Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 88-minute teaching, Ven Jamyang explores how healing requires seeing through mental stories to reality itself. He guides practitioners through impermanence—body, mind, and everything perceived constantly change, yet we cling to permanence. Using concrete examples (a silent retreat, childhood trauma frozen as an image, medical labels), he shows how false permanence in the mind generates suffering and rigidity. A core insight: labels like ‘depression’ are mental overlays, not reality; they disempower unless we use them to understand what’s actually present. He then outlines two dimensions of reality—conventional (arising through causes and conditions) and ultimate (the absence of fixed, independent selfhood). The teaching is philosophical groundwork; an afternoon practice session applies these insights directly. Pitched at practitioners with Buddhist background.
File metadata (for organising)
File: Jamyang – Track 2.mp3
UUID: 6cb58f8c-a635-4a90-a887-fee27274d6da
Teacher: Ven Jamyang
Collection: Ultimate Healing (Ven Jamyang)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 88.6 minutes
Words: ~12,712
So today I wanted to really go into the nature of reality. Then first, you know, how things exist and how we perceive things to exist and the discrepancy that is between both. And what I would like to try to do is that I tell that I tell what I first have you know, that I say what I have to say so that I can keep on talking. If you have questions arising during that I have some paper I have one pen but maybe some other people have another pen that you could use. You can write the questions down, and there will be space after that or this afternoon to address these questions.
Sometimes it is that the questions are already answered, you know. In beginning, question pop up and then actually in the end they get answered. It would help me to keep a little bit on track because there is so much to say. If you get lost and you think I know I don’t know anymore what she’s talking about, then I want you to Yes. You have to let me know.
You know that we make sure that everybody is connected and everybody knows what I’m talking about. If I go too fast, I also want you to say. Alright? But there are questions that are only related to what I’m saying then I would like you to wait until the end. Is that okay?
Good. So we talked about ultimate healing has to do with developing knowledge about the nature of reality which is the wisdom side. We develop our wisdom in order to understand better how reality works. And then part of healing is to develop the tools that we generate a compassionate mind for whatever situation arises in our life. And then having these two together in Buddhism that’s called the two wings of the bird.
We need both in order to fly. So I thought today we will going to talk about the wisdom aspect to think about reality, the nature of reality, to look at how we perceive reality and what the difference is between both and then to see how we that will already have the effect that we can counteract our current state of mind. And then tomorrow we’re going to talk about the compassion aspect. So if we talk about wisdom then we talk about the things that we believe, the thoughts that arise in our mind, the concepts that we hold on to. You know I think moment we have a lot of not knowing, we also have some knowing.
It’s not that we completely lack wisdom. Know it’s like even intelligence is a wisdom. Being capable of thinking about certain topics is wisdom. Wisdom is not just knowing it exactly how it is. Wisdom is going from the ignorant state that doesn’t question anything towards a more enlightened state.
Anything that helps you on that path is I call that wisdom. Okay? Sounds that good? Give some hope. So what happens is that when we are a complete ignorant state at a certain point we have to wake up isn’t it?
There has to be a point that we start asking questions. Asking questions we start doing that because something happens that doesn’t make sense or something that we absolutely do not understand. So reality shows us something which is very different from what we thought how things should happen. As soon as that starts to occur the first question might start to come. And that first question is the first instance of a wisdom arising.
What’s going on here? Asking questions in your mind, checking why is it happening like that, why is it happening like that, and trying to find a way to analyze in a proper way helps to develop that wisdom. We all have wisdom already inside. I talked this morning a little bit about Buddha potential, that we have that potential to develop ultimate wisdom. Some Buddhists say that wisdom is completely there, completely developed.
We just don’t see it. We can’t access it because in front of that is our ignorance, is our not knowing, is that survival mode, you know, that is just concerned about our own life and our own happiness and wants to be free of suffering. That is the ignorance that is obscuring that wisdom. Other schools in Buddhism say there is a potential for wisdom, but you can only access this wisdom if you start to recognize what is not correct in that ignorance. And if you and by removing that you can only remove that if you have seen that it is how it is right.
Right? So they say only when you start to remove the ignorance can your wisdom come into existence. So they say the wisdom is not yet completely there. We have to develop that by removing ignorance. But whatever way you’re going to choose, it’s like we have to do the work, isn’t it?
We have to recognize what is ignorance and we have to remove it in order to really have access to our wisdom. If something happens to us that doesn’t seem right, what happens in our mind? And now you can’t say something. What happens? What arises in our mind?
For instance, that neighbor next door, he has been really nasty to you and he is making a lot of trouble for you and you’ve heard he won the lottery. What happens in her mind? Thank goodness now he might move. Is that your first thought or your second thought? What is your first thought?
I’m much nicer than him, so I should win the lottery. That doesn’t make It doesn’t make sense, isn’t it? If a nasty person, some good fortune comes, think that doesn’t make sense. That should not happen like that. Or if we have we see a very good person, you know, a person who’s always good doing good good good good and then something very nasty happens and we think that doesn’t make sense, you know.
But So then what happens in our mind is think, maybe I project that, but definitely in my mind some resistance comes up and I start to struggle with that. And I think, no, that should not happen. You try to change that somehow, you know, either in your mind or with your actions. And if something bad to the good person happens, you try that that doesn’t happen and how can I influence that and what can I do to counteract that? And if the bad the good happens to the bad person maybe we try to think, what do we try to do then?
We keep on talking how bad he is and that it shouldn’t have happened to think Or maybe he’ll use the money in a bad way and he’ll end up in more trouble. Oh, yes. That’s also that’s that’s a negative rejoicing, isn’t it? Oh, yeah. We’ll see.
He’s gonna end up with more trouble just because of the money. But there is resistance, isn’t it? I cannot accept this. So having this resistance, how does it make us feel? That tense comes.
And we know that if we are tense we know what happens in the mind, we know what happens in the body. There is a tension that we hold on to and we can only let that tension go if we make peace with what we have seen. Isn’t it? If we can understand what has happened in a certain way we can let it go. And sometimes at understanding we cannot find that on the conventional level.
We will have to look for other tools to make it right. And that is when we start to look into spiritual practice like how can I see that differently so that I can make peace with them because I do not like that resistance? That resistance makes me suffer. So that means that if we start looking into what can I do with that resistance or what have I seen or why is my conclusion wrong with reality that makes that we already stop putting energy into the outside world? Isn’t it?
We stop thinking why that person got all that money or we stop thinking why that nice person met all these unfortunate circumstances. We start looking inside and we say, Where does my view doesn’t fit reality? Because it happens. That’s the first thing that we have to say, It happens. It happens.
That’s the reality. Our mind makes stories to make it, to undo it. Can we see that? And we believe that that is reality. We believe these stories are real.
We try to undo what actually has happened. So the first step in trying to change our view is to accept whatever happens and say that is what has happened. That is a starting point. And stop all these stories that go on and on and on. We just cut them.
It’s no use to make other scenarios because it already has happened. Yeah, so that’s where we start ourselves first. And then we’re to see, okay, then how do things do exist? First of all, we live in a reality of experience and we think through a reality of concepts, images, thoughts. There is a difference.
These are two different realities And I want you to really see that. There is a reality where, you know, if we would look through the whole day today, what we’re actually doing, you know, we’re sitting here, we’re sitting comfortably, we’re having something nice to drink, we have good food, we’re listening, we’re in nice company, it should all be fine, nothing big thing. But if we look what’s going on here, wow, you know, that might go from a lot of suffering to a lot of bliss. Two stories. One is what really happens and the other one is what happens in our mind.
We believe that what happens in our mind is reality. True? We believe that the stories that we go through is reality. Buddhism says that is not reality. That is our story.
I once did a Vipassana retreat for a month and you were not allowed to talk and you were only, you know, you only focus your mind in here and now, here and now, here and now. You do nothing. You sit, you focus your mind, you have a break, you walk, you focus your mind, you sit, you eat, you know, it’s like you do nothing else than that the whole day. The stories, you know, the movies that arise in the mind. That was the first time that I realized: Oh my God, you know, you have all these fantasies going on and on and on and the next day you try to do it a little bit different and the next day you bring a different color like that in to entertain ourselves, you know.
It’s like to really go in a quiet state of mind. It’s so difficult because the story are so good and we believe that is reality. And then at a certain point I realise, but I’m actually not doing anything. I’m just sitting here, I’m just walking, just eating, I’m just drinking, I’m not talking to anybody and all these story is happening. So for me that was a very clear moment of that story is not the reality.
Many times we go into situations with the story and we think that that is the situation and then we already know how things are going to happen. We have a feeling, oh my god, if I’m going to say this then this and if I’m going to do this then that and the other person comes with their own story. We hardly ever meet just on the basis of reality where we just enjoy each other’s company without creating all these stories. Where we are just there for each other. It’s very rare for us to go to that moment, isn’t it?
So that’s one thing that we are doing. We mistake a whole conceptual world with reality. It’s a big mistake. So one thing that you can do to counteract that is to constantly say what is my story? What is really happening?
What goes wrong if we believe that our world is our conceptual world? For instance, you know, I see I saw my mom three years ago or five years ago and I have an image of my mom. That image doesn’t change. That image is always the same. Then I see my mom five years later and she looks like a completely different woman.
I think, Oh my God, what happened to mom? You know? But nothing happened to mom. She grows every day one day older. But my image got stuck five years ago.
I don’t think what happened to my image, you know? I used the wrong image, but I think what happened to my mom? Isn’t it? So when think what happened to my mom, we want mom to fit the image that we had of mom. It’s for us very hard to let go of the image and accept what is there.
If we have experienced a trauma when we were a child, there is a very strong image in the mind, isn’t it, as a child? As a child you do not know necessarily what is a good way to deal with that. Many times children experience things, they can’t even express what they are experiencing, and if nobody picks it up they might just put it inside and keep it there. But that image there is very, very big and very strong. You see the world through that image.
And then if something appears that looks the same, you still react from that image. If we could let go of that image, it’s like the trauma is gone, isn’t it? And to find that image is so difficult, isn’t it? Because it’s like, it’s very deep down and very, it is many times, trauma is it really threatens your life or threatens your existence or it threatens you who you are, which means that your reaction is very deep and very strong and to get to the bottom of that is very, very difficult. So means that if you have that experience it can influence everything that happens after that.
And it’s almost like you don’t know how to get around that. If you can see that that is coming from that image, that is already one tool that can help you to step back and say, Oh, there is the image again. That lets me see the situation in a certain way. What would I see if I could put aside the image? Training this doesn’t happen in the situation where that image comes up.
The training happens afterwards where you realize, oh, it was there again. How did it look like? What did I do? You know, what did I see? What was really there?
What was not really there? And then you think over again and again and again, how could I have done that differently? How would I have reacted when the image would not have been there? How would that have looked like? How would I have felt like when I had done that?
And maybe this afternoon we can practice that and see if that is a tool that can help us to change that. Fact that we have these permanent images arising in our mind, that believe that that is the reality. Because they are permanent we get a very permanent sense of reality. If we come to Buddha House, you know, I’ve been coming here almost two years and to me this Gompa looks every time the same. Sometimes the chair is a little bit different, but that doesn’t really change the Gompa, it’s always the same.
There are saying it there, there are saying it there, they’re all the same. In my image I enter the same gampa. I do not realize that actually this is changing all the time. I do not realize the fabric is fading. I do not realize that maybe even that the flowers, you know, sometimes the flowers they go we don’t even realize because we’re so used that that is there.
Right? Our minds just adjust and how to say? You can do two things with that. One is that you can say, so as soon as something changes you can see it because it changes because the difference between what you see and your image is there and you immediately see that. There are people who have a mind like that.
They see every detail that is different from how they remember. And then there are people who absolutely do not see any of that. They don’t see the details and they think everything is always the same and they don’t notice the small changes. Right? These are two ways how the mind works, but it’s both comparing to our permanent image.
Many times when we see the change, you know, I don’t know what your reaction is, but what I see in most people is that they resist that. Even if it’s a good change. Just the fact that what they’re seeing is different from the image in their mind. Resistance. Because when it’s different you have to let go.
You have to let go that image that is you, part of you, that you believe is true. Oh no, you can’t do that with a Gompa. No, no. Buddha has always been like that. You cannot change it.
That’s how we nourish what we are familiar with. That is how we nourish what we feel good with. And it can be so strong that we cannot even look like, oh, what would a change mean?’ Maybe a change means that many more people can come to Buddha House and feel happy here. But just because you feel, Oh no, no, no, you can’t change anything here at Buddha House, you stop that. That’s how our operates.
True? We know deep inside that things are changing and at the same time we deny it. For instance if we look at our own life we know that our life is changing or Helen said it in the beginning, we know that we are moving towards death. Especially when you get older you might become more aware of that. But when you’re young, me dying, you know, dying is so far away.
We might even have the feeling it’s not going to happen to me. You know, I’m not going to die. My mom, she feels still like eighteen. You know, she says inside I never grow older than eighteen. She doesn’t believe she’s going to die.
I don’t believe I’m going to die. You know, and then when I think about it, I get scared, oh my God, I’m going to die. And then I can think, oh but not yet, you know, but I know that the older you get, the not yet becomes shakable, isn’t it? It starts to shake like you’re But even when we are young, know, we somehow we live, I’m not going to die because I’m still too young. I have still too many things to do.
I’m in a good health. I’m intelligent. I know how to what to do not to die. But if we look around us there are many people with the same conditions who have died. Isn’t it?
So having all these conditions doesn’t mean we’re not going to die. Yesterday I thought maybe tomorrow one of you might not come. I thought maybe that’s too harsh to say that, but it could be true isn’t it? That one of us dies tonight, might be me, you know? That’s why I needed your phone numbers.
It might, and then So if you die, you’ll let us know? No, no, somebody else. That’s true, I can’t let anybody know. So that’s how you cannot even believe that you’re gonna die. You still believe you can tell somebody.
It’s a mess. It can happen. It can happen at any time to anybody. In Buddhism we call that if your karma is is ripe, you know, if your karma is really ripe you cannot even stop it. In Buddhism we believe that when you are born you’re born with a certain amount of merit and that merit can make you go to a certain age.
And there might be that there are obstacles in the way where if you do not have the right circumstances you might die there. But if you go around that you can actually live maximum till here. So in Buddhism they say when your karma is finished then you will die, and we know stories from people who maybe, you know, who almost died, but how to say? I heard a few weeks ago a story from a guy, he got an accident with a car, think. Drove off the road, was very, very badly injured.
It took him one or two days to get out of scramble up and nobody had seen it happen. And he scrambled up and I was on the freeway and he was up and a car came and hit him and he died. And it’s like death is, you know, your karma is finished. Even if it looks like you might be able to survive, when it’s finished, it’s finished. And we hear stories like, you know, where people have no chance, isn’t it?
Even sometimes the disease comes up. People get a cancer, no chance, no matter what they’re doing, no matter how hard they work on their mind, no matter what they have been doing in the past, no chance. Know, then it’s just come as finished. You just prepare for death in a good way and then that’s it. Right?
It’s not that we can change everything, even if we know about the mind. When a strong karma is there from the past, we have no chance. We just have to accept. Hard, isn’t it? For the mind.
Want to have that space that we can influence, that we have control. So when we look at ourselves we somehow deny I’m not gonna die. We deny our aging process. Isn’t it? We try to keep young, to stay young.
And especially at the moment there’s so many things that we can do to stay young. You know, a little bit of botox here and a little bit of what is the other stuff? You just put it all in there and you still yesterday, there was a woman on the television. She had this face, and she looked and I think she was seventy or seventy five, but she was completely Somebody said, what did they say? If you, they said, you know, if you have money, they said, I would prefer, or men prefer to see a beautiful woman coming out of an old car instead of an old woman coming out of a beautiful car.
So if you have money you better spend on yourself than on your car. I mean that’s the culture that we are living in at the moment, isn’t it? Change the man? Man? Yes, change the man who says that.
It was a woman. That’s terrible. Yes, and she had done a lot to make herself beautiful. Anyway, so we see things in a permanent way and as soon and that makes that anything that happens that changes that permanent view is like a disturbance, can cause a disturbance, can cause resistance, can cause a reaction. Right?
If we see a flower, not this flower but a real flower, if we see a flower, then we see the flower. We do not see that at once there was a seed. And we do not see that there was a lot of conditions needed for that flower, for that seed to grow into a sprout. And then there was more conditions needed for that to become a little plant and then the flower came. And when we see the flower it looks like just a flower in itself.
And we do not want to see that that flower is going to die. We somehow believe that it’s just going to be there. You know, and then at a certain point everything is gone like this, everything: Oh, the flowers are gone! You know? But if we had been attentive we would have seen every day that the flowers were going and somehow we don’t notice it.
We only notice the big changes. Oh, now it’s gone. How did that happen? Like it happened overnight. No, it didn’t.
It happened from moment to moment to moment to moment and we’re not aware of it. Part is because we see things through our images, but part is also because our sense organs cannot see these changes from moment to moment to moment. Our eyes cannot see that subtle change. Our eyes can only see the big changes. Know, and some people have trained their eyes and they can see very small changes and some people, they don’t see it.
Goes from really beautiful to really ugly but they don’t see what happens in between. The eyes do not have the capacity to see the small changes. What happens on the cellular level, what happens on the momentary level, we don’t see it. It’s too subtle. True?
Can we recognize that? We do not see the table change, do we? It looks the same table as two minutes ago. But one day this table will be very, very, very old and damaged and, you know, maybe, I don’t know, it looks almost impossible that it will fall apart, but maybe that would happen in a few hundred or three hundred, I don’t know how many hundred years, it would fall apart. That cannot happen overnight.
That does not happen or suddenly the table is old. You know, the table grows older every day a little bit. And then there is a moment that we realize that it has happened. So if we want to contract that sense of permanence this is what we contemplate. We look at everything that is around us.
We look at our own body. Know, not that one day that we look in the mirror and think, Oh my God, I’m grey, you know. It’s like that grey has been coming for a long time and maybe I have tried to cover it out, maybe I have which means that I deny my aging process, you know? And then suddenly I think oh my god, where did that come from?’ Confronting ourselves with reality again and again and seeing the changes and having peace with that. And what we are doing is we are fighting it constantly, but having peace.
We are just part of a big, big living organism, organism, you know, we’re just a little part of that and we come and we go. And whole nature is like that. We are part of nature in that sense. When we talk about the body and how the body works, the body is completely part of nature. It doesn’t work different than the body of an animal or the body almost like a plant, you know, according to Buddhism plants don’t have consciousness but they do have similarities in how they grow, you know, how they come to a peak and then cease to exist and then disappear.
Our body works with a similar nature. If we accept that nature and if we have the courage to go through these stages, they are normal, you know. But what do we do? We lock up sick people, we lock up old people, we lock up handicapped people. We don’t want to know anything about that.
And we want to stay young, as if we were always going to be young. And then aging and death becomes very painful because we deny it all the time. So bringing that back into your life, at yourself, you know, making peace with what is happening there. And I’m not saying you can’t dye your hair but keep on checking, you know. You do grow all every day and every day we are moving closer towards death.
We can’t stop that, no matter what we’re doing. And that might feel in the beginning horrible because we are so used to getting the other way around, moving our attention in the other way. But if we can accept that these things are going to happen, life actually becomes much easier. We let go of a lot of resistance to something that is happening anyway. It’s not that if we fight death, death is not going to come.
It’s not that we run the other way, they can’t find us, you know? Is that true? We have that tendency, isn’t it, to run away from it. No belief sickness is not going to come to me. Not possible.
You know, it can happen at any time. We don’t know what we have done in our previous lives. We do not know even how the process works today. We know a lot of things, but at the same time, you know, some people do all these things and get sick, and some people do nothing of these things and never get sick. We don’t know, isn’t it?
It’s not a guarantee that things will happen in a certain way. We do not have control over that. So contemplating that again and again and again makes you surrender to whatever is coming in your life and accepting that and going with that and working with that and living with that, which means that the resistance is gone, which means that less of more suffering that you’re going to experience. Somebody once said to me, We cannot stop the pain from coming in our life, but we can’t stop the suffering. The suffering meaning the resistance we have to whatever comes in our life.
We can’t stop that. In order to stop that we have to be very clear: this is reality. So we can look at our body and realize that our body is impermanent. And our body is not only impermanent in the sense that it comes into existence and then one day it ceases to exist, our body is also impermanent and that it’s changing every day, every moment. We do not feel that.
But if you start meditating and you start for instance observing your breath, just simply observing the movements in your abdomen when you breathe, every breath is a different breath. They look similar but the breath that I take now is a completely different breath I took two seconds ago. Every breath is completely different. And as long as I’m alive I’m breathing. And one day I breathe out my last breath and then I’m gone.
But every day, every breath is different. And just as that change comes, it’s like a continuum of breath but at the same time every breath is different. Just as that, in all the cells in my organism there is movement. My blood is moving, my heart is moving, my liver is moving. Inside the cells they are moving.
There’s a lot of transport coming in and out of the cells. Everything is moving all the time. If we meditate and we reflect on that, then change is much easier to accept. We have to meditate a lot. It’s not just I hear the story and then oh yes, yes, that’s true, everything is permanent.
But our feeling says no, everything is permanent, everything is not impermanent. In order to counteract that deep feeling that we have of permanence we have to think about it again and again and again and again. And sometimes they say that when you start to realize impermanence, you know, your practice becomes really, really, really powerful. Because every time, every moment there can be an opportunity for practice, a moment that never comes back. That moment comes never back and you can take it or you can leave it.
If you realize that that moment is the only moment you can do that practice, use that for your practice. In every moment we can learn something about ourselves, about our own mind, we can learn to let go of deep habits and it’s opportunity for growth. Only when we realize impermanence you can take these moments like that. If you believe things are permanent you think, oh you know, so many other chances coming. I’m not going to die yet so I’ll first do my career and then I have my kids and then I’ll buy my house and then I’ll do that.
And then when I get a little bit older I’ll start doing that. I don’t have time for that now. Impermanence helps making more connection on that level with our own life. So our body is impermanent, our mind is impermanent. You know, and we said our mind has been living, has been in existence since the beginning of this time.
For Westerners that is a permanent feeling. It always has been there, it always will be there. It’s permanent, we say. Buddhism says, well, it exists there all the time, but that doesn’t mean it’s permanent. Permanent means that it’s not changing.
And although it exists since the beginningless time and will always exist, it changes from moment to moment to moment. It’s like a big river that never disappears, but every moment of the river is different. So our mind changes moment to moment to moment. The cause for the next moment of consciousness or awareness is the previous one. If I can generate positive states of mind, I create the cause for next positive state of mind and the cause for the next positive state of mind.
So wherever I can help to change my negative state of mind I influence the rest of my continuum. And if I do it with the right motivation I can even do that until I’ve developed my whole potential. I have today influence on the result that might come lifetimes further. That’s how powerful we can make a moment if we realize the impermanence of the body and the mind, and if we use whatever happens in the right way for spiritual practice. We influence the rest of our future and not just this life, but also next life.
And then we can look around us and we can see everything around us is also impermanent. And sometimes maybe you have a partner and you have been with a partner for a long time and you’ve got children and the children always have been with you. We believe they are the same children as when they were born. Isn’t it? These are my children because they’re the same as that were born for me.
But in thinking like that we don’t even see how we are still living in the same house. Yes, have changed cars but we’re still driving in the car and there is a feeling of permanence that we create, isn’t it? We like that. It’s comfortable, it’s nice. We don’t have to be active, we can say back and say, Oh yeah, this is really nice, I like this.
But actually if we really look it’s constantly changing. And the children that were born from us are not the same as what they are today, completely different. Their continuum has been changing moment to moment to moment. And you might recognize some tendencies, you know, oh yeah, from the moment he was born he was an angry child and it’s still like that, it’s still very inflammatory and whatever happens they react very, very strong. But it doesn’t mean it’s the same person.
Because another person with the same kind of anger you don’t say: Oh yeah, that’s my son, I recognize him because he has that anger. That anger is not the person. But we get used to it and in our mind we just believe it’s all the same. Same child. But there are so many different stages and so many different mindsets.
We think it’s the same. And not that it’s wrong to think that, but it’s like thinking it’s the same reinforces our sense of permanence, reinforces our holding on to that things are that way, makes that we are less flexible when something happens which counteracts them, which throws us out of that comfort zone, isn’t it? It makes us less flexible to do that all the time. And if we are not aware, everything in us does that because it’s so comfortable. Practicing is not easy because you have to get yourself out of your zone again and again and again.
And you to challenge yourself. Our health is impermanent. And I already said that, you know, that we can try very, very hard to make sure that nothing is going to happen to us. And we don’t smoke and we go to the gym and we eat very healthy and suddenly we have cancer. Where does that come from?
And this person who smoked their whole life and went every day to McDonald’s and they’re already eighty and they still look very healthy, how is that possible? The fact that we believe that if we do this and this and this and this I’m going to be healthy, we believe that that is it, but it’s not. There are always things that can happen which counteract that. And the more we are open for that, that doesn’t mean that it will happen to you, but it just means that if it happens to you, you’re prepared for that. There are people who think that if I open up for that it’s going to happen to me, isn’t it?
If I have that possibility in my mind it’s going to happen to me. If I think one day I might get cancer it’s going to happen to me. I attract it by thinking like that. That’s true isn’t it? But thinking that one day cancer might come just from a realistic point of view is not going to attract cancer.
It can’t. If I have the karma to get cancer and if I have a mindset functions in a certain way and I already have the feeling Oh my God, one day I’m going to get cancer, you know, then if you think it or not the cancer is going to come anyway. Your thoughts of One day I might get cancer have nothing to do with you getting it. And there are many people who believe that it does, isn’t it? If you believe one day I might get cancer from a realistic point of view, there is no emotion involved.
That cannot affect your body. If you believe from an emotional point of view one day I might get cancer because, you know, maybe you recognize something in your mind stream, a way of thinking that is actually related to the mind and I have to be careful how I say this sometimes you can look at diseases and it’s like there is a certain mindset that attracts, that fits with these diseases. Cancer patience are many times, and I use this example and I have to be careful when the doctor is in the room, but cancer is this kind of disease that is people, I think these are people who give too much of themselves to others and do not take care enough about themselves. That’s what I sometimes see in cancer. They do not, they cannot connect deep, deep, deep inside with their own true nature.
They do not believe that they have, that they are completely good inside. I don’t know if that’s what I’ve seen in my life. One teacher of mine once said cancer is denying yourself on the cellular level. So it’s not something that we can then just change, Oh, I have cancer so I just change that, because it’s not that simple. It’s very, very, very deep in the psychic, it’s like a condition that creates a condition in the body that cells can start to grow in a certain way.
Right? Knowing how it works doesn’t mean we can change it. Even if we can see it in our mind doesn’t mean that we can change it. You alright? And I have to be careful by saying that, and I must say I have a lot of resistance to that, saying you get that when you haven’t done that.
For instance, your thyroid is blocked because you do not express yourself or your liver is hurting because you do not know how to deal with your anger, or your, you know, the organs are related to certain organs, but we have to be very careful to stigmatize people. You say that like that? That we put people in a corner and even start thinking if they just changed their mind they would heal from the disease because it’s not like that, it’s not at all like that. It’s much more complicated and much more subtle. But there are some tendencies that you can see sometimes.
If we have a problem, for instance a disease, and I think you have to try to listen to this with whatever is bothering you, get diagnosis or for instance, you have back pain and they tell you that’s because the disc in your back is too thin. What does that mean for the rest of your life? How do we hear that? You have back pain? You’re suffering from back pain and then they make a photo and then they say, Oh, your disc is too small.
That’s why your nerves are too much, they have too much pressure on them from the spine, from the vertebraes. What perspective do we have in life? It’s permanent. The disc is not going to grow, we know that, it’s just going to get smaller. So you have a permanent diagnosis.
This is never going to change. Very difficult to live with, isn’t it? And then you have to check if that’s really true. Or if they say you have cancer, what does that mean? Well you have depression.
You have depression. You are depressed. You are depressed. How does that feel? Is that something like a big cloud that comes and goes, or is that like you are depressed?
You are lucky when you sometimes get your head above the cloud but you are depressed. Do I exaggerate? That’s what we hear, isn’t it? It’s like we get this label on us and suddenly perspective is gone. We do it all the time in common language too.
We don’t say she has diabetes, we say she’s a diabetic. He’s an alcoholic. It’s like a label that defines the person. Yeah, the person becomes that. So that gives a very strong identification with that label.
And if we identify with it, it’s very, very difficult not to live in accord with that. You know, when my friend was told that she was going to die, she first got rid of a lot of stuff for two weeks and she put on her pajamas and laid in bed and was waiting till death was coming because I’m going to die. You know and then so she would wake me up and say I’m laying here in my pajamas and you know I’m praying to Tārā that she comes quickly. But that’s not how death works, isn’t it? Just because she heard I’m going to die she made the outer world as if it was going to happen but not connected to what was happening inside her.
She lost the connection with herself when she heard that and when she took it on in a certain way. So after two weeks she realised I’m not gonna die yet. I get up and I’ll keep on living. But this is what happens, you know? I don’t know what happened to your mind when you got a diagnosis.
It’s very strong. Had a couple of months ago, it was almost a diagnosis, cancer came. And I started thinking about it and it was this big, you know, and suddenly everything was different. And I thought this is really strange because I’m not different, I’m a little bit different than yesterday but not really and just because that label comes I’m a completely different person. I perceive myself completely different.
I perceive my life completely different just because of one word. And the power of that word is so strong, you know. And I try to stay away from it, like it’s not in here. That is just a word that I put onto something. My situation has not changed since yesterday.
My situation is a continuation from yesterday. And yesterday I felt good. So how can I feel now so bad just because they give me that word? But that is what the mind does. It’s like you don’t get just the work, you get a whole package of symptoms, of beliefs, of expectations that comes with it.
And you accept that and suddenly you can’t function anymore, you know. I couldn’t function anymore. And it’s strange because, and I could see it happening and I could not shift it because it’s such a powerful concept. That is what happens when we say, you have this, you know. And I was a physio in my previous life and I treated children and these children would come and they had all these, you know, you have this behavior where they do not listen and run alone and cannot sit still and do not concentrate and then they would say what would a child have?
What would a child have? And I would say I don’t care what a child has, the child has these symptoms and every symptom we can counteract with certain things and if we keep on doing that in every little symptom that they have eventually it will come all together. Now the parents want to know what a child has and the moment the diagnosis comes, oh that must be ADHD, ADHD, it’s finished, you know. Oh no, can’t help the child, the child has ADHD. It’s coming from the child, it has nothing to do with me, it’s coming from the child.
And then the chance of success for your therapy is at least half reduced because every time when it’s too difficult for the parents they say, Oh, it’s coming from the child, it’s because they have that. Well give them some meditations so that they’re quiet. The moment you do that you lose your connection with your child. But it’s a very powerful world, know, the whole medical system and also how we use it in our minds. It’s very very very powerful and it’s so easy to become that.
And you can sit with that the rest of your life. And I’m not saying that we shouldn’t diagnose, right? I’m not saying that the doctor shouldn’t do that and whatever and shouldn’t help with medicine and that kind of things, but we have to look at how strong we believe in a concept. And what happens if you say to a child you have ADHD that is the child. That’s the main characteristic of the child.
We do not see anymore the symptoms that were all coming together. We are not interested anymore to help the child working through symptoms. That is what a child is. It’s very hard for a child to get rid of that one. Right, it’s eighteen and start messing up with girls and then they say, it’s because he has ADHD.
I can’t go to school, you know it’s driving and then it’s drinks, it’s because he has ADHD. It’s like you take a lot of responsibility away from that person by putting that label on the person. But we do it because we believe in that, isn’t it? That’s how it works but what we have to do with that is bring it to our own situation and say where do I take it on and what do I with that? And how do I I think it can lead to a disempowering when you do it strongly, you know.
It’s like if you use the label to connect with what is going on. My friend who died from cancer she said, Oh, I’m not a cancer patient. I absolutely have not the mind of a cancer patient. And for me it was so clear that she had, but there was no space in her mind to look at that aspect where she was suffering from her whole life. Right?
So if the diagnosis comes you can look at what is that? What is the characteristic in my mind or in my body that what is happening there? What is the process that is happening? Cancer can help you to look into that and can help you to make a shift there. So you can use that in a positive way, but if you use it in a negative way you get completely disempowered.
Disempowered. So I’m not saying the concepts are not right, I’m saying how we react to concepts, that is not right and we have to change. That is the place where we can change it. We cannot ask doctors not to give diagnosis anymore because they have to, that’s their job, and they should because that can help us a lot to know what is going on. If I feel tired I wanna know what’s going on in my body, I wanna see what is going on in my blood, and I wanna see where it is in my body, where it gets stuck.
And that can help me to connect with that. Right? But then if I say, Oh, that doesn’t work, and I would take the medicine and it has nothing to do with me, then I miss my opportunity. So now that’s only the impermanent nature. Then another nature that’s another way how things exist and we do not perceive it in that way is that we somehow define our world into the things that make us happy and things that make us not happy.
The things that we like and things that we do not like and we are constantly looking for that thing that makes us happy and we’re constantly looking for avoiding the things that make us not happy. We think that happiness that we find is real happiness. We somehow think every time when I get this I be happy. I will be really happy. And we believe beforehand that if we get that the happiness will be there forever.
We know it’s not true. As soon we start thinking about it we know it’s not true. But the moment we start going for something we believe that the happiness that comes from that is going to last forever. That beautiful part, that beautiful car, that beautiful whatever, the moment we chase the happiness there is this feeling of belief that it’s going to last forever. And every time when we check we know it’s not true.
We know that that happiness is only very short and soon after it reaches its peak it will go down and it will change until we feel, Oh, I need something else, and we start chasing again. So in Buddhism we say the nature of that, what we experience as happiness, is not real happiness. The nature of the happiness that we are chasing is actually in the nature of suffering. If something is real happiness, if something gives us real happiness, that means that the more I get from it, the more happiness I will experience. Is that true?
If something is real, then the more I have of it, the more it will lead to a certain result. If I believe chocolate makes me happy, that means the more I have of it, the happier I’m going to be. We know it’s not true. If the car would give us real happiness, you know, then whatever goes wrong with the car should not give us any suffering. But we know that if we have a beautiful new expensive car, the suffering that comes from that is much bigger than that old, rusty car.
That would have already so many bumps anyway, you know. But we believe that if I have this nice car I’m going to be happy. So Buddhism says these happy experiences that we chase all the time, they’re actually in the nature of suffering. If we could see that we would not chase so hard, we would not put emphasis so hard on getting what we want. Because we know that that moment is just a temporary thing.
Yes it’s nice, and I’m not saying please enjoy that. Every moment that you experience happiness enjoy it fully, but don’t believe that that is your absolute happiness. Don’t believe that happiness is going to last. Know it’s just a moment and enjoy it fully. Then you let it go.
We live in an impermanent world. Our body is impermanent, our mind is impermanent, our feelings are impermanent. Anything that arises in the mind will be impermanent. Buddhism talks about achieving a mind that has everlasting happiness. So that maybe sounds a little bit contradictory if I said that we live in an impermanent world and in a permanent body and permanent mind.
Part of the mind is permanent. Part the mind is like space. That doesn’t change from moment to moment. That’s just space. And in that space things pop up, feelings, our thoughts, our emotions.
These are all impermanent. These will never bring us the happiness that we are looking for. But in Buddhism there are techniques that you can actually learn to remove that whole set of impermanent thoughts, feelings, emotions. And if they are removed, and we can only experience that space, we remove this by using our wisdom, right? So there is still a wisdom working there and there is a space.
If we achieve that then there is everlasting happiness. Our suffering is that constant impermanent coming and going of things and grasping of us, of grasping for that happiness: Oh, now it’s going to work. Oh, now it’s not going to last. Oh, me, no, you can’t hurt me. Me, me.
You know, we grasp at me. We can’t do anything. We have to make sure that that ‘me’ feels happy. If we can remove these concepts from the mind, the mind is naturally happy, blissful, open, loving, but we have to let go of that grasping mind that is chasing the happiness, that is trying to avoid the suffering. And we have to see that that mind is completely invalid.
It is the mind that has helped us to survive so many lifetimes. We have to see it as an invalid mind. Invalid to give us happiness that we are looking for. That is very hard, isn’t it? It’s like something that has helped you again and again and again to survive, to make you feel good, to protect you, and you say, oh no, that’s actually that doesn’t give me what I want.
It’s like attacking yourself and sometimes they say it’s like it’s like giving yourself an operation without anesthetics. That is sometimes what we have to do, you know. So that’s the happiness. And then I already mentioned a little bit that we have a self. We have this feeling of me.
And we have this feeling of me in a very permanent way and we believe in a me as an entity, one single entity, and that me feels very independent of anything else. We believe that we exist like that. If we’re going to check if that Self really is there, then we have to look at different things, isn’t it? And we can do that with the self, but we can do that with any object that we have, a clock for instance. If I talk about me, I talk about a single entity, isn’t it?
One I, I have one I, one feeling of I. What is that I? Is it part of the body? If it is, if it is part of our body we would have to find it, isn’t it? If we start looking in the body we have to find an entity that we say that is I.
That is what I call I. And if we look in the body the surgeons haven’t found the I yet, have they? They have not found any structure in the body that they say that is the I. It’s not there. Now we can say alright, if it’s not in the body then maybe it’s in the mind.
Which part of the mind is it? And then we’re to look. Where can we find that one, what we call I? And if you’re going to look for it it’s almost like you can never ever find it, isn’t it? It’s like you chase it but you can’t grasp it.
It’s like it almost disappears all the time. I’m angry, oh I can feel it and I’m going to look where is it? What is it exactly? It’s gone. I can’t find it.
And then you know you can say, Oh, but it’s not the body and it’s not the mind because, you know, I talk about my body and my mind, so that means that there must be a separate entity somewhere that owns the body and the mind, that is the possessor of the body and the mind. So if that is true then we have to find that entity. We have to define it. How does it look like? What is it made of?
And if we start doing that we can’t find anything. There’s no separate entity. And then we can say, Oh, but it is the collection of the body and the mind. But a collection of the body and the mind has many, many parts and we call it only one eye, you know, which is strange. So you’re going to see that we refer to our body and our mind that exists out of many parts, we refer to that as one single thing.
They don’t match. When I say I and I express feelings and my ideas I have this feeling of I’m totally one thing. And I believe it’s here and I believe it’s in my body and in my mind. I believe it’s this. This is I.
But if I’ve got to check with my rational capacity that one thing this is not one thing. This is many, many, many, many different things that is constantly changing. You know, the eye is not changing. The eye always feels the same. But this is constantly changing, moment to moment.
Many causes and conditions influence this. It exists out of many parts. And then I have this one thing. And I believe that this one thing is this. So Buddhism says these are two very different things.
One is a name and one is a collection of something. And I bring them both together. So they say what I feel here as being my ‘I’ that is not at all the I. That I does not exist. If I get really angry and that I comes up, I say I am angry.
And I have this feeling that there is this I living somewhere in me, in my body, in my mind. Maybe I feel it outside me. But it’s definitely something that protects me. It’s definitely something that helps me. And it is my I.
But if I’m going to look for it, I cannot find that I. That I doesn’t exist the way I feel it. That I doesn’t exist in the way it appears to me. That I doesn’t exist as a single entity. That I doesn’t exist as a permanent entity.
That I doesn’t exist as an independent entity of, you know, it feels like I’m in control, I’m in power, I can do whatever I want. We do not realize that there are so many other things that influence us all the time that actually we don’t have that much control. So we make a big mistake there. We believe that what we call ‘I’ and what we use to refer to that whole system of body and mind, we believe that they are the same. We believe that the name is my body and my mind.
We believe that the name I is the collection of my body and my mind. But they’re two separate things. For instance, we believe that this is a clock. We believe this is the clock. Is the clock.
That’s what we say, isn’t it? This is the clock. And then I’m going to look for the clock in this. And I think where is the clock? Is it here in the numbers?
Is it in the how do say it? In the arms? In the numbers? Is it in the arms? Hands?
Is it the hands? The hands? We can say arms. You’re going to look for the clock, but you cannot find clock in here. This is the clock.
This is called the clock. But clock is not in here. I only find parts. And then I can think, oh, the whole collection is the clock. But if the collection was the clock, then a little child without us telling him would know this is a clock.
You said that in the beginning, wasn’t it? You were Andrew. And then you said, you know, I do not have that written here. If you were really Andrew, if Andrew was really you, if Andrew was more than just label that we put on you, we would know you were Andrew. From the moment you came in we would recognize, Oh, there’s Andrew.
Isn’t it? If your name comes from you, from your body, from your existence, we would all know it. So your name is not coming from you, not from that basis. The clock is not coming from that basis. A clock is something that we put on it.
In order for this to be a clock I need the base and I need the name and they come together and then it’s a clock. If I don’t have this and I say, you know, there was a clock here in the room and I can see it’s twelve o’clock and blah blah blah, you all think, She’s not right because there is no clock. What is she talking about? Or if I have this and I do not have the name, it could be that nobody of us perceives this because it doesn’t exist for us. That’s maybe strange whenever I say it like that.
When I say that I have to think about they did an experiment, where was that? And who taught me that? So I can’t remember that part. But it was an experiment where they had people doing basketball and they asked the people to really concentrate very strongly on the person next to them where the ball was going and they had to keep on concentrating. They were not allowed to let go of the concentration.
So they were doing that and they were playing the ball around and this man dressed up as a monkey came in and stood in the middle of the circle. People didn’t see him. They simply did not see that man. They were so focused on what they were doing they did not see something really strange appearing there. That’s how our mind works.
We are very concentrated and we definitely do not expect that to happen. And when it happens we don’t even see it. If you didn’t know about clock and objects and whatever and you wouldn’t see clock. You wouldn’t see a clock. Maybe you would see a shape and a color and then say, you know, what’s that?
And blah blah blah, you start talking about it until somebody says, That’s a clock. Oh, that’s a clock. Now I know what a clock is. That’s the clock. But before that you don’t see clock, do you?
You might see the form and the shape, but you don’t see clock. So that means that the label that we put onto something is not it. If I have the label depression, depression is not what is happening in there. If I have the label cancer, cancer is not what is in there. It almost feels, you know, when you have a label as there is a different kind of entity which is maybe part of you or maybe not part of you, it’s like a strange entity somehow comes in you, is there influencing you, where does it come from, how did it happen, How do I relate to that?
But it seems that one thing. And we can say I don’t like that, I deny that, I don’t want that to be here. Or we can say how horrible, how do we get rid of it? We lose somehow, is a danger that we lose the connection. Well, you know, this is our body and our mind and there is a natural process constantly happening and yes there can be imbalances and yes that can if we keep on living these imbalances that might end up into us feeling really horrible and eventually dying.
But it’s still our continuum. It’s still we are part of that. It’s still our experience to go through that. It’s not that we suddenly become powerless because we get this diagnosis put onto us. And you can do that with a diagnosis or you can do that with beliefs in yourself, you know, you can believe I’m really a person like this and this and this and you believe, oh, that’s me.
And maybe it has been told to you from when you were very young. You’re always this angry person saying these horrible things. And you’ve heard that reinforced again and again and again. And if people reinforce that or if you have been reinforced in certain characteristics, you become that. And then when you become it, you start to live like it.
And you start to invite other people to reinforce that into you. It’s because you believe in it and because you hold on to it and you believe that’s really you. That’s something so deep and ingrained in you that you cannot change it. It’s just there, you have to accept it. Acceptance means in this sense you can’t do anything about it.
Healing we also talk about acceptance but in a different way, as a start of the healing process. But many times it is used in the normal language as you have to accept this as you cannot think change. You can’t change anything about this. So if we had this I arising and this I looks so real, we know now that that I is not really there, not in the way it appears to us. There is an I there, you know, an exist and I eat and I walk and I drink and I do a lot of things.
But that I does not exist in a way it appears to us. That I does not exist as the collection of me. That I does not exist as a part of me or a separate entity for me. That all doesn’t exist. The I is just a label that I put onto a whole collection of body and mind.
So things exist in a certain way. Things exist due to causes and conditions. Things do not appear out of nothing. Not possible. Not in the body, not in the mind.
Right? In the physical world things do not appear out of nothing. We don’t see that. In the mind it’s exactly the same things do not appear out of nothing. Things come into existence due to causes and conditions.
Many causes and conditions. It’s not just one thing. Things happen to us. It’s not just one thing that happens to us. It’s a whole collection that happens at the same time and then you end up in a certain way.
Many causes and conditions. And then things do not exist as single entities, how we always call them, you know, a clock, as if it is a single entity. It’s not. There are many, parts. I talk about me as a single entity.
I’m not. That I doesn’t exist as a single entity. I exist out of many parts. Or I is the label for something that exists out of many parts. So that is how things exist, made up out of many parts.
And then, and if you’re going to trace back, if you’re going to look into the parts, every part exists again out of another part. More parts and more parts and more parts. We know on the physical level that we can go to the level of the atoms and of the protons and of the deeper and deeper and deeper. And every time when we think we find something, oh this is the final particle, you know, it just takes time for new methods to come and we can see through it, know that even more subtle particles and more subtle particles. And These particles, they mainly exist out of a lot of what is it called?
Negative space? Negative space? Black space? What is it called? The black holes?
Dark Dark matter. A lot of dark matter and then it appears that there is some matter there, isn’t it? And then you look into the matter and what you see is lots of dark matter and then some things that appear like matter. But eventually you find nothing, isn’t it? Because you can look into the part again and again and again and things just seem to disappear.
Nothing to really hold on to. But we call it one single thing, you know? But if I’m going to look into my body and into all the atoms, there is nothing really that I can find that is me, that exists even, you know, that I can grasp and This is really there, this is really something there that doesn’t change, that is concrete, that is permanent, that doesn’t exist. And then things exist in a way that they are what they call merely labeled in the mind, merely labeled by mind. So if this is a clock but clock does not exist here, if I look here what clock is, I can’t find the clock.
Clock comes from my mind. It’s the name that I give with my mind to this object. So clock is in the mind. If I have cancer, cancer is in my mind. There is something happening in the body, but cancer is coming from my mind.
It’s the label coming from the mind. Cancer. Cancer is not there in the body. That is not cancer. There is a condition that we label cancer, but cancer is not that condition.
They’re two different things. So that is how things exist. If we talk about reality we can do two things. What we do is we create a reality that doesn’t really exist in the way it appears to us. We create a reality that looks in a certain way.
What we can do is we can realize that that reality is empty of how we see it. Or we can say, How does reality exist? We can say, It doesn’t exist like that, and it does exist like that. So investigating reality can be investigating your own mind and saying, Oh no, this is not right, and that is not right, and that doesn’t exist, and that doesn’t exist. I negate what I believe in.
If I negate what I believe in, I’m talking about emptiness. If If I posit how things exist, then I’m talking about conventional reality, how things really exist. If I talk about emptiness, I’m talking about ultimate reality. If I’m talking about conventional reality we talk about dependent arising. Things come into existence due to cause and conditions, are made out of our parts and are merely labelled by the mind.
That is called dependent arising. Things depend on a base of a collection and a name coming together. They arise together to come into existence. Yeah? So these are two sides of reality that happen at the same time, that we have to realize both in order really develop our wisdom.
You know, we have to know how things ultimately exist and we have to know how things operate on the conventional level. So when we develop our wisdom, we go into both sides. Sometimes we reflect on all the things that we impute on objects which is too much, which is not really there. And then other times we think about things but how do they exist? Oh they exist like this and like this and like this.
We have to do both, right? Because when we only focus on emptiness and we say, Oh that’s not there and that’s not and that’s not and that’s not, then it’s very easy to go to a place where you say, Oh, so it doesn’t exist. The cancer doesn’t exist, and I’m not saying that. The cancer does exist. But the cancer appears in a certain way and it doesn’t exist in the way it appears.
So then you say, Okay, how does it appear and how does it really exist? It exists like this, it exists like this, it exists like that. If you think too much about it, it can become too concrete again. If that happens, you think again about emptiness. How does it not exist?
Thinking about emptiness makes that things open up, that you give things space, that you allow things to unfold, with the danger that you end up into nothingness, which is not what we should do. If you see that as happening then you go into how things do exist. But that is the danger, that we make it too concrete, too fixed. And these are two sides of the scale, I mean you have to do both. One to make it really light and the other one to be real about it, you know.
You can make cancer really light but you have to be realistic that something is there. Yeah? Okay, I think that’s enough for now. Quarter past one. I promised Liz that we were gonna be out there on quarter past.
Could you check? Because she sometimes heats the food then we’re not coming out and then things get cold and she has to do it again and that’s really frustrating. But I’m also aware that there might be questions and Is? Yeah. Okay.
Yeah. Please. Please. Please. Yes.
Yes. You don’t even have to ask that. We can also let it sink in. Then in the next session after lunch, we start with a few questions. And we say, you know, we take like fifteen minutes.
And then we go into a kind of an exercise to counteract these tendencies that we all have and see, you know, apply to our own situation and see how we can work with this to look differently at where we are. Okay? Thank you.