Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 118-minute teaching, Ven Lobsang Namgyel takes up the question of how delusions shape our lived experience of reality. He begins by laying out the mechanics: how three hundred sixty-five karmic imprints ripple outward every second, projecting the world we perceive; how the first labeling moment—like, dislike, or indifference—then hooks into deeper karmic patterns and generates elaborate stories about people and objects. He traces how ignorance of the self underlies all other delusions, and how desire and attachment follow naturally from that. Using concrete examples—mistaking a beautiful person for their carefully labored-on projections, the cycle of buying flowers only to watch petals fall—he shows how we superglue false labels onto a shifting reality and then suffer when it doesn’t conform. The teaching ends with practical guidance on supporting those with mental disturbance through kindness, dropping judgment, and prayer, pitched at practitioners already familiar with Buddhist frameworks of mind and karma.
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File: 2013 10 22 Ven Namgyel Oct 22 2013.mp3
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Teacher: Ven Lobsang Namgyel
Collection: Ven Namgyel (Ven Lobsang Namgyel)
Date: 2013-10-22
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 118.4 minutes
Words: ~4,419
Prayers. What can we do? I think the heart of the perfection of wisdom sūtra. Page three. Looks like Judy Wagner is giving refuge, doesn’t it?
It does. I think she’s going into competition. Her ego’s out of control, and she’s gone into competition. I think the way I wrote that makes it look like she’s giving vows, doesn’t it? Okay.
Sheridan, zip it. Zip it before I turn you into a toad. Okay, so we’re back on. We talk about karma, how we do negative actions, how that negative, karma then can become a habit, and how these karmas are being accessed in order to produce this world that we’re experiencing. So three hundred and sixty five karmas a second are projecting themselves out onto our world, what we think of as solid and real.
We are forming in our mind that world, and we’re projecting it out, the positive and the negative karmas. So it’s not all negative karmas that we’re projecting out, then we’d be experiencing a hell. It’s some good, some bad, isn’t it? So when you’re seeing good things around you, it’s mostly positive karma. You’re accessing those three hundred and sixty five positive imprints a second, projecting it out, and then seeing a nice world, a positive world.
But when your mind changes and when you see something negative, you see a person, you think, oh, I don’t like that person. There’s the negative karma. Then from inside, projecting out, producing the enemy, believing that’s an enemy, and then the delusion arises, the emotion arises in response to that label. So you have the first labeling moment. Okay?
What you have is a basis, an object, human being, and you have the first labeling moment. You see the object, your eye consciousness or one of your consciousnesses, whether it’s the tongue, the the ear, the eyes, one of the consciousnesses comes in contact with the object, and then the information goes inside, and then there’s a response. And the response can be, I like, I don’t like, or I don’t care. Whatever. So now my ignorance response has become whatever.
You know? So like, don’t like, don’t care. These are the three main responses. So if it’s like, then it’s attachment desire, and then we hook into that previous attachment desire karma. The karmic imprints to do with attachment desire towards people that we’ve had from beginningless time.
That habit. And then that projecting mind that says, this person must be must be nice, must be this, must be this, blah blah blah blah. You know, we write all this very positive story, isn’t it? Really like the look of this person, and then all that positive story is projected onto them. And then the person we don’t like because they were eating peas from their knife.
Right? So very nice looking person, but you saw them pick the peas up with their knife, and you think, oh my goodness, how gross. I could never go out with anybody who ate peas off their knife because my mother said, right? It can be something as simple as that. My mother said twenty or thirty years ago, people who ate peas off their knife at disgusting people.
Silly things, you know, mine was the blue and green should never be seen except with a color in between. Did you get that one? Somebody told me there’s another one, red and yellow. Do you have you heard of that one? Somebody told me once there’s another one, red and yellow.
I said, that was something bad. Makes you puke or something. I said I said, well, you must have a problem when you’re sitting looking at me. You must be sitting there like, I want to puke. I want to puke.
You know? Because she grew up with that saying. No, no, no. It was red and yellow makes you puke, you know, but in a rhyming way. So you know these things that we’ve received in our past come up very quickly don’t they?
They just pop up right? So somebody can be doing something and then your mind connects with that through your eye sense. You see something being done the way they walk, the way they talk, the way they eat, whatever it is, and then you put a discriminating label on it, I don’t like it, that connects with all the aversion and the anger and the hatred that we’ve had from beginningless time, and your mind starts to think in that direction towards that person. And what all this depends on is the first labeling thought. As soon as you see that person and you think nice, like, whatever it is, that first labeling thought then starts the story.
From like, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, the story follows it. That projecting mind of duality thinking that that like person exists, that beautiful person exists, the handsome person exists. We think they exist not as something outside of our mind, but as something sorry, not as something inside our mind, but we think it exists outside of our mind, something separate from us, out there rather than in here. Okay? So now what creates that is karma, the actions that we’re doing and have done from beginningless time, all those seeds constantly ripening.
What makes them ripen? Delusion. So delusion is the rain, is the water, if you like, that ripens those seeds. We need the conditions for the seeds to ripen, So you need two things. You need karma and you need delusion.
If there was only karma, no delusion, those seeds would not ripen. They’d stay as they are. You could leave them alone. The unfortunate thing is always there’s one delusion present. There’s always ignorance.
This is the major underlying delusion, thinking I exist, you exist, the world exists, Samsāra exists, nirvana exists, this sort of mind is always present. This ignorance, it’s manifest gross ignorance or subtle ignorance, it’s always there. And from that ignorance, all the other delusions appear. So because there’s a duality, because I believe in me and you, the separation between us, that separateness of me and you, because I believe in it, then I project from me onto you what I think exists, but doesn’t exist at all in reality. This is the difficult part.
I think it exists, and I project it out onto the base. The first label is being put like, and then I start putting all these other labels, and I think of them as, super glue, super glue labels. You know, you’re writing the labels and you’re super gluing them onto the base. And then and then and then and then and then and then then one day you discover in the divorce court it’s not true at all, you know. Then what happened?
I had all these nice labels and then I had to start scraping them off. Who made the really good person? Who turned them into the demon or the devil? It all happened within your own mind. Wasn’t happening out there, but you think it happens out there as part of saṃsāra.
You think the story is happening to you rather than you creating the story. So one thing is all these karmic imprints that we’re projecting out constantly, three sixty five, three sixty five, three sixty five, like that. But how do who how do these imprints get ripened? What makes life better or worse, more tolerable or intolerable? The delusions.
So the underlying ignorance always there, I exist, you exist, Samsāra exists, so I have to get out of Samsāra and go to nirvana. We have that type of thinking. Right? So let’s put that to one side. Let’s start with the easier delusions, the things where we really do exist, anger, doubt.
It’s quite simple, isn’t it? We have doubt. So anger, doubt, hatred, desire, attachment. Buddha talked about eighty four thousand delusions, eighty four thousand afflictive states of mind. We just talk about a few, you know, that keeps us busy enough.
Pride, know? Pride is a really good one. I’m so happy I’m coming to this class. You know? Then you can go home and tell everybody else what to do.
Right? So we can take the class in the wrong way and then become proud. That would also separate it separate us from enlightenment. We get further and further away from enlightenment. So I’ll give you the general definition of delusion because I always think it’s very good to have the definition so we’re on the same page.
We know what we’re talking about. Okay? So here’s the definition. Delusions are defined as a mental factor. So it’s not physical.
It’s something happening in the mind. Delusions are a mental factor that when generated, so they’re not there all the time, they appear and they disappear. That’s our experience, isn’t it? Right? So think about your own experience and how emotions appear and disappear.
So these delusions are a mental factor and they’re generated. They appear, they disappear. Another one appears, another one disappears. When they appear, the mental continuum, that continuum of this thought arising into the next thought, this moment into the next moment, it provides us with a continuum like a river running on and on and on. Okay?
So you have that continuum. The continuum, when there’s a delusion, the continuum becomes unpeaceful. Right? If we left the continuum alone, the continuum would be peaceful. The mind’s nature is peaceful.
But because the delusion takes advantage of the continuum, the mind, so the mind nature, clean, clear, pure. The delusion is taking advantage of it and then making that continuum unpeaceful, unsettled, dissatisfied, rocky, you know, like waves of the ocean, something like that. So if we left the mind alone, the mind’s nature would be like smooth water or like the sky, vast, peaceful, no clouds, the water, no waves. But when we introduce a delusion, then naturally, the mind starts to do this, starts to go up and down, and that’s where the confusion comes from. We can’t see things clearly.
We can’t understand things clearly because we bring along our baggage. We like our baggage, you know, we pack it when we go on journeys. So when we’re leaving this life and going to the next life, we pack all our garbage. We pack the good stuff too, but that’s a small case, You know, the little vanity case. Vanity case, the small one.
And then the big ones, you know, I’ll pack the attachment and the desire and the anger, take along some ignorance. You know, you pack all these cases and you take them along and then you unpack them, hang it all up, know, more of the negativities, more of this. And where is that positive one? It must be around here somewhere, it’s a little case I know I put it somewhere. So that was the past experience.
Lots of big cases, lots of negativity, small case for the positive. Now what we’re being aware of is more of the positive and less of the negative because we don’t want the result of the negative, the suffering. So that should give you a healthy fear, not a bad fear, but a healthy fear. Healthy fear is I don’t want to repeat the actions that produce that suffering. Right?
You don’t have to experience all the negative sufferings in order to have an aversion for suffering. You’ve had enough suffering even at your age. Isn’t it? You’ve had enough. Right.
So even at a young age you can experience some suffering and you think well I don’t want to repeat that again. You don’t have to repeat all of it, you know, I need to kill, steal, lie until I develop renunciation. You have some suffering and that’s an indication of much more suffering that we can experience, but we’re not experiencing right now. So when you compare this mind that you’re sitting with right now, compare that to a time when your mind was disturbed. We’ve all been disturbed, haven’t we?
So compare this mind to that mind. Compare the quality, the feeling. How did it feel when you were disturbed? Did you feel in control? No.
Because the mind’s going like this. Right? Should I? Yes? No?
Which way? What? When? What? Who’s the enemy?
Who’s the friend? Don’t know. Totally confused. So that’s the quality that is pervading at the time when we have delusion, that confused quality. Ignorance has taken over.
Ignorance is now the boss, is controlling you, and you’re thinking this is all happening outside, not inside, so I’m a victim of this negative situation, this angry person. I’m responding, not necessarily initiating. Right? Often when we think we’re victims, we think they’re doing it to me, and I’m just responding in an angry way, but I this is just a response. I’m not the one who started this.
Whoever thinks they started the fight, it’s usually somebody else. You know? That you started it. No. You started it.
Can’t remember who started it. This is the ignorance. Right? Because we’re so confused. We don’t know who started it.
All we know is, I felt a bit cranky or a bit irritable or whatever, but suddenly, whoosh, like a fire, this anger comes up. It’s like throwing petrol and a light and whoosh, you know, like the fires in New South Wales, but worse. Right? This fire of anger can destroy many, many things. So when you compare this state of mind that you have right now to that state of mind, how you felt when you were disturbed, the main thing I think we can find is confusion.
Are you clear? Do you know what to do? Do you know how to do it? I think the answer is pretty much no, isn’t it? In that confusion, we don’t have a clarity of mind.
So we’re not accessing the state of mind that we have, this clear light mind, this Buddha nature. We’re not accessing that. That’s not pervasive at this time. What’s happening is we’re accessing the delusions, what’s surrounding that mind, these negative habits, the negative karmas that we’ve created, the negative feelings. So we’re accessing all of that, we’re not accessing the Buddha potential.
Then the basis is ignorance, and then on top of it, we can have desire and attachment. I really like that person or that object. What happens when you go into, a department store and you walk through a department store? Do you walk through just thinking, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, there’s nothing I need? Or do you see things that you want?
So your desire is triggered, right, by objects inanimate objects like that, you see inanimate objects of clothing, TVs, whatever it is, and then it triggers desire, and then what’s triggered after the desire is attachment. It must be mine. Rather than it being in the shop, it must be mine. Because if I get it, if that’s a beautiful flower, if I possess it, I must become a beautiful flower. Do you know what I mean?
In some way, if you think that this is a beautiful flower, if you possess it, you also become beautiful. You possess the beauty. Right? So if this is yours, you must be beautiful. If I think you’ve got beautiful flowers, in some way you have beauty.
And if I want beauty, then I have to buy it. So I buy this thinking this is going to become part of me, but doesn’t happen that way. Right? It’s another possession, another object. We get attached to it.
I think, oh, so heavy, these flowers. You know? So then I buy my flowers, and I think, ah, beautiful. We forget the impermanence of the flowers. There’s our ignorance again.
Completely forgot they were impermanent. So I’ve got them in front of me. I love the smell, I love the shape of it, the color, and now one day I come and look and the petals go boom, they fall off, my heart’s broken, it’s a tragedy, you know. Now what am I going to do? Oh, I have to go and buy some more flowers.
So the dissatisfaction now arises. I let go of the attachment that I have for the present flowers because they’re not desirable anymore. The petals have just fallen off. Right? But my desire and attachment is still there, that’s been triggered by this, by this shape and form.
So now I go and buy more flowers, replace them, forget about the impermanence of them. Again, I bought beautiful flowers. I’m so happy because the beautiful flowers are mine. Therefore, the beauty is part of me. And then one day, again, the petals drop off, and we keep repeating that over and over and over.
We do this with flowers, but what about with people? We can do this with people too. Right? So you project out, ah, beautiful woman, handsome man. If they’re part of my situation, I’m improved.
Something good is happening here. They’re going to improve my situation, not make it worse, we think. And so we want them, desire, we want to hold on to them, attachment, they change, we change, our mind is changing moment to moment, their mind is changing moment to moment. So in that moment, you put those two minds together, there can be a harmony, but you don’t know there’s always going to be a harmony. Things change.
Delusions arise. Delusions diminish. They go away. So that desire appears, and in the desire mind, we see things as very wantable, a must have it, possessable. And if it’s extreme, you’re so confused you’re willing to steal, lie, kill, do anything to get what you want if you’re in that strong delusion.
For most of us that doesn’t happen, but for some it happens and this is when extreme behavior manifests in our society. You hear about incredible things happening, you know, somebody murdered in order to get something or whatever and you think that doesn’t make sense. Why would somebody do something like that so crazy? But like I said, when the mind is full of this ignorance, desire, attachment, confusion, not this mind that we’re sitting with here, but that total confusion, anything is possible. You have to put yourself into that position of anything’s possible.
Right? That’s what we want to purify. That’s what we want to remove as quickly as possible because we never want that mind to ripen ever again, to feel that level of confusion and fear and anxiety and doubt, you know, all these negativities that arise. So the basic confusion, ignorance, believing there’s a self, and then because that self appears to exist, we grasp onto that self. This is the basic attachment that we’ve been living with from beginningless time.
I’m attached to me, myself, my home, my possessions, my car, my pet, my bird, my dog, my cat, my food, whatever it is. It’s my. It’s in relation to the self. So that attachment to the self then helps us to develop attachment to the other. It’s our habit.
From a long, long time, we’ve been attaching to the self, and because of that attachment, we’re so used to attaching. We also want to attach to the other. We project out desirability, and then we want it. Why would we not want it? Do you understand?
It seems to make sense. In that confused mind, it seems to make sense that holding on to that burning bush is gonna help you. You know? It’s burning. So desire is like a burning rod of iron or burning wood or something, but desire says, go on.
Take it. Don’t worry about the consequences. Once you’ve got it then you attach to it and you say, but it’s burning it’s hot, you should drop it. Oh well you know I’m not dropping it was so difficult to get hold of it. Right?
So you can understand, once you’ve got it, you don’t want to let go of it, even if the wisdom mind says, I drop it if I were you, you know, this is gonna be trouble. This part of the mind that has got wisdom that’s saying, let go. Don’t do this. And then the others the other part that says, but it’s mine. You know, mine, That sense of possession.
And because I possess it, it increases my value. But it doesn’t increase our value at all Because the basic ignorance is what we’re saying, ignorance, there is no self, never existed, never has existed, there never will be a self. And so this is all an illusion happening in your own mind. And this is the most difficult thing to understand, I think, about Buddhism is that Buddha said, it’s all only happening happening inside. Your saṃsāra is in your mind.
It’s not out there. You know, I usually describe it as a septic tank, and you’re floating in the septic tank, but, you know, it’s a visualization. The septic tank is in your mind. So that’s the way that we’re headed. We’re going next week, I’ll finish off about delusion.
We’ll talk, more about, desirous attachment, anger, But what I want you to do as homework is watch the delusions as they’re appearing, and I need you to look for the worst delusion. What’s the most pervasive delusion? Don’t bother saying ignorance because you’re all ignorant. I’m not saying this insultingly, you know, but you’re all ignorant. I’m ignorant.
You’re ignorant. We’re all ignorant. So don’t bother coming back and saying, I found I’m ignorant. We know. Yes.
It’s very hard because you’re in a mental hospital. This world is a mental hospital and you’re in the mental hospital. He’s more in a manifest mental hospital. You’re in the invisible mental hospital. We’re all in the mental hospital.
This is what Buddha said. Until you’re enlightened, you’re in a mental hospital. You’re confused. You don’t see things as they are, and so then you project your problems out onto the world. I think when somebody’s in a mental hospital, there can be chemical imbalances that create these strange states of mind.
And so if you can get the right help, you can live a good life without the chemicals that they give. I know students who would find it impossible to function without those, like, serotonin or something like this. You know? So I think we’re very fortunate to be in an age when these drugs are available, whereas in the past, they would have had to just live on the streets or in one of these horrible institutions where you wouldn’t want to live, you know. So I think things have changed a lot.
I know Buddhist students, one or two who’ve hospitalized themselves because of these chemical imbalances and you can go home, you can come back, you know, they’re not like they used to be. So I think getting the right help is very important, and then I think having nonjudgmental people around you is very important and I think if you can drop that judgment of you know or whatever is also judgment. You know when “whatever” is being said it’s not neutral, it’s a rejection. I don’t care. So drop the I don’t care, which you don’t have.
Drop the desire to help because that turns you into a dangerous person. You know, a Mother Teresa without the halo. You have to drop the Mother Teresa thing and just from your heart be a good person, be a kind person, you know, and when your daughter’s talking, if if you hear things that are not pleasant because children can say things, you have to correct it, you know, how it is. But I think to be kind and open for mentally disturbed people is such a benefit, such a good thing, you know, that just that can help enormously. I think that’s what you can do.
And and I think you you can also you pray. You know? You light candles. Candles represent wisdom. So you you pray.
You light candles. You can say to your daughter, let’s light a candle, which represents wisdom, removing confusion, ignorance. You know? And, then it gives you a sense of harmony between you, praying for the same thing, and then the light is a representation of that clarity of mind. But I think that’s what we can all do.
We all know people are confused, having problems, and then we think, well, what can I do? Well, one thing is to be kind to them. When they’re not being kind to us, to be kind as a response is something spiritually incredible. You know? Something difficult to do, but we should do it because we’re spiritual.
You know? And then, praying for them, lighting a candle for them. You know, doing something externally helps to remind you of the internal because we’re so connected with the outside. I keep saying it’s all happening inside, but if we do something external, lighting candles, you know, these prayer rituals, things like this, it can really help. And, I think just step by step as they go through their process, be prepared to alter your state of mind, your response, to be flexible.
That helps. Don’t fix one position, but just be flexible and, you change your view as you go along. Okay. We should stop. The evening just seems to disappear.
I don’t know what happens. Time is not flexible. Or maybe it is, isn’t it? We’re going to dedicate just with Śāntideva. So in your prayer books, maybe you’ve got this one.
So thinking about those with mental problems, those with physical problems, emotional problems, all sorts of problems. And then whatever positive energy we’ve created by being here tonight, we’re going to offer to them with the wish that they never experience those sufferings ever again. May all beings everywhere plagued 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.
May the thirsty