the good things of life. I’m going to commit myself to bringing myself happy, take responsibility, to experience all the goodness of life. The way I’m going to express my commitment to myself at this very moment, through my meditation. This is the way I’m going to help myself.
Bring your mind to the breath. Be really gentle We’re looking at the three fundamentals of the path. The path is that which takes us from the level of aspiring to express our dreams to the state of having fulfilled those dreams. This path has three fundamentals: developing the determination to awaken, to grow, to actualize our dreams and potential, to solve our problems. The awakening heart and the awakening mind.
Last year we completed looking at the first of these three fundamentals: determination to awaken beginning to feel, to overcome, a self limiting misconception about our nature, about who we are and our potential. Beginning to see that we have the potential to solve our problems at a very deep level. We have the potential to be really healthy people, to live on another order of being, to be loving and wise human being, that we have that potential. Breaking out of our sense of ordinariness. We are very special, everyone is special.
But we’re special in the sense that we’re not in comparison to our conception as being ordinary. We’re special. And we have all of the necessary conditions, both external and internal, whereby to travel this path. There’s nothing that is missing. Nothing needs to be gotten that isn’t here.
But this opportunity is simply not going to last forever. This definitely is that we’re going to die. Talking about death, only the big death at the end of the course of this life, but all the very small deaths that we experience over the course of our life. Those periods in our life when our lives are, as it were, turned upside down, when all our values, everything that we believed in, everything that we held onto has had meaning, that we took security in, perhaps is taken away from us in one way or another, either voluntarily or torn away from us, as in through deaths and divorce and separation. And change involves a leaving behind and moving on into an unknown.
We can’t quite know what the result may be. And what gives us the confidence to voluntarily implement change rather than holding on to these repetitive patterns of what has been out of a fear, an open and fluid way of relating and seeking security in the past. What gives us the courage? We have to have some kind of faith that we may not know where we’re going to end up, exactly the particularities, the specifics of the nature of the result. But we have a sense of confidence in ourselves in our being that I’m going to land on my feet, that things will be well.
No matter what appearance, what form they may take, they will be well. Why? What gives us that inner confidence? Because we have trained our mind. We’re determinant of all things.
This is linked into the area of karma. karma as the skillful patterns that we have developed within our mind, the foundations of happiness that we’ve laid over the course of our practice. We can take a sort of a refuge in our own mind, in what we have done and what we have developed ourselves. We think that things are going to go well because I’ve done my work. I’ve taken up the difficult task of dealing.
I’ve committed myself and worked through legitimate suffering. And now I’m going to experience the rich reward. Thereby we can enter into difficult situations and voluntarily bring about change. We’re going in full well that things will work out well. What kind of life are we creating for ourselves?
This brings us to the final level of determination to be free and to awaken. That is the question of suffering. That no matter where we go and what we do, no matter how comfortable we may make our prison cell, that ego oriented existence is not satisfactory. There’s nothing worth having and becoming. And we decide to seek a sense of liberation, to become free.
All the very confronting issues of suffering in our life, the issues of pain, mental and physical pain, suffering of change, of fluctuation, the ups and downs, the sufferings of universal conditionality, that we’re vulnerable beings who are susceptible beyond our control to forces out of our control. But we don’t have any say so. A great deal of what happens to us. This is an uncomfortable situation to be in. It’s an anxiety stressful situation to be in.
And so determining to be free ourselves from this difficulty. There’s nowhere else to go if we can change our attitude toward our situation, toward the world without us, and create a therapeutic environment to heal ourselves and enter into the task of positive world-making, creating for ourselves an environment and a world which is characterized by spontaneity, by benevolence, by joy, peace. This is what we can mean by liberation, developing this determination to awaken. But how are we to awaken? This brings us to the second of these three fundamentals of the path.
The fundamental of awakening our hearts, awakening our hearts to others. Now we’ve awakened our hearts to ourselves because compassion directed toward ourselves means that we’re going to take responsibility for solving our problems. Compassion directed toward others means we’re going to take responsibility for helping them to solve their problems. In order to overcome selfishness it is necessary to be daring. It is as though you were dressed in your swimsuit standing on a diving board with a pool in front of you, and you ask yourself, now what?
The obvious answer is jump. That is daring. You might wonder if you will sink or hurt yourself if you are afraid of, if you jump. We are attracted to our cocoons, our selfishness, and we are afraid of selflessness, stepping out beyond ourselves. So in order to overcome our hesitation about giving up our privacy, in order to commit ourselves to others’ welfare, some kind of leap is necessary.
So this leap is the leap of the awakening heart. The overcoming of our hesitation about giving up our cocoon of our egocentric world. Seeing everything and everyone in terms of what’s in it for me. Evaluating, manipulating. It is the measure of all things, whether it’s going to enhance my existence or detract from my existence.
That is the standard by which we act in the world. And we aren’t very healthy by maintaining that standard as the determining factors of how we’re going to conduct our lives. Our lives are marked by dissatisfaction, by discontent, disappointment, frustration. It doesn’t seem like it works very well with particular standards that we have chosen for ourselves as a way to conduct our lives. Mental health is ultimately a social phenomenon.
Is, you know, failing to understand this is a great part of human dilemma. As I mentioned in the beginning, one of our most basic problems is that we are completely absorbed in our own problems, and therefore we can never find any real solution. Growth is essentially an individual task, something that we have to do very much for ourselves, take the initiative and responsibility for our own well-being. It occurs as if it’s some kind of authentic response, Not only to our own needs, which are limited and exclusive, which leads to a narrow and partial growth. But But in response to the needs of others, the needs of others are unlimited, are universal.
And this will lead us to complete all encompassing growth. The actualization of all our potential. The idea of love and compassion. It’s as if, you know it’s been very much romanticized. A very powerful sentimental idea.
But if we can see, which I hope in some way to communicate, it’s a necessity, utilitarian pragmatic necessity in order to be a happy person. That you have to develop love to some degree, compassion to some degree, to be a happy, contented person. It’s just like we have to eat in order to be physically healthy. We have to love to be mentally healthy. It’s just something that gives us a warm feeling in our tummy.
It’s a necessity of life. This is food, clothing, shelter. A baby that isn’t picked up, it needs to be loved, it will die. We have to love others or we will die. We will always be confined to this prison of our own exaggerated self-concern, and we will only experience frustration, disappointment.
Opening up and responding to the needs of others is the way of overcoming our cowardice, our inertia, the way that we break out of our cocoons and fly. In order to fly, we need two wings. The two wings of a wise heart and a loving mind. The actualization and integration of our rational and emotional potentials of our being. We have to develop both our rational and emotional potentials and integrate them into one unity, a whole.
This is the integration of the awakening heart and the awakening mind. As I’ve talked about, and I’m quite often using the phrase of Gregory Bateson, that is he said, The psychology of misery is the pathology of epistemology. The psychology of misery, the internal quality of our being, of our suffering, is thought about in terms of unhealthy ways of knowing. The rules that we try to make sense out of the world are dysfunctional, they aren’t working. That a life based upon ignorance and self-centeredness simply doesn’t work.
It’s doomed to pain, to failure. So the only real method that we can begin to go beyond our pain, our fears, our anxiety, our sense of lack, our fragmentation, alienation, having to be on guard, having to protect our own territory, having to reestablish our credentials in front of others, in front of ourselves, again and again, this constant struggle to keep up some sort of self image, The only way to go beyond all of this, these are all the ongoing themes of my life. This is what dominates most of our waking existence. It’s to grow, to grow, to grow in love and compassion. Borne by these two wings, we can cross over a sea of all our sorrows and light on the shore of well-being and peace, of love and sanity.
The reason that we don’t help each other, that we don’t have time for each other, that we don’t have energy for one another because we don’t understand one another. 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 for 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 love itself. Understanding is another name for love.