Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 96-minute session, Ven Jampa Gendun uses a striking analogy — a television set whose images shift when you adjust its internal parts, yet whose true source is a distant studio — to argue that the brain is a cooperative cause of mind rather than its origin, grounding the case for past lives. The bulk of the session develops the sevenfold cause and effect instruction within the second principal aspect of the path, focusing on its first precept: recognizing all sentient beings as your mother. He treats this as emotional excavation rather than doctrine, drawing on Abraham Maslow on self-actualization, a patient’s letter to R.D. Laing on unconditional love, and a haiku by Issa to show that recovering the primordial bond with one’s mother — unconditioned, unearned — is both psychologically liberating and the seed of bodhisattva compassion. The session closes with a guided loving-kindness meditation.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 1988 07 22 3 P A P.mp3
UUID: 48b5257a-d46a-4d8e-9cc3-301a4aae58b9
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Three Principle Aspects of the Path 1987-1988 (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1988-07-22
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 96.0 minutes
Words: ~9,679
That one does not meditate in order to go deeply into oneself and withdraw from the world. There should be no feeling of striving to reach some exalted or higher state. Since this is simply produced as something conditioned and artificial, that will act as an obstruction to the free flow of the mind. When performing the meditation practice, one should develop the feeling of opening oneself out completely to the whole universe with absolute simplicity and nakedness of the mind. Meditation is not to develop trance states, rather it is to sharpen perceptions, to see things as they are.
Meditation at this level is relating with the conflicts of our life, our situations, like using a stone to sharpen a knife, this situation being the stone. So the simple process of meditation, we can gain some control and gain some choice in our lives. At the present, we have very little choices in how we react to situations because we have very little perspective. We have little space between ourselves and our reactions. You know, the stimulus and the reactions are almost simultaneous simply by developing some awareness, some mindfulness.
Awareness in the sense that we know what states of mind what states of mind are rising and mindfulness determines what states are skillful and what should be avoided if we’re going to realize the happiness that we’re all looking for. So it becomes it’s a very simple process of creating some space between the stimulus and the reaction so that we we know we can exercise some choice as to whether to react and how to react. Most of us at present have little choice. It’s more of a our button is pushed and we have a reflex action. So we’re going to meditate mindfulness and breathing for five minutes.
And then at the end of five minutes, we’re going to try to simply be intensively aware without with choice of awareness, not to any particular object, we’re not concentrating on the breath, but whatever the mind naturally becomes involved in, then we want to know that. If a thought, if it’s a thinking process, simply note thinking. If it goes to a sound, note hearing. If it goes to a bodily sensation, feeling. Simply from moment to moment be aware of what the mind is attending to.
Know what your mind is involved in. Draw in choiceless awareness. Be aware from moment to moment what your mind is involved in, whether it’s hearing, thinking, feeling. When you reach the third line, you make the a substitute at the asterisk. To the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha, I go for refuge until I am enlightened through the merit I create.
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. May I attain Buddhahood for the sake of all beings? To the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha, I go for refuge until I’m enlightened through the merit I create. May I attain Buddhahood for the sake of all beings.
So we go for refuge to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha, and to our own wisdom, to our own innate sanity, potential, our basic intelligence in order to solve the difficulties or problems, to realize the potential which is in all of us. We make use of the Dharma or the teachings. Not necessarily the teachings, that is the way that leads us to the way things actually are, the truth, the various methods, the realizations. And this within the context of a spiritual community and as a support, as an inspiration, example. We all have, all of us have an impulse toward actualizing more of our potentialities, towards self actualization or full humanness or human fulfillment. This is a push toward the establishment of the fully evolved and authentic self and increased stress on the role of integration or unity wholeness, Resolving a dichotomy in the higher, more inclusive unity amounts to healing the split in the person and making him more unified.
This is also an impulse to be the best, the very best you are capable of becoming. If you deliberately plan to be less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you’ll be deeply unhappy for the rest of your life. It’s a quote by Abraham Maslow. I think he died in the early seventies. He lived in the United States.
He’s a psychologist. So he was talking about the process of self actualization is the same as bringing meaning to our lives. They’re very intimately related. The meaning is something beyond egoistic meanings that we usually involve ourselves with. So once you have developed an accurate and healthy ego, what then?
Once you have met your egoistic goals, once you have the car and the house and some self esteem, once you have accumulated material goods and professional recognition, once all of that work then? When history runs out of meaning for the soul, when material pursuits in the outer world go flat in their appeal, when it dawns on you for the certain that death only awaits you, what then? Meaning is not found in outward actions or possessions, but in in a radiant current of our of your own being, and in the release and relationship of these currents to the world to friends, to humanity at large, and to infinity itself. So whatever we want to call the process that we’re involved in, whether we want to call it a spiritual practice or self actualization or simply to answer the impulse toward an authentic way of being, to lead a meaningful life and answer the question, What is the meaning of life? Then we have to make some effort over and above our egotistical and egoistic you know, concerned with our material welfare.
These can bring us comfort, but they’re never going to bring us inner peace. They have their limits and we have to become aware of their capabilities or we’re going to lead a very hollow, shallow life and always meet with frustrations and disappointment. So it doesn’t take so much. It’s not as if the Buddhas or this impulse within us are demanding that we run off to the Himalayan mountains. It’s just that we make some consistent effort that we at least acknowledge that we have an impulse to becoming a healthy, happy, sane, loving human being.
That really material wealth and a few attached relationships aren’t going to bring us to fulfillment, aren’t going to help us actualize everything that we can be. That we simply acknowledge that and make some effort in some small way consistent with this impulse, and then we’re going to find some peace no matter then we find some meaning in our lives whether we actualize that potential or not, it doesn’t make much difference. It’s only the matter if we try in some small way in the course of our daily life. So we’re talking about the three principal aspects of the path: developing a determination to be free, opening to others, and seeing deeply into the nature of reality. And within the second of these three paths, opening up to others, developing the aspiration develop oneself in order to be of greater and greater benefit to others so that one can develop the skillfulness, the abilities in order to be more and more help to others.
There are two systems, two methods, techniques to help us actually develop this altruism, this enlightening mind, awakening heart. It’s simply, you know, as I’ve said before, it’s one thing to wish others to be happy and to wish that you were able, but it’s quite another thing to actually to take the responsibility upon oneself to bring us out about in actuality, to put the foundations beneath the castles that we usually build in the air, to realize our greatest journeys in reality, to express them in some concrete way. This is quite a jump from merely a wish to actually taking responsibility in the real world. And it doesn’t come about by accident or simply by wish, but it takes a at first we must be motivated toward that direction and have a sincere wish, but then we actually have to cultivate the attitudes necessary, the motivation, the intention, until there’s such a time when it becomes an integrated part of our very being that we respond spontaneously and skillfully to the needs of others. And so these are two methods to help us develop, to integrate this wish, to cultivate it, so it becomes a very spontaneous part of us.
There is the sevenfold cause and effect instruction based on equanimity, which as our foundation we develop equanimity. That is essentially, we want to begin to see the arbitrary and changing labels which we usually designate other beings by friend, enemy, and stranger. The essential insight here is that we want to see that these labels of friend, stranger, and enemy are quite arbitrary. They’re not based on sound rational reason and again they’re constantly changing. A friend can become an enemy, an enemy of friend.
So at least we don’t have the we don’t hold as tight to these labels. That we become a little fluid, a little more open allowing these labels to float. This enemy is not always going to be your enemy, so don’t hold on to that label. By holding on to that particular label, you respond in that manner. You know, we’re very much creating our reality from moment to moment.
I don’t think any of us realize that to the extent that we are. A part of this momentary recreation of reality is in the labeling process, designating, for example, in terms of relationships, this person is friend, this person stranger, this person is enemy. Then through this process of labeling, which goes on not consciously but unconsciously, we’re going to respond in the manner that we label. It’s going to become a self fulfilling prophecy. If we label this person for whatever reason, it might be simply that you remind us of somebody we didn’t like when we were little, we don’t like the way they part their hair, It may be an absurd preposterous reason, but still you make this label through some association, through some karmic affinity or you maybe feel even justified, but for whatever the reason, by labeling this person enemy, you’re going to relate with that person as an enemy and you’re going to develop the animosity, anger, the hatred of an enemy type relationship.
And this only reinforces your assumption, oh he really is an enemy and likewise with a friend, likewise with a stranger. So in this way, the reality begins to the way we relate with reality is confirmed by our experience and this experience reinforces our attitude and the attitudes again will reinforce the way we relate and this becomes a vicious circle which we can’t get out of. One way we can begin to get out of this circle is simply not to hold too tightly to our labels, in this case a friend, enemy, and stranger, that we can understand that even though I feel that maybe I project an enemy upon this person, that in fact this is quite arbitrary. If you’re willing to go into the reasoning why you feel this way, you may see it has no rational basis. You may see that okay, is my enemy now, but next week he could be my friend, and this happens every day in our lives.
Perhaps not every day, but we’ve all experienced this fact. Someone who was an enemy in our childhood can become a very good friend and likewise the reverse of that can happen. Someone who is a, as we all know, someone who is a good friend of ours can become quite a bitter enemy and I think many couples find that out. So we don’t have such a degree of attachment to our friends and such a degree of aversion to our enemies and such a degree of feeling of indifference, unrelatedness, uncaring toward strangers that we realize that these labels are arbitrary and subject to change very quickly. So we allow the openness begin to relate with people more spontaneously within a situation devoid of a particular label.
Based upon this leveling off, this building of a foundation, we developed the sevenfold cause and effect instruction. The first was recognizing all sentient beings as your mother and repaying their generating affectionate love, great compassion, exceptional resolve. And then the seventh of these, which is the seventh effect of six causes, is the actual awakening the heart, opening our hearts to others, developing the altruistic intention to achieve healthy, skillful states of mind, loving states of mind so that you can be of maximum benefit to others in helping them to go beyond their suffering. We were talking last week about recognition of all two weeks ago, about recognition of all sentient beings. And as I said, I think, you know, this particular system of meditation, sevenfold cause and effect precept, is worth making use of.
As you will see, it has some very profound aspects to it. But probably the latter of the two systems, that is the exchange of self with others, is more accessible to Westerners since this particular sevenfold cause and effect precept requires that we have a strong conviction in the existence of past lives in order for it to work to its maximum benefit and most of us don’t have that. So therefore it will not have the same force as perhaps the exchange of self with others. But still I think as you will see as we go through it, it’s worth making use of from the standpoint it’s going to develop a lot of our potentials. It’s going to act as a source of growth.
And in dealing with this first precept, the first of the seven cause of the precept, we’re recognizing all sentient beings as our mothers. This obviously, you know, we have to have come to some conviction in past lives because we’re trying to develop the absolute conviction that every sentient being has literally been our mother just like the mother of this life. And then no matter where we may go, we were born there in some past life. No matter what situation we may meet, we experience this in the past life. And no matter what individual we may meet, this person has been our mother, our father, our brother, our lover, all those in some particular past lives.
We talked about the proof of the existence of past life from the point of view of reasoning. We can talk about past lives, at least some of the possible proofs and recall either through, for example, hypnotic regression, spontaneous recall, through developing clairvoyances, through having others tell us of our particular past lives. There have been many individuals, most important in the West has been Edgar Cayce for example, who recalled innumerable past lives of not only himself but other people. And there are other documented cases of people recalling their past lives. So, we can make use of these.
It might help in some way to develop the conviction in past lives. We went through the various types of reasoning involved. It all comes down to within the area of logic, is the nature of the mind and the nature of the law of cause and effect. Whether the mind, which can arise from the brain, from the nervous system, Whether at the moment of conception, the first moment of consciousness, where did that come from? There’s probably maybe three or four possibilities.
It could come from, know, be generated from the nervous system or essentially organic molecules or atoms or matter, you know, basically. Or it came from our parents, our mind came from our parents, or it’s coming from somewhere else. So we have to this is what we’re investigating when it comes to the point of past and future lives. Where does the mind come from? Where did the first atom come from?
I think that’s a good question, which you asked the most. I go out to Flinders University, Adelaide University, and I say, Well, maybe you don’t believe in rebirth. Maybe you’re a typical materialist, but where did the first atom come from? You know, if you say the mind came from the body, okay, mind came from matter, and they won’t be able to offer you a reason. You know, we’ve actually become so mechanized in our, you know, what we call the paradigm, in our scientific paradigm of today that we’ve lost the ability to we’ve actually taken the divinity out of humanity.
We see life as merely an accident of unconscious matter which is and this is simply one way of looking at the universe. It’s rather a biased way. We have unholy prejudice towards science through the scientific method born out of Descartes and Newton. But even it’s interesting that mechanistic science in which so many people take such great faith in, founded within the mechanism of the discoveries of Newton and Descartes, they both believed in God. They never for once thought that life was an accident, that somehow it evolved out of some kind of primordial soup or the mind evolved from atoms.
But somehow that was kind of embarrassing to most scientists, so they left that part out. They just took the mechanistic process of how we can very well establish, predict how events in the universe are going to occur and they thought this was because they had a high degree of predictability and they thought, well this must be truth. But essentially it’s quite biased that we’ve pretty much accepted it. People will say they don’t believe in past or future lives but they’ve never really questioned it. They never really thought about it.
There’s no question about this body somehow. When I was young and people talked about future lives, I thought, well, somehow this body is going to go somewhere else. It’s going to become rejuvenated after it dies and go somewhere else. Simply rejecting this kind of childhood notions doesn’t mean that we should reject rebirth altogether. We have to look at it with some reasoning, with something of an open mind.
So we can at least begin to question. I read something interesting just this week. You know, I was talking two weeks ago when I was discussing the proofs of beginningless mind, which is the foundation for understanding that all sentient beings have been your mother. I talked about two types of causes, substantial cause and cooperative cause. I used the example as using a pot, a clay pot, a ceramic pot.
And that the substantial cause of the pot is the clay. And the cooperative cause of the pot is the potter, his wheels, various tools. And what I read this week was quite interesting. It said that one of the main proofs why the mind arises from the brain is that by if we poke around in the brain and we get various mental responses, we can anesthetize the brain. If we cut off a piece of the brain, we lose certain functions, mental functions, mental capacities, you know.
People no longer can think in certain areas. And he said in this article, he was saying that this is very much like if, I’m going to paraphrase, make it into a little more simplified a little. If someone had a, for example, a television set and if there’s something going wrong with the television set, if you remove a part, maybe the screen becomes narrow, if you twist the dial it starts to flutter. If you turn the dial, the entire channel switches over. And so by manipulating all the parts inside the television set, you manipulate what’s on the screen.
And one could get the feeling that all these pictures, these people that one sees on the screen are being somehow generated from inside the television set. Know, somehow the source of all these people moving around the screen is the source of it all is coming out of this television set because why? Because if I take this piece out, then the people become smaller. If I take this piece out, they go away altogether, right? So obviously they must be coming from inside this television set.
But we all know this is not the case, isn’t it? It’s coming from a television studio hundreds of miles away perhaps. And this is just a basis of transmission, this particular television set. So this is the idea of substantial cause and cooperative cause. The television set represents a cooperative cause in the transmission of what’s going on in the studio.
It’s not the source of these images, merely the cooperative cause, the basis for transmitting them. And likewise, there’s no question about that the brain and mind are not there’s an intimate relationship, but it’s the type of relationship which likewise is cooperative cause. When you get sick, for example, or if you cut away parts of the brain, you impair the mental capacity just like taking a transistor out of your television set. But what Buddhism is saying that the brain is not the source of these images, these thoughts, not the thought awareness, knowing. That it’s merely the cooperative basis.
It’s acting as a support just like the potter shaping the pot as a cooperative cause. The mind is shaping how the body is shaping how the mind is going to be able to express itself. If there’s a cat brain, there’s a cat mentality. There’s a conditioning influence. So I think these are things we can think about.
Where did the first atom come from? In modern physics, they talk about a participatory universe. That is to say that things do not exist objectively out there, divorced of an observer, that the object observed and the observer interact. There’s nothing out there which is objectively existing, that we’re interrelated with everything. And this is what Buddhism has been saying for two thousand five hundred years.
Without mind, without an awareness, there are no objects. Without objects, there’s no awareness. They’re completely interdependent. Therefore there can be no first atom without awareness of that atom. Where did the first atom come from?
So these are questions which can be raised. And once we begin to see the nature of the mind and relationships of cause and effect, then we can gain some reasonable conviction that simply because the body will deteriorate, dies, that the mind does not necessarily cease. That it can go on and become re associated with another body And this is simply what we’re calling rebirth, reassociated with a new energy pattern, which we call body. And this takes place through the force of our karma. The mind is associated with this particular body through the force of past actions.
And when these actions, the energy of these actions have been dissipated, We call this death. The mind and the body part. The body simply rots, returns to the elements, and the mind moves on. And due to the force of previous actions, habitual actions, karma, will become reassociated with a new body in the future. And this process has been going on without beginning.
There’s never a point we can find where we can say this is the first moment of mind. Without a first moment of mind, then we can never point to any first birth. The process of birth, death, birth and death has been going on since the beginning of this time. We can never find a beginning to it. And through the course of these infinite number of rebirths, we’ve had a mother.
Over an infinite period of time, we’ve taken infinite rebirths at infinite number of places. Therefore, we cannot logically point to any one person and say, This person has not been my mother in my past life. This person has not been my father, my brother. We’ve been all things to all people infinite number of times. So you sort of have to start to loosen up your present concepts.
We’re very much frozen into a very static way of thinking. Things are like a boiling stew. Sometimes a potato comes to the top and sometimes a carrot and sometimes a celery. It’s just our relationships with others are tumbling, constantly changing, shifting positions. So we don’t in this way, we begin to gain some perspective and we begin to develop loosen up our labeling to others, quit holding on to others through tightening.
So, you know, we can know, we if we investigate this and get some feeling for it, we can begin to, you know, think, well, you know, it’s quite a mind opener to think this isn’t your only life, to think back, well, I existed in a previous life. I know what don’t know what to do. I don’t know what happened to me. And then you well, and and before that one, I had another one. Before that, I had another one.
Another one. It’s kinda hard to to to conceive of. It’s because the mind has been very conditioned to frozen into a mold of only conceiving of what has been present in this life. We don’t take into consideration that much of our thinking, many of our actions, many of the ways we feel about people are being conditioned by what has occurred in past lives. So we can begin to loosen up these conceptions by beginning to think, wow, maybe I wonder what I did in a past life.
How does it relate to this life? And begin to go back and begin to remember past and past lives that you’ve been everywhere in this universe. You’ve been in almost every situation. You’ve related with almost every person in almost every way. And you will probably do it again in the future.
So it’s essential in this process to begin to develop an awareness of that every sentient being, every sentient being, you know, we can’t we’re not going to leave out your ex girlfriend or your or the Russians or whatever, but every sentient being has existed in all these various possible types of relationships with you. In fact, they’ve all been your mother. Everybody in this room has been my mother. Sorry, mom. They’ve all held us, you know, been just as dear to us as our mother, this life.
Generally, we don’t think you don’t you feel unrelated to most of the people in this room as if they don’t exist, indifferent. So it’s not easy to begin to think, well, all cared for me. They all worried about me, protected me, loved me just as much as my mother of this life. Everybody in this room, but we’ve forgotten over the course of infinite number of rebirths. Birth and death, we’ve all forgotten.
You were born out of my womb. I was born out of your womb. It’s been going on for in this time. So we’re trying to this is a process of mind training, isn’t But it’s not brainwashing. There’s a big difference between brainwashing and mind training.
We have to make use of our reasoning, our experience, and our intuition and bring it to bear. And in the process of propagandizing or brainwashing, it’s simply that you have a certain state or an idea that you want to incorporate into your mentality. And whether it’s based in reality, whether it’s intuitively harmonious, whether it’s experientially verified, it doesn’t matter. We simply want to incorporate some particular mentality, some idea. But here we’re trying to train the mind in what, at least from the point of view of Buddhism, is the real situation.
We’re trying to train our mind, trying to have insight into the actuality that in fact all beings have been our mother. They’ve loved us and cared for us just like our mother this life. And we want to develop this sense of dearness, of closeness with every sentient being. This is the training process because ultimately it’s going to lead us to complete awakening of our heart. If we can see every sentient being as our mother and have the same feeling of caring, protectiveness, I’m going to go into this, the kindness of our mother.
See every sentient being, can imagine the revolutionary effect, the transforming effect on the social aspect of oneself. Whether these people happen to be pleasing to us or unpleasing, whether they help us or hurt us, they’re still our mother. They’re still showing us kindness, infinite kindness, unimaginable kindness in the past. Usually when If someone harms us either physically or mentally, we reserve our judgment to find out what their intention was. For example, if someone spills coffee on you accidentally, it’s like, it’s an accident.
If we find out that they did it intentionally, we might become very angry, don’t we? It’s just too much for us. If someone has an accident, we don’t mind too much. We’d rather it didn’t happen. But if we find out it was on purpose, then we respond with anger.
Usually we think this is rather quite a reasonable response and it’s justified. They spilled this coffee on me on purpose and I get angry. Who wouldn’t get angry? It seems like quite a legitimate response. But can you imagine how wonderful it would be if we were free of having to respond in that way.
That is to say, if we’re free of determining our response in accordance with other people’s intentions. You know, after all, it’s our decision to get angry. We’ve made a decision. We’ve made a decision about the situation. I’m going to get angry.
It depended upon that person’s intention. Our point is, wouldn’t this limits our freedom, doesn’t it? Wouldn’t it be a wonderful thing if no matter what that person’s intention was, I can decide for myself how I want to respond to that situation. Maybe they intentionally spilled coffee, but still, I can decide whether I want to be angry or not. Now we don’t have that choice.
We don’t have that decision. So instead of deciding how we’re going to relate to another person, determining how we’re going to value another person, we begin to focus on, for example, the Buddha nature, which is a much deeper level, a way of relating with another person. You know, what do we call it? Others were in image of God, Christ nature. So the in this in this whatever, you know, various personality, this personality traits this person may express, that beneath this, there’s something much deeper.
That’s for example, Buddha nature. And if in all the various by the various shifts of people’s personalities and circumstances, situations. And this is this is how we can begin to take control of our lives in the sense of cultivating the attitude that this person has been my mother. No matter, you know, if you no matter what your mother may do to you, know, if your mother were to go crazy, you would have tremendous compassion. If she hurts you, you’d still have tremendous caring, worrying about her, concern about her.
You wouldn’t, probably wouldn’t react with anger. You wouldn’t walk away from the relationship. If we can begin to see all sentient beings as our mother through all the shifting circumstances, personality changes, difficulties in all the various situations, And we can begin to we always see the individual on that level, not their particular personality trait which you’re expressing at that time. If we can begin to see each sentient being as being the most beautiful person in the world, which we once thought of our mother. This closeness and cherishing that you once felt for your mother.
So we have to begin to try to recover these emotions to these very profound and deep emotions which lay buried in all of us. You know, when you’re you know, it’s some people talk about somewhere someone one woman talked to me this last week, and she said, oh, I think Tibetan Buddhism is very philosophic and intellectual and very ritualistic. And that was that’s okay. But the point of meditation, the point of training of the mind is to get in touch with very deep seated emotions and begin to integrate them into our conscious awareness and be able to deal with them skillfully. So in this context, we have to get in touch with very deep emotions.
We have to be willing to sort of dig around and relive some of our experiences that we had which we’ve now forgotten which perhaps we never we would not particularly like to remember. You know, for example, when your your mother took you to her breast and she gazed down on you with loving eyes. And, you know, at that moment, she was your complete world. There was nothing else outside of her. Your complete happiness, well-being, security were completely associated.
Remembering this psychological merger with another being, which is probably the greatest bliss that ordinary human being can experience. So we have to it’s a very deep seated and very profound emotion we have to begin to try to get in touch with because this is the same feeling which we’re going to begin to express, train our minds to associate with all sentient beings. This is the mind of a bodhisattva. This is this deep overflowing burning love which he feels for all sentient beings. And this is one of the ways he tries to create it.
So it’s not a kind of casual type of love or a type of love which is kind of safe and warm. It’s about burning. It’s very profound, and it goes to the very depth of our being. This is what the bodhisattva feels towards all sentient beings. When a yogi, someone who is very proficient and has attained very high realizations, very profound realizations, when he has understanding of emptiness, a direct perception of emptiness, He’s merged in that moment, he’s merged with a larger reality.
The realization of the emptiness of all phenomena that exist in that moment, all the phenomena in the universe, the emptiness of all the phenomena in the universe. And he experiences perhaps the greatest bliss which a being can experience, which the mind is capable of experiencing. But if he had not, during the course of his training, experienced this bliss which is brought about by merging with the reality of the feelings which are associated with an infant and its mother, it would never have been able to cultivate this greater infinite bliss. The bliss, for example, that a child feels when it’s being cuddled by its mother, he cultivates this purposely, this bliss that he remembers it. He tries to evoke it.
If he hadn’t opened himself up to this experience, he would never be able to experience the even greater bliss of merging with a greater reality at once than he’d be the reality of emptiness of all phenomena in the universe. This is why the mother is taken as the epitome, as the model of relationship, the most beloved being. And we take this as the model by which we seek to relate with all sentient beings. It’s kind of unimaginable, I think, to the Bodhisattva, that there are such beings. It’s said that a bodhisattva, one who has developed an awakening heart, loves us more than we love ourselves, which is kind of hard to believe, I think.
But this is the type of mind, this is the type of emotions that he or she experiences. But, okay, but maybe you don’t like your mom. Many people don’t. So we have to work with that possibility. I had one teacher who said, after he was talking about which I’ll talk about, the kindness of mother, He was talking about, after many days of talking about the kindness of mother and the various reasonings and the various experiences, now if you don’t care about your mother, you need a good beating.
We forget, I think, as we grow older and our heart becomes a little harder and we become a little more selfish than we normally are. Anyway, I’ll go into that. It was a great shock to me. This wasn’t too long ago. It may sound like an absurd realization inside for me, but it was to think that my mother didn’t exist solely for my own welfare, that she had a life of her own, that she had her own goals and happiness, that she was seeking outside of me.
I thought only existed for me. And I don’t know, maybe I was a slow learner. Don’t know. Anyway, that was quite an opening for me to think that my mother had some being outside of interests, concerns outside of me. That’s how narrow minded and self centered I am.
But for various reasons, may not like your mother. So you may be unable to take some feelings of your childhood as model and be to reassociate this with all sentient beings in order to develop the love and compassion towards all sentient beings. So according to your present emotional situation, you take someone that you feel close to, that you love, that you feel loved by. You cultivate this sense. So we take our model, which ideally is our mother, and we’re going to get in touch with some very profound deep feelings.
We’re going to relive the experiences that we had when we were infants in connection with our mother and remember her great kindness, her great love. And then we’re going to take a neutral person, someone a stranger, and we’re going to try to develop, try to associate some of those feelings with this person through the process of imagination, remembering that having the strong conviction that this person too was our mother in a past life, just like this person over here, treated me exactly the same as my mom. I don’t recognize her because through the death process, I’ve forgotten who we’ve been split apart, now I don’t remember. But she must have treated me just like this. And remembering the great kindness of my mother in this life, we begin to associate it with this neutral person.
You know? Then we begin to associate it with maybe even an enemy who was our mother just like this just like my mom over here, just like this neutral person here. And we begin to extend this feeling. But we have to develop this feeling. We have to develop a model feeling.
We begin to associate that model feeling with all the various beings until we’ve covered every sentient being in the universe and we have that same exact feeling, the profound primordial bond between ourselves and all sentient beings. So it’s not an easy process, is So even if we don’t have a conviction or a belief in past lives, we can sort of use this imaginary process as a psychological challenge. It takes a great deal of strength and courage to pursue such a type of meditation. But we can see how it could be transforming possibilities of such a type of mental cultivation, even if we’re just doing it simply to be a happier person, which essentially is what we’re doing. But even for this life alone, even if we don’t have any conviction in the future lives, even if it’s only a self centered motivation.
It’s going to make us a happier person. In this way, we can begin to break out of the self imposed isolation that we always feel, the feeling, self imposed boundaries that we’ve set up, now self-cherishing. And our heart begins to open up to other sentient beings. And we try to keep it open through all the various shifting situations, all the various attractions and appearances, whatever might arise. This is my mom.
This is my mother who loved me in this profound way and who cared for me no matter what they no matter what a sentient being may do to us. This is why a bodhisattva you know, many of the things you hear about the bodhisattvas, these are beings who have developed an awakening heart. They just think like child fairy tales. But I think if you begin to approach it in this way, that this being has trained his mind, cultivated his his understanding to the point where he does feel this primordial bond with every sentient being, then many of the the stories you hear about bodhisattvas seem reasonable, probable, possible. Whenever they hear a sentient being say, give, please give, they feel bliss.
Once, Atisha, who was a great Indian master, the lineage of this particular meditation technique comes through him. Atisha, once, when he was riding across in the country in Tibet, he was on his horse and a large boulder, a large rock rolled down the mountainside and struck one of the pack horses. And he spontaneously screamed out, my mother’s hurt. This is the measure of developing the recognition of all sentient beings as your mother. Every sentient being is as if they were your mother.
So in this process, there’s a lot of resistance. It may be true that everyone has been kind to us, like my mother, of this life. It’s one thing to think that, it’s very much another thing to actually acknowledge it as a real experience, to acknowledge it willingly. Our minds are bound by fears of being controlled by others. A fear that if we let other people touch us very deeply, or that if we get in touch with the feelings of gratitude and appreciation and deeply admit others’ kindness.
And somehow they’re going, we’re going to be under their control. We’re going to be under some kind of obligation. We’re going to lose our freedom. We’re going to have to do whatever they tell us to do, whatever they want us to do because they’ve been so kind to us. And we feel this and we feel guilty.
So we begin to we don’t want to get in touch with these these deep feelings of gratitude and appreciation of allowing other people to touch us because we don’t want to lose control. We have a feeling. We begin to repress these feelings. And in doing so, we repress the feelings of tenderness and intimacy. These feelings become locked deep down inside of us.
Because we have attachment and selfishness, we are always paranoid. You people are not paranoid. Paranoid means you’re always thinking, maybe she is taking advantage of me. I better be careful. Or maybe he is taking advantage of me.
I should be careful. You understand? You’re always paranoid thinking that society is taking advantage of you. Your boss is taking advantage of you. Your mother is taking advantage of you.
Your father is taking advantage of you. Your girlfriend is taking advantage of you. Your boyfriend is taking advantage of you. Your husband is taking advantage of you, or the Tibetan monk is taking advantage of you. You know what I mean?
The peace are taking advantage of you. Jesus is taking advantage of you. You have so much fear, so much unnecessary fear. Okay. You think I’m exaggerating, but this is how it is.
I tell you. I am not exaggerating. Somehow, as long as you have attachment and selfishness, you will always be uncomfortable. Even when are with your heart friend, your loving, kindest boyfriend, your husband, your girlfriend, your kindest mama or papa, you will never be comfortable because your self-cherishing thought is always like a knife. For twenty four hours of the day since you were born till now, your knife is always within you through your heart.
This is only my feeling. Maybe people think I’m terrible man. Really, I think this is the way. But when you begin to open up to others, have more trust for other people’s feelings. When you begin to do this thing, other people are so kind.
Due to their kindness, I am surviving in the world. My mommy is kind to have given me this body. My papa is kind that I have food and clothes because somebody is working, so I survive. As a matter of fact, my life is completely and totally dependent upon others. Others are the resources of all my pleasure.
Then suddenly, you begin to breathe better. How many of us have ever felt thoroughly loved? You know, not loved for what you can offer or withhold, not loved for what you do or don’t do. And you felt a type of love which cannot be earned, which you can never be worthy of, Or that is to say, we can never make ourselves worthy of it because we’re already worthy of it. You know, just by our very existence, the type of love which we’re worthy of experiencing.
This was written by a schizophrenic. It’s written by a woman, but she used the it’s written by a woman who was schizophrenic. It was cured by one of R.D. Laing’s patient, a British psychologist. Everyone should be able to look back in their memory and be sure he had a mother who loved him, all of him, even his piss and shit. He should be sure his mother loved him just for being himself, not for what he could do.
Otherwise, he feels he has no right to exist. He feels he should never have been born. No matter what happens to this person in life, no matter how much he gets hurt, he can always look back to this and feel that he is lovable. He can love himself, and he cannot be broken. If he can’t fall back on this, he can be broken.
You can only be broken if you’re already in pieces. As long as my baby self has never been loved, then I was in pieces. By loving me as a baby, you made me whole. She was addressing that to R.D. Laing, who was her psychological guide. So we can get back in touch with these feelings of having been loved.
Get back a baby. Completely helpless, completely vulnerable, you know, has no way of earning its mother’s love. It can’t give anything in return you know, for the warmth and the protection, the caring and the worrying that a mother goes through, completely unearned. In all the physical and mental hardship that a mother goes through for a baby, all the difficulty that it unknowingly brings to its mother. You know what?
And this relates back to what I was saying about before, about my understanding when I saw that my mother wasn’t in this universe simply for my benefit alone. I was being totally irrational. What gives us the right to think that somehow we deserve all the attention and pain and trouble that we bring to our mother. Somehow we deserve it. We have this right.
She should go through all these difficulties, these problems, these sacrifices. From the moment of our inception, when we’re just more or less just a blob of cells, A mother begins to be concerned about her child even when it’s just a fetus. Can we earn that attention? Can we earn devotion? Can a massive cell somehow earn the right to be the object of love and caring.
And in return, you know, give your mother morning sickness, difficulties in pregnancy, uncomfort and discomfort, and the pain of childbirth as a way of returning the care, the thought and the concern. And we come into this world helpless in pain, but we’re beautiful in our mother’s eyes. Can we demand of our mother that after the exhaustion and the pain of labor and the pain of birth, having done nothing on our part, having not earned the right in the least, but she takes us lovingly in her arms and holds us as if we were the most precious jewel in the world and forgetting all her exhaustion and all her pain as if they never happened. And it brings us to her breast and smiles with tears of joy. Inner life, inner warmth flows into us.
So such a moment of being, which we have all experienced, comes unasked for, unearned, undeserved. And then all the years that follow after this, and then the years of sacrificing, years of worrying, and all during this time, there’s nothing that we can do in return. You know, when I say do, there’s nothing we can do. We don’t need to do anything. Our existence is enough for a mother’s love.
Just our very existence is worthy of all the attention and the pain and the caring that our mother gives to us selflessly. There’s a haiku by the Japanese master Issa, Wild persimmons, the mother is eating the bitter parts. And you see this all the time. The mother quite willingly taking the worst part for herself and giving this thing which has never, what in a materialist sense, in a worldly sense, never shown any gratitude, never done anything for her. But it’s the constant total giving simply because we exist.
Feeding us, cleaning us, clothing us, caring for us, protecting us. And our mind is constantly concerned about our welfare. At one time, our mother was our whole life. And just to hear her voice made us feel secure. That was enough.
The complete faith and utter dependency of a child, utter the complete trust of a baby, absolute trust and love. You know, when when Christ was in agony upon the cross, and he said, this trust, complete surrender to another being, When he said, Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit. This is the same type of primordial bond which we have all experienced at some time. It’s what the bodhisattva it’s what enables the bodhisattva to dedicate his life to all sentient beings. But, you know, such feelings as these gradually dry up in the desert of our life.
Our self-cherishing and selfishness replace feelings of, you know, this primordial bond which we’ve all experienced at some time. We’re talking about something which is beyond intellect, beyond reasoning, beyond thought. And slowly our hearts harden. And we begin the games of calculated love, I’m demanding, making demands, and having expectations. We develop a type of love which is the love of a banker’s mentality with all the credits and debits.
And we forget what it was like to be loved for no reason other than the fact that we existed, that we are intrinsically worthy of being loved, that we are lovable beings. We don’t have to deserve it. We don’t have to do anything for it. Unless we can begin to get in touch with this feeling that I am worthy just by my very existence of being loved, we can never value others for their intrinsic worth. We can never really love others.
It’s always going to be a banker’s mentality of credits and debits. It’s always going to be a calculated love, never an unconditioned love, the love of a bodhisattva, the love of a Christ, for example, the love of a Buddha. We’re never quite going to be able to love. Fathers and teachers, I ponder what is hell. I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.
Remembering the love of our mother, the kindness of our mother is like opening up a wellspring of emotions. But we have to try to make it a living experience, a living experience of long suppressed memories and feelings. So in this process of training the mind, we may have to temporarily set aside our judging mind, perhaps our present feelings of some negativities that we might feel for our mother. Quit judging her by yourself for self-pitying standards, your self centered egoistic measures the way she should have been. And just allow your heart to soften and remember a time when you weren’t so self pitying, when you weren’t so self righteous and so completely wrapped up in your own welfare, When you are helpless, vulnerable, being completely dependent, Completely trusting and experiencing unconditioned love.
So we have to get back into touch with some of these primordial feelings. This is we have to become like a child again and love as a child and feel loved as we once felt loved. And he called to him a little child and set him in midst of them and said, verily I say unto you, except ye become as little children, ye shall in no wise enter the kingdom of heaven. So this is remembering the kindness of our mother. I’ll stop there.
So I’ll meditate on loving kindness. Consider your own difficulties, your own problems, and the fact that you want to be happy. No matter what you may have done in the past, what mistakes you may have created, you can simply regret them and determine to, as best as you can, not repeat them again in the future. 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. At the present, we have to make friends with ourselves, all the various parts of ourselves, even those parts that we don’t like. We have to have compassion for them too because they’re suffering. So simply direct positive, warm feelings towards yourself. Wish yourself happiness.
Be gentle with yourself. May I be happy. May I not suffer. May I grow. Be kind to yourself and direct warm, positive feelings towards yourself.
Think of someone that you like, that you love, someone of the same sex. Imagine that person in front of you. And recall all the good times that you’ve shared together, the happiness, the kindness that this person has shown you. Direct radiate out the positive feelings which naturally begin to arise when you think of this person. The feelings of caring and wishing happiness.
Just make you happy. May all good things come to you, these positive warm feelings direct them toward this person. Now think of someone that you neither like nor dislike, someone you feel indifference towards. Imagine that person in front of you. You want to try to go beneath the superficial appearances that we usually cling to, that we usually judge people by.
Whether they’re male or female, beautiful, ugly, rich, poor, intelligent, unintelligent, educated, uneducated, Beneath all that, there’s someone there who wants to be happy and doesn’t want to suffer just like yourself. No difference whatsoever. Begin to direct some positive warm feelings toward this person wishing them happiness. It’s very much a reflection about how we feel about ourselves deep down, how we feel about this essential person since we’re exactly the same deep down. I just wish them happiness.
I think of someone that you have problems with, someone that disturbs your mind, someone you don’t like. Imagine that person in front of you. This person wants to be happy and doesn’t want to suffer just like yourself. And perhaps their method of going about finding their happiness, eliminating their suffering, has come in conflict with your methods of finding your happiness, eliminating your suffering. It’s just a conflict of interests, yours and theirs.
You’ve hurt others either intentionally or unintentionally in the past to find the happiness that you were looking for. Now this person has done the same to you. And just as you have to forgive yourself for the mistakes that you’ve made in the past, you have to begin to forgive this person for being like yourself. Just for the moment, set aside your hurt, your grudge, your anger, and try to see someone very much like yourself, trying the best they can to get some happiness out of life, being very confused about how to go about it, and making many mistakes along the way. And have some compassion, some caring, and wish them happiness.
Now imagine these three other people together And try to see them as in the point of view as exactly equal and wanting to be happy and not wanting to suffer. No difference, exactly the same deep down, without any feelings of bias, direct positive feelings, caring feelings towards all three equally since they all three want to be happy. And all the people in this room, with all their aspirations, with all their seeking, trying to take responsibility for their lives, for their happiness. Wish them all success. Wish them happiness as you radiate out good feelings to everyone in the room.
Extending out to all the people on the block, watching television, eating, cooking, sleeping, whatever they’re doing, whatever they’re saying, they’re doing it and saying it because they think it’s going to bring them some happiness. Wish them that happiness. Radiate out warm feelings touching everyone on the block. Extending out further and further to all of Adelaide, all the people in their cars and buses on the streets and their homes. Opening your heart, extending out your mind to all of South Australia, all the people, animals, and insects, wishing them happiness.
Further and further, extending out your wish, your heart further, Alice Springs, Perth, Darwin, Canberra, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Hobart, the entire country. And further and further, extending up to the ceiling.