Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. “Why are you unhappy?” Ven Jampa Gendun opens this 47-minute session with a pointed quotation — “because 99.9% of everything you think and do is for yourself” — and builds from it a sustained inquiry into self-cherishing. He argues that the relentless struggle for personal happiness may itself be blocking genuine happiness, citing Lama Zopa’s teaching that all daily difficulties — isolation, loneliness, conflict — trace back to the self-cherishing mind. He then draws a careful distinction between self-affirmation and self-centeredness, and between other-affirmation and self-sacrifice, showing how ego identity is habituated rather than innate. The session closes with a guided meditation: beggars along a roadside, patients in a hospital ward, all equally in need, yet met with unequal care.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 12 3 PA 1989 03 17.mp3
UUID: 6c6ddaca-60f8-46a4-9d06-24fbd29e55b6
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Three Principal Aspects of the Path 1988-1990 (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1989-03-17
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 47.3 minutes
Words: ~5,023
There’s a quotation. Why are you unhappy? Because ninety nine point nine percent of everything you think and of everything you do is for yourself and there isn’t any. So I didn’t want you to maybe I’ll leave it at that. I was gonna qualify that but I won’t.
Maybe it’s better. So that’ll give you some ideas to work with as far as equality of self and other. Developing not to the same degree that you’re concerned with your happiness. Developing to that same degree, you’re concerned about happiness, about others. You know, we have to be concerned with our problems.
We have to solve them, but we can keep them in some sort of perspective. So, the second meditative technique is beginning to contemplate on the disadvantages, self centeredness, self-cherishing, exaggerated self concern, selfishness, ego centeredness, whatever whatever you want to call it. Now this I, I, I, me, me, me, constant preoccupation with our self. Whole context of a way we relate. A whole reference point is this absolute commitment to our own ego.
We lay all things, all people at the altar of this ego without question. You know, so talking about some of the disadvantages of this type of mentality that we use as a context for all our relationships, our reference point. Now we can begin to object. Should I be concerned with the suffering of others? Why should I be concerned with the happiness of others?
What’s in it for me? That’s quite a good question and hopefully I think maybe we covered it. But this is you know we have to begin to see with our own experience that we have all been struggling up to this time. You know we wear ourselves out worrying, thinking, trying to find the key to happiness. Going here, going there, studying, buying, cultivating, working, spending, trying to find this constant struggle to find happiness.
And is it in fact, hasn’t been working. Has in fact perhaps the struggle has been an expression of the problem itself. That the struggle constantly for one’s own welfare may be in fact preventing you from finding the happiness that you were looking for in the first place. We never questioned the struggle. It seems it goes unquestioned doesn’t It seems as if it’s just the proper way to lead one’s life, the struggle for one’s own happiness.
But in fact, we have to begin to bring that into question. That’s a very, you know, this, the whole tradition of the great vehicle and such traditions of, you know developing love and compassion are quite extraordinary. They aren’t aren’t the bubblegum psychology that is being passed around. And we’re talking about something which is, you know, to seek to emulate Christ if you like. And I was just talking to someone and then we were talking about developing love and compassion.
Yes, yes, yes. Like the Buddhist, yes, yes, just like Buddhist. We must all become Buddhist. Just like Christ. Christ.
No. He really was loving and compassionate. You know, this kind of he wasn’t identifying with the with the enormity, with the unimaginable quality of the love and compassion that a Christ might have, that a Buddha might have. So it’s it’s a it’s an extraordinary aspiration to even think about it, contemplate, to contemplate. You know it’s said in the traditional teachings even to hear about is like seeing a star during the daytime.
It’s as rare as that. To know if in the Christian tradition, you’re following the precepts of Christ, you know, to love your enemy, to do good to those who maltreat you, to pray for those who hate you. That if you thought about that’s very nice and good to talk about emulating the life of Christ would be they would think you were a little bit insane, that you had too much pride. And in fact the Bodhisattva is insane from way of speaking from the normal perception of the world. But to be what could be normal in an insane society it’s probably not worth being.
So you know we’re talking about something which is a direction to set our lives. Keep talking about this reorientation that it said that one of the necessities, Dharmakīrti, in one of the great logic texts of the Indian masters. And the reason he wrote this entire text which is one of the greatest of all logic texts. He wanted to set out the qualities of the Buddha. And one quality he wanted most to set out was enormity of the love and compassion of the Buddha.
And in order to do that he saw that he had to establish the proof of past and future lives. Because the enormity, the unimaginable quality of the love and compassion of the Buddha is such that we couldn’t conceive arousing that quality in one lifetime, in one single span of fifty, sixty years. That we have to see it as a long evolutionary journey. And we have to get some perspective on what we’re about and we have to orient ourselves at least in that direction. Otherwise, we’re either going to mistake some of our romantic notions, our attachments for this type of love that we’re trying to cultivate or we’re going to become completely discouraged.
I can’t do that. But thinking that I can grow a little in that direction in this life and then I can carry on next life. I can carry on. This long long spiritual journey that we’re involved in. That, you know, we can begin to feel, you know, I talked about the quality of feeling as opposed to rational conceptions and logic.
We can begin to feel the equality of self in others. Know someone objects well, you know, why should I take care of the pain of others? I don’t feel their pain. Their pain isn’t my pain. And we mentioned when we discussed this before that if this were in fact the case, then why does the hand which feels no pain when the foot has a thorn in it, why does it reach down to remove the thorn from the foot, even though the hand is in no pain because they’re part of the same hole.
Therefore, it’s quite appropriate for something, when the whole is experiencing pain, for parts of that whole to relieve pain. Likewise, trying to begin to understand that we’re all part of this whole called sentient life. As mentioned before, I in self, the self in others is simply a matter, a manner of speaking. Ultimately, we’re not these isolated skin encapsulated egos that we imagine ourselves to be. That we’re all very much a part of this thing called sentient life.
And therefore we can that we’re not these isolated beings that we usually imagine ourselves to be. We appropriate our pain through habituation. In the sense of ego identity is not something which is something which is cultivated from childhood. My nose, my arm. We didn’t we weren’t born thinking my nose, my arm, my pain.
We’re beginning to identify with with it. We expanded our ego territory to cover everything which was encapsulated within the skin and all the events. This is my thinking, these are my thoughts, this is my pain. But we can, if we begin to understand this, begin to extend our sense of ego identity beyond our skin encapsulated ego, the usual customary area of concern, our usual area of territory and embrace all of sentient life. It’s logical, It’s possible that one can identify completely with the pain of others.
That could be your pain. You know this sense of ego, ego, ego identity, appropriating our pain. You know, in very emotion, highly emotional states when under hypnotism we can, what would normally be excruciating pain goes unfelt. That’s simply because we cease to identify ourselves with that pain. There’s no resistance since it’s not my pain.
You know in dealing with chronic pain these days, one of the methods that you use is to begin to distance oneself from the pain. Try to see the pain in a distance that is cease to identify with it. Cease to creating some space between you and the pain as if it was somebody else’s pain. As if that pain didn’t have anything to do with you. It has as much to do with me as this book has to do with me.
I can just observe it. I don’t have to identify it as my book and incorporate it into my identity. So the reverse reverse process can also work. We can expand our identity to others, toward others. There’s we can begin to feel the equality of self and other.
Just as in the sense that we have, we identify with the sperm and egg of that union which has eventually culminated, grew up into his body. This is me. You know if you saw a sperm and egg on the sheets, you might find it rather repellent. You wouldn’t think it was me. It would be very difficult to identify.
But through habituation we’ve been able to identify with that, what came out of that. So you know this ego identification process takes time. It didn’t happen all at once. Happens. You know, people are soldiers identify with their country when they go they’re willing to give up their life for my country right along.
You run off with the machine gun and go. You can even overcome the instinct of self preservation. Sense of identity with something outside of yourself. Know, people identify with their teams, with their religion, with their political parties. So can can we can begin to develop a very distinctive, rational, powerful altruism.
There’s nothing unnatural about such a way of thinking. There’s nothing really unreasonable about it. There’s nothing which is outside of our ability. We’re basing this on the. From the hard cold fact that all sentient beings want to be happy but they don’t want to suffer.
That’s kind of the cold reality of the situation. Developing the sense of going beyond our habitual ego, our habitual ego sense. You know, when we we have to check up with our own experience. Where do our most of our pleasures come from? I mean, not what we might say superficial pleasures.
But there’s moments of real self fulfillment, self authenticating experiences, peak experience. Really the most meaningful experiences. Where those which we have all experienced in the course of our lives during rare moments, Where did they come from? What were the conditions? What was the situation in which they arose?
I think it’s evident that we are at our happiest. You know when we’re able to transcend in some way the narrow habitual ego sense. When we go beyond our self confinement, our claustrophobic sense of self concern, the sense of continually caught up with their self. The sense of self consciousness. The sense of the watcher.
For example, know, sense pleasures. They’re at their highest when we’re we’re able to when we say we actually use the word I was carried away, sense pleasures, listening to music maybe. Listening to beauty you know, carried away by some beautiful music. We lose a sense of self. Completely absorbed in the music.
We’re no longer self conscious. We’re no longer concerned about self. We’ve transcended this narrow boundary and opened up to this beautiful music for example. Emotional pleasures. For example, the the loss of self when there’s union with the beloved.
The sexually sexual emotional pleasure. Probably in many ways one of the most blissful experience that we have ordinary open to us. Simply because it allows us to momentarily transcend our ego. The narrow confines of our usual concern. Intellectual, aesthetic, pleasures.
You know to the, to the, our proportional to the intensity. To, you know, when we talk about beauty or truth. The degree of that intensity, that experience is proportional to how is able to take one beyond one’s normal self, out of one’s self? You know, we begin to, you know, our mind seems to universalize, become expand, catch new glimpses of new possibility. As long as we remain so tightly focused upon our own happiness, whether temporal or ultimate, we will never experience the expansiveness of a truly open heart.
The only way to achieve a total vision of complete enlightenment is to free ourselves restrictions of this narrow self-cherishing attitude. In the teachings of all the highly evolved men and women of the past, it is clearly stated that this narrow self-cherishing habit of mind brings us nothing but spiritual suffocation. If we truly wish to fulfill our highest potential or even if we only want to achieve a certain mundane satisfaction in our everyday life, then we must overcome this self-cherishing and dedicate ourselves as fully as possible to the welfare of others. This is the only way to achieve completely open heart, the only way to experience lasting happiness. Dedication simply means that having created a certain atmosphere of positive energy within yourself, you determine to share this happiness with others as much as possible.
According to Buddhist psychology, if you do not have a dedicated attitude to some extent, you will never be totally satisfied. Instead, you will remain bored and lonely. So this isn’t, you know, what we’re trying to get at here is not some complex philosophy. It’s not some abstract theory. It’s, you know, we’re talking about, it’s a statement about our life what’s actually happening to us, our own experience.
So we have to find some way to open up some small crack in this wall of our ego cell, this this prison cell that we have encapsulated ourselves in. You have to create some inkling of a doubt that perhaps this our self centered me first, my wants, my needs attitude which we have been approaching our life with up to this point has in fact been working against our best interests. Maybe there’s another approach. It’s quite a radically different approach but we don’t have to We can approach it quite sanely and rationally. But we at least can begin to think in that direction, we can point ourselves and reorientate our thinking again and again in that direction opening up the possibility.
You know generally our whole life, you know we’re always trying to take advantage of someone else and to profit only for ourselves. Ourselves. What we mean essentially when we talk about self-cherishing is finding happiness for oneself at the expense of others. It’s not that we aren’t to bring ourselves happy but it’s not to be at the expense of others. And the happiness that we do achieve will be even greater if we’re willing to share that happiness with others.
This is a motivational statement, developing that positive energy within you and sharing it with others. But we can’t keep it to ourselves. It a struggle to keep it to ourselves which turns pleasure into pain. And everybody is trying to use somebody for their own welfare. All the whether it’s racism, classism, sexism, Husbands use wives.
Big children take candy from children. Everybody’s got their hidden agenda. Talking about the disadvantages of self-cherishing and self-centeredness, this quotation from Lama Zopa, which is his picture on the wall. He’s the spiritual director of Buddha House. He is the anti-self-cherishing lama.
That’s all he talks about is evils of self centered attitude. That’s that’s kind of the thing. The badge he he kind of wears when wherever he is. However, the essential thing is whatever problems arises whatever problem arise to be aware every time immediately that all these problems come from your selfish mind. This problem is given to me by my self-cherishing thought.
Every time, immediately try to recognize this recognition. As long as you do not put all the blame out as long as you put the blame all the blame outside, there’s no happiness. In reality, all the problems, all the difficulties of life come from the self-cherishing thought. All these problems are the result of negative karma accumulated in the past out of self-cherishing thought, being under the control of self-cherishing thought. You allow the disturbing thoughts to arise.
Then you are motivated by this negative karma. These problems not only come from past karma accumulated under the control of self-cherishing thought, but also come from your self-cherishing thought in day to day life. And all the various feelings of isolation, of loneliness, of frustrations, conflict, defensiveness, competitiveness, feeling of being unloved, unable to love, feeling of being unwanted, useless. All stem from self centeredness. Completely The world revolving around you, your problems, my needs.
Inability, you know, it’s such that there’s no space for others in such a mentality. There’s no love, there’s no communication. There’s no touching of others, there’s no being touched by others. There’s just a sore spot with this big iron fence protecting Isolation. You know, this big big black hole kind of sucking everything into it.
So that’s some of the disadvantages and disadvantages of cherishing self centeredness and cherishing others cherishing oneself, self centeredness and other centeredness. We do have to be concerned with our welfare. As I said, we have to solve our own problem. Very much we have to talk about idea of self affirmation. What is the difference between self affirmation and self-centeredness?
And what is the difference between self sacrifice, self denial and cherishing other relatedness. Know, I think you know there’s a new we have to You begin to distinguish between these. You know, because we think of ourselves as as being as isolated substance, you know, it seems that in order to to find happiness, to order to affirm myself, I have to deny others. You know, come in and there has to be this it seems as if there’s an inherent conflict between what I want to do and maybe what I think I should be doing for others. Even between mothers and children, between parents and children, between lovers.
It seems as this always is conflict arising. And if I deny if I give if I give myself over to the world, you know, as I have to affirm others to become other orientated then I have to deny myself. So these are kind of extremes of possibility. The two extremes of self centeredness and self denial and self sacrifice. And we have to see that this you know life is like this ongoing process of experience.
Life is not something which is static. There’s a continual flow of flux of experiences. So each of these, all of these experiences are both internally related to our surrounding world. All of these experiences are internally related to our surrounding world. Our own unique individual way of interpreting and synthesizing all these worldly experiences.
So, you know, we exist all the experiences we’re having exist in relationship to what is happening. We exist in a context. We don’t exist as an isolated sore thumb. We exist in in the context of a situation whatever the experience may be. Various experiences rising, these experiences rise in a context.
They also rise in dependence upon how we interpret the way we synthesize the outside world, how we perceive the world. So we exist as the way we perceive the world, the way we interpret, synthesize is something which is very unique and individual to us. But we also exist in relationship. We have a relatedness to the context in which experiences are happening. So there’s this individuality and relatedness.
And they support one another, enhance one another. You know often, for example, in the patriarchal societies, You know for Australia, by patriarchal societies. Men have been encouraged to cultivate their sense of uniqueness and personal freedom at the expense of relatedness. So you end up with a macho man who says, I don’t need anybody. I can take care of myself.
One has becomes develops inability to relate. When it’s completely withdrawn into one’s own individuality and when the expression is of one’s own self centered freedom. On the other hand, there’s a women in patriarchal societies are usually encouraged to cultivate their relatedness at the expense of their uniqueness and personal freedom. And then you come up with the extreme of you know. I don’t know in America, I mean this is my example.
I don’t know if it’s so much Australia. We the example of the Jewish Mother Syndrome. I gave up my life for you. Could have been a beauty queen but I gave I worked it and I scrubbed and I put you through college. Something like this, the Jewish mother syndrome.
Complete self denial. I gave up everything for you and now this is the way you treat me. Something like that. Self sacrifice in Jewish mother. So in each each each of these two cases, people have been more as victimized by by the premise that the self is after all an ego cut off from the world.
We you know, the life everybody’s life is very much unique but at the same time existing relationship with others. It’s unique and is constituted by the way it’s related with others. You know it’s as if we have you know I mentioned this many times before, the two aspects of the self in a sense of this private experiential world which we experience in and our public social world, aspect of ourselves which exists in relationship to others. So we can you know, so it seems that if we’re going to approach our growth in a holistic manner, we have to be concerned with both of these aspects of ourselves. Neither cultivation of one or the other at the expense of the other would be an extreme.
We also This is the quality of uniqueness and how we are synthesizing the experiences around us. How we synthesize, how we incorporate our past experiences into our present moment, into our present self image, our identity which constitutes who we are in the present moment. We’re very much determined by what we have been in the past. We’re very much past orientated. And we have to become aware that our memory is selective.
But there is no such thing as objective memory. We select out of our past arbitrarily. We rearrange our memories, we color them, and then we base our present experience on who we are in orientation to what I have been in the past. And this is the way we become very much stuck. And this is that pattern that’s unique to me.
This is the way I’m synthesizing my past to become the person I am in the present. This is the conception of who you have been. So most people are very much attuned to what they have been in the past, the past person, who I have been. So they become very much enslaved to who they have been and abound by their by, for example, their past role. And then they keep repeating this pattern.
So in Buddhism, it asks us to make a shift in in our orientation away from who I have been to what I can become. We are to ourselves. Who I can be you know both personally and in relationship, both personally and in relationship. So in this sense, the future person exists as a potential in the present moment. The present only the past only comes up so far.
It doesn’t determine the future. It only comes up at the present moment. We can’t go any further anymore. But we can perpetuate that past or we can begin to reorientate ourselves and see that within the future exists within present potentials and make use of this potential to determine what type of future, what type of person we want to become. So in the sense of self affirmation, you know which we all need, that on the road to ego transcendence we have to develop healthy egos somewhere along the line perhaps.
Think I’ve used this expression many times before but we have to be somebody before we can be nobody. If we’re constantly having to prop up our ego, constantly having to guard our territory, secure our identity And there’s no space, there’s no chance to go beyond our own conventional self, begin to move out to a greater universal perspective, convention, ultimately be able to transcend this the whole quality of this grasping. That’s such a type of self to begin with. So this self affirmation begins with a recognition of our potential in the present moment. And from a Buddhist standpoint, obviously we’re talking about Buddha nature, Christ nature, whatever.
This quality of innate potential of love and compassion, of brilliant wisdom, sanity that we have as our potential and the possibility of growth to what we can become. That old rock and roll song has a line in it which says, What you are now is what you have done. What you do now you will become. The idea that we can begin to direct our future, our future becoming in the present moment by our choice and not have to be stuck with what we have been. It is purely our conception of what we have been.
Objective reality of what we have been. It’s very selective. The patterns that we have developed, the role that we’re stuck in, in a way that we interpret synthesize the past, the way that we interpret synthesize the present. So no. Okay.
Again. Again, didn’t finish. The idea of self affirmation as opposed to self centeredness and other affirmations as opposed to self sacrifice. You know, the question of self denial, which of the two selves are we denying? Self centeredness or self affirmation?
We definitely we have to have self esteem. We have to affirm ourselves. But is it being done at the expense of others? In the healthy context it would seem that self affirmation is other affirmation. But in realizing our own potential, our own divinity, we must equally affirm that quality in others.
That in seeing the basic quality of self in others. That in any way that we enhance ourselves, that we affirm ourselves, that we develop a greater and greater self esteem, it must be seen in the context of equality that others are no different in that same respect. It seems like there must be raising of the affirming of others. That others have the same exact qualities just like myself. In that way it can’t be interpreted.
It can’t be incorporated in one sense of ego isolation. That one is somehow uniquely endowed with these qualities over and above others. That one is sharing. There’s always a sense as if we’re by recognizing our own Buddha potential, acknowledging the Buddha potential of life, That life can be a happy, healthy, loving experience. Okay.
So we’ll meditate for a few minutes. Okay. I can just imagine imagine that you’re walking down a road perhaps in India or if you know a very poor section of Australia, somewhere where there there might be a lot of derelicts. People are really in need, hungry, really, really hungry. Very poor clothing, children.
They’re lined up along the side of the road. And some of them are quite pleasing to see. Some of them are are good looking. Some of them are very horrible. Some of them are disfigured.
Some of them are quite gentle. Some of them are quite rough. Some of them say please, sir, madam, very polite. Some of them are very abusive. There are always varied appearances that you see before you.
And try to get some feeling for how you relax, you’re reacting to these various appearances. The person once the person says please, the other person is very abusive. They’re all asking you for money. Give me, give me, give me. How do you react to these different types of people, the different mannerisms, the different appearance?
Your reactions are very different. Some you’re quite willing to give, others you want them to go away. Look into their eyes, look into what they really need. They’re all hungry. They all need money.
No difference. Their needs are completely equal, but you’re reacting to them quite differently, quite in a biased manner. I’ll take another situation. It’s on a hospital ward and the patients are lying in their beds. They’re all equally ill.
Some of these patients are quite beautiful, some are quite rich, some are poor, some are ugly, some are very kind, some are very abusive. You’re a doctor and you walk on the ward and you have the skill to help them. Which one are you going to help first? Which one are you going to spend most time with? Be the most patient with?
Treat the kindest, the most tender with? Give your skills? What would be your natural inclination? Your natural tendency? Who would you go to first?
Who would you give the most care to? They’re all equally sick. They all equally need your help. Look in their eyes, behind the eyes. Is there any difference among all these different varieties of people?
And you can just think about the people in this room. That the person sitting next to you wants to be happy and doesn’t want to suffer just like you. Whether you know them or not, whether you’re a friend or your enemy, still this fact remains. A very personal fact, a very real fact that everybody in this room wants to be happy and doesn’t want to suffer no different. What’s so special about myself that I use others for my own happiness?
We can dedicate the positive energy. Again, you know, if we had sincere conviction in the power of the mind, what we are doing and the law of cause and effect that