Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Ven Jampa Gendun opens this 45-minute session with a traveler who mistakes a striped rope for a snake — suffering real fear over an error, not a reality. He uses the image to frame ego grasping: we treat a constructed self as solid and spend our lives reinforcing it endlessly. Reviewing the first two principal aspects from the prior year, he walks through the four reversals that build determination to be free — recognizing our potential, our mortality, the direction of karma, and the inherent dissatisfaction of any ego-bound state. He then turns to bodhicitta, distinguishing it from sentimental overwhelm, drawing on Einstein’s “optical delusion” of separateness and a Thich Nhat Hanh story equating understanding with love. The session closes with a self-directed loving-kindness meditation.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 06 3 PA 1989 02 24.mp3
UUID: e92c833f-3daa-40c5-94f8-91e2fbfce7de
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Three Principal Aspects of the Path 1988-1990 (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1989-02-24
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.3 minutes
Words: ~5,871
Simply choosing the Let me talk about a path with heart. Choosing to to making the choice, the consistent choice of the path with heart, the consistent choice of growth, the consistent choice of those conditions which are going to cultivate the seeds that we already have. You’re continually putting yourself in those conditions, creating those cooperative causes. Continually removing the discordant causes, those types of conditions which prevent, which inhibit the growth of these seeds. That’s not a task which is beyond any of us.
And we make that decision every day, making this choice, setting our direction, creating our world. And this is more than anything, this is our going for refuge. We can recite words, we can create ceremonies, but if we don’t do this, then it’s merely a game. We haven’t really done anything. By reciting the words or going for refuge, perhaps, we can remind ourselves.
We have very tough minds, we need to have as many supports, as many props, as many fingers pointing as possible to keep reminding ourselves of what we are and who we can become and what the preciousness of our opportunity and the preciousness of ourselves. To the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha, I go for refuge until I am enlightened through the merit I create by practicing giving and other perfections. 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 giving and other perfections. May I attain Buddhahood for the sake of all beings.
To the Buddha, the Dharma, the Sangha, I go for refuge until I am enlightened. Through the merit I create by practicing giving and the other perfections, may I attain Buddhahood for the sake of all beings. We’re just reviewing the three principal aspects of the path, The first two that we completed last year, and then we’re going to move on to the third. The first being developing the determination to be free, and usually talked about as renunciation.
Usually referred to as renunciation is the definite quality, the definite emergence, which is a literal translation from the Tibetan, definite emergence. The second is opening our hearts to others. bodhicitta, the mind of enlightenment, the altruistic aspiration to achieve, you know, our highest potential whereby we maximize our ability to benefit others. And then the third is, you know, seeing deeply into the nature of reality, which ultimately is seeing the nature of our own mind. That’s what we want to understand, how our mind is operating.
You know, we have many We base our lives on many core assumptions, on many sets of ideas, belief systems. And to the degree that these sets of ideas, core assumptions, are in accordance with the actual way things are, to that same degree that we’re going to live in harmony with the actual situation, with reality. To the degree that they’re in discordance, then we’re going to experience frustration, disappointment, conflict. So it’s very much to our benefit, to our advantage, to try to come to understand, you know, how actually things exist, how our mind is operating, so that we can begin to live in harmony with the way things actually actually are. If we’re mistaken, then we’re always going to have conflict, we’re always going to have disappointment.
Things aren’t going to turn out the way we think they should have, that we preconceived them. In developing, in coming to an understanding that we’re very much, you know, stuck in certain unskillful patterns of compulsive behaviors, neurotic cyclic neurotic this quality of going around in circles all the time, repeating repetition, know, like this quality of a firebrand. You know, the a stick with it which has a fire on the end of it, which, when whirled around fast enough, gives the appearance of a solid, continuous circle. And the quality of trying to secure this circle, you know, believing in its solidity. This is we can see those of the ego as being solid and concrete.
There’s an I, an agent behind our thoughts who’s thinking our thoughts, eating our food, saying our words, whatnot, and constantly having to re secure it, reestablish its territory, affirm its credentials again and again and again. This process of again and again and again. The process of ego, this conflict, this struggle. So, you know, trying to develop the determination to go beyond this patterned way of existing. And this is what we mean by developing, essentially, the determination to be free.
And as as a basis of this patterning, the two basic misconceptions that I mentioned, the misconception of the which we call ego grasping, and the other is self centeredness. As the two basic misconceptions upon which we operate our egotistical life. You know, somehow we have to begin to see this for ourselves and determine to overcome these misconceptions. And these misconceptions are quite deeply ingrained. They aren’t going to be easily uprooted.
They aren’t easily going to be changed. So it takes a lot of energy. It takes a lot of determination. determination to be free, to become unstuck. You know, it’s as if, you know, talking about these errors that we’re making.
You know, for example, you might be walking along at night, say, the evening, just as the sun is going down. And you see, you know, on road what appears to be a snake. And of course, you react as if it were a snake, and you jump back, and you’re afraid. And you watch it, and you watch it, and you watch it, and you watch it, and it’s not quite behaving like a snake. It’s not moving.
Maybe you throw a rock near it, and it doesn’t move in the least. It doesn’t react at all. And you go up a little bit closer. Okay. Watch it.
Observe it. A little bit closer. And then you get up to it, right up to it next to it, and you realize, ah, it was a striped rope. You know? And you you realize that you had been making a basic mistake, an error.
You mistook its appearance, that it didn’t exist the way it appeared. And that based upon this misconception, you had all these various unnecessary sufferings that you went through, experienced, fear, uncomfortableness, whatever, based upon some misconception. So, you know, what can we do about this? Know, we can approach it from, for example, a psychological point of view. Now, within, you know, to some degree, western psychology psychology is saying, let’s learn how to live with the snake.
Know? That’s how to be let’s befriend the snake. Let’s train it, perhaps. You know? And this, We’re going to have to live in the same cage, so let’s get along as best we can.
Buddhism says that, Okay, I agree with that. Let’s get along with the snake. But ultimately, living with the snake is no fun. In fact, it’s not really a snake at all. We’re making some basic mistakes with the nature of this object.
And so we’re sort of living with the snake, developing the snake is sort of a remedial at best. It offers a you know, we’re talking in a way that we’re introducing the idea of the two levels of truth. You Conventionally, we have to work as if we did have an ego, perhaps, that we have to work in the world from the basis that as we conceive of it, as ignorance conceives of it, with various misconceptions that we may have with it, we have to learn to live with the snake, to adjust to the snake. That is to say, there seems to be a transition necessary, especially to develop a healthy ego. Yeah, we talked about developing a healthy ego.
We have to, you know, we have to be somebody before we can be nobody. We have to if we’re constantly having to prop up our ego, then there’s probably no way to to transcend it, to go beyond the ego. That we have to become somewhat have a feeling of self worth, self affirmation, that we feel good about ourselves. And then perhaps we can begin to forget about ourselves even on a conventional level, but ultimately working to transcend the ego on the ultimate level, you know, to begin to see that, in fact, you’re making the ego in itself arises based on certain misconceptions. But there seems to be some remedial steps necessary that we can’t simply jump from hating ourselves to transcending ego, thinking ourselves as worthless to thinking ourselves as going beyond ego.
So this transformation process requires a lot of work, I think. First, to begin to develop a healthy ego. And in unison with that, at the same time, begin to develop the conditions to go beyond ego altogether. So we’re working on both levels of truth, the conventional level of truth and the ultimate level of truth. Developing healthy ego as a conventionality, a means of relating with the world, with things as they exist, from the point of view of ignorance.
But all the time, working to transcend ego, developing the wisdom which is going to go beyond ignorance, which is going to act as an ultimate antidote to ignorance. So the conventional level, working with ourselves, working with this this thing that we this ego of ours, you know, going beyond our present feelings of negativity, feelings about insufficiency, of limitedness, of feelings of incompleteness, Feelings as as if we were victims. Someone said that you know, I attend a class on Wednesday nights. It’s a class in in archetypal psychology, and we’re discussing dreams. And this one man brought his dream to the class and he was interpreting this dream.
And his dream was and his interpretation was it wasn’t his dream. His interpretation was that he had had to clean up clean up his father’s mess. His father left him with his legacy of a screwed up mind, you might say. And his job in life was to work out to clean up the mess his father made of his mind. And this this idea of being a victim of something outside of yourself and that, you know, that somehow perhaps you aren’t responsible.
Somehow I read you an interesting quotation. There’s a tendency today to absolve individuals of moral responsibility and treat them as victims of social circumstances. You buy that and you pay with your soul. It’s not men who limit women. It’s not straights who limit gays.
It’s not whites who limit blacks. What limits people is the lack of character. What limits people is that they don’t have the fucking nerve or imagination to star in their own movie, let alone direct it. Yuck. So, you know, this is the beginning to take responsibility for one’s own lives.
That, in fact, it’s, you know, it’s more of your attitudes toward what’s happened in the past, which determines whether how much it’s going to affect you, to what extent it’s going to affect you, and whether it affects you detrimentally at all. That is very much within choice, within our hands. We don’t have to remain, you know, the victims of our history. You know, Developing this determination that the past only goes so far, it only comes up to the present, and the future exists as potential within the present moment. We can determine by our choice what type of future that we wish to experience.
And they’re said to be in this process developing this energy to go beyond these repetitive patterns which are very much stuck in, which come from the past, to be four reversals, the way to develop the energy, to break out, to get unstuck, to begin to redirect your life. You know, becoming aware of our potential and beginning to appreciate ourselves and who we are and our opportunity for change. You know, we’ve covered each of these last year in some detail. We’ve discussed, for example, the idea of going for refuge in the direction of our particular potential, that we have the seeds of a sound, healthy, loving, sane human being within us, and that we have the opportunity to chance more so than the vast majority of the people in the world, more so than than we appreciate, you know, this opportunity, this chance. You know, sometimes we we become very restricted in our view, or we lose our perspective, and we don’t realize how very fortunate we are, each of us as individuals, just in general, to be Westerners living in a highly affluent society where our material needs are quite easily met.
You know, the people I know, you know, what would you be doing now if you lived in Sudan, for example? You know, I don’t think you’d be sitting here listening to a talk on the Dharma. I think you might be dying of starvation. Or if you were living in India where if you don’t work that day, don’t eat that day. There’s just not the opportunity, there’s not the physical chance to realize your potential, to cultivate the seeds which you might recognize, but in fact you don’t have the circumstances that create the cooperative causes to cultivate those seeds.
So beginning to very deeply appreciate who in fact you are, that you have all the chance, both external and internal, to go beyond your past history, not to be stuck and bound in these patterns. But this, in fact, this chance isn’t going to last forever. It’s definite that you’re going to die, and the time of death is uncertain. And this second reversal That in In the face of death, we are thrown back upon ourselves, upon our own value system, determining, well, what is important for me? Not, you know, we actually have to reevaluate to take stock of our lives.
You know, if you were going to die six months from now, in what way would you change? How would you reorder your life, your everyday life? And what’s going to happen to you at the moment of death? And as I mentioned before, the fact of the small deaths which are recurring throughout our lives, qualities of change itself is like a small death. And the quality of, you know, the big death at the end of this life has been a radical change in lifestyle, that these changes are taking place all the time.
And what helps you through these changes? You know, it’s very much dependent upon the tendencies of our mind and how we confront these changes, the strength of our mind, our willingness to be open to change, for example, rather than struggling against it. And this is a you know, we’re talking about karma. karma can be explained in many ways. But one of the ways, perhaps in one relevant way, is that it represents the tendencies, the directions of our mind.
Where is your mind taking it? What types of patterns are you building up? You know, whether to remain a victim of your past history or are you moving toward the type of person who you want to become? And then the fourth reversal is beginning to become acutely aware of the dissatisfactory quality of any state which is bounded by these compulsive patterns, which is bound by ego, the inherent dissatisfactory quality of the inherent conflict which is involved. So the idea is, in these contemplations, becoming aware of your potential, your chance to change, that this chance is not going to last forever.
In fact, when it’s necessary to undergo a change, where can you expect to end up on the other side? What is the tendency of your mind? And then finally, beginning to understand that any type of change within this system, within this closed system of cyclic existence, within this system of ego, is inherently dissatisfactory and say, I want to go beyond all types of compulsive pattern behavior. You know, to develop energy, the determination to be free beyond all egotistical states. This is the culmination of developing the determination to be free.
So, you know, we talk about the quality of renunciation, renouncing the causes of our suffering, renouncing ego, if you like, which is the basic cause of our problems, Renouncing our cultivated unawareness, our ignoring quality, and our self centeredness. But there’s another type of renunciation, you know, that we can talk about. Renouncing whatever stands between you and others, whatever inhibits communication, renouncing whatever prevents you from developing the qualities of kindness and gentleness toward others, developing an awakening heart. So we have two basic errors, two basic mistakes that our lives very much are dependent upon: ego grasping and self centeredness. And so when we talk about developing the determination to be free, where are we going to grow to?
We’re going to grow out of these two basic misconceptions, these two basic unskillful patterns, our egotistical life revolves around. We have to grow out of ego grasping, we have to grow out of self centeredness. These represent the two aspects of our existential self. You know, there’s two overall aspects of our self: the very private, personal self, inaccessible to others and the public, social self, which exists in relationship to others. This is simply one way of looking.
This division doesn’t ultimately exist. It’s just a way of looking at a diamond, just the different facets. And one way we can look at this is to see that we exist as social beings. Part of ourselves exists in interrelationship with others. So if we’re going to you know, within the great vehicle, we’re seeking to make use of a holistic method whereby to actualize our complete potential.
And therefore, it’s necessary to relate with ourselves and others as skillfully as possible. And in this sense, the way we can relate most skillfully with others is expressed through the qualities of love and compassion, of non separateness, of interconnectedness, of a sense of unity with other, you know, that we’re all parts of this living being called sentient life. This is, in fact, is a conventional wisdom. I’ll read you a quotation by Albert Einstein. A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space.
He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. So I think, you know, as I mentioned initially, that in very much in very many ways, physics is, you know, through one of the kind of the cutting edge of science may actually lead lead us to become more compassionate people. That is becoming aware that the non reality of the of this division that we’re that we keep making between self and others.
And in fact, this is quite it’s arbitrary, and it doesn’t, in fact, exist in reality. That, you know, that this separateness that we conceive of ourselves, this feeling of isolation, is in fact based upon misconceptions. And that by is the quality of love and compassion, which is the expression of the wisdom which understands that we aren’t these separate individual distinct beings that we imagine ourselves to be, and that we’re all part of this living being called sentient life, just as in the cells of the body. If, you know, if the cells in the body would begin to act as we do, self centered, egotistical. And we would call this cancer, I think.
As if organism, part of the organism, was working against itself, destroying its very it doesn’t see itself as a part of a greater living whole, and it’s going to destroy it’s going to bring harm to the whole by conceiving itself as isolated and working and destroying in this process. And this is very much what we’re up to, what we’re into, what we’re about. The development of you know So, you know, we developed this idea, this thought to be separated from our suffering. We direct it toward ourselves, and we develop determination to be free. We direct that same thought toward others.
We develop love and compassion. We develop an opening toward others, an awakening of our hearts. So it’s the same thought. It’s simply directed toward others. In order to develop an awakening heart, we have to become very You know, we have to understand ourselves and our situation very intimately.
Without this as a prerequisite, there’s no way that we can really develop sincere love and compassion. This sincere thought to help others since we haven’t developed that same attitude toward ourselves. It’s more or less a kind of a romantic idea. It remains very much so. All the qualities, you know, of why it’s necessary to create some make make some effort, to create some space, to use some of your time in seeking to benefit others.
You know, both from a reasoning standpoint, from an experiential standpoint, and from our own intuition. And all the the various And it’s been repeated over and over, at least to myself, to to me, by my by my many teachers that I have. You know, if you want to be happy you know, as the Dalai Lama said, know, since we’re selfish, let’s be wisely selfish. And what does it mean by being wisely selfish? It means to work for the benefit of others.
And working for the benefit of others, then we’re going to receive back more happiness than we could have ever imagined ourselves to have received in any other way. You know, as it says in Engaging in the Bodhisattva’s Deeds, all the happiness in the world works arises through wishing others happiness. All the suffering that one experience arises from wishing happiness for oneself alone. All these people, you know, Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama, all of my teachers, the various traditions, Christ, they are always talking about this quality of seeking to benefit others and developing love and compassion for others. And we have to ask, well, you know, is the you know, were they just talking?
Were they was there some foundation for what they were saying? Is there just is this kind of an idealistic way of life? Some romantic notion. Again, questioning. When some people first hear about bodhicitta, bodhicitta is the awakening heart, the mind of enlightenment.
When first when some people first hear about bodhicitta, they confuse it with a sentimental, highly emotional state of mind. Oh, how happy I want people to be. I cannot stand to think of their suffering. They feel so overwhelmed by the needs of others that their mind becomes depressed. But true bodhicitta is not like this.
It has nothing to do with such an upset and paralyzed state of mind. Instead, it is clear and easygoing, possessing a calm wisdom as well as a deeply felt compassion. It is an attitude of opening our hearts completely and leaving it open as much as we can. So, you know, it becomes a rather reasonable understanding of our own situation and beginning to understand that others are just like ourselves. That basically, beyond the superficial differences, beyond the superficial appearances, that they’re in very much the same situation as ourselves and being able to empathize with them.
And therefore, wishing them to the same degree, perhaps developing the same positive regard towards them all, understanding that they’re developing this ability to turn your attitude of wishing to separate yourself from suffering toward others in some small way, you know, acting upon that. It doesn’t it has to be it doesn’t have to be a a a an emotional wrenching affair. But, you know, we can begin to orientate ourselves in that direction, begin to move the center of our psycho the psychological center of gravity to ourselves away from ourselves to move it toward others, that considering others just as important as ourselves in some small ways. And we can make some small space in our lives and make some effort toward that end. Within our own experience, you know, the fact that we oftentimes, in our own difficulties and our own confusions, our own problems, it’s as if they’re never going to go away.
You know, we’re we’re just completely surrounded by this cloud of our own problem, and we can’t see any opening in this cloud. It’s permanent, completely wrapped up in our own difficulties. So often we make such a fuss of insignificant events in our lives that we turn minor difficulties into major problems. As we develop a universal view of bodhicitta, however, these small concerns become unimportant and no longer bother us. As this burden of self concern drops from our shoulders, we experience a small taste of the complete freedom that comes with full spiritual fulfillment.
Experiences like this are encouraging because they demonstrate so convincingly the practical day to day value of training and transforming our mind. So within our own experience, beginning to see that those moments when we went out of outside of ourselves, that when we were This is when the training in equalizing and the exchange of self for others, when we talked about the disadvantages of self centeredness and the advantages of other centeredness. The fact is that most of our most meaningful fulfilling experiences are those which are somehow outside of our usual self conscious preoccupation. You know, when we no matter what it might be, it may be a sensual experience. For example, listening to music, and we talk about being carried away by the music, going outside of ourselves, finding, you know, in a union with the beloved, perhaps sexual union, the quality of being able to transcend even momentarily our total self preoccupation, our absolute commitment to this ego, just for momentarily, this transcendent quality.
In many ways, it’s probably our our highest, our our most meaningful peak experiences that that we experience in our in our lives. And beginning to see this in our actual experience. And beginning to see that when we’re completely caught up in our own needs, my I, I, I, my want want want, my needs, my desires, And then insignificant problems become great problems. And great problems, you know, we just almost we freak out. We can’t handle them.
Anyway, it just compounds our suffering. So the reasonableness of seeking to benefit others, to begin to move to a more universal perspective, the reasonableness of devoting some of your energy, effort to benefiting others as a a means to go beyond our mistaken misconception of the efficacy, the effectiveness of self centeredness to find our happiness. To begin to see an impact, it creates all our problems. And as a more skillful way of relating with others and developing this social aspect of ourselves to its fullest potential, which is in accordance with the reality of our situation, in which we are going to find real harmony and real peace and real meaningful relationship with others. Going beyond this feeling of isolation, of defensiveness, of threat.
And beginning to open your heart as much as possible and to leave it open. Some of the foundations for, you know, why it might be useful, why it’s to make this effort. Otherwise, you know, it might sound like a nice idea. It might like it’s just kind of a, you know, pleasant idea to think about, but we really won’t become sincere about it. We won’t really begin to begin to work to oppose our natural instinctive self centered qualities and begin to cultivate our unnatural, other centered attitudes.
That takes some measure of energy, some measure of determination. So the only way this can arise is if we see it in our own self best interest. To actually to care for others is the way we’re going to be wisely selfish. That’s why we’re going to experience more happiness, more fulfillment. And I was told that people only have one hour concentration span.
So I’ll read one more. It’s very beautiful quotation. It’s not a quotation. It’s just a little story by a Vietnamese monk who was on SBS a few months ago, Thich Nhat Hanh. You know, in talking about love, in talking about coming to an understanding of being able to empathize from our own understanding of our situation to to the situations of others.
Suppose we had a son who becomes unbearable, becomes an unbearable young man. It may be hard for us to love him. That is natural. In order to be loved, a person should be lovable. If our son has become difficult to love, we will be very unhappy.
We wish we could love him, but the only way we can is to understand him, to understand his situation. We have to take our son as the subject of our meditation. Instead of taking the concept of emptiness or some other subject, we can take our son as the concrete subject of our meditation. We don’t blame our son. We just want to understand why he has become like that.
Through this method of meditation, we find out all the causes, near and far, that have led to our son’s present state of being. The more we see, the more we understand. The more we understand, the easier it is for us to have compassion and love. Understanding is the source of love. Understanding is love itself.
Understanding is another name for love. Love is another name for understanding. Understanding our own situation is a real means to begin to love ourselves and beginning to extrapolate that to others, understanding their situation. And, you know, if we completely understood our situation, I mean, understanding What is it? I think Anyway, it’s said that the most intelligent practitioners first understand emptiness, and then they develop an awakening heart.
Why is that? Because through understanding emptiness, understanding selflessness, that practitioner sees the total purposelessness, the total unnecessary Is that a word? In necessity. Lack of necessity for all the suffering that we’re going through. By having insight into emptiness, by having insight into egolessness, that practitioner sees that you know, it’s as if, you know, we’re in a movie, a very sad movie, and we take it.
We’re totally wrapped up. We believe that this is actually a real happening, that there’s real death. You know, it’s like in a dream. A mother gives birth to a raises the child with love and affection, works day and night for the child’s benefit. And the child reaches about the age of eight or nine and dies of fever.
And the mother weeps tears, has tremendous pain in her heart, and then she wakes up from that. And all those tears were very real. That, you know, mother gave birth to a dream mother gave birth to a dream child, and the dream child grew up and suffered a dream death, and the mother cried dream tears, and it went through dream suffering. But during that dream, it’s all very real. It’s as real as anything can be real.
But so those who who see the situation for what it is, the reality of the situation, who have experienced egolessness, they see that we’re very much involved in a dream, that we’re crying dream tears, experiencing dream pain over having lost dream children, and they’re asking us to wake up. Because of this, they see the lack of necessity, that we’re suffering for no reason. They develop tremendous compassion. They completely understand the situation. The more we understand our situation, the more we understand our potential of love and wisdom, all the circumstances, I think we will really understand that we shouldn’t be suffering.
And love is simply the wish to be happy, that we really wish ourselves to be happy. And understanding other people’s situation by understanding our own, extrapolating from our own situation, empathizing with them, and developing the possibility of really sincerely wishing others to be happy. That is to say, really wishing others love. So this idea of wisdom and love, they are it’s like, you know, we they aren’t really different, I think. Just the social, perhaps, expression of wisdom and the We have to develop both of these aspects of ourselves.
So I’ll stop there. And maybe next week, we can begin. Our mind, We can all see the nature of reality, maybe. I thought I’d review very quickly the two traditions of developing our waking hearts. Maybe we’ll have to wait, put it off of seeing reality for one more week.
But don’t be impatient. I was going to change the meditation also, it would take some while to explain. I was going to do one of the giving and taking meditation. But perhaps, since the time is is getting late, we’ll we’ll do our traditional meditation. So if you take a comfortable posture I hope, you know, if you have any suggestions or perhaps in the future we can do less talking.
I hear myself talking quite a lot. And then we can have a discussion, more of a discussion at the end. I think that might be useful. Otherwise, maybe I’m becoming irrelevant, I don’t know. Getting out of touch.
So if you take a comfortable posture, then we’ll meditate. So we begin with ourselves, with our own situation, getting in touch with that. thinking about some of our own difficulties and some of our own frustrations, problems, becoming sincere with the moment, with ourselves. Whatever you may have done in the past, the various mistakes that you may have created, we can simply regret them and determine as best you can not to repeat them again. You can begin again.
And however you may conceive of yourself, whatever identity you may hold to, you can change. You can become anything that you want to be. Within this moment, within this space of time, you want to try to befriend ourselves. We normally are constantly torturing ourselves and we’re constantly putting ourselves down. And that we want to wish ourselves well, and that we want to be happy, and recognizing that fact that we should be happy, that we can be happy, and wishing yourself all the happiness that you’ve ever desired, all the good things, to care about yourself, respect yourself.
So just generate and direct some positive feelings towards yourself, caring these feelings. May I be happy, may I grow. You’re wishing yourself all the good things that you’ve ever wanted. Really being kind to yourself, treating yourself special.