Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. “The wound is the mouth which is trying to tell us our truth” — this image anchors Ven Jampa Gendun’s opening session of the Heart and Mind of Awakening series. In this 30-minute talk, he draws a sharp contrast between two responses to pain: treating suffering as a temporary malfunction to correct (his thermostat analogy) versus listening to it as a diagnostic signal pointing to deeper causes like attachment and codependency. He frames the Buddha as a “systems analyst” who saw cyclic existence as fundamentally miscalibrated — not to be adapted to, but exited — and introduces the eight worldly dharmas as the operating principles that keep practitioners perpetually stuck. The session closes by naming suffering, impermanence, and selflessness as the three marks of existence the series will examine. Accessible to newcomers yet substantive for those already on the path.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 12 HMA 1996 11 20.mp3
UUID: c6df2ca9-d007-4f9f-8654-777f8b409697
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: The Heart and Mind of Awakening 1996-1997 (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1996-11-20
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 29.8 minutes
Words: ~4,074
Quite naturally, mind will begin to orientate itself in another direction. Our our present approach doesn’t work very well. There are alternatives available to ourselves. And how do we how do we actually, you know, beyond intellect, begin to make those choices at a very at a deeper level of our mind, to orientate our minds at a deeper level of our being? So we have begin to see the actual suffering nature of the way that we’re operating in our life, you know, beyond what we might like to believe about our life, what we’ve been told about, you know, about what we should be experiencing in our life, what we would like to have others know us as to be experiencing in our life, and actually beginning to gain some perspective on what we actually are experiencing.
You know, it’s we don’t we don’t come to this path freely, you know, this this all this exploration, all this questioning as it may appear, but only through some deep crisis, some some emotional pain in our life, you know, an an important level of of recognized unmanageability, some kind of anxiety about our life. You know, as as I’ve probably emphasized many times in the past, you know, it’s unhappiness that makes us think. If if if we’re unhappy, we want to know the reason why, but we never cause ourselves to ask the reason we’re happy. So it’s it’s therefore unhappiness rather than happiness which actually makes us causes us to reflect upon what we’re doing and where we’re going with our life, the condition of our lives. It’s unhappiness which makes us think.
Now how many that seems to be the nature of our situation. So, you know, it’s not a it’s something that we discuss. We have to discuss suffering. It’s not a it’s not an academic subject, but it’s not something which is divorced from our lives. It is not a theory or more information.
We’re trying to see it as a way of what is being said is somehow mirrored in our actual experience, that it’s it’s intimately related. What is that what is being described is reflecting of what’s going on for us. It has to be seen in in that way, in a in a heartfelt way, in a feeling manner. And then the the moment our minds experience pleasure, they become superficial more than not. You know, it’s pain that makes us that makes us profound.
And then it’s our suffering. Or or or maybe not just our suffering. I mean, everybody suffering suffers, but everybody’s not profound. Are they? It’s our conscious awareness of suffering, its nature, its pervasiveness, the nature of the human condition, its acknowledgment of our suffering, and all all the associated questions that it begins to bring up for ourselves.
You know, what is this all about? What what is what’s the meaning of it all? This thing called life. You know, what’s the use of it all? Why are we what am I doing?
Why am I here? And it is you know, it’s almost corny know, questions, but they’re only corny because we I think there’s a certain usually, questions are associated with a sense of hopelessness, a sense despair, a sense of anxiety. So therefore, you know, we don’t let’s not deal with them. Let’s let’s let’s call them corny. That’s a word.
You know, we do we don’t know where we’re going or what to do or we don’t know what to believe in or if it’s there is anything actually to be believed in. It all seems some somehow pointless or somehow meaningless at times for all of us. And there’s a fear that this feeling of meaningless may not go away. I feel kind of empty and hollow inside. The Buddha saw the suffering, the fundamental anxiety of all humans as a kind of plague.
You know, talking about suffering isn’t going to cause us to suffer any any of the more, or maybe it does. I don’t know. Maybe who needs it? It’s it’s maybe the actual time of listening to it is kind of uncomfortable. I don’t know.
Maybe it’s boring. Maybe that’s the kind of more suffering. But I think it can be liberating if we if we begin to see the universality of what’s going on for if we see it as not unique to myself. And then we sometimes have a notion that that everybody out there has got it all together. Yeah.
Over on this side of the looking glass, there’s confusion, questioning, and continually there’s no continuity of of being able to come to any conclusions, having getting a handle on things. It’s always continually falling apart to whatever conclusions that whatever answers I may get for myself. But everybody out there seems like they know what they’re doing. Something particularly wrong with me. It does that’s that doesn’t happen to be the case.
It’s been a well kept secret there. The Buddha saw that suffering the fundamental anxiety of all humans as a kind of plague, a dis a disease that afflicts everyone. No matter what the circumstances of birth or upbringing. And he described it in very great detail. This was not because the Buddha liked to dwell upon suffering or was of a pessimistic turn of mind.
On the contrary, he appears to have been a rather joyful and positive in this position. It was out of his compassion and sense of irony that the Buddha saw that people constantly preoccupied with trying to avoid facing this anxiety and therefore constantly feeding it. He saw people trying to lose their awareness of their state of existence and of their inevitable death in every form of entertainment from the luxuries of the rich to the asceticisms of the forest dwellers, from the passions and aggressions of personal life to the not so different passions and aggressions of the battlefield in the political conference table. From the search for certainty in the philosophy of materialism, which was as prevalent and sophisticated in its time as it is now, to the not so very different search for security and religious beliefs of all kinds. Thus, he realized, as so many modern therapists have done since, that the cure for our deep anxiety can begin only when we begin to recognize our urge to ignore it.
So, you know, in in in response to our suffering, we we can either run away, we can ignoring it, cultivating an unawareness. We can desensitize ourselves through various means. We can numb ourselves to the pain of our life. We can distract ourselves by all types of possibilities which our culture offers us. We can take flight and become absorbed in whatever particulars or we we can finally definitely refuse to our own conscience, our own we can refuse to feel our own feelings.
You know, we can we can reject our own inner truth about ourselves is in in in which state most of modern humanity lives, divided off from their own their own deeper experience of the human condition and who they are. Or we can begin to confront suffering and the meaninglessness of our lives. And out of this, begin to this confrontation and this deeply deeply felt need to resolve the conflict and this this tension aroused by this conflict, begin to synthesize and create some kind of path for ourselves, and begin a journey of healing for ourselves. There are two basic attitudes that we can take towards suffering. On the one hand, we can look upon pain and suffering as simply something to be overcome.
It’s an interruption and kind of an obstruction to life itself. Things should be different. They ought to be different than the way they are. That this suffering is incidental to life. You know, I should not be suffering.
And it’s just that something has temporarily gone wrong, which which can be set right again. So that’s one possible attitude we can take toward our difficulties, toward our pain, our suffering, our feelings of dissatisfaction, that there are only ab temporary aberrations of something has has gone astray, and we can fix it and put things right again. We we, you know, we it’s like we’ve set our thermostat of pleasure pain at some kind of some kind of comfort zone. And when it moves beyond a certain threshold, kind of counteracting mechanism. Is this is it kicked in?
You know, that that that brings our life back to some kind of prescribed limits. You know, that that’s there’s like a homeostatic balance. That’s like a thermostat that keeps the room temperature at a certain level. And that’s the way that we you know, it may it may be only a tolerable level, but at least it is we have a sense that that that that life should be have have a normality, and any deviation from that is not part of life. It’s an aber it’s it’s an abnormal abnormality of life, an aberration.
And we can we can set things right again by, you know, we can by having less of a more of something or other. You know, if if we can have, you know, less work, less stress, less demands placed on us, or we can have more time, more energy, if we can have more sex, more love, then things will be okay. Either less or more, and we can get the balance right again, get it within the parameters that we set for ourselves in one way or another. The other attitude that we can take toward suffering, towards our pain, is that our suffering and pain give us a glimpse of what needs to be done next, that our pain and suffering are a kind of truth about ourselves, a kind of intelligence trying to tell us something about ourselves in the way that we’re living our life, that they are saying that there is something wrong with the system and that we and the way that we’re relating to it, that there is something wrong in the way that we are living our life. It’s important not to forget that any healing process, even the question of what each of us with a common cold is to do about this virus, is a myth, a way of viewing and evaluating oneself and one’s body in relationship to the world.
Unless my illness changes my image of myself, my myth of myself, I shall not have distilled from the turmoil of illness the opportunity for new insight into myself and my possibilities for self realization in life, and I shall not attain anything that can be rightly called cure. You know, the the symptoms are not the disease. If we simply alleviate the the pain, the disease can remain. The the fundamental causes are still there, and that’s and we we only are waiting for them to find to erupt again. We will fall ill again, again, and again.
There’s no sense in trying to adapt to a pathological pathological situation, a pathological approach to life. Just just as physical pain can be seen as some kind of disbalance, an unbalance, disharmony with inside of ourselves, terms of our bodily processes. Mental suffering can be seen as a kind of a sign of some kind of mental illness, and that there’s an imbalance, some kind of conflict, some kind of disharmony with inside of our own minds. So so pain and suffering tell us that there’s something wrong with the processes of living. We and we have to listen.
The the the wound is the mouth which is trying to tell us our truth. And we it’s necessary that we listen to our wounds and what they’re trying to say to ourselves, that we have to listen to our suffering, you know, and cease avoiding them, cease trying to numb ourselves to them, cease trying to simply get rid of the symptoms, but try to listen to what they’re trying to tell us are the causes of our pain. What are they where are they coming from? What is the actual disease? So, you know, for example, in reacting to maybe a broken relationship, something that we’ve all experienced, probably the rest of our life, and the depression, the pain that comes with that.
We can we can see that that that pain, the suffering, the broken relationship as some as simply a state to be gotten rid of, you know, a temporary obstruction to our happiness. And we move on as quickly as possible to another relationship in order to eliminate the pain surrounding the old one, or we will find some means of distracting ourselves from that pain. Or we can listen to our suffering and try to understand what it’s trying to tell us about ourselves. Perhaps our pain is symptomatic of a disparity between our expectations and reality, of an inappropriate way of relating to the fact of change, of impermanence, of relating to aloneness, or maybe there’s an under way of inappropriate relating to problems of fear, attachment, of codependency in our life. You know, the pain is telling us a lot about ourselves.
It wouldn’t be there if there wasn’t a deeper cause. So there’s no — you know, we can either try simply to get rid of the pain or try to understand what is the deeper cause of which that pain is simply an expression, a voice trying to tell me what’s wrong in the way I’m living my life, and try to learn from it and try to correct it at a deeper level. It eliminates the more fundamental problems. You know, it’s at moments of suffering that we that we are temporarily, momentarily deflected from our habitual attitudes and usual focus and our attention to different ways of of thinking and viewing. We we concern ourselves with issues that we we never think about generally.
Our suffering is trying to tell us something, trying to to tell us what needs to be looked at. And maybe it’s the fact of change. Maybe it’s the fact of codependency. Maybe it’s the fact of attachment. Maybe that we we are afraid we cannot be alone with ourselves.
We don’t like ourselves. Maybe it’s or we have unrealistic expectations of relationships. Maybe it’s a lot of things, and it probably is all of those things in what different proportions. But, you know, that’s what it’s saying to ourself, that pain is symptomatic and that is the disease. Now maybe at on a universal level, you know, it’s just it’s telling us some tell us something about conditioned existence, the human dilemma, you know, and that’s difficult to see the relevance at times of that, but maybe it’s necessary to to gain that perspective, that a type of life which is lived under the control of karma and afflictive emotions.
That’s what that’s the bottom line message that and that what needs to be awakened to, you know, where it is that we need to grow. You know, it’s yeah. I think it’s it’s it’s very much of a truism, you know, that positive psychological psychological growth only occurs when there’s a deep awareness when there’s deep awareness and associated discontentment or anxiety in connection with the present state of affairs. And if there’s no awareness and there’s no anxiety with the with the continuance of what it is, then there will only be efforts in maintaining the status quo. That there will be there’ll be avoidance and resistance to any change.
And only when there’s an awareness and then there’s a coupled with a sense of discontentment that I don’t want things to remain this way any longer. A certain anxiety, a certain discontentment with them remaining this way any longer. Even if it’s just sitting in a chair, you know, if if there’s going to be a certain certain, you know, regret about getting up out of a comfortable chair, isn’t there? But the moment you become aware that your position in that chair has become uncomfortable, then spontaneously, quite naturally, you shift your position. So likewise, if we if we begin to see that our particular approach to life, a life which is governed by ignorance, which is very much under the control of attachment and hatred and jealousy and spite and miserliness and all the various deluded states, and under the control of karma, that such a state is an uncomfortable position to be in.
And quite spontaneously and naturally will shift, will begin to move in in in a direction which frees us, which orientates us in in another way, away from those states of attachment and hatred and most basically ignorance and begins to work with the problem of karma. But, you know, but this awareness has to be something more than mere curiosity or intellectual speculation. Something more than simply the intellect. It has to it has if it’s going to serve as a catalyst for change. And as I said, you know, the pleasure and pain take priority over logic for most of us, for most all of us.
I think there may be individuals rare individuals where this may not be the case, but I think these these aren’t the these individual aren’t typical. You know, I know I shouldn’t do this, but it feels so good I can’t stop. And oh, I know I should do that, but I just can’t be bothered. It’s too much trouble. It doesn’t matter anyway.
You know, that’s the way most of us think in one way or another. And we remain forever stuck in one way or another. So what are we stuck with? We’re stuck with what we mentioned and what was mentioned week and I think the week before in terms of these eight principles of ego, as well, the eight worldly dharmas. We’re stuck with the principles of pleasure pain, the pursuit of pleasure, the avoidance of pain, the pursuit of gain, the avoidance of loss, the pursuit of praise, the avoidance of criticism or ridicule, the pursuit of fame, the avoidance of ridicule.
And these are the standards by which we delineate what we determine, what we’re going to do and what we’re not going to do. We run our life. And these aren’t the for a healthy way of life. So the without this sense of anxiety, you know, like getting sick and tired of being sick and tired, almost a sense of revulsion, repugnance around our present approach to life, what we call cyclic existence, a life governed by ignorance, the afflictive emotions, and karma, then we’re we’re always going to remain stuck in one at some way or another. There’s there’s never there’s never going to be the motivation necessary to change, the energy to get ourselves, you know, to interrupt these patterns.
The to endure the the the motivation to endure the risk of experimenting experimenting with other possibilities. The breaking away from these principles of pleasure, pain, of gain, loss. One of the basis of neurosis, these dysfunctional patterns of our mind, is our lack of willingness to expand our awareness and our our lack of courage to bear with the with the tension experienced in the resolution of conflict. Now we and therefore, we remain forever stuck. We keep we keep repeating the same patterns.
This this characteristic of neurosis to compulsively repeat the same patterns, same ways of thinking and behaving and speaking. You know, getting sick and tired of being sick and tired, then we’re going to find a way to get well. You know, we’re going to begin to draw our own inner resources, you know, our resources of wisdom and energy and creativity to get ourselves unstuck. You know, though we’d rather not to, if we’re really going to you know, I I don’t think Buddhism is saying let’s let’s let’s try to Buddhism isn’t going to help you to adapt to a pathological situation, and by that I mean a sick situation, unhealthy situation, a situation of suffering. You know, if no good therapist should do that for you, you know, to help a person to return to an unhealthy situation and somehow be able to live with it, you know.
I think you’re doing discredit to the client, you’re doing discredit to the possibilities of their health and what they could be doing with their lives. We aren’t really helping them in in any real way. We’re just, you know, to be to be normal in an insane society is not to be very healthy. It’s not to be all that we could be. So, you know, Buddhism isn’t trying to help us to become normal, to adjust to pathological situations.
It’s trying to help extricate ourselves with what it sees as a as a dysfunctional situation, as a situation which can only be experienced as varying levels of suffering. So, you know, we have to see that for ourselves if our minds are ever going to develop the orientation to get out, you know, this will to awaken, this determination to really grow. So though we’d rather not from you know, we if we’re ever really going to develop a strong consistent will to awaken, if we are going to really going to heal ourselves, if we’re ever going to really deal with our problems at a more fundamental level and not just change the names of our problems, not just change you learn some some new technique of dealing with our problems which really never solve our problems, but if we’re ever going to, you know, really exit the system, and this system you know, the Buddha, Śākyamūni, was a systems analyst, and he he saw a system which governs people’s lives, and he called this system cyclic existence, and he said this system should be exited from, that nothing within it is worth having or becoming, that it it is by its very nature suffering.
You know, that’s hard to say, I think, at its deepest level, its most most subtle level. That is you know, that at best we can only make you know, we can only make best of a difficult of a of a suffering situation. You know, it is it is as if all of our tools that we have to work with, that we’re working with, are in some way faulty, are in some way calibrated wrong wrongly, that our levels are off balance, that our tools in some way are defective. And and that’s all we have in within this cyclic existence, that’s all that’s what we’re working with. And and we’re trying to make the the best of a difficult situation out to me.
But what what can what with those tools, what can we hope to construct? Something at best which is some way dysfunctional, which doesn’t work properly, which is flawed most basically. And no matter how much energy and no matter how much how clever we may be, what you know, all the time we may be able to put into the project, we never come up with what we want, you know, real happiness, fulfillment, meaning, love. So we’re going to look at the nature of our situation in terms of, what we call the three marks of conditioned existence in terms of suffering, impermanence, and selflessness. And these these characterize our experience of the world, our lived life, and being able to see how they fit in, how they’re relevant to what we’re actually going through.
And I think appealing to our our basic sanity in the process that it’s going to move us in a positive direction. So we’ll stop there. I dedicate the positive potential of the skillful actions that we’ve created together. In the land encircled by snow mountains, you are the source of all happiness and well-being, powerful Chenrezig, Tenzin Gyatso. Please remain until the end of cyclic existence.
May I quickly become an awakened spiritual master and lead each and every living being to that awakened realm through these skillful actions. May the supreme jewel, the awakened heart that has not arisen, arise and grow, and may that which has arisen never diminish but increase more and more.