Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 43-minute talk, Ven Jampa Gendun opens with a five-part poem about walking down the same street and falling into the same hole — using it to frame going for refuge not as a Buddhist formality but as something every person does when they finally grow sick and tired of repeating the same dysfunctional patterns. He argues that the anxiety we feel about those patterns is, within Buddhist psychology, a healthy sign of sanity and evidence of Buddha nature. The session moves through the three refuges (Buddha, Dharma, and spiritual community), a nine-round breathing practice, a guided meditation on death and our deep-seated illusion of immortality, and an introduction to the four powers of purification. Optimistic in tone and accessible to newcomers.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 09 HMA 1996 11 13.mp3
UUID: 1a5dae61-72d0-4322-a09e-48e6883108e1
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: The Heart and Mind of Awakening 1996-1997 (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1996-11-13
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 43.6 minutes
Words: ~6,101
I talked about the fact of going for refuge and the fact of that going for refuge is not particularly a Buddhist idea, it’s not particularly an eastern idea. Though we might not call it that, though we might not be conscious in our going for refuge, we’ve been doing it all our lives in one way or another and having to check up whether our particular refuge is working for ourselves, whether it’s actually helping us to solve our problems, whether it’s actually bringing us the quality of life that we want for ourselves. And this process of going for refuge is perhaps a reorientation in terms of what are our refuges, what are realistic refuges that can actually bring about what it is that we want. It has two basic causes, one of which is constructive anxiety and beginning to get some perspective on the reoccurring patterns of one’s life, the themes of dissatisfaction and disappointment and frustration that very much permeate our way of life, our particular approach to life, our dysfunctional approach. And the other is faith, that there’s that there is in fact something more than perhaps what we’ve experienced up to now, that that life is not just a bitch and then we die.
That there are to our present approach. You know, that that what we what we know of as life, what constitutes our approach to life, may be not in fact all that there is possible to life and the way it can be lived. I walk down the street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I fall in.
I’m lost. It isn’t my fault. It takes forever to find a way out. This is a biography in five parts. The second part, I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I pretend I don’t see it. I fall in again. I can’t believe I’m in the same place, but it isn’t my fault. It takes a long time to get out.
Part three, I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole on the sidewalk. I see it there, but still fall in. It’s a habit. My eyes are open.
I know where I am. It is my fault. I get out immediately. Part four. I walk down the same street.
There’s a deep hole in the sidewalk. I walk around it. Part five, I walk down another street. So maybe sooner or later at, some point in our lives, depending on just on just how sanely or insanely we’re living them. We grow sick and tired of being sick and tired and we, you know, that is to say, we grow sick and tired of falling into the same damn holes, you know, time after time after time.
And we decide maybe it’s time to get better, maybe it’s time to explore other avenues, other approaches, ways to live our life. And we begin to discern if only vaguely these reoccurring dysfunctional patterns, these pathological themes which very much constitute which make up our life and our approach to life. And beneath the obscuring self deception of our unwarranted hopes and their wishful thinking that these holes in our life are going to go away all by themselves, There is beginning to be an undercurrent of anxiety around the unending continuation of such a way of life. You know, as long as we’re recreating the basic dysfunctional patterns and the grounds of our very approach to life, how can we ever expect anything to get better of itself when we keep creating the cause the same causes for dissatisfaction, disappointment, and frustration, suffering in our lives. And if we continue creating the causes of suffering, what more can we expect than suffering?
So this quality of the object of our anxiety is quite often rather ill defined. It’s it’s a but there’s something which is felt to be a real threat to to our well-being. You know, there’s a a diffuse, vague feeling, an underlying experience of unease or some kind of a dread, a feeling of foreboding about what perhaps we’re not quite sure that there’s something wrong somewhere, that something is not right, that the perhaps about our life itself or the way that we’re living it, you know, its reoccurring patterns and themes, you know, the way we seem to be experiencing it. We don’t seem to be learning, and we keep missing or dismissing the lessons that life is continually bringing us or or we or forgetting those lessons that we’ve once learned at one point in our life. And we keep making the same mistakes again and again and again, even against our own better judgment.
And thereby we keep experiencing the same general dissatisfied outcomes again and again and again. I don’t think, you know, we don’t need any more suffering. People say that you learn from your suffering and there is a point to that, but there is a point when it’s stupid to suffer anymore just because you need another lesson. I think if we make use of our intelligence we can extrapolate from our past experiences into the future. We don’t need to be continually hit over the head with suffering.
But maybe we’re pretty tough minded in that way. Maybe you’re pretty thick skinned. Maybe we do need the lessons again and again. But at some point perhaps we have to begin to modify our behavior and our ways of thinking in view of the lessons that life is continually bringing us. You know, we we keep going down these same streets and falling into the same holes time after time.
And then at the back of our mind there’s a there’s a feeling that our lives are being lived as if out of our control, a feeling of ineffectiveness, a feeling of of powerlessness, of what’s happening to ourselves. Even if we were in control there’s a kind of a distressing recognition that we wouldn’t know what to do with our lives anyway. Even if we could have our life exactly the way that we might want it, we wouldn’t know what it is we want anyway, how we might want to live our lives. So this basic constructive anxiety or, you know, generally, it’s translated as fear. You know, it’s kind of a yeah.
Quite often in often in in western, at least in new age thinking, fear is always thought of as something which is negative, it’s something which is to be overcome. It’s unhealthy at least. But within Buddhist psychology, there are certain useful fears. Certain fear can be a healthy sign of your basic sanity. And there are certain things which is quite reasonable to be fearful of or at least anxious about in some way.
So this anxiety or fear is one of the two basic causes that’s directing ourselves toward change, toward perhaps another refuge in our lives. Our old refuge simply isn’t working for ourselves. So from the point of view of Buddhism, such anxiety is constructed because it is in fact directed at what are real threats to our well-being, to our security, the real holes in our life which we are going to continue to fall in one way or another. And it begins to act as an antidote to this the psychological stagnation of our hopes. You know, this wishful thinking that the holes in our life are going to go away all by themselves, that we really don’t have to do anything about it, that things will change for the better merely by the mere passage of time.
So this, from the point of view of Buddhism, this anxiety is seen as an expression of our our basic sanity, is the mind’s intrinsic instinct toward wakefulness, towards authenticity, towards wholeness. It’s a expression of the natural purity of the mind. Let us say it’s an expression of our Buddha nature, this the self healing potential of the mind. And that the this is finding expression in our conscious awareness. And the way that is experienced is a sense of foreboding, a sense of anxiousness, a sense of dread.
In other words, our anxiety about the condition of our life and our future prospects is and our refusal or in our inability to ignore it any longer testifies to just how fundamentally sane we really are. There’s a quote by American Jungian analyst where he says, Carl Jung discovered that each person’s psychological structure includes an independent religious function. This does not mean that there is a need necessarily to follow a particular creed or dogma, but it means that each human being comes with an inborn psychological urge to find a meaning in life. We all have an intuition that we could see ourselves as whole persons, see the ultimate meaning of life, experience ourselves totally. Jung saw that most Westerners, although they consciously only believe in what is physical and rational, have dreams and fantasies overflowing with symbols of those very qualities that people used to seek in their religious life, symbols evoking a sense of wholeness and a vision of a world larger than their own egos.
And if we did not possess potential to go beyond our own suffering, we would not be anxious about it and thus our minds would not be turned toward its eventual end. Those who do not possess the element of Buddha, that is our Buddha nature,, do not despair of suffering. I think that’s an interesting notion, isn’t it? That Buddhism is saying that our very weariness of suffering is an indication of the possibility of a radically alternative way of life. Otherwise we wouldn’t be weary of it.
There would be a certain acceptance, there would be no thought of other possibilities. There would be a an acquiescence. This is all there is. There is no more. A giving up.
You know, like a a a foregoing of any thought of any other way of life or possibilities. Those who do not possess the element of Buddha, that is the Buddha nature, do not despair of suffering, and thus they neither wish nor long nor strive for beyond sorrow. That is to say nirvana. nirvana is the end of all of our suffering, liberation from these dysfunctional patterns of our minds and the sufferings that they cause. So, you know, anxiety goes with becoming aware.
I think that’s a necessary part of the spiritual path. It’s unavoidable. And anxiety goes with assuming our potentialities and with realizing more and more of who we could be. And going for refuge is the constructive use of this anxiety. You know, potentiality, which we all possess, which we all have, goes over into actuality by means of anxiety.
Know, when we get sick and tired of being sick and tired, we’re going to find a way to get well. We’re going to avail ourselves of the resources of our own mind as a self healing system whereby to solve our problems at a more fundamental level, you know, or decide it’s time to get better at some level. And then perhaps it’s not all not conscious, rational, intellectual, but there’s still the the process is is there, is evoked in some way, and things begin to to change and find expression in our waking consciousness in various ways. You know, it becomes it’s time to begin to seriously search out other possibilities, explore other alternative avenues to travel down, other alternative ways of being. You know, we can do that.
You know, the way that we are living now, the value system, the belief system that we constitute, how we determine what the good life is for our self can change. You know, what has been not does not necessarily always have to be the same, will not always be the same. We can begin to contemplate, determine the nature of what’s going to determine the good life for ourselves and begin to create its causes in a very conscious fashion. We can begin to rewrite the story of our life and begin to find a place for the sacred within our life. We can begin to solve the problems in our life with perhaps a more fundamental level and realize what is ultimate worth to ourselves, what is ultimate value to ourselves.
In this sense we are beginning to look for an alternative refuge. And the way that we formalize that search, that we make a statement about ourselves and what it is perhaps that we are yearning for, what it is that we would like to believe in, is by a declaration or a commitment to go to a point of refuge. You know, it’s making a statement about ourselves, I go for refuge, and we do that all the time, but what is that refuge that you would prefer most for yourself, the preferred most story that you would have yourself live out? It’s the Buddhist story, from the Buddhist point of view at least, or whatever title we might want to give our our narration about our lives. You know, this perfect this happy, healthy, loving, sane human being that we are seeking to become, however each of us might presently conceive of it, whatever ideas and feelings that we might associate with that.
And we call that a Buddha, you know, just for want of a better word. Someone a tremendously happy, sane human being who’s, you know, experiences peace within themselves and skillfully and fearlessly and skillfully works with others in order to help them to experience the same. You know, from the point of view, this is the finest story that we could ever hope to tell ourselves about ourselves. And but we you know, it’s that’s important, the orientation, but we actually have to begin the doing of the living of that story. We have to begin to translate it out of the images within our imagination into some kind of actuality.
We actually have to begin to express it in our daily lives. We actually actually have to practice to to take up the work which needs to be done, that is to say to practice the Dharma, and that becomes our second refuge. And the techniques, the meditative traditions, the ways of changing our minds and our values and our ideas within our minds. And this process all occurs within the social context of a spiritual community, those who who assist us, who who support us in the process, who validate our aspirations, what we would have of ourselves, who act as material resources, as emotional resources, as supports in whatever way they can, the the the social matrix in which awakening takes place, and trying to again and again and again raise the level of our motivation. You know, we’re here now and we’re going to listen to a talk and maybe the talk is of no value, maybe I have nothing to say, but that’s beside the point.
And if we can at least orientate our minds that if something is said of, if I can take away something, if I can make use of some information, if I if I can become a better person by it, then I can be of that much more benefit not only to myself but maybe to one other person in my life, maybe a partner, maybe a loved one, maybe my parents and my children, but something outside of our own complete self interest. You know, something you know, trying to make that effort in a continual, consistent fashion to to break out this self defeating pattern of exaggerated self concern, this isolation, this this myopic vision of what the good life is about and seeing it only in terms of me, mine, and and ourselves alone is very much very integral to the process of awakening, to the spiritual path. So the inner focus of our life becomes Buddha, which we try to actualize by means of the Dharma within the social context of the spiritual community, and in our own way trying as best we can to raise the level of motivation that we’re doing it not just for our own selves, not for our own selfish ends, but for an ever widening circle of others.
And this is the way that we can help ourselves. At least we’ve got our our cart pointed in the direction that we might want ourselves most to go, and the rest will follow. 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 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 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. Reverently, I pay homage with my body, speech and mind and 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 has ended and turn the wheel of dharma for living beings. I dedicate the skillful actions of myself and others to the great awakening. Is it okay with that the light? Is that nice? You don’t feel scared or anything?
Would you like to stand up and then we’re going to meditate together? And, you know, working with this spectrum of possible types of relationships, we’re going to pick somebody that you have some problems with, somebody that disturbs your mind that you don’t like. And that you know, not your worst enemy. We’ll save them for later. Know, I mean, some people say, well, there’s there’s nobody I don’t like or there’s nobody I maybe they’re quite aren’t quite being honest or maybe maybe they’re saints.
I don’t know. It’s hard to say. But anyway, I think if you search you know, even if it’s only somebody who who, you know, cut you off in traffic or Yeah. Maybe somebody didn’t smile when you when you expected a smile, you know, and just a a slight feeling of unease or you know, it doesn’t have to be some great, you know, deep dislike, just something a small hurt, a misunderstanding of some some sort. Anyway, they were just going working with these people.
It’s not that we’re we’re looking for trouble but trying to make use of these difficulties as a means to help ourselves work with our mind. So anyway, just think of somebody that you have some problems with, that that disturbs your mind, that you feel uneasy around or that’s hurt you in the past in some some small way. We use we use them. Then we’ll meditate on the nine round breathing meditation, you know, breathing in this brilliant white light which and you can think of as, you know, whatever is positive in the universe, however you might conceive of that, know, the blessings of the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas and, you know, all your spiritual teachers or just some kind of positive universal energy. Whatever makes sense to you, whatever has meaning for yourself.
Taking that in, bringing bringing it down and around and breathing out, blocking your right nostril, breathing out through your left nostril, you know, all the various negativities, especially the first three rounds, those associated with attachment and desire and any obstacles, any feelings of heaviness, feelings of discomfort, physical and mental, all going off in this form of thick black smoke into the far distance and disappearing. Doing that three times, alternating and breathing again, blocking your your your left nostril, blocking your right nostril, taking in again the white light and breathing out this time the second three rounds. All those negativities especially associated with anger and hatred and aversion and all the various feelings of heaviness and discomfort, mental and physical. And then the third three rounds, breathing out those negativities associated with ignorance and confusion, darkness of mind, bewilderment, feelings of loss, you know, like you don’t know quite what’s going on any longer. All that mental difficulty, that frame of mind, that perspective is all going out and being lost, going up in the distance and disappearing.
And then I thought just you know, I I realized, you know, Buddhism isn’t particularly heavy. I think you know, Buddhism is quite in fact, is quite optimistic. You know, it especially the universal vehicle, the Mahāyāna, which is associated with the types of Buddhism generally extent in Tibet, used to be China, Korea, Japan, parts of Vietnam. It used to be more extensive but now it’s no longer is. But anyway, the there are some minor doctrinal differences amongst the various schools of Buddhism.
But according to the universal vehicle that everyone from the lowliest insect up to and including myself will all someday someday be a Buddha. And if I can be a Buddha, well, what to say of you people? So that’s a great that’s a great optimism that someday we’re all going to be Buddhas, that we’re all going to be these tremendously happy, healthy, loving, sane human beings. We will be that someday. It’s just a matter of when, how soon.
So there is that optimism. The the even the the the great, you know, the descriptions of the terrible pains and sufferings of the hell realms is at best only a temporary difficulty. At best, that is not a permanent situation that we’re just visiting there. And it is at worst, we’re not going to stay and move in permanently. So, you know, so the various meditations that we that we involve ourselves in are quite often concerned with heavier matters of life.
You know, some people think of Buddhism rather as pessimistic, that it’s always talking about suffering and death. Well, it’s necessary to take up and confront these issues if we’re ever going to resolve the deeper problems of our life. I think sometime we have to see that for ourselves. But just because we talk about death, just because we we talk about and analyze the nature of suffering and difficulties in our life is not is not to say that we have to become solemn about them, that we have to become depressed about it. On the contrary, I think we you know, there’s there’s reason for rejoicing that that that there is a if we are willing to to abide in the difficulty and the and the legitimate suffering or the and the anxiety that working through these problems necessarily entails, then there’s great, you know, there’s warranted hope, there’s grounded hope that things are going to get better, that there will be a cheering up, that things that you’ll be of greater use to yourself than others, that life will be less problematic.
So in in this context, the reason I went through this long preface is that we’re going to meditate on death and and I think it’s a quite useful meditation. Helps us keep our priorities straight in life. The time you hear people who are dying of cancer saying, Oh, if only I had thought about death. I remember once hearing an interview with a woman who had a very short time to live. She was terminally ill with cancer.
And they asked her, What do you regret most? And she said that I never thought about death till now. So, you know, there’s a great deal of advantage. There’s a lot of profit to be be gained by thinking of death now. It it helps you to go beyond the superficialities that we don’t get caught up in the mundane, that we keep our eye on what are the deeper, more significant issues of our life, our priorities.
Don’t waste our life when we begin to when we reflect about when we reflect on it from the vantage point that we’re all going to die and we simply don’t know when. So that’s where we’re going to meditate on. Of all the various mindfulnesses, you know, people talk about meditation and for most it’s the meditation is is mainly fixative or stabilizing meditation. For example, we do do it in meditating on the breath, watching in and out of the breath, which is an important element in the overall meditation. But there are other meditations which are equally as important, and one of these is meditation on death.
Of all the various mindfulnesses, the Buddha said that the mindfulness of death, the recollection of death, keeping in mind that we’re going to die and that we don’t know when is the most significant, the most important. And then we’re going to make greatest use of our life. We won’t allow our lives to be wasted. So we’re simply going to meditate on death, remembering the inevitability of death that everyone’s going to die. And then somehow we have to you know, we you know, I’ve talked about you know, we people talk about realization, realization.
I’m you know, I don’t have any realizations. They have all the realizations. You know, the people up in the sky have realizations. People in in the in the caves in in India and Tibet, they have realizations. And what do we mean by realization?
What is it? Realization is simply a elimination of a superimposition upon the facts. You know, it’s like if you were wearing sunglasses and you were looking at a snow mountain. And because you’re wearing your sunglasses, you saw the snow is green. And if you took out when you take off the sunglasses, you see the snow as it actually is.
It’s white. It’s not green. But due to some factor that you’re imposing, some kind of fantasy element that you’re you’re that you’re superimposing on what’s there. You see it in a in a wrong way. And likewise, when we talk about realization, it simply means eliminating our superimpositions, the fantasy element that we that project upon the world and upon things and people, the nature of reality.
And one of our imposing factors is that we’re going to live forever. I mean, you may not consciously have thought this out. But there at at some level of awareness, you have a notion, most likely, that you’re immortal, that you’re going and that that you’re going to live a long, long, long, infinitely long time, that in fact you’re not going to die. That’s one misconception that we harbor. A realization would simply be to eliminate that misconception and see the nature of the reality of our situation, that in fact I am going to die.
Everyone in this room is going to die. Everyone on this earth alive right now is going to be dead maybe in a hundred and twenty five years at the outside. That’s the reality. Reality. Our notion, our our present conception, our misconception is a fantasy.
So removing the fantasy element and getting at the nature of what is is all we mean by reality or realization. Simply removing the sunglasses so we begin to see the way things are. And moreover, we don’t know when. Again, have a miss we have a we hold that even if we were to intellectually at least acknowledge that I am mortal and all mortals die, that it’s not going to be any time soon. It’s going to be some time in the far, far, far distant future.
We put enough veils between ourselves and our impending death whereby we don’t have to feel its significance. Fact is that we don’t know whether we’re going to get home tonight alive. There are statistical probabilities which we could calculate which would tell us that there is a small chance that one of us isn’t going to come back here next Wednesday, that one of us is going to be dead in the interval. That’s the reality. We don’t know when.
Now one of us in this room is going to be the first to die. I know these are kind of not very cheerful thoughts, not things that we like to think but that doesn’t make them any the less important to think about, any, you know, necessary in our in our education, in our our program of mental hygiene that we’re working through. This is the reality the truth will make you free and this is the way that we can begin to free ourselves by coming beginning to see and remove beginning to see the way things actually are and beginning to remove our misconceptions based upon which we just keep we maintain this dysfunctional approach to life. And we’re working on some really faulty premises and and deeper and deeper levels of these mistaken notions, these wrong ideas, these erroneous beliefs. And a life lived on on the base of them is is somehow inappropriate, inappropriate, is ineffectual.
We aren’t it’s it doesn’t accord with the way things are. And that disparity between our beliefs and the way things are, in fact, is experienced as some type of dissatisfaction. There’s some kind of of disharmony. There’s some there’s there’s a there’s a misfit between our ideas about the world and the world as it actually is. And that misfit is dukkha, translated as as suffering or dissatisfaction, but with which originally meant a wheel that grinds on its axle.
It doesn’t quite fit properly. That’s how we experience our life. It hurts us. We clash with our world. So we can begin we have to begin we have no choice but begin to accord the living of our life with the way things are to find some kind of harmony and peace.
At some point, we have to get sick and tired of being sick and tired, and this is the way to get well. So anyway, we’re going to meditate on on on death. So if I take a comfortable, firm posture. First, getting in touch with the body. Are you noticing any tightness?
Is there any tensions in the shoulders and upper back, neck? And bringing your awareness to these areas. Just letting go. So we’re going through the four powers, sometimes called the four counteracting agents. These are the the the means, the the tools we can use to help purify, eliminate the negativities in our within our mind, the the karmic latencies which have been left within our mind due to previous unskillful actions that we’ve created.
I mean, this is the way that we can you know, we can’t there’s nothing that we can do about the past, but we can do something so our past doesn’t undo our future, that we we can begin to ameliorate the negative results which we’re going to we’re going to experience due to our past negative actions by applying these four power opponent powers. The first of these was the power of repudiation and this and this is the most important of these four. And it is essentially, as we’ve discussed, recalling past negative actions as best one can, but even having not been able to recall all of them, we can have a general sense of genuine regret about these negative actions that we’ve created in the past. You know, one of the you know, we try actually to to recollect negative actions, unskillful actions. But even those we we can’t recollect, we can have a gen a a general sense of regret about knowing that they’re how they’re going to affect us and how they’re affecting us even now.
And the the the image which is used in this context when people, you know, sometimes question how can I regret something I don’t know I’ve done? Is that, you know, someone who’s in a prison and they’re accepting extraordinary circumstances, we may not know exactly the crime that they committed, but we can assume quite legitimately that they they committed some crime. And so, likewise, though we may we, you know, we can remember, at least I can, and I don’t have all that great of a memory. Recall a lot of negativities that are recreated over the over the course of this life. But I also know that there are a lot of negativities that I have forgotten or wasn’t conscious of.
Perhaps we could include lives previous to this one also. Just as, you know, having recollecting the specific negativities that we can remember, developing a genuine sense of regret toward those, but also having a sense of regret around even those types of physical actions that we can’t remember specifically, that we are perhaps aren’t even aware of. So then the first power is the power of repudiation, then there’s the power of reliance. And this involves, you know, realigning our our our basic sanity and getting back on the path, recommitting ourselves to Buddhadharma and spiritual community, you know, those which are of the ultimate resources for helping ourselves in our life and solving our problems in terms of having broken a vow or a promise that you’ve formally made in some way or another or just in the negativities that we create, we harm ourselves or we harm others. And the power of reliance in this context would be simply developing compassion toward those people, whoever, that you’ve hurt in some way and recommitting ourselves to helping people rather than harming people, essentially. So the power of reliance, the power we rely upon those objects toward whom we’ve created a negativity as a means to get ourselves back in the direction that we would have ourselves travel, where we’d we’d have ourselves go.
We’ve covered those two, the power of repudiation, the power of reliance. The third of these four powers is the power of refraining. They’re sometimes called the power of restraint or reversal. So this is a determined turning away, of restraining from repeating the same past unskillful action again. You know, we have to be honest.
Know, in all things, think we have to be honest that there’s nothing magical about what we’re talking about here. There’s nothing magical about Buddhism. It involves psychological processes. There’s nothing which they may be terribly profound and at present inexplicable to ourselves to some extent, but still they are they all operate within the context of law, cause, and effect. There is nothing which transcends that as far as Buddhism is concerned.
And in that context, you know, we have to if we if we seek to bring about a particular type of effect, we’re going to have to create the cause. If we seek to bring about some type of purification of these negativities, we’re going to have to bring about some genuine cause, and that is these four powers. So in all of the things that we do, you know, it’s not like pouring there’s no there’s no absolution. There’s no power outside of our our own mind. It is our own mind which have created these negativities and only our own mind which can purify them.
And this is this extends to all of Buddhism. There’s no it doesn’t do us any good to to to take on dogma. It’s of no use to ourselves. It’s it’s it’s like pouring oil on water. It doesn’t mix with our minds.
The accumulation of information is will make no difference to our experience of life. Somehow we have to make it our own. Oh, thank you. So, you know, all of this, and this is emphasized again and again and again. You know, we can’t look to the left.
We can’t look to the right. We have to look to our own experience. We have to find the keys that open up our own mind and our own feelings. What works for us in a very is very unique.