Ven Namgyel — 2013-10-13

Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.

About this talk. In this 4.8-hour teaching, Ven Lobsang Namgyel provides detailed commentary on the Eight Worldly Dharmas—the habitual patterns of attachment and aversion that keep practitioners trapped in saṃsāra. Opening with the distinction between dharma as spiritual path and dharma as “that which holds you” on a worldly path, he systematically explores four paired concerns: praise and blame, gain and loss, pleasant and unpleasant conditions, and reputation and insignificance. For each pair, Namgyel illustrates how attachment to the positive and rejection of the negative stem from a self-cherishing mind that mistakenly grasps at a solid self. He weaves practical examples from Western life—shopping habits, low self-esteem, social media, hoarding, job loss—alongside Buddhist analysis of karma and rebirth to show how these worldly concerns create suffering. The teaching emphasizes renunciation not as rejection of happiness but as detachment from clinging, and repeatedly returns to the theme that reversing one’s ordinary reactions—rejoicing in loss, welcoming criticism, accepting blame—is the path to genuine dharma practice. Pitched at those new to Buddhism who may be attracted to the teachings but not yet equipped to practice advanced thought-transformation techniques without first stabilizing self-confidence and understanding karma.

File metadata (for organising)

File: 2013 10 13 8worldly dharmas namgyel.mp3

UUID: 5f876f44-1819-4e23-bf14-ac8ed248ec79

Teacher: Ven Lobsang Namgyel

Collection: Ven Namgyel (Ven Lobsang Namgyel)

Date: 2013-10-13

Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide

Duration: 288.3 minutes

Words: ~30,557

Offering and refuge in bodhicitta. Brief mandala, Tibetan English. Refuge, bodhicitta, Tibetan English. So the mandala offering, as I’ve said before, transforming the environment into a perfect place. So that has to come from a perfect mind.

So you’re projecting your clear light mind, your perfect mind onto what do you want? Oh, you. I am telling you, I’m dripping with technology, Dripping with it. Room service. Okay.

So from a perfect mind, your clear light mind, your Buddha nature, Buddha potential, accessing that potential, that perfection, the quality. It means it’s holding you on. Okay. Thanks. Thank you.

So it means to hold you on a path that is worldly, not Dharma in the the sense that we’d usually talk about where we’re talking about love, compassion, high wisdom, things like this. So don’t get confused when you hear eight worldly dharmas. It doesn’t mean it’s something positive. It’s actually something to be worked on, something to be removed. So it’s because it’s worldly, it’s not otherworldly.

It’s not things like bodhicitta. The word Dharma is used in this context because it’s saying it’s holding you. You’re on a path. So then we need to investigate, well, where does that path take us? If it’s worldly Dharma, where are we going?

What’s going to happen to us? So then we have this Samsāra. You know Samsāra? Yeah. They keep going around and around.

Right? So we have Samsāra, and they keep going and they have, they have grandchildren, and it keeps going and going and going and going. So Samsāra, we keep going around and around and around, and, you know, in the texts, Buddha describes the middle of that ground. This is human, we can say is in the middle of it, and then below it is great suffering. So I’ve been taught like this before.

I’m just making it up as I’m going along. And then the upper realms and we don’t think of this as suffering. So we think of human. Well, it’s not so bad. You know?

And often say, think of human realm as being a septic tank. You know a septic tank? You’re a civilized country, maybe you don’t. But in India, have septic tanks. So, a septic tank that you’ve ended up inside the septic tank, and after a while, you think, well, it’s not so bad.

You know, I can decorate it. I can make it look good. And so this is what we do in our suffering in the human realm because of certain pleasure, then we start to think the human realm’s not so bad. I can have a drink, it’s not so bad. I can have some chocolate, it’s not so bad.

I can watch my favorite TV program, it’s I got a new car, I’m in a new relationship. This is okay. When then we become very aware of the worldly the worldly dharmas. Alright? So all those things that we keep doing in order to here’s what I call it, to interior design or decorate saṃsāra.

Yeah? So you take this situation, saṃsāra, which is this uncontrolled suffering, birth, death, rebirth, on and on and on. We take that situation, and then we analyze it, and we say, well, okay, human. We often say PHR, perfect or precious human rebirth. So why is it precious?

Because we can become enlightened in this lifetime, in this human body. But if we don’t focus on that, if we’re focusing on the the worldly side of it, the pleasure. So if we focus on that, the pleasure, then we’re using up our time, and then by using it up for pleasure, the next life we can go down. We can fall into the great suffering. So there’s ghost realms, there’s hell realms, there’s various types of suffering, and Buddha described a lot of suffering.

And it’s not that there’s a place to go, it’s that your mind creates a place. This is what you should understand when we’re saying realms. You know, when we talk about hell realms. There’s not a place like you can get a ticket and you can go to that place, and that’s where you’re going to suffer. It’s not like that.

It’s that your mind, because of its particular type of actions, creates a particular type of suffering. And so we we create this hellish mind. You should say hell realm, but I think it’s better to think of a hellish mind, which we can see examples of as human beings. You know, in in the places where we are, we see suffering minds. And so that hellish mind then has others with hellish minds which are similar, and they join together in a collective situation, and then that’s what we call a realm.

It’s not a place. Alright? So maybe that makes it a bit clearer because often people think there’s an actual place where you go, and then if we can find that place, we can believe in them. You know, if we can find a hell, we can then believe in a hell, but hell is happening right right. Hell can be right there.

There can be beings without of gross form. They have a subtle form. They can be right here experiencing their hell, and because we’re not clairvoyant, we can’t see them. It doesn’t mean they don’t exist, but it’s happening right under our noses, and we don’t see it. So if you don’t believe in this hellish realms, then I think better to start investigating the hellish realms that we can perceive in our human forms.

We can look around us, and we can say, well, look at Syria, look at Iraq, look at these various places, look at but look at the mental hospitals. I don’t know if they exist so much anymore. You know, they put them out more and more these days, isn’t it? But look at the the mental hospitals. Look at the well, look at the newspapers.

You know? If you read the newspapers, you see so much suffering in the newspapers. Then you wonder how is this possible? Even in a country like Australia, how is this possible that these great sufferings happen? Then it must be because of karma created and then because of that previous negative karma created, this is the result, and the result is suffering.

So we can have suffering as humans, but we’re not talking about that that sort of ordinary human suffering. When we’re talking about this great suffering, it’s suffering that just goes on and on and on and on. And the reason that Buddha taught about this is twofold, and it’s important you know this. One is to develop renunciation. I don’t wanna go there, so you you should have fear.

You know, we often think of fear as something that we don’t want, but in this case, it’s a healthy fear. It’s a positive fear. That’s not what I want. I don’t wanna go there. Right?

So you can start to investigate before we go solo. One of the realms, which is a suffering, which is just below human is the animal realm. We can easily investigate the animal realm. Do you want to be an animal? And people say, well, it’s not so bad, you know, dog or cat.

But will you get a really nice owner? Can’t guarantee it. Right? Many people say, I wouldn’t mind being a corgi, the queen’s corgi, you know, with the silver tray and the delicious food like that. So I wouldn’t mind being the queen’s corgi or the Dalai Lama’s dog or a cat lover’s cat.

The problem is we don’t have such control in the Bardo that we can say, I’m going there. The lamas say, I’m going to Spain or Tibet or wherever they’ve chosen as a rebirth. They decide. They decide the mother and the father, and they have that decision to go there. We’re floating around with our karma and our delusion going somewhere, but not quite sure.

So we we should become clearer, you know, in the living and dying that we’re talking about Tuesday and Thursday, we’re talking particularly about death. But, you know, where do you want to go? Do you really want to be a dog or a cat? And if you were a dog and a cat, would you like to be on the streets in India? Is what I always think.

You know? Because, particularly dogs, they have stones thrown at them. You know, they’re very, feared because of rabies. So it’s not that people hate dogs. It’s they don’t like stray dogs because they’re afraid of rabies, and so they’ll throw stones at the dogs.

And so look at the animal realm and think to yourself, is that what I want to be in the future? And then you get a more realistic idea about the suffering of animals rather than interior designing the the animal realm. Would you like to be a bird? Well, not so bad. You know, you think, I can go on Barbados.

But if you’re a little bird, that’s a lot of flapping, isn’t it? You don’t think about that. You just think, I wouldn’t mind being a bird. And then you think of that little bird flap flap flap flap rest flap flap flap flap. And and the birds are not gonna be thinking Barbados.

Barbados. You know? Canary islands. I hear canaries are from there. I should go there.

Flat flap flap like this. The bird is just desperate to get somewhere where it’s safe and where it’s got food. It’s not sinking holidays. You know, Sunday, I’ve got the day off, and I can go and do some meditation like that. It’s not thinking like that.

It’s thinking of safety, and it’s it’s got fear. And that’s what Lama Zopa says. If you watch birds, you see they’re very nervous. We don’t think like that, isn’t it? You know, we do think, aren’t they cute, nice colors?

But look at the nervousness, how they’re always looking around. Why? Because they’re thinking, I’m lunch. For a cat, for a bigger bird, they’re lunch. This is the snack.

You know? So they’re looking and always looking behind them. So imagine living with that fear. So this is what’s pervasive in the animal realm. The main feeling that we have for animals is fear.

So when you’re checking out this worldly situation, do you want to live with constant fear? We have fear as humans, don’t we? We can be afraid of bombings or, children getting sick or whatever it is, losing your job. We can have fear, but we talk out of the fear. Oh, don’t be ridiculous.

You know, that’s not going to happen or whatever. So we can have fear as humans, but think of this fear that you can’t talk yourself out of, that you’re living with twenty four hours a day. How would that be? Right? You wouldn’t like it.

So then the second thing that we need to develop is compassion, isn’t it? When you go into the fear and you think, oh, that’s awful. No. I don’t want that. Then the second thing is, but there are beings who are experiencing that, and then compassion arises.

So it’s twofold. One is what don’t you want? You don’t want the animal realm, and you don’t want that fear, that pervasive fear that goes on and on and on. And on the other hand, there are animals who are experiencing it, so then we should develop our compassion and our love for them and include them in our prayers. It gives you a stronger motivation.

Okay? And then if you go below the animal realm, then we have hungry ghost. So hungry ghost is said to be caused by miserliness, not wanting to give. You know? This is mine.

You’re not getting it. Very important to think about hungry ghost now, not when you’re dying, because when you’re dying, you could be saying, you’re not getting it, but they’re getting it. Right? Because you’re leaving, and then they can fight over it once you’re gone. So we have to deal with hungry ghost when we’re alive, when we’re healthy, when we’re okay.

So think about the hungry ghost mind that never has enough. This is a marker of our society now. We don’t have enough. So if you go to Indian houses, they might have a settee, a TV, a bed. You know, they’re very basic.

You go to Australian houses, we have a lot of stuff and still looking to buy more stuff. So what do we do with the old stuff? You know, gotta get rid of the old stuff so we’ve got space for the new stuff. So the hungry ghost is that mind that is dissatisfied, always wanting more and more and more. Right?

And the the pictures that depict hungry ghost, thin throat, big stomach. Can’t get enough food for the stomach that’s always hungry. So then translate that into a mind always wanting more and more and more. But, also, it could be, food. It could be always wanting more food even though we’ve got enough food.

So, you’re watching TV. You’re not hungry, but you have to have popcorn, or you have to have chocolate, or whatever it is. You say you go to the fridge, or you go to the cupboard, you get something, you come back, and you’re eating, and you didn’t even realize you got something. It’s just on automatic. But this is the hungry ghost karma from the past that’s pushing you into have more, have more.

So the antidote to this is to be satisfied and to give away what you have that you haven’t used for at least a year. So if you’ve got stuff in your house that you haven’t used for a year, do you really want to keep it? If you do, it’s okay. We’re not coming around to check. You know?

The Buddha House, team will swoop in with the TV cameras. You know? We just wanna check, are you a good Buddhist? But one of the suggestions is, do you have resources that could be used by others that you’re not currently using? And then this is good to pass it on to others.

And this makes you feel very good because the things that you thought of as junk, not usable anymore, you’re starting to pass on to others. And this counteracts the miserliness, this feeling of it’s mine, and you’re not getting it. Alright? And, again, this comes back to a worldly path, a worldly concern, something that we’re trapped in, and we feel trapped. You know, I’ve got all this stuff.

And now the the, I don’t know if this is the latest problem, but one of the problems of the West is hoarding. Isn’t it? Shocking when you see these programs of people with so much stuff. They’ve got to climb over all the stuff to their little place where they can lie because they don’t have any space for anything else. I mean, how does it get to be like this that we have to keep shopping and shopping and shopping and can’t throw anything away, can’t give anything away?

We have to keep it all. That mind is a terrible suffering, you know, that it’s it’s all mine, and you’re not getting it. So think about that hungry ghost mind. And, again, not about do others have a hungry ghost mind, but do I? Because it’s painful to look inside.

It’s much easier to say, oh, Sheridan, she’s a hungry ghost. She’s a hungry ghost. You know? I know what to do to sort her out. You know?

I don’t know what to do to sort myself out, but I know what to sort to do to sort her out. You know what I mean? This is what we tend to do with the dharma in the beginning is we project it out onto others and say, I know how to fix them, you know, but don’t know how to fix myself. Dharma is for yourself, for your own mind, and you start to work with your own mind, and that’s how you become an inspiration to others. You’re not an inspiration if you go around picking on everybody else and telling them what to do.

Right? So we have to personalize this and say, am I suffering? And not run away from the suffering. Your meditation practice is to sit with the suffering, not to run away from the suffering. Right?

And when we do that, we develop a stronger conviction in our Dharma practice, but also we develop courage in face of fear. We develop generosity in the face of miserliness. This is how we develop qualities, but we have to go in. Then, hungry ghost, and then we can think about the hot hells, the cold hells. So there are examples of very cold places and very hot places on this planet.

You can experience it in Adelaide. Isn’t it? One day like this and the next day like that. So the temperature changes so quickly, doesn’t it? But these days, we have our little remote controls that you you know, you click the the remote control.

We don’t necessarily even think about temperature if we’re inside, only if we’re going outside. The car I was in, I think it was Finland, and I got into somebody’s car, and it was, March, April. There was still a lot of snow, like deep snow around the city. And we’re driving along, and I’m thinking, oh, I’m getting hotter and hotter. I think there’s something wrong.

You know? And I wasn’t sure whether I should tell her, I think your car’s about to blow up. But my bum was getting hotter and hotter. You know? And it was a very strange feeling.

I’d never felt this before in India. You know? So and I’m sort of squirming around a bit, and she said, oh, I forgot to tell you the heat. The seats are heated. You know?

I said, oh, thank goodness for that. You know, I I can relax, but I started thinking there was something seriously wrong. So now cars have got to this extent, and you have split heating and cooling between the two sides of the car so you can have your temperature. So without thinking of the extreme hot and cold hells, start to think about the ordinary hot and cold that we experience in our lives and how quickly we reach for the remote control or for the heater. We don’t suffer like we used to suffer.

Right? I can remember in my grandmother’s time, even in the kitchen, we had this great big it it was something like a Rayburn, but it was one of the old Rayburns, you know, before Rayburn. And, oh, all the fiddling around to get it started, you know, these sticks that you have to light, the the make the flame, and then the pieces of wood, and and then bigger wood and all this. So just to cook, you had to go through this big palaver, you know, and then we had this gas stick that you could connect to the gas, and then you lit it and you put it inside the coal or the wood to get it started. These days, life is so much simpler, but actually in another way much more complicated.

You know? So we can just yeah. We can flick a switch to switch on heating or cooling or light, but what happens when it doesn’t work? We completely freak out. Remember when they had a, a time in New York when the power system completely broke down and people on the twenty fifth floor, people in their eighties were climbing twenty five flights of stairs to get home, and then once they were home, they couldn’t cook because they only had electricity.

They only had microwaves and electric ovens. They didn’t know what to do. Right? So now think about heat and cold. How much do we do to keep adjusting the temperatures to make ourselves comfortable?

And for some people, that’s a problem, and for some people, it’s not. But we need to consider it as a beginning point to go more deeply into and so what would it be like to be cold all the time? Not just five, ten minutes, but imagine day after day after day, and there’s no alleviation of the suffering until the karma is finished, and then you come out of that suffering. Imagine what it feels like, the fear, the anxiety. So hot and cold.

So these sufferings that we can experience below the below the human, we usually say below because it’s just suffering, suffering, suffering, suffering. It goes on and on and on. The ones above human, as I said before, we call the upper realms, but actually still suffering, but more subtle suffering. It’s like a pleasure suffering. It’s like a mixture.

So, then we have the demigods and the gods. So I’ll write it down for you. And, when you read this, it may seem a bit confusing if you don’t know about Dharma teachings. So the demigods, they have jealousy and anger. So do you have jealousy and anger?

When we’re considering the eight worldly dharmas, we should start considering, do I have? Not do they have. So the demigods, jealousy and anger towards the gods. So the gods, I think of as is it Millswood? No.

Where am I staying? Millswood. I’m in the god realms of Millswood, and you are all living on the wrong sides of the track. And so you’re looking at me in Millswood and thinking, well, he’s okay. You know?

Look at him. He’s happy. So that’s what the demigods do towards the gods. In every city, there’s a god realm and a lower, the other side of the tracks realm. Right?

I’m usually on the other side of the tracks. So, you can go from this side of the tracks to the other side of the tracks, and then you realize the god realm that we thought was so happy is not so happy after all. Between behind their high fences, the electricity in the fence, the dogs, why do they have all of that? Because they’re afraid. Who are they afraid of?

The demigods. So the demigods are making their plans. You know? We’re gonna go, and we’re gonna take what the god realms have got. So it’s that feeling of, again, dissatisfaction.

So pervading all of this is dissatisfaction in every realm. We’re not satisfied. We always want better. Okay? So dissatisfaction and the demigods particularly, we’re looking at anger and jealousy.

And what’s jealousy? You see something somebody else has got and you want it. And you’re not going to work for it, you want to take it. And then it involves you in scheming, lying, cheating. You know?

It involves you in those negativities. So from that initial mind of jealousy come the other negativities. I want what you’ve got, and I’m not going to work hard for it. I’m going to steal it from you. And so in the demigods, it’s that plotting, you know, getting together with your mates and plotting how to go into the god realm and how to take what they’ve got.

Is it clear? And the anger is seeing them in a distorted way, seeing the god realm in a distorted way. You’re not seeing it clearly with wisdom. Of course, you’re accessing your ignorance, your suffering mind, and you’re seeing the god realm as just much better than you, much happier than you, getting what getting what you’d like to have, and getting it very easily. Look at these people.

You know, the god realm, they’re just sitting back having a great time. It’s not fair. Right? So when we have ignorance, then we don’t see things as they are. We see things in a distorted, delusional way.

Ignorance is one of the delusional minds. If I put ignorance down here, this is the fundamental mind that then distorts and produces the other delusions. Okay? So I said to you before, you have this clear light mind, clear light nature, Buddha nature. Has it anybody not heard this before?

You’ve all heard this, haven’t you? So we have this purity within us, but why aren’t we accessing it twenty four hours a day? Why isn’t it manifesting? Why not? So I like to think of it this way.

So this is your purity, and around it, it’s a bit like a fried egg. Around it, you’ve got your karma and your delusion, obscuring it, masking it, stopping it from showing itself. But every now and again, a crack appears in the karma and delusion as you’re purifying and you’re doing good things, cracks appear. And out shines the light. I know what to do.

You know? You get these moments of wisdom. I know what you should do, and then it goes. And you think, oh, that was a nice mind. That was a light bulb moment, wasn’t it?

You know, a hundred watt bulb. You don’t see them much anymore. So there was that bright light, light representing wisdom, and then it shuts down. It goes away. So it’s very helpful to think, I have this clarity.

I have this wisdom. We all do. Animals do. Hungry ghosts do. Hot and cold hells do.

Demigods, gods, we all have it. There’s no difference between any of us. We all have this Buddha potential, which is why as Buddhists, we have this reverence for life. Because in that way, you’re revering Buddha potential, the potential that every being has to become enlightened. Alright?

So we have this basic ignorance. It’s distorting and then producing desire, anger, hatred, all these other emotions. So in every one of these realms, of course, there’s always ignorance present, but there’s sometimes a stronger emotion along with it, and in the demigods, it’s anger and jealousy. In the animal realm, it could be doubt and fear. In the, hungry ghost realm, it would be miserliness and, not wanting to give, not wanting to be generous.

So in the demigod realm, we’re particularly thinking about anger, jealousy mixed with ignorance. You’ve created a duality, me and you, me and them. They have what I want, and I’m going to go and take it. I’m going to go and take it away from them. So this is the particular duality in the demigod realm.

They go to the god realm. They’ve got their plan. Right? They go to the god realm. They’re going to climb over the gates.

They’re going to do something to the god realm, and they try and they fail because the god realm’s got better security guards. It’s got a better system set up. So the demigods go to the god realm with the anger and jealousy, wanting to steal, wanting to take. The god realm repels them, sends them back. They come back.

They sort of lick their wounds, and then they start all over again. Alright? So this is again it’s a cycle. This demigod, they go to the god realm. They want to take what they’ve got, get it go back, lick their wounds, dissatisfied, anger, jealousy arises again, go back, and it goes on and on and on.

And that’s how you just pass time. Long long time passes just doing this backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards. That’s your life. You’re not going to do anything else except live within that frame of mind. And when that negative karma is used up, then the next life would be more beneficial, would be better because of having used up your negative karma.

And then the god realm, so, you know, we should say every one of these karmas is impermanent, and it’s going to finish. You don’t stay in this situation forever. You use up the karma. When you leave, you go to another realm, another state of mind, and then again, you experience it, and then that finishes. You go to another realm, you’ve experienced it.

It goes on and on and on, and this is what we call saṃsāra, saṃsāra, around and around and around. Okay? So none of these realms are permanent, unchanging. They’re constantly changing. And then the god realm, Maybe better not to use the word bliss, but great happiness or pleasure.

I don’t know which word to use that you don’t get confused, but it’s a little bit like Hollywood, Bollywood. They’re having parties twenty four hours a day. They’re having a great time. They’re really enjoying themselves. And it’s said that, the big problem about the god realm is that they don’t want to know anything about dharma.

So twenty four hours a day, their mind is full of wanting happiness. It’s a sort of party place. You know? So if you like trance music, you’d hear trance music twenty four hours a day. If you like Mozart, you’d hear Mozart twenty four hours a day.

Your karma produces this on and on and on feeling of, great happiness, but it’s not real happiness. It’s pleasure. It’s the alleviation of suffering. It’s not real happiness. Alright?

Because if it was real happiness, it wouldn’t be caused, and it wouldn’t finish. It would go on and on. But, again, it finishes. You’ve used up your positive karma. You come back into one of the lower realms.

So great happiness and twenty four hours a day, and you’ve got everything that you want, food, drink, anything. And then it said that, you know, there’s a knock at the door, and your guru’s there. And you open the door, and you say, yes. What do you want? And the guru says, I’m your guru.

You know, what are you doing here? And you’re, oh, I’m busy. We’re having a party. It’s great. And you slam the door in your guru’s face.

So this this is a great possibility. It’s happened in the past with these gurus who are clairvoyant, who could go to these realms and Buddha himself. There’s very little you can do for anybody in the god realm. You just have to wait until they come out, and then again they go back into one of the other rebirths. So the god realm, the particular suffering is using up your positive karma.

So you’re using up all this karma that you’re creating just to be in the party zone. And then the second suffering is just before you’re about to leave the god realm, you’ve got big problems. You start to wither. Up until now, you’ve got these garlands and flowers and, you know, things on you that smell beautiful, and you always look good. You always smell good.

When you’re about to leave the god realm, these flowers start to wither, and you start to give off a bad smell, and people start to know, the people around you, you’re going to leave. And so they shun you. They stay away from you. They don’t want to know anything about you. So this produces a huge suffering before you’re going to leave the god realm.

So you’ve got this twofold suffering. One using up your karma, which you don’t know about, and the second is that just before leaving the god realm, there’s a tremendous suffering, and then you feel rejected. You feel nobody wants to know you. And so there’s that distancing between you and the others. And this, I think, you know, it lasts a short time as far as we’re concerned in the human time, but in the god realm time, this, separation, this feeling of being separated, it feels like it’s a long, long, long time.

So it appears that the time scale in these realms are different from the human time scale. It’s a little bit like dogs and humans. You know how we say one human year is seven dog years? It seems to be the same in these other realms, that, their time is much, much, much longer. So we’re talking five hundred to a thousand years in each of these realms, the god realm, the the demigod realm.

On average, five to a thousand years or more. It’s a long time to be wasting. So you could go to the god realm. You’re partying. You’re having a great time, and it seems like a short time to you.

You come back to the human realm. Maitreya’s gone. You know? So the time when Maitreya’s coming, he came, he’s gone because so much time has passed by. We’re now in the degenerate times of the dharma, so you know about that.

Right? The the degenerate times are here, so there’s less dharma available in the world. So it seems like right now, there’s more dharma. But when you think about all the lamas who are dying out and the texts that are missing, this is the sign of the degenerate time. And so the prediction is that the diseases and the sicknesses and the pollution will increase in the world because of greed.

So this is a prediction that Buddha made, more than two two thousand years ago, so two thousand six hundred years ago. He made the prediction that this is going to happen because of greed. And he said this particularly because you’ve got a choice. If you choose not to act with greed, we can change things. Right?

So we have what’s called degenerate times, and in India, this is called Kali Yuga. So Kali is black. You know, we’ve got this goddess called Kali in India, this black goddess. So Kali Yuga means black time. So it means a time when there’s more and more suffering.

So in Hindu tradition, they also talk about Kali Yuga. And in the Christian tradition, they also talk about the suffering times and Maitreya coming back. So now Christians are talking about Maitreya coming. Buddhists have Maitreya coming. Not sure why the Christians have Maitreya.

Do you know why? Yeah. They talk about Maitreya. Oh, Maitreya is a big thing in Christianity now, and even some people say they are Maitreya. There’s a guy in Spain no, France.

There’s a guy in France who says he is Maitreya, and he’s holding meetings in Paris. And thousands of people come because he says he’s the coming Christ. He’s Maitreya. Not sure. So, we have this degenerate times, Kali Yuga, and what it means is that because of more and more greed, it affects the environment, and then because it affects the environment negatively, it affects our human bodies, and then we have more disease, more sickness because the air is not so clean, the water is not so clean, the food is not so clean, and then the medicine is not as powerful.

So these are the signs of Kali Yuga. And the lamas say that we’re now in Kali Yuga and that it could take five hundred more years for the the sort of peak of Kali Yuga. But if we slow Kali Yuga down, if we’re not so greedy, it could be a thousand years, two thousand years. Who knows? But at the peak of Kali Yuga, when it’s the worst time, Maitreya will appear.

Maitreya will have a shining beautiful body, be very healthy and different from everybody else, and people will look at him and say, well, why are you like this? Why are you so healthy and so good looking, you know, in the clean, good looking? And then he will give teachings on loving-kindness, particularly loving-kindness, Maitreya, and then things will start to improve, and then we’ll get to a maximum lifetime of maybe a hundred years or two hundred years. So things will get better, and then again it starts to go down. And this is what’s happened from beginningless time.

Things get much better, things get worse. Things get better, things get worse. So in Buddhism, it’s not all gloom and doom. You know, it’s going to get to this terrible time, and then that’s it. It’s that we get to this terrible time, and because of that bad time, things start to get better or to want more because we have desire mind.

We want something better. We want something nicer. Things start to go up, get better and better. It reaches a peak, and then it starts to go again. And this this cyclic time that we go through, getting better, getting worse.

Okay. So does does that help to give you a sort of overall picture and some of the feelings that we need to start working with right now, particularly the anger, the jealousy. If we’re in the god realm, which means no problems at all, then we need to be thinking about the plight of others. How are others doing? So if you’re up there, you need to be looking down, And what can I do for them?

If you’re down, you you can think about those up and rejoice, but you can also think about how to change it. What can I do about it? So what can I do to transform these negative energies, particularly the anger and the jealousy, the fear? So we have some emotions here that we’ve already established, haven’t we? Anger, jealousy, fear, ignorance.

And I didn’t write it down before, but important one is miserliness, the antidote to generosity. Miserliness is the antidote to generosity. So you have the thought to give, you know, I should give that. I don’t use it. You know, it’d be very good to give it to Mary.

And you go, oh, but I don’t, you know. And that’s what miserliness does. It pulls you back. You want to give in the beginning. You have this thought to give, and then the next thought is, but and it pulls you back.

No. I’m not going to give it. Alright? So, we have varying degrees of this. So check up on miserliness because this is very important to counteract in order to have generosity.

And the first of the six perfections is generosity. It’s supposed to be the easiest perfection. As bodhisattvas, the easiest thing that we can do is practice generosity. But actually for us, it’s not easy. It’s very interesting.

We’re probably in a time where we’ve got the most that any generations ever had. If you think about past generations, the war generations, the eighteen hundreds, you know, think about the the mills and the mines and all this, you know, the very difficult jobs that people had and very little money and a great deal of suffering. We’ve come from all of that. We’ve gone through the wars, not having enough food, not just not having enough. So, yeah, you can understand the miserliness.

We’re now at the point where we’ve got the most that we’ve ever had. We can’t give it away. Just in case, you know? Well, you know, in the future, I may need that. And so it’s that trick, you know, the trick of the mind that says, I want to be generous.

No. I want to give. No. It keeps pulling you back from doing it. And so what that does is it stops you from experiencing success.

It stops you from having more. You’re running out of your karma. You keep going to that karma bank with your card, and you think, oh, I must have that TV, you know, the TV. I sort it out. I saw a forty inch TV advertised the other day, three hundred and forty nine dollars, I think it was.

I thought, wow, so cheap. You know, compared to India, it’s so cheap. So, you know, here you could be think, oh, forty inch TV. You go to the karma Bank, get the money, go and get your forty inch TV. And then you think, oh, but now I need a new satellite system and going satellite system satellite system, and then DVD would be good.

If you go and you go to get the DVD and the machine goes, the card goes, it’s gone. What happened? Bankrupt. You know? Karmically bankrupt.

So this is what we need to become aware of, the karmic bankruptcy that we can experience by taking and taking and taking. In our generation, we’ve taken a lot, whether it’s housing, material possessions, what holidays, you know, whatever it is, we’ve taken a lot. How much do we give back? Right? So it’s okay to use things, to have that happiness and that pleasure, but are we sharing it with others, or are we just keeping it to ourselves?

Are we being miserly with these good feelings? The lamas always say, when you have good feelings, offer it to the Buddhas. So this can be a good beginning that when you experience something pleasant, something pleasurable, offer it to the Buddha. Say, you know, may you have this, may you experience this, and then offer it to all sentient beings. When you see something like fireworks or a lot of lights, you offer it to the Buddhas, you offer it to all sentient beings.

If you start to generate that type of mind, you want others to be happy, and you start to develop that rejoicing mind instead of the jealous mind, the grasping mind. Okay? Where are we now? What time do we have tea? Twelve.

Thank you, dear. Okay. So any questions about this? Yes, Sheridan? Must be something that’s not clear.

Please. Yeah. Right. Okay. And another teacher, a student asked, when we have Yes.

Yes. Oh. Oh. So somebody who’s experiencing pleasure or happiness, human being, right, experiencing pleasure and happiness, should we offer it to the Buddhas? And the answer at that time by somebody else, was no because it’s suffering.

Right? So the pleasure that we’re experiencing at the moment, if I’m experiencing pleasure, it’s an alleviation of suffering. Right? But it’s not suffering. It’s an alleviation of suffering.

So therefore, as humans, it’s what we label happiness. Right? It’s not true happiness, but it’s what we would label as happiness. So, let me see. When a new baby’s born in the family and you’re all standing around the new baby going goo goo goo, cluck cluck cluck, isn’t it, Jan?

Cluck cluck cluck. Goo goo goo. Everybody feels so happy, isn’t it? So that’s human happiness. It’s what we we term happiness.

In the Buddhist context, of course, there’s some foundation of ignorance. There is a foundation of ignorance, a duality appearing, but it’s not so manifest. It’s it’s minor in comparison to other situations where, for instance, I really love you, and I really hate you. This is when the ignorance is much stronger. But in these situations of great happiness, the ignorance can be not so manifest smaller.

But I think in Lama Zopa’s tradition, he just seems to like rejoicing and, just be happy, happy, happy, rejoice, rejoice, offer it offer it offer it. And I think that if you’re offering it and it’s not quite appropriate to offer it because it’s happiness, but it’s tainted with ignorance, what would the Buddhas do with it if they could really receive it? So I’m a I’m a suffering sentient being. I’m offering my happiness to the Buddhas. What are they going to do with it?

They’re gonna throw it back at me and say, oi, you. You know? I don’t want your dirty, disgusting pleasure. I think they’d be happy if I was generating that type of mind. I mean, it’s just my opinion.

But I think they’d rejoice and they’d be happy because they’d see that this is a path. It’s a process to reach the bodhisattva’s mind, the Buddha’s mind. There’s got to be a path. You know? You’ve got to have your starting point, and then your path goes all over the place.

Your plan your path goes everywhere. And I think as long as you accept that and you accept that your path below eighth level bodhisattva is going to be tainted by karma and delusion. Below eighth level bodhisattva. Once you reach eighth level bodhisattva, you only have very subtle delusion. But until eighth level bodhisattva, you have gross delusion.

Eighth level Bodhisattva, you can manifest so many forms. You can walk through walls. You can do incredible things, but you still have gross delusion up until eighth level Bodhisattva. So how are we going to get to eighth level bodhisattva if we’re not rejoicing, if we’re not offering? You know?

So I I tend to think that even though there may be ignorance associated with the pleasure, the happiness, that if we offer it, it starts to develop a good habit that we should have rather than saying, wait until there’s no ignorance, until your eighth level bodhisattvas. I think we’re in trouble because we’re in the degenerate times. We’re in Kali Yuga. You know? If you look at Kali Yuga, there’s so many obstacles to us developing love and compassion, developing generosity, developing, wisdom.

I think there’s many, many obstacles. So if we’re going to not use every situation possible to become enlightened, we’re going to go much much more slowly on our enlightenment path. And sentient beings are suffering. Then it should then it should be beneficial. Yeah.

I think if you know, always in Buddhism, we always talk about three things, motivation, action, dedication. What I call mad. Mad, m a d. Go mad every day. You know?

Motivation, action, dedication. Before you do any action, check why you’re doing it. Do it in accordance with the motivation and quickly dedicate before you lose the positive energy. So as Catherine’s saying, if you have a positive motivation, the Buddhas would look at this positive motivation and think you’re doing your best. So where’s the fault?

You know? Is it from you as a human being? Is there a fault they’re offering this to the Buddhas? I think offering can’t have a fault if it’s based on positive motivation. But if it’s based on negative motivation, ignorance, I want something back for it, then, of course, there could be a problem.

So it depends on which way the practice is done. And, of course, in Buddhism, there’s always somebody who will say yes and somebody who will say no. That’s Buddhist teachings, you know. But I think check. What would Buddha say if Buddha would manifest here and then say, I have this happiness that you’re here.

I’ve seen you, and I’ve have I’ve got this happiness, and I’d like to offer you this happiness. And Buddha slaps you and says, how dare you? You know, how dare you offer me this happiness? This is tainted by ignorance. I wonder.

I I can’t see it happening. I just always put myself in the position of the other. If I was Buddha with great love and compassion, great wisdom, and Buddha saw that for the first time Namgyal offered something, wouldn’t Buddha have a party? Break out the cupcakes, you know, the Buddha cupcakes and the tea and have a party because you think, wow, this is amazing. A little crack in that miserliness, that self-cherishing, that self grasping, wouldn’t Buddha be really happy rather than saying, he’s still got ignorance.

How dare he offer this, whatever it is? I think he’d be happy at the generosity, the the open spirit. But it’s just my opinion. In a similar way, I’ve heard that Yes. Yes.

Yes. Reformed or deformed? I would hope you’d end up reformed, but yeah. But, but, yes, a horse. Yeah.

You can end up like a horse or some some, with a hoof, things like that. So it is said that because of, yeah, you have positive motivation, you do the prostration, so you’re still going to get the positive energy from it, but there’s some negative karma associated with it when it’s not done properly. So every action has a corresponding result. Every action has a result. So you’re receiving the positive karma from the prostration covering the atoms of the earth.

You’re getting the positive merit from that. On the other hand, if you keep your fist like this, then you’re going to create a karma to experience this. You’ve got you get the karma from that. Another another You get the positive karma from that, the positive karma from the the prostration, but on the downside, you’re getting some negative karma. It’s a mix then it becomes a mixed karma, not completely clean, clear, pure.

And I think every karma that we create, the positive karmas, they’re all mixed because of ignorance. Every single action that we do is tainted by ignorance, isn’t it? There has to be ignorance involved because we haven’t got realization of emptiness. I am prostrating to the Buddha. We don’t think I’m empty.

The Buddha’s empty. The action’s empty. We think I’m prostrating to Buddha. So there’s subtle ignorance under there. Right?

So then there’d be a a subtle negative result, which is we stay in saṃsāra. The greater result is we get out of saṃsāra in that mixed result. Right? So you can have positive negative karmas together. It’s said that when you’re very angry and you look at the Buddha, there’s still some positive karma.

Even you’re really, really angry. So just by the power of the object, you get that positive energy from the thangka, the statue. On the downside, you have some result from the anger. So, again, it’s a mixed karma. This is not that, you know, the Buddha’s punishing you for putting your hand like this, nothing like that.

It’s just because you did that, you had the choice of this or this. Instead of creating human karma, you created a different type of karma. But everything is karma, And I think karma’s very difficult for us to understand because coming from the tradition we come from, it appears to be punishment. You naughty girl, we’re gonna get you for for doing this. It’s nobody punishing you.

It’s just a result. You did this, you get the result. You do this, you get the result. That’s what karma is. It’s just natural.

So that’s why Buddha taught what are the results for these actions. Do this, that’s the result. Do this, that’s the result. How do we know though? Nobody made it up.

Buddha. That’s what you have to check. Do you trust him? And if you don’t trust him, this is when the whole thing falls down based on karma and rebirth. Those two are very difficult, isn’t it?

karma’s difficult, and rebirth is difficult unless you can remember your past lives. I mean, I was I was very lucky to be with Lama Ösel when he was small, and I saw many cases of when he remembered people from past lives. And I got this very strong feeling that past lives do exist. I believed in in it anyway, but from his behavior, from what he was saying, and from what people told me, then I really developed a strong conviction past lives exist. But but I think these two things, karma and then the result, future lives, you connect these two together, very difficult.

karma, I think the Buddha said, until you’re enlightened, you don’t understand karma. So as ordinary beings like us, we don’t understand karma. We can understand a little bit. If I do that, I’m likely to get this, isn’t it? Oh, that’s nice.

You know? But nobody catches me. I steal this, and I think, I got away with it. The police didn’t get me. The owner doesn’t know I did it because I completely lied.

You know? Did you see my my case? No. You know? Maybe she did it.

So I completely get away with this, and often kids do or adults, but often kids do, and then they think, oh, I can get away with things. Right? So karma is not immediate, which is why it’s very difficult to understand. If in the moment you killed that cockroach, now my kitchen’s clean. If in that moment when you broke the cockroach’s back, your back broke, you would understand karma because you’d connect it.

Broken, broken. But broken and five lifetimes later, you have a car accident and you break your back, you don’t think back and think, oh, that must be to do when I killed that cockroach and blah blah. You don’t think like that. Right? So that’s why in Buddhism, we use, this type of intellect, this type of reasoning and wisdom and knowledge to try and guide us to the right path, to the right understanding.

And you know for two thousand six hundred years, very clever minds, cleverer than us, have been trying to disprove Buddha. Haven’t been able to. Trying to prove Buddha lied. Haven’t been able to. But we have extraordinary examples, the Dalai Lama, Lama Zopa, you know, these examples of how the Buddhist path leads you to perfection.

The examples are there. So you look at those examples, then you look at, people who’ve tried to disprove, haven’t been able to. So you get some sort of feeling for Buddha that why would he lie to me when all he wanted was to stop me from suffering? That was his point. The first noble truth was suffering.

Second noble truth, the truth of suffering, the cause of suffering, the cessation of suffering. Let me teach you a path to get you out of that suffering. Not let me teach you a path to get you into suffering, into problems. I want to get you out, and that’s what’s been happening over all these years. So you have to develop a conviction.

It’s true. What he’s teaching is true, not about karma, impermanence, death, precious human rebirth, compassion, love. You know, these subjects that you can check, you check them until you’ve removed your doubt. But, you know, you can keep checking and checking and checking and checking and there may be a point that you never reach that that feeling of faith. You never remove your doubt, then this is a terrible suffering.

Doubt is a suffering, isn’t it? Doubt is yes, no. Yes, no. Yes, no. So you have to reach that that feeling of faith in the Buddha so that then you can move forwards.

You stop vacillating. I could never say this word in Europe, you know, vacillating, going backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards. The Tibetans say it’s like a two pronged needle. You’re trying to sew with a two pronged needle. It’s impossible.

Yes. No. Yes. No. Yes.

No. That’s what doubt is. It’s one of the delusions. It’s one of the confused states of mind, and we all have it. We don’t come into Buddhism thinking, oh, it must be true.

We come into it cynical, thinking, I’m not sure about the look at the weird paintings. You know? Look at this. Look at the we come in into it with cynicism. Right?

And by meeting people who practice for a while, you start to develop some feeling, oh, maybe it works, maybe. But, again, this feeling of faith in Buddha, it’s difficult to develop unless you look at the qualities of Buddha. And then the I like to read the Mahasiddhas, the life stories of people who practice Dharma. That really helps. So the eighty four Mahasiddhas or Milarepa, these sort of stories, it can help you to develop a feeling of faith because they also had doubts.

But when you practice, then you get the result, then you feel it’s true. I think it’s true, but it takes time. I know. Yes, Jan, dear? You have a deep and meaningful question, don’t you?

No. Lunch is not twelve. It’s twelve thirty. But we don’t have a tea break? I mean, gosh, Jan.

Yeah. Does any does anybody need to go to the bathroom? You two have already been anyway. I’m keeping keeping a log. Yeah.

Go on, Sue. So if you want to go to the bathroom, go now, and we’ll wait until you get back. How long would you like to Half an hour. I want that he want. Okay.

So if you’ve urinated, saying it politely, we’re starting with the eight worldly concerns. So you have the first pair, and they’re all in pairs as four pairs. The first pair is praise and blame. Okay? Praise and blame.

Can you read that green? Can you read that green? It’s not as strong, is Calming. I thought the green might calm you in the face of the storm. Praise and blame, I think, is very easy for us to understand because when we’re praised, there’s a definite change of mind, isn’t there?

More positive, happier. You can remember praise from years ago. Somebody said something nice. You can remember it ten, twenty, thirty years ago. At school, if your teacher said, oh, you are a clever girl or a clever boy.

You can remember this years and years and years. So praise, we remember very easily, and it can have a continuing effect on the mind. And then blame, same thing. We can also remember from a long time ago, blame, you broke that cup, and you did or you didn’t, but still you’ll remember the blame. And how does it how does it affect you?

What does it do to your mind? Which way does it move your mind? So in this case, we have to be a little bit skillful and stepping back from the mind, stepping back and becoming aware of the mind, and we’re analyzing the effect that this has on the mind. So the mind has its clear light nature, its purity, and now we’re adding something into it. We’re adding praise into it.

And what effect does that praise have on the mind? So as I said the other day, I think of it as a bicycle pump that you’re attaching to the ego, and you pump, and the ego gets bigger and bigger. So when you’re being praised, it can have that effect of the ego getting bigger and thinking, I am incredible. I am really good. You know?

Look at me, people. I’m amazing. So in the extreme, it can do that. So, of course, we go from the middle, balanced, up to any extreme. You have to think of your own examples and how it works on you.

So what does it do to you? How does it affect you when you’re being praised, and what are you avoiding? What are being attached to? What are you avoiding? Alright?

So when you’re being praised, you start to attach to the praise, and because we’re dissatisfied, we want to hear more praise. One time is not enough. So you may change outfits. How do I look? You know, the next day, because you got praise the day before.

You’re looking good. You know, your outfit’s really nice. Tomorrow, another outfit. How am I looking? Oh, okay.

That’s not what you’re looking for. Now you’re attached to praise. You want more compliments. You want to hear good things. Alright?

So attachment to praise, and then are you attached to blame? So you don’t look good, you did something wrong, you burnt the dinner or or or or or think of your own examples. So again, we have this situation of here, we think of this side as maybe I use a different color. We think of this side as the positive, and we think of this side as the negative, isn’t it? So if we put a line down the middle, and we could say we would call this balanced, but in Buddhism, we would still say there’s ignorance, so it can’t be perfect.

Right? We’d say this is balanced. There’s still ignorance as something fundamental, so it can’t be perfect. And then the mind moves because you’re saying, oh, you did that really well. You’re a really nice person.

You’re good, whatever. And your mind starts to move over here, and you can say it’s coloring the mind, if that helps you to think of it in another way. That the praise is coloring your mind and you’re seeing things in a different way. The world, you know, it’s not looking so bad now. Obama.

What’s the new prime minister’s name here? Abbott. Oh, yeah. Abbott, you know, the financial crisis or whatever it is. It doesn’t look so bad when your mind is colored by what we think of as being positive, but we have to look at from a Buddhist point of view.

What’s the problem with praise? We get attached to it, and we want to repeat it. We want it to happen again and again, And so we can start to cheat, lie, steal, whatever, in order to keep repeating this experience of praise, hiding our mistakes in order to be praised. I didn’t do it. She did it.

You know? Now I’m quite willing for her to lose her job rather than me losing my job. Like that. So very much over here, we have attachment, Something we don’t want to let go of. We don’t want to lose it.

Isn’t it? This good feeling. I’ve had a good feeling. I want to hold on to it. Now you can’t keep your mind over here in this color green.

You can’t keep your mind over here because sooner or later, because of impermanence, it will start to change. So the praise goes away, the feeling starts to wane, starts to go away, and we start to move back this way. And, unfortunately, what happens is there seems to be an opposite reaction when we start to become afraid of blame. When we get praise, now what we don’t want is blame. The opposite.

We don’t want to hear the opposite words. You did something wrong. So when we’re praised, we start going back to this side. Don’t blame me. Don’t say anything negative about me.

And it seems like when we’re inflated, so this can be inflated ego. It can be low self esteem, low self confidence. These sort of things can really look for praise. Isn’t it? If you have low self confidence, low self esteem, what you cover it up with is wanting praise, not wanting blame.

So if you receive blame, this reinforces the low self esteem, self confidence. This is a major problem now in Western countries. I think low self esteem, low self confidence, it’s become endemic. Pandemic? Endemic.

Pandemic. It’s everywhere, isn’t it? Every country I go to, low self esteem, low self confidence is very prevalent now. So what do we do in our Western society about it? We cover it up by shopping.

You know, remember the the the song when the when the going gets tough, the tough go shopping. Right? Clutching our credit card, we go. So we can cover up low self esteem, low self confidence by shopping, Shopping, retail therapy, it’s very busy, very good on TV, isn’t it? Tell you, I could shop.

What else do we do? What? To keep busy? Cooking, you know, buying the equipment. It takes you an hour to get the equipment out, an hour to wash it, and an hour to put it away.

That keeps you busy. So it could be cooking, it could be talking to the friends on the mobile. What else? Facebook. Yeah.

It’s a very good example. You keep your Facebook on all day, another message comes up and then this and, you know, other people’s lives that you get involved in, not concentrating your on your own mind, but on their mind, on what they’re doing instead of what am I doing, the response to my world. So, we’ll do various things to keep us away from the reality. The reality is wisdom. So we see wisdom as something that we’re afraid of.

It’s interesting, isn’t it? In Buddhism, we keep talking about wisdom as something to acquire, something to be, to be wise, to acquire knowledge, to acquire wisdom. But in actual fact, we could be afraid of wisdom because wisdom could take away praise, and wisdom could give you blame. In fact, in in the thought transformation techniques, you’re supposed to take on the blame and give the praise to others. So when you start to hear Buddhism, you might start to think this is a crazy system.

It’s the opposite of what we’re all doing in society. Then you have to ask why. Why would we be doing the opposite? So Buddha said, up until now, what we’ve done has not made us truly happy. We’re not satisfied.

Here we are two thousand six hundred years later, more developed than we’ve ever been, more money than we’ve ever had, more leisure time, everything. We’re not satisfied. We’re not truly happy. Without causes and conditions, just happy. Right?

We still don’t have it. So why is that? Because we don’t have wisdom. So when we’re over here, praise is very much to do with attachment, and then we don’t want to move to this side, but inevitably, blame comes. And because we’re attached to pleasurable feelings, we want to to push this away, you know?

To say no. That’s that’s no. That’s not me. I didn’t do that because I want to go back over here. I don’t want to be over here, you know?

So I’m running backwards and forwards because it shows you what the mind does. We’re over here. The mind’s over here. It’s received its glow. It’s nice warm glow.

And then the potential of blame comes. We’re starting to lose the feeling from here. The potential blame comes and the mind, because of its attachment to pleasure, will reject the blame. And in the rejection of blame, we think we’re going to move back over here, but we’re not. It’s just a rejection of blame, but it doesn’t give you something positive.

Because actually you may know that deep down inside you did do what you did. You should have been blamed, but instead of taking it on and saying, did I do that? To be constructive about it, you know, did I break that? Did I do that? And if I did, there’s something to learn from that.

I can move on. I can become a better person. That would give us more self confidence, more self esteem. Yes, I did. But in our society, we have to hide our mistakes.

We’re supposed to manifest perfection. Being imperfect human beings, somehow we’re supposed to be perfect. But we’re not. None of us is, which is the reason we’re human. We have the label human, meaning born from karma and delusion, and yet we’re trying to manifest as Buddhas.

Is there no wonder we’re confused? We need to become clear about our identity. As ordinary human beings, what we grasp onto is praise. What we reject is blame. Why do we do this?

Because we want to be happy. We don’t want suffering, and we see praise as happiness and blame as suffering. Right? This is the way it is, isn’t it? But now in Buddhism, we need to switch it around.

We need to switch this for this, and we need to desire blame. In the text it says, now turn on your desire for blame and don’t care about the praise. Switch it around. What’s that going to do for you? So if you get more blame, you’ve been saying, give me the blame.

Give it to me. What’s it going to do for you? The unfortunate thing, as I said before about our society, low self esteem, low self confidence, you may increase your low self esteem, your low self confidence. So in a way, you have to evaluate where are you right now on your Dharma path, where is your self esteem, self confidence, and if it’s too low, I think you can’t go for this method. You first had to develop your self esteem and your self confidence and then we’re going to attack it.

It’s like you’re building the army, you know? You’ve got your your home and at the moment you have one soldier here and one soldier here and one here. There’s a just a few soldiers to protect your home but it’s not enough. So this would be like low self esteem, low self confidence. One positive thought, one positive thought every now and again.

It’s not enough. So now what we need to do is develop the army, the positive army with the right ammunition to defend you, feel I’m okay. Okay now. Now let’s go for this method. Now you’re strong enough.

Now we’re going to attack you. Because in attacking you, it’s going to strengthen you. Isn’t it? What doesn’t kill you? What is it?

Makes you stronger. So if you’re practicing, jujitsu, judo, you know, all these sort of things you need an opponent to make you stronger. So the opponent in this case is blame. The opponent to the negative state of mind because when the opponent appears, blame, what don’t you want? Don’t say anything bad about me.

Don’t mention my mistakes. Don’t say what I did wrong. That’s the attachment to the pleasure appears very strongly, very clearly. So we’re manifesting attachment and then we will manifest negative states of mind pushing away the negative. So now I I will tell lies, I will cheat, I will steal anything, so you don’t blame me.

So if you think about being in the office and you really want to keep your job, but somebody’s blaming you for losing a file. So I didn’t do it, you know. He must have done it. And poor him with his six children and, you know, really needs the job, you just got him into trouble, but that doesn’t matter as long as I’m I’m not blamed, as long as it doesn’t come on to me. So think of that negative mind that can develop when just this blame is being given to you.

So you’ve got to have a strength and a confidence to say, I did it. And in the Buddhist text, it says, put all the blame on the self-cherishing mind. Right? Blame the self-cherishing. So now there’s ordinary blame, and then there’s Buddhist blame.

So in Buddhism, we’re not talking about the ordinary blame. Did you break that cup? You know, not that sort of blame, but the self-cherishing blame. Put the blame on the self-cherishing mind. Why do you make mistakes?

Why do you get jealous, angry, have hatred, doubt, etcetera, etcetera? Any of the delusions comes from the self-cherishing mind. And along with the self-cherishing mind, you have to have something to cherish. Right? If there’s nothing to cherish, you wouldn’t be cherishing it.

So along with the self-cherishing mind, you have self grasping. You’re grasping onto the self, which doesn’t exist. There’s your delusion, your illusion. So the self doesn’t exist, you’re grasping onto it, and then you’re taking care of it. What a strange situation we got ourselves into.

Isn’t it? It’s weird. Really, when you think about it, it’s totally weird and we believed it from beginningless time which is why we’re in Samsāra. We believe the self exists. We believe that because the self exists it needs to be happy, so we cherish the self by giving it what we like, praise, and avoiding what we don’t like, blame.

And that’s what we call self-cherishing, Self grasping, self-cherishing. It’s only people like Buddha who said, hang on a minute. self-cherishing, self grasping, there’s an assumption in there. You’re assuming something that that self exists. Does it exist?

This is what we talked about on Tuesday and Thursday. Does it really exist the way we thought? And once you start to analyze and meditate on that self, you realize that it exists in the way that a dream exists, in the way that, something like a rainbow. I I actually like the example of rainbows because rainbows truly seem to exist. When there’s a rainbow, you really think it is there in the sky, but it’s an illusion brought about by water drops, the sun, your eye consciousness, your mind.

These different causes and conditions produce the illusion rainbow which exists in your mind. Does it really exist without causes and conditions? No. Take away just the eyes, does the rainbow still exist? Take away the sun, does the rainbow still exist?

The water drops exist. The eye consciousness exist. The mind exist, but there’s no sun. Does the rainbow still exist? No.

So because of causes and conditions, rainbow exists. Because of causes and conditions, self appears. But does it really exist as an entity, a selflessness, like Loch Ness, you know, Loch Ness, selflessness. That monster that that appears to exist, does it really exist without causes and conditions? Of course not.

And yet we still keep going along thinking it exists. Grasping onto it, this is who and what I am. No confidence, no self esteem, hanging on to that the threads of that, and then cherishing it. Cherishing it even more strongly when we have low self esteem and low self confidence. We get we give even more cherishing to the self then, don’t we?

Because we’re afraid. You may find out I’m not a very confident person, that I’m not a very strong person. You may find that out. And so therefore, I cherish myself even more and protect myself even more because that seems to work. It seems to work.

But does it work? That’s what we’re analyzing. If it doesn’t work, change it. If it works, continue. So from beginningless time, praise and blame actually has not worked for us.

Praise inflates the ego, makes us more difficult. You know the, the young girl from Pakistan who might have got the Nobel Prize prize and didn’t get it. She didn’t get it. There was a lot of talk about is it too early? Is is she too young?

Imagine that age and you get the Nobel Peace Prize. What might it do to her? You know? She could become huge egotistical being. She might not, but the big concern was how should how will she handle it?

So this means there’s some very wise people talking about this because they’re talking about her dreams and how to manifest her dreams into good things happening in Pakistan. So they’re saying if we give her too much praise, Nobel Peace Prize, maybe her dreams will all disappear. You’re giving a huge amount of money to a young girl. How do you know what’s going to happen? Does she have the wisdom to be able to use it in the right way?

We don’t know. Imagine any one of us when we get a big label, you know, Nobel Peace Prize, and then we here’s a million dollars. Wow, shopping, you know? It could easily happen. Spend all the money and then you think, oh, I should have used it for something better.

Who knows? We don’t know. When we’re like this, when we’re sitting here, we look on that situation and we think, oh, yes, I I could do that, you know, I’d be quite wise, but you see people who win the lottery, they go berserk, you know, shopping, cooking, you know, anything. So if you’ve got low self esteem, low self confidence, how much are you attached to the praise and how much do you reject the blame because you’re attached to the praise? Even the blame is to do with the praise.

You reject the blame because you’re attached to the good feeling which you want to get back to. Right? So it’s all about attachment. How much is that prevalent in your life? And then if you discover, actually, I do have low self esteem, low self confidence, you need to start there, I would suggest.

You need to start on building your confidence and your self esteem. Keeping a diary, not a dairy, not cows, a diary. Had to say it clearly because maybe someday one somebody will write to me from Adelaide and say, you know, I’ve had twenty cows for ten years and it hasn’t changed. So keep a diary and write down every day the positive things that you’re doing. Because we often do them and we often forget that we’re doing them because we think we’re good people.

We should do it. We don’t we don’t take it in, you know, it’s it doesn’t seem like useful information, but when you’re looking for good self confidence, self esteem, we need the information. I helped mom. I did this. I did this.

I did this. And then this gives you something to rejoice in at the end of the day. And rejoicing is very important because low self esteem, low self confidence, it’s the half cup empty. Never never good enough. So when are you going to think you’re good enough?

Your house is good enough. Your family is good enough. When are you going to think it’s good enough? When it’s low self esteem, low confidence, we tend to think it’s never going to be good enough. And so we always want more, better, and fueling this sense of, I must have more.

I must do better, but not in a positive way. So if you have an esteem problem, start with the diary, accumulate experiences in the diary, use that to rejoice, and use that to start to elevate your self esteem. You’ve got to move yourself up. Before we destroy you, we’ve got to move you up because it’s all an illusion. It’s all karmic imprints.

Right? So all we’re doing is giving you a better illusion than the illusion you had before. You said before you said, oh, I’m no good. Well, that’s an illusion. Now we’re saying, I’m more confident.

That’s an illusion, but it’s a better illusion than the illusion you had before. So we’re replacing one illusion with another. None of it exists, but we’ve got to do this work in a skillful way. Thought transformation is difficult because it attacks what we think of as being positive, and we can’t do that immediately if we’re feeling low. Oh, we should stop.

It’s Jan, you’re not doing your job very well. You’re letting me you’re letting me rave on and on and on. And meanwhile, Judy’s out there with the knife. Late again, Sharpening the knife. It’s okay.

Okay. But it’s real. So any questions about that before we break? Attachment to blame. Yeah.

So where is that? Is that is that on on the scale? What what’s that? Attachment to blame. Anyway, there’s attachment because from self-cherishing, self grasping, it gives us the habit, the technique, if you like, of grasping, of holding on.

Holding on is attachment. Right? So you can also hold on to blame in the sense of you keep remembering the blame that was given to you so you never forget it. It can also be that you blamed. Somebody did something to you, and you hold on to that blame for many years, and you keep revisiting, going back to it.

And so each time in the beginning, three hundred and sixty five seeds, then three hundred and sixty five seeds in the next second, the next second, the next second, the next second. Each time you go back to it, adding three sixty five, three sixty five, three sixty five. And what we’re building is a stronger and stronger memory, a habit of revisiting, and that’s a suffering revisiting. You know, each time you go back to it, you remember the blame you were given or the blame that you gave, isn’t it? You did something wrong.

You did something wrong or you did something wrong, and you don’t want to hear about it, and but you keep revisiting it. You know? So revisiting is is also painful. It also gives you problems. When we think about blame, then is it something that we want as a constructive knowledge, something positive that we’re receiving, or do we see it as destructive?

That’s what we have to check. The dharma practitioner needs to change the mind from it is destructive in its nature to it has no nature, then it becomes positive. It is positive because it’s giving me something to work on. So, for instance, if you’re getting the blame for for, something happened in the computer, You wiped some files. You I wonder what this d e l button is.

You know? A whole set of files goes. I have to cover it up. You know? I’ll get away from the computer as quickly as possible.

And somebody said, did you use a computer? No, not me. You know, I don’t know what that DEL button is anyway. So, you know, you could wipe files. So do you see the information as positive or negative that you made a mistake?

If you see it as positive, you would go to somebody and say, you know, I made a mistake without knowing. I pressed that button, the files went. What should I do? How can we fix it? And usually there’s some way of fixing it, but you hide it.

You don’t want to get the blame. You hide it. You lie about it, You know? So they’re flummitting around. We can’t understand what went wrong.

And in all of that, maybe they make the situation even worse than if you described this is what I did. This is how I deleted those files. You’re afraid of losing your job. You’re afraid of getting a bad reputation. People might think you’re an idiot.

Whatever. Well, who cares? But we do care because we have such a fragile self esteem, such a fragile confidence that we’re afraid of losing even those fragile little pieces, isn’t it? We’ve got this, cup that ourself that’s broken, and we’ve stuck the pieces back together in its negativity rather than in its positive sense. You know?

It’s just pieces stuck back together, and we’re so afraid that the pieces are going to break. And if they break, then we’ll be left with nothing. Realization of emptiness, wisdom, enlightenment. We’re so afraid of that. That’s what I said.

We are afraid, and Buddhism brings up the fear. There is no self. There is no I. There is no nose. There is no tongue.

And you say, oh, give me a break. There is a nose. There is a tongue. You know? We want to believe in those things rather than let it go.

Let it go. It’s empty. It’s empty because we’re so fragile. So this blame brings up the fragility, I think, the self doubt. You know, don’t do that to me.

I think in a way, when we’re blamed, we go back to being children, don’t we? We sort of feel insecure and we go back to five or six. This big father or big mother or big teacher, maybe you have to get on the ground. There are exercises like this where you get on the ground on your hands and knees and an adult stands in front of you. How does it feel?

You might remember how it feels to be small and they’re big, and they have power and you have none. Remember that feeling? Of course then. That’s why we don’t want to get blame because it takes us back to that. You know?

It’s a bit a bit scary, isn’t it? Also what’s scary is lunch, but anyway, who knows what Madame Judy has done? But we should have it. We should dedicate in case we lose the positive energy. I think we’ll just dedicate with Śāntideva, a family favorite.

Everybody has Śāntideva now? So thinking about all the positive energy that we’ve accumulated this morning, which is empty from its own side, that we’re going to dedicate all sentient beings who are empty from their own side, and then we do the dedication, which is empty from its own side, and then it becomes perfect. It becomes the best that we can do. May all beings everywhere play by sufferings of body and mind obtain an ocean of happiness and joy by virtue of my merits. May no living creature suffer, commit evil, or ever fall ill.

May no one be afraid or belittled with a mind weighed down by depression. May the blood see forms and the deaf hear sounds. May those whose bodies are warm with toil be restored and finding repose. May the naked find clothing, the hungry find food, may the thirsty find water and delicious drinks. May the poor find wealth, those weak with sorrow find joy, may the forlorn find hope, constant happiness, and prosperity.

May there be timely rains and bountiful harvests. May all medicines be effective and wholesome prayers bear fruit. May all who are sick and ill quickly be freed from their ailments. Whatever diseases there are in the world, may they never occur again. May the frightened cease to be afraid, and those bound be freed.

May the powerless find power, and may people think of benefiting each other for as long as space remains, for as long as sentient beings remain. Until then, may I too remain to dispel the mysteries of the world. So now is ten to one, so we’ll start around ten to two. Looking so bright and perky there. I thought you had a question.

Oh, I’ve got a really good I’ve got a really good one. You look so bright. Oh, I thought of something. No? Okay.

Yes. Yes. Blame for something that you’ve done or something that you haven’t done. According to Buddhism, it’s the same. You take on the blame either way, and you take on everybody else’s blame too because you’re spiritually strong enough.

You know? You know? We’re supposed to be strong enough to take this on, and they’re not. If we’re still talking about spirituality, who’s strong enough? We’re supposed to be strong enough to take on the blame, and they’re not.

The non spiritual beings that we’re surrounded by are the ones who need nurturing and being taken care of. But in actual fact, we could be the weaker ones. We could be the more insecure ones, the more the ones with less self esteem, less self confidence. We’re we might be the ones who need the nurturing and the taking care of. And that’s why I say, don’t just take dharma as a road map that says, you’re here and you’ve got to reach there.

What we know about the road map is where we need to reach. We don’t know where we’re starting from. Each one of us is starting from our own GPS position. Right? So when I arrive somewhere, I can switch on the computer, and the computer says, do you want to know your location?

And I said, oh, absolutely. You know, I want to know where I am. And then the computer in the maps will go, and you’re here. I hope it’s right, but you’re here. And so if I want to get from here to Buddha house, then it will show me this route.

The same in Buddhism, you’ve got the Lamrim, which is your map. It takes you to enlightenment, but it doesn’t tell you where you are. You have to figure that out. And that’s why I’m telling you that if you are not totally secure, safe, confident, like most people these days, you have fear or doubts or whatever it is, don’t just wipe that out and say, oh, well, tough luck. You’re not supposed to be feeling like that.

You have to be strong and confident as the trainee Bodhisattva. Don’t do that, but really take on board where you’re starting from. Because I think self low self esteem, low confidence, I think, are the opportunity to develop confidence and self esteem. I don’t see it as negative. I see it as a possibility.

But if you don’t accept it, there’s no possibility. There is no chance. You can’t move from where you are because you don’t know where you are. It’s like, you know, in this maps, Google Maps or whatever it is. If you say, I want to get to Buddha House, and it says, where are you?

And you say, I’ve got no idea. And it says, do you want to find your location? And you say, no. Thank you very much. Because maybe you’re going to blame me for having got myself into this place.

Buddha wouldn’t blame you, but we would blame ourselves. And then the other thing is rebirth. Why on earth did you choose those parents? What was wrong with you that you chose those two? You know, you can do that too, isn’t it?

If they if they drank or they were abusive, anything like that, why did you choose them? That’s not the way we think of rebirth in Buddhism, but we put our Western blame, guilt into rebirth, and then now we’re guilty for being reborn into an abusive situation. Do you see what I mean? So I think these are the dangers we as Westerners need to be very careful of, that we don’t take on board the Bodhisattva ideal without having worked on the worldly situation, the ordinary situation, where we are right now. It’s okay to say we’re ordinary human beings.

We have Buddha potential, same as every other being, but right now, we have things to work on. So it would be very nice to work on bodhicitta and wisdom. Oh, wouldn’t it be incredible? But forget it. Just forget it.

Start with loving-kindness. Yeah. Contempt. Oh, I let’s just go say contempt. I didn’t do it.

That’s what many people would do. Right? Because if we’re insecure, we may say, I didn’t do it, which makes you look more guilty. And the more you say I didn’t do it, the more they think you’re guilty. You see the problem of saying, I but I didn’t.

Trust me. You know? So, yes, we should have compassion towards them if we can. But I think, and I’m just speaking generally again, for Westerners, do you think compassion is a difficult quality to generate? I think it is.

Might think like that. But it’s just not nice when you get The blame. Well, and text messages. Yeah. Yeah.

Oh, no. Explaining doesn’t doesn’t go anywhere. Doesn’t go anywhere. I’ll give you I’ll give you your mantra. You need a new mantra.

And I like this, this way of saying it. Here’s your little blue box. Just for today, blame me. Give it to me. Get but you pray for it.

You’re asking for it. That’s no. That’s the difference between don’t give it to me. I don’t want it, which is a resistance, You know? Or give it to me because I don’t want one person to suffer.

There’s your compassion. So that’s why I say, check your compassion quotient. You know, how how much compassion is there? If it’s on the low level, this is gonna be really difficult to do. It’s still possible, but it’s going to be very difficult.

So, like taking no. Recently, had the nerve taken out in the tooth like that. What do you call it? Root canal. Like a root canal.

This is the Buddhist root canal. There there’s this horrible nasty enemy, and you think you gotta develop love and compassion. But, you know, but so we gotta remove the but in order to develop love and compassion. Let’s be realistic. How do we start?

We need to change the view. Right now, we’ve got the wrong view that by avoiding the blame, we’re not going to get the blame. We’re going to be happy. We know it still doesn’t work. Now we need to do the opposite.

Give me the blame. Because from beginningless time, I have been self-cherishing, self grasping, and I planted my three hundred and sixty five seeds gleefully, skipping along. Here’s some more seeds. Here’s some more seeds. And now they’re ripening and I’m saying, but why me?

This isn’t this isn’t fair. It’s not right. Being blamed is the result of the action. You’re responsible, and you’re responsible for that other person’s suffering, the one who’s blaming. Yes.

Yes. You’re the object. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And and as time goes on, it gets worse because of the three hundred and sixty five, three hundred and sixty five. There’s an accumulation of negative imprints that make the situation worse. By trying to explain yourself, trying to it’s seen as getting out of it. She’s trying to weedle out of it.

You know? She’s like a rat in a trap, and she’s trying to grease her way out of it. That Jan, you know? So no matter what you do, that white haired rat, you know, she will always try and slip out of it, won’t she? You know?

So you go, there you go again. What have I done? Now she’s thinking of it me like a rat. And then whatever it is, she will see you in a negative sense because your negative karma is projecting onto you a negative aura, if you like, in her mind. She’s res she’s responding.

She’s just a condition for you and your karma to appear. The good thing for you is your karma’s finishing. So you’re finishing your negative karma. Once it’s finished, you won’t experience it again. The problem for her is she’s going to have a lot of negative karma, which she’s going to experience in the future.

So that’s why you should feel compassion towards her. Gratitude for yourself, thank goodness this is finishing. But for her, oh, dear. That’s that’s really, really sad. You know?

And the best thing you can do is wake up in the morning just for today, blame me. Every morning, you think as much as possible, give it to me because I don’t want one other person to be blamed. I know the feeling it gives people. I know the suffering it can give people, so give it to me. And particularly, the me means the self-cherishing I.

So attack the self-cherishing I. So the more you’re attacked, the closer you get to enlightenment. You’ll get you’re inching closer and closer to enlightenment. The more abuse you’re receiving, closer and closer to enlightenment because you’re taking it in the spiritual way. But if you’re trying to get away from the blame and you’re getting the blame, it creates a tension in the situation.

And so I think of it like, Judo, that if you’re learning Judo, when you’re tense and they try to throw you, you’re going to break several bones. And then you tense up and they throw you. You break some more bones, and you tense and they throw you. You break even more bones. That’s what’s going to happen if you put tension into the situation.

I don’t want this. You’re stiffening. Spiritually, you’re stiffening up. You’re protecting your ego, And then what happens? You’ll get attacked anyway.

This way, you’re saying, come on, attack me. I mean, you don’t call her. Better say that quickly. You don’t call a text and say, attack, attack. You just think, come on.

Today, you attack me as much as possible. And if it doesn’t happen, you feel disappointed. Oh, dear. What a shame. That was a great opportunity I had for patience and tolerance and all those great spiritual qualities, and it didn’t happen.

What a shame. Hope it happens tomorrow. I’m looking forward to the attack tomorrow. Do you see what I mean? If you can go in that direction, then spiritually, this situation is incredible.

Tonglen is also very good to do, to do Tonglen for her. You know? I know one of my students, he hadn’t seen his brother in fifteen years. His brother just walked out one day, and they never saw him again. And then, the father was sick, and, this person wanted to contact the brother to tell the brother, your father’s sick.

He’s got cancer, and you should come and see him before he dies. And so he said to me, what should I do? You know, how should I approach it? And I said, Tonglen. I wouldn’t call him, wouldn’t contact him, but first you do Tonglen.

And he did Tonglen, and one day he thought I can call my brother today. He had this feeling. It will work today. And he called his brother, and his brother said, oh, hello. How are you?

Like they’ve been talking every single day because it’s removing your resistance. If you didn’t remove that resistance, you’d call with resistance. Well, why haven’t you called and your father’s sick? You know, like this. And you think you’re being normal, but you’re not.

You think you’re speaking nicely, but you’re not. You’re projecting it onto the other person. So the first thing is adjust your attitude and then approach the other person, and Tonglen helps you with that love and compassion. Yeah. So when it’s really difficult, do Tonglen.

When it’s not so difficult, do Tonglen. When it’s easy, do Tonglen, which I whatever it is, do Tonglen. And if you keep doing that, it’s good for death. At the death time, it’s very good for death. It’s also good for living.

Either way, tonglen works. Okay? But, yeah, you’re the you’re the enemy, and protesting that you’re not the enemy makes you more enemy, doesn’t it? If you say, but I didn’t steal that money. There’s, she must have done it.

You’d I didn’t kill that person. She must have done it. The more you say, but I but but I’m not. I’m innocent. She must have done it.

It doesn’t work the way we think. You have to relax into it. And so if you said, yes, I’m guilty. They said, no, she’s not. Right?

She didn’t do it. She’s just being a Bodhisattva. Right? Who can understand human beings Born of karma and delusion, who can understand? It’s difficult, isn’t it?

Yeah. Any other questions? No. Okay. Okay.

The next pair, I think we’ll go for we’ve done praise and blame, maybe gain and loss. Gain and loss. Oh, I’ve ended up with a crowded board again. I’ll put it just in there. Gain and loss.

This is what I was talking about before about the the dissatisfied mind. So the dissatisfied mind can can bind with self-cherishing, self grasping. I want to gain things. I want more. And at what point are you going to say, this is enough.

I have enough. I don’t need anymore. We don’t reach that point. Then we buy a bigger house, then we stuff it with more things, and then we can buy a bigger house, or we buy a bigger garage, or we get, rental storage units and put the stuff in there. It doesn’t stop.

If you have an acquisitive mind, a dissatisfied mind, gaining things will never stop. And along with the gaining is attachment. So you remember when you bought it, where it came from, how much it cost, or if somebody gave it to you, you know? It doesn’t matter whether it’s valuable or not in that sense of it cost twenty thousand dollars or five dollars, but you can remember the story around the object. And if it’s an emotional story, very much we want to keep it.

Oh, my mother gave it to me before her death. And, yeah, it’s an ugly thing, but I want to keep it, you know, because it’s my mother’s. I don’t particularly like it, but because my mother gave it to me, then I want to keep it. So it doesn’t even mean that it’s attractive. It doesn’t even mean we really like it, but somehow we’ve developed attachment to something particular.

So this teacup reminds me of my mother or this, this house reminds me of my mother, or my father, or my brother, or my sister. So we’re reminded of something pleasurable, and so we want to maintain that connection to the pleasure through attachment. So attachment to objects, attachment to feelings, you know, so you want to have more good feelings, less bad. It’s also gaining more and more good feelings. So it doesn’t just mean objects.

It can be, wanting to have more love and compassion. In which case, we can use desire and gain in order to start moving us in a positive direction and then drop the desire and the gain. Doesn’t necessarily mean we don’t have any desire, any gain, and we can have compassion. We might have to use what we would think of as negative emotions in order to move us, and then we drop the negative emotion. So desire is not necessarily negative.

It can be used to develop love and compassion in order to move us in a positive direction. Because desire is a movement, is an energy to move you. Are you using that desire in order to move you to go shopping? Another pair of shoes or what, Sue? What else could we be shopping for?

Scarves. Sue’s got forty three scarves, I believe, of various colors for every for every for every occasion. You know? She whips out a scarf. Like, men used to have ties, except we’d have one tie.

You know? And then you get soup stains all over it and things like that. You know? Then maybe you get a second one. But it could be shoes, scarves.

Scarves seem to be popular now, don’t they? Are scarves coming back in? Oh, it’s just the weather. Okay. Yeah.

I mean, you read I reached into my wardrobe, and I didn’t find any scarves. But I’ve got this thing, so I got out this. Hats, sunglasses. Some people love all different sunglasses, isn’t it? Wigs, clothes, you name it in our society, it caters to every single desire.

So this gain is very much promoted, and if it didn’t happen, if we all stopped shopping, the whole society would just disintegrate because we have shopping centers built all around it, isn’t it? And they know how to get us to shop, how to buy things. So you put the tea next to the biscuits in the supermarket. You know, they psychologically, they know all about these type of things. And then, playing slow music.

So you push your cart. So you push your cart like an old woman around the supermarket, you know, like this. You’re being manipulated into into shopping. Right? And then smell.

Smell is very interesting because when you walk into a department store, they go whoosh. And you go, oh, you know, sometimes it’s nice, sometimes it’s not. You go into a supermarket, sometimes it’s nice, sometimes it’s not. So it’s not for everybody. It’s not we’ll all react in the same way.

But if it’s something like a bread smell, you know, bread. You can smell bread and think, I must get a loaf of bread. You just decided to start dieting today, but, you know, because of the bread smell, I’ll start tomorrow. Yeah. The the good old mantra.

So, gaining things in our society very easy. Going against it is quite difficult because it’s being promoted. Any shop you go to, any place you go to, this gaining idea is being promoted as part of our society. So, very much if you’re going to a supermarket, you need to have a list. Don’t have a list?

You’re in trouble. Take your credit card with you, and you can max out your credit card on biscuits you didn’t need, cakes you didn’t need, coffees you didn’t need, breakfast cereals you didn’t need, because it’s all there, you know, and you’re being pushed. Buy more. Buy more. So I think very much having lists is important when you’re trying to reduce this gaining mind, the mind that says, I must have more.

And by having more, I’ll feel safe. I’ll feel secure. Then the problem is you have more, you want to protect it. So then you put bars on the windows, alarm systems to protect what you’ve got, and still you can lose it. Whether it’s through impermanence, through breakage, which is death, and then the object goes into a rebirth, you stick it back together, but now you’re not so happy with it.

Right? So also objects, they go through in per sickness, impermanence, death. Sickness is when you’ve just broken it and you’re sticking it back together and you think, oh, I hope it looks as good as it did before. I heard the super glue’s really good, but, of course, it’s never the same again. It’s like when you have a car and somebody scratches it, or you have a slight dent for the first time, and then something happens and you think, it’s not as good as it was before.

You’ve lost that feeling. Right? So gaining is very much about desire attachment, satisfying the ego. Isn’t it? Making the ego happy, making it feel satisfied, and then arises the fear, I could lose it.

So, again, we go from mentally here, we’ve gained things, and as soon as we gain, the mind starts to retreat into loss can happen, and then fear arises. What will I do? But this is not on a conscious level. It’s happening on a subconscious level of of course I buy things. Everybody buys things, you know.

So you gain things, and then the fear starts to arise, and you can start thinking about security systems, how not to lose the things that you’ve got, how not to get it stolen, etcetera, etcetera. So always, you’ve got this level of attachment, desire, and then this avoiding. And the avoiding is also attachment. Avoiding is attachment to what we see as positive, avoiding the negative. I want the positive to happen, So because of my attachment to the positive, I’m rejecting the negative.

Do you understand? So you by rejecting, there’s still attachment involved with it. So gain and loss. I’m also thinking about spiritual qualities. We might also become very attached to our spiritual qualities.

I’m a good person. I’m a kind person. I’m on the bodhisattva path. I have vows. I want more vows, and I’m attached to the vows.

So how happy, pleasurable, comfortable does that make you feel, Or does it make you feel uncomfortable? These are the things that we need to think about. Because if we approach the spiritual path in a worldly way, the spiritual path also becomes the cause of suffering, also becomes a problem. So we need to approach our spirituality also clean what Lama Yeshe used to call clean clear. Isn’t it?

Clean clear. The mind is clean clear. We need to be clean clear coming from the dharma mind rather than the drama mind. I like to call it dharma or drama because then it becomes very clear which which direction you’re headed in. Dharma or drama?

And like I said last week, very easily we can say, well, you know, I don’t know. Life’s been a bit boring lately. Maybe the drama way is a bit nicer, a bit more interesting. But if you keep doing that, you’re creating the karmic propensity, the karmic pathway, more and more drama in your life. What happens when it comes back?

Do you like it? Do you enjoy it? Usually not. When you’re getting the text messages, I hate you, you white haired, horrible woman. You think, well, maybe I should dye my hair.

You know? Then I could be the black haired horrible woman. Maybe she wouldn’t recognize me anymore. But, you know, you think, but why me? Why is this happening to me?

Why isn’t it happening to her? She’s not as good as me. We can think like that if we’re not spiritual people. Why isn’t it happening to her over there? The neighbor who’s not such a nice woman.

You know? So why doesn’t it happen to her? The horrible neighbor, instead of me, the good person? And we don’t see that also as being unspiritual, just practical. I shouldn’t suffer.

She’s not a nice woman. She should suffer. And not seeing that as unspiritual. So when we’re being spiritual, clean, clear, then who is responsible for the loss? Who is responsible for the blame?

Now we’re starting to check on this side who caused it? Maybe this is the question we should be asking over here. Who caused it? Because this is the negative side, the blame, the loss, we don’t like it. Who caused it?

Is it them or is it me? You have to be very clear if you’re in Buddhism. Is it them or is it me? In Buddhism, it says very clearly, it’s you. You caused it.

Not in a blaming way, not in a negative way, but just you sowed the seeds, now you’re reaping the result. Why are you complaining? You sat at the crossroads thinking, dharma or drama, dharma or drama. Oh, I’ll go for the drama. You did it.

You went down there. You sowed all these seeds very happily, gleefully, sowed them, and now you’re getting the result when you plant an apple tree, apple seed, you get an apple tree. Why are you complaining? Why do you plant poisonous seeds and expect to get a positive result? Why do you plant arsenic seeds and you expect to get a mango tree?

Doesn’t make sense. We have to plant what we want to experience. So if you want to experience good things, then choose the positive experiences, the positive behavior. So on this side, maybe we should be asking ourselves more. When I’m being blamed, who caused it?

When I’m losing something, who caused it? I remember Lama Zopa on my first course nineteen eighty six in Copan. He said, if you have valuables and they’re stolen, so fortunate. I remember thinking, well, it’s all very well to say, isn’t it? So fortunate, you know, so lucky.

I think this is weird. You know, this lama goes a little bit too far sometimes. And then you you meet him and you get to know him and you realize this is the way he is. He’s not just saying it. He really is this way.

But in when I heard these things, you know, so fortunate. I thought, how can it be fortunate? You know? So at the end of the Kopan course, I brought all this stuff from Australia. I had the sleeping bag that you could sleep on top of Mount Everest, you know.

I was not going to Mount Everest, but you could sleep on top of Mount Everest safely. I had trekking boots that were like this thick, you know, clomp clomp clomp clomp. You didn’t want to wear in the monastery because you have to take them off to go into the Gomp, and so I never wore them. All sorts of stuff. You know, I went to one of these trekking shops before I left, and I bought the Lonely Planet guide and it said, well, you’re going to Nepal, you’re gonna need all these things and a a rucksack, you know, so a huge rucksack that when I put it on, I sort of I was falling backwards, you know, it was so heavy with all the and boots hanging off and the sleeping bag on the top and of course you get a taxi and you go up to Copa and you never walk anywhere.

So I could have had a suitcase. But, you know, because of the Lonely Planet guide, I wanted equipment. I wanted to be ready for Copan monastery. I was equipped. The Swiss army knife with all the you know, Never never used any of it.

I used the I bought the lot. It cost me thousands of dollars, thousands. And so I was at Copan, and I bought a tape recorder, never used it. I don’t know what to put a tape recorder for. Maybe to record experiences.

Had an incredible meditation today. You know? No. Note to self. Had an incredible meditation today.

Tape recorder. So I I at the end of the course, I decided I’m gonna sell all this. This is a load of rubbish, so I’m gonna get rid of it. So I had a sort of mass sale, and I put up a list of of things, items on the board. And, apparently, it was very cheap because it all sold really quickly.

And I got some money and then decided I was going to Varanasi and Sarnath and Bodh Gaya with some people. One of the people particularly was Hillary Clark, he used to work at Corona Hospice and now she works in another hospice and she’d said, you know, we’re going down to Varanasi and then we’re going to these other places. Do you want to come? A group of four or five people. So I said, okay, yes, that’d be good, but I don’t have enough money, so I’ll sell all this stuff, then I’ll have the money.

Right? So I sold it, I had the money, and, we went to a hotel, Vadra Hotel, to pick up somebody to go for dinner in town, and then the next morning we were flying. We’re walking along the road, and I’ve got my bag, my Jola, which is sort of underneath like this, and this very strange man appeared. He was like, like a crazy guy. I don’t know what maybe fifties, sixties, seventies, hard to say, but he started talk to talking to me about emptiness.

So I’m walking down these side streets of Kathmandu with these other people behind me and this man standing, you know, walking next to me, and we’re having this sort of emptiness conversation. And at one point, I thought, this is a very strange conversation. I wonder if this is Lama Zopa. Because it just struck me as if he can manifest in different forms, this is him because this is weird. And at some point, I turned away and I looked back and this man was gone, but I couldn’t see where he was gone.

And I said to the other people about this man, like, what man? So I thought, okay. Well, you’re either going crazy or it’s Lama Zopa. We went to the restaurant. I sit in the corner of the restaurant.

There’s no window, no door, and I’m right in the corner. Nobody’s with me. I go to pay my part of the bill. My money’s gone. And my money was right at the bottom of my bag with all this other stuff on top of it, so you couldn’t just put your hand in and get it.

You’d have to dig through to get the money. The money was gone. I went into panic. Who could have stolen it? Why did they steal it?

La la la la la. And I lay awake all night thinking, who? Why? Not thinking I created the cause, but why did they do it to me? Right?

Why is this happening to me, the innocent one? About three o’clock in the morning, I remembered Lama Zopa saying, so fortunate. You know? You don’t say, oh, thank you so much. But I could hear this voice, so fortunate.

And I thought, ugh. Then I have to work on this, so fortunate, because, honestly, he believes it. So it must be something very important that I’ve got to learn in this situation. Why would it be so fortunate to lose everything that I’ve accumulated in a short period of time in order to do a dharma activity? Because that makes it worse.

Dharma activity. I wasn’t going to use it for drama. I was going to use it for dharma. Makes it worse. Right?

More more, projection onto the negativity. They’re negative because they’re taking away my dharma. So I fell asleep thinking I created this. They’ve taken away the money that was their money anyway. This is another hard one.

When we took the bodhisattva vows, Lama Zopa says, you’ve now given everything that you own to all sentient beings. So you don’t own anything. So this also came up. Haven’t I already given away everything? So how can I say, this is my money?

How can it be mine? I gave it away. And then I fell asleep. Until that time, it was going around. I I tell you, was a washing machine.

Whoosh whoosh whoosh whoosh whoosh. How? How? Which way? When you accept this, you relax.

And I thought, okay, then I don’t go to India. I can’t do it. It’s okay. So I went to meet the people the next day, the next morning, having slept, and I said to them, well, obviously, I can’t go. And they said, no.

No. We had a collection, and we collected for you some money so you can go. And they gave it to me, and it was virtually the same amount of money that I’d lost. It came back. It’s incredible, you know?

So when you relax into these things, other things happen. You activate your positive karma. But when you go into the negative, you continue with negative appearances and bad things happening because you keep triggering more and more and more negative to happen. Understand? Any questions?

Yes, Carrie, do you? Note to Bill. Carrie didn’t answer any ask any questions. Make a note of that. Put it on her file.

Have you had any experience of losing something where you can transform it into a dharma experience? You have? Yeah. Captain’s table. Cabin.

Oh, in the at the airport. Yes. Yes. Right. It changed you.

Yes. Oh. Oh, which makes it worse. But how? But why?

But where? But when? Yes. Yeah. When I was flying here from Brisbane, a friend in Brisbane had given me a a thangka in a big role, and so she said to me in the airport, oh, you can’t have a hand luggage and this.

Choose which one. I said, well, then I put the bag through because I’d gone without hand without, checking luggage. I was traveling really light for once, and she said you have to check something in because I didn’t want to check anything, and I wanted to get out of the airport quickly. And my bag always seems to be last or near last. Just when I’m saying, oh, Tārā, please.

You know? Then then the bag comes around. So, I said, alright, then I’ll check this bag in. And it was a Samsonite bag that somebody had bought me, and I think somebody must have sawn the zip or something because one day it just snapped off and it was only about three months old. So now you can’t lock the bag, and I didn’t have a lock with me.

And so she said to me, anything in there that could be stolen or anything? No. No. No. And off it goes, and then I realized, oh my goodness.

My passport’s in there, my credit card’s in there, everything was in a money belt, and I never take it off, you know, my my bag or something like that. But for this time, because I was carrying it on, I thought the safest place is in in this bag. And they goes whoosh and then a few minutes later was like, it’s in that bag, you know? So the and then your attachment comes up. You think, but what what happens if my passport’s gone?

If my credit card’s gone or money’s gone or anything like that? And you get this initial feeling of what will happen? You know? And then you you have to relax into it and say, well anyway, if it happens, it happens, and you’ll deal with it, and, you have to trust. I I just said, okay, mother Tārā, if you wanna help me, now’s the time to help me.

And so I just prayed to Tārā the whole time, and then when the bag came out, Judy was there. I was going to immediately open the bag to see is it still there? But I thought it doesn’t matter anyway. Just wait until you get home. Nothing happened.

So it was unlocked, You know? And also I checked in early, three hours early. It was sitting downstairs, and I think three hours early. Are Australians good people or not? You know?

And it seems there are some good people. So, yeah, you you can be in a situation where the case is locked, supposedly secure, they get into it. You can be in a case where it’s virtually unlocked, insecure, and they don’t touch it. What’s the difference? It’s the karma.

And that’s where we need to keep going. Why? It’s the karma. You have the karma to lose it or the karma to keep it, but not keep it forever. It’s just for this time being.

It’s like you’re the custodian of public goods, isn’t it? Because we gave it all away. So you’re the custodian of public goods until the public decide to to take it back, to take it away from you, you know, to have it returned to its home. We have to think like that, and it’s definitely not easy. Yeah.

Thank you. Okay. Is it tea time, Jen? Do you want to do your thing? Your little bell.

Go on, Jen. I mean, you’ve you’ve got it. Pavlov’s dog. You’re all salivating now and you’re all going to rush off to tea. You know what that sound means don’t you?

Okay so ten minutes. Pleasant, unpleasant, or in other words, happy, unhappy. So good things happening. You know? Nice things happening around you.

What happens when nice things are happening around you? You get attached to it. You want it to continue. You don’t want it to stop. Inevitably, anything that comes together that forms inevitably will separate, change.

So this is the law of impermanence, if you like. So anything that comes together separates. Anything that’s formed will disintegrate. So if we keep meditating on impermanence, then we understand the nature of things. But as we are, we want to keep things as they are.

When things are going well, we get attached to it. I’m enjoying it. I don’t want to give it up. I don’t want to change it. So then a certain rigidity, a stiffness comes into your mind that wants to hold things.

And so then we go from pleasant, wanting to avoid the unpleasant, wanting to avoid being unhappy. So that resistance then comes into it. This is not what I want. This is what I want. And then we start to create even, the causes, the conditions around us for the unhappy to have to happen because we’re avoiding it.

We can actually go into it. We can actually produce it. Because we don’t want it, we have attachment for the pleasant. And then because of that attachment, attachment being the negative, it starts to ripen negative seeds. Then negative imprints start to come up, then we start to experience the unpleasant, then we think this is not fair.

Why is it happening to me? I was so happy. Now I’m not happy, and I want to get back to happiness. So this ping pong, you know, ping pong effect going backwards and forwards between one and the other, and in both creating negative karma. When things are happy and you become attached, then because of the delusion attachment and the desire to hold on to what you want, then the negative karma starts to ripen or you produce negative karma.

You start to perform negative karma in order to hold on to what you like. And then the opposite, the unpleasant, not wanting the unpleasant to happen, then again, because of the rejection, the aversion, and aversion is also a delusion. Because of that, then you’re triggering negative karma, and then this negative karma comes up. It produces a view, and then, of course, it produces something that you don’t want to experience. So both ways, we’re creating karma.

One, we call positive, but still we’re creating negative karma. The other, call negative, we’re still creating negative karma. But in our minds, non dharma minds, we think one side is positive and one side is negative. I’m gaining things. Woo hoo.

Hearing nice words. Woo hoo. This is the way to go. More of that. I’m, experiencing pleasant things, happy things.

Way to go. Not seeing that this is an opportunity for negativity to happen. So as dharma practitioners, we need to be more aware of the opportunity that the negative can take in these, what we would call, positive situations. Don’t turn what you label positive into something karmically negative. And when it’s negative, don’t use it to create something even more negative.

Rejoice when it’s negative. So now you’ve gotta go the other way around. Something negative is happening. Woo hoo. I’m so glad that my negative karma is finishing.

This is great. I won’t need to experience this again. And then the positive, rejoicing in the positive. Rejoice. Think, wow.

This is incredible. Because of my positive karma, this is happening, but I must use it in order to benefit and help others rather than this is great for me. You know? Because in these situations where, everything’s going for us, we can then turn it into a self-cherishing, selfish situation. It’s good for me, but who cares about you?

And he said, oh, bodhicitta. Oh, that’s right. Yeah. Others. You know?

Easily we can forget others. We’re going around, you know, really enjoying the I don’t know, a crazy example. The horse racing on TV. You know? And you’re sitting there, you’re really engrossed in it.

And you think, oh, this is great. It’s my favorite program. What happens if the line’s cut? Which is, oh, well. What to do?

What would you do? Would you just say, that’s karma, impermanence, death, death of the the signal? You get upset. You might get on the phone and shout at somebody, or you might go around the house banging doors. I didn’t get to see the result of that race.

I put some money on the horse. You know? So just think, when you’re really happy, your favorite program, jump. This happens all the time in India. All the time.

If you try to watch TV in India, it drives you crazy. You never see I don’t know whether it’s my karma or just the karma in India, you never see the end of a program. You never know who killed who, who stole what. You know? You have to make up your own program.

So in the end, you you real this is the way it is. You give up. But in the West, we’re so used to things working that when something doesn’t work, we’re very frustrated and upset with it. So we have to be careful that we don’t bring up these negative feelings when something that could be labeled a problem. Don’t label it a problem.

See the opportunity in it. So pleasant is an opportunity for rejoicing, an opportunity to help others, to be helpful and kind towards others rather than more self-cherishing. Unpleasant, rejoicing in the fact that your negative karma has ripened, your negative karma is finishing, and how good that is. So rejoicing this side and rejoicing that side, but rejoicing in different things. It’s not the same thing, but rejoicing in different things.

Any questions about that? We want pleasant, pleasurable situations, don’t we? We organize it to happen. If you think about your life, you organize your life in order for happiness to happen and to avoid unhappiness. His Holiness says, we all want happiness.

We don’t want unhappiness. We schedule happiness. Eight o’clock, Wednesday night. It’s my TV night, people. You know?

You can all go out to the cinema or whatever, but I’m watching my program. And then if you like popcorn, you like chocolate, Coca Cola, whatever it is, you’ve got it all organized. What happens if at five to eight on Wednesday night, your best friend calls and says, I’m in really bad trouble. He said, oh, give me a break. You know?

What is this? All I want is a bit of peace and quiet so I can watch my program. You know? And they say, oh, alright then. You know?

Or the Buddhist Center schedules a teaching. How dare they? On Friday night at seven o’clock and your program’s on a Friday night seven o’clock, and you know, this is not fair. Why are they doing this to me? Right?

So we’ve I think we’ve all experienced something that we’re attached to, that we really enjoy, that we want to experience over and over and over, and we don’t want to experience the opposite. That’s what these eight worldly dharmas talk about. They talk about something that insidiously, it’s very subtle. Slowly, slowly, it’s like this hook and the line. Just slowly, you’re being reeled in, and it’s got you.

Whether it’s gaining something, nice words, pleasant situation, it reels you in, and then you’re trying to avoid the opposite. You want to get rid of the opposite. The opposite is actually the opportunity for dharma. The opposite is the good news. This side, the negative, for dharma practitioners is the good news.

But as ordinary people, we don’t rejoice in this side. We see this as negative, bad, and to be avoided and to be removed. Dharma practitioners see this side as the good side. But this takes a radical change of mind. Give me the unpleasant.

Give me the criticism. Let me lose something. How many of us would really pray, oh, Buddha, you know, if anybody should lose anything, it should be me. I think I found a loophole, you know, planting positive imprints, but also stopping it from happening. If we could find a way, we’d do it.

Right? So wasn’t it in in church, you could you could tell a lie, but if you if you did this, you could get away with it? Unfortunately, you know, in Buddhism, you know you’re doing this, so you don’t get away with it. Christianity is the same, but somehow you think you’re getting away with it. But you can’t think by crossing your fingers, somehow you’re getting away with it.

You have the memory. You know for yourself. So this side, try and emphasize wanting this in your life. It’s not going to happen because you want it, but when it happens, it’s not going to be a shock. It won’t be a surprise.

It’s well, of course, I prayed for it. May all the suffering of sentient beings ripen upon me right now. We can say these things. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. And when the suffering ripens on you, you go, why me?

You forget that you prayed for it. May all the suffering of sentient beings ripen on me right now. May the suffering of all sentient beings come to me. May I be the one who’s strong enough to take it on. May the happiness that I experience be given to others.

May I give it to them. We pray in Buddhism for these things to happen, but when it happens it’s a shock because it hasn’t gone deeply enough. It’s just words. The Tibetans say, from here. You know, like the what’s the bird?

The pelican, is it? That catches the fish. You’ve got to tie a scarf around the pelican’s neck so the fish doesn’t get swallowed. You know, that’s what that that’s what they do in China. Is it a pelican?

What is it? Cormorant or something. One of these fish, you know, fish fish fish feeders. So they dive into the water and they catch the fish and but they don’t want them to swallow the fish. Right?

So in the same way, we sort of dive into the dharma. Woo hoo. You know, this is great. I’m going to hear things I like, pleasant things, praising things, nice things. And, of course, in the beginning, you do.

The Lama say, oh, you’re all precious human rebirth, lovely people with Buddha nature. And you think, oh, this is lovely, you know, very very smooth, smooth going, and then it starts. Then they slip the knife between the ribs, you know, gotta take the blame, gotta do this, gotta do this. So in the beginning, you hear the nice things because you want to. But then when you start to connect with the dharma, you have to go deeper.

So the depth comes from this type of thing. Do you want unpleasant things in your life? And the immediate feeling is no. Do you want to lose anything? No.

Do you want criticism? No. So how are you going to deal with it when it happens? You’re going to react. Why me?

Isn’t it? You’ve been around for years, donkey’s years. Donkey’s years. You’ve been in Buddhism for donkey’s years, but still you have this feeling about being criticized, isn’t it? So it shows you how deep seated and she’s a really good woman.

I think a good Dharma practitioner, I think. So this is a really good woman who works for the CIA. CIA? Yes. You didn’t know.

She start didn’t you start CIA? Who started it? Yeah, but you were the first one. Chairwoman. She was, she was, she was.

Yeah, she won’t accept it. She won’t accept it. Who was the who was the good one who started it? Jen’s going, oh it wasn’t me, wasn’t me. You know?

You didn’t start it? Yeah. So now pastoral care, which I thought sounded like something like cows. I kept saying it sounds like cows in the field. Pastoral pastoral care.

Criticize, criticize, criticize. They didn’t like it at all. So after the criticism, got CIA. They wrote to me and said we started the CIA. I thought this is all we need, know, Jan packing a gun.

The female James Blonde, Emma White, you know, packing a gun. So, you know, bit of action in your life, Jan. So there you are, you know, I think a very good woman, but I tell you, when you’re criticizing, it feels unjust. Feels. May not be unjust because we understand the karma.

You can work it out from a karmic point of view, but it feels unjust because you can’t remember why this is happening karmically from lifetimes ago. You can’t remember doing this. So if you could go back in a time capsule and see yourself doing the same thing to somebody else, then you say, oh, I get it. It makes sense to me. Of course, why shouldn’t I experience this?

And even in this life, we’ve forgotten a lot of what we’ve done. Isn’t it? As children, we do many things. We can be nasty as children. You know?

So why not? And the thing about karma is it doesn’t stay the same. It grows. It develops and it grows. So that’s why Buddha and, Lama Tsongkhapa and other, people have emphasized purification because you don’t want to experience the result of these negative karmas.

So you have thirty five Buddha, you have Vajrasattva, you have skillful practices to remove the negative karma because you don’t want to experience it. So that desire not to experience the unpleasant is then being used to fuel your desire for enlightenment and your desire to remove the negative karma. So desire at some point is a good thing, then you have to remove the desire. Drop it. It burns itself out.

Okay? Anything about that? The last pair, isn’t it? This one, you may not understand or you may. Here we go, I’m unraveling.

Reputation. Fame or reputation? Because fame, most people say, but I’m not famous. So they think it doesn’t relate to me. But if you think about reputation at work, in your community, like that, we want to have people saying nice things, good things about us.

Dharma community. We might want people talking about us in a good way. We want to have a good reputation, not necessarily a bad reputation. So, reputation or in the text, it says being famous. And then in the text, it would say infamous.

So the opposite would be infamous, having a bad reputation. But I think in our society, we wouldn’t really understand fame, would we? In our society, most of us are not famous. Jan might be because of the the CIA. You know?

The FBI are currently looking for her, but, in in a dharma community, you could you could have a small fame, you know, like that. But it’s not really what we’re thinking about. What we’re thinking about is what are we protecting? What are we holding on to? That’s what reputation is, isn’t it?

Because of desire and attachment, we’re holding on to something. We want to have a good name. A name for some people is very, very important. The family name. You’ve sullied the family name.

You remember that? That used to be famous, wasn’t it? You sullied the family name. You’ve done something negative, and now you’ve tarnished. You’ve tarnished the family name.

We’ll never be the same ever again. You know? My mother was Irish, and it was very much like this. If you did anything in an Irish family, maybe same with Italian, Greeks, you know, these family dynasties? If you did anything against the family name, you were finished.

You’d hear about it for years to come. We used to have a good name before you or small towns, small villages, isn’t it? We were okay before you came along. The black sheep of the family who gave us a bad name. So you can see how reputation was very important within families and also within small, like you’re saying, areas, villages, towns, but also within small communities like this where you tend to come together for practice and then somebody can say, oh, I heard that, you’re very good at meditation, for instance.

Praise. And then other people start talking. Oh, she’s very good at meditation. So you get a reputation of being good at meditation. And then you start feeling, I should sit straighter than everybody else.

I shouldn’t move because everybody thinks I’m a good meditator. So now I need to live in accordance with the words, with the reputation that they’re imputing onto me. I need to live in accordance with that. So then you sit bolt upright, but you’re not meditating anymore because you think, oh, this is so uncomfortable. Oh, I can’t stand it.

Oh, how much longer? You know, like this. So before the praise, before the reputation, you were doing well. You swallow it, you take it on, you stop doing well. You start being afraid of the opposite of losing your reputation, of getting a bad reputation.

Or, actually, another way of saying it is becoming unknown. If you want people to know you positively, the opposite could also be to be unknown. You just like people to know you in a positive way, And now they don’t care, so you become unknown. So that’s another way to think about it. And this can be very painful when all their life somebody wanted to be known, to be acknowledged.

You know, for somebody to say, I acknowledge your work, to talk about you in the community in a positive way. So you could work in a company for fifty years and nobody ever acknowledges your work. Nobody ever says anything and then you’re retiring and they say, okay, bye. Where’s where’s the cake? Where’s the key or something?

Nothing. How would you feel? If you’re not attached to something, you’d feel nothing. But if something goes, oh, you do feel something when there’s attachment. So what’s the enemy?

The self-cherishing. Right? So the self-cherishing is the problem. What we need to do is cherish the others, not be attached to the self, to the self-cherishing. Don’t be attached to that.

Be attached to others. If you want to be attached to something, be attached to their happiness rather than my happiness. Be attached to their pleasure, their gain, them getting something positive. Be attached to that rather than your own happiness, your own gain, your own reputation. So I’ve got some notes.

Anybody have any questions before I tell you my notes? It’s all clear, isn’t You understand what I’m saying? I I think it’d also be reputation that, you want people to say things about you in a certain way. He’s a serious person, you know. You know?

In the beginning, when I started teaching then, I used to tell jokes and then people would say, oh you’re very funny, but I used to think well I don’t want to be known as funny, I want to be known as serious. You know? He’s a serious teacher who tells some jokes. You can’t you can’t win. You know?

Or he tells jokes seriously. So you see, you can get attached to wanting things to be written in your way. And, actually, it’s your karma writing the story. You can manipulate a little bit here here and there, but your karma writes the story and you’re experiencing it. According to the doctrine of emptiness, there’s just a blank screen.

But when you look for the screen, can’t even find the screen. But for the purpose of explaining, it’s good to say a blank screen. And onto that blank screen, all your karma is being projected. Three hundred and sixty five imprints a a second are being projected onto the screen, and that’s what we’re experiencing. That’s what we see, what we hear, what we touch.

Is it being experienced outside or inside your mind? It’s all being experienced inside your mind. The interesting thing is to get hold of something like a hard rock or a hard pen and to hold it and squeeze it and think, where is the hardness of this object? Is it here or here? Where do you experience it?

Actually, experiencing it here, not here. The sensations from the hands are being sent to the brain, which is then processed through the mind. So the hardness of the rock or the pen or whatever it is you’re holding is being experienced inside your mind, but we think it’s happening inside the hand. So everything is mind. Whether you think I want to be, serious, have a good reputation for being serious, for being, kind, for being compassionate, you know, then we can be talking about somebody else and say, oh, what a compassionate person.

And you can think, I’m also compassionate. Why don’t you say I’m compassionate? Immediately it can come up, isn’t it? And then you could hint isn’t it? Throw out a few hints don’t you think?

And they sort of look a bit puzzled. What are you talking about? You know? So I think as human beings, we’re terribly complicated, terribly complicated. We take simple situations and we make them complicated.

And that’s where the drama comes in these complications. So I think always try to keep things simple. But when you say, you know, you’re getting a reputation as this is your karma. This is your karma writing the story, and if you fight against it, the karma tends to get stronger. The the story is being wrath written deeper and deeper, further and further.

So acceptance, I think, is a very good quality, but difficult for us to just accept without becoming despondent, without becoming depressed. Oh, alright then. You know, do what you want, karma. Like that? Not like that.

Still, you’re strong. You still have your confidence, self esteem, but you look for the dharma opportunity in the situation. But you have to relax into it to look for the opportunity against the opponent, the self-cherishing mind. The opponent is the self-cherishing mind, not the other, not the conditions. So if you’re poised, if you’re balanced, you’re waiting for the opportunity to attack the self-cherishing mind, and then that gives you the good karma or the superiority in the situation.

But if you keep attacking the other, the conditions, you’re just creating more and more negative karma which you’re going to experience in the future. There’s nothing to rejoice about. You think you won. You know, I won. Said some horrible things about that person.

I won. But from a dharma point of view, we we didn’t win anything. We lost. That’s why I say we’ve got to switch all of this around. What we think of is negative, positive.

Positive is negative. We’ve got to switch it around because somebody asked Lama Zopa Rinpoche, how do we know if we’re dharma practitioners? He said if you’re doing the opposite of ordinary people you’re a dharma practitioner. If you’re doing the opposite. This is what I’m saying, do the opposite.

If you don’t like them calling you serious think, anyway, what does it matter? If they call you tall and you want to be called short, what does it matter? Because you you can go somewhere where you’re tall and somewhere where you’re short. I remember a friend of mine from Sydney. She was size twenty two.

She was in her sixties. She was size twenty two. She went to America, and she said, oh, it was wonderful. She came back so happy. She said, store after store after store of of big clothes.

So she said, I became thin in comparison to them. Right? You can go to Pygmy land and they’ll call you really tall. You can go to America or Germany or these sort of countries and they’ll think you’re average or short. It doesn’t exist from its own side.

It’s your karma is writing the story. We have to keep repeating this to ourselves because we forget, isn’t it? It’s difficult to remember. We’ve got countless imprints of the opposite thought. You like what?

No, I think it’s fascinating. Isn’t it? Probably much more interesting than what I’m saying. This is your karma. This is your karma.

When this happens you think why is this happening especially when you’re meditating. Why is this happening? You know that when you sit to meditate somebody starts talking. Or tap or tap. Remember two years ago when I was here, we had all this tap dancing next door and happy days are here again, you know, like this.

And you think, why us? Why? Because we’ve disturbed others’ minds when they want to be peaceful, when they want to meditate. It’s very hard to keep remembering this in the time of distress when you’re clinging and attached to what you want, merely labeled happiness. It’s very hard to remember, I created this karma, but you have to keep going back to it.

I created it. Therefore, I can remove it. That gives you power, and it gives you good self esteem, good confidence. This gives you power. But if you think, oh, poor me.

I’m a victim of these samsaric people. You know? You’re putting the power onto them, then they have to change. They have to be quiet. They have to move.

They have to do this. They have to do this. You’re pointing the finger and saying what we’ve been saying for a long time. Oi, you. Be quiet.

Oi, you. Do this. You know? I remember once in a dharma center, a retreat center, a nun who was in retreat going down to town and printing notices, no smoking, no talking, And put them up all around this retreat center on trees, everywhere. No smoking.

No talking. And right outside her room, there was one, no smoking. No talking. And I had to go to her to tell her there was a message about something important so I went to her room and I said oh you know sort of talking really quietly and she said why are you talking like that? I said well the sign and she said oh don’t worry about that that’s not for me that’s for them.

So we we can print signs, know, isn’t it? Mentally we do it, but physically we can also do it. We print signs, we put them up and we say keep quiet in meditation shut up for the benefit of all sentient beings shut up. Isn’t it? I’m developing bodhicitta shut up.

Why are you doing this to me? Why why the minute I want to meditate you switch the TV on or start tap dancing on the roof? Because I did it before. I disturb somebody’s mind. And so my meditation is the condition for something negative to arise rather than something positive because I did the negative in the past in response to somebody who want a peace and quiet.

So this karma will change. This karma will finish, then I will experience unbelievable conditions for meditation. But right now, I can’t because my karma is writing the negative story on the board. So the board is empty. The life saṃsāra is empty, but the karma is writing the story.

So that’s where you need to keep going back to. Yeah. Any other questions? Well, usually the karmas that you’re experiencing are an accumulation of negative karmas. It’s the accumulation that you’re experiencing, not just one, but those similar karmas over time.

So then it’s usually a sign this karma is finishing. You’re experiencing it. It’s finishing. It may not finish for five years, ten years. It doesn’t mean in a second.

It’s gone. But over time, you’ll experience it, and it will finish. Same with sickness. Sickness is a response to previous negative karma. It doesn’t mean you just experience a headache and all karma is finished.

You might experience some heavy negative karma. And so, if you’ve been praying for the suffering of all sentient beings to ripen on you, when you experience sickness, you say, thank you very much. My tongue then is working. But we tend to think, don’t don’t give it to me. It’s hard.

If it’s cancer, heart problem, disease, you know, diabetes, anything heavy, you’ve been praying, give it to me. Now you get it. What? You know? Why me?

It’s not fair. So you see that self-cherishing mind cuts straight back in and says, no. You were praying for it, but then the self-cherishing mind strongly comes back and says, no. I don’t want this. And then you have to counteract the self-cherishing mind again.

The the habit is the self-cherishing mind. That’s why you’re not enlightened. Why you’re not a bodhisattva, it’s only because of the self-cherishing mind. It’s very simple. And look for the habit of the self-cherishing, the selfish mind.

Look for the habit that continually arises in all different situations where it says, but what about me? Why aren’t you taking care of me? Instead of saying, I’m so happy they’re taking care of you, why aren’t you taking care of me? This feeling comes up, doesn’t it? self-cherishing mind.

Delicious cake, you know, avocado coated in chocolate. Well I rejoice. Everybody else gets one except you. Why not me? It’s not fair.

I don’t think I wanted one, but what about me? You see how it’ll keep coming up like that, like a mantra that keeps saying, it’s not fair. What about me? But if your karma of generosity isn’t there, the karma to receive doesn’t exist. So you don’t get things.

Others around you do, and you don’t. It’s an indication of what you need to improve. Yes? Sorry. It was that obvious.

Yes. Wow. You know, But why why do we have to analyze others generosity? Yeah. Why can’t we just rejoice in their generosity?

Why do we have to say, can they afford to do it? You know? Should they be doing this? Like this. This is how our society has become.

We’re over analytical in a negative way that stops kind things happening. If they’re refugees, they’re refugees for a particular reason. They’re behind barbed wire for a particular reason. Right? So they’ve created that negative karma.

How to get them out, allow them to do positive things. But we don’t allow them to. So keep your food. It’s better for you, but actually better for them to practice generosity to experience the opposite. I think it’s a difference between, guilt and rejoicing.

You know, guilt guilt and sin, isn’t it in our society? We have this guilt and sin. So, if you go with guilt and sin, then also you tend to blame. You’re a blamer, isn’t it? When you go with this negative side, guilt and sin and blame, I think, go together.

And then in Buddhism, we don’t have guilt. We decided to wipe it out. It doesn’t exist in our vocabulary. Just like coal seam gas, isn’t it? You’re up on the news, aren’t you, Jan?

Coal seam gas has been removed from the government’s vocabulary because it doesn’t sound good, so we call it natural gas. Right? Much better. Now you call them people holes. Same thing, but you see how words are so powerful.

Guilt, sin, blame in our society. These are very powerful words. We give them power. We put something onto them that doesn’t exist, so we add to the negative power. So then what would be much better than guilt?

If you think about it, what allows you to move is regret. So in Buddhism, we don’t have guilt, but we have regret. And regret is, I see that I didn’t have the wisdom to do better at the time, but now I have the wisdom to develop regret. Hold on. I’ll just rewind that tape.

I didn’t have the wisdom to understand to do better at the time. So you don’t understand the negative action that you’re doing because you don’t have the wisdom at the time. Right? You do the best that you can do at the time. Every one of us does the best that we can do at that time.

Regret is looking back and saying, oh my goodness. Now I understand. But then what do you do with that understanding? Do you use it to further your Dharma, or do you use it to beat yourself with guilt? In Buddhism, we say, well, the action’s already finished.

What’s the point in being guilty? But if you use regret, then you develop a positive state of mind. I would not want to do that again. I would not want to repeat that again. So regret leads to a change of behavior, whereas guilt stops you.

You just get stuck. You can’t move with guilt. Right? Regret enables you to move to a more positive future, a wiser future. Eating too much.

That’s why the CIA is there. The CIA is on the end of the phone ready with wise words twenty four hours a day. But they must have been grateful also. Clutching the dollars. Yeah.

But also like Jan’s saying, in order to give, you need somebody to give to. You know? And in Asia, we’re very fortunate because we have many, many beggars. And yet when Westerners come to Asia, they don’t rejoice in the many beggars. They say to me, how do you manage with all these beggars giving to each beggar?

I think it’s particularly bad in Bodh Gaya. But Gaia and Kathmandu, there’s a lot of beggars. And we’re comparatively rich compared to those countries. So many people in Copan used to ask me, how do you manage? What can what do you do with all these beggars?

I said, okay then. One dollar Australian dollar now would be maybe ninety, I think around ninety Nepali rupees. Ninety. Here, if you give one dollar, the beggar would probably throw it back at you. I’ve had it happen to me in America where years ago, I gave a dollar, and he gave it back.

He chased after me with his trolley and said, I don’t want this dollar. I want three. I said, well, you’re not getting three. I only have a dollar. You’re getting a dollar.

No. I don’t want it. I want three. He’s very definite about it. How much he wanted?

Minimum minimum wage, he wanted three. In Asia, you give one rupee, they’re happy. So I say to them, the westerners in Kopan, do you have a problem giving one rupee? In which case you can give ninety beggars one rupee. What’s your problem?

Even if you do this every single day for your two week holiday, how much have you spent? Very little. You know, fourteen dollars to practice generosity to ninety beggars. But people don’t see it like this. Yeah.

Not to give. Oh, don’t I don’t give to children. I refuse. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, I don’t know. There was a BBC program on a boy in Delhi, and I think this really opened people’s eyes to begging because they followed this boy around, and he told everything very honestly. I don’t know why because it virtually stopped his place to live, his money, everything. But they followed him to the shelter. They showed the shelter, which after closed down, where he lived free.

It was a shelter in Delhi. And he begged on the streets. He was about thirteen, fourteen years old, and he received three to four thousand dollars, rupees a month. And if he went to school, he would get nothing, and he would not be supported. If he went to work, he would get maybe five hundred to a thousand rupees a month.

So three to four thousand was a lot. And they said to him, would you give this up to go back to school? He said, absolutely not. Why would I? You know?

This was an eye opener, I think, and the BBC showed this. I think for many children in India that I know about anyway, there is an attachment to what they gain from this situation. And then for many women, there’s an attachment to what they gain through babies. They have these babies that they rent. There’s a factory where you go, and there’s begging clothes and babies, and it used to cost a hundred and fifty rupees a day to rent.

Rent a baby and rent the clothes, and they pinch them constantly so the baby cries, you know, like this. And then they take them back at the end of the day. But they get lots of money from it. And also if you’re not careful, if you have a money belt, they also put their hands down out of the sari. One time, I could feel the zip on my money belt opening.

So she had the baby here and, you know, like this, and the zip is going like this. They’re very smart, you know, streets street smart. So I limit myself to, you know, the older people, the the people cripple, you know, these sorts of things. And I always tell people, don’t give to the children because you’re creating a whole industry and, I think, generation of beggars. And the Indian government and the Nepali government are not happy about beggars.

They want to do something about it. So they’re trying to increase their social program to remove the beggars, and it’s going to take time. I know some people carry fruit and biscuits around, and for the children, they give fruit or biscuits. But often the children say, I don’t want this. Give me cash.

You know? Give me money. And then you have to say, oh, well. And now they speak Russian, Russian, Italian, Spanish. They’re on the streets in Delhi.

You know, I said, I’m not Italian. Oh, you’re Russian? And I mean, they’re smart, very smart, you know? So I I think this beggar issue in society is difficult. Here, we have a social system.

You have something that catches people if they want to be caught. In Asia, there’s no social system. And so, personally, I don’t want to create a child who depends on begging for the rest of their lives. This is not something I enjoy. And so I don’t think it’s a kindness.

I think it’s stupid compassion that you go, oh, you’re in the taxi and they’re going, give me, give me, and you go, oh, alright. Take it. But I think you need to look it in the face and see the suffering in the face, and then you don’t want to give to it because then you understand by giving, you’re increasing the suffering, the desire, the attachment. You know? But these things are very difficult.

I talked to a beggar once in Goa, maybe for half an hour. He was on a trolley with his legs missing. You know? You just go along like this. And then he he was saying, give me money.

Give me money. I said, I’m not giving you money. And so we started talking, and we talked for about half an hour. He spoke very good English. And at the end of it, I said, do you still want money?

And he said, no. No. I don’t want your money. He said, I get lots of money. He said, the Westerners in Goa feel so guilty about me.

They throw money at me. Hundreds of rupees, not one, hundreds. And he said, I get hundreds of rupees every day. He said, more important was you talk to me. You gave me respect, you know?

And this is also important, isn’t it? They don’t get people talking to them like human beings. They they see them in a certain negative way. So that’s what we can also give. Giving is not just material things like money.

It’s also giving of love, giving of kindness, giving of other things. So we can also think of that, giving protection. Yeah. Any other questions? I’ll just see if I’ve missed anything.

If we allow our mind to be influenced by eight attitudes, these worldly dharmas, worldly concerns, then we’re at the mercy of conditions over which we have no control. If you allow your mind to be involved in these eight worldly conditions, you’re allowing yourself. You’re giving your power over to these worldly attitudes over which you have no control. So your mind becomes like a yo yo. Do you remember yo yos?

They’re back in fashion, aren’t they? We used to do the yoga, yo yo and walking the yo yo, walk the dog, right? And particularly flinging the yo yo, knock them in the face, you know, and you could get away with that one. Eight attitudes mind becomes so if you’re involved in the eight attitudes, your mind becomes uptight and fearful. Because uptight is the attached mind.

Right? When you’re attached, you become tight. And then fearful, you don’t want to lose it. It’s the opposite. So then your mind keeps going between one and the other.

Experiences and things which are impermanent, not the next life or even the next week. Look back for six months. Can you remember what upset you? When you’re in a an upset state of mind, we tend to think it’s going to last forever. But in that time, look back six months and think, what was I upset about six months ago?

Can’t remember. So what’s upsetting me now in six months? Won’t remember. It’s not important. There’s no problem with having relationships, with having happiness, pleasure, but don’t be attached to it.

So we’re not saying give up happiness. You know, because often when we’re talking about renunciation, what do we have to give up when we talk about renunciation? Do we have to give up job, home, family? What do we have to give up? What we need to give up is the attachment to the happiness of this life.

Not the happiness, the attachment to the happiness. Because the happiness story is being written by past karma. Your reaction to it is what’s writing future karma. So what you’re experiencing right now is the result of the past, not the present. Attachment exaggerates the positive qualities of people and objects and overlooks their shortcomings.

Right? So we take an object, we exaggerate it, the positive qualities, We exaggerate the objects. We overlook their shortcomings. Any problems that we see, we don’t wanna know about it. We’re just focusing on the exaggeration.

So we get lost in a fantasy that we’re creating in our minds. And then we get lost in the desire not to separate from the people or the object because of the projection that we’ve done in our minds, the fantasy that we’ve created, that we’ve then projected onto the object or the person, and then we don’t want to separate from them. So we have an unrealistic outlook, not based on wisdom, but based on ignorance, we create an unrealistic outlook, and then that leads to possessiveness and disappointment because it usually doesn’t work out the way we think. We write the story. In our in our brain, we’re writing the story.

This is what’s going to happen. Blah blah blah blah blah blah. If it’s a relationship, they’re also writing the story. You’re going to be blah blah blah blah blah blah. You get together and you think, who are you?

You’re not who I thought you were. You know? The one I wrote the story about, you’re somebody else. So that’s what this is doing. And then that writes the story for disaster when it’s a relationship because you’re not seeing the other person as they are.

You’re seeing them as you think they are. You’re writing it in your mind. They’re separating. He’s saying nasty things about her, she’s saying nasty things about him. I was quite impressed with Sandra Bullock when she separated from what was his name?

Tats. Who? I don’t know. His name was Tats. Yeah.

This motorbike guy. Jesse James. Jesse James. Yeah. Because he’s from the original Jesse James, the robber.

Oh, he is. Yeah. He’s part of that family. And so that’s that’s where he got the money from trading on the name, Jesse James. And so, I mean, actually, when you see him interviewed, he seems like quite a nice guy, but delusional, completely delusional.

If I sleep with somebody else outside the relationship, I’m going to be happy. I’ll get away with it, and I’ll be happy. Right? And what really impressed me was the fact that she never spoke about it. She just said it’s happened, and I’m moving on.

And she maintained, I thought, her grace under all that Hollywood pressure to reveal the dirty stories, you know? Come on, give us the dirt. And it could have all come out, and then they would have turned on her as the one who revealed the dirt. So this is the difficulty, isn’t it? When somebody hurts you, you want to turn it back.

You want to tell people. I’m the good one. They’re the bad one. But don’t take the opportunity. Just leave it alone.

Things work themselves out. The eight worldly person in the dharma So somebody who’s involved with the eight worldly dharmas and they’re entering the dharma, the remedy is impermanence. The remedy to the eight worldly dharmas for the new dharma practitioners is impermanence. Things will change. Things will pass.

Don’t attach and cling to it. The dissatisfied mind, by its nature, will change. Things that come together will disperse. A meeting is the cause for a parting. Meditate on all these type of things.

So the dissatisfied mind will change. For the Dharma person, the remedy is death. I don’t mean literally people. The Dharma person, the remedy is death. Because one is subtle impermanence, one is gross impermanence.

So you start with the subtle impermanence, things will change. Phenomena is changing. The mind is changing. Moment to moment, everything is changing. And then for the dharma practitioner, you go deeper than that, more difficult.

I’m going to die any moment, or I’m going to die today. I’m going to die tonight. I’m going to die in my sleep. And then if you’re going to die, are these things important? The praise and the blame, the gain and the loss, you start to understand this is very temporary.

The happiness that you get from this is very short lived. So is it worth it to be attached to the pleasant words, gaining something? Is it worth it? Then if I’m going to die today, you detach, you let go, and you let go of these things. You don’t hold on to them anymore.

You see them as the cause of suffering, future suffering, rather than the cause of happiness. So I think death is a very good antidote, but you’ve got to be a Dharma practitioner to really go deeply into, if I die any moment, is it worth practicing these things? Okay. Any questions? If not, we’re going to do a meditation to finish off.

Always good to finish with meditation so you don’t go home with too much blah blah blah. Yes, Sheridan? No confusion? No questions? And this is the antidote to these I want them!

Where’s that gun? That’s a lot of chocolate. Yeah. Not really. Even the good chocolate.

But I think it’s a really good example of when even though you’re just hearing about death and you’re contemplating it and maybe it hasn’t even gone very deeply, it doesn’t necessarily go very deeply, but when a problem arises caused by one of the eight worldly concerns gain and loss, you want it, you don’t want to lose it, there’s the opportunity to let it go to practice generosity. So you can think, I’ve given this away or it’s been stolen. Oh, and that was the other thing that I remembered Lama Zopa saying. You either make somebody into a thief or the recipient of your generosity. Which do you choose?

Oh, well, right then. You know, I give it to you. Right? Or you’re they’re a thief. I didn’t want that person to be labeled a thief for taking my money because it wasn’t my money anyway, so give it away.

They’re not a thief. If you’ve given it, they can’t be a thief. But if you say it’s been stolen, somebody stole it, and then they’re a thief. And then they have the negative karma of stealing, which is going to come up in future. But if you say, gave it, you’ve accumulated incredible merit by giving it, and they haven’t created negative karma by stealing it.

It’s a better situation. Pardon? No. Because you’ve given it. But you did.

You did? You take bodhisattva vows. You’ve given everything that you have, including your body, your body, speech, mind, you’ve given everything to all sentient beings. Yeah. But you can.

It’s your choice. It’s your possession. You can choose whether you give it or whether they steal it. It’s it’s yeah. Some something something clicks in the mind where you say, well, I either give it, and how does that feel?

And I think, you know, Lama Yeshe used to say a lot, how does it feel? Except he used to use the word peel. I think for years, people must have been wondering, what does he mean? How does it peel? You know?

Because he couldn’t say f. So the famous one was pamily pamily peeling. You know? You should all practice pamily peeling. What says pamalipeeling?

You know, what’s a pamalipeeling? Some sort of fruit, must be a Nepalese fruit. Right? Pamalipeeling. So the the problems of, you know, Tibetans trying to speak English, isn’t it?

So, how does it feel to you if you just feel, something stolen from me, taken from me? It’s a bit like it’s ripped ripped away from my possession, or I give it. Which do you feel more comfortable with? Like that. And then you can choose to say, I gave it.

You didn’t, but you’ve converted it into your mind into the an object of generosity. You can. That’s your your prerogative, you know, to think I gave it. Then if they caught the person, now this is interesting, they bring the thief, merely labeled thief, into the police station. They call you up and say, we have your earrings here, your diamond earrings.

Come and look at them because they’ve been stolen. Would you go to the police station and say, they weren’t stolen. I gave them. No. Because it depends on you whether you feel you’ve given them away or they’ve been taken from you.

It’s all your choice. It makes and you get the the accumulated karma from giving it rather than feeling you’re a victim and you’ve been stolen from. It’s all up to you. It’s really hard, you know, when you start practicing this type of thought transformation, it’s tough because your instinct is, no. I’m not going down that road.

I want them caught, you know, they should be caught. Get them. And then the Dharma side says no, no, no, no. And you go backwards and forwards between the two. And that’s what we should do.

We shouldn’t just mask it over and say, it’s okay. We should have the conversation. Yes. No. Yes.

No. Through logic, through wisdom, we should have the debate. Debate is very important. We should have the debate in our minds until you come to a positive conclusion, not just shut up. You will do as I tell you.

You know? But I accept this is difficult for me to do, and it’s going to take time for me to see things automatically, instinctively in a positive way. Of course, we’re not going to. From beginning this lifetimes, we’d have we’ve had good and bad people, Dinosaurs and us. You know?

I’m on the good side. They’re on the bad side. Now goods good people, bad people. I’m on this side of the bars. They’re on that side of the bars.

Still bars. We don’t think of ourselves as in prison, but in a way, we put bars on the on the windows and we live inside a house that looks like a prison. And then we say, well, they’re in prison and I’m not. We’re all the same, really. You know?

We’re all human beings when it comes down to it. human beings with an amazing potential to become enlightened, But we create this separation and this division between each one of us that they’re good, I’m bad, or I’m bad, they’re good. This, they’re, that side of the railway truck so they they’re bad, I’m good. I’m on the right side so I’m good, they’re bad. We tend to do this division between us.

Mentally it’s happening all the time, good, bad. But if we take away the good, bad judgment and then guilt and just say, people with the ability and the the karmic imprints that can ripen any moment into something amazingly nice happening, even for the worst person, change can happen. Isn’t it? To anybody, change can happen. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And then I didn’t need to have him arrested for the theft of the Visa card. I didn’t actually need it. But I I wanted to do it.

Not that I didn’t wanna do it, but I Yes. Yes. Yeah. I think there’s idiot compassion. You know, where then you understand that by saying to that person, I gave it.

It’s gone. I gave it away. It’s constructive for them. I think what you have to weigh up is what’s the best possible action you can do for them. If by giving it, you take away the label thief, for some people, that will be the best thing you can do for them, for them to have a second chance.

For certain people, they have had second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth chances, and they’re not going to get it. And what they need to have is a situation that they’re put into where they recognize their negative action produces a result, police, court, prison, whatever it is. And that’s the best thing you can do for them. But this takes moral strength and is very difficult to do, and you won’t be called nice names. But you’re doing the best you can do out of compassion for that person.

But, you know, in this case, your mind needs to be calm, needs to be clear to weigh up the possibilities. If you’re very emotional, you can’t stay clear and weigh up the possibilities. You’re reacting from emotion, from attachment or aversion. But if you can stay calm and clear, you may realize the best I can do for this person is dob them in. Put them in.

That’s compassion. For somebody else, if they get that label, they’re going to live with that label for the rest of their lives. Maybe it’s it’s not a good thing to do. So compassion, very difficult in present society because so many things are happening. But if you think that by them experiencing the result of their negative action, it’s more beneficial, you should follow through on telling the police, going to court, still loving them, but doing this.

This is real compassion. Idiot compassion is just, oh, it’s alright. You know, whatever they’ve done, it’s alright. Using drugs, stealing, lying, killing, it’s alright. You know?

That’s idiot compassion. It’s easy because in a way, you’re turning away from the negativity. You’re just like four teenagers saying, whatever. So you’re an adult, whatever. It’s not like that.

You don’t want others to suffer, and by allowing them to do negative actions, they’re going to suffer. And so you have to take the responsibility, even if it’s negative, to do this for them because they can’t do it for themselves. So it’s better, you know, than not to be guilty afterwards, but to say, I did this for the best possible reason, isn’t it? Not negative reason, not nasty reason. The best possible way to help them, for them to get help, for them to wake up.

Like that. None of this is black and white, you know, Buddhism isn’t. You you should do this, and you should completely avoid this. It’s all according to the situation, the motivation. It’s all very open to interpretation, and that’s why we need to develop our wisdom, our wisdom mind.

So in each situation, we know what to do rather than being told what to do. I think that’s really important to develop our wisdom mind. And then in the future, you’ll take your wisdom mind with you into your next life, and you can be a dog who appears wise. You can be a bird that appears wise, and then again another human with the possibility of developing your wisdom. It doesn’t mean that just because you’re in another form, you’ve lost your wisdom.

The wisdom’s still there. Many stories about Buddha as a bodhisattva, as a bird, a monkey, an elephant, being wise, being kind and compassionate. So that’s Buddha telling you, no matter which form you’re in, you’re going to continue this. You’re going to go on. It’s not wasted.

So we should also look at animals and see them as they are in with their wisdom and their kindness. You know, sometimes you need a bit of kindness and you go home, and those big brown eyes look at you and you think, oh, life’s not so bad. You know? That’s what they give you, isn’t it? That unconditional love.

Okay. Now we’ve got three minutes left for meditation. You’re very, very clever. Very clever. I know you don’t like meditation so you just bring out those questions.

Yeah. Now we know Sheridan. Anyway, just to to finish off with a few minutes of I always go back to this breathing meditation where you let go because we’re training with the detachment with the attachment, the detachment. Something appears, interesting thought, and instead of going into it, just let it go. Interesting sensation.

Don’t get into it. Let it go. Interesting sound. A guy talking outside the window and your ears sort of going like this. Don’t get interested.

Let it go. So whatever appears, it’s the object of detachment, and you let it go. We practice with that for a few minutes. 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.

So if you can please turn to page ten. We’ll just dedicate all the positive energy. Lord of Dharma, who in accordance with the various dispositions of those to be subdued, makes clear in the light of your well spoken advice, the sacred Ganden tradition, essence of Buddha’s teachings, oh, foremost and holy lama to you who are supreme. Oh, lama, please, please live long. And then go back to page eight.