Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 5-minute talk, Ven Jampa Gendun makes a single, pointed argument: we habitually treat both ourselves and others as unconditioned free agents, ignoring the role of karma, culture, environment, and personal history — and this false premise is the root of the merciless self-blame and anger we direct inward and outward. He traces how that distortion sustains inner violence: guilt, self-recrimination, and impossible demands placed first on ourselves and then projected onto others. The remedy, he argues, is not passive resignation but a conscious “reframing” — a consistent, deliberate effort to view old situations from new perspectives, attributing different meanings to the same facts without distorting them. Suited to anyone working with anger, guilt, or tolerance toward difficult people.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 19 Tce 1991 04 10.mp3
UUID: 8f20fb4d-8ea7-43f7-8ee6-d13a493481bf
Teacher: Ven Jampa Gendun
Collection: Tolerance (Ven Jampa Gendun)
Date: 1991-04-10
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 5.0 minutes
Words: ~483
And we go on to project this onto others, the same belief, with all the same demands, with all the same expectations, as though they were free agents, completely in control and not existing interdependently with their situations, with their environment, with not a product of their value systems, their peers, not a product of their culture, not a product of their karma, their history. And we fabricate this moment by moment, suggesting it, and we project this same quality onto others. And we make the same demands and have the same expectations of others that we have of ourselves. That we treat ourselves and others as though they weren’t conditioned to act in the way they act, to think in the way they think, to speak in the way they think, speak. It’s only on the basis of this distorted premise that we continually are perpetuating violence upon ourselves, upon others.
That we can’t understand our conditioned nature, that we’re doing the best we can, that everything that we experience, everything that we do is appropriate to what has gone in the past, to the context of our situation. And the same holds just as true for others, rather than this continual merciless violence that we commit upon ourselves in the sense of guilt, in the sense of self recrimination, in our unfounded expectations, our impossible demands that we place upon ourselves, and likewise upon others. It’s not to say that we can’t change, but who we are now is a product of what we have done. And there has to be a certain acceptance about that. And this non acceptance is based upon not understanding.
And all of the anger and all of the violence arises through this non understanding. People cannot help what they are doing. And their suffering is worthy of our compassion or minimally our tolerance. So we have to begin to use our wisdom, our understanding to begin to penetrate our hypnotic trance or our ego self justifications, ego’s our self aggrandizing daydream in which we live. So this reframing process, you know, is not going to happen spontaneously.
It requires some conscious cultivation. This consistent effort to view old situations from new perspectives, and transforming our belief systems about these situations. You know, the facts remain the same, but we begin to attribute different significances, different meanings to old facts. They still fit the facts. But they’re on a higher order of self correction, a higher plane of being, higher order of perspective.
So I’ll stop there. And we’ll dedicate the positive energy that we create. May I quickly become an awakened spiritual teacher and lead each and every sentient being to enlightenment’s realm through these skillful actions. May the supreme jewel of the awakening heart that has not arisen arise and grow, and may that which has arisen never diminish, but increase more and more.