(ungrouped) — 01 ENM

My name is Pende. It’s a Tibetan name that I got a long time ago when I was ordained as a monk. I was called Thubten Pende. And I was a monk for twenty one years, so when I stopped being a monk I just kind of hung on to the name because I was so used to it. But if you can’t remember it, I also go by the name of Jim Dougherty.

So if that’s easier to remember, please I answer to both those names and a few others. So please feel free. When I was asked to give a series of lectures here and what subject I wanted to choose, I picked commenting on this book by His Holiness, Ethics for the New Millennium. And does everybody have a copy of this book? No, no, no?

Okay. This is required reading for this class. Maybe it’s in the libraries by now, I don’t know. Barnes and Noble? Well, certainly it’s in the bookstores.

So I don’t know if the paperback is out yet. But I guess you can a chair in a Barnes and Noble’s and kind of read through it. It’s not really required reading, it’s just suggested reading and this is the basis of my lectures and I’m not going to be able to comment in detail on this text just in four evenings. So I warmly recommend that you have a good read. His Holiness has been working on this book for quite a long time and it’s one of the reasons why I chose this book because I find that the essential message of Buddhism is not restricted to the Buddhist religion per se.

I find that it’s just so fundamental and experiential that it is something that makes a great deal of sense without requiring that one believe in some metaphysical system, that one believe in some object of faith that can’t be verified by one’s own experience. I find that most of the teachings are things that one can verify from one’s own experience. So His Holiness has been working towards a language which is not one of Buddhist jargon, is dealing with issues that are not exclusively those of Buddhism in order to provide something that is of value to anyone, whether they’re Buddhist or not Buddhist, whether they’re religious or not religious. And this book is an example of that. It deals with the subject of ethics.

Ethics is basically the subject of right and wrong, what to do and what not to do in order to accomplish our goals. So it is something that’s very practical. It’s not a theoretical thing, it’s a practical thing. It’s putting something in action and it in fact deals with action and it helps helps us to make a decision about whether we should take a certain course of action or not take a course of action depending upon whether this is going to take us to our destination or not. That’s the whole subject of ethics.

And within ethics, you have ethics of restraint, which identifying those things that you want to hold yourself back from because that’s going to take you in a direction you don’t want to go. There’s an ethics of cultivation or development that develops qualities within you because they take you in the direction that you want to go. And there’s an ethics of altruism, which is basically helping other living beings because that’s considered to be fundamental in any in the use of our ability to act, how we interact with others. The best way to interact with others is altruistically helping them out in one way or another. So, those are areas of ethics that all that we can see this essential process of judgment where we discriminate between what we should do and what we shouldn’t do.

When we’re dealing with any conscious act putting using our body, speech and mind to do something. So this is not just a course in theories. This is this has to deal with something very practical, how we act in the world and making decisions on how we’re supposed to act. And what I’m hoping is that by the end of this series of lectures, you will be better informed and you’ll be able to make more accurate decisions about what you should do and what you shouldn’t do based upon the points that His Holiness brings up here. So I’m going to try to go through all of these points.

There’s I may not get to all of them, but as many as I can. And certainly in this world, we’re asked to make moral or ethical decisions all the time. And we often have to just decide ourselves on what we’re supposed to do. And we’re not a very traditional society. We’re not a very traditional society, which means that we have to ad lib a great deal.

We have to improvise a great deal. We can’t always go the way our predecessors have gone. Oftentimes, we don’t have the advantages of traditional societies. Oh, I feel much better now. Smells good.

We don’t have the advantages of traditional societies where you live in a village and everybody knows what they’re supposed to do at every season and every situation and if you don’t do what’s expected of you, you’re in big trouble. We’re not in that kind of situation. Nobody lives in villages anymore at least in this country. Nobody knows you. You move into a neighborhood, so you don’t have the benefit of embarrassment to keep yourself under control.

You can basically do whatever you want because you don’t know them, they don’t know you and you could care less. You can just do whatever you want to do. So as an old friend of mine once said, that’s like giving a monkey a machine gun. If we can do whatever we want, what is it that you want to do? Well, when you ask people, what do you want to do?

It’s not just at the tip of their tongue and it’s not always the same answer. It changes all the time. So if we base our actions on just what we happen to want to do in that moment, the course of our life could go this way and that way and that way and that way and it could be very destabilizing. So it is an important issue to try to cultivate that understanding that will help us to make good decisions on how we act determining the right and the wrong of each situation. Okay.

Once again, this is the suggested reading. And so those people who have read who have the book, is there anybody that has it and hasn’t read it? Can I see hands? Okay. I got a lot of books in my bookshelf that I haven’t read.

It’s always nice when I walk past that bookshelf and look up there and feel like I’m kind of intelligent because I have all those books, but it doesn’t do me any good if all that knowledge stays in the book. And even though there are countless books out there and we want many of them, we really have to just start reading through the most important ones. And as we’re doing a class on ethics for the new millennium, this is the perfect excuse to pick up that book and start reading it. The first section of the book is the foundation of ethics. So in this first section, we’re determining what ethics is and what’s the basis of ethics that His Holiness is providing that transcends any particular belief system.

This is a little difficult. Some people when they think of ethics and morality, they think of it as part and parcel of religion and couldn’t imagine a system of ethics and morality that is outside of religion. His Holiness thinks it is possible to present a system of ethics that is not essential or is not specific to a religion, because you end up having the problem of which religion’s ethics is the right one. They all have some things in common, but they have differences as well. He thinks that there’s something more fundamental than the particular religious beliefs systems.

And he bases his system in spirituality. Well, that’s interesting. That gives the question, is there a difference between spirituality and religion? And His Holiness would say, yes, there is a difference. And he says that the difference between spirituality and religion is that spirituality requires belief in some system of metaphysics, in some objects that can’t be verified by your immediate experience.

It could be God. It could be heaven. It could be nirvana. It could be Buddhahood. It could be any one of these things, omniscience, which is difficult to verify by our direct experience.

And so a religion requires a certain belief in that and then everything follows. If this then, then it all is set forth for you. And it also involves devotional practices, rituals and so on. Spirituality, on the other hand, he says, deals with the inner qualities such as loving kindness, patience, generosity, contentment. These qualities of the mind or heart or soul, whatever you want to call it, but these qualities that we all experience within us and it’s the cultivation of those qualities, which His Holiness calls spirituality.

Now there is no religion that does not cultivate those qualities, but it’s not necessarily the case that you are a religious believer by virtue of cultivating those qualities. There’s plenty of people who don’t ascribe to any particular religious belief, but nonetheless cultivate loving kindness, cultivate patience, generosity, contentedness, serenity, these kinds of inner qualities. And this holiness brings up the interesting point that of the six billion people on the planet today, I was startled by that statistic. I just I remember the good old days when it was four billion people. It happened so fast.

Of the six billion people on the planet today, he suspects only one billion are religious believers. So and the rest of them are not religious believers and they might claim to be, but his definition of a religious believer is a little different from just what you might write on a census. You’re actually putting into practice the tenets of that religion. So and the five billion are not, but somehow we’re all managing to get along. So it must mean that there’s these five billion people who are doing something for the sake of harmony, world harmony and peace.

And on the basis of that, he’s thinking well, if five billion people are doing it without religion, then that’s evidence that religion is not necessary at all. Of course, he admits that it must sound strange for somebody like His Holiness to say that, but the facts force him to say that. Now he admits in that first chapter that for him Buddhism is just great. He likes it. He enjoys it.

It suits his temperament. But he says that just because you like a particular religion, it’s a big mistake to think that the rest of the world should adopt that religion. And he admitted that he was guilty of those thoughts in his youth. Thought that Buddhism was so great that if only the world knew it they would all become Buddhists. And there was at least one advantage of being forced to leave Tibet because in their diaspora they could spread around the world spreading the message.

And when they were living in Tibet, they knew of other religions, but they hardly ever had the opportunity to actually sit down with leaders of different religions and get to know them and see the impact of a sincere practitioner’s practice on that person. In fact, most Tibetans never even knew that there was another Buddhism outside of their own brand of Buddhism because throughout Tibet and the Himalayan world and Mongolia and Russia and so on, it was all influenced by Tibetan Buddhism. So they knew that there was such a thing as what’s known in scriptures as the individual vehicle or the Hīnayāna. They didn’t think that anybody actually still practiced it. When they came out of Tibet into India then they discovered that Hīnayāna Buddhism in the form of Theravadan Buddhism was alive and well.

So alive and well that they discovered that the Theravadins were accusing the Tibetans of not even being genuine Buddhists. That was quite a surprise. So there’s all of differences that are existing amongst the different religions, but His Holiness has pointed out that since he got to meet people who are practicing their different religions, he’s discovered a great deal of respect for these different religions. And he finds that the fact that there is such a variety of religions is something that we should celebrate rather than lament because Because the fact is, is that there’s such a variety of people in the world that you’re not going to find everyone being satisfied with message. So if you have different messages, then you can have different people being satisfied.

It’s just like we could be sometimes discouraged when we go into the supermarket like when I bring my little girl into the store and she wants to buy candy and there’s so many different kinds of candy that it takes a very long time for her to decide which one she wants, especially when her old man makes her choose just one. And so she’s just it would be better it seems if there was only one kind of candy, but she wouldn’t agree to that. She likes the variety. I don’t feel like chocolate today. Today it’s going to be bubblegum like that.

So like that, it’s good that we have that variety of religions and it’s something that we should celebrate. But at the same time, this within our own experience, there’s the possibility of discovering a basis for deciding whether actions, whatever course of action is right or wrong for us, not based upon what one of my teachers, Lama Yeshe used to call superbelieving, but rather on the awareness or presence you have in your own self, in your own state of mind understanding the impact that this particular way of thinking that is involved in this course of action has upon you. And deciding whether to follow an action based upon whether your state of mind is upset by that course of action or goes into a state of serenity, of peacefulness by that state of action. And that’s something that you don’t need super belief. All you need is to be attentive of your inner state.

In the first chapter, His Holiness also makes the case that there’s a great need for change existing in our society because there is a great deal of misery existing, not the obvious kind of misery that you might see in the third world, but the invisible kind which is inside people’s heads, in their hearts, that’s there’s a great deal of that misery going on. And he gives a number of examples of this and of course this is his own observation from traveling around the world and it’s not an observation that is unique to the places where he stays. We can all see it, but he found it in interesting ways like for instance, in one of his travels, he was invited to stay in the home of this one family who was very, very, very wealthy. And while staying there and looking around and he was thinking, My goodness, with all these wonderful things, this wonderful house and even servants and wonderful food that somebody else cooks, and lovely mattresses, and bedding, and swimming pool, and view, and all of these things. These people must be really happy.

And then he confessed that one day when he was in the bathroom, he opened up the medicine cabinet and he discovered it filled with tranquilizers, sleeping pills, all of these things. And he discovered that these people were not so happy. They they had a hard time going to sleep at night. They were filled with worries. So that was just one anecdote of the discovery that he has made that in the West there’s a great deal of inner misery going on.

And just statistically, we see the phenomena of people being prescribed tranquilizers by doctors. There’s a lot of that that’s going on. And everybody goes, well isn’t that normal? It’s not normal in the third world. There’s a lot of suicide.

The suicide rate is not rising in the third world. It’s in the affluent industrial world where there’s a big suicide rate. The kind of hardships that exist in the third world are these things of struggle to make a living and so on, but and people may not be very wealthy. They don’t have like closets full of clothes and like racks full of shoes and so on, but they’re kind of content and they have good family connections and they enjoy communal living and support of other people and so on. And they don’t have the same kind of malaise that the people of affluent countries have.

Ours is an inner problem. So His Holiness was quite surprised by this and he wondered why. Why people who have so much outer wealth at least compared to the third world, he looks at just the average person and it looks like they’re very wealthy compared to people in India and so on. And he wonders why they’re so unhappy, why they’re taking tranquilizers to get by, why there’s such a high suicide rate, why even young people like fourteen-year-olds are committing suicide, why old people are so isolated in the society, why it is that why is this phenomenon taking place? So he comes up with a number of reasons why he thinks it might be taking place.

One would be increased urbanization, a lot of people packed into a tight space, no village sense of community, a lot of strangers stuck together and passing groups of people, so you don’t even know your own neighbor. This phenomena of urbanization, which very much sticks out to a person who lives in the third world and Tibet is almost exclusively, if it weren’t for the communist Chinese takeover, it would have been totally agricultural. Since the Chinese came in, they’ve also done the extracting industries of mining and so on. Before that people didn’t mine in Tibet. There’s interesting anecdotes.

This one place in Ladakh called Zanskar, kind of a province of Ladakh which is in the far north of India bordering Kashmir and it’s a Himalayan community. The culture is very much informed by Tibetan culture and there’s just gold nuggets in the streams and people kind of leave there. They’ll go to the local lama and says, Shall I pick up some of that gold? So, No, I’ll leave it there. And then maybe at another point, Oh, go get the gold.

We can we should make some gold for painting of religious imagery. So then they go and get the gold. Otherwise, it’s just left there, quite a different perspective. They didn’t believe in mining because they always felt like everything was owned by somebody. And you couldn’t just if it was sort of laying on the ground, you may not be able to see the landlord, but there’s some landlord there, somebody who thinks that it’s his own.

So they didn’t want to create disturbances when it was unnecessary unless there was a very good motivation. So was pretty much all agricultural. So he comes to this country or the industrialized West and sees that it’s not this is not an agricultural society. Machines and services have replaced reliance on family, friends and neighbors. So even in this country, it wasn’t too long ago, it was an agricultural society.

And if you needed a barn, you’d call up everybody in the neighborhood and they’d all get together and build the barn. And you’d feed everybody the food and you’d be out there helping them and so on and everybody worked together and you got to know everybody and you relied upon your neighbors like that. In the days before insurance companies, people would get together and they’d like contribute a little bit of money each month into a kitty and then anybody who needed to make a loan then they would loan that amount of money out interest free and pay it back at some reasonable what made sense for that person to be able to pay back. And then meanwhile everybody would be paying money into the pot and this person would be paying into the pot plus their little bit of interest and people got by. That’s how it worked.

This is that’s what they did in Ireland. That’s what they did in Taiwan until about five years ago when they introduced hire purchase. That’s what they’ve done they did in Italy. That’s what they’ve done all over the world before insurance companies. And so people from the village, from a little wider community that’s how they took care of those kinds of needs.

And consequently, there was a lot of relying upon each other. So now we rely a great deal on machines and not so much upon each other. Modern living is organized so that it demands the least possible direct dependence on others. And the ambition is for everyone to own their own house, car, computer, etcetera to be as independent as possible. People are more independent of others than ever before.

You can just sort of go in your house and you never have to come out again. Food can be delivered to your door, videos can be delivered to your door, you have your whole entertainment system, clothing can be delivered to your door from all over the world with dot com now, right? So you can guess everything can be delivered to your door. UPS is loving it and you never have to leave your door. And of course people complain about being lonely, but we’ve created this lifestyle.

It is inherently lonely making lifestyle. So once when I was traveling, when I graduated from university and loathed the idea of joining the workforce, committing myself to a career and had the opportunity having given my diploma to my parents then I thought, ah, now I can go out and do something that I want to do. So in my travels, I ended up in Israel. I think I was following a book by Michener, The Source, his story of the Jewish people and so I wanted to explore my Judeo Christian roots and I ended up working on a kibbutz. And they had great sound system but it was a communal sound system.

If you wanted to listen to albums, you got in touch with the person who was responsible for taking care of that machine. You booked the time that you wanted to listen to it. You had to interact with others to make sure that you could have your time and then you could bring your records and sit there and it was sort of written on the board and anybody else who wanted to listen to the Beatles or whatever it was could also join and you would listen into it. And then movies, once a week they played the movies there and so and people got to choose communally what the movies were and so and so there was a lot of communal activity. So but most people now they kind of their ambition is to have their own system, so they don’t have to compromise with anybody.

They can come in whatever music you want, you put on, whatever TV show you want to watch, you put on, whatever video you want to watch, you put on until you get merit. And then we find marriage is not working very well, lasting very long like that because people don’t like to compromise so much. This is kind of spirit of wanting to be do my own thing and yet people complain about being lonely. People think their happiness is dependent on their jobs rather than others. All I have to do is get a good job, then I can make enough money to make myself totally independent and be really happy sitting by myself alone, getting old and nobody to talk to and wondering where to go to meet people and going to the mall and so on.

So he’s observing these kind of things and they’re not so difficult to perceive and not difficult to see how there are problems arising in just achieving what we want is to be happy when we’re in the midst of this kind of these priorities or values in our culture. So just the job rather than others are important such that others are not important to one’s happiness. And consequently, the thought arises that their happiness is not important to oneself. And for His Holiness, this touches on a key, key, key points. For His Holiness, the essence of sanity, of mental well-being is the good heart, which is the genuine concern for the welfare of others.

You hear him say that wherever he is. He regards that as the very essence of mental health, this genuine concern for the welfare of others. But if there’s a culture that is producing the thought that you don’t depend your happiness doesn’t depend upon others and you’re kind of involved in getting all this stuff together to be completely in dependence upon your own, then it also will give rise to the thought that others happiness is insignificant to you. His Holiness says that society has developed into a state where it is increasingly harder for people to show one another basic affection. In place of the sense of community and belonging, which we find such a reassuring feature of less wealthy and generally excuse me, rural societies, we find a high degree of loneliness and alienation in the developed world.

Despite the fact that millions live in close proximity to one another, it seems that many people especially among the old have no one to talk to, but their pets. Modern industrial society often strikes me as being like a huge self propelled machine. Instead of human beings in charge, each individual is a tiny insignificant component with no choice but to move when the machine moves. That’s what strikes him when he looks at our society. And this is compounded by the contemporary rhetoric of growth development, which greatly reinforces people’s tendency towards competitiveness and envy.

With this comes the perceived need to keep up appearances, itself a major source of problems, tension and unhappiness. Yet the psychological and emotional suffering we find so prevalent in the West is less likely to reflect a cultural shortcoming than an underlying human tendency. So he’s saying that this is not just a phenomena of Western culture. He’s seen also in Eastern Asian cultures that as people become more affluent, have more money at their disposal, they do the same thing, gather more and more things for their own happiness, less dependent upon others for their happiness, end up becoming aloof and alienated from others and generally fall into this pattern of depression and other manifestations of mental unhappiness. So there’s some kind of a tendency that is present in all people whatever their culture is that if you give them plenty of money and they can do whatever they want with it, they tend to gather things into these little islands of independence and then sit there in misery.

It’s not that they wanted to be miserable. That was an unwanted outcome, okay? So this is an interesting point to consider and it’s a point that he brings up later when he talks about the our perception of reality and that there is this tendency to view things as discrete autonomous units rather than seeing things as interdependent and interconnected. And so long as one sees oneself and others as these autonomous units, then of course, the actions cause one to follow in accord with the view and create these little islands of so called autonomy, autonomous islands. But this is unhealthy.

This doesn’t fit our nature. Actually human beings are quite social. Now people might think, well, I’m not a very social person. In fact, we’re very social. Just consider your thoughts, your private most innermost thoughts are usually thought in language.

Nobody who knows a language thinks without a language. And language was created to do what? To communicate with others. It’s intrinsic in language to have connection with others outside yourself. So even the thoughts that we think in our private little world are intrinsically connected to others because that is the basic function of language to communicate to others.

This let’s say, all this implies that there is strong reasons for supposing a link between our disproportionate emphasis on external progress and the unhappiness, the anxiety and the lack of contentment of modern society. Now that’s an observation that we’ve heard a lot about, right? That with so much attention on external sources of happiness and people just looking for happiness out there. As one friend put it, I’ll find happiness as soon as the furniture has been arranged in the right way. Every so often they have to rearrange the furniture because they’re unhappy with how it somehow they became unhappy with the last rearranging and they rearrange it again and now they’re happy and everything’s fine.

And then gradually their happiness fades away and then they have to rearrange the furniture again. So this is something we observe that those people who are solely focused external things as sources of happiness, then they never find any lasting contentment because in a way it’s obvious that external objects can only be a source of happiness when you connect with them, right? Like a beautiful dress is only a cause of happiness when you see it or when you wear it. It’s not a cause of happiness if it’s sitting in the closet and you’ve forgotten about it. It can’t have any impact on your happiness whatsoever.

So it’s only when you’re aware of it that it can be a cause of happiness. So that’s one reason why that beautiful dress is not a true cause of happiness. A true cause of happiness should be something that keeps you happy all the time. So an external object, can’t it can’t be a source of happiness, a true cause of happiness because you can’t be aware of it all the time. Also that dress even when you’re aware of it is not necessarily a true cause of happiness because there are occasions when you’re aware of it and it doesn’t make you happy.

There are even occasions when you’re aware of it and it makes you unhappy like. What? It doesn’t fit. There you go. When it doesn’t fit, when somebody else is wearing the same dress, when it’s ripped, when it’s out of fashion and you’re still paying for it, all of those things.

It can also make you unhappy. So there’s it’s very obvious why those kinds of things are not true sources of happiness, but there’s some advantage of those external things for happiness, because you get some experience immediately, just immediately. You decide to go out and buy a brand new car and you buy it and you’re driving immediately you’re enjoying the thing. And you hope it lasts. Then somebody takes a key and walks by your car and then it’s over that fast.

It could be the same day, heartless. But it’s like that. The outer things give some immediate hit, but it’s a very superficial thing. It’s just a superficial sensory experience. And we know how that can be like for instance, if you’re emotionally distraught about something.

Say for instance, you know you’re going to be downsized. Is it still the word that’s used? I don’t know what it is. I hear you have here. What is it?

Reorg? Reorganization. Reorganization. You know you’re going to be let go. Okay?

You know it’s coming. You haven’t got anything else lined up yet. You don’t know, you don’t have any savings and you got to get something together to pay the rent and all that kind of stuff and that’s what’s going on in your mind and you go out to a really nice restaurant that you’ve wanted to go to for a long time, it’s hard to taste the food. Usually you can go to a good restaurant and at least for a little while, you can forget everything. The food is so sumptuous that you’re just into taste for a while and you can forget everything else.

It’s a great moment of peace. But if your problems are particularly strong, you don’t even taste the food. So sensory experience is quite superficial compared to emotional consciousness, the thoughts that are going on in our mind, that strikes one much deeper. To enjoy sensory experience, you have to have some kind of luxury, you have to have kind of be at ease and then you can go out and listen to music and then, oh, this is wonderful music. Why is it so wonderful?

Well, you don’t even have to talk about the composer, the skill of the musicians, you can just say because I haven’t a care in the world. That’s why it’s so great. Because if I was filled with cares, it wouldn’t matter how good the musicians were and the composer was, you still wouldn’t enjoy it. So it’s like that. Now, His Holiness what’s he’s going on here.

He’s on a roll here. I’m saying these things to develop a motivation for getting into the subject. I’m suffering, aren’t I? I don’t want to be obvious like that. Well, let Us Holiness describe it and if the shoe fits, wear it.

This is compounded by a devotion to technology that supposes that the keys to happiness are material well-being on the one hand and the power conferred by knowledge on the other. If I only knew computers, then I would be in control of my life. This is due to the many advantages brought on by science and their immediate satisfaction. However, not only does technology not produce happiness by itself, but also knowledge alone cannot provide the happiness that springs from inner development. There are plenty of people who have a great deal of knowledge who are really unhappy.

Other people not well educated and they’re serene content. So it’s not necessarily the case that just an accumulation of knowledge itself produces happiness. There was a point when Carl Sagan was the rage, writing all those books and having the TV show and everything. Even I felt obliged to read one of his books, Dragons of Eden, I think it was called. I picked up I thought, okay, well this guy seems to know something about he wants to talk about evolution and all of this kind of stuff.

So I have to see what he has to say. I read the first page of the introduction and I think in the first paragraph, he dismissed the mind. There is no mind. It’s just all electrochemical responses going on in the brain. He just dismissed it.

It doesn’t exist at all. And so axiomatically went on with reductionist point of view. I was totally disheartened. I couldn’t read any more of the book. I don’t have much patience.

That’s my problem. So and then I thought, well, I hope he’s happy. And then after he gained his popularity, one of the first things he did was divorced his wife, remarried, all of these kinds of things and I mean that’s suffering, It’s an indication of suffering. So he wasn’t so happy. So you can have all kinds of knowledge, but if it doesn’t bring some inner contentment, then what good is it?

It seems like and that’s another point I would like you to keep in mind that the bottom line of whatever we do should be that it makes us happy. That’s something to consider. His Holiness goes so far as to say that the purpose of life is to become happy. Quite simple, others don’t agree. What’s his name?

Harrison Ford doesn’t agree. Happiness should be a byproduct of something, but His Holiness says, happiness, the meaning of life is to be happy and then you have to do what it takes to make you happy. And everything that we do from the moment we get out of bed in the morning, every conscious act is connected with this fundamental wish to be happy. Nobody in fact acts to make themselves unhappy. Even masochists want to be happy.

Everybody we can’t expect that everybody believes in the same methods, in the same path to achieve happiness. But if you look around you find that everybody wants to be happy. And oftentimes you can ask somebody how they are and they say, fine. And you scratch the surface a little bit and you find that they’re quite unhappy. And then but very clearly, but do you want to be happy?

It’s like no doubt in anybody’s mind. It’s like they hit you, yes, I want to be happy. It’s really clear. Everybody is really clear about that. And His Holiness points out that there’s nothing invalid about that.

That comes from our essential core being this wish to be happy. Nothing invalid about that at all. It doesn’t need any justification. It doesn’t need any reason. If somebody says, well, what are you going to do on your holiday?

And you say, well, I think I’m going to go to Mongolia. They might say, why do you want to go to Mongolia? And you might feel you have to justify that. But if you were to say, from my vacation, I think I want to be happy. Nobody is going to argue with that.

You don’t have to justify that. They say, happy? Yes, yes, but how are you going to do it? That’s what they’re interested in because they’re hunting too. The pursuit of more knowledge of external phenomena with the urge to narrow all focus to it, far from bringing happiness can be dangerous.

It can cause us to lose touch with the wider reality of human experience and in particular our dependence on others. So, yes, there’s so much to know in the world, right? Incredible, the amount of detail. And who’s collecting all of that detail. There’s people out there researching, getting more and more and more detail.

Lameyashi when he first came to the United States, he was talking to people and he ran into somebody who spent his whole life measuring skulls. He couldn’t believe that a person would spend his whole life measuring skulls and really being enthusiastic about it. And thinking all the things there are to know this person is just knowing that. And in academia, the whole objective of academia is to know more about less than anybody else. So that you are the reigning expert, then you can get a job like that.

But I’m being facetious, a friend of mine said that in a comedy skit, I thought that was so funny. But in a way it’s true. Nowadays, it’s very difficult to find the family doctor who you have to go to specialists. You can’t go to the family doctor because you have an earache. You have to go to an ear specialist to make inquiries about your ears and so on.

So I’m exaggerating a little bit, but there is this tendency that because of the plethora of information, there’s a tendency to specialize and focus on some bit. But in focusing on that bit of information, we can become so focused and it’s just a function of mind that it tends to go in the way that it has gone, you become better and better about focusing on that information. For instance, gaining new knowledge is not so easy even if you’re well educated because we end up we tend to think of new bits of information in terms of what we already know like outlines of information and we kind of put new information into the same old sort of boxes. It’s like where you have those canisters on your kitchen cabinet, flour, sugar, coffee and tea, right? Who puts their coffee in the coffee canister anymore?

Keep it in the freezer, right? And then you grind it, it’s the moment you need it. But so then what do you do with the coffee canister? More tea. We can be flexible and use these compartments for different things.

But oftentimes because it’s so difficult to learn something new, we tend to put this new bit of information into old categories and understand it from that point of view. So then everything becomes somehow jilted and it all kind of looks the same and we stay within that familiar position where we are. But in fact, the realm of possible objects of knowledge it’s like, there’s no limit to it. And the perspectives that exist are as infinite as there are living beings because each one has its own perspective. And the only way that you have access to that perspective is by communicating with them.

And the only way you’re going to communicating with them is by breaking the distance between oneself and others. And some people find that easier to do than others like for instance the extrovert finds that very easy to do because they get their energy from communicating with others. The introvert gets their energy from going inside them self. I just discovered this recently. I was in last week I was in Australia.

It’s my first trip to Australia. Has anybody else ever been to Australia? You been to Australia? It’s rare to find people that go to Australia. I was in Queensland.

Have you been to Queensland? I thought the tropical island was this one little island someplace in the South Pacific. Thousands of miles of fantastic beach in Queensland. There you can actually walk right in to the Pacific without a wet suit. It’s warm.

Although when you have picnics there, it’s not the squirrels and the chipmunks you have to look out for, it’s three foot long monitor lizards that just suddenly appear and have no fear of human beings come out and look for your deviled eggs and koala bears drunk in the trees. It’s quite amazing. We had a big conference happening. There was this one person who was helping with the conference and she was giving these ideas and she was telling me about the extrovert and the introvert. I know these terms from a long time ago, but from the perspective of Jungian psychology and where people get their energy from and stuff like that.

And it was so interesting where the introvert at the end of the day, they have to be by themselves to collect their energy. An extrovert calls somebody up to get their energy. Was really interesting. So the extrovert can connect with others, I suppose easy enough. But oftentimes not so much to hear what the other person has to say, but to get going.

So they’re still not learning so much from the other person. It’s just kind of an excuse to get their own motor going. So but amazing, know, we’ve heard the expression that each person is a whole world, is a whole realm and we can so if we have a way of connecting with others and genuine openness and interest in their experience, it’s just amazing the things that we can learn. So what happens when we rely too much on the external achievements of science? By the way, His Holiness is not going to debunk science here.

It’s a question of an overemphasis. His Holiness by the way loves to get together with scientists and his own temperament since he was a kid is he likes to tinker. He got more fun out of taking apart an old projector that was left behind in the palace and putting it together and running movies. So he was like, when I was in university, there were all these usually Asian students would come in with the visual aids and the projectors and stuff and they knew how to do all of that kind of stuff. And I always felt so lazy because they knew how to do that kind of stuff and so His Holiness was like that.

He knew how to do that. He liked to do that. He would tinker with the cars. The thirteenth Dalai Lama bought two cars and had them in the palace. I think because he didn’t like the fact that wheels were illegal in Tibet because of some ancient prophecy prophecy when the some kind of the wheel turns then the Tibetan people will be scattered across the face of the earth.

So he brought two cars into Tibet and a few other years later the Tibetan people were scattered across the country. So he had those cars and he tinkered with them and he still tinkers with watches. People like on the staff of the private office if their watch breaks they give it to him. He tinkers with it. Sometimes he sends it back to them in worse condition than he found it.

But he likes that’s the kind of mind that he has. He’s into technology and he brings scientists together and he talks to them about their views, what they think. Recently there’s this whole what is it mind and life series of meetings with His Holiness and scientists of different kinds of scientists that come together and the most recent one that took place last month was with mainly psychologists, psychiatrists, cognitive scientists and the theme was anger. And what is it? How is it best dealt with and so on?

But he gets together with physicists and tries to learn quantum mechanics. I transcribed notes from the tapes of a colloquium in which he participated in some institution in Grenoble, France and the theme was interdependent origination. It was mainly physicists, although there was a biologist there and also somehow a philosopher got in, I don’t know how they managed get through the screening process. But and so and most of the physicists talked about quantum mechanics and His Holiness confessed that he’s found it difficult to comprehend though he’s tried as hard as possible. He’s tried his best to figure out what it is.

So that’s his interest. He likes it. And if he was back in charge in Tibet, he would not stand in the way of technological advancement. He wouldn’t prevent nomads from having televisions. He wouldn’t prevent nomads from having smokeless fuel and so on.

He’s not against technology at all. But there are some things that he notices about people who become too engaged in science and there’s some reason. First of all, what happens? The influence of religion declines. There’s mounting confusion with respect to the problems of how ourselves in life.

The belief that science has disproven religion. The belief that with no apparent final evidence for any spiritual authority, morality itself must be a matter individual preference. Whereas in the past scientists and philosophers felt a pressing need to find solid foundations on which to establish immutable laws and absolute truths, nowadays this kind of research is held to be futile. As a result, we see a complete reversal heading toward the opposite extreme where ultimately nothing exists any longer, where reality itself is called into question and this can lead only to chaos. And this was definite like for sure he had that conclusion when he interacted with those physicists when they were talking about quantum mechanics, because they were really in the extreme of there is nothing except when it appears sort of in front of you like examples of there is no fish in the lake until you’ve pulled it out of the lake and it’s in a different context like on the grassy shore, then there is a fish.

Before it’s all totally interconnected with its environment such that there is no distinction between the fish and its environment. That’s going a little bit far. In replacing religion as a final source of knowledge and popular estimation, science begins to look a bit like another religion itself. It’s called scientism. With this comes a similar danger on the part of some of its adherence of blind faith in its principles and correspondingly to intolerance of alternative views.

That this supplanting of religion has taken place is not surprising given science’s extraordinary achievements, but generally speaking a scientist is in no better position than a lawyer to help us find an answer to our moral dilemmas. I don’t know why he chose a lawyer. They’re the brunt of a lot of jokes these days. I don’t know why he chose. We need let’s see.

Neither can help us decide how we should act in a moral sense. We need to recognize the limits of scientific inquiry itself. For example, though we have been aware of human consciousness for millennia and though it can be the subject of invest and though it has been the subject of investigation throughout history, despite scientists’ best efforts, they still do not understand what it actually is or why it exists, how it functions, or what its essential nature is. Neither can science tell us what the substantial cause of consciousness is or what its effects are? Mainly because consciousness is not perceivable by definition to by the definition and limit set by science.

Science only operates in the world of the senses and its functions something is only proven to exist by science, if it’s proven, what’s the world, in the arena of public knowledge, right, public knowledge, something that a bunch of people can look at it and say, yes, it’s true, it exists. If it can’t be proven that way through seeing, hearing and so on by a bunch of people doing it, then it doesn’t exist. So for instance, if you have a thought in your mind, like the very thought that you have in your mind right now, think of a thought, That doesn’t exist for science because only you, only your word is testimony to its existence and that’s not enough. That’s not enough because you could be wrong. Doesn’t it happen that we’re often wrong?

We think we know something when we don’t know it in fact. So your word, your testimony is not sufficient proof to the existence of something. So all of your thoughts, your whole inner world of experience and emotion and so on doesn’t exist for science unless no, even no, no, it doesn’t exist. If we can hook up some electrodes to our heads for instance and connected to some machine and our thought can make that machine move and a number of people can watch and see that this is moving, then it is true that you were doing something to make it move. But whether that’s something was imagining an ice cream cone or something that can’t be proven, because just your testimony is not enough, because you could be lying.

So that’s I mean science has that parameter. That’s what they function in. And it’s good to understand that, to understand that that’s the limit that they function in. And when dealing with things that can’t be perceived in a public way like that, they’re not really an authority on. There’s an interesting dialogue by the way between a philosopher and a monk and they happen to also be father and son.

The monk and the philosopher I think it’s called isn’t it? And they’re French and the philosopher is well read in France, political philosophy. He’s really a philosopher. He knows classical philosophy. He can quote things all the time.

His son is a Tibetan Buddhist monk. He’s an excellent translator. Has translated a number of books. He’s been the direct disciple and has lived with one of the greatest masters of the Tibetan tradition and particularly the Nyingma order Tibetan Buddhism Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche. He studied with him and many others.

And his son also has a doctorate in biology and studied and worked at the I think he did his doctoral work under this one Nobel Laureate in the Pasteur Institute, prestigious place. So he’s kind of got his feet in both worlds. He knows science intimately and then this dialogue is fascinating. I’m reading it now, can recommend it. But this it’s that dialogue, his father is just a is a materialist.

Believes in this like criteria of proof of science whereas Sun is quite different. They talk about the nature of mind and whether the mind is more than just the electrochemical responses in the brain and so on. And they discuss many things. So it’s very interesting to read that and get engaged in that conversation. Okay.

How are we doing for time? Plenty of time. So one point here is His Holiness is not suggesting that the way that we should achieve happiness is by moving back to the farms. He’s not suggesting that we disconnect ourselves from the electrical grid and then start working with primitive tools. He’s not doing that.

He’s saying that our challenge in particular is living in an affluent society with all these things and yet still cultivating inner causes for happiness. That’s our challenge. And he’s saying that the problems that we are experiencing many of the problems, he divides our problems into two kinds. Those that are that we make for ourselves and those that happen in nature. So natural disasters like earthquakes and those kind of brushfires and floods and that kind of thing, we can’t do much about that.

We can’t do much to stop an earthquake. But there are a lot of these problems that we make ourselves such as the escalation in murder, violence and rape, abuse of an exploitive relationships, drug and alcohol addiction among younger people, higher percentage of divorce and children growing up in single parent families, high suicide rates. These various problems that he perceives in our society, these can be changed because they’re things we create. They’re created by some conscious volition. So something can be changed then.

He has reason for optimism too. So it’s not like this is just an observation by somebody who’s not totally on the planet saying goodbye the late planet Earth sort of thing. It’s reasons for optimism. I think this one is cute. The Queen Mother.

He got to meet the Queen Mother. We all know who I mean by the Queen Mother, right? So he’s known her all of his life and she’s lived the whole twentieth century. So she has in a particular position where she gets to see quite a bit of what happened in the twentieth century. And of course, the twenty first century is just the continuation or the results of everything that were done in the twentieth century.

And she has reasons for optimism of what’s going to happen in the twenty first century. Because the interest in the inhabitants of other countries as opposed to only those of one’s own country has increased. Once upon a time, the English were only concerned for the well-being of the English. Now they’re concerned for the well-being of people all over the world. And like that in this country and so many countries, people have a genuine concern of the well-being of what’s going on and people who they’ll never meet, whose culture they’ve never experienced and they have a genuine concern for that.

That’s a good sign. There’s a growing appreciation of fundamental human rights. We even have some kind of a universal declaration of human rights and whole countries are held up to it. What are you doing for human rights? The Chinese government is very nervous whenever that issue is brought up.

They’re very conscientious about how they appear to the in the view and the estimation of the rest of the world. That’s a cultural thing. International responses to national disasters, that’s also it’s amazing that some an earthquake can take place or a mudslide can take place in a little community in Mexico or someplace in South America and there’s like jets coming in and dogs coming in from all over the world and people are helping out. Disasters that happened in Turkey recently is just an example. People from all over the world going there to help.

Ecological concern, when I lived in France and was responsible for the monastery, we had to do some improvement of the infrastructure and I discovered that the sewer system from one of the toilets ran direct nonstop just a slope from the toilet to the river. No cesspool at all. And so that’s how people used to think. And there was one town along the way, Maisons, I think it was called. No, Maisons, specialized in tanning.

Why? Because the river ran through the town and where were the tanneries? All on the river and they could just get rid of their chemicals like that dump right in the river and they’re gone out of their neighborhood as this horrible water goes down a little bit further. Nowadays, don’t think like that. And it’s like that a lot.

We find ecological concerns are important. They’re high in priority local governments, state governments, national governments, international conventions and so on to take care of ecology. That’s a good thing. Accepting of diversity, nowadays people are more accepting of differences amongst you. They can handle differences a lot easier and they don’t have to be well educated.

They can still tolerate other people’s individual points of view, quirks, whatever it is. They are more easily accepted than they used to. Higher standards of literacy and education throughout the world. So those are all good signs. So the problems that are made by human beings His Holiness says, reflect our understanding of what is right and wrong, of what is positive and what is negative, of what is appropriate and what is inappropriate.

But beyond this, we can point to something more fundamental and neglect of what I call His Holiness calls our inner dimension. The overemphasis on material gain reflects an underlying assumption that what it can buy can in itself alone provide us with all the satisfaction we require. However, these things are only on the level of the senses, whereas we are much more complex than this having thoughts and emotions as well as imaginative and critical faculties. So while you’re tasting some food, there’s so much more inside you that’s thinking and experiencing and taking so many things into consideration that just the mere taste of the food, there’s no way it can satisfy you. I get a kick out of wine tasting.

I was a monk for a long time and thirteen of those years I lived in France. And Buddhist monks don’t drink alcohol. That one drop of French wine and it was everywhere. The people would talk about, Oh yeah, those wine those vines they were planted by the Romans before the Romans made it to Bordeaux. It’s even better than the wines of Bordeaux, couldn’t taste any of it.

So then when I disrobed and I’m living in California, it was time to make up for the past time. And then I hear people talk about wine and they get into wine. There’s so many ways of describing wine. And I have no expertise. I have not learned the vocabulary to talk about wine.

All I can do is say, oh, that tastes good and this one, oh, that tastes different from that one. Isn’t it fascinating how these two wines that have the same color taste so different? This one has a similar taste to that one. What is that taste? And so, that’s its fruity taste.

Fruity? Doesn’t taste fruity. So it’s a robust character. Robust? I don’t know how to describe it, but those are the words that you’re supposed to use to describe it like that.

So it’s kind of funny, but it strikes me how when human beings put their intelligence into something, it becomes immense. It’s not just some flavor that just exists during the for the length of the tongue and the aroma striking the nose and then it’s gone. It’s just immense all the things that can be talked about and then the history of it and going on and on and on. One person could lecture for all evening about just one wine, right? Just one wine they can talk all evening about it and still not be done.

And that’s because of our faculty of intelligence. So how can just the taste sensation satisfy? It can’t do it. That’s an example. The very fact that people have these whole kind of cultures of wine is just the result of having so much intelligence in what we do with our mind.

And we have to do that because we have that faculty. And that’s just the analytical capability, let alone there’s the feeling capability. And that’s when you drink this wine and then you were in a bad mood and then you drank this wine you forgot everything. What a relief that gave me, this wine, the spirit of the wine captured me, took me away, saved me and blah blah blah blah blah and they go on and then if they’re really skillful with words, they make poems and then the emotion gets involved in so many different ways and if you’re a good poet then you have a wealth of mythology to draw on, of verse and different kinds of imageries that you can bring to light and skill in words so that you can like get people high and just whether you use whatever your technique is. And there’s no way that with that mental capability just taste sensation is going to satisfy.

So the inner dimension, the overemphasis on material gain reflects an underlying assumption that what it can buy, we’ve already been that way. So with all the suffering we experience in spite of the proliferation of material development and the promises of such wonderful ideas as democracy, liberalism, socialism. I mean, I don’t know the time before the First World War, that was kind of hedonistic. The time between the two World Wars, imagine there’s Hemingway in Paris talking with all of those neat people, philosophy, the idea of, you know, world nations and democracies and so on and communism and the possibility of Marxism and you know, sitting there next to this little guy from Vietnam says, yeah, Marxism. I’m gonna take that to my country and liberate it from these pesky French and Ho Chi Minh and so on and on the promise of that and everybody living in communal societies being provided by according to your needs, not by according to your ability to contribute, but by according to your needs, Just getting high on these ideas, they didn’t last very long.

Something was missing. You get high for a little while, try to put it into practice and discover that happiness doesn’t come from that either. Various economic revolutions, political revolutions that people gave their lives for. So then what His Holiness proposes is a spiritual revolution. A spiritual revolution.

So what he means by a spiritual revolution is that a revolution is a change. What the change is, is that instead of trying to derive happiness from all of these things outside of oneself, derive it from within oneself, from within oneself, from the spiritual dimension of our being. Spiritual means from our mind. The term mind like is it kind of takes the right meaning when you find such like dichotomies as mind and body, okay? If that’s all you have to work with mind and body then the term mind it includes everything else in the body.

But sometimes we use the term mind in more narrow way. When we use it more narrow then we have to invent other terms like spirit or soul or emotion, things like that. If we’re using mind in a very narrow way, maybe we use it to just talk about analytical ability, intellect, something like that. So spiritual qualities are these mental, emotional qualities, our capacity for loving kindness, our capacity for patience, for generosity, also including our capacity to penetrate and understand the deep nature of things. Deriving our happiness from that not from the external things, but from that.

Now it would be great if we could get happy from that because as I think there was this one character, a movie character of Buckaroo Banzai, I forget his name, but I think he was the first one who said, wherever you go, there you are. There’s somebody more recently who wrote a book about that Jon Kabat-Zinn. He wrote a book called that, but he got the expression from Buckaroo Banzai. I don’t think he gave him credit. Wherever you go, there you are.

So wherever we go, our mind is right there. So if your mind is a source of happiness, then you’re never without your source of happiness. Other things like you can be deprived of your money. So if your happiness is invested in the money that you have in your pocket, then there’s something you’ve got something to worry about, pickpockets for example, something to worry about. If your happiness is dependent on your Lexus like those commercials that we’re seeing nowadays, the guy that comes in the early morning puts lipstick on his face, undoes his shirt, comes in and his wife says, you don’t fool me.

You’ve been driving the Lexus again. Clever these guys, you write commercials. So your happiness is only partial because you can’t spend all your time there. They don’t make a Lexus with a toilet for instance. Those are the RVs.

You have to give up maybe the Lexus will make an RV. Do they really? Is it Lexus that does it? A with a toilet in the back. Toilet and microwave.

That’s it. So you don’t have to stop anymore except to collect gas. Who’s going to be the first one that has gas on wheels? Just like the planes can refuel. There’s a new business for you.

So you never have to stop. You can just keep going and going and going. So, okay. So the idea is to derive happiness from our inner state of being. Is that possible to do?

Very possible to do, very possible to do. For example, when you see one of these action adventure movies, which has kind of all the explosions and so on like that, doesn’t have a very deep plot. It’s just the good guys are saving some pure heart from the bad guys and they kill all the bad guys and rescue the pure heart and that’s over. That’s the movie. And for a while there, it kept your attention because it was boom, boom, boom all the time.

All the senses were engaged like that. And for a moment, you forgot about everything else, your problems and so there was some piece derived from it. But I’m only talking about the example where you come out of the movie and it’s over instantly and you think that was a waste of a couple of hours. It had no deeper impact than just the noise and the visual effects, nothing deeper. And then you go to another movie and it just boom, hits you, emotionally engages you and like can stay with you for hours.

It can stay with you for days. It might have caused you to dream. It might have changed your life like that. And that’s all because of your mind, right? Your mind was affected.

There was something communicated. Your mind got into a state and when it was in that state, it made you feel very different. So, we have those experiences all the time and that just gives some clue as to the capability of what our mind can do. What our mind can do for us, get into a particular state of mind and you become like free in a way and there’s like nothing stands in your way. There’s no obstacles.

Everything is all right. There are no problems. Everything is interesting. One time I drove from I drove a drive away car supplied by my mother’s company to drop off at one of their best salesman who got repositioned out here in California from Chicago. He was really happy and I got to drive his car.

Company gave me all the money I needed for fuel, for motels. I was really happy. And so I and it was the first time I ever drove cross country. It was from Chicago and it was in Boulder Creek that I dropped the car off. So and I was driving and driving and driving and driving and and I used to meditate while I would drive and I would think about this profound teaching called emptiness like form is emptiness, emptiness is form and I would look at all the form, the mountains and all of these things and it was January in Nebraska.

I had Highway eighty to myself, Cruise control, zoom, looking up at the jets in the deep blue sky, nothing in front of them, a spark of silver where the jet was and then its vapor trail, strong, weaker and then disappearing back into the blue sky. Nothing but blue in front of After a while nothing but blue behind it and just that form is emptiness, emptiness is form. The mountains, they’re here in this moment of time. Their next moment, they’re a little bit smaller, getting closer and closer to the level of the plane. And there then the silhouette of them that’s kind of disappearing.

Everything is kind of disappearing. And when you’re driving, you develop this capacity to let go, right? You have to let go. You can’t just sort of, oh, what a beautiful sight. You have to let it go.

So you’re sort of letting go for hour after hour after hour after hour. I stopped in the Best Western, got something to eat, got my room, laid down and I had such a joyful experience that by the time I got to Berkeley where a bunch of my friends were, I was just as high as a kite. Everything was great. I was meditating on impermanence, letting everything go, whoever you were, now you’re not the same. Hello, who are you?

Who are you now? It was like that everything was just changing, changing, changing, changing. I was changing, change was good. Change wasn’t bad. I mean, you can get into a Buddhist thought about change is bad, death, that’s bad, death is bad.

But what would you look like if you were going to live forever? Change is good, death is good. So like all change became good. You were celebrating change, it’s good that there’s change. Losing a job, that’s good.

You can get another one. You get bored in those things. Everything was good. I don’t know whether I want to stay here or not stay there. You’re in the midst of having to make a decision.

A change is happening for you. Good, change is reality, change is reality. Ride it, ride that change, enjoy that change. What’s choice? Trying to be static, that’s impossible to be static, Just sort of I’m not changing.

How comfortable does that feel? Everything becomes like petrified, but if you enjoy the change, change all the time. Oh, there’s change in my face. I had a birthday the other day and the colleagues at work, we have this tradition that the office pays for lunch for everybody. We don’t have a lot of people.

More and more people are joining the office though. So this tradition is not going to last very long. So there were two of us. So we had two cakes and there’s I don’t know twelve people and the other guy, it was his thirty first birthday and it was my fifty first birthday. And I just felt a little old at that moment.

I looked at everybody else’s face and I said, my face doesn’t look as smooth as their face. Good. Change. It’s great. If everything remains the same then I could never be enlightened.

I’d have to be as ignorant right now as I am right now forever. I could never develop more loving kindness, could no hope in developing more patience. I would always forever have to get angry at the same old little things, no hope at all. So it’s good that there’s that change taking. That’s just a sign.

Hey, you’re in luck. My old dimples which are now scars of a middle aged person are telling me celebrate man, it’s changed. Everything is possible now. So I got into this great state of mind by that and it just was just one of those little nice things to experience that let you know that your happiness can be derived from a state of mind and a state of mind is basically a perception. It’s a way of knowing.

That’s the definition of mind, It’s knowing things. So when you know something there’s like it includes a lot of things in the what we know, how we engage an object by what characteristics of an object like the a person who’s into fashion when they look at a pair of pants, it’s aesthetic. Somebody who works, it’s practicality. There’s everything has innumerable characteristics by means of which it can be known. So when we know something, how are we engaging the object?

By what characteristics are we engaged in the object? Are we engaged in the objects, the object with the thought in mind that what I see is all there is, what you see is what you get, what I see is what I get or is there more to the object than that? That’s some people when they think of themselves, they’re aware of their whole rich life, their history, their connections, their emotions, their aspirations and when they look at somebody else, it’s just a shape. Totally unaware of that richness that’s there as well because the only thing that appears to the eyes is the shape and the color. So you actually have to think about, you have to be mindful, recall all these other characteristics of the person or other object that’s there.

It requires a little bit more effort, but the payoff is tremendously more. It becomes incredibly more rich and happiness is just a description of an experience, right? And an experience is knowing something. And so when you know something superficially, you experience something superficially and that’s called a superficial experience. If you want a profound experience, you have to know something profoundly.

So that requires more effort, but the experience is more rich. Am I talking too much? Does anybody else want to talk? Is it okay? I mean, should know better.

I mean, I’ve organized courses in adult learning for my Dharma teaching colleagues to help them be better teachers and as adult learners, we’re not as adult learners, we don’t like to listen all the time. We like to share our own ideas on the subject. Tell me, does anybody disagree with anything I’ve said so far? Because if you have, then you give me something to think about. That’s good.

Yes? I don’t disagree. I just have a question that almost seems like the emphasis is on profound happiness or a great happiness, but sometimes it seems like it should just be just be okay. Mhmm. And that and it shouldn’t always be happiness.

Maybe it should be more peace of mind, like, two times of sorrow and loss. Mhmm. And I almost get the impression sometimes that the idea is just to be blissed out all the time which I think is just as bad as being depressed all the time. His Holiness describes in one book happiness as peace of mind. So when he talks about happiness that’s what he has in mind is peace of mind, contentment, serenity like that.

So no matter what the passing sensation is, it takes place within the space of serenity. So that would be nice. One thing we can all agree. Bliss, we don’t need that all the time. And in fact in the Tantras which is an esoteric form of Buddhism, use bliss, but they don’t necessarily describe the ultimate attainment as bliss.

They use bliss as a means of achieving that ultimate attainment. So bliss describes kind of a quality of an experience, but doesn’t describe the whole experience. I think serenity, inner peace describes much more of what we’re looking for. So that if you can have indestructible inner peace, indestructible serenity, that would be really something. It’s almost impossible, isn’t it?

I can’t imagine it. Can’t imagine it. You have to read some biographies. Right. It’s interesting.

Also the Stoics were into that. The Stoics were into an un unshakable serenity. But the ideal of the Buddha is not just an indestructible serenity, but rather is an indestructible capacity to work for others, to work for others. So no matter what their reaction, no matter how long it takes, no matter how much effort it requires, just indestructibly engaged in accomplishing the welfare of other living beings. So, by the way, serenity comes Like for instance, if there’s nothing you need anymore that helps a lot to have serenity.

It’s like after dinner and big feast, you sit back and you have to think, I don’t need to eat anymore. It lasts a little while because the thought to eat more doesn’t come in the mind. So in that moment you have this serenity of not needing to eat anymore. And can so if you could satiate all of your desires not just the eating one, you could have a serenity like that one I described with the eating with being content from a full stomach multiplied by all the other desires that you have fulfilled. So that would be quite a serenity.

Now the Buddha’s strategy towards that is difficult to satisfy all of those desires, because and will you have the wherewithal to do? It takes a lot of resources to do that. Also it’s difficult to do it all at the same time, but it’s not impossible, not impossible. And I said it’s like for instance the way shoes were invented. They were invented in China.

Did you know that shoes were invented in China? There was this Chinese emperor and he lived in this forbidden city and it was like immaculate, perfect and he didn’t wear shoes, he didn’t need shoes. And he decided to go out one day and inspect his kingdom and he went outside the walls of the Forbidden City and he stepped on a stone. It just sent him in agony and he came back to his ministers very angry and he said, Cover all the robes in my kingdom with leather. I want when I visit my kingdom, I don’t want to step on stones, thorns, anything, cover it all in leather and also my subjects will enjoy as well, not stubbing their toes, not piercing their skin and so on.

The ministers checked with the treasury, it would ruin the bank. If they did that, so what to do, what to do. If we tell the king no, we’ll chop our heads off, what do we do? And then a particularly smart minister said, wouldn’t the same purpose be achieved if we just covered his feet in leather? So like that, you can satisfy all of your desires if you have no desire.

Just eliminate desire and you’re there. Eliminate desire and you’re there. So if you try to satisfy desires by chasing your desires, you only give them strength and that’s where they use the example of drinking salt water. It gives them strength because when you use your mind to do something, some way of thinking, whatever, the more you go that route, the stronger tendency to keep going that way. So like for instance, drinking beer for example.

I went to university in Wisconsin. I lived in Illinois. One of the advantages of going to university in Wisconsin was that they had beer bars for eighteen year olds, so you could drink beer at eighteen. So I went there, wow, I can drink beer now and drink it, that tastes terrible. Why do I want to drink this stuff?

So eventually I trained myself to drink beer and unfortunately I overdid it, but it’s something like that. It was the first response was I’d rather drink grape juice. It tastes better, but then you develop a taste for it, right? And that’s just because you keep telling yourself this is good, this is good, this is good and after a while it’s effortless. This is good, this is good.

This is better than that one. I prefer this one than that one. In the beginning, I didn’t like any of them. They all tasted foul or smoking cigarettes same way. Oh cool, I’m going to be cool.

Joe puke the whole after a while you train yourself this is good, this is good. I’m cool, I’m cool, which way this way is the cool way. No, maybe this way. Let’s throw it in my mouth. All the tricks, roll my own, do all the tricks and so I’m cool.

And then you can smoke and it’s all okay. And then you can’t stop even after a while because you got a physical addiction, but you’ve also got the mindset going, yes, this is cool. It’s how I want to look and whatever. So we train ourselves to do that. Well similarly, you can change that way of thinking.

You can change the desire that causes us to lose our serenity is the one where we have overestimated the quality of the object and we believe that we can’t be happy without it. So that so as soon as we get into our mind, we have to have that thing, we lose our peace. Then when we get the thing, we have a momentary happiness because we are freed from this compulsion to get it. So we enjoy the happiness, which is the relief from the desire to get it. That’s some kind of happiness, but that’s the happiness which is like the case of that person who mysteriously was beating his head with a hammer.

His friend came up and said, What are you doing that for? And the guy said, Because it feels so good when I stop. So it would better for and there’s another example. It’s even though when you scratch has anybody had poison oak here? She hasn’t had poison oak.

Have you been in the Santa Cruz Mountains? In the Santa Cruz Mountains, there’s a plant called poison oak and if you ever go walking in those mountains and whether it’s a wide trail or a narrow trail, the narrower the trail, the more important it is for you to find out what poison oak is. And it has a little oil on it that gets on your skin, it’s an irritant and it causes are you from the East Coast? No. In the East Coast, have poison ivy, which is just as bad probably.

I never got that, but I got poison oak. And when you scratch it, when you scratch the itch, it feels good. It is a relief. Can’t you just feel it? And you scratch and you scratch and you scratch and it itches more and more and more and it has this kind of warm burning deep itch and you have to kind of get under the skin to really get it.

And the little bumps kind of open and ooze and then you can even can bleed from scratching and it’s insidious. So the scratching makes it worse even though there is some pleasure to scratching the itch. And because the scratching makes it worse, it becomes a good example that it would be better to not have the itch than to have the pleasure of scratching the itch. So like that, it’s better to be free, better to not have the desire at all because once you have the desire, you have no peace in that moment. It’s compulsion to go out and get all of these things.

So many people, the whole concept of the spiritual path was just to be free of desire because the whole one could easily imagine a state of contentment in a mind free of desire. And all it took was making one’s view more realistic because the compulsive desire was dependent upon an unrealistic view of things. Like if you’ve ever seen Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, he goes into all of these issues of what people think are the most important things to do with eating. Mr. Creosote for example, who’s the most important thing was eating.

And if you or having kids, there was the other. I’ll pick that up. He remembers. So you can go to the video store and look up this one. But there’s all of these things that people get into as the meaning of life, which like for instance, if eating was the meaning of life, if that was the true cause of happiness then the more you did the happier you should get, right?

So but in fact the more you eat, the more pain you experience, right? You can’t eat anywhere. You get sick. You could die like that. You explode like Mr.

Creosote did. And if having kids was the source of happiness then the more kids that you had the happier you would get. But after a while, kids hanging from the rafters, father coming home and selling the kids off to medical science, can’t afford them anymore. And so it’s the kids saying, why do that? Why don’t you just cut off the tubes, dad?

And then all of these other things that if it was really the source of happiness then the more you did it, the happier you should get, an interesting test. So sometimes we become possessed by something. We have to have it. But in that moment, it’s important to really think why do I have to have this thing? Is it so important?

Imagine yourself with it. Imagine yourself inseparable from it. Imagine yourself inescapably connected. Imagine yourself with it forever and ever. Imagine yourself with lots of it, an abundance of it.

I was a kid, I used to like peanuts and I would imagine myself in heaven laying down with a mountain of peanuts with a funnel coming down. So one and then another one and then another one and then another one. Well, I would have been a perfect subject for one of those milk commercials, but anything that was liquid with all the salt that pick that peanuts have. So it’s like that. You just imagine how wonderful can it be if the more I have of it the more suffering and dissatisfied I’ll get.

So this is that recognition that desire overemphasizes. So they have this idea just contentment, freedom of desire, peace of mind can be achieved through freedom from desire. His Holiness has another approach to it. That peace of mind that this happiness which peace of mind can be achieved through altruism. That’s the direction that he takes and I’m going to show you why next time.