Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 73-minute teaching, Ven Lobsang Namgyel introduces the Buddhist practice of transforming the mind through understanding karma and ethical conduct. He begins with the Four Immeasurables—wishes for all beings to have happiness, be free from suffering, abide in equanimity—and explains how practicing these cultivates a compassionate mind. The bulk of the session walks through the ten non-virtues: killing, stealing, and sexual misconduct (bodily actions); lying, divisive speech, harsh speech, and idle gossip (speech); and covetousness, malice, and wrong views (mental acts). For each, Ven Namgyel explores where it comes from, how it perpetuates suffering, and what negative results ripen from these habits. He uses concrete examples—mosquitoes in monastery rooms, a friend’s death, the coffee-addicted commuter—to show how delusion and anger spiral. He emphasizes that real change requires not willpower alone but understanding the harm caused and building knowledge, healthy habits, and meditation practice as a foundation. The teaching is aimed at practitioners new to these foundational Buddhist concepts and willing to examine their own habits honestly.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 10 IC_A_001 1.mp3
UUID: 833f129e-5332-40b7-a811-5191ad98a9e9
Teacher: Ven Lobsang Namgyel
Collection: VenNamgyel Thought Transformation (Ven Lobsang Namgyel)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 73.0 minutes
Words: ~10,646
Sorry. I just got it. Switched it on. Then may all sentient beings be free from suffering and the causes of suffering? So then you think, well, what does that mean?
May all sentient beings be free from suffering and the causes of suffering. So it means that you’re not going to make them suffer, and you’re wishing them well. You’re wishing all beings happiness, planting a seed, and then free from suffering and the causes of suffering, not wanting to create that suffering for them. So this starts to work on your own mind. What does it mean?
It means I’m not going to create their suffering. Inseparable from the happiness that is free from suffering. Well, not going into that one. You can think about that. May all sentient beings abide in equanimity, free from attachment for friends and hatred for enemies.
So the first three, you really think about them. You know, the first one, second one, third one. And when you get to the fourth one, it’s what you actually have to do in order to produce the other three. So the first three sort of give you an enthusiasm and you think, yes, I should do this because this is the right thing to do. Then the fourth one, may all sentient beings abide in equanimity, this equal state of mind, free from attachment for friends and hatred for enemies.
Then can you give up your attachment? Can you give up your hatred? There’s another meditation. Alright. So I’m going to write on the board the ten non virtues.
I guess most of you don’t know the ten non virtues. Amanda, you’ve been here for two courses. We haven’t even talked about the ten non virtues, have we? So I thought I should write the ten non virtues down for you. So avoiding, killing, stealing.
That’s the wrong one. Sexual misconduct and lying. Divisive speech. Harsh speech. Idle gossip, malice, and wrong views.
So killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, lying, divisive speech, harsh speech, idle gossip, covetousness, malice, and wrong views. So killing is particularly an action done with the body. Stealing, body. Sexual misconduct, body. Lying, divisive speech, harsh speech, and idle gossip, these are all speech.
Speech. And then covetousness, malice, and wrong views, these are mind. So that gives you actions of body, speech, mind that we start avoiding. Killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, lying, divisive speech, harsh speech, idle gossip, covetousness, malice, and wrong views. And I’ll I’ll tell you in a second what it means and why this is important.
So yesterday, I’d said to you that, I wasn’t going to talk in the sort of particular Buddhist way which is the Lamrim that’s the stages on the path to enlightenment, that I wanted to talk from the point of view of essential education. But then I thought, without a background of these qualities that we’re talking about in essential education, the four that we’re going to talk about is humility, tolerance, forgiveness, and delight. So, these support your forgiveness. So then I thought I was thinking last night, well, if I don’t talk about some of this other stuff, then you’re not going to really understand why you should forgive and why you should be tolerant. So you need a little bit of a background.
So from the Buddhist, way of thinking, we start off in the Lamrim thinking, meditating on precious human rebirth. So this is I have a human rebirth, but more than that, I have the ability to achieve whatever I want to achieve with this rebirth. So it’s precious from the point of view of its capability, what you can do with it. Okay? So you have the freedom and you have the ability from a spiritual point of view.
And in Buddhism we talk about enlightenment. And enlightenment is to be able to achieve all the qualities that we can achieve, which is mainly compassion, wisdom, to remove all the negativities. And enlightenment is a permanent state of mind. It doesn’t change. It doesn’t sort of slide backwards.
So you can’t get to enlightenment and then start going backwards. Once you’re enlightened, that’s it. Then, you have the full capability of working for other sentient beings. So a human rebirth with all the capabilities and the the situation around you, external situation and internal situation, supporting you to be able to achieve anything spiritually. We’re not talking about able to become a millionaire or buy a house in Outlook Heights.
What’s the most expensive area? Paradise. Paradise? Paradise? Paradise.
Oh, paradise. I thought paradise. Paradise Drive. Yeah. So you could buy a house in Paradise Drive for fifty million dollars, and you think, this is it.
Now my life is precious. You know? Then the house burns down and then your life is not precious. So, is that what we mean by precious? You know?
I own this car or I have this amount of money. From a Buddhist point of view, it’s not that. It’s talking about the capability. What are you able to achieve spiritually with this life? And do you have the condition supporting it?
Because if you’re in a country where it says, you cannot practice spirituality, you can’t do this, you can’t do that, you know, there there are some countries where you cannot practice what you want to, then it restricts you. We’re not in that situation. So, we’re incredibly fortunate. Know, many of you come from England. It’s a long way and somehow you find Buddhism so many thousands of kilometers away from home.
And then you have the interest. You know, it’s not that we forced you to arrive here and stay in that room and come on this course. We didn’t go out and sort of catch hold of you and say, you must do this. From your own side, you wanted to do it. So, this is actualizing your potential thinking, I must do something to improve myself.
I must do something to change my situation. So, this is precious human rebirth. The next point is that that precious human rebirth is not permanent. It’s temporary. So, we were born, we’re going to die.
Every moment our life is changing, our mind is changing, our emotions are changing. So then we think about that, the impermanence of the situation. So yes, I do have a very precious situation, but it is impermanent. Okay? So you’re thinking about now, moment to moment change.
And as part of that, you’re looking at the moment to moment change happening around you. It’s not just you and your body and your mind and your emotions, but that’s very important. But it’s also the environment. So look at how the environment is constantly changing. This makes you more connected with the environment, with the trees, the water, you know, all these sort of things.
Nowadays, as as we were saying yesterday, much more consciousness, awareness of the environment, but we haven’t been so aware over the years that it stopped us from degrading the environment. Right? So, if we were really connected the environment, we wouldn’t be doing a lot of the things that we’re doing now. By looking at the impermanence of the environment, for some people it’s easier to look out and then to look in. So, by looking outside and looking at the environment, the change of trees, change of the flowers, how the flowers grow and then they die and they drop, then you keep thinking, oh, that’s right.
You know, that’s not permanent. This is not permanent. So, what is permanent? Right? You keep looking at what’s permanent, and you come to the conclusion that most things are impermanent.
And that must include me. Because is our body permanent? It certainly wasn’t this size when it was born. Otherwise, your mother would have extreme trouble. So, your body was small and fragile.
And as we grew, we grew stronger and we started to think I’m not fragile. Right? I’m quite strong. I’m I’m I I remember I used to think if you watch Superman or Popeye, I used to watch Popeye and say to my mother, I want spinach. And she say, you won’t like it.
And I want it, you know. It’s gonna give me muscles like that. And then I can do whatever I want. And one day she bought me spinach and she boiled it. I think in like two liters of water and so this horrible you know like boil for an hour or dolloped on the plate and I said, what’s that?
And she said, it’s what you’ve been asking for. You got your spinach. And I couldn’t eat it and she kept saying, go on, eat it, eat it, you wanted it. So, when you’re a child, you think of Superman or Superwoman and Popeye and this and you think I’m invincible. But actually, you know, one small bacteria or virus or one thorn in our body and then we can get very sick and we can die either unnaturally or naturally.
So, there are many diseases that can cause our death. There are many causes of death, know, driving a car, motorbike, whatever. So, we started with precious human rebirth. We went to impermanence, which is subtle. It’s subtle impermanence.
We’re looking for something very fine. Gross impermanence is death. So this is quite easy to see. I mean, it’s hidden in our society, but we all know somebody who’s died. A friend of mine just died two days ago from cancer in Italy.
And I just got an email from somebody today saying, I feel really bad because we were supposed to go and see her on Sunday, and I put it off because my mother wanted to go, but I didn’t want to go. So we put it off. And the day we arrived, it’s only sixty kilometers away, the day we arrived, she’d already died. So, you know, you put things off thinking, I’ll go later, I’ll visit later. But actually, one day it’s too late.
So that’s why it’s very important to think about death, to think about the qualities that you want to have, who you want to be at the time that you’re dying because that’s the destination, isn’t it? In this life, it’s the destination. So, what’s your goal within this life as to the type of person that you would like to be when you die, the sort of qualities that you would like to have, and what you would not like to have. This is also important to acknowledge. What do you have now that you don’t want then?
So if you’re angry, you’re jealous, you have hatred, you have resentment, you haven’t forgiven, you know, think about having that at the time of your death. How would it make you feel? Very important to honestly go into your own heart and how you would feel to have these negativities in your heart. Because otherwise we just deny them and we hide them. And then we don’t want to go into it.
Know, how would it feel if I was dying today and I was dying with my resentment and my anger and my hatred? How would I feel if it was today? And it could be today. None of us knows when we’re going to die, right? So babies die, young children die and the very sick can go on twenty years.
You know often doctors say, you’re really bad, you’re going to die within three months, and that person can die in twenty years time. So there’s no certificate, there’s no form, you know, that they sign to say, absolutely you will live until this age. None of us knows. Right? There is that uncertainty about the time of death.
So even if somebody is sick, still the time of death is uncertain. Doctors cannot say, absolutely you’re going to die at that time. There’s a very good book written by a scientist who’s been working with terminal cancer patients for many, many years. And one of the first things he discovered was people don’t die when the doctors say, people die when they decide. So he said the very first person they had in the nineteen seventy’s, she was in her seventy’s, she’d had cancer I think one or two times before.
She got cancer again and she said to him, Oh, I know what caused it. And he said, Oh, you can’t know. You know, he was a scientist. You can’t know. And she said, Oh, yes, I know.
It was when I got really upset and I got this certain state of mind that caused my previous cancer. And he said, That’s completely impossible. As a scientist, I’m telling you, you can’t do that. And she said, Oh, well, you’re wrong. I know.
I created my cancer. So from that time, he went on into investigating those minds and realized that the mind is the most important factor in good health and in sickness and in dying, whether you want to die or you don’t. So those books are called Getting, one of them is called Getting Well and the other one is called Getting Well Again and the guy is called Carl Simonton, c a r l Simonton. So he’s a scientist who only took terminally ill cancer patients and actually showed that they could live five, ten, fifteen, twenty years. He said if somebody was having a wedding in three years, the grandmother had to live for the grandson’s wedding in three years, they would live three years and one week.
He said it became really eerie that they would live exactly that amount of time. So we need a reason to live. Why are we living? You know? And usually it’s for ourselves, isn’t it?
We want our happiness, we want money, we want a car, those sort of things. But does happiness really come from that? And when you’re dying, is it going to make you happy? You can have your house on paradise drive and your incredible car parked outside that guzzles the petrol and SUV, you know a massive SUV and you’re just one little person inside this SUV, puts you really high up so you feel superior to all the crowds. And you have a motorboat and you have this and you have this.
But at the time of death, that rich person, same as the poor person, is only taking what they’ve done in their life with them. This is all that goes. Not your money, not your car, not your house, not your relationship, not your friends, not the people who hate you, nothing. The only thing that goes with you is your mind. So what you’ve done in this life and other lives.
So then, this is the difficult one for some of you people, rebirth. Isn’t it Len? Not difficult for you, but it’s difficult for some people. So now in Buddhism we say, we don’t only have one life, we have countless lives. So then why is the time of death important?
Because we have another life. And what you become depends on that time of death. So all that you’ve done in your life and then that time of death and the last moment of death propels you into your next rebirth. So then if you have that capability of producing your next rebirth, what sort of rebirth would it be? And if you think about your state of mind when you have resentment, anger, hatred, you know these negativities that can go on and on, think about that state of mind, how much suffering it is, how unhappy it makes you feel and then just imagine I’m dying in this moment.
So I’m dying right now in this very negative state of mind. What sort of rebirth would you have? Do you think it would be positive or negative? Do you think it would be happy or a continuation of the suffering? And we’re not just talking about rebirth as a human, but rebirth also as animals, as fish, as birds, whatever.
So, try and think of an animal that is similar to your state of mind. So, think about animals or the beings that we don’t like, you know, that we maybe we feel frightened of. I often give the example of the cockroach or the scorpion. So, you see, the moment you see a cockroach or a scorpion, you think, you know, you draw back from it. You don’t say, Oh, beautiful.
Look at that, you know. Isn’t it gorgeous? You want to keep it. Except on one course in Tuśita, I did have one guy who said in college he kept cockroaches as pets. He’s the only guy I’ve ever met who said he really liked cockroaches.
Most people have this aversion, right? So in Buddhism it says the reason you have aversion is because that being had such negative karma and this is the karma, the negative actions, so has created so many negative actions that they produce a negative form. And then that form is disliked by most beings. Right? So that’s where doing many negative actions gets you.
People go, you know, and you start looking for something to hit them. Isn’t it? You don’t think, oh it doesn’t matter, let them go. Unless you’ve thought a lot about these subjects. But just the normal reaction out in the world is grab a spray or hit them, some way of killing them.
Right? So then, we have this aversion to these negative forms. Cockroaches, spiders, in this country we don’t have snakes. My mother used to rave on about snakes. I’m sure she’d never seen a snake in her life.
Terrified of snakes. Absolutely terrified. She was always warning us, you know, about snakes. Some people have that feeling about snakes. Some people about anything.
You know, you can have an aversion for anything and you keep building on it and building on it. But say your negative mind resulted in you becoming that creature. So imagine you become a cockroach. You’ve got your family, you know, you’ve got your children, your husband or your wife, and you think, I’ll just go and get some food. You know, I’ll go down to the supermarket and I’ll get some food.
So you go into somebody’s kitchen and you’re looking in the supermarket, you know, what’s in the kitchen, for some food and you hear this almighty scream and a shoe heading towards you and that’s you. You’re the little cockroach. You know, and you’re thinking, I wasn’t doing any harm. I’m just looking for a bit of food for the family. So it’s important to put yourself in that other side.
What would it be to be like that? Do you want to be like that? Right? Everybody would say, No, don’t want to be that being. But what are you doing in this life that will create your next life?
What are you doing? What’s the balance of habit? Is it more negativity? More positive? More neutral?
What’s the balance? You have to look at your own mind and just see what’s the balance of what’s happening within your body, your speech and your mind. So you don’t just have one body. There’s the body creating negative karma. So we have killing, stealing, sexual misconduct.
So killing we can easily do when we’re walking. We don’t mean to, but we can walk on ants. They want to live, they don’t want to die. So you become more aware of the ants or the creatures on the ground that you could kill, than stealing, taking something from somebody else that they value, that they want to hold on to. So when it’s taken from them, it creates pain and suffering for them, doesn’t it?
But we’ll talk later about where does stealing come from? Because stealing has to come from a thought. You don’t just take, like some of the film stars say, I just took it. You know, I was in the department store and I saw it and I just took it. How much money do you have?
Fifty dollars So why didn’t you pay for it? I don’t know. I just took it. What’s the thought behind the stealing? That’s important, isn’t it?
It’s not just about I want it. So we’ll talk about that later. Stealing, sexual misconduct. These first three I put together because they’re actions of the body. Sexual misconduct is forcing somebody to do what they don’t want to do.
So it’s inappropriate behavior. And it could happen within a relationship. What if your partner doesn’t want sex and you’re saying, I want sex. And you keep pushing and pushing and pushing. Oh, alright then.
That’s sexual misconduct but usually we talk about children, rape, you know these sort of conducts. But even on a finer, you know getting down to a finer basis, you can talk about relationships where one person is forcing the other. So sexual misconduct is somebody not wanting something and you push them, you force them. So these are the three particularly heavy negative actions of the body. Then the speech.
Lying, not so difficult. And once you tell one, usually fifty follows, you know, so you can tell one and then you start to have to add more lies and more lies to hide the first lie. So lying is telling something to somebody and they believe it. So you say, particularly in Buddhism, we talk about big lies. And big lies are, are you enlightened?
Are you a Buddha? And then you don’t say anything but you sort of you shrug your shoulders and smile nicely and and they think, that’s it is true. You must be but you’re just not saying it. So lying doesn’t have to be speech. Lying could also be a gesture.
You know? So you could go, are you a Buddha? So this is why you’ve got to be quite careful with lying because it can be something that you just indicate and you think, well I didn’t say it. And then it confuses people. So by confusing people, what comes back to you is confusion.
Right? This is why it’s important to you because what you’re putting out is what you’re getting back. So killing, you start being afraid for your life and you can have many sicknesses. Stealing, you can never seem to keep hold of what you’ve got. They seem to disappear.
Know, some people seem to get money and then it just goes or possessions, they just go. Sexual misconduct then having fear and anxiety. So what sexual misconduct does, particularly again, not just thinking of rape and things like that, but also you call adultery. So if you think about adultery, adultery is one person divides the family. So often it can be the woman but these days it could be the man left behind with the children and often in a very bad economic situation.
Then they get depression, anxiety, they can get anger and you caused it. You’re responsible. So from sexual misconduct, it’s not just people chasing after you down the road, but it’s also feelings. Just anxiety arises and you don’t know where the anxiety comes from. Fear arises and you don’t know where it comes from.
So these are emotional feelings that you’ve created in the past in somebody else. Then lying, creating confusion. Divisive speech is two or more people are having problems and you come between them. So we can also do this with friends, you know, where you might like there’s a married couple, you might like one of them and you don’t like the other so much and they’re having problems and they come to you and say, we’re having problems and you say, I knew you shouldn’t have got married. You know, I knew it all along.
Get rid of him or get rid of her. Separate, divide, you’re better off. This is divisive speech. So, separating people. And often what happens is they don’t separate and then the person that you gave advice to tells the other person, Oh, you know what that person said about you?
You’re the worst in the world. And then you’re the enemy now and not the partner. So, divisive speech really creates a lot of trouble and especially in a community, you can create big rifts in communities. So you can have say, what this was aimed at in the beginning was monasteries, nunneries where you could have ten thousand people. You could actually create sides where they would be fighting against each other.
So you got to be very careful with that. Harsh speech is the type of speech that would really hurt somebody. So harsh speech is it can be any type, but something that would really hurt somebody. And then idle gossip, we can spend hours on. It’s something meaningless that we treat as meaningful.
And it can just go on and on, you know, have another cup of tea and you just talk and talk. And I think the famous one recently was George Bush. So people used to talk about George Bush like incessantly but there was nothing we could particularly do about it. If there is something you can do about it, if you are doing something about it, then it’s not idle gossip. idle gossip is something meaningless that you’re treating as meaningful and you just spend hours doing it.
So usually I think we’re talking about the weather. You can talk about the weather for ages or anything meaningless. Try and use your speech for something meaningful, something that will help others. Then covetousness, this is where stealing comes from or even possibly sexual misconduct. Killing, I’m not sure.
Covetousness is a mental action. There’s no physical action involved. You see something that doesn’t belong to you. It belongs to somebody else or it could even be in a shop and you start thinking, I want that. That’s covetousness.
So you start thinking, if I had that, my life would be much better, much richer. I’d be I’d look better. I’d be You know, this sort of desire mind, I, I, I, I. If I had that, I’d be much better off. I’d look beautiful or handsome.
My life would be happier. And you’re you’re creating these similar thoughts around and around and around. If only I had that object, I’d be better off. And you just keep building those thoughts. So it’s covetousness which is desire attachment.
You know, the basis of covetousness is coming from desire and attachment. So desire and attachment is producing covetousness which can then push you into stealing, sexual misconduct. It can produce other negativities. So this is a mental habit. Do you have this habit of thinking, why do they have that?
Jealousy can come from covetousness. Why do they have that? Why don’t I have it? Then malice is thinking badly about somebody. You know, so you have really bad thoughts.
If If I could get hold of that person, I do this and this and this. Or I hate that person because blah blah blah blah. Or I resent them because blah blah blah blah. But you never say it, you never do it, but you just think it. So it’s still a karma.
It’s not a complete karma. You haven’t done anything, but it becomes the basis for other things that can happen like harsh speech, divisive speech, lying. You know, all the others come from the mind. So malice is this negative way of thinking about somebody, and then it can become something that you do. And then wrong views, particularly in Buddhism, this talks about how when we talk about karma, somebody will say, well, I don’t believe in karma, so therefore it doesn’t apply to me.
So I can do negative things and I’m not going to get any consequence from it. So in a Buddhist context, wrong views is saying particularly that karma doesn’t apply to you. Because if karma doesn’t apply to you, then what do you change in your life in order to produce a happier life? How do you do it? So even in Christianity, had something similar to this.
This is two thousand five hundred years ago, nearly two thousand six hundred years ago. Buddha said, this is the very basic list, just ten. Actually, there’s countless actions, but this is just ten to get you started. So then five, six hundred years later, Christianity came along with the ten commandments. What do you avoid and what do you do?
So you’ll find most religions or philosophies have things that you avoid. Why? Because generally these actions create suffering. They don’t create happiness, generally. So how do you get happiness from killing or stealing harsh speech, divisive speech.
How could happiness come from that? So you need to keep going back to that list, keep going over it and thinking, if I did this, could it produce happiness? I thought it did at the time. You know, when we’re lying, we’re thinking it’s going to produce happiness. It’s going to get us what we want.
When we spray the kitchen to kill all the bugs in the kitchen, we think we’re going to produce a clean kitchen which is going to make us happy. We don’t think about the bugs that are losing their lives. So we do do these actions thinking at the time it’s going to make us happy. But are we happy? When we do these actions, are we happy?
Or afterwards, when we think about these actions, are we happy? Does it produce a happy state of mind? Right? So that’s karma. karma is that when you do an action, it produces a reaction.
Something comes back to you. Right? So what you put out is what you get back. But karma also comes back to you much more strongly than what you put out. So a very small negative deed can turn into a much bigger negative action.
A small positive deed can turn into a much bigger positive reaction. So it’s important to look at this and to be thinking about it on the weekend because for sure, we’ve done most of them. Haven’t you, Amanda? What? I caught the first reaction, which was yes.
Me? Me? Kill? You must be joking. I wouldn’t do that sort of thing.
We do. We do. And the thing is, delusion is sort of pushing it away. You know, saying, oh, oh, I wouldn’t do that. You know?
But you think back to when you were a child. We didn’t have such reverence for bugs at that time. You know? I mean, some kids pull the wings off butterflies and stuff like that. We think, oh, butterflies are so lovely.
Some kids pull the wings off. But particularly, you think about rats, cockroaches, spiders. I know people completely terrified of spiders. Mosquitoes. Yeah.
It’s a really good example. They can send you berserk, completely berserk. In Kopan, where I teach in the monsoon in Nepal, we have lots of mosquitoes. And they often get into the room when the door is open. And people get tired of meditation courses and you hear all these ideas and they think that one of the rules is you won’t kill in the monastery.
So they haven’t had good sleep for a few nights, and they’re starting to get a bit tetchy, you know, a bit cranky about the whole situation. And up early in the morning until nine o’clock at night and on the go all day. So they go to bed and you think, oh, just one good night sleep. That’s all I need. So there’s the projection.
Right? I just need one good night sleep, and I’ll be okay. And just as you’re falling off, you hear, you’re awake. Right? And there’s flailing arms and go crazy, you know, just about this one little thing.
Just one little. And people say, yeah, because of the malaria, because of this and this. It’s not that really. I mean, I’ve been in India and Nepal twenty two years. I don’t take malaria tablets.
I haven’t had malaria. There’s more to it than that. It’s not just about this mosquito biting you. So but people go completely berserk. And even if you have a net, then you think, oh, I’ve got the net.
And then the worst thing is the mosquito gets inside the net. You know. So you’ve got this projection. You’ve got the net. The net is safe.
You’ll be okay and now the mosquito’s inside, you know. And then life is a complete nightmare. And then you’re sort of flailing around. The neck gets caught up in you. You know, the strings snap.
And then you think, is a nightmare. So at two o’clock in the morning, you’re tying the strings back up and, you know, it’s like that. So we can have these sort of crazy states of mind about just a little creature, just something really small. So don’t think I’ve never killed. Don’t think I’ve never stolen.
I’ve never lied. Of course, we have. And if we’ve done it in this life, we’ve probably done it in other lives. And that’s what we’re experiencing in this life. We’re experiencing the result of all the actions that we’ve done.
That’s this life. Alright? That’s why things happen to you in this life, good things and bad things. So we label some things bad because we don’t like them, and the good we label good because we like them. It’s not good for everybody and bad for everybody, but it’s good and bad for us.
Where did that good and bad come from? You need to start thinking about this list. And we don’t just have these actions. We also have delusions. And delusions are negative states of mind.
Right? So delusions are such things as anger, hatred. That’s one. So from anger comes hatred. Yeah.
So particularly think about anger, the delusion of anger. When we put on the anger glasses, I often say, you know, think of it as glasses. So you put on the anger glasses and now you see everything is red. You’re angry. Right?
And whoever you see, you feel angry towards them and they look angry. Haven’t you ever woken up and feel you feel really cranky and then you see angry people everywhere and you think, what’s wrong with everybody today? Don’t know why they’re so angry, you know, but it’s you. One guy told me, he lived in London, and he said, I have a real problem with not starting the day with a cup of coffee. I must have my cup of coffee.
So that’s a projection. You know, you’ve you’ve already set yourself up for having a bad day if you start thinking like that. Every day, I must have my cup of coffee. So he has his special coffee making machine, you know, to make his coffee the way he likes it. There’s your second problem.
So one day he woke up in a real mood. He was late. The coffee machine didn’t work. So by now he’s raging angry, he’s really, really angry, but he thinks, but on the way to work there’s a Starbucks. So that’s okay, I can get the coffee I need in order to survive.
Now we’re down to survival. To survive today. Right? So he runs down to Starbucks and there’s about, I don’t know, he said fifty people in front but it was probably ten but seemed like fifty. Right?
And so the person in front saying I’ll have a blah blah blah with a blah blah blah and don’t give me that and blah blah blah. And you know how people talk about coffee now and they want this and they don’t want this and blah blah blah and they want this. Oh and I might have a muffin and then the change. And so he’s in the queue and he’s getting angrier and angrier and angrier and he’s looking at the time and it’s getting later and later. And he knows he has to be at the train by so and so time and it’s getting later.
And he’s not going to get to the front of the queue, now he has to run off and get to the train and get to work. And he walks into work and people are saying, Oh, what’s wrong with you? Nothing! And all they’ve got at work is Nescafe. He can’t stand Nescafe.
He wants his double espresso blah blah blah, you know? And that’s what we can do. This negative state of mind that we wake up with. We don’t think, Oh, how wonderful! I’m alive!
The birds are singing. What a beautiful day. We don’t think like, well, I need my cup of coffee. And if I don’t get it, I’m going to kill. You know?
People actually think like that, I’m gonna kill. And so you don’t have a knife or a gun, but already you’re primed for this aggression. And then you have your car, which is like the killing weapon. You’re dodging in and out and you’re driving like a lunatic because you want to get to work early so you can rush down the road and get your Starbucks before you get in to work and la la. So we make all these problems for ourselves.
Where does it come from? That coffee is covetousness. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
You haven’t changed over. Yeah. No. You can’t. Yeah.
Yeah. Right. Right. And I I might be like I’m gonna try and it doesn’t fit. You know what I mean?
I think it’s like a pair of shoes that you keep thinking are gonna be comfortable one day, but they’re never quite comfortable, isn’t it? Rather than the shoe rather than the coat. The coat you can sort of work with, but the shoes, you walk in your shoes every day, don’t you? And I think it’s are the new habits appropriate for you? You know?
So you’d have to look at the old habits and what are the new habits that you’re trying to create, and are the new habits built on a foundation of knowledge. So very important is that you investigate your situation. You know, what we often do, I think, the West is that we decide we don’t want to be angry anymore. We don’t want to be irritable anymore, even irritable, you know. But we’re really irritable and we’re really angry.
Right? So, yes. Okay. I acknowledge we’re in December this is. Over Christmas, it particularly comes up.
I’m a really irritable angry person especially when the turkey burns and the pudding didn’t turn out as it was supposed to and everybody criticized my food and blah blah blah. So Christmas is a very stressful time and it leads to us writing a list. So, we take a piece of paper on the thirty first of December and we write down all the stuff we’re going to change. You know? So, I’ve decided these are the things I’m going to change.
But it’s not based on true knowledge. It’s just based on aversion. It’s based on the reactions that we didn’t like from people that we like. It is based on temporary situations that have happened before, but we didn’t really go into why should I change. The real reason underneath.
Not just I don’t like myself being irritable and I don’t like being angry. We can easily find that. And, you know, in there, it doesn’t even mention anger or hatred or ignorance or attachment, desire. Just this basic list, you can find yourself. You know, you can find yourself being divisive or harsh or idle gossip or lying.
Easy. You know, these are not difficult thing. Malice, just thinking bad things in your mind. So you might think, oh okay, I really want to change that. But unless you investigate why have a lot of knowledge about the harm that it does to you and the harm that it does to others, then you don’t have the foundation to change.
It’s like you haven’t laid the foundation of the house. If you’re gonna build a house, you need to start with the foundation. So unless you lay the foundation from a Buddhist point of view with knowledge, then if you don’t have knowledge, you have ignorance. You don’t really know about your situation. You don’t really know about why you should change.
If you have knowledge and then the resistance comes up, this feeling of, oh, I don’t know. I keep trying, but it doesn’t feel comfortable. You don’t have the knowledge that counteracts that negative state of mind that comes back and says, yes, but the reason I’m doing this is because blah blah blah blah blah. So this is why in Buddhism we actually go into the background why we need to change. Why we need to have good habits rather than negative habits.
Why we need to, I think, live in truth. You know, if you live in truth, the truth is that we really don’t want to hurt other people. We don’t want to be angry. We don’t want to tell lies and be divisive. But often, our upbringing taught us most if not all of this, you know?
I mean, parents aren’t saints. So our parents teach us many bad habits. And then when we grow up, we don’t know any different to that. And then we get to know different because we read books. Now we have self help books and think positive books and magazines and you do the quiz in the magazine.
Are you a good person or not? And you come out a disaster and you’re like, oh, you know, I thought it was better than that. You go back over the quiz and you change some of the numbers, you know, to prove that you you got over the line and maybe average. But what do you think about the situation? What do you think about your situation?
Not what do other people say about you. What’s important when you go inside your heart is the truth inside there. Can you look at yourself truthfully and say, I’m happy with how I am. I’m satisfied with how I am. You know?
There’s always something more to learn. There’s always something more to change or to develop. But are you are you satisfied? At the end of the day, can you look back over the day and say, that was a good day. It was okay, you know?
But mostly we look back over the day and we think, oh dear, I lost it. I got angry or I was very irritable or I was jealous or I had this or I had this. A lot of negatives and then we don’t have a method to remove them from our mind. So we go to bed with them, with these negative states of mind. Then we wake up with them because they were going on all night like the mosquito buzzing around but it’s your thoughts buzzing around.
Then you wake up with this negative state of mind thinking, terrible night, awful dreams, really strange stuff going on. I need a strong cup of coffee. And then it goes on like that, you know. So it’s making a having knowledge, making a strong determination that you want to change and having the enthusiasm to want to change, which is when I was talking about precious human rebirth, impermanence death. This is to give you the energy to want to change because you have to do it on a daily basis.
Not say, I’m going to completely change from being angry to being patient. Doesn’t happen. It really doesn’t happen. You’ve got to persuade your mind that anger is the fault, is what creates harm and patience is what’s beneficial. And when you’re angry, you don’t think that.
You think anger is the quality and patience is the fault. And you can cite examples of people who are patient and you say and look at them I think patience is a weakness. I think anger is a strength. And people say this. Especially today.
They say I’m a manager in a company. Mainly women say, I’m a manager in a company and if I’m not angry they don’t listen to me. So I have to be angry and I have to thump the desk and then everybody is afraid and they run. I say, fine. But who wants to be in a job like that and then you drop dead because you’ve got to show this anger every day?
Who wants that? Men are dropping dead at the age of forty of heart attacks because we do that. You know, that’s how we run business. Listen to me. You know get on with it.
And people go and they run. But then it kills you or you know you take Valium or you take sleeping pills because you can’t live with yourself and you drink and then it affects your heart, affects your liver and then you drop dead. And yeah, it was all worthwhile because at least the family got a nice house and some money and a good car, but the husband’s dead. Well also for women, is that what you want to do to yourself? Do you want to have that sort of anger that’s going to harm your digestion, your heart, your liver, your kidneys?
Is that what you yourself? So from a scientific point of view, not just a Buddhist point of view, from a scientific point of view, you start to investigate what these negative emotions will do to you even just physically. It’s very harmful. Anger is very harmful just physically. Resentment is like something burning going on and on and on, you know?
So not forgiving is a resentment that you haven’t dropped. You haven’t let go of. And so you keep putting a bit more wood on the fire, a bit more wood on the fire, a bit more wood on the fire and you say I really must give this up. But you don’t mean it. Right?
In a way, it’s a bit like a dance. Right? There’s the resentment and the resenter. So it’s a bit like you stay in a dance and you push that way and the other person leans that way and you push that way and then you lean that way. And so in the end, identify with the emotion.
And by identifying with the emotion, you don’t want to let go of it. I am an angry person. I am resentful. And it’s like that’s what makes us alive but not well. Know?
Yes, we’re alive just but we’re not well because that resentment, jealousy, anger, hatred, those negative thoughts, they’re not pleasant. We don’t like them. And so what we end up doing is looking at ourselves being unpleasant and saying, I don’t like you. Looking at yourself and saying, I don’t like you. Right?
So then resenting yourself others for making you like that. And so then more resentment and more anger comes up and I think you get into a circle where you can’t seem to break out of the circle. Know? So what I’m hoping in this weekend is to sort of support you with different thoughts. It’s not just one thought.
Easy would be, what’s the point of resentment? It hurts you. Who would agree with it hurts you? You’ll all put your hands up. Yes, of course.
Resentment hurts me. Then you need to forgive. Okay. Forgive. Thank you very much.
Goodbye. You know, it would be easy. Isn’t it? That’s what we talk about. The change of mind.
I’ve read all the think positive books. You know, seven steps and blah blah blah blah. And I always come away thinking, yes. I’m going to do it. You know, for the new year.
You know, year after year after, I used to read Krishnamurti and I used to read many, many people. And Krishnamurti, I used to think absolutely incredible. Wow. This is the answer. And then I think, but what’s he saying?
What is the answer? Krishnamurti says no, no, no, no, no. Right? If you read Krishnamurti really well, what he’s saying is no, no, no, no, no. So you say my negative feeling, no, doesn’t exist.
Keep saying doesn’t exist. You doesn’t exist. The person you resent doesn’t exist. The person you’re angry with doesn’t exist. That’s what Krishnamurti was doing.
He was talking about wisdom, emptiness. The Buddhist wisdom. He was talking about that. But it’s really tough. I used to read in the bath.
I used to when I was really cranky. I’d get in the bath, put the water up here sort of with the book and stay in there for hours. Come out like a prune, you know, But clean. Clean. This is the good thing.
Know, you clean your teeth, you’ve cleansed your body, and you’ve read Krishnamurti. And you go to bed thinking, Yes, I’ve conquered it. And the next morning you wake up, same anger, same resentment because it’s so high. It’s so lofty. It sort of lifts you up.
Spiritually it lifts you up, but it’s far above where we are. We’re down here. We’re down in the basement, you know, with the cobwebs and the dirt and we haven’t even dealt with that level. Never mind getting up to the lofty levels of wisdom and emptiness. So you need to go step by step in order to persuade your mind into it making sense.
And then it doesn’t seem like the squeaky shoes or the coat that’s got an arm missing or something like that. You brought your mind to the point where it said, This totally makes sense. And I’ve had this experience with many, many people. Not Buddhist, where we’ve done these courses, particularly we did many of them in Mexico where people are very emotional and have a really strong, strong resentment and anger and family feuds and all that sort of thing. And when we talk about these sort of things by the end of the weekend, they’re completely transformed.
Not because you persuaded them into it, but because they see the wisdom of it. They see the logic of it. You have to go step by step. Know, don’t jump from the beginning to the end without having all the steps in between. Right?
Because if you don’t have the steps in between, if you don’t look at the small stuff, you’re just looking at the big stuff. You’re just saying, I have resentment. I have anger. And it’s so big you just don’t know what to do with it. You don’t seem to know how to change it.
But you look at those ten and you start looking at them and thinking, Well, have I killed? If I’ve killed, then what state of mind did I have to kill? Right? We don’t just kill. We kill from a particular point of view.
I’m big, this is small, this is dangerous. I don’t want danger. I’m, you know, and the cockroach, poor little cockroach, you know, doesn’t have any sting, doesn’t do anything dangerous, but poor little cockroach is going across there and because of our background we go cockroach. And what comes up? I want to be safe.
I want to be protected from this little creature. I mean, if we stopped and thought about it, we think that’s ridiculous. That little creature isn’t gonna harm me. It’s not gonna do any harm. And actually, it must be cleaning up all the rubbish.
You know? If you think about it eating all these little bits and pieces, it must be cleaning up all the rubbish. If we thought of it in a different way, we wouldn’t think danger, harmful, I want to kill. But because we don’t think about it, this aggression and anger or aversion can come up and then we can kill without even thinking about it. We can also hit without even thinking about it.
That you can build up resentment and anger until one day you want to hit somebody. Or you can build up resentment and anger so one day you say, I hate you to the person you love. You’re the horriblest, worst person in the world. I hate you. And afterwards you think, oh, that’s terrible.
Why did I say that? It doesn’t come from just there. You have to look in there. The harsh speech, the malice, the divide, you know, look in there, you’ll find the beginnings of these major actions, where everything else comes from. But if you don’t look at your daily actions, you don’t find the answer to how to start changing things, how to do it.
You just say, I’ve got this big problem and I need to change it. But actually look at the small stuff. Start with the irritability. Why do you get irritable? If you don’t have enough sleep, if you’re not eating properly, if you’re not exercising properly, your body’s against you.
This is the first thing. Right? So you have to support a healthy mind. So you need a healthy body in order to have a healthy mind. And as part of healthy mind, healthy emotions.
Do you sleep properly? Do you eat properly? Do you exercise properly? Enough for you. Right?
And part of eating, how much caffeine? Because some people just live on coffee. Right? So how much caffeine? How much of the foods that you shouldn’t be having?
The sugar. You know, we take in a huge amount of sugar which exhausts us. It makes us really tired to eat processed sugar. So how much sugar is in your diet? Because if you’re eating a lot of sugar, you’re affecting your body in a negative way.
There’s an impact. Then that means it’s as if you’re waking up in stress. When you wake up in the morning, you’re already stressed because of this habit of not eating properly, not sleeping properly, not exercising properly. You wake up in stress and then you’re starting the day in stress. Is it any wonder you get irritable?
Or you get angry? Because there’s no support for that change of behavior. So rather than just thinking, I am an irritable person, I’m an angry person, I’m a jealous person, go back, Go into the background and look at the background. What’s going on underneath? And then you have to change some of those things in order to support your body so that your body isn’t stressing you and so then you can make the decision as to emotionally, mentally what you want to do, how you want to change that situation.
So you have to go step by step, not just go for the end result, you have to build up towards the end result so that by the time you get to the end result it makes sense. Persuaded your mind into it. Do you see what I mean? I gave an example which I really like because I like computers. In the beginning I didn’t like computers but now I really like computers because I think they’re an incredible tool for communication and helping people for me.
And so when I first had a computer, it was Windows ninety five. So I don’t know if you remember Windows ninety five. In actual fact, I had the very first computer they made and I bought it from Dick Smith in Australia and it was sixteen kilobytes, sixteen kilobytes, the first computer. I think it cost me about three thousand dollars and it was just sixteen kilobytes and there was all this fun for the new computer, you know. And I thought, I must have this computer.
It’s going to be great. And so I got it. It couldn’t do anything. Sixteen kilobytes. So I took it back.
I had no idea what sixteen kilobytes was. I don’t even know now if I know what sixteen kilobytes are. But there was a huge advertisement. You can do anything with this computer. So then the next one was Windows ninety five.
So Windows ninety five, you connect to the Internet and you know in those days the Internet was really slow and the computer was really slow and you click send. And then you just sort of, you know, go and make a cup of coffee, cook lunch, have a lie down, come back and it’s still going click, click, click, click, click, click, right? And then I think Windows ninety eight was the next one I had. Now I’ve got Windows two thousand and eight XP something, I don’t know, XP something or other. And it’s much, much faster.
Now if you ask me, would I like to keep this program or Windows ninety five? I’d say, of course, this program is much better. It’s faster, it’s more efficient, it has more things available. I can do more things. It works for me.
Right? But in the beginning when I switched to the higher program, it was always difficult because new icons, new ways of working and it was always difficult for me. And then, you know, you go from ninety five to ninety eight, ninety eight to two thousand, and two thousand to the next one. Now people say Windows Vista, so difficult. They don’t want Windows Vista because it’s so difficult.
But it must have incredible capability in there. But unless we become familiar with what we have, this level where we are, who we are, what we are, and becoming familiar with that, Unless we become familiar with it, going to another level becomes frightening because you’re just adding something onto what is. So you don’t understand this and now you don’t understand that and you’re compounding it. It’s just making the situation more confusing. So I think if you end up like this, then probably the first question to ask would be, are you meditating?
I’m sure not. If you don’t meditate, you’re not going into yourself, into your mind. You don’t know what the operating system is. You don’t know what’s in there. You can know from the point of view of mind, knowledge.
But we don’t know from the point of view of looking inside. We know what How can I say? We know what we know. So if I ask you about geography and history and stuff like this, this is accumulated knowledge. Cognitive knowledge.
But to know ourselves, we need to meditate to get beyond the surface, the conscious mind. We need to go into the subconscious mind where we hold the resentment and the anger and the hatred. We need to go into that. So this is the cognitive mind. Right?
So these ten negative states of body, speech and mind. This is knowing. And then it starts to get more subtle. So you start with body, it gets more subtle, speech, and it gets even more subtle. What are you doing with your mind?
Junk it. Chuck it out. No. But when you get there, you have to watch it and and understand it and be aware of it. You see, at the moment it’s something that’s appearing out of nowhere.
The behavior, the emotions appear out of nowhere. We can get really angry without even knowing we were getting irritable. It just comes. We can have jealousy without knowing where it came from. We can have hatred without knowing where it came from.
So it’s like whoosh, you know. Mount Vesuvius volcano goes whoo, you know, and you think, where did that come from? I wasn’t so angry. But little, little, little, little, little. My mother used to say the the straw that broke the camel’s back.
In a way, it’s Because little bit, little bit, little bit, and suddenly whoosh. So we’re tolerant up to a certain point and then something, something snaps, right? But we weren’t aware of what was happening before the anger. We didn’t know. And what didn’t we know?
What was happening inside our own mind. So we’re looking at the result, the world, the people around us. That’s the result of all the actions that we’ve done in the past. Who is projecting that result onto the world? I am.
Where is that result coming from? The karma that I’ve created. Who wrote the movie? Me. Who stars in it?
Me. Who produces it? Me. Who decides the type of movie? Me.
Right? Whether it’s a comedy, a drama, whatever we are in, the movie that we’re starring in and each one of us thinks we’re starring in a movie. I’m the star of my own movie, right? You’re not getting into my movie. So each one of us stars in our own movie.
And we think, but I wanted a sort of romantic comedy, you know, like Reese Witherspoon or something, I don’t know. Reese? Anyway, Reese Witherspoon or I wanted a sort of romantic comedy, but somehow I’m in a nightmarish drama. And how did this happen to me? It wasn’t supposed to work out like this.
Isn’t it? So we can often feel that we’re in the wrong movie and it’s your fault. And if you’re in a relationship, it’s your fault. Or the family, it’s your fault. It’s not my fault.
Why should I be to blame? They’re to blame. But Buddhism says wrong. It’s your life. You wrote the movie.
You decided. Right? Up till now, you decided. But you were ignorant because you didn’t know you were deciding. You didn’t know the choices you were making.
But now, know. This is knowledge to know. Now know the choices that you’re making. And if you make negative choices, take responsibility, know that you’re going to get negative actions. If you do negative things, negative comes back.
If you do positive things, positive things come back. It works like that. But we need to know. And so, after the break, now we’ve talked about this and we’ve talked about that, I’m going to start talking about these, four four qualities. The first one, is humility.
And humility, you know, isn’t adulated in the world. We don’t think, oh, humble people might think, Dalai Lama humble. That’s nice for him. But humble for me, how’s it gonna work? But humble is making yourself smaller so that you can grow, so that you can change.
And often we put ourselves bigger up on top of the mountain and it’s very difficult to change up there. You know, I’m up there. You’re all down there. That’s where pride gets you. So we need to sort of make ourselves a bit more humble, a bit smaller, not low self esteem, but humble.
So we’re going to talk about humility and what humbleness is, but I have to stop because I’m riding on, and it’s your tea break. I don’t want you to miss your tea break because you might get cranky. We don’t need more cranky, do we? Switch that off.