Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 46-minute teaching, Ven Robina Courtin begins with the stark reality of impermanence — we’re alive today only because accumulated merit hasn’t run out, like a fuel tank still holding gas — then moves into detailed meditation instruction. She covers proper posture (spine straight as an arrow, hands in meditation gesture, chin tucked), the core practice of watching the breath at the nostrils and repeatedly returning attention when the mind wanders, and the crucial distinction between gross levels of mind (conceptual, busy, emotional) and subtle levels (refined, clear). A striking example of a prisoner achieving a vivid vision of the Buddha Tārā amid prison chaos illustrates why accessing subtle consciousness matters: only there can we directly realize emptiness and karma. She concludes by outlining the two meditation types — concentration and insight — and positions Buddha as an observer of reality like Einstein, not a receiver of revelation.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 12 DAR 2003 06 22.mp3
UUID: 1204fff4-0ff9-4a6b-89e3-00c658994212
Teacher: Ven Robina Courtin
Collection: y Death and Rebirth (Ven Robina Courtin)
Date: 2003-06-22
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 46.7 minutes
Words: ~7,451
Little wee prayers there. Couple little ones. Put these thoughts into our mind. And then we’ll just do a little bit of meditation. A few minutes of concentration meditation.
And then we can talk about it after. We’ll explain more go into more detail about really what meditation is, being clear about it, it’s important. Excuse me. Beg your pardon? That’s my hanky.
When I went to prison two days ago, one of the blokes gave me me one of his big hankies, a brand new hanky, he said, I said, where’d get that from? Who has hankies these days? You know, this big square hanky, brand new and he gave it to me as a present and he said, oh, when we come in they give us three. I thought it was so touching, in Australian prisons you get your three big hankies when you arrive. I couldn’t believe it.
I can’t tell you. I just couldn’t believe it. I mean, who gets a hanky anymore, you know? Anyway, I lost it. I don’t know what I did with it.
I couldn’t believe. It just shows me that this is the touch of Australian prisons. I can’t tell you. God, Get strip search up Uranus, you know? More than that.
Anyway, so here we are. As Lama Zopa Rinpoche says, we should think as we wake up, and if we didn’t do it this morning, we did fantastic. If we didn’t, then we think it now. Notice, you know, although we seem seem rather embarrassed to notice it because we just take it for granted because we’re grasping it permanently. Notice, wow.
Look. I’m still breathing. The breath’s still going out of my nostrils as well as in. I’m still alive, you know. This is incredible because we don’t know when we’re gonna die, so we could die today, but we didn’t yet.
The petrol tank hasn’t run out yet. We have to practice being amazed, and eventually, we will be actually amazed. That’s when we have realization of impermanence, you know. We have to practice thinking it. Again, remember the only the the main reason we are still alive is not because we’re young or, you know, not very old, very old.
It’s not because we’re healthy. It’s because literally the accumulation of our past morality, an accumulation of our past morality hasn’t run out yet because karma is like you put a certain amount of petrol in, you get a you get a certain amount of mileage, you know. This is how it is. This is this is energy. We you know, a certain amount of momentum, you know, and you’ll keep going.
Momentum is very strong, you’ll keep going, you know. So the momentum of our morality hasn’t run out yet. This is miraculous. We should be so kind of feeling so blessed and we have to practice feeling that because we don’t feel it naturally now, again, because of this instinctive habit to believe in something totally that’s a lie, which is called permanent me. So let’s strongly aspire to make the most of today, which means, you know, here we are listen here thinking, listening to Buddha’s ideas, thinking about them, seeing if seeing what applies to my life, and having and having the wish to bring it into my life, to put it into practice, to make it real, to taste it, as Lama Yeshe says, for our sake and the sake of every living being.
So we can sing the refuge prayer, the second part which expresses this motivation, and we can make a mandala offering, and then we can do some few minutes of concentration meditation. There’s another little prayer called the seven limbs. It’s the seven little points of practice. I’ll just sing that if we know it, join in. If not, just hear it.
It’s not in the book I don’t think. Now imagining offering all the precious things of this world that beings use to the Buddha as a request for the teachings. There’s another little prayer which is called the inner mandala and it’s just imagining offering all your delusions, just your depression, your anxiety, your fears, jealousy, attachment, anger, pride, whatever, laziness, and all the objects of these are things that activate them in us, in our lives, people, the things, the objects. Just sort of like it’s like offering all this to the Buddha, getting rid of it, getting it getting out, just throwing it out of yourself and imagining offering it to the Buddha and instantly it’s transforming into all the blissful qualities, you know. So we’ll talk about meditation, try to be very clear about exactly what it is, what we’re trying to achieve in meditation.
After we do, we’ll just do a few minutes. Two or three minutes, really, quality. Two or three quality minutes is much better than twenty minutes of just spacing out, you know. It’s useless. So basically, the aim of this concentration meditation is to train the part of your mind that we can call awareness.
We tend to say, oh, I’m watching my breath. Well, it’s true, you know. I’m watching my mind, you know. It’s true, you are, but let’s be more precise. What part of me is doing it?
It’s your mind. Well, what part of part of your mind is doing it? It’s the part called awareness. It’s like the eye, the eyes of your mind, e y e, the eye of your mind that does the looking. Awareness actually is the function of the mind.
It’s the part of your mind we’re trying to train. So right now, we can think of it as like a two year old, completely hopeless, all over the place, like a little bird, you know, distracted by everything, no focus whatsoever. So because it’s like a little two year old, it needs a parent. So you can think of another part of your mind, there’s many parts actually, and we’ll talk about it later, that do the job altogether working nicely. You know, you can say my hand picks up an apple.
It’s true. But then you start to analyze, your thumb does this, your index finger does that, each each bit of your hand, each muscle, each tendon, all plays their role beautifully, you know? Well, we have to analyze our mind to that depth, the parts of the mind. We have to train the parts of the mind. When one learns Buddhist psychology in more depth, one learns about these components of the mind.
And of course, they’re not physical, but we have learn to become aware of them and to train them, you know. So, again, it needs like all of this, it needs a lot of rigor, a lot of discipline, a lot of clarity. And when all the parts of our mind are working beautifully, then, of course, it’s gonna be an incredible instrument, you know. So the part of the mind that’s like the parent or as Holiness called it one time, the policeman, and it’s the part that you can call vigilance or alertness, and it’s the part that it’s sort of like the you know, you think of it, and there’s a good analogy actually, don’t think of meditation just sort of relaxing, spacing out. You can lie down and do that much better, you know.
This is not that at all. We’re training the mind, and we need enormous effort to do this. Any meditator you talk to when they’re, you know, doing the the effort of concentration meditation, you have to employ incredible effort. Not like stress, you can, you know, over stress, but effort. To learn anything properly, you’ve got to apply effort in the beginning, don’t you?
Anything, even just your little mathematics, you’re riding a bicycle, anything has to be effort to really focus in there and do it well. Same here. So, you know, the they would all the meditators will tell you you to need you have to use enormous effort to do it. So this is good analogy. Think of your awareness as like the two year old walking on the edge of a cliff.
So that’s kind of nerve racking, isn’t it? You know, and you’re the parent behind. You imagine the alertness, the awareness is hopeless. You can’t expect it to concentrate. It’s a two year old, you know, it’s impossible.
But you’re the parent behind. There’s no way in the universe you’re gonna lose concentration for a split second, are you? You’re gonna be watching every split second that awareness, what it’s doing, and the minute it wanders off the breath, that alertness will bring it back. The parent will bring it back, bring it back, bring it back. Well, in the beginning, it’s alertness that does most of the work because awareness is useless, you know?
And then eventually when you train, the awareness grows up, then the parent doesn’t have a job, you know, because the awareness is now so concentrated. So what we’re gonna do, just I’ll check, I’ll tell you the physical posture. Best one, they talk about this in the text, you know. Ideally, it should be we should be in single point in in what they call full lotus position. They say there’s something very stable about that position, especially when we get more subtle, you know, the advanced meditators for the inner kind of the subtler energies is extremely excellent, extremely good posture.
If we can’t put our legs in that position, then we have them in half lotus. If not that, then regular, and if not that, well, like most of us, sitting on chairs, you know. So if we’re in the chair, have your feet firmly planted on the ground and don’t slump into the back of the chair. Hold yourself up. That’s extremely important because the body slumping makes the mind slump, you know, so we have to be alert.
So the body hold yourself up. So okay, now it’s like this. The body has to be very firm and strong but it’s like the infrastructure, the bones to be very strong but the muscles have to be relaxed, no tension, you know. There’s a nice balance. So the first is the legs.
Second is the back. The most important is the back. So you imagine your back, the spine, think of it as like an arrow they say. You know, an arrow very straight and the the head of the arrow is the coccyx pointing directly into the ground, you know. Very straight.
The hands should be in what we call meditation gesture or mudra. And again, significance to each of these points. There’s meaning to it, you know. The left underneath, right on top like this, thumbs touching, resting in your lap. Shoulders strong and firm but relaxed, not tense, you know?
Drop all the burdens. Now it doesn’t mention it in the text, I think we all tense our abdomen, you know, tense our abdominal muscles. So consciously now, keep your body strong but relax the muscles, like flop the muscles but keep your infrastructure strong. It’s important. No tension, you know, but strength.
Shoulders, I’ve said those. Your head now, slightly forward, not thrust back. It makes the mind more agitated. Slightly forward. And your chin tucked in, you know, slightly.
Your mouth, the jaw relaxed, lips apart, and then the tip of the tongue resting behind the top teeth just near the palate. This they say, when you start to meditate more and more for longer times, it prevents you from dribbling and also from having to swallow too much. This is very practical. Breathing through your nose. Finally, eyes.
Best, as his holiness and all the great yogis say, they should be open when you but that’s only really successful when you’ve got very good concentration, when you’re not distracted by the external objects. But for most of us, perhaps, you know, it’s best maybe to have them closed. But whether they’re open or closed, have your eyes looking downward as if you’re looking along your nose towards the ground, but not focusing on anything. That’s the sitting position. And now forget all about it and just be in the position and then forget about it because remember this, it is not your body that meditates.
It is not a sensory experience. We’re gonna discuss the difference between mental and sensory later. So first, before we do the focus for just two or three minutes, take, you know, we we often breathe in a very shallow way and again, I talk about in the text but we can see this, you know. Look at the we just sort of breathe at the top of our chest. Well, just in the beginning, take very couple of just very deep breaths to sort of settle the breath, very deep, feel it down in your abdomen.
Not loud, but very strong in and very strong out. Just a couple, then we can do the actual concentration. So okay, let’s just discuss for a moment what we’re gonna focus on. This awareness will be watching, you know, the the sensation of the air at your nostrils as you breathe in and out. That’s the object of concentration, something very simple.
So the fact is, you know, what’s happening actually is just chaos. The mind is just, you know, even if it’s quiet, even if the emotions aren’t very loud this morning, we know they’re just constantly there, all the thoughts floating around, you know, this great big soup of emotion. And what happens is when we’re just floating around, you know, certain thoughts become more strong and we follow those, we go off, and before you know it, you’ve written a little novel, you know? Isn’t it? So we have to really learn to not force don’t force the aim isn’t to force the thoughts to go away.
That’s wrong. Or think, oh, I can’t my mind’s so busy. Don’t think about that. It doesn’t matter about that. Everybody’s mind is busy.
What we’re trying to do is locate one thing in all that noise and focus on that, and that one thing is the sensation of the breath. It’s just there all the time. So, you know, it’s like you’re in a really busy room full of wonderful people and you’re all full of excitement and happiness and you’re deciding you’re gonna focus just on one spot on the wall. You’re not gonna get the people to go away, but you’re gonna have such strong determination to focus on that spot that you end up almost not hearing the other people. That’s and we have to force ourselves, not force, but focus on wanting not to rush off and listen to what everything everything’s going on, you know?
That’s the way it is. So it’s a slow, gradual process, this ability to concentrate. So one more comment. We won’t stay on the breath more than a second. It’ll be off again just because of habit.
So that’s why alertness has to be watching. Bring it back to the breath. Bring it back to the breath. And if you have to do that for a few times a minute, you rejoice because that’s an excellent meditation. If you space out, then that’s not a good meditation, you know.
So with strong determination, so that we can develop our qualities, so we can be a benefit to others, we will watch the breath. That’s it. For three or four, you know, two, three, four minutes. Full complete breaths all the way in, all the way out. Not not loud, but just full complete breaths.
Just bring your mind back to the breath. Just the breath. Just relax now. The one time we did a retreat with Lama Yeshe, and he got us to do just five minute sessions like that. It was about four minutes.
Five minutes really full on, strong effort, then relax. Five minutes again. Then it’s real quality, you know. We can see how that just that was just roughly about four minutes. It it can in one way, it feels like a long time, doesn’t it?
Because we’re being conscious. This is not for nothing that the word Buddha means fully awake. The implication being, of course, we’re fast asleep, you know. This is, in a way, what Buddha’s saying, that one of the functions of the various delusions, which we’re gonna talk about more today, is to dull us. We don’t think we’re dull, but actually the delusions have this function of dulling our mind.
Completely kind of and that’s why we don’t use the example yesterday of talking about why we, you know, when we’ve got a habit to do a certain thing, let’s say a negative thing, you’re blinded, you can’t see the harm you’re doing because you’re so full of your own story. In other words, you’re blind. You’re just not awake to reality. You’re not seeing what’s evident to another person who hasn’t got that problem because you’re so just blinded by your own stuff, you know. We’re living in our own little world.
We say that, you know, don’t we? Living in your own little world. That’s what Buddha says we’re doing. The more delusions we have, the more that’s happening. We’re like, delusions, the more narrow, the more thick, the more obscured our mind is, you know, before the more dull.
So we have to wake up. So let’s just look a little bit more of what meditation is and how, you know, even the things that we’re listening to, how we use these ideas as a basis of meditation in our meditation because we have such a strong concept, I think, of what meditation means. You know? We have this general idea that has to do with being quiet, calm, you know, putting on pleasant music, sweet smells, and feeling better. I mean, Buddha would say we will feel extremely much better as we get rid of delusions.
There’s just no question. And so it’s rather short term and rather narrow and rather simplistic to think that the purpose of meditation is to feel better. I mean, you can have a nice ice cream and feel better. You can go to sleep and feel better. You know?
That’s not quite purpose. I said, okay. There are two kinds of meditation. Millions of techniques, as many as you want to invent, but two types. You could say that.
Two ways of meditating, two divisions, two headings, two categories, all of which the all of which all of the meditations fit into, you know. So the first kind, we did a little tiny sample of it now, is called concentration or stabilization, they call it. Stabilizing the mind. Stabilizing the mind or concentration meditation. And when it’s fully developed, when you’ve accomplished it, they call it in English there’s different terms which are the translation of the Sanskrit and the Tibetan.
The terms in English are calm, abiding that’s a curious phrase. We don’t talk like that normally, do we? Mental quiescence. Abiding in calm. The mind truly is then calm, but not in the general way we tend to think, but in a very profound, extremely subtle way.
So this brings us just quickly now first to a particular way of looking at the mind, which we did describe yesterday when we talked about the death process, you know. That And it’s very interesting way to look at the mind. We have the gross level, which is the way we function from day to day in all our concepts and our sensory experiences, which of course in the world is all we think there is, isn’t it? The sense the the conceptual busy, you know, the emotional and the and sensory. But then Buddhist view, that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
We’ve got much subtler levels of awareness that for most of us is completely asleep right now. It doesn’t don’t know how we we haven’t got techniques to access it. We occasionally might get glimpses. You can say that. Let’s say you have a strong sense of, you know, an intuitive feeling of someone else’s situation, you know, or a strong sensitive awareness of someone else which we we have quite a bit, we can see.
So you can sort of say, we’re mainly functioning at the gross level, but occasionally we’ll get glimpses on the outer edges of the subtler level, you know. But sometimes you can have a really full on memory people will have of of something in the past or a clear almost a clairvoyant experience of something, a premonition. That’s when you can say even touching slightly more strongly, the sense the the subtle consciousness, the capacity of our subtler awareness. So the point is what I’m getting at here, The meditation techniques in Buddhism, and actually these simple concentration techniques aren’t Buddhist in their nature. They’ve come from the Hindu tradition.
By utilizing these concentration meditation techniques, one can access not subtle but subtler levels of one’s awareness where you can say virtually one’s conceptual and sensory level has ceased temporarily, you know. You can say that. So if you were to see a person ‘d accomplished this level of concentration, which they call single pointed concentration or this word calm abiding, then almost you could say they’d look as if they’re fast asleep. They’d have almost no breathing. They’re totally sitting like this, but they’re it’s like they’re almost asleep.
I mean, it’s almost like they’re dead. Sorry. There’s almost no breath because the the grosser levels of the physic of physicality and therefore the grosser levels of the conceptual mind, our conceptual awareness that are linked to the physical, which is the conceptual, the busy busy busy, all the thoughts and feelings and the dramas and the sensory, that has literally ceased. Like in that death process yesterday, the grad you know, when you get to the point of stopping breathing, all the gross levels of your being have ceased. Well, that happens to some extent when you go to sleep.
This happens for the great meditators, but they’re able to do it with consciousness. And so for us, when we go to sleep, we kind of may have a few dreams and we wake up eight hours later with no much with not much awareness, you know. We’ve gone to sleep quite literally. We’ve been unconscious for several hours. Well, a meditator can can go to that point of, you know, to the point of where, you know, you almost stop the breathing like we talked about in the death process.
It’s a very practical physiological process you go through. But they are able to, you know, because they’ve controlled their mind, completely subdued the mind. That’s their main purpose. Our body just gets gross so we go to sleep. But they are working with it with alertness so they’re able to subdue the mind, all the conceptual stuff, and then therefore keep it and so the body naturally, all the energies absorb, but they’re conscious, and they go to the subtle level and they sort of stay at that level and they’re completely conscious, but they’re conscious at a subtle level.
So why would we want to go to there? Not because just not just so you can feel nice. The purpose is because it’s like you’ve just now accessed the microscope of your mind and you need to access the microscope of your mind in order to see through to reality, to really cut to cut through, to really realize impermanence and realize emptiness and realize karma. You know, we’re talking at a gross level about these things but that’s just the starting point. But you could say to actually taste, actually taste these things, to realize them, to get insight into them.
It’s only the subtle level of our mind that can do this. So it’s a practical reason one wants to go to that subtle level in meditation. It isn’t just to feel good. In fact, yes, you will feel better than you’ve ever felt in your whole life. They say in the text, when you’ve achieved single pointed concentration, they say like this.
They say that the ecstasy that you experience, physical and mental, at a subtle level of physical, is so superior, they say, to any pleasure, any bliss, joy, happiness we’ve ever experienced. It’s just a technical thing, you know. It’s an interesting point there. And why? It’s so simple.
Because temporarily even, you’ve ceased the gross conceptual level which is where all the blah blah is, you know? That’s all. It ceased temporarily. We don’t feel that bliss when we go to sleep because we’re unconscious. Though a meditator won’t be unconscious, they’ll be conscious at a subtle level.
And so it’s just it’s you just naturally experience incredible bliss. I mean, there’s interesting examples of this. I remember one of the guys in prison. This is anyway inspiring story, but he it’s in the magazine. You saw a small quote.
If you’ve read the from within pages, on the last quote, this is about the the guy who had the vision of Tārā. Did anybody read that? Anyway, when you do, it’s on the beginning pages in your magazine. This guy, Paul, who’s just this ordinary white guy who’s and I say that because a lot of the people in prison in America, of course, are Latinos and blacks, and we get lots writing to us. So, anyway, that’s just showing where he comes from.
He he was was now you know, he was an old drunk, because he said he was an old drunk, and he killed somebody in a car accident. So he was a very good man, you know, kind heart. But when he woke up in hospital, he was just devastated. Actually, was paralyzed. This is it’s an antidote story, like an added bonus actually, this part of the story, the first part.
He woke up in hospital, he told me, and he was paralyzed and they said he’s, you know, that he was gonna be quadriplegic. I don’t quite understand, but he was gonna be quite paralyzed somehow. And he was anyway, the point was he went through he he he was just full of this grief at what he’d ‘d done, killed somebody, and full of just the deepest regret, the pain. He went over his whole life and just the the the he said the selfishness and and just the waste of his life, and he just after a couple of days, he said he made this powerful, like a vow to himself. He said, I will only ever benefit others from now on, you know.
And what was so interesting, just as an aside, he told me this, next morning, I think he woke up blonde completely, you know. No one understood why. But I can say, I can speculate myself, I think, that this is the power of his past Bodhisattva vows. The vows where you vow to benefit others, you know. They kind of this this whole experience he went through kind of ripened these vows from the past.
Anyway, he started running the AA groups in prison. He still does that. He got a life sentence. And he then started he had an interest in Buddhism, which really began to grow. And so he wrote to all these different Buddhist centers, and we were the one that one of the ones that replied to him.
And he told me that he’d already he’d he’d developed this incredible liking for the Buddha Tārā. You know, the female Buddha. And he put together a very nice meditation, and he explained exactly what he I told him to tell me about his daily practice. And so he told me, and actually it was extremely authentic. He didn’t get training or anything.
He just really did it all nicely, the right prayers and bodhicitta and the, you know, really nice practice. And so he told me about his practice. He lives in a prison called Folsom in California, which is, you know, very big very big population. And he’s in one section where there are eight hundred people. And it’s like you see in the movies, the classic American prisons, you know, several tiers, all metal, you know, big bars.
Everything’s metal and concrete. And so something you don’t often think about, but that really has come clear to me from the the different people in prison, the noise is inconceivable. I mean, there’s even one of the guys who’s in this very top security prisons where they’re in their cells all day except for one hour. Eight eight cells, sixteen people, just, you know, he said the noise is like being in a rock concert all day. Just sixteen people.
Because there’s no there’s no insulation. He said at night when people are sleeping, and you’re in the one’s self and there’s four cells down, you can hear them breathing, you know. There’s just there’s no privacy, just this insane noise. So you can imagine eight hundred people. So in order to, you know, to meditate, they don’t get they don’t, like we, get all holy and say, oh, know, excuse me, I’m trying to meditate.
You know, Or they don’t say, oh, it’s too difficult. I can’t meditate. They don’t have a choice, you know? That’s their life. So he gets up early in morning, this is common among so many.
They get up at three, four because there’s a few hours in the middle of the, you know, night when it’s fairly quiet. So he does his morning meditation. And he said then, Robina, it was really nice, very much devotion. He does it very authentically, really tries to concentrate on on his visualization really nicely every bit. But he said, Robina, nighttime, another another story with eight hundred other guys wide awake and wound up, you know.
And and and you’ll see in the magazine, he talks about this very briefly. But, basically, he said I can’t remember the words exactly, but it’s something like he was well, who’s got the magazine? I’ll just read it out. It’s easier. Someone got your copy of your magazine?
The one here. It’s okay, sweetie. Yeah. Helen’s one here, darling. I’ll just read what he says instead of oh, thank you.
I’m good. Instead of paraphrasing him, his name’s Paul. He said and we we cut we cut it right down. The racket is deafening and resembles nothing less than bedlam and chaos. Last Friday night was especially loud on the tiers.
I was just about ready to call it a night with my visualization of Tārā when it got quiet, real quiet. Tārā became so clear and vivid, so real, unlike anything that I have ever experienced. It was as if I’d been removed entirely from the prison and was very high above it. It was just Tārā and me and the whole field of merit as real as I sit here now. I was no longer consciously trying to hold her image.
She was with She was there with me on her own. We just sat there and smiled and never and never have I felt so close and intimate, as if I were her and she were me. I felt the deepest sense of peace, security, clarity, and ecstasy in every cell, nerve, and membrane. Well, what happened was, you know, due to his later on, I didn’t say it here, he said to in his letter, he said, and what I got from this, he said, I’ve never had this experience again. He said, it lasted for a long time, but and what I got from this, he said, was and he put in capital letters, never give up, which is this marvelous quality of enthusiastic perseverance or effort, and we’ll talk about this.
And so you can say it was catalyzed, that experience, but basically what happened was he accessed his subtle level of mind, all the noise going away. In other words, that’s what happens when you go to sleep, all the noise goes away, doesn’t it? But there’s no awareness. But he was able to stay aware and have the gross level subdued, and he said he can’t do it again. So and I told Lama Zopa this, he said, oh, the way he said it was, oh, yes, the blessing of the Buddha’s, he said, you know.
But also you can say, it’s because of his own hard work, his past work, but the key factor here, which is incidental now, the point I’m making here about the ecstasy, just showing, is his effort. He made the effort. He made the effort, you know, and that’s what I’m getting for so many guys in prison. They make the effort. It’s incredible.
And that effort is what caused him to go beyond, know, to go to that extra level, that enormous effort in face of that insane those insane obstacles, you know. But the point here I’m making is that’s what they just naturally say. When you’ve subdued the gross level of your being and you’ve accessed the subtle level, and we can do that at will, this is what when you do when you get single point of concentration, you can go to that level every time effortlessly. You’re now in control of it, you know? And that’s what they say happens, it’s just natural that the level the mind at a subtle level has the capacity for extraordinary bliss and that’s exactly why we have sexual bliss because they say when you have when you go to the level of orgasm, all the energies that that happen in meditation like this are the same thing.
They’ve absorbed. The gross level of mind has temporarily ceased. So there’s that huge sense of extreme bliss. But for us because it comes from attachment, there’s no control, you can’t sustain it, you know, all that hard work to get there, all that puffing and panting and then it lasts a second, you’re gone again, then you gotta start to build it up again, you know. But if you go meditate, excuse me, no puffing and panting.
Anyway, you won’t get my point, excuse me. But it’s really interesting. Not that you meditate to get the bliss, you don’t, but it’s like a byproduct. The the real point of getting to that single point of concentration is even if you’re just watching your I mean, you wouldn’t do it with your breath, you do it at a subtle level. You you you’ve you’ve kind of got your mind to a refined level and this now, it’s an amazing instrument that can easily realize emptiness.
It’s just effortless because it’s a subtle level. The gross one can’t do it. It can see emptiness. It can see karma. It can see interdependence.
It can see, you know, it can At this level, you can realize all these things that we initially work with at the conceptual level. This is what’s this is why so it’s a it’s a very technical practical reason to get to the subtle level, not just to get blissful, you know. That’s just a byproduct. So it’s interesting actually. So the single point of concentration is getting the mind to a very refined level so it can do the job of penetrating and and or tasting reality, you know?
So to get your mind to be able to do that whenever you want to, that takes massive effort. It takes the effort that he employed or employs in his meditation until eventually it’s effortless, until eventually you can get there every time. When a person’s achieved single point of concentration, they just have to sit down. Boom. Boom, they just go there because they’ve trained.
Like, we you know, and it’s not mystical. Don’t think it’s mystical. Okay? We mystify religion. It’s really so wicked.
It’s just like how do you learn to walk on a tightrope? How do you learn to become a doctor? How do you learn to become anything? It’s obvious, you know? You don’t sit there and cross your fingers and go, wow, I’ve become a dentist.
You know? Oh, wow, now I’m a dentist. Excuse me. George worked hard to become a dentist, know, he put effort into it and memorized all these boring things, look at these boring mouths and everything, he had to learn how to do it, you know, and then when he gets to do it, he does it second nature, he’s probably busily talking, thinking about the weather and the footy when he’s looking at people’s mouths, we don’t think so, we think he’s doing a good job, you know, because he’s got it down now. Well, the same when you learn to meditate.
It’s not mystical, it just needs effort. But because all this stuff is couched in religious terms, we really insult it by, you know, it’s far beyond, wow, no one can understand serious, just blessings flow, you know, a load of rubbish. I tell you. Practice makes perfect. Our mothers told us including getting enlightened, including just getting boring old single point of concentration, you know.
So that’s one mode of meditation, single pointed concentration, which you’ve gotta get to to have the mind to do a job. You can’t if you can’t even have that much concentration, you can’t even make a cake, you know. So you’ve gotta have concentration to do anything well. That’s all. It’s a practical thing.
It just happens to have the bonus of feeling extremely good. That’s all. I mean, it’s a nice character to have in front of us, but not to do it for this reason, that can be a problem because then it just becomes huge attachment, you know. I remember when we interviewed in Mandela magazine a few years ago, one of our monks, Rene, a Swiss monk, a wonderful monk, venerable Rene, and he was one of these people from the time he started hearing the Dharma. He was about twenty.
He decided to meditate immediately. He went off to do meditation. He’s virtually lived in retreat in and out all his life, the last twenty years, more than that. He’s marvelous. And in this interview, he was discussing his meditation and normally you don’t talk about it, I think it’s very helpful for Westerners, especially here about other Westerners who can achieve meditation who can achieve skills in in practice, you know.
And he he said he said, you know, they describe meditation, this single point of concentration meditation in terms of nine stages. You can track the stages, you know, of your own development. And he said he and there are nine, and he maybe got to the fifth. He said, just touch, just glimpse the fifth. And he said, Robina, there was no question that the bliss and he said these words, the bliss, the joy, the pleasure, the the joy, the fullness, the contentment, the wholeness, whatever words you like, you know, that he experienced.
It was just no question. It was infinitely superior, he said, than any pleasure he’d ever had through the senses. So that’s just a a really interesting point, I think. And all we’re saying here is that as the mind becomes more refined, that’s the way of saying it, subtler, more refined, so therefore more joyful. This is the Buddhist view, it is just something utterly natural.
It’s in the nature of the mind to be joyful and blissful. And this is and if we look at our own lives and the more we become aware, and this is the Buddha’s point, the more we become aware of the day to day feelings we have, I mean, can just look at the ordinary levels of anxiety in most of us. Stress, this terrible gaping hole of something always missing, not having enough, something’s always missing, constantly pursuing, you know, the the the stress, the anxiety, the low self esteem, the depression, the the the laziness, jealousy, all this this stuff. This is the function of the gross level of mind, you know. It’s very when the mind is more refined to experience our own to explain bliss, our own words, if our own joy, whatever words you want, you know.
It’s very interesting. It’s a technical thing, Buddha is saying. There are technical skills to enable us to do it. So that’s the first level of con the first type of meditation is concentration meditation. So then what to the whatever extent you have it, you then employ it to do the second mode which is where you do the actual job and it’s called insight meditation.
Insight. So there’s different you know, there’s a kind of common type in the world called Vipassana, which just means insight and it’s developed it’s a Theravadin practice and it’s developed a certain way of, you know, developing insight into the feelings and things of the body. That is a very skillful technique. But the way we’re discussing it here, the way it’s practiced in the Tibetan tradition, the Mahāyāna tradition, what we’re developing insight into is how things exist, reality. Because Buddha says right now we’ve got insight into unreality.
We’re living in la la land, which is why we suffer. So we’re trying to develop insight into into how things exist, that things are impermanent, not permanent, that things happen interdependently, not from their own side, that therefore that things are empty, that things happen according to the role or the the process of cause and effect, not people doing it to us unfairly. All these things. Buddha’s explanations of reality, his views, his findings about how things exist. Which is an interesting point.
I wanna stress this one again. I was discussing with two Anglican priests in Perth. Someone a friend of mine wanted me to meet them. Well, I wanted them to meet me or whatever, asked to meet each other. And and a very good question.
They they he said, well, where did Buddha get these things from? Which, of course, you know, the usual view of most religions is that God it’s revealed to you. You know? It’s revealed. Oh, God was, you know, manifested as Jesus and gave the teachings.
Well, I said Buddhism isn’t like that. And I remember even in the beginning, it was hard, and he’s very intelligent man, it’s interesting we can’t get our heads around this concept because that’s we don’t call that religion. But he’s more like Einstein. You know, if I if if I’m Einstein up here telling you about relativity and I say, this has been revealed to me and you’d better believe it. Excuse me.
You’d chuck me out that door in one minute flat, wouldn’t you? You’d laugh me out the room. I’m not being now about religion, but I’m saying this is the view. So the point is Buddha is like Einstein. He wasn’t revealed.
No one revealed Buddhism to him. Just like we wouldn’t think anybody we we would you know, while we like science, because we’re thinking now we’re dealing with reality, he observed things. He observed it to be so that things that relativity blah blah blah equals m c squared blah blah blah. He didn’t make it up. He didn’t get in a dream or a vision.
Nobody told him. He didn’t invent it. He observed it, and he simply articulated it. Well, that’s Buddha. Same, you know.
It’s interesting that we get our heads around this one. It’s not because we think religion, you know? Science. Yes. That’s reality.
Religion? Not sure. No one knows. Mystery. I mean, no wonder science came along.
I mean, no wonder we came along with chucked out all that and started getting caught, you know, but we chucked the baby up the bathwater and then started getting too concrete and, you know, dealing just with physical in your face eye reality, you know, ears and eyes. Buddha is like is a is a person who through his own experience having accessed subtle levels of his mind, and this is the point which