Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Ven Jampa Gendun opens this 44-minute talk with a wry image: we are all waiting for “that phone call telling us that the life we’ve ordered has arrived.” Drawing on Macbeth’s plea to his physician — “canst thou minister to a mind diseased?” — and the doctor’s answer that the patient must minister to himself, Gendun argues that Buddhism addresses what he calls “ahistoric problems”: attachment, hatred, and ignorance cause suffering regardless of personal history, and nothing external can remove them. He then examines ungrounded hope as an obstacle — quoting Thich Nhat Hanh — before introducing analytic and stabilizing meditation and leading a compassion practice directed toward someone of a different racial or ethnic background. Accessible to newcomers but substantive enough for regular practitioners.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 07 HMA 1996 11 06.mp3
UUID: a667b85f-7dc5-4d6f-a6f2-31dc277fce57
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: The Heart and Mind of Awakening 1996-1997 (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1996-11-06
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 44.3 minutes
Words: ~6,525
Such a beautiful evening. It’s to talk about many of the subjects that Buddhism confronts us with is is quite difficult I think to become to draw ourselves in, to become confront issues about our life. To begin to perhaps deal with the practical necessities of having to work with our mind is I think it’s quite a challenge. There’s a lot that draws us outside of ourselves and to the world about us and into, you know, with the looking to and for somebody, something, or someone else. And we’ve been talking about this for a few weeks now in terms of some factor x, some some it that we’re all more or less waiting for in one way or another whether I mean, most of it is unconscious, to ourselves, unawarely waiting for that something that’s going to help us.
It’s gonna help us to solve our problems, help us to find the happiness that we’re all looking for, to get what we want out of life, you know, waiting like I have often said, waiting for that phone call which telling us that the life we’ve ordered has arrived. So would you like to come down and pick it up or shall we deliver it? Just somehow there’s a sense of waiting and our life goes by, creeps on at its petty pace. You know, it never quite occurs to us or I think it I I really think it it is terribly difficult to to bring about this consistent reorientation of looking to yourself to solve the basic problems of your life. And by that I mean to to deal with the the illnesses within our own mind.
Many of you perhaps were here last night when Khensur Rinpoche was talking about, you know, the differences between a physician or let us say anything or someone outside of ourselves. You know, what in fact they can do, what in fact they have the outside world has the capacity in helping us to deal with our problems of life and helping us to find the happiness that we all want. And I think, you know, people in situations can you know, some of the temporary, some of the superficial ills of our mind can help in real ways, meaningful ways. But the chronic patterns, deeper nature of our problems can only be dealt with ourselves. I think that’s a there’s a certain feeling which I think Alan Watts calls the loneliness of liberation.
When one begins to sense this at some deep level that it’s we’re alone with this to some degree having to deal with the deeper problems of our life. There’s you know, there there are aids, there are the teachings in the teachers, there’s the spiritual community, there there are those who can support us and act as the cooperative conditions for helping us and working with our problems. But very much the initiative and the resolution or the giving up is very much our own responsibility. There’s no getting around it at some point of having to get on with the work. You know, whatever our problems may be, I think Buddhism is very much concerned with what we might call ahistoric problems.
That is to regardless of our particular backgrounds, regardless of whether we came from a rich family or poor family, whether we came from a rural family or a city family, whether we had loving parents or abusive parents. As long as you have attachment in your mind, you’re going to suffer. As long as we have hatred in our mind, we’re going to suffer. As long as we have pride and jealousy in our mind, we’re going to suffer. It doesn’t matter the nature of your external situation and your particular history, you’re still going to suffer.
As long as we have the root cause of ignorance within our mind, One way or another, suffering is going to find us. No matter we can’t run away from it. We can’t we can’t prevent it because the cause is there within our own minds. There’s nothing more to do but to begin to deal with that and begin to remove it from our own minds. And then I think kind of confronting the reality of our situation.
There’s in the in the play by Shakespeare, Macbeth, the doctor. Macbeth asks the doctor, canst thou minister to a mind diseased, raze out the written troubles of the brain, pluck from the memory your rooted sorrow, and with some sweet oblivious antidote cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff which weighs upon the heart. And the doctor answered answers, therein the patient must minister to himself. And it it perhaps never quite occurs to us that we are both the patient and the doctor ourselves. That within our mind lies not only the illness but also the cure for our problems, our chronic dysfunctional patterns, our suffering.
And it’s never quite clearly seen or seen as quickly lost sight of that our suffering and our happiness are the results of our own ways of thinking, our own ways of behaving. And therefore, it is our responsibility for ridding ourselves of our suffering and finding our happiness because it is only we who can minister to, let us say, change our own mind. No one else can do it for us. No one nor anything else apart from ourselves can can do the work for us. And that the no one nor anything else but ourselves can minister to the dysfunctional patterns of our own minds and thereby, you know, lift the the burden of sorrow that weighs upon all of our hearts in one way or another.
That’s the nature of our situation. But still, we I think we’re orientated in a much different fashion. And perhaps this is one of the one of the great obstacles to actually bringing about change in our life, to actually getting on and growing, finding it is what we want. This continual waiting, this continual this ingrained pattern pattern of waiting for someone or something, this orientation of seeing happiness and our problems lying outside of ourselves and therefore looking to for the solutions outside of ourselves. You know, an analogous situation but something which can carry over into what we’re talking about here.
One delivers one’s alien body with its abscesses or tumors or broken bones into the hands of the surgeon. And his most elementary information and skill will transcend anything the patient need know. The patient must cooperate one green capsule three times a day, keep the leg elevated, force fluids, but need not understand how or why. The responsibility lies with the surgeon. The problem is his.
His the accountability for failure, the credit for success. Patient and surgeon do not learn from the same text. Many patience go to psychiatrists as if to a surgeon and many psychiatrists regard themselves as psychic surgeons. When such a patient comes to a therapist, a relationship of considerable length may result. I should mention this is written by a psychiatrist.
When such a patient comes to such a therapist, a relationship of considerable length may result but little else. For the job can be done, if at all, only by the patient. To assign this task to anyone else, however insightful or charismatic, is to disavow the source of change. In the process of personality change, the role of the psychiatrist is catalytic. As a cause he is sometimes necessary, never sufficient.
The responsibility of the patient does not end with free associating, with being on time, paying the bills, or any other element of cooperation. He is accountable only to himself and this accountability extends all the way to the change which is desired, the achieving of it or the giving up on it. But we have great hopes. Now hope is normally considered a desirable attribute, isn’t it? You know, don’t give up hope.
Don’t give up hope. You have you have to keep hoping against all odds. But from another point of view, hope is a tremendous obstacle, a tremendous obstruction. And here, perhaps we have to qualify what we mean by hope. Perhaps ungrounded hope.
That is the type of hope which is not grounded in reality, which is unwarranted hope or unrealistic hope. You know, we keep we have great hope and our hopes become ends in themselves. We we have hopes for someone or something that’s going to bring us about that better tomorrow. And our hope becomes a substitute for doing anything we necessary that we can do today to bring about that better tomorrow. You know, freely involving ourselves in the difficult task of actually healing ourselves and making ourselves better, which we ourselves can only do and which can only be done today.
There’s no other time to do it than now. But we hope. You know, when our hopes for a better tomorrow becomes a substitute for doing doing the work which needs to be done today to bring about that better tomorrow, nothing is ever really going to be done. Nothing and therefore, nothing done, nothing changed. And only the only thing we can expect is more of the same.
Our life becomes, in these compulsively repeating dysfunctional patterns and we we experience very much of the same again and again and again. Hope is important because it can make the present moment less difficult to bear. If we believe that tomorrow will be better, we can bear a hardship today. But that is the most that hope can do for us, to make some hardship lighter. This is a quote by Thich Nhat Hanh, the the Vietnamese monk who presently lives in France.
When I think deeply about the nature of hope, I see something tragic. Since we cling to our hopes in the future, we do not focus our energies and capabilities on the present moment. We use hope to believe something better will happen in the future, that we will arrive at peace for the kingdom of God. Hope becomes a kind of obstacle. You know, with with great hope we can face almost anything about except for what is really before us now and the reality of what we’re actually experiencing.
You know, as long as we can hope we have hopes for the future, we never really become sincere and serious about the present moment. You know, hope tends to take us away from what is real for us and therefore appreciating that if what is is present for us, if what we are presently experiencing is not enough, then we’re going to have to do something now to ensure that it is enough at some time in the future. But as long as we can hope, there always remains the alternative to the actual doing of change, hope itself. Hope becomes, as it were, an end in itself. We can always just hope and our hopes just keep changing their names and nothing is ever really done for future’s sake.
You know, only when we’ve become despaired of hope is there really any realistic cause for hope. When things become hopeless, there’s real hope that things are going to get better. There is the personal sorrow and the sorrow of the world. There is the sorrow of ignorance and the sorrow of time. This ignorance ignorance is a lack of knowing oneself.
And the sorrow of time is the deception that time can cure, heal, and change. Most people are caught in that deception and either worship sorrow or explain it away. But in either case it continues and no one ever asks oneself if it can ever come to an end. Time may in fact heal some of our wounds. It cures some of our occasional and superficial ills of mind.
But our deeply rooted sorrows, our chronic pain, which is born out of our perpetually recreating the very grounds of our dysfunctional patterns of thinking and behaving, is not going to go away due to the length of due by means of any particular length of time. You know, it is not going to be healed by the mere passage of time because we keep creating the same causes for suffering continually, perpetually. You know, mere time is not going to change that. You know, the the occasional sufferings, the superficial ills of our problems and our difficulties are going to change, that the chronic patterns and the and the the deeper nature of our problems is going to remain the same. I think sometimes we have to confront that issue and see that very deeply for ourselves and come and confront that.
If we’re going to make this real decisive jump, this gradual shift in the in the center of gravity of our psychological thinking from seeing our solutions and problems outside of ourselves to begin to see that the nature of our deeper problems and therefore the nature of their solutions is in our own mind. We have to work with our own mind. There’s no avoiding. There’s no getting around it. There’s no deceiving ourselves.
There’s no there’s nothing more that we can do other than that. No one nor nor anything else can minister to the dysfunctions of our of our own minds except ourselves. You know, healing is not about time. It’s about change. You know, changing our mind, our thinking, our the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves, our behavior, changing our lives.
Unless these change, we are not going to distill from the trauma of our illness the opportunity for new insights about ourselves, for the opportunity, the possibility for self realization in life. And we’re not going to attain anything that could rightly be called cure. Our disease just changes its name, takes another name, another form, but the but the suffering remains in one way or another. Nothing less than change is a cure. And we’re trying to get some kind of perspective on the nature of our difficulties.
Anything less than change is just another word for for another empty refuge, another fiction, another distraction, another type of morphine shot that we can to temporarily mask the symptoms of our difficulties, of our of our underlying pain, of our suffering. You know, just a kind of another type of, you know, of cosmetic to to hide our wounds. You know, just another kind of false hope in one way or another. That’s kind of heavy talk, isn’t it? I think it’s maybe it’s necessary.
Maybe it kind of it’s so maybe it’s kind of a sober a sobering kind of talk. It perhaps it draws us to another level necessary to begin to address our real problems, to to to draw the necessary inspiration to determine, to begin to work with our problems at a deeper level, to change in our mind. You know, the if fear if fear is the mother of cowardice, hope is the father. Men accept indignities without end and a life not worth living and the hope that their miseries will end and that eventually life may be worth living again. They renounce love, courage, honesty, pride, humanity, hoping.
Hope is as great an enemy of courage as is fear. Now I think too, And we’ve talked about change and it it always involves some risk that that we can never foretell all the details of the street that we’re going to seek to walk down, you know, that we we cannot foretell or pervasion all the various outcomes of change. But but So and we have a resistance to change, a fear around change. You know, we are to some degree cowards about change, about the unfamiliar, the unknown. And we habitually avoid the difficult path and the legitimate suffering that taking the cure might entail.
But, you know, but we need to understand that the basis of our continued neurosis is our lack of willingness to expand our awareness to just what is presently unfamiliar to ourselves, what is unknown to ourselves at present, and and our lack of courage to bear with the inevitable ensuing anxiety experienced in the the the transformative process. And to expand we have a choice. We’re it’s we’re on a continuum of awareness. At one end of the continuum is death. That is to say, to be like a rock.
And a rock doesn’t suffer because it doesn’t feel. It doesn’t feel because it’s not alive. Many of us try to deaden ourselves as if to become a rock. And we do a lot of we we we have many strategies whereby we try to implement in the course of everyday life to numb ourselves, to distract ourselves from our pain, to and in the end we feel hollow. We feel as if our lives aren’t being lived.
We feel a lack a sense of despair and aloneness and loneliness. On the other end is awakening, that is to say total awareness. And we lie somewhere along this spectrum of awareness. And to expand the area of awareness involves a degree of anxiety. To become aware of our potential and the nature of our problems is to experience a necessity to change.
It’s all anxiety provoking. But if we’re willing to bear with this, if we’re willing to to to learn and to to confront the reality of our problems. And then perhaps we can begin to to draw upon the the basic resources of our own mind as self healing systems. And if we confront the reality of what is going on in our life, maybe for once we can we can live up to the occasion by beginning to solve the problem rather than distracting ourselves from it, masking it over, numbing ourselves. There’s a disparity between our expectations and reality.
And this disparity is experienced as some degree of frustration, disappointment, of dissatisfaction, some degree of anxiety. And if we’re willing to bear with that, then perhaps we can move toward the goal of disillusionment. Yeah. The disillusionment disillusionment. We become we lose our illusions about the nature of our situation and the reality.
We begin to deal with people and things in a more realistic way about what in effect they’re capable of bringing ourselves. And most we give up our hopes in a way or or we have we develop more realistic hopes about what is really possible. You know, hope is a is a wonderful thing. It’s if it’s grounded in a kind of a reality. If we know that we have to do the work to bring about that hope for tomorrow, then maybe hope has its place.
But perhaps but as has been mentioned, maybe hope can be an obstacle once if it’s an end in itself, when it’s not grounded in seeing the necessity that we have to do something for We have to actually work with some practical methods and the means to change our mind. As long as we have attachment, as long as we have hatred and pride, jealousy, and as was mentioned last night, perhaps eighty four thousand ills of the mind, we’re always going to remain ill. Nothing we do outside of ourselves is going to change that. No matter how much we may hope, it changes otherwise. You know, most all of our hopes are hopes for the wrong thing, are an integral part of the pathology of our of our lives itself.
And our hope is is an essential element in the equation of our suffering. You know, with understanding that we can live a life without hope, with great purpose. Purpose. So the orientation in this whole process of what we’ve been talking about is in terms of seeing the basic solution to our problems with inside of our own mind, this orientation, this this confronting. And we call that, you know, outcome of that, resolution of our basic problems, of our fundamental problem, we call that a Buddha, this tremendously happy, healthy, loving, sane human being which represents, which a metaphor, which is stands for our experience of the preferred most story that we could ever hope to tell ourselves about ourselves.
And this is what we are continually orientating ourselves toward. You know, we don’t we don’t completely lose ourselves in in the externals. We we always maintain some mindfulness that the that the necessity to to work on our problems problems at a deeper level. You know, over the course of our everyday life, in the practical situations that we’re confronted with over the course of our everyday life, you know, making the choice of Buddha and going for refuge, Making the choice of sanity, of awareness, of love and compassion, making the choice of forbearance, of tolerance, making the choice of generosity, making the choice of ethics, making the choice of working through the difficulty and not running away from it. And this is the choosing of Buddha.
This is the actual point for refuge. This is our orientation. But we’re not without means. Maybe we’ll have a prescription or a description of our situation, but it’s not as if the situation is hopeless because we have some practical methods that we can work with. And we call these means, the techniques, the trainings, we call them the Dharma.
Or, you know, we could at another level we could simply call it the truth, the way things are in fact. Somehow the truth is transformative. Buddhism places great trust in the truth and the truth shall make you free. And that’s what we want to know, the reality of our situation, the reality of the nature of who we are and the world about us. And we keep going.
We try to find that. We explore it. We that’s what we want in our life. And we we’re sick of living in illusion, in falsity, in in self deception, in self ignorance that we want to know the way things are. And this is our orientation.
And this is and Dharma is there to assist us bringing this about. This is our real refuge, the truth itself. And those who assist us in this process, the social context in which truth is realized or is actualized in all the various facets of our life, in our character, in our relationships, of our everyday life, and who we are, and have become a student of the truth. We become an embodiment of authenticity, of the truth of who we are in fact. You’re living out the truth in our everyday lives and trying to raise the level of our motivation and why we’re involved in this process such that we’re doing it not just for our own selves, not just for our own egotistical ends, our our narrow concerns, our exaggerated self importance, which has been, you know, one of the primary causes for our continuous suffering, for our continued never finding the truth, never been able to solve problems.
We’re trying to raise the level of our motivation. You know, the the fact is that everybody in this room and outside of this room wants to be happy and doesn’t want to suffer. That’s that’s the truth, isn’t it? I think we can recognize that if we think about that. But we don’t think about this so often.
We get claustrophobic in our vision and we see only ourselves and we forget that others are just like ourselves. So this is an, you know, something that we can an important truth amongst other truths. And it becomes a a a very a a truth in our lives that others want to be happy just like myself and what’s so damaged, so important about me that I’m concerned only with myself. And that’s been part of our problem all along. So maybe in this process of searching for the truth, one of our our dominant truths can be the necessity to help others as as as equal to helping ourselves.
That seems to be a a real possibility of actual changing ourselves in the way that we’ve generally acted in the path. So I go for refuge to the Buddha, the Buddha within sight of ourselves, the social context of a spiritual community, actualizing that Buddha by means of the Dharma and trying to raise the level of motivation again and again such that we do it not just for our own narrow ends but for every widening circle of others. So, you know, if we think if we if if we are able to, even in some small measure, you know, try to change the flow of our our thinking, change the our attitudes, our belief systems to begin to to work with these in some way that maybe this orientation, these ways of believing, these types of thoughts can be of more functional value to ourselves. They can really begin to help us fulfill our lives and find meaning in our lives and purpose in our lives, find the happiness that we want in our lives and forego the suffering that we don’t want in our lives. Maybe this way of thinking, this way of internal change is going to be what we’ve been looking for.
And this becomes our refuge. There’s no other refuge than that. There’s no god, no Buddha, no lover who’s going to ever change your world for you. It’s all very much up to ourselves and changing our own inner world, our own mind. That’s our only refuge.
That becomes our orientation. So we go for refuge. To the Buddha, the Dharma, and the supreme community, I go for refuge until awakening. Through the creative potential of my listening to the Dharma, may I achieve the state of a Buddha for the sake of all living beings. To the Buddha, the Dharma, and the supreme community, I go for refuge into awakening.
Through the creative potential of my listening to the Dharma, may I achieve the state of a Buddha for the sake of all living beings. To the Buddha, the Dharma, and the supreme community, I go for refuge until awakening through the creative potential of my listening to the Dharma. May I achieve the state of a Buddha for the sake of all living beings. Reverently, I pay homage with my body, speech and mind, present clouds of every type of offering, those actual and imagined. I disclose all my destructive acts accumulated since time without beginning and rejoice in the skillful actions of holy and ordinary beings.
Please remain until cyclic existence is ended and turn the wheel of Dharma for living beings. I dedicate the skillful actions of myself and others to the great enlightenment. Would you like to stand up for a minute and then we’ll meditate? On the basic mindfulness of breathing and working with our motivation again in the development of a love and compassion. And, again, we’re just to review, we’ve been working through a spectrum of individuals.
You know, the word meditation quite often evokes some kind of mystical or otherworldly notions or ideas and especially in western westerners’ minds. It’s not particularly exotic from the from the eastern view point of view. Something it’s a it’s a way of working with the mind. In fact, the word in Tibetan for meditation is gom. Gom. Gom simply means to familiarize, to accustom the mind, to acquaint, to get used to.
So getting used to productive states of mind and be developing the skill, the ability to evoke, consciously evoke states, love, compassion, mindfulness of understanding of emptiness, understanding of impermanence, all these possibilities, all these various conducive states of mind which which help us to approach truth the way things are. The world is empty. The world is impermanent. I am going to die. These are truths which I don’t presently recognize.
But the closer, the more familiar I become with these truths, the more liberated I will be, the more they can help me to solve my problems of attachment, hatred, basically ignorance. So getting developing the skill of meditation is being the skill in being able to evoke these states, of a sense of awareness about death, of understanding of emptiness, developing the quality of loving compassion, and being accustomed accustomed to our mind, familiarizing our mind. There are generally two types of meditation, analytic meditation and stabilizing meditation. And generally in the west we only talk about stabilizing but analytic meditation plays a very significant role in development of the mind, especially in Tibetan Buddhism. It’s any type of Buddhism, not just Tibet.
Analytic meditation is simply investigative meditation. We think about things. We try to penetrate something and examine nature, try to understand and try to get at it. Stabilizing meditation, we don’t examine. We just hold on to it.
We we don’t want to know its nature. We’re not trying to penetrate. We’re just simply trying to hold on to fixate the mind on it. These two types of ways of using the mind in the course of meditation are quite often used alternatively. You know, we we evoke a particular state of mind.
You know, we we talk we think about compassion or, you know, that all sentient beings want happiness, that they don’t want to suffer just like myself. And we think about the various possibilities, the advantages of, you know, of development of compassion of other centeredness as compared to self centeredness. The and how the kindness of others, even even those who I may feel indifferent to, even the kindness of enemies and, you know, being able to expand in Yeah. The area of our of our concern, of our caring. And then, you know, we we get some feeling.
The feeling’s important. The thoughts, you know, it’s like when somebody points to the moon, you know, the you don’t get hum up on the finger. What a great finger. And you look to what’s being indicated. Like words are simply arrows pointing towards something which is ineffable, inexpressible.
So know, we think using words and symbols and images. But at some point, we have a sense our mind is actually evolved into the image of love and the the the entity of compassion. Now there’s a sense I want that person not to suffer. You have a sense you have an object, this this this hermit, this human being or this animal or whatever whoever, and they’re suffering. And there’s a sense of wanting to separate them from suffering, that you don’t want to see them suffering.
You know what? You know, you want this to discontinue, to not go on any longer, and willing to to to get involved to remove their suffering by by whatever skill that you have, whatever means that you have. So there’s a there’s a feeling involved and then so you fixate on that feeling. You’ve analyzed through various means. Through There’s a you know, when we come to the the second of these three principal aspects of the path, the awakened heart.
We’re going to go through two meditative traditions for developing an awakened heart. So it’s quite, you know, it’s like a recipe book that we’re that we’re we’re that is presented to us and we can prepare this wonderful dish and we can taste it, we can eat it, experience it, be nourished by it. And likewise, through these meditative practices, we can we can learn about the systematic means of actually evolving our mind and evoking these states. Having evoked that state using this recipe book, then we hold on to it. And we let we we custom our mind.
We get used to being a compassionate person, this state of mind. So this is a very important part of our our growth, our process. You know, we talk about grow, grow, grow, grow, grow. What does it mean? This is really a systematic method of of actually evolving our mind, of really making use of antidotes to to to go beyond these dysfunctional patterns and become the type of person that we want to be.
This is the work of changing the mind. There’s nothing Buddhism doesn’t have anything more than this to offer except this type of work. There’s no magic formula. It does have a method, a real method that’s been worked with with for over twenty five hundred years and been refined and expanded by great past great masters. It has that to offer for us, you know, so we’re not alone.
We don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You know, we have something to work with. We’re we’re very fortunate in that. But still, we have to do the work. We have to learn about the methods and actually put in actually put them in put them into practice.
You know, as Khensur Rinpoche was emphasizing a great deal last night, you know, there’s no use of of receiving medicine from a doctor, you know, and filling your medicine cabinet up, medicine cabinet up, you know, no matter how wonderful the medicine, how potent the medicine, how accurately it’s been prescribed, if you actually have to take it for it to actually cure you of your ills, you actually have to do something, put the teachings into practice. There’s nothing more to be done than that. There’s no magic. There’s no secret that we’re holding out. That if you stay here at Buddha House long enough, we’ll tell you.
You know, if you pay your dues, become a member, you learn what we don’t tell the general public. Yeah. It doesn’t exist. I’m sorry. Yeah.
Just maybe I crushed your hope. So, anyway, I’m sorry. Go on. So anyway, this individual whom we’re going to develop towards whom we’re going to develop this love and compassion for is in this you know, we can pick for it. We’ve going working through a spectrum of individuals from ourselves and those we hold most closely.
We’re going to eventually get to enemies and etcetera. But maybe tonight just choose someone who you’re neutral toward but perhaps a little bit less than neutral in the sense that someone you you know, maybe someone of a different racial background, someone of a different ethnic background, someone you might feel maybe a little bit uncomfortable if you were to admit it to yourself. And even how no matter how liberal you might think you are, that’s maybe you might feel a little bit uncomfortable sitting next to them on a park bench. You know, you don’t know them. There’s just something about them.
Maybe they’re black or maybe they come from another ethnic or religious background that you feel uncomfortable with. Anyway, this is something someone of that nature and we’re going to see it, you know, we’re going to work with our minds. And if we can help help ourselves, if we can evoke such a state of mind toward that individual, you know, working with it, challenging ourselves. And meditation is very much a challenge. It takes a lot of skill.
It can’t be done purely mechanically. We have to you know, we don’t and we’re trying to learn how to operate our minds in in a better fashion. Get to get to know how, you know, the nature of mind, become aware of ourselves. And then we’ll do a nine round breathing meditation, and then we’ll do we’ll just do mindfulness and breathing. I I didn’t realize I was had so much talk about.
Okay. So if you take a firm comfortable posture, you know, the posture makes a difference. You know, there’s an interrelationship between the body and the mind. You know, the mind is dependent upon the body and the body is dependent upon the mind. You know, if So if you if you take a a purposeful posture. You know, there’s like body language, isn’t it?
You can Some people are very good at reading body language and we all are able to do it to a large degree. Most of our communication is done through our gestures, our expressions on our face, etcetera. So, you know, if you if you purposely and consciously position your body in a in a in a purposeful, stable, upright position, that sense of, you know, a groundedness, stability that you have in your physical posture is going to find expressions in the state of your mind. It’s going to because your mind is dependent upon the body. So so actually sitting in in a you know, if, you know, what, you know, we can’t what kind of mind what does such a type of posture kind of induce?
What can we kind of expect? You know, if you sit like a Buddha, you are a Buddha enough to some degree. You know, it’s very this this way of thinking is very much emphasized in Zen Buddhism, which some of you may be familiar with the type of Buddhism which is most predominantly practiced in Japan and Korea and previously in China. The body posture was held to be extremely important. It’s also important from the from the point of view of physiology of the of these channels that we’re going to make use of when we do the nine round breathing meditation that if the mind rides on airs or energies that course through the body.
And if if these passageways are restricted, then the mind we cannot develop concentration. The mind not the the mind cannot be collected and focused. It’s it’s diffused and it is it’s it’s there are interferences to our concentration. So it also has physiological consequences, you know, sitting with a straight back, but more the attitude that we bring to the experience. Yeah.
Let’s we do something holy. You know, the the word the the way they have the same root. To do something holy, that means with the entirety of who we are and to do it holy, to do something holy, that is to do something in a sacred manner, something which transcends the mundane. We generally are fragmented in all that we do and whatever we do. Here we’re trying to bring the entirety of our being constituted by our body and mind to a single act And and it becomes a style of life, the way that maybe it can carry over in our everyday life, bringing everything of who you are to this one experience and and being in this present moment with all that you are to be holy and present.
So so taking a firm comfortable posture. First, getting in touch with the body. Notice any any tightness, any any tensions, especially in the the upper shoulders, the neck, upper back. And consciously relaxing, bring your awareness to those areas of tightness or tension. Stay with that area and soften.
Relax.