Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute talk, Ven Jampa Gendun opens with a provocation: Buddhist teachings can easily become another means of self-tyranny, co-opted into the very patterns they are meant to dissolve. Fresh from a narrative therapy intensive, he uses “deconstruction” to question beliefs absorbed uncritically — mother-blaming, Anglo-Saxon defaults treated as universal truths — and draws on a Suzuki Roshi passage to argue that no set way exists for anyone. The Buddha, he proposes, is simply a name for one’s own preferred story, discerned from lived experience. He then leads a layered meditation: breathing with noting, choiceless awareness, then consciousness itself as object — anchored by a Lama Yeshe passage on meditation as “intense awareness” rather than squeezing or spacing out. A brief loving-kindness exercise closes the session.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 23 HoM 1993 09 22.mp3
UUID: 2bcd62e6-35e2-4562-81e3-c5e758bbc601
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: The Heart and Mind of Awakening (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1993-09-22
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.7 minutes
Words: ~5,156
Orientated, getting back in touch with some of our our most deeply held values. Those principles and guidelines and ways of being that in our finest moments, we would like we prefer to see as an expression of be expressed in our in our life. It’s a a direction of of honoring our best judgment. In a way, I think about Buddhism in in particular, but also the various ideologies and our various views that we’ve, adopted or absorbed either consciously or unconsciously somewhere along the line. You know, we have to ensure that somehow that it is validated with our own lived experience.
We cannot allow, for example, Buddhism should not be made into some universal truth which we simply use to tyrannize ourselves. No beliefs or views should be a means of oppressing ourselves. And finding a You know, having to perform some kind of mental gymnastic to so that somehow we coincide with preconceived notions about prescribed ways of being. And that somehow we have to and we we begin to marginalize our own real lived experience. We begin to discount what it is that we actually experience in our real lived life, in our near experience, in the pursuit of living up to some sort of theory, some idea, not just Buddhist ideas, but our our various ideas that we hold in general, what it means to be a mother, what it be means to be a man, a woman, all the various identities that we may assume.
It’s quite a challenge, think, to to live our life in terms of what we actually experience, to learn from our actual experience as opposed to what we believe our experience is telling us, to see the difference between the two or what we think we should be seeing. You know, that we can, any ideology, even the best motivated, spiritual paths can be simply another means of finding ourselves wanting, another means of perpetuating a lot of, dysfunctional patterns of our life. And, you know, if we, we can’t allow the practices of Buddhism and the ideas of Buddhism to be incorporated into those, dysfunctional patterns, They are there to help us, to help us to solve our problems, to make, our solutions a habit of life. So Buddhism can act as a method for assisting us to experience other versions of who we can be through its ideas and through its practices. But we have to be rather intelligent.
It’s quite demanding. It’s quite challenging, this process. You know, what is what is is most important is what works for you within your own lived experience. You are the authority on your life. Now the Buddhism, no no one else.
And to accept that authority, reclaim that authority, and take responsibility for your life is quite demanding. It’s quite challenging. You know, the goals goals never work if they’re split off from the natural unfolding of who we are in time. There has to be something which suggests our goals, something about our own lived experience which suggests in which our goals seem like some sort of natural evolution, a natural progression about where we are now and where we seem to be going, the trends of our life, the directions which we’re moving rather than some idealistic notions about what we have been told is the preferred view. You know that this can be very terribly oppressive.
There’s a quote by Suzuki Roshi. I’m quite fond of. If you want to read a very inspiring book, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. Suzuki Roshi was Japanese Zen master who did in the United States in San Francisco up to I don’t know. He probably died about fifteen years ago.
As long as we have some definite idea about or hope in the future, we cannot really be serious with the moment that exists right now. You may say, can do it tomorrow or next year, believing that something that exists today will exist tomorrow. Even though you are not trying so hard, you expect some promising thing will come along as your life follows a certain way. But there is no certain way that exists permanently. There is no way set up for us.
Moment after moment, we each have to find our own way. Some idea or perfection or some perfect way which is set up by someone else is not the true way for us. Each of us must make his own true way. And when we do that way, we’ll express the universal way. This is a mystery.
When you understand one thing through and through, you understand everything. When you try to understand everything, you will not understand anything. The best way is to understand yourself, and then you will understand everything. So when you try hard to make your own way, you will help others and you will be helped by others. Before you make your own way, you cannot help anyone and no one can help you.
To be independent in the true sense, we have to forget everything we have in our own mind and discover something quite new and different moment after moment. This is how we live in the world. So I think it’s a great challenge to grow and to challenge to what beliefs that we have. And just to what we take for granted the realities which we take for granted. Now there’s a there’s a word called deconstructionism.
And this is a process of of seeing through those ways of being and realities which we take so much for granted as if they were natural to life and which are subjugating and impoverishing, subverting subverting these ways of being, these way these ways of knowing, these realities which we take so much for granted as if they were universal truths unquestioned. But in fact, we have to begin to question these truths. And this is, to a large degree, what we’re involved in in terms of of all of the path of Buddhism. But I think it’s also, has to be almost a way of life. And beginning to look to one’s own experience for one’s validation of of one’s own knowledge.
And one taking recourse to one’s own knowledgableness and skills and history. You know, the the What is most important is what works for you. You are your own authority. You are your own boss. You know yourself best.
You know, to know oneself is to be free, ultimately. And this this direction that we take, this this coming to know ourselves is, you know, metaphorically, I just say something which represents the the preferred outcomes of our life. Now aside from our preconceptions, but what, in terms of our own experience, would be the ways of being and the ways of relating that we would prefer? How would we like to live our life In an extension about who we are at present in terms of our history. And we call that a Buddha.
That’s a representation. It’s the you know, I talk about stories that we tell about ourselves. It’s the Buddhist story or the the happy, healthy, loving, sane human being story. There’s something about our life which suggests this as a possibility, as we don’t have to engage in some mental gymnastics to put ourselves into that story. If we look within our own experience, perhaps we can find it within the plot, a subplot as it were buried beneath the dominant story of our life, which oftentimes is impoverishing and subjugating.
So, you know, this is the direction. This is what we come we keep coming back to. And we talk about I I am continually talking about redirecting oneself, reorientating oneself within our own lived experience, validating the type of person, finding that out the ways of being and the ways of relating, which are experienced as preferable for oneself, which you find some kind of satisfaction, contentment, fulfillment, which has meaning, which you can believe in as a very unique individual. And then not these tremendous universal truths about what we should be, but what works for us within our lived moment by moment lived experience. And that becomes your Buddha.
And that becomes your Dharma and your spiritual community. And the Buddha as the the the preferred outcome of the type of life that we would like to live. Buddhism can supply us with thinking tools, which in combination with our own knowledgableness, in combination with our own skillfulness and history, can assist us in bringing about our preferred outcomes. So it’s supplying us with tools. We already have some tools.
And we need to make use of those. But it can supply it can assist us in that process. It doesn’t have the answers for us. Those are answers that that are very much unique to ourselves because our our problems are very unique to ourselves. We have to see the the reality of our own situation and the dysfunctional nature of our own situation and arrive at very unique solutions to our own situation.
And this process is assisted by, you know, the the spiritual community. Those who acknowledge and authenticate our preferred claims about our life and the type of person that I want to be and helping us to perform that way of being in life. I get perhaps I’m speaking a bit abstractly. I think I’ve been doing a a course this week on week’s intensive course on narrative therapy. And it’s been quite a challenge because it is continually seeking to, this word, deconstruct the preferred, the the dominant beliefs of our culture that we take so much for granted.
And just to become aware of how how much our our life is led on the basis of beliefs. Our reality is conditioned by these beliefs, which we take so much for granted. And how how very much this can be oppressive. You know, that the whole there’s a great deal within Western psychology up to the present of psychopathologizing. And as he in terms of, you know, one one easy example, which many people can identify with is is mother blaming, for example.
That that if only I had been a better mother, my child might not have turned out that way. And this is taken as a reality. And one can point to various instances in one’s history which which demonstrate, which prove to oneself that one, in fact, is the cause of one’s the mother is the cause of the child’s problem. But it never occurs to anyone that this is simply a culturally conditioned view, that it is a a a belief system. And it is more than that, is an is an oppressive belief system.
It impoverishes, impoverishes and oppresses people’s lives. It is subjugating to people. And it but it it appears to be a truth to some people. And they can look to it. They can prove it with their their own history as if, you know, they and but they don’t see that the very proofs that they’re using to to validate are are also culturally conditioned.
That the way that we’ve been forced to look, you know, that we we take we take the white middle class Anglo Saxon values as as being universal truths. And which is slowly being apparent coming apparent, this is not the case. There there are many other cultures with many other world views, with many other ways of being, which are equally as valid. And moreover, our particular world view is leading to a rapid deterioration of the possibilities of life on the planet. So maybe ours isn’t particularly all that functional.
Maybe it’s not the best. It’s not it’s definitely not the only one. So again and again, you know, not allowing ourselves, not using Buddhism or any other belief system as a means of tyrannizing yourself. And what works for you, what is prefer preferable for you is the best indication of one’s own path. That’s the way that you can make your way, that you can that you can advance in your life and solve your problems, your unique problems.
And I I’ve seen too many times people who who make use of Buddhism and the teachings as simply another means to find themselves wanting, as another means to they they incorporate the the teachings which are supposed to to liberate them into the the patterns of slavery. So in a that we have to be wise. We have to approach these teachings which can be liberative, which can be thinking tools if we use them intelligently. You know, we talk about various realizations, various steps along the path, and this is quite useful. But if we we can also think to ourselves, well, I don’t have that understanding.
My understanding is this understanding. Therefore, there must be something wrong with me. And then and we we we we try our best. We put ourselves in various straight jackets. We twist our minds.
We perform mental gymnastics in order to come to what is the the party line, the correct truth that we’re supposed to be knowing somehow. And things don’t go very well. We were talking about I think if I the way that perhaps I can relate this to Buddhism a little more clearly is in terms of you know, the entire path of Buddhism is very much simply an overturning. You know, the Buddhism doesn’t cannot say and does not say that it is a truth, the absolute truth, because Buddhism does not accept any absolute truth, that all truths are relative, all truths are conventions. Buddhism does offer a particular approach to life, how to relate with the world about us, what we experience, the way to frame them, the way to view them, to look at them, such that life becomes less problematic.
The mind experiences greater and deeper moments of peace. It is founded on the premise that we are living under the tyranny of many wrong views, mistaken beliefs, distorted conceptions. Only from the point of view that these ways of thinking are problematic in terms of peace, in terms of suffering. That’s the only standard that it makes use of. The Buddha taught two things, suffering and the means to go beyond suffering.
I think that’s quite helpful because it’s not prescriptive to some particular way of life, of how we should be. It’s saying we are suffering. That’s our lived experience. Right? We can validate that.
We can look in our lives and say, Yes, I am suffering. And there are ways that we can remove that suffering. It’s not saying that we should be some other way. It’s saying that we don’t want to suffer. And there are methods to remove that suffering.
That’s all it’s saying. However that how however that that the the positive there, the the the however that peace, whatever form it expressed, how it takes shape, is very unique to us. We don’t have to be in any particular way. We don’t have to fit in any particular mold. But we want to remove our suffering.
And there are some tools to help us to remove that suffering. The tools are in terms of the overcoming, the deconstruction of these dysfunctional patterns and wrong beliefs. These are simply tools. But we can’t allow the tools to run our lives, become part of the problem. So we have to accept the challenge and think and make use of these processes intelligently.
Anyway, if not, this isn’t what we’re talking about here each Wednesday night. It’s not something different than our life, our lived experience out on the street. Though in I I in my limitation and my confusion, I I find it difficult to to make it relevant. But that’s your work very much. How does it so how what is how does it relate to my actual lived experience?
How can it act as a solution? Does is it describing what’s actually going on in my life? How can I make use of it as a tool? So I guess you know, this this continual redirecting process is just a way of keep reminding ourselves, to keep looking at our life, to to continually to examine our life and what we’re about and what it is that works for us, what it is that actually makes us happy, makes us feel good about ourselves and the possibility of life in general. The possibility is personified as a Buddha, that ultimate outcome of our preferred story.
And we use these tools, the Dharma, to to as a means to actualize our preferred story, to perform our preferred story in real life. And this occurs within the social context of a spiritual community. Those who assist us in this process, who authenticate and acknowledge our preferred story, our preferred way of being. Who we would like to be, somehow suggested by our own lived history. We have found moments of who we would like to be.
If we look back, we can see moments of what we would prefer to be. And there are those who will help us to make that a habit, a way of life, the spiritual community. And trying to raise the level of our motivation. To assist others in the same process. This is a we’re in involved in a in a wonderful experience.
Something that we can all share in. That I think this sharing is in is in itself an essential part of the story, of the Buddhist story of communication and caring for one another. I go for refuge until I’m enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the highest assembly. When the virtuous merit that I collect by practicing giving and the other perfections, may I attain the state of the Buddha to be able to benefit all sentient beings. I go for refuge in my life, to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the highest assembly.
And the virtuous merit that I collect by practicing giving any other perfections, may I attain the state of a Buddha to be able to benefit all sentient beings. I go for refuge until I’m enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the highest assembly. And the virtuous merit that I collect by practicing giving any other perfections, may I attain the state of a Buddha to be able to benefit also. So we’re going to and to take as the object of, you know, in development of our motivation and development of working with our mind in terms of our motivation, our love and compassion. You know, if we can maybe if we can if we can imagine that that friend enemy and a stranger, someone we are naturally close to and someone we have no particular feeling or particular relationship with And someone that we aren’t getting along with, someone who’s we don’t like or someone who disturbs our mind in some way, even if it’s in a only in a minor way.
I think when people tell me they can’t think of someone as they don’t like, you know, it doesn’t have to be a huge raging hate or anything. Maybe somebody pulled in front of you in traffic or slammed the door. That’d be great. I know that’s fine. Great.
If there’s something that you can work with that someone who displeased you. And then we’re then we we’ll meditate on mindfulness of breathing. And then we will meditate on on consciousness, and we have been doing this. We’ve done this before in terms of, you know, first meditating on mindfulness of breathing and if it’s helpful using the techniques of counting and noting. And then at a certain point, we’ll we’ll stop counting.
And we’ll continue to to note. Or if you don’t if you don’t know, usually, that’s that’s fine also. But but practice noting, try noting, and that is to say, mentally acknowledging or emphasizing with one within one’s mind what one’s mind is involved in. And ideally, in in the when one is meditating mindfulness of breathing, it it is on the breath. Breathing in, you know that you’re breathing in.
That is to say that you’re aware of it, that you’re sensitive to it, that you’re attentive to it, that you acknowledge in, breathing out, knowing that you’re breathing out, acknowledging out, noting out. And if, you know, during the course of your your meditation, your mind’s going to wander or be distracted. You know, someone’s moving around, you know, then you simply hear the sound of them moving around, hearing, and then come back to the breath. Or maybe it’s a car on the street hearing, come back to the breath. Or maybe it’s internal distraction.
Maybe your knees hurt pain, come back to the breath. Thinking, come back to the breath. So acknowledging. Then we’ll do a practice, choiceless awareness. And we’ve done this before.
Simply, we’re not going to focus on any particular object whatsoever, but we’re going to maintain awareness. There’s a big difference between choiceless awareness and choiceless non-awareness. Usually, we’re practicing choiceless non-awareness, but we’re going to allow the mind to become involved in any object that it naturally tends toward. But we want to maintain our awareness. So we’re going to continue the noting process.
But it’s going to be what is most stimulating in our environment, maybe internal or external, the thing that we find most interesting in some way that catches our attention. But we’re going to note it. Maybe thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking. Maybe pain, pain, pain. Maybe external object, hearing, cars going down the street, hearing, hearing, hearing, hearing, hearing.
It goes up, then you can’t hear it anymore. And then the mind will naturally turn to another object, another stimulus. We’ll catch the attention of the mind, and the mind will become involved in that. Then, finally, we’re going to focus upon the mind itself. I’ll read you something from Lama Yeshe to give you an idea, some feeling about this.
This was a meditation it’s from a meditation course he gave, I think, in Switzerland. Lama Yeshe, some of you may not know, was the founder of FPMT. About it’s been about eleven years now. His picture is in the glass case on the left in front of the Buddha image. In the West, the word meditation brings much misconceptions.
Sometimes people interpret meditation as squeezing your mind. Others interpret it as spacing out. Both are misconceptions. If you space out, you become completely distracted. If you squeeze, you are completely selfish.
Meditation is very simple. Close your eyes. What is happening? Your awareness radiates like a sensitive machine. It is like a radar.
If there is any kind of signal or vibration, you notice it. You are aware. Similarly, when you are aware or meditate, you are very sensitive, totally aware, aware of what is going on. Communicating? That is what I call meditation on consciousness.
Meditation does not mean, oh, there is a light, there is a blah blah blah. We are not making conversation. Suppose you are meditating, you’re aware of your surroundings, the sky, trucks passing by, you’re aware of everything. You do not make conversation saying, all these trucks must be very nice trucks full of cheese or juice on their way to market. That type of conversation you should not do.
Although you’re aware, you need to be in control of not making conversation. By meditating, you are learning control and eliminating the uncontrolled mind. What makes you what makes you uncontrollable? What makes you uncontrolled? By making conversation.
She’s like that. She says that. He says that. I don’t like that. I like that.
You’re constantly reacting. Control means not reacting. If somebody says, you’re a bad guy, you do not react. You do not say, he called me a bad guy. My ego is hurt.
This is reacting. It is uncontrolled mind. It is also a mind that is it is obsessed. My interpretation is that the obsessed mind is two objects, either an object of beauty or hate. Obsessed obsessed means you cannot get free from thinking about the object.
Do you understand what I mean? Obsessed means you are not free or peaceful. Instead, you are thinking this, this, this, this. This is becoming obsessed. So the mind of hatred, jealousy, or craving, desire is too obsessed and disturbed.
That is why meditation is to teach you the habit of not reacting when the obsessed object arises. What is the benefit of directing your awareness on your own consciousness? Instead of directing it onto the flower, your girlfriend or boyfriend, the benefit is that there is some energy taking place when you’re aware of your consciousness. Consciousness itself does not have a concrete self-existent nature as does this flower or your boyfriend or girlfriend. The beauty of watching or being aware of your own consciousness leads you to break down the concepts.
It directly leads you to know it directly leads you to break down heavy blankets of superstitious concepts and to experience great emptiness. To solve our problems, we need some experience. Blah blah, intellect is not enough. We need some way to experience with our own mind in order to break down concepts. Then you know you are capable and you encourage yourself thinking, oh, I can, I can, I can do anything?
If I want to solve my problems, can. In Buddhism, this is the way for human beings to become liberated. And finally, one last paragraph. So we are talking about a stage of experience, an experience of consciousness. So you should not worry about, I am disappearing.
Everything is disappearing. Maybe I will end up like a nihilistic person. You should not worry about that one, okay? Just completely knock out the wrong conceptions, the egotistical kingdom. During this kind of meditation just be intense awareness of your own consciousness.
Do not even interpret your consciousness as being bad or good. Just be and let go. Do you understand? Let go does not mean you space out. It means you let go with intense awareness.
Intense awareness is like the sun radiating the consciousness and then just let go, just be. That is good enough. When you close your eyes, relax. Be aware. Sometimes visions of different colors arise.
Just let them come and go. Do not think about the white color. Do not make conversation. Just be. Okay.
So we’re going to try that. So in the process of so we’re going to go in stages mindfulness of breathing, then we’re just noting the breathing, then choiceless awareness, that is to emphasizing this quality of awareness through noting, but we don’t want to direct our focus on any particular object. Then we’re going to focus it upon consciousness. And mainly, you’re going to use the note, the noting of thinking. I mean, you can use any type of noting that is you find useful for yourself.
But mainly, it’s going to be somehow around noting. Thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking. Internal conscious, mental consciousness, thinking, thinking, thinking. But you have to you want the noting to describe what it is that you’re actually experiencing. What is it that you’re actually aware of?
The the noting can’t become a mantra, you know, that we simply are saying to ourselves thinking, thinking, thinking, but it’s actually describing our experience of our mental consciousness. You know, the mental images will arise, pictures arise, colors arise, or thoughts arise, words arise in our mind. That we can we can just classify those all as one type of thought or another. Good thought, bad thought. We’re not interested.
It is simply thinking. So you’re describing what it is that you’re experiencing in your mental consciousness. You are aware. Thinking, thinking, thinking. And then at one point, we’re going to stop noting.
The thinking helps you to maintain your awareness, to to maintain a perspective between yourself and the objects of your mental consciousness, thought. You know, there are six primary consciousness, eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mental consciousness. Each of them has their particular object. The object of mental consciousness is phenomena or that is to say mental images, symbols, you know, these words that are always churning around in our mind, the pictures that are always coming up in our mind, that arise in our mind. These are the objects in mental consciousness.
Normally, identify with them. We identify with the words, I am thinking. The thinking is us. The thought is us. The emotion is us.
Here, we can begin to simply be aware of the objects of mental consciousness as objects through noting. Then we’ll stop noting and make but try to maintain your awareness. The tendency is to lose awareness and begin to identify with the mental content, the objects of the mental consciousness. That’s the tendency. That’s habitual pattern of how you normally are in terms of these thought patterns, these emotions, these feelings in your mind.
But here, just simply try to maintain to your awareness. Watching, watching. And then we’ll come back to the breath. So if you take a comfortable posture, we’ll try that. And just, you know, you don’t you can just be.
Just be with your with your consciousness and with awareness. You don’t have to be self evaluating. You don’t have to be self surveillant, self referencing continually. How am I doing? That’s just a thought.
Note it and let it go and just be with your awareness. So So, beginning with adjusting our motivation, and if you can imagine three people, one that you naturally that you like, one that you feel no particular relationship to, and the third person that you feel in some way displeased with, ill at ease with. It would be wonderful if you three didn’t have any problems. All three of you. May you not have any problems.
May you be free of suffering. I’m going to help you. I’m going to commit myself in working with you three in solving your problems. It would be wonderful if the three of you were happy. May you be happy.
I’m going to help you commit myself in working with you three to solve your problems. The way I’m going to do this, express my commitment to you at this very moment, is through my meditation. By developing my skills and my wisdom, my loving and my compassion, then eventually I can be of real significant practical benefit. And bring your mind to the breath. Easy, gentle, in and out flow the natural breath.