So tonight, I would like to go through summaries that I have made of the chapters, number of chapters from the book so that we can try to follow His Holiness’s logical progression where He is leading. And in the second section of the book which is dealing with ethics as it pertains to the individual, we find the chapters dedicated to the ethics of restraint, for instance, and ethics of compassion. So in addition to restraint, there’s also the ethics of virtue, accumulating virtue, in particular the virtue of compassion and so on. So generally speaking, when we’re dealing with ethics, there were these general categories of ethics such as the ethical conduct of restraining from those actions of body, speech and mind that are obstacles to creating happiness for oneself and others. In fact, they create unhappiness.
And so that’s where the ethics of restraint comes from. And then the ethics of virtue is the cultivation of the positive inner qualities as well as those actions of body and speech that reflect or are motivated by positive states of mind. And then in particular, there’s the ethics of compassion, which is focused on cultivating this special mind of compassion and so looking at that and how one would go about doing it. And then dealing with issues of the problems in life that are inescapable because if you recall the foundation of His Holiness’s argument for ethics is on the wish to be happy and to be free from suffering. So there are certain, you could say, built in flaws of human existence that are problems that are difficult to avoid.
So he also deals with that issue of the frustration and how we can face inescapable problems and a few other things. So, I want to cover a lot of ground, and I’m going to do that through these summaries that I made of the chapters. And for those who haven’t read these chapters, then it will give you a flavor of His Holiness is putting points together and what he regards as important for our consideration. And for those who have read it, then it will be a review. And we might even check with each other whether or not I actually mentioned a point that you regarded as very important.
If I left one of those points out, please let me know. I’ll be interested in your perspective. Does anybody remember what the main points I covered last week were? Do you do? What was it?
Altruism Altruism and egoism? Alright. Good. I want to be sure that I don’t repeat myself tonight. Okay.
Now, with the ethics of restraint, as I mentioned before, principally that’s a practice of restraining your body, speech and mind from conduct that produces unhappiness. So His Holiness describes this and he says, this involves the cultivation of the habit of inner discipline in order to restrain those factors which inhibit compassion. Up to this point he has argued compassion is essential in the cultivation of happiness. So in order to be happy, we need to create the causes for it. Compassion, he argues, is one of the essential causes for happiness.
So anything that inhibits the cultivation of compassion would be something that you would try to restrain from doing. As inner or spiritual discipline cannot be achieved by force but only through voluntary and deliberate effort insight into its purpose and destructive negativity must be sought. So insight into the purpose of discipline, insight into the nature of negativity, all of those things must be sought. Insight into discipline must be sought because inner discipline is something that arises naturally from understanding. And it’s actually something that you would just tend to find yourself doing following a code of behavior because of understanding that to do otherwise would only be creating trouble for yourself and others.
However, the idea just generally the idea of following some discipline could be challenged by somebody thinking that well discipline is the opposite of the free spirit. And if you’re not free, then you’re in bondage. And if you’re in bondage, you’re restrained from realizing all you can be blah blah blah blah, that argument. So a person who actually understands the reason for discipline sees it as a cause of freedom because when you restrain yourself from stupidity that frees you from having to bear the consequences of stupidity like that. So in order to have confidence about that, you need insights.
Everything always comes down to wisdom, understanding, insight. So that’s one thing. And then also that insight depends upon understanding the destructive nature of the negative emotions. If you understand that these things really are causing me suffering then there’s no doubt that one has to restrain oneself from them. While the undisciplined mind is like the mad elephant, the nature of the mind is not inherently destructive.
So the mad elephant I don’t know if we have a more contemporary, a more local example than the Mad Elephant. I just came from the New India Bazaar over on El Camino Real. Oh, I’ve been wanting to go there. Anybody who likes India, it’s great. As soon as you walk in the door, you smell mother India.
But in any case, in India, they have elephants, they use elephants, they work with elephants, and they can train elephants. But during a mating season, there’s no way to restrain a male elephant who catches a whiff of a female, no way. They can just go crazy. So this it’s like that you can have now compare that to maybe an experience of yourself or if that’s a little too close, somebody you know who just an ordinary person together sort of person and just but it can happen. It can just happen that if the circumstances are right then boom totally out of control.
So that’s the Mad Elephant mind. However, this mind is not inherently mad. It’s the Buddha said our mind is the source of suffering but it’s also the source of happiness. And as happiness and suffering are different, their causes are different. So if the mind is the source of it, it is something that is kind of below or deeper than the different causes giving rise to those different results.
So that’s something to consider anytime you get carried away by the mad elephant mind and start to feel discouraged and then, wow, I just did something incredibly stupid which I may be able to live to regret But I’m also capable of becoming a Buddha. So I have to avoid whatever it was that caused me to lose my self control and try to realize this other potential that I possess. There is a distinction between consciousness as such and the thoughts and emotions it experiences. So consciousness generally and the different states or the different yeah, the different states of consciousness, there’s a difference. Or the mind and the and the content of the mind.
There’s a difference. It’s good to even sit down and contemplate that. If you’ve got nothing in particular to do sometime and just contemplate for a moment. What’s the there’s a difference he said between my mind and the content of my mind. Can I perceive that difference?
I’ve got a mind. I don’t have to go to a book to find out about my mind. I can just look at it and and see that difference. It’s like the difference between clear water and muddy water. Water is just water.
Muddy water is water with stuff in it. It’s like that. So our mind is in a similar way. The mind is just a clear knower, a clear knower, apprehender, experience of things. But the uncontrolled mind is that clear knower of things that’s become agitated.
The primary attribute that distinguishes ordinary emotions from those which undermine peace is its negative cognitive component That’s His Holiness’s translator at work, Thupten Jinpa, who is a Tibetan, who was a monk for many years and quite smart. So that he ended up going to Cambridge and getting, I think he’s got it, a PhD in philosophy. So he likes to use those, you know, not just one adjective, not just a negative component, we’ve got a negative cognitive component. The stories we tell ourselves that undermine our basic serenity, that is an expression that comes from a kind of psychology known as narrative psychology. Their whole idea is that we get into trouble when we tell stories about ourselves and others that produce negative responses and that those stories don’t necessarily have anything to do with our reality or anybody else’s reality.
But so long as we believe them, then we’re under the control of the emotions that would naturally arise from such stories. It’s like going to a movie or reading a book. As soon as you get caught into the plot, then emotionally you react as if it’s real. Some people I knew once took a Tibetan Geshe, like a monk who has a PhD from Dreipung Sera or Ganden Monastery and took him to see Star Wars. And they had the hardest time shutting him up because he kept saying, That’s not true.
He was looking at a screen with images being reflected on it and said, None of that’s true, know. They wanted to see the movie. Afflictions, what are these afflictions? Afflictions are these negative emotions such as clinging attachment, ill will, misknowledge of reality, jealousy, envy, belligerence, all of those bad guys of the mind. And when I talk about afflictions in general, you can think about any particular affliction that you want and it brings it more to home.
It’s not then a mere abstraction. You can think about anger for example. And certainly anger is the biggest obstacle to the cultivation of compassion. So in terms of the ethics of restraint, that would be the one that we would try to restrain ourselves from the most. So Tibetan, the Tibetan word is and this is being translated as that which afflicts from within, the afflictive emotions.
Now, sunglasses suggests that we might perceive these afflictive emotions like anger and so on as integral to our mind. You might say, well, anger is natural, jealousy is natural, clingy attachment is natural. We just see it as just part of our being, not separate. So he says, especially if we do not witness their extremes. So then we nurture and reinforce them rather than challenge them.
So there was somebody I was at a at a where was I teaching? At an elder hostel and I was going on about negativities and the value of overcoming them and cultivating positive mental states to overcome the negative mental states and he responded by saying, Well, so that’s okay for people who are totally out of control, but what about ordinary people? What have you got to say to ordinary people? And so it is it may seem as if these negative states of mind of anger and so on that are being criticized so thoroughly and completely in from the standpoint of Buddhism and many of the other world religions and humanistic philosophy and so on. They’re not talking about states of mind that are only found in their extremes.
They’re talking about ordinary people, Ordinary people’s state of mind. Remember the movie Ordinary People? Just ordinary people, what can happen to ordinary people? And the point is, is that this is we might just accept that those negative states of mind are there and just learn to tolerate them. And when they arise, just arise, whoops, like belching in public, whoops, and that’s it.
That’s just the way it is, whoops. But then our conduct and our way of thinking can end up justifying those states of mind providing no antidote or opponent for them to arise whenever they do arise. And thus we become become opportunities for extremes at any time. When we find ourselves in extreme situations and we will easily we can easily and we often do behave in extreme ways. So if we have not cultivated some kind of opponent to these disturbing negative thoughts, then there’s nothing to stop them from manifesting in extreme ways which can cause ourselves a great deal of damage and also others.
So in order to remedy this misperception, this underestimation of the delusions within ourselves, it’s important to observe them, observe their character, see how they actually are. It reminds me of a what’s his name, David Lynch? Is he a producer? Reminds me of his movies. Well, he likes to focus on ordinary places, small towns, things like that, ordinary neighborhoods.
And then he brings your attention to insidious horrible things going on there. So in a similar way, you just look at ordinary me and see what’s going on in this mind and identify these negative emotions and see what they are. Say this is an angry state of mind. Then you think, well, what is its function? Its immediate function is it makes me feel uptight and un peaceful.
What other functions does it have? It makes me want to lash out, sort of not being able to bear something. It makes me want to run away from that thing or destroy that thing, get rid of that thing. That’s a function that it has. What other functions might it have?
It ruins my discrimination. If I’m angry, I might lash out at anybody. It doesn’t have to be the person who made me angry, could be best friends. So I can’t even discriminate. It eliminates my self control.
I can’t even apply an appropriate remedy. So if somebody is just turned down the music too loud and that upsets me rather than just turning it down, I’ll go over and smash the machine. These are functions that anger does. What effects does it have? You’d look at that too, you look at the effects.
One effect is remorse. I wish I hadn’t have done that. It has many other effects, destroys my reputation. It creates a kind of nobody wants to come around anymore because they’re frightened of me. It creates disharmony between myself and the people I live with.
And you look at all of those kinds of features and by noticing all of those things, you eventually have quite a case against anger such that when it bears its head again even if it just sticks its nose up in your awareness, even it’s just sort of creeping in as a bad smell in your mind, you just immediately cut it. I’m not following that. There are sources of unethical conduct, These disturbing negative thoughts, clinging attachment causes one to ignore the feelings of others in order to satisfy one’s own desires. Ill will causes us to harm others and so on. They are the basis of anxiety, depression, confusion and stress.
Anxiety, fears for instance, where does the fear come from? Well, fear is one of those responses that we have that can be both good or bad. A positive fear is very useful. It prevents you from doing something by which you could be harmed or you could harm others. So fear is not necessarily a bad thing.
But when you dwell in fear such that it becomes stronger and stronger without looking for remedies, then that ends up paralyzing you. And what’s the state of mind that’s responsible for not looking for remedies, for not like facing a situation and looking for the remedies? A state of mind that goes into denial about it that’s a disturbing negative thought. That’s just there could be stupidity. Oh, I don’t want to deal with it.
Or they could have that faces it with clinging attachment that’s not facing it. It’s like one tries to kind of hide in some sort of stupa and this sort of thing. Our failure to check our response to the afflictive emotions opens the door of suffering for both self and others. That should be clear. We create problems for ourselves and we create problems for others.
We create problems for ourselves by the disturbing negative thoughts, they immediately disturb one’s peace of mind and we create problems for others through our actions of body and speech. The impact of our actions both positive and negative, this an interesting point. The point is that sometimes we might do something like let’s say for instance, I was reading recently a magazine called I don’t know what it’s called. I think it’s called SV, I guess short for Silicon Valley. And there was an article in there about the CEO of a company called Propel and recently did a startup.
Could somebody again tell me what IPO means? Thank you. You. Yes, I know IPO is used quite a lot recently, but I can’t remember what it means IPO. So it’s like BMW.
Do you know what that means? Okay. So it’s one of those recent companies did that. And the guy hired an ethicist to help him and his company establish company values. And like one of the he was he gave an example of a dilemma that the CEO was in.
And the dilemma was he just hired a guy for a job and then the best guy in the world for the job called him up and said he was available. So his immediate response was to call the lawyers. Is it okay if I renege on this other thing and hire this other guy? It was all okay, he could have done it. And then he talked to the ethicist.
The ethicist says, No, that’s not okay. So then he called up the guy that he hired says, What do you think about it? And the guy that he hired says, No, I don’t think it’s okay if you let me go and hire somebody else. So then he kept his word because he saw the advantage in the long run of keeping his word. I don’t know all the details.
Only know what was said in the article. And the thing is when one gets into these kinds of positions, oftentimes we just think about the short term effects. We don’t think about long term effects. And also the kinds of effects that we end up focusing on are the effects outside of us. We don’t think about the effects that take place within us.
And it’s important in the system of ethics and the whole theory and practice of the ethics which is holiness is presenting for us to make that a primary consideration. Because he’s pointing out something very important. The thing is that When we sit there and think of ourself like me, if you generate the thought me, which is a way of thinking often that you have to think about, you have to think about yourself if you’re going to interview, right? You have to like figure out how to talk about yourself if you’re not used to talking about yourself and you have to be able to answer questions like, tell me about yourself. So this me is nothing more than the word me, which you think in respect to all the stuff that’s happening with your body, like for instance, what are you doing?
Who me? I’m sitting here. So that’s with respect to your body. And with respect to your mind, what are you doing? Who me?
I’m thinking about this stuff that I’m hearing like that. But our mind is full of functions, full of thoughts and basically that’s everything for us on an everyday level are all of those thoughts. And the thoughts when we decide what we’re going to do and how we’re going to do it and making decisions about like values and so on, those are all thoughts. And we can end up creating great contradictions for ourselves when we act on the basis of one thought and then a moment later act on the basis of a totally contradictory thought and that creates a division within us. Who me?
Well, who am I? Am I the good guy or the bad guy? I don’t know. I want to be the good guy. When I did that, I wanted to be the good guy, but everybody I talked to tells me, you’re a bad guy and you know it because you wouldn’t want anybody to do that to you.
Would you? No, I wouldn’t. So you’re a bad guy, but I want to be a good guy. So you’re in this kind of conflicting emotional state. Why?
Because of acting in contradictory ways. It has an effect on us. And when your state of mind develops a lot of those inner contradictions, you end up becoming very superficial just to keep some peace of mind. You try to kind of turn it off, avoid thinking about it, take meditations so that you’re not aware or sensitive to the content of your mind because when you become aware of it, it’s full of contradictions and that’s the basis of who you are. Who am I?
I am this is me. How can I be one thing when there’s so many contradictory things happening here? It tears you apart. That’s important to take that in it’s very important to take that into consideration because your peace of mind and thus your happiness depends upon it. So as Holiness says, the impact of our actions both positive and negative registers deep within us.
To harm another, the capacity for empathy must be overwhelmed. One may suppress his or her feelings by subscribing to an ideology that justifies giving harm to another but the effect on unconscious levels of mind is made nonetheless and often becomes conscious at some later time. Like with Stalin’s paranoia and loneliness that arose later in his life as a result of all the murders that he did. Millions of murders murders he was responsible for. So that towards the end of his life, he didn’t trust anybody, every single person he regarded as somebody who was out to get him.
And I don’t mean get him like get his job, I mean got him, every single person. So that arose as a consequence of the way of thinking that he had been doing earlier in his life. It’s just like dominoes, but happening with thoughts, with emotions. It may be unconscious initially, but if nothing stops the mechanism, you become aware of it and then it’s conscious. Or it may be the unease or tears that arise in a child after a fight.
Like for instance, you can get some kid and he gets into a fight with another kid in the schoolyard and he acts big and tough and so on. But as soon as he’s home tears come out so upset because of the state of mind that was generated in that fight and the state of mind that the person normally wants to have. Or like a child who acts belligerently and toughly when in front of the parent says, No, I won’t turn the TV off, something like that. And then two minutes later, he’s in the other room crying because of being so upset by that state of mind. Also an effect of the afflictions is that one’s reputation suffers.
You notice that when people don’t come around as much anymore. Why don’t people call me anymore? Well, maybe if you didn’t lash out at everybody all the time, they would, things like that. Discriminative awareness suffers. Afflictions are irrational and undermine good judgment.
They’re irrational because all these afflictions arise from fundamentally a misknowledge of reality and that misknowledge of reality might be something subtle and it might be something difficult to identify, But with the afflictions themselves, you can see irrationality right there all the time like somebody might get upset at somebody and their immediate thought about that person is, that person is a swine. No, they’re not. They’re a human being. They’re not a swine, they’re a human being and that person’s family loves them. They don’t regard them as a swine.
It’s only you who think of them as a swine because that person is your landlord and just gave you notice to leave. That’s the only reason. It’s irrational in that sense. Deception, they deceive us. We are misled to believe what is not the case.
They present when you perceive things according to these afflictions then the way in which the object appears to your mind is distorted. It’s actually distorted. It’s like when you are angry at somebody, the only thing that anger lets you see is the negative things about that person, only their faults. It filters out everything else. And that when we noticed that that’s going on when suddenly we become aware of a quality, a good quality that somebody has that previously we couldn’t stand.
Funny that, when did they get that? It reminds me of what Mark Twain said when he was seventeen, he left home because he couldn’t bear his father’s stupidity. And he came back home after traveling all over the place and just throwing himself in the world and experiencing that and came back home at the age of twenty one and couldn’t believe how much his father had learned in four years. So like that, the delusions give us a distorted view that deceive us and create justifications for actions that are also deceptive. It’s like when a person is a court of law and they’re like on the witness stand and somebody comes up and says, so what possessed you when you decided to take that gun and blow the head off of your wife.
What possessed you to do that? Because well, it seemed like a good idea at the time. And that’s totally deceived them. It completely deceived them that state of mind. Deceiving one worse than anybody else could, more so than anybody else because it’s like traitors or deceptive persons and con men and so on.
Fortunately, we don’t run into them all the time, but our mind is there all the time and the afflictions are there all the time. They may not be manifest all the time, but they’re there like seeds in the ground, for the right cooperative conditions to arise and when they do, they distort everything and make you think that it’s the right thing to do. Your health suffers from afflictions. Like anger is becoming well known as a cause of illness. I’ve seen it many times in news newspapers and magazines and so on.
Causes heart attack, it cause cancer, all kinds of things like that. It can cause stress because if you don’t have a good way to deal with if your general response to a stressful situation is aversion and anger then you’ve just made the situation worse. Because now in addition to whatever the frustration that’s there, you also have to deal with the distress of anger itself in the mind. So that causes that gripping of the heart and the heart disease and so on. Discriminative awareness suffers..
Remorse, we burn with remorse from the misconduct afflictions cause. That’s when sometimes when you sit quietly, maybe you want to meditate, you’ve got nothing else you have to do, so your mind becomes peaceful. Your attention is withdrawn away from the things around you, the kind of survival instinct to look around, any danger, what food do I need, what’s the temperature like, do I need other clothes. When it’s with all of that’s taken care of, it’s not being drawn out, not being forced by survival instinct and then you start getting higher minded and start looking what’s the content of my mind? What ethical actions should I undertake now?
And then you become aware of everything you’ve ever done. It’s all still there. All the memories are there. And whether you’ve dealt with them or not, they’re there. They arise and you respond to them however you’re going to respond.
And for some reason, I don’t know why it is, there’s a tendency to remember the worst of things rather than the best of things. And when we do, boom, remorse sets in. Sometimes the immediate response is we hit ourselves, something like that. We beat ourselves with remorse, not a peaceful state of mind at all. Furthermore, afflictions are useless.
One time early in one of my early encounters with Lama Yeshe, I was talking about some way of thinking that I noticed which was sort of habitual. And he said, Why do you think like that? It’s useless. I didn’t think I had a choice. Thought I had to think like that because it was just a thought in my mind.
It’s like somebody who’s sort of semi conscious and then they say, Oh! Why don’t you go and have a cup of coffee? Okay, I’ll go and have a cup of coffee. You don’t have to have a cup of coffee just because somebody suggests it to you. But we do things like that just by the power of suggestion.
Well, the power of suggestion doesn’t have to come from somebody else. It can be just some thought that comes in our mind that suggests to do something and then there we go following it like it had the rope to our nose ring. They’re useless. They don’t help us at all. We lose our inner peace by them.
That’s the fundamental reason for getting rid of them. They’re also habitual. Whenever you generate a negative negative state of mind and follow it expect it to come back again. Yes, the Wheel of Sharp Weapons, but you can expect it to come back again because the tendency of the mind is that it does the same thing that it’s done in the past. That’s the tendency.
So it’s not that it has to, it does it because of causes. The cause is that simply we tend to act in the same way that we’ve acted in the past. That can be changed but it takes the more familiar we are with a certain course of action, the stronger it becomes and then it takes a greater effort to change from that habitual response. So because of that habitual tendency, we lose independence. We can’t do what we want to do.
We end up doing what the habits lead us to do. It’s like for instance, if when you come home at night from working and your habit is to notice how peaceful it is to not be doing anything. And then the habit of clinging attachment arises which doesn’t want to be separated from that peaceful experience of doing nothing. So then the thought arises, what’s a good way to do nothing? I think I’ll sit in front of the TV and channel surf and do nothing and then the whole evening just goes it’s hard if you do that like repeatedly every night, then it’s hard to get out of that.
And then if you need to use your nighttime to do hard to do that. You have to kind of get out of that. It’s like, I don’t have any energy to do that. But in fact, we’ve got tons of energy if we can tap it and we do tap it from time to time. We find something that interests us, we don’t want to stop.
It’s after midnight, we’re still going, we don’t want to stop. So it’s there. All we have to do is get enthusiastic about it, but we don’t often because we even have the chance to look for something to get enthusiastic about because these habits have are in control of us. It’s insidious. They’re in control of us.
Was anybody disappointed in nineteen eighty four that Big Brother wasn’t in charge? What a disappointment. All those years we were expecting Big Brother and then it didn’t happen. It’s because it was already firmly entrenched in our minds. The exhibition title that was meant to be nineteen nineteen forty eight?
I see. I don’t think he called it nineteen eighty four because he just transposed the last two numbers of the year he wrote it. More four more wrote it in forty eight. Uh-huh. Well.
Like even more current Y2K, it didn’t happen, the event that wasn’t. Right. But here my example was just that we’re not in control of our own lives because we’ve got this big brother inside us which is not somebody who’s possessed well in a way. We’re being possessed by emotions that have the force of habit. They don’t have the force of any insight into reality.
The only reason that they’re controlling us is because of the force of habit and the reason why we haven’t questioned them and employ our insight to actually see whether or not the view that they present us is in fact the case is because we’re in the habit of not doing that, because we’re in the habit of following the afflictions. So it’s kind of think about if you think about that for a little while and it’s really useful, react. Nobody can stand to be controlled by anybody else. It’s just against our nature. So as soon as you have that feeling that these disturbing negative thoughts, they’re only present, they’ve got all of these reputation sufferers, health sufferers destroy the discernment like that, they’re deceivers, they’re useless, they produce remorse.
All of this, why haven’t I questioned the view of reality that these things give me? Check and see. It’s like it’s insidious. It’s like there must have been some movie that I saw about that. It’s like somebody wants to well, a second, let me think about this.
Yes, you need to think about that. But when was the last time you wait? Okay, yes, think about that. But first, you need to eat some food. It’s bad for your health if you don’t come over here.
Boom, you’ve just been cheated, deceived, robbed of an opportunity. Yes, but I really have to think about That’s okay, that’s okay. There’s plenty of time to think about that. Here, have another piece. At the end, Well, I need to think about that.
Yeah, for sure you need to think about that but that was really a lot of food, wasn’t it? Kinda sits heavy on you. My goodness. Would it be great to just hop in the bed right now and have a good night sleep? Just been robbed again.
It’s like that. That’s how it happens. And there’ll be time until there’s no time. And then there’s plenty of life forms that we can live in where we don’t take the time to use intelligence because they don’t have intelligence. That’s right.
Okay. It’s these so think when you think about that it produces a recognition of being in a state of non freedom. And that is really useful state of mind because it automatically provokes a thought to be free, a thought to escape from that condition of non freedom. And that’s the state of mind known as renunciation, which is one of the three principles of the path to liberation and enlightenment. Having that state of mind conceiving to escape from this condition where I am not in control of myself, of my destiny.
So it’s a basis for they are the afflictions, think of anger for example, clinging attachment, the basis for frustration, confusion, insecurity, anxiety, loss of self respect and depression. I don’t know whether it’s holiness, just stop there or I stopped typing. But it keeps going and going and going. They undermine happiness such as by destroying the causes of happiness, such as destroying friendships. Causes of happiness and these afflictions such as anger destroy that.
The faults keep going. They’re a cause of other afflictive emotions like for instance, you might say, Well, I’m not so bad. I’ve only got this one, this one affliction then you’ve got them all because that one gives rise to the other ones. And don’t think that that one is without numerous causes which are other ones like jealousy. Well, I’ve never got other brothers but I do have a problem with jealousy.
Sorry, that means you have a problem with anger and clinging attachment because jealousy is nothing other than those two working together. And clinging attachment produces anger. How does it do it? I want that. This person is in my way.
What? But I want it. And then anger arises. This person is trying to take away from me what I want. Anger arises then.
They cause us to think of ourselves before others and this undermines the cause of happiness, which is thinking of others before oneself. I spent all last week talking about that. They bring about a tendency to project characteristics onto things and events that aren’t actually there. Like sometimes prejudices. It could be racial prejudices, there could be gender prejudices that cause us to project some image of how this person is supposed to be, what they like and what they don’t like and so on that they have nothing to do with the reality of that person.
Things and events, anything can be a source of afflictive emotions, anything, even our friends, even ourselves, anything can be a source of them. Lama Tsongkhapa went into a whole explanation of the source of where the afflict ive emotions come from. He talked about ignorance, the misconception of reality, talked about the seeds of afflictions from former lifetimes. So having already when we’re born, we’re not born as what the Leibniz called it a tabula rasa. We weren’t born as empty slates.
If we were all empty slates, then there’d be no such thing as prodigies. We’d either all be prodigies or there would be no prodigies. There would be nobody who was quicker than another, no one that was slower than another. We would all it would all be the same and it would all be by what? Nurture.
It would all be due to nurture. So you could put anybody in any particular situation and they would always grow up having this developing the same characteristics but it’s not like that as you can see just from the same family that growing up in the same family, you get totally different characters. So we’re not empty slates when we’re born, tendencies. And then objects just coming into contact with any particular object at all. Like a person there’s this expression, an addictive personality.
Now, if a person has an addictive personality, they could get addicted to anything, right? And they do, right? That’s what we sort of mean by an addictive personality, a person who can get addicted to anything. So then any object could be a cause for that state of addiction, addictive mental state to arise. Or even somebody who’s angry by nature then anything can cause them to be angry.
Even a sunny day, they can look outside another sunny day in paradise and then it’s cloudy, it’s cloudy again. It doesn’t matter. It’s just anything can be a cause giving rise to the afflictions. And also some of the worst causes for afflictions are misguided, bad friends can be causes of afflictions. There’s a Tibetan proverb that if you lay on a mountain of gold dust, when you get up, some of it will stick to you.
If you lay on a mountain of manure when you get up some of it will stick to you like that. So in Śāntideva, his Bodhicaryāvatāra said that he was responding to the the whole book is dedicated to cultivating compassion and altruism. And then at some point he’s saying, so now you might think that you want to go out and save the world. And so he said, well, beware. He said, beware.
He said, it’s more likely that the saint will be brought down by the sinner than the sinner will be brought up by the saint. So think of that, be careful who you associate with. And the thought is that you don’t abandon an altruistic concern for other beings, but you have to know your limits. You have to know what your weaknesses are, what your limitations are and act wisely. So avoiding afflictions.
So when you practice avoiding afflictions, how do you do it? One way is you might avoid the situations or activities and objects that give rise to afflictions within you. That’s really easy although you can’t do it all the time. But it’s one part of the strategy. So if you’re somebody who argues easily and gets angry, then you just sort of avoid arguments like that.
Or if you’re the kind of person that just if you’re in, I don’t know what the name of that street is in San Francisco. But if you don’t have very much control over your pleasure producing parts of your body, is that it? Then you avoid walking down Broadway like that. Is that what it’s called, the theater district? Broadway Columbus.
Actually That’s enough. My point was made. Legal in that. Right. Okay.
Yes. Right. Well, yes, that kind of thing. So it ends up so you know what your own limiteachings are, but you notice that they arise in certain circumstances so you just try to avoid those circumstances thinking that, do I enjoy this peaceful state of mind where I’m kind of in control of what I’m doing? Yes.
Then why put myself in this other situation where habitual negativity will arise and I won’t be in control of what I’m doing? Like that. Yes, it’s the wisdom that arises from remembering suffering. Lama Yeshe used to say that one good thing about suffering is that it teaches us not to repeat the same mistakes. He said, But the point is, he said, and you call that our expression was learning the hard way.
He said, but what you need to do is try to get as much mileage as possible out of one hard way and not keep doing it again and again and again and again. Avoid the inner conditions, gaining insight into our own negativity is a lifelong task that requires a great deal of observation and thought like a scientist. This is being an inner scientist. A person who wants to cure diseases, observes diseases all the time and test them and see what they’re doing like that. We’ve got this disease of the mind called afflictions, negative mental states.
If we don’t make an effort, we will not know where to make necessary changes in our lives. So if we don’t make an effort to develop an insight into the negativity, we won’t understand that we’ve got causes of suffering within us. And then we won’t have a motive to make some change. And we won’t even know where to begin to do it. So we need to avoid these and sometimes we come up with these arguments, yes, but all of this takes a lot of time.
We waste a great deal of time on trivialities. Now, if you have a toothache, then you could spend your time in the usual way or you can go to the dentist and have them do something about it immediately. So it’s like that. When you understand the problem that’s there, then it gives us some strength to not waste our time in activities that aren’t as important as this subduing of these negative emotions. If we don’t do anything, they just continue, right?
So we do have to do something. We can make so sometimes we might think that well, okay, let’s say that I don’t there’s a lot of things that I’m doing that’s not really productive use of time and I could probably actually do something to one of these things that you’re talking about like observe my mind, develop an insight into reality through studying these books and discussing with other people who are studying, meditating, doing these other kinds of practices that accumulate merit and do purification. But I don’t think that I’m going to be successful. I don’t know. It just seems like I tried to do it sometimes and nothing happened.
Didn’t like weaken the negativity at all. I think that it’s just I mean I think I’m just going to have to live with it like that. And we need to encourage ourselves. We need to develop some confidence because His Holiness says, we can make a huge impact on our quality of life. We can do it.
There’s no reason why we can’t. It’s just a question of sticking to it, having your method and persevering with it. And as everybody who ever got out of this quagmire of the uncontrolled destructive emotions was at one time just like us. Just like us had exactly the same kind of resistances, had exactly level of propensity towards disturbing negative thoughts, all of those things was just like us and they just made that effort and kept on making that effort after day after day, not a lot, just a little bit, make that little bit of effort and then set a positive habit. Then it gets a little stronger, easier to rise, last little longer and so on.
Just get stronger. Yes. If that doesn’t happen in a vacuum, I mean, it’s one thing to think you can do it, but it’s another thing to think you can do it alone. Just by going home and doing this, reading and practicing, you have to get teachings. You have to have a teacher that’s taught, that knows the path.
True, there’s many conditions but you have to find those conditions. You have to create them with good karma like with one’s merit and one’s You have to have the will is what I’m saying. Have to have that will. And even if there’s nobody around you can still have the will to find them. Sure.
Yes. So that’s so there are some things you can do alone. You can start to look. That’s right. But you’re not going to find enlightenment sitting home reading books unless you’re also doing other things like learning how karma works and learning the causes and conditions of happiness and talking to other people that are on the path.
And There’s all kinds of conditions. Getting oral instructions, following the oral teachings. Yeah. There’s many things. But to come home from work and think, okay.
I’m gonna sit down and meditate and do that and keep it up on one’s own, you’re going to get discouraged. Some people may not. There may be some people who don’t, maybe some people who’ve had teachings, who have a practice, they know what the practice is. Because they’ve had teachings. Because they’ve had teachings.
That’s what I had in mind. Somebody who has the kind of problems that I’m talking about are not problems that face people who never heard the Dharma before. I’m talking a lot closer to home than that. I know what those antidotes are and why aren’t I doing that right now? Like that.
Yes? I have a couple of answers to that. One time I went to see His Holiness. I was in Dharma Salla and I was worried about something. I was worried about coming back to the United States and I talked to I went to talk to him about that and other studies that I’ve been doing and I was full of what the Tibetan medical system calls Lung.
Lung is a kind of frustrated energy from doing a lot of concentration memorization stuff like that. And so it was a lot of kind of like tense and uptight stuff. And I was struggling so hard to get some irreversible positive shift in consciousness so that I could be clear, calm, detached, altruistic wherever I was, including in a suburb of Chicago wearing robes. I and I was talk telling him about that, you know, I said, I feel close, but I’m not there yet. And it’s like bothering me.
And he said, how long have you been studying this? And I said, three years and he just erupted. He went back like this. He just like a gasp. And then he said something in Tibetan and his interpreter said, his holiness said, you’re rather arrogant To think that you could gain such an achievement in such a short amount of time.
So then that was useful because it helped me to let go of something. Just because I wasn’t there, hadn’t met my goals yet, it didn’t mean that I was like relax on that level, just relax which is what I needed to do, relax. And then he gave me some things to prepare with and those things came together and I would say it was good. But the thing is what we need to cultivate is enthusiastic perseverance, joyful effort of which there is a type of joyful effort called perseverance. It is an aspect of joyful effort, which means that one doesn’t give up no matter what.
And it’s an attitude that we need to cultivate. Enthusiasm basically or joyful effort is delighting in virtue. You delight in it for all the reasons. It feels good. It has all of these great results that come from it.
It’s the most sane thing to do. All of these reasons and thus you delight in it. And so you want to do it. You want to continue to do it and you want to follow through until the goals are reached. And no matter how long it takes because it’s the most sane simple and profound way to live the life And thus that’s what one is going to do.
His Holiness said that even with a tantric practitioner who engages in that mode of practice because one of the main reasons is because it’s said to bring results quicker than any other mode of practice. He said even the tantric practitioner has to have the enthusiastic perseverance of somebody on the snail’s method because it’s a state of mind you need. You need that state of mind because otherwise every time that you slip, it’s a huge obstacle because it means that you’re not there yet. And then it’s difficult to survive in a state of with a state of mind that can’t bear falling back, that can’t bear not making progress because all of that happens all the time. So that state of mind will eventually drive you to total discouragement and despair and you’ll give up.
So we need to never despair, we need to never give up and so the antidote to that is enthusiasm which is enjoying, enjoying the path. One of the I did the Everest trek one time when I left Dharmasala and I went to Nepal and I had a three week trekking visa so I did this Everest trek from Kathmandu to Mount Everest. And I met a couple of guys who I had seen in Dharmashala, had seen in Bodh Gaya kind of on the Dharma trail in India. And one of them had a book of the one hundred thousand songs of Milarepa and that’s what he did. It’s like people, some people walk around with a guitar and they pull out the guitar and what they do is play guitar and sing songs.
He had his one hundred thousand songs of Milarepa and what he did is he read aloud Milarepa stories. I had the book Jewel Ornament of Liberation which was by Gampopo, Milarepa’s main disciple had the whole path laid out. So then I helped interpret what Milarepa meant by the poetic language that he used. We just before I met those guys and we just met by chance, I had been walking for I was walking by myself and you end up walking with other people for a while. And was walking with one guy for a while from Australia who he was going to get to the Mount Everest Base Camp in seven days.
It’s just a one hundred mile walk like this up to eighteen thousand feet. It’s just I’m gonna get there in seven days. And so his whole thing was to get to achieve his goal. And I was kind of walking with that for a while and then met these guys, the other guy was in Zen so he had all of these Zen aphorisms and so on. And it became so vividly clear the difference between doing something to accomplish the goal and the doing of the thing itself like the walk and the destination.
So you can walk without being so motivated to get to the destination but rather the walking itself, how you’re walking becomes the most important thing. And that was fascinating because then we became real freaks in terms of the trekking world because we didn’t like start our day by just well, here we are here, here’s our map and we have to get to here because that’s where the lunches are given and we have to get here by dinner because that’s the lodge that you stay in. We didn’t do that. When we were humry, we just knocked on some door of somebody. It wasn’t a house that was on the map of the meal place.
If we were tired and wanted to go to sleep, we’d knock on some doors. Can we stay here, give us some money, they’re happy to have it, provide food. So we just wandered, we wanted to sit down and meditate in front of a waterfall, that’s what we did. We created this reputation in the whole Sherpa area of Nepal and these guys that were meditating on was you never knew where they’d run into these three guys. It’s the going, it’s the Trungpa Rinpoche wrote a book that was called Journey Without a Goal.
And I never read it but the title reminded me of that state of mind. We thought maybe we could just spend the rest of our lives like that. We didn’t run into any visa police up there. We didn’t see any huge walls between one country and another country. We could just Nepal today, Bhutan tomorrow, wherever like that.
Okay, I’m going to have to stop there. To remind ourselves, we can make a huge impact on our quality of life. We will benefit from this work of subduing the negative mind and also society will benefit from it. As Lama Yeshe once said, if you take the vow to not kill that means all living beings can have a sigh of relief. That’s one person they’re not going to have to worry about.
We would discover how destructive afflictions are and this alone would make us less inclined to act them out. So I have to leave it there. I was planning on going from Chapter six through Chapter nine tonight and I just did Chapter six. That’s how it goes sometimes. So thank you very much.
I hope that helped.