Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 52-minute teaching, Ven Robina Courtin presents the Four Noble Truths as a practical system for working with suffering. She walks through suffering at three levels—gross misery, happiness as a subtle form of suffering, and the instability underlying all experience—then identifies two causes: karmic seeds from past actions and your emotional reaction now. The core practice is the Four Opponent Powers (regret, reliance, remedy, resolve), a four-step purification method anyone can employ immediately. Stories illustrate: a mugging in New York that triggered no fear, a meditator’s miraculous escape from a cliff, gang members transforming in American prisons. She emphasizes that fear is the root of all delusions, and the mind has genuine power to change through compassion and mental discipline.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 02 DAR 2003 06 20.mp3
UUID: 3497ae17-772a-4e2f-88f0-bc1a9d1bb807
Teacher: Ven Robina Courtin
Collection: y Death and Rebirth (Ven Robina Courtin)
Date: 2003-06-20
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 51.6 minutes
Words: ~10,728
To jealousy and anger and hurt, don’t we? But just because we go to it more easily doesn’t mean it’s our natural state. This is really the natural meaning in what is harmonious and appropriate and what we all want anyway, happiness, contentment, fulfillment, joy, bliss, you name it, you know. So, okay, if it’s true and if we’re prepared to give it a go, that you can be free of unhappiness, free of suffering, then we need to know what suffering is. We better be on the same page, you know?
So the Buddhist view of so this is the first noble, just where Buddha starts. Okay? There is suffering. So of course, if you sort of when you start learning about Buddhism, he says, you start off with there is suffering and suffering is suffering and it’s suffering and it’s so depressing and it’s you think, god, come on, mate. Give us a break.
Give me something good, please. But the only reason you’re wanting to say that there is pollution and that you have to investigate its nature isn’t to make you depressed, is it? It’s so that you can now identify it and remove it. So you’re happy to find the pollution now, aren’t you? Not just to sort of reinforce it and rub your nose in it.
The reason to say there is suffering and then identify it precisely is because you can then recognize it and remove it. So what is suffering according to Buddhism, you know? Well, you can say there’s three different levels of it. The first one is what we all agree is suffering. Misery, depression, someone harming you, hurt, hunger, starving, a war zone, all this.
That’s gross level of suffering. No question. But the second level is kind interesting. It’s a bit scary and that’s what we call happiness. So what Buddha is saying is that what we call happiness is nothing other than suffering.
It’s a subtle level of suffering. And so to really get this one, we have to look at the second noble truth, which is the causes of suffering. Because it’s you first, you’ve got to know what suffering is, the pollution, so you can remove it. But then you’ve got to know the causes of it, so you stop doing it again. It’s very obvious.
So this brings us to the causes of suffering. So okay, we’ve touched on these both, but I’ll say them now together. Buddha says there are two causes of suffering. And again remember why you’re finding the cause of something? So you can find a solution.
So the causes of suffering are two. Now this gentleman punches me in the nose and and, you know, and and Gloria says, what’s wrong, Robina? Why are you suffering? And I’d say, Fred punched me in the nose. We’d all understand.
No one would argue. No one would think I was stupid. Right? You’d all agree. How dare he blah blah blah, you know?
But Buddha says there are two causes of suffering, and I’m sorry to tell you his punch is neither of them. Okay? It’s a catalyst, definite, but not in terms of solution to my ending of suffering, his punch is not the issue. This is the way of saying it. So what are the causes?
Well, you said them both. There are two causes. One is the long term which is the action that I did two and a half lives ago of harming this person when he was known as Mary or Fred or whatever. And that that karma set us up, that energy set us up to meet again, and so now he punches me back. Like I said, very simply.
That’s the long term cause which answers the question, why me? You know? The second cause of my suffering, as we can see, is my angry response, my hurt, my fear, my resentment, my bitterness, my wish to harm him back, whatever. So then I harm him back, and then what happens? I sow the seed again to set me up again to have another punch again and so we keep going and the ball keeps rolling, you know, and never ending me.
So the Buddhist approach to what practice is is to cut this cycle, you know. So the first and immediate level of practice that I have to employ is to change my mind now. Okay. Get the hell out of his way if he’s gonna punch you again. Don’t just say, oh, it’s karma.
Punch me. No way, you know. If you get out of his way, but work on my mind because anyway, that’ll give me more contentment now, why make me so miserable. And secondly, we’ll cut the cut this this this broken record, you know, we’ll stop it. That’s that’s the really first most powerful level of practice, to work on my mind now.
And of course, if in order to work on your mind when someone harms you in whatever way, you know, you’ve got to be aware of your mind, which means you have to do these meditation techniques which enable you to see yourself so that you can do the process of changing your mind, you know. And in terms of changing the second cause of suffering, the long term one, then okay, in this case, it’s just ripened so it’s too late to pull the seed out now. But the Buddhist view is given that we’ve all got a continuity of consciousness and it’s been existing since who knows when, you know, going back and back, and given that we’ve been having lives all that time, that every moment of our thoughts, our actions and our words is a seed that has been planted in this mind. So in other words, we’ve got masses of seeds, negative ones, let’s say, and positive, that haven’t ripened yet. So let’s pull out the weeds before they ripen.
How intelligent. So deal with the weeds now, but pull out the weeds that haven’t ripened yet before they ripen in the future. So that we have these two levels of practice in Buddhism. We call the second one purification practice, you know, and I was talking about that again in prison today. And it’s very, again, very psychological process because it’s the mind that we’re talking about.
And as Lama Zopa says, purification is the power of doing these four steps. So this is where, again, the view in Buddhism is quite different from the religious views. Of course, if God is the creator, then it’s obvious God created the universe and created the laws and created what is right and wrong. So clearly, it’s God’s job to forgive me. You know?
But that’s not the view in Buddhism. So the the relationship you have with the Buddha is more like a doctor, really. You could sort of say like that. A person you rely upon, you have enormous respect for, enormous reliance upon, who has done the job that you’re attempting to do, so has all the methods, has all the advice, advice, has all the solutions, you know, so whom you turn to with respect to to get his solutions to employ them yourself. This is the idea.
That’s the relationship one has. And we call that devotion, you know. It’s very similar to the relationship between a person and God, you know, but it’s just from a different point of view, that’s all. So the first step in purification is this very practical attitude we call regret. Now normally, we have guilt.
And the Dalai Lama was asked one time, what’s the difference between guilt and regret? This one we talk about in Buddhism. And he’s and he’s very sweet the way he gave the answer. He said, guilt is looking into the past and saying, I did this, I did this, I did this, I’m a bad person. I’m a bad person.
I’m hopeless. I’m no good. It’s like constantly going on about what we did, but never looking to what we can do to change it. Kinda hopeless, impotent. Regret is saying, yes, I did this.
I did this. I did this. I did this. But what can I do about it? It looks to the future.
That’s a very similar way to say it. It’s an empowering attitude, and it’s very courageous because you’re owning responsibility because guilt is not taking responsibility, you know. Guilt cops out. Guilt is like blaming you instead of blaming him. They’re the same attitude but different objects.
That’s all. You know? And they’re impotent. They’re completely useless states of mind. There’s no benefit in saying it’s his fault.
What does that do? You know? Just the same as saying it’s my fault. What does that do? So what this regret is, you know, in just the same way, it’s the attitude like this.
Let’s just say you just had your dinner and then, you know, Gloria tells you there’s poison in it. Oh my god, you’d say. You know, you wouldn’t I mean, you’d be so shocked, wouldn’t you? And then instantly, because you know the meaning of poison, poison is that if you leave it in your body, it’ll cause you suffering. Right?
And you don’t want suffering, so you immediately think, what can I do about it? Quick, let’s do something about it. Well, that’s regret. And that means and we do this practice every night. You know, one should.
What is it sensible to do it every night? And and actually, as Lama Zopa says, you’re insane not to. Because, you know, as many moments as the day as as many karmic seeds we planted, you know? And we don’t have to be Hitler to be bad, believe me. I mean, we all know that to create negative karma, you know?
So okay. So the first step is this regret, and that means you check up on that day, okay, you know, at nine o’clock I bad mouth my mother and ten o’clock I killed the dog and at eleven o’clock I, you know, ran the red light. I mean you understand, whatever. You check out the day, you recognize the main things you did that harmed others with your body or your speech. And you regret them because leaving those seeds in your mind is like leaving poison in you, you will get the suffering.
So this first step really does require we have a very kind of wholesome relationship with ourself. It’s like compassion for yourself actually. Just like it would be if you go to a doctor because you don’t want the poison inside you because you you know you don’t want to suffer. It’s very sensible. And Buddha says, you’ve got to recognize your own suffering and not want it before you really can have compassion for others which is recognizing their suffering and not wanting it for them.
So this one of regret is, you know, you contemplate, okay. I did this, I did this, I did this. Okay. You know, I really regret it because I if I leave these seeds in my mind, I will suffer and I’m fed up with suffering, you know. And then you can’t then you think even then you think also that that just all the the miserable thoughts, the angry and the hurt and the depressed and the and then all the rubbish, you know, that’s that’s poisoning you.
Again, not guilt. It’s really intelligent view that recognizes that your mind has power, you know. It’s producing you. So then you regret these things because you don’t want the future suffering. And then even if, you if it makes sense to you, you can regret whatever you must have done in this life and infinite past lives to ever harm any living being ever because you don’t want future suffering.
It really is compassion for yourself, and we and that takes time for us to cultivate actually because it we’re almost as uncomfortable for us. You know? Then the next step which follows logically on from this one. Well, whom can I turn to to give me the medicine, you know, to give me the the antidote? So here we’re talking Buddha.
If you’re a Christian, you turn to Jesus. If here we’re talking talking talking Buddhism, you know? So the second step we call reliance. We whom and so it’s got two parts actually. The first part is we rely upon the Buddha to the extent that it has meaning for us, you know?
Just like, again, the good analogy of the poison. Let’s say, you know, you had you know, let’s say you’ve heard about some great doctor, but you’re not sick, but you’ve heard about this amazing person in Timbuktu. You have great respect but you know you don’t much care do you because you’re not sick. Now let’s say you suddenly get sick, you’ve eaten that poison and you know that one doctor in Kathmandu has that antidote, Timbuktu whatever has that antidote, you will be galvanized into action, You’re gonna go all the way. You don’t care how much it’ll cost.
You’re gonna hang on every word that doctor says. That’s what reliance is, and that’s what we mean by refuge. You really have great respect now because you need they’ve got the medicine you can use, you know. So that’s the attitude one would have as a Buddhist, which one would cultivate for the so called Buddha, you know, for the Buddha. As a doctor who’s got the methods you could employ to remove this poison, you know, that’s gonna harm you.
And the second one we call reliance also is the second part of the second step is is where you have compassion for others now. So you contemplate, you know, those you’ve harmed, really have compassion. Compassion is defined in Buddhism as the wish that someone else doesn’t suffer. It’s empathy with their suffering, you know. So you’d have the strong wish to wanna purify yourself, remove your negative karmic so that you you can only benefit others in the future.
And then also you even have compassion for those who’ve harmed you, which is a tough one. But if you have the view of karma, you know why they’ve harmed you. He’s punched me because I punched him before and he’s gonna suffer in the future again. So I have compassion for him, you know. I don’t want him to suffer thinking like this.
Then the third step is you take the medicine. And you could say in Buddhism, we’ve got this whole medicine cabinet of medicines, you know. And there’s many many different practices and things we would do, and this third step is called the antidote. What do you call it when you call the four r’s? Remedy.
Remedy. The remedy. She calls them the four r’s. It’s very nice. You know, re regret, reliance, the remedy.
That’s the remedy or the antidote, the remedy. So you do a practice, you know, and we have different ones. We do certain ones where we use mantra, maybe you visualize, you know. Because again it’s your mind that’s doing it. And the fourth one is the what will you call the r?
Resolve. Resolve. The resolve not to do it again. No. I like the four r’s.
That’s good. I would call it the power of the determination not to do again. Resolve not to do again, you know. And again this brings us to the power of our own mind which we often don’t have. We think that this victim of our own delusions.
I can’t change. What can I do? You know? But the Buddha is saying, it’s my mind. It’s my mind.
You know? If I’ve got a big entrenched habit in my mind from having done it before, I can change that habit. That’s up to me. It’s tough work. We all know habits are hard to change, but we all know they can.
So here you start real small and humble, you know? So maybe you can’t ever say, I will never gossip again if you’re, you know, gossiping from your bad habits. You might say, you know, let’s say you’re doing the practice at ten o’clock at night before you go to bed, you know you probably won’t talk until eight in the morning, but you can say I will not gossip for ten hours, you know, and you’ll keep it, you’ll be very happy with yourself, you’ve kept it, you’ll feel good so you’ll be able to say eleven hours the next day, you know? I mean really, you give yourself a real proper timeline just like when you go on a diet, if you don’t resolve to go on that diet, you never will, will you? You’ll always be wishy washy and oh, I have another piece but if you really make that mental determination, I will definitely only eat one piece, sure enough, your hand will stay in your lap, you know?
You see my point? It’s the power of our own mind. We all know it every day we have it, you know? So it’s beginning to have confidence in that. And this is what Buddha means by really changing.
All these steps all play a part in changing fundamentally our karma. This person who I very who this very person I am. You know? And it’s extremely practical. And it’s very it’s very again, very empowering.
You know. And it’s step by step, step by step, step by step, you know. So a little bit more about karma then you can please, if you have any questions. Just to say here that each of these steps purifies one of the four ways that karma ripens and this is very interesting. The Buddhism would say, you know, this is like I said, the creative principle.
It’s not as if karma happens sometimes, but the rest of the time, things just happen. No reason. Everything’s karma. You could say that without being a bit cosmic, you know. Just like everything in your garden, such as some have seeds, but roses just kinda grow, no one knows why, you know.
Everything has a seed. This is how it is, you know. So everything in your life has a cause, a seed you planted in your mind that is now ripening. So our seeds from past ripen in four ways. The first one is in even the very kind of being we are.
So, you know, like I said, we think our mom mom and dad made us, literally shaped us, created this person called Robina. Buddha says nonsense. Well, he’s not being rude. I’m being rude, but is very polite. He’s saying not true, and he gives his reasons.
So, okay, like I said, you know, what yeah. Did you your consciousness came along and entered your mother’s egg and sperm. Right? So mothers and fathers. So, basically, simply speaking, in certain Buddhist Buddhist teachings, they would say not more than forty nine human days before your mind went you know, before your present conception, your consciousness was in another body, another form of some kind.
And just roughly speaking, let’s assume it was a human one, that at the time of death of that one, very strong karmic seed of what we call morality. And morality in Buddhism is is meaning if you’ve practiced not killing, not lying, not stealing, not bad mouthing, not harming sentient beings. That is the major practice of very powerful morality Buddhism says. And morality is the cause of having a one example is the cause of having a human life, going to a human body. By the time your consciousness leaves that past body, it’s already on autopilot, propelled by the force of your morality karma finding its way very precisely to your present mother’s human womb as opposed to your present mother’s dog’s womb in the backyard.
It’s like, oops, got the wrong one. Not like that, you know? It’s very precise. Structured. It’s very kind of it’s no one up there pulling the strings.
It’s it’s it’s it’s lone law, you know. karma takes care as Lama Yeshe says. And so so the first way our karma ripens is in terms of the kind of form we have, you know, the kind of life we occupy, human, animal, whatever, you know, because we’ve all got all these options, Buddha says. So then the second one is in the next three are in any any of that as lives. So in this, let’s say, in our human life.
So we’ve got a reason we’ve got a human life because of morality. But we have also we can now see we have we have tendencies. So in other words, Hitler and Mother Teresa had a both got human body, but we can sort of say they’re the similarities in, isn’t it? Look at their personalities. Look at their tendencies.
Completely different. And that’s the second kind of karma. It’s actions similar to the cause and it’s the name given to the kind to all your tendencies. So, you know, your tendency to love or to be kind or jealous or angry or depressed or lazy, you name it. All those tendencies, all your personality, all your characteristics, they are all simply from the habit of having done done those before.
That’s no big secret to us in this life. If you’ve practiced the piano for twenty years, no one’s surprised that you’re good at piano if you’ve practiced for twenty years. But why be surprised if you’re angry if you’ve practiced it for twenty years? I mean, it’s obvious. So all Buddha says is if you can look at your little baby self, you’ve already shown these tendencies, it’s because you’ve practiced them before and you brought all this baggage with you, you know, good or bad ones.
So that’s the second kind of karma, the second way our karmic seeds ripen in terms of our personality, our tendencies. The third one is called experiences similar to the cause and that’s all the punches and the kisses, what people do to us, how we are seen by others, how we are treated by others, what happens to us in our life. This is due to our karma too. No accident, you know? And the fourth one is interesting.
It’s even called environmental karma. It’s, you know, I mean, one person can be born in this life and have incredible tendencies to get sick when they eat this and practically die when they eat that and very and very weak. I mean, that’s this is a direct result of it’s like environmental karma that even the food that’s meant to nourish you harms you. Or and all the actions we do, all the positive, all the negative, have all these four kinds, four ways they ripen, but obviously not altogether. So for example, you can see you might have a tendency to be very truthful but people always lie to you.
Well that’s the experience similar to the cause to your past lying. Some people might always lie but everybody else doesn’t lie to them. We can see, maybe you’re very generous but people always steal from you or maybe people don’t pay their bills. Or people just say you’re really kind, but people are mean to you. We can see that they don’t always go together, you know, because they’re different kinds of karma.
But all of them are from the past tendencies, from the past seeds we’ve planted. And so these four opponent powers as we call them or the four r’s as Gloria nicely calls them, the regret, they all each purify one of these four which is really interesting. Regretting, it’s most interesting this one, regretting, let’s say regretting lying. In the long term what that purifies is people lying to you. So instead of getting angry when people always lie to you, just remember, oh, there’s my past lying coming back to me.
I regret it. Don’t be surprised they stopped lying to you, honestly. It’s not cosmic. It’s really practical and I’ve seen it myself. The second one they call the the reliance, that purifies environmental karma.
The third one, the antidote or the the the remedy, this purifies what they refer to in Buddhism as the suffer lower realm karma, being born as an animal or suffering realms, which Buddha says we all have the potential to do. And the fourth one, which is the resolve not to do again, this purifies the habit to do it again. If you say, I will never kill again, don’t be surprised. You will never kill again, you know? So this is the way you can, as Lama Zopa says, mold your mind into any shape you’d like.
This is how they say, you know? That’s a few of Buddha’s ideas. So please ask me some questions if you’d like. You got three hours worth. I talk fast.
Okay. So ask some questions if you’d like. It’s already nine o’clock. I’m sorry. If you’d like.
Anybody. Yes, please. Yep. Yes. You mean the first connection?
How can you have a first chicken? If you don’t have a view of Creator where does the first chicken come from? I mean it’s a chicken and egg idea, isn’t it? It is what is most fascinating again we talked a lot about that today it’s fascinating that we all want a beginning why should there be a beginning? What’s the reason?
It’s fascinating we all a beginning but why should there be? How can you have a first I mean this is the Buddhist mean even one time the Dalai Lama because he likes to talk with all these scientists and everybody, he said one time, big bang, no problem. Just not the first big bang, that’s all. I mean in other words, the Buddhist view, have they don’t call it physics, but it’s very similar explanations of the subtle energies that existed that that out of which universe has come, but that was coming from an a previous universe, which came from a previous universe. So Buddha would say, your mind, my mind, you’re not afraid, know.
What’s your name again? Malcolm’s mind. We can’t find a first moment. I mean, in other words, if you trace back your thoughts and feelings, this moment coming from a previous and you might thought, maybe I began at conception. But no, if you didn’t make our God a Buddha, you’re not coming from mommy, not coming from a deity, not coming from nothing, the only option you can come up with intellectually is previous moment of itself.
So you go back a thousand years, maybe I began then. Well, if your mind began then, where’d it come from? It has to have come from previous moment. A million years, you gotta have the same. So Buddha says, as outrageous as it sounds, but you think it’s true conceptually, it’s faultless.
Your consciousness is beginningless. You can’t have a first moment. But equally, there’s a subtle energy in the the way they talk in the text in Buddhism. There’s a subtle physical energy. Like, talk in terms of earth, air, fire, water.
Subtle wind energy that’s that’s also indestructible. That is the source of all universes, even the source of these bodies, you know. And it but it’s also it’s not created. And it’s it’s the it’s the basic matter of the universe if you like, the way they talk, you know, in Buddhism. Does that make sense?
Okay. Yes, please. Gabe? I hear you. Yes.
It’s a good point Gabe saying well if you don’t have attachment, don’t have anger, there’s some kind of neutral point there. No way. This is what’s another way of saying interesting. It’s like, you know, you just just forget about whether it’s attachment aversion. This is called as pollution and there’s pure water.
There’s there’s delusions and there’s virtue. Okay? So every time you remove one drop of pollution from your water, your water is that much more pure, isn’t it? You agree? So every time if you you remove a great lump of pollution, your water immediately manifests as that much more pure.
Well, that’s what happens here. Without even beginning to practice compassion overtly, directly, just by removing your attachment and anger, just by lessening your attachment and anger, automatically the natural qualities of your mind will manifest. So as soon as you’re not attached or angry, you’re going to be kind, just naturally. You don’t get to neutral, that’s meaningless, that’s depressing. It’s not as if when you remove the pollution, you removed all the pollution, you removed it, got to go find water to inject back into it.
Not like that. As you remove pollution, so naturally you become more loving, more kind, more wise. So the more delusions, the less happy, the less kind. The less delusion, the more kind, the more happy. It just naturally rises.
So there’s this nice analogy in what is that a bird needs two wings. I think I might have mentioned that. The compassion wing is where you actively go out there and increase. It’s sort of like you purify already the pure water. You make it amazing.
You develop proactive love and compassion for others. You absolutely do incredible things. But already on the wisdom wing, which is all the work I’ve discussed so far that you do yourself, love and compassion are the natural consequence of the mind of a person who is lessening their delusions. It’s just a natural consequence. So as you get less if you just keep working in other words, the main way of working on the wisdom wing is to concentrate on removing the pollution.
The main way of working on the compassion wing is to purify even more the water. So just by removing your delusions, by coming less angry, less jealous, you naturally become more loving and more kind. It’s sort of like it’s this other words, we think happiness is what you sort of have to look for like a needle in a haystack. It’s what you get when you get what you want. Buddha says happiness is what you get when you give up delusions.
It’s just simply the byproduct of removing the suffering. In other words, you don’t even have to concentrate on, oh, where’s happiness? Where’s happiness? Where’s love? Where’s compassion?
It will just arise naturally as you get rid of the rubbish, and then you perfect it with a compassion wing, isn’t it? So it’s hopeful, it’s rather positive attitude really. Anyone else please? Yes? Good.
Doesn’t matter darling, you go for Development of what? Dementia. Is there any evidence to suggest that meditation or these practices can offset the development of dementia? I don’t know if there is, but I would but using but talking in the Buddhist approach Buddhist way of how how the work we do on our mind does affect our body, then definitely you could say. So just recently it was interesting in the new scientist.
I was in Europe recently actually and because last year when I was in London the BBC interviewed me on for something I must be in their system because they call me again and I was in Germany so I participated in this very brief interview on radio four BBC radio four which is on the basis of this recent article the new scientist by I think I don’t know what he was some psychologist, called Owen Flanagan who’s worked a lot with the Dalai Lama I think and he’s for fifteen years now His Holiness is having all these conferences called mind life conferences meeting with all sorts of physicists and scientists and neuro blah blah blah’s you know and he’s encouraging these people to do research and so he’s using some of his own monks from Dharamsala as people to, you know, they’ve done tests and the findings that Owen Flanagan wrote about in The New Scientist was the brains, is it the left side of the brain that’s all, what’s the left side of the brain? Okay, well I don’t know which side but one side was completely developed and the other side wasn’t in other words what he did all the tests on like when suddenly a big noise or the anxiety levels, the happiness, the anxiety levels, the stress levels were completely almost minimal, know, and that no matter what happened they were extraordinarily happy, content, unflustered, unstressed and they saw evidence of this in the brain.
So they can only conclude, is the point, Owen Flanagan’s point, that yes, when you meditate, it actually changes the physical, you know, the chemical balance of your body. So that we can conclude therefore, you know, that it it can radically change. So the Buddhist view is exactly that because even this is where the Buddhist view of karma is. The way they talk in the Tibetan text, in the Buddhist text, sorry, they use, you know, for their view of the universe, they talk in terms of earth, air, fire, water. Right?
They don’t talk about, you know, atoms and things. And so they had these explanations especially in the what? Don’t go backwards. Oh, no. Okay.
I won’t. That they had these in Tibetan medicine for example, Tibetan medicine is very similar to the Chinese medicine insofar as it diagnoses by feeling the pulses, know, it talks about the physical energies and the relationship between the subtle, the earth air fire of the body, the components of the body, the makeup of the body and the relationship between that and the mind. So if you go to a Tibetan doctor, they’ll diagnose you and then they’ll say, okay, oh gosh, you’ve got lung, which is an over emphasis, an exaggerated amount of the wind energy is kind of out of control you know so that’s they have this very elaborate way of diagnosing and describing the relationship of all the imbalances of the elements in relation to the various negative states of mind so there’s lots of attachment energy that’s going to bring this lung which brings anxiety and stress and all that worries and stuff so they will give you physical medicine, herbal medicine that will calm down the physical energies which will then immediately impact on your mind equally you would go to work on your mind which will then impact on your body as well because I mean obviously this is completely interdependent relationship because Buddha would say the mind and the body aren’t the same.
The mind and the body physical is not mental and mental is not physical but they’re obviously interdependent. So working on either one can impact obviously on the other because it’s a holistic thing you know. So it makes complete sense in Buddhism and you can in other words the number of Tibetan doctors already you have so many stories of this they don’t even keep records normally, well yes I had this patient in Germany who took my medicine for six months and now he’s got no cancer and this one fixed his MS and this oh yes is that one who had AIDS and I mean they just kind of we did a story in the magazine I edited once and interviewing a Tibetan doctor it was astonishing and I know from my own self talking to people just taking medicine plus, you know, working on your behavior, they say. You gotta take the medicine and you work on your behavior, which means practice morality. And then also do some new practices.
Altogether, you can heal anything, you know. This is very very fits perfectly with the Buddhist view. It makes sense? Yeah. Yes.
Talk about what the last sentence you just said was what? So you’re meaning can you have control over your death and your rebirth is what you’re saying perhaps? No? Yeah and then once and then happens then will that subtle consciousness realize in the next life what actually know what really means to Oh absolutely, it’s more it’s okay yes first of all the most basic level of practice for a Buddhist is without with a Buddhist you know say a person who doesn’t have the view doesn’t have the doesn’t have the awareness of a past and a future life which most of us don’t have so you know a Buddhist at that level is working on, you know, having thought about it, working that using that as their working hypothesis. Put it like that.
So you act as if, you know. That means you abide by the laws of karma. You don’t bad mouth, don’t lie, don’t steal, don’t kill. First, because you know it’ll cause you suffering, but also because you it’ll cause others suffering, and you don’t want suffering. So you act like that.
So that’s setting up a virtuous seeds, karma takes care. Even if you just die with no control, you’re gonna die a happy death and your might, karma will just carry, your own actions will just propel you to a reasonable life and you’ll carry on. Then the more advanced level of practice and this is what Buddhism would assert is possible for all of us, we really develop what through meditation techniques develop learn to access subtle levels of this consciousness which we definitely can do, Buddha says and that in other words we have gross consciousness which is what we function at from day to day conceptual and sensory and that’s about all we have and we can all see it’s limited I mean we all go on about well how do you know reincarnation is true who remembers the past life well excuse me who remembers most of today and a serious point, we don’t. If we even if we all wrote down everything we remember, we’d get it wrong anyway because we all have distorted views and we remember probably two percent of today, you know. So the conceptual mind, we can see it, but Buddha would say is very limited in its capacity, know.
But we have subtle consciousness they call it. Now we virtually never access that. You can say we do get glimpses of it when we dream, but we don’t have much control. You know, we go here, fly there, it can be weird, can be nice. We don’t we can’t go back there every time at will you know but the Buddha would say through the various meditation techniques that we can access these subtle levels of awareness where you virtually ceased temporarily the gross level it’s like we do that every time we go to sleep we you know we’re unconscious a meditator can go to that level, can be conscious at the subtle level and that level of consciousness is has the power to see past.
It’s like a microscope of your mind, it can see more subtle phenomenon like past and future. Then you’re able to do that easily, you know, and those great meditators can then go to that level that when they die, they can have complete control. They can kind of book the womb they want. They have no worries. They’re in control, you know, and they talk like this.
Completely possible, know. It’s not potluck, you know. Then you’re really in charge, then you really know what you’re doing. And by this point, you’re pretty advanced on both wings of the bird, you know. They say like that.
And what’s interesting too, then you have you got gross level, subtle level, and also, by the way, this subtle consciousness, it it it can leave the body. It doesn’t need the body for its existence. This is how come you get you you have people in this room, I’m sure, have had out of body experiences, near death experiences. This is the explanation in Buddhism, how come you’re gonna have those, you know? Floating up on the ceiling watching yourself, you know?
Completely fits with the Buddhist view. The gross level of consciousness, obviously it needs this gross body for its existence and what the death process is when you time you die then this gross one has ceased for sure, that’s it. But your subtle consciousness then is coming into play and only if you’ve meditated and become very experienced at the time of death, you go to that level and you’re still conscious at that level and you get to what they call very subtle consciousness, which is the subtlest level of your conscious being beyond which it can’t be subtler. And and this you could say loosely is the equivalent to what Christians would call the soul, but they have very many different philosophical views about the nature of that phenomenon. Okay?
But this very subtle level of your being which they call indestructible, it’s indestructible consciousness. This didn’t this never not existed, you know? That’s the Buddhist idea. Yeah. Someone else, please.
Yes, please. Good on you. Just popped up. I love being in Australia. I love Australians.
What’s your personal opinion on euthanasia? Well, darling, the Buddhist opinion the Buddhist view would be but darling, excuse me. I don’t have an opinion that isn’t Buddhist. And that’s a fact. I’m a Buddhist.
So then, of course, I have an it fits with the Buddhist view. It’d be bit spitting for my poor head if it weren’t, you know? So I’ll give it to the Buddha, not me. Okay? Buddha and I think it.
I agree with Buddha, put it like that. The Buddha’s the Buddha’s view would be, what is euthanasia? It’s killing somebody who is suffering, isn’t it? And we kill them out of kindness, don’t we? So from the so there’s two factors here.
There’s let’s say you’re gonna kill me and let’s say you do the action, so there’s two things, there’s your karma and that’s determined by your motivation and how you do the action and why, in other words why you do it, that determines whether you create negative karmic seeds in your mind or positive ones which determines whether you have future suffering or happiness, that’s your story. Then there what you do to me and what happens to my consciousness when it leaves my body. Now, you know, let’s say you have compassion and you very well might and indeed what we mean by euthanasia, it is compassion. So from your point of view, you could say because motivation was pure, then you’re killing me, you don’t create much negative karma at all. But now we have to ask the question, but we never do.
Well, I wonder if I did benefit Robina. Now darling, in Buddhist terms, the only way you can say with certainty that you benefited me is that when I died, my consciousness left my body and it took an even better rebirth where I could carry on practicing my spiritual path. Now if you can’t say that with certainty, excuse me would you please leave me alone? It’s sort of like you know I’ve got a headache and you really mean well and you have such compassion and you have a pill in your hand but you forget whether it’s cyanide or an aspirin. You’d rather I have my headache wouldn’t you unless you know the consequences now we know in our ordinary life if you don’t know the consequences of your action you’re not going to do it you’re just intelligent you know well the same here okay good so you agree with Buddha too good are you okay somebody else go on yes yep I beg your pardon I can’t hear you you’re gonna have to say that again fear Oh to how to deal with it you mean kind of fear of rapists and murderers or just fear about the exam or what?
Just problems in life. Well it’s really interesting the way Buddhism describes it that the Buddhist view psychologically of all these unhappy states of mind that we all know and you know attachment, anger, pride, jealousy, their nature is fear. It’s the nature. The the way they say it in Buddhism is the nature of Samsāra. Samsāra isn’t some exciting place where you’re allowed to have sex and drugs and you have to give up boring nirvana, not like that.
Samsāra is a word that you can say refers to being caught up in the neuroses, the miserable states of mind, which are all ego based. We didn’t talk too much about that one, this all based in this neurotic sense of self that’s so primordial for us we don’t even notice it. We just take it as a given, you know? But the nature of all this the garbage in us, which causes us pain and which causes us to harm others, which we can all call ego, it is fear. So as they say, when you’ve when you’ve and I haven’t discussed this at all, but Buddhism Buddhism talks very much when we’ve completely removed all those delusions, and we’ve real we’re in touch with reality now.
We’ve realized the true nature of all phenomena, blah blah blah. We’ve realized emptiness, they would say. Then there is no fear. As Lama Zopa says, fear is finished. So it’s a question of so fear as we know is completely irrational.
I mean, excuse me, but all the people on September eleven at eight thirty in the morning who were up on the hundred and tenth restaurant floor or whatever, looking at the divine sky and rejoicing in their beautiful office environment, they should have been out of their mind with fear. They were gonna die in a horrible way in one hour or something, but because they didn’t see it coming, they’re living in this illusion of beauty, you know, and then after this, everybody then forevermore has fear about high buildings. I mean, it’s completely irrational. When you hit once with lightning, we continue to imagine it’s gonna come again. People have been held up once, they’re never gonna go on the street again.
We we we our fears aren’t based on knowledge, they’re based on projections of what might happen based on some past experience, but not in rational way at all, you know. I mean, I’ve got lots of fears of different things, but I know I don’t have much fear of violence. So I know that, you know, if I go to prison or like, Gloria, whatever, some people hear that I go into prisons among rapists and triple murderers and these ex gangsters and I can, you know, I can tell you amazing stories about some people in prison. People can’t believe that I’m not scared. I mean, I I remember got held up with a gun in New York City, you know.
I didn’t have a fear, it didn’t stop me from it didn’t tell me it didn’t stop me from talking the bloke off for a start and it didn’t stop me from walking in the streets of New York again, know. People think I’m insane but I don’t have those fears. In other words, because I did have that experience, I even was able to placate this man and make him go away with his gun. I didn’t so that’s me, know, but I have other fears, but so fear doesn’t have is in other words, makes a is a problem. Fear doesn’t help you deal with anything anyway.
It disturbs it. It distorts it. It exaggerates what’s going on. You can’t see the truth, but we all have it. Doesn’t mean we’re naughty people, so we have to learn to understand it deeply, which is again the whole Buddhist view, you know.
And again, you look at more broadly, look at your attachment, look at your anger, look at jealousy, look at pride. Fear, if we really get to see it, you know, we can see that fear is beneath them all. I mean, there’s this wonderful new age saying I’ve been hearing for years. It’s either love or fear. I tell you there’s a profound truth in that.
It’s fear is at the basis of all the unhappy states of mind. It’s this oh, I mean, it’s like you look at anger, know? It’s this panic that this thing in front of me, I just cannot cannot stand it. I have to make it go away. I mean that’s fear.
It’s like completely like a coward, you know. Patience in Buddhist terms is described in a very interesting way. It’s the courage to open yourself, to confront, to walk into and accept this thing which you can’t change. Anger is, oh my god, hysterical scream, shout, punch, kick, make it go away. It’s completely based in fear.
Attachment is this huge neediness for something such that if you don’t get it, you’ll go mad, which why we manipulate and do the most outrageous things to get what we want because we’re so hysterical, know, it’s fear. All the delusions are fear based. They talk about the fears of saṃsāra, you know, that’s why we have so much suffering. Look at our daily lives. Just general kind of this is undertone of anxiety for something being wrong or something not being enough.
Just we’re looking for it like it’s always, what is it? Where is it? You know? We all can see this. Solely, solely, we don’t have to have it, you know, by developing the positive, letting grow of these neuroses, understanding them is the crucial point though.
Just deconstructing them, owning them, start facing them, walking into them, you know. I mean, we all block away from our fears. We we we try to do anything to make them go away. We shove in all sorts of things into our five senses to deaden our fears because we can’t bear it because we don’t have techniques and it’s reasonable. But, you know, there are techniques.
We have to be brave to confront them and face them and when you walk into it, it dissipates, it goes away. I remember as a kid, we live in I mean in Melbourne, we had an outside toilet, you know? And every time I opened that back door at night, it was just a toilet was ten feet away to the left, but in front of me there’s this great big black hole of the garden, know, and it was just my heart was in my mouth every time, you know, it was awful. So I’d kind of you’d run to the toilet, you couldn’t bear to go out because of this fear, and I used to think even then, well, if I walked into the garden, into the dark hole, you know, I wouldn’t I would be in the middle of it, and I knew I wouldn’t be afraid if I walked into it because then you just be where you are, you know, wherever you are. It’s all this projection and what might happen.
And it’s all based on this poor eye, you know. I mean, we have to be brave to look into our minds. That’s all. Doesn’t mean just make it go away overnight. We’ve got be seeing it first, you know, and then be brave and own it and then blah blah blah.
You know? Does that make sense? Yes. Yes. Yes.
Uh-huh. Yes. So then so then yeah. How do you deal with those? Well, in other words, she’s saying how I’m do you deal with when you’re in the midst of a life threatening situation isn’t it?
Well this is what’s most interesting I mean it’s sort of like it’s like saying if you’re suddenly on the motor or the freeway in the road and you’re about to crash, the extent, I mean, it’s a bit late at that time if you don’t know how to drive. All you’re gonna do is damage control, isn’t it? So if you know how to drive, you’ve got some skills to help you deal with that in a clear, clear intelligent way. So the same here with a person who has done no work on their mind, to be in that situation unless you really, you know, unless it’s either huge compassion which you heard about on September eleven or even in Bali or whatever, people have this compassion comes to the fore and you can imagine they die with compassion in their hearts, you know. That is alleviating of all fears.
That’s incredible. But if you haven’t done the work on your mind, there’d just be this huge, as we call it, instinct for survival, just total overriding panic arising. Nothing to do. But the Buddhist view is when you’ve done the work on your mind, you wouldn’t have, and we’re talking highly advanced now, there would be no fear. Let me tell you a story.
This sounds outrageous, but this is exactly what I’m saying. There’s this friend of mine called Harry, he’s an American, and everybody says, oh Harry’s like an old, he’s like a saint, he’s an amazing, like a bodhisattva, so compassionate. And what you see is this is really nice bloke, you know, but very kind. And he’s just, you know, he’s and everybody says he’s a great meditator. He’s been off to the mountains for many years doing all these and in Buddhism, we have all these techniques that we do to develop this love and compassion.
Extraordinary, very profound profound techniques to really transform our minds, you know, which is what Buddhism says we can do. So Harry was gonna go up the mountains up in Solu Khumbu in Nepal to meditate up in the caves up there. He’d been up there before. And basically, anyway, what happened was he he he was going up the mountain with a friend and he had this big pack on his back he said, and I’ve checked this with him because I’ve heard this story and he told me directly what happened. And he was walking up in this very narrow path and there’s a big drop there and there’s a mountain here.
Right? And these four Sherpa Sherpa porters with their big packs, you know, and when you got these big packs on, you’re kind of walking bent over. All you can see is your feet. So they’re walking very focused down the mountain. And then the first thing that occurred to him, he said the first thought that arose was, well, four of them, one of me, alright, I’ll step to the side.
Now this is interesting because in Buddhism, we have all these techniques and one of the ways of meditating is this very simple logic that others are more important than you, and you use these very simple techniques to kind of argue with ego’s dumb view, you know, until the point that you’ve actually realized it. So for anyone just in a natural way without fear and neurosis to have that thought, you’ve got to done some meditating first on that very thing to train yourself to think opposite because the first thing we’d say is, oh my god, panic, stop to this, you know, step by the mountain, if they fall over, I can’t help it, what to do, you know? Do you see my point? So first of all, that’s outrageous. That shows he must have done some work on his mind.
If he can just, without a second thought and without big drama, you know, he just was able to think that. So he stood by this to the edge of the mountain to let them pass. Then somehow I don’t quite know what happened, but he said that then he thought it was so narrow, he then thought if they knock me, I will not hold on. Now that’s insane unless you’ve done the work, you know? So in other words, there wasn’t any fear in his mind.
There was just this genuine arising of unassuming compassion for these people, putting them before himself. So what’s interesting, this is already that’s amazing, but this is like the the bonus, the end of it is interesting. He he said he was he then they knocked him. So then he’s falling, but he this must have all happened in like a half a second because his feet are on the ground, okay, and his big pack’s pulling him and he’s going back. And he said he had a complete psychic vision, he said, of the entire fall.
He saw his body crash to the ground, but he’s halfway through the fall and then he feels this huge force pushing him and he reversed direction like that. In other words, so called miracle. Now Buddhism would have explanations to how that totally fits with karma and that enormous compassion at the time of something like this can truly just be like a miracle in a sense. You can reverse what you think of as you think of as normal, you know, because compassion was there, incredible. No fear at all.
No fear. And look what happened, you know. Now even a smaller story but already outrageous, this bloke in New York is a very devoted Buddhist, he had a cheese shop and he has very purely wanted to keep his vows, no killing, no lying, blah blah blah, you know. So one day the health inspector came in and she was saying do this, do that and kill the rodents he said I’m sorry I can’t you know she was getting mad at him and she had this clipboard and a fly landed on her clipboard and she said you kill that fly now or I’ll close your store down and he said I’m sorry I can’t do that and she kind of stopped then she burst into tears and she hugged him and she said please pray for me and she wrote a perfect report and she left I mean that’s who would expect that you know your entire shop for its life not even your little pet dog, you know. I mean that’s that’s so the Buddhist view is this is karma that the power of compassion is a very one way of overriding all fears, all dramas, all so called laws, you know.
It completely can counteract everything. That’s the compassion wing. But the one of the wisdom wing is where the the work that Harry must also have done of removing all the neurosis from his mind to the point where he’d cut the ego delusions. He’d cut the fears, you know. There is no fear.
Buddha says we are capable of this. Obviously, just not naturally, we ought to do the job, you know, do the work. Okay. And I can see this with a lot of guys in prison. I mean, some of the people I have in prison in America in these outrageous situations.
I mean, I’m saying this to people in every every state I go to here, the prisons I go to in Australia, they are like paradise in comparison. I can’t tell you the number of good human beings that I have running prisons in Australia. I mean, I can’t tell you how incredible they are. I I mean, we’ve been doing it seven years in America, you know. If you have your magazine, you’ll read all about it.
We just published that. It’s all about what we’re doing all over the world. So anyway, it’s just incredible there. They’re so fundamental. They’re so heavy.
The sentient beings, unbelievable. And the violence in the prisons, can’t even tell you, you know, in California especially with all these gangs, unbelievable. And some of these people, these Mexican gangs that I’ve known, you know, covered in tats and all their lives since nine years old, stabbing and shooting and raping, you know. Now they are there and they are in prison for life. Men have killed two, three, four people just in their gang wars as they call them, even in the prisons, completely transforming their minds.
I mean, really doing incredible job in their minds. It gives me such inspiration, but such so much courage because, you know, if you give up the gang, it’s like you’re you’re you’re now you’re you’re on a hit list. You’re gonna die. There’s just no question. So to have the courage to of your convictions in that way to truly just say, okay, I’m finished violence, you know?
And it’s and very interesting stories actually. One of them very funny guys. They all have gang names. Right? And one of them is called silent death.
And it is Richie his name is Richie. And he says he’s called silent death. He said, Rubina, it’s because I’m really laid back. And he is he’s very relaxed, very easygoing, speaks slowly, really quiet, you know. But he said, when I get angry, I get very angry, you know.
And he’s killed three people in prison in the wars. Right? In their wars, they have like, the prison system call them riots, but these guys call them wars. They love their wars, I tell you. So anyway, oh yeah, one of my friends Francisco, I said, they all have knives, you know.
And I said, what do you make knives out of? Because they’re so restricted. He said, Robina, anything, even plastic bottles. But he said, they’re not much good because you only use them once. Not funny, I know, but it’s interesting.
They’re very creative. So anyway, there’s Richie and I and I he wrote to me first. He’s a friend of somebody else and he then wrote and talked about in one time in his letter about his anger, you know. And so when I vet him for the first time, it was, you know, between glass and he was covered in tattoos and they what they do is they they tattoo their gang names because the big big question in the street because they have these gangs like block by block just about, you know, it’s their territory, it’s all territory based. And the big question is where are you from?
And that means what gang? And then pity help you, the response. So instead of saying all the words, you you write it like in this gothic type, you know, on your neck, on your arms, on your chest, all over you. So there’s Richie covered in his tats, all around his arms, is here, on his face, everywhere, you know. And he and I said, how’s your how’s your how’s your angered Richie?
And he kind of blushed under his tats. Right? Because he said, Robina, I have to confess this morning I had a fight with my Celly. And his Celly means cellmate. They call them Cellies in California.
And he said and I put his head down the toilet but then he said, I took it out again. So I rejoiced, I thought well that’s progress you know And then he said, I had him thrown out and then I did my Tārā practice. I mean that’s progress. I mean you can’t even have not had been inspired by that, you know. He really made, he didn’t kill his fourth person.
I mean incredible, I tell you. Incredible, I tell you. But many of them mean, you’ll see there in the on that section called from within, this little section just quotes from different prisoners. Some really very inspiring experiences many of these guys I have such inspiration from them is because in any prison, but especially, I have to say the ones that I know in America