Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 47-minute teaching, Ven Robina Courtin shows how realizing emptiness—that nothing exists from its own side—awakens universal compassion. She guides practitioners through foundational practices: establishing equanimity by seeing enemy, friend, and stranger as equally wanting happiness; contemplating how all beings have been one’s mother and the full nature of their kindness; and exchanging self for others. Throughout, she uses vivid examples to show how recognizing interdependence fundamentally changes how we feel and relate: attachment coloring what we see in others, meditating on the infinite chain of sentient beings who made your socks, taking compassion to prison visits. For practitioners with some Buddhist background.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 17 DAR 2003 06 22.mp3
UUID: dca05b6e-abc2-4d04-95d9-b530acbe72c6
Teacher: Ven Robina Courtin
Collection: y Death and Rebirth (Ven Robina Courtin)
Date: 2003-06-22
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 47.0 minutes
Words: ~9,651
Saying when we’re grasping at self-existed me, one way of saying how that how we experience that is your mind’s very fixed, concrete, limited, small, cut off, vivid sense of there’s a vivid sense of I in its position of rightness and goodness and this and that and whatever it is that excludes others. One of the ways of describing the consequences of ignorance is this experience of dualistic and quite literally, like I said before, when Amy and I are talking, you know, we’re here for then. When Amy and I are having a little discussion and we’ve got positive qualities within our mind, be kind and loving and friendly and easy going to each other, then you can say there’s a sense of we there. You see my point? There’s no vivid sense of me and her, you know?
We’re comfortable around sort of unselfconsciously each other. Now when we to argue, look how it feels. Me vividly over here, her vividly over there, not fair, this big solid I coming rising up. Well, vivid sense of a separate I, that’s the consequence of ignorance. When you realize the emptiness of that wrong sense of I, then there’s a sense of interconnectedness which is what how things exist.
Interdependence is what I’m talking when I’m talking the conventional reality one and that’s the flip side of emptiness. So one thing when you have a sense of things connected an interdependent sense of connectedness that’s the consequence of understanding emptiness it’s the flip side of emptiness yeah precisely precisely Oh good, go. That’s exactly why you become more loving. Yeah. The more deluded you are, the more attachment, anger, jealousy, pride which are the symptoms of ignorance, the more separate, the more lonely, the more paranoid, the more pointing, the more fantasy, the more nonsense, the more suffering.
The less those things therefore more sense of interdependence, therefore more loving because you’re seeing others, you’re not feeling separate from others. Do you see? So Buddha’s saying that when we’re completely in the grip of this ignorance, we see things as existing from their own side as separate and as not you know, that that’s a lie. So when ignorance when we’ve annihilated the ignorance, we’ve realized the emptiness of that way of existing because things don’t exist that way. So what’s empty is that way of existing.
What doesn’t exist is that way that we think things exist. When I’m sitting here freaking out thinking she’s this monster, she’s I mean, she’s this, she’s that. That’s that that things don’t exist like that. It’s not true. We are exactly in fact existing interdependently and when we’ve got realization of emptiness she’ll see my mind, I’ll see her mind, it’ll be as if we’re the same person.
There won’t be any separation between us actually. Do you see? Okay. Yeah. Is time empty?
Everything that exists is empty of existing from its own side. Whatever you can posit as existing, if it exists, you first have to establish that it exists conventionally, then you can see that it’s empty because it can’t exist without being empty. Nothing that exists cannot be empty. So how do why would time not be empty? What are you thinking?
Okay. You first have to establish what we have to define time. So what’s time? Establish just give me a definition of time. Well Is it a is it a label for what?
It’s a term used to refer to what? I’m not sure because I I don’t understand really about time. Well just don’t be all cosmic about it. What’s time? It’s it’s it’s just dividing up, you know, the passing of mind moments from past to present to future.
Isn’t that how we call time? It’s a lot longer than a minute. So time seems to be the less Well, that’s just because we’ve got no. No. No.
Just the general idea of past present and future don’t worry we call them seconds or minutes or longer or shorter don’t worry about that it’s just the passing of you know like we can talk about past insofar as it was existing before and we can talk about future insofar as it exists after it hasn’t come yet would you agree that’s a broad way of talking time to forget about how you qualify whether it’s seconds or minutes or longer or shorter. Well then that’s time. So that’s existing. We can all agree that there is such a thing as the past. You were two at one point.
You’re not two now. You’re being two was in the past, there’s labels for it, but we can see it’s true on a relative level. Well, that’s time and that is existing in dependence upon causes and conditions itself. It exists in dependence upon its parts, this moment of it and that moment of it. Everything is a concept referring to something that we can establish as existing conventionally.
So whether it’s the most cosmic thing in the universe, emptiness emptiness itself, if we can establish it exists, then that it too is empty of existing from its own side. There can be nothing that doesn’t exist from its own side. There’s an impossibility. It is said that everything exists because it’s empty. Things can’t exist that weren’t empty, that aren’t empty, Buddha says.
It’s an impossibility. So of course, the key, of course, here is understanding what empty means, back to the same point. This example I gave yesterday of the guys who had this near death experience, were you here then? And the guy who said, we can establish he probably was left, he left his body for a few minutes, not more, his body, but he had this experience as if it were eons, he said. Well, that’s really the shows, you know, your experience of time.
When you’re a little kid, time just goes in slow motion. The summer, the winter is like an eon of time. As you get older, I mean, look at I mean, I can remember last year like it was yesterday. Just it goes it seems it seems so it’s just you put experience of it. It’s you know, it’s just a perfect it’s just depending on what you’re feeling.
If you’re suffering, time goes longer. If you’re happy, time goes shorter. So that’s not what we’re discussing here. That’s just your experience of something. But just the general existence of a thing called time, past, present, future.
You know? It’s called very subtle consciousness or indestructible consciousness. It’s the subtlest level of your awareness, your mind as it were. Is that separate? From what?
From everybody, anything else. What do you mean by separate? You’re just talking about the interdependence of everything. Mhmm. Mhmm.
Mhmm. But you have to have two things in order to have them to be interdependent, don’t you? You have to even say there are two things in order for there to be interdependence, don’t you? Yes. So?
My mind is not your mind. The word for your mind means your experiences. So it is by their nature that your experiences, not mine. And whatever you do brings, you know, pollutes your river of moments and what I do pollutes my river of mental moments and whatever you do purifies your river of mental moments and whatever I do purifies mine. You get to become your Buddha.
I get to become my Buddha. But honey, we could say, Joe, that when you become Buddha and I become Buddha, your consciousness is pervading the universe and knows everything and all the minds of all beings has empathy for all sentient beings and so does mine. We won’t bump into each other in the sky, believe me. We will it’s as if we’re the same Buddha then, you can say. But you got to yours by your work and I got to mine by mine.
So you can say there are many Buddhas and you can say you can say when you’re Buddha, I’m Buddha, there’s like what? Might as well say it’s the same Buddha. So it’s the same awareness, the same knowledge, but not this cosmic consciousness idea. It’s not emerging. Not emerging.
You can sort of talk like that, you know. It’s all these analogies you can use. But if you know everything and I know everything, we might as well say we’re union oneness. We’re the same Buddha. You could say like that.
It’s not a contradiction to say that. But at a conventional level, there’s your mind definitely and there’s my mind definitely. When you and I are Buddha, it’s as if we’re the same. You could say it like that because you know you might as well because you know the same as I know you know I know you, you know me, you know everything, I know everything. I see everything.
I’m infinitely compassionate. You’re infinitely compassionate. We’re of one mind, they often say. We can say we’re of one mind, you can say like that. He said it’s the word, you know, cosmic consciousness.
Mhmm. No such term like that in Buddhism. No. Don’t use it like that. Someone else?
Does emptiness just a word to express the interdependence? It’s the flip side of it. There’s two different ways of talking. It’s sort of like negative numbers and positive numbers. So emptiness is like the negative numbers.
It’s saying it’s not this and it’s not that. It’s lacking this. It’s lacking that. It isn’t this. It isn’t this.
Isn’t this. Sort of the same thing. And then saying it is this, it is this, it is this, you come to the same conclusion. When you’ve got them both and they finally merge into the middle way, if you like, is a way of saying it. There’s flip sides of the same coin.
Two different ways of approaching the same thing. Yeah. When you think emptiness, it means dependent arising. I think because I just got the dependent arising, but I had an idea of the word emptiness in it, but they sort of mean the same thing. Different ways of talking about the same ways of getting to the same thing you can say like that.
Mhmm. Exactly. Well the way they would say is what we have to realize is emptiness and the method to use is dependent on arising. For thinking to do the insight to get you know. Darling, it completely depends on the person where they’re at and their own progress.
Anyone at all has the potential. I mean, in general, the reason to say that, you know, in the traditional teachings, it would say that the best condition to have to do all this work is to be a fully ordained monk or nun up in the mountains meditating single pointedly with all the appropriate and perfect conditions so that you can access your subtle mind and get all these realizations. And that’s the most beneficial way to do that. But you know, there could be I know when we talked, when we were doing a Mandala magazine and Rinpoche, Lama Zopa would occasionally send us various letters from his students and he that were extremely inspiring about all their realizations and he would ask us to publish them without the name of course anonymously because it was so incredibly helpful and I can think of one person who was a nun living in a one of the Rinpoche retreat centers who you know when people know this person and she’s this you know people think of her as this neurotic old person you know this kind of neurotic, oh god, know, here she comes, you know. But then you read this letter, she had profound realizations.
So there’s a nun, you know. And then another person was this ordinary guy living in one city in the United States looking after his old auntie. Just an ordinary guy, does a job, you see him as smiling happy guy, know, but you read his experiences mind boggling. High realizations, great bodhisattva, you know. So it depends on where you’re at in progress, but in terms of looking at the ideal scenario to go do the job, best to be a fully ordained monk or nun up in the mountains.
Best, just best because it’s got very, I mean all the reasons laid out in Buddhist teachings, know. So like the ideal scenario to go off and be a footballer. You might not all have those conditions, you know, but that’s, you can always look at the ideal scenario. But again it depends on some footballers are just such geniuses they can be often, I mean I can think of music you know Charlie Parker, this jazz musician was always renowned to be this just total unbelievable insane junky drunk violent person who never did any practice, but he was a he’d come totally out of his brain to any any gig and he’d be a genius at the music. He didn’t have to do any practice because he was so advanced.
But another person who who had to work harder, it’s like one drink would completely make him a disaster, you know. So it depends on where you’re at in your progress from life to life. But you can still say there are ideal conditions, you understand? So we have to know ourself well. Yeah.
Right, I understand. Having you trouble with no eye because she’s already been part of another eye twin so it’s bit difficult. Well, know, I mean this is what I’m saying. There’s not no eye at all. Nāgārjuna says it’s as if there’s no I but what’s what does exist is so subtle it’s as if it’s an illusion.
I find that very tasty actually. There’s no I that exists from its own side. You gotta finish the sentence. And why Buddha says that is because he is saying we believe we exist from our own side now.
We have that view. We don’t know we have it. That’s why he’s arguing with it. I guess I think when I let that go, I think that’s No. But the twin part’s not relevant to you because it’s not you.
It’s a person who’s completely separate from you with a different mind stream. It just happens to be you’re both born in the same womb at the same time, looking the same, sounding the same, thinking the same because you’ve both got similar karma. That’s all. But you’re two separate minds as you’ve a very close karma connection. You both have the same amount of goodness and virtue and kindness so similar.
You get zapped together, you know, in the same way. We’re just separate people. I mean, even my sisters and me, you know, I still think I speak to my sister Janet and my sister Judy and I kinda I keep thinking that’s me. I kinda hear my voice, you know. So why we’re the same in a family, not to mention twins, is because we’ve created the similar causes.
So we get the similar karmic results. So you don’t even I mean, you should dismiss your twin. You know what I mean? Not don’t dismiss her, but in terms of who you are. Your twin is not relevant.
You know? Who else? Nothing? That’ll do. Carry on.
Yeah. Patrick. Yeah. Yeah. Yes.
Concrete way of knowing Patrick. Solid inherently existing subject and object. The way we write, you know, in the subject. Oh, this I think so because we just it’s hard to hear past the words. I mean we have to use words because that’s the level we’re at.
There’s nothing wrong with words. I mean words can as long as words we use do convey the truth then we’re going in the right direction. We like to label everything. There’s nothing wrong with it. We’ve to label.
How can you how can you not label? But you see that’s the trouble because we again, as soon as we hear all things are dualistic and all the labels we then chuck the baby out of the bathwater and think oh we shouldn’t label but excuse me, well how do you say I want a cup of tea? You can’t if you can’t label, you cannot. The problem is not saying I want a cup of tea, the problem is I want a cup of tea now for me please which is what we’re really saying and then freak out if I don’t get it that’s what we’re seeing by clinging to cup of tea as inherently existent or I, another one is saying I, I exist okay but it’s sort of like when it’s I that’s the problem we exaggerate the I we give too much meaning to the I we give it more import than it has which doesn’t imply it doesn’t have import that’s why it’s so subtle the meaning here as soon as we say it doesn’t have import we chuck the baby out the bath water. As soon as we say it does have meaning, we make it concrete.
These are the two wrong views, these are two extreme views. We don’t have the middle way view in our mind. It’s a label for a way of seeing things. We don’t have that way now, we’re training. So we have to constantly catch ourselves every time we get nihilistic to come back towards the middle way.
We have to constantly catch ourselves when we get too eternalistic, concretizing to lighten it up with emptiness. Back and forth, the middle way, the middle way. It’s a very skillful way to say it, you know. They’re really kind of testing they’re kind of like this you counter at them all the time, you know. We just had emptiness.
We go off into the la la land and then we have the the eternalistic view, which is even why it’s interesting in the different Tibetan traditions, they all kind of have debates, know, and often they they they argue with Tsongkhapa whose way of presenting is this one and saying that he’s too eternalistic because he talks about dependent arising a lot. Many of the I know when I first started with the Kagyupas and the Nyingmapas, or just when I was editing the books for wisdom, I I thought they were speaking wrong of you. But it’s just their way of talking. They don’t talk so much about dependent arising. And they accuse them of being it was just a different ways of talking.
You have to learn to know the meaning. And then it’s just as ever getting the words right first is unbelievably important. Don’t ever think words aren’t important. Once you’ve got it’s like the recipe. How do you just have a wishy washy recipe?
Know? Oh, it’s not really the cake. You can’t describe a cake. What does it matter what the recipe is? I mean, excuse me, you’d never get a taste if you didn’t have a decent recipe.
Same here. You gotta have the right words, then you invest them with the right meaning. That’s by thinking and meditating. I don’t understand what you mean by imputing an eye on them. Well, that’s why Tsongkhapa says you don’t say that, that you look at the dependent arising of it and you look at the factors and all the causes and the conditions and you focus on those and the more you get in touch with those causes and conditions and factors, then that loosens the grip on this poor eye.
And that’s the point. That’s why you don’t look at the, oh, there’s no eye there. It’s kind of a meaningless statement, you know. It’s not helpful to us because it’s too subtle. We have to look at the dependent arising at the conditions.
Okay. This happened because I did this and that’s happening because I did that. But mostly, if you look at the ego and how we experience these things, we think we’re an innocent victim that I didn’t do anything to deserve this. There’s just poor me, all these things happening. But no, Buddha says, excuse me, it’s karma.
karma is the way of describing the first level of dependent arising, that things occur in my life in dependence upon causes and conditions. It’s the way of taking responsibility. So if I want to look at my own life, I see that why am I poor? I have I’m not just poor me, I’m poor, it’s not fair. That’s how we think now.
I have to think, no, Robina, I’m poor because I lack generosity in the path. That’s one of the causes and conditions for this fruit called then immediately there’s more space because I’m taking responsibility for it and that gives me space to now move and that’s dependent arising. That’s what you think. You don’t think emptiness, you think dependent arising. Emptiness is the conclusion you come to.
So how does that argue with karma? Doesn’t. That means that people did certain things and activated but if we want to analyze that, excuse me, it’s out of anger and killing and hating and stealing with great respect. You know, sometimes when it’s when we do our revolution because we’re thinking other people are the blame. So you you might activate certain other karma to ripen so you get a nice cup of tea instead of having nothing before, but that cup of tea is not because you had revolution.
You had a cup of tea now because your karma from the past ripened. But if you use a negative method to activate it, excuse me, you’re just you’re just poisoning it. It’s it’s it’s not, you know, you could say that, you know, people who steal get money. I agree with you. Therefore we conclude stealing is good.
No, it’s too subtle. More subtle than that. Stealing is a cooperative cause for me to activate some karma of mine to ripen such that I get some money. Why I get money? It’s not because I’m a good thief, it’s because my karma was of generosity was there, but because I did it due to stealing, I’m polluting it and diluting it and I’m gonna end up with nothing next time.
Just like thinking that cake cake is the cause of happiness because when you get it, gives a good feeling. That’s the whole point, you have to analyze them so much more subtly, the actual process of actual cause and effect. Where does disease, sick disease? Disease comes as, disease, being sick is one of the experiences, the kind of karma called experiences similar to the cause of past killing. Disease, yeah.
But the point about karma is that when bad things happen, we can see this, we can, know, if we’re practicing virtue, then as Lama Zopa says, you know, depression and anger and things are just delusions but when they ripen in the context of practice, they are signs of incredible purification. Purification. So sickness is a sign of incredible purification if you’re practicing. You’re cleaning up the karma, you know. So there’s different ways of interpreting it but simply speaking, it’s the fruit of negative karma.
How come anything bad would happen to you only because of negative karma? No other reason. This is dependent arising in terms of karma. So when you think about this, it changes the view of I because if we analyze the way we cling to the poor I, now it’s poor innocent I. So as soon as you think karma, well no, excuse me, it’s not poor innocent I, I must have done that.
Oh, okay. So it changes the whole dynamic, you know, because it now tells you, well I better be generous because do I like being poor? No, so I better start being generous rather than I better go out and steal from the rich and blame everybody else. But sometimes there are situations where you ask people, you can’t you can’t be generous. It’s not true.
You can think generously. You can have meditate on generosity. As they say, you know, these offerings real and imagined. You can think in your mind. You can be a person who’s quadriplegic unable to lift a finger and you can be sitting there creating infinite infinite infinite causes of countless virtue because this is the power of the mind.
You think of offering everything to everybody. You think of love and kindness. You think of it. You’re transforming yourself into the most amazing being. It all starts with the mind.
We do it whatever we’re capable of. You can I mean, you can do so many things? You can of course, anything, countless things, causes you can do that set you up, that will purify your karma, that enable you to in the future experience the fruits. Know, like you look in your garden, you’ve got no flowers now, what can you do? Don’t get depressed and blame everybody else, you start planting the seeds for future flowers.
That’s that’s that’s why thinking about karma is the most powerful way to think about dependent arising in relation to self, the first level of dependent arising because it argues with the self pity me which is an innocent victim which is not fair and they’re all doing it to me and that’s the problem, that wrong way of thinking. So we should do the compassion wing. So we move on further. Here if we accomplish these two wings, we’ll really put ourselves together in the most amazing way. We become the most amazing being, you know, full and blissful and kind and loving and compassionate and wise and not lying and not stealing and not killing and not harming, guaranteed that continuing to create, you know, causes.
And if we were to complete this wing, we would realize emptiness, we’d cut the root of saṃsāra, and we’d be in bliss, and we’d finish. But here we continue on the compassion wing because we start to see that others are in the same boat. Here we’ve looked at ourselves. We’ve to know our own suffering, the causes of our suffering before we can even begin to see the suffering of others, you know, before we can even begin to feel interconnected with others. We ought to value our self first, take care of our self first, love our self first, be good to our self, understand the causes of my suffering and want it to stop.
Then I can have compassion for others which is understanding their suffering and wanting it to stop. So the basis of compassion wing is the foundation practice is the one of equanimity. It’s a very, again, a very specific state of mind. There are many techniques we use as we know to progress along this compassion wing. Many just practical analytical meditations, techniques, techniques, ways of thinking that expand, ever expand our consciousness to encompass others is what we’re doing on the compassion wing, you know.
The foundational practice is so called equanimity and it’s a very clear clear recognition from much contemplating that enemy, friend and stranger are absolutely equal from this one simple point of view. Actually, Actually they’re equal from countless points of view but the basis of all the analysis is one point of view. It’s the point of view that enemy friend and stranger equally want to be happy. They want to be happy. So right now we look at enemy and we see, you know, this is John again, mean ugly person who punched me, how dare he?
Then obviously, I don’t want him to be happy. Wanting someone to to be happy is a definition of love. May you be happy, that’s love. And then to whatever degree you build it up, know. So when we have the enemy, we see them as a cause of our suffering, we see them as horrible and we do not want them to be happy.
You know? We don’t therefore, because we we are so and so because we can see with all these three with attachment, you know, the the voice of a aversion is the filter through which I’m seeing John, so I can’t see John at all. I see is a projection of my own misery, you know. When I see my friend, if I love John, if I’m attached to John, all I see is a filter, you know, through him through the filter of my own needs. I see him only as a projection of my needs.
Therefore, of course, I’m completely happy for him to be happy as long as he makes me happy, you know. And in fact, right now even I can say I love John, definitely. I do want him to be happy, but as long as Lama says, that love is unstable. Or as we would say in the west, it’s a wonderful phrase, it’s got strings attached. I only love him because I’m attached to attachment means he fulfills my needs.
So as long as he fulfills my needs, I am very happy for him to be happy, there’s no doubt and I do have this love, but it’s polluted love. You know, if I’m everyday looking at John and he looks at me with loving eyes and I’m so blissful because he loves me, why does he love me and I why is he happy? Because he’s looking at me, I’m making him happy. It’s so blissful, isn’t it? But you look one day when I see him being happy, but she makes him happy now.
Oh my god, you know? No way in the world do I want him to be happy. My love cuts off like a tap. Isn’t it? Finished, turned off, no more love because it had strings attached.
It was not stable as Rinpoche says. In other words, the reason we love somebody now is because they make us happy. It’s the wrong reason to love somebody. The reason we don’t love somebody is because they make us miserable. And then the stranger, what’s a stranger?
Definition it’s a person who neither harms nor helps me. So what’s the emotion in relation to them? Profound uncaring, couldn’t care less. Ninety nine point nine nine percent of the universe, isn’t it? They’re all the strangers.
We do not care. Not interested. You can’t even see them, they’re so boring, you know. So we can see this is the three categories for the entire universe. There’s no fourth category.
There are those who help us, they’re called friends. We’re attached to them and therefore we’re happy to love them. There are those called enemies whom we who are not attached to, whom we do not wish to love in fact we even hate and there are ninety nine point nine nine percent of whom we simply don’t care about and all Buddha is saying is we have to blast ourselves out of this narrow limited view in order to really build up stable love, compassion, great compassion, bodhicitta for every single sentient being without exception. That’s the first step, the foundation of all the other practices. You can’t do the others without this one.
So we have to contemplate again and again how enemy, friend and stranger are using many arguments, much analysis to prove to ourselves that they’re equal from the point of view of each wanting to be happy. I mean it doesn’t take too long to prove it, it’s just we have to want to, that’s all. And you can see it’s true. I mean there’s various ways of looking at this. You check yourself, it’s a very good example of this one.
You check yourself. You know you’re the friend, the enemy and the stranger for at least three people, right? We all know this. And you know when you look at them looking at you, you can see what they’re seeing. The person who adores you is just, you know, stars in their eyes, they see a little angel there.
The person who doesn’t like you see some horrible person, you look at the coldness in their eyes. Now the stranger, the fact that they flip their eyes past you, they don’t even notice you, proves they don’t even notice you, you don’t even exist. So they see three different people don’t they? And they each feel their appropriate feeling. So the friend wants you to be happy because the enemy doesn’t and the stranger doesn’t care.
Now you know you are constant, aren’t you, through all those three experiences? You’re the same and you want to be happy every single second. You’re the same. You’re constant in your wish to be happy. Well then the enemy friend and stranger are exactly the same.
They are each constant in their wish to be happy. Constant. So this is something that sounds so simple but it’s really profound because we can begin to hear this rationally, see it correctly, appropriately, then what we’re doing is right now we’re up here, you know, we can’t see anything. We can’t always sing as our own stuff, too close. We gotta get a bit of space, you know, and see them apart from us, separate from us.
Excuse me, enemy friend and stranger have nothing to do with you. Excuse me, they’re separate people with their own life, their needs, their feelings. Get yourself out of the equation please. Then it’s easy to see they’re equal equal in their wish to be happy. Equal, there’s no question about that.
Every minute they wanna be happy. That’s the basis for your love now. Once you’ve established this equanimity that they wanna be happy, now you have a foundation for to begin to develop love upon and compassion and all the rest, you know. So there are all these techniques, you know, and so one of these one next little contemplation that one would do and it’s very weird for our minds is called seeing that all sentient beings have been your mother. I mean, it sounds very bizarre, you know.
Well, this is just as they say in the Lamrim, it’s a numbers thing. It’s just purely a numbers thing. It’s just getting your head around the fact that all sentient beings have got beginningless consciousness, which follows they’ve all got beginningless lives, which follows we’ve all bumped you to each other countless times, which follows we’ve been they’ve all been my mother countless times. It’s just a question of numbers. Getting your head around those numbers which is quite an insane view for us, but it’s a very interesting concept, know?
And then you’ve got the basis now to begin to think, well, you know, they’ve been kind to me. All my beings have been my mom. They’ve kind to me. Now this is a curious one for us because we think our mothers haven’t been kind to us frankly, but I think we’ve got a series of wrong assumptions here. This is the problem, so it’s very helpful for us to think this one.
We’ve got to base wrong assumptions completely. First of all, I think this is a you check this one, I think it’s really true, what we mean by kind is when someone does what I want, isn’t it? That’s why we think our moms aren’t kind because we’re full of attachment, full of bottomless pit of neediness in any way, they made me, you know, they made me, they’re responsible, it’s their job to make me happy, that’s how we think. Excuse me, like I said, your mummy and daddy are lying there quietly and you come along, don’t blame them. So when you change your assumptions, you know, they didn’t make you and anyway, she’s an you know, again because we had this view and we kind of, you know, we we kind of put our mamas up on pedestals when we were kids.
I remember almost a day when my mother started falling off her pedestal. Know? I remember it, you know? But I mean, that’s our projections then. Okay.
It’s wonderful to have a mother whom you just adore when you’re little kid. That’s why mothers adore their children because they just see them as angels, you know? And it’s nice mutual. But naturally as we get older, it’s gonna start changing, then attachment’s gonna take it’s take you know, come up in aversion and because we have these wrong assumptions, then of course we don’t think our mother’s kind, it’s her job. Well, me, how dare we think this?
When you begin to know, especially if you’re a mother yourself, you can see how cruel it is because you’re an ordinary sentient being with ordinary delusions, know, and that I and you’ve got this child due to karma. So we’ve got this collective karma, you know, and then if you have the view of karma as the child side, then you know that you created the cause to have that particular mother. Yes, she might be neurotic and yes, she beat you up and yes, she gave you away. Well, excuse me, put the emphasis on yourself again if you’ve got the view of karma way back in the first scope of the practice. It’s a very different perspective then.
Then there’s space to see the kindness and the fact that she did anything at all for me means she’s kind. This is a fact. I mean, even if your mother did give you away, okay, we would all think we have no reason to think our mother’s kind. Well, I think you’re wrong. The fact that you’re living here today sitting in this room means she didn’t abort you and this is the most amazing reason to never stop being grateful to your mother.
Again, more beings are aborted or miscarried than those who get born. We won the lottery by getting born and getting out, even though she gave you away. She didn’t abort you. She carried you for those nine months. That’s enough reason for you to do years of meditation on the kindness of the mother, I tell you.
So it really means seeing it differently, you know. And the fact for me it seems that when I see my you know, her neurosis, you know, typical human being, join the human race, nothing special. But we’re so shocked that our mothers have delusion, aren’t we? It’s fascinating, you know. That just shows our bottomless pit of neediness.
We ought to have had an angel for a mother and then we tend to think how dare a person who’s deluded make me, how dare she be deluded you know and make me. I mean how dare they we think. It’s what bizarre thinking you know. She’s a human being with delusions. So all the more we should be grateful that she went out of her way because of her that here she is with her own attachment, own needs, her own fears, her own anger and she still took care of me.
All the more we should be grateful because she was so deluded, you know. That much harder for her. There’s many ways of seeing it, know, we just have to shift our emphasis and then we all know, we all know when someone looks at us, if they don’t like us, all they see is the miserable things we do. Like when our mom’s criticizing us. We know she’s not seeing the real me.
All she does is find fault. Well, that’s what we do. That’s why we find our mom so miserable. All we’re doing is finding fault. Seeing the half instead of the full glass, all that kind of stuff because that’s aversion strongly prevalent in the mind and aversion is nothing other than thwarted attachment because I’m not getting what I want, you know.
I mean, it’s being cruel to ourselves but we have to, you know, we’re at the third scope now, can afford to be. Be very brave with ourself and critical looking at it, just the wrong views we have. So we kind of just shut breaking down our view here of all being kind. So naturally, you’re gonna you’re gonna then start to wanna repay their kindness. This is very reasonable.
Like, when you really see the kindness of somebody, of course, you want to repay their kindness. There’s a softness in your heart, you know? But before we even do that, there’s another interesting way to contemplate the kindness of others and it’s very similar to this to dependent arising argument we used before but it’s in relation just to sentient beings, not to things as well and it’s a way of seeing the kindness of all beings. This particular argument says all beings are kind to us. Now this is seems insane, so how is it true?
Well, you just think of anything in your life and we can use the mala in exactly the same way or your your or your zen, my pair of socks, my pair of socks, you know. How all beings — you take anything, my socks. You can’t begin, just like the dependent arising argument about everything, you can’t find the end of the sentient beings who’ve been involved in these socks. You can’t find the end. There’s the person who made them, person all the people who made them, the factory, the people who made the factories, people who made the packaging, the people who did the typesetting on the packaging, the people who wrote the copy, the people who designed the typeface, the people who did the printing, who made the ink, who all these little things who did the packaging and put a thing and it got across and who shipped it and who made the trucks and got it to the shops, people who put it on the shelves, people who served you, the little the little creatures that died when the wool was picked, you know, the the the people who spun the wool.
I mean, you could if you had a picture, you’d just have a picture of millions of different sentient beings not thinking about you, of course they weren’t. Again, we think kindness as if they think of me especially. No, the very fact that they did it at all and all these things came together miraculously that now I have a pair of socks, keep a pair of socks to keep me warm you know. I mean you check this one, it’s like your mother, I remember mother when she died, I wasn’t there, I was in England, my sisters told me this at the house and I knew this, she kept everything her seven children ever had, just about, everything that we’d given her, you know, every sixpence, every little piece of hair, an old stick, an old drawing, and a card, little the most bizarre, you know, in themselves meaningless things. So you know, Lou, check how you feel when you go to the shop.
What’s in the forefront of your mind? I want maroon socks and I’m very fussy. I mean, the moment I’m wearing all these different color maroons, look at me, and I hate this, I’m completely like matching maroon, tell you, totally vain, you know, I think I just like matching but everything’s different, I can’t believe I’m doing it, so degenerate. So I go to the shop, I want a particular color maroon and I’m looking at what I want, you know, I go to the shops, I scan the socks, oh there, and if I get a pair that’s the right texture, the right price, the right color, I’m happy then to say thank you and aren’t they kind, but if I don’t find that, excuse me these boring people, I don’t make these socks properly, how dare they, you know because why, because what I’m seeing through everything through is my needs, therefore I’m blinded from seeing all the people who worked, so look if my mother didn’t adore her children, let’s say, and then I gave her a little piece of drawing with a stupid thing on it and she was an artist, let’s say, and then she sees that piece of drawing, that’s a stupid drawing, she’d say, because she had her attachment involved.
Do you understand my point? No, she doesn’t because she adores her little Bobsy. Everything her little Bobsy does is just like the most perfect blissful thing, isn’t it? Well, that’s a bodhisattva. It’s like, okay, was attached as well, but the bodhisattva, they’d go to the shop and they’d be prostrating to the socks, weeping in compassion for all the beings who made all these socks, but for whom there’d be no socks.
They don’t care if it’s pink socks or white striped, they just see the scent, what they see in the forefront of their minds is the work of all those sentient beings. It’s like in Mummy Saw, when she sees my little drawing, well she sees her little Bobsy and she cries, you know? We all know that feeling. When you’re in love with somebody, you see their socks, you see their shirt, you nearly weep. Right?
Isn’t Everybody knows this one because all you see, you don’t see socks, see your beautiful lover you know, that’s the same. If you just transfer that to being a bodhisattva, everything you see you see the work of sentient beings. That’s what bodhisattvas do because why didn’t come down from the sky like that is because they practiced, meditated until eventually there’s no attachment and all and they meditated in this way in many ways and all they do is see the kindness of others but for those sentient beings all working in the factory and doing it, little sentient beings who died and the trucking ones and they see their little minds and on the freeway and crying and miserable, they just weep with compassion and therefore out of this came my socks, know? All the hard work of all these little working people. I mean, God, you think like this, it’s not illogical, we can see it’s the truth.
When you go to the supermarket, the baked beans, all the things on the shelf, again, well, we walk in there thinking, you know, with an assumption, I want my baked beans at the best price, best nutritional value, no gluten, no this, proper that and including for me, design, I’m really a sucker for design, if the package is designed well, I’ll buy it, you know, I don’t care, so I’ll think, oh aren’t they good, because look at that good design, really appreciate it more, you know, if the price is good, the nutritional value is best, everything is in terms of whether it suits me, then I’m happy to say thank you to the waitress, to the shop lady, you know. If I go to the cafe and I order chocolate cake and the chocolate cake comes and it’s really delicious and she gives me a discount, oh you’re so kind I’ll say. Why? Because my attachment got what it wanted but she’s just as kind even if she brings a carrot cake. What I don’t want you know.
So we see everything through the filter of our own needs right now that’s why we can’t see the kindness of others. You start shifting your you know your your emphasis, then this is how you get these realizations. You start to really everything you see now, you’ve just drained yourself, that’s all. You see the kindness of others, it’s vivid in front of you, you see the bricks, you think of the architect, the builders, the people who put the lights in, how about the little people climbing up there and putting tubes in, how are gonna have a light? Little human being walked up the ladder up there, know.
You’re probably depressed and wanting to go home, but for the putting in the light you wouldn’t be able to see each other I mean that’s a human being who did it you know. How do you see these things not get completely overwhelmed by? Wisdom. So compassion is this one we’re trying to do compassion here but what we’ve done on the wisdom wing is kind of what wisdom does is give it iron to your compassion. It it cause you to know why and how and and because you’ve got rid of your own delusions, you’re very very powerful, very strong.
So just wisdom on its own could be a disaster. Compassion on its own is weak and soft. They kind of one gives strength to the other. So I can see too but also you get inspiration from it. Inspiration from it.
So I can say when I go to the prisons, you mean you could get very depressed. I mean their lives are really pretty hideous and there’s no hope and you see some of the people, their eyes just haunted. You hear this talking about people who are completely insane, like the suffering is beyond belief, the gross suffering. It could be enough to make you very unhappy, you know, but I’m not saying I have wisdom but by thinking about karma, by thinking and getting strength from this myself and realizing, you know, but you know, I mean just thinking about karma, thinking about impermanence and thinking about why people are there and how, it gives you some kind of basis to your compassion. I mean, that’s so you gotta have wisdom as well.
It gives it I can say it gives it iron and strength, you know, and then from this compassion, you don’t start going sentimental. This is the point about pride, now your point, right? You say, oh great, I’m doing a good job. If it’s going in the right direction, you really rejoice in this and then you let go, you think great, but if you go the wrong direction, you start going on about it, I’m so special, I’m so proud, you inflate yourself, and then you get then it’s all wrong, you go wrong. So the same with compassion, you know, you hear about the suffering of others, you know it’s karma, due to their karma they’re going through it, and then it reinforces you to remind yourself, reinforces your wish to remind yourself to stop playing to delusions, because look at the suffering, I don’t want us to have that suffering, and I want to help others not have that suffering so you think about it in a correct way you don’t think about it in an incorrect way because you get dragged down and you’ll drown too you know that’s what wisdom is really so for me I can practice it reinforces my determination to keep doing so when I went to prison with Gloria, you know, and I could see these guys wanting so badly something then I thought okay I’ve got to do something about this I’ve got to get Gloria more books, we’ve to sit down have a meeting what can we do to make it really better structured, I’ve got to get more money in so I can do it instead of oh my god, it’s so hopeless, what am gonna do, I can’t stand it, there’s so much suffering, can’t bear it, go away.
Then you get energy from it because you think what can I do? Because that’s the one about compassion, okay, we’re moving on this compassion path and we use these new techniques to help us change our minds, but this culminates at a certain point in what’s called this genuine affectionate love. And then in compassion too, and I’ll talk about the technique we use, but there’s a key characteristic to the compassion of the bodhisattva which is the the one along this path, is the compassion is seeing the suffering and finding it unbearable, but you’ve gotta have the next one which says seeing the compassion, finding it unbearable, thinking what can I do about it? That’s what gives you strength. The great compassion, this they call it great compassion.
That’s the unique characteristic of the bodhisattva. The aahat, the person they call the this foe destroyer, the person who’s destroyed Delusions on the on the wisdom wing is an amazing being with enormous compassion because as you get rid of delusions, how can you not have compassion? But it never gets to the level of what can I do about it, that it’s my job to take it away? When you die having achieved emptiness, go into bliss, know, for eons. Having realized emptiness even on the bodhisattva path, you don’t say, you don’t go off into bliss, you say what can I do about it, so you get reborn again and again and again and again to continue to benefit others and that’s what gives you enormous inspiration, You never give up?
You get this energy of never giving up because you always feel you feel confident. You feel happy to just keep moving. Just keep moving. Just keep moving. Just keep doing it.
And that gives you because when you feel confident, you don’t get depressed. You don’t go down, you know? And you always always feel I can do something, it’s up to me to do it. Then you’re not feeling like a victim. You do what you can, you can’t do everything.
You’re still continuing to see suffering but you just keep moving and that gives you energy, you know. That’s the great compassion one. For the kindness of all beings. Then it moves into these techniques, there’s various other things we do, little techniques you use but really there’s a whole area special level of practice here. The techniques come from what’s called exchanging self for others, and this is very it’s a very profound way of really quickly developing love and compassion.
But Pabongka Rinpoche, the author of this book I don’t know if you’ve got copies down there. Were you selling Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand? You weren’t, were you? No. You didn’t bring it?
No. Okay. Okay. Well, that is a big book big big book and it’s a commentary. So this detailed commentary and all this stuff that we’re discussing here in a very traditional way, but it’s a very excellent kind of handbook, you know.
So as he says in there, in order to to do this type of practice of developing compassion called exchanging self for others, there’s a whole series of techniques, you need to be a suitable vessel. And what he means by that very simply is a person who’s done the work of the wisdom wing, which is again this point here. If you haven’t done the work of the wisdom wing, which means if you haven’t got rid of your own delusions, which means you haven’t got rid of your own ego investment, you have very little capability of doing much compassion and love at all. You get dragged down. You don’t have any wisdom wisdom for a start and you’re gonna you got your own eye invested in it and it’ll be too painful to you.
You won’t be able to bear it. Whereas the person who’s a suitable vessel has, to a huge extent, gone beyond the neurotic eye and has become a very very strong, confident, clear, wise person who doesn’t get bogged down, you know. So in other words, in one of the texts called the Eight Verses of Thought Transformation, one of these little thought transformation, these little exchanging self for others texts. There’s these very simple little instructions which one would utilize in meditation to really transform one’s way of seeing the world. It says, for example, in one of the verses, when you’re with others, see yourself as the lowest of all.
Now if we just hear that out of the blue coming from our usual low self esteem and misery, we would think Buddha’s being extremely cruel and we’d sort of say, well, excuse me. I already see myself as the lowest of all. What the hell is he trying to prove here, you know? So we’ve gotta be a suitable vessel. In other words, it’s only a person who’s gone beyond the neurotic eye and has developed a marvelous sense of themself who can really hear that comfortably.
So a person with low self esteem, that would not be an appropriate practice. But a person who’s gone beyond low self esteem, who’s got some courage, and who really believes in their own potential, it’s that’s amazing practice. But even there, it’s hearing it wrongly if we think you’re walking into a room, you gotta keep saying, the lowest of all. I’m the lowest of all. I’m lowest of all.
Oh, I’m the lowest of all. That’s low self esteem. The person who’s really got that view correctly is the one who’s really able to see all the marvelous qualities of others. Because it’s not self conscious at all. It’s not I I I.
In that sense, you can say you’re seeing yourself as the lowest all because you’re putting everybody up high. Now not in the usual deluded way we do that.