y Robina Courtin — 2016-07-21

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

About this talk. In this nearly two-hour session, Ven Robina Courtin presents karma as natural law—observed by Buddha through his own mind, not decreed by God or genetics. Consciousness is beginningless; every action sows seeds ripening in four ways: type of rebirth, personality tendencies, social experiences, and environment. Through concrete examples (killing with aversion, generosity with hidden motive, euthanasia), she shows how motivation—not just the act—determines karma. She outlines purification: regret, reliance, remedy, resolve; explains how vows amplify virtuous karma; and directly addresses objections about children’s suffering, environmental collapse, and how trapped animals escape saṃsāra. Central message: we create our reality through past actions, not victimhood. Direct, rigorous, unapologetically practical—for those new to karma or ready to exchange guilt-based morality for self-authorship.

File metadata (for organising)

File: 02 E 2016 07 21.mp3

UUID: 253ad8fb-0f71-4bd6-aba1-88cf1332954e

Teacher: Ven Robina Courtin

Collection: y Robina Courtin (Ven Robina Courtin)

Date: 2016-07-21

Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide

Duration: 115.2 minutes

Words: ~20,016

Okay everyone, please sit down. Sit sit sit relax. Okay. So I think we’re going to talk about karma tonight. Is that right?

Is that the plan? You can all hear me? Yes. You can. This is on?

I think I still need it for recording. This one? Perhaps. Okay. There’s a clip tonight.

There’s a new clip tonight. I know, and I’m supposed to leave it alone. So we’re gonna talk about karma, this business, Dalai Lama, not Dalai Lama, Buddha, Buddha’s teaching, Buddha’s views about how the world works, right? Buddha’s views about how come this, how come that, why happiness, why suffering, why me, all this stuff. Buddha’s deal.

How things exist. And we’re going to listen to see if there’s some tools we can take from it, to listen to it with an objective mind. Then crucially, the tool means how to apply it. This information should be practical. There’s no benefit just having a head full of knowledge, unless it doesn’t touch your life.

It’s like having a head full of recipes but never bothering to make a cake, a complete waste of time. So this information should be put into practice. You might like to put into practice, that’s your call. You don’t need to Buddha’s not the boss here, you are. That’s the way to think about it, that’s the way to listen to it, as advice.

And then we’ll discuss this, the application, the implication of karma, because it’s real tasty. So we sing our little prayer that reminds us, for those of us who Buddhists already, reminds us of our reliance on the Buddha, and the second two lines are expressing our kind of altruistic motivation or reason or purpose for listening, to take some tools, to develop our qualities, to be of benefit to others. Well, are certain kind of fundamental points that are utterly necessary to know about in order to understand Buddha’s teachings, you know? I mean, a lot of Buddha’s teachings in the world, a lot of thinking about what Buddhism is, is really most most people think it’s all about kind of being mindful and calming slowing your mind down, calming your mind, and that kind of thing. This is like a miniature, miniature, miniature tip of the iceberg of what Buddha’s all about, you know?

Miniature, but it’s such a cliche view, even among most Buddhists, you know? It’s really just miniature. The big picture is so important to get. So the point point of all this stuff is that Buddha, this person who came two and a half thousand years ago out of this amazing Indian tradition, coming out of this Hindu tradition, on the basis of using this extraordinary technique called single pointed concentration that enables a person to go to these subtle levels of their own mind, where these Indians kind of basically unpack and unravel and then map the mind, and this is on the basis of which Buddhist view of the mind is existing. And so Buddha, from his own experience, you know, he’s not a creator, this information is not revelation, it’s not coming from a vision, you know?

It’s a really important point by the way, have to kind of think it through. But if you read a cookbook, you know it’s either a person’s own direct experience, it has to be reasonable it? Actually they’ve made these cakes, they’ve made these dinners and they’ve put the recipes in, so it’s from their direct experience. One is the usual one. Two, it might be their mother’s recipe, so they’re being humble and saying thanks mum and I’m passing on mum’s recipes.

Or they’ve made it up or they’ve stolen it. You think about it, there’s only four options. It’s their own experience, their mother’s or their teacher’s experience, they’ve made it up or speculate, which is what we think spiritual information is, it’s so shocking. I’m allowed to think what I like, we say. Well, they’ve stolen it, you know?

There’s only four options. Well, the same with Buddhism. What’s this information? Where’s it come from? Well, it’s come from Buddha.

Now I it’s not coming from me, promise. I’m quoting my teachers here. I’m quoting my mom. I’m telling you my mom’s recipes. They’re the ones I’m trying to work with myself.

But it’s coming from the Buddha. He’s not a creator. And where did it come from the Buddha? How did he think of it? How did he come up with all this stuff?

I mean, there’s lot of stuff. They studied for thirty years in the monasteries, you know, there’s a lot of stuff there. So where did it come from? His own mind. Guess where?

You know? Not from there, from his mind, from his own observation. And this is something that’s quite shocking if we say it so bluntly because we’re not used to thinking like this when it’s spiritual. Like if I’m Einstein, you know very well it’s not revelation, you know I didn’t have a vision about it, you know I’m not making it up, And you know I’m not asking you to believe it. You know it’s coming from my direct own experiential observation.

That’s what we mean by science. Well, that’s what Buddha means. Same deal. It’s a bit shocking to us, but that’s what it is. It’s from Buddha’s observation, Buddha’s own direct experiential observation in his own mind, with his own mind.

So everything that is Buddhism, karma, the mind, reincarnation, all this stuff, emptiness, it’s coming from the mind of a Buddha, that’s it, his experience. So that’s why it’s meaningless to say you should believe it, it’s ridiculous. Believing it won’t help you. I mean, it’s better than nothing, it will help you, but it’s not the point, it’s like believing in mathematics. Oh, believe in mathematics, what good is that?

I mean how does it help you? It doesn’t, because then you go to the market to buy two oranges and you don’t know what two means. Oh I believe in mathematics, I’m very happy for you, but it doesn’t help you much. You’ve to apply it, you’ve to experience it for yourself, you know, and that’s the point. So the first step is to listen.

So Buddha’s deal is this person who has found from his own direct experience, own direct observation that consciousnesses trillions of minds, consciousnesses. These words are synonymous, virtually. Sentient beings in Tibetan, the term sem chen, mind possessors, there are trillions of mind possessors, consciousnesses. You know. There’s not an atom of space you won’t find, minds actually.

And he happens to divide them from his own observation into all different realms of existence. There are animals and humans and many other kinds as well. And his basic point is this, the consciousnesses of these beings are these like riddles of mental moments that are beginningless and endless. This is the Mahāyāna view. Very simple concept, beginningless and endless.

That’s why he doesn’t posit a creator. We don’t need creating, he says, we already existed. It’s unnecessary embellishment, you know, we don’t need creating. First point, our consciousnesses are beginningless and endless, which sounds insane, but there’s some logic to it, you know? The logic is that he says everything in the universe runs according to the law of cause and effect.

Well, we all know that, that’s called science. You do this and this, you put this together and you get that. You put a bit of earth, a bit of water, bit of soil, a pear seed and you get a pear tree. It’s called cause and effect. Well he says, this consciousness, one of our big questions is where do I come from?

Who am I? Where do come from? Well, are basically two options on this earth. One is a superior being created you, and the other is your mommy and daddy created you. Well, for Buddha there’s a third option.

He disagrees with those, both of them. Your mother and father gave you a body, how kind they are, but they surely did not give you a mind. That’s very clear of a Buddha. They didn’t give you your anger, your love, your kindness, you know, your psychosis, you’ve been good at football, good at music, they didn’t have nothing to do with your parents. Well, of course there’s a lot to do, but it is yours, and they exist in your mind.

And where does your mind come from? Not a superior being, not your mommy and daddy, from previous moments of itself. Think of it like a river of mental moments. From the moment before conception, your mind was existing. And a few weeks before that was in another body, a few lives before that past bodies.

The concepts are complicated, just got to get a head around it, that’s all. This is fundamental in Buddhism. The whole of Buddhism collapses into a heap of utter nonsense if this isn’t so. So we have to take it as a hypothesis, you know? So your mind is a beginningless continuity of mental moments, first point, and it’s endless.

Second point, every millisecond of what your mind does, any mind does, the mind of a dog, an ant, a monkey, whatever, every millisecond of what arises in your mind, what arises in your life, in your experiences at the hands of others, is necessarily the fruit of your past actions. The word karma means action. Every millisecond of what we think and do and say leaves imprints or programs, is a really good term, programs our own consciousness, programs our mind, leaves seeds in our mind. Every millisecond of what we think and do and say necessarily leaves seeds in our mind, programs our mind, and these seeds necessarily ripen in the future, in this mind, as our experiences. So our experiences are the fruit of our past actions, and what we do now is the source of our future experiences.

It’s again not a complicated concept, it’s just absolutely not how we think, that’s all. This is fundamental for the Buddha, this is absolutely basic. So then the key Okay, the second point is this: he says every millisecond of our happiness, our good experiences, our happiness is the fruit of our past virtuous actions. Every millisecond of our suffering experiences is the fruit of our non virtuous actions. Again, a really simple concept.

So third, given that hey, I don’t like suffering, listen to what it is, we ought to know that, I don’t want suffering, I do want happiness, thank you very much. So then clearly if you choose to live according to Buddha’s view, which you’ve done if you think about it and you take it on board as your hypothesis, then obviously you better learn to know what seeds you should plant because you know you want those fruits and what seeds you shouldn’t plant and indeed should pull out because you don’t want those fruits. It’s like being a gardener. It’s a great analogy. Your life is your garden and whatever’s in it, you planted it baby.

Your life is your garden. That means Okay, so karma actions these seeds ripen in four ways. And if you think of these four, it’s your entire universe for each being. The first one is the type of rebirth you get in the first place, the type of body, so we’re human. This is a big shock.

We believe utterly that Mummy and deity made me or God made me. That’s it, no option, there’s no other options really. Buddha says no, you made you baby, you made you, you’re the boss, you’re the creator, you did it. Kind of a surprise. That my getting a human body is the fruit of my past incredible virtuous karma.

So to know these things we’ve got to understand what virtue means, which we’ll do, we’ll describe it clearly. What is a virtuous action? What is a non virtuous action? What is a negative action? What is a positive action?

This is crucial. Like what is a seed that will bring the fruit that you want? And what is a seed that will bring the fruit you don’t want? So then we have to learn to be a good gardener, to learn Buddhist botany basically. So the first way, the main way our past karma ripens in the present is the type of rebirth we get.

The second way our karma ripens in this life is all our tendencies, our personality traits, our characteristics, our tendencies, our neurosis, our tendency to be kind or truthful or lying or to kill or to steal or to play football or to be good at music, whatever it might be. We make this big distinction in our world, I think, between intellectual and creative and it’s kind of emotional stuff, you know? No, there’s a bunch of tendencies for the Buddha. That’s it. And how come it’s a tendency?

Because you’ve done it before. It’s not complicated. The third way your karma ripens is the way you’re seen and treated by others, really. If you think about it, we’re really social beings, aren’t we? So from the second we’re born, we’ve got mummies and daddies and siblings and aunties and uncles and neighbors and next door neighbors and mean people and ugly ones and rats and cockroaches and, you know, the bugs in the house, all this stuff.

We’ve got lots of sentient beings that we interact with and we can say really broadly some of them are nice to us and some aren’t. The third category which is ninety nine percent of all other beings and they’re called strangers they do neither. Let’s forget them for now. If you think about your life, you’ve got people and sentient beings in your life who disturb you, and you have people and sentient beings in your life who are kind to you, and indeed sometimes they keep changing roles, that we know. So this is really intense, this is called experience, similar to the cause.

The cause being your past action, like that to them. karma’s pretty personal. For Buddha, the law of karma, this is a law, it’s a natural law. There’s a big deal here. We think if we’re Catholic I was a Catholic that it’s God’s law.

This is massive. God’s law. There’s no concept like that. This is not Buddha’s law. He did not make anything up.

He was observed. For him this is a natural law. No one runs it. There’s nobody running the show. There’s no punisher.

There’s no rewarder. There’s no boss. Don’t need one. We’re doing nicely on our our own, creating our own misery. Buddha’s observed this, it’s a natural law.

This is a shocking concept because we think it’s religion, it’s coming from up there. It’s a natural law like botany or gravity. So the first way karma ripens, they call it the fully ripened result. We’ll go into this. The type of, in our case human.

The second one is called actions similar to the cause action meaning karma but keep it simple it’s our tendencies, our personality traits. Third is our experiences. Fourth is the environment, the very way the physical world impacts upon us. So the Buddha is saying the main cause of the way the physical world impacts upon you pleasant, unpleasant, ugly, beautiful, you know, pleasing, not pleasing, harms you, helps you, abusive, loud, horrible, stinky, peaceful, sweet, whatever you call it, the physical world for you, not just the elements, but you know, the environment you live in, the suburb you live in, the country you live in, the way it impacts upon you. Main cause of this?

Your past actions. The main cause of all your experiences at the hands of others? Your past actions. The main cause of your own tendencies? Your past actions.

The main cause of you being a human being in the first place? Your past actions. So Dalai Lama calls it self creation. Not a joke, it’s probably the simplest way to put it. So of course it’s shocking to us because nothing like this exists.

I mean we know certain things we cause, like if I eat bad food I know it’s going to cause my bellyache. So we do have the idea, we do have that concept, clearly. We know if I practice hard at playing the piano, we don’t say it this way but it’s true, I created the musician. It’s me. I mean I had to have a good piano, I thanked Mr.

Bach, I thanked my good teacher, but I’m I the one who did it. And that’s how Buddha say it. The world is full of conditions for us, but we’re the boss. We’re the boss, you know? But we can see how different we don’t think this.

Why are you good at piano, Rubina? Well, I’ve practiced really hard for many years. Why are you good at anger, Rubina? Oh, that’s not my fault, you know? It’s mummy’s fault, deity’s fault, and you know, this fault, and that fault, and my genes, and my DNA, and God knows what.

Everything but me. So this is this is the minefield for us when it comes to this emotional stuff. It’s a minefield, know? So much neurosis about it. So good at music and good at killing, same reason you must have done it before baby and you’ve practiced really hard at it.

Practice makes perfect. So the concept is not complicated. It’s just going open your mind to the possibility that your mind maybe isn’t your brain. You’d still be a neuroscientist, it doesn’t contradict what I’m saying. These wonderful talks between the Dalai Lama and all his mob and the best brains in the West about these types of things now, they’re wonderful, bringing these seemingly opposite views together, finding some kind of coherence, it’s great.

But the Buddha’s clear point. Your brain is not your mind. I read a book recently called The Undead, not about zombies. This is an American journalist, I mention it when we do the death and dying stuff. This American journalist who’s done amazing work in America mostly looking at all the contradictions now that are coming up as a result of farming organs or whatever the polite word for it is, you know?

Taking dead people’s hearts and things, nothing wrong. Lots of confusions about what is life and what is death and when it begins and when it doesn’t begin, all this kind of thing, which is great because they’re bringing up the topic. As one doctor said, I can say now with certainty that consciousness is not a function of the brain. I haven’t got a clue what it is, I can say that much. So that’s great, know.

And this is the kind of conversation that Dalai Lama is having with these people. But this is Buddha’s point, clear as crystal. We’ve got a brain, no problem. Cosmos plays a role, obviously, but it aids your mind. So simple for the Buddha.

And until we get our head around this even intellectually, Buddhism won’t make much sense to us, you know. So that means very obviously. So then we have to ask, well where, so if I have anger and have been good at music and good at killing where does it come from? So the first place we look in the West is to mommy and daddy. Where else can we look?

Because that’s our system, that’s your source, that’s your history. We go back to them you know. That’s how we look for the causes of why I’m happy and why I’m suffering. We try to look for needles in haystacks back there somewhere for the cause, you know. What is the cause of your mind?

Your past actions. So okay, first of all, as I said before, one of the ways that karma ripens is a type of rebirth we get, and that’s what they call a fully ripened action. So let’s just look at what that means. And then look at the other ways that karma ripens: the tendency to keep doing something, having the thing happen to you and the environmental result. Okay, so very first entry level into Buddhism, before you begin to even commit or anything, the first entry level if you wish to take on board some of his advice, the advice would be his little list of ten don’ts.

Three of the body, four of the speech, and they’re just the beginnings of working on our mind. But the main point at the very beginning is body and speech. You don’t really start to work on your mind until you get more advanced. High school, this is junior school. So he exhorts us to stop, don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t jump on the wrong partner.

Three things using your body, very rough, very broad. Four of your speech. Don’t bad mouth people behind their backs, one of our worst ones. Don’t rabbit on about nothing, which is what we do, we don’t care whether they want to listen or not, we don’t care, just blah, you know. Don’t say things that aren’t true and don’t use harsh language.

Don’t use harsh speech. There’s four little ones in the speech. There’s seven little actions that he would exhort us not to do. Now there’s a really crucial point to get. The first thing you should say is why not?

Don’t accept what someone tells you, you should ask why? What’s your reasoning here? Well if I was a Catholic, and I was, the reason is crucial is because God said. My Jesuit priest friend, I asked him, I always quote this, by definition a sin, a negative action, Buddha would call it, is one that God said you shouldn’t do. So that’s completely reasonable if you have faith in a creator, because God’s the boss.

God made you, God made the laws, so obviously God is the punisher and the rewarder. He’s the boss. You know, he’s the boss. So therefore, must doing what God said is what defines an action as good. Doing what God said not to do is what defines an action as bad.

He said there’s some natural law involved, but that’s the crucial piece. So that completely makes sense. And I think we don’t analyze it enough. Now if you look at our ordinary world, in my mother’s household and mommy says don’t do that and we know we’ll say why not and we know her answer because I say so. So is that not our view of morality?

I shouldn’t do that because someone said so. I shouldn’t be a bad girl because I’ll get punished. I’d better be a good girl because I’ll get rewarded. This is very deep in our bones. This philosophical position.

It’s a philosophical position that morality is something imposed upon us from up there. God, mummy, deity, the police, the next door neighbor, they, some vague they out there. This is a massive point, this is deep in our bones. Buddha disagrees. So then why would he suggest we don’t kill?

What’s his reason? What’s his reason, if it’s not because he says so? Well he said it’s a natural law. Do a bit of market research in this room, you’ll find pretty quickly no one likes getting killed, one likes getting jumped on by the wrong person, no one likes getting stolen from, no one likes being abused, it’s pretty obvious, it’s hardly a no brainer. Well he says guess what, it’s a natural law that people don’t like being harmed.

Look at the dog and the ant, you can deduce the same thing, it’s hardly rocket science. That’s the basis for the Buddha’s saying that’s a negative action, one that harms another. And it’s saying, obviously, conversely a good action, pretty obvious. It’s not moralistic, it’s not because he says so but this is so deep in our bones. It’s so deep in us you know, this sense that it’s something someone says I should do which is why we have so much guilt and neurosis which is why we want to be seen to be a good girl or we want to hide.

You know like when mommy says don’t do that but then she doesn’t see me do it, we go oh I got away with it. This is how we feel. Buddha says this is infantile. It’s like thinking when your doctor says don’t smoke and you go home and you discover your doctor’s not there, so out come your Marlboroughs and you start smoking. Oh I won’t get cancer, she doesn’t see me smoke.

I mean that’s you’d be laughed out of the room. Because it’s a natural law that smoking will harm you and that’s Buddha’s point. First, an action that’s called negative, the very first level, the broadest one is one that harms another, but the reason he asks us not to do it, the reason he would advise like a wise doctor, this is to a massive point, and this is what takes time, the reason in the beginning he exhorts us not to do it is not out of compassion. That’s advanced. He says guess what, Rabina, If you kill and you lie and you steal, it’ll harm you, honey.

And this is hard to see. This is very hard to see. So I’ve got to think it through and really think about it and make a decision that you want to use this as your basis of morality. The reason is because I don’t want suffering enough for us not to do them. Look at how it’s distressing.

If you spend your life, you know, killing, what do you think killing comes from? Not out of compassion, Not growing compassion in your heart, not growing love in your heart, you’re not growing kindness, you’re growing aversion. How dare those ants be in my house? You know most people say you can kill creatures, even most religions say you can kill. But not for the Buddha.

So even see what you’re doing to your own mind. And that means we’ve got to learn to look at the deeper one, which is what is informing our wish to kill, lies, deal. And this gets to the point now. So okay, in order for any action we do let’s use a simple a good or bad, no difference Let’s a virtuous action of intentionally not killing that mouse in your kitchen. So in order for that to become a complete virtuous karmic action that then leaves a seed, I like to use the analogy of we’ve got these bank vaults, we’ve got four main bank vaults for the four ways that karma ripens.

Because every millisecond what we do goes into these bank vaults and they ripen down, you know, can collect them down later. They ripen later, these seeds. So let’s just say there’s one action of non killing, it’s a virtuous action of non killing. So there’s got to be four things in place when you do that action for it to be a complete action, which is an action that will leave a seed in your complete bank vault which later down the road will ripen as many happy types of rebirth, like a human one, because one seed brings many fruits. So the four things that have to be in place are first of all the object, and in this case a living sentient being.

So first number one point, the object, the mouse. The second one is massive. This is the role that your mind plays. This is the involvement of your mind in this action. This is massive and you’ll see my point.

And there’s three parts. 2A is called recognition or discrimination, one of these states of mind that’s there every millisecond that’s constantly working that’s enabling us to distinguish between this and that. Every millisecond. So it’s crucial this piece is there, this 2A, the first part in your mind, there’s this ability to see clearly that is the mouse. That is the mouse.

2B) and this is the very meaning of karma intention, not like good intention, but the bare bones thought. I will save that mouse. Or equally, I will kill that mouse, whatever the intention is. This is the real meaning of karma actually. karma really is action but it’s referring first first first to mental action, which is intention, volition, will, I will.

The main cause of me walking out that door is not my legs. It is the thought: I will walk out that door. It’s so obvious but we don’t join the dots, you know? Because the trouble is most of our intentions are on autopilot because we practice them to perfection we don’t even notice we have these thoughts. We’re just completely programmed, you know?

So there’s got to be this part, the second one: 2B intention. I will save that mouse. Now that’s the main one, but there’s another one there that’s even the most important once the intention is there, and that is call it simply your motivation, or as we’d say, your reason. Why are you saying the mouse? Oh the poor thing, he doesn’t want to die.

You know, it’s called compassion. Not complicated, it’s called compassion. We all have this. That’s compassion, your motivation. So that’s the three parts of your mind: you recognize it’s the mouse, you have the intention I will save the mouse and the reason that kind of informs your intention.

It informs your intention. So if we’re killing the same thing: object the mouse, a living mouse. 2A is recognition: that is the mouse. 2B intention: I will kill that mouse. 2C: Reason, Rubina, why are killing that mouse?

Well, disgusting. How dare a mouse be in my kitchen? Yuck. That’s called aversion. It’s very obvious.

Often the intention and motivation are so packed together we don’t notice. We don’t even notice. You know as I’m chatting away to you being very friendly and I feel a tickle and I go like that. That’s a complete action of killing. I’ll do the last two now.

The next one, number three is you do the action. You pick up the mouse. And number four, the result a living mouse and you release it. Thank you Rubino, bye little happy mouse, you know. That’s a complete action of non killing and obviously the same for killing.

The complete action of killing. You do the action and then the fourth dead mouse and you rejoice, delighted, and actually it should die before you to be a complete complete action. But the crucial piece is the second one, the mind. Gabe might have a mouse in her kitchen, object number one, there it is. Recognition no, she doesn’t see it.

No, she doesn’t see it. So two: is missing completely. Her foot stands on the mouse. Dead mouse. She didn’t create karma, how could she?

karma’s done on the mind. karma’s not created by a foot. The foot does the job of the mind, but in her case the mind wasn’t involved, so there’s no karma. How can there be? Impossible.

The same with another generous action, a good action like generosity, gave a homeless person. One, the object, homeless person. Two, my mind involved. Well I might even actually go, Recognition, homeless person, I’m not going give any money to that homeless person, I might even have an intention to not give money, and I walk past, but my fifty dollars falls out of my pocket. Three, money comes out of the pocket.

Four, homeless person gets fifty bucks, she’s happy. Zero karma for me. In fact negative karma because I decided I wouldn’t give. So your mind’s got be involved, the mind is what runs the show, the mind is the creator, the mind is everything, the mind is behind everything, but our trouble is we come into this life completely programmed with much of what we do we call that instinct. That’s because we’ve done this stuff so often it’s second nature so we don’t notice you know.

And then because in our lives we’re so addicted to the physical world and paying no attention to the mental world we don’t even know why we do things most of the time. We’re as thick as post, you know. Concentrated by the mind and it’s carried out by its servants, body and speech. So you can have another action, let’s say saving the mouse. Let’s look at this one: one) the object that’s there, tick.

Two) involvement of my mind, recognition that is the mouse I will pick up and say. To be, intention, I will save that mouse. Three, motivation, attachment, I want to eat it for dinner later and want to keep it fresh. Three, I save the mouse looking so so kind. Four, it stays there.

But look at my reason, look at my motive, I’m evil. I want to torture it later than eat its legs for lunch you know. But the same, Gabe has a mouse and she’s suffering, and she’s got compassion for it. Recognition. To be recognition, there it is.

Object first. To be recognition. To A recognition. To B intention. I must kill the mouse.

Poor mouse is suffering, I must end it suffering. Which is common in the world, we call it euthanasia. And the reason usually isn’t because you hate your grandma, it’s because you love your grandma. And the mouse you’ve got compassion because it’s suffering, this is so common. Three, she kills the mouse.

Four, dead mouse. No negative, can’t be much negative karma there. There can’t be, she meant well. But meaning well is not enough as Lama Zopa points out. You’ve got to have wisdom.

So there’s two things involved here, this is really huge. Two things involved: there’s the karma we create with all these different components, But then there’s the karma of the mouse. They’re two separate things. So we ought to ask the question once you kill the mouse, once you killed your grandma, you ought to say well I wonder if I did benefit the mouse which is your reason? Well how the hell do you know unless you’re clairvoyant?

You don’t, because we’re so addicted in the West to believing in, and I mean that purposely believing in that the mouse will die and its suffering will stop because mouse is finished when it’s dead. Because that’s based upon the materialist view that you know death is the end, isn’t it? That’s assumption and we believe that very strongly. Buddha would suggest otherwise. That the mouse’s mind will continue once you’ve killed it.

So unless you’ve got the wisdom to know the mouse’s mind, to know the karma the mouse has as you kill it, that you’re so confident it’ll get a really nice human rebirth next live and meet the Dalai Lama, then back off please and stop invading, stop playing Russian roulette with a mouse, or your grandmother for that matter. It’s common sense, it’s not kind of like, oh you shouldn’t kill. It’s logical. Like any action, if I’ve got a headache and Gabe has real compassion for me and she’s got a pill, but she just can’t remember if it was the cyanide or the aspirin. Would rather keep my headache please.

So fairly obvious, we all know in our daily life if you know, if there’s a likelihood of a dire result of a particular action, we would not play games with it. So here we’re discussing the life of a being, a sentient being, that’s future life, that’s Buddha’s deal. Of course I’m asking you to believe it. So for this logical reason, using this view, you do everything in your power you can to help the mouse, you know, to help the mouse so that it dies as much as you can. We’ll discuss all that when we discuss the death business next week or whenever it is.

But the karma that Gabe creates isn’t so bad because she really did mean well, because the motivation intention is the crucial one. That’s the meaning of the word karma. karma is intention. And that’s there all the time but we just don’t notice because it’s so instinctive. But then the crucial piece this is the piece, this is the point that the motivation is the component that determines the character of the action we do, that is to say whether it is a negative or positive one for us, that is to say it determines the seed we plant in our mind which will determine the future results.

Our motivation. The reason we do it. When intention is there, then the reason behind it is the key factor. So this is obvious then, if this is true, if this is the nuts and bolts of how karma works, then obviously if we’re trying to abide by the laws of karma, we’d better learn to know about this stuff, otherwise we’re just kind of crossing our fingers, it’s ridiculous. Know?

So then the main way the karma ripens is like that, and that brings types of rebirth. But the other way the karma ripens is sort of like the residual results left over from these imprints and from the habit of doing these things. And that’s the tendency to keep doing it, the experience of it having it happen to you and the environmental results. So we give a simple example of say the action of killing. So all of us as humans necessarily a non killing, especially a very strong intentional non killing karmic seed, is likely to have been triggered at the time of death, before we even stop breathing, from our bank vault of complete seeds, virtuous seeds.

But not just being good and being nice. Lama Zopa says that it’s likely that the whole life we’ve got now, with all the good conditions we’ve got, is the result not just of being good being good is not enough he said, but of practicing virtue in the context of a spiritual path, and even more precisely practicing virtue in the context of keeping vows of morality. This is a massive point, you know. So we can deduce that a virtuous karmic seed of non killing was triggered before we stopped breathing in the path life, whether we were a kangaroo or a dog or an ant or a human. Already before we even stopped breathing that was triggered and that already programmed us to go to our mummy’s womb, human womb, weeks later.

Already decided. That’s why your mother and father did not make you. They’re lying there having fun and you come and stick your nose in there. Literally, it’s already determined weeks before that maybe you haven’t even met each other yet. But already your karma has been triggered to go to that mummy and daddy.

The same time instantaneously these other triggered time exceeds are triggered which will provide you with your personality traits whether you’re Mother Teresa or Hitler. Your own tendencies. Good at music, good at football, good at this, good at that. Simultaneously the third set of Cs that will be triggered will provide you with your experiences which starts with even the kind of parents you get and the siblings and how people treat you, if people love you or hate you or you’re stolen from or given to if you’re very poor or all these things. All these karmic seeds are triggered before you even stop breathing in the past life.

The fourth one: your environmental. So we think of one action called killing and how will ripen as those three in this life. This life is the fruit of virtue, of non killing, okay. So in this life we can see can’t we lots of humans have a tendency to kill. It arises naturally.

Even most of our religions tell us it’s okay. So most of us have a tendency to kill the ant, the cockroach, the rat some people kill humans, know, we can see this fish, all this thing. We can see. It’s completely common in our culture, in the world, in saṃsāra. So this is the residual result left over from having killing karma being in the lower realms in the past, because when killing ripens, and the killing okay, if killing were to ripen at our past life, if our killing tendency from our complete vault had been triggered, then our consciousness would have been programmed to go to the lion’s womb, the dog’s womb, and other realms of intense suffering, the Buddha would say.

So having been in the past these lives, having had suffering rebirths Buddha would say we’ve all had countless rebirths. Let’s say the result of killing. That killing karma has been exhausted, but we haven’t purified all aspects of it. So in this life, one of our virtuous seeds ripens from our first big bank vault, then our next bank vault of our tendencies, we’ve still got the residual result of killing left over. So we wake up in this life among our other tendencies, and we’re nice people, kind, loving, compassionate, but we have a tendency to kill.

No one teaches us. I’ll use the example of a little fisherman, a little boy, the son of a friend of mine, really lovely boy, from the second he met fishing, was like he fell in love with it. It was like he fell in love. So what’s happening is, the tendency to kill is this residual result of his past lower realms as a result of killing, because he didn’t purify all aspects of it. Crucially, he never made a strong decision to never kill again.

This This is a massive one. This is the purification process which we’ll talk about, which Lama Zopa says we’re insane not to do every day. So there’s this nice human being, good nice mummy, ticks all the boxes, really good karma, good environment, good tendencies, good experiences, he’s a nice person, people like him, blah blah blah, but he has a tendency to kill. He meets fishing at the age of five or whatever, runs like a magnet, it looks divine to him. Because he’s got the tendency to kill, the residual result of the main karma left over.

So he spent the rest of his life killing. So look at the human realm: most humans kill something, cultures assert our right to kill, isn’t it? So it shows us this common thing. And then because we don’t question it, we consider it right. So we never question.

But we can see some children another example I always use, a friend of mine in Queensland, Dae Chen, she was taking the lice out of her little boy’s head and he starts to cry with compassion for the lice. Mummy, mummy, don’t hurt them, it’s their home, leave them alone. You know, did everything he could to get her to stop hurting the lice in his own head. Now both mummies had not taught their children this. One has the tendency to kill and one has the tendency not only not to kill, and he’s like forty plus something and never killed a living being, so we can deduce logically he must have vowed never kill again he came with that imprint in this life.

He cleaned it up, you know. So this is the residual result of the main karma from the past. The tendency to keep doing it and that’s all the good stuff we do. If we just wake up in this life and we naturally don’t want to lie, don’t steal or kill or whatever, how incredible. We can deduce we’ve lived in vows of morality in the past, that’s why it’s natural to us.

Tendency, you know. We can deduce that Mozart must have had a strong familiarity with that kind of activity. I read recently some little seven year old American girl, she’d been writing orchestral pieces since she’s three. She conducts orchestras, she writes orchestral pieces, she plays the violin and piano, she’s seven now. I think she must have done it before, don’t you think?

I mean, where’s it come from otherwise, the sky? I don’t think so. Strong familiarity. I remember reading about one serial killer. Since a tiny child he was compelled, attracted to torturing the creatures, because he got pleasure from it.

He didn’t know why, his mother didn’t teach him that either. The tendency was there. So he spent his life doing weird things like, you know, stripping or cutting people open, eating their skulls and God knows what, whatever he did. Tendencies. Since we’re conceived, we come fully programmed in this life with tendencies from the past, zero to do with our mommy and daddy.

They might also have those tendencies, so they reinforce them, but if you don’t have the tendency, they can’t reinforce them. This is a really one to get a head around. You know, my mother was a musician, so everyone says, Rabin is good at music because of her mummy. No. The main reason, if she said I was good, I had a tendency to music, was because I had the tendency there, but she nurtured it, she was a teacher.

But if I was tone deaf, what good would her teaching do? Nothing. So the tendency has to be there. People say, Rubina’s angry because her daddy was angry. Not true.

Rubina’s angry because she’d been angry before, And her daddy was angry because he’d been angry before, then his anger just exacerbated my anger. We’re joining together, you know. Our tendencies are our own. This is a massive point, a massive point to get used to, to become familiar with and feel easy with, because then we start to take responsibility. Otherwise it’s always blatant, not my fault you know.

It’s a huge one. So the second way that killing would drive me in this life, have a look at the world, is called the experience, similar to the cause, which is you die young or you get killed. Look at the world. Look at fetuses for a start. We don’t do this research, I’m sure, but I bet if we did, we would find that more human beings who created the cause of the past life the karma was tricky to go to a human womb more human beings who get conceived in a human womb die before they’re born than those who are born.

That’s called abortions and miscarriages. I bet. I wouldn’t be surprised. So that person, their unbelievable virtuous karma ripened to get a human body. Amazing, like winning a lottery.

But another one of their karmas kicked in, which is another lot of karmic seeds of killing in the past, and that triggered that caused them to have a short life three months in the womb or cause them to be killed by their mummy. That’s called abortion. That’s called the experience similar to the cause of having passed killed. So babies die, one year olds die, three year olds die, seventeen year old basketball players for no medical reason drop dead. Life running short or being killed.

These are the experiences similar to the cause of killing. So conversely for every one of us in this room, the main reason we’re still alive, main reason isn’t because we’re healthy, isn’t because we’re fortunate, the main reason is our past killing, non killing karma, our past non killing petrol tank hasn’t run out yet. That’s the main reason. That’s the main That’s main reason. This is for the Buddha.

The main reason you have any tendencies because you’ve done them before. The main reason you’ve got a human body because you created it. So the fourth one, the killing result, the result of killing, is the environmental result. Look at the world. The very physical world that harms you.

The water’s polluted. The air’s stinky. The food’s revolting. You’ve got allergies to peanuts. Look at the stuff, look at humans, the impact impacted by the physical world, know.

We’ve ill health and weak and sick. That’s the environmental result of killing, look at the world. So look at the conversely, I was thinking of Warren Buffett, this mega richest American businessman, he’s like eighty six, eighty seven, he’s as fit as a fiddle, I read his vocal thing, and his daughter said I’ve never seen water pass his lips, diet since he can remember unfailingly cheeseburgers, some variety of Coca Cola, it’s a flavored variety, and vanilla ice cream. Now scientists should be shattered by that. That’s not logical if we are so convinced that health is a result of good food blah blah.

He probably does no exercise and she said I’ve never seen water pass his lips. He’s eighty six and fit and he’s old. Well, for Buddha that’s because he’s got strong experience similar to the cause of non killing, strong environmental karma of non killing. They’re the main reasons that food nourishes him, whatever it is, and he’s fit and healthy, and he’s old. This Buddha’s you.

And everything’s like that Buddha says, and this is how it is for all sentient beings. So karma’s a natural law, therefore nothing’s random. This is so shocking to us, because we don’t believe it’s random, you know. We believe it’s God’s law, which means it’s not my business to stick my nose in God’s head and ask him why why why, it’s God’s plan, back off and mind your own business. That’s the best way to be a Christian I’d say, or a Muslim.

It’s God’s plan, it’s not my business, you accept God’s plan. Or the scientists, they haven’t found the answers yet have they? So most of us just say no one knows, know, that’s how we think. This is Buddha’s answer. It’s natural law, it runs itself.

karma takes care, as Lama Yeshe says. So given that we’re the ones who do it, we better learn the law, do you not think? Because we’ve got stop not being in charge of the process, because no one does it to us, we do it to ourselves. So given that I want happiness, thank you, I don’t want suffering, no thank you, then I better start learning the laws of botany, laws of karma, pretty straightforward. It has nothing to do with compassion yet, that’s too high, it’s compassion for yourself.

I’m sick of suffering mate. I want some happiness please, nothing wrong. Go for it baby. Here’s the method. Here’s some instructions, pretty simple.

Back off, first level, back off and don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t jump on the wrong partner, don’t lie. Seven little baby things of body and speech, broad stroke simple little things. Then you nourish those seeds by living in vows even more powerfully, which we’ll talk about more, and you purify the seeds you’ve already planted to get ahead of the game so they don’t ripen because we’re lugging around countless lives of our bank vaults and rubbish seeds, know, and we don’t want them to ripen, so we’ve to purify them, put atomic bombs under them. This is junior school practice. Is there any questions?

Can I ask a question? Yep. You know with your example of that Warren, whoever he is, rich Warren Buffett, the rich guy. I don’t know, I hope this isn’t too silly, you know Never mind. That he’s lived a life of cheeseburgers, for example.

That’s his diet. Yeah. Well, by eating cheeseburgers, isn’t he contributing to the death of animals? Yeah, that’s not the discussion here. Of course you’re right, not wrong, that’s not the discussion here.

We’re not looking at that yet. We’re not looking at the karma he’s creating now, which will bring future results, we’re looking at the results of his past karma, that’s all we’re looking at right now. Of course, there’s no question about that, but that’s another discussion, we can look at it, of course. So what we are now is the fruit of what we’ve done. What’s in your garden now is the fruit of what you’ve done, what you do with it will bring your and so when you learn this law it implies that.

Isn’t it? You see my point? Clearly, of course, absolutely done. What else? I mean go into all that, so what else?

Don’t you have microphones for people? There we go, that’s lovely. Thank you so much. Yes my dear. Thank you, two short questions.

With regard to all the starving children in the world, can we then say that’s all their own fault because of previous comers? We turn the question around? What about all the happy children in the world, and all the children got lots of food, is it their own fault? Yep it is, of course it is. But our trouble is, you you’re the one who had to ask the questions so I’ve got to show you up, know?

Basically I say this and I want to say it, all these years I’ve been a Buddhist, is quite a few years now, I do lots of these things and we all ask the same questions because they’re all valid questions. But I have to tell you this, and it hasn’t ever changed yet, I’ve never ever ever ever ever had a person ask the question, Robina you mean to say all the happy kids who’ve got lovely families and beautiful things and good health and food and money and good you mean it’s their fault? Can you hear my point here? Can you hear the point? No one’s ever asked that yet because we always run to the bad side.

Yes you’re right though, yes. Fault is a heavy word. But if you look in your garden, it’s full of weeds, then it’s your garden right? So is it your fault? Yep, because you’ve been lazy, haven’t done the gardening.

So yes, yes, but still of course it’s hard for us because we’re so addicted to believing we didn’t ask to get born, it’s not our fault. That’s like an absolute belief in us, isn’t it? So it’s shocking if we hear that way. Yes. May I ask a second question please?

Go on. With regard to the planet Earth as a physical existence Bit louder darling, I can’t hear you. Yes, good. With regard to planet Earth as a physical existence, how important is it to the Buddhist mind? What’s what’s the question mean?

Well, if if the earth gets destroyed as we are just about to do that right now, I’m wondering right now. Yes. Exactly. So how important is it to to a Buddhist? Do you mean To worry about it as as in terms of, you know, is is it as a physical existence?

Do we really need that earth as from a Buddhist mind point of view as a station or progression? If the Buddhist view okay. The the fundamental the basis of person, the basis of a Buddhist approach would be to refrain from harming others. So that surely would end up being don’t harm the creatures, don’t harm the things, don’t cause imbalance, don’t be greedy, don’t be self centered, don’t be selfish, don’t eat up all the resources, do you understand? It’s just clear.

It’s like basic sense of morality and ethics, don’t harm others. And that means that implies everything from there, doesn’t it? Good ethics, reasonable respect. I the you know, I’m not saying Tibetans are also perfect, but they’ve all been Buddhist for twelve hundred years, probably ninety nine percent of them are Buddhist. I’m not saying they’re all perfect, I’m not saying that, but it was a pretty pervasive worldview, and this one of calmer and not harming creatures.

I remember Dalai Lama used to talk about how the creatures would be practically the wild creatures would be practically not wild because no one harmed them, you know, and there was never they never had such a thing as environmental, you know, destruction. I’m not saying they were perfect, they weren’t. But it was because they had this obvious and what would flow from good ethics, whether you’re a good ethical communist or Muslim or Buddhist, my sense is it might be the same, you know? It starts from there, doesn’t it? It’s obvious, this is the earth we live on, you know, so we’d respect it because it’s the home of others and it’s your home.

Makes sense, doesn’t it? Makes sense, don’t you think? Makes sense? Ask to me. Does it not make sense, is what I’m saying?

Yes, it does. I’m just wondering Go on. How important is the earth? Let let if if the earth didn’t exist anymore, it’s gonna be massively destroyed. Oh, mean from that perspective?

Yeah. Oh, don’t worry about that, honey. Worry about that. We’ll make more earths. No, darling.

Now I get your point. We will make more earths. This is a bit cosmic at this point, I haven’t gone into it yet. But the Buddha would say we’ve had countless lives, we’ve had countless universes. Earth is not the first one, it won’t be the last.

So don’t worry about it, we’ll find more. Don’t worry about it babe. Which doesn’t mean don’t care and blow it up, no. We’ll still keep living, we’ll still keep doing things until we clean it up and clean up our act and become Buddha so we don’t need to be reborn anymore. Do you understand?

Okay, thank you very much. Who else? Nothing? Yes. Microphone over here please.

If someone experiences I’m trying to think of a clear way to put it if someone harms another person, is that a direct experience of that person’s bad karma playing out and in that same action someone else is creating bad karma for their next life or is it two separate? Does that make sense? Well, normally we talked about the mouse, Yeah. Me killing the mouse, there’s two sentient beings involved isn’t it? There’s me harming the mouse, and then depending on what’s in my mind and what motivated me, that’s the karma I create.

Then clearly the mouse has to have had the karma to get killed by me. karma’s very personal. You know that baby when I was twenty three, I had abortion. That sentient being had the karma, amazing karma connection with me from some past life, God knows when, to run like a magnet to my human womb. Then we had the karma, I had the karma then to go and abort it for twelve weeks.

So it had the karma to be killed by me because karma’s pretty personal. So the same with kind actions. Everyone is kind to you. You created the cause from your past virtue to have kindness and that person has the karma to benefit you. Karma just means the causes of things, you know, why or how come it happens.

So would that mouse then carry that karma over to the next life? What do mean by carry it over, darling? So if the mouse had the karma to be killed by someone, would they carry that karma onto the next life and be killed again, or does it just kind of resolve itself? No, the way no, no, okay. I think the way they talk about it, they use the analogy of seeds and fruits.

So is it true with botany that every time a fruit comes that’s the end of that seed, isn’t it? Does one seed bring a fruit? Please people can you tell me? Is that right with botany? So a flower is the fruit of one seed, is it?

No, a tree. Pardon? A tree is the fruit of one seed. Well what’s a flower? It’s the fruit of the tree.

Oh sorry, okay I’m wrong then. What’s an apple? Is that the fruit of a is that not a seed? A seed doesn’t cause an apple? It causes the tree, yeah.

Causes the tree, oh now I’m getting confused. Okay then, if we use the analogy of seeds and fruits, whatever you like, seeds and trees, then every time a tree ripens it’s the end of that seed isn’t it? But you can grow lots more from it, can’t you? You can. Then the same.

So that mouse, that karma’s ended, that particular one’s finished. Every time you punch me, that punch is now finished, but most likely I’ll punch you again and sow another seed, and we’ll keep the ball rolling, won’t we? Do you understand? Yes I do, thank you. Oh I see, that fruit’s not the result of a fruit, no one’s ever told me that in all these years, it’s the first time I’ve heard that.

I can’t believe it, I better learn symbology. Down there? Who are you? Where are you? Put your hand up.

Okay, thank you. Talking about, like, if you really mess up your karma and come back as I think we have to talk closer to the microphone. It’s a very subtle microphone. Yep. That’s as good as we are.

Okay. So if you really mess up your karma and come back as some kind of animal Animal, yes. Yes. Whatever level of animal that might be, how then does an animal Get out. Say like a mouse, take action to Quite difficult, honey.

But the point is this. The Buddha’s view would be that there’s not a millisecond of anything we’ve ever done and said in thought that doesn’t leave a seed and those seeds will not go astray until they ripen. So we are carrying around, including the mouse, plenty of human seeds, plenty of good seeds. So that’s where we can be helpful in intervening. Like if you know that mouse is sick, the Buddha’s view would be you can help it die peacefully and say mantras in its ear like that which you do and that could help trigger one of its virtuous seeds and then it can get a human body.

We’ve all been animals in the past so clearly something has shifted but you can’t do it as a mouse. You can’t create virtue or use your intelligence as a mouse. All you can do is create non virtue because your mind’s so caught up and so deluded. I mean we’ll go into this in more depth. So the karmic seeds you already got there.

Do you understand? Yes, so it seems like it would be very difficult. Difficult, yeah. As we say, once you’re on a good wicket you better stick to it. That’s what we say about a human birth.

Once you’ve a human birth don’t tip it down the toilet. Use it as much as you can to get ahead of the game, get another one, and then you can get rid of all the other seeds before they ripen. Because once you lose the plot, you’ve lost it for a while. That’s what they say. Part two of that, sort of.

What, sweetheart? Sort of the second part of the question is, as people like we are now, becoming aware of Buddhism and the concept of saṃsāra and so forth, and hopefully working towards improving our karma or escaping saṃsāra. I know there’s probably not really a solid answer for this but how many more lifetimes might one expect before one kind of nails that? I understand, it’s a good question. First of all surely it has to depend on how far you’ve come doesn’t it?

I mean you know if you, it’s like saying how long does it take to make a million dollars, when you’ve got nine ninety nine in the bank it won’t take long, But you’ve zero in the bank and you don’t know how you don’t you don’t can’t count you’ve got a bit of work to do. So it depends on how much you’ve got you’ve done already. It’s how much you’ve got in the bank already, how much virtuous tendencies you have and how much good fortune from hard work that will enable you to get that stuff done quickly. So you always talk about, you always read stories about how somebody got enlightened in this lifetime, but they must have done masses of work in the past, you know? Do you understand my point?

So that depends, and we’re not clairvoyant, can’t see how much we’ve got under our belt, but there are methods, there are lots of methods. The key answer to me has to be, the key approach, given that we haven’t got knowledge of what our past work, what we’ve got under our belt, then the thing is to use the tools as well as possible to keep ahead of the game, to keep the human birth. But there are lots of methods and lots of practices to do that can hasten it, they say like that. Will that do as an answer? Okay.

Thank you. You’ve got to stay optimistic and perky. There are ways. Yes, someone else? How many days have we got to talk about karma Judy?

Only tonight. Only tonight? Good lord. Long night. It’s going to be massive stuff to talk about.

Okay, go. We’ll see what I can do then. Go. Hi. You were talking about the practices and methods.

Are you able to give us an example of the practices and methods? To get enlightened quickly, you mean. When are we going to do death, Judy? This weekend, the following week. One day or two?

Tuesday. Can we leave it till then? Unless you die beforehand. I’m dying to know. Okay, we’re going to Karman more then for sure, but certainly for example there are practices in the vajrayana, you know.

In Buddhism there are different sort of like levels of practice of teachings. Junior school is what we’re talking about today, this is junior school and you know if we take the type of Buddhism in the world we’ve Hīnayāna and Mahāyāna this is the first stages of the Hīnayāna level of practice which is the stages of practice for everybody as junior school. Controlling your body and speech. Make sure you stop doing as many negative things as possible to play safe, do it in the context of vows which is very powerful. This is one of the ways to help hasten our practice and I’ll talk about that.

And then to purify. So the two crucial ways to really make sure we create lots of virtuous karma and refrain from creating negative karma, and we’re talking junior school which is the first answer, would be to live in vows of morality. So let me explain. So right now we’re sitting in this room, we’re probably not killing anything, are we? Probably not.

So if our mind isn’t thinking I must not kill, which we’re not doing because there’s no creature in front of us, then we’re not creating any virtuous karma of not killing. Because karma is intention remember? Do you see what I’m saying? We may be creating lots of virtuous karma by listening to the teachings and making aspirations but we need in our bank vaults bucket loads of these fundamental virtuous karmic seeds of refr it’s called the practice of the morality of restraint. Conscious intentional not killing, not lying, not stealing, not this, not that.

It just sounds passive to say I’m not killing, but it’s a proactive intentional decision I will not kill. So when you make that mouse and you say I will not kill, it’s only then that you put in your bank vault a seed. But it’s quite weak, Our motivation isn’t that powerful. We haven’t got much emptiness, we haven’t got much bodhicitta, our motivations are quite weak. But we do sow one little seed.

But the Buddha says, and he loves his vows, it’s easy peasy to sow bucket loads of seeds twenty four hours a day by living in vows of morality. There’s different levels. So at this level, this junior school level, which is the morality of restraint, refraining from harming, then if you take a vow not to kill, know, you’re doing, Buddha says vows are so potent. They say in the teachings that when you take vows, this is in a particular, know, tradition in the Buddhist vows, you’re sort of plucking into this power source going right back in an unbroken chain of human beings back to the time of Buddha, and you take vows from somebody when you first take refuge as a Buddhist, then the Lord Buddha says that vows are like this subtle physical energy that’s visible to clairvoyance. There’s something so potent about living in vows, because it’s a very powerful decision to define yourself in terms of being a non harming person.

And you decide for the rest of your life I will never kill, I will never steal, I will never jump on the wrong partner or rape, you know? I will never lie, I will never there’s five of them, that’s all. Taken from that ten there’s five. And they’re done in the context of these vows. Well Lama Zopa says, you can be a person who’s doing lots of Buddhist practice but doesn’t have a vow not to kill.

Or another person can be merely keeping their vows, not doing much else. The second person creates infinite more virtuous karmic seeds, pops virtuous karmic seeds in their bank vault twenty four hours a day, whether they’re thinking about it or not, because the power of ours is so marvellous. And secondly, create virtuous karma as well, because ours are so intense. So that’s hard to hear maybe, it’s hard to think, we should think about it. But my sense is when you make a decision to do something, it’s more powerful than just doing it sometimes, isn’t it?

Like even the fisherman, you could say he basically vowed to be a fisherman, he vowed to he defined himself as a killer of fish. That’s not much that’s obviously more heavy karma, isn’t it, than merely fishing sometimes. In other words, his life was determined by his job as a fisherman. Everything he did, he decided where he went and what he did, and what he bought and everything was determined by his ability to go fishing. So that makes it more powerful, the karma of killing.

Equally, the karma of not killing. Just being a nice person is not enough. Just merely not killing is not enough because only when you meet a creature and you avoid killing it that you pop a little non killing seed in your bank vault, but you need bucket loads just to get a decent human body. So living in vows is a no brainer, first way, and that’ll hasten, that’s a step. And then on top of that you’ve the bodhisattva vows in the Mahāyāna path, which are stupendous and they last from life to life.

And on top of that you have the tantric vows, and they all say vows are the like the nervous system, the infrastructure of who we are, and if we keep vows purely, they say really keep our vows purely, which is hard, up the tantric ones, we can get enlightened a few lifetimes. But without living in vows it’s impossible. Impossible. So vows is one of the different levels, three different levels. The other one is the more esoteric teachings in Tatra than vajrayana itself, these marvellous practices of the greatest yogis who get single pointed concentration, have completely controlled their minds, living in their vows and they can do certain techniques that can really hasten their ability to get enlightened, but that implies incredibly advanced.

And the third one is easy. When you die you go to Amitābha’s Pure Land where you can get enlightened easily and then you can come back and be human again. So that’s the best one I’d suggest, that’s the one I’m aiming for. I’m a fan of Amitābha’s Pure I’m going to talk about that at the death time. That’s an easy way to cut across everything, and you just make aspirations and you get born, you sort of, I decide it’s on the end of my itinerary.

So I’ve got to go to Adelaide or I might go to Abercrombie’s Pure Land first, it’s on my itinerary. So we’ll go, we’ll discuss that at the time in the weekend. Okay? Thank you. Thank you very much.

What else? What else? Yes. Yes? Sorry, I know we don’t have much time, but could you briefly describe the purification process?

I will darling, absolutely. Four steps, the four R’s, it was Venerable Gloria, who used to be here remember she told me about the four R’s I like it maybe other people do the four R’s as well but it’s an easy way to remember. First one is regret, second one is reliance, the third one is the remedy, The fourth one is resolve. I think this is in all your course notes. This teaching is in your course notes, okay?

So you can read it slowly later. So the first one is really important. Lama Zopa says this is the most important because it’s the entry into it. So regret is also a very important thing to understand. When we hear that, I think we tend to have the interpretation of that sort of unhappy guilt that we’re very good at.

So His Holiness was asked this, and I always quote this, and it’s so sweet, the answer, what’s the difference between this regret and what we tend to think of as guilt? And he said guilt, you look at the past and you go, I did that and I did this, and I did that, and then you go, and I’m a bad person. Now we are very familiar with that, and that’s a very deep assumption we have and we really do believe it’s true. I did that, therefore I am bad. Well, that’s anger, except you’re the object, that’s all.

Listen to anger. You did that, and you did this, and you did that, and you’re a bad person. So one of the key things about all these neuroses, these delusions, anger, attachment and the rest which we’ll talk about, is that they exaggerate, they grotesquely exaggerate. So it’s literally incorrect. It’s not accurate to say I lied therefore I’m bad.

Well the Christians say it in a beautiful way. You don’t criticize the sinner, you criticize the sin. That’s a beautiful saying. Be more precise please. Just because your hand is dirty doesn’t mean the whole of you is dirty.

Just because you know your hand aches doesn’t mean the whole of you aches. It’s an exaggeration, but that’s the job of delusions. They love to exaggerate, they’re drama queens, you know. So literally it’s not accurate. So as Holiness says, regret.

The first part’s the same. You have to go, I did this and this and this. But then you go, what can I do about it? It’s proactive, optimistic, intelligent, reasonable, and that’s the crucial part that regret is. So again this is this trouble when we come to emotional, spiritual, bad and good stuff.

It’s a mind field, we’re a mess when it comes to this stuff. But if you’re playing the piano and you play the wrong note, it’s obvious that you first have to acknowledge that you played the wrong note. You go, Oh my god, I didn’t mean to play that note. You don’t then go, Oh, I’m a bad person, I can’t play piano and go, Kill yourself, you know? You say, how can I fix it?

So you look at the music and you get the right note and you fix it. It’s really simple. But we’re such we are drama queens. Ego is a drama queen. And we run like a magnet to negativity and we assume it’s true.

This is the way the irony of ego, you know. It’s kind of awful. And we really got to consciously, consciously change this thinking. So regret is a really practical one. Regret has to be the acknowledgement that I did kick the dog and I did kill my grandmother and I did steal the money and I did get angry at my boyfriend or whatever, you know.

And we’re starting at this first level, your body and your speech. You do this at the end of the day. As long as I’ve said we are insane not to do it every day. It’s like doing some weeding at the end of every day. This is obvious.

So the first step has to be this courageous, self respectful, reasonable acknowledgement of things I’ve done with my body and speech to harm others first. Reasonably. And we all do this. By the end of the day, no wonder we’re exhausted and feel so stressed Because we bad mouth that driver, they didn’t have to hear us, we just harmed ourselves. We bad mouthed, we talked about the person at work, we got angry with the husband, we screamed at the daughter.

I mean little baby things, know, listen to us, look at this. We build up this stuff and we’re exhausted by the end of the day. Because stuff we’ve done with our body and speech. That’s all, it’s nothing dramatic, know. It’s something simple and that’s what weighs us down.

Because we have guilt. So we’ve to clean up our act, you know, for our own sake first. So just acknowledge. And this practice is like I like to think of it as you’re talking to yourself. For me during this practice, there’s very formal sadhanas practice to do it, with all the prayers and the offerings.

For me it’s more powerful to do it in your own words and sit there, it’s like you’re talking to yourself and you’re going through these four steps. Then you make it sincere, not just some kind of religious practice you just blindly say, you know? It’s really important to engage in it with this respect for yourself. I mean it sincerely because you become confident. So we’ve got to acknowledge things today.

And then you can think of main things in this life that you’ve burdened, you’ve been lugging around, that abortion you had, whatever it is, the fishing you did, the whatever whatever, stuff that we feel bad about. You bring it up and it sounds like this, you you’re talking to yourself, I regret that abortion, I was twenty three, you know? I always knew I didn’t want a baby, I didn’t care. I didn’t know it was a baby. I knew all I knew is when it came out to be a person, I didn’t want it.

Do you understand? So I thought, good, I’ll get an abortion. It was in England when they just started with National Health. So I regret. So what I mean is, I say to myself, and I regret killing that human being.

Because I was ignorant. I didn’t know. Often people think, and this is a really important point, often people think you say you regret it, but you say but I did it, I can’t change it. That’s not the point. It’s like if you’ve eaten poison, you didn’t know it was poison.

Regret is oh my god what an idiot, I can’t believe I ate poison. Not well I didn’t know it was poison, it’s not my fault, why should I regret it? This is stupidity. Regretting is acknowledging you did it, and yes you were foolish, yes you didn’t know what you were doing, yes you’re uncontrolled, be kind you know. I regret it, and they have to say this is the point now, this is the point now, this is the point now.

I regret it because you know what, Rubina? Talking to myself, I don’t want the future results from this action, because karmic seeds are dynamic, they’ll keep getting stronger and stronger and they will burst into life at some point. Don’t sit there just latent, you know? So I regret from the depths of my heart that killing. And then you think of any other killing I’ve done.

And then you go, and you know what? Any killing I’ve ever done since beginningless time, why not? All the seeds are in my mind anyway. I regret them from the depths of my heart because I don’t want the future results. So what does that mean?

Well you think it through. If it makes sense to you to think of being in the lower realms, if you’re familiar with that, think that. But if you can’t get your head around that, well just think of it being unhealthy. Do you like that? Do you like people trying to kill you?

Do you like, you know, no way. I don’t want that kind of suffering, you know you don’t want that kind of suffering. So you say, because I don’t want that kind of suffering, of course I regret it from the depths of my heart. Then you think of the other actions, you can go through the ten non virtues, can go through the five, you can go through the main things, I regret the lying, the stealing, the killing, and then the best way to get it is like a blanket, and I regret anything I’ve ever done since the beginning of this time with my body and speech to harm any sentient being, because all those seeds are in my mind, and I do not want them to ripen honey, this is a fact, I’m talking to myself. So of course I regret them.

It’s so wholesome and so intelligent because I’m sick up to here of suffering. This is the meaning of regret, otherwise you say the words I regret, it just sounds like guilt, it’s meaningless, it’s meaningless. There’s got to be compassion for yourself first. This is the important point about regret, it’s about you. Compassion comes second.

This is about you. And that means linking your actions to the karmic results. We’re not used to thinking that way. We’re used to thinking that way when it comes to food and eating poison and cigarettes, but not mental actions because we’re very caught up in the guilt blame mode you know, and if no one saw me do it I got away with it. I mean if no one sees you eat poison, believe me, getting away with it has zero to do with anything because it’s a natural law.

So this is a natural law, Buddha says. So regretting is massively important because I don’t want the suffering. Regret’s about you sick of suffering. Regret saying it is meaningless until you say why you regret it. It’s because of you, you’re sick of suffering.

Then you think well who can I turn to? Where’s the doctor? Give me the medicine. And this is a really again crucial point. When I was a Catholic, the second point is I would rely upon God, and this is the point here.

I would have to beg God to forgive me because forgiveness is what purifies. And that’s in our bones we feel that. If I’m bad mouthing my boyfriend every day and I’m at work and I’m freaking out and thinking about it all I want to do is get home and look him in the eye and say darling I’m so sorry mostly because I want him to forgive me because basically I want him to get me off the hook. I feel relieved that he hasn’t given me up yet, phew I got away with it. It’s so frantic to get someone to forgive us because we can’t stand being disliked, we can’t stand someone turning against us.

So we use forgiveness in a bad way I’d say, it’s to do with neurotic and guilty. The second one, relying on the Buddha, he would forgive you, he’s a nice guy! But it is not the point. It’s zero to do with it. Buddha is a doctor.

In this context it’s exactly like a doctor. Whom can I turn to? Where’s the doctor? And you go to the doctor. You don’t go to the doctor and say I’m eating poison can you forgive me?

Could you give me medicine please? So clearly that’s refuge, that’s refuge. The first part of the second step, reliance is refuge. That is you’ve to have thought about the Buddha and be confident he’s a decent doctor, and you’ve to need his methods. You don’t go to a doctor because he’s cute, well you might, you want a boyfriend.

You go because you need his methods, his medicine. So you’ve to be confident he’s a good doctor, you need his medicine, either curative or preventative, obvious. Then in your delight you’ve got a doctor, so then you do a prayer or something, but you visualize the Buddha, well maybe we’ll do it the weekend, you visualize a particular practice. Anyway, you take refuge. That’s the first part.

The second part of reliance is now where you have compassion for those you’ve harmed. Now you have compassion. First is compassion for yourself. This is compassion for those you’ve harmed. So why is it under the heading reliance?

This is peculiar. And this is how they talk. They say we need Okay, right here we are now trying to cultivate compassion. What’s compassion? Compassion is seeing the suffering of others and finding it unbearable.

That’s what compassion is. And then thinking what can I do to help? So in order to have compassion, you have to have suffering sentient beings, don’t you? If you never met a suffering sentient being, you can’t have compassion. You need suffering sentient beings.

So that’s why they say reliance. We rely upon suffering sentient beings, because you can’t get compassion otherwise. Geshe-la said, body sufferers need their enemies, they’re the best ones to have compassion for. So it’s under the heading reliance. Then think of those you’ve harmed.

This is where you can now think of your boyfriend, know what it’s like to be abused all the time, know what it’s like for you to be mean or passive aggressive or whatever you do, know, all have bloody relationships, you know what we’re like, our boss, the unkind girl at work. Really think of the other person now, you know? Especially those you killed, the baby and the fish and the creatures and the ants and the rats and the cockroaches. Just think of their suffering, think of it, doesn’t take too long. That’s the suffering you regret because you don’t want that suffering for your first one, now it’s for others.

And so you think I’m stop regretting for their sake now, must purify for their sake. And then if you can, have compassion for those who’ve harmed you. If you can, if you’re not ready, don’t go there. You know your abusive father, your hot What? Oh, sorry.

Just sneezed. Sorry. Okay. What’s wrong with your back? Oh, nothing.

I was just laying. It’s gotta be sit up. Okay. If you can, unless your back’s really bad, is it? Was hurting a bit.

Is it a bit better? It’s fine. Okay. So then the compassion for those who’ve harmed you, this is powerful if we can be brave enough. And the logical reason is what?

Why would I have compassion for the enemy? Because guess what honey? Because they’re going to suffer unbearably in the future. That’s all. That’s the logic.

That’s why you can regret for yourself, because you’ll suffer in the future. So that’s why you regret, that’s why you have compassion for those who harmed you, because you just finished your part of it, well you’re lucky, but they have just begun their future suffering. So of course you have compassion for them. The third step is you take the remedy. They say that you apply the antidote.

There’s anything you can do here. Anything in the daytime, if you were regretting killing, well go save some lives. If you regret lying, go and tell the truth. Anything that’s the opposite, that’s an antidote, that’s clear, you’ve got to do all that anyway. But there’s a very powerful, very potent third one, the practice, a dakini that all the Lamas praise, which is the visualization of a particular Buddha called Vajrasattva and the recitation of his mantra that’s said to be a really powerful antidote, a really powerful medicine remedy.

So basically it’s thinking, you know? Because as I think she says, We create negativity with our mind, so we purify it by creating positivity with our mind. There’s nothing else but your mind involved here. Your mind sows the seeds, your mind changes it. That’s what purification is.

So the more clearly and powerfully you engage in these four steps it’s just psychology the more powerful you make the changes, Because it’s your mind changing. So the more regret, the more compassion, the more you do the practice and say the mantra and visualize and imagine and the more the fourth step. The fourth step is called the resolve, the determination to change. So as long as I get off the hook every time a boyfriend says it’s alright Rabina I still love you, nothing will ever change until I decide to change. And this fourth one, Pabongka Rinpoche says, is the most important.

So you sit there with yourself and you give yourself a timeline. If you’ve got vows, clearly in the beginning the first one, regret, you need to regret breaking your vows. We all break our vows, you know, because these are so potent. So you do regret that, you regret the weakened vows, think of it, the ones you know you’ve got and try and do the best you can. So the fourth one, you make determination to not break your vows as much as you can, you know, you strongly recite that, you say that to yourself.

Then your other rubbish, like bad mouthing your boyfriend, maybe you can’t vow never to do it again, because it’s an old habit. You don’t lie to yourself, but you might go and sincerely mean it because this is what makes you change I will not bad mouth him for twenty four hours, and you really mean it, then don’t be surprised that you won’t bad mouth him for twenty four hours. It’s hardly a no brainer. The more we determine to do something, the more likely we are to do it. It’s completely obvious.

So this is a very proactive practice, know, and I would prefer to do it in my own words than to read one of those holy psalms, you just read it mindlessly you know, sounds like religion. It’s a very powerful one and it gives you confidence, it gives you confidence and it’s like kindness to yourself. Really like Mutter says we’re insane what to do until you finish your day with this. It’s so powerful. Is that clear?

Okay, it’s in your books. But you’ve got to do it, like anything, you’ve got do it, you know, with enthusiasm. Because it’s you talking to you, you use the Buddha. He doesn’t do the purification, you do. Come on.

We all know when we think things through, whatever it is, I must go and go, you know, I must study that thing, I must go on a diet, I will go on that holiday, I will save money, I will go to the gym, we know when we have determination, we will do it. It’s the same here. It’s such a powerful practice. Because that trouble is we’re full of guilt, we’re full of hopelessness, we’re full of misery, we’re full of self pity, we’re we’re full of our bad, you know? And we stumble along and don’t believe we can change, don’t think we can change, don’t think it’s possible to change.

We’ve got to be realistic, engage in this process, so powerful, so practical. And that’s what changes you, that’s what purification means, Nothing religious and mystical. It’s your mind changing. Come on. And the extra component here is each of these four specifically purifies each of the four ways that karma ripens.

You hear different ones, you know? Recently I heard Lama Zopa say one that’s different from what I thought, I’m bit stubborn about my ah, prefer the other one, although Lama Zopa says the other one. Whatever. But I got it from Geshe Jampa Gyatso’s book about purification, maybe it got in your shop, don’t know. And they republished it recently at Wisdom.

But the first one, regret, purifies the karma called experiences similar to the cause. This is very tasty. So meaning, if you sincerely regret killing because you’re sick of the suffering then you purify the future being killed or dying young. But today let’s say you had a bad time at work, know, and somebody’s accusing you of something. This is a very powerful way to apply this one in daily life, I tell you.

This is really powerful. Things happen every day, don’t they? People are mean to us, they’re unkind to us, they don’t like us, they bad mouth us, they criticize us, they say we’re lying, and this is like torture for us. This is like unbearable suffering, we can’t stand it. And all we try to do is desperately get the person to see the truth.

But we can see no matter how hard you try, they can’t. So, when you realize that they’re not believing your words is the direct result of your lying in the past. And this is the type of karma called experience similar to the cause of past lying. And karma’s pretty personal. This person isn’t believing your words.

So instead of freaking out, Oh pity is not fair, I’m telling the truth why can’t they believe me and shouting and yelling and putting all the blame on them which of course is what we do. You go Oh my god you know I must have lied in the past to this person. So you take responsibility, you sit down and you regret from the depths of your heart whatever damn lying you did because you know you don’t want the suffering because look it’s in your face. Don’t be surprised things change. Next life for sure people will believe your words But don’t be surprised it changes even now.

And this is a very powerful way to stop the self pity and obsess with trying to make the world out there change. You realize it’s the fruit of your own past action. It’s the fruit of your past action. It would not be happening if you hadn’t done it. You’ve got have this kind of rigor and logic if you take the view of karma you know.

So then you deeply regret it and you can sincerely regret because you know you can’t stand the suffering here it rises in front of you. Like you’ve got bugs in your house or creatures or they eat the things, white ants whatever you have you know, mice whatever. This is due to your past you’ve got personal karma that you’re mice, hi mice this is their house. How do you think these mice, you don’t think they are? Not in my house, they’re in your house.

They’re your mice. So you go I must have invaded these mice, I must have shat in their house. Seriously, so you regret the depth of your harm whatever harm you did to these little mousies in past lives. Who knows what and when? You really regret sincerely because you can’t stand this suffering.

Don’t be surprised the mice go. I’ve heard so many people say this. Cause the cause of why they’re there is your past action. Own what’s in front of you. This is a really powerful thing about karma.

It’s your karmic appearance Lama Zopa says. But we this is the point we see, oh how dare these mouse be in my kitchen, how dare these people out there not trust my words like we’re innocent victims? Nothing to with me, I’m sorry it’s got everything to do with you. So take responsibility, regret the action in the past that is causing this, that’ll help shift it, don’t be surprised. Next life guarantee.

Everyone will believe your words. The second one, reliance. And I can’t quite get this on but I think it’s got to do with compassion, the second part. They say it purifies the environmental karma. So they have a saying, ground you fall down on that hurts you is the very ground that you rely upon to stand up.

So the very sentient beings you harmed are those you rely upon by having compassion for them. So environmental karma is the way and that can include sentient beings, you know? The physical world have impacts upon you, like I said. The third one purifies the lower realms, doing the actual practice, the Vajrasattva, the mantras and everything purification purifies the lower realm results. And the fourth is obvious, the vow never to kill again guarantees you’ll wake up in this life, next life with no thought to kill.

This is the most important. This is where you change and that means then you wake up next life with no thought to kill, lie, steal, bad mouth or anything else. This is an incredibly important practice. Okay? It’s psychology.

If it’s not psychology, it’s a load of rubbish. It’s all psychology, it’s about the mind. So anyway, come on, more. They’re the essential components of karma and purification, bare bones, okay? Maybe we should talk about the lower realms.

Shall we? Now we’ve got time, look, twenty minutes. The fully ripened result. For the Buddha, there are trillions of sentient beings, of mind possessors. There’s not an animal space you won’t find mind possessors.

Our body is a walking zoo. We know this. There’s no way you won’t find sentient beings, you know? So I find this helpful, this is from the vajrayana, and I find this very helpful. It’s also to help us understand karma too.

In the vajrayana, when we go through the death process, which this is from, right? We’ll discuss that then, but this is really helpful in my mind. In the vajrayana model of the universe, there are these trillions of sentient beings, trillions of mind streams, minds, are inextricably linked to their own set of the four elements. It’s really fascinating. For the Buddha, the physical world is made of the four elements.

There matter and there are minds, That’s it. And all of this stuff is beginningless, it’s just the way it is. No one made it. It’s just how things are. And all minds are inextricably linked to their own set of the four elements.

So in the death process you’ve got the gross consciousness, which is this one, inextricably linked with the gross body. And the first stages of death are this deconstruction of the gross level of our being, right? Then you get to subtle consciousness, which is when you stop breathing. And your subtle consciousness is also inextricably linked with this subtler physical energy. And they deal with this in great depth in the vajrayana, and the Tibetan medical system is the same, you know?

This is coming also from the Hindus, the four elements. So we’ve got this subtle wind energy that courses through this subtle nervous system and all our states of mind they say the mind rides on the winds. All of our states of mind are linked to the different wind energies. So when your Tibetan doctor feels your pulses, you’ll feel an imbalance of certain wind energies that’s the cause of your attachment and your anxiety, stress and panic attacks. If you can feel the other wind energies, they’re polluted by your anger.

So by changing your herbal medicines, which fixes the winds, that interacts on your mind, so your mind can calm down. So the mind and the winds are inextricably linked. This is a fundamental component of that entire model, you know? And it’s just the way the universe is. All minds are linked to their own set of the four elements.

When we get through the death process, let’s say at the time you stop breathing the negative karmic seed of killing is triggered that programs your consciousness when you die and the mind leaves to run to the lion mummy’s womb. Basically your very subtle consciousness, the subtleness level when it leaves, inextricably linked with a very subtle wind energy. These are inextricably linked together. This is how karma manifests. So Lama Zopa is another little piece I find helpful, in the Kālacakra tantra.

They talk about sūtra and tantra. Sūtra is the general teachings of the Buddha and also referring to a text of those teachings. The tantra is the esoteric teachings of the Buddha and there’s a text. The text, the Kālacakra Tantra, Rinpoche says there are these detailed descriptions of this intimate relationship between the internal and external energies. Internal means minds, and external is the elements.

So as he said, when the mind is out of balance, which is deluded, angry, attached, that pollutes the wind energy. That’s called sickness. And in turn karmically, like karmic evolution, that in turn manifests in the external, causes the imbalance of the external elements, including getting the type of body, because it’s elements, know, the four elements. A lion’s body is four elements, that fish’s body is four elements. Your mind due to the karma you created runs to that condition.

You run to that little house called the lion body or the fish body or whatever. You created the cause and the lion body is like you created that house in advance by killing and doing all the things. Then you run like a magnet to that lion body and now you’ve got a body that’s perfect to carry on your job of killing and doing what you kill the things that lions do you know. There are three lower realms and each of them a manifestation of the three main delusions. So the animal realm is mainly to do this primordial ignorance which we’ll talk about when we talk about emptiness, we talk about the heart So the animal realm we can see it’s massive, there’s probably seven billion mozzies out in your backyard one night.

So clearly it’s much harder to get a human body than an animal’s body, you know. There are trillions, I mean under here is like a zoo, The creatures love our face, they’re like these nice paws, know, love little caves they live in. They love our I mean we’d be repulsed and vomited if saw the creatures live in our body, know. This is an animal realm, billions and trillions of them. And these creatures, these sentient beings are experiencing the fruits of their actions.

They created the cause to get born as an egg, an ant, a dog, an elephant, you name it, or a human, whatever. So the point of Buddhist psychology also is it refers to all sentient beings, not just humans. So this model of the mind, you know the negative states, positive states, neutral which we’ll talk about when we get to that topic, whatever day that is. An animal has exactly the same kind of mind, but they can’t access their virtues. That’s the one saving grace that makes us human.

We’re basically a bunch of animals, look at this, you know. Apparently before this human planet, there were trillions of you know, that man’s question, there were trillions of you we’ve had countless lives. As man has all this sounds to us, you know. And countless lives we had much a human birth, which is mainly referring to a type of mind which can access virtue and intelligence. That’s the human component.

We had types of rebirths where the subtle in our elements was subtle light, because there were no gross delusions. There were no gross delusions. There was mainly virtue and intelligence. There was no manifestation of attachment and all the other delusions. They were still there but latent.

So over eons of time, like karmic evolution, gradually attachment would grow, and that pollutes the wind energies, and literally karmically created holes and penises and vaginas and eyes and ears and this body. This walking kind of junkie with five senses to be stuffed full. Isn’t it? Are we communicating here? We created this!

It’s not a bloody gift from God! Excuse me I did a conference last night in Sydney, I flew over to Sydney at the night, and it was an interfaith at a college, at a big boys school, and it was on the ABC, so I’m be on the ABC on Sunday night I think, John Cleary. I was very polite though, usually I’m polite in panel, but I was very polite. But it was wonderful people, this gorgeous Muslim lady, her husband was that man who won the Logie. She’s gorgeous, Susan, and then a Jew, a rabbi, a girl, a lady, me and a Jesuit priest.

Was lovely conversation, very nice conversation. So anyway, very low key, was very polite. So we’re not made by God, we’re a gift, are basically our karma is so deluded now that we now, our human life, we’re born on a planet looking like a bunch of apes basically. So all of our delusions like killing and lying and sex and food and drugs and all the cravings we have, these are animal actions, people, not being rude, just how they are. The human aspect is our virtue and our intelligence, that’s our saving grace.

That’s why it’s so hard being this human in this bag of bones. Just want to go to the Amitābha’s Pure Land and get a light body for a while and get a few realizations. Then I can come back and have fun. That’s my plan. I love the human realm.

I love the human bodies. I want have hundreds of boyfriends and thousands of daughters. But I want to be a bodhisattva first. So go to the human the Amitābha’s Pure Lands, I’m serious, I’m a fan. I thought it was a lot of rubbish before I did this book of Lama Zopa’s, now I’m a complete fan, I promise.

And the main cause is wanting to go there, I want to go there, I tell you. Get some enlightened, cut across all this rubbish, then come back and help people. I’m happy to help people as well. Anyway, so the way the physical world manifests dirty, stinky, smelly, loud, gorgeous, pure, clear this is the karmic appearance of our past actions, collective or individual. We created the universe!

Way the elements configure is due to the collective karma of the sentient beings who experience it. This is based on emptiness. There’s no created needed Buddha says. We’re doing a good job on our own. So there’s animals.

Then you’ve got the further down even more suffering beings whose minds you can say are conjoined with air energy. They’re these spirits, these nightmarish suffering beings, predominance of attachment, grasping. Nightmarish lives, ghosts, all that kind of being. Nightmarish lives. Their minds are conjoined with air energy.

Fit from pillar to post. They’re hopeless. Then you’ve the worst lot, the hells. Well I think you could argue that their minds are conjoined with fire. And as long as Lama Yeshe said, hell is not some place where the devil is waiting, saying I’m waiting for Lama Yeshe, He says hell is the manifestation of the negative energy of that sentient being.

We make our own reality. It’s not cosmic. It’s not meant to be a cosmic statement. It’s a literal truth, but not like magic overnight create evolution. It’s like karmic evolution, personal evolution.

So you know you get born as a lion. You created the cause to have that body. But that kind mummy lion, she’s been working on that body very nicely. And the previous lines along the track, this is like the world’s evolution. They’ve been fixing that body as they go along haven’t they?

They’ve been making really nice houses for people who’ve got lion karma to run to. So you go into this newly organized lion body that’s changed over a few eons hasn’t it? Because all the occupants of those lion bodies have done the job of housekeeping. Are you sort of seeing what I’m saying? Relatively, don’t you?

We create the cause. So you know you got some karma that say due to strong anger and strong kind of kind of like war type mind. You get born as a Mexican gangsters mummy in Los Angeles, I promise. You get the womb you deserve you know. You got really intense strong killing and very ignorant, very powerful, very arrogant you’ll be born a mountain lion.

Born a stupid idiot eats leaves all day you’ll be born a koala. You’re vain, you’re have all this big, know, like you’re vain, you gotta be born with of those fish, know? Colors, this wacky looking body, you know? I saw one of those shows, what’s his name? He died recently, Attenborough.

He’s like the Australian, but they’re both super fanatic about the about the environment, right, and the animals. But one’s Australian, one’s one’s English. So, you know, Attenborough is posh, wasn’t he? And he I remember one time he waxed lyrical about these amazingly amazingly brilliant ants getting more intelligent. No one knows why.

Meaning that there’s twenty two seven degrees here and this and this and they’re completely organised and genius and I thought well what the hell? What’s an ant with clever kind of technology? Clever engineers and mathematicians. Because you see the Buddha says there’s nothing that goes into our mind that ever goes astray. So there’s an ant, clever ants working as a big group with their clever technology programmed in their mind from being engineers and architects or whatever, engineers and mathematicians, but they’ve got an attachment, they’re born as a bloody ant.

There’s birds all day, there’s a bird that danced all day to get a girl. What do think ballet dancers do? All day they practice dancing all day! And you do it with attachment instead of body teacher, guess what you’re going get born. This other bird was like making houses all day for his to get a wife.

What do you think he’d been an architect all his life? Never stopped! Due to attachment he’s born a bird but he retains his cleverness. Well we are, you know, born as humans retaining our animal tendencies. So we’re a sorry lot, okay?

Sorry, nine o’clock. Any questions? The main one about karma that I find is we are the boss. We do not need creating. We do not need to have someone make the world and then send us into it, which is how we think.

In fact, forget the Christian view, I have respect. But the materialist one I find just fascist. That my mother and my father, deluded people, can actually dare to decide to make a person like them. That’s what they did, that’s what we think in the West, isn’t it? They made me.

So they make Rubina, she pops out, then they sort of give me anger and give me depression and give me jealousy and give me the wish to kill or whatever personality you’ve got. And then I go to my therapist and she says I’ve got to stop blaming my parents. Well she is wrong. They made me, they are the blame, that is logic. I’m serious here.

They are the blame and I find that worse than Frankenstein making a monster. So don’t believe your therapist. If you’re a therapist stop telling your patients they’ve to forgive if you believe in the materialist view. Now you’ve got the Buddha’s view, yes they did not make you. You made you baby.

Was so powerful for me, the karmic one. When I first heard the Buddha’s teachings in Lama Zopa, forty years ago last month in Kopan, that was the piece in my life I’d been missing, felt, you know, I loved hearing it, I loved it. For me it’s the most important one, it implies emptiness, it implies everything, it’s an incredible view, incredible view of the universe, you know. And the experiential implication of it is I’m responsible, I’m the boss, I can do it. And then when you have that you have fearlessness, you own it and then you have compassion.

Now you know why the world is suffering, but you’ve got to get it yourselves first. That’s why those young, you know, that’s what compassion Buddhism is based on understanding karma, I tell you. Without that compassion is ridiculous. So I always quote that story, these young Tibetan nuns who were invited by Richard Gere in two thousand and three, he invited a bunch of former prisoners, about twenty of them, all of whom had done some kind of meditation in prison to meet the Dalai Lama when he visited in New York. I was working at the time with the prison project, and he invited me and some other people.

It was a very moving day all day, these Americans, you know? Black, white, Puerto Rican, Mexican, all with their suffering, being in prison, blah blah blah. He invited also two young Tibetan women, young nuns who’d been tortured and sexually abused. And they were telling their story. See the first thing was that they were sad, there were tears, and it was really clear to the Americans that they weren’t angry.

And this in our culture is a shock, because anger for us is like this noble right. But of course it is. If you unpack anger, it’s a philosophical view based on the view that you didn’t ask to get born, which is exactly what we believe is truth. We don’t even think it’s a belief. We think it’s true.

It’s a belief. Buddha says a load of rubbish. So if you believe you didn’t ask to get born, therefore of course it’s not your fault. Of course anger is the perfect response. It’s the perfect response.

It’s the correct response. How dare you do that to me? I don’t deserve it. That’s a perfect philosophical statement of truth if you are made by your parents. And that’s the view of this world.

So those young nuns didn’t that view, so they don’t have anger. It’s not complicated because they’re not saying how dare you do that to me? And they’re not saying why is this happening to me? Which is the main one of why we all suffer so badly in our lives. Look at this, that’s the main reason we suffer, cause we don’t know why this is happening to me.

Or why we always ask questions about the poor children and the suffering, this and the suffering, that you mean they deserve it. I’m not being mean to anybody. This is natural when we have the view that you didn’t ask to get born. Of course it brings anger, and nightmare, anxiety, panic, grief, loss, insanity. Because it is a nightmare this world if you have no understanding of why it is this way.

But if you have a view of karma, don’t have that. You don’t have fear, you are fearless because you know why it is happening. So it completely changes your way of interpreting the world. So these young women were not angry, they were sad. And then at the end, they were very humble and very quiet and they said, and of course, we had compassion for our torturers, because we knew we must have harmed them in the past.

Now that’s their viewpoint, okay? That’s a viewpoint, this is a viewpoint. And I’m in the process of trying to see if it’s true or not, this is what we do as a working hypothesis isn’t it? Christianity is a viewpoint. These Muslims, I remember reading about a couple of years ago when an Air France flight went down in the ocean and these two Muslim mummy and daddy were interviewed about their dead daughter.

How do you feel? They were quiet, they she belongs to God, he has taken her back, we are happy. Now that’s another viewpoint, but what a lovely viewpoint, at least they’re happy. Look at the worst viewpoint, pull your head out and go mad and kill people. God, what one would you rather have?

The karmic one is this one you know. See once you’ve got karma for yourself you become fearless, courageous, you own your garden, you own your life, you own those enemies you own the friends. You realize amazing, I must have done so much hard work in the past. You bliss out, you rejoice in your good qualities, you are delighted when people are kind to you and loving to you, you delight when there’s money in the bank, you delight when you’ve got a good healthy body, you don’t take it for granted, you know you caused it. So of course you want more of that, so of course you practice virtue, it’s a no brainer.

You want more please, give me more please. Fantastic. Then you have compassion for others, but for yourself first. And it becomes fearless, You understand the world. I haven’t improved karma yet, okay?

I’m not clairvoyant, but I’m working with it. It’s helped me change my mind. You become fearless, you don’t freak out, you know why there’s suffering, and it brings you compassion for others and then you go and I must keep doing, never give up helping others, but you’ve got to get it for yourself first, junior school. Okay? That’s my take on Buddhism.

Take it or leave it. So we finish. Thank you so much. And any useful thoughts here? Any views that are interesting?

Any tools to take? Because you’re the boss. And you take it on board, you think about it, you study it, you apply it, and go slowly slowly and never give up on yourself, never give up. You have this unbelievable potential and it’s up to us to cultivate it, you know, for the sake of others as well. And may we never develop, even for a moment, wrong views towards the deeds of our most precious teachers, our most precious lamas, with faith and respect gained from seeing their goodness.

May their full inspiration flow into our hearts. Thank you.