Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 49-minute session, Ven Lobsang Namgyel unpacks the Buddhist understanding of delusion as the root cause of suffering and explores practical methods for transforming negative emotions. Drawing on a contemporary poem questioning why we cling to emotional wounds, he explains how delusions are mental factors that disturb the mind, then introduces the critical role of motivation: a single moment of compassionate intention shapes the entire day. He walks through the mechanics of karma and habit, revealing how sixty-five karmic seeds are planted per second, meaning an hour of anger generates a quarter-million negative imprints that grow exponentially. Rather than suppressing or acting out emotions, he advocates regret over guilt, analytical meditation to reprogram responses, and meditation itself as the essential tool to access the mind’s underlying wisdom and compassion. Directed at practitioners working to change emotional habits, whether in daily life or retreat.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 23 Session 2.mp3
UUID: 6d96d5c9-cf49-4714-935e-b39ae230bf62
Teacher: Ven Lobsang Namgyel
Collection: VenNamgyel Thought Transformation (Ven Lobsang Namgyel)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 49.5 minutes
Words: ~6,888
How to transform negative emotions. A poem by Jennifer Edwards. Why cling to the arrows shot at you? Insults, wounds, time heals you see. Why hold so tightly?
Do these things define you? Do these things set you free? Why inject yourself with these poisons of the mind? Anxiety, greed, anger, despair, why not let them go? Set them free.
Accept the choices you have and your responsibilities. Accept all that is rather than as it should be. For what does define you? What will set you free? What if you never find great meaning?
What if in not clinging you find stillness, calm, honesty, health, and peace? What if you don’t find great meaning but you find stillness? Yes. So I have to give you the definition of delusion, the official definition. So this is a general definition of delusion because all the the minds that we’re talking about, we can call delusion.
So then what is delusion? What’s the definition of delusion? So delusions are defined as a mental factor. This is very important. It’s a mental factor.
It doesn’t arise by itself. So emotions don’t arise separately from the mind. They’re part of the mind. So delusions are defined as mental factors that when generated cause the mental continuum to be very unpeaceful. Okay?
It causes the mental continuum to be very unpeaceful. And delusions are sometimes referred to as afflictions, defilements, negative minds, contaminated minds. So there’s various descriptions of them, but it all means the same thing. And The source — excuse me — the source of cyclic existence is karma and delusion, and karma and delusion, delusion is the principal source.
So that’s why it’s so important to be talking and thinking about delusions because the principal cause of our suffering is delusion. In actual fact, if you have billions of karmic seeds but no delusion, those karmic seeds cannot produce an effect. So you have the karmic seeds every moment we’re doing action, we produce seeds. Good, bad, indifferent. The delusion is like rain or sun that actually makes the seeds grow, produces something happening.
And then if there were no previous karma but delusion, delusion now creates karma. So if you had all your karma removed, you know, you got one of these TV guys to come on the weekend and completely clean your karma for you. So they have some sort of special vacuum cleaner. You completely remove all your karma and you think that’s great. Sunday night, I’m completely purified.
Some sort of delusion that could be pride. Well, look at me, you know, completely purified. There’s your delusion, you’ve started creating more karma which is going to produce result. So in this weekend we don’t talk much about karma but I think some of you are beginners, some of you don’t know much about karma which is a little bit difficult. But if you think of karma in a simple way, karma actually means cause.
When we think about karma now generally, we’re talking about cause and effect. But the actual definition of karma, what is karma? karma is only cause, it’s not the effect. Alright, so when you create karma you’re creating causes, you’re creating causes. So that’s why it’s important to have a good motivation.
What I started with was, what’s your motivation? What are you doing here? Because you might just think, life, you know, not very happy about it, and so without a strong motivation, you just arrive here, plunk yourself on the cushion, spend the weekend, go home and not much changes. But if you have a strong motivation, this is what I want to do this for, I want to change my attachment or my desire or I want to change my ignorance or whatever it is, I have a very strong feeling I must change this, then you start moving in that direction. Every moment after that motivation is a moment of that.
So if your first motivation is compassion, every moment after that is a compassionate moment because of your motivation. This is incredible. If you start your day thinking I want to live today to remove suffering from others, to make others happy. Your day is one of love and compassion. You don’t have to keep thinking about it for the rest of the day.
Just because of your motivation, the day is like that. The same as when we wake up and you look out and you think, oh, it’s a shitty day. I’m not happy. What do New Zealanders say when it’s a bad day? Do you have a saying?
No. Come on, Zealanders. In German, you must have it. Something or other. Isn’t it?
Scheißt. Yeah, it’s it’s a scheißt day, right? So you think it’s a shitty day I’m not going to work and so you call in and they say you’re back you know and you put the phone down You know, I’m gonna watch TV all day. Well, it’s not much of a joy in New Zealand where you’ve got, like, three channels or something. So you you go through the channels and then you’ve got days of our lives and they’re going oh you know like for twenty years somebody’s leaving somebody somebody’s divorcing somebody somebody’s gonna murder somebody and you switch it back on twenty years later still different they’re older but they’re still doing the same stuff and you can really get into that the drama of it, you know.
Or you can think, I don’t want to watch this sort of stuff and turn over General Hospital and you know, don’t worry we’ll save you, boom! You know, like this. On TV there’s a lot of emotion, right? And then in the breaks it says, eat chocolate, drink alcohol, you know, and you think, yes, that’s what I need to solve my problems. So TV, I think, is supposed to be stressful because then you become consumers.
If you’re reading a very emotional book, you notice your mood, how your mood changes when you’re in this really emotional book, difficult book to read. Your emotions start to be triggered and to start coming up. So that’s what it’s doing. It’s the delusion, the emotion is sort of hooking into past karma and then ripening it, bundling it together and bringing it out. Now just as part of that, I’m going to tell you something shocking.
Here we go. This is about karma. I’ll leave this here in case anybody wants it. Alright. This is what Buddha said.
He didn’t talk about one second. He didn’t have that word at that time. Can you say that? It’s okay. Can you say?
I’ll tell you anyway. So one second, he said that. Right? The click of the fingers. That’s one second.
One second equals what are called sixty five moments. Okay? So in one second are sixty five moments of karma. Seeds. The easiest way to think about it is a garden.
In one second you’re planting sixty five seeds of karma. Then it was only until computer science and people making, you know, technological advances they realized that in order to make a solid real image on the computer screen, you need at least sixty five dots per second. So what we’re doing is we’re utilizing sixty five karmic seeds in order to see our world, in order to project onto our world solid, real. This is how it is. Okay?
So one second equals sixty five moments, which means sixty five seeds, which means potential. What sort of karmic potential do you want in your life? Yes, sir. I said, This is the Dharma drama path. Do you want to be in days of our lives or general hospital?
Someone is saying yes there. I’m a little bit worried. Twenty years later, still going through the same drama. Right? So this is the Dharma or drama sort of pathway.
You get to this point, and in every time, there’s a there’s a decision depending on what you know, the changes that you brought about. Right? So sometimes you can’t choose, and you automatically go onto the drama path. Oh, well, what to do? You know?
Here we go again. But sometimes you can choose. You choose not to be angry. You choose not to have hatred. You choose not to have desire.
And in that moment you’ve decided the Dharma path. And then again there’s going to be another path and then there’s another path. But it gets easier as you make these choices to change the habit. And it’s the negative habits that we want to change, not the positive habits. It’s not that habit itself is a bad thing.
Habit is good but which way have we used habit? Have we used it to develop good habits or we used it to develop some good, some bad or mostly bad, little good. Each person’s dealing with their own story, isn’t it? So if you have really good habits, when you come to the Dharma drama pathway, it’s quite easy for you to choose Dharma. You think I go with the love and the kindness and the compassion.
That’s what I prefer. If you’re fifty fifty, you’re there and you think, well, life’s been a little bit boring lately. I think we’ll go for the drama pathway. You know, let’s go for it. And if if you’re really frazzled and, you know, a lot of stuff going on and you’re anxious and you’re tense and you’re worried, easy to choose the drama path.
But then what happens? Sixty five moments, sixty five seeds, sixty five karmic potentials. Now when I really thought about this, in the old days when I was a child and growing up, I didn’t like to be with people very much. I liked to read books. And my mother was a very very people person.
She loved parties and going out. So she used to take the books off me and say, go out. So she’d locked me out the house and said, go out for the day, you know, in the freezing cold, got nowhere to go, twelve years of age. And I used to get really angry about this and moody. And sometimes I could be moody three days, three weeks.
It’d also be possible. And now then later, I used to think when I’m older, oh, well, anyway, three days wasn’t bad. Right? Three days of being moody or irritable wasn’t bad in comparison to say three weeks. Now I think, I haven’t got a calculator, but one second is sixty five, so that means sixty five times sixty for one minute.
This is six six of the thirty six, three thousand nine hundred seeds, potentials only in one minute. Now we’ll go to one hour. Add on a zero, multiply by six, Five nine forty five fifty four. Three six six. Eighteen.
Eighteen plus five twenty three. Two hundred and thirty four thousand. Let’s make it easy. Let’s say two hundred and fifty thousand. A quarter of a million seeds in one hour.
Now do you get frightened? Now do you understand why when you keep going back to the same habit of strong emotion that in one hour you’re producing nearly a quarter of million negative seeds that you’re putting in your garden mind, that is then going to potentially arise in the future as even more seeds, even more potential. Because going on from here, one seed, and you might think, well, sixty five seeds, not so frightening. One seed that you plant, what happens to that one seed? You water it, and it starts to grow.
And it grows into a massive tree, and then it has fruit. So the teaching on karma that Buddha gave is not that it stays the same, but it grows, it produces fruit. That fruit drops and now also creates many more potentials. So this is why it’s important to get a hang on this. This is why it’s important to change.
Because in these decisions of dharma or drama is so much more suffering in the future, so much more confusion, or in this moment I go for drama or dharma, do I go for ignorance, do I go for wisdom? It’s important to make these distinctions because of this in the future. Quarter of a million seeds, but those quarter of a million seeds also producing even more potential. So that quarter of a million doesn’t stay as a quarter of a million, it becomes a million, two million, three million, just on its own. It keeps growing and growing and growing.
And so as we get older it can get more difficult. It gets harder to change. Habituation in Tibetan, the word for habituation is meditation. How do you reprogram? How do you change?
We need new habits, new ways of looking at things. And so how you reprogram is through your meditation. If you don’t meditate, this is information, is knowledge, but it doesn’t mean it produced a change. We need to use this information in a way that produces a change. So that in the quiet time when you’re sitting on the cushion, when you’re not stressed out and anxious and seeing things in a delusional way, when you’re sitting there peacefully with yourself and you go into your own mind, you actually get some feeling for your own mind.
Your own mind, the state of your own mind or the potential of your own mind is very beautiful. Our own mind’s nature is wisdom and compassion. This is what Buddha said. This is why everything is possible, that our mind’s nature is wisdom and compassion. So everything is possible from there, you know, not just compassion, patience, generosity, love.
Think of all the good qualities. That’s the potential of your mind. But we need to actualize that potential. And how can we actualize the potential when from beginningless time, we’ve been putting all these karmic imprint seeds which surround our mind, the potential, and don’t allow the potential to show through. So we have two jobs.
Jobs. One is to purify, to remove all these negative karmic seeds, and the other is to accumulate, to have new positive seeds. So you’ve got two jobs. One like your home, one is cleaning, and the other is furnishing. You know, the good stuff that you wanna put in your house.
You don’t bring junk into your house, you know, broken down rubbish. Sometimes you might and you call it an antique, but mainly we don’t. So what do you do with your mind? We have this incredible potential to do whatever we want to do for ourselves and others. Very positive.
But we have to deal with all these negative emotions, all this past behavior that has created this karmic imprints. Every time a negative thought arises in your mind and you choose not to follow it, the Dharma drama pathway, you’re purifying it. You’re removing it. Every time you choose not to follow it, this is purification. But if the thought arises, you know, oh, look at look at that.
This can happen in meditation. You know, somebody’s sitting there and you’ve decided you don’t particularly like them because of something something strange like blue and green. You know, they got blue blue top on and green pants, and you think, oh. Because your mother told you many, many times blue and green. So instinctively, you’ll look at somebody and say, oh, without even thinking about it.
Don’t think I like her or him. And then you’re trying to meditate and you think, oh, this is so difficult. You know? I thought meditation was gonna be easy. I’m an intelligent person.
I should be able to do this. You try and you try and you’re really squeezing to try and then you look out the corner of your eye and you see this person wearing blue and green and they seem to be doing really well. Then you think, you know, I don’t think they’re a good person. And now jealousy and envy can arise. Right?
So we impute all this onto somebody else. In fact, they’re sitting there thinking, oh, dear. This is so difficult, so difficult. They’re having the same trouble as you, but just their physical posture is better than you. Right?
So we put ourselves down. Oh, I’m useless. I’m terrible. And then we get jealous about them. They’re not a good person because they can sit really well.
So even all those thoughts are causes of suffering. Nobody heard them. I think if we could attach a speaker to the mind, we’d hear incredible things. You know? We’d run.
We’d all run down to Café Ville and have double lattes or something to be able to cope with the the stress of hearing all these thoughts. So we all have these bizarre thoughts. Yeah? But we think, oh, it’s okay because nobody hears. But you hear, you’re experiencing it, isn’t it?
And sometimes it manifests in your behavior because you keep adding to that thought, strengthening that thought, strengthening, making it bigger, making it stronger, and one day when you’re upset and you’re anxious and you’re tense and things are happening, my mother used to say, maybe it was true, the last straw that you put on the camel and it breaks the camel’s back. So it’s like one last thing small and then you say everything you’ve been thinking. And this can often happen in relationships. I hate you. I don’t like you.
And you say all this terrible stuff and the other person hears it and thinks it’s true. And then afterwards you say, oh, it’s not true. I didn’t mean it. But it’s very difficult to get over it because it was so negative. And you wish you hadn’t done it.
And you think, well, where did that come from? That situation wasn’t so bad. It’s actually you’ve been meditating for weeks or months, meditating, adding, adding, adding all these negative thoughts and building it, and it becomes a very very strong powerful package. If you look at sixty five imprints per second, you’ll understand how many negative seeds were then created that when a delusion was added, some irritability, some anger, the delusion came together with all those seeds and then projected out. You’re the worst person in the world.
And it can happen when you’re driving the car. You know, your nice new car and somebody nearly heads it. And because of your desire, your attachment for the car, you want to keep it pristine, beautiful, unscratched, they know they scratch it, you go berserk. You think what happened? When you think about it, the wisdom cuts in and you think I shouldn’t have been that angry, why did that sort of anger come up?
But it’s not just about that situation, it’s about all the thoughts that you’re creating before the situation happens. So don’t think just because it’s thoughts you’re getting away with it. We have three types of activities, mental. Right? We have physical, the body, and we have speech.
So body, speech, and mind. The most important of those three is the mind. Without directing the mind, how do you have a comfortable healthy body? How do you have nice speech if you can’t direct your mind? So if your mind’s crazy and berserk, you can’t have meaningful speech.
You could have hypocritical speech, you know, this crazy mind saying, hate, hate, hate. And you can say, how are you today? You’re right? But people don’t really feel it’s true. Right?
You okay? They say are you all right? Yes. Why not? You know?
And suddenly there’s some sort of change of attitude because really deep down you don’t mean this. It’s like, you know, when you go to some places and they say, have a nice day. And you think they don’t care at all. You know? Oh, do you mean that?
Do you want me to have a nice day? And they’re sort of looking at you as if to say uh-huh. What do you mean? You know? They don’t even know what they’re saying.
It’s just have a nice day. Right? But if we really meant it, that would be good. Right? We’re we’re offering something good to people.
But often it’s just something that we say, the Tibetans say, from the throat, not from the heart. Yeah. The more you say that, though, would it result in you immediately? I don’t think necessarily so. I think you have to want to mean it.
It could be, you know, you work for Hertz, rent a car or Avis or something like that, isn’t it? You go on a training course and they say, the first thing you do when the customer walks in is you smile. Oh this is gonna be difficult. Anyway, you know, good morning, can I help you? You know like this and they say, doing well and then if they’re being difficult, you’re right, you’re right, but we only have a small car.
Yeah, I want a big sedan. You’re right, you should have that, but I never small car. And then, oh, alright, then give me the small car, you know, and they sign up and at the very end you say have a nice day but you’re already thinking about the nice thing to do you know what’s the next job I’ve got to do so it could just be a reflex action not much different from this, this, anything. It’s just a reflex action. But say you had the motivation, you wanted to benefit others.
Your motivation is to have compassion, love, kindness. Whatever your good motivation was for the morning, have a nice day could turn into your means for achieving that. What changed was the motivation, right? So there’s nothing wrong with have a nice day. It’s where you’re coming from.
What are you feeling in your heart that comes along with have a nice day, you know. When His Holiness stops on the line — this was in America, it’s a very nice book called Art of Happiness that I really like — His Holiness is talking about emotions and he stops on the line and he says, where are you from Mexico? What do you do here? And when he says, have a nice day, he means have a nice day. Right?
Or it could just be words, have a nice day. So what puts the meaning in there is where you’re coming from. What you would like others to have instead of what you want to have. And I think that’s the important shift to make is why you’re living. Are you living for your own purpose or the purpose of others?
If you’re living to benefit others, to be of help to others, and you truly felt that, would you get angry if you wanted to help others? Would you be jealous? Would you have hatred? Because if you truly felt that others are more important than you and you really want others to be happy, then these emotions wouldn’t even arise. But we’re at the stage of myself exists, I want this and I don’t want that, and who cares about the rest of it.
We’re not at this the altruistic, you know, completely selfless, let’s care about all sentient beings. Right? This is realistic. We care about the friends we have, the family we have, maybe some people at work if they’re lucky and the rest, who cares? And the other category is, I really do care in a negative way.
These people have decided enemy I don’t like, and that’s it. So the the number of people that we really care about is actually quite small. If you if you look at the number, compared to six billion humans, not talking about all sentient beings, but just humans, six billion. We might care about ten, twenty, thirty. So there’s a stretch that’s got to go on.
You know? How are you going to stretch yourself to care about all sentient beings to go from where we are? Well, I think we need to get real. We need to look honestly at who and what we are, where we’re coming from. No use suppressing it.
There’s no use saying, I’m not that anymore and you push it down. That’s not the the healing of the emotion is it? Just it doesn’t exist. I don’t feel jealous. I don’t feel hatred.
I don’t feel angry. I don’t feel push it down. That creates problems, that can create sickness. So that’s not the way to go. The opposite is let it all out and that was, you know, what we used to do in the eighties, nineties, the psychology thinking behind that, Freud, used to think we’re a pressure cooker and the pressure cooker has to blow.
So Freud said, let it out. And we went the the Dalai Lama, his holiness, nineteen ninety two, I think it was. And we said to him, as a group of people from Tuśita Dharmasala, just finished a course, what do you think about this method of getting a cushion and getting really angry with the cushion because it’s your mother? You’ve visualized her as the you know, the your mother is the cushion. So you see this cushion, you say, you know, I’m really angry with you and you should have treat me like that, my mother.
And then you can punch and hit the cushion. Yeah. This is a psychiatric method. And his holiness had never heard of this before. He said, what?
People do this? And we had some psychiatrists in that group and they said, oh yes, yes, we do that. And he said, oh, no, no. This is not good. Because he said, you’re visualizing the person.
There’s the behavior, there’s the thinking. The only thing missing is the real person. But he said you make a very powerful potential for you to behave that way. It’s not going to remove the behavior. It’s going to increase the behavior.
So he said that’s not gonna work. And that’s what we found over the years is that acting out actually short term may make you feel better, but becomes a habit that you use long term. What’s your habit? You know? What do what do you go back to?
When you’re stressed, do you shop? When you’re stressed, do you eat? Some people just stagger to the fridge. You know? The TV on, on automatic control, they stagger to the fridge, open the door, get something out, close the fridge, go back, and they’re sort of eating.
Then they think, where did this popcorn come from? You know? Like it dropped from the sky. Because we we weren’t even aware that we eat or that we snack. The difficult thing about these causes is you can’t sit here sort of snacking all day.
Some people might be used to snacking as a way of alleviating the emotional pain. Some people drink. Some people use drugs. Some people sleep. There’s all different responses to emotion.
But is it a healthy response? Is it the response that you want? Because you might think, actually, it’s normal. You tell your girlfriend or your boyfriend, whoever it is, oh, when I’m really uptight, I watch TV and your friend says, oh, yeah, I do that too. And I drink beer and I eat popcorn.
Yeah. I do that too. And you think, oh, well, must be normal. You know? Must be what people do.
But is it working for you? And if it isn’t working for you, you need to change it. And when you change, it’s going to feel painful because it’s a change of habit. So in order to change the way you think, the mental habit, you need to do meditation. Because without meditation, it’s just information.
It hasn’t got into the subconscious. It hasn’t reprogrammed the way you do things. So that’s why meditation becomes very important because meditation gives you the space in which to have clarity. It gives you the space in which to experience love and kindness. Whereas in the day we may not feel it at all but at least in that safe place on the cushion you can feel it and nobody’s telling you it’s wrong, it’s bad, it’s stupid.
You can feel this is a good thing to do and then what happens when you don’t behave in the way that you would want to behave? And at the end of the day you get home, you’re tired, you put your feet up, you have a cup of tea, you think back through the day and you think, I got really angry with that person and I really wish I hadn’t. Right? You could use it to be guilty and then beat yourself with it. Well, that’s just going to increase the anger, isn’t it?
You know, if you’re guilty about anything, whatever the emotion, and we had so many emotions, forget about the emotion. What’s your reaction to having had the emotion? Bad. Bad. Bad.
Bad. Like you’re your own parent. You know? You’re really naughty for doing that, and then you feel guilty. Well, guilt isn’t gonna change it, but regret changes it.
So we very much need regret. And regret is, I wish I’d done it in a different way. And what would that be? Right? So when you have regret, it’s very positive because because you’re not beating yourself up about it, you’re just looking at the situation honestly and you’re saying well actually I could have done this, I could have been more patient or I could have explained it in a different way or or or or whatever’s appropriate for you.
So when you meditate on them actually doing it in a different way, you take that person in the office, you meditate on them, they come along and they say to you I’d like you to do this and you lose it and you say, you know, because it’s the fiftieth person that’s done this to you, and on the fiftieth person it’s the straw that broke the camel’s back and you go whoosh and you say, do you think I’ve got nothing else to do in the day? And then you, you know, you go, and then you think I wish I hadn’t done that you know so at home what can you do you think back to that situation that person comes along and they say it to you can you do this photocopying for me or whatever it is and you see yourself being patient, see yourself reacting in a different way. When you visualize yourself doing that, your brain actually thinks it’s true. The response of your brain to the visualization is the same as if you were really doing it. So now it’s reprogramming you to do it in a different way.
This is how analytical meditation work. It takes a negative situation and it reprograms it. It says, wouldn’t you rather be this way? And because our basis, the the condition of our mind, who we are is wisdom and compassion, we actually feel much better with doing the nice things, the good stuff. We feel much better about it.
But sometimes we just don’t know how. We can’t access that wisdom and compassion because of too much going on. You know? Now gleefully, we say, I’m a multitasker. Well, multitasker means multi exhausted.
You know? Because you got five things going at once. We can’t do five things consecutively. We not consecutive. What do call it?
Simultaneously. Simultaneously. You can’t do five things simultaneously. You can do one thing well. So when you’re trying to do five, it means you’re not doing five things well, and that’s stressing you.
And unfortunately, that’s what’s demanded these days in business, isn’t it? That they demand you answer the phone, you’re writing here, you’re doing the computer, and then when you’ve got some peace and quiet, you look at your work, you see mistake mistake mistake and then you pick up that stick and you say you’re so stupid you made that mistake but well why why wouldn’t you make that mistake because we can’t do five things simultaneously. We’re going to make mistakes. We’re not concentrating. We’re switching very quickly from subject to subject.
Back over here, back over there, back over there, back over there, and no wonder we get exhausted. Mentally exhausted, stressed, anxious, and physically tired. It’s because we’re switching very quickly in our mind, which uses a lot of power. If we did the same thing in the computer, the computer would slow down. You open many windows in your computer, your computer will slow down.
Right? If you’re using, the first computer I had was Windows ninety five. So I have Windows ninety five. It was a cheap computer from America, hundred dollars, secondhand revamped, know, and to send an email you used to have to press send and you just sit there, file your nails, you know, do something else, and and it used to tend take ten to fifteen minutes to send an email. And you thought this was a miracle because before it used to take a week for the letter to arrive.
So now in comparison you think, wow, this is great, you know, ten minutes. Then you get Windows ninety eight and you think, much faster. And now we’re up to Vista Vista, isn’t it Vista? Windows Vista. We’re demanding faster and faster speeds, but still you open things that have a lot of capacity, you know, you’re playing a game, you have a big file open, you open five files which are bulky, the computer slows down radically.
We’re the same. We slow down radically and we make mistakes and then we beat ourselves up about making mistakes and then we get anxious and then we get worried. If my boss finds out I’m going to get sacked. So you start blaming other people for the mistakes. Who did that mistake?
Oh, I think it was, you know. We don’t say, yes, it’s me. We say, oh, I think it was her, you know, her with four children and really needs the job. And then you feel guilty because you put the blame onto somebody else. You don’t have to say it’s her.
You just go, I can’t say a word. You know? Then you feel bad. Then the anxiety and stress builds because now she hates you. And now she’s doing things to you to try and get you sacked.
So we can have these things going on in the office. We can have stuff going on at home. And then we wonder why we’re so tired all the time, and then that tiredness produces these strong emotions. It’s no wonder, you know, when we think of what we are, just a human being, just an ordinary human being, we’re not superhuman, then it’s no wonder that we have negative emotions that arise. But we don’t want to leave it as it is because we have so much more potential.
So should we be satisfied with all those negative emotions? No. We don’t have to be that. We are not that. In the Heart Sūtra it says know this, know this, know this, know this.
So you are not your anger, you’re not your hatred, you’re not your envy or your jealousy. All those emotions that we mentioned, the eighty four thousand, we are not those emotions. What’s our potential? Wisdom and compassion. We have tremendous potential that we can actualize, but how do we actualize it?
First, we need to know what we’re doing. First, we need to know why we’re doing it. Right? So we have this gross behavior on the outside, and then we go in. Well, where did that behavior come from?
The mind. The emotions are not separate from the mind. The emotions are a manifestation of the mind. Do you get it? So when you keep thinking hate, hate, hate, hate, then a feeling of hatred can arise, a feeling of anger can arise, aversion, you know, and then because of that feeling, chemicals start to go around your body and you feel you want to do something about it.
Attack. You know, do something. Go for it. You know, spiky hair dangerous. Go for it.
Isn’t it? Look at the well, you know, I make it into a joke, but look at the possums. Spiky hair danger. You know? Kill.
Kill. Kill. Kill. You see them hanging from signs, you know, don’t come into our area. Knock them down.
Swerve across the road to get them. People go out at night to get them. What sort of thinking is that? It’s all around us, you know, it it exists. This is not different from, our reality.
We’re living in that reality where people think possums are incredibly dangerous. Well, not much further is spiky hair on people. Spiky hair on animals, you go to spiky hair on people. Little bit different, is it dangerous? From its own side, it’s not dangerous.
But from our side, we’re making it into dangerous and that makes a lot of stress and anxiety for us. And then that means we can produce a very strong emotion which becomes a harmful behavior. Okay. So I think that was a good morning for me anyway. But I have delusions.
It was a good morning, and we’ll stop there. We’re going to dedicate. I like dedication. And this afternoon, you have a discussion group. So you’re going to start talking about what we’ve been discussing this morning because you can just sit there going, you know, like Japanese people who come to New Zealand and go, you speak English?
Mhmm. So you could be just sitting there going, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
But it’s good to talk about it to see if you really get it because we’re setting the foundation for all emotions you know rather than last weekend was just anger this is just thinking about what’s your situation different people have different emotions and how do we change that situation? How do we reprogram? How do we do it better? There is a great potential there. So we’re going to dedicate with Śāntideva.
I think two forty six. Yeah. So page two forty six. Talking about, you know, people that we label no good. Śāntideva, this great Indian saint in the monastery, they said he was only good for three things, eating, sleeping, and going to the toilet.
How can you get it so wrong? Alright? So the culmination of all criticism from the monks in the monastery, the end of that criticism was Śāntideva giving a teaching which is a book called the guide to the bodhisattva’s way of life. This dedication is in that book. Then you see the quality of this person’s mind.
But because of the discrimination, nobody saw it. Right? So when discrimination happens towards you and you’re trying to do good things, you think, well, look at Śāntideva, Look at Śākyamūni Buddha. Great beings get criticized. You don’t change your good behavior just because of criticism.
Yeah. You need to know the qualities that you want to have in your life. So we’re going to dedicate. So thinking about your family, your friends, but particularly about the people you don’t like, you find disturbing. And then all sentient beings, they all want happiness.
They don’t want may they find 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 blind see forms and the deaf hear sounds. May those whose bodies are worn with toil be restored on 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 harvest 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 that 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 miseries of the world. Thank you very much. So we’re back in here. I think two o’clock, you come back here and then we organize the discussion groups. Have a good lunch.
Bon appetit. Rachel’s cooking. It’ll be a good day. The weather’s nice. Enjoy.