Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this two-hour intensive workshop, Ven Lobsang Namgyel guides practitioners through a Buddhist approach to understanding and transforming disturbing emotions. He opens with foundational meditation practice—observing the mind as sky and thoughts as clouds—then explores the philosophical underpinning: emotions arise from afflictive mind, not external circumstances, and sustained attachment creates most suffering. Drawing on both classical Buddhist teaching and accessible modern parallels (diaries, the Pavlova cake example, the five chapters of falling into holes), he outlines three practical aims: identifying emotions clearly rather than being swept away by them, reducing vulnerability to habitual negative patterns, and letting go through mindfulness and opposite-action meditation. He emphasizes that renunciation is not about material loss but releasing attachment to worldly happiness, and walks through how even positive acts—giving, shopping, helping others—become seeds of grasping if done with ego. The second half moves to a “myths and challenges” exercise: participants examine eight common false beliefs about emotions and discover that emotions themselves are amoral tools; the problem lies in how we grasp them. Pitched at serious Dharma students ready for introspective work and practical transformation, not beginners.
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File: 2011 11 23 Ven Namgyel Healing Disturbing Emotions. Week 3 23 Nov 2011.mp3
UUID: effa786a-e965-45a5-8aef-9b03c10078ab
Teacher: Ven Lobsang Namgyel
Collection: Healing Disturbing Emotions (Ven Lobsang Namgyel)
Date: 2011-11-23
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 128.0 minutes
Words: ~12,613
Thank you. One week, you’re really bossy, and you’re saying before I’ve even sat down, Paige. And another week, ignore me. Is it page thirty four, Lindy? Let’s see if it works.
Nope. It’s not working. Is it working? No. No.
No. No. No. I hear sound, but I don’t actually hear me. Is it?
You can hear me? But can you hear me here or you can hear the you can yeah. Exactly. No. No.
No. No. Louder. Turn the volume up. Give it a thousand megawatts.
Right. Full power, isn’t it? Okay. Chö dam sok kyi chog nam la, jang chub bar du dag ni kyab su chi, dag gi jin sog gyi pe so nam kyi, dro la pän chir sang gye drub par shog. I go for refuge until I’m enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, the Supreme Assembly. By my practice of giving and other perfections, may I become a Buddha to benefit all sentient beings.
May all sentient beings have happiness and the causes of happiness. May all sentient beings be free from suffering and the causes of suffering. May all sentient beings be inseparable from the happiness that is free from suffering. May all sentient beings abide in equanimity, free from attachment for friends and hatred for enemies. Reverently, I prostrate with my body, speech, mind.
I present clouds of every type of offering, actual and imagined. I declare all my negative actions accumulated since beginningless time and rejoice in the merit of all holy and ordinary beings. Please remain until the end of cyclic existence and turn the wheel of dharma for living beings. I dedicate my own merits and those of all others to the great enlightenment. So then think of all the things that you’re attached to that give you great pleasure, and then you offer those countless offerings to countless Buddhas in order to create merit for you to become enlightened and for others to cease their suffering, for them also to become enlightened.
This ground, anointed with perfume, strewn with flowers, adorned with Mount Meru, four continents, the sun and the moon. I imagine this as a Buddha field and offer it. May all living beings enjoy this pure land. Idam Guru Ratna Mandalakam Niryatayami. So then we start with motivation and meditation.
So let’s think about why we’re here. So if I’m here to get rich or to become famous, then not much benefit for you. So from the teacher’s side, then the teacher has to have pure motivation to teach because if they’re teaching to get something from the situation, some sort of manipulation, then there’s no benefit for the students. So from the teacher’s side, they have to be clear that they’re teaching in order to benefit others. Then when you listen to the teachings, you need to be clear as to why you’re receiving the teachings.
As I’ve said before, you can want to be happy in this life, and so you receive the teachings in order to be happy in this life. As soon as you’re happy in this life, the merit’s finished. You can want to be happy in future lives. So that happiness in future lives, we can say nirvana. Self liberation, not enlightenment.
So as soon as you have self liberation, nirvana, that merit’s finished. And then we could think about enlightenment, wanting to benefit all sentient beings. So by achieving enlightenment, you can be a benefit to all others. Through your motivation, you want to benefit all others, and then depending on their connection with you, depends on whether you can help them. So the greatest motivation is enlightenment.
Enlightenment is based on Bodhicitta. Bodhicitta is based on developing love and compassion, kindness to others. So let’s think. Right now, at this stage, maybe we’re not bodhisattvas, but we’re surrounded by sentient beings. We live in a city full of sentient beings.
So let’s have the motivation of being kind to others, being considerate, and then using that as a basis to develop love and compassion. And then with that in our minds, we have huge amounts of merit. And then we can develop Bodhicitta, which is conjoining that kindness, the love, and the compassion with wisdom. And then we’re on the bodhisattva path, and then we become enlightened. But still we have to come back.
Still we have to benefit sentient beings. So our job is always to benefit sentient beings. It doesn’t matter what level we’re at. Whether we’re ordinary sentient beings, bodhisattvas, buddhas, we still benefit sentient beings. So then we base our practice on may I benefit sentient beings.
May they be liberated from their suffering. May they be happy. Once you’ve established that motivation, then your heart is more open, more connected to sentient beings. And then you take three deep breaths. You breathe all the way down into the abdomen.
If your mind is busy, you think breathing in peace, breathing out thoughts. Letting go. So what I’d like you to do is imagine that your mind is like the sky. In fact, your mind is bigger than the sky, vaster than the sky. Your mind is limitless.
So think that your mind is like the blue sky. On a warm summer’s day, you look up at the sky, and your mind and the sky become inseparable as if they’re one. And then whenever thoughts or sensations, sounds, feelings appear, you transform them into clouds, and then you watch that cloud drifting across the sky. You don’t make any attempt to remove it. There’s no feeling of aversion or hatred or anger towards the cloud.
It’s just a cloud. So you watch it as it disappears. So sometimes there’s many thoughts, many emotions, many feelings, many clouds, but still you know the sky is there. Behind all those clouds is the clear mind, just like the sky. So what we’re doing in this meditation is we’re being aware of our nature, our potential to be totally clear. Clean, clear.
And anything that obscures that clarity, that creates confusion, we’re aware of that. We transform it into a cloud, and we let it go. We don’t hold on to it. So we have ten minutes just to be aware of the mind like the sky and anything else as a cloud. Let it go.
Concentrating on the clarity of the sky, just like your mind. The luminosity, the spaciousness of the mind. And then being aware of anything that obscures that, anything that hides it or covers it up, the thoughts, the feelings, the sensations. Transform them into a white cloud, and let them drift away. Five more minutes. Just two more minutes.
And slowly becoming aware of the room we’re sitting in, the cushion you’re sitting on, and the meditation we’ve just been doing. In your own time, please finish your meditation. Ding. Ding. Ding.
You may not see it, but it’s there. Can you see it or not? You can see it? Uh-oh. I worry about you, Jem.
You know I worry. How many of you can see it? You know, Buddha said we’re all crazy. That’s a tough one, isn’t it? We’re all crazy.
And then I sometimes wonder if the people in the mental hospitals are the sane ones. Makes you wonder. Yeah? So we’re continuing to explore emotions. And last week, what did we do?
We talked about speech. So speech is very important in our society. Communication is very important. And we were talking about how quick communication is now. So we have to be even more aware of how much we’re communicating and where we’re communicating from.
So are we coming from kindness and love and compassion or from anger, hatred, anxiety? You know, there’s many different emotions. So where’s our communication coming from? And then I explained to you about keeping a diary, and not a dairy for those of you who get it wrong. They’ve all bought cows.
You know, they thought it was a dairy? Yeah. Yeah. They bought cows. They’re milking.
You’re not the only one. Right. So a diary. And this is to monitor your behaviour, so looking at the positive, the negative, what am I doing in the day? So that you have the opportunity to look back over the day without just things happening, good and bad.
You know, because often we don’t have the opportunity to say, oh, that was good. You know, I did something well. I could have been irritable, but I chose not to be irritable. I was afraid of something, but then with courage, I went through that experience.
So the diary works in two ways. In that it’s monitoring the positive behaviour. What are you doing well? So that you’re able to pat yourself on the back except I’ve got a microphone so I can’t pat myself on the back. Hang on.
Okay, you’ve done well. See this thing is so difficult. You need a tape actually to, you know, to keep it in one place. You need that ability to be able to say well done because if you don’t do that, you don’t necessarily have good self esteem. And in our society we’re always looking to others or often we’re looking to others to give us good self esteem.
Spiritually, we need to have good self esteem from ourselves, not from others, and not be hinting to others. You know, do you think I’m doing well? How do they know? Spiritually, really, how do they know? If we can’t say somebody’s a Buddha or a Bodhisattva, we don’t know.
Right? The sign is not somebody floating on lotuses or with halos and, you know, glowing with light. That’s not the sign of a Buddha. You know the story about Asaṇga and Maitreya. So when Asaṇga saw Maitreya, Maitreya was a dog.
So his karma, Asaṇga’s karma, projected a dog, not a Buddha. So that’s the problem with living in society. We tend to keep thinking ordinary people or nuisance people, or difficult people, or whatever. You know, we can have a sort of superiority or an inferiority. But in order to become enlightened, we need to have those positive imprints to help us to develop our own minds.
So we need to see things in a better way. So when difficult things are happening in our lives, we need to transform them. When good things are happening in our lives, we need to rejoice. Do we rejoice? Do you?
Doubt it? Doubt it? Not many people do. One. Do you really rejoice?
Every time? Not every time. We also forget. Right? So we need to put it very firmly into our minds when something good is happening, why is it happening?
It’s not just chance, good luck, bad luck. I remember years ago, Lama Zopa saying, if there’s good luck, bad luck, there’s no system. We’re in trouble. Right? Because then you sort of buy lottery tickets and you think, well, if I have good luck, if I have bad luck. You know, we’re on that system.
So because of karma, everything is created by karma. But every karma has a delusion, these afflictive emotions, associated with it. So karma is not alone. Karma is created by emotion. Okay?
Any action has an emotion associated with it. So when something good is happening to you whatever it may be, you get a good job, somebody smiles at you, somebody helps you, whatever it may be, it’s happening because you’ve created the karma for it to happen. In that moment, we should be rejoicing and thinking, incredible. How good this is. And then dedicating for others.
May they also experience this happiness. May this also happen to them. But we could use it in order to become more selfish, isn’t it? In our happiness, in our little bubble of happiness, we could sort of hold on to it and think, well, this is good for me. And then we forget about others.
So it’s hard to keep remembering that thing of when I’m really happy, I should remember others. And we talked about that too in the Eight worldly concerns. When I’m experiencing great pleasure, don’t forget about others. When there’s great pain and suffering, don’t forget about others. You know, when you’ve got this terrible headache or pain or something and you say, oh, poor me.
You know, you forget about others. When you’re having an incredible time, really happy, you can forget about others. So these worldly concerns, we can call them worldly Dharma. Seems a bit strange. But Dharma actually means to hold, it’s a path that holds you.
So worldly path, worldly Dharma, you don’t get out of Samsāra. Then we need to understand what Samsāra is. Do we like it? You know, do we want to stay here? And actually, I think most of us do want to stay here.
How many people want to get out of Samsāra? That’s all. Only one. It’s not that bad. There’s chocolate.
You know, or there’s people or whatever there is. But you know because of our desire attached mind, we actually can see Samsāra as not such a bad place. And in that case you don’t develop renunciation and because you don’t develop renunciation then you don’t develop Bodhicitta and then you don’t become enlightened. That’s the consequence. Right?
It’s not what I’m saying, it’s what Buddha says. The three principle teachings are renunciation, Bodhicitta, emptiness. So renunciation of what? You know, this is what we need to be careful of because when we talk about renunciation, we often think oh but you know I like my iPhone I’m not giving up my iPhone so renunciation sort of out the window because I want to keep the iPhone or the BlackBerry or you know whatever it is. So is renunciation in the sense of you know I have my iPhone and I love it so I have to give this up.
Right? Is that what renunciation is? So we really need to think about what renunciation means as a feeling. Not, is it objects in the sense of giving it away. Are we going to pack up everything that we’ve got?
Our home, our family might be desirable for some people, you know? I want to give away my family, that would be great. And, you know, the house, it’s got such a mortgage, that would be nice, give that away, and, you know, then I’ll get down to having nothing. And that would be great. But we have to go beyond that.
Then what? Then we have to sit outside Buddha house with our begging bowl and say to all the people who are coming in, help, you know, I’ve renounced everything, but you don’t renounce the stomach. Right? So in your renunciation, you don’t renounce your stomach, you still want to eat. And your stomach is probably saying, oh I’d really like to eat whatever it is, whatever you like, falafel or tacos or whatever, you know?
So there’s that desire and attachment for food. You can give up your clothes, you can give up your home, whatever, but you still have this mental attachment to something. This feeling of I’ve got to have this, so we don’t go beyond the stomach. We still have to eat. So renunciation is a giving up of something which is not material.
It’s an attachment to the happiness of this life. So think about that, you know, in this time before the weekend. Think about what it would mean to give up your attachment to the happiness of this life. Now, is the consequence of that I’m never going to be happy ever again? You’re going to look like me for the rest of your life.
You know, really grumpy and irritable. Dragging your arms around Adelaide, I’m so depressed. Oh, you must be Buddhist. You know, isn’t it? So depressed. Ah!
You’re a good Buddhist practitioner. You’re just like His Holiness, the Dalai Lama. Not. Right? So then what does that mean about him?
He doesn’t have renunciation and you do? So this is how you can check, isn’t it? When you go to extremes, you can check. So if I become really, really depressed and upset and, you know, down, ah, that must be renunciation. So then check the opposite.
You think about his holiness. Oh, but he seems really happy. He’s got a heavy schedule, you know, flying around the world constantly, meeting thousands of people, all the problems with Tibet. Does that mean he doesn’t have renunciation? I do?
Then that seems very arrogant, doesn’t it? We’re putting ourselves up, His Holiness down. So when we give up on the happiness of this life, when it happens, what do you do? Do you attach to it and say, this is mine, You know?
I want it. Or do you rejoice and think how incredible that I’ve had this happiness and you want to use it to make others happy? To share it with others. Which way do we go? One way would be the attached way, the other way would be the giving way.
Okay? And we all think that we’d like to give, isn’t it? We want to be generous. But in actual fact, we can have the habit of when this happiness comes, we grab hold of it. You know?
This is mine. So develop the habit of using it to make others happy. And when you think about his holiness, that’s what he does. That’s the quality that you can see. You can see he’s very joyous.
No matter what’s going on, when he’s with people, he’s using his joy in order to make others happy. He’s not dragging himself around saying Oh, Tibet! You know, what to do? You know, and these refugees, hundred thousand, you know, I’ve got to feed them. What to do?
It’s such a responsibility. You know, imagine if you met him and you said oh, you know, your holiness, I’ve got relationship problems and, you know, problems with the children and hang on a minute. I’ve just got to tell you what my problems are. You know? Yeah, I don’t have a family but I’ve got this problem, this problem, this one.
And you sort of Oh, thanks Your Holiness, it was really interesting to meet you. You sort of drag yourself out the door and you think what a heavy meeting that was. Nobody ever comes away from a meeting with His Holiness like that. They all come away feeling that they were the only person in his life in that moment. No matter what’s going on in his life, he concentrates completely on that person.
He’s totally present. Right? So this is an indication of what we should practice being totally present. In your ten minutes of meditation you can check how much were you present. How many clouds did you have?
You know, usually it’s a lot isn’t it? You know, you think one, two, three, four, five and they all appear and then before you know it you’ve got a whole lot of clouds and there’s no sky, there’s no mind. You wait and you let it go, you let it go. And this is what we’re practicing in our meditation, to be aware of the potential, what’s there, and to be aware of what’s obscuring it, and to develop the skill, let it go. Why on earth are you holding on to these obscurations that are blocking you?
That are creating your confusion? Why are you holding on? So why I keep going back to these meditations for you is to develop a skill for us to be able to let it go instead of constantly returning and returning and returning. Can you wait until after? Because yeah.
But can you wait till after? Once I’m on a roll, I can’t stop. I feel like I’m on a roll. Now where was I? Oh, that’s right.
That beautiful woman in the third row. So, you know, the reason why I’m giving you this is because it’s not enough as Buddhists that we say to you, this is the reason this is happening, this is what’s happening. It’s not enough to explain to you your mind. You need to be aware of your mind and the potential of your mind. This is the most incredible thing in Buddhism, I think, is in the beginning, you find out that you have an amazing potential.
And all these practices, all these meditations, all these teachings are to increase that potential to the point of perfection. And that perfection is what we call Buddha. Right? And in Buddha’s time, when people said to him, So what have you done? He said, I woke up.
So that word Buddha means to wake up. And what we need to do is, in our lives, wake up so that when somebody’s in front of us, we’re totally aware of them and we’re totally present. Not thinking, you know, dinner, tomorrow, problems, whatever, but we’re totally here and putting our love and our kindness and compassion into the situation as much as we can. Then if there’s any happiness that comes out of the situation, don’t hold on to it, but use it in order to make somebody else happy, in order to roll it over, in order to go on. Because otherwise anything positive that you do becomes a cause for grasping, for attachment.
Do you understand that if you do something good, then you think, look at me, I’m good, you know, and then if you do it in that way of grasping, it doesn’t go on. It stops with me. And that’s not the point. We’re not using others in order to make us happy. You know, we need to somehow get our minds around that yes, we are here to benefit others, but we’re not using them in the sense of you make me happy and then I’m okay.
It’s not like that. We want to make them happy because, actually, in that happiness, I do become happy. When I make you happy, I become happy. But in my selfishness, I want to grab happiness and then hold on to it, and that doesn’t make me happy. And this is what Buddhism says and now what science says.
Science actually says, through testing, through biofeedback, that when you make somebody else happy, things light up in your brain. Parts of your brain light up that make you happy. So you don’t need to grab your happiness. I often used to give the example of the birthday cake. You know, it’s passion fruit pavlova.
You know what that means, don’t you? You’re already salivating, aren’t you? Passion fruit pavlova. And with sparklers on the top instead of candles. Right?
So it comes in at the other end and it’s cut into slices and it’s going around the party and you can see the slices disappearing. What are you thinking? So happy. So happy. You know?
They’re getting slices of So happy, so happy. You think, where’s the cake? Where’s the cake? Right? It’s a simple example of how the mind immediately goes to where’s the cake?
Where’s the cake? So it comes to you, you know, I’m here and Jan’s here. Jan, my victim. So Jan’s here and there’s two slices of Pavlova. A big one and a small one.
Right? So if you’re political, if I’m political, which I am, I’d say, Oh Jan, take the big one. I know he said take the small one. The real me, you know. Jan, take the big one.
And Jan said, Oh, no, no, no, no. I couldn’t. You take the big one. You know, you can have this fight over who gets the big one. But in actual fact, each one of us is thinking, if we really like that cake, I want the big one.
Right? That’s how we are. That’s the attachment. That’s how we find the attachment. And we need to be able to find it to renounce it.
If we don’t find it, if we don’t say, oh, yeah, that’s who I am. I do have that attachment, then we can’t actually work on antidotes to remove the attachment. We say, oh, no, no, I don’t have attachment. But then you’re watching the cake, you know? Your eyes are going this way and this way.
And when it comes down to you, you look at the two pieces and you think big, small, which one am I going to get? I’ve got to have the big one. Must. But if you’re a dharma practitioner, maybe you don’t take any cake at all. Maybe it’s you know, my guru, one of my gurus in Pokhara, is the reincarnation of a great lama from a thousand years ago who was a robber.
He was a thief in Tibet. So he used to go all over Tibet stealing from people. And he developed a really good reputation of being a thief. Big reputation. So he told me himself, he climbed to the top of a mountain and he was putting a stone and he met this old lady and the old lady said, We’ve had such a nice conversation, by the way, what’s your name?
And he said Ben Kungyal and she started, you know, shaking and he said What’s wrong with you? And she said Your name? And he said What? And she said You have such a bad reputation. You’re known as a murderer as well as a thief. Don’t murder me.
Please don’t murder me. And he said, I’m not going to murder you. So she went on her way. And then he was thinking about it and he thought, how awful that you say your name and from that somebody’s terrified. So this had such an impression, made such an impression on his mind.
He decided that’s it. From today, I’m giving up being a thief, and I’m going to become a monk. So he became a monk, and he became what’s known as a Kadampa practitioner. So this means these great practitioners who transform everything.
This is what we need to be in our everyday lives. Anything negative, we transform into positive. So the first thing he did, instead of the diary, something similar, he had stones, white stones and black stones. Something good that he’d do, he’d put a white stone. Something black, bad, black stone.
So he said at the end of the day, I think he had twenty stones, there’d be twenty black stones, no white. And day after day, like that. One day, one white stone, then two, then three. So slowly changing. So, when Ben Kungyal, Geshe Ben Kungyal, was in the monastery, just like the Pavlova example, there was yogurt.
So in Tibet yogurt was Pavlova. So the yogurt was being doled out, you know, to thousands of monks and he’s watching it, you know, and he’s thinking, I hope they don’t run out, you know, because he’s at the end of the line. He’s new. So it’s going down, down, down. And it came to him, and he had his bowl there, and then he turned his bowl over.
And they said, don’t you want it? And he said, oh no, I’ve already eaten it. Because he was so involved in watching the yogurt and he was so aware that now he didn’t need it, so he turned his bowl. And then, he was at a sponsor’s house, and there was this delicious tea, I think Chinese tea, in the cupboard, and he was looking through the cupboard and he saw this tea, and out of instinct, his hand went to steal the tea, to take it. Because we have habits, right?
So he went to take it and he caught himself and he started shouting, Thief, thief! And all the family came running and they said, Where is he? And he said, Here, I’ve got him! We wouldn’t do that, Right? We want to hide the faults because that’s now what our society says, is that we should hide everything.
Don’t show that we do anything wrong. But in actual fact, we need to be honest with ourselves in order to transform these destructive emotions. And attachment is very strong. So this attachment, grasping, you know, what do we grasp onto? Ourselves.
I want to be happy. I don’t want suffering. And when I have happiness, I’m attached to the I that’s happy, and I want it to continue. And then when I’m suffering, I’m attached to happiness, so I’m rejecting the suffering, and again, I’m trying to get back happiness. So, actually, everything that I’m doing is quite worldly.
I want this worldly happiness rather than the happiness of enlightenment. So that’s why we talked about the eight worldly concerns. Watch the mind that goes between one extreme and the other. How the mind bounces, you know, from one extreme to the other. I’m really happy now.
I’m attaching to it, and I don’t want it to go away. But when it goes away, which inevitably it must because it’s impermanent, every object is impermanent. So when that happiness starts to go away, we get distressed because we’ve attached to it. So that increases the problem of the unhappiness. Unhappiness is coming, or displeasure is coming, and so now what we’re doing is because we’re attached to the happiness, the feeling of losing it is so strong we’re intensifying the unhappiness. So do you understand what you do?
It’s like having a boil and then you’re squeezing it. And then you have something and you really love having it, you know like an iPhone or a computer or something like that and you attach to it because you never want to lose it but the potential is always there to lose it because you’ve got it. If you didn’t have it there’d be nothing to lose. Right? Can you wait till after?
So then, what happens is, like Milarepa, when the thieves came to Milarepa, you know, they came to his cave and he had nettles. One tattered rag that he was living in and nettles so his body turned green because that’s all he was living on was nettles day after day after day. And the thieves came and they said, what have you got? And he said, well, if you can find it, you can have it. That’s not our situation.
You know? We’ve got so much. And so even when we’re sitting here, we can be concerned about what’s there. Hope the computer’s okay. You know, hope this is okay.
That’s okay. So now we have to have systems to protect the house, or we have to have a dog, or we have to have bars. You know, in India, we live behind bars. It’s like living in prison. Because every house now has to have bars.
It’s always surprising to me to come to the West where you don’t have bars on the window. You can’t see them. Not as noticeable as the Indian bars, you know? Yeah. But, you know, that feeling of, because you want to protect yourself from what you have, then you have to keep on doing more and more and more.
As the thieves become more sophisticated, you have to be more sophisticated in your attachment for what you want to keep. Alright? So that’s where the suffering comes from. Not having the object, but the attachment for the object. So when we were talking about renunciation, we’re talking about the attachment to the objects, attachment to the happiness, the attachment to the fame, or the attachment to whatever it is.
You think of anything that you’re attached to. The attachment to your statues on your altar. You know? I love my altar and I have the most perfect water bowls and all this and you could get really attached to that Buddha statue, to the bowls, to the flowers, you know, you found the silk flowers that really look nice and you sort of interior design your altar and you love it. And then one day somebody comes along and steals your whole altar.
You’d be crushed, you know? How am I ever going to recreate that altar? So Buddha said, don’t even be attached to Buddha. Don’t be attached to the Dharma. Don’t be attached to anything.
Because through that attachment, you create problems for yourself and problems for others. But in our society, we often see attachment as something very desirable. Attachment and love is very possible. Right? We put the two together.
So we have attachment, and we have love. Because I love you, I’m attached to you. But that attachment is what causes the problems. So when we have more time on the weekend, we must talk about your ideas of attachment and love. This is always an interesting one.
Right? Do we have to have attachment with love or could we have love separate from attachment? This is an interesting discussion that you have to have. Alright? Can we separate the two?
We can, but we have to really think about this. So then, in this workshop, what we’re doing is three things. My aim is three things. One is to understand the emotions that you’re experiencing. To understand them. In order to do that, what I’m trying to help you with is to identify, which means observing and describing the emotion.
Okay? So to understand the emotion that you experience, you need to be able to identify, to observe, and describe the emotion. Not just the emotion appears and it does something to you and others and then it goes away, But that you can actually observe it and describe it. That means you’re starting to become the observer rather than mixed in with the emotion. Remember how I said last week, you can be like milk and water.
The emotion and you are inseparable. We want to step back and become the observer of the emotion in order to be able to control the mind. Secondly, we’re understanding what emotions are doing for us. We have emotions, so what do they actually do for us? Are they positive or negative?
So in that, we can talk about, for instance, one emotion could be anger. We talked about that before. Or jealousy or hatred. These are emotions. On the other hand, love and compassion.
Those are also emotions. So what do emotions do for you? They move you, but do they move you in the right way, in the direction that you want to go in? Okay? So that’s the first thing, understanding the emotions that you experience.
Then the next job is to reduce your emotional vulnerability. Okay? We’re reducing your vulnerability to your emotions. Instead of saying the conditions have to change, they all have to change, you know, what’s around you has to change. What we’re doing is we’re reducing your vulnerability and so we’re doing that by a tracking method I’ll show you later and then we’re increasing the positive emotions.
So we want to decrease the negative emotions and we want to increase the positive emotions. So if you have negative emotions, which you have, we want to decrease your vulnerability to them reappearing. They become like a habit. A little bit like, I’m not sure if you’ve heard it before, One person’s life in five chapters, and this is a paraphrase. You’re walking down the street, there’s a hole in the street, you fall down the hole, and you’re down the hole, and you think, who threw me down here?
How on earth did I get down this hole? So the hole is the emotions. Who’s digging it? You. But you think, why did they do this?
The Adelaide Council. You know? So why did they put this hole here? And why in this street? And why me?
You know? So we can spend all that time on why them, why did they do it, etcetera. So then you’ve got to climb out of the hole, you go on your way, the second chapter, walking down the same street, you fall down the same hole, it seems a bit deeper, and you have to climb out again. And again you go through the blaming process. Why me?
Why? Yeah. Why? Why? Why?
The third chapter, you’re walking down the same street, fall into the same hole, it seems a bit deeper, and it’s getting a bit easier to climb out. You’re getting used to the situation. You fall in and you climb out. The fourth chapter, you walk down the street. You see the hole.
You walk around and you go on your way. The fifth one and the final one, you walk down a different street. So we go through a process of, first of all, we’re falling down the hole. So now you have to be aware you’re falling down a hole. It’s an emotional hole.
And then you sort of dig yourself out. You climb out. And it takes so much energy to climb out of that emotional hole. Then you realize, oh, there is a hole, I’m digging it, and I have the choice to walk around it. That’s what awareness gives you.
This mindfulness and awareness practice gives you the ability to see the hole and you go around it. Then finally, you walk down a different street. You do it in a different way. So that’s the second job. Reducing emotional vulnerability means you start to be aware of the ongoing negative emotions, reducing those, and increasing the positive emotions.
Then the third is to decrease emotional suffering. We want to decrease emotional suffering. We do that by letting go of painful emotions through mindfulness. You keep letting it go, letting it go, letting it go. And your mind says, I won’t let it go.
I tell you we’re bizarre human beings, really. It’s like you’ve got hold of a burning branch, you know it’s burning and you’re saying it’s burning, it’s burning and somebody says well drop it and you say I will not. Don’t tell me to drop it. You know? So there’s some sort of habit of it’s hurting me, but it’s so difficult to let go.
So we’ve got to work on that habit of I must hold on to it. Even though I know I’m suffering, I must hold on to it. So letting go of painful emotions through mindfulness, and then changing painful emotions through opposite action. So the other thing to do is once you’re aware of the emotion and you cannot let go of it through mindfulness, it’s just so strong. The thought is so strong, what you need is what we call analytical meditation. The opposite positive thought.
Okay? So an example would be if you have a very strong feeling of jealousy and you just cannot remove it through mindfulness. You’re aware of it, it arises. I’m really jealous, I’m really jealous, I’m really jealous. And it keeps arising and you keep watching it but it doesn’t take it away, it doesn’t remove it.
Then what you can do is meditate on the opposite of the jealousy which would be rejoicing in the happiness of others, rejoicing in what they have, their good health, their good family, their good job, whatever it is that you’re jealous of, then you rejoice in what they have, and then that plants positive seeds in your mind stream that becomes the habit, the new way of thinking. So we’re doing those three jobs, three main concerns: understanding emotions you experience, reducing emotional vulnerability, and decreasing emotional suffering within this whole time. I’m gonna have a break soon, and then you’re gonna work during the break. I don’t mean scrubbing the floors, but scrubbing your mind. Okay.
You can ask your question now or you can make your point. You probably you’ve probably forgotten now. Towards me, you mean? No. It happens.
Me and George Clooney. I think, you know, we have that similar karma. You know? Wow. Tonight’s the night.
It’s my lucky day. Do you have a sports car is what I want to ask. Is that your red sports car out the back? So if in your meditation loving thoughts arise, but your meditation is what? What is your meditation when the loving thoughts arise?
Okay. Okay. Let it go. Yeah. Oh, in the sports car?
But you see the attachment? Oh, I think give it to me and then let the thoughts go. But that’s the attachment because even when the seemingly positive thought arises, it’s still an obscuring thought in the sense of what we’re looking for is the clear mind. So anything that appears is obscuring the clear mind in that particular meditation. If you are watching thoughts, just thoughts arising, then a hatred thought could arise and you think, oh, there’s a hatred thought.
A loving thought could arise and you think, there’s a loving thought. But if you go into the thought, you know, then you go into the hatred thought and the story comes, or the loving thought, the story comes, that’s the usual mind. The meditation mind is back to the object, back to the object. So when you’re on loving thoughts, you know, you’re meditating on love, an obscuring thought would be compassion because you’re only meditating on love. You know what I mean?
It’s like you’ve decided the color is blue, and then red appears. And even though red might be an interesting color, you have to let red go. So once you’ve decided the object of the meditation, it becomes finer and finer that the obstacles appear. Right? It becomes subtle.
I think in the sense of, maybe not so many negative thoughts, but then the positive thoughts start to come, and then you start to get interested in those. And even those are an obscuring thought. There’s something taking you away from the object of the meditation. So then it’s discursive thought. It’s not holding your mind on the object.
You know? And with this one of the sky, I really like this meditation because it visually shows you your mind and what’s obscuring your mind. And the fact that what’s obscuring it doesn’t have to be removed. You have to be patient and tolerant, and you let it go. And that’s what happens with us.
Things arise, and we let it go. It arises. Let it go. But we can’t do it all the time, you know, then we get interested and then you chase after the thought and you want to grab a hold of it. Oh, that’s a good thought.
And then you want to get involved in that thought. So no matter what the thought, train in letting go. Go. Go. Go.
Go. You know, like that. Because otherwise, we keep going back to the attachment and the grasping, which is, I’m sure, our nature, you know, at the moment because we have so much in our society to attach and grasp onto. This is our training. You know?
When I’m in the West for long enough, I tell you I start feeling like I need to shop. You know? Let’s go to Coles! I mean, right now, it’s driving me crazy. Every single day the catalogs are plopping in the door and, you know, you look through and you I need to buy.
I need to buy. You know? Isn’t it? You get this feeling Christmas is coming. We need to shop.
So if you weren’t shopping, then there’d be that feeling there’s something wrong with you. Isn’t it? There’s this push to make you shop. So there’s the attachment and the grasping. To be different from society in this time, Christmas time, would be quite difficult.
Right? So do it with a good motivation. Shop with a good motivation. With Bodhicitta motivation, to make others happy instead of the attachment and the grasping. I’m buying something for you in order to for you to like me, for you to give something back.
It’s selfish. But if we give wanting others to be happy and we don’t care if anything comes back, Bodhicitta motivation. Right? Then we can transform everything that we’re doing into something positive instead of another cause of attachment and grasping. So I think we need to train with attachment and grasping, especially at this time of year where all the catalogs are coming and, you know, you get Coles and Woolworths and Big W and, you know, all this sort of stuff, and you look through it, and there’s always something that you could have, something you could buy.
Right? Always something. And so the mind sort of lights up and says: Yes. Must get that. Not because we need it, but because we want it.
Isn’t it? There’s a difference between need and want. Yeah. Hey. What’s the consequence?
Realisation of emptiness. If you had that realization of emptiness without compassion, without love, it’s quite cold. It would just see things as empty, and then, perhaps no need to do anything about it. Just you’d have that blissful mind of emptiness. Well, the reason in Tibetan Buddhism we talk so much about compassion and love rather than emptiness, why it comes first, is because once you have realization of emptiness, then you see compassion as empty, love as empty, suffering as empty, not inherent.
And so then you think that there’s nothing that can be done about it. You know, there’s a coldness about it. Emptiness or wisdom actually stops you. You know? It confines you to where you are.
Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know. But from a wisdom point of view, if you say there is no suffering yeah. But your realization would give you no suffering.
The message you’d be receiving is no suffering. When you see suffering, then you say empty of suffering. Immediately, with realization, I’m not talking about intellectual, but realization, automatically you see suffering and you see empty of suffering. No suffering. Right.
Right. Yeah. So that’s why it’s important to develop your positive emotions, the compassion and the love, but not use those to increase the size of the ego. Right? That sense of I’m doing a good thing.
You know? I’m buying you a Christmas present because I expect something back from you. So I think on our ordinary level, our conventional level, when we’re working with Christmas, we can very much become egotistical, you know, about what we’re doing with others, to others, for others at Christmas. But actually, deep down, it’s about me. It’s about what I want to get back from Christmas.
It’s my investment in Christmas. Right? So then, as a dharma practitioner, what would you do? Would you just stop buying for everybody? You know?
Well, I’m a dharma practitioner, I don’t buy presents. Right. You give it to somebody else. So you buy it and then you buy something that you’re attached to and then you give it to somebody else? If I can just get my fingers open, I’ll give it to you.
It must be quite hard. It is. But it takes a lot of courage because you’re buying something that you really like, and then you’re having to give it to somebody. That’s hard. But it’s a very good spiritual practice.
Is the iPhone illusory? Well, I can ask you, is the iPhone illusory? But it exists. Are you sitting on an illusory bench? But is it illusory?
But no. But in its conventional existence, is it illusory? It’s real, isn’t it? Isn’t the bench real? No.
No. No. But then you’re going to ultimate truth. Just on the ordinary level, does that bench exist? No, no, no, no.
Not going to the bullshit level, but just, sorry, Bill. I told I said I wouldn’t swear near Christmas. On the ordinary level, there is a chair, there is a floor, there is a bench. You have to stay there. You know?
Stay there and understand the relativity of things and then start to meditate on how it doesn’t exist. But if we go too quickly to, yeah, but it doesn’t exist. You know, it’s all like a dream like that. It’s like the mind is cheating itself in a way. Like Christmas, but Christmas doesn’t exist.
Suffering doesn’t exist. It’s too quick. So I think what we need to do is become very real. Right? I exist.
I have my attachment, my desire, my anger, whatever it is. We understand all of that, and then we start to look at but where is that I? You know, once we have that strong feeling of I, then where is that I? But if too quickly you just say, yeah, but I know it doesn’t exist, then you’re sort of skimming over the surface. You’re negating something that actually does exist.
Are we? Apart from Kathy? She’s from the eastern suburbs, I think. Some are from the north. Well, personally, you know.
You’re not speaking about everybody, are you? But I think what we need to do is get real. You know? I think often what we’re doing is with Buddhism, we’re intellectualizing Buddhism, and we’re going too far. You know?
What we do is we go to wisdom because we hear this is the highest teachings and then we very quickly we’re removing things, we’re negating. But actually where we are is we’re emotional, we have our attachment, our desire, our grasping, you know, have all that level. And I think once we start dealing with that, working with that, what we establish is the I that feels the anger, the I which feels the jealousy. The I starts to become very apparent in the situation of being emotional. So then you’ve got two choices.
One choice would be you go for the I and how do I remove the I, which is much more complicated than going for the emotion, and how do I reduce and gradually remove the emotion. So what we’re doing here is working with the emotions, and then as you reduce those, the I becomes very apparent. And then through the I being apparent, it’s like saying, I’ve seen it. You know, there it is. Then you can start to negate it.
But if you go too quickly to emptiness, to wisdom, then, you’re sort of jumping over all the steps. It creates an illusion of knowing what it’s doing, but it’s not actually knowing what it’s doing. You’re creating an obscuration of ignorance and saying, well, now I’m really clear, but actually what you are is more confused. But I’m more ignorant. Yeah.
I think. And I think that’s why we’re really good at thinking about Christmas, about birthdays, about the ordinary level of emotions, and how we can get involved in those emotions. And as we start to establish, oh, there’s the emotion, but there isn’t just emotion. There’s an I feeling that emotion. Isn’t there?
When we have that emotion, it’s I am. And so as you start to understand the emotion and label it and be aware of it, be the observer of it, then you start to observe the I. So then you start to get the I and the emotion. And as you reduce the emotion, then the I becomes more and more apparent. And then that gives you very good karma to be able to work with the I.
Without the good karma, we don’t work with the I anyway. They say you need tons of good karma, and I’m not sure how much good karma we’ve got. We’ve got incredible karma to be here, but to have realization of emptiness, you know? I think it must be something amazing, really. When you look at Geshe Lama Konchog, Lama Lhundup, Lama Zopa, His Holiness, you know, the practices that they do.
You know? Getting up at three o’clock in the morning and doing hour after hour after hour. You know, we sort of lie in bed with the mala hanging off the bed. And we think: Well, I think this is good enough, you know, it’s fifteen minutes. You know?
I mean, let’s be honest, you know, we’re not incredible practitioners, so we shouldn’t expect incredible results. You know, we’re not gonna be floating on lotuses very soon. But we can really take hold of our emotions and start to work with them. And that would be incredible. Because that’s the world we’re living in. We’re living in a very emotional world.
You know, where day by day we’re reading newspapers or watching TV and our emotions are responding. Oh god, look at that. And, you know, when I saw the helicopter, did you see the helicopter? You know, and this guy, the pilot, fall out of the helicopter. That was horrifying in New Zealand, today.
He hit a wire when they were putting up a seven story Christmas tree or something. So there you go. Christmas. They had this helicopter. They’re putting up the thing, and he hits this pole.
And the helicopter sort of tilts. The whole tail comes off. The pilot falls out and you go, you know, isn’t that awful? So on a daily basis we can have these created emotions that I think maybe thirty forty years ago we might not have been so aware of. You know?
I remember when we used to have TV with the aerial that we used to have to hold. You know? And there’s you know, like all the dots and everything. And you could hardly see the TV. You didn’t have any emotional response.
But nowadays, instantly, we know about all these disasters from all around the world. Right? And so our emotions, these emotional habits that we have, whether it’s irritability or anger or whatever, or compassion, these emotions are constantly coming up. And so we could feel uncomfortable on a daily basis, out of control. And yet what we want to be is in control.
We want to be able to control our emotions. So I think we need to understand emotions, not just say, oh, there’s emotions, but to actually understand what emotions are, that they’re a motivating force. They make us do something. Right? So it’s not that emotions are bad, but it’s that emotions sometimes cannot be controlled by us.
Or if we don’t know about emotions that they’re appearing, cannot be transformed. We need to know about them in order to know then what to do with them. We need to know it’s appearing, isn’t it? So we’re gonna have a break, and you’re going to do your homework in the break. There is no break in Buddha House. You’re going to do something called myths about emotions.
So you can fill it in individually. You’re not going to give it to me. It’s for you. So each one of these that are mentioned is a myth. Because in Mexico people came back to me and said: Well, I really don’t agree with this one, you know, as if they were all true.
And I said: Well, they’re myths, you know? And they said: Oh. So, they’re all myths. And what you have to write is the challenge. Within the myth, there’s a challenge.
So you can do it individually, but also if you want to discuss it with somebody else or if you want to do it in a pair, you can do that. I don’t mind at all. But what it’s to do is to give you something to work with. All this material is for you to take away so that you can continue to work on what are the myths. One of my myths was, blue and green should never be seen except with a color in between.
Right? That was my myth that I grew up with. And then somebody told me during one course, there’s another myth which is, red and orange or red and yellow will make you puke. Something like that. I don’t know if she made it up on the spot, but I said, looking at me, you must feel like you’re constantly wanting to puke.
So I thought there’s just red and you know? There are blue and green, but apparently there’s other ones. I grew up with, you know, all of them about throwing the salt over the shoulder and the umbrella inside the house and all this sort of thing. There’s lots of things that we grow up with that we accept as part of our operating system, as what we believe. Right? Until we challenge.
So that’s what this material is for, to enable you to challenge it. So where’s the material? It’s Uncle Fester. What you should really have is along that wall, a coffin, and Bill sort of pops up, you know, at the appropriate moment. The coffin opens and Bill arises.
So I’ll give you until, I think nine o’clock, about fifteen minutes. Go. Have something to drink. Go to the bathroom if you want. You can come back in here and do it if you want, but fill in this.
Have you got all the answers? Did anybody get one answer? Jan? No? Have you got one answer?
It’s not as easy as you thought, is it? That’s okay. So is there a right way to feel in every situation? So then what should we be thinking? The challenge is a different way to think than that.
So if there’s not a right way to feel in every situation, what is there? There must be something appropriate for me, isn’t it? For us. But not one answer for everybody. I asked Andrew, letting others know I’m feeling bad is a weakness.
This is a very popular male thing, you know, isn’t it? We’re not supposed to say that we don’t feel good or whatever. But so is it a weakness if we say we’re not feeling good? If we’re not yeah? Couldn’t it be a strength?
Right? It requires strength to be able to say it. So the challenge is to be able to speak our truth. We need the strength to be able to speak our truth, to be able to say that we’re feeling bad. Negative feelings are bad and destructive.
By their nature, are they? You know? If you think about tantra, tantra takes anger and transforms it into something positive. We also do the same with the thought transformation teachings where we take something that appears negative and then we transform it. We flip it over.
Right? So we’re taking something that appears bad and destructive, but we’re transforming it into something positive. So it would be like saying, no, I’m not going to give in. I’m not going to say bad words today. I won’t say shit.
Sorry Bill. You take shit, if you’re a gardener you transform it into manure. So that basic shit that you think, you know, I don’t like it, then transforms into something that you like. The basic thing itself, the object, you can put the label on it, I don’t like it. Right?
But that’s coming from your side, your discrimination. But from the object side, it has the potential to become beneficial, to be useful. So negative feelings are bad and destructive. They’re not necessarily. We can learn a lot from negative feelings, from negative situations.
Right? So negative situations can teach us much more sometimes than positive situations. Being emotional means being out of control. Alright. Number four.
I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Except if you’re standing on top of the car jumping up and down. Or road rage, you know, like my friend bumping people, you know. Get going. Go faster.
Then that could be out of control. But just the word emotional. This is often used as a criticism of people, isn’t it? You’re being emotional. And you go, that means and so you can have a negative connotation in your mind.
When somebody says you’re being emotional, it means something negative. So then you take it as a judgment, as a criticism, and then you react to it in a bad way. You’re making a link in your mind that says emotional means something bad. So does it mean does being emotional mean being out of control? What does emotional mean?
So then just think about it, you know, before the weekend. What does emotional mean to you and what’s the challenge in there? Can you be emotional and in control? Is that possible? That’s the challenge, isn’t it?
I can be emotional and in control. Emotions can just happen for no reason. From a Buddhist perspective, is it possible? There has to be a reaction to something, doesn’t it? Right?
Some emotions are really stupid. Whatever. Let’s resort to the four tenets thing, you know, whatever. So some emotions are really stupid. Would that be true?
If you think about the range of emotions that we experience, are they stupid? So then instead of just saying no, of course they’re not, but think about what does that mean if I say they’re stupid? Say emotions are stupid. Right? And then take the opposite.
Emotions are not stupid. And then work between those two and what are emotions. What we’re trying to get at is some definition, some feeling of what emotions are. That’s just saying emotions are. We’re trying to go to the two extremes and then get you to think about emotions.
Okay? All painful emotions are a result of a bad attitude. So just go through those just for your own sake and then, on the weekend we’ll talk more about them. If others don’t approve of my feelings, I obviously shouldn’t feel the way I do. That’s a very popular one.
Isn’t it? If others don’t approve of my feelings, I obviously shouldn’t feel the way I do. So I’m upset about something, and because others don’t agree with me being upset, then I should stop being upset. We might say now, Oh no, that’s not true, you know, or That is true. But go into it.
Think of a time when you’ve been upset and others have said to you you shouldn’t be upset. Right? And you’ve stopped it because they’ve said to you this is inappropriate. Doesn’t that happen? Right?
I like number nine. Other people are the best judge of how I’m feeling. True. Isn’t it? That’s very true.
Especially when they’re fully clairvoyant and totally omniscient. Otherwise, how do they know? And yet we often give them the power and say, you know, you know better than I do. You know, people come to me and say, ‘blah blah blah blah blah blah’ and they sort of look at me as if, you know, oh, just tell me what to do. So, you know, even a Buddha would be working with the conventional truth of who you think you are and what you think about your life.
So very much we need to increase our Buddha wisdom, our own wisdom, to know what we need to do for ourselves. Rather than judging and basing things on outside, we have to go more into our Buddha nature, our Buddha wisdom inside. Painful emotions are not really important and should be ignored. I think you can understand that. Then think of any others.
If any others have happened in your life, you’ve got an opportunity to write them down. And then if there’s something that you want to discuss on the weekend, you can bring this back and we can talk about it. Okay. Any questions or comments or anything before we finish? You don’t disappoint me.
Yes. Yes. Yes. You go through different yes. Yes.
Really? Right. Yes. Yes. Yes.
You’re a clever guy. It’s true that we’re very black and white often in our language, aren’t we? I love, I hate. You know? Did you like that movie?
I hated it. It’s not, oh, it was okay, but I hate it. I love it. You know? So we do tend to be very black and white in our language, isn’t it?
And so in that, there’s the response which comes from the decision. I love it. Attachment, grasping. And the I hate it, aversion, anger. You know?
Because as soon as we make that decision in our minds, that’s not good. That’s a bad thing. That’s something I hate. We continue to develop the story around that original decision. The interesting one I think is, you know, when you’re walking down the street and you see a tree and you decide you don’t like the tree, an inanimate object. Right?
And you can look at a tree and think, did somebody put that tree here? You know? Why this tree? Why not a different tree? And we can build up this whole story around a tree when it’s just a tree.
So we have an emotional response to something that we don’t need to have an emotional response to. And that’s what I mean about in our society, we’re continually being poked and prodded into emotion. And then making these decisions like, dislike, because in that like dislike we feel that there’s survival. The tools for survival, you know. I’ve decided I like you, I’m okay, I don’t like you, stay away from you, I like you, I don’t like you and so we sort of sort it all out in order to give us survival tools.
Stay away from those and stay close to those. But we now know, actually, that doesn’t work. Right? Because we’re basing it on past judgments that are not necessarily correct. These are the myths.
Often the judgments we’re making are based on wrong wisdom. Right? Mythical wisdom. And then you’re walking down the street, you know, and you can kick a tree and think, what are you doing here? You know, if you bump into a tree, you can get really angry with a tree.
And so, you know, a Buddha just sees form and color. Knows that it’s got the function of tree, but sees shape and color. We see tree, and then we put all these judgments on tree. You know? And I think sometimes when you’re starting to work with this, what we’re talking about, it can be easier to think about objects. Cars, phones, you know?
Like, dislike, love, hate. People say, I love Nokia. You know? Like that. I hate iPhone.
You know, I hate Apple. And somebody says I love Apple like me. I love Apple and I hate Nokia, you know, or I, you know. So we’re sorting. We’re constantly sorting.
And in that language we keep increasing and adding to the intensity of the feeling. That’s what you’re saying isn’t it? You know, we keep adding and adding and adding and this happens over a long period of time too. You know that with the history of, you buy a phone and it doesn’t work the way you think, and so you think, I hate this phone, you know, and you can throw it or you give it away to somebody, you know, I’ll never buy that phone ever again. And twenty years later somebody might mention that brand to you and I’ll never buy that brand.
And yet, there’s twenty years of evolution. Your mind hasn’t changed in that time. You’ve fixated on that idea, I hate it. And you’ve stayed there. Yes.
Yes. Intense. Yes. Yes. Yes.
Yes. Fuzzy. Yep. Yep. It’s true.
Yes. Well, that’s part of the thing of, you know, distance yourself a little bit from it. Starts to diminish the size of the emotion, doesn’t it? If you think of it as the scary monster, you know, if you stand back from it, it’s a little bit less scary than if it’s right in your face. And so this jealousy, anger, hatred, you know, these frightening emotions, if we can just step back a little bit, which is not the way we usually step. We usually step forward.
You know, we step into them. Now we’re training to step back a little bit and step away from it and see it in perspective, in a perspective that we haven’t had before. Rather than I hate you, I love you, it just is there. You know? It’s not good or bad, but it’s just there.
Just observe it. Just watch it. And watch the emotions as they appear. Oh, that’s interesting. I like that.
Oh, no. I don’t. Again, we go back to the original way of thinking, you know? And then we have to be aware of that, and then we have to let go of that. It’s a process that we go through, but we started on the process because we started challenging.
Yeah. Thank you. Right. Right. Right.
Right. Right. Yes. Yes. Yes.
It’s like this or it’s like this. Yes. That’s very interesting. Yeah. Yeah.
Gosh. I said something intelligent tonight. Yeah. There’s this thing of I’m angry. Right?
But then we don’t usually challenge the I that’s angry. Right? But when you start thinking who is that I that’s angry? Where is that I that’s angry? How does it exist?
No. No. You’ve got to subdue that strong emotion that tends to pervade the mind and make it fuzzy so that you can step back a little, and then you become aware of the I, and then we can go further on the path. But if we don’t deal with the emotions, I think we don’t move on, you know, we stay at that emotional level, that constant reaction to the environment. So this is great. Yes. Yes.
Yes. Well, you’re also holding on to the happiness that you want. And in response to the happiness that you want, you have aversion for what you don’t like. And so then you’re bouncing between this happiness, unhappiness. That’s right. Yeah.
Yeah. And you don’t know this. You know, we don’t know what we’re holding on to, but we just know we’re holding on to something because that’s safer than not holding on to anything, you know? And so we sort of cling and attach thinking this is safe, but actually it creates more insecurity. You know?
So I think what Buddha did first of all was he took this safe concrete ground and then shook it. Right? He turned it into sand. And so then you put your feet in the sand and you squish, you know, when your toes sort of squish in the sand and it’s not quite solid, but it is. So we go to that level.
And then Buddha took away the sand and then said, there’s nothing. Right? And that’s a sort of matrix jump. You know? You’ll be okay.
There’s nothing there. You can jump. You know? It’ll be okay. So I think we have to go in these degrees in order to feel safe, less safe, less safe, but in that less safe develop faith.
It’ll be okay. You know? If we remove the negative emotions, we won’t be we won’t end up like zombies, like robots. We’ll still have emotions, but they won’t be the negative emotions. There’ll be positive emotions. There’ll still be something there.
Yeah. And to think that, well, if I remove all this