Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Ven Jampa Gendun opens this 46-minute session with a pointed contrast: sitting with a television program is an invasion of the self, while meditation is the deliberate act of returning to it. He then offers two hands-on analogies for the mechanics of meditation — holding a glass (mindfulness, the act of gripping an object) and knowing how firmly you hold it (awareness, the watching faculty) — illustrated by the image of a cat fixed on a mouse hole, before a short guided breath session. The talk then moves into a review of Tsongkhapa’s Three Principal Aspects: renunciation, bodhicitta, and wisdom. Gendun covers the three types of suffering within saṃsāra, introduces the Four Immeasurables as a foundation for opening to others, and explains how conventional and ultimate bodhicitta reinforce each other like two wings of a bird. The session closes on ego’s resistance to change and what inner strength is required to step beyond it.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 17 3 PA 1998 06 24.mp3
UUID: 9ae69697-8578-4b8c-90db-ddfcb0323e90
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Three Principal Aspects of the Path 1988-1990 (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1998-06-24
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 46.2 minutes
Words: ~6,020
When we sit down peacefully, breathing and smiling with awareness, we are our true selves. We have sovereignty over ourselves. When we open ourselves up to a TV program, we let ourselves be invaded by that program. Sometimes it is a good program, but often it is just noisy. Because we want to have something other than ourselves’ interests, we sit there and let a noisy program invade us, assail us, destroy us.
Even if our nervous system suffers, we don’t have the courage to stand up and turn it off. Because if we do that, we have to return to ourself. Meditation is the opposite. It helps us to return to our true self. Practicing meditation in this kind of society is very difficult.
Everything seems to work in consort to try to take us away from our true self. We have thousands of things like videotapes and music which help us to be away from ourselves. Practicing meditation is to be aware, to smile, to breathe. These are the opposite side. We go back to ourselves in order to see what is going on because to meditate means to be aware of what is going on.
What is going on is very important. I talked about I gave an analogy about the factors that we’re cultivating, making main use of any type of meditation, be it mindfulness of breathing or tantric meditations and all the gamut of meditations between, is the factors of mindfulness and awareness. And I mentioned that mindfulness was like remembering that you’re carrying a bowl of water on your head and awareness was watching the situation as you walked along a road. We have to have both together, otherwise we’re going to spill the water. I think another useful meditation, another useful analogy is in this in the analogy of holding a glass.
Mindfulness just means memory, recollection, holding an object of meditation, whether it’s a breath or whether it’s a visualization or a thought, some analysis. And so we’re just holding this glass. And we can hold that glass with various intensities of, you know, of strength, or we can actually become unaware of it completely and let it drop. Likewise, mindfulness is just simply holding the glass. Awareness tells us, you know, how we’re holding the glass, whether it’s being held too tightly or whether it’s being held too loosely or possibly not at all.
So in this way we can begin to understand that we’re working with two factors. Mindfulness, which is holding the object, and awareness is which is telling us how we’re holding the object or if in fact we’re holding the object at all. So when we meditate, for example with mindfulness of breathing, we’re just meditating for about five minutes. And in that period of time, it’s important that there be some real purposefulness in your meditation. If there’s some real intensity and purposefulness, it’s going to go very well.
You’re going to train your mind very quickly. And what I mean by purposefulness is, using another analogy, perhaps not a very good Buddhist analogy, but anyway, it’s meaningful. I have a cat watching where a mouse is coming out of a hole. You know, it’s, It’s completely one pointedly watching its whole body, its whole intention, its whole being is concentrated where that mouse is going to come out of that hole. Likewise, we’re simply watching our breath, holding it with mindfulness, but there has to be this factor of awareness.
We’re sitting there breathing, we’re noting perhaps, in, out, one, in, out, two. Then maybe a mental image arises, for example, a visual image. You can just note it instantly. Like that cat, which is standing at the hole of the mouse, instantly note. You can use any type of notation you want.
Imaging, imagining, seeing if you like, internally seeing with the mind’s eye. So you’re going in, out. And at the very first moment that some visual image appears, seen, and go back to the mind, go back to the breath. Thought arises, in, out, one, in, out, two. You’re that cat watching that hole.
You’re the awareness watching the breath, which is being held by mindfulness. The moment that thought arises, thinking will come back to the breath. Hearing the fan on the motor, the heater. Hearing, if your mind were to wander to that, hearing come back to the breath. So it’s like this cat.
This is completely absorbed and watching at that point where this mouse is going to come out of that hole with this entire being. It’s very purposeful, a great deal of purpose involved. Likewise, during a short period of five minutes, we can maintain such an intensity of awareness, of purposefulness in our meditation. And it’s going to have a really far reaching effect on your meditation rather than having perhaps even longer periods, but more lackadaisical, more kind of less attention, less alertness. In some ways, I use the word awareness.
This term can also be translated just as easily with the term alertness, watchfulness, being awake in that sense. So for five minutes, we can watch the breath, hold it with our mindfulness as best we can, but always with this purposefulness, you know, very intense alertness watching, whatever comes up. You know, if our mind wanders off the breath every five seconds, it doesn’t matter particularly. If we’re if we’re training ourselves in awareness, if we know when our mind has wandered off, and we keep simply bringing it back in again and again, just like the cat watching that the mouse hole. So let’s try that for five minutes.
To the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha, I go for refuge until I am enlightened. Through the merit I practice by practicing giving and the 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 the other perfections, may attain Buddhahood for the sake of all beings. Through the Buddha, the Dharma, the Sangha, I go for refuge until I am enlightened.
And the merit I create by practicing giving and the other perfections, may I attain Buddhahood for the sake of only This is a little book written by a Vietnamese Buddhist master. He’s talking about taking refuge in the Buddha, for example. The root word bud, can you hear from the word Buddha? The root word bud means to wake up, to know, to understand. And he or she who wakes up and understands is called a Buddha.
It is simple it is as simple as that. The capacity to wake up, to understand, and to love is called Buddha nature. When Buddhists say, I take refuge in the Buddha, they are expressing trust in their own capacity of understanding, of becoming awake. The Chinese and the Vietnamese say, I go back and rely on the Buddha in me. Adding in me makes it very clear that you yourself are the Buddha.
So we go for refuge to the Buddha, our own wisdom, our own clarity of mind, even in its present germinal form, because that’s where we’re going to really solve our all our problems. I give refuge to the Dharma, the means by which we’re able to develop what is now merely a seed, where it’s going to grow and develop and actualize to its fullest extent. And we go for refuge to the Sangha, which is the social context in which growth takes place. Growth doesn’t take place in isolation, in a vacuum. It requires cause and it requires a special type of new environment.
We have to have both both the causes and the various conditions. So I’ve we’ve been talking about a very short text by the fourteenth century yogi scholar, Tsongkhapa. His image is just in front of those two frame photos on top of the altar. He is the founder of one of the four main sects of Tibetan Buddhism, the Gelug sect, which means simply means something like the virtuous tradition. This is a very short text, but it contains the essential entirety of the path.
So we’ve been talking about the three principal aspects of the path: developing the determination to be free, opening to others and seeing deeply into the nature of reality. And just as a way of review, in order to develop the determination to be free, we described several meditations and attitudes which need to be developed. For example, first we have to appreciate our potential without appreciating the fact that we have the seed of Buddha within us, or the seed of Christ, or whatever we want to call it, Buddha nature, we’re never going to really become sincere about developing ourselves. It will be either a matter of curiosity or an intellectual pastime or it will be simply very short lived over simply a period where we’re perhaps very depressed and we’re willing to try anything. And then when the sun shines again, we forget about the moments of difficulty that we just had, and we turn our back on our practice because we take this as being the best that we’re going to ever experience, even no matter how mundane and mediocre such a state might be.
At least it’s not gross suffering. So we have to begin to appreciate our potential and appreciate the fact that we have all the conditions and circumstances necessary, both outer and inner. You know, that we pointed out we have to go through this very thoroughly, understanding how special we are, in fact. It’s not a matter of pride because pride represents an inflation. It represents some adding on something which in fact is not there.
But this is simply looking at our actual situation realistically and appraising it realistically in a very balanced point of view. And seeing that we’re very fortunate in the world to have all the circumstances, material, physical, health, all the necessary endowments and leisure to practice the Dharma, to practice a means of growth. It’s a very rare circumstance, but it’s not going to last forever. It’s definitely going to die, even though we would rather not think about it, even though we keep putting it off and thinking it’s going to be in some distant future. We don’t have to worry about it now.
This is in fact not realistic. It’s simply a defense mechanism that the time of death is uncertain. And in fact, at the time of our death, what is going to be of any benefit to us? You know, all the various possessions that we’ve worked our lives to accumulate, whether they’re videos or cars or homes, the status that we’ve worked so hard to gain that has cost us so much, and even the people who sincerely love us and that we love, and even this own body, our own body which we take such good care, which we take such pride in. At the time of our death, none of these things can be of real benefit to us.
Only the degree we have cultivated, we have developed our mind. Only the skillful actions which we have implanted on our mind stream will be of any benefit to us in the future. But what kind of actions of body, speech and mind have we actually created during this life? What are overwhelming tendencies of our mind? Are they in a positive direction or a negative direction or simply indifferent qualities?
You know, is our life predominated by positive, skillful actions such as faith and love and compassion, wisdom, or the predominantly emotions of desire, attachment, anger, spite, jealousy, miserliness, pride? So we can check up for ourselves. And looking at this, we can come to some understanding of what the future is going to hold for us. So it’s definite that we’re going to die in the moment of our death is uncertain, and that the only thing which can benefit us is the type of life we are leading now, every day of our life. This is the only thing which can benefit us.
And we looked at the nature of the possibilities of suffering, of dissatisfactory states, of any state which is bounded by ego, from the very most intense physical pain of the hell realms where beings are completely bound up and unremitting pain to the absorptions of the celestial gods and all the various possibilities in between, that they all are marked with dissatisfactory dissatisfaction. That there’s no there’s nothing within cyclic existence that is within the realm of ego, within the actions, the obscuring actions of ego, the boundaries of ego, there’s nothing worth becoming or having within this entire realm because they’re all marked with dissatisfactoriness through the various three types of suffering. The suffering of pain, mental and physical, the suffering of change, the very fact that we can never hang on to anything, that in fact there’s a perpetual having to keep running after new happiness, this new experience, because the old are seen as pleasurable only relative to the past sufferings. And once we forget about what the past sufferings were like, we lose our reference point and we lose the feeling of pleasure we’re now experiencing. So again, have to work to find new, more extreme types of pleasure.
So it’s like a built in catch-22 in our lives that we can never hold on to happiness. We’re always like a a rat running in circles. You know, you develop a relationship and at first it’s very beautiful. And then after a while you forget the beauty and it becomes very you develop neutral feelings. It becomes somewhat boring and unexciting.
And then it becomes a source of suffering, so you decide to move on. And in view of your suffering that you can remember, a new relation seems to be very pleasurable. But as you forget these past sufferings, then this pleasurable relationship becomes boring. And again, it turns into displeasure, unhappiness, and you move on. And we go through our lives, in our jobs, in relationships, and within ourselves, how we view ourselves.
Always having to watch over ourselves and feelings of guilt and constantly never finding any peace within ourselves. And the very quality of having an ego, the pervasive compositional suffering of us compared to carrying a bundle of thorns on our back, there was always this watcher watching over everything that we do, always having to guard our territories, always having to see others as threats, always having to reestablish our self image, establish our credentials again and again, and it becomes very tiring and weary. There’s no time just to be authentic, no time just to be ourselves and let go and relax and find some peace. So within any state bounded by ego, there’s no real peace. So there develops a yearning, a longing to go to transcend, to go beyond the bounds of ego.
And this is the the determination to be free, to emerge out of any egoistic state. But we’re not alone. You know, as I pointed out, you know, we have two overriding aspects to ourselves, the self or the personality, and that is our experiential self, our private self, and our social self, the self which stands in relationship to others. And without taking into consideration the social self, the self which stands in relationship with others, any type of growth would be an imbalance. It would be probably more than not simply a perpetuation of our own egotistical desires and therefore can never really take you to where you want to go, really to a source of peace.
It’s only by taking into consideration our relationships with others that in fact others are exactly like ourselves. They want happiness and they don’t want to suffer. And that I’m one person and others are many. It’s only the isolating boundaries of ego which make us feel separate from others. It’s not that there isn’t an I and that there isn’t others, but these are not ultimately existent.
They’re not as solid and concrete as we feel them to exist. You know, we pointed this out through the reference to Śāntideva’s Engaging in the Bodhisattva’s Deeds, where he pointed out the fact that the hand removes the thorn from the foot, even though the hand is not suffering, because they’re part of the same whole, part of the same body. And likewise, you know, all living beings, all humanity is part of something greater than each individual. And it’s only the ego boundaries which by which we conceive of our separateness. And in this separateness, we only experience isolation and loneliness and more suffering.
So if we’re ever going to really find peace, if we’re ever really going to grow, the thrust of our practice, the thrust of the causes for our growth are found in others and taking responsibility for others’ happiness. This is kind of, I think, kind of a revolutionary thought in accordance with, you know, a cultural predominant thinking. There’s the word bodhicitta, which literally means mind of enlightenment, mind of enlightenment or sometimes we translate it as awakening heart, mind of enlightenment, the aspiration to achieve enlightenment. But there are two types of these aspirations to achieve enlightenment, two types of bodhicitta. bodhicitta is a Sanskrit word.
There’s ultimate bodhicitta and relative bodhicitta. They both represent a revolution the transformation of consciousness, but they’re working on two different levels, one on the conventional level and the other on the ultimate level. The ultimate level we speak of or we’re going to talk about when we discuss seeing deeply into the nature of reality. But ultimately, the revolution in consciousness is that we don’t have a concrete solid identity, a fixed being which we grasp to as I, as our ego, of who I am. Seen through this is a revolution, complete transformation of our way of relating to ourselves and others, of our entire being.
This is on the ultimate level, seeing that ultimately such a type of self does not exist, though we in fact, to the depth of our being, believe it does. But conventionally, working within the relative world as we conceive it to exist, There is an ego, there is an I, there is a self. We are trying to transform this ego, this I, this self through skillful means, not seeing that it doesn’t ultimately exist, but transforming it by developing it. If we’re going to be stuck with an ego, let’s have the best possible ego we can. Let’s be the most skillful that we can.
So this represents a revolution on the conventional level. Actually, two work together. It’s said that in order to attain enlightenment, it’s like the two wings of a bird. A bird needs the wing of method and wisdom in order to fly. The method is conventional bodhicitta, this aspiration to benefit others, to develop one’s own skills and ability so that you can be of greatest benefit to others.
And the other wing is the wisdom, seeing the ultimate nature of reality, ultimate nature of the self, the I, the person. And they complement one another. As we develop a sense of going beyond conventionally of the ego, taking more and more responsibility for others, going away from our self-cherishing, our self centeredness, our exaggerated self concern, our selfishness, This diminishes the influence, the power of ego on the conventional level. This mere diminishing of the power of ego allows for a greater degree of wisdom to arise. And seeing the transparency of the ego on the conventional level allows us to develop the wisdom that in fact it ultimately doesn’t exist at all.
By ultimately seeing it doesn’t exist at all through the wing of wisdom, the ego lessens in its power and in its strength. It becomes more attenuated, transparent, and this allows for a greater growth of love and compassion, for a diminishing of self-cherishing of selfishness. So these two are working together, these two bodhicittas, these two ways of revolutionarily transforming the mind. One is conventionally diminishing the influence of self-cherishing and selfishness, which removes obstructions to seeing the ultimate nature of the ego. By seeing the ultimate nature of the ego, this diminishes its power.
Our ego centered ideas, ego centered actions promotes actions of cherishing others, of loving others. By loving and cherishing others, this diminishes the influence of the ego, enabling more and greater wisdom to rise. So these two are sort of reinforcing one another conventional bodhicitta, bodhicitta, and ultimate bodhicitta. These are the two wings. So in order to actualize our full potential, these two wings of this bird, is going to fly as enlightenment, are absolutely necessary.
So in some way, we have to make this effort to open up to the needs of others. So I was in opening to others, I spoke about the two main systems of meditation which we’re going to discuss, by which will ultimately lead to awakening mind or this conventional bodhicitta. And one was the sevenfold cause and effect instruction, and the other was exchange of self for others, these two lineages, two systems of meditation. But as a foundation for those, I’d like to talk about what are called the four immeasurables. The four immeasurables are common to both, you know, the Theravadan tradition and the various, great vehicle traditions, the Mahāyāna traditions, you know, whether it’s Tibetan or Japanese, Korean.
They all have this in common, this this practice of the Four Immeasurables. And we’ve been practicing it probably unknowingly all along every Friday night. Sometimes the Four Immeasurables are termed the Four Sublime Abodes, the four sublime abodes of Brahma Vihara. Or sometimes, the four immeasurable great catalysts for growth. So the four immeasurables immeasurable love, immeasurable compassion, immeasurable sympathetic joy, and immeasurable equanimity.
It’s said that the distinction between these two from the point of view of, for example, Theravadan Buddhism, that is the type of Buddhism which is practiced predominantly in Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, and the great vehicle Buddhism, which is mainly practiced in the northern countries of Nepal, Tibet, China, Japan, Mongolia, Korea. One system of the four immeasurables and the other system of four immeasurables is that within the Great Vehicle, not only do they practice as they would in the Theravadan countries, but they also emphasize that all these four immeasurables, this immeasurable, for example, love, compassion, are directed towards all sentient beings, not just a great number of sentient beings, but the feeling that all sentient beings, without the exclusion of one single sentient being, without saying, I wish all sentient beings except my old girlfriend and the Russians to be happy, something like that. We work with as many vast categories of sentient beings, beginning with one sentient being and working with categories of sentient beings, categories of countries and nationalities, categories of people we like, people we have no feeling for whatsoever, and people we don’t like at all. So we make it a point to work with as many categories until we feel as though there’s not one type of sentient being, even hell beings, hungry ghosts, you know, animals.
We’re directing these immeasurable thoughts, feelings towards all sentient beings. That’s said to be one difference between the types of practice. I don’t know. Don’t think it’s perhaps not a very It’s important from the sense that we shouldn’t exclude anyone from these wishes that we’re trying to generate. That’s for sure.
The feeling of lots of sentient beings or innumerable sentient beings and all sentient beings, probably not so important. But there is the quality of responsibility within generating the four immeasurables within the great vehicle tradition. Not only do we think, you know, may all sentient beings be happy, which is immeasurable love. We go on to say, I will make them happy. You know, we’re working with the words at the moment, okay?
But we have to begin somewhere, so we work with words. But there is the intention, at least the root beginning of some idea, not only that may they be happy, you know, we can walk away, oh, it’d be nice if you’re happy and then walk away, but it was, I’m gonna make you happy. We’re just carrying it quite a bit further, just a willingness to take responsibility to enact these feelings, these thoughts, these wishes out to actualize them in reality. So we’re going to look at the four immeasurables briefly, but it’s importantly to see how they’re interrelated. Why these four immeasurables exist as a unit?
How they complement one another? How they counter possible negative fixations which may set in. That is how ego the ego is quite clever, it’s very intelligent How it can incorporate our best intentions into something which will just make it bigger and better. The ego is, you know, this is called spiritual materialism, and how the four immeasurables guard against spiritual materialism. So, the four immeasurables.
Now, generally, on this sheet, there’s the four immeasurables. So, is May all sentient beings have happiness and the cause of happiness. This is the usual terse in a very short and abbreviated form of the four immeasurables. But as I said, there’s also the quality of the willingness of taking responsibility. So this is emphasized in most of the practices, for example, in this practice of Chenrezig,, who is the personification of compassion.
You know, it’s a practice involved in making use of it, identifying with compassion itself. And in this, there is a practice of the four immeasurables. Over here, says limitless thoughts, immeasurable, limitless. But it goes on not just to list them as it does on this other sheet, but as you will see, May I do this? For example, How wonderful it would be if all sentient beings attain equanimity, free from attachment and hatred, holding some beings close and others distant.
May they attain equanimity. I myself will make them attain equanimity. Please, Guru, Buddha, bless me to be able to do this. And it goes on like this. How wonderful it would be if all sentient beings attain the true cause of happiness and true happiness.
I myself will make them attain it. So it’s sort of carrying the idea very much further than simply stating, may you be happy. You know, it’s very much like a mother. I’m sure, know, mothers, they want their children to be happy. And, but the mark of a mother is that she’s willing to bring that about bring that about in reality.
So there’s something much more than simply a a simple wish. So these are also termed the four catalysts or the four immeasurably great catalysts of growth. And we’ve talked I’ve talked about growth, especially in terms of the first first path, developing this determination to be free. So, you know, as I said, is takes place if necessary to have a cause, and does not take place in isolation. It has some kind of condition or context, circumstance.
So the initial catalyst, as we mentioned just before, then we have to actually confront our difficulties and recognize them. Recognition of the general unmanageability of our lives, for example, recognition of the problems which we keep reoccurring in our lives. Without this, without confronting and some recognition of problems as problems, then there’s going to be no motivation. There’s going to be no catalyst to develop ourselves. There’ll be no necessity.
And in many ways, just as they say what is it? Invention need? What is the need is the invention of this? What is the need is the father of invention? Necessity is the mother of invention.
Okay. Chauvinism. Necessity is the mother of invention. Likewise, you know, if we sincerely see it as a necessity to grow, then that recognition is the mother of growth, I think. But without seeing that recognition, without having that recognition, feeling it very deeply, then there would be no growth.
We might be able to make some cosmetic changes, know, add a few, get rid of a few wrinkles here and there and add on a little makeup. But there will be no basic change because there’s no need for change. Change only takes place when there’s a real need. This is the aspect, the important aspect of responsibility. When there is need for change, change will occur.
So if we take away such responsibility where there which I’m going to expand upon a little bit We put ourselves in position whereby there’s a great need, demand made upon us, then we’re going to change. We’re certainly going to be able to draw upon greater resources, you know, within ourselves. Greater resources of wisdom, love, compassion, energy. We can sort of go beyond our egoistic limits when more and more demands upon it are made upon us within a healthy context. But first, the initial catalyst is recognition confronting and recognizing our problems as problems and accepting.
And next, it follows on from that, and this is simply the Four Noble Truths. It follows on from that and accepting of the causes of these difficulties as being within yourself and not outside of yourself. If you see the causes of your difficulties, your problems outside of yourself, you’re going to seek, search for the solutions outside of yourself. And therefore there will be no growth. There’s only going to be frustration and a continuation of your difficulties.
Because, you know, we have you know, for material problems, we can deal with them materially. That’s no problem. If you’re hungry, the best thing to do is eat, you know. And that’s a straightforward way to solve your problems. But for most of our difficulties, at least mentally, our attitudinal problems, our view of unskillful way of relating with ourselves and others.
So no matter what changes we may make on the outside, if the attitude is basically mistaken, misconceptions, if it’s unskillful, we’re not going to change anything except the type of suffering. If suffering is going to remain, the difficulty is always going to be there because the basic cause has not been worked with, and that is the mind itself. So this involves an exploration, you know, with our own reasoning, within our own experience and with intuition. You know, be willing to explore what are the possibilities, the means to solve our problems. And this leads to you know, this exploration relates to a discovery, a more skillful, more productive, more satisfying, meaningful, authentic ways of relating.
So I think especially one of the hallmarks of Buddhism that I appreciated most was necessity, almost the demand that’s placed upon you to explore. Know, dogma is antithetical, antithetical to Buddhism. There would be no value. There would be nothing to be gained out of simply accepting something. We might accept something provisionally because we don’t have the capacity at that moment to analyze it properly.
We don’t have perhaps enough time. So we can make a provisional acceptance of some statement that the Buddha made or something our teacher said, some doctrine. But ultimately it’s going to be necessary for us to explore it and discover that same exact truth. If it in fact it is truth, we have to discover it for ourselves. You know, the Buddha said when he was passing into when he was dying, he said, Do not accept my doctrine out of respect for myself, but test it and assay it as if it were gold, know, scratching it, putting some kind of chemicals on it.
Only then, once you found it useful and true, accept it. So there’s no problem with Buddhism about, you you hear something, people don’t perhaps you don’t like it, perhaps it’s not appealing to you, perhaps it’s not of any value to you at that particular time. You can set it on your shelf. You don’t you know, Just taking what is of value to you, what is meaningful, and what works benefits you. Because we’re not trying to please anyone in particular.
We’re just taking, for example, wisdom and love, compassion and benefiting others as a foundation for relating with the world and experimenting from that basis and trying to see whether that brings us the happiness that we’ve always been looking for or not. So it’s very experimental and exploratory. And I think it’s very much through only through exploring are we ever going to discover anything. And the willingness, we have to have a willingness to explore and experiment. I think some of you might have been here the other night when the Jesuit priest, Father Ama, I think,, who had he was a Catholic priest and he went to he received this permission to go to Japan to study Zen Buddhism.
And he completely immersed himself in the practice of Zen Buddhism. And at that talk that he gave, there were many Catholic nuns, Catholic priests, and he was saying to them, you know, you have to experiment. You know, if your if your faith, if your relationship with God and Christ is such that if it’s real, you have nothing to fear. It’s only if you have doubts, if only you’re afraid, that such an experiment could bring could not any benefit. But if you have real conviction and have a real relationship with God or Christ, then this exploration into other possibilities, other avenues of approaching the same problem, approaching the same concepts through other avenues can only enrich your experience.
And there’s really nothing to be afraid of if in fact your faith is real. If it’s not, then it’s better to find out than to just kid yourself or not confront. So it requires a I think some real inner strength, a high degree of self determination because there’s always some resistance to growth. Old habits are hard to break. Overcoming stagnation, inertia of a way of being which is continually being reinforced by memory and by our situation, our environment, other people.
And the fear of change, fear of an open fluid state, and the longing for security of our cocoon, a closed minded ignorance which perpetually, you know, recreates our basic patterns of thought and behavior. All the time, the same basic patterns. We find our security in these, so there’s a resistance against change. We have a vast reservoir of possible potentials, of qualities about us, and we divide off, we create a boundary very artificially. That part which we begin to identify with, we call this ego, And we begin to fixate upon this small section of all this vast reservoir of potentials of who we are.
And we cling to this as this is I, this is me. So any change, any sort of going outside of this boundary is fear because this feeling of I’m a concrete, solid self. And to go outside of this boundary, we begin to lose this feeling of your concreteness and solidity. And so there’s a resistance, there’s a fear against going out to other possibilities, identifying with other qualities which, in fact, are there. So there’s a resistance to change.
There’s also resistance to going beyond ourselves, even on a conventional level. You know, this is more the ultimate level, when we begin to break down the boundary fixation of ego. But even on a conventional level of trying to escape from the cocoon of our ego. You know what the attraction to our cocoon, our selfishness, and we’re afraid of selflessness. So in order to overcome this hesitation, in order to overcome the unwillingness to give up our privacy, for example, and commit ourselves to the welfare of others.
Some real leap is needed.