Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 55-minute teaching, Venerable Lobsang Namgyel explains Tonglen, a Tibetan Buddhist mind-training practice drawn from the Eight Verses on Thought Transformation. He opens with two methods for developing bodhicitta, or awakening mind—seeing all beings as family and Tonglen itself—then focuses almost entirely on Tonglen: the practice of breathing in others’ suffering and negative karma, letting it explode against your own selfishness, then breathing out happiness and positive qualities to them in return. Namgyel uses a clear diagram of karma surrounding Buddha-potential to explain what you’re removing and what you’re improving, then walks through a simplified visualization technique suited to beginners: black suffering in, explosion, white light back out. He covers how to apply Tonglen to specific struggles—pride, illness, difficult relationships—and answers concerns about whether you must experience suffering to understand it, and whether the other person must change for the practice to work. The final verse addresses perceiving all phenomena as illusory to release attachment. Throughout, he draws on vivid examples: a scientist who felt pain sucked out during Medicine Buddha practice, a mother’s sacrifice during pregnancy, reputational fragility. Suitable for anyone learning thought-transformation practice or seeking tools to work skillfully with difficult emotions and relationships.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2011 10 03 Ven Namgyel – 09 Mon 3rd Oct.mp3
UUID: bc216d4c-d872-4e44-a5c6-fbf76ad4630c
Teacher: Ven Lobsang Namgyel
Collection: 8 Verses Thought Transformation (Ven Lobsang Namgyel)
Date: 2011-10-03
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 55.4 minutes
Words: ~7,136
And indirectly do I offer every happiness and benefit to all my mothers, I shall secretly take upon myself all their harmful actions and suffering. So that’s fairly self explanatory, isn’t it? I’m sure you can do that. It’s mentioning two methods to develop bodhicitta. I already told you one method is, seeing all beings as your mother, your father, your brother, your sister.
Usually it was mother, but now we extend it to mother, father, brother, sister. Must be somebody you like, somebody you feel connected to, you know. So a nurturing person in your life, and then see every being similar to that nurturing being. The other way is Tonglen. So this is the method that that I I particularly like.
Now what we have to be careful of is what are we attacking, what are we removing, and what are we improving? So I shall secretly take upon myself all the harmful actions and suffering. This is referring to Tonglen. Tonglen is giving and taking. So we’re giving something.
We’re taking something. Okay? Do you all know about Tonglen or you don’t? Is it Susan? Susan, you don’t know Tonglen?
I’m surprised. You seem you really seem like a lot a a Tonglen woman. Okay. I’m on the move. There.
This is one of my famous it’s not a fried egg. Thank you. This is one of my famous diagrams that makes everything very clear. This is positive potential. I mean, diagrams can confuse.
Positive potential is the emptiness of the mind, but I’m trying to put it into a diagram that helps you to understand what we’re doing with Tonglen. So this is your enlightenment potential or your positive potential or your Buddha potential, whatever you want to call it. And then here is your karma and delusion. So each time you do a negative action, you know, you have all these karmic imprints along with an emotion, and so this is black surrounding your positive potential. Okay?
So I’ll write it here for you. Because once I said in Kopan, we’re gonna talk about Tonglen, and then later somebody said to me, it was a man, he put his hand up and he said, I really like that Tom and Len practice. Two men invented it. Tong Tong Len. So it’s taking and giving or giving and taking.
Taking and giving. So this this part, we want out. This part is good. We want to improve. We want to encourage.
So what we’re removing is this. What we’re improving is this. So how to do that? The taking needs to refer to this, and the giving needs to refer to this. So now I’ll explain.
From beginningless time, we’ve done negative actions based on self-cherishing. Because of self-cherishing, we’ve created karma and delusion which obscures our positive potential, our Buddha potential, our ability to be enlightened. What stops us from being enlightened? karma and delusion. So what do we want to remove?
karma and delusion, which is associated with self-cherishing, self grasping. So all that negativity is what we want to take away. Then what’s left, this potential, emptiness of the mind, then we improve that. We increase, the qualities within that, and then that will give us the ability to benefit others. So how did we harm others?
Selfishness. The selfish concern, self-cherishing. Me. Me. Me.
Me. You know, I want this for me. So how we harm others is through selfishness. So what’s the antidote to selfishness? Helping others, benefiting others.
Okay? So helping and benefiting others is the giving. And then the harmful actions that we’ve done, the negativity that we’ve done that we want to take away, we take away with a a good motivation, a bodhicitta motivation. I don’t want you to suffer. So you know we have the four immeasurables.
This is associated with related to the four immeasurables. The first one is, I want you to be happy and to have causes of happiness. The second one, I don’t want you to suffer, and I don’t want you to have the causes of suffering. So I want you to be happy is I want you to have only love and love and kindness in your life. I want you to be happy.
And in order to do that, I need to take away your suffering causes, the unskillful actions that you’ve done from beginningless time, and I’m going to use it as medicine to destroy my selfishness. Okay? So you’ve got a problem, but give me the problem because by me taking it, it’s going to help me to remove my problem. This is going to create something like a nuclear explosion to remove my problem because my problem has been brought about through selfishness. So in order to remove the selfishness, I need to do the opposite, to cherish you, to cherish others.
And then once I’ve done that, I need to give something. So it’s not enough to just take away the problem, the negativities, but I also need to give something. So what would I give? All my happiness, all my joy, my qualities. And in giving of that, you receive it, but like a boomerang, it comes back to me.
So by giving it, I have even more of it. So in the past, I was trying to grab it. You know, give this to me. I want it. But now we’re doing the opposite because we’ve seen that grabbing it doesn’t actually make us happy, doesn’t actually create the causes of happiness.
It makes for more suffering, more problems. So in order to give us real happiness, we need to do things in an opposite way, not the way we’ve been doing it, but in a different way, a wise way, the way the Buddhas would do it. So recognizing that I have problems, I have an incredible potential, but it’s obscured by these negative actions that I’ve done, by these delusions mixed in with the actions. Okay? So we have that situation from beginningless time.
Do we want to continue it? Do we want to go on forever experiencing these negative actions and repeating the negative actions? Is that what we’re going to do? Or right now, while we’re human, while we have the choice, do we want to do things in a different way? Because we’ve recognized that no matter what we’re doing in our present situation with our present methods, it’s not giving us true happiness because it’s not an enlightened happiness.
So then we have to look towards the Buddhas and say, well, what did you do? Not what society does, but what do you do? And then the Buddhas do the opposite of what we have done up till now. Give me the suffering and take my happiness. And this sounds a bit crazy.
You know? This is a bit loopy. How can this make me happy? Give me suffering. Take my happiness.
Up to now, we’ve said, give me happiness. Take my suffering. Hasn’t worked. So the opposite is, I’m giving you happiness and give me the suffering. So what effect does it have on the mind?
It makes you strong. It gives you courage and strength even in the very difficult times. So we need courage to be a bodhisattva, to be able to work in the world for the benefit of others. You do something good, they slap you. You know?
Do something good, they slap you again. You don’t say, okay, I give up bodhicitta. I’m not talking about literally they’re slapping you, but often mentally, it feels like you’re being slapped. And so you can just give up your bodhicitta. So how do you train your mind to have the strength that you’re going to need to be a bodhisattva?
It’s through this method. It’s a meditation that you do to strengthen the mind, to train you in the way of behaving when things are difficult. Instead of turning against others, instead of responding to suffering with suffering, you’re saying, I understand your situation. You have suffering causes. Give it to me.
I know more I know better than you do in the sense of I know some dharma. So I know that those suffering causes are not good for you, and they’re not good for anybody else. So now you’re reaching out like a bodhisattva would and saying, give it to me. I’m strong enough. I’m the nuclear power reactor, but without any of the the problems.
So in the meditation, you’re going to breathe in their suffering, their problems. You’re going to take away all this black area with each breath. And what I’m teaching you is a simplified way of doing Tonglen. There’s a Tibetan way, which is much more difficult. It’s breath going in black one side, going out white the other side, and white going in over there, and black coming out there is too complicated.
You know? Most beginners get completely lost and give up. So do it this way where you just breathe in the suffering. You breathe it in. You breathe it in.
You breathe it in. And the blackness in your own heart, your own suffering and causes of suffering, is getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And there’s a storm. Each time you breathe in the suffering and the causes of suffering, then there’s a storm. There’s a lot of activity.
Okay? It’s getting bigger and bigger and bigger. At some point, you either can’t breathe in anymore. You can’t stand it. Mentally, can’t stand it, and you think, enough is enough.
You know, I’ve breathed in enough. Or you feel you’ve taken all the suffering away. At that point, there’s an explosion. So all this suffering that you’ve accumulated, yours and the others, now explodes because it’s this combination of negative energies. So taking on that negative energy has created the explosion that removes all the negativity.
So taking the suffering was a good thing, not a bad thing. All the black negativities have gone out into the universe, and all that’s left is Buddha potential, positive potential, enlightenment potential, whatever you want to call it, the potential of all the beautiful qualities that we could have, but has been obscured up to now because of the negativity. And now from your heart, you offer light to the person in front of you with qualities, and they fill up with that light. So this is the giving part. All your happiness, all your joy, all your qualities, you offer to the person in front of you, and then once they’re full of light and qualities, from their heart, it comes back to you, and you fill up with light and qualities.
So now in the visualization, you don’t have any negativities left, and they don’t have any either. You only have positive qualities, and they do too. So that’s Tonglen. Questions? Yep.
Can definitely change the situation. It takes away your resistance to the negative situation. When there’s a negative situation, each one of these verses is saying, take away the resistance. You know? In martial arts, the first thing they teach you is to fall.
They don’t teach you how to throw somebody, they teach you how to fall. So you can be stiff, you know, and they go, uh-huh. And you go, bang. Uh-huh. Bang.
And after a while, they’re gonna say, no. You can’t learn this because you can’t fall. So we need to learn to use the other’s energy in a positive way rather than taking it on in a negative way. The choice is ours, but up until now, we haven’t had the choice. We’ve just reacted.
But if we’re spiritual beings, we need to choose the reaction. And if we don’t have the reaction worked out, we go back to previous habits. But with a method like this, then you’re removing the previous habits. You’re starting to change the way you do things. And so, for instance, you were talking about pride.
You can visualize all the proud people in the world. Right? Every proud person in the world, give me your pride and breathe it into your own pride, and then explode your pride. You can imagine all the people in the world with headaches when you have a headache, and you think, oh, poor me. You know?
Instead of thinking, poor me, you think, okay. There’s many more than me suffering from headaches in the world. Breathe in the headache, explode the causes of the headache, remove their causes of headache, give them back peace of mind, happiness. So you could use it for something specific that you want to change or just generally taking on all negativities because we have harmed virtually, you can say, every living being. If we’ve had countless lifetimes, we can’t pick and choose and say, well, I’ve harmed you, but I haven’t harmed you.
We have to assume every being in some way has been harmed. So the way to antidote it is to be willing to take from every one of them, not certain ones of them, not just the family of this life, but the family in every life, the enemy in every life. And in this way, we totally remove the suffering and the causes of suffering. By removing that, what’s revealed is something very beautiful. But now we could think, well, that’s nice for me.
I’m I’ve removed everything bad, but now I’m going to keep the good back to the selfishness. Then we start creating selfish causes all over again. So before we do that, we say, no. This is something very beautiful I want to offer to you. And then this is the accumulation of merit of giving without wanting something back.
But inevitably, it comes back to you. By giving, it comes back, and then you receive this very positive energy, and then it works for you. So it’s it’s a a really, really nice method to transform the mind. The mother one can be a little bit problematic. If you don’t have a good situation with your mother, it can be a problem.
But seeing all sentient beings as your mother, your father, is also possible. If you have a very nurturing person in your life who’s been really kind to you, you can also see every being as your mother or father, and that can also work. But this one, if you do it on the cushion, you start to be aware of the relationship, between the person and the suffering and happiness, you start to understand a lot of things. And then when you go out into society, you go to Cole’s supermarket or Woolies or somewhere like that, and you see the mother with the children, your mind stops being so partial. Oh, look at that mother so upset, and look at those poor children.
Instead, you see the suffering in all of them, and you breathe in all of the suffering, the mother and the children, give back your happiness, explode all the suffering, give back your happiness, and walk on. So you can do it in a minute. Just breathe it in, explode, walk on. You know? You give your happiness, walk on.
So we can do it as a meditation over time, or we can do it in a very short way. You see your boss who looks really distressed, and instead of thinking, oh, what’s wrong with her? You know? What’s her problem today? Oh, it’s gonna be one of those days.
You know? Instead of putting the label, breathe it in, explode it, give happiness, move on. So this changes your response to difficult situations, and it helps you to develop your bodhicitta. Any questions? George, you’re not a questioner.
You’re an outsider. If we had to experience all sufferings before we could have an understanding of other sufferings, I think that would be really problematic. If we had to have cancer, to understand cancer, broken knees to understand knees, you know, like that. So not like that, but I think that, yes, Buddha said, first no first noble truth, the truth of suffering. You can’t just say, oh, that’s true.
There is a truth of suffering moving on. Suffering cause, cessation path. You know, it’s like these days, we want to move on very quickly. Done that. Next next step.
Suffering? Oh, I know about that. Next step. Actually, we need to go more deeply into suffering, and Tonglen really helps you to connect with that suffering rather than rejecting the suffering. You know, in Asia, in India, in Nepal, you can’t turn away from suffering, isn’t it?
It’s everywhere. You see it. You go down to Boudha stupa, somewhere beautiful to circumambulate, and there’s all this suffering, people with hands missing, legs missing. So one of my students, who really didn’t like this, so I told him, you have to go down to Boudha Stūpa and look at every beggar as a human being. So he’s, oh, you know, this doesn’t sound so good.
So he went down there, and he made it a practice to talk to every beggar around the stupa. And he said he realized they were all human beings wanting happiness and not wanting suffering. And by talking to them, he learned more about their stories and how they were feeling. So I think the obstacle in the West is that we sanitize suffering. We don’t see suffering.
And in order to have more empathy, sympathy, you know, there’s levels. So you start with sympathy, then empathy, then love and compassion. So in order to extend ourselves, we need to be more aware of of compassion as a response to suffering. Otherwise, it’s a concept of suffering. So, maybe it’s like a horse with blinkers.
You know? We go around like this thinking in Australia, there is no suffering. It’s such a perfect place. We nobody suffers. You know?
I never used to teach the method on seven-point cause and effect, which is seeing all beings as your mother, because this was so problematic. You know? We’d have eighty people in the room, forty hands would go up. I don’t like my mother. You know?
So now what do I do? So I I stopped teaching that method long time ago. And recently, I started teaching again that method because this is a confrontation, and I think we need to be confronted with this. That if you do have problems with your mother, and I did, many other people do, my mother wouldn’t let me go to the Beatles concert. I have never forgotten that.
Right? That was the biggest tragedy of my life, and I could have been proud about it for years after, you know, I went to the Beatles consort. So often we have a perceived problem with our mother. And when you start meditating on your mother, you start to realize, actually, what we thought was harm was good. Your mind changes.
You know? So nowadays, I say to people, if you have a problem with your mother, this is the place to start, because she has such a strong connection with you. She gave birth to you. You know? She went through all this pain and suffering in order to give birth to you.
And often we say, well, she had to. You know? She it had to come out, so she had to go through that. It’s like we don’t pay attention to what others go through in order for us to exist. So the the pain and the suffering of childbirth.
But not just that. I’ve been with a child who cried twenty four hours a day, day after day after day. If you’re that mother, you can’t get away from it. You can’t put sellotape around the baby’s mouth. You know?
You just have to live with this crying and crying and crying. And the mother keeps going back to see what can she do and jiggling and, you know, she’ll try everything she can to make sure the child isn’t suffering and it’s happy. This is the kindness of the mother. You know, my mother used to smoke forty Kapston full strength a day. She smoked a lot.
So when she was pregnant with me, she decided by herself, the doctors didn’t tell her, because in those days smoking wasn’t a problem. It was in all the movies. It was everywhere. She decided to give up smoking for nine months. And then once she’d had the baby, she started smoking again.
But she decided she didn’t want to harm the baby. So this is must have been an incredible sacrifice for somebody whose pleasure was smoking that much. So in my meditations, in retreat, I started thinking, gosh, she did this and this and this, and you start seeing all the benefits rather than all the problems. So these methods of working with your mother or doing Tonglen for your mother, it can be so helpful because you have to see the suffering in order to breathe in the suffering. So then we have to study the eight sufferings, the six sufferings, three sufferings.
We have to become more aware of we’re all born, therefore we’re all going to age, therefore, we’re all going to have sickness, therefore, we’re all going to die. We’re all going to experience this. You know, there’s not one of us that never experiences any sickness. Not one of us, doesn’t experience aging. We can be Joan Rivers, you know, from the neck up, not experiencing aging, but actually we are experiencing aging.
Isn’t it? So we may not want to, but this is the reality. And then we can assume our mother was also born, aging, sickness, death. And so when we start to go through the sufferings, the dissatisfied mind, wanting something, not being able to get it, getting what you don’t want, you know, all these sufferings that we experience, my mother must have experienced this too. And so I think working with close family members becomes essential to your Dharma practice.
If you don’t, you’re working with others, which can be fairly easy, you know, because the emotional contact is less. Whereas with us, we have a definite emotional contact with our mother and father. And if we don’t like them, it’s even more of a contact, and so we should do something about that. Imagine at the time of death, all these memories come into your mind of things you don’t like, and then you’re extremely distressed and upset, and then you die. What’s your future going to be?
Better to deal with it now while we have choice. Isn’t it, Jack? Right. Does it answer you? Yeah.
Anything else? Oh, Geshe-la. Can be. I I have a specific experience where, it definitely helps somebody. My own experience.
You know? I mean, there’s many stories in the Lamrim of Lamas doing it and benefiting others, but I have a very specific experience where we were in retreat in Kopan, and I had seven scientists on one course. It was like the nightmare course. You know? Prove it.
We had a quantum physicist from Taiwan. Prove it. Yeah. Like this. So it was very interesting.
And so seven scientists in the front row, and one lady was one of those scientists. Knew hadn’t heard Buddhism before living in Kathmandu, decided to come up to Copan. And so she did that course and and said, oh, you know, I found it interesting. I’d like to continue. Can I do Medicine Buddha?
And I said, well, it’s more difficult because it’s a lot of recitation repeating things over and over. Anyway, that’s fine. You know, I’d really like to do it. Okay. So, a few days into it, I I’m watching her sitting there.
She’s right in front of me, and I can see she has a terrible headache. You know, the eyes had gone small, and her face was sort of crunched up, and she looked like she was in terrible pain. I couldn’t stop because we have sadhana, so we have to continue through the sadhana. And I can’t go down and say, are you alright? Would you like an aspirin?
So what can I do? And this is what I like about Tonglen is because we often think, well, what can I do? Or what’s the wise thing to do? So before you do something, do Tonglen. It helps you to find a balanced mind.
So I breathed in her suffering, gave back my happiness, and this is maybe ten minutes. And then I saw her face completely change, like the headache had gone. And she looked at me, and then I continued with the sadhana. So at lunchtime, after lunch, she came up to me and she said, what did you do? And I said, nothing.
I do I really didn’t want to talk about it. But she was very insistent. I want to know what you did. And I said, well, it looked like you were in pain. And she said, yes.
I had a terrible headache, and I was thinking to give up. And then she said, I noticed you looked at me, and she said it felt like a vacuum cleaner sucking this pain out of me, and then I felt incredibly happy. So she said, as a scientist, I want to know what this is. So I said Tonglen. She said, right.
I’m taking refuge. I’m signing up, taking bodhisattva vows. So she did. And, she’d been working with animals on cancer research, and she decided she couldn’t do that anymore because she’s now a Buddhist. She wants to save lives.
She moved to Singapore because they work on computers, computer modeling of cancer and and treatment for cancer. She’s still there, and she’s involved with the Buddhist Center in Singapore. So that was one experience. It really can it can help to change the other, but the purpose is to change myself, me. The other benefit is side benefit.
If you get some benefit from it, great. But the main thing is me. I stop harming. I stop doing negative things. I start doing positive things.
So I’m changing my mind. I’m not insisting that you change yours. I’m not insisting that you’re happier and less suffering. I’m not insisting that you live by my story. This is where we have to be careful.
When we breathe in, we just breathe in. When we get back, we just get back without the story. You know? We’re not missionaries. You know?
We’re not insisting. So that’s where you can go. You can you have to be very careful, you know, that you don’t start writing the story and then projecting it onto the other. And so now you’re going to get better. And the person doesn’t get better, then you’re disappointed.
Oh, maybe it was my bad motivation, or maybe I didn’t do it properly. So you start beating yourself, and you put yourself down, and you stop doing your bodhisattva practices. Whether the other person changes is according to causes and conditions. Right? Tonglen can be one of the conditions for their karma to change.
It depends on their karma. But at least we can do something from our own side. You know? Be good for you to do Tonglen for your court case friend. Well, your court your court enemy then, isn’t it?
For the fifty percent that wasn’t good, it’s good to do Tonglen. Give me all your suffering. Give me your cheating and your lying and everything else, and I’ll breathe it into my own, and then I’ll I’ll destroy everything. This can really help when you’re you’re at a stuck place with somebody. You know?
It’s very difficult to forgive, to move on, to change your mind about the situation. Tonglen can really help to move on. So we’re going to do that in the afternoon before our discussion. Otherwise, it won’t get done. So I just want to finish, the eighth verse, and then in the afternoon, we’ll try it.
And when we try it, we’ll do it with ourselves. So you visualize just yourself, your own suffering, your own problems, and breathing that into yourself. Then it’s not so frightening. Okay? And then it’ll give you the experience of doing Tonglen, and then you can practice with, visualizing your mother or your father or your friend like that.
Okay. So we’re up to the eighth verse, undefiled by the stains of the superstitions of the eight worldly concerns. May I, by perceiving all phenomena as illusory, be released from the bondage of attachment? So if everything is illusory, how can I be attached to it? If the self is illusory, if it the self is an illusion, like a dream, like a rainbow.
If it’s like that, how can I attach to it? How how can I grasp onto it? Because we don’t have realization of emptiness, we do. We think phenomena are real. Situations are real.
I’m real. You’re real, and your problem is real. And so in order to undermine that what we think of as real, then we start to think everything is like a dream, like an illusion, like a magician’s trick. You know, when he puts I don’t know why it’s always a woman, but he puts the woman in the box, and then he saws her in a half. And then he puts the two boxes apart, and their legs are over here.
Don’t quite know how all this works, but the legs are down here, and the arms are up here. And you think, well, that’s really weird, and then puts the two boxes back together, and she’s still alive. So it’s all an illusion. It’s not real. He’s not really sawing her in half and then separating her and putting her back together, opening the box and going, whoops.
Oh, dear. A bit anybody got super glue? You know? Band aids? So it’s not really happening, but to us it appears as if it’s really happening.
So this is one of the examples that Buddha gave. In life, it appears as though things are really happening, but we have to keep reminding ourselves this is like an illusion, like a dream. So, the example is, if I’m a magician, and they usually talk about stones, they said, you can take a stone. So imagine this is a stone, this singing bowl. So I have a stone in my hand.
I have my magic wand, and I say, now I am going to recite the mantra, and then you will all see an elephant. So I go abracadabra, and an elephant appears. And the people in the audience go, woah, you know, there’s an elephant. How incredible. The stone doesn’t exist anymore.
It became an elephant. Right? I would be cheating myself if I look over there and I say, there’s an elephant, and I believe in it. So I need to be the magician, the one who created the illusion, not deceived by the illusion. You understand?
So there’s a difference. The audience are being deceived by the delusion, by the illusion, delusion. They’re being deceived, but I’m the magician. I know what the trick is. So that’s where realization comes in.
Once you know the trick, you can’t be tricked anymore. You see things as they are, not as you think they are. So what we’re thinking is that stone is the elephant. But we need to not be in the audience. We need to be the magician.
We need to know the reality of things, not what we think is the reality. So now this verse is talking about try to see things as as an illusion, a dream. Because if it’s all an illusion, a dream, then what we’re experiencing in the eight worldly concerns is also like an illusion, like a dream. It doesn’t really exist the way we think. So we have four pairs of confusion, of extremes.
The mind moving from one extreme to the other. Four pairs. The first pair is gain and loss. So gaining something and losing something. Once you gain something, you become attached to it, and then the fear is that you’re going to lose it.
Okay? So you gain it, but from gaining it, it’s not simple, you know, just I have this bowl and that’s the end of it. It’s actually once I get it, then I’m attached to it. And because I’m attached to it, then I have fear of losing it, fear of somebody stealing it, fear of whatever I have fear of. So from attachment, we have fear.
From attachment, we can have anger, hatred. If it’s, a precious, old Ming vase at home, and you value it so much. You love this vase. It was passed on from your, grandmother to grandmother, you know, like that. You love this vase.
And one day somebody comes over and says, oh, you know, where’d you get this? Woolworths or something, and they drop it. And you go, oh, you know, that was my vase. So there’s a lot of imputation put into objects thinking it’s real, and then the feeling you build you build around it, you develop around it is also real. But the object is impermanent.
It’s changing moment to moment, and any moment it can be broken, it can be stolen, your mind can change, you give it up, so things can change is the message. Right? So from gaining something, you can lose it. They’re the two extremes. So when you lose it by it being stolen, broken, however you’ve lost it, what’s your response to the situation?
And it can be gaining and losing friends. You gain a friend, and contained within that is the potential to lose the friend if you’re realistic. Right? So by gaining friends, also in brackets, you can lose friends. It’s not you will always keep them as a friend.
They can turn against you. They can do something awful to you as we’ve seen in the other verses. And so then what’s going to happen is you’re devastated. This is my friend. I never expected my friend to do this.
Right? So when we’re gaining something, if we’re dharma practitioners, we should be aware of the opposite. From gaining, we can also lose. And then we’re expecting, you know, if if it if there is loss, we were expecting it. We’re saying, oh, yes.
That was always a possibility. We’re not making it happen, but we’re open to the possibility of it happening so that it doesn’t devastate us. We don’t go into depression. We don’t turn against sentient beings. We just say, of course, it was always possible.
Then the next two pairs is pleasant and unpleasant. Pleasant, unpleasant. Or you can say happiness, suffering, or pleasure, displeasure. But, something pleasurable is happening, and you attach to it. You don’t want to lose it.
You don’t want it to change. And then the opposite is, but of course, when you experience something pleasant, it’s going to become unpleasant, or unpleasant will appear. It can’t last forever. So, the response you have to, eating chocolate. And like I said, you can’t keep eating chocolate.
Sooner or later, you have to stop eating chocolate. So when you stop eating chocolate, then you can have a dissatisfied feeling, and then you satisfy it through eating more chocolate or smoking cigarettes or drinking alcohol or or or or, you know, you can put your own examples. But we experience something that we call pleasure, pleasant, and then contained within that is the potential for unpleasant. The good thing about unpleasant is that it can change and it can become pleasant. But then don’t attach to it because when you attach to it, again, it’s going to change and it’s going to be what you call unpleasant.
So what we would call positive gain, pleasant, is associated with desire and attachment. What we call dis, what we call suffering or dissatisfied or displeasure or whatever, loss, unpleasant, that’s associated with aversion, anger, hatred. So there’s the two extremes. Okay? You go from one extreme, attachment, desire, to the other extreme, anger, hatred, and then back to the other one, backwards and forwards.
This is the mind like a ping pong, like playing ping pong, going backwards and forwards without control. So by being aware, you start to be aware of the reaction to the situation. The third pair is praise and blame. So we talked about this before, that when we’re praised, the mind goes up, it becomes elated, and when we’re blamed, we go down. So we go from one extreme to the other.
If we’re attached to the praise, when we get the blame, we don’t like it. We’re devastated by it. So particularly for people who get a lot of praise, this can create the cause for devastation when there’s any sort of blame. So think about when you’re praised, does your mind go up? Does it get elated?
You know? It’s exaggerated. It’s too much. It goes too high. And then the opposite is it goes too low.
It’s not that we stay somewhere in the middle. It’s that we go too up too much up, too much down, and this is exhausting emotionally. So when we receive criticism or blame, unkind words, we get depressed, we get unhappy, we become negative. Poor me. You know?
Why did that person talk about me like that? Why did they do that to me? And this is, you know, like I said, picking up the the knife, stabbing yourself with it, and saying, it’s not fair that they’re doing that to me. They are doing this to me. So by taking responsibility, we’re saying, I’m responsible for my mind going up and down because I’m attached to something, and I have aversion for something.
So by working on the attachment and the aversion, we start to become more balanced. And then the last pair is good reputation and bad reputation or being unknown. So it’s not necessarily that you, have a good reputation like being famous. We’re not all Hollywood film stars, but just having a good reputation in the office. Everybody’s, oh, she’s she’s really good, you know, or he does a great job.
And so you get attached to that. This is a good worker or it’s a good boss. You get attached to the praise, and then what happens when something goes wrong? You go from praise to blame, and in the blame, you lose your reputation, and you go from good reputation to bad reputation. So you go from high to low.
Look at Jeffrey Archer, you know, the writer. He was in parliament, writing so many books, became so famous. In there is the potential to become infamous, to lose your reputation. So he made one mistake, and because he was so well known, it had a devastating effect on his life. He went to a prosecution, he said, I never did it.
Right? I’m innocent. Believe me. And because of that, he went to prison. Now for us, you know, for you I’m not including myself now.
For you, you know, if the same thing happened and somebody said, did you go to a prostitute? And you say, yeah, I did. Who cares? Really, you know, maybe your family or friends, but not millions of people care. The problem is when you have a reputation, it starts to develop into, I must maintain my reputation.
We get attachment and desire for good reputation. And then you want to protect that reputation, and you’re protected at any cost. And that’s when the lies, the deceit, you know, this can come afterwards. And so wanting to be attached to something creates the potential for us to do negative actions. And then comes the bad reputation.
You know, like the swimmer on TV who said there was a hit and run driver, and, there wasn’t a hit and yeah. He said there was a hit and run driver, and that’s how he got injured. And then he said afterwards, it wasn’t true. He fell off his skateboard. Right?
So he went from good reputation to bad reputation just like that. One little mistake like that. And you’d think, how stupid to say something like that. Why? Why would you say something like that?
You fell off the skateboard. Well, he’s probably banned from skateboarding by his coach. His coach has probably said, you’re a swimmer. You can’t skateboard. And he loves skateboarding.
So he’s out secretly, you know, having a great time skateboarding. Nobody will ever find out. And then he injures himself, and he can’t say to the coach, I was skateboarding because this is a big sin. So he says, somebody hit me, you know, and then he’s found out. So you go from good reputation to bad reputation.
In a split second, It happens. It switches from one to the other. And if you’re attached, the more you’re attached, the more fear, the more anxiety, and the more suffering comes from the change. So then we can see having pleasurable feelings is not a problem. Attaching is the problem.
Having objects at home is not a problem. Attaching to the objects is the problem. So don’t think when we’re considering these things that we’re saying, have a bad reputation, don’t have any objects, you know, don’t have any pleasure. We’re not saying that, but we’re saying when you have it, be careful of the attachment that tends to be generated in relation to it. Be careful of the aversion that’s generated in relation to the change, Because then there’s a potential of harming yourself, harming sentient beings, and that’s not what you want to do.
You want a happier life, not a more suffering life. Okay? Any questions? Anyway, you’ve got your discussion group. You can have your chat.
Are we missing anybody? Are all your groups okay? They’re all the same, aren’t they? Oh, she is here, yeah. You were with yeah.
You you two can go together. Catherine is around. If Catherine is around, wherever she may be, her dog was in the car, locked in the car. She was arranging flowers out there. So if she’s not here, you’ve got a pair.
And if she’s here, she can join you.