Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute talk, Ven Robina Courtin teaches how to become your own therapist by analyzing the mind’s core delusions. She opens with a striking analogy: we are all junkies, addicted to external objects—cake, lovers, possessions—believing they will bring happiness when they bring only suffering. She walks through attachment and aversion, showing how delusions distort perception through “rose-colored spectacles” that exaggerate the appeal or repulsion of objects. She distinguishes sensory from mental consciousness, explaining why attachment is not a function of the senses but a conceptual lie. She explores the difference between simple liking and needy attachment, and between virtuous and deluded states of mind. The core insight: removing delusions reveals an innate, stable happiness requiring no external object. Pitched at those with familiarity with Buddhist practice.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 13 2002 01 19 BYT.mp3
UUID: d6fc60af-7a75-427c-a723-0ae0542ab40c
Teacher: Ven Robina Courtin
Collection: y Be Your Own Therapist (Ven Robina Courtin)
Date: 2002-01-19
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 45.1 minutes
Words: ~8,847
What we all live in. The polite Buddhist way to say it is dualistic. Lama Yeshe says schizophrenic. It’s like this sense of a split off sense of separate self. So the irony of this kind of ego, ego grasping, is that it is that, that we’re alienated, separated, cut off, lonely.
So then, of course, this gives rise to this huge main delusion, which is effectively the default mode of our mind every day to day, from day to day, is one called attachment, desire, attachment. And it has many, many facets. And again, we could spend months just talking about this one. But as Lama Yeshe says, I can tell you about it for one whole year about attachment, unless we begin to look deeply into our own minds, being our own therapist. We will never begin to learn it, you know, about it, really how it functions.
It’s quite kind of subtle how it functions. Anger anger or aversion is the response when attachment doesn’t get what it wants. But the primordial can almost effectively from day to day, the main cause of our suffering is attachment. These are very curious because we can’t see this at all, it’s not evident to us, we don’t look at it deeply. So let’s look at this one, because this one, attachment, is the cause of this first noble truth, that the second kind of suffering called the suffering of change.
And that’s, like I said, is what Buddha calls what we call happiness. So let’s look at this. Okay? I need some tea. Alright.
So the best analogy to use for how what we call happiness is nothing other than suffering is the one of being a junkie. I don’t want to be personal, please. Okay. Just hear it. And it’s a good example because in our world, in our ordinary Samsaric world, when we know a person’s like a junkie, quote unquote, whether it’s alcohol or drugs or whatever, you know, that serious state of mind of grasping a neediness for something and so locked into it that you like you’ve got no choice.
Right? And we can see this. That, actually, what Buddha is saying is we literally are all junkies. He’s not joking. It’s just a question of degree.
That’s all. It’s just a question of degree, and it’s a question of the severity, the strength of the object. And Buddha’s not joking when he says that. This is the way they talk. You know?
So how is this so? This kinda sounds awful. Well, this is what attachment is. So let’s use the analogy of the junkie, and we’ll see it. According I mean, I’m just again, not being personal.
Just using it as a a kind of a cliche, you know, a cliche kind of understanding. In general, we can see the strong and the strong grasping for something. The logic is this, isn’t it? That when I get it, I will get happy. And that it’s the cause of happiness.
The thing is the object, let’s say, the heroin or the alcohol or the or, let’s face it, the cake, the chocolate cake, the handsome body, you name it. The logic, absolute logic of it is, when I get it, I will get happy. Isn’t it? So clear. And then the logic of that is, when I don’t get it, I’m unhappy.
Now even this alone, we can already see in our life. But it’s so totally what we think happiness is and how you get it, we never actually question. We never question our assumptions. You know? We can see that it’s true.
We can somehow see that the more we want something in a needy way, the more delight and joy we get when we get it, but the more we go crashing down when we lose it. Somehow we all think, well, that’s just the way life goes. What can I do? You just that’s what you get for loving somebody. You gotta have the jealousy.
You gotta have the anger. You gotta have the grief. You gotta have the loss. We just assume. Do you see my point?
We just assume. We just assume, don’t we, that that’s that’s just the deal of getting happy. You just gotta have the suffering to come with the happiness. And that’s what why Buddha’s saying we’re insane. To think that that’s the only way to get happiness.
And it’s sort of obvious that’s how we get our happiness, whether it’s a simple chocolate cake or the most divine romantic relationship, or the cigarettes, or the junk. Okay. Indeed, you can see some objects are more are more powerful than others. It’s very obvious. A little bit of heroin can really indeed do much harm.
But so one of the reasons Buddha says, for example, that why the happiness we have now is nothing other than suffering, he says, because the objects we depend upon for that happiness are contaminated, meaning they poison you. Now, I don’t mean in a literal sense, but in a sense, that’s true. Now they do. They poison you. And you analyze this.
We think, well, excuse me. Heroin poisons me, but not carrots. Not handsome bodies. Excuse me. Well, I’m sorry.
You’re wrong. It’s just a question of how many you have. We all know that if you keep taking heroin, you you don’t need much of a dose to kill you. It’s very obvious. It pollutes you.
It destroys you. You’ve got to eat an awful lot of carrots. But if you analyze it, it’s really true what I’m about to say. You eat keep eating carrots. I mean, don’t stop and go to the toilet.
Keep eating carrots. Okay? Unceasingly. Do what would happen? You’d vomit and die.
Right? So conclusion? Carrots are contaminated. So therefore, Buddha’s simple thing is, what sounds outrageous to us, that external phenomena cannot cause you happiness. It is not their job to cause you happiness.
They are contaminated. There’s a proof. You think of the most divine body you have ever had contact with. I’m sorry. It’s the same thing as the carrots.
You know, you have contact with that handsome body, and you think it’s gonna bring the greatest bliss on earth. It does. The best we know. But what do you do? You stop, you go to sleep, and you get hungry again.
You have more. Well, you think of having continuous contact. I don’t mean continuous. You’d become exhausted and you’d die, wouldn’t you? This is logic.
It is it sounds ridiculous, but this is Buddha’s point. We’ve got to see that all the things that we depend upon now for our happiness are contaminated. So in the more so another reason, therefore, it leads to it. The more you you have it, the the more suffering it becomes. The heroin is fairly easy to see.
The cigarettes is easy to see. The chocolate cake is easy to see. We believe that chocolate cake, when I get it in here, will bring me happiness. Just as if somehow as if your mom put a spoonful of happiness along with the recipe. You know?
Isn’t it? That’s the logic of attachment. It believes that. So hang on. So we eat the cake, right, With this incredible expectation that happiness will come.
So, you know, you eat the first mouthful, and there’s still you haven’t got satisfaction yet, and you’re still so excited because your stomach’s empty still, and you can afford to have more. This joy is kinda you’re waiting for it to come at the end of the rainbow. You know? So you have another mouthful. You haven’t got satisfaction yet.
You still got not empty stomach. You still got more to come. You’re still delightful. You have another mouthful, but gradually, your stomach starts getting full. It’s really painful.
Right? Because you know you haven’t got satisfaction yet, which attachment absolutely believes it’ll get. So you have another mouthful. And the only reason you stop is because it becomes disgusting now, doesn’t it? Do you understand my point?
This thing that attachment so believed is the cause of happiness, painfully, we have to face the fact that it’s now looking disgusting to us. Right? We all know this experience. Oh, this is a tragedy. This is Buddha’s point.
Sorry. The happiness we get now is so miserable in comparison, this is where it sounds kind of religious, with the state of mind that we can actually experience, which is innate within us. This is what’s hard to hear. The the the the happiness Buddha is talking about, our capability, you know, that we’re capable of having, is really the analogy is like the water. It’s a very simple one.
Let’s say the water’s polluted, and the pollution is the delusions. Right? Just this is a simple example. Then what Buddha is saying is, we all know that if you remove the pollution from the water, you what what are you left with? Okay?
What are you left with? Pure Right? And that’s the very nature of what water is. It’s pure. You don’t have to go around searching for pureness and inject pureness back into the water, do you?
It is just what’s left when you remove the pollution. Right? Well, it’s almost so simple, but we can’t hear it. The Buddha is saying one of the characteristics of the of consciousness is that it’s like pure water. It’s pure in its nature.
And all you’ve got to do to get blissfully happy all the time, unceasingly, forever, and he’s not joking, is simply remove the pollution. Simply remove the delusions from the mind, because that’s the pollution. So but we have this incredibly schizophrenic view so strong that happiness is something you have to search for like a needle in a haystack. Right? So we feel we’ve got to find it to put it in us.
But you don’t have to find waterness to put into water to make it water. It is already water. You’d have to remove the pollution. I mean, it’s almost so simple. We can’t hear it.
We can’t hear it, you know? It’s so simple because we’ve got this wrong view so caught up. What happiness is and where it comes from. So Buddha’s just saying that, actually, the joy and fulfillment and wholeness and contentment and you name whatever word you like, that we have the potential for experiencing right now, it’s in our mind right now, is something that is stable, is incredibly blissful, is completely natural, it is our real nature, and it never changes. It’s permanent in a subtle sense that it changes from moment to moment, but it will never cease.
It won’t run out. It won’t run out because it’s the natural state of your mind. This is what Buddha means by nirvana. That’s all. It’s a state of mind.
It’s psychological. And the method for getting it is by giving up being a junkie, giving up attachment. And that means giving up all the absolute stories that our mind is riddled with, that we believe about chocolate cakes and handsome bodies and this and that and good and bad and getting what we want and getting the green lights and getting the nice weather and getting the nice food, you name it. Buddha says we’re actually living in a in a desire realm. Like you’re living in a junky realm.
The only things you can ingest are junk, and your senses in their nature need junk to exist. This is the third kind of suffering, actually, or pervasive suffering, they say. By being born as this kind of being, with this kind of senses and this kind of mind, that demands satisfaction from the sensory objects, we are caught up in suffering. So to go against it, to start obeying the to go against the rules of attachment is hugely deep, hugely difficult, very painful. So the happiness we get now is the happiness is inferior, that’s all.
We do get some happiness. There’s no question we get happiness. Even when you taste the cake, a little bit of pleasure comes, isn’t it? That little bit of pleasure is happiness. But what all Buddha’s saying, just like with a junkie, when you’re no longer a junkie and you look on, you see, what is that bit of happiness worth all that suffering?
Do you see my point? Is that happiness that you get as a junkie worth the torture That a person who gives it up is a person who realizes it’s not. Well, a person who looks at a saṃsāra, Buddha says, and sees that the happiness we get, which is all we know right now, is inferior because we’re depending upon an external object. We can’t guarantee we’ll ever keep it. We can’t guarantee that person will continue to love us.
Just look at the world. We can’t guarantee the chocolate cake will continue to be then we need it. Even if it is there, the more we eat it, as our mothers told us, our secret Buddha’s mummies, the more you get, the more you want. So one of the reasons the happiness we have now is nothing other than suffering is because it doesn’t last. Attachment thinks it will.
Reality is it doesn’t, so it always is disappointed. Because the objects are contaminated, we can see that, it leads inevitably, as you keep having contact, it leads inevitably to to to disgust and suffering. And finally, actually causes you to even want it more because you the more you get, the more you want. So we can see all these reasons. We can see it.
And Buddha says, this is the attitude we have to everything. So you don’t have be just smoking cigarettes or having junk to be like this. It’s everything. People, things, sounds, smells, getting what you want every day, getting the green lights, getting everything just nice. Because the the addiction of attachment is when I get everything just so, then I’ll be happy.
I mean, look at us. We all we know all this one. And then we don’t we, you know, we we fail, then we think we’re miserable. We think we’re terrible. We think we’re we’re failures because we didn’t make it right because the person left us.
I must be a failure. Excuse me. It’s Samsāra. What do you expect? Everything’s impermanent.
You know? So, really, we’re demanding so much more from ourselves than is ever possible because we’re using the wrong methods, Buddha says. We do have, he says, the capability of being blissful and joyful, content, fulfilled, you name it. But the method, I’m sorry, is cold turkey. Giving up attachment. Therefore, giving up anger, giving up jealousy, giving up pride, giving up all the neuroses that we totally take for granted, that we totally identify with.
You know? This is a tragedy. So kinda like we’re locked into this system that we’re so used to. Buddha says from eons of practice. You know?
So maybe some questions about all that. Does it make sense? It makes sense. And you like It makes sense, she said. Of the chocolate cake and the heroin.
Mhmm. You know, that’s The analogy works. Okay. The chocolate cake and heroin. Okay.
Then? Good. Then gone. If we’re talking about love. Right.
Yes. Yeah. Yes. Mine. Much harder to come Of course, it is.
Yeah. So we have to so as Shane is saying, it’s much harder to come to terms when we start talking about love and relationships and family and attachment. That’s the point. But the principle is identical. So this is the point.
Keep remembering this, which is hard for us to hear too. Because when we say attachment in our culture, especially in this Western culture, so very different from the way they use it in the Buddhist terms, as soon as we hear attachment, we hear happiness. We hear love. We hear good things, don’t we? But when Buddha uses the word attachment, he’s, by definition, referring to a poisoned state of mind.
So even if you wanna use another word, please do. But he’s not referring to virtuous states of mind. So now let’s listen. Look at this one. This is very important.
This is unbelievably important. This is really the essential point in being your own therapist now. It’s to realize okay. Buddha says there’s ways of dividing up our mind. There’s different ways of looking into what the mind is in the consciousness.
We’ve already looked at some aspects. Another way of looking at it is in terms of we have two things. The sensory consciousness. Sensory. You know?
The the capacity of our mind to be aware of shape and color through here. Sound through here. Taste through here. And so on and so forth. Now, first of all, Buddha would say, as we’ve already made the distinction, but we really get it clear here, that body is not mind.
This already is confusing for us because the body and mind is such a kind of interdependent complex, and everything happens also spontaneously and altogether. It we can be easily forgiven for thinking it’s all the same. Do you see my point? But when we start to analyze it, we can really see that it’s not the same. And once we start to see this, we have great power to help change our minds.
For example, as Lama Yeshe said, you people seems to be a Tibetan way of talking when they’re being rough for whiskey. They say you people. You know? He said, you people it means us in the West. You people think that attachment is a it it’s got something to do with the senses.
Desire. He said and this is shocking. He says, a desire, attachment, and this is meaning the same thing, have nothing to do with the senses. Now this is outrageous. Let me explain it.
Okay? First of all, we have mental consciousness, and we have sensory consciousness. And consciousness or mind, its function is to be aware at whatever level. So when your consciousness is functioning through the medium of the eyeball, in Buddhist terms, it’s not the eyeball that sees, it’s your capacity to be aware, which is called consciousness, that is the part of you that functions through the medium of the eyeball. Ear consciousness, it functions through the medium of all the little bits and pieces out here, that call you, you know, ear.
The consciousness part is not physical. The ear and the eyeball clearly are physical, but they’re just the external. Okay? So we’ve got the sensory experiences. Now, in terms of the chocolate cake, let’s say, you know, we say, Wow, I see this divine chocolate cake, and we sort of faint this anticipation.
Well, no, we’re not analyzing quickly enough. It’s all happening in a second, but what we’re not doing is analyzing. So what Buddha is saying is this, eye consciousness, here, this one, sees merely is aware of merely shape and color. That’s it. Shape and color.
Nothing more. It is not capable of seeing chocolate cake. Chocolate cake is the label given by mental consciousness that’s familiar with that shape and color, that recognizes it because you’ve got memory from the past experience, because you hear smell the smell and see the shape. So mental consciousness, which is really where all the intelligence is, which is where the computer is, boom boom boom, the sensory gives a trigger to the mental consciousness that then recognizes it and says, boom, delicious chocolate cake. But it all happens in one second, so we assume it’s a function of all the same part of us, you know?
It’s like, this is where we have to almost put everything into slow motion, to really be our own therapist, to really analyze the parts of us. And once we can establish, from this experience, that the senses are just these kind of dumb animals that lead us to things, then the rest of it, all the stories and all the energy, is coming from the mental consciousness. Right? So there’s a really interesting example to prove this is interesting, to prove that attachment is not a function of the senses. Okay?
So then we have to look at mental consciousness, and that’s what we can talk about, simply speaking, in the mental consciousness, we can talk about the two levels, two ways that our mental consciousness is aware of phenomena. One is called conception, and one is called perception. Perception, the hearer, the use here, as far as our mental consciousness is is concerned, is actually a very advanced and very subtle level of our mind, which we virtually never experience. So let’s just throw that out for now. So this leaves us only with conception.
Now, is most interesting because that includes what we refer to as emotion and thoughts. Buddhism says it’s all conceptual, and I’ll talk about this in a minute because this is what’s most interesting. But as far as the general mental consciousness is concerned in terms of the cake, the mental consciousness, meaning the concepts, now we divide that, That has two aspects. There are two kinds of conceptual thoughts. Two kinds of the mental consciousness in terms of conception.
One is the positive states of mind, and one is the negative states of mind. By definition, Buddha says, the positive states of mind, and we all know those words love, kindness, patience, generosity, forgiveness, blah blah blah they are all the ones that come from a reasonable sense of self, a reasonable sense of an interdependent, connected I with you. We all know that if you and I are having a nice time together, and it’s reasonable, not kind of all grasping and fantasy, then I’m more aware of you for that moment, you’re more aware of me, I’m listening to your words, you’re appreciating me, there’s a nice sense of we there. Do you see my point? But you watch what happens as soon as you start getting angry, or jealous, or attached.
Suddenly, you there, me here, you grasping, you pointing fingers, me freaking out, you, you know, I this, I that, you’re saying you, I this, I that, there’s a sense of very separate you and me, isn’t there? So this is the point. The deluded states of mind are the ones that Buddha says are naturally suffering in their nature, if we see them in our mind. They’re not realistic. They’re coming from a wrong sense of not being interdependent, of being very separate and dependent, which is not natural, which is not how things are.
But the virtues are more natural, they’re more appropriate, because they’re coming from interdependence and a sense of openness and spaciousness and seeing others. So those virtuous ones, gosh, we’ve to develop those as much as possible. And in fact, if you want to say about the pure mind, our natural state, the h two o of our mind is love, compassion, generosity, patience, kindness. They are our natural qualities. So, this pure mind isn’t some kind of abstract concept.
It’s when your mind is full of all the positive states of mind, because Buddha says they are natural. The deluded ones are completely unnatural. Even though they come more spontaneously because we practice them, but in their nature, they’re poison, they’re deluded, they’re inappropriate, they’re not in touch with reality, they cause us so much pain and suffering, and they cause me to harm others. That’s the stuff we have to get rid of. So Buddha’s saying, the one that’s called attachment is virtually the default mode of our mind from day to day.
And it’s it’s beneath all the others, you know? And it’s really so it’s got many, many facets, which we’ll talk about after tea, after whatever we’re gonna have at six o’clock. When’s the next scheduled bit? Hang on. Just I know you wanna ask a question.
What’s that? Another session. Another session. Okay. So maybe we should have a break here.
Unless you got a burning question. You have. What’s your question? Oh, I can wait. Can wait?
Okay. So is that okay if we have a break now? I’ll go into it more detail. Yeah? Yeah.
Okay. Have dinner. And you can talk and discuss all this. Okay? But, again, like I said before, really make a conscious effort to stick to this stuff because it’s so tasty, and don’t just gossip about nothing.
Know? It’s wasting your time. Can do that when you leave. Just stick to the subject. And if you don’t wanna talk, don’t talk.
You know? But talk and make it useful. And you can laugh and be funny. You don’t have to be serious. Okay?
Thank you very much. Goodbye. Am I on? Yeah. Okay.
Reminding ourselves that we we might think, yes, I wanna become a Buddha. That might seem a bit obtuse to us, but perhaps we can definitely realize definitely think that, yes, I wanna be more happy, more wise, less neurotic, more in control of my life. And certainly, in my relationships and the world around me, I do want to be more useful. Even this much, we think. How nice it would be.
Of course, Buddha is saying that we’re capable, you know? We have far more potential, in fact. But even this much already, that’s amazing to wish to do that. So for this reason, I’m sitting here listening to the teachings, meditating, to bring me one step closer to my amazing potential. So let’s continue about this presentation of the mind.
We can finish off with a meditation using the four opponent powers purification. As I said, the first scope of practice based on the preliminaries of looking at the mind and finding a teacher and knowing how to meditate on these points to increase the realizations of these various points of the path, as well as thinking about this perfect human rebirth, we then begin to do the lower scope contemplating impermanence, particularly in relation to one’s own death, in order to energize us to not waste this life even more. We contemplate the suffering of the various realms of existence, the lower realms, in order to give us a healthy revulsion of that kind of experience. We turn to Buddha for refuge, who gives us the methods. And then we begin to practice.
And so the minimum requirement, the minimum level of practice in Buddhism, if you think of it this way, the minimum level, but it’s like central to the entire path, This really like a level of playing safe. Given that our consciousness is a beginningless, endless continuity, and that whatever it experiences at any given moment is necessarily the fruit of past actions, then it’s reasonable to know that we because we don’t want suffering and do want happiness, and that we don’t know when we’re going to die anyway, then it’s reasonable to want to begin to abide by the laws of karma, practice morality, avoid creating negative karma. The principle is quite simple, really. It’s the question of thinking of it in this way, and then recognizing the need for this and wanting to do this for one And we’re not even discussing it for the sake of others, we’re looking at one’s own sake. We need to see this first.
This is the first part of the first scope. And in terms of these two aspects of the wings of the bird, it’s the first part of the first wing, the work we do in our own mind. When we expand our mind further, we begin to see that even this life is in the nature of suffering. Buddha says we have an even more potential than merely having a better rebirth. We can actually go beyond suffering altogether.
The mind can be in a state of freedom from suffering. Buddhism means by this too. Buddha means by this that we’re also free from having to be reborn. So, you know, even if we think of reincarnation, if we think of life, we think of even reincarnation, it’s still life, you know? But if we actually think of of achieving the state of mind known as nirvana, which is freedom from suffering, which is a state of great joy and bliss, which is the natural state of our minds, Buddha says, and then to realize that that means once we’ve completely removed the delusions altogether, remove the gross delusions and achieve the state of nirvana, then we don’t even need to be reborn at all.
Seems a bit kind of boring, doesn’t it? Hard to kind of get the mind around that one, to get excited about that one. But nevertheless, this is the point. The Buddha is saying that, you know, all these deluded states of mind are the cause of why we suffer. And the root delusion, as they call it, which I referred to before, known as ignorance, you know, this fundamental unawareness of the true nature of how everything exists, is the main reason that we’re propelled.
It’s the motor that propels us from life to life, you know, from moment to moment in our experiences. So it’s finally the removal of that one completely by the realization of emptiness, as they say. Say. If we were to complete the wisdom wing and complete the path of the Hīnayāna teachings of the Buddha, we would meditate upon emptiness again and again in order to remove all the delusions and eventually remove the ignorance from the mind. In terms of the Four Noble Truths, this state of freedom from suffering, or full of joy and happiness that Buddha says we are capable of because it’s fact our nature, we can just in terms of the wisdom wing, is when we have accomplished when we have removed the various delusions from the mind, removed even the imprints, the seeds from the mind that are the cause of suffering.
That state of freedom from suffering is this third noble truth. The first one is what is suffering? So we learn to look at what is suffering, the different levels of So we’ll look at this little package just briefly of the three kinds. The first level is regular, ordinary, everyday suffering, that every single sentient being has to one degree or another. And the freedom from this kind of suffering is obvious, that we no longer have a need to have a life, you know?
You’re free from this one completely. The second level we talked about is the kind of suffering that we actually call happiness. I want to talk more about this one to more clear, especially in relation to relationships. The third one is called more pervasive suffering, which is being born with these type of aggregates that demand the contaminated objects that we depend upon and that attachment believes are the cause of happiness, that in fact are in fact the actual cause of suffering, you know? What happened?
You all moved back or something? Did you all tidy up or something? No, you did. Fine. No?
Your chairs. Oh, I just got extra long sightedness. I’ve struggled with you all to move forward this morning. You’ve all gone back again, I’m sure. Something.
Wants to live for? No. No. No. Don’t.
It just seems like suddenly you look further away. It’s okay. All this space in front of me. It’s okay. If you’re happy, you’ll be as long as you’re happy and content, then I’m happy.
Okay. Okay. Let’s look at more of this one about the very good points that you made before about it’s easy enough to talk about attachment to cakes and things, but it starts getting complicated when it’s people. Because it is indeed people that we have to be problems with. We do indeed have problems with chocolate cake, but they’re minor, aren’t they, in comparison with people.
So let’s look at this one, and look at how we work with this one, you know. As I was saying, we really need to be very, very clear about the way the mind works. We looked at how, first of all, sensory is not conceptual. First of all, sensory is not mental. When you see the cake, it’s your eyes seeing it, your tongue tasting it.
They’re the doorways to the experience of the cake. So yes, the senses have huge power right now, but we give them power they really don’t possess. As Lama Yeshe says, we make the body the, you know, the body the boss, but in fact the mind is the boss. So we were discussing how actually attachment desire is not a function of the senses, actually. So how is this so?
We can see. You have the sensory experience of it, and then the same, almost virtually simultaneously, the mental consciousness is accessed, the memory of it arises, we recall the name of it, we recall the experience of it, then we recall the pleasure that it gave us, so then all the mind gets all Then all that occurs, like the computer of our mind, all goes boom boom at the same time. There are different parts of our mind doing their job. And then, then, you know, it arises a memory of the pleasure. So because of this, then this state of mind called attachment then arises.
So looking now just at our mental consciousness, we can say, you know, in the regular day functioning, the way our mind functions, we either have positive states of mind or negative states of mind. There are sort of ones that are called neutral. Let’s forget about those. Okay? The real ones are the positive And the positive ones, know, the ones that I said, generally speaking, if you’ve got a, you know, kind of more spacious and more relaxed, more connected with others or with things, there’s no sort of real sense of separateness, a sense of grasping, or a sense of anger, or all the fearful neurotic stuff.
That’s when we feel like this, that’s a sign that delusions are in the mind, you know? So these are the ones that are mistaken. They’re mistaken in the sense that they are in this is a very curious way to say it. Attachment, for example, is a mistaken state of mind. It’s a deluded, it’s a liar, is a way of saying it.
Attachment is a liar. It’s accurate to say that it’s chocolate cake. That’s a conception, and it’s accurate. It’s completely accurate. It’s accurate to say that it’s a good chocolate cake.
Even relatively speaking, you can deduce because you know your mum’s a good cake, and you see the cake, you’re, oh, she did a really good job this time. Even from the relative point of view of good and bad cakes, you can still say it’s a really good, delicious chocolate cake. That’s not a wrong statement. You can even say that I like chocolate cake. That is not wrong, that’s not a delusion, there’s nothing wrong with liking something.
You know, pleasure, joy, liking, in terms of just cakes now, not even discussing people yet. There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s a completely valid state of mind, given that we’re a human with a body and a tongue and a mind and all the rest, to like something, enjoy something, whatever, you know? There’s nothing wrong with that, not at all. So if that’s the case, then where’s the problem?
Why do we shove three pieces in? Why do we get miserable? Why do we get fat and things? Why do we kind of get hungry for it and get all of these Not just hungry in the stomach, it’s only almost having a stomach, in this relative sense, okay? So where does the problem come?
Well, that’s when the delusions come. So you know, they all come at the same time, like the senses and the mental consciousness, boom, all together, like that, in one second. So all through, all these states of mind all come zapping together in like one split second. This is why it is so hard to analyze our minds, to really look at how our minds function, to really discriminate between this is the essential job of being your own therapist, what I’m getting down to it is extraordinarily difficult to discriminate between virtuous states of mind and non virtuous, because they all kind of almost come together. We mix them all up and confuse them, give them the wrong names.
That’s why we have to do much analysis and be very precise with our own minds. But first, have to know the theories. We have to know the botany before we can start doing the job of pulling out the weeds, you know? So what is attachment then? What causes the suffering?
What causes us to want to shove three bits in, four bits in? What causes us to grasp at it a bit anxiously? What causes us to wish that the other person doesn’t get it? What causes us to get, Oh, God, I’ve eaten so much now, feel miserable, you know? What causes us to get only a fat stomach and no happiness?
What’s the cause of all that? That’s attachment. So, okay, there are these positive, like I said, positive states of mind and negative ones. In relationship to this, the valid, or appropriate, or positive, or reasonable states mind are to say, I like chocolate cake, are to say, I enjoy chocolate cake. There’s nothing wrong with that.
That’s completely human. The unreasonable, the neurotic state of mind, is the one that’s called attachment, which at the moment is completely mixed with liking and the pleasure, as if milk and water were mixed together. So that’s why we can’t discriminate. And that’s why we hear when we say when we hear Buddhas say, you’ve got to give up you you can’t get happy until you give up attachment. And we go, as Lama Zopa says, we go, oh, you mean I’ve to give up my heart?
You’ve to I’ve got to give up chocolate cake? I’ve got to give up pleasure? No. We just don’t see it more precisely enough. We can’t discriminate, you know?
So like I said, there are two characteristics I haven’t said, I’ll say it now there are two characteristics of so called negative states of mind, which imply, of course, are two characteristics, the positive ones. There’s a particular way of looking at them. These are what we have to learn to recognize. The two characteristics of a negative state of mind, for example, attachment, much harder to see. It’s like a honey-coated razor blade.
So let’s talk about something more simple, like anger, or like aversion, let’s say when you’re stuffed full of chocolate cake. Aversion for the cake. There are two states of mind. The first one, when aversion is in the mind, even when it’s mild, like for a chocolate cake, anger for a person, just aversion, because aversion is the basis of anger, really, isn’t it? The state of mind is aversion as opposed to attachment.
When they say aversion is in the mind, Oh, God, I can’t stand chocolate cake. Let’s say like that, you know. Then there are two characteristics. One is, and it’s very obvious, and this is indicated by the term that Tibetans use to refer to these states of mind, there are several terms to refer to them. That is disturbed emotion.
The term is disturbed emotion. Clearly, it’s indicating that when that’s in the mind, to whatever degree, the mind is disturbed. We know this feeling. We know it a thousand times a day when we’re disturbed, when jealousy is there, when anger is there, when depression is there, when stress is there, when anxiety is there, when attachment is there, when we really see it. The mind is disturbed, it’s not peaceful, it’s not content, you know?
But because it’s so normal for us, and we just assume this is ordinary, everyday human life, what can I do about it? Then we take it for granted. It’s like we only ever know that, so we don’t really see it starkly. That’s why we have to look carefully into our mind, because remember what is saying we don’t need to have it. The second characteristic of all these states of mind, which is much harder to see but which is incredibly necessary at some point without a deep analysis, being our own therapist, is again indicated by another term that’s used in the translation of a Tibetan term, it’s like a synonym, used in a different way to refer to these negative states of mind, and that is delusion.
I’ve used the word many times already. The word delusion. Now, we don’t normally think of this term, it’s sort of odd, you know? Or, for example, we would never think we’re delusionary, would we? I mean, it’s only a person who’s really wacky, who’s delusion My god, they’re just living in delusions.
They’re really living in a world where, basically, they’re seeing things that don’t exist. Right? That’s what delusionary means. Right? Well, again, sorry to say, Buddha says we are all delusionary.
It’s, again, simply a question of degree. And what he means is this: that these states of mind I’ve been sort of indicating it already, but I’ll spell it out. These states of mind that Buddha says are the source of our pain, that are disturbing to us, that therefore cause us to harm others, and that keep us suffering in saṃsāra because we continually follow them because they’re deeply habitual in us, that they actually have this characteristic of being liars when they’re in the mind. So it’s like it’s like when you’ve got attachment in the mind, for example, it’s just like our secret Buddhist mothers told us, you’ve got your rose colored spectacles on, haven’t you? So we all know when you’ve got your rose colored spectacles, everything you see through them looks more delicious than they really are.
Do you see my point? We all know this experience when it certainly comes to being in love with somebody, when it comes to the delicious chocolate cake. When your stomach is empty, and you like chocolate cake, and all the conditions come together, delicious chocolate cake and your stomach empty, and you and your strong neediness for it, your attachment, then you’ve got your rose colored spectacles on. And so you then, you know, believe so this is the point. The cake looks this is really hard to see because we you know, the cake looks more delicious than it really is.
The cake in other words, our rose colored spectacles, our own eyes, our own mind itself, the attachment itself, when you have your attachment spectacles on, it causes the object, that is to say, the person, the cake, the weather, whatever the object is, to appear more marvelous, more fantastic, more delicious, more perfect than it simply is. That’s one aspect, one aspect of attachment, just one. And we know this experience. And this is why it’s called delusion, because it causes us to see something in a way that it simply isn’t. And this is what is so hard to see, unbelievably hard to see, you know.
Once we look at attachment as one example of a delusion, one of the major, major ones, the source of all the others, we can then look at all the other characteristics, and some of these we will then recognize. There’s a whole series of characteristics. These are the two essential ones. They’re disturbing in whichever way is unique to that particular delusion, you know? Aversion I’m sorry, started saying aversion for the cake, didn’t I?
So aversion is the same. Aversion I hate chocolate cake. When you’ve got your aversion spectacles on, the cake looks disgusting. Second, your mind is disturbed. The mind is Oh, I hate that.
The mind is agitated, agitated, disturbed. So whatever the delusion is, it’s disturbing in its own particular way, and second, it’s its own particular liar. This is interesting, it’s not hard to see, but this is really the major cause of suffering. Then what happens is, because we’re so addicted to seeing it in a certain way, we believe it. This is the problem.
You’re used to having your rose colored spectacles on for a certain period. So then you believe, you get sucked into believing that that’s what the cake is. So let’s I mean, if we look at people, my goodness, we can really see this, you know. But then we think, well, that’s fantastic. When I’m really in love and he just looks so divine, We think it’s great.
It’s just so marvelous. And the thing is, what’s interesting, it does trigger very good experiences. Buddha is not denying this. It does trigger wonderful experiences, which we call very nice happiness. But the trouble is, this is the thing that sounds very interesting, the Buddha is saying we can have very nice experiences without leaving ourselves up garden paths about the object.
So the tragedy is, like I said before, the only way we know how to get happy is by, through the medium of attachment, to get all this excitement that brings the happiness with the contact with the object, whether it’s the cake or the person, but we don’t know how else to access the happiness within us. We only know it through the medium of these objects. Part of the function of this delusion is to exaggerate their deliciousness, so we grasp at them all the more. So the belief is when we get them, we’ll be happy. We believe the happiness will last forever.
We believe the more contact we have, the happier we’ll get. Now, all we have to do is look at all our experiences, whether it’s cake or people, or anything at all in this universe that we’ve ever had strong contact with that we’ve been so attached to. We will all see that it’s simply not true. It’s just not true. It’s not meant to be some moralistic issue, Buddha’s trying to make you miserable and says you’re not allowed to have cake or sex or drugs.
He’s not saying that. He’s just saying we lead ourselves up garden paths because we misinterpret, because we exaggerate everything. Distort. The mind has lies to us. Our delusions, when they’re in the mind, lie to us.
Another way of talking about what the function of these delusions is, let’s say you have aversion in the mind, your aversion spectacles. The way they say it, you know, is that the object, let’s say the cake Say you hate chocolate cake, right? Certainly, people hate that person. You know? Then when you go to aversion spectacles on, the object, in this case, the person, let’s say, appears no.
No. They say it takes on the aspect of what would of of that particular state of mind. In this case, aversion. Meaning, the person looks disgusting, don’t they? We all know that.
The person whom you hate looks horrible to you. You can’t even bear to see them. You can’t even bear to hear their name. You can’t bear to be too close to them. You understand my point?
Well, that’s And then so what happens is, of course, the usual thing, the aversion to the mind for various reasons. We believe, don’t we? We believe a hundred percent that that is what the person is like. Even if someone says, Rubina, he’s not that bad. You start to dislike them just as much, because they’re stupid, you know?
Do you understand my point? Or you get everybody to kind of, you know, come along, you’ve got to kind of do this market research, get all the other people who hate him as well. Yeah, well, they think so, and they think so, and they think so, which gives us increases our logic for believing the person has to be horrible. Okay. This gets very complex because it’s all mixed with, well, they did bad things to me.
Buddha’s not denying they do bad things to you. But the simple thing that we’re trying to see here by looking into our own minds is that when delusions, unhappy emotions, are in our mind, We’re not discussing whether the person is bad or good. They could be evil. They could be very harmful. There’s no problem with that.
This is where it’s quite shocking. Buddha is saying the main cause, one of the major causes of your suffering, like we said already, is the delusion in your mind. So then we say, But excuse me, this person raped me, killed me, harmed me. Yes, Buddha is saying, I know that, but that’s not the issue here. I’m really paraphrasing here, but I’m getting the essence of trying to get really to the heart of what our personal practice is to be.
It doesn’t mean it’s easy, but this is all based on Buddha’s view of karma. This is where the real liberation from suffering begins to develop, when we can learn to separate like this. And this is why you can have a person like these old lamas who’ve been tortured for thirty years go in and be tortured and come out more compassionate, more loving, more forgiving, more wise, more content. It sounds insane to our usual view, because the logic we use, which is what Buddha says is samsaric, is the way we are now, and it’s absolute total logic for every being that most of us are like this, you know, most animals, creatures, humans, everybody, you name it, is like this: If there is an object in front of me, that due to whatever reason I find attractive, be it a chocolate cake or a person, then we say, well, of course, I’m going get attached. Of course attachment arises.
Of course it’s delicious. Of course I want to have it. What has it got to do with me? It’s there, vibrating deliciousness at me so powerfully that I am just forced to eat it. What can I do, you know?
Right? Isn’t it? We all know this. So we’re completely giving all the power to the object. We never think for a second that we can have control over our own mind, and really, by understanding the nature of attachment, to eliminate the attachment, learn to remove the lies from our mind so we see the object as it is and don’t get kind of seduced by it, you know?
This is the major suffering we all have. It’s like we’re victims. Now, same with aversion. The logic is, when a person out there harms me, for example, you know, when a person harms me, we say, of course I’ll be angry. Look what they did to me.
What’s it got to do with me? I have no control over this. Of course I’m angry. No one ever doubts this. What Buddha’s saying is nuts.
Of course the person harms you. We know that. We can see. But it doesn’t follow, just like with the cake, that you need to be seduced by it, that you need to automatically grasp at it. It doesn’t follow that when a person harms you, that you automatically get angry and hate the person.
This is why Buddha says the cause of our suffering is our delusion. Of course the person punching me is a catalyst for it, it’s obvious, you know. But this is where the real freedom, and I mean freedom, this word liberation from suffering is not a joke. This is the key to it, the absolute key. Why isn’t holding on to compassion and bliss, isn’t that another form of attachment?
What do you mean? She’s asking if holding on to bliss and compassion. What do you mean holding on to it? Explain what you mean. Or attaining that and making that your focus.
What would be wrong with having a mind full of compassion? How would that be causing you suffering? How would that cause you suffering? The point of making a judgment on the other. No one’s discussing anybody else.
We’re discussing ourselves here. We’re not discussing anybody else. We’re discussing ourselves. So the point is, what we have to do by analyzing all this is discover which states of mind