Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Ven Lobsang Namgyel teaches the foundational practices for Buddhist thought transformation in this 61-minute session from his ongoing commentary on Geshe Langri Thangpa’s Eight Verses of Mind Training. He begins with practical daily antidotes to negative mental habits—using rejoicing to counter jealousy, cultivating bodhicitta to counteract despair about the world’s suffering—before walking through a structured practice sequence: refuge and bodhicitta vows, the prayer of seven limbs, the four immeasurables, and mandala offerings. A substantial portion focuses on developing self-esteem as the foundation for thought transformation work, arguing that genuine humility and capacity to serve others requires knowing one’s actual qualities rather than seeking external validation. The teaching includes extended discussion of the second verse, which asks practitioners to regard others as supreme and themselves as lowest, clarified as a secret mental practice rather than literal self-diminishment. Namgyel addresses anger’s role in spiritual life, distinguishing destructive rage from compassionate wrathful action, and emphasizes working with difficult people as the key opportunity for real practice.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 33 Teaching 9.mp3
UUID: 176b2570-09b5-4266-8a09-194419db0fc7
Teacher: Ven Lobsang Namgyel
Collection: VenNamgyel Thought Transformation (Ven Lobsang Namgyel)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 61.5 minutes
Words: ~8,765
So can you understand how that works? That you can use this in your everyday life. You may not be reading this on a daily basis if you’re not Buddhist. You may not want to, But the point is to take some of these antidotes to negative states of mind and then at the beginning of the day to work with it. So if you find jealousy as a problem, you want to work with rejoicing.
You want to keep thinking of the good things that people are doing or even if you have a very bleak sense of how the world is going, which a lot of us have, you know, you can think about the pollution and governments and blah blah blah and sometimes you can get this feeling that the world is really not a very nice place to be in. That’s great if you can develop renunciation, but if you just get depressed then it doesn’t do you any good. You sit there, know, say at home alone and think, oh, the world is so terrible and you know what future is and la la la. So we need to have a way of getting up in the morning and feeling that there is a purpose for getting up. There is something that we can do.
karma is not immutable. karma is changeable. There is emptiness. There is impermanence. So it means situations can be changed.
It’s not fixed, permanent, the way that the media portrays it. And the unfortunate thing about the media is we only hear bad news. We don’t see NBC or CNN or BBC saying incredible news. Somebody helps old lady to walk across the road. You know?
I mean, it’s okay. Maybe not a big deal, but we don’t hear that type of thing. So when you read the newspapers, listen to the radio, watch TV, you sometimes get the sense that the world is very bleak. So very important to believe in the Buddha nature of all beings, even the beings that you don’t like, and particularly important for the purposes of thought transformation. If you don’t have that feeling of Buddha nature, you’re going to have problems when they’re creating difficulties for you.
So Buddha nature is very important. You realizing, recognizing that you have a precious human rebirth, precious because of what you can do with it. It’s just a human life, but what are you doing with it? Right? So don’t don’t just sort of lose time.
Impermanence death, time is passing and I need to get on with it. But get on with what? And these are the questions that you need to be asking yourself. From a Buddhist perspective, of course we say, get on with love, compassion, wisdom, you know, become a Buddha, blah blah blah. But they may not be your goals.
It depends on what you want to get out of this life, and the next life is a continuation of that. So, if you find that you are doing negative actions and you regret them, you want to do something about it, I confess all my negative actions is that line. And then in the evening you might want to do Vajrasattva, which purifies it. I rejoice in the virtuous actions of ordinary and noble beings. At the moment you feel that you can’t do very much and so you rejoice in others who are doing it.
At least connect with that positive energy. Please Buddha remain as our guide. If you’ve decided Buddha is your guide, you’re making a continual karmic connection. That you have a teacher and that those teachers will continue to give teachings until the very end of Samsāra. The origination of that is in Buddha’s time Buddha’s attendant made a big mistake.
When Buddha was eighty two, he said to his attendant, I’m getting very tired. You know, maybe I should be going now. And the attendant said, well, you have done a lot, you know, for sentient beings. You’ve given all these teachings. It’s true, you know, maybe you should be going.
But it didn’t have to go. But he was giving a warning, you know, how much do you need me? The second time, same thing. The attendant saying, okay, bye. And the third time Buddha said, I really mean it.
I’m thinking of going. And the attendant did not ask him to stay. So it was said this was a big mistake. If you have a teacher, if you have if you’re a teacher sorry, teacher student relationship, your job is to ask the teacher to stay as long as possible. The teacher’s job is to decide when to go.
Not your job to say, well, you wouldn’t say to your mother or father, well, it’s time to go now. You know, these bills in the hospice or the hospital are getting too much. It’s really time you were leaving. You wouldn’t say that sort of thing, right? So you don’t say it to your teacher.
So this is the antidote: remain as a guide, turn the wheel of Dharma until saṃsāra ends. It’s the antidote for the times we’ve made that mistake, or for the times that we’ve turned against the Dharma. So if you are a Dharma practitioner, there are times when we just can’t keep it up, you know? You sort of, your meditation falls by the wayside and you’d really like to study but you can’t and sometimes you think, oh, it’s just too much. I can’t do it.
And that negative state of mind then has planted a seed. So you want to antidote that seed. You want to be able to remove it and then making that sort of request remove it. Through the merits created by myself and others, may the two bodhicittas ripen and may I attain Buddhahood for the sake of all sentient beings. So, thinking about how you have this precious human rebirth, it’s an impermanent death is coming.
What can you do with your life? And then you try to get a very strong feeling of bodhicitta. Now, if you don’t have that strong feeling of bodhicitta generated on the cushion, it’s extremely difficult to deal with sentient beings during the day. When they’re being pesky or when they’re hassling you, you know, you think, sentient beings, you know. I’d just rather be in a cave or living in a monastery, wouldn’t that be nice?
Or living in a nunnery, such a blissful peaceful existence. It all goes on there too. You know, it’s like a place where it’s sandpapering the edges off you. So even if you’re in a monastery or nunnery, after a while it’s also a problem. Wherever you are and the sentient beings, there’s always going to be problems.
I remember Lama Zopa Rinpoche saying many years ago, the more you do for sentient beings, the more complaints you get. So that’s how you test how much you’re doing for others. If you’re doing a lot, more complaints. If you’re doing very little, no complaints. Right?
So, it goes along with it, doesn’t it? The more you’re trying to help others, the more people will say, Why did you do that? So, complaining, complaining. Lama Zopa Rinpoche, I remember many years ago, I was very surprised. He said, Oh, you think nobody criticizes me?
He said, People criticize me. They say they can’t understand a word I say. They say I cough too much, etc, etc. You know, many, many complaints. So, he said, when people complain, I see this as a great opportunity.
So he invites them to his room, or he used to, I don’t know if he’s too busy now, but he used to invite people who complained to his room and he’d always have cake or biscuits and tea and he’d offer them the best tea, the best cake and then say, Go on, tell me what sort of complaints you have. And they’d complain, yes, yes, more, more, more. And he said this is really good for him, because as a teacher you need to subdue your ego. And if all you’re hearing is how incredible you are, what a wonderful guru you are, this is not realistic. There’s another side of it.
So he said, I also get complaints, but you have to be open to listen to the complaints without ego. So can you do that? Can you listen to the complaints throughout the day without the ego arising and saying, Why is my boss saying that to me? Why is my partner doing this to me? Just take it on as information.
Is it true? Is it true or not? I mean you really need to sit with it when they complain about whatever it is. Sit and meditate on it. Is it true?
And if it’s true, it’s something that you can work with to change. If it’s not true, you can let it go. But you need a good level of self esteem to be able to do that. Right? Otherwise, the criticism is just criticism.
It pushes you down, you feel terrible, and then you’ve got to try and pull yourself back up. So developing a good level of self esteem, which is what we’re going to talk about this morning. Maybe I’ll leave it there and the four immeasurables I’ll do on another day, another time. I wanted to show you this sort of format. Refuge bodhicitta, special bodhicitta, prayer of the seven limbs, the four immeasurables, short mandala, inner mandala.
It’s a sort of format that we tend to follow in order to do everything that you want to do in the day as a good practice to start the day. So for some of you who are not Buddhist, you pick out what’s suitable for you. So particularly it could be bodhicitta. In particular, I must achieve enlightenment. Well, you may not connect with the word enlightenment.
But you know, if you think about the meaning of enlightenment, all positive qualities, no negative, there’s no problem with that. Right? So just trying to actualize qualities in your mind and remove all the negativities, all the delusions quickly because your mothers are waiting for you in order to free all the numberless, kind mother sentient beings from the unimaginable oceans of samsaric suffering and causes of suffering and lead them to peerless full enlightenment. So in this world now, we do hear about so many people who are sick, emotional problems, mental problems, and you often think, well what can I do? You know, you could feel overwhelmed by the whole thing.
So at least starting off the day thinking, well, if I’m improving myself, if I’m increasing my qualities, that’s actually what I can do. Because whenever I can be of help, of benefit, I’m bringing qualities to the situation. Okay? Any questions? It’s okay?
Alright. So we’re going to read it. We’ll start at, refuge bodhicitta, then special bodhicitta, seven limbs, four immeasurables, and then the short mandala offering. And the inner mandala is, even more than the outer mandala. So you remember we did the short mandala where we’re making external offerings.
The inner mandala is then saying the objects of my attachment, aversion and ignorance, friends, enemies and strangers, this is particularly what we’re working with. Okay? There’s more, actually there’s more under there. So we’re particularly working with our attachment, our aversion, and our ignorance in this thought transformation course. We want to try and soften attitude towards our enemies.
We want to try and remove some of the attachment we feel so we don’t create so much pain, so much jealousy, so much anger towards people that we’re attached to. And what about the strangers? What about opening up our heart to the strangers? And then what about your attachment and your clinging to your body? Not saying give your body up, but how attached are you to your body?
Wealth and enjoyments, we tend to be attached to wealth and enjoyments. So what you’re doing is an internal practice. You’re only imagining, imagine giving this, imagine giving this, imagine giving this, so that the wealth, the enjoyments, the body, whatever it is, stops causing so many problems for you. It’s not the body that causes the problem, it’s the attachment to the body. It’s not the wealth, it’s the attachment to the wealth.
It’s not the enjoyment, it’s the attachment to the enjoyment. So we’re just trying to reduce the attachments. The only way to do that is to start by visual ising you offering it. Eventually you will be able to offer it externally, but you can’t do that until you want to offer it internally. Okay.
I go for refuge until I’m enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma and the Supreme Community from the merits that I create by practicing meditation, may I become Buddha for the sake of all universal living beings. I go for refuge until I’m enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma and the supreme community from the merits that I create by practicing meditation, may I become Buddha for the sake of all universal living beings. I go for refuge until I’m enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma and the Supreme Community. From the merits that I create by practicing meditation, may I become a Buddha for the sake of all universal living beings. And then special bodhicitta.
In particular, I must achieve enlightenment quickly in order to free all the numberless, kind, mother sentient beings from the unimaginable oceans of samsaric suffering and causes of suffering, and lead them to peerless, full enlightenment. Therefore, I’m going to meditate on the stages of the path to enlightenment. Respectfully, I prostrate with my body, speech and mind. I present clouds of every type of offering, actual and imagined. I confess all my negative actions accumulated since beginningless time and rejoice in the virtuous actions of all ordinary and noble beings.
Please, Buddha, remain as our guide and turn the wheel of Dharma until Samsāra ends. Through the merits created by myself and others, may the two Bodhicittas ripen and may I attain Buddhahood for the sake of all sentient beings. How wonderful it would be if all sentient beings were to abide in equanimity, free of hatred and attachment. May they abide in equanimity. I myself will cause them to abide in equanimity.
Please, Guru Buddha, grant me blessings to be able to do this. How wonderful it would be if all sentient beings had happiness and the cause of happiness. May they have happiness in its cause. I shall cause them to have these. Please, guru, Buddha, grant me blessings to be able to do this.
How wonderful it would be if all sentient beings were free of suffering and its cause. May they be free of suffering and its cause. I myself will free them from suffering and its cause. Please, Guru Buddha, grant me blessings to be able to do this. How wonderful it would be if all sentient beings were never separated from the happiness of higher rebirth and liberation.
May they never be separated from these. I myself will cause them never to be separated from these. Please, Guru Buddha, grant me blessings to be able to do this. And then the short mandala, we’ll do in English. By the virtue of offering to you assembly of Buddhas, visualize before me this mandala built on a base resplendent with flowers, saffron water, and incense, adorned with Mount Meru in the four continents, as well as the sun and the moon.
May all sentient beings share in its good effects. And then the inner mandala thinking that you’re offering up anything that you feel very strong attachment for or strong aversion for or feeling a sense of indifference towards. The objects of my attachment, aversion, and ignorance, friends, enemies, and strangers, and my body wealth and enjoyments, I offer these without any sense of loss. I accept them. Please accept them with pleasure, and bless me and others to be free from the three poisonous attitudes.
So did anybody have a very auspicious dream? Yes. You did? Yeah? That’s good.
But you have to remember it’s empty. Right? Dreams can be tricky. So you can have really wonderful dreams and you you can create an attachment for it and you want to recreate it. And then you can have a really bad dream and you want to get rid of it, know, get away from it.
So in the text it’s always mentioned that if you have a really good dream, remember it’s empty. If you have a really bad dream, remember it’s empty. Don’t worry about don’t worry about it too much. Yeah. It could be just another cause of the ego getting bigger.
But anyway, rejoice. Yeah. Yeah. Come on, who else had a good dream? You did.
Oh! Conventional and ultimate. So we have conventional bodhicitta, what do we do in order to benefit others? And then we have generosity, morality, patience, you know the six perfections. So there are six perfections, thirty seven practices of a bodhisattva.
There are many things that you can do in order to start working on benefiting others. And then ultimate bodhicitta is the emptiness of bodhicitta. And then there’s another way of explaining it which is you have aspiring and engaging bodhicitta. So aspiring is like I said, I would like to go to Kathmandu, but you don’t make any effort. Engaging is I’m doing it.
And then once you are engaging, then you would have the emptiness of engaging. But usually it’s conventional and ultimate bodhicitta. And somebody else I saw Who else put their hand up? You had a good dream. You had the feeling it was a good dream.
So when you go to bed, you have to say, may I remember my dreams when I wake up in the morning and then you train and then eventually when you wake up you can remember your dreams. Otherwise quite quickly you forget them. And again like I said don’t worry about it too much you know. If it’s very nice you can the whole day you can be thinking, wow, what a dream, what a dream. You know, poor sentient beings in front of you needs help and you sort of walk straight past them thinking, what a dream, what a dream.
Yeah? So you can get really into the ego of the dream, so we have to let go of it. That was very nice. Nice way to start the day, but let it go. You can write it down.
Yeah. There is something, there is a book called Dream Yoga, which is something like a meditation. You meditate while you’re dreaming, but I think I can’t even meditate when I’m awake. What hope do I have when I’m sleeping? So I think better to start when you’re awake than do all these very esoteric practices and you know, I think it’s a bit like cheating yourself.
If you can’t meditate really well in the day, forget about doing dream yoga. It’s just nice to remember some of the good dreams. Especially when you are having a difficult time. If you write down some good things and then you are having a difficult time in your life, you can look back over time and you say, Oh, there were good times. Something gives you energy.
Okay. Anything else? You had a dream but it didn’t seem like a good dream. Maybe you’re supposed to stay in Nepal. And is that actually something that you are supposed to be doing?
Oh, there is. It could be an indication that you don’t have the karma to do what you’re supposed to do. So one thing you can do is make prayers. If it’s something important, make prayers that you will be able to achieve whatever you need to do in Delhi. Know?
Dedicate, make aspirational prayers, keep thinking about it and offering some positive energy towards it. Because sometimes there’s obstacles and then the dreams indicate obstacles and when they do, you increase your practices. You know, don’t think, oh, that was a really bad dream. I need more chocolate, more coffee, you know, our usual way, but increase your spiritual practices. When you’re having the good dreams you tend to drop the spiritual practices because you think that was an incredible dream, no need to do meditation today.
So either way, going. But I think when you’ve had an indication like that, particularly increase the mantras you’re doing, the offerings that you’re doing, the dedication you’re doing. That’s important. Goodness gracious! Did you organise that?
I have a feeling it was something to do with you. Just pushing me to the limits, aren’t you? Really? You know? How much more can I take?
It’s a wedding, isn’t it? So they’re gonna go away and then come by and all these people going, you know? Yep. Okay. So we’re back to the verses.
Verse one, determined to obtain the greatest possible benefit from all sentient beings who are more precious than a wish fulfilling jewel, I shall hold them most dear at all times. Well, that’s comparatively easy to do, isn’t it? There’s your first challenge. From benefit from the greatest possible benefit from all sentient beings. What do you want it to be?
Four. Four. No. Because, you’re using them as a field of merit. Because it’s thought transformation, you’re trying to change the way you view sentient beings.
In the past we would have wanted something out of them. Hang on. Determined to obtain the greatest possible benefit from all sentient beings from all sentient beings. Okay, yeah. I can’t even think, you know.
All I hear in my brain is this drum. So you’ve got a field of merit, is sentient beings. And those sentient beings, instead of harming them, instead of doing something against them, you want to see them in a different way. So you’re seeing them as the wish fulfilling jewels, as an opportunity, as something incredible. So the word from is that you’re just seeing them in that way.
And then you’re offering them the benefit of that meditation. But why it’s said in that particular way, it’s determined to obtain the greatest possible benefit from all sentient beings who are more precious than a wish fulfilling jewel. Whenever you see any harm coming from them, you don’t give the harm back. Do you see what I mean? It’s sort of very subtle.
It’s a subtle switch of the way you’re seeing sentient beings. It’s you’re seeing them now as, a sort of ocean of gold or an ocean of jewels or something like that. So because it’s thought transformation, it’s what are you taking from them? You’re taking the benefit from them, rather than, seeing anything that they do as harm. You’re seeing everything they do as good.
You see what I mean? So it’s whatever they’re doing to you, it’s okay. You know, just like that. You wanna you want to and we go through. You wanna criticize me?
Okay. You wanna judge me? No problem. You want to slander me? Okay.
And it goes on like that. You know? Because it’s just saying sentient beings are incredible. Just they’re amazing. Just leave it like that.
Because the usual thing for us, I think as Westerners, is we react. We have a reaction to sentient beings. So some sentient beings, we let them get close to us, and then when they’re very close to us, we can start having problems with them, because we have expectations of how they’re going to treat us. So just start with that one sentient being who you’ve let in, who’s very close to you, and then that one sentient being says, why did you do that? Why this?
How’s that? And you think, oh, oh, you know, it’s sort of that in the heart that, oh, that really hurts. So you love somebody, you want to be close to them, but somehow they’re hurting you. If you come back with more hurt, then they build it and then they come back with more hurt, and then where does it stop? It just goes backwards and forwards.
Right? Then you end up in the divorce court, and they’ve got their list of complaints, and you’ve got your list of complaints. So who’s going to stop this? Who’s going to change the situation? If you’re fixated on bodhicitta, love, compassion, bodhicitta, that’s your your goal.
You know, that’s what I want. Not necessarily enlightenment, but just better qualities. I really don’t want to come back this way with anger, hatred, you know, bad words. I just don’t want to do that. In that way, you have to change the way you’re viewing sentient beings, and particularly, the way you’re viewing the people closest to you.
Because the people closest to you are often the ones that we argue the most with, and we have the most problems with. Can you wait until the end? Yeah. So then, the first verse, we’re trying to get that sense of connection. Like we said yesterday, you know, the big family, not necessarily thinking about karma.
If you believe in karma, that will help. karma and connection with all sentient beings. If you don’t believe in karma, then connection with sentient beings. You did a meditation on that yesterday, which tried to give you that feeling of connectivity. Having a connection with all sentient beings.
Even though you may not recognize or understand the connection, you start to understand that more and more sentient beings are involved in your life, and to repay their kindness. So that’s the first verse. Then the second verse, when in the company of others, I shall always consider myself the lowest of all, and from the depths of my heart hold others dear and supreme. Now we’re really in trouble. Okay.
This does not mean that you become a doormat. I remember as His Holiness saying years ago, being a bodhisattva, developing compassion and love, does not mean that you become a doormat with welcome written on it, and then you lie down and you say, wipe your feet on me. Right? So actually being a Bodhisattva means that you’re a warrior, not a warrior, but a warrior against delusion. Right?
So you’re not there to help others to be more delusional. You want to help them to remove their delusions. But what happens when they do something negative to you and then you respond back? Now your delusions have increased, they get more angry, they respond back, and it just goes backwards and forwards. So that’s not often the way to solve the situation.
So Geshe Langri Thangpa is saying, if you want more love, more compassion, more patience, you’re going to have to do things differently. It’s no use just trying to do the same thing over and over and over. You know like the road, you know you go down the road, you fall down the hole and you think what’s that hole doing here? And the second day you walk down the road you fall down the same hole. And you think amazing, the hole’s still here.
And the third day, and it goes on and on like that. You keep falling down the same hole. And you think, why me? Why are they victimizing me? Why are they attacking me?
Can you wait until after? Because otherwise I lose I lose my my track. So one thing is to change the habit of what we’re doing. The second thing is though, you need to develop a good self esteem. There’s a difference between what they’re talking about here.
Lowest of all, it does not mean that you’re putting yourself down. It does not mean no self confidence. It does not mean low self esteem. It actually means you have such a good level of self esteem that you can say, let it go. This is not going to bother me.
This does not affect me. Just like the air blowing past your ear, something like that, you can just say, it doesn’t matter. So in this way, and this is a secret practice, you don’t go around telling people what you’re doing. This person becomes your guru. So after you’ve done it, you then don’t go back to them and say, you’re an incredible guru.
And they say, what do you mean? So, well, you’re such a horrible obnoxious person. I use you as my patience guru. I mean, right? And some people have done this.
It’s a terrible thing to do. You don’t go around telling people you’ve you’ve suddenly become my guru. You know, your boss or your partner or whatever it is. This is a secret practice that you do to improve your mind. To stop the negative action, the ego that arises and wants to come back.
Okay? So if you’re seeing this person as a guru, then virtually what you do is you put them above the crown of your head. And you’re seeing them as being there for a particular purpose. What are they helping you to understand? We keep praying, you know, please may a guru appear, may the buddhas appear.
They just appeared. Doesn’t necessarily mean they float down on a lotus and they’re all glowing and gold looking like a statue or whatever. They appear in whichever way is necessary for you. And you kept saying, you need a guru to help you with patience, or with compassion, or with love, or whatever it is. This guru is absolutely perfect because they just got to you.
And your instinct is to react back not from compassion and love, but from anger, attachment, hatred. And then afterwards you justify it and say, well they were nasty to me, so I was nasty back. But in that, there’s no control. So using this verse, then you’re trying to gain control over the negative actions that you would normally have. If you don’t have them, then there’s no problem.
But if you have them, and you’ve been doing the same thing over and over, you get into arguments, you lose your friends, you lose your partners, there’s a point where you have to take responsibility and say, I’m the one who wants love and compassion. Don’t go around telling everybody else they should have it, but just you’ve decided you’re going to generate it within your mind. And therefore, in this difficult situation, when somebody, when in the company of others, you know, you go to a bar. This is often when it happens, isn’t When you go to a bar and they’re drinking, you’re drinking, they’re drinking, and people start saying things and then they start saying things about you. And you start getting hurt.
And so you could start saying things about them. Oh, do you remember? You know? And it’s like a knife going into the heart, and do you remember? You know, like this.
And then the next day you wake up and you think, uh-oh. That was a pretty much of a disaster because I’ve just sort of trashed half my friends. So drink is responsible for a lot of problems I think. It’s why Buddha said, if you can try to avoid intoxicants. But also this sense of ego that arises.
You know, they’re attacking me. As if by people saying something bad about you, you become the bad things they’re saying about you. What do you think about yourself? That’s what I mean about self esteem. Low self esteem is always waiting for others to say something good about you.
Right? I mean, don’t you do that? How am I looking today? Do you like these pants? Do you like this dress?
Do you like this hair? And then somebody goes, you go, oh, you don’t like it? It’s too short? You know? The color?
Is it the color? It might look great. For you, it looks great. And if you ask fifty people no. Let’s take a better number, sixty.
Twenty, I love it. Twenty, I hate it. And twenty, who cares? Right? If we’re going on attachment, aversion, and ignorance, you might get a third, a third, a third.
Who’s right? What you want to believe is right, isn’t it? So if you want to believe that you look ugly because somebody’s saying you’re ugly, you’ll believe it and you’ll take it on. If somebody says you’re the most beautiful or handsome in the world, you’ll take it on. And that means you’re gauging yourself against what other people are saying.
You don’t know yourself. So good self esteem relies on you knowing your qualities. And they’re not inflated qualities, they’re actual qualities that you have, that you know you have. Yeah? There’s a difference between pride and good self esteem.
And I think there’s a there’s a quite a fine line, but there is a difference. Pride is inflated. Self esteem is you know what you can do. In the one of the vows it says, if somebody asks you to do something and you can do it, like for instance, please would you teach meditation? So somebody asks you, please would you teach meditation?
And actually you know you’re capable of doing it, but you say, oh no, no, no, I couldn’t do that. It’s also falsely humble. You can do it. So there’s a problem there between humble, self esteem, pride. It’s very difficult.
Right? But if you say, you know, oh no, no, I couldn’t do that. Actually, it’s not realistic. You can. And so in the Bodhisattva text it says if you can do something you should humbly say, okay, I’ll try to do that.
So what the Tibetan Lama say or the Geshe’s when they’re asked to do something, they say well, of course, I don’t know that subject very well, but I will try to do it. Or they will say no immediately and you have to keep going back three times and the third time they say yes. It’s a bit tiring. You know, you have to keep going back and going back. So as westerners we tend not to be into this three times thing.
You know, we don’t have to be like that. But you don’t have to come out and say, I’m the best meditation teacher in the world. You know, I’m the best of the in the world. You’re not. You’re not the best.
You’re not the worst. You’re somewhere in between. So what can you do? And then when somebody asks you to do it, not being inflated and proud about it, but just accepting, yes, I can do that. And you can say, I’m not the best at doing it, but I will try my best.
I’ll do what I can. Yeah? So how can you develop a good self esteem? Do you have a good self esteem? I think this is really something you need to meditate on for yourself.
It’s important that if you’re going to be working with sentient beings and particularly all sentient beings, you need a good level of self esteem. You need to be able to keep going even though sentient beings are not praising you. They’re not saying you’re doing well. In fact, they’re criticizing you. Because the more you’re doing, the more criticizing criticism you’re going to get back.
So remember, the more you put out, not necessarily will you get more positive back. There could be more criticism, more blame, more anger, whatever it is. And that’s the reason you need these eight verses. In addition to needing these, you know, say we start at the beginning. All sentient beings.
How incredible. How precious. The second one, I’m going to be a bit smaller. You know, ego smaller, not body smaller. I’m going to see myself as lower.
What can I do for you? Right? So this is a change of attitude. Instead of standing there and waiting everybody to serve you, now you say, well what can I do for others? I’m now the servant of sentient beings.
I want to serve them. I want to help them. What can I do? So this is a change of attitude holding all others dear and supreme. So supreme in the sense of because of these sentient beings, I can achieve incredible qualities.
Without sentient beings, you cannot achieve those qualities. So in this way, all these sentient beings are such a powerful field of merit, such a powerful way of working with them. I’ll give you an example. There’s a very famous Tibetan story about a lama who’s very, very angry. So he’s living in the monastery and he’s always shouting at the monks, shouting, shouting, shouting.
Many years go by and he’s not getting any better. So he decides, I must do something about this. So he goes off to a cave and he sits in a cave for many years meditating, meditating. I must be patient, I must be patient. You know, it’s going on and on like this.
So after ten, twelve years, his friend in the monastery thinks, well, he must have achieved it by now. It’s been a long time. So his friend climbs up the mountain and he gets to the cave and there’s a curtain over the over the door of the cave. And his friend pulls back the curtain and he sees his friend, you know, sitting there in meditation. I must be patient.
I must be patient. So the Lama who’s visiting, when he opens the cave, he says, oi, you eat shit. This is the famous Tibetan insult. You eat shit. The Lama turns around and says, You eat shit too.
So it’s often told by the Tibetans as a joke against themselves that when you’re with others, there’s an opportunity to develop patience. You can spend years alone in a cave, you might never develop patience. But you’ve got to use the situation in the right way. You have to want to develop patience. Otherwise, you think anger is a quality that you want to have and you hold on to the anger.
So you need to see the faults of anger and you need to renounce the anger. You want to give up the anger. And if you’re an angry person and you find it difficult to give up anger, use the technique we were talking about yesterday. Give it up for five minutes. I’ll give it up for five minutes.
Right? And you can keep going. Another five minutes, another five minutes or ten minutes, half an hour, however long you can, you promise I won’t be angry and I will be patient. So the antidote to anger, patience and love. If you want all all others to be happy, how can you be angry?
Right? Also another way of of going at this, I tell people patience and love are the antidote to anger. Who out of you, which one of you wants less love in your life? Nobody wants less love. We all want more love.
If if anger is the antidote to love, then every time you get angry, you’re going to have less love in your life. So therefore, in order to have more love, you need to have less anger. You need to reduce the anger in order to give the space for love to be there. So this is also another helpful way of persuading your mind. So we’re nearly at the break, but you can ask your questions and then we’ll go into the break.
You okay? Okay. Madam, flowery shirt, blouse, whatever, are you okay? You have a question? See, I answer all.
Constructive or destructive? Constructive. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah.
I think what we’re first of all talking about is uncontrolled anger, because anger can become uncontrolled. And you know I think if you can’t imagine how it can become uncontrolled, you have to read the Liberation Prison Project newsletters of people who are on death row and they ask, you know, why did you kill your wife and children? I got really angry. And I picked up a gun and I shot them. Or I picked up a knife and I stabbed them.
You know? You don’t stab them because you love them. You stab them because you’re angry with them. So in that way, uncontrolled anger becomes extremely dangerous. Can we always control our anger?
That’s up to you to decide. But there can be an anger that you could be really angry about the trees being cut down and you could be angry about the pollution. But if you’re angry to such an extent that your ego’s involved, you may not be able to work with the situation in the most wise, compassionate way. Anger can often be such a heat, you know, in the brain and in the body that you just don’t seem to know what to say and what to do and how to do it. And then there’s there’s something called wrathful action, which is different from the normal anger.
So wrathful action is compassionate anger. It’s the the sort of anger that a mother can generate towards a child when the mother has tried everything and the child keeps being naughty. You know, like there’s some danger walking along the road and the child keeps going to run into the road and the mother keeps saying, don’t do that, come back, don’t do that, come back. And it’s a three year old, you know, come back, come back. And in the end the mother shows an angry face to change the behavior of the child.
But the mother doesn’t, but the mother doesn’t feel angry. So you can show this angry face, but you’re not angry in your heart. So that’s different from being the normal anger. Yeah. So there’s different levels and I’ve read interviews with His Holiness the Dalai Lama about anger because anger’s very popular in the west.
Know, we seem to sort really like it, and people often think they don’t want to give up anger. And His Holiness has said things like this, that if an energy that you can use to change a situation, then it’s okay, but if it becomes uncontrolled, then it becomes something very dangerous. So you have to decide for yourself what type of feeling you have, what type of emotion it is, and whether there’s a possibility of it becoming uncontrolled. And if there is, you need to then apply the antidotes. Yeah, yeah.
I mean it’s that sense of we can feel the anger coming, and when the anger’s coming, then do you like the feeling of the anger for yourself? This is what you have to check, right? When the anger just appears, do you like the feeling of it? Is it constructive? Is it beneficial?
If the answer is yes, then no problem. But if the anger gets into the uncontrolled sort of rage where you start throwing the dishes around the kitchen and saying things you wish you hadn’t said, actions that you wish you hadn’t done, then it’s a problem. So, the other thing is too, you can go to the scientific studies. Scientific studies now say that if you’re an angry person, more likelihood of heart attacks, liver problems, alcohol problems, drug problems, etcetera etcetera. So but I think we’re talking about a particular level of anger.
You know? People get into a rage. And the more you do it, the more you fall down that hole, the more you fall down the hole. The more your resources anger, the more you tend to go back to anger as a way of solving the problem. And then if you’re angry at home, but you can’t be angry at work, work can be a source of frustration.
Your boss says don’t do that and the anger comes up but you can’t express it. And so then you feel frustrated Then you feel angry. Then you get home and then you feel more angry. So you know if you’re expressing anger in one part of your life, it could create frustrations in another part of your life. But you know these are all things that you need to investigate for yourself.
Nobody’s telling you what you should do. It’s just from Buddhist perspective anger can become a really dangerous emotion. But how much is it affecting your life, your body, your mind? I don’t know. Yeah.
You have to check. We have people who fly to Nepal for the first time. I’ve taught them down in Kathmandu, and they say, I become like a frothing, raving lunatic in Tamil when the twentieth person says, you want drugs? You know? You want prostitute?
Rickshaw? Whenever I’m down in Tamil, I haven’t seen them lately, but when I used to be down in Thamel, they’d say the same to me. And you know, you could get really self righteously angry about that situation. And I’d say, hello? You know?
They’d say, pssh, you want drugs? And they’d say, hello? You know? Robes, monk? And they’d say, oh, sorry.
You want prostitute? Go figure, you know? No, thank you very much. But it’s like, they don’t they don’t see the rose. They don’t see you.
You know? You’re just another customer, isn’t it? So that used to make people so angry. The rickshaws, you know, twenty times in half an hour. You want a rickshaw?
You want a rickshaw? And they said, I get so angry and red and frothing and sort of work. Don’t want to leave me alone like this. And they say, at home I never get angry. But somehow in that situation they get really angry and then they come on a Buddhist course because they decided there was something hidden there that they didn’t like that was very very disturbing.
So it just shows you how in different places different emotions arise. And if that emotion arises and it’s very frightening to you, suppression can work but it’s also not very healthy. You just push anger down. But that’s not good either. Yeah?
It’ll work for a while but then the anger will come back even more powerful. So you need to change the way you view the anger. Not seeing the anger as beneficial and then the anger subsides. I think that if you meditate and you visualize the situation and you watch your reaction in the meditation, I often say to people the first place to start is on the cushion, In a safe place. If you have a problem with somebody, you know that you don’t even want to meet them in the street or even the mention of their name sets you off, you know.
Oh, so and so, they’re such a good person. And you’re like, you You get so angry because you don’t want to think of that person as a good person. So if it’s like that, you can’t deal with it. You know, you can’t say, oh yeah, yeah, it’s all okay. I’m a Buddhist.
I’m peaceful. You know? And you go and meet them and you got that funny little smile on your face and you know, hello, how are you? And they say, well you’re looking really stupid, what’s wrong with your face? And you go, you know?
Right? I mean, they only need to say one thing and you, and off you go again. Right? Arms whirling. Reminds me of Lost in Space.
Do you remember that that robot in Lost in Space? It was like one of the first, you know, Star Trek sort of things, but Lost in Space. And he had these arms and he’d say, danger, danger. You know? He was this big clunky robot, know?
Not like these days but danger, danger. I always think like that. Oh, get out. You know? Get out.
Don’t stay. Don’t try to handle the situation. Get out. Because it’s a physical reaction. You’ve got adrenaline running around your body.
You’re about to fight. So take the loss. Go. Calm down. Be peaceful.
Remember, connect with your values. Go back to, well what’s my values? I’d rather not fight. I’d rather not argue. It didn’t do us any good before.
It’s not gonna solve the problem. I say bad things. They say bad things. Just more harm. You know?
So go back to the cushion, meditate on the cushion. You have to visualize that you’re meeting that person. They say what they say, you know, nasty, nasty, nasty. How are you going to respond? What would you do?
And keep meditating on it, reprogramming the situation so that you can behave the way you want to, not the habit. Because the habit’s been set up, You know? You keep falling down the hole, falling down the hole. And in addition to falling down the hole, there’s a spade down there and you keep digging the hole deeper. You know?
You dig deeper and deeper and deeper and you think this hole is getting deeper. What’s happening here? If you are responsible, if you can change the situation, you’re powerful. It gives you power. But if you keep looking to others to change, you have no power.
And that’s more disturbing. Yeah? Having to tell people what to do to make you happy is not the way to go. It’s putting the leather. Who Who said putting the leather on the person?
If that’s your sort of visualization, that’s fine. But you know, putting the leather on the world, we know it doesn’t work. It works for short periods of time, but it’s very exhausting and it’s a source of frustration when they don’t do what you want them to do. No. You you might have to avoid them.
You might have to never see them again. I mean, Śāntideva said, if you are in a very difficult situation, be like a tree or be like a rock. Trees and rocks don’t answer back. But mostly for us we can’t be trees and rocks. You know?
We’ve got motor mouths and so they say something, we say something. That’s a, that can be your reaction. Just like that. So you might have to avoid the situation in order to get more calm, more peaceful, do your meditations, change your mind, and then you check it out again after some time. Can I deal with the situation?
So it’s it’s not I don’t advise people to stay in very difficult situations if it’s beyond them. You have to gauge how difficult is that situation for you. Isn’t it? I don’t know. But if it’s a very difficult situation, you’re constantly feeling very bad feelings.
First of all, you need to change your mind. You need to change your view of the situation, how you respond to the people. And gradually as you keep doing those meditations, you’re building up a karmic benefit within your mind. And by the way, when you visualize for your mind, it’s the same as reality. So what is reality?
You know, like I said, not really sure what reality is anyway. Everything’s like a dream. So for your mind, when you’re visualizing, it is like reality. It’s the same. Your mind doesn’t know the difference between you talking to that person and you visualizing you talking to that person.
So if you’re visualizing doing things in a better way, your mind believes that to be true. And that’s how you can change the habit. But if you’re really trying to do it, hello, how are you? And they say, what are you doing? Why am I alone?
And you get upset again, the habit is deepening and deepening and deepening. So sometimes the situations are just too difficult. Then leave it. Get out. Okay.
We’ll have a break. It’s ten forty two so we’ll come back. Oh no, mine says nearly quarter to. I think five past eleven so twenty minutes.