y Robina Courtin — 2016-07-24

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

About this talk. In this 113-minute teaching, Ven Robina Courtin challenges Western misconceptions about compassion by introducing courageous compassion—combining heart with wisdom and understanding. She structures the talk around the Lamrim, moving from basic ethical practice through to advanced compassion, then anchors everything in karma as natural law, not divine punishment. Drawing on concrete examples—a fisherman driven by past killing habits, Warren Buffett’s exceptional health—she unpacks how karma ripens across four dimensions: rebirth, tendency, circumstance, and environment. She examines how attachment masks suffering, and why sentimental compassion without understanding causes harm. An extended Q&A engages practitioners on applying karma to real-world suffering: racism, euthanasia, suicide. Pitched at those familiar with Buddhist basics.

File metadata (for organising)

File: 05 E 2016 07 24.mp3

UUID: dc5434ec-b8e7-4963-956b-680691236b7e

Teacher: Ven Robina Courtin

Collection: y Robina Courtin (Ven Robina Courtin)

Date: 2016-07-24

Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide

Duration: 113.0 minutes

Words: ~22,062

Alright. Please sit down, Amy. Can you all hear me? Yes. Because there’s no I’ve gotta shout louder.

Can we close the door? Keep the warmth in. I’m sure the chill will come in. Keep it back and open it. They’re not nervous.

I mean, will they be that nervous if the door is closed? Okay. So as always, let’s start with just a little prayer, which is expressing two thoughts. For those of us in the room who already identify with being Buddhist, the first two lines reiterate our reliance on the Buddha and his teachings. And the second two lines are expressing an altruistic reason for sitting here together listening to these teachings, these approaches, these attitudes, these Buddhist way of seeing the world, thinking we’re gonna listen to these teachings to develop our amazing potential so that in turn, we can be of benefit to others, which is kind of a long term goal, you know, develop two wings of the bird, wisdom and compassion.

Okay. The second line, when some usually we say, what it means by listening, it means from the merit of practicing the six — the generosity and the other perfections. But here, when it’s in the context of the teachings, say by the merit of listening to the teachings. So instead of that, it’s. So why courageous compassion?

You know, because we when we think of compassion, we tend to think it’s soft and sweet and sad, that kind of thing. You know? And then we certainly tend to think of innocent victims. I think this is these are the objects about compassion. In normal world, I think, compassion is for people who are innocent.

I think it’s a very strong point. For who you know, where bad things happen who don’t seem to deserve it. Whereas if you see them, you know, some and that’s and so it’s only it’s it’s for those with that kind of suffering. So in other words, our view of compassion maybe we could say is quite limited, quite limited. If we take the Buddhist view, the big picture point of view, actually, it’s quite shocking.

And we’re gonna this is what we’re gonna go into, and you’re gonna soon see what it means by courageous, you know. So it’s just holding us you know, you could say that the whole point of the path, it’s true, is the compassion. The compassion wing. It’s where it’s like the action wing. It’s where the political wing is where you help others.

I mean, we live in this interdependent world, don’t we? You know, we function in relation to others. So instead of harming, we try to help. That’s the goal, you could say. That’s the job of the bodhisattvas and the Buddha.

But as his holiness Dalai Lama says, compassion is not enough. You gotta have wisdom. As Lama Zopa says, meaning well is not enough. You gotta have wisdom. So this is why, you know, if you look at the structure of the teachings, if you look at this Tibetan packaging of the teachings that we may be very familiar with called the Lamrim, this gradual path, this course, basically.

I mean, I think a twenty first or twentieth century term better to translate lam rim as, you know, with gradual path and kinda quaint. What’s that mean? But it just means a course, you know, it’s a course. And if you if you engage in this course, you you graduate as a Buddha, basically. So we all know if we know the Lamrim, you got the the lower scope and middle scope.

Well, again, another way I prefer to say that is junior school, high school. Well, compassion is the university level. Compassion is the great scope. Compassion is the university level. You know?

It’s it’s everything leads to that. And we know straight away if you have a course, obviously, the most advanced comes after the earlier stuff. It kinda goes without saying. But that’s the way that you approach of this Lamrim. And so the the wisdom wing is where you’re you’re dealing with yourself.

You’re looking at yourself. You start with yourself. Junior school actually is where you learn, first of all, to behave nicely, abide by the laws of karma, back off, don’t harm others, control your body, control your speech. Why? Because at the moment, our speech and our body, which are servants of our ridiculous delusions, are what cause us suffering now and in the future and what cause others harm, you know.

So the very first level is like sort of almost like almost playing safe of Buddhist practice is back off and don’t harm others. But the reason Buddha would exhort us not to harm others, and this is what we’ve been talking about karma a few days ago, is because it’s gonna harm us. So the reason to practice morality is because somebody said so, which is our typical view. I’m supposed to be a good girl. No.

Because Buddha says, you better behave well, honey, because otherwise, you’re gonna harm yourself. So it’s almost like you got compassion for yourself. That’s how we’d state it, I think, in the in the west. Working on your so that you control your body and speech, and then you have the luxury of going to high school. Now you can become your own therapist.

Now you can learn to concentrate and get some meditation and see your own mind and unpack and unravel all the delusions and start to discriminate between those and the positive qualities in your mind. So in other words, the conclusion from all this is you you become this this is a wisdom wing. You become this marvelous person, this amazing, subdued, disciplined, controlled, content, unneurotic, unangry, unattached, unjealous, kind, loving, wise human being. How incredible. If you just see the wisdom wing alone, just that, you’d be phenomenal being.

Now you can say you’re ready to start helping others because now because you’ve lessened your own neurosis, you’re more clear in seeing the way others are, and you can see how they’re all in the same boat. And crucially, this is the point I wanna get into here, the people like us are causing their own suffering. So okay. We wanna develop compassion. So let’s first even define what is compassion.

You know? Let’s get the words clear. Like I’ve been saying, we use these words in very, you know, simple words. All these words are very simple English words. Well, probably each of us in this room would have a different definition.

So we better be really clear about Buddhist definition because actually when you study Buddhist philosophy, Buddhist psychology, the terms are very precise. We need to be communicating clearly. So compassion, if you look at the Buddhist model of the mind, as we’ve been discussing a bit, you got, you know, the in looking to the mental consciousness, which is dealt with very extensively in all the Buddhist literature, you got three categories of states of mind. This is a massively important point to understand Buddhism. Even that little wee light went off.

What happened? Sad little one light disappeared. Oops. Okay. So if we look into this Buddhist model of the mind, you’ve got your so called negative, positive and neutral states of mind.

You learn about this in the Wisdom Wing, because you have to learn about yourself. And this is not a way we tend to think in the West, you know. And I think in the West, our models of the mind, we tend to think, you know, a regular person, a reasonable person, has some anger, some jealousy, some depression, some love, some compassion, hopefully more of the good than the bad. But that’s a normal human being. You know, you got equal the kind of we give them all equal status, we tend to mix them up a lot.

And but whereas the Buddhist view, and that we’re not used to that, but if we start to hear it, it really rings bells. It’s got this absolutely clear distinction between the neurosis and the virtues. And part of our absolutely fundamental job of being our own therapist, as Lama Yeshe likes to put it, in the wisdom wing in high school, is to learn to know the mind deeply and well so that we can discriminate between this stuff. And the trouble is it’s like all mixed in one big soup of emotion right now, we really can’t tell one bit from another. You know?

And that’s our job. It’s massive. So it’s on the basis of this understanding that the negative states are not at the core of our being and that our goal is to get rid of them, and that the positive states are at the core of our being, are what define us, and eventually we can develop them to perfection. This is a fundamental point that Buddha is making, which is quite unique to the Buddha. So okay.

So compassion is under the positive heading. It’s one of the positive states of mind, the altruistic states of mind, the valid states of mind, the virtuous states of mind, the productive states of mind that cause us to feel good, pretty simply, and thus help others. And there’s some clarity and wisdom in them, you know? The the neuroses are just plain old rubbish. If we had pure moments of total anger or total attachment or total jealousy, we’d be monsters.

So fortunately, our delusions are tempered by our virtues. But part of the problem of that ironically is it prevents us from seeing the delusions. You know? So we it’s what have this develop this clarity to know our minds. Because what’s holding us back now from seeing others clearly, what’s holding us back from having incredible levels of compassion, which we’re gonna talk about, which Buddha asserts, is the presence in our mind of attachment and all the other dramas, you know, our the self centered rubbish.

So okay. Compassion’s under the positive heading. So there’s these two main qualities they always talk about, love and compassion. Love and compassion. So they’re like flip sides of the same coin.

Love is you can a state a definition of is a sentence to describe it. It’s a thought. Starts with a thought, and it’s may you be happy. Delight in someone’s happiness. That’s love.

May you be happy. You see someone happy, you’re happy for them. It’s it’s necessarily altruistic. Compassion is you see suffering, may they not have suffering. May you not have suffering.

You know, this is expressed in that four what you call those four immeasurable thoughts in a prayer. You know? So compassion, we can say it’s empathy for other suffering. You see suffering and you it’s like you feel it. Oh my god.

That’s terrible. That poor person’s suffering. You know? Compassion and love. So so it’s but and the the the one that’s mainly that’s all the others is assumed to or whatever the right preposition is into something is compassion.

They will come to that. That’s the most advanced level, you’d say. So okay. So compassion is okay. So one of the crucial components of compassion in the body suffering is is like an extra level on top.

So compassion is, oh my god. Look at that suffering. It’s unbearable. But the next one, and this is a courageous one, this is the one that’s unique to the bodhisattvas. We’re gonna go to all this more detail.

Is what they call great compassion. And that’s actually a technical term, maha karuna, great compassion. So not only is it, oh my god, look at that suffering, but it’s what can I do to help? So this is the key characteristic of the compassion of the bodhisattva. And this comes from masses of hard work in the wisdom wing.

You can’t just leap into this one. It’s outrageous, and that’s what we’re gonna show. You know? It it demands already a phenomenal level of inner work already to get to actually having actual actual maha karuna, actual great compassion. It’s like the job of bodhisattvas.

The bodhisattvas’ job is to benefit others. That’s why they, you know, they maybe have gone way beyond needing to be reborn because they cut the root of suffering and they don’t need to be reborn, but they choose to be reborn. They choose to be reborn only for the sake of sentient beings. And, of course, because they’re on their path to Buddhahood. The bodhisattva is a Buddha in the making, you know?

Awakened being is a Buddha, bodhisattva, awakening being. So okay. So so then if it’s empathy for suffering, we better know what suffering means. And again, this word, everybody in this room would define it differently. And this is where we get now it gets shocking because Buddha’s view of suffering is not how we think.

So we gotta go back to high school for this. We learn about the suffering in high school when we listen to the Buddha’s four noble truths. So we’ve gotta understand this, which is like in the wisdom wing before we really get it clear for the for the compassion wing. So okay. What is suffering?

Well, there’s four noble truths. What’s this? You know? Well, actually, it’s just the way they translate it. But, actually, truth is a funny word, isn’t it?

Because as soon as we hear about the truth, it sounds a bit like religion. God’s truth. You know? I’m not complaining. Nothing is wrong with that.

But we, you know, but but we I think in a better word, I like this word, it’s more grounded as facts. What are the facts here? You know? Truth sounds like, come on, it’s like immorality. But what Buddha’s on about is the facts of life.

Facts. Facts. So actually, four noble truths the truths aren’t noble. Don’t know why they call it this, but actually all it means is it’s the four facts for the noble ones, for those who’ve realized this. That that is, you know, the superior being, the ones who’ve achieved realizations who are out of saṃsāra.

I think it’s a noble one, isn’t it? What’s that term? Is it the same as Ārya being? Is it some Yes. Superior oh, that’s superior then.

Oh, really? Are you sure? Noble’s the same as superior? I’ve I’ve heard it is portraits of the of of the Of the noble ones? Yeah.

But is it ones or the ārya beings. So it’s the ārya beings. So aria means noble. Okay. That’s good.

So then a superior being or an aria being is somebody who’s who’s realized emptiness is on is on the path, you know. Okay. So the four facts. They’re the facts of they’re facts of life. And the framework is suffering.

So it’s a really interesting point. This one of Buddha’s first teachings. So the first one is, guess what folks? There is suffering. The second one is there are causes.

The third is, you know what? You can get free of it. I think that should come first. It gives you more enthusiasm, you know. Exactly.

I really think I only I joke about it, but it’s really true. Because when you listen to Buddha’s view of the suffering, you’re gonna see. You wanna go kill yourself. It’s so depressing. Then it’s even worse when you get to the causes because we’re all the cause of it.

You definitely wanna kill yourself by then, and you’re not ready. You can’t you can’t wait to hear the guess what you can get free of it. So I think we should hear that first. Gives you some optimism, gives you some confidence, you know. And then the fourth one is how to do it.

So it’s very practical. But our childhood is always couched in these holy words, you know, something that kind of throws us I think. So okay, the four facts about suffering. Well the first one is there is suffering, so let’s look at this. Because as soon as we understand Buddha’s view of what suffering is, now we understand what compassion is, and that’s where it throws the entire world way open.

And that’s where you can hear, wow. That takes courage. You’re gonna see straight away. So first kind of suffering is what we all agree is suffering. The Buddha would call it the suffering of suffering.

It’s like in-your-face suffering. It’s the obvious one. It’s the one everybody knows about. It’s basically when the bad things happen.

You just look at your own life. The monkeys and the dogs and the ants, look at their behavior. You can deduce by their behavior, but when the bad things happen, they don’t like it. Well, that’s what we call suffering. It’s real simple.

So now okay. A bigger from a bigger point of view, more traditional perspective, what Buddha is referring to here is the lower realms from the bigger picture point of view. But it’s just as valid to talk in the more narrow point of view of this life because we can relate to that much more easily. Okay? So we know what it means when the bad things happen.

You know? So then so we’ll go into this. The second one so, okay, that’s easy enough to have compassion for people who have the bad things happen. But again, like I said, it’s kind of a narrow group. It’s only the innocent victim.

So if we see, you know, an evil person get harmed, we kind of we almost think, well, he deserves it. Serves him right. You know? But if an innocent person, they’re the ones we have compassion for. And I’m sorry that usually comes down to two groups, children and animals, and usually only pets.

Occasionally, other animals as well. So it’s kinda limited. So here we’re aiming at this is the Buddha’s view. We’re trying to get to have compassion for every single sentient being, and this is where it gets shocking. So let’s go back.

Okay. So the first kind of suffering is when the bad things happen. The second kind of suffering, this is really shocking. Buddha calls it the suffering of change, And we can spend months on this one. This is really and this is extremely important to get this one if we wanna understand Buddha’s Buddhism from a bigger picture point of view, what he’s on about.

You know? And basically, the suffering of change is what we call happiness. It’s when the good things happen, and what I’ll explain. And then third is even is very abstract. I mean, we will go into it and we might not.

It’s called all pervasive suffering. So we’ll forget that for now. But the first two are really, really interesting, and this is following on really from our discussion about the mind, about the delusions. When we understand, in particular, attachment, when we understand Buddha’s take on attachment, these true sufferings will make complete sense to us, I tell you. And this is really hard to get because it’s not the way we think in the world.

So, you know, so then if we okay. So if we look into the second noble truth, we’ll go go to the second noble truth for a second, and look at the causes. This is super important to understand as well. First, to get your own, you know, work done in the wisdom wing, but then as a basis for your genuine, stable compassion for all sentient beings. To understand the causes of suffering is fundamental.

Okay. So the causes of suffering, all kinds, at three levels. For the Buddha, there are hundreds. There are millions. You know, he he’s into the law of cause and effect.

And we think simply about the whole world, that’s we all recognize that. It’s called science, you know. It’s called botany. It’s called everything. You put you put this and this and this together and you’re gonna get that.

Once we’ve proven it, then that law is stable and we’re gonna get the result every time. So once you understand botany, you get a rose seed, a bit of water, a bit of soil, bit of sun, a bit of time, you get a rose tree. And that’s it. You won’t get a peach tree. You don’t cross your fingers and hope it won’t turn into an oak tree.

You know you’ll get a rose tree because it’s a natural law. So this is what Buddha deals with. So basically, that’s cause and effect. We get it. And he’s into this one.

He’s into the law of cause and effect. It’s massive. For him, when it comes to human beings, sentient beings, he calls it the law of karma. It’s the law of cause and effect. So Buddha’s deal, given, as we know, that given that our consciousness, this mind of ours, this mind stream that’s a not physical continuity of mental moments, that is not the product of a creator, that is not the product of our parents, is not the function is not a function of the brain, is not a function of the physical body, they work interdependently.

You can say that if you like that the brain is the indicator of what is going on in the mind. That’s the way to say it in the in Buddhism actually. The brain is an indicator. It’s like an indicator of what’s going on, but it’s not the thing itself. That’s a crucial point to get to understand Buddhism.

Buddhism. Consciousness is not physical by definition for the Buddha. In fact, the whole of Buddhism as a world view would collapse into a heap of utter absurdity if consciousness were the brain. It has no basis for any of the views about karma, reincarnation. All of this stuff’s a load of nonsense.

So we’ve gotta take this as a hypothesis here to get our head around the Buddhist view. You know? So your consciousness is this continuity of mental moments. The Buddha would say it’s not the handiwork of somebody else, didn’t begin at any point, is a beginningless continuity, and indeed the Mahāyāna view would say it’s an endless one. Which is kind of a brand new concept to us.

Who thought this? You know? And that and that what goes on in that mind, the main cause of it is that the main cause of our as we’ve discussed before with karma, the main cause of the tendencies in our mind that we come programmed with from the first, second, and conception, the the main cause of the experiences we have at the hands of others, the main cause of the way the impact of the the the environment impacts upon us, the main cause of even our own humanity, the four ways that karma ripens in this law of cause and effect, the main cause, me. We are the boss. We’re our own creators.

Dalai Lama calls karma self creation. It’s not kidding. It’s literally true. Not an evolutionary sense of like a magic wand creation, but like karma is like personal evolution. Every millisecond of what any sentient being is experiencing, thinking, being, having done to them, even their own being, their dogmas, their humanity, main cause, actions done in that mind.

And, of course, it’s dealt this this principle, this natural law is dealt with a massive detail in all the literature. It’s all there for anybody who wants to study it, you know, the principles of this law of cause and effect. So the two main causes of suffering, which are expressed in the second noble truth, the two there are thousands of causes, but you can narrow it down to two main ones such that when we fix those up, we can be in charge of the process and we can stop suffering. You all know that once you’re gonna first establish what the problem is, that’s the first noble truth, there is suffering. Then you gotta establish the causes of the problem, the second noble truth.

And then you, you know, and then you do the fourth one, which is the methods of getting rid of the suffering. So you gotta look clearly locate the problem properly, and then you gotta locate the causes. Otherwise, you can never find the solution, can You got it. That’s clear. It’s obvious.

So with the Buddha, the two main causes are called karma and delusions, and they subsume to the one, delusions. So for the Buddha, the mind, what goes on in here is the starting point, the main cause of all happiness, all suffering, the universes themselves. This is not like a joke. It’s literally true for the Buddha. That’s his trick.

That’s his observation about how things are. So okay. Then I so take a simple example of, you know, a moment of suffering. A moment of suffering. Fred punches me in the nose.

The usual view we have instinctively, emotionally, and the world reinforces this. Our scientific views reinforce it. Our general psychology reinforces it. Why are you suffering, Robina? Fred punched me.

No one’s gonna argue with you. No one’s gonna say, but that’s not the main cause of your suffering, Rubina. Everybody would say, it is the main cause of your suffering. We feel it instinctively, and everybody else buys into that. So that’s the way we think in the world.

So naturally, if I think Fred is the main cause of my suffering, I’m gonna have to fix Fred, aren’t I? Suffer him back, get him to be punished, you know, then you feel like you’ve sorted it out. Well, Buddha disagrees. He doesn’t disagree that that that Fred’s punch plays a role. Clearly, it does.

In just the same way, he would also say, what you know, we say, why are you happy with me? Oh, Fred is so kind to me. He gave me a hundred bucks, you know. So we would assume too that Fred is the main cause of my happiness. And again, look at the world.

This is absolutely clear. This is this philosophy, there’s no question. It’s what we assume is the truth, and all our behavior indicates this. Buddha disagrees. He says it’s way more nuanced than that.

You know? He says the main cause of my happiness is two things, karma and virtues. The main cause of my suffering is karma and delusions, and the main cause of every single sentient being suffering. It’s I mean, this is literally what he’s saying. So to get this clear, which is shocking to us until we start thinking about it, very hard to hear it and even harder to practice it, of course.

Clearly. You know? So then that means that if, you know, clearly we can see Fred punching me, we can say that’s a moment of suffering. So the main cause is a past action, And karma’s pretty personal. You know?

There’s no way Fred would punch me if I hadn’t punched him before. It’s not possible. Second so the the first is the action, the karma, the action. But that’s the real cause of it is the is the is the delusion, the mental action, the delusion that impelled it in the past would have to have been a delusion, like, you know, anger or whatever. Speaking very simplistically here.

And that seed stays in the mind unless you pull it out. Eventually, the karma will ripen, the conditions come together, and you meet this person who two and a half lives ago was your dog or something. I mean, whatever. He’s now called Fred. And out of the blue, seemingly as an innocent victim, I never even met this ridiculous friend.

Here he comes along and punches me in the nose. You know? So of course, we think I’m I’m an innocent victim. This is why we’re shocked. This is why we blame him.

This is why we get angry. We’ve got a counseling, all this stuff. You know? Bad things happen. I’m not saying they don’t, clearly, but our interpretation of it is the point here.

So Buddha’s deal is and this is so hard. I mean, it’s so hard, this one. This is even if we’re Buddhist for fifty years, this is the hardest one to really put our money where our mouth is until we have it clear in our heads first. It’s very hard to apply because everything in us says the opposite. Everything in me says I’m innocent.

Everything in me says he’s the fault. It’s so deep instinctive. Notice it teaches this, you know. It’s so primordial. It’s the way the ego sees it.

So it’s really hard work to hear the Buddha’s view and then to apply it. My goodness. And that’s why it’s not enough just to say, oh, it’s karma. What do you mean? Can you spell it out, please?

No. I don’t know how it works. That’s a bit useless, isn’t it? It’s like saying, oh, how what’s that what what that made that tree grow? Oh, it’s botany.

Oh, can you please explain? No. I don’t know how it works. What good is it? What good is it?

Gotta know how it works. You know the nuts and bolts. You know? So that moment of suffering, and that’s a typical example of suffering, is the first kind of suffering when the bad things happen, which is what we all think of as suffering, then obviously if you think I’m an innocent victim and Fred is the cause, then that tells you behavior from there on. Your attitude, anger is justified.

I’m allowed to be angry. I’m allowed to him back. I’m allowed to sue him, etcetera, etcetera. I mean, look at the world. Is this not the philosophy of the world and of the animals?

Well, Buddha says, it’s not as simple as that. You know? Yes. Fred punch definitely plays a role. Yes.

Fred’s kindness, his hundred dollars, definitely plays a role in my happiness. So a a simple way to put those actions out there, which we think are the main cause, for Buddha, they’re just merely the catalysts. This is a perfect way to put it. But, oh my gosh, this takes time, as I’m saying, you know, to really apply, to start having confidence in. Okay.

So my past action motivated by a delusion is are the two main causes, and they both subsume down to the one. I don’t know what subsume what’s the proper preposition for subsume? I don’t know. Into whatever. Collapse into.

Pardon? Collapse into? No. I want the word subsume. I’m talking about the preposition.

Subsume to, subsume in, subsume what’s the preposition? Five. Five. Bee Bee subsumed? No.

I wanna use assumed the other way. Never mind. I’ll look up my I’ll look up my dictionary. Don’t worry about it. But you get my point.

They come down to those two, to the one. The delusion is the main cause. Buddha’s deal. Wow. So okay.

That’s the first kind of suffering, and that’s already unbelievable. Now straight away before we get to the subtle level of suffering, this is in the wisdom where we learn this for ourselves. Now let’s take this and look at the world. Once we’ve got this for ourselves, this first level of suffering only. Now look at the world and you’re going to see the world is made up of people being harmed and people harming.

Is it not true? The group left over is in of the strangers, but everybody has their enemies and their friends. Would you agree? People have enemies and they have friends. They’ve got people who are being kind to us and people are being mean to us.

Look at the universe. This is how it is. So this is the basis. The ones who are being the the ones who are being harmed at the hands of others, they’re the ones who are the who are the objects of our compassion. But like I said, there’s a very narrow group.

So it’s only the ones who are having some bad things to them, first of all. Only those ones. And second, only a very select group. They’ve got to be innocent. And I mean this.

They’ve got to be innocent victims. Because in the west we don’t have the view of karma, so naturally if, you know, I see Mary being punched in the nose by, you know, Joe, and I know that Mary hasn’t met Joe before, then clearly, I will have compassion for Mary because she is an innocent victim. She’s never met Joe. How dare this bloke come along out of the blue for no cause and punch Mary in the nose. That’s the way we think of compassion.

Do we not agree? And that’s why we love to have compassion for innocent children. They’re our favorite and I I am sort of being sarcastic here, but that’s our favorite object of compassion and animals, the poodles and the pussies and things, know, the ones we’re attached to. Not the rats. You know?

Not the rats. Very small group. So okay. So then we even still, forget that. We see the world, people, sentient beings, get harmed by others.

They’re the ones we have compassion for. But now, if you straight away hear this view about karma, it’s a bit shocking. And now you suddenly hear that that rat, you know, that pussy cat, your cute pussy cat who gets harmed by somebody. Well, what’s oh, dear. Well, the cause of my suffering is my own past action and my delusion.

That’s why I got punched in the nose. Well, that must apply to my pussy as well. Do you mean my pussy must have done something bad in the past to get harmed by that awful person? Oh, my dear. You’d be stuck, you know.

What are gonna do with that? Then you go, oh, maybe the pussy deserves it. Why should I have compassion? We can’t so we can’t stand this view. But the real point is this, the bigger point that’s implied by this view of karma, that I am suffering now at the hand of Fred because I have harmed Fred in the past.

And guess what? Fred having harmed me, he will suffer in the future. He will be he will be the victim of the next life. So as soon as you hear that, your whole world explodes and opens up. It’s too shocking for us.

Because this so called innocent victim, which we think didn’t ask to get born and got born in his mommy’s womb and Noah now, you know, blah blah blah blah, suddenly it opens up. You realize the pussy was a harmer in the past and is now getting harmed. And the harmer now will be the pussy in the future who will get harmed or the victim. So completely your whole world changes right there with that one view of our karma. And this is just for the first kind of suffering.

It completely changes everything. And already this is the basis for compassion. So straight away you could argue that the body suffers having this so clear for themselves, their heart breaks more for the harm of the pussy than the pussy. Because why? Because the pussycat’s suffering, its own suffering, which it caused itself has just finished.

But the person who’s harming the pussycat, their suffering is just beginning. So this is like this is just this suffering alone. Forget the subtle levels of suffering, but just the first kind of suffering, the obvious one, which is when the bad things happen. Having this view of karma completely tips the whole thing upside down and it blows our mind. And we don’t like to think about it.

We’ve got to think it through logically, otherwise it makes no sense. And because we bring all this emotion of innocent victims, there’s a very deep assumption in our heart. Very deep assumption. Because we have this total belief in the materialist view. We don’t think it’s belief.

We think it’s science. So we think it’s true. What Buddha would suggest very quietly that this is a belief system, Rabina, and maybe you should check your facts here, you know, because he disagrees. He says your mother and father did not make you. They gave you a brain.

They gave you a body. No problem. How kind they were. But, honey, they did not give you a mind. You brought your own mind with you, sweetheart.

There’s a fundamentally profoundly different view which shifts everything when you see the world in this way. So that means straight away, when we think just this kind of suffering, forget the subtler kinds, the whole world looks different. But it takes time. It means every sentient being is experiencing the fruits of their own past actions, and every sentient being is doing those actions which will cause their future suffering. So we’re in this nightmare of of being harmed and blaming everybody else, and so increasing our own suffering.

It’s like the the basis for compassion of the bodhisattva is this precisely, that we’re profoundly ignorant of karma, of our own role in our own lives. And so we have this dreadful self pity victim view of the universe, you know, for ourselves and others. And it just increases our suffering, the Buddha says, because it brings anger and rage and blame and and that whole dualistic view. But having this view of karma, I mean, the first kind of suffering changes everything. But we gotta think it through because it doesn’t come naturally and it doesn’t feel comfortable.

And it’s not enough to say, oh, it’s all karma. You gotta squeeze yourself into that view. You gotta spell it out to yourself so it sounds it’s a logical proposition. And it’s still only a hypothesis. I mean, who’s clairvoyant in this room?

Who can see it’s true? But you gotta start with your hypothesis, and you gotta start with the clear words being able to present it. But it’s not comfortable. And you wouldn’t say it in the normal world. Mhmm.

You know? You’d you’d be put into jail if you I mean, I remember one time years ago in England, some one of the managers of I think one of the soccer teams. He had this view of karma, and he sort of indicated that some person in a wheelchair due to past karma, their suffering, he was sacked. He was sacked because he indicated the karma. That sounds so shocking to our ears.

Shocking. It’s very ingrained, very intense. And this is what, you know, you think of the Dalai Lama when he teaches. He teaches to the world. You know?

He hardly ever talks about karma. He never spells it out. He doesn’t. Because he’s talking to the big world, you know, even though he has philosophy and things. It’s all there.

And it’s all there in the teachings. And it’s the fundamental part of our first stages of practice to get ourselves together, and in a way, you could say, to bring incredible compassion for ourselves. This is why the wisdom wing is fundamentally necessary first. To just to have compassion the way we have it now with no understanding of ourselves is just only compassion for a few people. And then because it’s also polluted by our attachment, it brings anger and stress and depression and despair, you know.

So the way we think of compassion now is so miniature and the Buddha would say not very stable because it’s based on a whole series of wrong assumptions, the Buddha would suggest, you know. Are we communicating here? Yes. It’s kind of intense, you know. Mhmm.

And that means this view of karma, I’ve known for myself in my own life, you know, this view of karma. I know when I first heard the Buddha’s teachings, the view of karma was the one I really felt in my life I I was I’d been missing, and I love somehow I felt that I like very much the view of karma. I like very much this explanation of the universe. Because basically it’s Buddha’s explanation of the universe, you know, the nuts and bolts of why, what, who, which, why dogs, why anything. The you the whole universe is Buddha’s worldview actually.

And because he’s not a creator, he has not made this up. He’s observed. This is a this is a major point, by the way. This is a huge point actually. Oh, there we go.

Look at that. We just had hoop realizations. A major point. You go. So okay.

Yeah. Go. Go for it. Okay. Yeah.

I think we’re so used to the view of creative religions. And I really again, I have to keep saying this because I’m not criticizing. I mean, I was a devoted Catholic, you know, I love the view. But there’s a massive difference. The philosophical position is a massive difference, and it’s really crucial to you have to understand this and to spell it out clearly.

So we know what we’re saying when we say we have a Buddhist view, you know. So even and this is where it even comes down to karma to really understand understanding morality and and what is good and what is bad, what is moral, what is immoral, where does even that view come from, you know? What’s the basis of this? Is this is this is crucial to understand. So the the usual view we have a religious or spiritual is a creative religion.

And that means a superior being who created the universe. I’m not criticizing this to you. I think it’s an incredible view. And the implications of it are amazing, you know, the person really practices. The the view that God is the boss, and therefore it’s God’s law.

That they talk about natural law and God’s law. So I remember always, I quote this every time, my Jesuit priest friend, I asked him, what by definition is a sin? He says, by definition it is doing what God said not to do. So he disobeying God’s law. He said there is some element of natural law there, but the clear one is God’s law.

Now that’s profound, but the point is this is not the Buddha’s view. There’s no such thing as Buddha’s law. That’s like a joke. He’s not a creator. There can’t be.

He’s an observer. In other words, what natural law is is what just occurs, isn’t it? It’s just what happens. So people in the West were pretty clever at this stuff. So a mathematician is what?

A person who has you know, mathematicians don’t invent mathematics. They’ve invented a method. That clever Arab fellow who went from the silly old Roman x’s and v’s, remember? Who came up with the zero to nine or whatever it is, I don’t know. He didn’t make up counting, he simply articulated.

There’s always been one or two, we just never had words for it. Do you understand what I’m saying? He created the method for expressing it. Botany has already been there. It’s natural the sun, the water, the soil, the temperature, all that gravity, and things grow.

But we can learn botany and we can harness that energy, can’t we? We can learn that law. They are natural laws. Well, Buddha says karma’s a natural law. He’s not a creator.

You’ve got to hear this point. But we’re so used to thinking religion means something above, from on high, imposed upon us that is to be believed. This is not, not, not the Buddha’s view. It’s a natural law. This is shocking to us.

It takes us time to get our head around this. Because, you know, we always ask, where does all this come from? How do we know about reincarnation? How can we prove it? Well, just read Buddha’s teachings.

He’s presented it. So where did he get it from? I always quote this example. It’s so simple, but you don’t get it. If you read a cookbook, you’ve got to ask them, where does this information come from?

Where did this person get these ideas from? Well we have to produce either they’ve actually had the experience themselves and have made those cakes, right? Which means it’s experiential. They’ve observed it themselves and approved presenting their recipes. Or they’re being humble, and they’re presenting their mummy’s recipes.

Or they made it up. Is it not true? Or or stole it or made it up. There’s only those four options if you think about it. They’re someone else’s ideas that they’ve stolen.

They’re they’re presenting their mother’s recipes or it’s their own direct experience. Would not agree with that? Well, the same here. Where does Buddhism come from? Buddha’s mind.

He didn’t create it. He’s observed. So he has observed with his own mind that karma is how things are. He’s observed reincarnation is how things are. He’s observed that the consciousness is not physical, it’s how things are.

This is natural law. This is not what we’re used to thinking of as natural law, you know, that’s all. It’s a bit of a shock to us. But this is a necessary point get to understand Buddha. He’s not a creator.

He doesn’t assert a creator. Therefore it’s not from on high, you know. That’s why I always like to say I’m taking this as my working hypothesis. And I mean it sincerely. Okay.

Okay, so the first kind of suffering was when the bad things happen. And that we is the and that thing is the trouble is that’s the only kind of suffering we know. So Buddha gets into more subtle now. The second one is called the suffering of change. It sounds kind of innocuous and kind of boring.

So first of all, what’s the fundamental point he’s making here? So this is where we have to understand the causes of suffering, which means we’ve to hop to the second noble truth for a second and look more deeply at the delusions, because delusions are the main cause of suffering. karma, actions of body and speech that harm others, driven by a delusion are the two main causes of suffering subsumes down to this one of the delusions. So in order to understand this kind of suffering, and indeed the first kind, we’ve got to understand the causes. It’s obvious.

You’ve got to understand the cause of suffering, to understand the suffering, so you can have a solution, which is the fourth one. Okay. So in those delusions, as we’ve been talking in the past, in the mental consciousness, Buddha’s view of the mind, three categories, the negative, the positive, and the neutral. So just to remind us, neutral states of mind this term doesn’t mean that they’re not important. It means they don’t have the characteristics of virtue, like compassion, love, generosity, but in their nature positive, in their nature source of happiness and the source of benefiting others.

Relatively speaking, in sync with reality. The delusions, the neuroses, the misconceptions, afflictions, the disturbing emotions are these ridiculous, disturbing, demented states of mind that are leading us up garbled paths, they’re completely misconceptions, and they’re deeply disturbing. They’re the source of all suffering. The neutral ones, I like to call them the mechanics of your mind. They’re the things like concentration, good memory, alertness, all the clever parts of our mind that actually are developed to a marvelous degree by doing this concentration meditation technique these amazing Indians invented three thousand years ago, which the Buddha uses.

We need to hone those, you know? So they’re neutral insofar as they’re neither virtuous nor non virtuous. And the crucial thing about these neutral ones is that anybody needs everybody needs them. A sniper needs good concentration, doesn’t it? Don’t they?

So a murderer or a meditator, you’ve got to have these good ones. You’ve to have concentration, you’ve got to have good memory, obviously. That’s why they’re called neutral in that sense. So okay, there’s those. Then you’ve got the positive ones, you know, the ones that are useful and helpful to others.

Then you got the negative ones, and they’re the ones we’ve got to understand. We’ve got to understand these. This is and this is again the the clarity that Buddhist psychology goes into uses to understand these is quite unique to the Buddhist view, I would suggest, So okay, there’s a hierarchy of these negative states of mind. I like to put it that way. Speaking simply, the root delusion, they call it that, the mother of them all, the most primordial, and we practically have a name for it in our culture, we probably don’t.

In fact, what this root delusion assumes, a neurotic I, a separate sense of an I, is what we affirm in our culture. So it’s this neurotic, fear based, frantic, separate, unhappy, neurotic sense of I, deep in our bones. So now, on the basis of that neurotic sense of an I, a wrong sense of I, the main delusion effectively as far as these four facts for the noble ones is concerned is called attachment. This craving to get what that fantasy eye wants every millisecond. And one of the functions of this attachment is junkie to only get the nice things.

It can only this attachment, and it’s like a motor that drives us throughout the day. It’s their default mode, naturally, all the time. We’ve programmed ours, we come programmed with this from, Buddha says, countless lives of perfecting attachment. It’s even the cause of having this type of this body, you know. So attachment’s massive.

It’s not just, oh yeah, I like chocolate cake. It’s way more subtle than that, way more nuanced, way more multifaceted. So it’s the energy of dissatisfaction, which is this pain of the suffering of a separate I, the craving to get something, the manipulating to get it, the anticipation of getting it, the exaggeration of its deliciousness, the getting of it and then the grasping it and the holding of it and then the devastation when the whole bubble bursts because it’s a big fantasy, which is very hard to see. So this attachment runs the show basically. Effectively in the Four Noble Truths it is the main cause of suffering day to day, which is quite a shock.

So now we’ll get to the point now. So as we’ve been discussing, this isn’t like the like I said the motor that runs us. So the point is this is this junkie that is always there every second underpinning everything and it’s always it’s got a and it’s naturally anxious. That’s what anxiety is frantically, desperately trying to manipulate to get things to be the way attachment wants, which is what I want every second. That’s what attachment is, it’s energy to get what I want every second and it’s under everything.

Our virtues are all working on top of it, and are polluted by it, but we don’t notice. And our virtues are our saving grace. But this runs the show until we’re highly realised. This is going to be the main motivator of most of what we do, which initially is quite depressing. So, this attachment is a junkie to get only the nice things.

So guess what? What the first kind of suffering is, is when attachment doesn’t get what it wants. It’s when the bad things happen. The red light, the mean husband, the punch in the nose, that’s being sacked, the person insulting us to the most intense level of suffering. It sounds cruel to say that when you really get abused by somebody that the reason you’re suffering is because of your attachment.

It sounds monstrous, doesn’t it? It sounds like totally monstrous. But this is literally the way to unpack it and understand it. It’s such a junkie inside us. And it’s not criticizing.

Because you see we have this victim mentality, victim oppressor mode very strong in our bones. So as soon as we hear that our own delusions are the main cause of our suffering, again we can’t help but think you’re blaming yourself. It’s blame, know, you’re blaming the victim. That’s very hard to get past, but that’s not what’s being said. Buddha says when we really start to understand our own attachment, the delusions and how they are the cause of our suffering, it’s like our heart would break for ourselves.

We’d be pained for ourselves, we’d have such compassion for ourselves. We’d be in tears for ourselves. But What we do is we beat ourselves with a big stick, know, because we call it bad. This is our neurotic guilt, which is just internalised anger. We hear it like that.

So wrong, but it’s why it’s scary to hear it. That’s why it’s shocking to hear that another person has caused their own suffering. You mean they’re the blame, you know? We can’t help but hear it like that. It’s very deep inside us.

So, you could argue then, the first kind of suffering, which is when the bad things happen, is when attachment doesn’t get what it wants. The husband saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, not turning up on the right time at the appointment, dropping something, the loud noise, the day to day things forget the big things, day to day stuff that triggers our aversion. Aversion is a very bare bones powerful word that is the response when attachment doesn’t get what it wants. So here we are, motored, this motor inside us propelling us frantically to get what I want every second. It’s the junkie that drives us.

The second it’s thwarted, the second the attachment is stopped in its tracks, that’s what aversion is. That second is what arises. That second aversion arises. So when you get punched in the nose, guess what? Really strong aversion.

How dare you do that to me? Shock the pain. Added, you know, the suffering increased hugely by the feeling of being an innocent victim, which increases the anger hugely. So the bad things happening, you could say, is when attachment doesn’t get what you want. Well guess what the second kind of suffering is?

Is when attachment does get what it wants. This is what’s so depressing, because it’s what we call happiness. And we understand it, if you use the analogy, attachment — a good word for it — is being a junkie. It’s addiction. And I’m not joking, this is technically correct.

Just in our culture, it’s sort of like normal everyday attachment, which is actually like a nightmare. We consider it normal, we don’t call it a mental illness, you know. It’s only when it’s very severe like for alcohol or heroin or you want to jump on twenty two girls every day or something, then you then we can say you’ve got a problem with attachment. Buddha would call it all attachment, it’s just a question of degree. So we call one lot normal, then the other one is a mental illness.

Well Buddha says guess what folks, we’re all mentally ill And I say this but I mean it literally, I think Buddha would have liked that phrase mental illness. Attachment in any level is a mental illness. Anger is a mental illness. We use it very distinctly in our culture for an extra special kind, extra level, you know? Mental illness.

Mental health issues. We’ve all got mental health issues. If you have attachment, you have any level of anger, level of low self esteem, any level of jealousy, that’s a mental health issue. Hear those words please. It kind of really grounds it, you know?

Are we communicating? When we get this, this is all coming from attachment. So in other words if you can try and imagine, think of it logically, if you can imagine you’ve got to a certain level of high realization where you have gone beyond attachment, and we’re talking really high level here, there’s levels of it. Even, even, even when you realize if you’re on the wisdom wing only, and you’ve achieved your own nirvana, there’s still levels of delusions there. Subtle levels of these delusions.

In the different levels of the Buddha’s teachings the Hīnayāna and the Mahāyāna there are different levels of these delusions, you know? I was reading His Holiness yesterday. Still, more levels, subtle levels, still imprints left in the mind. We’re talking high high high level of realization. Don’t have false expectations.

Attachment is primordially deep. It’s way way to go before we utterly rid of it, do not hold your breath. When we understand how primordial it is, we’ll be more humble with ourselves and more understanding and more cautious and more reasonable and not expect fantasies, you know, beat ourselves up. It’s kind of bizarre. So if you can imagine being a person, you know, who’s got some renunciation, so because already it’s a very interesting concept, renunciation.

It sounds always forbidding to us. We visualize a person who’s very depressed, doesn’t like anything, sits there looking miserable, know, unhappy or they’re so renounced. No, that’s not renunciation. What you’ve renounced, this is from Wisdom Wing to some degree, not before even before you’ve realized emptiness. Yeah, well before that.

You’ve got some degree of renunciation when you’ve understood what suffering is and its causes. These are the two components of renunciation. You’ve got to know what suffering is, and you’ve got to be sick of it. I’m up to here with suffering. You’ve to know what suffering is to whatever degree, and you’ve got to be up to here with it.

You’ve got to be sick of it, you’ve to be fed up with suffering. And second, obviously, you’ve now got to know what the causes are, and that’s your own ridiculous rubbish, your own past karma and your own delusions. They are the components of developing renunciation. So how would you be if you had some semblance of this? Well I’ll tell you, you’d be an amazing, gorgeous person.

You’d be stable as a rock. You’d be disciplined. You’d have controlled body and speech. You’d be living purely in your vows. But because you’ve got less attachment, anger, less jealousy, less depression, what have you got in place of it?

Not like nothing. You’d be having more love, more contentment, more joy, more compassion, more fulfillment, more self confidence. You’d be a gorgeous person. You’d be the person you want to become. This is before you even realise emptiness.

So attachment, you’ve less attachment, you’ve got more contentment. By definition, they’re the opposite. You’re more fulfilled. You’re more content in who you are. You’re more self confident.

You’re more joyful. You’re more loving. You’re more forgiving. You’re more stable. You’re more disciplined.

You’re more fearless. Who wouldn’t want to be this way? That’s what you’ll like if you’re renounced. But when you hear the literature and hear the words, it sounds so fundamentalist, you know? You’ve given up attachment.

You’ve given up this. So even when so it sounds depressing. So what Lama Zopa says, Lama Zopa says, you’ve got renunciation when just the thought of another moment of attachment is so disgusting, it’s like being in a septic tank. Now it always sounds so dramatic when they talk.

Think when Tibetans talk they always sound like the worst fundamentalist, you know? The way they talk is always so it sounds like a knife in the heart, isn’t it? You think, oh, got so full of attachment, I’m supposed to think it was disgusting, how can I think that? What is that? But if you think of what you’d be like if you didn’t have it, it seems kind of joyful.

Oh wow, wouldn’t mind being like that? If you go on about attachment every time you have it and you think of next time you eat chocolate cake and it’s like being in a septic tank, get bit depressed because you know it’s not like a septic tank, you’ll love it. I mean we swim in attachment right now, we enjoy our attachment, we are junkies for both now. So when we hear how you’d be if you didn’t have it, we go oh wow, I wouldn’t mind that. Joyful, content, courageous You wouldn’t be up and down like a yo yo You’d know why you’d be anxious There’s no way you’d neurotic There’s no way you’d be depressed There’s no way you’d be angry I mean it sincerely I’m not even talking about before you realise emptiness And that means understanding suffering and its causes.

That’s what brings this. Not, you know, you’re like in a septic tank, what’s so repulsive and that kind of thing, which is how their body suffers are, they realise it. But just to know what you would be like if you didn’t have attachment, they go, Oh wow, I wouldn’t mind that. Do you understand? That’s how you would be.

Then it really starkly shows us how attachment is, what it is, and how it causes aversion. It’s the source, you would not have anger, you would not have depression if you didn’t have attachment. Absolutely crystal clear. Because aversion is the response when attachment gets thwarted, which is a thousand times a day, this is underneath, you know, subtle subtle subtle. Are we communicating?

We’re have some question time. Look. Eleven thirty already. My gosh. I think it’s tea break.

We’re all leaving. Just getting a mic. Oh, okay. Good. So very good.

Okay. So questions for a second, then we can have a tea break. Well, was fuming about the tea break, aren’t we? Is that the plan? What time?

Lunch time’s twelve point three zero. Okay good, we’ll see how you feel. So any questions people? Yes? Do you reckon it’s really good when thinking about karma to think about the things that it isn’t?

Like it isn’t punishment, it isn’t something about trying to understand what it really is, like that it’s consequence, That’s a massive massive point, yes. We have to unpack all those. In other words, we have to notice that at the moment when we hear it’s karma, we’ve got to look at how we respond. And that means we’ve got these assumptions in our mind of punishment and reward. That’s a very deep philosophical assumption in our mind.

I think we’ve all got it, it’s very profound inside us. So that’s why we’ve got to the more and more we hear these things, what they’re doing is attacking our current assumptions. And because we take our current assumptions as the truth, what we really have to do is question, unpack our assumptions. So the deep assumption we have, because the view and this is where I’m not criticizing Christianity. It’s a it’s a marvelous view.

I’m I’m really not. But we’ve got to look at the philosophical position that it is. At the simple level, and even in our materialist world, it’s the same view. In my mother’s house, okay, by definition a sinner is doing what God said not to do, so therefore God has the power to punish and reward. It’s a reasonable concept we all have, but it’s the same in my mother’s household.

You don’t have to be religious to have When mommy says do that or don’t do that, I will say why not? And we know her answer because I say so. So that’s the view in our mind that we have of morality. The morality is don’t do this, why not? Because someone said so.

So naturally, then we want to this is the reverse then because we want to do what Mummy said, because we want to be a good girl, and this brings us to the attachment to be seen as a good girl Oh Mummy, I did what you said, so we want her now to reward us. We’ll very depressed if she says do the dishes and we do it and she doesn’t notice. We want to be rewarded, but guess what? We don’t want to be punished, so we hide our bad qualities. Oh, mommy didn’t see me do it, I got away with it.

That’s our view right now. The Buddha says that’s like infantile. So that’s deep inside us, we can’t hear karma first. It sounds like punishment. One of our commonest questions, everybody in the world, we’re all the same.

You mean that child deserved to be raped? Where’s that view coming from? This assumption of innocent victim who didn’t ask to get born, whose fault it is not, and we always ask about the bad things, you know? Because karma includes good things, but we only and I say this and I mean it and I say it every time and it’s not meant to be mean or anything but all these years I’ve been a Buddhist and this is myself and everybody else I’ve never ever ever ever had anybody ever ever ever and I say it like this, ever ever ever say, you mean Raveena that child who has a beautiful mother and a beautiful father and money in the bank, health and beauty and good schooling and friends and support, do you mean they deserve it? Are you hearing me?

And the answer is yes. Because we created it ourselves. But you see we only ask the bad things, we only ever ask why do bad things happen. We never ask why do good things happen. We take them for granted and that again shows our assumption.

You know we’re sitting in this room right now, right? Hello George. You haven’t seen George for a long time. We’re sitting in this room right now, would you agree, relatively speaking, it’s sort of fairly nice isn’t it? No one’s attacking us, there’s no terrorists coming in the door, it’s not that cold or that hot, it’s not that noisy, you understand, it’s quite pleasant, but we’re not sitting here wondering why this is happening.

We’re not sitting here, I wonder what I did to create the cause to have a peaceful environment. We take it for granted, but the second a bad thing happens, like when the lights go off or something happens or the heating goes off, why is that happening? So what that’s telling us is the assumption in our mind of greedy grasping vampirish attachment which says I deserve good things and then the aversion and the shock that I don’t deserve bad. But it’s an assumption, Buddha says there’s no logic to it. If you look in your bank account and you see no dollars there, you don’t go How dare there be no dollars in my bank?

I deserve dollars! Well you don’t deserve dollars if you didn’t work for it. I mean we know that, you’d never say you deserve it if you haven’t worked. Well, you don’t deserve anything if you haven’t earned it, Buddha says. Good life is earned.

You’ve created the cause by working incredibly hard at virtue. Unbelievable. Lama Zopa says even just being good is not enough. We must have practiced virtue in the context of not only a spiritual path, but in the context of keeping vows in the past just to get the life we’ve got now, you know, which we completely take for granted. It’s only when the bad things happen.

So this is massive when we unpack it all, but we’ve got to unpack it. We have so many assumptions and we don’t notice, you know. So you’ve got to unpack like this. karma is a law, karma is natural, karma is like botany, that’s why I use examples as well as what you’re saying. I mean, we know if you’ve got if you have a garden and it’s full of weeds and it’s your garden you’ve been there for twenty years you can’t say I deserve flowers which is very bizarre because you know the assumption is flowers come from someone else isn’t it?

Isn’t it? But you know it’s your garden I’m sorry as much as you don’t like it, it’s your garden honey. Well I love the analogy of a garden. Your life is your garden. And that brings this power to own it.

And even from the view of karma, already confidence comes, courage comes, and therefore compassion for others. That’s the point we’re getting to here. It’s compassion for yourself first, ownership, courage, change and then others. Easy to have compassion for the pedophile. Easy to have compassion for these terrorists, for the maniacs who shoot people every day.

Easy to have compassion for them. Easy! I really mean it. But without karma there’s no reason to have compassion for them. This is too peculiar.

So we’ve to use our noggins, know, we’ve got to think it through, we’ve to be mathematical, clear, logical, I’m not kidding now, you know. All our assumptions are so deeply ingrained, riddled with nonsense, the Buddha would say. Do you understand? One of the things I have trouble reconciling or getting my head around for many years is the idea of karma and justice. For many years you’ve been thinking this one?

Yeah. Good, go on, go on. Well, know, I’m really active helping the world be a better place. Fantastic. In Aboriginal activism primarily.

And I’ve dedicated a lot of my working life and my personal life to standing up against the So where’s the contradiction for you? What’s the contradiction darling? I feel like I’m a very privileged person and I very much come from a place of white privilege that’s something I’m very conscious of. That’s right. And so I am acutely aware of that.

Good. I guess it’s very hard to see what my friends and my colleagues, the sort of injustice safe place Why is it hard? Because Hang away. You said for several years. Are you Buddhist?

I have to know that to talk to I mean I’ve not taken refuge over this. I’ve spent ten years in and out of here in and out of Sydney. Like we’re talking here, have you thought like this? Yes. So how come you can’t reconcile?

I don’t know why. What do you mean you don’t know? I just have a really strong sense of I understand you intellectually Well that’s a good start isn’t it? Yeah What’s the problem? You have to start with the intellectual first don’t you?

So we start to see, we’re constantly seeing people That’s fine, that’s called compassion But you know why they’re happening. Listen, if a person’s got cancer, it upsets you to see their suffering, doesn’t it? Would you agree that? Would you agree with that sweetheart? Yes, of course.

So naturally in the ordinary world, so compassion is Oh my god that poor person is suffering. Now the next step is How can I help? Would you agree with that? Next step, that’s great compassion, that’s where you put your money where your mouth is. But in order to help you have to know the name of the problem and you have to know the causes, would you agree with that?

So then does it make you up happy? I know you’re about to burst into tears, that’s good! Stop! No, you’ve to listen to me, you ask me a question, you’ve to listen me, but pry as well, it’s perfectly fine to pry Listen, I know you understand. So when a person has cancer you’ve got to know the cause which is they smoke too many Marlboroughs, right?

Would you agree with that? Yeah. So does that make you feel bad that they cause their own suffering? I mean you know they cause their own suffering. Why that distress you so much?

Does that distress you so much that they cause their own suffering? Because you see my point now? You don’t have a problem with that do I think my idea of people causing their own suffering is qualified to certain things By what? It’s qualified by smoking a packet of Marlboroughs. Right but you do accept that?

So it’s conditional. What do mean conditional? As in I think people’s can’t see my friends who experience because out of ignorance they’ve caused their own suffering. Can you accept that as a principle? Can you accept that as a principle?

Now we have to go to the next step. Darling, you’ve got a very intelligent mind so think it through your past the emotion, if you can. So the next step is to expand the idea of a consciousness existing before this life and after this life. Can you get that as a concept? You can posit that as a possibility.

You can do that. Okay, So if you posit that as a possibility So in this life, have you seen people do mean things to other people? Yes. Right. So if you posit this possibility, is it too hard for you to think that by putting imprints in their mind, doing negative things out of ignorance, unless they purify it, that’s going to ripen as their own suffering in the future.

Can you take that as a possibility? Yes. Well then, therefore you must see that if a person is in this life suffering, they must have done something bad in the past. That’s not too difficult. You’ve got three little steps there.

You’ve got to look at what it is that prevents you from thinking that through. I think it just makes me sad. But but now that’s emote I know what you mean, but what is sad? It’s a big fat word to many things. You don’t like it.

No, stop, stop, stop. It means you don’t like it because you’ve got the view of blame in your mind. That’s why. But then you don’t have it when it comes to the person smoking cigarettes. So there’s a lot of emotion and then there’s guilt.

Guilt because you’re white, so if you’re white and I’ve got white privilege, who caused that? Who caused that? Right, from doing what in the past? Being virtuous. If you’re treated with respect, that’s the fruit of having treated someone else with respect.

If you’re born in a culture where you’re treated like shit, that’s because you’ve been arrogant and harmed others in the past. I know that’s the trouble, we can’t stand hearing that, If you’ve got an emotional view of compassion, oh these poor aboriginal, these poor people so innocent, that’s bullshit and it’s insulting people. When you have a view of karma we are all in the same boat. We are all life after life after life after life suffering and then being suffering suffering and then being harmed endlessly. You’ve got to have the big picture for this to all make sense.

If you keep it small like you’re doing, you’ll always feel sad and tortured, you know? So you’ve to use your noggin and think it through. It’s a logical proposition and you can’t get a feeling your head around it until you think it through logically It might be a load of rubbish but you’ve got to posit it if you want to Otherwise don’t go there, worry about it It’s up to you But can you not hear what I’m saying? I can’t It’s just something I struggle with. Yeah but can you see why you’re struggling?

Why? Tell me. Yes. Why? Because I think I struggle with it because my idea of karma I think it’s like you’re saying it’s very shocking to hear that this applies to everyone and it’s and I can’t see it as a limited that it’s sorry not limited that applies to everyone that it is a universal law and that’s And darling it applies to happiness.

Excuse me, I mean we never ask the question why do good things happen? And the fact is it’s insulting your friends who experience racism every day as if that you know, that’s way for me when I used to work with people in prison. It can be really insulting. Our compassion is insulting. Oh these poor people suffering.

It’s insulting. So you’re insulting your friends who are suffering by having all this pity for them. Excuse me, I I realise even without the view of karma, my friends that’s their life in prison. I did not send them there, I have no judgement, that is their life. So out of respect for them I was happy, was kind, I was loving, I was respectful, I gave them tools and it’s up to them to deal with their life.

So don’t insult your friends. It’s the one thing that the people who are being, you know, who are black can’t stand about pathetic white liberals like you. Excuse me. I totally agree with you. Do you understand?

Yes, This guilt, this right Excuse me. Be a grown up and stop doing it. You don’t have to blar on about karma to people, that’s not their It will inform your clarity, your respect for others, because it is not your job to make it all right for them that’s their life, that’s their particular experience, you do your part but back off and mind your own business sometimes maybe. And this is why Buddha says you can’t possibly have valid compassion until you’ve got this for yourself. So the Buddha would suggest you do more inner work about karma for yourself That gives the basis Do you understand?

Good, thank you very much, wonderful I mean of course it’s not easy darling, it sounds brutal, you know. And if a person came to me with their terrible suffering, they’ve been abused by their husband, I would not give them a lecture about karma, that would be just beyond disgusting. I would tell him how dare you live with that husband. He’s an outrageous bully. You must leave him immediately.

Of course I would do that. It’s exactly the same with racism or anything else. How dare these people treat people like animals in prisons. It doesn’t mean because of karma that you go, oh, the poor things can’t help it. You criticize and you tell a person, you give them courage.

Yes. It’s outrageous that you’re treated this way. I agree with you. Stand up. Have confidence.

There’s no contradiction. Okay. None whatsoever. You know, but we have a wrong view about karma. Oh well you deserve it.

If I give a lecture to a person, you must have raped him in your past life. What good is that? It’s like you go to the doctor and you’ve got cancer and he gives you a lecture about cancer and its cells. You just want his medicine please. You don’t want his boring intellectual interpretation.

You have it here and that informs your view of the world. I mean you could be a devoted Christian and have a view of Christianity and be able to help people without having to go blah about your views. But if you have the Buddha’s views, you’ve got to have them properly otherwise you’re be all tortured, you know? That’s no hope to you or others. And it refers to the good stuff, but we never think of that ever ever ever ever.

So fascinating. Do you understand? Yes, go Are the okay, sorry I’m just having to remember my question now. Go on. It’s just too interesting.

Are the good and bad things that happen in our lives now always only due to past life actions or are they also due to things that we’ve I think the only way to say that is this the main seeds okay okay the seeds okay At the time of our past death we’re going go over this next weekend at the time of our past death, about the time a few hours before we stopped breathing, a certain process is occurring and so what would have happened would have been the karmic seed in our big bank vaults of trillions of karmic seeds that I sort of talk about Buddy didn’t talk about bank vaults, obviously. But we got lugging around all these bank vaults of trillions of seeds from everything we’ve ever done, thought and said. Okay? So all the conditions must have come together at the time of our past death, that the particular seed that was triggered that would cause us to be born to a human mummy. That was triggered then.

Secondly, all the seeds that would be determining our personality. Every one of those was triggered right then. Third, all the karmic seeds that would determine the experiences we have at the hands of others, which means where we’re born and whether the rats eat our house or the mummy is kind or the person rapes us, all the good and all the bad things at the hands of others. Those karmic seeds would have been triggered. And the fourth one, the environment, the way the physical world impacts upon us, whether we’ve got a sick body, a healthy body or whatever, where food harms us, helps us, those are all triggered from past lives.

It could have been a thousand lives ago. They’re triggered before you even die in the past life. So they’re all determined. So you become this pliancy that then pops into life called Abbey. human, Australian, with certain tendencies and certain experiences.

They’re all determined from the past. It could be a thousand lives ago. Now, that’s your garden. You’ve got your garden, but obviously everything you do in that garden today, the pruning and the watering, that nourishes and encourages all sorts of things. But you can’t turn into a man overnight.

Well, people do these days, sorry. I mean you can’t turn into a black person overnight. You can’t change the shape, you can’t be if you’re an oak tree you can’t turn into a peach tree, so that’s determined. Your own personality traits are there. Yes you can change them, of course you can, your job is to change them.

But you you wake up in this life with a tendency to kill because you’ve killed before. You wake up in this life with a tendency not to kill because you’ve vowed not to kill before, that’s determined by past. But what you do with it, that’s what practice is. But there’s only so much you can do with it. Like if you’ve got a strong tendency to kill in this life, even if you hear about non killing, you can’t trigger that non killing part of you because the killing one is so strong that you can’t change it.

Every second we do things, but new seeds that you plant now won’t ripen now, they ripen in the future. So it’s a tricky way of seeing it, it’s more like the pruning and the watering and the nourishing and the purifying that you do with the package that you came born with. Do you understand my point? So otherwise it’s obvious, a person, let’s say born in this life with a strong tendency to kill, which is one track of karma tendencies. Then they’ve got another track of karma from another lot of karmic seas of non killing, so that’s called experiences similar to the cause.

So then they spend their life killing fish, but they’ve got strong non killing karma from another lot of karma that ripens as an experience to be healthy and to live a long life. But it’s not this life because if killing causes you to die young they would have died the first time they killed. Can you hear me? You can’t hear me can you Abby? There’s two tracks of karma in your life.

One is the way you’re treated and seen and treated by others in this life. That’s from one track of karma, a whole bunch of different bank vaults. Another set of bank vaults is bringing you the seeds you’ve got in your own mind, own tendencies. So killing is said to cause you to get one of the experiences of killing is you get killed. You hearing me?

So obviously killing today if it ripens in this life you get killed tomorrow wouldn’t you? Yeah sure. But you can see that people spend their lives killing but live till they’re ninety seven. So the killing now doesn’t bring the results now it brings the results next life of lower realm suffering. Certainly the tendency to keep killing and the getting killed that’ll all happen later.

Can you hear me? Depending on the stream, even which one? Because you talked about the two streams. There’s four ways to karma write them, four bank vaults. One is the type of birth you’ve got, which is in our case human.

That’s the fruit of non killing. The next track of karma, next bank vault is your tendencies. How you behave, what you like to do, what you’ve got to be good, kind, loving, play music, kill, lie, not kill, your tendencies, a second track. The third track is what happens to you. You understand?

How you’re seen and treated by others. You understand? And the fourth one’s environmental. So, to answer your question, killing in this life will not ripen as a result which one of the results of killing is to get killed. Can you hear me?

I understand it is complicated if we haven’t heard it before. But don’t be sorry, Evie, it’s perfectly fine darling. Okay. There are four results of any action. One would be a negative action called killing.

One result would be a lower realm rebirth, born as a dog, born as a lion, let’s say, that’s one result. The second result is the tendency to keep doing it. The third result is to have it done to you. And the fourth result will be to have bad health and the food poisons you, polluted water, polluted so environmental. So one track of karma is environmental.

So killing would cause environmental karma and look at the world. Lots of people are experiencing terrible ill health, would you agree? Their bodies are weak, food doesn’t nourish them, water pollutes, they die from peanuts, that’s called environmental karma and it’s a result of past killing. Can you hear what I’m saying? Can you hear that?

Second way karma ripens is you get killed or you die young. That’s the experience similar to past killing. You die young or you get killed. Can you see the world? Lots of people are dying young, would you agree?

And lots of people are getting killed, do you agree? Third one is you have a tendency to kill. Can you see that? The world, most people kill. There are three results of killing.

Now can you see there are some people who spend their lives killing you with me? Don’t they? But they live till you’re ninety six. Do you agree? So living till you’re ninety six is the fruit of non killing from some other past life.

So you have the of non killing as an experience which means you lived until you’re ninety six but you have the karma from killing to keep killing. So clearly if killing now if it ripens in this life you’d die tomorrow right there wouldn’t you? So therefore all I’m answering is karma doesn’t ripen in this life is what I’m saying? Can you see what I’m saying now? Okay good fantastic.

Rubina where does suicide come into that part? Well it’s killing isn’t it? Yeah it’s killing isn’t it? You want a tea break? Or do you want keep going and wait till lunch?

What do want do? It’s nearly lunchtime. Okay, let’s go. Let’s go right back to the basics now of what a negative action is. You know, what is it?

Like if you ask Christians, it’s what God said you shouldn’t do. That’s pretty clear, and I’m not complaining. That’s perfect. Do what God says, you know? Do you understand?

Here, what’s a negative action? You ask Buddha, he’ll say, well honey, the first level of negative action is one that harms another, it’s a natural law. He didn’t make it up, he’s observed it. Well do your market research in this room. A hundred percent agreement, no one’s been killed, jumped on by the wrong person, lied to, stolen from, we all know that immediately.

So that’s what Buddha would define the very first level as a negative action, one that harms another. Okay. So the first level of practice, junior school, grade one, Buddha says well then don’t kill, don’t lie, don’t steal. But you’ve got to ask why not? So the curious thing is, the fascinating one is, it’s not first because it harms others — even more fundamentally Buddha says, guess what Robina, it’ll harm you, like I’m just describing.

Now this is hard, who sees this you know? It’s like when in the sixties when I smoked my Marlboroughs, no one told me about cancer. I didn’t see that I was getting cancer right then, I didn’t get cancer straight away did I? Because it takes time doesn’t it? We know karma takes time, seeds take time, you’ve to smoke for many years before the cancer will come.

You couldn’t see when I smoked my fangs that I was going get cancer. Well here we’ve got more long term, that’s all. So, okay, so for the Buddha, his view is, and the basis of why he would exhort us to live according to the laws of morality, first is not because he says so, which is our usual view. And second is not because it harms others, that’s too advanced. It’s because guess what Rabina, it’ll harm you baby, it’ll ripen in the future as your lower realm suffering.

Having the tendency to keep doing it which is the worst because you go backtrack to the lower realms, having it done to you and having an environmental result. They’re the four ways that negative karma ripens and crucially the four ways that virtuous karma ripens. So the four results of non killing intentional non which I’m going to talk about is you’re going to get born as a human, you’re going to have no tendency to kill, you wake up in this life with no wish to kill that’s pretty miraculous, you will not get killed or you won’t die young and you have a really fat healthy body and anything will nourish you. Do you understand? Like I always quote Warren Buffett, you know that mega-rich business fellow who gave his fifty-five billion dollars to Bill Gates remember that bloke?

You know that one? You’ve heard about him? You haven’t heard about him? Anyways, this mega rich American I read his biography and he’s like he touches money and it turns into billions, he’s got some very good generosity karma you know. But he’s also got really good non-killing karma because he’s eighty six and he’s as fit as a fiddle and his daughter said I’ve never seen water pass his lips.

His diet since he’s a boy, exclusively cheeseburgers, some fancy version of Coca Cola and vanilla ice cream. That’s it and he’s as fit as a fiddle. Now that shatters any scientific views about health, doesn’t it? So we can deduce his long life is the fruit of non killing karma, his one track of non killing. He’s still got a long life, he hasn’t died yet, he hasn’t been killed, he’s got long life karma, which means he’s still got petrol in his tank of non killing as an experience.

Then the next one is the environmental. He’s got a healthy body and whatever he eats nourishes him. That’s the fruit of non killing. So if we’re reasonably healthy, it’s because you’ve non killing karma in that particular tank. Tank.

If you’re not dead yet and you haven’t died young or no one’s killed you yet, that’s because you’ve got petrol in your experience tank of non killing. And if you’ve got no tendency to kill or you really work on it, it’s because you’ve lots of petrol still in that tank. And you’ve a human birth, which is the fruit of non killing. So we should be weeping in happiness every day at our incredible virtue but whoever thinks of it you know because we take it for granted. Are we communicating here?

So okay the first medal of practice is don’t kill don’t steal. You know three things of the body: don’t steal, don’t kill, don’t jump on the wrong partner, don’t rape, and don’t steal. And then four of the speech: don’t lie, don’t use harsh language, don’t you know abuse people, don’t say bad things about people behind their backs which we’d love to do it’s our favorite one and don’t rabbit on about nothing, you know. Four things of speech. Seven little baby techniques, seven little baby methods, seven little bullet points, seven little don’ts and the reason he would exhort us not to do it is not because he says so.

It’s like your doctor advising you based on their experience, well don’t do this, Robina, don’t do this, and don’t do this, and we’d go, oh thank you doctor, you’re so kind. Instead we hear the reality of someone stuffing it on top of us, that’s our neurotic view, don’t blame your Jewish mother or your Catholic mother. It’s ego grasping that causes that view. It’s pathetic, it’s childish, it’s infantile. Joking away.

Moving all my wings. Are we communicating here? So go, Oh wow Buddy, you’re amazing. You, that’s such good advice. So then you take that of course you’re not clairvoyant yet you can’t see that it’ll result in the future life as a bloody elephant or a tiger who can see that?

I can’t but I’m taking it as my hypothesis good enough so you live according to those. So then, let’s look though more precisely at what makes an action negative and what is Buddha’s logic for why a negative action will leave seeds in my mind and ripen in the future as my suffering. I’m gonna see even here the technical logic of it, you know? And you’ve got to be able to unpack it, otherwise it’s just superstition. Just do what God says and be quiet.

No, not like that. Okay, well then they talk about a complete action. A complete action is one that has four components in place. We discussed this last week, or this week, whatever week it is. And all this is the basis of having compassion, believe me.

Once we get this stuff, and we see it for everybody, compassion just falls into place, and I mean it. So we’ve got to get it for ourselves first. Okay, so the first one, it has to be the object there, the mouse in my kitchen. A living mouse. First one, number one point.

Number two point is my and this is the massive important point for Buddha, and this is the unbelievable one to understand. The second point is the role of my mind in this action. And there are three parts. 2a is the state of mind which is in the neutral category which is called recognition or discrimination and it’s happening every millisecond. The ability to see a million different things in this room and go there’s square, there’s this, there’s some carpet, there’s that, there’s a bookshelf, there’s George, there’s something.

All the time it’s happening, every millisecond, it’s this incredible brilliance in our mind. It’s called discrimination, recognition and that’s to a has got to be that is the mouse, that mouse. To b is the main one, this is the meaning of karma, it’s the word intention. The word intention doesn’t mean like motivation, oh she had a good intention. This is bare bones, the meaning, the actual meaning of karma, the mental action, intention, will, volition.

And the Buddha, as Lama Zopa puts it, as the Buddha says, but Lama Zopa quotes as Tibetan saying: Everything exists on the tip of the wish, the thought. So look at it, my walking out that door, it’s really obvious isn’t it? When you see me pick up myself and walk out the door you can deduce logically that there was a thought first that said I will walk out that door. You can see if I just pick myself up vaguely and wander around the room looking lost you’ll know I’ve lost the plot. Won’t you?

There’s no intention. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’ll become senile, you know? But if intention is there, it’s what makes my legs work. And the fact is most of what we do is just instinctive from countless lives of instinct.

We instinctively like sex and food and drugs and this and that and comfort, that’s because of attachment. We programmed our minds with countless eons of intentional attachment. Now that it’s second nature. We don’t notice this intention. So to be is intention.

I will kill that mouse. Now the third one is the point, the third to be, to see, to see. Motivation, reason. Why are you killing the mouse? And the trouble is with us, everything we do in our life, the intention to do it and the motivation that impels it are so packed together we don’t even notice.

Because that’s why intention, most of our motivation is attachment. This is very depressing to hear it initially. We’re basically totally self centered. Luckily we have access to our virtues, that’s our saving grace, that’s how we do anything reasonable on this earth, because we can access our virtues. Otherwise we’d just be like a lion who’d rip out the guts of the buffalo for breakfast and casually bring her children and eat the hot entrails while the buffalo’s screaming in agony.

We’d be doing that if we just had mainly attachment, know. But we’ve got our virtues, aren’t we fortunate? So but attachment is the motivation that runs everything. So here in this case, why but why are you killing the mouse, Raveena? Why do you decide to kill the mouse?

Well what do you think? How disgusting! How dare a mouse be in my kitchen? That’s called aversion. So the reason we do most things, diluted actions, is attachment or aversion.

The third one will be ignorance. You think you’ll enlightened if you kill mice or something stupid, you know? Attachment or aversion, that’s it. So this one’s aversion. So aversion’s a heavy one.

That’s anger. That’s disgust, how dare a mouse be in my kitchen? That’s anger, We use all these other reasons, oh it’s dirty and this and you’ve got to protect my children, it’s just external on top. Basically it’s aversion, you know. That’s number two.

2A, 2B and 2C recognition, intention, motivation. That’s the role of your mind in this action. Action. The third one is you do the action. Foot goes on the mouse or whatever, whack it with a broom.

Fourth, dead mouse and you rejoice and it dies before you. That is what they call a complete action. There’s various components. Roughly speaking that’s a complete action so that seed will stay in your mind and will multiply and bring many many many suffering lower rebirths the teaching says. Now in exactly the same way that an intentional action of non killing First there’s the mouse, the object, number one object.

Two, your role of your mind. Two A, recognition: that is the mouse, I will not kill it, I will save it. Two B, intention: I will save that mouse. Motivation: compassion.

You pick up the mouse. You release it. Thank you, Rabina. Bye. Happy mouse.

That’s a complete action of non killing. So the role of the mind in actions is what makes it calmer. So George can have a mouse in his kitchen, but he doesn’t see it. So number one is there, object. Number two, recognition.

No, he doesn’t see it. Two, to be, intention. No, he doesn’t see it. To see, motivation no, he doesn’t see it. So his mind is completely not involved.

His foot stands on the mouse. Dead mouse. But there is zero karma created, because karma starts with the mind. So clear this one. So the Buddha says that the motivation, the reason why you do what you do, is the component that gives the character to your action, determines whether it is negative or positive, which determines the seed that you plant, which determines the future result.

It’s a natural law. So all this is happening spontaneously inside us, we had better learn the laws of karma had we not. So we can start running it, controlling it, being in charge of it. Because right now we’re on autopilot. Are we communicating?

And that means changing our minds. At that first level, he doesn’t get you to change your mind for me, he just says back off and play safe. Just make a decision, back off and play safe and don’t kill and don’t lie and don’t cheat and don’t this and don’t that, protect yourself. So at least you refrain from sowing lots of ridiculous negative seeds at the grossest level, at least that much. Then you can get to high school and start now developing concentration and working on your mind and becoming your own therapist and get to the root of the problem.

So the first one is you control the first aspect which is karma, the first cause of suffering, and then the second in high school when you start to know your mind become your own therapist and you unpack and unravel the delusions now you deal with the second cause of suffering which is the main one, the delusions. Now the point is this: The main result of that action is to be born in the lower realms. So let’s now look at us as a human. So we can deduce at the time of our past death a virtuous, a powerful morality karmic seed of conscious intentional non killing, probably as Lama Zopa says, practiced in the context of keeping vows of non killing, was what was triggered. Which is how come our mind ran to our mummy’s womb at the time of conception, you know, she jumped into bed with her partner.

Right there, time of conception. That’s when you started. You ran like a magnet. We’ll discuss this and we’ll discuss the death process next week. But now look at the human realm.

There are seven billion humans roughly. Every one of them, including Hitler, including the pedophiles, including the wackos, one of their karmic seeds from their complete seed bank vault of virtue was triggered at the time of their past death. But at the same time their tendency bank vault was triggered and they got bored in this like with the tendency to want to rape, the tendency to torture, the tendency to kill, the tendency to look at the world. Let’s just say the one killing one here, one we’re talking about, one action killing. So we’ve got the human birth as a result of non killing, but the next track we’re born into the human realm with a tendency to kill.

Most humans kill something. Look, and it’s considered in our culture normal, it’s coming from the Christian background, I’m not being rude here. God made creatures, I was told, for our benefit. I’m not being rude, this is what he said. But it just shows the views, you know?

I mean actually one Muslim I met recently, she said we’re not supposed to eat meat only every forty days or something and we shouldn’t kill unless she said we’re not supposed to kill unless it’s for food so they had that view So variations in different cultures, we can see that in religions, but we’re not a culture, what’s religion? We have created all these things So clearly from strong tendency to kill, been, you know, religions even say it’s good to kill and you offer it to God. Where do all these habits come from? From our own mind, we’ve made up all this stuff, you know? So we get born in this life with a tendency to kill.

This is a tragedy. So what was that example I used as a fisherman, a little boy? His mother told me that the first time he met fishing, he fell in love with fishing. Here is a human being, a good human being. He’s got tendencies, lots of good tendencies, kind, loving, compassionate, lots of good experiences, third way, and lots of good environmental four tracks of karma, masses of good karma ripening.

But one of his tendencies: to kill. He met fishing, and he ran, he ran like a magnet, fell in love with it. Why? Because as soon as he saw it, the karmic seed was triggered. The habit.

It’s like he met, it’s like he recognised it. And then second, attachment was triggered simultaneously, and attachment is a junkie that only wants the nice things, and one of the functions attachment is to make the object look very delicious. So the stronger you have the habit to eat chocolate cake or to jump on girls or to kill, the more delicious the object looks. And that’s the killer about attachment. What that does, it causes for him, it made the object look delicious because when attachment rises in the mind, and this is dealt with in great depth in the vajrayana model, it triggers very nice feelings in the body.

And we’re all junkies for good feelings. So this poor fisherman, due to past killing, he’s been in the lower realms, that’s exhausted itself, but the tragedy is he hasn’t purified all aspects of the killing. Specifically, he’s never vowed not to kill again. So the habit to kill, or the habit to get killed, or the environmental result are the residual results left over from the main killing because we haven’t purified them. Which is why back in junior school not only do you refrain from killing, lying and stealing but you’ve got to live in vows which is so potent that means you’re creating virtue twenty four hours a day and you’ve got to purify.

So the other example I always use, my friend Thubten’s boy, when he’s very tiny, my friend in Queensland, she was taking I always quote this story, are both stories she was taking the lice out of his head and he was crying with compassion for the lice. And he’s now forty something, he’s never killed a living being. So clearly we can deduce he’s got a human birth from his past virtuous karma, but he must have purified it by vowing never to kill again. Amazing, boy in this life with no wish to kill. How incredible.

How incredible. And this is the main one. So that fisherman always liked fishing. He never and that means this is the worst tragedy because it came so strongly and because it feels like self existent, it feels like so blissful because attachment makes it blissful, attachment makes it look delicious. That’s the tragedy with attachment.

It’s a honeycomb and razor blade. It makes it look delicious, and you’re driven to do it because it’s so delicious and it triggers incredibly good feelings. The stronger the habit, the deeper the good feelings. This is why torturers get you know, I remember reading about one torturer. He got his orgasms from torturing.

We don’t want to hear about that, we just find that repulsive, know, because we can’t explain it. It’s because he’s got the strong tendency to do that torturing. And guess where you get torturing from? Animal realm. In fact, the negative states in our mind, and the habits we have to eat, sleep, go to the toilet, kill, lie, steal, you name it, have sex, guess where they’re from?

They’re animal tendencies, you know. It’s not being horrible. The virtues are human. The virtues are human, they’re our saving grace. The other ones are just animal tendencies, know, look at the animals, they kill, they rape, they steal, they lie, they get jealous, the same delusions as us, just the same, and we bring those habits with us.

We bring those habits with us from animal births and from not having purified them. That’s the tragedy. So this boy spent his life fishing, never saw the suffering. His mummy went fishing one time with him and couldn’t stand it because all she could see was suffering. Because why?

He couldn’t. Because attachment makes its own story, writes its own novel, and you project that novel onto reality. So we are seeing everything to the filter of our fantasies. This is what’s so suffering about delusions. So he never saw suffering.

He saw the same flapping fish that his mother saw when she went fishing one time. For all the years he was fisherman, but he never saw it as suffering because he had his own fantasy called attachment. This is the tragedy of attachment and that’s the tragedy of having the habit because he didn’t purify that habit and guess what he died scuba diving, age of twenty nine, he died young, He got killed, probably eaten by the fish, who knows? And then this French, this woman came, she was in tears when she heard the story, when she heard about karma. And so she said, Where’s he been reborn?

I said, Oh, don’t know. Go and ask this Lama in Kopan, he was there, she was there. Geshe Lama Konchog, this amazing yogi. You know, they very rarely tell you what they see with their clairvoyance. So she said, Where’s he reborn?

He said, Oh, first he was born in the animal realms, and now he’s in the hell realms. This is too shocking for our minds, I tell you. But she was very moved by it, she said, Oh what do I do for him? And he laughed sort of sadly and said, What do you mean for him? He said, For everybody.

Now this is what they mean by courageous compassion. The basis of body sufferers compassion for us is we’re as thick as posts. Forget attachment, forget emptiness because of karma, no understanding that we are in charge of our own life. No understanding that we created our own life.

We’ve this schizophrenic insane view that I have this person prolonged on this earth by somebody else and they didn’t consult me. I mean no wonder we’re suffering, it’s a mad idea. Okay if you have faith in God and surrender that’s good but the materialist view there’s nowhere to go with it except insanity and blame and anger and rage. I’m not being fundamentalist here, I know I sound it! But as a philosophical position, can you hear my point?

We’ve got to think this stuff through, it’s kind of intense, you know? So the mother who was suffering when she saw the son suffering No she didn’t show she saw the son because he was fishing She couldn’t stand fishing, but she was trying to be kind to him because she didn’t want to interfere in his life She was sad for him that he fished because he killed creatures She had no view of karma, she wasn’t a Buddhist could she have helped him if we’re meant to be courageous with our compassion? Could she have? Good, perfect, perfect question! That’s compassion, right? So compassion is the seeing of suffering — even more crucial — the understanding of why, so if you have the view of karma you know why he’s doing it.

But guess what, that doesn’t make you know how to help. That’s wisdom. That’s wisdom. That means you’ve to know the reasons and know his mind, and know what will be helpful. And if there’s nothing she can do to change him she’d love him for who he is and her heart would break, what can you do?

What would you suggest perhaps, would you suggest that she have a conversation? No no no, what I’m getting at is the only okay, if you’ve a five year old in front of you you have to know they’re five and you have to know what they can handle so you have to have enough wisdom to know that they’re five and how you talk to them, wouldn’t you agree? You wouldn’t talk to a seventeen year old so you have to have wisdom to know the person’s mind and what is beneficial for their mind and what they understand which means you have to know their mind But what we do is we walk in with all guns blaring, blasting our views on top of people thinking we’re being compassionate. But their ears aren’t ready for it, we’re being stupid. That’s what wisdom means.

And best wisdom is clairvoyance. So aim for clairvoyance, honey, Then you see the minds of others. That’s the answer. Compassion is the wish to help, but it’s got to be based on the wisdom to know what and why and how and the mind of the other person. We all know that.

You can’t help your child if you don’t understand their mind. It’s absolutely a no brainer, but we don’t kind of think of it. We kind of blast in and try to make a person stop doing something. Do you understand? Yes, so you need a clear mind to start.

No, more than clear, you need to have wisdom. Not just clear. Yes, clear darling. But have a real understanding of your boy’s mind. Knowing how to that’s anybody, whether it’s a fisherman or just an ordinary person, you’ve to know their mind enough.

But we don’t tend to think this way. Do you understand my point? I do and I realize that how that is. There you go, precisely. And that’s why you’ve to start with your own mind.

Because you can’t know another person’s mind if you don’t know your own. It’s so clear, so clear you know? Isn’t it? And this is where to know how to compassion is one thing but to how to help them and that’s the wisdom of the bodhisattvas. This is why there’s one lovely story about Lama Yeshe, our friend Harry, he’s a meditator, he’s been around for years and now Kopan — I told me this story years ago, and there’s always monks in Kopan in Nepal.

You know Harry George, don’t you? Remember Harry? Mary’s husband Harry, the meditator? Don’t think. Never mind.

Okay, anyway he’s an American fellow, he’s a meditator. Apparently he was living years ago, he was helping one of the Nepalese monks who was very sick. And he’d found a doctor to help. And he basically told Lama Yeshe, who’s our guru, and he’s also Harry’s guru, and he happened to mention to Lama cause Lama’s the boss there, he said, I found a doctor to help this monk. And Lama just said to Harry, Leave it alone, don’t do anything.

He didn’t explain to Harry. So Harry trusted Lama, so he didn’t do anything. Well the monk got sicker and sicker and then eventually went up to the mountains from Solu Khumbu and then he died. Now that sounds like Lama Yeshe was really cruel. Do understand my point?

It sounds like Lama didn’t care. But Lama Lhundrup, the abbot, told Harry, he said what’s going on here is Lama’s clairvoyance. Now this is something in Buddhism — Buddhists have had clairvoyance in countless lives. It’s one of the natural qualities of a mind as we progress spiritually, as we use this meditation technique called concentration, coming to these amazing Indians, we’re able to access these subtler levels of our own consciousness and we do not posit as existing in our materialist world. And it’s not mystical, it’s clear and it’s there and we’re as blind as bats at the moment.

But we can all get clairvoyance means literally what clairvoyance is, is a function of your subtle level of cognition, which you can only get using these stupendous techniques to go beyond the gross level of sensory and conceptual. And you access these subtle levels at a very clear level, and you can see this capacity of your mind, this level of your consciousness, can cognise phenomena that your gross consciousness can’t, which means the past and the future and the minds of others. And that’s advanced level, okay? So because of Lama’s spiritual realizations, his clairvoyance, he could see clearly the karma this monk created that is the cause from past lives of this particular sickness, he can see also, Lama Lhundrup told Harry, that if he’d gotten better, he would have been fine, but he wouldn’t have finished that karma, and next life would have been terrible suffering, even worse. So by having the suffering, by dying young and in fact he died really well, really peacefully, he purified all the karma, next life fantastic.

Now who’s got that kind of wisdom? Okay, that’s a really good example of long term wisdom but we’re just running in like little chooks with our head off with all our worry and our need but this is a really important point about compassion we’ve got compassion right now there is no question like you’re talking we have compassion we see suffering but because we’ve got so much attachment and so much fear ourselves and so much despair and depression and fears and delusions and dramas and indeed no understanding of karma, we make a mess half the time. We’re all very sentimental, and we get depressed and we get worried, some people want to kill themselves because the suffering of the world is so bad because we don’t have a way of understanding it. That’s why you’ve got to have wisdom, compassion is not enough. Because compassion is the wish to help.

But wisdom is the ability to know how to help understanding what and why and how. That gives courage and confidence and gives strength and iron to our compassion. So that kind of compassion, the Lama Yeshe example is very shocking. That’s real wisdom, know, assuming we take this as a truth, you know. Who’s got that kind of wisdom?

So we do our best And this is where too we’re going to talk more about this after lunch. The way we have our compassion now because we don’t have much wisdom, we don’t understand karma, we don’t understand the causes, we don’t understand the mind, we don’t know why things happen, so we’re kind of rushing around like I said with chooks with their heads off all freaking out. That’s why we get despairing, that’s why we freak. Even if our alcoholic brother like I mentioned you know, just that alone we’ve got so much compassion for him. But what we don’t see is our own attachment which is this junkie to only have the nice things, This attachment in us can’t stand seeing this alcoholism.

It’s upsetting our lives. It’s sort of self centered. But we don’t see that, we just see the compassion. So we manipulate our brother to make him change and bully him and help and then we see him only as an alcoholic brother. We don’t see anything else cause we exaggerate his alcoholism.

Or we don’t exaggerate it but we only see that part of him. So then we push him, we bully him, we manipulate, then we get mad at him when he doesn’t take our advice, then we give up on him. That’s because of attachment, not because of compassion. So maybe he doesn’t want our advice, maybe he’s not ready for our advice. So we love him for who he is.

We know where he’s at, we know what advice is necessary which is maybe being silent. You love him for who he is. Hello darling, how are you? How’s the weather? What are you up to?

How’s your wife? Even though he’s tortured, mind your own business, back off please, don’t stick your nose in his business and be all self piteous, all the poor thing you know, that’s so rude! But if he’s ready for your advice you’ll know and then he can help you. If you can’t help him, love him anyway. But attachment can’t stand it you see, attachment wants to make it all go away.

So it causes a mess, it makes a mess of our compassion. So we’ve got to have the wisdom wing first, because the wisdom wing is lessening your own attachment which grows your clarity as you said. You’ve got clarity but you have inner strength and courage and you know why it’s happening. Your heart breaks for the compassion of the whole world. Because you realize everyone is harming themselves.

You stay stable and wise and do what you can. And of course as the Dalai Lama says the bodhisattvas never give up. They in terms of eons. This is the compassion that comes based on wisdom and there’s more to talk about yet. Yes darling?

I might be opening a can of worms. Where’s the microphone, please? That’s okay. You’ve spoken a lot about killing and karma associated with the karma that arises from that or exists already. What about euthanasia?

What about it? It’s the same as suicide, we’re back to suicide. Speak the question. I’m getting there. What about someone in your life wants your support and assistance in dying?

Is that act I guess is that killing or is that coming from a place of compassion or is that down to intention? Your question is so loaded with so many things but unpack your question. Is euthanasia killing? Well I would suggest it’s not stealing is it? What’s the action called?

Killing? That’s called killing isn’t it? Is euthanasia killing? Is it you’re killing it? I don’t know!

Jesus God in heaven what does killing mean? You better get your definitions clear, what’s killing? Taking something or someone else’s life? You mean taking something is called killing? Sorry not something, like someone else’s or another being’s life So then euthanasia is not taking another person’s Is it killing darling?

Be simple, is it killing? I’m not discussing it I understand your mind now, it’s very fascinating. Darling, we’re not discussing emotion Okay, me, one step at a time. We’re not discussing motivation yet, we first establish the name of the action. It’s taking a life called killing.

Euthanasia is called killing. Do you agree? Good, now we can go to the next step, can’t we? Get that clear first. Now we have to look at if we take the Buddha’s view that the consciousness of that grandma or that mouse, because it’s both cases, it’s euthanasia, that it will continue after you kill it.

Can we take that as our view? And we take the Buddha’s view that at the time that they die, before they stop breathing, particular conditions ripen that will trigger the particular karmic seed that will determine their next life. Can we take that as a given? So then, okay, so then if that’s a possibility, if that’s one of the consequences, if a type of rebirth is a consequence of dying and then there’s a possibility to have a very suffering rebirth or a reasonable rebirth. So that’s one of the consequences.

So okay, may I ask you a question? Are you clairvoyant? Can you see the mind of this person? Are you clairvoyant? Can say with certainty that at the time you kill them that a virtuous karmic seed will be triggered that will cause them to get a really nice human rebirth so they meet the Dalai Lama and have a nice spiritual path.

Can you do so then who the hell do you think you are intervening? Playing Russian roulette with somebody else’s consciousness. That’s the simple answer. Okay, great. I mean that’s so it’s like if but you ought to have that as a view.

The materialist view, of course as well, the big fuss about it in the West because we have the view that when you die, you die, you turn to dust. So if that’s the case, then killing is a kind thing to do, I totally agree with you. But here we’re going to have your view first. So the view is your consciousness will continue. And the fact is, as we again will discuss next week, this is something they do not take into consideration in the West.

People who plan their own lives and everything, their deaths. The Buddhist view is this very extra, extra, extra, unbelievable extra level of frantic grasping and fear, powerful than in normal life, occurs at the time you’re dying, that is like desperate, and that is likely for most people to trigger a seed that will throw them into a lower realm rebirth. Then that’s like really no one understands that unless you understand this view, know, because no one understands the process of death, certainly way the Buddha understands it. So that’s really playing, that’s why, as we’re going talk next week, as Lama Zopa says, if you’re going to help anybody in their life, help them at the time of death, that’s when they need you most because it’s like going through a storm. You need to support a person to help them be virtuous and peaceful.

But it’s playing with fire because you don’t have the certainty. Like even if there’s an ordinary thing, if you’ve to cross the road and there’s a masses of cars coming around the corner, you’ve got to play safe because you don’t know what’s going to come around. If I’ve got a headache and you just want to give me a pill because you’re full of compassion, but you can’t remember whether it’s the cyanide or the aspirin, I would rather you mind your own business than let me have my headache. So that’s not an easy thing because we have to first establish that we think that’s a possibility and that will determine your choice. I mean you’re playing with fire in the Buddha’s view, it’s Russian roulette.

So you’ve got to be cautious, including the mouse, the ant or the human, No difference. Do you understand? That’s the approach. So the suicide one, who asked me that? So suicide is killing yourself isn’t it?

So then in general then, let’s look at if we understand the killing of the mouse or the killing of it. Okay, sorry, there’s two things. Euthanasia of killing the mouse. We can all see that you might do it with great compassion, you might kill your grandma with compassion too. So there’s two things here.

One is the karma of the mouse and the type of rebirth it will get. That’s the karma of the mouse, and wisdom is knowing that. Now you might have compassion, you might really have compassion for your grandma or the mouse, so that means you don’t create very much negative karma. But honey it doesn’t mean you help the mouse. There’s two things there.

Are you hearing me? You fine because you meant well but meaning well is not enough you’ve got to have wisdom. That’s the point. So suicide if we look at killing of the mouse, we looked at the main factor that determined that that is a negative action or indeed in her case not even a very negative one but even a positive one because she really meant well, the karma for her. Then suicide, I’m not sure what you think is the reason most people kill themselves.

Compassion, bliss, joy? To despair. No? It’s not, is it? So therefore the only option is to be a negative state of mind.

Unhappiness, fear, despair, that’s a negative state of mind. Don’t be moralistic about it, it’s a very disturbing state of mind that’s related to ego and it’s related to fear, isn’t it? Would you agree with that? Well the mind’s going to be very, very, very disturbed at the time of death, so it’s more than likely to send the person to the lower realms. I always remember, you know you can argue though, you remember those Vietnamese during the war?

Yes, They burned themselves, not like these poor Tibetans now you hear about them running down the street screaming in agony as they’re burning to death. They might have meant well, but I don’t think they’re going to be meaning so well as they’re dying in agony. If they haven’t got realisations that would be a pretty terrible death, wouldn’t it? Do you understand? For those Vietnamese, went into they looked like they went into Samādhi, didn’t it?

Because they didn’t move. So clearly they’ve gone into a subtle level of mind, and maybe their motivation was very pure, which means they wouldn’t suffer at the time of death, because their mind has gone to a subtle level where the gross level has stopped. That’s probably you could imagine that could be a virtuous motivation. So because you’ve got control over it, you wouldn’t be suffering you’d know what you’re doing it’s a possibility do you understand the point? So it’s a practical issue not some moralistic one like you shouldn’t do it it’s a practical issue do you understand poor people?

Let’s have lunch So the plan is where’s Judy? So the plan is ninety minutes? So the plan is have your lunch, enjoy, but I’d love you for some part of that period. And if we need less than ninety minutes, let’s have that. Got lunch that’s going be here, right?

So if we need less than ninety minutes, that’s fine, we can do that. So just we’ll play it by ear. But I’d love you to have at least thirty minutes of it, if not longer, to be in little groups of three or four, pulling apart any or all of these topics and discussing them. Can you do that for me? And I would suggest if you don’t want to do that then be silent.

Try and do two options: be silent, do your own trick or talk about the stuff it really makes it helpful. I mean you can also talk about the footy beforehand if you like. Did the Crows win yet? Who? I thought they would, I knew they would, you know?

Good for the Sydney Swans, we got ahead, you know? You can’t help but think that, can you? Okay, so you can talk about the footy, but at least thirty minutes of discussing the stuff. Thank you, darlings, I’ll see you later.