y Public Talks — 2000-06-03

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

About this talk. In this 92-minute teaching, Ven Robina Courtin explores karma’s mechanics through concrete examples: a fisherman habitually drawn to killing, serial killers like Jeffrey Dahmer, the September 11 attacks. She covers the six realms of rebirth, the four conditions for karma to fully ripen, and four ways karma manifests: throwing karma determining rebirth, actions similar to the cause shaping habit and personality, experiences similar to the cause returning as circumstances, and environmental karma. Central to her approach is intention and motivation—the same action produces radically different karmic results depending on one’s mind. She addresses Buddhism’s most challenging teaching: recognizing what happens to you not as random misfortune or someone else’s doing, but as your own karmic appearance, a fundamental shift from Western views of free will toward understanding reality through interdependence and responsibility.

File metadata (for organising)

File: z 2000 06 03 Karma tape 3.mp3

UUID: 17e77743-3bbf-4d55-92fd-84dac638070d

Teacher: Ven Robina Courtin

Collection: y Public Talks (Ven Robina Courtin)

Date: 2000-06-03

Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide

Duration: 91.8 minutes

Words: ~19,287

The more deluded with more sicknesses and more violence and more anguish and more depression and more anxiety, the more likely you are to ever really, you know, procure a good quality human being. So I’m not gonna be kind of hierarchical about it, you know, but it’s kind of like for the sake of the whole human race. It’s interesting. So then off you go again. You start your next life, clinging to this particular person, the delusions and all the other ways come, right?

Because we talk about all kinds of karma now, after these little packages started, off you go again. Roughly speaking, that’s how they flow, like they’re Any questions about that before we go on to the next topic? Yes. I’m I’m really curious to know what Buddha would say about that, what would happen. Obviously, this girl, she’s now a young woman, clearly had a karmic connection with the mother and the father.

She’s good friend with the father, the parents all adore the kid. Everybody loves her. She’s a good quality family, you know. They don’t live together, a good quality kind of relationship she has with her parents. So clearly she had good karma.

But whatever happened at that point, who knows? I mean, she’s got this gay daddy and this lesbian mummy. So I was kind of curious how that all fits and what would happen. What what would have been the energy that propelled her towards the towards what, you know? The bottle?

The syringe? It’s hard to know, you know? Her dad two doors down the road, you know? One of mums here. I mean, it’s hard to know.

So I don’t know where all that fits with that one. It’s a good point. Know. It’s yes. Subtle consciousness.

No. Nothing to do with no. Nothing to do with realisations. The point about these levels of consciousness is not that they have any realizations in and of themselves, they’re simply consciousness, but they have the capability. This is why yogis want are able to get to them.

That’s the point. So it’s sort of like the microscope of your mind. The microscope of your mind the micro a microscope doesn’t see anything. This is something there. Do you see my point?

You’ve got to have an object there for the microscope to see. The mind is like the microscope. So at the moment, we have this gross mind that can’t see much. Then we have the the subtle mind, is like the microscope. So if you so what you want to see with that is emptiness.

Yes. That’s what but you’ve to have the emptiness and the knowledge has got to be there so that when you have the microscope of your mind activated, you can see emptiness then. The gross level of mind can’t see emptiness at all. Put it like that. So it’s not emptiness.

It’s just simply the mind. It’s just it’s just a tool. And yogis are able to use that tool. We have the subtle mind every time we dream, but what can we do with it? We’re full of grasping and fear.

We don’t forget about emptiness. Have the clear light consciousness every time we go to sleep, we don’t see it. We don’t remember. We hold it. Do you see?

It’s basically the idea that in you know, the it’s like the mind is a tool. It’s like it’s like the microscope. That’s all. So a microscope in and of itself, if there’s nothing for the microscope there for it to see, it’s not seeing anything, is it? So the mind is like that.

It’s like the eyes, you know? It’s got to have something in front of it to see. So emptiness is the object. Emptiness is what you have to see. So you’ve got to activate the microscope in order to see it.

So once you’ve got the subtle mind and you’ve had the teachings on emptiness, then you’ve got the good thing emptiness and the mind come together and you have the experience. Creating through karma. No. It’s it’s just a level of awareness. So we’ll talk more about the mind later.

We’ll talk about it later. It might get clearer. Okay. So basically, what we’re talking here is the various points that we need to contemplate. As I said, Gampopa, this twelfth century person, got us to contemplate Buddha nature right in the beginning, and Lama Zopa talks about contemplating a beginningless mind right at the beginning as a starting point for this whole process.

Then Lama Tsongkhapa came along in the fourteenth century and discussed the whole business that got us to contemplate the second point, or as he put in front of it, Atisha’s point, the one about guru devotion. Then Atisha got us to begin the whole process contemplating, perfection and rebirth, that we discussed. And the first point in the first scope is to contemplate death and impermanence. And all of each of these I mean, so starting with the perfect human rebirth leads us to the one of death and impermanence. Now the next point that he gets to contemplate, the kind of really ripen our minds, and what all we’re doing in this is from death and impermanence, we’re leading up to where we actually are going to begin to practice.

We’re kind of priming our minds by doing these kinds of contemplations. So the next one that leads on naturally from death and impermanence is that is all of Buddha’s Buddha has these very elaborate and very detailed teachings about the various realms of reality, the possibilities of rebirth, different realms, you know, whole spectrum of possibilities. All the way from enormously blissful experiences, are the result of virtue, to middling experiences, is the result of virtue, to very suffering experiences, which is the result of non virtue, karmically. These realms of existence. And so what what Atisha gets us to do here at this point is, given that we’re all gonna die, don’t know when, given that we’ve all created countless karmas and we have countless karmic imprints in our mind, that many of them negative, then the likelihood of the negative ones ripening is that it will ripen as a suffering experience, a suffering life.

So what our teacher gets us to contemplate here is the suffering, as they call it, of the lower realms. So what does this mean? Like I said, Buddha posits that one of the in saṃsāra. This word saṃsāra is like a state of mind that’s opposite to being in nirvana. They’re not places, by the way.

So nirvana is not some kind of boring place called heaven, and saṃsāra is some delicious place with with sex, drugs, and rock and roll we have to give up, which is how it sort of sounds to us, you know. saṃsāra really is a name given to a state of mind, you know. That’s all, roughly speaking, of being caught up in all the delusions. And thus, getting reborn and suffering lives and going round. And going around in circles, around in circles, caught up in this garbage, you know.

So that’s when you’re in saṃsāra. So as long as you’re in saṃsāra and the criterion of of being in saṃsāra is that you have this primordial delusion called ignorance, which we’ll talk about more later. It clings to the self existent me, then causes all the other problems. So as long as we have this, then we’re in saṃsāra. And so within this, within saṃsāra, are these different possibilities of rebirth.

Some incredibly blissful, which are the result of a lot of virtue, but still there’s the subtle imprints of ignorance there. And those virtuous, very blissful states of life, those realms of existence are called the god realms. So you could say, if you hear the descriptions of them, they’re very similar to, you know, the Muslim experience of paradise. They’re quite culturally specific, and they have seventy virgins if you go to heaven as a Muslim. I don’t know what the girls get, but that’s the boys.

The boys get seventy virgins, and they are allowed to bring seventy of their relatives into heaven, into paradise. Anyway, so there’s different kind of cultural explanations of heaven. As you hear the Christian one, for example, is different again. So this this interestingly, this level of reality, this is and they’re all mental experiences. That’s the point.

And they’re mentally created. They’re not places made by God or devil who are kind of, you know, gonna put you there if you’re naughty or bad, you know, good or bad, you know. They’re not like that. They’re karmically created. They’re karmic visions.

They’re mental experiences. So the god realms, there are couple of those. It’s said to be the result of incredible virtue. So you just lead a very good life, very moral life, you know? The karmic fruit of this is to be born as this very as this subtle with this kind of subtle life, light body, and incredible bliss, they say for eons, not forever like the other religions say.

Buddhists say also it finishes. It’s still only within saṃsāra. It’s the peak of saṃsāra, it’s not out of saṃsāra, yet you’ve still got suffering. And eventually it ends. Your petrol tank of morality runs out, you know, and finishes.

So so it’s like these god realms. Then you’ve got the two of those, then you’ve got the human realm. Now it’s clear that it’s not the best kind. If you compare with having a blissful life that lasts for eons and you have no suffering and only joy and bliss, excuse me, we’d all we’d we’d all choose that one. So the human one, which is also the result of virtue mainly, the throwing karma at the time of your past death was virtuous, it threw your consciousness into your mummy’s womb, also the result of less virtue.

But what’s interesting, if you’re very skillful, you can make it a really good life, you can use it for spiritual practice. And that’s why the human realm is a better one for that reason. It’s not as good in terms of experience, but it’s better if I want to use it to try and get the hell out of saṃsāra and use it for your spiritual practice. When you’re in the god realm, they say you’re so blissed out, you can’t do anything but be blissed out, you know. So it’s better to have a life that’s not quite so blissed out so you can remind yourself you’re suffering.

And it’s hard enough for us. We’re grasping at the bit of pleasure we’ve got, not even noticing we’re suffering, you know. So it’s the human realm. It’s the result of virtue. Then you got further along the spectrum, you’ve got the animal realm.

And that’s all the creatures that we call the elephants and the tigers that live on the surface of the earth, the ones that we know on the earth. Then you’ve got all the trillions and trillions more. The vast majority, all of them are in the sea, you know? And what’s most fascinating, I remember reading no. In the text, they talk about how the vast majority of all the animal beings, all the insects, all those creatures, the vast majority of all those consciousnesses born as animals are living in the depths of the oceans, like stacked miles high in total darkness of ignorance.

Now what’s most interesting, I remember reading the the science pages of the New York Times a few years ago, how they’re finding not just billions of beings, billions of species in the depths of the ocean stacked miles high, one on top of the other, in complete darkness and ignorance. Isn’t that fascinating? I thought it was most interesting. Where they thought once there was no way they could survive because there’s no no light and no oxygen, you know? But there they all are.

Billions of species, they can’t keep up with it. So it’s kind of interesting. So it indicates, you know, using the Buddhist perspective, that it’s easier to get an animal birth than a human one. It’s easier. It’s obvious.

They’re the numbers to prove it. I mean, you look at some of the lives of some of those little creatures, they have millions of babies a year. They’re they’re baby making machines, you know, just all day, all night being impregnated. Millions. I mean, this is one little centipede that can have millions of babies.

It’s incomprehensible. So it’s really easy to get one of those lives. And in Buddhist terms, it’s necessarily the fruit of delusion, of ignorance, to be born in that realm. So clearly, the realms have vast spectrum of possibilities just within the realm. I mean, to be born some cute little poodle in a rich person’s house with diamond collars and carved livers for breakfast and insurance and medicine and gravestones and psychiatrists somehow, you know, There’s some I mean, they’ve created some virtue there, but although they’ve lost they’ve got the wrong throwing karma, as opposed to being in the depths of the ocean or some of these or they’re being eaten alive every day or something.

I mean, clearly, there’s a difference in the animal realm. So then, further along the spectrum and even more occupied, you’ve got what they call, broadly speaking, all the spirits. Often in the Lamrim, they talk about it as the hungry ghost. There’s a certain kind of spirit called the hungry ghost. And their main delusion the main delusion of the animals is primordial ignorance.

Ignorance meaning ego grasping. Narrow, profound sense of I, locked in it way beyond just no chance, millimeter of space of any kind of volition or clarity or change or compassion or anything, you know. Stuck in who you are, you know. Then the the the spirit’s huge attachment energy. Huge, huge, huge.

And there’s a whole, again, a huge spectrum of possibilities of types of spirits. You’ve the hungry ghosts behind. You’ve got then all the spirits, you know, people who possess other beings. You hear voices. You are indeed hearing voices, you know.

People who, you know, possess others and ghosts, all that kind of all those deals, you know. Trillions of these, countless numbers of these, and they’re intensely suffering. And some of them have have obviously, have karma with humans. So you can die in a relationship with a very freaked out mind and be reborn as a spirit in that house hovering around that person, you know? So many of these beings, and all suffering in their nature.

Some are very powerful. Some can act like they’re very high beings. They’re very powerful. Some are very just intensely suffering. Then it’s the the bottom end of saṃsāra, in the slums of saṃsāra, you’ve got what they call the hell realms, various levels of these.

And they’re all again, remembering they’re all mental experiences. They’re all karmically created. They are all the fruit of our past actions. It’s the it’s the games that our mind plays, you know. So this is a mental experience, this human realm.

Okay. We grasp it as absolutely concrete and real, but it’s created by our minds. It’s hard to hear this. But this is Buddhist view, and we’ll talk about it all the time. So Lama Yeshe said, hell is not some place where the devil is waiting and saying, I’m waiting for Tupac and Yeshe.

Not like that. He says hell is the manifestation of the negative energy of that sentient being, manifesting as like a nightmare, you know, as intense suffering. So the point is, Buddha’s the particular contemplation to do here you know, Buddha’s teachings have very extensive explanations of all these realms and lord knows what, you know. But the point here, Atisha gets us to do, he takes this point from Buddha’s teachings, and he gets us to contemplate the suffering of the lower realms, not to generate compassion yet, because compassion is is the third scope. We’re only the beginning of the first scope.

The real reason here is to get some kind of energy when we contemplate how that type of life is suffering. You get some energy to think, thanks a lot, but I don’t want to be reborn in that. Which sort of seems a bit inferior. We think, well, excuse me, that’s using fear. How inferior?

You know, this is so low, you know. But I’m sorry. It’s like, what what prevents you from going too close to the fire? Fear of getting burned, for god’s sake. It’s perfectly perfectly practical, you know.

Fear doesn’t have to be kind of hysterical. Fear is common sense. What what prevents you from going like a maniac on the road? Because you don’t wanna get mangled, isn’t it? Not to mention get a ticket.

Because you you don’t wanna get mangled, so you you the fear of this prevents you and can cause you to act appropriately. So there’s kind of there’s a kind of fear that’s a common sense. It’s it’s a recognition of the likely consequences of of something if you didn’t behave properly. This is reasonable. Nothing wrong with that.

So there’s something we don’t think like this way at all in our culture. It sounds most odd, you know? But it’s very common sense. It’s very practical. Training our mind to see things in a very different way.

So the one the way to contemplate this is to contemplate the suffering in these various realms. And the way it’s described in the various texts in the lam rim is, for most westerners, it’s so hilarious, so ridiculous, like some bizarre cartoon strip, you know? All about the different hot hells and the cold hells and being boiled in iron pots. I mean, it just sounds hilarious. So now when we first went to you first go to courses by on his courses in monastery in Nepal, in seventies when the westerners first started taking teachings.

You usually spend three weeks of the four weeks on the on the describing the hell realms. I mean, of the entire course. Right? And there’d usually be this uproar because it was just insane. So Rinpoche, after a while, said he wouldn’t even mention the hells.

He doesn’t even talk about it anymore because it’s too ridiculous for our minds. We can’t kind of there’s no way I’m for myself, I can’t get a handle on it. It doesn’t it doesn’t help it doesn’t move my mind, you know, to think about these beings in molten pots and this and that and being stretched bodies and cracking and ice and it just seems like kind of a parody. But the thing that I find useful, that I do find useful, is to think more and more about how it’s possible. And the Buddha’s teachings are the more you think about emptiness, the more you think about karma, more you think about no creator, the more you think about the nature of mind, the more you think about actions and causes and results, all this whole story kind of concludes in how it’s possible for our own mind to be the creator of our own experiences, to even sort of to try and imagine the possibility of this.

This is what I find kind of most compelling. And so, you know, at least we can but we can certainly contemplate animals. We can see them right in our face. So there, at least we take the ones we do and can see and have experience of, you know, to try and contemplate how it’s possible for a start. This is the first point.

That my consciousness, which we label as my humanness, you know, we’re so concrete about it, like I’m this real human being. There is no human nature there. There’s not a human there is nature there, but it’s not a fundamental one. By the say that by the time you get to the clear light consciousness, the very subtle mind, there’s no rubina left. There’s not a fraction of rubina left.

There’s not a fraction of human being left. There’s no human or god or anything there in that subtle, subtle consciousness. But as Lama Yeshe says, there’s there’s the potential for heaven or hell. You’re speaking kind of, you know, metaphorically, For the most incredible bliss, for the most intense suffering. And it’s all a question of what karma we’ve created.

And, again, it’s not a question of punishment and reward. No one’s up there pulling the strings, I’m gonna send you to heaven and send you to hell. It’s it’s it has its own rewards, as we say. Virtue has its own rewards, you know. It brings its own results.

Negative energy brings its own results. So when thinking this way, then you think about animals, then you start to look at them in a different way. It it has some relationship to us. Whereas the usual one is that we’re so grasping at the sense of meanness. It just seems like a joke to contemplate how being a dog is suffering, except to generate compassion.

But the point here isn’t to generate compassion. The point here is to generate revulsion. Thank you very much. I don’t want to be a dog. So we first have an equanimity how it’s possible, you know?

That’s the idea. So let’s look at how being an animal is suffering. It doesn’t we don’t think this way. Usually, when we think of suffering, we think that, you know, think, you know, being beaten up is suffering. We think the the animals that suffer are the ones who get, you know, killed as killed for their killed for their meat or something or used as, you know, as a slave things.

We don’t think of the wild animals as suffering. We watch those animal shows. We watch the the scorpions and the tigers all doing their thing. We think it’s called nature. And so it’s natural, and so therefore it’s not suffering.

We say how fascinating. We see them all ripping their guts out and killing each other and doing these monstrous things. We think, isn’t that fascinating? Well, according to Buddha, it’s like it’s that’s that’s what suffering is. So if you if what’s interesting about Buddhist psychology think like this.

Buddhist psychology doesn’t just refer to humans. It refers to all living beings. So if you use this, you know, the the rough idea of this human this consciousness of ours that has got delusion, which is ego grasping, which causes attachment and anger and pride and jealousy, you use that as your model. You look at any creature that you know. You can see pretty quickly from their behavior.

We don’t have to be clairvoyant. You know? So you look at you look at a a lion. Right? It seems to me a lion, a mummy lion, has incredible attachment.

Unbelievable kind of bottomless pit of neediness, you know. So we call it, oh, that’s instinct. She’s got to eat the buffalo for breakfast every morning. That’s just her instinct. She’s got how does feed her babies otherwise?

Well, excuse me. Just put yourself in the same situation. When you wake up in the morning, you’re so hungry. You’re compelled to go outside, stalk your neighbor, grab them with your teeth, rip their guts out in the middle of the road while they’re screaming in agony, excuse me, your attachment’s that strong? I don’t think so.

Do you see my point? So conclusion, look how intense that energy must be for that poor mummy lion, you know. Then look at the aggression. Look at the unbelievable skill of her aggression that she uses to to conquer those animals. The stalking for hours, I mean, they’re so incredibly skilled at it.

Can you imagine what’s in her mind every second? It’s only the one oneness with the wish to get that being to eat it eat it because she’s hungry, you know? That’s pretty intense delusions if you ask me, and that’s due to karma. She was a mummy three lives ago as a human, you know? But due to delusion ripening, her mind went into the lion mummy, and all her package is this package of violence and attachment.

And then you look at the jealousy, the lions. I mean, they they rip each other out if you do the wrong thing and take the wrong piece of food at the wrong time, you know, unbelievable jealousy and resentment. I’m incredible delusions. You look at it. Look at those little fishes and those creatures, those weird, bizarre little creatures in the sea, and how they they are living in just fear the whole time, and they’re eating or being eaten.

That’s it in the animal realm. It’s like a true nightmare if you think of it this way, you know, which is the Buddhist approach. All these sentient beings due to negativity are born in this situation, you know, with these bizarre bodies and bizarre mouths and weird shapes and strange I mean, everything about them is we’re all weird, though, really. It’s true. But you look at it, not just the odd things that all these fascinating creatures also in nature.

And there’s another way of looking at it. It’s not that it meant to make us depressed. This is a different perspective, you know, where these beings come from, Why are they like this? Why do they eat each eat each other alive? You know?

Well, it’s mental energy. It’s karma. It’s mental energy that is compelled. No choice, you know. I mean, this is enough suffering to make your heart.

But the point is here to to to try and imagine being this is so simple. Put yourself in that situation. Would you like it or not? I mean, you just have to think a little bit, I think, and you’ll see that unbelievable suffering in the animal world. The gross level of suffering is obvious.

It doesn’t take too much to to have the suffering of a sheep who has been who’s been compelled to die. Know, I remember when I lived in Hong Kong for a while in the South China Morning Post, there’s a little story. It’s a very news in brief thing, you know, just a paragraph about this buffalo. I can’t remember what kind of animal it was. It was in a slaughterhouse.

Right? And it stuck its feet in the ground and had tears in its eyes and refused to go to get killed. Well, that’s quite a poignant, isn’t it? And the and the people, the slaughterhouse guys, were so moved by it. They kind of they bought it and gave it to the local monastery, Buddhist monastery.

But so it’s like to be they had that kind of fear. My friend yeah. Adele, you know, in Adele House. Right? You know, some of you know.

She she was brought up in a sheep farm up in the bush somewhere. And she said she remembers even as before she was a Buddhist or anything as a kid that you could that these animals, when they before they were gonna be killed, they could it was like the stink of death. They knew their instincts were so honed. You know, they knew they were gonna die. It was just the hideous fear, the incredible fear, you know?

So, I mean, that that’s screwed. That’s gross suffering. Being an animal, having no control, being so ignorant, being just used as some kind of nothing, you know? No respect. They don’t have souls according to most religions, you know?

According to Buddhism, they have mind, they have consciousness, but they have a very deluded and suffering mind, and they have no and the suffering in that level is having no control over your life, and then being misused to others. But the suffering at the deeper level is just the they say the intensity of the ignorance. Like I mentioned before, Lama Zopa has said that if you had a direct insight into the into the mind of an ordinary dog, your little cute dog, your little cute cat, you think so special, you know, you would never sleep again. You’d so overwhelmed by the ignorance, just sitting there quietly, not being eaten up. Just the ignorance of their mind, the depth of their ignorance, which brings fear in Buddha’s terms.

The presence of ignorance is is oneness with fear, which is how come whenever we are threatened, this ego rises powerfully, this ignorance rises powerfully, this brings this primordial sense of fear, this panic. Well, that’s the state that animals live in all the time, you know. It’s kinda quiet sometimes, but you watch when it’s threatened. Then you can see it, you know. Can you only imagine how all these creatures who are living in total terror of their lives day and night?

And then the other of the time, they’re having sexual, you know, desire and screwing each other. I mean, what a life, you know. I’m not trying to be depressing, but it’s a different way to look, isn’t it? So contemplating the suffering of the lower realms, specifically to get some sense of horror at the thought of that suffering, and you realize, thank you. I do not want that kind of suffering.

You know? No way. As like an energizer. Really. Just like you would like I said, if you’re driving on a freeway, you see this accident and these mangled bodies.

It immediately causes your heart to beat faster than you to slow down because you don’t wanna be like that. It’s exactly like that, you know. We’ve got to of get ourselves outside ourselves and relate to and but this is a slow way, I mean, eventually, it can become now the point is here is to get this energy because we cannot try to see the consequence because we’re so caught up in who we think we are now with no sense of consequences in whatever we do, say, or think. Not future consequences anyway. The only consequences we know about is if it happens to us right then from someone who’s mean back to us.

We don’t get liked or we get sick. We can’t see long term, you know, which is Buddha’s view of karma, how things happen. So anyway, then this leads us inevitably to the next contemplation we need to do, and we’re priming ourselves, remember, to really practice the actual laws of karma, which is coming in a minute. We then think, well, whom can I turn to to give me methods that will prevent me from having this kind of experience when I die, which I have no idea when? Well, here we turn to the Buddha.

Here we go for refuge. We we rely upon the Buddha, the Dharma, the Sangha. So here, you know, there are extensive teachings in the Buddha’s teachings all about the qualities of a Buddha, the Dharma, Sangha, blah blah blah, you know. So it’s sort of like the analogy here is a bit like, you know, you you you’ve eaten something, and somebody tells you it’s got poison in it. And this sense of horror, the thought of the future suffering, is what caused you to immediately think, well, whom can I turn to?

So then you hear about some doctor in Kathmandu who can heal your sickness. You don’t care. You’ll borrow the money. You’ll do everything. You’ll be gone in one minute.

You don’t care if they’re mouse, the bombing, which they’re doing at the moment, bombing everywhere. You don’t care. You’re gonna go find that doctor. You’re so focused on that. Why?

Because you cannot bear the thought of the future suffering. Right? It’s true. Well, that’s reliance. That’s refuge.

So it’s interesting. You can’t really have refuge. You can’t have a sense of refuge in the Buddha until you know you’re suffering, because the function of the Buddha isn’t just to be there to be looked at and thought of as an acute person. The function of a Buddha is to act as a doctor, which is what refuge is, relying upon somebody. So you only need to you you rely upon somebody when you feel you need it, don’t you?

So if you don’t if you don’t have an illness, let’s say, you’re really healthy and you hear about some amazing doctor in Kathmandu, you couldn’t care less, could you? No interest, because you don’t think you need a doctor. But if you are sick, then you definitely will get sudden, incredible, vivid awareness of this amazing doctor. You’ve got to go find them. Well, that’s really what refuge is.

So in order for us to really even know to even have a sense of refuge, we have to know that we’re suffering. You know? And they say, particularly, we have to have a and this is what they say. It sounds odd to us. They have a fuzzy fear of the future consequences, but this is this kind of fear we’re talking about of, like, horror of the future suffering.

It’s a healthy fear. You do not want that pain, you know. So you you had this enormous sense of refuge in the Buddha, who is the person who who acts as a who actor, whose methods, whose medicines you can take, you can use, which is what the Dharma is. So the Dharma is the real refuge. You can have twenty seven doctors in front of you, best doctors in the world, but if you don’t take the medicine, nothing happens.

Right? So same here. You can have Buddha in front of you every day smiling. But if you don’t practice the Dharma, you don’t put your money where your mouth is, nothing changes. So the Dharma is the real refuge.

It’s the medicine. Then the Sangha is is like, you know, the helpers and supporters on the path, is how they say. So we’ve discussed already briefly what the qualities of a Buddha are. We’ve said already, you know, infinite wisdom, compassion, all these qualities. So if there was such a person, it seems to me that’s a pretty reliable person.

You’d rely upon them, you know, definitely. The Dharma. So okay. They have a way of talking. They say, you’ve got absolute Buddha, absolute Dharma, absolute Sangha, and you’ve got the relative Buddha, relative Dharma, relative Sangha.

Well, it’s easy to understand. Absolute Buddha, if you think about it, we’ve got body and we’ve got mind. Right? That’s how Buddha talks. We’ve got the mind, which is the gross, subtle, very subtle, all this deal, the whole deal, whole spectrum.

So we have body and mind, physical, nonphysical. So then when you’re when you are fully developed so what a Buddha is is a fully developed being in terms of their mind, and that’s called this this enlightened mind is called the Dharma. It’s a Sanskrit term that’s used called dharmakaya. All that means technically is truth body. But what it refers to is just a is a kind of phrase, this term referring to this pure, expansive, pervasive, compassionate, all knowing consciousness.

That’s the absolute Buddha. That is what Buddha really is. But it’s sort of like, what that’s not much use because we can’t communicate with that because we’re so gross, you know. So the Buddha out of compassion, the Buddhas out of compassion manifest in different forms suitable to the needs of sentient beings. And that’s called the form body or the and that’s the relative Buddha.

It’s like the one we need in front of us, you know. The absolute Buddha is the consciousness itself. When it manifests in form, that’s the relative Buddha. So that’s mister Buddha of two and half thousand years ago who manifested, you know, in a human body for our benefit, you know, like that. Then the absolute Dharma is simply the realizations, the actual knowledge, the realizations in the minds of beings who’ve achieved the path of seeing and upwards, a certain level of realization where they’ve realized emptiness.

They say like that. It’s the it’s like it’s like, you know, the yeah. Sorry. I’ll finish. The relative Dharma is is is all those experiences written in words in piece on pieces of paper bound in books, you know.

That’s what we need, don’t we? We can’t we can’t have direct awareness of the of the experiences in someone’s mind, so we need the actual words. So you can say the absolute the absolute the absolute, how to say it, knowledge of cake making is in the mind of a cook. But if they don’t speak it out and write it down in recipes, then how can you do it? You see my point?

So the relative the relative knowledge is the is the recipes. The absolute knowledge is in the actual the actual direct experiences of the cake maker internally. Do you see? Okay. Then the relative, so the relative Dharma is the books.

Like I said, they’re the ones we need. And they say, you know, when you’ve taken refuge, they say that it’s the words that the the words on papers that you actually you have the highest of all. You keep those when you have your altar, for example, you’d have your books up highest. You’d have all your holy books. Not because you’re kinda getting all superstitious, oh, it’s also holy.

I mean, it’s all toilet paper. But the in those books is the the recipe for you to become a Buddha. So you need this more than anything. More than anything, you need this. So that’s why you have such respect for your books.

It’s an attitude, you know. The relative Sangha are those very beings who have those realizations. The absolute Sangha, sorry. Sangha, spiritual community, and the relative Sangha amongst the nuns. They represent the living Dharma in any one place.

Buddha has said, in fact, that it’s the presence of four fully ordained people, isn’t it four? I think so. In one place, maybe five, can’t remember. In one place, that is the actual criterion of the Dharma existing in that place. And yeah.

Because, I mean, there’s a story in Tibet about how at some point when one of these wicked kings, sort of like a time now, is happening in Tibet, where all the Dharma was being chucked out and all the people being murdered and all that. And there were, you know, and and there’s only like four Sunga left in the whole of Tibet. They managed were on the border of China or something. They they wanted to keep the lineage alive, the dharma alive in Tibet. They wanted to keep, therefore, the the the ordination alive and the Sanga alive.

So they they sort of borrowed a monk from China. He came out and and they wore blue, I think. And so out of respect to this blue to these Chinese monks, they had this blue thing on our donkers. This is respect to this Chinese monk who kept the the dharma alive in Tibet by the they being the fifth person so they can continue to ordain other people, keep it alive. So relatively speaking, you can talk about the Sangha as your spiritual community.

It’s true. But this for this reason that I’m describing the monks and nuns, it’s not being personal here, you know, which is as much peanuts as everybody else, that there’s something there’s something in the eastern tradition, which is Buddhist, of having great respect for monks and nuns, which is not easy for our minds. Even as westerners, we don’t respect each other or even, you know, monks and nuns. We see each other too well, everybody’s too personal. We’re too much into personality trips, you know.

Whereas there’s meant to be an attitude of trying to develop great respect for anyone who lives in the vows because that represents represents the Dharma refuge, you know, the Buddha, the Sangha refuge. It’s not an easy one for our minds at all. Okay. So there is a ceremony that you can take, a little kind of formal commitment where you can commit yourself to becoming a Buddhist where you take refuge, as they say, or go for refuge. And the various commitments involved in that would be, for example, if you take going for refuge in the Buddha, it it demands that you, you know, that you wouldn’t take refuge in anything else that contradicts that.

Which doesn’t mean you can’t like Jesus Christ or anybody else. But if if if, you know, you’ve got a real conflict in terms of different teachings that conflict with each other, it wouldn’t be healthy, you know. So you have to be very skillful. If you wanna be a Buddhist, it would mean that anything else you you you you you really use in your spiritual path doesn’t contradict that. So let’s say you have a teach let’s say you have you really accept Jesus Christ’s teaching that animals don’t have a soul and it’s okay to kill them, then that would be a bit of a difficulty to be a Buddhist, I’d say.

Because one of the fundamental commitments of a Buddhist, the bottom line of being a Buddhist is to have the intention not to harm any living being. For example, that could be a conflict, couldn’t it? Then to take it’s taking refuge in the Buddha and the Dharma, your main commitment is to have great respect, like I said, for the written words. Again, not in a superstitious way, but in a in a because you really recognize the value. These teachings are what you need to get enlightened, you know, so you have great respect.

And the respect is meant to be, again, is something that is something for your mind. It doesn’t benefit the book. The book can care less, you know. It’s for one’s own sake. But by respecting the dharma and keeping the dharma up high, keeping it very clean and pure, not putting on the floor, not putting where you put your bottom like on cushions, things like this, then it’s like you’re you’re you’re you’re keeping your own mind very open to receive the realizations.

This is the idea. Then refuge in the Sangha is you have, like I mentioned, you wanna learn want to have great respect for anyone who’s living in ordination because they represent the refuge. They represent the living Dharma, you know. Whether you think they’re a peanut or not, whether you think they’re deluded or not, doesn’t matter. It’s not important.

Doesn’t mean it’s easy, but it’s an important attitude to have, all of us, especially monks and monks. Refuge. Okay. So then you you you know, blah blah blah. You meditate on refuge, blah blah blah, all this stuff.

And now now now you’re ready to put your money where your mouth is. Now you are ready to learn to abide by Buddha’s instructions, which is why you’ve turned to Buddha. You’ve turned to Buddha because you can’t bear the thought of being born in the lower realm. This is all the lowest the basic level of practice, by the way. And you think about that because you thought about death and impermanence.

Thought about that because you thought about perfect human rebirth. It all follows from each other, right, logically, organically. So now you start to put your money where your mouth is. Now you are ready and primed to start abiding by the laws of karma, which is Buddha’s view of how things happen, you know. What time is t?

Three thirty. We’re not there yet. Any questions? Yeah. Yeah.

That’s right. You do whatever is appropriate. I mean, generally speaking, you would still, you know, try and be you know, make the place a conducive place for that person. But if they’ve got great faith in Jesus Christ, you don’t start reading Buddhist texts, you’ll freak them out. Maybe you read them things to subdue their mind to talk about God, and things will help their mind be peaceful, you know.

You use whatever you can use that will help that person die with a happy mind. But this is interesting, this could be controversial to people, but Lama Zopa said even sometime, you know, depending on the person, even if they do freak out, they are freaked out, It’s still beneficial that say mantras and things because that goes that’s imprinted in their consciousness. So for example, the teaching in Buddhism is that anything with any sentient being receives through any of their senses goes into their mind, which is why one of the most precious things you can do for animals is to say, mantras in their ears to bless them. So for example, you know, to, yeah, to bless them their minds by having them imprinting these virtuous things so they have a karmic connection with the Buddha and with the Buddha with the Buddhadharma, you know. So it’s yeah.

That’s one of the most precious things you can do for animals, dying ones, living ones. In fact, you know, we tend to think this is no. Okay. Did I answer your question then? Yes.

Okay. So with this one of animals, it’s kind of interesting. We tend to We love our little pussy, wussy cat, little doggy waggy, we’re so kind to them. But excuse me, and all you’re doing is feeding their attachment. At least you are preventing them from killing other creatures if you take care of them and feed them their dinner every day.

But you’re not you know, when you go to work every day, leave them in the depths of their ignorance sitting all day in own stupidity, that’s not helping them at all. So why not turn a dharma tape on and have dharma playing all day all day all day? So at least the imprints go deep into their consciousness, they’ve got the deep blessings, and definitely when they die, they’ll go zapping towards becoming a monk with a Dalai Lama or something, you know? How incredible. Remember being in Singapore at a zoo with Lama Zopa, you know, he’s famous for this.

There he was having this picture taken with this big ape. Right? And there is Lama Zopa kind of shouting mantras of this ape’s ear up here while he’s having his foot, because all he’s concerned about is getting imprinted into the ape’s mind. And then he had this porcupine who’s bent over this fence, shouting all these prayers at this porcupine. He was completely kinda mesmerized, you know, like this, you know, hearing all this stuff.

And one time in New Zealand, we were doing a retreat with Rinpoche, and he he got us together all the goats in the field, and then he put up loudspeakers and he read the sutras to them. Really. And then other times, he’s kind of, you know, he I mean, every sense he’d be so it’s really because they say every imprint that goes in your mind. There’s all these wonderful stories about, like, one bird that was living on the windowsill of some great yogi who studied one particular text in particular. This bird, just by hearing it every day, got born as his disciple next life.

And as Lama Zopa says, he was very he made very good he wrote very good commentaries on that particular text, not very good at anything else. So strong karmic imprint. I mean, everything we hear and this is if you think about this, this very reasonable. No wonder the world’s a berserk place. Everything, every little tiny child hears and sees leaves an imprint in their consciousness.

So we walk around so blind and so stupid saying, oh, well, it doesn’t make any difference. It’s not the videos that cause the violence. It’s not this you know, there’s everything. There’s all the karma too. But everything makes a difference.

Everything it leaves an imprint in your mind, for God’s sake. It’s a good thing. If you use this, it’s very powerful. Which is how come you’re get Tibetans going to the teachings of the Dalai Lama. They they can’t read.

They can’t write. They don’t know what he’s talking about. They don’t care. They’ll sit there for ten days happily hearing everybody saying, knowing all the imprints are going in their mind, storing it up ready for next life, you know. It’s a very intelligent view, actually.

It’s a long term view as well. Whereas we’re obsessed with understanding everything, you know? We panic if we can’t. Of course, we need to understand eventually, but there’s some benefit even if you don’t understand. This is the point, you know?

So it’s a great vehicle to benefit your animals. Say mantras in their ears. Say Say so they can hear. And you have types of music Dharma, you know, teachings. Why they’re why you’re not there?

We can monitor that. Very powerful in little minds. So certainly for dying people too, this is the what goes into your mind especially then, it it can activate whatever the karma is, you know. So if there’s panic and hysteria around you, you’re dying a freaked out death. Well, don’t be surprised, you know, the mind panics.

If you’re dying a peaceful death with good energy around you, well, you know, that helps the mind find its new way. It’s very very precious. Any points? Any white questions? You have to say you’re the most serious group I’ve ever had in years.

There’s nothing wrong. It’s wonderful. I’m not complaining. Everyone’s so different. Each group’s like a little person, you know, got got personality.

Very curious. I’m not being rude. It’s very nice. Any more questions? So you don’t have to have any.

Okay. We now talk about karma, how karma works. The various basic rules about karma, one of them is that, yeah, like I said, whatever you say, do, and think is necessarily is a karma. It’s an action, and it’s dynamic in the sense that it will bring a reaction. And the reaction we’re talking about here isn’t so much in terms of the external world.

There’s definitely results of whatever we do now. If I punch you in the if I punch you in the nose, there all sorts of repercussions immediately in you, but that’s not what we’re discussing with karma. What we’re discussing with karma is specifically in our own mental consciousness, in our own continuity of mental moments, in our own river of consciousness. This is where karma is being discussed. So whatever we say, do, and think leaves an imprint in this consciousness that at some point will ripen as experiences in that same consciousness.

But everything we do same thing is this, and nothing and nothing and there’s nothing that we do same thing that doesn’t bring a future. There’s nothing that doesn’t have a reaction. It’s not possible. Impossible. That’s one point.

Another point is karma. They say karma expands. So just like you know, you sow you sow a little seed, a baby little apple seed. You’re gonna get hundreds of fruits, you, from that seed, from that one little baby seed. Well, karma expands.

A small little good action can bring huge fruits of happiness. A tiny negative action can if left in the mind, of course, that seed is left in the mind, not pulled out, and you can pull it out if you want to. It’ll bring huge fruits of suffering. The a a a so called positive action can only bring the fruit of happiness, and a so called negative action can only bring the fruit of suffering. These are kind of these these are laws, Buddha says.

They’re just how things are. It’s nature. You know? And, again, it’s not Buddha inventing this. It’s Buddha observing this.

Einstein didn’t invent that he was m c squared. He observed it. This is it’s a way of interpreting what you see, isn’t it? That’s what we’re talking here. So okay.

We create karma with our body, with our speech, and with our mind. And why the body and speech is because it’s coming from the mind, isn’t it? You know, if I have have love in my heart for you, I don’t suddenly punch you in the nose. Equally, if I have hate in my heart for you, don’t kiss you. I mean, I rule if I’m being wicked and kind of deceitful.

But, you know, we can see the body and speeches follow. You know, they do the job of the mind. The mind they’re they’re the servant of the mind, aren’t they? Everything comes from the mind. Quite literally, you can see it.

So we create this kind of can say there’s positive karma, negative karma, and there’s indifferent karma. We can kind of forget about indifferent at the moment. I don’t much care about that one. The positive and the negative are the main ones we should be concerned with. Like I said, there’s various karma ripens.

The main way, which we described already, is the one that’s called the throwing karma or the fully ripened result. That’s the type of life you’re born into where your mind zaps to, which realm of experience you’re born into. So here we are, we’re born in a realm where we that we share with mosquitoes and dogs, but we have a human attitude towards it, don’t we? So mosquitoes have clearly created the cause to be very linked to humans, you know, drinking their blood every day. But they’ve got a they’ve got a mosquito perspective on life, haven’t they?

So we’ve got, you know, that’s the sense that you’re in different realms of reality with different mental possibilities and different experiences, you know. So okay. So the main karma is the one they call the fully ripened result. And now for any action we do to be to to to to manage to ripen in this fully ripened result, to become a throwing karma, there have to be four conditions in place. And the first one, the most important when it when it comes to karma, almost the meaning of karma is is the intention to do the action, the intention to do it, the intention.

So powerful. It’s the mind, you know. The main meaning of karma is intention. Then it says in the action of killing an ant. It’s a simple action, killing a little ant.

The second factor that has to be in to be in place there in order for this action to be a complete action that will ripen as a future suffering result, for it to be negative, for example, there has to be a there has to be a real a little living kicking ant right there. The third one is you have to do the action of killing or get someone else to do it for you. The closer you are to the action, in general, the closer you are to the action, the heavier the karma. Or the closer you are to the action of good karma, good action, the more the more strong the the virtuous result. And the fourth thing that is in place has to be there is the the completion of the action.

It dies, you recognize it, you rejoice. Great. Now it’s dead, you know, and they die before you. If those four conditions like that, just bare bones are there, that is a a fully that brings a fully ripened result. It’s a throwing karma.

Now if you look at intention, there’s got a few other crucial factors involved that play the major role in the karmic result for you of that action. We’re not discussing what the the result for the ant at all. It’s for you. karma’s for you, you know. So the other conditions that are really crucial under intention, once the intention is there, then the most important of all factor that determine is the main determining factor for the karmic result is your reason for doing it, your motivation.

So the so the fact is, in it’s in and of itself, killing is neither good nor bad. How can it be? It’s simply this action to go, oh, putting a knife in that, you know? But when we look at killing is, we can see that ninety nine point nine nine percent of the time, and, of course, it is bad. Why?

Because the energy of destruction is is is the wish to harm that creature. So the motivation aversion. So we can see that mostly killing is coming from aversion. Is aversion logical, Wouldn’t you agree? Except, of course, it’s attachment if you want to eat the flesh.

So you wouldn’t smash on the ant really strongly if you want to eat its flesh. You’d kill it. You don’t want to mess up its legs because you want to eat it. Right? So it’s a very different energy.

Attachment is a very different energy. It’s not aversion. The people who are in the chicken yards, you know, killing the chickens or killing them, they’re not they’re not full of aversion. You look at people who go to fishing. They keep they think they actually love the I mean, they love all the nature.

They often have a great affection for these fish, but they kill them all the time. They’re not kind of full of rage like you are if you’re in a war or something or if you see a bunch of mosquitoes. Aversion is the basic state of mind of what we call anger, isn’t it? Anger. So we can say so we can deduce that, conventionally speaking, killing is seen as negative because we can see from experience that it always comes from a aversion.

It’s reasonable. It’s it’s clear, you know. So the motivation is what makes it is what cause then if whether the motivate if the motivation is attachment, the karmic result will be quite different. You know, for me, the motivation was aversion. It’s obvious.

This this plays the real role, the motivation, what’s in your mind, you know. Now what’s really fascinating also, we can also see that you can kill the the ant with compassion, can’t you? Killing is normally not associated with compassion, but we can see that compassion can be the motivation. The ant could be suffering. That’s very clear.

We can have that experience. Now that means the action, the result to you is quite quite different because you actually had a good motivation. Now, it’s another story whether you really didn’t, you know, benefit the ant, and we can talk about that. We’ll discuss that in a minute. So motivation plays a major role in determining the type of karmic result will come to you from that action that you did.

So then another factor that plays a huge role, like another subdivision under intention, is the habituation. If you are deeply habituated to killing, then it’s a much, much heavier action than for a person who’s not habituated to killing. Another factor that plays a huge role is how you do it. So if you kill the ant really sadistically, you know, that’s much heavier than just killing it quickly. It’s obvious.

So all these factors, and they’re all, obviously, all psychological, they all play a major role in the karmic result. And, of course, the actual to know what karmic result comes from what action is complex. Only the Buddha finally knows that. The only omniscient mind which we can develop. When we’ve really got a huge omniscient mind, then we can see.

It’s so intricate. But these are the basic principles. Okay? So if that’s in place let’s say there’s a version in the mind, you’ve got the habit, there’s strong intention, you do the action, it dies, that’s a very strong negative karma. If left in the mind, that karmic seed, it will ripen in the future as many suffering lives.

That’s what it says. Then now you can see also, there’s many variations here too. You can see that you you you know, you might have the intention to kill. The ant is there. You stomp your foot, but you miss it.

You could actually say that’s much heavier karma for you. You’ve left a stronger negative imprint in your mind than if you didn’t have any intention at all, but you put your foot down, an ant was there, and it died. Do you see? You could almost say you had no negative karma there. There was no intention whatsoever.

An intention is the main energy of karma. So this is why, of course, in the end, we can’t really tell who who does what. There’s no way to really know unless you’re clairvoyant. You know? You can deduce it if you can.

Possibly what people did, what was in their mind, you know? It’s very hard to see. And I can see some yeah. I mean, I can just tell from talking to different people in prison who are in prison for killing. Right?

Very interesting. You can just by them talking about their experiences, you can really feel from the person. Some of them much more heavy, some less heavy, some less calmer, some more calmer, but some have got worse sentences than than less, you know. So it, you know, doesn’t but in our world, we also see that murderers are wicked evil people. But you can see some people even probably pull for a pull for a good reason, because they got a life sentence because of it, you know, whatever.

So it really gets hard to see people’s minds, isn’t it, their motivations? But in terms of this is for our us, this is for our own sake, we have to learn our mind, to know our mind so very well. And this is why they say motivation is so huge. We’ve got to generate very positive motivation for whatever we’re doing, you know, because then that that causes the action that we’re doing to become much more powerful just by having a pure motivation. So let’s look at the scenario where you’d kill an ant with compassion.

And this is a very common thing in our culture, and we never ever question it. We and the logic we use for it’s being a good action is because we mean well. Now what’s interesting about this is this. Let’s say I see an ant and it’s a little mangled body, and I feel my heart breaks for it, I have great compassion. The first thing I think of is I must kill it.

Why? Because you wanna stop its suffering, don’t you? So you can say that when you kill the ant with compassion, and you really meant it, you really did have your heart really reached out, and you stomped on it, and it died, and you were relieved for its own sake when it died, you can really say you created good karma, you know, depending on how strong your compassion was. And if it was pure compassion, not pretending you’re compassionate, obviously. Then you can say that you create good karma.

You, personally, create good karma. You left karmic seeds in your mind that will bring not a very suffering result. You can say that. But it’s interesting. It it demands, isn’t it?

This action demands we ask the question, which we never do. Well, I wonder if I did benefit the ant. We never ask that question. But that’s obvious because the reason you did it was for the ant’s sake. Well, then you have to ask the question, did I benefit the ant?

We never do because we don’t have any sense of what happens after the ant has left its body, you know, or it’s dead now, therefore, its suffering has finished. So then this is what Buddha says we must do. Give remember that we Buddha says that when the ant dies, its consciousness will continue and will take another rebirth. And then given that what’s on its mind at the time of death will determine to a huge extent the kind of life it will take. And then given, as we mostly know, if you can imagine, you’re suffering already and then this big foot comes and stomps on you, you’re have a peaceful state of mind?

Excuse me, you know? So for this reason, even you can see it’s an outrageous thing to do, because you’re bringing huge fear to the mind of that creature. Well, especially not always. I mean, you can, you know, have your little dog and your medicines make you go to sleep and all these things we say. But still, we don’t have the clairvoyance, do we, to see that when that consciousness leaves our little dog, that it will definitely take a better rebirth.

And I don’t just mean a better dog rebirth. I mean, actually, a good rebirth, like a human one, so I can get this practice spiritual path. If you can’t see that with certainty, excuse me, you have no right to kill your dog, you know. We don’t think this way, but this is the Buddhist approach. It doesn’t mean it’s that easy to make these decisions.

I mean, the real thing is you gotta think like this. Just in other words, there are consequences to everything we do, and we should be aware of all the consequences before we do an action. We’re aware of that. You wouldn’t run your send your kid over the road with you don’t if you can’t tell if there are cars coming around the corner. You’d be very careful.

You know, if if you if I have a if someone’s really sick, they’ve a terrible headache, you’ve got compassion for them, you’ve a cyanide pill and an aspirin in your hand, but you’ve to mix up and you can’t tell the difference, you know, just all out of compassion, not gonna say, please, please have it. You’d rather have the headache you’d rather than have the headache, because you don’t know the consequences of that action. You’d rather have them the status quo. Well, the same with the ant, please. What right have we got to interfere with that ant’s life?

There’s nothing wrong with interference if you know the consequences. If you know with certainty that if the ant dies now, certain karma will ripen and get a really good rebirth, please kill it immediately. Please kill me immediately. If you can see that if I die now, a really good virtuous karma ripens, I get an incredible new life. Please immediately kill me.

That’s a really good action. We don’t see that, do we? So instead of the fear that arises, panic, you know, because we can’t better see it, we do what we can to help that creature. Because the thing about karma, which we’ll talk about, is that it suffering is necessarily the fruit of negative karma. We’ve established that.

So that little creature is purifying its karma. So who knows that two more days of suffering of that little cat or whatever, it’s purified huge amounts of karma, and when it’s got its own karma, to allow it to die, then meanwhile, you you do various good things for it, you help it support it, you try to, know, alleviate its mental pain, you blow mantras into its ear, you have a teachings in its mind, you have little vision, little images of the Dalai Lama in front of it, whatever, you know, to bless its little mind stream. And then when the time is right, it will die, you know. That’s the way that’s the approach. Anyone have any questions about that?

The whole deal, a little bit karma? Okay. So okay. So so there’s, you know, there’s I mean, it’s incredibly subtle and very complex, of course, how it actually all does ripen. But one of them is ripens is sort of in a residual sense.

There are four ways that karma ripens. The main one is that one where we just said the throwing’s karma, positive or negative. We just use an example of a negative one then. Then you’ve got all the residual results of karma, which are like the kind of the the residual route. So it’s sort of like this.

A person, let’s say, due to killing, is born in the lower realms, and then they, you know, have many, many lives on the on the animal track and then the lower realms, blah blah blah. And eventually, their petrol tank of that suffering track runs out. And like a little miracle, one of their virtuous karmas, which was buried in their mind, has now come to the surface, and then they die. They they get born as a human, let’s say. Let’s say.

And they’re able to practice, you know let’s say, they’re just born as a human, good qualities, and so on and so forth. But this is the point, and this is the big tragedy. You look at one of the next ways that karma ripens, which is the most tragic one. It’s the residual result of the killing. You get born as a human because you’ve got a throwing karma that ripen, which is virtuous.

But the next karma, which is called actions similar to the cause actions similar to the cause, you get born with a habit to kill. Look at this human realm. Most humans kill something. Not humans, necessarily. Most humans kill something.

And tragically, it’s part of our culture. It’s even part of our religions with great respect that it’s cool to kill, you know, isn’t it? It’s totally acceptable. Look at fishing. It’s a classic example of how utterly integrated it is into our culture, so much so that it’s seen as good.

It’s something that people are hugely attached to, you know? Not criticizing anyone, just looking at karma. You’re born with this tendency to fish. You go I mean, this is the classic story I always tell every single teaching I give about karma. This friend of mine came to me at our center, at our monastery in Nepal one time, and she’s just tears pouring down her face because she’d been hearing teachers about karma and all this stuff.

And she was devastated because she her five years before that, her one of her beautiful sons, twenty nine year old boy, had had died, drowned. He was scuba diving. And she was only just getting over the grief of this death. Right? And then she suddenly dawned on her that maybe this boy was in the lower realms, because he was a fisherman for thirteen years.

So she said, since the time he was born, the time he can a little boy, he was attracted like a magnet to the water, into fishing, you know. Now the Buddha would say that comes from the habit of having killed in the past. He’d cleaned up his negative, his killing karma being in the lower realms. He’d finished all that, but he hadn’t purified it all completely. So he he’s born as a human.

He’s like a miracle. Has this amazing human life with good parents and good all kinds you know, good morality, blah blah blah, kind person, lovely human being, but he has this huge tendency to kill. Then due to his karma, he’s born in an environment near the water. He goes like a magnet towards it, and he’s you know, he even called himself salmon. So for the thirteen years, he’s a professional fisherman, killing hundreds of thousands, no doubt, creatures, you know.

So what’s fascinating about this about kite Anyway, I’ll it’ll all unfold. So anyway, it was sort of most fascinating, you know, there he is with his habit to kill. This is the residual result of having the killing and having done the serious killing, having had the lower role of suffering, get born as a human again, then you get boom. You haven’t cleaned it all up. You’ve got the habit.

And of course, one of the tragedies of when you’ve got the habit to do something, good or bad, but when it’s a tragedy when it’s a bad one, is that you go towards it like a magnet. You’re attracted to it. Now what you’re attracted to, obviously, is what gives you pleasure, isn’t it? So we can see when we have our own negative habits. We we you know, one of us hard to it’s hard to change because we’re attracted to doing them.

I mean, if we have a strong habit to be angry, it you know, we all know it feels very good. You go towards it as a very right thing to do. It feels so correct to be angry and so righteous, isn’t it? So cathartic, you know? It’s a good experience.

It’s only afterwards you have any conscience at all that you’re kind of mortified. So whatever you have the habit to do, you go towards it like a magnet. If it’s to be lazy, to lie, to steal, you go towards it like a magnet. By definition, what you’re attracted to, what you go towards is what you’re attracted to and what gives you pleasure. When you think of serious experiences, like I remember reading recently looking on the television, seeing a documentary about these two American serial killers, one called Jeffrey Dahmer and one called Bundy.

I don’t know if you know about this bloke called Bundy. I think most people you’ve heard of Jeffrey Dahmer? Anyway, what’s fascinating about them, different things occurred from my own mind. It’s very interesting watching. You see it all in terms of karma, you know.

So these two people were who had the karma to kill many, humans and torture them and brutalize. Right? But it also what was interesting, the difference was their personalities and that’s also karma. So what I’m talking about here is the action similar to the cause, which is all the tendencies within us, good and bad. The whole deal, all our personality, all our thoughts, all our feelings, all our emotions, all our tendencies.

All of these, remember we’re discussing, don’t come from God or Buddha or mommy or deity. And aren’t there because someone is mean to you or good to you. They’re there because they’re in your mind and having done them before. They’re a bunch of habits, right? So if I look at them watching this Jeffrey Dahmer guy, in my opinion, he looked like a very nice person.

Very honest, quite humble, unassuming, very pleasant looking, good habits, kind man, you know, very straightforward about who he was and what he was doing. But he had this tragic karmic imprint from who knows, from some animal life, you know. I mean, really, really tortured mind, just that particular habit. To since a tiny boy, he said he was attracted, hugely attracted to torturing creatures and then killing them. And then, of course, he graduated to humans, you know.

And now, Bundy, same, whatever his style was, but he was much more he had far more deluded habits. He was a liar. He could see like he was a liar. Was very deceptive. He was very manipulative.

He was paranoid. He had many other actions similar to the cause were much more complex and made him much more suffering, demented human being. But this Jeffrey Dahmer was very curious to see it actually. Very interesting. Actually, friend in prison who is in life for murder asked us to send books to the man who murdered Geoffrey Dahmer in prison.

He never wrote back, but he asked me to do that, so I did. Jeffrey Dahmer got killed in prison. So anyway, the point is, you could say that due to, you know, due to very, very strong karma, you know, past life, it has to be some animal life, you know. Really, I mean, you look at if you objectively look at the way animals kill each other and get killed, you can see it. I mean, it’s just like there’s no end to the methods they use.

There’s no end to the ways they do it, you know. Then, of course, we carry this karma over to being human, you know. So there he is, this poor man who had this tendency since he was a tiny kid, and he got his orgasms from it. Not just vague pleasure. He got his orgasms from it.

No wonder it was hard to change the poor thing. I mean, talk about going towards something like a magnet. This is what makes it very hard for us to change. If we got an electric shock every time we were negative, we’d all be Buddha by now, you know? But that’s the problem why it is so hard to change our habits.

Because we go towards them like magnets. That’s what I’m saying here at this point. So this is boy, you know? Very nice human being with a good mom and a good family and lovely things, blah blah, good qualities, very generous, you know, very generous with his fish, everything. But he had this habit to kill fish.

Okay. Became fish. He had the habit to kill and it manifested as fish, you know? He went towards it like a magnet. Of course with fishing, because it’s so caught up with nature, we get confused about nature and the fish.

So fishing is good because it’s in nature. Ask the fish if they like it. That’s not good for them to be killed. You understand my point? We don’t think it through.

Mean, fishing is seen as almost like this high art in our culture. So totally, the intellectuals do it, you know? So of course, I mean, to say it’s a bad thing, people think you’re nuts. Absolutely nuts, you know? It shows how strong karma is.

It shows how tragic karma is, you know? Because we never question. Whatever you feel good about, whatever then culture has decided as good and a whole kind of story around it that calls it good, it’s very hard to to to go through this, to see the logic of how it’s not good. It’s very hard, you know? Someone like Geoffrey Dahmer, it was very easy to see it wasn’t good and he knew all the time.

He had enough intelligence to know what he was doing was wrong. I’ll pass out tea time, I’m sorry. Shall we have tea? We’ll carry on Geoffrey Dahmer in a minute and karma, okay? I’ll stick to my schedule.

Okay, see you soon. And this is really the worst one of the worst types of karma to have, the habit to do something if it’s negative. The best kind to have if it’s positive. And it’s like the as I said, it’s the residual result left over from the from the main karma from the past, you know. What what you have the habit to do, so you keep this habit.

And the other and the various facts, like I’m saying, the fact is that make the habit so difficult to change because it we’re we’re we’re kind of like, you know, you’ve dug this groove in your mind and you just go towards that. You go towards it like a magnet because we all know how habit works. We know. I mean, we look at how we are when we learn how to do something. You’ve learned how to play the piano.

You just keep doing, keep doing, you’re training. Basically, you’re brainwashing yourself, aren’t you? To do something automatically. We all see we have this capacity. Well, that’s exactly this principle at this time.

Every single thing we bring with us from the moment we’re born, all the imprints are there from past life. And, okay, the intricacy of the of why all that package comes together is highly complex. We can’t see this, you know? But we can see that we’ve got this certain personality, various karmic imprints all appear in our mind. Our personality is a bunch of habits, you know?

So when when we have those habits, the very nature of the deluded of of the ignorance in our mind and all the other delusions, we support them all because we go towards them. And so because they make us feel good, we naturally have this rationale that says they must be good. We give and we look at all our negative habits, and especially we’re very strongly caught up in them. We have this very elaborate philosophical presentation of them as being good. You know?

Always rationalize. We have to to support what we’re doing. Otherwise, it’s too difficult, isn’t it? So this is all this huge packaging, all this story supporting this action. It’s good because of this and because of this and because of this and because of this.

You know? And we’re con and all of this is continually denying responsibility for it and not recognizing how it’s negative because it’s so hard to see, you know? I mean, the difference, for example, is looking at Jeffrey Dahmer, this other guy. This other guy never ever actually ever confessed that he ever did anything wrong. He always had this strong impulse to defend everything he did.

We can see this in our own mind, and there a lot of pride there, lot of stubbornness. Whereas Jeffrey Dahmer was very he was so relieved, he said, that he was caught, you know, because now he realized he couldn’t do it. He was relieved. It was like he was just relieved from the pressure because he recognized he was doing this harm. He was very open about it, you know.

And even when he said he knows that if he were out of prison, he’d do the same thing, this in Western terms sounds so horrific because people were convinced that’s that’s evil because we have this view in the West and we all have this kind of free will. Meaning, kind of all got the same slate, and we make these objective choices to do this evil action. I mean, you just have to look into your mind to know that’s nonsense, you know? It’s complete fantasy. It doesn’t work like that.

If it were true, if we’re all equal, which which is a teaching, as a Christian teaching, I’m just debating with it, right? God gives us a free will, they say. Or it’s it’s an established Western con con concept now, Even we don’t call it Christian. We all believe we have this thing called free will. We make choices.

So that’s why people hate, you know, people who do harm because they’re evil. So for example, the latest things in the age today about Osama bin Laden, they’ve got this video that they’ve, you know, they publish they publish a transcript of it. But, basically, he was you know, if you know, assuming it’s authentic, that he was actually behind the whole thing. It indicates that, and how he’s rejoicing when the building fell down, and the brothers are doing such a fantastic job, and all these kind of things. Right?

And then people say he’s evil. He’s got no heart. He’s got no soul. He’s evil, they say. Buddha says something ridiculous, you know?

He’s not evil. He’s just got strong karmic imprints due to past actions to do this thing that he’s doing now. And look at I mean, that’s the point about wrong views, Buddha says. We all have wrong views, you know? We support whatever actions we do because we have the habit to do them.

So the trouble is something like his, and I’m, you know, argue I’m not being against Muslim, but I would argue objectively with the the view that he has that it’s just morally wrong. He’s got he’s got it built up so strongly, this habit to kill, encompassed in the context of a of a spiritual path. And then, of course, it’s in Vincent. It’s, you no one can argue with the spiritual path. This is the view.

We’re so strongly holding on to it. You know? Even most Americans who are happily supporting George Bush and his bombing, all agree they have a philosophy that says it’s right to kill because you’re killing them back. The Israelis have a view that it’s correct to do this, what they’re doing to the Palestinians, you know, ripping the life out of Palestine now and and and just destroying, you know, because they really feel it’s correct. Well, it’s hard, isn’t it?

We look at our own mind. We support what we do. We give it this philosophy. So when it’s a religious philosophy, it’s very difficult to break it down. Very hard to see it’s wrong, you know.

This is what Buddha means by wrong views with sort of these elaborate layers upon layers upon layers upon layers of philosophical viewpoints that support negative actions. So it’s hard to strip it all away, to look into our minds with great integrity, you know. So we can just see our own delusions. We might not have a philosophy we might not have what we call a religious philosophy built around it. We’ve all got a philosophy, though.

You know? And that’s all coming from the habit to continue to do something. So the next kind of karma is the one called experiences similar to the cause. And they got these different they have different phrases to translate, these are the terms I’m using here. And this is the kind of karma that’s all the stuff that happens to us.

And this is a really hard one to take responsibility for. It’s it maybe we can bear to take responsibility for our own anger, but it’s but to actually realize that someone else’s anger against you is because is is because it’s yours anger coming back at you from past life. That’s a tough one. You tell all those Americans they are now that they’re getting this action because they have done it to them. They wanna kill you along with Osama Bin Laden.

You’re insane. I mean, it’s outrageous concept, you know. So this is a really tough one, to take responsibility for the stuff that happens to us. And that means, as Lama Zopa says, a kind of more cosmic way of looking at karma, much more profound, it’s really linked to interdependence and emptiness actually, is that every single thing is our own karmic appearance. Look how how we see things now, you know.

Something happens, and it’s always like whether it’s innocent victim. Whether it’s good or bad, what happens? It’s like as if it’s as if that thing has come from left field and has nothing to do with me, isn’t it? Very strong. Person gives you a hundred bucks is like an amazing surprise out of the blue.

Wow. Wow. Just incredible. How did this happen? Amazing.

Like, you just won the lottery. It’s luck, you know. It’s not luck. It’s karma. You set it up in the past life by being generous.

It’s the hearer it comes back to you. The logic of karma is if it comes back to you, you must have done it first. In other words, if you have the fruit, if you see the fruit, then you know that you planted the seed. If you look into your garden, a little rose bush pops up. Oh, wow.

My neighbor must have planted a rose seed in her garden two years ago. You know? Excuse me. It’s in your garden the rose bush is coming. It’s not your neighbors.

It’s your rose bush, isn’t it? Well, if someone gives you a hundred bucks, that’s your hundred bucks. Coming back at from that’s yours. You know? It’s personal.

It’s not like luck as we see everything. That’s coming from ignorance. The function of ignorance is to be separate from everything, to see everything as self existent, having no relationship, no interdependence. No relationship to me. Definitely, when all the suffering comes, you look how we are, you know.

How dare they do this to me, this outrage, you know. Complete lie, Buddha says. Not seeing reality, you know, interdependence. It’s your karmic appearance. So one of the powerful ways to even get us feeling for this just in your own life, to have the wish to see everything as your own karmic appearance.

So that mosquito, that’s not just generic mosquito out there picking you at random. Okay. Equally, it didn’t make a choice. I’m gonna go eat Ravina’s blood. It’s due to karma that that mosquito and I come together.

No volition from either our side. karma takes care, as Lama Yeshe says. karma is the creative energy that brings people together that causes them to do what do do do what they do to each other. It’s not random. It’s not someone up there pulling the strings.

What are the two views we have, isn’t it? Either it’s random or it’s God. Buddha says neither. Karmically created. So that mosquito is your karmic appearance.

Like, welcome back, mosquito. Hello. You know? That person who harms you, that person who loves you, whatever it is. So this is another residual result if you like.

Now, if you in terms of practice, the one that’s much better to have, which of course we think is the opposite, is the experience is similar to the cause. Better to have all the garbage coming at you, but to have a pure mind and not to have a habit, than to have the habit but not to have anything bad happen to you. But of course, we all think bad things happening is the worst thing of all. That’s what suffering is. Of course it’s suffering, but it’s much better to be, you know, to be harmed and lied to by others than you to harm and to lie.

This is the worst one, you know, in a sense. Lama Zopa Rinpoche says it’s the worst one. Because all it does is you’ve you’ve got this human life like some amazing fluke. You’ve won the lottery, you know. Not a fluke, it’s karma, but it’s so fortunate.

But you’ve got the residual results of negative karmas and you just use this human life to just just tip it down the toilet. It’s so tragic, you know. And then you go zapping straight back to the lower realms. This sounds pretty shocking, but it needs looking at and seeing the logic of don’t just fear something horrible Buddha is trying to scare us with. It is said the vast majority of all humans who are living on the earth at the moment will when they die go to the lower realms.

And you don’t need to be clairvoyant to see that if you really look deeply at the nature of karma and actions negative and positive. It needs a lot of analysis to look at this, and it’s not a judgment thing, you know. Because the majority look at the humans, more and more, lying, delusion, anger, fears, yelling, killing, stealing. I’m not talking about being Hitler here. Just look how we are.

You know? Like I said, the majority of humans kill things. Killing is one of the most negative actions you can have. And the tragedy is we don’t see it as bad. Why?

It’s because we had that one factor. The one makes a big plays a huge role is the habit to do it. You can see, you know. But the experience is similar to the causes also, all the karma coming back at us, their own stuff, like an echo, your own voice coming back at you. And the logic of karma is if you plant the seed, you will necessarily get the fruit.

And if you get the fruit, you necessarily planted the seed, whether you like it or not. And this is what’s hard to see, you know, so painful, because ego is shouting, this shouldn’t be happening to me. It’s a really interesting view of reality. Quite a profound one. Quite a hard one, you know?

But it’s the reason why most Tibetans don’t go crazy. Why most Tibetans, you know, might be pained and full of suffering, but aren’t angry. Because they have a logical reason why it’s happening. They have this calm of you, you know. And that’s why you read the biographies and some of the really high lamas who’ve been in prison for years and tortured.

They come out of that experience with more compassion, more love, more forgiveness, more generosity, more kindness, which is mind boggling. We can’t kind of comprehend that, you know. Because I understand it’s karma. So, you know, it’s like this is one old we one of Lama Zopa’s gurus called Ribur Rinpoche. Has he been to Australia?

Ribur Rinpoche? No? You haven’t heard of him? Because you’ve seen stories about him in Mandela, I’m sure, if you’ve read Mandela. We interviewed him a few years ago in Mandela, and he he was in, like, I think thirty years in Tibet.

I can’t remember. Much of that time in prison being being tortured. He said, you can’t even he kind of laughed when he said it. He said, can’t even imagine what they did, you know. And then his whole body was kinda wrecked.

He can hardly walk. He’s got no teeth. He has falsies, but he’s not wearing them. So he’s got this big, gringing, gummy mouth. You know?

But he’s this amazing high being who everybody thinks. He says he’s just extraordinary high being, you know, full of love and oh, yes. When? None of you people know or hear them. Wow.

Amazing. Okay. Incredible. Okay. Anyway, he’s a pretty astonishing person.

But when he talks about the suffering, you know, he said he was he was able to he said he was able to transform suffering into pure joy. When you can’t when you put those words together, it seems just too much to think about to know what he even means by that, isn’t it? You know? But if you can kind of hear about think a little bit about the logic of karma. Then you can kind of understand that a person like him, there he is in a situation where he can’t change.

He can’t walk out the door. His suffering is appalling. You know, the physical suffering. But his mind is full of love and compassion and wisdom. And the wisdom, no doubt for someone like him, he has the absolute clairvoyance to see precisely what the karma is between him and his his his torture, you know.

His personal. His he knows. He can see. And so one of the the attitude of Bodhisattva, a high being, is when they see this person, so, you know, the torturer with a very tortured mind obviously, who would torture who didn’t have a tortured mind, you know, who was full of delusion and rage, that he can see himself that all this energy coming back at him is because he harmed this person in the first place, which was a cooperative cause for this person having so much violence. So they have enormous regret for what they did in the past, you know.

Because look what they’ve caused. Cooperatively caused for this person to have this raging, deluded mind, you know. Suddenly they can see that this person, because of this harm that they’re doing to him, is going to have unbearable suffering in the future, they have huge compassion for him. This is the attitude. Very different from our usual attitude.

So karma is a really strong one. So there’s the throwing karma, which is known as the fully ripened result, which is the one you know, is the cause of what realm you occupy. Then there’s within that realm, whatever you whether you’re a dog or a human, there’s the actions that are similar to the cause. So if you look at animals, for example, a lion, you know, and a deer both have the throwing karma of being an animal. But look at their actions similar to the cause, quite different.

Deer are quite timid, aren’t they? They don’t kill creatures. They’re vegetarians. Right? Isn’t it true?

Whereas look at the line. Yeah. So they’re all obviously different personalities. You’ve the Hitler’s and the Mother Teresa’s of the human realm as well. Both got the throwing power of being a human, but within that many, many different actions similar to the cause.

You know? You see the personalities. And then equally, you’ve got the experiences similar to the cause. That cute little poodle who gets all the good things. That poor little other dog, you know, being beaten and bashed and, you know.

So in some sense, can really say the dog is purifying far more than the poodle. The poodle has got all this incredible good karma from much generosity and goodness in in the past, but unfortunately, he’s all rubbing as a poodle, kinda useless, wasting all his good karma, you know. Whereas that little dog that suffers, actually, is purifying karma, you know. The fourth kind of karma is environmental karma. So, you know, Buddhism doesn’t have the view that this universe is made by God or Buddha or a person called mother nature.

Buddhism says it’s it’s it’s, you know, it’s the there are very, again, very detailed explanations of how this universe comes into being, just a similar way to the way bodies come into being. You know, they talk about the four elements. There’s a very subtle kind of wind energy that is the result of a previous universe that has collapsed, you know. There’s a very subtle wind energy which is beginningless as well. It’s simply existing.

And then due to karma, the collective karma of the billions of sentient beings who are gonna occupy this universe, let’s say, this gradually, this universe, the energy of the karma causes is the is the creative energy. It’s like another volitional one, like God or something, you know. But it’s just the energy that causes the elements to to begin to form into this universe. And then what determines the way the universe changes and goes over the centuries, you know, like polluted and violent and earthquakes and all this is this is also due to karma too. Due to karma.

So for example, the action of the throwing karma of killing is to be born in the lower realms. The action similar to the cause of kill kill is to continue to kill. The the experience similar to the cause of kill to be killed or to die young or to get sick. You think of sickness. The elements in the body are kind of, you know, going against the opposite the opposite of life, aren’t they?

Which is going towards death. So that’s all the result of we experience similar to the cause of killing. Then you have the the environmental result of killing is that where you are, where you live, the actual elements themselves, the food, the water, are polluted, really polluted, let’s say, are kind of are conducive to ill health as opposed to health. Now you look at the world now, more and more kids being born with incredible environmental diseases. Can’t eat can’t drink milk, can’t eat this, can’t eat that.

It’s their karma from past killing, you know, but it’s environmental karma. So even the environment itself is completely due to karma, not random, not just coming from big big bangs, you know, not merely physical, not god, not Buddha, not mother nature. karma. So we’re responsible for all of it. And if you think about this, the entire universe we occupy, there’s the body we have, there’s the mind we have, and there’s the things that happens to us.

There’s nothing else left. That’s everything. It’s all due to karma. So, you know, we’re responsible. So if we want a reasonable universe in the future, you practice morality.

Don’t harm. Don’t lie. Don’t steal. Don’t kill. If you wanna have a reasonable body in the future, ditto.

Whatever reasonable personality in the future, ditto. You know? It’s up to us. It’s in our hands. That’s wonderful.

Nothing wrong. It’s wonderful. It’s nothing. I mean, it’s good. Mean, if everything well, any karma we create, memory has got to do with our motivation.

So if our motivation is pure, that’s good. We’re doing good actions if you’re checking the environment. But if it becomes anything that’s you know, when when I was politically active, was very extreme. So did what I call good action, but with a very heavy motivation. Sort of pure in some way, but kind of bashing and shouting and yelling.

So in the end, you defeat the purpose of the good action, you know? Don’t you? So it’s like anything nothing wrong with trying to preserve the environment. It’s fantastic. It’s a very obvious and appropriate thing to do.

What do you mean? Say it again. Give an example. Yep. That’s right.

Okay. It all depends on isn’t it? You’ve got a group of people in a war, let’s say. Depends even so you can see, first of all, that war and that violence is their collective experience similar to the cause, like all the Tibetans. It’s their collective experience similar to the cause.

Each of them, according to their own personality, had all very different motives and different and different personalities and different actions similar to the cause. So it all depends on what each person does with that experience. So, you know, if you a lot of a lot of the Tibetans, because they did have this view of karma Right. They didn’t retaliate. They don’t retaliate.

They do forgive. Therefore, they’re purifying karma. So it depends on how you work with it. It’s attitude. That’s the point.

It’s motivation. Because the car all the stuff that happens to you is your experience is similar to the cause, but how you deal with that is what’s gonna happen to you in next life. So a person who has an incredible suffering in this life, but sees it as calmer and accepting it and turning it around, incredible virtue in the future, incredible happiness in the future. They’ve purified it. They’ve purified it.

And this is the way that the major approach when we discussed the the Mahāyāna path. We’ll do that tomorrow. The major way to practice. How much time do we have tomorrow? Says we finish at three.

Tomorrow. We’ll see how we go. Okay. There’s a way a whole way of practicing called transforming problems into happiness. It’s given that in other words, you’re born in this crappy society with a bad thing happening, let’s say, as say, then the attitude is let’s work with it.

Let’s see if we because it is purification. How fantastic. So this is why I said it’s much better to have if you want to choose between having actions similar to the cause of the bad and experiences similar to the cause, you better have experiences because at least you’re purifying. But to be in a good environment but have a lousy mind, you’re in big trouble, straight down to the suffering again. So that’s how you work with it.

I I was thinking more people who don’t remember the word message. It’s still the same principle applies. Many people accept their suffering without, you know, calling it religious, don’t they? Because they’ve the hindrance. They’ve got the tendency.

I mean, there’s a woman I met in prison. Where was it? Canada recently. And it was a very interesting example. She was talking about all the various things that happened to her in her life, know.

And there was this one thing after another, one ridiculous disaster after another, being raped, being killed, not killed, being divorced, husband leaving, someone stealing from her, being all these things are happening like one after the other, the punch is coming, you know. But she had this unfailing kind of optimism and kindness and accepting it and didn’t know why, but just kind of jolly about it. And she wasn’t putting it on. That means she just had the karmic imprint to have patience and kindness, but the karmic imprint to have a lot of suffering come at her. She was fortunate because she was accepting it and putting up with it, you know?

You understand? So an example too, I’ll use an example of my friend, my mother’s friend. Actually, I’m in Melbourne. I’m not in Melbourne. I’m Bendigo.

So when I’m in when I’m in Timbuktu, I can tell these stories and say the names, I think, oh my goodness. It doesn’t matter. You’re not no one’s gonna know these people. You know, my my mom’s friend, Sheila. Okay?

My my mom was a Catholic. We were Catholics. We had this kind of what we call now dysfunctional family, what we thought was normal, of course. You always think your own family is normal. But, anyway, you knew it was berserk.

But my friend my mother had a best friend, Sheila, who also had a berserk family, right? So my mother had a family full of girls and one boy, and my friend Sheila had a family full of boys with one girl. So, know, I like going over to Sheila’s because of all these boys, but whatever. You also don’t mind somebody else’s dysfunctional family, do you? Because it’s like a break from your own.

So I loved going over to Sheila’s house, and Sheila they’re both Catholics, they were dear friends, my mom and Sheila. And Sheila, like, it was unbelievable, the suffering she had. Her husband was such a creep. He’s like this classic creep, you know? This ugly looking bloke who was alcoholic, completely arrogant, would regularly beat up his kids and beat up Sheila, raped Sheila regularly.

But the fact is she had incredible devotion in God. She had a wonderful sense of humor. It was like water off a duck’s back for her, definitely. Was this skinny woman who just ate bread and butter and smoked eighty fags a day, know. She was unbelievable.

We had this wonderful sense of humor, so kind. Some people have this type of kindness in their bones. You understand how they talk and everything? Well, she was like that. So I loved going over to see Sheila.

It was a great break for my family, you know. And I and but but it was, like, hilarious to me how she had all this suffering. She always talk about, like, in a joking way. But it was clearly incredible suffering, but she had this because she had faith in God. She didn’t call it karma.

She didn’t kind of bear it. She made a conscious decision that her job was to be Reg’s husband, the father of his children, the mother of his children, and because God was in everyone, including Reg. So she it was her practice to love Reg, she loved Reg, and I mean that. It was most fascinating. So it really shows, you know, who all whatever story you have, to do it some people have due to karma, you have a certain personality.

That’s just how it is, you know. Whether you label it Buddhist, label it Christian, label it nothing. You’re fortunate if you’ve got that, you know. Isn’t it? She is always a great example of, you know, what you how your attitude is what counts.

So this is the the essential Buddhist idea. How you see something is how you experience it. How you see it is how you experience it. It’s very interesting. So okay.

karma. Any questions about karma? What do you mean they don’t see the karma ripen? Sorry? You have to see if if you kill someone Yes.

You have to see the result of the death of the animal. Uh-huh. They say that no. It’s true. They say one of the one of the conditions of of a complete karma in that way is that the people die before you.

You. Yeah. So maybe many of them wouldn’t have died before them is true. Yes. Well, many of them probably would in front of them, though.

I understand. I understand. But what’s most interesting about this, I didn’t see the email, but Rinpoche regularly emails come from the FPMG office about different things Rinpoche is saying. Right? And one of lately, he apparently showed incredible interest in this whole thing, watching the television, which he really does.

And long teachings on it and very, very interesting because it’s most fascinating. One of the things he said, and he really talks about karmic results for anybody personally. He said according to his view, the karma of these guys who who are the airplane pilots would would be that they’d get human rebirth. Now this is interesting because they say, say, what’s on the mind at the time of your death is the karmic cause of the time of life you’ve got. If you when I’ve I’ve read a lot about these guys who do this.

In the New Yorker, they had this long story recently. It’s most fascinating that they’re incredibly religious, genuinely religious, genuinely devoted to Allah, you know, with enormous devotion, enormous faith, trying to practicing, I mean, the ones who are really pure. Then they truly have this view, which of course Buddha would say is wrong view, but they’re totally faithful in it, that this is the truth, that this is a good thing to do, and that the second their first drop of blood goes, they’ll go straight to paradise. Allah will forgive all their sins. So they have great faith and they’ve trained in this.

I mean, they talk I’ve I’ve read about the training. It’s most fascinating. They be almost they become totally disciplined in this and completely focused on it. And so at that time of death, they weren’t thinking with violence at all. They weren’t thinking about harming people at all.

They were thinking about God, you know? This for this reason, they got a a they will get, as put it, they will have hundreds of human lives due to the virtue that was he didn’t say this. I’m commenting now. Obviously, there must have been virtue in their mind at the time they died, but they he said, they will die like that in every one of those human lives. They’ll get the experience similar to the cause.

So what’s so interesting is this is why it’s so hard for our so then there there you can see, because there wasn’t a complete action and because they had huge positive motivation. Huge positive motivation. Do you see? So interesting. Whereas another person normally speaking when you got violence in your mind, to the hell realms or the animal realms or the spirit realms because that energy is that, you know?

So it’s most interesting. So and then he said it’s interesting. He said then after hundreds of lives of being a human and experiencing the experience result as a result, which is being killed in that way, they will then have a short period in the hell realms. And then that’ll a short period is here. It’s most interesting.

To sort of complete the karma somehow. Let’s remember what he said. So he’s got the vision to see it, so I trust. But it’s most interesting that he should say it because they really do. So back to my fisherman.

Let’s try to complete the fisherman story with all the big the story now from this friend Salmon. What happened was, there he was with this powerful karmic tendency to kill, went like a magnet towards it. And what’s most fascinating about this as well is this, and this is where everything’s interdependent, and this is the September eleven event or any event at all, that all those fish that he killed had the karma to be killed by him, and their karma drove sort of magnetized them to him. So it’s a completely collective experience. I tried to go fishing once to impress a boyfriend.

He got fished, not one came to me. I even had the intention, but not one fish came. I didn’t have the karma to kill, you know. So he had the karma to kill, and he had beings who had the karma to be killed. This is what caused it all to this is what’s so into defense.

All those people in September eleven, every one of them completely in this world, in this life, innocent victims. Due to a thousand lives ago, the karma, who knows when it was, was these people in the plane. There they got annihilated. You know? They were there.

They were there to be killed. They had the karma. Because the fact is if you don’t have the karma to be killed, they could’ve gone and blown planes up all over the world. But if there was no karma to be killed by them, they they wouldn’t kill anybody except themselves. Some of those Palestinian bombers you look, you read the stories about those Palestinians going crazy now.

All these little all these martyrs coming up one after another. Some of them drop you know, they the BAM doesn’t go off. In the New Yorker, this guy is a is a is some a Palestinian or an Arab, I can’t remember who did a lot of interviews with hundreds of people involved with the martyr thing. It’s most fascinating. And he said he talked to many of who who who were the bombers, but they they pulled the thing and it didn’t go off.

No matter how hard they tried, they couldn’t do the BAM, so all the conditions weren’t in place. The people didn’t have the karma to die. Some of them, they do the BAM, no one else dies except them. The people didn’t have the karma to die. It’s completely interdependent, you know.

It’s most fascinating.