Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. A beach trip followed by a junk-food binge — Ven Jampa Gendun uses this image to show how we seek refuge in momentary pleasures and come away fat and sunburned, no closer to solving anything real. In this 46-minute session he reframes the five hindrances — desire, hatred, sloth and torpor, restlessness, anxiety, and doubt — not as meditation problems but as ego’s basic mechanical operating patterns, habitual reactions that block direct contact with the present moment. He explains ignorance as active misknowing rather than mere absence of knowledge, then leads a breath-awareness meditation with a practical counting technique (in-out-one through ten, back to one). The talk closes by redirecting the taking-refuge declaration: Dharma is not for solving temporary difficulties, which are impermanent anyway, but for addressing their underlying cause — attachment, aversion, and ignorance. Suited to practitioners with some meditation background.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 05 3 PA 1998 04 22.mp3
UUID: 72b39b40-5ca6-4b6b-9564-4ebd9ab21934
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Three Principal Aspects of the Path 1988-1990 (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1998-04-22
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 46.2 minutes
Words: ~4,665
We’ve been talking about the five hindrances. Desire, hatred, sloth and torpor, restlessness, anxiety, and doubt and indecisiveness. Now in a few minutes when we meditate, one of these hindrances will most probably arise. It doesn’t arise because we’re meditating. These hindrances are the ongoing themes of ego itself.
These are the basic patterns which we by which we deal with the world. The basic patterns we relate with the world with. This desire, hatred, these five hindrances. Reacting with desire, aversion, disinterest, indifference, confusion, to the various situations. The ongoing action of the ego.
We generally see the various situations in terms of stereotypes, in terms of categories, We react to them in a very mechanical way, as if we just plug in a predetermined program to the various situations that arise. Rather than seeing them newly, being open to present situation as it actually is. Qualities, for example, of love and wisdom and creativity our response, a creative response, to actually being open to the way things are in the present moment, in the actual situation, the reality of what is. Buddhism is very much always getting back to trying to come in contact simply with the way things are. This we can really begin to solve all our problems.
It’s that because we have continually habitually, for various reasons, sought to elude reality, sought to cover over reality, to escape from reality, to live in our fantasies and our dreams, our memories, that we have all the various problems that we experience. Reality is in no way our problem. It’s the way we relate to reality, the way things are, the way we relate to the world, to our suffering, and our place in the world. It’s the obscuring patterns of ego which hinder a seeing reality. This is actually what we mean when we’re talking about ego in a way.
We used the term ignorance. Ignorance is probably it’s not so much used in the same way that it is perhaps in the usual western sense. It doesn’t mean simply not knowing. For example, I don’t know who’s in the hall. It means something more than that.
It means a misknowing, a misunderstanding, a misconception. Ignorance has the quality of obscuring, blocking, but more than that it imposes certain ways of existing, certain conceptions upon reality, which in fact actually don’t exist. This is the basic cause of all errors. This is the basic reason why we relate with other people, other situations in reality unskillfully. Arising from these unskillful modes of actions, we experience suffering as a consequence.
In the simple practice of mindfulness, we’re beginning to, in a very simple way, get in touch with reality, the way things actually are. When we breathe in, we know that we’re breathing in. When we breathe out, we simply know that we’re breathing out. Or if we’re having contact, the sensation of the air rushing out the nostril, we are aware of the contact. There’s no judging.
There’s no discriminating with regard to the breath. No reaction to it. We simply are knowing something very directly. In this continued uninterrupted knowing, they’re going to arise many hindrances. It’s a tendency of mind to revert back to patterns, to some habitual way of reacting rather than staying merely with the present situation.
The mind won’t allow itself to merely open fully to the object, to the present moment, whatever the situation. It’s always reverting to some habitual way of reacting to what it considers the same situation in some mechanical means that it has reacted to it in the past. By allowing our awareness without discrimination, without judging, without any sort of preconception of the way things should be or might be or the way they were, or simply dwelling on the present moment, we begin to create some gap, some space, allowing for our basic wisdom, basic sanity to operate more and more in our lives. We’re beginning to open up more and more to the present situation without any preconceptions or judgment about the situation, about the present moment. The basic tendency of the mind When we say the mind in the sense of ordinary people, we’re more or less talking about the ego.
But perhaps that’s not very technically correct. For us, who are very much bound up in ego, ego probably plays a very large portion of our lives, of our mental lives, of our inner lives. We’re always consistently reverting back to habitual patterns and relating and dealing with situations. This reverting back is an obstacle to knowing the situation as it is in the present, as it is right now, as it actually is. When we say that this tendency to revert back to habitual responses as an obstacle is a hindrance, we’re not saying that, for example, it’s somehow bad.
We can’t say that desire is bad. We can’t say that hatred is bad or good for that matter. If we begin to make these discriminations in this way, these discriminations are simply going to maintain and support the operations of ego. It’s going to be an internal struggle, the good guys against the bad guys. I’m going to win out.
Winning out, this battle that is always ensuing in our mind, is simply a maintenance of the ego. So this is not a very skillful way to approach meditation or in fact to approach life in general, the ideals of the good guys against the bad guys. This constant internal struggle which we’re usually involved in. We shouldn’t bring that into our meditation, that this is a bad thought or sinking is bad in general. I shouldn’t be sinking.
I should be on my object of meditation. This would be an unskillful way to go about your meditation. You would simply be maintaining exactly that which you’re trying to transcend in the first place. So there shouldn’t be any sort of battlefield or struggle involved in your meditation. We would be identifying with the ongoing action of ego if we were simply to engage in this constant battle of repression, of struggle.
You know, the various themes of ego, desire, craving, craving for good meditations, craving to be a good meditator for that matter, and disliking yourself when you aren’t a good meditator, when things aren’t going well, or you think they aren’t going well. We cease to identify with the actions of ego. That’s all. The of the various images that the ego is churning up, the various ideas, memories, images, fantasies. We cease identifying with them and we simply identify with the present situation.
In this case, it’s merely the breath, knowing that you’re breathing in. We identify with the breath. Knowing when you’re breathing out, we identify with the breath. We simply do not allow ourselves to identify with the various actions of ego, the various ideas, desire, hatred, the various moods, feelings, which are constantly arising, abiding, and will cease by themselves if we don’t try to repress them or if we don’t indulge in them. In this way we can You know, it’s the nature of the ego that it cannot exist in the present.
It cannot exist in the nowness, if you like. It doesn’t have the fluidity of openness. It always has to work in mechanical patterns. That’s its very nature. These trying to pattern to habitual responses to the various stimulus, to various situations, which in fact is ego.
Ego is this very action itself. There’s not something which is doing these actions. These actions are themselves ego. There’s no agent involved. It’s simply a process.
So we have to dismiss the process, not become caught up in this process, not identify with this process, and the ego will cease by itself without struggle, without battle. We can work with this. In some small way, we can begin to create more and more gaps of openness, of dealing with reality as it is in the present moment, and stepping outside the world, a fantasy which we usually dwell in. You can’t really deal with real people, with real situations, with things as they actually are. It’s always trying to You know, ego doesn’t deal with things.
It deals with our concepts of things, our ideals of people, our images of situations, not with the way things actually are. It’s always mainly dealing with concepts, ideals, images. It never comes in contact with the actual reality, with real people, even ourselves, it has an idea of who we might be, of who we should be, but it doesn’t have any idea of who we actually are. And if we’re ever going to find out who we actually are and who are the other people around us and what is the actual situation that we’re in, we’re going to have to more and more develop a method to begin to step outside of its fantasy world, these constantly churning up compulsive reoccurring patterns which constitute most of our life. The ego can never let the situation just be.
It must always be becoming. It must always be manipulating, adjusting. Meditation is in a way of reorientating our identity, rooting our identity in being rather than becoming. Ego is always reacting in terms of preconceptions, in terms of how it’s been conditioned in the past, its various patterns. The way we can approach to stepping outside of these reactive patterns of ego is simply to get in touch with the way things are, to begin to habituate, develop the pattern of staying with the present moment, to knowing what’s going on directly.
We use the breath as a stable point, as a sort of reference point of reality, upon which we can develop awareness. While we’re maintaining this awareness of the breath, there’s no identification with the ongoing actions of ego. One is not lost in the content of desire, the content of hatred, the content of the various feelings of anxiety, and the various emotions as they arise, the various thoughts. One isn’t identifying with the thoughts as either being me or mine. That this isn’t my situation, this is what is occurring.
One doesn’t identify with desire, with its various content. This is the style of ego. One simply notes them, is aware that this has arisen. This is the reality of the situation. Desire has arisen.
A thought has arisen. Hatred has arisen. Notes that and goes back to the breath. During this entire process of simply being aware, there’s no stepping into preconceptions, there’s no re occurring patterns, there’s no dealing with our images of things. We’re simply knowing how things are very directly in the here and now with what is actually going on in the here and now.
One of the marks of the ego is its fear of openness, of fluidity, of real communication. In real communication we begin to step outside of our concept of who I am and who is this other person. In real communication there’s a sense of a loss of I am talking to you, for example. It becomes a circuit of communication. There’s this constantly getting feedback and constantly responding to that feedback and communicating.
And there’s not I am talking to you, but there’s a circuit as if there were not two people, but just simply an information circuit, a communication circuit that’s been set up. But in this process there’s a loss of sense of self, which the ego fears, which would mean that in fluidity and openness the ego cannot exist since its very existence is dependent upon maintaining repetitive patterns, mechanical ways of reacting. This is the very antithesis of openness, fluidity. So in this process of communication the boundaries between, for example, two people begin to dissolve. You know, we aren’t simply reading out each other’s printouts like two computers.
That there’s something creative happening. But there’s a fear involved in this. There’s a fear of losing one’s reference point, of losing oneself, losing going out of control. The situation may you might goof up. The fear of goofing up, you may lose your self image.
Based upon this fear we fall back into some sort of secure pattern, some way that we reacted in the past which perhaps wasn’t particularly satisfactory. But at least we didn’t dissolve, at least we came out of it. The patterns of attachment, aversion and confusion, basically. This is the way the basic patterns of our ego. This is the way we basically relate with reality.
Aversion, attachment, confusion. In a real communication situation we’re dealing with the same processes we’re dealing with in meditation. We’re dealing with the same obstacles which hinder our meditation. Communication, opening up to the very situation itself, and meditation are very much the same in the quality of their states and mind. They all are stepping outside of the boundaries of ego, The action, the ongoing action of ego.
The action of ego seeking to control, to manipulate, the ongoing action of ego to struggle, to maintain itself, to maintain this self reference point. So in real communication, opening up to the situation, being here now, meditation, there’s no longer the feeling of a duality of a subject and object, of me and other. The feeling of a struggle, of distance, of separation begins to dissolve. This is experienced as peace. This is the meditative state.
It is the integration of all our various energies, our emotions. There’s a feeling of wholeness, of completeness. There’s no conflict, no fragmentation, no feelings of insufficiency. There’s experience of the total situation and a oneness with the situation. The practice of meditation can help us to approach such a state, to become accustomed to such a state.
In our meditation we acknowledge the various actions of ego, but we simply cease to identify with them. We simply note the thoughts, the feelings, the emotions, the objects of sound, taste, touch within, but we don’t identify with them. When we talk about the five hindrances, we’re talking about the identification with the action of ego. We’re talking about identifying with desire whereby the thought to enhance one’s existence, to draw toward you, to repeat pleasurable experiences, to maintain contact. We become the desire, the various images, the various ideas which ego is working with.
That’s who we are. It’s as if there is no other reality. The way this object is appearing to you is your reality. It’s a desirable object. It has certain qualities which if you can bring into your territory, into the world of your own ego, is somehow going to enhance yourself, going to make you happy.
But we don’t quite know what that object is. In actuality, there’s always an exaggerated quality. There’s taking of its various positive qualities, exaggerating those, and overlooking, negating its various negative qualities. This is the fantasy that ego has to live in. This is why we’re acting unskillfully when we identify with the ego because our actions are based on misconceptions that aren’t in accordance with the way things actually are.
There’s always an imbalance, an exaggeration, a negation. So we become lost in some particular pattern of ego, some particular style of using images, ideas, conceptions. We’ve been talking about the five hindrances, particular style, the categories in which ego operates most often. We talked about the craving of pleasure and displeasure as being obstacles of desire and hatred. This pattern which prevents us from dealing with the actual situation, patterning our responses.
We talked about the third hindrance, the quality of restlessness where the mind is simply off track, where the energy has no direction, and the quality of anxiety which is like water flowing beneath ice, some uneasiness, some anxiety which we can’t quite point to. We can’t quite give a reason but there’s some quality of discomfort, worry. The fourth hindrance is the opposite mode of this very type of energy. Our energy is blocked. There’s a blockage of bodily and mental energy.
This is broken up into two, sloth and torpor. Sloth and torpor. Sloth is mental dullness. Whereas torpor is a physical dullness, physical heaviness as if you just ate a big meal. The feeling of resistance against any sort of change is like an inertia.
Even within the mind and in the body there ‘s a resistance against moving physically, against moving mentally, against any sort of change. We’re talking basically about laziness, sleepiness, stagnation. The trouble with laziness is we’re too lazy not to identify with it. You were talking about identifying all the various emotions. If we identify the emotion, the state of laziness can arise in our mind.
We can, if we’re a skillful enough, simply acknowledge, note it laziness. Laziness. Mentally noticing, observing the quality of mind which has arisen laziness and go back to the breath. Normally we will identify with it once we become lazy. And now I’m lazy.
It wasn’t the fact that there was simply an emotion, a quality of mind which has risen, which we call laziness. But now I’m lazy simply because I’ve identified with that quality of my mind. It’s not necessary to identify with that quality of mind, just as it’s not necessary to identify with desire or hatred. These emotions, feelings, thoughts are going to arise, abide, and cease of themselves. If we identify them through the action perpetuating these patterns, then they become ours.
Then we become them. We become desire. We become hatred. We become laziness. The problem with laziness is we’re too lazy not to become lazy.
There’s no inspiration. There’s a feeling of poverty, of inadequacy, insufficiency to conceive of changing. I’m this way. Why try? Just be myself.
Why bother? This is the reason we never change. As long as we identify with the material that ego is continually churning out, there will never be change because it is the mark of ego, yet it resists change. It can’t change because it’s embedded in the past. It’s embedded in memory and who we were and how we reacted to the situation in the past.
Not how we could develop ourselves and how we could evolve ourselves to react, to respond, not to be open to the present situation with openness and fluidity, but how we mechanically acted in the past and continue to act. And this in itself is what we mean by ego. And we have a choice whether to identify with these mechanical reactions or begin to simply stay with the way things are, to know that we’re breathing in when we’re breathing in, to know that when we’re breathing out that we’re breathing out. This may seem like a small, insignificant achievement, but it’s going to carry over. It gives us an option in our daily life, an option of choice which wasn’t there before.
Before you were desire, you were hatred, you were restlessness, anxiety, worry. But now you can begin to see that these are merely states of mind and it’s not necessary to identify with them. You have a choice of simply noticing them and they will pass if you neither indulge in them or try to repress them. So it gives you an option. In this option, in taking this choice, we’re opening, allowing a gap, allowing some space for our wisdom to arise.
We can begin to identify with the more positive qualities of ourselves which are there, which have in the speed and the aggressive quality of ego have been lying dormant and which haven’t been able to see the light of day to become manifest more and more in our waking reality. So in a very small way, this very simple meditation of mindfulness and breath is like the beginning of a long journey of choosing what type of person, what type of reality you want to experience. We’ll meditate on mindfulness and the breathing. I think most of you have been experienced with the method, I believe. Maybe some of you haven’t.
Those who have, please go on. We’re going to simply breathe naturally without any sort of forced breath or prolonged breath. When we breathe in, we want to know that we’re breathing in in order to help us train ourselves in awareness, we mentally note in. When we breathe out, to help us develop the awareness that we’re breathing out, we mentally note out. In, out.
Mentally in, out, in, out. As a technique we use counting. We simply count the breaths. In out one, in out two, in out three, in out four, in out five. When we get up to five, we go back down to one, and go back up to six, and back down to one, up to seven, one, eight, one, nine, one, ten, and then back down to one through five again.
Mentally noting, simply being aware from moment to moment that you’re breathing in, simply being aware you’re when you’re breathing out, that you’re breathing out. Your mind is definitely going to become distracted. It’s going to wander. Over and over again, the moment you become aware that your mind has been distracted, that it’s not on the breath, simply bring it back and place it back on the breath. The moment, the very second that you become aware.
Okay, let’s try that. Now we’re recycling the verse of refuge in bodhicitta. Does somebody have it? Does somebody have it? We substitute the third line.
There is an asterisk. To the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha, I go for refuge in time and enlightenment. For the merit I create, talking about May I attain Buddhahood for the sake of all beings? To the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha, I go for refuge until I am enlightened through the merit I create by practicing the Dharma. And I attain Buddhahood for the sake of all beings.
To the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha, I go for refuge until I am enlightened through the merit I create by practicing Dharma. may I attain Buddhahood for the sake of all beings. So we go for refuge to the Buddha. Our own clarity, our own wisdom, the Dharma, the methods, the truth by which we are able to actualize our innate potential, our innate wisdom, innate love, our innate creative actions, spontaneous actions working in the world to benefit others, and to the Sangha of the spiritual community, the context in which this process takes place, the context of others who act as our examples, act as our guides, act as a source of inspiration, as friends, as support, both spiritually and physically. These become our refuge.
They become a way we can solve our problems. The phrase taking refuge is borrowed from traditional context, the often repeated Buddhist declaration of faith in the teachers, teaching, and spiritual community. I take refuge in the Buddha, take refuge in the Dharma, I take refuge in the Sangha. To make the point that taking refuge in momentary, transitory pleasures is something that we are not doing all the time, it’s an almost religious fervor. For example, one day we think, I’m so depressed.
I think I’ll go to the beach. So we drive to the ocean and jump into the water, play around like fish, and then lie down and fry in the sun. When this becomes worrying we think, Now I’m hungry. Where does that refreshment stand? Then we stuff ourselves with as much junk food as possible hoping to find some satisfaction in the ice cream, popcorn, coke and chocolate we are devouring.
We take refuge in these things as a way out of our depression and boredom only to end up fat and sunburned. The idea of refuge isn’t something eastern, it’s not something new. It’s what we go to to solve our problems, you know, when you’re having difficulties, when you’re bored, when you’re depressed. What do you usually rely on? Do you see your refuses outside of yourself, in other people, in possessions, events, ideas?
If so, you have to check up within your own experience. Are these methods of solving your problems, these refuges that you’ve been going to, are they working? Are they solving your problems? We all have problems to a lesser or greater extent, and we want to solve these problems. We want to somehow clear them up.
We want to be happy. We see these problems as obstacles to our happiness, And this is quite reasonable. So we have to continue in our reasonableness and see if our present methods are solving our problems or whether they’re really prolonging problems, perhaps proliferating our problems, creating more problems. Where are our problems finally going to be solved? Not in any temporal sense.
We don’t need the dharma, we don’t need spiritual methods to solve the fleeting temporal difficulties that are continually arising. You know, you break up with a girlfriend or a boyfriend or husband or something, and it’s painful, it’s a problem, and you want to solve that problem. That’s quite reasonable. No one wants to suffer. We all want to be happy.
But how do you go about solving that problem? You can merely see that problem as a temporal obstacle to your happiness and which is something to be overcome, so you immediately run out to get a new boyfriend, a new girlfriend, a new husband, a new car, house, boat, new job, new degree, whatever, and the problem is finished. You think you’ve solved your problem because that temporary problem seems to have gone away. In fact, the problem would have gone away anyway. It’s impermanent.
It will arise and it will stay for a while, and then it will cease. We don’t need the Dharma, we don’t need the spiritual practices to deal with such temporal problems. But in fact, that particular problem was an expression of an of some theme which has been reoccurring in your life over and over and over again. The problem with dissatisfaction, the problem of attachment. If we can see that it’s not my husband leaving me, my boyfriend breaking up, my wife walking out, my girlfriend ending our relationship that’s causing me the suffering.
But in fact, it’s attachment to that wife, to that husband, to that boyfriend, which is causing me the suffering. Then we’ll really begin to see the basic problem which needs to be solved, not its temporal particular expression, which is in this particular instance, I’m suffering because this particular wife left me, this particular boyfriend broke up with me, but it’s in fact attachment. It is in fact hatred. It is in fact ignorance. So this is where we need the dharma.
This is where we need spiritual methods not to alleviate the various temporal expressions which arise and will continually keep arising, but to eliminate the basis to begin to solve the underlying problem of our own mental attitudes, serve as a foundation of which these particular problems are merely an expression of. This is what it means to take refuge. Even during the good times, even when the sun is shining, you realize that there’s a problem within your mind. There’s still a basic unskillful attitude which is not particularly manifest at this time, but given the right conditions, it’s going to express itself in suffering again. Even at those times, if you think, Ah, it’s still necessary to practice a method to use a technique in order to develop more skillful ways of relating because I know sooner or later this present situation is going to end and conditions are going to ripen such that a particular unskillful attitude is going to arise, and I’m going to suffer.
Then you’re really beginning to make use of the Dharma, make use of the spiritual path. It is the consistent effort to change