y Public Talks — 2000-12-11

Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.

About this talk. In this 90-minute talk, Ven Robina Courtin reframes a core assumption: you did not become who you are because your parents made you. Buddhism teaches that your past actions created the causes to be born into that family with that mind. From this take on responsibility, she unpacks karma’s mechanics, consciousness as a continuity independent of birth and death, and Buddha-nature—the potential in every being to achieve full awakening. She explores attachment in detail: not mere liking, but neurotic exaggeration and desperate grasping, convinced happiness lies in possession. She covers meditation as mind-training, the spiritual teacher’s role, processing harm through karma, and preparing for death by understanding impermanence. Her style is irreverent, concrete (chocolate cake, Mozart, prisoners), and philosophically rigorous without becoming abstract. For newcomers to Buddhism and those testing whether its core claims resonate.

File metadata (for organising)

File: 02 2000 12 11 PT.mp3

UUID: 8369996e-cc36-4de2-8daa-d28ba9426259

Teacher: Ven Robina Courtin

Collection: y Public Talks (Ven Robina Courtin)

Date: 2000-12-11

Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide

Duration: 90.6 minutes

Words: ~19,091

On this very consequence, and they will not work enough. So basically, everything come together. Now the Western materialist view would say that’s all there is. The Christian view would be that God put a soul there, and that’s how come you become what you are. But even if we’re Christian, I think we definitely all feel that our parents made us, they created us, which is, you know but unfortunately, you gotta stop blaming your parents.

Yeah. If you become a Buddhist, it’s most unfortunate. Cause they just provided you the means. They and your mother provided you the womb, your father provided the other bit, the egg and sperm, they come together, boom. That’s the beginning of you.

But the beginning of you, you know, the the living part of you is a is a is a subtler level of your consciousness. Mean, there’s many many kind of explanations of all this, the actual process of how it happens. The subtle level of you, interestingly bearing all the imprints or or propensities or seeds if you like, this is the idea of karma, from previous actions within this stream of consciousness, but then due to many many causes and conditions goes into that particular mother’s womb, you know, and then turns into this person. So in that sense, in that sense Buddhism is saying, literally, we are our own creators. Now this is kind of a shocking idea because who has memory of this?

You know, very few of us, none of us maybe. And then also what’s most interesting, if we check how we feel in our life, isn’t it? We don’t feel, there’s no gut feeling of having anything to do with who I am. We’re continually looking out there, isn’t it, for the people who cause our happiness and cause our suffering, is why we spend so much energy on the outside world, because it’s our implicit belief. This is what Buddha is saying, if we check deeply, that somehow I’m a product of other people.

I didn’t ask to get bonded, I got plunged here by somebody else, which is why we’re so furious with our parents, that they dare to be anything less than perfect, to have me, you know. Whereas the Buddha says, honey, please excuse me, take some responsibility, you know. You created the cause, this is how they say it, you created the cause due to your past karmic actions to go into that mother’s womb, you know, to have that particular parent, to have this particular life. This is the whole idea of karma. And I’ll talk about that more in more detail.

Because if you like, if you wanna find a creative principle in Buddhism, there’s no concept like creator, and not like in the magic wand sense, you know. If you want to find the principle of creation, how things come into being, then that’s karma, that’s Buddhism. When I am in America I have got to say karma. Because if I say karma, they hear c a l m e r, you see. So karma, okay?

It’s the process of karma, we’ll talk about that. So this mind, okay, it’s not physical, consciousness, it’s more than just the intellectual process, it’s the whole spectrum of your inner being, to the most subtle, most pure, most gross, most negative, you wish to kill, you wish to love, whatever is there, know, the whole deal, you basically. It’s not physical, it doesn’t come from God or Buddha, doesn’t come from your parents. And doesn’t and also, isn’t physical as I said, so then it’s not and it doesn’t just come from nothing. At the moment of conception somehow boom, you just begin with no causes.

That in our ordinary terms is a bizarre idea, there’s nothing I think we can point to, is there? We say there was nothing and suddenly there’s something. We all know there’s a process of cause and effect, isn’t it? It’s like chicken and egg. Okay, so that’s one of the very big differences, these various points indicate the difference.

And of course within this concept of mind being a continuity, it being mine and therefore what I am coming from what I’ve done before, already the powerful kind of experiential implication of this is really the essence of Buddha’s practice. Because Buddha is saying this, you know one point I mentioned before, he is saying that we are the creation, we are responsible for our own suffering and our own happiness. Therefore the essence of Buddha’s practice, one way of saying it, is learning to take that responsibility and begin to have a powerful sense of confidence which comes slowly because it’s changing a very fat habit. A strong sense of responsibility to know that if I change me, I change me, and that’s the point. So I can see myself and my life, know, and all of us, look at our lives.

We spend all our energy, don’t we, on trying to change the outside world. And you can see our Western culture, it’s obvious that our philosophy, although we don’t think we’ve got a philosophy, but it’s absolutely evident we do, because we the fact that we spend all this energy on trying to make the outside world more beautiful, more more everything, know. More clean. Actually one Tibetan Lama was asked what he thought of the West and he said, it’s so clean. And you keep on cleaning it.

I feel like I’m in a comedy club. So I should crack a few jokes, Oh good, okay. So, where was I? Thank you, before that. Oh yeah, how we put all our energy into the outside world.

It’s sort of such a given, in other words our mother didn’t have to teach us, did she? To get attached to nice things and get angry with miserable things. I mean somehow since the beginning, since day one, it’s sort of something automatic, know. It’s kind of interesting. Well the Buddhist idea is, Buddha is saying that due to much habit in the past, we have gotten into these wrong habits, these mistaken habits.

Not in a moralistic sense wrong, not being like that, but simply literally mistaken. He says, listen you guys, you wanna be happy, that is totally perfect. But the trouble is we’re kind of heading south instead of north, we’ll never get there, because we’re using the wrong methods. And the methods, broadly speaking, the biggest mistake we make is in believing that the outside is a cause of happiness and the outside is cause of suffering. And this is sort of like a it is a radical statement, it’s not something we haven’t heard before, but it’s kind of annoying because it doesn’t seem to give any clue, you know, what the hell does that mean?

What am I supposed to do, give up sex, drugs and rock and roll, you know? It doesn’t mean that, that’s what’s interesting, we’ll talk about, okay? Okay, so let’s talk about karma, because that’s one of the major differences in Buddhism, between Buddhism and other views. Philosophical views, religious views, whatever. And it really is a central point.

I mean, like I said, there could be some part of what you hear today, we talk about the mind and psychology, that would be very tasty for a person, maybe the idea of incarnation is a joke, that’s fine, know, take what you need. But I’ll try and give the overview so that at least we have it in our mind. So okay, what’s this idea of karma? Well, you can say that really there are four ways that Buddhism is saying karma ripens, and they always use the analogy of seeds and fruit. Remembering this is Buddha’s view of how things come into being.

There’s no view of creation. There are very extensive explanations in Buddhist when you learn Buddhist metaphysics and so on, whatever the right word is, when you learn all about the physical world. They have very detailed explanations that are quite similar to some of the western scientific views, you know, about external reality and how it and so on and so forth. But the crucial point is that it’s linked to consciousness, and I’ll describe this. So there are four ways Buddha is saying karma ripens.

One way is if you look into your personality, you look into your thoughts, your feelings, your emotions, why you do certain things, your old habits, your propensities, the positive ones, the negative ones, whatever’s there, know. All of that is due to simply, I mean we, you know, if I have the habit to be angry, in my life, I check out who’s the cause of it. Well, she’s the cause of it, it, and he’s the cause of it, and and the nuns were the cause of it, my father was the cause of it. We always find someone out there who causes me to be angry by what they did to me. Well, the Buddhist view is the main cause of my anger is simply the reason I am angry is because I’ve been angry before.

Just like if you see a person playing the piano, why are they playing the piano? You could say it’s because they have a good teacher, because they did this, because they did that, it’s true, they have a piano. But the real reason, surely, is because they practiced it yesterday, and they practiced it the day before, and they practiced it the day before. So the same with being angry. It could be that the external condition are there, like the punch in the nose and the mean father or whatever.

But the main cause of Robina’s anger is because she’s got the propensity of anger inside her. The main reason Mozart at the age of six just started playing music when his mom gave him a piano wasn’t just the piano, it was his propensity to play music, from his habit of having done it before, in previous lives I’m talking about. He carried that ability in his consciousness. In other words, we say God made me how I am, my parents made me how I am. Well if that’s the case, pity helped poor old Hitler’s mom.

You know what I mean? This poor Austrian housewife, what did she do? There’s no evidence in her history that she did the things that Hitler did. So where did Hitler come from? I mean, they’ve written sort of forty nine biographies trying to work it out.

Well, the Buddhist view is karma, know. Past actions like this that set him up to be who he was with the propensities within him. Okay, that’s one way. They call this actions similar to the cause. You’ve got the habit since you were a tiny kid to stomp on the snails, but your brother cries if you see the snail suffering.

Why is this? Your mother hasn’t had time to teach you. The propensity is in your mind from the habit of having killed or the habit of not having killed. So our own personality. So one of the again, the experiential implication of this one is, instead of blaming everybody else and feeling like a victim, which is the inevitable result of blaming other people, you feel like a victim, you know.

And the more you feel victimized, the more powerful you blame. Whereas if you learn to take responsibility, not in a neurotic guilty sense, which is our usual mode. If I’m to blame, I mean, poor me, isn’t it? But somehow the Buddhist idea is it’s an empowering thing, is bravely taking responsibility for my anger. And then immediately I say that, that means, well, if I’m responsible for it, I can change it.

Whereas you check how we feel now, there’s kind of this strong sense, isn’t there, of a hopeless me, a me who can’t change, is always coming out there at me, me having no control of it. Whereas slowly, slowly, through even having this as one’s this is how you bring it into practice, by beginning to even give some credibility to this idea, even though you might not have clairvoyance into past lives, but already it’s a very powerful idea. If I begin to understand that I can change my anger, then fantastic, know. It’s not permanent, nothing’s permanent. You can change anything, might take time and much effort, but the very fact that we feel it’s possible is already a very big starting point.

So this is an interesting point, one of Buddha’s fundamental ideas, there’s a saying in Buddhism that we all possess Buddha nature. What does this mean? It’s sort of like saying God is within all of us, but it’s sort of a different meaning, okay? The idea in Buddhism is that every living being, simply by virtue of being a living being, and the criterion of being a living being, this term in Tibetan, is actually the English term is a translation, roughly, of the term in Tibetan that literally means mind possessor, having mind. We’re all having minds, it’s a noun.

So then having in other words, the difference in Buddhism between this earth, air, fire, water elements here called the rock and this one here is that this one is imbued with consciousness, mind. So this is a sentient being, a living being, this is not, you know, not Buddhism. So this consciousness, Buddha would say that its natural state, what I actually am, my real nature, who am I we think, what is my job in life, what is the purpose of life, why am I here? Well the Buddha’s answer is to develop your natural state, to be who you really are, which ultimately, according to Buddhism, is to be perfect, perfect, to become a Buddha. This is a Sanskrit word that means fully awakened, you know.

And according to Buddhism, that’s our natural state. It’s kind of like, you you see an acorn. Now you can use it for a tool, can use it for a weapon, you can use it for jewelry, can use it for decoration on windowsill. You see my point? You can use it for all this, it’s not a problem.

But what’s its true nature? Its true nature is to manifest into an oak tree. This is the point. So somehow, Buddha is saying, what we have to learn to first get is that our true nature is to develop into this perfected being. This is what Buddha is saying.

Not just one being who can become again, my mother thought this was terrible, so arrogant saying you can become like God. What kind of Buddhism are saying? They don’t use the word God, they say Buddha. That is simply our natural state. Nobody made us this way, our mother and father.

You didn’t win the lottery and become like that. As long if only Mother Teresa’s of the world had this, and then the Hitler’s don’t. Every living being has this nature. Doesn’t mean they’re developing at the moment. I mean, look what we use our mind for.

Talk about using an acorn for everything but its true nature, look what we do with this crazy mind of ours. We I mean, we know the Hitlers of the world, killing and lying and stealing, being depressed and angry and miserable and unhappy and low self esteem and hopeless and what am I gonna do? Or Buddhists say we’re missing the plot completely, know. Our true nature is what it is. No one made us this way, it is simply that, is to develop into this Buddha.

Now that sounds holy in the sky, what does it mean? Simply speaking, what Buddha is saying, using another analogy, is that our true nature is like pure water, H2O, two bits of H and one bit of O. We know that, I I know water is more complex than that, but just saying, right? But when you see this liquid stuff, you know that’s what its true nature is, it’s what it is, it’s very nature of its existence. Now we also know it can be very polluted, right?

So somehow because, and this is the analogy here, the water has been polluted for so long that we just assume that is what water is. You’ve never tasted non polluted water, you’d assume it’s just polluted, what can you do? Well that’s kind of like how we are now because for so long Buddha is saying, we’ve been missing the plot and going in the wrong direction, using our mind for ridiculous things that only anyway bring us suffering instead of happiness, is what we want in the first place, happiness. And we’re so addicted to this and so caught up in it, and it’s so easy to do it because the habits are so strong that we just don’t realize that we can de pollute this mind of ours. So the H2O of our mind, if you like, of who we really are, is simply all the positive qualities, there’s nothing mysterious, it’s not sort of holy and mystical, it’s down to earth.

So you check, when we say love, kindness, generosity, patience, we don’t go, how disgusting, do we? We know they are the things that we call positive, again, good communists, good Catholics, good Buddhists, good nothingists, all kind of sense that dogs agree with this, you know, It’s obvious, you see my point. That’s called virtuous energy, positive. It’s not in a moralistic sense, but somehow it’s what we want, and when we do it to others it’s what they enjoy. It’s sort of clear, know, it’s kind of fundamental, it’s sort of fundamental.

It’s not God or Buddha making it that way, which is how we tend to think of religion, that he says, this is what I say, you better believe it. So the Buddha is saying, if you look into it, it is how things are, you know. So the development of this, a degree which we can’t develop it further, in other words, to a degree that’s way beyond what we would accept as possible in our Western culture. In other words, it seems to me Buddha’s view is quite radical, psychologically speaking. I don’t know, and I’m not that good a psychologist, I haven’t studied that much of other Western views, you know?

But I haven’t heard yet any psychological model that would assert that any being, a human, could completely eradicate any trace of pollution from their mind. Meaning, what? What’s pollution? We all know, you hear the words anger, jealousy, depression, anxiety, stress, low self esteem, guilt, all these words. We all know what this means.

You know, when I say to you, I was so jealous yesterday, then it was just great. I mean we do not say that, right? So we all know that these are heartbreaking, cause us suffering and actually then cause us to harm others. Mean look at the world, you know. So something very fundamental, very obvious.

So all Buddha is saying in a simple way that it’s the utter absolute development of this stuff, the positive stuff, and the complete eradication of the negative. That is eventually what a Buddha is. Okay, there are implications to this the way Buddhism would describe the qualities and it really does sound like you’re talking about God eventually, and I’ll say that in a minute. But this is where you begin, it’s not something out of the sky, in heaven, impossible, mysterious, not knowable, how we think of religion in our culture, you know. In Buddhist terms, everything is knowable.

It is possible. It’s an organic process just like everything else. So this is what’s behind even all of the Buddhist view. This is what a person who is a Buddhist okay, there are different traditions of Buddhism. One called the Hīnayāna or the Theravadin Buddhism, would assert that actually only some beings have that, but that’s just the philosophical difference, it doesn’t matter.

The Buddhism I’m talking here would assert that we have this potential to develop these two wings of the bird. The full development of the compassion wing, which is the ability to benefit others to a profound degree, and the full development of the wisdom wing, which is the ability to it’s the it comes from the removal of all the pollution from our own mind that brings us our own joy, our own delight, our own bliss, our own happiness. And then on the basis of this way, we could benefit others, you know. This is the idea in Buddhism. So what a person who is being a Buddhist is trying to do, is do in the long term, is do this job of discovering one’s own true nature, which happens to mean removing all the rubbish for my own benefit, getting ridiculously happy, this is very simple, the result.

And then being on the basis of this, recognizing everybody else is in the same boat and through many many lifetimes as they say, developing using various techniques of literally breaking down all the barriers between self and other. In other words, the characteristics of this Buddha, I said simply, it is the full development of all these positive qualities, well, how that’s articulated in Buddhism is this, that the full development of a compassion wing is that, you know, one’s own mind or consciousness is like as vast as space. There’s no separation between self and other. Absolute empathy with all living beings. Whereas you check how we are now, we might have compassion and love for some people, you know.

And it seems like a bizarre and comprehensible idea. I mean, when I first heard this stuff, kind of made me tired, you know. To think I had to love everybody, God heavens. But somehow Buddhism would say that is as we get rid of all the pollution which is to do on the wisdom wing, then it becomes an inevitable consequence by working and working in this way. Expanding one’s connectedness with others.

And that’s our true nature, Buddhism says. Being separate and alienated and cut off and miserable and lonely and me and you and all the rest, in Buddhist terms is not natural. It’s all we know, but it’s not natural, it’s unnatural. It’s the cause of suffering. So then, why we have the separate sense of I is what we have when we haven’t developed the wisdom wing, if you like.

Because we’re caught up in what Buddhism would refer to as ignorance. The Tibetan term is ma rigpa. Rigpa is awareness, ma is the negation. So the negative, unawareness. So Buddha is sort of saying, from the wisdom perspective, that we’re fundamentally unaware of the true nature of how everything actually is.

We’re acting according all to the wrong things, and that’s how that’s why we never get happy, and why we harm others, and look at the world, you know. So the full development of the wisdom wing is quite literally, what my mother found was arrogant, that you know everything, omniscience. That’s because that’s what we say God is, isn’t it? But according to Buddhism, if you have mind or consciousness, one of its characteristics is to eventually know that which exists, to be aware of whatever exists with nothing missing. In fact when you study Buddhist philosophy, they talk that there are various sort of synonyms for what exists.

And one of the terms is existent. And so the definition of that is that that which exists is necessarily that which can be known by mind, consciousness. And that which is known by mind or consciousness is necessarily that which exists. Eventually this omniscient mind. And this is what Buddhism is saying is our own potential, if that’s our potential.

If your mind exists like that water, if the water exists, no matter how polluted it is, we also know the pollution never fundamentally alters the water, does it? As long as the water is there, we know its true nature is H2O. Well, H2O ness of us is the complete development of the wisdom wing, which is the removal of all the jealousy, anger, pride, attachment, all the rest, all the way down to this fundamental misconceptional pollution of this sense of a separate, you know, innate fearful neurotic kind of bereft lonely me ness. Which then gives rise to huge I want, which then gives rise to anger when we don’t get what we want, attachment, which gives rise to jealousy and all the other things, and all the sentient beings of this fundamental mistaken sense of me, I, according to Buddha. So when that’s fully developed, this wisdom wing, one’s mind is as vast as space, remembering that if it is true that mind or consciousness is not physical, then in its nature finally, how can it be confined by space or time or matter, something non physical?

Not possible. It is now, Buddha says, because we are so overwhelmed by the sense of I, this separate, you know, pinhead big me. And then we divide the world into the ones who support me, are our friends, the ones who don’t support me, they are our enemies, and then all the rest. Ninety nine point nine nine percent, they’re the strangers who we don’t care less about, you know. So all this in Buddhist terms, this is unnatural.

This is not appropriate. This is the cause of suffering. Okay, so in other words, enlightenment isn’t just getting a nice feeling, okay? It’s developing these two wings. That’s the long term.

So where do you start with this? You don’t just sort of go up in the sky, wow. You start where you are, like anything. If you want to become like Bach or Michael Jordan or whoever, know. You don’t just sort of panic about it and think it’s impossible, you start at grade one.

You start where you are now, and with that view in mind. You know, isn’t it? And so the whole idea even for us in this culture, I find when talking to westerners about this stuff, we really need to hear again and again this idea that we had this astonishing potential. I mean, told us since we were kids that we had this astonishing potential to be wise and clear and blissful and not angry and not jealous and not proud? I never heard it.

I heard it was you, angry shut up, know? It was true, I was, not pretending. But we don’t have methods in our culture, with great respect. I mean, I’m very happy with my Catholic upbringing. I really am, I’m not criticizing, truly.

But my mother didn’t show me methods. She had methods of how to, you know, show me how to pray and go to mass. Maybe I didn’t get it completely, which is why I was missing something. She had methods to show me how to write and read and walk and talk and go to the toilet and play music. But when I got angry, I mean, other words, when I couldn’t write, she didn’t panic and throw her hands up in the air, oh my god, Rabina can’t write, she had methods to teach me.

But when I got angry, she would throw her hands up in the air, oh my god, Rubina’s angry, what can I do? So that’s why we try to shut up or suppress, you know. So we brought up with, because also in our self we have it, and our mothers and our fathers have it. There’s something instinctive within us, Buddha is saying. We have this sense of this is who I am.

My characteristic, my personality is not my responsibility, my mother made me, father made me, God made me, somebody made me. So of course already we’re alienated from who we think we are. No sense of I have the possibility to be less angry, less proud, more kind, more loving. To see it as an organic process, just like learning anything else. We don’t think of it like this.

It’s kind of interesting, you know. So to begin to have a sense that wow, I have amazing potential, gives you some perseverance. If you really when you go to the you know, when you go to hear that concert, and you’re moved by that music, and you get you get really inspired, I want to be like that. That’s what gives you the energy to go off and start practicing eight hours a day for twenty years, isn’t it? Because you hold that vision of your potential in front of you.

It’s always like the carrot, nothing wrong with that, you know. So to begin to even know, and it has to come from our own self, that we all have amazing potential, that we’re not stuck in who we are, no matter how lousy life is, no matter how bad it is, no matter how rough, you know, whatever happens, and people dying on us, and people stealing from us, depression, and all the stuff we all know about. We’re all in the same boat, know. But to know it’s not permanent is the most precious idea. To really give ourselves, to become our own best friend, you know.

And know that we can change. There are ways to change, so never give up. This is something I’ve learned hugely from communicating with my friends in prison, know. Because, okay, for whatever reasons that they’ve done in this life, whatever, due to their own crimes and things, dumped into this appalling situation. I mean, nobody in their right mind would choose to be in these horrific places with metal and steel and concrete, with enormous amount of violence around you, much paranoia and all your freedom gone and no sensory pleasures.

I mean, who would choose this? Nobody. So either you go mad in that situation, we get angrier or whatever, or like so many of my friends say, it’s been their wake up call. So they’ve learned force because you’ve got nothing else to think about, you’re forced to go inside and start to look. So those have got some karmic connection with Buddhism for example, it becomes the most precious opportunity for them.

They really do see it as retreat. I’m not joking. Although it’s a tough situation because you don’t get all peace and quiet, apparently the noise is like they all talk about this, it’s something I never thought of until I heard some of the situations of some of these people. But the noise is like being in a rock concert all day, they say. So anyway, what I’m getting is very I find very inspiring.

And this is the same for any of us in our lives, and we know when things go wrong, it’s often the very best opportunity for us to be kind of broken out of our bubble, of fantasy bubble of life’s cool, everything’s just fine, going along doing what we’re doing there. We need wake up calls. And what’s that’s an interesting approach, because one of the ways that Buddhism is saying is to give our ourselves our own wake up calls, to reassess what we think happiness is, to reassess what our methods are for getting it. And again it’s not a moralistic thing, that you’re naughty and you shouldn’t have sex and drugs, you know, and rock and roll. That’s not the point.

What Buddha is saying is, it’s not as if the delicious cake is what you have to give up. But what Buddha is saying is, and let’s just talk a bit more now about these things that Buddha is saying are causing us suffering, attachment, anger, pride, jealousy. So we are not maybe prepared to see how anger causes suffering, it’s come in pretty volatile energy, you know. But to hear that something called attachment is the cause of suffering is not a comfortable idea. So the first reason is I think because everyone in this room would have a different definition of this word attachment, isn’t it?

And secondly, because most of us think of it as basically synonymous with love and pleasure and affection, isn’t it? So the Buddhist idea is that it uses the word in a very specific way. In Buddhist terms, if you look into your mind, basically have got two types of things going on. Variations of them hugely, but essentially two. You have the stuff that’s called positive and you have the stuff that’s called negative.

Positive or productive or beneficial, and the negative or non productive, non beneficial. The negative stuff is the cause of your suffering and the cause of why you harm others. And the positive stuff is the cause of your happiness and why you cause others to be happy. It’s as simple as that. It’s complex because right now there is this big soup of emotion we have, we can’t differentiate one bit from the other.

So one of the ways it’s interesting too that the precision and clarity of analysis that we use in scientific discovery and even in mathematics, one and one is two, in our culture is exactly the precision and analysis that you would use as a Buddhist, but on knowing your own mind, on being, as Lama Yeshe says, being your own therapist. This is kind of an interesting point. So it’s not just a generalized view of vaguely just trying to be a nice person, close your eyes, meditate, look holy, and something magic comes. It’s a full on detailed hard job to do. And the more precise you are about what you see in your mind, the more precise you are about how you define what is positive, what is then the more likely you are to actually develop something within yourself.

Just like it is with music, carpentry and anything else, you know. But somehow I think when we hear religion, we get all kind of glassy eyed, not going to la la land, isn’t it? It’s all kind of mystical and beyond understanding, you can’t put it into words. I mean, not being rude, I think it’s how we think, whereas it’s not the Buddhist idea at all. There’s something very down to earth.

Okay, being a Buddha, omniscient and all the rest of it is not so down to earth, it doesn’t sound. But the way to do it, the process, the methods, it’s down to earth, know, it’s psychological. Okay, so there is positive and negative contents of my mind. If it is true that what’s in my mind is the source of my suffering and the source of my happiness, then I better investigate it, hadn’t I? I mean I ought to know what the hell is going on.

But again, because it’s not part of our culture to look inside, I mean when I first heard about it, I’d get irritated. What do mean look inside? Where? I’d try and close my eyes and I couldn’t see anything. So it’s sort of a puzzling and irritating idea to look inside.

It sounds kind of holy and religious. Well, it’s not. It’s just something we’ve never developed a habit to do. That’s all. That’s all.

Just like we know, any of us who’ve been to some therapy. Initially, it’s a very painful thing. Don’t know what the hell is going on. You just feel all this chaos inside you. You’ve never looked inside.

You don’t know why the depression, why the this, why the that. Because why? Not because in its nature it’s hard to know what’s inside us, it’s because we’ve never looked at it. My mother didn’t teach me how to look into my mind, how to observe the nature of my jealousy, observe the evolution of it, how it worked, where does it come from darling, what do you mean? Why do you feel this?

You know, we never did this. We just kind of think this is who I am, what can I do? Hopeless. Also, we see, we all know from the second we wake up, don’t we, that the mind just turns itself on and off we go like on a train. And it’s so curious, isn’t it?

But it really does feel like even though we know it’s my thoughts, my emotions, my feelings, but it’s almost like there’s someone else in there having them in spite of you, isn’t it? And that somehow, of course I can’t control my mind, how can I control my emotions we say? Well we have all these ideas, know. In a Buddhist kind of idea we’re completely nuts to think we can’t control our own mind. So if you can imagine, from the time you were very little, part of your education was that you just, through your skill with your mother and father when you went to school, you learned certain techniques that allowed you to hear more clearly the evolution of your own thoughts and feelings, to recognize them, take responsibility for them and to know you could change them.

Can you imagine how amazing we’d be now, you know? So right now, the only time we notice our feelings and emotions is when they when finally the boil bursts, when it’s so dramatic, isn’t it? When the words vomit out the mouth, when the strong depression comes one day. We didn’t look at all the months before or even years, the baggage we carried around, not knowing how to deal with it. Either suppressing it, which is one mode we have, or vomiting it all out whenever you feel it, which is, you know, also useless.

It doesn’t help, you know. So this is the way we’ve learned to deal. It’s like useless, we have no understanding of this human mind of ours. So to be even begin to stop, and again it’s not because in its nature it’s difficult, it feels difficult. Because at the beginning when we’re half dead, know.

I mean we’re not five, fifteen, twenty, thirty, forty, up to ninety, we’re effectively towards our death, we haven’t even begun to look into our minds. Of course it’s a difficult job, not in its nature, but simply because we haven’t done it. So the crucial job of being a Buddhist, if you like, and this is where simple practical meditation techniques come in. I mean as soon as we visualize the person doing this, we’re going to again get all glassy eyed, wow, they’re meditating. Well excuse me, meditation is a tough job, especially in one mode, which is there are two main modes of meditation, two main ways of using your mind, hundreds of techniques, but two main ways.

And the first one is so practical. It’s I mean a communist could do it, they get great benefit. You don’t have to be religious to do it, okay? It’s simply you sit down in a certain way in order and you’re subduing your senses, aren’t you? Why?

Because the senses get in the way actually. We’re so overwhelmed right now by the sensory world and our sensory experiences, it’s one of the major reasons we’re not in touch with what’s happening inside ourselves, in our mental consciousness, in our thoughts and feelings and emotions. The senses speak so loudly and we are so seduced by the outside world, which is a bunch of sense objects basically. So why you sit down like this is not to be holy, it’s simply to give your mind a break. So usually what happens, when you subdue your senses, what do you do normally?

You go to sleep. Isn’t it? So what you are trying to do in meditation, in this first mode, where you are learning to concentrate, right? And the aim of this isn’t to get a good feeling, isn’t to see lights and have amazing things go on and experiences, it’s simply you are training yourself to develop concentration. I mean, so simple, it’s a joke.

So practical, know, so down to earth. So you sit a certain way just to subdue your senses. And then you use something, you know, you take the breath, the sensation here in your nose, or even certain, we do in a Tibetan tradition, we use certain visualizations, you know, the image of a Buddha or something. And you use that as like an anchor for your mind, and what you’re trying to do is train it to focus on it. Now we all know the moment you try to do this, we either go to sleep or our mind gets more excited.

There are two modes of being, asleep or rushing around like chooks of our head off in the sensory world, isn’t it? So what we are trying to do in meditation is like find a third way of being, keep the mind alert and sharp but without being all out control. But keep it completely subdued without going to sleep. That’s a whole new habit to develop. And it’s because our habit has never been this, it’s not an easy job.

Again, not because it’s difficult in its but because it’s difficult because we’ve never done it, that’s all. So we can see even the one of the practical benefits of learning even just five minutes in the morning, sitting down with yourself to watch your worrying old breath, you know? Nothing exciting about that. Even one of the benefits that comes immediately from it, is that for five minutes because the fact is you won’t be concentrating because the mind is crazy, know, it goes all over the place, we all know, but you are making the effort. So for that five minutes, because your eyes are quiet, the ears aren’t being bombarded, you are attempting to stay sharp and alert, you are attempting to watch the breath, but mainly what’s happening is the stuff that normally happens, which is all the thoughts racing here and there.

But because you are so busy with the outside world, you just don’t notice them. So what’s going to happen for five minutes with your eyes closed and your ears subdued and the rest, you are going to be listening to all this insanity. You are to hear it for the first time. I remember, I remember the first time even beginning to notice that thoughts would pop up randomly. It was a fascinating idea, I never thought it before.

I kind of knew I felt things continuously. But you only ever know our gross feelings when we’re depressed and having negative breakdown, you know? Then we know we feel something. But we’ve been feeling something continuously. Our mind is unceasingly writing us little commentaries about every single thing we say, do and think.

There’s just constant commentary, you know, but we just don’t notice it. I mean, for me it’s a miracle that we aren’t all completely insane, right? Truly, you understand my point? It’s not surprising. I mean, especially if I think of my guys in prison, some of them who are on permanent lockdown, twenty three hours a day in their cell with one of their cell their cellies as they call them in California.

I mean, kill each other daily. And I mean I’m not surprised, know, if you’re sitting in suddenly you’re deprived of everything, and you’re sitting in this eight by ten foot cell with one other human being, I mean I’d kill somebody, being a Buddhist. You know, even being a Buddhist, know, you go mad because you’ve never dealt with all this insanity. You’ve got nothing else to put all your energy into, a couple of books, a pen and that’s it, you know. You’ve got to go pretty insane.

Or you start learning to look inside, and that’s a heavy duty way to do it. I mean, they start mildly and comfortably in the comfort of their own homes, you know? Begin to listen to what on earth is going on inside here. In beginning it’s like chaos. And often they say this, that when you start to do this kind of meditate, for example, you think your mind is getting worse, but it’s not.

That’s if you haven’t heard it before, that’s all. And this is the absolutely crucial part of the process of being a Buddhist, being a spiritual person in Buddhist terms, developing your mind into its marvelous potential. You know, one of the cliches, gross ideas we have, I mean, gross, it’s a nice idea, it’s a fantasy. Somehow meditation helps to make you feel better. Well it’s like saying, you know, when you are completely overweight and all your muscles are floppy, someone tells you that the push ups will make you feel better.

Now they are right, aren’t they? But excuse me, a little bit of pain first. You understand my point, quite a while of pain, sweating and panting and puffing, a lot of diet, a lot of exercise, a lot of training, eventually you will feel very good. But you know, we forget about the trouble in the middle. So you know, the first day you start doing them, you get all red in the face, you know, if you’ve got white skin, and then you start puffing and panting and you think, well they’re a liar, they told me I feel better.

Well that’s stupid, we all know that. Well that’s the trouble with meditation, it’s why most of us give up a spiritual path. Because we have this la la fantasy idea that it’s something nice and feeling good and loving everybody. Yes it is, but excuse me, there’s a bit of pain first. Changing any habit is painful.

I mean as anybody who’s been to therapy knows it’s painful to have to uncover what’s inside you, bring it up, I mean you’re full of tears and anguish. Well it’s very similar to that, I’m not joking. It’s not a joke when Lama Yeshe says being a Buddhist is like being your own therapist. It’s not joking, it’s deadly serious. And it’s all based on, this is the point here, the possibility that you can change.

Now of course, obviously, why would you want to change? The only reason to change is if you can change for the better. If you can become more happy, less neurotic, that’s why you should change. Not because somebody said you should, you know. Do it because there’s a benefit, first of all to you, and then naturally to others, So that’s why Buddhism doesn’t just say religion is being a nice person to other people, it’s very narrow.

You can’t be very nice if you’re full of misery. You know, you cannot, there’s a very low ceiling on your compassion. But if you work on the wisdom wing first, dealing with yourself, understanding you have amazing potential, begin basically to have compassion for yourself, it’s not an understatement. Recognize that you have this marvellous potential, you can develop, you don’t have to be stuck in depression and hopelessness and anger and jealousy and all the rest. It’s not our true nature.

The pollution is not the true nature of that water. Just because it’s your habit doesn’t mean it is. So having this first gives us the courage to persevere, struggle through the difficulties, the puffing and the panting, and all the struggle of seeing this crazy mind of ours. But knowing it is my mind, I mean if I can’t control my mind, excuse me, who the hell can? It’s like it’s such a joke, you know.

So these are a few ideas. This is what being a Buddhist means, okay? Maybe you better ask questions, I don’t know. Yes? I’ll repeat the question for you.

I was about to go into it, I never did but I will. Thank you very much. She wants to know about attachment please. Okay. Well, that’s not mine either.

Not these robes, while I’m in Australia you see. It was very nice. Okay. Okay. Attachment, thank you very much.

But it’s kind of a curious word, like I said before, because we tend to think that it means love, it means kindness, it means it’s a cause of our happiness. So of course, as Lama Zopa says, when we hear Buddha saying, sorry guys, in order to be happy you’ve got to give up attachment. We go, oh my goodness, you mean I’ve to give up my heart? I’ve got to give up my happiness? Not at all.

So let me, like I said before, we all have a different definition, so let me try and give you the Buddhist explanation of what attachment is. Okay? And try and hear it freshly, just in this way for the purpose of this discussion. Okay, like I said before, I was beginning in this track and then I got lost. We’ve got the positive and the negative qualities within us, okay?

And the aim is to develop the positive ones and diminish the negative. It’s as simple as that. It’s complicated but as simple, okay? So we have to begin to investigate what are the negative ones. And not just believe it because Buddha told us, but listen to it, check it out, think well that sounds reasonable and then through one’s own inner analysis, meditation, investigation, being your own therapist, you slowly discover with certainty how it really is the cause of suffering.

So let’s look, okay? Your attachment. Okay, all the negative qualities, according to Buddhism, have certain characteristics that actually make them negative. It’s not God or Buddha that makes them negative. This is interesting, I remember having a discussion.

And again, I’m not criticizing Christianity, believe me, have a very good heart for my Catholic upbringing. There’s just these differences. I remember a discussion with dear Catholic friend of mine, and we were trying to work out what is what in its nature, what is it that makes something sinful or negative? Sinful as the Catholics say, you know, the Christians say, or negative as we say in Buddhism. Well, friend said, that which is a sin is that which goes against the will of God.

And I said, why? And he said, that’s not the point. Now I’m not being rude, but I’m really not being rude, I’m not. But that’s fine if you have that as a view. But I said, but for Buddhism, it is the point.

In other words, the analogy would be, you know, it’s like when I’m a kid, my mother says, don’t go near the fire, Rabina. And I say, why? And you know, so she would say she might say, and as a kid maybe it’s fine, because I said so. That’s fine, but she knows and I’ll discover eventually the real reason is because it will burn me. So this is the Buddhist idea.

What is negative is not because Buddha said it, but because he is saying that he has discovered this is so. That if you do something that’s called attachment or anger, it in its nature causes you suffering. No one makes it that you suffer. Itself brings you suffering. So if this is true, what are the characteristics that make it this way?

So let’s look. There are two main characteristics of what’s called the deluded or the neurotic or unhappy or negative states of mind. One of them, and it’s sort of fairly obvious, know, one of them is that it’s disturbing to me, not to mention other people. So if we look at something like anger, no matter how much we rationalize it or believe it’s our right to do it, right? We all can see that it really disturbs me, doesn’t it?

It’s so unhappy. This is what we mean by unhappiness. I mean, you know, when I’m really angry or something or depressed, we can see that I mean, usually we say because he did this and she did this and they did this and we think it’s all these other people that caused it. But you just look at me looking miserable. That’s what the misery is, it’s really disturbing from my own mind.

All the stories I am telling myself in my own mind about him and her and this and that and what, whatever it is, you know, it’s very disturbing. That’s evident. Now the other characteristic of these negative states of mind, and this is where it’s quite more subtle and hard to see, but let’s try and discuss it, okay, I’ll use attachment, is that it actually, it’s like it’s deluded. So in Tibetan the term used, there are two terms they use for these unhappy states of mind. One is literally disturbing emotion, and the other one is, interestingly, delusion.

So what does that mean? So when we say, oh my god, she’s so deluded, it means that she’s off the wall in knowing what’s going on, she’s kind of in la la land. Do you understand my point? So that’s a really interesting point, this one. So let’s look at how attachment basically is a liar, how it is an inaccurate assessment of whatever object it is that I am grasping at.

This is what Buddha is saying. So let’s look, let’s look at this delicious chocolate cake in front of me, okay? Pretend. Delicious chocolate cake, okay? Okay, first of all, this is a very interesting point too, we think attachment has something to do with the senses.

This is very interesting point, Lama Yeshe says you people, meaning us Westerners, you think attachment and desire have something to do with the sense, they have nothing to do with the senses. Now this is truly shocking, but I’ll explain, okay? Attachment or desire or anger or anything, they’re not in our senses. We obviously experience, vividly we experience things through our senses, there’s no question that chocolate cake is a sensory experience, there’s just no question. But know, Buddha is saying, it’s not the tongue when it gets into the mouth that experiences attachment, It’s not the eyes that see this brown and shape and color.

It’s not the smell, it’s not your nose that experiences the problem. They are having the experience of this chocolate cake, but where all the problems are are in the mind, the mental consciousness, and it’s not even all the mind that has a problem because there are some reasonable states of mind that say, this is chocolate cake. I like chocolate cake. Liking chocolate cake is totally fine, it’s a completely reasonable human experience, know. It’s just like if you were Tibetan you’d like yak cheese.

Now Australians love Vegemite, you just say Vegemite to an American and they vomit immediately, they think it’s the most disgusting thing they have ever heard of. They can’t even conceive of how we all adore it on our toast, right? So to like Vegemite is just fine, but being attached to it is something completely different, okay? So back to the chocolate cake. So I can I have a sensory experience, I taste it, I smell it, I see it, you know?

But what’s interesting is this, we think we I say, oh, look at that divine delicious chocolate cake. And what what is happening is that it’s absolutely gorgeous out there, delicious, vibrating deliciousness at me, demanding that I eat it, and if I don’t eat it I’ll be miserable. That’s sort of the voice that’s going on. That’s the voice of attachment. It’s the story that the mind makes up so quickly about the divine qualities of that object that are a gross exaggeration.

So like we say when we are in love, it’s very meaning, the same meaning, our mothers were very they were all Buddhist I think. She said, you know, you put people on pedestals, you make them more than they are. Now you know when you are in love, he looks the most divine thing you have ever seen, isn’t it? From the tip of his head down to his toenails, right? And chocolate cake, when you are hungry for it and you like it very much or you are very attached to it, you are needy for it.

So liking it isn’t attachment, enjoying it isn’t attachment, it’s the neediness for it, this big commentary inside that’s so spontaneous and automatic, that makes it far more than it is, and then desperately grasps to get it. And also, absolutely believes that when I get it, I’ll get happiness. Now this is most interesting. Why do you have a second piece, and then a third, and then a fourth? Why?

The stomach is already shouting, hey, I am full. But why do we keep having it? Because we are desperate to get happiness, which is a completely valid thing to want to be happy, but attachment is just projected, all its neediness onto the cake, absolutely convinced it will bring me happiness, desperately trying, four, five, six, you’d vomit and die if you kept trying. Right? You agree?

So therefore Buddha says, conclusion, attachment is the cause of suffering, it doesn’t mean it’s not the job of cake to bring you happiness, or it doesn’t stuff you full, and in the end make you more miserable. And even you check, it makes you even more grasping for it next day. So it’s like, talk about suffering, this is suffering, attachment is the cause of suffering. You could look at a whole lot of the things that are necessarily that we are attached to that we don’t necessarily need. But what’s interesting about this is attachment, this is what I am even meaning here, it sounds like, oh you mean I’ve got to give up chocolate cake?

No, please enjoy your chocolate cake. Enjoying chocolate cake, nothing wrong. Liking it, nothing wrong. Having the pleasure, even saying that’s a better chocolate cake than the other one, nothing wrong with all this. Having your senses all turned on, nothing wrong with any of this, this is human.

The problem is, the one that we got rid of, is the story, the fantasy that’s polluting all the other experiences that is so deep in us that we don’t notice it’s there. We’ve gotten rid of the story, the fantasy polluting that you can have your cake and eat it too. You really can enjoy the cake. I mean, is actually very sophisticated. It sounds easy, but because we’re all like a junkie, you all know that you’re an alcoholic, not being rude, you need to give up the alcohol first.

You can’t control your desire for alcohol while you’re still drinking it, it’s insane. So in a sense, at a first level of practice in Buddhism, it’s often recommended to remove yourself from the object, even when you go off to a retreat for a week, to remove yourself, which is why my guys in prison are doing very well with their practice. They had no sensory things and given any pleasure whatsoever, you You see my point? But in the end, when you’re really skillful in your practice, you don’t need to give up the cake. You just give up the neurotic attitude towards it.

And that’s a very deep thing, actually, because it’s very pervasive inside us. Now, of course, when it comes to a person, a relationship, where it’s fun or profound and cake, you know? I mean, look at the stuff. Look at the stories our mind tells. The all our idea of the absolute ultimate in happiness in this culture is to do with, you know, relationship and family.

It’s the peak, isn’t it? As if what? As if when I find the right one, I will find happiness. I mean, look at us all. We all we have this huge romantic notion.

Again, we’re trying to say don’t have lovers, don’t have husbands and wives, of course. But we all know it’s the the mass of fantasy expectations, meaning the voice of attachment constantly working, all these stories, highly elaborate conceptual construction that’s so automatic in our mind, we don’t even notice it. And even if we do, we assume it’s normal. We don’t see a fault in it. We don’t see a mistake in it.

We don’t see it as the cause of our suffering. So we build up this huge fantasy and put all so okay, one of the things to recognize about attachment is that the energy of it is neediness. Neediness. Now why do you have neediness? It’s like saying, why you you need something because you assume you’re missing it, isn’t it?

So this is the irony of ego, which is the root problem according to Buddha. We have this wrong sense of I, so deep, so fundamental, so pervasive, and the irony of it is, as Lama Yeshe calls it, it’s actually the self pity me, poor me. So the irony of that is, is that ego actually is poor me, lonely me, cut off me, separate me, miserable me, small me, which causes them to have this huge I want, and you only want because you feel you’re missing. So when Buddhism talks about eventually how we can be completely one with all beings, he’s not joking, you know. There’s no longer a neurotic narrow sense of a lonely me.

You’re as big as the bloody universe when you finally really discover who you truly are by giving up this neurotic attachment, this neediness, this lonely, separate, little miserable me, that therefore needs to have this gorgeous wonderful person who, you know, all this stuff. I’m not trying to put down relationships, it’s not the point, you know. So we can see the suffering, It’s like again, another phrase our mothers told us, have your rose colored spectacles on, everything looks gorgeous. That’s one of the characteristics of attachment, that it exaggerates the beauty of that person. And then you have all this stuff, this story.

I mean, if you wrote every thought down, you’d have a novel, you know? And what it is is a novel of attachment, describing in detail all the attachment fantasy. Having this you know, if you even check it more clinically, what do we mean even by happiness in this life? It’s by definition, having someone, for example, say, I love you, Rubina. Isn’t it?

Having people say nice things to me, having nice objects, nice sounds, nice smell, nice taste. In other words, getting what we want, because we are so utterly convinced that happiness is in the chocolate cake as if your mother went and put a spoon of happiness along with the eggs and the chocolate, you know? Ridiculous. In other words, we really do believe chocolate cake is out there delicious. This is another fascinating point.

Same as the let’s use the person, the one I’m in love with, okay? So all this investment in getting this person because, you know, he says I love you. That makes me feel I’m a real person, doesn’t it? Now I’m not saying we shouldn’t have affection. Affection is totally normal human experience.

But the problem of attachment, when there’s mainly attachment there, it’s like the neediness of the junkie. You have to keep having it. So, you know, if we really have affection, we kind of can grow from it ourselves. You know, says, I love you. If I’m not so attached, it’ll give me enormous pleasure, and I’ll be able to use that to nourish my own sense of myself.

When is only attachment? I keep wanting him to say it, don’t I? And the second he doesn’t, mental breakdown. Isn’t it? I mean, you check, you know, attachment, and then you look at all the stuff that comes from it.

Once all the nice wonderful beginnings, you know, starts to calm down, then it’s kind of constantly thinking about what he’s thinking, checking every single thing he’s doing, analyzing what he thinks he’s thinking, making up all the stories, freaking out, paranoid, he’s home half an hour late, you’ve got to kill yourself. I mean, jealousy, anger, all these things come as a result of this fierce attachment, which is this huge neediness that that person in my life saying I love you is actually causing me to feel like I’m a real being, and unless he does, I’m nobody. That’s the suffering of attachment, and we all have this. I’m not trying to criticize this. This is human nature, you know.

And Buddhists are saying, this is the source of our suffering. So don’t necessarily chuck the baby out with a bathwater and give up relationships. No, no, no. Give up attachment. Learn to love the person.

So what’s love? In Buddhist terms, attachment is one of the deluded states of mind, that in its nature is disturbing and is deluded in how it sees things, that exaggerates and distorts. It exaggerates specifically the nice qualities of the object of a person, which is a lie basically. It’s a lie. So okay, so then, you know, let’s see what happens.

You fall in love with a person, all this incredible bliss, this joy, the sensory experience, and the fantastic, the absolute it’s the cause of your happiness, now I’ve finally found it, we think. And then when all the energy calms down, then you find yourself in the morning when he slurps his eggs, you start getting irritated, you know? How dare you? So it’s like your attachment is now affronted, so you start to get anger and irritation. So as one lama said, anger is the response when attachment doesn’t get what it wants.

Because, you know, in a sense, attachment is like the name of this default mode that we’re always in, which is constantly searching for the nice smells, nice taste, nice feelings, nice everything. And the moment it doesn’t get, we get angry, get unhappy, get depressed, get whatever it is, know, get jealous. It’s kind of interesting, we all can see this. But what happens, let’s say, after six months? Same person, hasn’t got any grey hairs yet, still the same size, not maybe much better, same nose, same hand, but now you start to find fault in it.

You can’t bear him anymore, you chuck him out, you give him up. And now when you look at him, looks disgusting, isn’t it? Now it’s interesting, isn’t it? We really believe that in the beginning he was really gorgeous and delicious and divine from the tip of his head to the tip of his toes, right? That was what appeared to us was real as far as we’re concerned.

Now what’s happened six months later, he looks disgusting to me. I mean, isn’t this fascinating? What happened to him? Nothing changed. His nose is the same, you know?

Do you see my point here? What has changed is our mind. After the fourth piece of chocolate cake, how does it look? Do you see my point? Isn’t this fascinating?

It is still warm, it hasn’t even gone moldy yet. And look how it looks. It looks now this is what’s really point. In the beginning with attachment in the mind, it looks delicious. It from outside coming at me delicious.

Now after four pieces in the stomach stuffed and your senses are affronted, it looks even like disgusting is there now. Someone’s crept in and put a spoon of disgusting into the cake, right? But what’s interesting, Buddha is saying, we don’t ever recognise this. We just think, well, of course it looks disgusting. So we never learn our lesson.

We never learn the lesson, which is the main one, that cake does not possess innately deliciousness nor does a pest possess innately ugliness. The handsome person when I’m in love with him, he’s not handsome from his own side, excuse me, my sister hates him. And then when I hate him, he’s not ugly from his own side, because now my sister’s falling in love with me, she’s taking him, right? You know what I mean? So it’s kind of psychologically totally fascinating.

And this is what Buddhist psychology says, you know, and this is very interesting, we can see this actually, that, you know, that it is our mind, it’s our attachment. One of those attachments in my mind. It’s like I’ve got my rose colored spectacles on. The cake looks divine. When I’ve got aversion in my mind, had my ugly looking glasses on, and now it looks disgusting.

In other words, literally, Buddha says, our mind makes it up. So we didn’t kind of or even our mind creates it, which sounds like, again, like a magic wand. You didn’t kind of invent the cake overnight, but really what they’re saying is that what really is the cake is our story that we describe and then believe that is the cake. As long as Lama Yeshe says, it’s like we’re decorating on top of what is already there, layers upon layers of qualities that simply aren’t there. Delicious, gorgeous, handsome, this and that, and then ugly, revolting.

And so but what’s causing us to have these extremely different views and not really see reality as it is, which is what Buddha is saying, you know, is the presence in our mind of these various polluted states of mind. Whereas the virtuous ones yes, okay, please talk. Okay, I’ll tell you, that’s a very good point, thank you. Now I’ll answer yours now. Of course, there’s two points.

She wants to know about yeah, like for example, when someone punches you in the nose, how do deal with all that? And he’s saying, surely you don’t deal with attachment by denial. Let me answer yours first. No way. Denial is our usual mode now.

We either have denial or shove it in. Either denial of my feeling or vomit them all out. Not denial. This is aware the whole point of this meditative approach is to develop awareness of the whole evolution and like to use it like an you know, as an experience to analyze how it works. Okay, initially, if I’ve got the habit to shove four pieces of cake in, for my own sake it’s helpful to not shove four and maybe control myself and shove one in.

You see my point? That’s perfectly normal human behavior, that’s discipline. Then but the real point isn’t just to do that. We give that up, you know. When we decide we’re going to give up cake, we give up the cake.

We don’t look at our mind. When we stop being an alcoholic, we give up the alcohol. We assume the energy is now the same, so I can now put it into something else. The Buddhist idea is maybe you give yourself some space by backing off from the cake for a bit. That’s not denial.

But then you look at the actual process of attachment, all the fantasy the mind is doing, because that’s the real problem. And then when you’ve sorted that out, that’s my point, eventually you’re gonna have your cake, you know? Do you see what I’m saying? That’s the real point. So as to how you deal with the punches, mean, this is gonna sound pretty heavy duty, but if you’re really trying to practice, this is the approach, given the view of karma.

Okay. But two things. What’s your name? Celia. Okay, there’s Celia.

Let’s say Celia’s mean and nasty, and she punches me in the nose, alright? So what if my usual response is, and the usual logic, isn’t it, is how dare Celia punch me in the nose? Who does she think she is? I did nothing to her. How dare?

All the rest. This is back to the voice, isn’t it? That’s called indignation and how dare she and anger and all the rest. Right? You agree?

Okay. Now, the first of all, from the simple point of view of morality, of course it’s mistaken that Celia punches me. She shouldn’t punch me in the nose, it’s right. It is wrong to punch someone in the nose, that’s not moral behavior. We can all agree, okay?

Now, the Buddhist approach is this one. This is where it’s kind of pretty tough, Is that there are various causes within my own past called karma, why Celia punches Rabina in the nose? Because one of the biggest voices is why me, isn’t it? So we say, well, because Celia had a mental breakdown, because she had a bad mother. That says why Celia punches, but why me?

And this is the Buddhist view, okay? First of all, it’s not an accident that I meet Celia. There’s no way an accident. Buddhism would say there’s no there’s nothing in the long this is the big picture now, okay? This might not be so comfortable for us if we don’t have the idea of incarnation, but I’m just telling you the Buddhist view, and it’s the background for one’s wish to practice, okay?

This is the big view. Okay, Buddhism would say there’s not a possibility to have a random activity, that every living being, their consciousness is a continuity, is what they’re saying. So then you and I have, you you or maybe Fred knows, who knows what, but what caused us to come bump into each other now is not just some random activity that we have met before. We created the cause, we set up the energy, and now we again. Now how come when you see me, you don’t like me?

That comes from aversion your mind, okay, called anger. And you perceive that I do certain things, so the anger arises and you go punch, okay? Now, why you do that is because of your past misery and whatever when I harmed you before. So you retain that and how dear, I’m gonna get back at her, well sure enough, two lives later, you get me that, you get that back at me, right? I mean, this might not be palatable if you don’t relate to karma, I’m just telling you the view.

Okay, so that’s why you punched me. So now if I’m trying to work on my mind, if I’m trying to be a Buddhist, I might get the hell away from your punch, that’s sensible, keep away, but the commentary that you’re trying to develop to yourself as a Buddhist is accepting the fact that this you is the result of my past action. Because the one way that karma ripens in Buddhism, they call it this, you know, what I said before, there’s one way that karma ripens and I said it’s all your own personality. Remember I said that? What you think, what you feel, is the result of you having done it before.

And this is the one I’m now talking about which is quite Buddhism would say, whatever happens to us, any one of us, a scorpion, an ant, a dog, a human, no matter what it is, anybody on this earth who has whatever that comes at them from the outside, what experiences they get, the kisses or the punches, and look at the world, you see my point here. All of that is also due to your past karma. We have said mean, in other words, the Israelis and Palestinians have known each other for a long time, and here they are again, punch punch, you know, each believing the other is the monster, whatever whatever. Powerful energy, you know. All sorts of cooperative causes in this present culture called Palestinian something.

The Tibetans and the Chinese, for every Tibetan worth their salt, they don’t ask the question, why me? That’s the point. Therefore, they don’t go mad. They don’t argue you watch it that a lot of the suffering we have in our culture, even if it’s just mild, not even just being punished, just having someone be mean to me, the point we get stuck at is why me? Why is this happening to me?

And if it’s a really strong suffering, we have almost mental breakdown, the anguish is unbearable. Why is this happening to me? It’s very interesting, isn’t it? Well, most of those Tibetans, they don’t ask that question. They have the view of karma, which for them answers the question.

So then they get along with dealing with it. They don’t like it. Who wants to be punched? Who wants to be slaughtered? Who wants to have your country destroyed?

Nobody, thank you. But they get asked a question, why me? They know that they set it up from past lives to have this happen, so now they deal with it. You with me? This is how they talk to you about it.

This is the approach. So the commentary I have to now develop is, try not to punch you back, try and let go of the anger in my own mind, don’t blame you, know that you’re my karmic appearance, as Lama Yeshe calls it. In other words, this is some interdependent scenario that I’m participating in here, I’m not some innocent victim. Even though on a relative level, yes, it’s wrong for you to punch me, it’s true, but the karma is the reason why you punch me and why you punch me. So my work is to stop blaming, let go, get the hell out of the way maybe, that’s fine, and then by doing this, I purify that whole deal, I clean it up, you know.

And this is a simple example, but that’s really the very powerful way that one is trying to practice as a Buddhist. Learning to see everything as a result of what you’ve done before, don’t blame people, don’t get angry, don’t get neurotic. I mean, not saying it’s easy, not for one second it’s not easy. But this is the approach, this is the attitude. This is where Buddhist philosophy comes into practice.

You see what I’m pointing to? Hang on just a sec, darling, hang on. Please stay. I understand. I’ll say, yeah, she wants to know about psychotherapy and some people think we’re very screwed up and we need psychotherapy before we get Buddhism.

Okay. In a minute. Yeah, I mean, forget about the reincarnation side, but what I’m talking about here is, obviously, it’s psychology, right? Talking about the mind, how we suffer, why we suffer, how to see ourselves, how to work ourselves, blah blah blah. It’s psychological, okay?

This is what Buddhism is. And like I said, as Lama Yeshe said, being a Buddhist is like being your own therapist, you know? You’re not pretending, very deadly, deadly serious. The difference is being your own therapist, that’s all. So all the point is here, maybe we, you know, we don’t know how to be our own therapist first.

It’s actually quite sophisticated to know your own mind. So maybe, why, we need to go for someone else, who’s a little bit of skill, whom we can then talk to all the random stuff, pour it out, and they can be a sounding board for us. How sensible. Nothing wrong, you know. It’s a question of where we’re at.

So I think for most of us, learning to first be our therapist is probably quite tough. So yeah, get someone else, not a problem, no big deal, perfect. In other words, basic idea is, according to Buddhism, anything that you can do to help you know your mind better, please do it. And that means going to a therapist, well please go to a therapist. But the point of going to a therapist isn’t just to sort of go blah blah blah, ego ego ego, is to do it and say it to get it out so you can hear it, so you can begin to change.

If that’s your motives, fantastic. Brilliant. Yeah? Yeah, hang on, just a sec, please. Yes.

With my teacher, being angry. I don’t get angry with my teacher. No, never. It’s never even occurred to me. Well, I’ll talk about that maybe.

Lama Zopa, who is now his reincarnation has been recognized, he’s now fifteen years old, he’s a little Spanish boy, big Spanish boy actually, quite tall. He died. Lama Yeshe was one of the first people to bring Tibetan Buddhists anyway to this country. In nineteen seventy four he visited, and then the first Tibetan Buddhist center was started in Australia by him, which is one of the centers I’m part of, and the center that’s in Buddha House is part of. It’s called Chenrezig Institute, that was up in the Sunshine Coast, inland a bit.

So then Lama Yeshe came here then, and I met him in seventy six, yeah, in Chenrezig Institute. I went to my first Tibetan Buddhist course there. And basically, at that time, was really a radical feminist, Very radical. And I couldn’t bear men, wouldn’t even look at one of them, except to hit them basically. I’m not joking, okay?

I like men now. So anyway, it was kind of shocking. I mean, I knew I was looking for something spiritual again, very strongly having not been for about ten years, eight years. And I really like what I heard. It was like, I know it’s corny, but it was like coming home, it was so strong for me.

Hearing these Buddhist ideas, especially the one at karma, it really resonated very deeply. It was like in my life I was desperately looking for something to get a handle on, me somehow, although I didn’t think it was that. And that was the first thing that really struck me that was quite powerful, this idea of karma. Because it was a strong idea to take responsibility. Anyway, Lama Yeshe’s teachers were very effective for my mind.

He was this kind of lama who spoke English, kind of crazy English, but he really had a very powerful ability to communicate with people in a very psychological, down to earth, western way, you know. So I felt very I liked him very much, although it was quite shocking to me to like this bloke. But anyway, the point was I mean, okay. I mean, they use these words guru and all this stuff. You know, what does guru mean?

It’s a Sanskrit word. It means actually, it’s a very nice meaning. It means heavy with knowledge. Then the equivalent in Tibetan is lama, and that means ma is female and la means high, so it means high mother, basically. Very interesting.

Lama. So Lama is the equivalent of Guru. So you can use it in many ways. This is a title for somebody, but usually when you talk about my Lama, it means your personal spiritual teacher. What I know is after, you know, this while hearing these teachings from Lama Yeshe, I got oh, and I was a bit shocked to realize I liked him, and I decided I’d call him my lama.

Was very embarrassing, actually. To think that I had a guru was a bit disgusting idea before that. Thought it was horrible, you know, to have a guru. I was a bit embarrassed, and I had to confess it eventually. But anyway, what it meant over these years for me is that as one of my friends said, who’s a therapist, she said, they’re the most brilliant therapists she’s ever met.

And that is the point, because Buddhism is so to do with psychology, so tasty, you know, and a person who is developed on this path is a person who knows their own mind, you can’t imagine. I mean, they’re incredibly brilliant, skillful, absolutely subduing all the garbage, really developing the positive. One of the consequences of that development is incredible wisdom to see clearly in the minds of others. Literally in Buddhism, they say eventually you will develop clairvoyance. And what prevents us at the moment from being clairvoyant in Buddhist terms is we’re so caught up with the pollution.

All we’re doing is seeing everything through our own filters. So when you remove all the filters, see everybody else very clearly. So I can only say over the years, like twenty three, twenty four years now, since I met Lama Yeshe and now Lama Zopa, Lama Zopa is my other main teacher. But I can’t see that they’re high, I don’t know, I mean they are said to be highly realized beings. I can only say that my interactions with them over the years has been like a very skillful therapist, but at an extraordinary degree.

First of all, from my own mind with Lama Yeshe, I just had enormous affection for him. And I somehow, from having checked carefully, because they say, check your guru very carefully, as one Lama said, because you’re going to end up like him, right? I did all the checking and then felt this connection and request wish I didn’t request him to be my Lama. Didn’t was very arrogant. Didn’t know you’re supposed to ask, so I told him.

And he said, yes, I know, dear. Anyway, I developed I mean, I didn’t see him much over the years, but he was like very strongly in my heart. But I had this felt this strong connection, felt I wanted to do his wishes, trusted him as a teacher. And that meaning, I trusted that he knew that I could take his instructions on how to lead my go on this path. Right?

That’s what a teacher is, isn’t it? So having done all the checking and being very convinced and committed to myself, over the initial years that I’d spent with Lama Yeshe, it was about eight years before he died, what I learned was that he, know, and I trusted this, he knew my mind unbelievably, more than anyone I’ve ever known in my life. He somehow intuitively was so skillful. So that his skill of how to learn and help me subdue my crazy energy was to put me into situations to work with people whom I hated. You understand my point?

What’s the best way to see your anger? Darn, don’t go to meditate up in the mountains and feel holy. Work with a person you can’t bear. Right? Well, that’s somehow out of his kindness.

This is what he did. And in the beginning of practicing, I really mean it, I felt like I was out of my brain, meaning my own pride and anger was so violent. I’m not exaggerating, okay, I was a nun and everything and I it’s just that somehow I trusted this process, I didn’t run away like I normally would have in my life. If I didn’t like something, I was gone, you know, with the wind, right? But somehow I knew this was my practice, and my practice hasn’t been being all holy sitting here like this.

I mean, my first seven years of being in none, my energy was so crazy I couldn’t even sit. I didn’t. I’d burst, you know? So I’d just move and do my things and do my work and work hard and do all these things, doing the publishing work and so on for Lama Yeshe. But I had this enormous trust in him as a person who knew my mind.

I knew he had affection for me, so his function for me was genuine, wasn’t some kind of ego trip. And therefore his great skill in seeing me and learning to know what situation was best for me was just incredible learning from my mind, incredible learning. It was very, very painful. But that’s always, since I first begun, for me that’s the real powerful way to practice. And that’s if we they have a way of talking in Tibetan Buddhism, you know, that we call it learning to transform problems into happiness.

So all these Tibetan lamas in jail, being, you know, imprisoned for years in Tibet, any of them worth their salt, they come out more blissful, more compassionate for this very reason. They see it as their past karma, they see it as a way to bring up their own garbage, they see it as a way to purify and how to develop genuine compassion. There’s one old lama who spent thirty five years being tortured, you know, whose body is completely ruined now, but he’s completely this blissful guy, I tell you. And as he said, which sounds bizarre for our ears, he learned to transform suffering into pure joy. So basically the idea is, you know, when you’ve got when you that when you’re being tortured or harmed, because you so totally accept that those punctures are coming from your own past actions, you’re not feeling like some kind of completely insane victim.

You’ve already subdued your mind hugely from your past practice anyway. You’ll learn to have huge compassion. Of course, you’d like him to stop, please. You see my point? If you have a choice, you walk out the door.

But given that you can’t walk out the door, what do you do? You work with it. So this actually allows them to develop huge compassion for Celia when she punches me in the nose, instead of violence and how dare she, who does she think she is, and I’m gonna sue you, which is our usual view of this innocent victim. So this anyway, that’s another thing. But with me, with working with with Lama Yeshe, and the same with Lama Zopa, my present teacher, you learn you they they’re very skillful in getting you to see your own garbage, you know?

And if you’re really trying to work on your mind, you’re happy to see it, you want to see it. It’s painful, but you want to. Because why? It’s like the push ups. You keep doing push ups, you’re go beyond your comfort zone.

Walking around thinking being holy is to do a spiritual is actually no spiritual practice. Excuse me, I’m going to swear now, okay? Just live up to my reputation. My dear friend who was a therapist, who said they’re the best therapists she’s ever met, she said, real practice is having your hands in your own shit. I think it’s a very good way to say it.

Practice isn’t just looking holy, watching your breath feeling good. It’s like a joke, know. It’s far more deep than that. Eventually, when you’ve really begun to work on your mind, you’ll be ridiculously nice. You see my point?

You’ll be able to be like the Dalai Lama who through appalling conditions doesn’t hate the Chinese, and anybody who even half blind can see he doesn’t have hate, he’s not pretending, he’s not denying, you know. It’s obvious. He’s the fruit of the pudding, you know. And this is interesting too, the function of the teacher. It’s like they’re the living example right in front of you of how you can become.

So it’s obvious, anybody who likes a Dalai Lama and observes how he makes them feel, how he talks, how he acts, to me he’s the most marvelous example of the proof of the pudding. That’s the result. If that’s the result of Buddhism, well good enough for me, thanks mate. You see my point? So I’ve said more things, does that answer your question?

Good. Yep. My first one, which Lama Zopa gave me when he ordained me, which came from his past lama, is Thubten, is one of the many words in Tibetan for Buddha, and ten, the second syllable, is meaning teachings, and then the second one is kun and then sel, kun sel. And kun means all or completely, and then sel means clear. So teachings of the Buddha, completely clear.

That’s your Dhamma, right? Thubten Kun Sel, yes. Thubten Kun Sel. Thubten is the first name, you always get the first one of the Lama who gives it to you, and the second name, Kun Sel, is the one that they give you particularly for you. So all the people Don?

Right, Don? My name is Karmatashi Oh, good. Fantastic. Happy to meet you, Karma Tashi. What?

Oh, get you. Okay, very good. He wants to know where this karmic habit is and does it have something to do with inspiration and does it come from some universal consciousness? Buddhism doesn’t have a view of universal consciousness, Karma Tashi. Okay?

What Buddha says is this, okay? That first of all, whatever we see inside us, positive, negative, Hitler, Mother Teresa, habit, love, hate, they’re all a bunch of habits. Basically, we’re a bunch of habits, which is a very refreshing way to see it, because we tend to see it as, oh my god, this is who I am and I can’t change. It’s just a bunch of habits. And some of them are clearly very deep.

So inspiration, as you just said, I mean, of course inspiration from others, so if I look at the Dalai Lama, having some kind of connection with him, being being one of my teachers, I get my heart feels full, I get inspired if you like, so that comes from his notes this is the point, it’s an interdependent thing though too, you can see that. The Chinese look at him and they hate his guts. So it can’t just be from him. But the combination of what’s in my mind and my potentials and coming and then meeting him, like with Mozart and the piano, it can’t just be the piano because lots of us might have had a piano when we were six, but we didn’t become Mozart. So you’ve got to have the external condition called the piano, but the real cause is his own potential for music so strongly developed that just really started playing and making sonatas and Lord knows what, you know?

So, okay, this idea of cos what did you say? What did you call it? What did you call did it? Universal consciousness. Okay.

In Buddhist terms, there are as many sentient beings as you can find as many individual streams of consciousness you will find. Now you can say like this, when you become a Buddha and when I become a Buddha or whatever, then you might as well say we’re the same. Your consciousness pervades the universe, your consciousness is oneness with all beings, my consciousness pervades the universe, my consciousness is oneness with all beings. We don’t bump into each other in the sky or anything, okay? So you might as well say we’re all the same Buddha then, but honey, you got there from your hard work and I got there from mine.

So we’re in a deluded state now of being these individual consciousnesses. And everything I do, say and think leaves imprints in mind that will ripen as my Buddhahood. So how come Mr. Buddha, two and a half thousand years ago, became a Buddha already and you didn’t, let’s say you’re not, it’s because he did the work. And so whatever he did brought the results in him.

Whatever you do brings the results to you. So in that sense we’re individual. So where inspiration comes from is sort of the interdependence, you know, of you connecting with the Dalai Lama and you trying to be like him, and the more you are like Mozart going to a concert, he would have got very inspired. And of course he would have got inspired by the other musician, but the real cause of that is his own openness to receive it. That’s the real key.

If he was deaf as opposed, he wouldn’t have been inspired, right? So still you have to have the outside person who is the inspiring person, but it’s interdependent. It’s interdependent. The piano and Mozart, interdependent scenario. Who?

What? These pictures? The blokes who what do you mean? They’re pictures by my friends in prison, yeah? Well, I suppose you could say I was one of the Yeah, was one of the catalysts because they sent them to me, yeah.

This is true, we’re interdependent, so we can have Where does that inspiration come from? What’s that? You’ve been too high for me, I can’t get you. What do you mean? Please tell me, now please go on, I want to understand.

What do you mean where the inspiration comes from? I sort of hear you, but say more. Oh, you mean why do they draw those Buddhas? That’s it. Well, because they’ve got past karmic connection from having been Buddhist before.

And you’re walking. And by my presence in their life, I was one of the catalysts for them to awaken their music like Mozart did. Here, that’s the point, it’s past karmic connection, past habit. Like when I heard first Lama Yeshe, I know it’s corny, but I felt like I’d known it before but I’d lost it, and now I found it again. That was how it felt to me, very strong, it was like easy to get it, you know?

You see my point? That’s because I had past karmic connection. If you’re lucky, if you’ve got born an ant next life, if I’m not going be born an ant, and maybe I will, we won’t meet again for quite a while. You’ll be off on your ant trips. So don’t do that, okay?

Are we communicating? Good. What is your plan for Christmas? What? My plan?

Well, I don’t have a plan really, it’s just how it worked, how it happened, I got it first about four years ago because I edit this magazine, right? And part of this magazine is the magazine of this organisation I’m part of, FPMT, and then Wisdom Publications, which is one of the Buddhist publishers, is also part of the FPMT. So they stick in the back of their books, please write for a copy of mandala. So obviously blokes have books in prison. So this one young Mexican gangster started writing, and then I wrote to him, and then his friend wrote, and now four years later, there’s four hundred, five hundred guys, and we get seventy letters a month.

So the key jobs we do are very focused. I’m not trying to change the prison system or stop death row, that’s not my job. What we figured we should do, and now I have a nun working full time and various volunteers, right, which is already happening in Australia. People write, we write back, we give them advice, we offer them books, we offer them a subscription to the magazine, and if they write again and want more, we keep writing more. So we basically help them develop a practice if they want it.

Some of them just want some books and that’s it, that’s great, I’m happy. But we help them develop their practice. We write back, we answer their questions, we give them teachings, and then if we can, we visit them, you know. So that’s the kind of the activities we do, helping them develop their Buddhism, helping them deal with their lives, sort of the guys on death row or whatever it is. So already in Australia, I was here two years ago, and I visited a prison near Cairns called Lotus Glen, and I visited this time two near Brisbane, I visited one called Woodford, I visited one today, I visited one in Pentridge, no not Pentridge, Melbourne.

So just the same thing here, there are people who like to practice Buddhism, you know. So if and what we’re all doing is trying to offer our services to these people, they know that they can write to us, we can send them books, we can send them study materials, and this what we’ve raised money for. So I mean this year in America alone, we spent sixty thousand bucks Australian. And that was all from donations, every penny, you know. So that’s what I’m trying to do, just being in Australia this time, trying to raise a bit of money to help provide this service for people who are imprisoned in Australia who want to be Buddhist.

That’s the idea. Does that answer your question? Okay. Great. Buddhism would say that everybody’s right to make their own decision.

And Buddhism, you know, for example, Buddhism has no problem with debating. They have these very sophisticated methods of debate, especially in India, when the Hindus and all these would all debate with each other, because they really believe in the power of clarity, intellectual clarity as a stepping stone to experiential clarity. So there’s no Buddhism would happily debate what reality is, but it would never say it’s the only one that’s right, that’s an outrageous idea, and would never say people all have to be Buddhists, and would never even try to make people Buddhist, or never even talk about Buddhism unless someone asks them, you know? And so Buddhism has this great respect for everybody’s right to choose their own religion, to choose what they think. There is no such concept of making a person, or no such concept of proselytizing.

This is an outrageous idea for Buddhists. That every one of us has different types of mind, you know. So I know for myself if I’m teaching a course and someone comes to it and they end up becoming a better Christian as a result, I’m very happy. Because my main wish, even though I’m a Buddhist, I talk about Buddhism, that’s my job. And people come because they know that’s what I’m going to talk about.

So I’m but what I try, my feeling is my wish is like the people in this room, that people look into their own minds, know they have potential, and then whatever methods they use develop that potential, I’m very happy. That’s my wish, not to make people Buddhist, you know. That’s their decision. Are you with me? Yes.

That’s a very good point. How we prepare for death? It’s a really big deal in Buddhism, of course because of the view of continuity and consciousness. So one of Buddha’s major teachings is that everything is impermanent, and there’s a very particular way, certainly in the Tibetan tradition, there’s a very particular way we learn to meditate upon that, to really kind of get it, you know? Not just wait.

So first of all, you don’t wait till you die. It’s sort of like waiting to go to your driving test to begin to start driving. It’s a bit late. You understand my point? So the point obviously to do is start doing it now.

So what does that mean? The most basic level of preparing for death is for goodness sake start recognising it’s true, that I will die. First point, I will definitely die. Now we all intellectually know that, Buddha says, But actually, if you check, he’s saying, and it’s true, we look, we live in the fantasy world, but I’m not going to die. We act as if death happens to other people.

We kind of think, you know, because we don’t know what to think about it, we say nobody knows, so thanks a lot, I’ll wait till it comes. You know? But even recently in Time magazine, I read an article, and the guy who wrote the introduction was very classically Buddhist. He said, look at the energy we spend on preparing for a holiday in a year’s time, the detail we go to prepare exactly where we go, how are the tickets and all this. But excuse me, death is more likely to happen before this, it could easily happen before this, but we don’t even think about it.

So it does indicate we’ve got some kind of fear, primordial fear, isn’t it? It’s obvious. So the Buddhist idea is, of course, Buddhism has all its very detailed explanations, and even two very precise way of describing exactly what happens when you die. It’s very interesting, you know. So it’s like, by becoming, first of all, familiar with the actual death process, the way Buddhism describes it, it kind of demystifies it completely.

How you get, you know, how you die, how you go into this intermediate state, they say, between lives, how then you get your next rebirth, they have all very detailed descriptions. So already even this, if you have some sense of being a Buddhist and you’ve paid to trust this stuff and you think about then it’s already quite consoling, you know, because it’s not some fearful thing, you don’t freak out. But the real most down to earth way to practice being ready for death is to start contemplating every day and learning from your obvious experiences in front of you, reading the obituaries, seeing the ants that died, reading about the car accidents, hearing about someone’s mum. Don’t just hear it in a gossip sense, oh, how terrible. Oh, or Frank Sinatra died.

He was a part of the mafia, know, all this rubbish. So, wow, you know, that that’s gonna be me one day. Kinda getting it as a personal lesson, bringing it closer to home, to oneself, not to make ourselves scared, but to wake us up, to burst this bubble, you know. I mean, for example, thinking in these ways. So as Lama Zopa says, we had this kind of bizarre idea that I’m a living person and I’m going to go to the hospital and visit my dying friend who’s got cancer.

And you look, know, if any of us in this room probably have been to maybe we’ve been told we’re going to die, so we don’t like to think we’re dying, but you know, I can be confident that I’m living. And what’s my logic? What’s ego’s logic? One, I’m not ninety yet. Two, I feel good.

I mean what a bizarre reason to think, a use as logic for why I’m not dying. John F Kennedy Jr, I remember when I was watching all the television when he died in America because people love him there. I mean he was young and handsome and thirty eight and in love, famous and rich at the peak of his life. Bet you if you’d asked him in that morning, do you feel like you’re dying, John, he would have laughed in your face. Excuse me, by the end of the day he’s dead as a doornail.

I mean, it’s not a joke, it’s kind of and these are the things it is joke, please laugh. But it’s like, can’t be too serious, okay? It’s what’s interesting about this, these are facts, but we don’t think them. This is not religious idea shoved down your throat, you know, these are facts. It is true.

And one of the things we contemplate, the first point is that death is death. You use all the various explanations and experiences yourself to kind of get through the dumb old ego. Until slowly you get some kind of experience for it, a truth of it. Just like a person who’s been told they’re going to die, they kind of get it finally. It’s their wake up call.

Like my friends on death row, it’s their wake up call. Well, me, Buddha says give yourself your own wake up call by simply thinking about how it’s going to happen to you at some point. Now the second point to meditate on, which is even more outrageous and more obvious, is that the time of death is completely uncertain. But you check, and this is what we have to do in meditation, really investigate, because the mind is so thickly involved in this idea of grasping at a permanent me, it’s so strong, we believe it so absolutely. We’ve got to really contemplate again and again to even observe how we feel.

We feel as if death is a long way off, unless you’ve got cancer, AIDS, death row or something. But, you know, as Lama Zopa says, excuse me, living people die regularly before dying people. These are facts. These are facts, you know? But, you know, we put ourselves in the category with such confidence as if somehow it’s written in the sky as absolute truth, that I’m not a dying person.

I mean, excuse me. We’re living in a fantasy land, you know? So thinking in a practical way these things, not to make us scared, but to actually make us more relaxed. And therefore, crucially, to make us this is the third point we meditate on. This is the point, okay, so given a few assumptions, given according to Buddha, given that your consciousness doesn’t begin at birth, it’s a conception, given that it’s a continuity, and that it won’t end at death, given that whatever you do, say or think leaves imprints in your consciousness that will necessarily ripen as experiences after you die.

This is the logic of how things exist in Buddhism, right? Given that the negative stuff, the misery, the confusion, the laziness, the don’t have to be hippie, that’d be negative, by way, we’re all human. That stuff leaves imprints in your consciousness that will necessarily ripen as suffering experiences for me. And given that the stuff that’s so called positive, the stuff that comes from happiness, kindness, joy and contentment and generosity and all that stuff, will necessarily ripen as happiness for me. And then given that I want happiness and don’t want suffering, please.

You see my point? Given all this, then the third point is, well what’s important at the time of death? At that moment, what’s important? If you can try and conjure up that moment, think of it. Well, obviously what’s important isn’t my, you know, Princess Diana’s thirty six year old aerobic body not being mean to her.

At that time it was profoundly useless, become something disgusting. It wasn’t her fame and her riches and her beauty and her being loved and her lover and all her reputation and her money. And I’m not trying to say we have to be like, you know, greedy people to think this way, but we just check. Buddhism is saying this, if we check what our priorities are now, we act as if we’re lasting forever. We act as if everything in our life is the point, our money, our this, our family, that’s the purpose.

But at the time of death, especially if it comes suddenly, it’s so traumatic because you haven’t dealt with all this. But now, whether you like it or not, you’ve got to give up your hand, give up your body, give up your love, give up your money. Why not practice beforehand? Not chucking it out, but learning to know that everything is impermanent. And then when you realize everything is impermanent, you actually value it more.

Just like that two week holiday you go on. You go knowing it’s two weeks. So even if you’re feeling a bit miserable, you don’t care. You’re up in the morning, out to the beach swimming, making the most of everything because, oh, one day left, only thirteen days to go. Oh my god, only twelve days to go.

That’s a very good example. You know it’s impermanent, but you still enjoy it. So often when we think of, Well, it’s impermanent, I’m going to die, what’s the point? Well, excuse me, everything’s impermanent. So it’s this very practical attitude to bring us down to earth, not to make us kind of scaredy babies, but to actually make us wake up and start to get some priorities in our life.

That is to say, don’t be mean, don’t be miserable, don’t be lazy, don’t be nasty, don’t be jealous, don’t be depressed, don’t hold on to grudges, not to mention don’t kill your mother or father. You understand my point? Be a nice person for your sake. Forget about even everybody else’s thing. Because that ensures because karma takes care, as Lama Yeshe says.

There’s no mystery. It’s a question of, if you want to be rich next life, be generous now. If you want to be beautiful next life, be patient now. If you want everyone to believe you next life, be truthful now. This is the meaning of this is the creation principle in Buddhism, karma.

What you do brings its results. How you deal with what you have brings its results. So if you know that death can come at any moment, like your holiday, make the most of it every day. This is just common sense, really. This is the way we prepare for death.

There are more esoteric ways of meditating on the actual process, but that’s more sophisticated. But this is the real one. Because then, whenever you die, you recognize you’re gonna die, it’s like the holiday, you know it’s gonna end at some point, and when they drag you out of the hotel because you forgot it was impermanent and your mental breakdown and said, you’re gonna be separated from your beautiful bed. You understand my point? You won’t have that.

You’ll know, okay, bye bye. Holiday finished. We’re all on a vacation, okay? And we don’t know how long it’s going to last. So you better make the most of it.

That’s the idea.