Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 71-minute session on thought transformation, Ven Lobsang Namgyel teaches that suffering arises not from circumstances themselves but from how the mind reacts to them. He begins with the Buddha’s core insight that all his eighty-four thousand teachings aimed at subduing the mind, then explores why we persistently pursue pleasure through desire and attachment despite the pattern never bringing lasting happiness. Using concrete examples—wealthy people, lottery winners, unreciprocated attraction—he shows how dissatisfaction feeds endless craving. He then walks through the mechanism of delusion: how a clear, spacious mind splits into subject-object duality when something captures attention, and how we then add layers of judgment and emotional reaction. Drawing on a teaching from Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche, he details how to recognize this process in meditation and offers impermanence as the antidote to attachment. The session includes practical advice on self-esteem, the role of humor in loosening ego fixation, and why changing deeply ingrained mental habits requires both intellectual understanding and sustained behavioural practice. Pitched at students ready to examine their own patterns of desire, aversion, and depression.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 40 _2.mp3
UUID: dcbcf108-c293-4382-b30d-2f0d843a27bd
Teacher: Ven Lobsang Namgyel
Collection: VenNamgyel Thought Transformation (Ven Lobsang Namgyel)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 70.7 minutes
Words: ~10,465
Maybe, maybe only four lines. I’m not saying it’s easy. Subdue your mind thoroughly. This is the teaching of the Buddha. So from all the teachings that Buddha gave, he gave eighty four thousand teachings on the delusions, then the tantric teachings, the vows, all sorts of different teachings that he gave.
It was all to subdue your mind. So in this praise, it says, the one who subdued the gods. And the gods, particularly hard to subdue because it’s a little bit like people living in Bollywood or Hollywood and they’re having a great party and they’re really enjoying themselves. And You can go to them and say, Listen, this is suffering. And they say, You’re crazy.
This is not suffering. This is happiness. We’re having a really good time. Leave us alone. It was said that even for Buddha, difficult to try and reach people in the god realm because they have excessive pleasure.
When they have so much pleasure, really difficult to talk about suffering and how from this god realm you’re going to come down into extreme because you are using up all your positive karma. So we are not like that. We don’t have that extreme pleasure. But sometimes we do. Sometimes we have this, you know, I want a party.
And then you wake up in the morning and you you feel, now I’m suffering. Right? So we get that short term temporary suffering. And then you think, I won’t drink as much in future and won’t use whatever I used last night. So when we think about this extreme pleasure that we want, you know, we think, if only my life was like that, if only I had this great house on the hill, if only I could have parties every day and lots of money and stuff like that.
Well okay, maybe you could get all of that. But what would your life be like if you did? Would you really be any happier? Often people with extremes of wealth are not any happier or or even can be more unhappy than us. Because then you’re worried about your wealth.
Then you’re worried about the stock market. You’re worried about the banks going broke. You’re worried about kidnappings. You’re worried about many, many things that we don’t have to worry about. Right?
So when we look at wealthy people, we often think, well, if only I was wealthy, I’d be fine. Yeah? If I win the lottery, I’ll be fine. But when they go back to these people who won the lottery, lots and lots of money, they’re usually not very happy. You know, often they’ve spent the whole lot within a very short time thinking this is the way to happiness.
Know, you buy a great car, you buy a great house, la la la. You get used to all these luxuries and then suddenly you don’t have any more money. And then what do you do? And all your friends are still saying, give me some. And your family turns up that you haven’t seen for twenty years and they say, me some.
So often money can be the cause of divisiveness. It can be the cause of a lot of problems. But when you don’t have it, you’re thinking, if I had money, I’d be really happy. That would be the solution for my problems. Right?
When people have money, they’re always thinking to have more. The person with ten million dollars isn’t thinking, well, ten million dollars. This is incredible. They’re thinking twenty million or fifty million or a hundred million. Right?
So once you have this mind that is always dissatisfied, always wanting more, it goes on. Whether you’re rich or whether you’re poor or whether you’re in the middle, wherever you are, if you have a dissatisfied mind, then Buddha said, this is like craving water. Know, if you’re craving water and you think, oh, I’m so thirsty. I really want to drink something. And then you drink salt water because it’s the only thing available.
You drink salt water, then what happens? You want to drink more. It doesn’t satisfy your thirst. And then you drink salt water and you want to drink more. So trying to satisfy craving and grasping this desire and attachment through more desire and attachment is like drinking salt water.
This is what Śākyamūni Buddha said. He said, if you have understood the suffering of desire and attachment, then it’s like drinking more and more and more salt water. There’s no end to it. Right? And we know that because we can say once we start thinking about something, you know, oh, I need some Your mind starts thinking about it and on and on and on and on, how to get it, which way to get it.
And then you can go online and search it and you can talk to other people about it. But your mind sort of zooms in or zeros in on this one thing and you keep thinking about it. As if all the happiness in the world is encapsulated in that one object. So that once you get it, you’re gonna be really happy. But once you get it, you realize, I’m still not that happy.
I thought I would be. Somehow, you know, in whatever the object is, it’s in that object. And here it comes. And all the happiness that I imputed over there, and remember, it’s imputed. So if you’ve imputed the happiness over there onto the object, once I own it, the happiness comes to me.
And we think the same with beautiful objects. If I think it’s beautiful, then once I buy it, the beauty comes to me. So we have to really go into that and investigate it because it’s an underlying misinformation or it’s an underlying confusion or an underlying ignorance. Right? It’s a very particular type of ignorance that we’re thinking that out there is the potential for happiness in that when I achieve something, when I get something.
So it’s coming from outside and it’s going to go inside. And then we think permanently. So once I’ve got it, the permanent happiness has come to me. It will never change. My situation will never change.
That’s it. That’s going to be the end of it. And we can impute that onto situations too. Marriages, having children, whatever it is. You can keep thinking, if I have that, I’m going to be happy.
So some people get this thing about, I must have four children, then I’ll be happy. Or I must have an MP3, then I’ll be happy. I must have a tour, a trip around the world, you know, I must travel around the world, then I’ll be happy. Actually, traveling is a great mind opener, isn’t it? When you travel, you see so many different ways of doing things.
You’re challenged along the way. And I think this starts to play with your mind because you start wondering, well is my culture and my way the only way? You start to recognize it’s not. That there’s so many different cultures and it works for different people. That shows you the emptiness of culture.
We think when we come from only our culture that our culture is the one. The one, you know? Then you go to another country and you see that they do things in a different way. They think in a different way. And that shows you the emptiness of culture.
That out of emptiness, our culture appears. Whatever our culture is, whatever our food is, whatever our way of thinking is, it doesn’t exist inherently. It exists because people came together and found that that works for them. Right? It’s what they like.
It’s what they enjoy. And so it becomes what we call our culture. But it’s not inherent. It’s not unchanging. It’s just what exists in relation to the climate, the people, you know, many different factors.
So because of all those factors, they came together with the people and it became known as my country, my culture. And then you invest something of your ego in it. You say, I am. So you sew your little flag on the the backpack. So you put your flag there.
So you go around the world wave waving your little flag and say, I am. You know? As if the mind is inseparable from the culture and from the country. We sort of merge with it. Right?
But then there may be things about your culture that you don’t agree with. There may be things that you really like about another culture. And then you go, is that right? You know, should I do that? Because I’m from this culture, is it right to take on that?
But your mind is not inseparable from your culture. What your mind is, is wisdom and compassion. Right? So that’s where we came from yesterday, that what we’re looking for, what we’re what we’re seeking, if we’re seeking anything, you know, we usually think of, I’m on the path to enlightenment. I’m on the path to wisdom and compassion as if we go out the door and we’re going to follow a path down there and we go up into the hillside and then there’s there’s a place called compassion, you know, and then there’s another place called enlightenment and another place called wisdom.
As if it’s, again, out there. In our terminology, we actually talk about reaching it as if it’s there, you know, out there. But it’s something that’s internal. It’s something that changes inside. So then, in the last day, what we’ve been discussing is coming back inside and what is inside?
Because this is something that you’ve got to gain, you know? It a changed mind like more wisdom, more compassion, more patience, less anger, is this something that I’ve got to put in there? Or is it a quality that I already have? Where are we coming from? You know?
If it’s a computer program, we buy the disc, and we put the disc into the computer. And then the computer has whatever the program is, Adobe or Windows Media or whatever it is. You want this program, you buy the disc and you put it inside. So is our mind like that? Do we actually buy the disc?
You know, we buy this course, we put the disc in, and then I’m going to be a completely changed person. Actually, by seeing things in a different way, by challenging and starting to see things in a different way, what you’re doing is you’re removing the faulty old programs, the confused programs. Like I said yesterday, you can be on Windows ninety five and we’re sort of clunking along, not quite getting, you know, how things are and which way things exist because the program is not quite right. So do we need a new program? Is that what it is?
We just have to put put in the two thousand eight program or two thousand nine program if it exists now. Put it in, everything will be fine. If it was that easy, his holiness would have done it. His holiness would have had this disc invented by now, and that’s all you’d have to do. Just buy a disc or just buy a book.
Just come to a weekend’s teaching. But what is it we need to do? You know? That’s that’s where we come to, isn’t it? What do I really need to do in order to change my life?
So I said yesterday, I think humor plays a very strong part in this because we need to have a lightness about it. Sometimes it can just seem to get a bit too heavy. When you look at the desire and you look at the attachment and you look at the anger and you look at this and this, we had this huge list, you know, that we made on the first day. And you might think, gosh, I’ve got that. I’ve got that.
I’ve got that. I’m a disaster. You could, but you could also just laugh at it and think, it’s really quite funny that I’ve got a lot of these things. And in that moment when you laugh, when you have some humor, it lightens it and I think it opens it up. It changes the way you see things.
And that it’s not so heavy and so much like a burden, you know? So when we’re talking about emptiness, I think also humor approaches emptiness in that humor allows you to let go. In that moment, you just let go. Instead of holding on and clinging to your position, you can let go from your position. But then quite quickly, we come back to our position again, the ego.
You know, this is who and what I am, and this is what I believe. And then difficult to change from that position because we have the habit of being that position. I learned this from my background, from my parents, from my school, and from my life experience. And okay, it’s not working very well, but it’s what I know. So we cling to it, you know, because we’re afraid that if we change to another position, maybe it’s even worse.
So the main thing in there to change is the habituation. That’s the difficult part in the beginning. The understanding, oh yeah, I get anger is dangerous, it could be very harmful, desire, attachment, la la la. The mental understanding, we can get quite quickly because Westerners are very clever. You know, Tibetans know yaks and they know how to milk and they know how to be nomads and stuff like that.
They know how to live in very extreme conditions that we wouldn’t survive in. But when you talked about intellectual things to uneducated people, very difficult for them to understand. They feel the natural heart, you know, the good heart of trying to benefit others, help others, be with others, and you know, be tribal if you like. They understood that very well. And then you have these places of learning where the highest minds of the land, the few, would learn these type of things.
But we come from a different background. We come from a very educated background in comparison. And then we can come along thinking, well, I’m an educated person. This shouldn’t be difficult to do. Yeah.
To become very compassionate or to become very wise shouldn’t be much more than what I’ve already done. But then, we have many obstacles and we find it doesn’t seem to be working. It’s not a matter of putting the knowledge in. It’s a matter of changing. It’s a matter of transforming.
And so we accumulate the knowledge, but how do we use that knowledge to change? How do we put it into action? That’s much more difficult. And that’s what Buddhism is. It’s look at the behavior that is creating problems for you and others, And then, how do I learn to change that behavior?
Because I’ve decided. Not because Buddha decided you should change, or because I decided you should change, or your mother decided, but because you decided. You decided this behavior is harmful. I don’t want this anger anymore. I remember when I used to get really angry and afterwards that feeling of exhaustion from it and confusion from it.
And you really wonder what’s the point of this anger? Because when you’re angry, you feel very powerful and very strong. And you can say, you know, things that you would never normally say. But then when you come out of the anger, you wonder, well, what was the point of that? You know?
I I just hurt people so much and actually I hurt myself so much. This is the worst part of it, is that I hurt myself. And then desire and attachment, you can have desire and attachment for somebody and never tell them. You know? So you keep looking at them and thinking, oh, how would it be?
And where would we live together? And how many children would we have? And you don’t even talk to them. You know? So it’s all going on in your mind.
And that’s incredible suffering because when they go off with somebody else, you know, they meet somebody else and you didn’t tell them, Oh, I like you. Is there a possibility of marriage and three children in so and so country like I’ve envisaged? You see them go off to somebody else, and the jealousy comes up, and then the rage can come up. How can they do this to me? Why didn’t why didn’t they recognize the beauty in me?
And then it can be, so obviously I’m not a good person. So obviously I’m not beautiful. And then we can use that to put ourselves down. So a lot of emotional roller coasters, you know, because the desire and attachment is inside, the anger is inside, and then when you release the anger, it goes outside and then it really hurts people. Or the jealousy hurts, hurts you and others.
The envy really hurts you and others. Envy stops you from even talking to somebody. You know, if you keep looking at how well they’re doing, you’re looking at how well you’re not doing. You put them up and you put yourself down. So low self esteem can be a big problem that we think I’m the worst.
They’re they’re much better than me. So we need to start changing our mind about how we look at the world, how we view the world. You know, if the world is seemingly a suffering place, where is the suffering coming from? So Buddha gave the Four Noble Truths teaching. The very first teaching he gave, the first Noble Truth, the truth of suffering.
The more suffering we’re experiencing, then actually the better it is for us. Because when you’re experiencing suffering, you start to think, I want to get out of this suffering. I don’t want this suffering. Who wants suffering? You know?
I mean suffering is not a good thing unless it produces the reaction, I want to get out of suffering. Not in the way of getting on a bus and going to Auckland. That doesn’t get you out of suffering. You just pack your suffering and take it with you. You you open your suitcase or your backpack and you think, now just pack this suffering and I’ll pack this and I’ll pack this.
And very nicely, you know, you wrap it in newspaper newspaper and you put it in put it down nicely. Put it on the bus, take it to Auckland, unpack it. Here’s the anger, here’s the jealousy, and there’s the envy. So it goes with us. It’s not being left behind.
So the Buddha said the very first truth, the truth of suffering. And I said yesterday that the pleasure we’re experiencing is the alleviation of suffering. So every time you alleviate that suffering, the underlying suffering which is from the ignorance comes everything else. So you have this underlying ignorance, not understanding the reality of how things exist. Okay?
From that very basis, we get our other delusions. Right? So if you can eradicate the ignorance, you eradicate every single delusion. But it’s the most difficult thing to do. We talked yesterday about about emptiness.
And that’s just, you know, opening the door a little bit, a little chink of light. But it means that you’re never gonna be the same ever again if you just think, where is that angry self? Where is that depressed self? How does that envious self exist? Even if you just start asking those questions, you’ll never be the same ever again because it started to cut the root of the delusion, this ignorance.
So everything is manifesting from there. So the pleasure we’re experiencing is not long term pleasure, it’s short term. We go back into the suffering and then we want to alleviate the suffering. So constantly, we’re experiencing suffering, but we’re alleviating it. So you might think, No, that’s not true.
I am not experiencing suffering. So I say to people, The nature of your body is to suffer. The nature. They say, No, no, no. That’s not true.
Okay then. Don’t move. Just don’t move for half an hour, one hour. Stay as you are without having to scratch somewhere or you know, you just go on Vipassana retreat where they tell you, you can’t move for one hour. Just one hour.
And you think before the Vipassana retreat, oh that’s easy. It’s only an hour, you know. So you get into a position and then quite quickly you start thinking, there’s a fly somewhere around me. I’ve got to scratch but you can’t move and it’s driving you crazy. And then there’s an itch over here and it’s driving you crazy.
And now your back starts to hurt and your knees are starting to hurt and you’re starting to think, I feel I’m going crazy. I need to do something. And this is only three minutes into the hour. You know? So the body is not comfortable the way we’re imputing.
We think the body’s comfortable but actually the body is uncomfortable. And our movement is about making it comfortable, alleviating the pain, alleviating the suffering. Right? So on an easy level, we can see that. If the mind were totally comfortable, the body would be comfortable.
We wouldn’t have a problem with the body. So it’s actually coming from the mind, but easy to see it happening within the body. You have to keep moving, moving, moving. Check when you’re at home watching TV how many times you feel I want something to eat or you want to make a phone call during whatever you’re watching or you change position. We’re not usually aware of it.
How you change channels, know, and surf and sort of looking, looking, looking for something better than what you’re experiencing now. It’s a habit. So we’re dissatisfied and we just keep changing, changing, changing. Otherwise, if there was one inherently existing good channel, we wouldn’t need all the other channels. We wouldn’t need cable TV.
We’d just have one inherently existing good channel. We’d put that good channel on and everybody would say, Oh, that’s the good channel and it’s completely great. We don’t need any other channel. But because of the dissatisfaction, we need a hundred channels and then two hundred and then three hundred and then we need DVDs and VCRs. We need more and more and more because of the dissatisfied mind.
Consumerism is based on the dissatisfied mind. Right? So you start looking at the dissatisfied mind and you try to make it satisfied Because you know that this pleasure that you’re achieving is only temporary, is only short lived. So then instead of running away from the pain, the suffering, go into it. Instead of being a victim of it, go into it.
Yeah? Don’t run away from it. So I wanted to read you something from Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche. He’s passed away now. He was a lama, not from this tradition, but from a different tradition.
But I really like the way he used to speak. Very clear, very, down to earth. There’s a book called, Gates to Buddhist Practice, and, it’s very succinct. So I thought I’d read this to you because he makes it really clear how delusion arises. So he says, to understand how delusion arises, practice watching your mind.
Begin by simply letting it relax. So this is the first step. You know, just relax. So difficult for us. You know, when we think about relaxing, we think, I have to have a book, I have to have the phone.
You know, we get all the stuff around us. But just allow your mind to relax without needing all these bits and pieces around you. Without thinking of the past or the future, without feeling hope or fear. Now already your practice has started, so you relax. You’re not thinking about the past and the future.
So as Margaret was saying yesterday, be present. Also so difficult for us because we’re often thinking about the past, what we’ve done, and the mistakes we’ve made. We’re often thinking about the future, what we will do, what we should do, and we’re not very much in the present. And what we can change is the present. We cannot change the past and we can’t change the future unless we’re present.
Right? Everything is contained in the present because the present becomes the past and the present becomes the future. And where we’re not usually is the present. We’re usually past, future. And so in this practice, come to the present and don’t think about fear, hope.
I’m afraid or I’m anxious about that, or I hope this is gonna happen. But just rest, you know? Just be in a comfortable position mentally. And be open and natural. Open and natural sounds really easy but actually to be open not so easy.
You know just allow your mind to open up instead of constricting your mind with thoughts of past, future, hope, fear. You know this makes your mind very busy. So just the nature of your mind is open, natural. Right? In the space of the mind, there’s no problem.
There’s no suffering. So if we could just experience that, you know, just for a few seconds, the nature of that mind open, clear, then the suffering would appear. You know, the suffering delusion would appear. Something captures your attention. An image, a sound, a smell.
So remember you’ve had this clarity of mind which is very open and in that clarity of the mind something happens. Something catches you. And then your mind splits into inner and outer. So immediately you have a duality. Self and other, subject and object.
Okay? So from nothing, this emptiness, which is the actual quality of your own mind, not to be one with the thoughts of the past and the future, not to be one with the thoughts of fear and hope, but just this openness and clarity. In that space appeared a sound. In that space appeared a smell or a thought. Something pops into it, you know.
We’re not we’re not free of the mind very long. And immediately, your mind splits into inner, something in here, and outer. Self, other. Subject, object. Then what happens?
If you can simply perceive the object, there’s still no problem. You don’t have a problem when if a thought appears what could it be? Oh, here, it’s often, you know, bird or a car. So if it was just bird, car, or if you put the mere label sound, no problem. You still haven’t got a problem.
Right? You’re still clear. You’re not confused. And then you go back to the nature of your mind. But if you say, car, I don’t like that sound.
Or bird, what sort of bird is that? And then the fantasy starts. You know, I think it might be blue. That’s probably one of those long beaked ones. And then long beaked, and then, you know, you go off into the hills, and then you’re thinking, oh, the hills of Nova Scotia.
And then on and then pizza. And then, you know, we can be on and on and on. And then you think, gosh, that wasn’t where was I? You know? Back to spaciousness, blah blah blah.
So in the spaciousness of the mind, no problem. You hear a sound, you’re gone. You have a thought, you’re gone. You know? That’s what happens in meditation, isn’t it?
You go. I remember one girl telling me in the Medicine Buddha retreat in in Kopan. It was very funny. She said to me, I must tell you what happened in the visualization. She said, I was doing quite well.
You know? Got the Medicine Buddha. Looks like Śākyamūni Buddha, but it’s blue. So I’ve got the Śākyamūni Buddha, which is incredible, you know, Medicine Buddha, Śākyamūni Buddha sort of form and the begging bowl. And then she starts thinking, I wonder what’s inside the begging bowl.
So she looks inside the begging bowl, you know, as if you can. So she looks inside the begging bowl, and she sees a pizza. And she thinks, well, that’s interesting. Buddha of Medicine Buddha obviously likes pizza the way I do. So she she felt closer to Medicine Buddha now.
So then she starts thinking about pizza, and that pizza looks like the place where I used to go. Then she was in the restaurant where she was last when she was eating this pizza surrounded by the friends that she was with at that time, the conversations that she was having. And then she’s thinking about what she’s putting on the pizza, you know, with this and this and this. And then she realizes she’s supposed to be meditating on the Medicine Buddha. So she said, all this happened in quite a short time, but it all came from, I wonder what’s in the Medicine Buddha’s begging bowl.
Wonder what he eats. So that’s the process. Right? That you go off, and then you know that you’ve gone gone off, and then you come back to that clarity and that spaciousness. So that’s the dualism, is you went off, and then you can get really involved mentally.
You can even taste the pizza. You know? You start to think about the pizza, isn’t it? So you’re constructing it, and it it becomes the sense object that you’re really zeroing in. But you come back to where you were, spaciousness.
Now, when you zero in on this object of interest, whatever it is, you notice whether it’s big or small. So if it’s an object of interest in the mind, a person. So is it big or small? Is it white or black? What color is it?
What shape is it? And then you make a judgment. For example, you say, it’s pretty or it’s ugly or it’s handsome or it’s not. Having made that judgment, you then react to it and you decide whether you like it or you don’t. So this is the process that we go through.
Yeah? And that’s when the problem starts. So up until that point, you didn’t have a problem. You just saw the object. You can put a label, you know, person, car, sound.
No problem. But then you say, beautiful, ugly, I like, I don’t like. And that’s when you say, I like, I want it. And that goes into the desire attachment, I want it. Right?
And I don’t like it leads to I don’t want it. So when we say we don’t want it, there’s some activity involved, isn’t it? Because if you don’t want it, you have to do something in order to get it away. So that’s the aversion. All the anger, the hatred, if it goes on long enough, get it away from me.
So I might actually do something in order to get it away. People kill in order to get it away. I mean, it sounds extraordinary that somebody would kill, but then haven’t you done that with a cockroach or a mosquito? We used to think, oh, killing people. I don’t I don’t kill people.
But we kill mosquitoes if we have strong aversion for them. We can kill possums if we have strong aversion for them. Killing is not much of a line to cross if you think, I hate this being. But why do you hate? Where did that hatred come from?
It came from a mind that’s labeling in a certain way and creates your pain and suffering, which then causes other pain and suffering. Yeah? Because you made a decision in your mind and you might not even know that you’re making that decision. I don’t like it. Therefore, I must do something about it.
So if we like something, we want it, and can’t have it, then we suffer. So what happens when you decide you like it, you want it, but you can’t get it? People steal in those situations or they become very frustrated. If we don’t want it and can’t keep it away, we don’t like it, we can’t keep it away, again, we suffer. What happens if you have a boss that you really dislike and you want to keep away from him, but you can’t?
Or somebody that you work with that you really don’t like, you can’t keep them away, but you need the job. You can’t leave the job. So every day you go into work thinking, I hate this job because of this person. It’s so difficult. Right?
So our suffering seems to occur because of the object of our desire or aversion. Our suffering seems to occur because of the object of our desire or aversion, but that’s not really so. It happens because the mind splits into object and subject duality and becomes involved in wanting or not wanting something. That’s where the suffering comes from. Okay?
So the suffering occurs because of the object of our desire or aversion. These are the two extremes. I really want, I really don’t want. Then subject object duality, and then we become involved in wanting or not wanting. We often think the only way to create happiness is to try to control the outer circumstances of our lives to try to fix what seems wrong or to get rid of everything that bothers us.
But the real problem lies in our reaction to those circumstances. What we have to change is the mind and the way it experiences reality. Okay? I’ll say it again. We often think the only way to create happiness is to try to control the outer circumstances of our lives.
To try to fix what seems wrong or to get rid of everything that bothers us. But the real problem lies in our reaction to those circumstances. So Buddha says, it’s not happening outside. That’s not the cause of our suffering. The cause of our suffering is our reaction to the circumstances.
What we have to change is the mind and the way it experiences reality. You mean whether we have aversion for our thoughts? Yes. With our thoughts and sort of things on a downward spiral. Yeah.
Yeah. But just they are. It’s like we often it’s it’s you’re sending yourself down, you know, that you build on thoughts. So again, in a perverted way, it’s attachment. You get attached to an idea and then you keep adding to the idea.
So, say for instance, you like somebody and then they say something to you that really hurts you. And you go home and you think about it and you think, they they don’t like me. I thought they were my friend. They don’t like me. And it really hurt me.
I must be a bad person. I think people don’t like me. Maybe I’m not likable. And then you can start adding and adding and adding. Or somebody says something and you start adding to that thought, you know, I’m the ugliest person in the world.
I’m the stupidest person in the world. People often say this thing. I’m the stupidest person in the world. No. Well, you’re not.
You’re also not the most intelligent person in the world. But we don’t go into that. You know? It’s that at that time, we attach onto a thought, and then we start going down and down and down and adding and adding and adding. Not recognizing that what we’re doing is sending ourselves into a depression.
That then it’s like digging a hole. You gotta pull yourself out of that hole. You know? Last weekend, I had a poem, and I haven’t got it here now. But it was something like, I walk down the street and there’s a big hole and I fall in and I’m down this big hole and it’s not my fault and how did I get down here like that, you know, isn’t it?
And the second time, I walk down the street and I fall into the hole and it’s very deep and I’ve got to figure a way to get out of this. And the third time, I walk down the street, I see the hole and I fall in it. It’s I think it’s still not my fault. The fourth time, I fall fall down the hole. It’s my fault.
I take the responsibility. I put myself in the hole. I find a way of climbing out. And then oh, no. I think I’m I’m went slightly wrong somewhere.
Anyway, it was five, but I’m going into six. The fifth time, I walk down the street, I see the hole, I walk around the hole. And the sixth time, I go down a different street. So I really liked it because the analogy is the hole, which I often use, which is why are you digging the hole? If in if in that time, you could mental thinking you’re digging a hole and you’re going down, down, down, down and you’re getting into the hole very deeply and then you’re going to have to put a ladder to climb out.
It’s such a lot of effort. If you could laugh at yourself at that time and think this is stupid, this is ridiculous, why am I doing this? You know, just laugh at yourself. You could possibly stop yourself from getting into that hole. But we have this habit of seeing ourselves in a negative way and then maybe using what people say or circumstances in order to prove it’s true.
I am stupid. I am ugly. I’m tall. I’m short. I’m fat.
I’m thin. Whatever it is. We can always prove it if we want to. You know? But actually, is it true?
From an emptiness point of view, it’s not. It doesn’t exist. Short exists in relation to tall. Right? North, south, east, west exist in relation to which direction you’re in.
There’s no absolute north. There is, you know, if I say from this way, which is north, it’s that way. If I turn around, north is that way. It’s in relation to. Right?
A mountain and me, I’m very short. If I stand next to Michael Jordan, I’m short. If I stand next to a short person, I’m tall. If I stand next to a really thin person, I’m fat. And if I stand next to somebody who’s three hundred kilos, I feel really thin, you know?
Then I’m doing okay. So it’s only in relation to. But we don’t think of that at the time that we’re building these negative thoughts. So, you know, one of the antidotes for pride is to think about all the things you don’t know. Quantum physics or, you know, languages or something like that.
You have a great deal of pride or arrogance in that it’s an obstacle, then you think of all the things you don’t know. With low self esteem, you need to think of the things that you do know, the things that you do well. Right? You do the opposite. With low self esteem, you need to build yourself up.
Because in Buddhism it says, well, there is no self. So then people come into these teachings and say, well, there’s no self, therefore, I don’t need to do anything with the self. Well, first, you need to have a good self esteem before we cut it. Right? First you need to have a self esteem.
Bodhisattvas have a good self esteem. Do you think his holiness doesn’t know who he is? His holiness has a very clear ego definition. Right? But it varies.
I’m a tantric master, and he’ll go like this, and then I’m the person talking to the Mexican housewife, and then I’m this, and then I’m this. He shifts. He’s not one ego. We fixate on one ego and say, I am a bad person. I did that wrong.
I’m depressed. And we sort of jump into the hole, you know, and say, I belong in this hole. Not why I’m in this hole, but I belong in this hole. You put yourself in the hole. But if you think rationally about it, you’re not the worst in the world.
You’re not the ugliest in the world, the fattest, the thinnest, the tallest, the shortest. There’s always somebody else who’s more suffering than you. Isn’t it? There’s always somebody else happier than you. There’s always somebody else richer than you, poorer than you.
It’s all relative. But we take it on and we own it and we say, I am. And then we add to, I’m the worst in the world, and then you add and add and add, and you get yourself into a deep hole, you know, depressed, anxious, and then you’ve got to climb out of that hole. Why are you doing this to yourself? Is it beneficial for you, and is it going to benefit others?
Why do that? Do you want to say something? Or is it I was just gonna ask about how many people go into depression. Has it something to do with also with the drug there? Like, they’re Drugs.
That can also be a factor. Yeah. It can be. Well, pros Yeah. Prozac, I think you go into a sort of gray fog from what I’ve heard.
It sort of sends you into I don’t care, you know. So it’s a funny place to be. But it’s true what you’re saying that when you have a positive mind, you have more antibodies, your body’s healthier, you know, you’re doing okay. When you start getting negative, then you have less serotonin, you start to feel depressed. So the, the, mind, the way we think, actually adjust the chemicals in the body has an effect on the chemicals.
So what Buddha said two thousand five hundred years ago, the scientists are now saying, well, is all true because if you have a more positive state of mind, you’re less stressed, less anxious, less worried, you’re going to be healthier. Things are going to be better for you physically, mentally, emotionally. Yeah? So what we’re doing mentally has a very strong effect on the hormonal system, the endocrine, you know, system is affected by the mind. It works, but it works in a chemical way in that it lifts you chemically.
It lifts you. But then you need to change your mind. I think the problem with these sort of cures, they’re not cures in the way of you keep taking the pill, the chemical balance changes. But then you need to change your mind so that you’re not always reliant on that chemical to solve the situation. So if you have a two pronged effect, one is from the mind and one is chemical, this is great.
You know, we’ve had people come to, particularly Copan, who’ve got severe problems, you know, paranoia, schizophrenia like this. And I always say to them, if you’re on medications, don’t stop because the medication is supporting you. And while you’re being supported and the mind’s fairly balanced, you can listen to these ideas and you can take these ideas on board and gradually you can reduce the chemicals as your mind is being more positive. But if you come to a meditation course, you completely stop the drugs and then your mind becomes unbalanced because it doesn’t have the chemicals, then you can’t hear these ideas. So actually, we need a balanced state of mind.
We need to be quite mentally healthy in order to listen to these ideas. If we’re not mentally healthy, then you think, oh no, I couldn’t do that. You know, I can’t antidote these negative states of mind. I’m just hanging in there. Some people feel that they’re just hanging on the cliff before they’re about to fall.
They’re just surviving. So when you’re just surviving, very difficult to think about changing the mind, isn’t it? So then you need support. Sometimes you need encounter groups or a psychiatrist or whatever you need, counselor. People to support you in your change.
Maybe chemical support, you know, in the way of a psychiatrist telling you this drug is good. But is it good for the next twenty years as the only way of changing your mind? I don’t think so. Think you need both. Not one or the other.
But if you need chemical, take it. And then change your mind. Okay, Ron? No, just thinking. Alright, so particular antidotes.
When we’re talking about attachment, you know, so we were talking about this attached mind that, you know, this is mine, therefore it’s not yours. So attachment, particularly focus on impermanence. So keep looking at the changing nature of things and hold on to that feeling things are changing. So one of my teachers was Gen Lamrimpa. He was, a very great lama who lived up above, Dharamsala in Himachal Pradesh.
Why they called him Gen Lamrimpa wasn’t because his name was Lamrimpa. It was because he realized the Lamrim. He’d actualized it. And he lived in a tiny house, absolutely minute. From his bed, he could do everything with a stick.
So he’d sit on his bed and he’d put the light off, put the thing on to make some water. It was completely amazing. And one day I said to him, you know, you have so many visitors, you need a bigger house. And he said, what for? Then I wouldn’t be able to sit on the bed and do everything from the bed.
It was like he had a remote control, but you know, switching things on and off all from the bed. And he was the one who would go to His Holiness and tell His Holiness about the realizations of the meditators in that area. So there were many Tibetan meditators in little houses living in the forest of that area. No running water, no toilets, just in these little houses and only doing retreat. Quite close to Tuśita.
And I used to go and see him and whenever I go and see him, a translator would turn up at the same time. So it was always quite strange that he didn’t speak much English and I didn’t speak much Tibetan. But whenever I think, Oh I have to go and get another teaching. I just arrived there and this translator would appear and I get teachings. And one day, it was snowing and it was like this deep maybe, nearly a meter nearly a meter deep and it was a long road, from Tuśita around and around and around and then up a bit and then into this forest area.
And I thought, oh, poor Genlamrimpa. He’s in the snow. You know? No water. No no electricity, no food.
I must go and see if he’s okay. So I I walked. So it took me, I think, two hours. And it was very soft snow, so you have to lift your foot up and down, and lift up and down, and lift and down. And I got there completely exhausted, completely exhausted.
And he was really surprised. He must have been thinking, Snow, I’m free. Nobody’s gonna come and see me. And I’m at the door, you know. Geshe-la, Geshe-la.
And he opened the door and he looked at me really shocked and he said, what are you doing here? And I said, are you alright? And he said, yes. And I said, oh, you don’t need anything? No?
Oh, okay then. He said, You better have a quick drink and go back. And then it took me hours to get back and I was completely exhausted. So he was one of the old school of the Tibetan teachers and really an amazing teacher. And when I was doing my Lamrim retreat, I go and ask advice and he’d say to me, You need to do the market meditation.
And I said, Well, what’s the market meditation? He said, Well, this is the meditation on impermanence. So when you go to the market, you look at the faces of the people. So keep watching them. When they’re getting what they want, they’re happy.
When they don’t get what they want or they don’t get the price that they want, which happens more in India where you’ve got to fight over the price constantly, then they’re unhappy. So he said, look at the faces of people. This is really good when you see many people around. And then the other thing is look at phenomena. So on the way to the market, look at the trees, look at the flowers.
So look at the changing phenomena and how much it’s changing. Because usually we don’t notice very clearly, you know, the tree, how the leaves are dropping, the colors are changing. So look at the trees, the birds, the clouds. These are all changing phenomena. Be very aware of the change and then once you have this strong feeling everything is changing, hold your mind on that feeling.
Everything is impermanent. Okay? So it’s really important because we’re in constant contact with impermanent phenomena, but somehow we don’t recognize it is impermanent. We fixate on it being permanent. You could do it with your face, couldn’t you?
I mean, we don’t wake up every day and look in the mirror and think same, same, same every day, same, same, same. Oh, not looking so good today. A bit more cream, you know? Or, Oh, found a gray hair. I must buy some color.
So we don’t see impermanence and think of it in a positive way. We see impermanence physically and think of it as something to be hidden, you know, something to be changed. So you can see changing phenomena, you know, impermanence in the face, in the hair, in the body. And then you think, is this body the same as it was yesterday? Is this body the same as last month, ten years ago?
So just think about your body. You know how we don’t recognize the change in the body, but actually if you sit and meditate on it, there’s been a great change over a month, a year, five years, ten years. For sure, the body is different than it was when you were born. Right? So go back to your birth, how you were small.
Yeah. You know, crying. Oh, maybe not so different. Give me that. You know?
So you grow a bit bigger, a bit bigger, a bit bigger. And then we grow to fully grown, you know, and then we start shrinking. So, we grow up and then we start shrinking as we get older and then the body starts going south and so things start dropping, right? So it pulls this way, and pulls this way. And then our constant job is to sort of push it north, you know?
So you’re trying to push everything upwards, right? So think of the body, and not in a depressed way, not in a critical way, but in accepting way of this is the way it is. You think, ah, so this is the way it is. It’s okay. Rather than stressing yourself out about it.
It’s very good for the mind to become more peaceful. Then you think of the mind itself, is it static? Is it changing every moment? And then concentrate on that experience of how much it’s changing. What do you know now that you didn’t know, say five years ago, ten years ago, twenty years ago?
You see how much your mind has changed. And when you find the good changes, rejoice. You think, That’s good. You know? Maybe on this weekend you discover something that, you know, really sets you thinking in a different direction.
And then you think, that’s really good. Last week I was thinking about things in this way, quite negative, and now I see the potential is there to be more positive. I started in a more positive direction. So you see how the mind can change quite quickly. It’s not static.
Yeah? We knew that at school, didn’t we? When we first went to school, you know, maybe five years of age. What did you know about geography history? Did you know the letter a?
Right? When you first learned the letter a, your mother says, line down this way, line down that way, like a little tent, you know, and then with a line across. And you try to draw it and you completely can’t draw it. And you don’t know what a is and you don’t know the meaning of a. What does this mean to me?
You know? And she keeps saying, a. You know, little turned, put a line across and you still can’t do it and you keep trying and trying. And one day you do it and your mother says, Well done, A. Okay, now B.
Is it ever going to end? Down a line and then like this and that. And it goes on like that. In the end, you know the alphabet so well, you don’t even think you had to learn the alphabet. But there was a point where you didn’t know the alphabet at all.
Now it’s become such a habit, of course you know it. If you try to learn a new language, it’s the same. You think, oh, I don’t know that. Oh. And if you try and try, you think, I’m useless.
I can’t learn a language. And so you stop yourself. You bring in the low self esteem. I can’t do it. Yeah.
I think you always have the capacity to grow. There was a man recently that I read about that just learned to read and write at the age of eighty two or something and then went to college and got a degree. I think this was China and then there was another man in India that at the age of seventy nine decided that he had to learn to read and write. So, you know, now we have the internet. These sort of things pop up.
In the old days, you would think, oh fifty’s aging, sixty one foot in the grave and you know, you can’t learn anything. But we don’t have this concept so much anymore. We’re starting to broaden our concept of who can learn? When can you learn? You know?
And I think until you’re dead, keep learning because it’s been found that until you die, you’ve got the capacity to learn and to grow and to change. This is what Buddha said. You know? There’s a lama in Kopan who’s ninety years of age and on his own, he’s quite frail now, on his own he’s got his walking stick. He goes down the steps of the Gompa, down more steps, all around the Gompa, down to the stupa, around the stupa, back up, up the steps again, up the steps again, and a lot of steps, I tell you.
And I get to the top and I’m up just the Gompa steps. He’s ninety and all the way down, and he’s still checking things for the monastery, giving advice. At ninety, we might think sixty, we retire. That’s the problem, isn’t it? We have this line.
Sixty, sixty five, we retire and we don’t grow. We don’t do anything anymore. It’s the time we’re put out to pasture and we play golf, know. We’re no use anymore. But it’s not like that at all.
The nature of the mind is wisdom and compassion And you can keep accessing, getting closer and closer to that, your own wisdom and compassion no matter what age. And you can learn a new language. You can learn to do new things right up until you die. And they say particular particularly mental things are really good for you as you get older. It’s the insurance against Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
You know, to keep using your mind. Take up chess. Take up meditation. Take up mental things, you know, rather than physical. Physical is good but you know we need something for the mind, isn’t it?
Some brain food. Then think of the room. You know, we’re still talking about impermanence as the antidote for attachment. So think about this room. Is it static, permanent?
Is it changing? I don’t know that but the scientists are saying that if you keep using your mind then there may be still a potential to get Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s, but it seems to slow it down. It’s one of the latest findings is that you can slow down these things. Whether you can stop it completely, no idea. But what Buddha said was, you’ve got all potential in this life, you know, from the beginning to the end, and then you’ve got another life, another life, another life.
So you’ve got all this potential. Keep using that potential. Never think you’re too old. Whereas I think in our society, we’ve got these old people’s homes and we can sort of put somebody in there at sixty and say, well now you’re old, park them in front of a TV and you know all they do is watch TV all day. Tibetan society, it never happened.
Indian society, it never happened. You know that you had this retiring age. When you were older, you looked after the children. That’s what you did. And the children kept you young.
And in our society too, that’s what used to happen. We’d have maybe three generations, you know, together. But these days it’s one generation. So you have the parents, then they have children, and the grandparents live somewhere else and you go and visit. But in the old days it used to be everybody living together and the grandparents looked after the children.
And I think this is very healthy to be challenged as you get older, to be challenged mentally. And then physically as much as possible, you know, within your own confines. But there’s many stories of in Buddha’s time. Somebody called Panthaka. He was seventy nine.
Lam Lam means little path. And Lam Lam wanted to become a monk, and he asked somebody with clairvoyance, and that person said, no. You don’t have any karma to become a monk. And he became so depressed he went down to the river and he wanted to commit suicide because he thought, I’m useless. I can’t read.
I can’t write. I have I don’t even have any karma to become a monk. No point in living. And then he was saved, by somebody from going into the river, went to Buddha, and Buddha said, you got one really small karma from a long, long time ago. You should become a monk.
And he became a monk and he was as thick as a brick. Could not remember anything, you know? So they say, they kept saying to him, Om Mani Padme Hum. And he’d go, Om Mani, what was the first one? What was the last one?
Couldn’t remember. Om Mani Padme Hum. Aum Mani Padme Home. Kept trying to teach him a mantra. Couldn’t remember.
So they say even in the end, the yaks were going Om Mani Padme Hum and the sheep were going, and he couldn’t remember. So they said, we give up with you. You know, even the sheep and the yaks are reciting, you can’t get it. So he gets depressed and he goes back to Buddha and Buddha says, We need a skillful means. Can you clean shoes?
He said, Well, yeah, I can clean shoes. So Buddha said, Okay, you can clean shoes of the monastery. You can polish them. So he started doing that to accumulate some positive energy of helping others. So he’s cleaning shoes every day.
And then after a while Buddha said, Do you think you could clean the Gompa, the meditation hall? Oh yeah, I can do that. He says, Okay, sweep the dirt. So he used to sweep, constantly sweeping and Buddha was always producing more dust. So all day sweeping, sweeping, sweeping, sweeping, sweeping, sweeping.
And people say, I never saw so much dust in that room as when you came. And after a while Buddha said, Okay, now think sweeping out desire, sweeping out attachment, cleaning it. So the dust now was symbolic of what you’re getting rid of. Removing aversion, removing desire, removing attachment. So he started doing that and within a period of time he had incredible realizations.
So he had realizations of emptiness, of compassion, and then Buddha said, Okay, now go and teach the nuns. And the nuns got really upset and they said, Oh, this is a slap in the face. Obviously, we’re being insulted because we’re nuns. What we need to do is put a really high throne so when this stupid person who can’t even remember Om Mani Padme Hum comes down here, he’ll run away. So Lam Lam comes down and he sees this really high throne and manages to sit on it, and he gives a teaching for a week on the practice of sweeping the Gompa.
And this is in the seven practices that we do, offering water bowls, cleaning the room. Buddha said that this is an extremely important practice that even he would do until his death because in the sweeping and cleaning of your room, you remember sweeping out the attachment, sweeping out the desire. So what are you removing and what are you improving? What are you bringing in? So even from practices like that, you can have realization.
So in the Buddha’s time, there were people like that, and it was showing that it’s never too late. There’s always a time to start. Okay, we need to talk. There’s always a time to start. Now we need to stop and have a break.
So it’s your tea break. So we start again at quarter past eleven.