Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. A passage from Carlos Castaneda’s Journey to Ixtlan opens this 46-minute talk: the Yaqui teacher Don Juan hears a lone dog barking in the desert dark and calls it the voice of a man begging death to witness his dull, chained existence. Ven Jampa Gendun takes that image as a diagnosis — the chronic low-grade anguish of a life managed by distraction rather than transformed by growth. He then sets out Lamrim’s three fundamentals — determination to be free, awakening heart, awakening mind — as the direction of genuine change, and uses the Ames room optical illusion to show how unconscious premises, particularly negative self-image, resist correction even when intellectually understood. The commentary closes with the Dalai Lama on gentle determination and the paradox that a coherent sense of self must be built before ego can be transcended.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 13 H and M of B 1992 06 17.mp3
UUID: da82f039-8d23-4337-8c0e-cd8940054b06
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: The Heart and Mind of Buddhism (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1992-06-17
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.9 minutes
Words: ~5,559
A quote by Don Juan. I think it’s from his book from Carlos Castaneda’s book Journey to Ixtlan. Now he’s talking to Carlos Castaneda. Don Juan was a Yaqui Indian, a very wise man who lived in the desert perhaps in northern Mexico, southwestern United States. And Carlos Castaneda was a PhD candidate in anthropology at UCLA who studied with him, studied the way of knowledge.
You know, bringing us back to some kind of awareness of our situation, this continual process that we have to continually involve ourselves in, sort of get back in touch with some the profundities of our situation rather than perhaps dealing with them on a superficial level or not at all perhaps. I don’t think it has to be a depressing experience, but I think it’s a profound experience. I think it’s a sobering experience. I think it makes us think. I don’t think it has to be depressing to become aware of some of our dissatisfactions and the necessity to grow, the necessity to make a consistent effort over the long period to develop ourselves, to make the consistent choice of a path with heart, as Don Juan calls it.
Don Juan is talking to Carlos Castaneda in perhaps northern Mexico. They’re out on the desert. It’s growing toward night, it’s evening, and the sun is going down. And they’re on a high mesa, a high plateau overlooking a village. It’s very quiet, just the hiss of the wind.
In the distance there’s the barking of a lone dog. So it’s a very melodramatic setting. Carlos Castaneda says, He paused. The silence around us was frightening. The wind hissed softly, and then I heard the distant barking of a lone dog.
Listen to that dog barking, Don Juan said. That is the way my beloved Earth is helping me now to bring this last point to you. That barking is the saddest thing one can hear. You were quiet for a moment. The barking of that lone dog was so sad, and the stillness around us so intense that I experienced a numbing anguish.
It made me think of my life, my sadness, my not knowing where to go, what to do. That dog’s barking is the nocturnal voice of a man Don Juan said. It comes from a house in the valley towards the south. A man is shouting through his dog since they are companion slaves for life, his sadness, his boredom. He’s begging his death to come and witness him in the dull and dreary chains of life.
Don Juan’s words had caught a most disturbing line in me. I thought as if he were speaking directly to me. That barking and the loneliness it creates speaks of the feelings of men, he went on, men for whom an entire life was like a Sunday afternoon, an afternoon which was not altogether miserable, but rather hot and dull and uncomfortable. They sweated and fussed a great deal. They didn’t know where to go or what to do.
That afternoon left them only with the memory of petty annoyances and tedium. And then suddenly it was over. It was already night. So I don’t think anyone in this room is particularly a basket case. I don’t know if you know where that expression comes from.
But I think it seems to be the quality of our life. It’s like a Sunday afternoon where we don’t know where to go or what to do with ourselves. Maybe you turn on the television and you’re trying to distract yourself. From confronting the present moment and what you’re actually feeling, trying to distract yourself from confronting perhaps the hollowness and the barrenness of your life. You turn the television on.
There’s nothing in my chair. Turn it. Nothing. No. Turn off.
Okay. Read a book. You can’t quite get into anything. Nothing quite absorbs you, nothing quite draws your attention to it. And you do one thing to another and you move from one thing to another, Treating all these various possibilities very artificially, nothing seems to excite you and interest you, nothing appeals to you, attracts you.
And then having spent the afternoon in that way, finally you realize, oh, it’s time to cook supper. And the day has passed. It’s almost night. And I think in many ways, you know, it speaks, as Don Juan says, of the life of men, for men and women, for whom an entire life is like a matter of coping, a matter of distracting, that they can only absorb themselves long enough they can forget the pain or the boredom or the tedium. It’s not so much that it’s a deep set anguish.
It’s not so much that it’s an acute pain. It’s sort of a chronic dull pain, sort of anxiety, sort of a sadness, a sort of a hollowness, a lack of something. And I think if we’re willing to confront that in the sense that no matter how competent we may be in what we do, and I’m sure that you are quite confident people, that simply being confident is not enough to get a quality way of life. That maybe something more needs to be added. That is not simply enough simply to cope, that perhaps something more needs to be added.
And this is what needs to be added. It’s rather intangible, you know. Last week I was asked, Well, what does it mean to grow? And I thought about this. As if we want another formula, another means to what may in fact become another matter of spiritual materialism.
Something we can say, Oh yes, I’ve done that and I’ve been there. And we can look back. It can be just another activity, another accomplishment, another goal conquered. But it seems like there’s something more to life than simply putting more trophies on our altar, hanging more medals around our neck. I think there’s this thing called life which we somehow stand apart from, as if our life and ourselves were two distinct phenomena.
And we feel a sense of alienation and a sense of fragmentation. And we’re always seeking some sort of union. It seems to be always constant struggle even to practice the Dharma. Everything is in some way dissatisfactory. Everything in some way represents something that still needs to be attained.
There’s never a moment when we experience a sense of wholeness, sense of being at oneness, a sense of desireless state. I was talking about this Monday, I think, a little bit in Learn to Meditate. And what I was trying to perhaps get across, both to myself and to some of the people who perhaps could follow my line of thinking was another order of being, another way of thinking or not thinking or not being or not doing. Don Juan calls it not doing, not doing. How do we go about achieving not doing?
How does one give up the struggle? How does one begin to understand that one has all that one needs at this very moment. There’s nothing more that needs to be added. It seems like we’re quite slow at this, that we have to go through a great deal of blood, sweat and tears to find out that there was never anything to be accomplished to begin with. It would seem that that is in the order of things.
So when it says, What does it mean to grow? I think we have to begin to look at who’s asking that question and what is it behind that question. What’s the motivation? What’s the thinking? What kind of paradigm?
What kind of value structure is that question coming from? I think from time to time we all experience some moment in our lives and peak experiences when it’s simply enough to be alive. You know, to breathe, even our pain somehow seems appropriate. There’s a sense of almost satisfaction. Somehow we have some perspective on all is happening to us.
It doesn’t seem to be incongruous with our life. There seems to be an acceptance even of our pain. So it seems it’s not so much that we can figure out what it is we’re about, what it is that we’re struggling for. But it seems that we can become the answer. We can ask the questions, and I think the questions need to be answered, need to be asked, you know, patient questions.
Without patient questions there will be no answers, but we have to begin to question even what kind of answers are going to satisfy my question. And maybe we have to live the answer. Maybe the answer is in the way we live. It cannot be made another matter of something that we can think about, something we can figure out, something that we can gain control and manipulate through our intellect, through our ego, through our rational processes, that we can live, we can be the answer to what it means to grow. Maybe it can never be quite expressed in terms of intellect, quite satisfactorily put forth in terms of words or concepts or ideas, in the way that we live our lives.
So it’s good to ask the question, what does it mean to grow? What’s this all about? This thing called life. But maybe we have to have a tremendous amount of patience until we can bear to live the answer of the questions that we’re putting to ourselves. So the inner purpose of our life becomes Buddha, that which is the living answer to these questions.
And we can begin to find ways to formulate our questions in terms of the Dharma. And we can actually actively progress to the possible to the answer of Buddha. And the Buddha is like the answer, what we call the answer. The Dharma as a means of answering our question, a living answer. The Buddha, you know, is is rather an ordinary person, I think.
They don’t you know, I was thinking it’s very interesting to call it humility. One thing about humility is you don’t know you don’t know you have it when you have it. It’s not something that you have on it’s something which other people seem to define you with, humility. And I think we define these people as Buddhists, but perhaps they don’t think they’re very special. I don’t know.
They just have found some peace. They have found the answer. They are living their answer. They don’t have to in any way conceptualize or formulate it. Maybe in order to help others to do the same, then they open their mouths.
They some words. But those words are not their experience. They are not the answer in itself. Their life is their answer. And so the way we live our life has become the answer.
So the way we can begin our life, we can approach that answer is in terms of the Dharma. And this takes place within this context, the social context of a spiritual community. So the inner focus of our life becomes Buddha, which is achieved by means of the Dharma, in the social context of a spiritual community. Those who support us in our search for our own answer, our very unique answer. We try to raise the level of our motivation such that our answer is expressed in terms of helping others to find their answer and to be able to benefit others.
That becomes part of our question, how can I benefit others? And our answer is in helping others to answer their questions, to live the life that we all can be, to live a life which is more than just coping, which is more than simply competence, but something which is infinitely more richer, a quality of life, which I think are, you know, we’ve been talking about basic sanity. The instinctive drive toward wakefulness. It doesn’t allow simply to cope. It doesn’t allow simply to be competent.
It’s always sort of saying, it’s always this something that’s inarticulate whispering which is saying there is something more than what we’re experiencing. It doesn’t allow us to be quite to go back to sleep, to numb out. It keeps saying there is something more. It is that which will which keep posing. I guess it’s our basic sanity which is consistently posing the question, which only actualization of the complete potential is the answer to that question.
Only when we are living life at its fullest does the question momentarily acquiesce. Only then does the answer, this questioning process, momentarily quiet, and then there’s peace. So maybe it’s basic sanity which is continually putting the question of what it means to grow, what it means to be awake. I go for refuge until I’m enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. From the virtuous merit that I collect by practicing giving and the other perfections, may I attain the state of a Buddha to be able to benefit all sentient beings.
I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. From 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 until I am enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, the Sangha. From 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 others. So we’ll begin with mindfulness and breathing.
And I thought we’d again practice the choiceless awareness, simply allowing your mind to become involved with any object that it naturally tends toward. First we’ll begin with the generation of love and compassion, and with the mindfulness of breathing. And then if you use the technique of noting, it will be quite helpful. Simply noting whatever the mind is involved in at any particular moment. When it’s applied to the third breath, we know that we’re breathing in, we note in.
We know that when we’re breathing out, we know that we’re breathing out, we note out. So we’re noting in and out. Then we reach a point where we’re simply going to allow the mind to become involved in any object that naturally tends toward. We’re not going to choose the object. The mind will always move toward an object.
The mind is a subject. Subjects always have objects. The mind will not arise unless it has an object. In some ways it’s like a mirror. In some ways it’s like a mirror.
The mirror is that which reflects the object. So what is the object of my mind at any particular moment? So we simply note that object, whether it’s hearing, thinking, pain, feeling, smell, whatever it might be, and simply allow the mind to move, but maintain your awareness. So there’s a great difference between simply allowing the mind to go on as it normally does, flitting from one object to another as opposed to being aware of what object the mind is involved in from one moment to another. And the way that we can maintain this awareness, this ability to observe our mind, is by the technique of noting.
Simply noting quietly in your mind, thinking, thinking, thinking, watching the mind think, watching the mind hear, watching the mind feel, watching the mind smell, whatever it might be. So if you take a comfortable firm posture. We’re continuing looking at Lam Rim, the three fundamentals of the path: developing the determination to be free, the determination to awaken, the awakening heart and the awakening mind. We are looking at the ways of developing the determination to awaken. Tsongkhapa divides it into two parts, in terms of its emphasis on present states of existence and in terms of future states of existence.
We are trying to give the mind a real direction and some kind of real motivation, such that it’s consistently trying to move toward higher levels of consciousness, higher orders of self-perfection, ways in which it begins to solve the apparent dissatisfactory quality of its present state of existence. I attempted to use the word energize the mind. I’m looking for other words, but anyway maybe that gets across some idea. Without this determination to be free, we’re going to remain stuck. The very inertia, the very nature of the system that we’re involved in is calibrated such that it’s going to keep us at an even steady state of normality.
So in order to perturb the system, to move out of the system, to reorganize it, to restructure the system, it takes a great deal of determination. And the way that we’re going to the directions of our growth are going to be outward in terms of our social awareness, in terms of our interrelatedness with the world about us through the awakening of our heart. And in terms of seeing deeply into the nature of reality, its ultimate nature, through awakening our mind. But without this determination to go beyond our present limits, our present modes of being, Without a real determination, some consistent effort, at best will remain intellectual curiosity. It will never have any deep seated change wherever it takes place.
Only moving on changes on the surface like oil and water. It doesn’t mix, it’s not integrated. The basis of this change that we’re looking at, we’re discussing in terms of Buddha nature, our basic sanity. But we’re trying to gain confidence. We’re trying to overcome some of our misconceptions that we have about ourselves, some of these wrong ideas that we based our life on up to this point, some erroneous premises But somehow perhaps there’s something wrong with me on a very basic level.
There’s something lacking. Just don’t have quite what it takes. Perhaps everybody out there looks very substantial. Out there look like they know what they’re doing. They look very confident and very adult.
They go about things as if they’re quite accomplished. Me over here on my side, it’s kind of fuzzy. It’s it’s kind of a bewilderment. I don’t quite know what I’m doing over here. And so so there’s a sense that we can get it.
I don’t the sense of something peculiar peculiarly peculiarly wrong with me. And then I I don’t know. Anyway, as I’m trying to emphasize it, to a large, you know, our life is based upon the stories that that we tell about ourselves, the various premises that we formulated one way or another in the course of our life, and in dependence upon which we operate and we deal with ourselves and we deal with the world and interact with it. And most of them, many of them are fallacious. One example, made a very interesting example.
There was a man in New York who was very interested in illusions, illusion, optical illusion. And he built this room, I can draw it, which was very oddly shaped. In fact, you know, the ceiling and the floor were not parallel. They were, at this end, they were much much the ceiling and the the distance between the ceiling and the floor was very short. At the other side of the room, distance between the ceiling and the floor was much longer, was much higher.
And he had two people the same size, one in that corner and one in that corner. And then he had there was a wall in which you looked through two holes into this room. And way that we would view this room would be in terms of our normal premise that that the ceiling and the floor are parallel. So what you see, what appears to you, is that there’s a very short person over here and there’s a very tall person over here. That’s because you’re bringing some sort of unconscious premise to this appearance, this perception, this perceiving process.
And even when this wall is removed, and you can see that these two people are exactly the same height, it’s the room which is set up wrongly, which is not according to your preconception, not according to your premise. Even when you see that and then they put the wall back on, you look through the holes, it’s still, even with that intellectual knowledge that these people are the same height, it still appears to your perception that this is a little person and that’s a tall person. That’s how deeply set these premises that we’re working with are. Even intellectually when we see that they’re being contradicted, we have different levels of awareness, that even we can hold different beliefs, different premises on different levels of awareness and they don’t quite match, they aren’t able to contradict and neutralize themselves as it were. So even though we know this person, these two people are at the same height, still another level of awareness.
Because we’re looking at from the premise of that floors and ceilings are parallel, they still appear to us to be different in size. We have these premises, some of them are extremely deeply rooted. The two most basic premises, which are erroneous premises, are self grasping and self centeredness. And this is ultimately where we’re trying to get to all this work that we’re involved in, is trying to dig down to these very deeply unconscious held premises. But we have layers and layers and layers of premises, many of which are misconception.
Many of them are quite valid and quite useful. Without them we couldn’t live our lives. We would be mad as other people would view us that way. So they’re quite useful, they’re quite necessary to act in the world. But many are erroneous, they’re dysfunctional, they need to be contradicted, they need to be brought to awareness, made known, contradicted and overcome.
And correct premises replace them. One of the premises is that somehow perhaps we don’t have quite what it takes, that we don’t have the basis of change, we don’t have the confidence in ourselves, that we have a negative image of ourselves. And as mentioned, was the Henry Ford once said that if you believe you can or if you believe you can’t, you’re right. It’s very that our limitations are very much those we acknowledge. I think I have a sense in some ways a little bit of arrogance goes a long way.
And maybe a little bit of pride, kind of pride, a little bit of arrogance. I think it’s as opposed to the other extreme of setting so many limitations out of lack of confidence. And nothing much is gained, nothing much is actually accomplished. But anyway, we’re trying to look at the world and ourselves in a realistic fashion as it actually is, hopefully, that the truth is therapeutic. It can finally begin to work its way down like water working its way down to they call that level the water table where it reaches the watershed and begins to mix with this wrong premise that we’re holding about ourselves and begins to dissolve it, begins to break it up.
We begin to believe in ourselves that there’s something about me. We begin to perhaps become aware of. You know, when something is pointed out to you, that gives you the opportunity to become aware of it, something perhaps that you had overlooked. It’s another interesting fact. I think was an I think it was Bateson, American anthropologist, that when Darwin, Charles Darwin was making his world voyage and he was studying animal life and various species around the world.
Came to one group of islands And they had never seen a ship come in off the horizon. And they couldn’t see a ship. He was quite convinced of that. Though his ship was docked, or not docked, it was anchored in the harbor. They couldn’t see a ship because they had no conception of what was there.
That may sound very strange. Without a metaphor we cannot see it, we cannot perceive it. They had no metaphor which enabled them to perceive the ship. Anyway, perhaps that’s getting a little bit far reaching. But without having this pointed out to us, that we have moments of great clarity, moments of sanity, moments of real wisdom, that we have an instinct toward wakefulness, that we have some love and compassion.
All of these, as it were, moments of enlightenment, sparks of awakening, which are occurring every day of our life from time to time. If it begins to be pointed out and we begin to become aware of it, then perhaps we can begin to reauthor our story about ourselves. We can begin to refocus our attention. We can begin to punctuate our lives and get a different meaning. We can begin to change our self image and how we conceive of ourselves, what we think about ourselves.
So maybe this we can begin to do, to begin to point out our moments of great clarity, moments of great sanity. And maybe that way we begin to see it for ourselves. The starting point of the path is our own confusion and pain, And we talked about that last week. To become aware of our own ignorance is the first step in wisdom. To become aware of ignorance is the first step toward wisdom.
And to become aware of our pain is a kind of intelligence. Our pain is a kind of our truth. It’s telling us something about the way we’re living our lives. It’s a statement about what it means to be an ordinary human being. It’s not as if it shouldn’t be there.
It’s inappropriate. It’s extremely appropriate to who we are and the way we’re living our life. Perhaps it’s telling us that we’re living our life unskillfully, inappropriately, that we’re living our life not in our own best interests. So the awareness of our confusion, the awareness of our pain is a sign of our basic sanity. And as I’ve mentioned before, not to be when a psychotic is not aware that their actions are inappropriate, there’s no ability to break through to them.
When they begin to realize that somehow they’re not that their way of relating, that their way of interacting is inappropriate, that there’s something that is off kilter, there’s something wrong. And they can begin to some of their own healing process can begin to become into effect, can begin to work on their problem. We are healthy enough to be aware that we’re sick and it’s time to get better. You know, if you weren’t healthy enough to be sick you’d be dead. If you’re not healthy enough to have a stomachache you die.
So we’re healthy enough to be sick. We’re healthy enough that we’re aware that we’re sick. So we are very precious because we are Buddha, because we have Buddha nature. But additionally, we are vulnerable because we are confused. So we have to be gentle with ourselves because we are confused.
But we have to, at the same time, we have to respect ourselves and we have to have courage because we are Buddhas to be. We’re confused, we’re vulnerable, so we have to be gentle with ourselves. But we also have to be creative because we are Buddhas to be. A quoting from the Dalai Lama, If we realize I am a human being, a human being can do anything. This determination, courage, and self confidence are important sources of victory and success.
Without willpower and determination, even something that you might have achieved easily cannot be achieved. If you have willpower and reasonable courage, not blind courage, but courage without pride, even things which seemed impossible at this certain stage turn into being possible because of the continuing effort inspired by that courage. Thus, determination is very important. So some kind of gentle, consistent determination to be all that we can be. All that somehow deep down we know that we can be.
We’re believing ourselves. Believing ourselves, which is not easy, is it? To be nobody else but yourself in a world which is night and day trying to make you like everyone else is the hardest battle that we can fight, and we have to fight it every day to be nobody but yourself. You know, somehow we’ve been led to believe that our self is not good enough. It doesn’t quite meet the mark, that we have to there is a lot more that needs to be done, a lot that needs to be improved.
There is a lot of work which we have to go through that oneself is not quite sufficient. We’ve always tried to be the best person we thought we could be, and what we could not be we can still become. Ultimately, to be yourself is to be Buddha. Buddha is what we simply mean by an optimal mode of being, the best way a human being can live their life. But conventionally, we need a coherent ego.
Perhaps we need a coherent ego before we can transcend our ego. That is to say, first we have to be somebody before we can be nobody, before we can begin to forget all about ourselves. We have to begin to appreciate who we really are. It’s not as if we’re trying to become Napoleon. We can’t become Napoleon, but we can become who we are.
We can begin to appreciate our potential and try to live out our potential, our basic goodness, that we have a chance to actualize it. But there is a tendency to ignore, to devalue ourselves and our situation by contracting inwardly on the ego. And we become totally absorbed in the patterns of ego, in the display of ego, as if that were all there was. This becomes our reality. The primary delusion which we live within is patterns.
We can’t even see that there’s any possibility to change. On the contrary, unawarely we tend to perpetuate our patterns. This keeps us stuck. We tend to notice and dwell upon data that confirms our patterns, that we tend not to notice. We tend to discount anything which disconfirms the conception that we have about ourselves.
We ignore, we forget, we discount, We don’t focus upon anything which seems to disconfirm who we conceive of ourselves to be, anything which contradicts the patterns about the display of ego. Someone who thinks of themselves as bad, someone who thinks of themselves as unkind will always dwell on instances where they hurt someone else, where they let them down, when they showed some unkindness. And even when they’re reminded, Well, how about this time? You acted you really were acting very kindly. You acted very graciously, very givingly.
And they’re going to contradict that. They’re going to discount it. They’re not going to be able to feel it. They’re going say, Oh, that was an exception. That’s not really me.
I did that for myself. And somehow they’re going to be able to frame it in such a way that it will have no force in order to contradict who they conceive of themselves to be. And also we like to misinterpret data to fit our pattern. You know, such that everything always seems to confirm, everything continually seems to confirm who we conceive of ourselves to be. For example, you know, who said who somebody who has a pattern of nobody likes me consistently interprets other people’s behavior to fit this.
You know, they can see that other people don’t like them. They can see that that frown on the other person’s face is because they’re being disapproved of, not because the other person has a headache. You know, it’s like three hundred years ago people saw the sun go around the earth. They saw the sun go around the earth. They didn’t see the sun go around the earth.
The sun doesn’t go around the earth. But they interpreted that data and it was a misinterpretation. So we have to begin to distinguish between our interpretation of reality and reality itself, because we are always going to interpret in ways which confirm our patterns, conceptions about ourselves and who we are and who we believe ourselves to be. And also we surround ourselves with people who seem to fit, who seem to confirm who we conceive of ourselves to be. You know, someone who agrees with us, you know, someone who has a pattern, it’s all your fault kind of pattern, is going to be attracted to somebody who has a pattern, it’s all my fault.
It fits. It’s complementary. You know, somebody who has a pattern, I’m no good, is going to be attracted to people who have the pattern, You’re not much, are you? Because it fits, it’s comfortable. It’s comfortable.
And we’re likely to set up situations which seemingly confirm our pattern of who we conceive of ourselves to be. For example, you know, was a cartoon in a psychiatrist’s office, and the psychiatrist is sitting in his chair and