Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. During this nearly three-hour session, Ven Robina Courtin introduces suffering and its causes within a graded-course framework: Buddhism progresses from basic morality to understanding saṃsāra to compassion and tantra. She explores three types of suffering—obvious pain, disguised suffering in what we call happiness, and being trapped in delusion—and identifies two root causes: karma (past actions) and delusion, particularly attachment and anger. Attachment is delusional exaggeration that promises happiness it cannot deliver. Central to her teaching is a radically different view of mind: beginningless, non-physical, shaped by habit and action. She stresses that practice is tough psychological work requiring us to see delusions as thoughts and stories we can argue with and change, not fixed aspects of identity. Includes student questions and dialogue.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 01 S 2011 09 03.mp3
UUID: 70c1da1d-b22b-42b7-932f-47559f12c2a5
Teacher: Ven Robina Courtin
Collection: y Samsāra (Ven Robina Courtin)
Date: 2011-09-03
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 171.6 minutes
Words: ~21,989
Why? Because I’m sick of suffering, and I wanna try and develop my qualities to get out of suffering. And even in terms of why that in term of why that because I can see that everybody else is in the same boat. But all. So we want to do this for our sake.
Finally, so that we’re qualified to help others. Okay. Covered by this program called Discovering Wood, which is an alternative way of presenting this Tibetan way of presenting. You know, it’s called the land rim. And really, as as Holly has pointed out recently, which is actually what I like to think about it as, it’s like a course.
You know? When you do a course of study, the first you enter junior school, then you go to high school, then you go to university, then you go to then you go to postgraduate. This is our way of structuring the way to learn something. We get that structure very easily. It really makes sense to us.
You know? We know what so the the the the the way of saying as I say, phraseology is called glam rim, a graded course. And if you look at the word graded course, it’s not what we say. It makes sense to us. A graded part.
I’m sorry. It makes sense. It’s a cute phrase. But you when you go to junior school, school in high school, it’s a it’s gradual. It’s step by step, isn’t it?
And that’s exactly the meaning of course. We get that. So we call it a course. The lamb ring, we say, but we mystify it sometimes. Oh, what’s the lamb ring?
You know? It’s just it’s it’s what it is. It’s taking all of Buddhist teachings from a to z z and and putting a nice orderly way, orderly in terms of your own capability of one person to internalize it. What else is it? You know, of course, in music, of course, in mathematics.
That’s all it is. Isn’t it? You start the very beginning stuff, and you grade. You gradually go and then you graduate. Well, that’s the language.
So it’s so where we are here, this is like high school. This business of saṃsāra and Nevada is high school. Sure you’re not sure sure if if okay. Okay. So it’s one way.
Another way of presenting this package is in terms of what we you know, Kiliana Mahāyāna. There’s two main tracks of Buddhist teachings. So the Kiliana teachings are just known usually as the Theravāda, teacher, which in fact, technically speaking, is the only remaining of the eighteen or so subschools of teachings from India, you know, two thousand years ago or a thousand years ago of the Hiriata this is part of the teaching. And then that’s so the Hiriata teacher or the Theravāda teacher is the wisdom wing, or it’s the junior school and high school part of the whole course. The Mahāyāna, wing of the bird, is the compassion wing, and that’s like university.
And then you’ve got tantra, which is postgraduate. So it’s it’s stages. And so, you know, with music, it’s hard difficult, you know, according to where you’re at in it is your capability as far as being a piano player, but so in terms of understanding the term, you know, how to put your fingers on the piano and to deal with all that music, The mathematics with whatever it might be. The state is on it. So here, experientially, psychologically, we have to look at where we’re at in terms of our development.
Because the thing we’re trying to train in practicing this this course is the mind. That’s the stuff we did. And this is, you know, it’s the mind. That’s what we’re learning to develop. Another way of putting that is if you look at the man we’re in, all of all of Buddha’s teachings.
It’s all of Buddha’s ways of seeing the world. Philosophy. And what what’s philosophy? Except a presentation. It’s a view of how things are doing, isn’t it?
So that’s all Buddhism, if you like to put it this way. Is the mind. Not as the you know, because the way they present the lab rings in in three stages, lowest scope, middle scope, great scope. Again, those words are peculiar. We are think this way, but analyze the meaning.
It’s not that complicated. It’s the scope of the capability of the practitioner. The junior school is the lowest scope. Can see. So the junior school is all about mainly the body and the speech.
It’s the very first stage of the Buddhist practice when you deal with controlling our behavior and learning to understand karma is the most basic way of looking for these things. And the fundamental logic there is that everything we think and do and say is a karma, an action that needs an inkling or brings a reaction in this very mind itself, my own experiences. So the very first stage of practice is on the basis very first stage of controlling the behavior. And the reason you don’t wanna kill or lie or steal, you know, the first stage of the practice is you don’t want the consequence. Because the killing and lying and stealing leave those difference in your life.
So he now we’re in high school. We’re getting to the sort of the fundamental causes of suffering. The context here is suffering. Buddha says in his third noble truth that we can be free of suffering. There is a state, a possibility of freedom of suffering, of the cessation suffering.
Mhmm. Broad meaning of the work and. You know? And so one way so one of the things one one thing we can discuss here is this one noble truth, one way of presenting the second scope, cause suffering that causes. What is saṃsāra?
What causes it? And how to get out of saṃsāra and achieve the the idea. You know? It’s all part of that wisdom. Part of the kiniata, part of the part.
It’s the high school And I said, what is it that defines something as a sin? Or is it what as we put it in Buddhist terms, a negative action? And he said, it’s that which goes against the will of God. And that’s the key point in that religion, the creator. Everything is created by the creator, created by God.
The laws of morality, you know, me, others, people, good and bad is determined by God. Remember what priest I talked. He said, there is such a thing as a natural law, And so the Buddha not being a creator, then what he is really is an observer. And like a scientist is is simply putting down, laying down what he has seen to be reality. Einstein tells us that he sees that a equals m t squared.
He sees things that the relativity, whatever. You understand? He hasn’t made it up. He didn’t have a vision of it. No one revealed it to him.
We know what science is. It’s something that’s coming from a person’s direct experience, and they present their findings. And then he doesn’t they don’t ask us to believe it. They say, well, here it is, and it’s up to you to go check it out if you feel right. That’s exactly the word.
That’s exactly the He’s a person from his own experience has found it to be so. Everything that is called Buddhism, And then we from our own direct experience, we work with it, and we discover eventually that it’s either true or it’s too much. And if you can prove directly from your own experiences that Dalai Lama points out that what Buddha says is true, in fact, isn’t, we must reflect it. This is the Buddha’s approach. So if it’s true, we use it in the third level truth, what we speak, then we can be free of suffering.
We should be encouraged by that. That’s great. I’m happy to hear it. You know? And we ought to then ask a question.
Well, what is suffering? But if we can be free of it, suffering. The second noble truth, crucial. It’s one of the causes. So if you don’t know what the causes of that pollution are, you can learn to identify pollution very nicely.
But if you don’t stop creating the causes, you’ll never get you’ll never cease the belief. So if we don’t know what the causes of something are, we will never, you know, use the Buddhist term, escape ourselves out, free ourselves from something. So it’s logical and reasonable. And then it gets even worse when you hear the second truth where he tells you it’s all your fault. And you go, my god.
You definitely wanna kill yourself. And you’re not prepared to wait for a third noble truth when he finally tells you you can be free of it. So I like to remind us that we can be free of it first, and we’re prepared to stick our noses in the rubbish, you know, the very back section? Unraveling up the the negative emotions. The section that I added to is the last part, the last.
That’s really yeah. Okay. Alright. We’re gonna do, what we’re talking about here, what we’re gonna be mainly discussing this weekend is what suffering is and it’s called. That’s it.
We’re discussing that. And implied by this is what is what is what freedom from because if you know what the suffering is, then you know what the freedom from it will be like, which is the nirvana part of it. So by understanding what suffering is and what cordial which this is mainly what we’re this is what we will be talking about. So strictly speaking, karma is covered in the first scope. karma is covered in another module.
That’s a crucial part of the cause of the suffering. So I’m gonna bring it in. So we’re gonna bring in and because of the second noble truth, Buddha talk articulates two main causes of suffering, karma and delusion. We’re gonna be discussing this. karma and delusion.
In other words, we’re gonna be living in debt at Buddhist psychology. The part I think part of that problem is, even when I read all these notes, you know, read all the the the terminology, which we do need to know, I mean, we do need to be really clear. We’re starting to start and get we need to be very clear, get our terms, our definitions clear. It’s so crucial to do this. Obviously, there’s something, you know, interesting, very, very idea where we really, really clear and structured and organized and precise.
We need this. There’s no question. So often we get caught up in the terminology. We read the traditional woman’s text. It’s we just have to sort of get visually out over time because we don’t use these we don’t use these terms in our world, which So what is something?
What is well, there’s different like I said, different ways of presenting, but the way I like to present, the main one is the three types, three ways, three examples of suffering. There are three ways in which we can describe suffering. The first one the first one is called what are called the the suffering of suffering. It’s like in your face, white printing eyeballs, suffering. And it’s what we all accept as suffering.
The world would agree with this. Giraffes and dogs and ants also. It’s when the bad stuff happens. It’s when the bad stuff happens. You know?
And now I’m gonna and if we look at it so in okay. In the second level truth, Buddha lays out the causes, and there are two there. Like I said, karma, meaning simply past actions. And then beneath that, and they even subsume down to this one, the negative space of mind, the deluded or negative space of mind. They are the core of karma and therefore suffering.
So if we link the three main ones this is my way of saying it. Okay? This the main cause of suffering sorry. The main suffering, the first one is suffering and suffering. You can think of it in terms of delusion.
It’s when you it’s when you it’s when you get what a hat doesn’t want. If you think about it, when the red light comes, when the person punches in the nose, when you get when you’re hungry, when you’re sick, when the war zone hack, whatever whatever degree of it. It’s when you get what you don’t want. You think of that. Simply speaking.
Anger, for example, anger, one of the three main reasons. Anger. It’s what it’s when that’s what arises, isn’t it? When you have the bad stuff happening. And if you think of it in terms of the causes, later on, I’m gonna go back and forth between these two.
It’s from it’s from harming others in the past that we get harmed in this life. We don’t get what we want. We get the bad things. People steal from us. People live with us.
People harm us. You know? This is from harming others in the past. It’s based in anger. So in in terms of our own experience day to day, what suffering of suffering is is is the stuff we don’t want, isn’t it?
You can see. Just a red light. Get annoyed. That’s the first kind of suffering. The second kind of suffering, this is this is where it’s depressing.
It’s actually Buddha calls it simply the suffering of change. It’s when but it broadly speaking, what this is referring to, it’s a bit depressing, is what we call happiness in ordinary daily life. In other words, this is when we get what we do want, the nice food, the green light, the pleasant sounds, the nice people, the lovely events, the good things happening. That’s the stuff that we do want. And we’re looking at the delusion here that’s related.
It’s called attachment. So when attachment gets what it wants, that’s what we call happiness. The Buddha calls that a suppler, level of suppler. And this is the one we really need to understand here. We’re going to this in detail.
We get this. We’re really on track in understanding the very specific Buddha’s particular approach to life. The third kind is called all pervasive suffering. You know, we’ll go into this. I wanna say briefly here.
It’s being caught up in the first place in these neurosis, in these negative states of mind. And as long as you continue to be follow these negative states of life, we will continue to create more suffering. We’re like, locked into it. There’s the suffering of suffering. Check suffering of change, and then also basic stuff.
So the suffering of suffering, like I said, is what we all agree is suffering. And if we think of ordinary world, everybody spends their life trying to avoid this one. And and then if we look at the second kind of suffering, then in the ordinary world, like I said, we call it happiness, and we spend our life trying to get it. Now this is what Buddhist and saṃsāra is. Living like this, these assumptions that the good things are called happiness, they need more of it, and I have and I deserve it.
And the bad stuff is called something, and I don’t deserve it. So you have to go against it. That’s what Buddha means by being simply speaking being saṃsāra. That’s what he means by it. He’s words in saṃsāra.
It’s his way of saying it. This is ordinary life. Look at life of a dog. humans, we’re more sophisticated than enough. We don’t we don’t pick our food off the floor anymore.
We have nice plates and fancy knives and forks and special recipes. It’s just we’re just more fancier. That’s all. We’re more sophisticated at it and doing nice The third one, all pervasive suffering, is being like, rock with, not seeing any way after me. Well, go listen.
The suffering of suffering is kind of obvious, and we know we’re sick of this one. So that’s reasonable. The second one, we don’t even know it’s suffering. That’s why it’s important. Let’s go into this one, to look carefully and logically at why it is suffering.
Let us give it a some nice, leave this idea of feeling depressed about it. You know? Explain it to ourselves. Not in some religious way, but in a really sound psychological way, but it’s psychology. Buddha is a marvelous psychology.
It’s not people. So broadly speaking, we can see this is what Buddha means by the second kind of suffering. Being more precise is the suffering of attack, the cause. The main cause of it is attachment. But broadly speaking, it’s being caught up in the inner prison of the neurosis, of the negative space of mind, of the pain and attachment, and then the anger, the jealousy, the fear, the depression, the low self esteem, the pride, etcetera, which is a supplement we’re talking about.
To eating self up. It’s like working. Is it consistent? Do you snap? So okay.
So we’ll just have the second noble truth there. And this is so interesting. We know that if we just think of suffering as we think of it, in most of us default mode, when we say suffering, we mean the first time. We mean when you don’t get what you don’t, when you don’t get what you want, when the war zone, you know, the the torture, the suffering, the hunger, the violence, the sickness, the lousy husband. It’s straight away when we say the word suffering on this earth, we mean that kind.
We never refer to the second one because that’s what we refer to. So it really takes thinking to look carefully. So the first so when we say suffering, we mean that first one. Let’s keep a memory. We’re looking at the Buddha’s view of suffering now.
Okay? So taking even the first kind of suffering, the first kind, the the gross one, the horrible stuff, the stuff we don’t want. But if we think of the causes of it, then straight away, immediately, don’t we? We look to the outside. The usual view of why am I suffering?
Because of my mother, my father, the mean person, the rapist, the thief, the liar, the people, the events out there, we see that. And this is just default mode, the view that we have. And all the Buddha is saying is, the ordinary world is you, that my mother is the source of the suffering, that you’re the source of the suffering, etcetera, etcetera. This is what he means by. He says we’re basically philosophically speaking, we’re all Sansariists.
We have a very particular view right now that we truly think is the truth. And the simplest way of calling is Sansari. We’re all sansarius. We have a sansari philosophy of life, which is to avoid the ugly stuff and to get the good things. That’s essentially it.
You think about it. Like I said, as humans, we’re more sophisticated. We’re basically the same. We’re we’re clever at it as well. We dress it up more nicely.
And Buddha is saying, this is a sansari philosophy. And what he’s saying is simply, it’s a mistaken assessment. He’s not being moralistic, saying naughty to think this way. He’s simply saying we’ve got it wrong. It’s a wrong interpretation.
But we’ve we’ve got bored with this. It’s completely the default mode. It looks like the truth. It feels like the truth. Everybody reinforces it as the truth.
And all Buddha is saying is it isn’t true. They’ve been very kind of scientific in how it’s going. And that’s what we have. By listening to Buddha’s view So just stop there. Step back a second.
And look at this idea of view, viewpoints, opinion, assessment. One, really, one way of describing how Buddha talks across the board, it it comes down to the mind, and the mind basically has a series of viewpoints that everything in the mind is a viewpoint. Everything is simply a viewpoint. It’s a viewpoint. And Buddha’s central point is this.
He’s saying reality is a certain way. Reality is a certain way. And then there’s the mind that sees it. And mostly, if we’re suffering and caught up in saṃsāra, quote unquote, it’s because the views in our mind are not in sync with reality. So one broad base or big picture way of describing Buddhism is that Buddha has a has, from his own experience, come up with a way of describing how the universe exists, how the suffering exists, what is happiness, what is mine, what is this, what is that, All the nuts and bolts of Buddhism are basically, like I said, Buddha’s view, his assessment, his interpretation of reality.
What we’re trying to do is listening to this to see to take it on board as our hypothesis to then work with it, to come up to the conclusion about whether or not we agree with Buddha from our own experience that it’s right or not. Because everything that happens in the mind, we think about it, is a viewpoint. Everything in the mind is a viewpoint. Oh, I love chocolate cake. We think it was an emotion.
It’s a it is. It’s got a component there, but essentially, it’s a thought. It’s an opinion about chocolate cake. I hate Fred. It’s anger.
It’s a feeling, but it’s basically an opinion. It’s You write down your view of Fred. He’s this. He’s this because he did this and this and this. It’s a viewpoint.
It’s an opinion. You think about it. What we can begin to see that everything in the mind is a viewpoint, we’re really on the right track. But some of those things, we’re so caught up in our viewpoints that we don’t even think we have a viewpoint. We just think it’s truth.
We think it is what we is what we are out there. We don’t even think our mind plays any role at all. So what we’re trying to do here, especially in this part of the part by understanding the mind is seeing the way the role that mind plays in all of our experience. It’s a really major point. We can get this we’re rooted on track with understanding Buddha’s approach to life.
So okay. Let’s look at the second noble truth. What what are the causes of suffering? The first kind, which is when you get the acne from the cat and gene. The second kind, which is what we call happiness, which seems to be the nice things.
And the third one, all pervasive suffering. What are the causes? Well, it’s too. So simple. And this is a bit of a shock already.
It sounds so simple. It’s almost embarrassing. The world, the scientific view. You say, what’s the scientific view of why there’s suffering? I wonder.
No one knows. No one has a clue yet. Well, all of the best we can say is we haven’t found the answers yet. It’s the best we can say. Otherwise, we don’t even know what the mind is.
We’re still looking. So there’s these really complicated explanations. People write books and books books books about something. What is it? Why more?
Why this and who this and why that? Because we’ve got a series of of different assumptions, haven’t we, in the physical world, the the materialist world, the materialist view of the world. So let’s look at even some of these assumptions before we even helps us then understand Buddha’s simple explanation of the two causes of suffering. He says there are two. Simple.
Just two. But let’s look at the assumption we have coming from our materials perspective that make it so hard to hear Buddha’s view, which is so simple, actually. A five year old can learn. It’s not complicated. But it’s so profoundly different from the view we have now or what we think is true.
So let’s look at our assumptions. First of all, the absolute assumption we never question in our materialist world is that we were made by our parents, that our brain is our mind, that we’re made up of genes and DNA. Now no no argument. We do have genes and DNA. We do have parents, and we do have a brain.
No argument there. Buddha’s not saying there’s no such thing. Indeed, doesn’t come from the creator. It’s such a so different. Words are simple.
But to take this as our basis, is our take this as our hypothesis is absolutely essential to begin to comprehend Buddhism. So then we hear in the second noble truth, there are two main causes of suffering. They’re both inside ourselves. That is a big shock. If, you know, Fred comes up and punches me in the nose and I’m crying, what’s wrong, Revere?
Why are you suffering? You don’t be surprised when I say, well, I’m suffering. This way, punch me. You’ll agree with me. So we will blame Fred.
We will sue him, punch him back, put him in prison, which is normal behavior, isn’t it? Fred is the cause of Rabina’s suffering, we’ll say. And we take this as an absolute scientific truth because we believe the outside is the main source of our pain. Isn’t the other huge assumption we’ve got that we never question. Never.
We also think the same about happiness. Why are you happy with me? Well, Frank gave me a hundred dollars. So it’s like I’m blaming Craig for my happiness, isn’t it? The same thing.
We’re ducking responsibility on someone else. So in terms of even the person that I had, I blame my parents. They made me. And we even think this way. I didn’t ask to get born.
It’s not my fault. We’ll say. This is an absolute given, isn’t it? No one ever questions this. All of our findings in the west, all the materialists, the scientific views are based on the simple assumption that I didn’t ask to get born.
In other words, I don’t play any role in my being Ravina. Someone else created Ravina and floated on this earth. You think about that you alone. It’s massive, and we don’t even question it. Whereas Buddha starts at the point of disagreeing with this.
So his view, and when we hear the two causes of suffering, is that my consciousness is mine, isn’t physical, doesn’t come from mummy deity, and doesn’t begin at conception. This, for the Buddha, is the nappiest idea. So Buddha’s view of two causes of suffering assumes a consciousness that is separate from the body, assumes a beginningless consciousness, and assumes the law of karma. The law of karma. Action.
So because he says, simple. Two courses of suffering, Ravina. What is the past action? You punched Fred two and a half lives ago, simplistically speaking. Okay?
An action or karma that verbena’s consciousness before it was labeled verbena, which is this unbroken chain of mental moments going back, back, back, back, back, And this is a proof logically provable as a as a hypothesis in the context of cause and effect that one’s mind is a beginningless continuity of mental moments. And that an action done and which leaves an imprint of that consciousness, which was only the auriges then need to see, which was not pulled out, then ripens now, meeting this person, Fred, he was likely, boom. So the main the first cause of that suffering is not Fred, his revenus, past action. It’s a technically simple point. It’s so emotionally loaded for us because why?
Because we’re coming to this with assumptions that I didn’t ask to get born. It’s not my fault. We’re all born this way. I’m gonna get free. Therefore, it’s not fair that Fred comes.
So these are all our assumptions, and then deepen our bones. So to hear the Buddha says, I’m sorry. You’re the blame of your well, you’re the blame for your suffering. It’s too much for us to bear. So you gotta unpack these assumptions to even hear this to So simple concept that past action is the cause of suffering.
It’s hard for us to hear it. Because why? Because all the assumptions we have now are in the way. They’re blocking us. There are all these viewpoints that we’re taking as an absolute truth.
The second cause of suffering, which is in fact the main one, the two subsumed out of this one, is called delusions, negative state of mind. Again, we assume we give first of all, in our view of the West, in the materialist view, we give equal status within a person to what’s called what Buddha would call negative and positive state of mind. We get equal statements to anger, love, compassion, generosity, fear, depression, most of us do. And we would just say that an ordinary person made by their parents, right, nice people, has all of these, and that’s make that’s a reasonable person. A reasonable person consists of some anger, some depression, some jealousy, some love, and we know we can hopefully grow the good stuff and try and not grow the bad stuff too much.
But that’s about the best we think we can do in our culture. So whenever we hear Buddha, there is outrageous, radical, ridiculous view that says, first of all, your mind is yours. You’re getting responsibility in little moments. You become a mommy or deity or a creator. Second, become fully programmed in this at this moment of negative ones, surprise, surprise, are not at the core of our being, are totally unnatural, are the source of all suffering, and, luckily, can be removed from the mind.
These are the assumptions in Buddhism. These are the ones we have to get our head around. And the only reason we find these here because they’re really quite straightforward, and Buddha hasn’t changed his story until about a year. It’s pretty straightforward. Not complicated to learn.
Like I said, a five year old is safe. But they’re so difficult for us to process because of the views we hold in our mind now at the level of assumption, the default mode, as truth. So these ones we hear these, we interpret them in a particular way because we can’t separate them from the. What do you think? Which one?
One of them have to Oh, okay. Okay. Okay. Listen. You you have the first you have the first present how else would you prove the equals x c squared except the same thing?
You can’t possibly prove equals x c squared unless you first present it theoretically. But first, have it theoretically, and then you start grade one, and then you go grade two. And then eventually, you you you gotta present the hypothesis first. You’ve gotta present it first, and it’s gotta be theoretically stable. Because recently, it’s to it’s easy to prove with.
You just take the ideas that you presented as as as a system, and then you take that as your hypothesis. If you how else would you learn to be an acupuncturist? You think let’s say, all you have to be an allopathic medicine. That’s your system. Suddenly, hear this weird and wacky world of Chinese medicine that talks about meridians and ears and god knows what, and you put needles here.
It’s a completely weirdest idea, isn’t it? Well, you can’t prove it by do right there. You gotta first open your mind, step back. First, you check that, like, your heart is reasonable. You’ve got a few decent people who’ve done it in the past.
It’s got a reasonable reputation, but you think you’re prepared to give it a go. It was a lot of wacky rubbish. Don’t even do anything. So you gotta check first and do your research. So you check the Buddha, maybe he’s got some good reputation.
You check the people. You check the systems. And then you you gotta then look into it and learn theoretically the entire thing. Why not? And then you you could present it theoretically.
And even even theoretically, you could learn at the pump system really well without putting one needle into anybody. You could even tell somebody about the meridian, the display of the needle there. You could have it theoretically can’t you? You could have this. You’d have to have this because how else would you test something if you haven’t got the words correct, if you haven’t got the theory.
So even theories have to be coherent. Before you even put them into practice, it’s gonna be a coherent presentation. When you could take the entirety of Buddha’s past from here to enlightenment and present and learn the whole thing theoretically, then that’s what you then take as your hypothesis. And then you start from your level experiencing each step of the way. How else could you learn to experience something if you’re gonna have a first positive?
You gotta know the recipe first. You’ll know the concept of cooking and what it means and if this and the function of eggs and this, and then you learn the recipe. If and if if you look at a recipe and you look at a cake, you can see no relationship whatsoever. You see this this is top of cake. There’s two and a half, three, this, four, this.
But, you know, but you’ve got to first learn the concepts of cooking, and then you learn the recipe, and then you do what it says, and then you prove it to yourself, and then you get the cake. Also, the Dalai Lama said, the Dalai had you proving here, you know, theoretically reincarnation. It’s not complicated. So what are the assumptions there we have to change? First, we have to assume the suffering is common of Sorry.
A mind not being physical. You want you have to take an assumption that mind is not physical. We posit that. Then we have to assume the law of cause and effect. And so the main broadly speaking, the main cause of something has to be something immediately before it that’s similar to it.
So if we posit a moment of consciousness which is not physical, the immediate main direct cause of that has to be the previous moment of that continuity of mental moment. The main cause of this cup, thinking the dynamic sets of, know, series of moment by moment by moment going back, has to be this clay. And, you know, that moment of clay, and this distracts it back before it was a cup, go back to the clay. The clay is a substantial cause. This is clay.
So the substantial cause of this cup is clay. The substantial cause of something nonphysical is that same nonphysical entity, the previous moment of that entity. So consciousness is an unbroken chain of mental moments. We’re just hypothesized. Right?
So the main cause of this moment of my mind, my nonphysical thoughts and feelings and experiences has to be a previous moment, a millisecond before. And then what’s the cause of this? A millisecond before. And what’s the cause of this? A millisecond before.
And you keep tracking this back and you go very well, even though we don’t remember ninety nine percent of even today, forget about this life. And it’s only eleven o’clock. We know even though we don’t remember it, we know logically that my mind existed in an unbroken chain of mental moments back to last night. We know that logically. Don’t remember ninety nine percent.
It doesn’t matter. We know our consciousness is living there. So you keep tracking this mind back in this unbroken chain of cause and effect, cause and effect, going back, going back, you end up in the first moment when you call back your mommy boy, won’t you? So there’s a way my mind began then. Well, no.
If your moment of consciousness, which we track back from now in an unbroken chain of middle moments to that second. Well, if it existed at that second as I popped out mommy’s womb, the the main cause of it has to be a previous moment when you’re in mommy’s womb, and you keep tracking it back in an unbroken chain of mental moments, and you get back you’ve got to get back to the first step second of perception. You cannot have a first moment somewhere. And you see the problem is we desperately, desperately, desperately want there to be a first moment. But but but but there must be, we’ll say.
But it’s utterly irrational if you apply for the effect. So you get back to the first step of conception. The main cause of that copy of your mind has to be the previous moment of that mind. And then you keep going back, and it has to be six weeks and seven weeks and nine weeks and a thousand weeks and twenty years and a hundred years and a billion years, you keep tracking back relentlessly, you will not find a moment that didn’t come from the previous moment. Logically then, this continuity of people moments is forgiving us.
That’s one fact. You take this as your hypothesis. You think like this. You can’t prove it yet. You are at first positive.
Then you take the law of karma, and you have to posit that. And then you put all these things together. So you take this as your hypothesis. And then once you’ve got the nuts and bolts of what mine is and what karma is and what isn’t and what it is, you can’t think about it until you know what it is. You can’t begin to put needles in the meridian until you’ve learned what a meridian is and learned how the needle goes.
You can’t just say, oh, I’m gonna try it out and then boom. You wanna know what you’re thinking about in order to hypothesize. Then once you hypothesize, you use it as your working hypothesis, and you try it out and you apply it by day by day. And then you get concentration meditations, and then eventually you get single quarter concentration, and you you go beyond the gross level of mind where you now have steroids, and now you can prove it’s true, where you’ll see it for yourself at a certain level. You’ve got to hypothesize it first.
And to hypothesize something, you have to have words. You gotta present it. And then, theoretically, that should all be coherent before you even begun to experience. It’s conceptually already. It should be reasonable presentation.
If it’s not, it’s ridiculous. That was all the theory of music understand. Yeah. Yeah. So you see and we’re gonna keep a kind of mind.
Okay? As some prophetesses, some sometimes, we’ll take this approach. The theories, the concepts first, and then you slowly apply them. And then from that, you get an experience. Because there are other kinds of minds that need first to get some kind of experience, so that they’re maybe people who go straight to learn to watch breath and look at their mind.
And then slowly from this, you can start to articulate. But but and we all need different methods at different times. Not just narrow minded single point one way. You know? There’s many, many different approaches in this stuff.
But this is what it is is a present it’s a view. It’s a it’s a vast world view. That’s all it is. It’s Buddha’s view of the world, and we have to take we have an assumption that’s in this experience that something’s made up. I promise you, you are exonerated.
I will take full responsibility. These are these are I like always at the the sort of like the two sort of like the pillars of Buddhism. It’s understanding what you mean by mind and by karma. When we get this, we’ve got the nuts and bolts of how a Buddha’s entire world. I tell you.
So, okay, consciousness, mind is worth using synonymously. And this general idea, like I said to you, what’s her name? Kathy. What’s her name? Maggie.
Maggie. Okay. So then, you know, like, here’s Maggie, and she’s this person. So we’ve got this person. So if we look at the materialist view, and this is stuff we take as as default mode, Maggie is created by her mommy and daddy.
Mommy and daddy pop into bed as, you know, the old fashioned And then suddenly, the eggers don’t came together, and they out popped the little thing nine months later called, and they labeled her Maggie. Girl, what? They called me Margaret. Oh, course you would. Maggie.
Okay. So they labeled you Margaret. And then so the assumption is that you are made by your mother and father, that there was no thought or anything of making the second before the second, wasn’t it? So you are the product of your parents. And that is such a a that’s the absolute unquestioned assumption of our world.
Would you not agree? Even if we’re Christian or Muslim, we know God put a soul there. That’s an extra thing. We still know mommy and daddy made it. We know that God didn’t do the conceit.
We know that mommy and daddy had to do the work, but you get this extra component called a soul. But we generally accept mommy and daddy maybe. And then most parents look at their child and agree they made the child. So if a kid turns out to be hit, you you get get guilty. And it turns out to be mother Twizzy, you feel proud because you think you made a nice kid.
So we just assume. Now Buddha is not saying you didn’t your mommy and deity didn’t play a role. He’s not saying that. He just adds an extra thing. He says your mommy and deity gave you a body.
How kind. But the the main part of who Maggie is is her mind. And this mind didn’t come from the superior being or the creator and doesn’t come from parents. Now this is kind of a shocking concept because then usually, if you’re looking at world views, there’s only two views. There’s a creator mode or the materialist mode.
World. You understand? This consciousness, mind, before you use to all of this. He says it’s not physical. He says it doesn’t come from superior beings, and it doesn’t come from mommy daddy.
So then our next question is, well, where does it come from? And, again, we’re assuming a a first moment back there, somewhere mysterious when Maggie began. So, yes, indeed, Maggie did begin. It was a coming together of egg and sperm, and then the entry entering into that egg and sperm is the this consciousness, which we can track back from maybe now, go right back to conception. It was obviously more subtle at that point.
The Buddha asserts gross consciousness, subtle consciousness, very subtle consciousness. There’s always there’s these levels of mind that we don’t even assert as existing in our material as well. As far as the material as well, we can still got the gross conception, and we have sensory conception of sensory. But the Buddha asserts much more subtle levels of capacity for cognition, which is the job of the mind to think. So the mind goes you know, if we’re reversing the process of of death to birth, we go from you know, going backwards backwards, then your mind, at the time of conception, has come from not more than a few weeks before that of that consciousness being in another body or person, if you like.
But it’s the same mind. You know, the same mind, the continuity of mind, unbroken chain of mental moments. And because of the law natural law of cause and effect, it’s got to be an unbroken chain. Because then this is the simple point of that cause and effect. Anything that exists, if you think about it, anything that exists it’s a chicken leg idea.
You know that if that thing exists at that moment, we all know it has to come from something before it. It’s a simple idea, isn’t it? You know, even in ordinary physical world, you don’t suddenly have nothing, and then boom, like out of the sky, something appears. We just we know things like likeness. Everything is just evolutionary cause and effect procedure, isn’t it?
Things you track it back. You can get back to the seed. Well, where did the seed come from a previous flower? Where did the flower come from a previous seed? Of course, the big thing is where’s the first egg?
We all want the first chicken, the first egg, blah blah blah. But Buddha has a very simple way of describing it. As Sattalama said one time, big bang, no problem. Just not the first big bang. That’s all.
So the Buddha’s view is that there’s material and there’s mind. There’s only two types of phenomena, broadly speaking, in his universe. There’s another little bit more abstract way of talking about time and things. They’re neither physical nor mind. Never mind those.
There’s matter and the you know, Buddha’s got the old fashioned idea. Buddhism still uses it, which is the same as Geshe-la and Hizmo back in the fourteenth century, which is the physical world is made up of the four elements. The Chinese thought this way. You know? You understand?
So that the world is made up of earth, air, fire, water, and all the physical universe, which includes Maggie’s body, this stuff is the same four elements as the volcano, as the river, as the stone. It’s different configurations. That’s all. So the whole matter of material stuff and of mind. There’s no other type of thing.
And the matter is also beginningless, not the first feedback. We all for for some reason, we want a first moment. We want there to be a first moment. We assume that there must be a first moment. Buddha says it’s utterly irrational.
There’s no logical basis for this. It’s just this instinctive wrong view that he says, all sorts of. But, basically, everything’s a continuity of mental moments, and Buddha says matter is also beginningless. This universe began at a certain point. You can pin it down if you’re really clever.
So man began at a certain point. The man began at a certain point, but but there’s something before it. Out of which my pain, out of which the universe pain, out of which Maddie came. So the components of Maddie are body coming from mummy daddy. We track the bodies back way back to who knows where, and then the mind.
That mind has got its own it. It’s its own trick. It’s its own thing. So you track it back to the first segment of section. You have to track it back to a previous moment if we’re taking the simple idea of a continuity of mental moment, which is not physical.
And then keeps tracking, keeps tracking, keeps tracking. You gotta find that it was in a previous body, and then you get conception, and back to the death, and the before and before and before. Now instinctively, frantically, what well, there has to be a first moment somewhere. That point, Christians and Muslim, we set we blame God for being the first moment. We assume there’s a thing called God that is no cause of God, is beyond all the laws of normal, and is always existing.
We’re gonna sense this beginningless idea of God. Buddha said nothing special. Everything’s beginningless. Everything is beginningless. Everything is beginningless.
But it’s just a weird idea to us. Now it’s really emotional. It’s a nutty idea. I don’t know who we don’t remember most of you today. Forget about a past life.
Think you’ve had countless past lives sounds completely demented. You know? But we’re taking this as our hypothesis here. That’s all. So this consciousness of yours goes back and back and back and back.
That’s one point. Now what runs it? What causes? If we now look at Maggie and describe her, this is where karma comes in now. karma is a sacred word.
It means action. It means action, but it and it implies reaction. Everything is action reaction, which is like cause effect. It’s a dynamic process of cause and effect, seed and fruit, action reaction. So Buddha’s basically saying every microsecond of everything that Maggie thinks and then does and says on the basis of what she thinks, let’s let’s face it, the body and speech are just the surface of the mind.
You listening? That’s called a karma. Every second. And every and that using the other analogy of seeds, everything you say to a thing leaves a seed in your mind, a tendency, a habit. It’s a it’s a it’s a simple logic of habit.
And and that seed will then, if you leave it in the mind, will ripen in the future as many experiences. So Buddha is almost literally saying we are the creator of ourselves. So if we look at Maggie now, we see her life. We can divide her life in terms of four types of fruits of past karma. We’re gonna get the causes of Maggie.
So the first one is being maybe in the first place. Being a human, female, Australian, blah blah blah, this human form. Buddha, you know, we’re supposed to talk about that here too, all these realms and this is what he talks about. There’s many mind many kinds of minds. Buddha says Buddha says there’s, like, countless minds, countless minds, limitless number of minds in in all universes.
Right? There’s no they’re all beginningless, and they’re all they are all experiencing at any given moment the fruits of their past actions. This is Buddha says this is a natural law. So and then and then he says, well, due to different karmas, we’re born in different kind of we have different realms of existence. So we can let’s say here, we can all agree with human.
We’re in the human realm. It’s it’s in within a bigger group called the desire realm for the Buddha, and then there’s a whole spectrum of possibilities. You more subtle levels of types of rebirth in the desire realm, which is called gods or the Muslims call it paradise. When you’ve got a subtle level of physical energy, that subtle light, it’s a result of a lot of virtue and that spirit is. Then you got humans, then you got animals, and there’s other kinds, a whole bunch of other kinds.
We’re going to get it. So in this case, we can produce a negative human. So this has got causes. And the Buddha would say the main cause of having what’s called a human mind, which is conjoined with a human body, having human experiences. It’s just all these common experiences that we have.
The cause of this getting a human body is the accumulation of a lot of morality, of virtuous karmic seeds in your mind. Because everything we are is the fruit of action we’ve done. Everything in your garden is the fruit of seeds you planted. We all know that. Even if you don’t like it, you’ve gotta accept that the result of seeds you planted because it’s your garden.
So if you look at your life, it’s your garden, and everything in it is the fruit of something your mind did. If you get a punch in the nose, honey, that’s your punch. If you’re gonna put your dollars in the laundry, that’s your billion dollars. And there are causes of those. There are seeds you plant in your mind to get those fruits.
So the first one is you’ve got the human life, the fruit. The Buddha would say, I think if we realize how hard we must have worked in a past life at morality and goodness and non harming and actually benefiting others, accumulating every one of those seeds and build up and build up and build up of that energy. That is the cause of how come at the time of your past death, your mind was programmed by that to cause it to go on autopilot and find its way to your new, you know, your new mommy’s win in Australia with your conditions. So this is the human body. Now someone in the desert had one of those.
Hitler had one of those. Mother Teresa had one of those. So the cause of that is one track of karma. We can deduce for this three of us, the person in the desert, mother Theresa and Hitler, similar causes of morality because there’s many tracks of karma, ripen to cause that mind on autopilot to find a a human wound and a mother. First one.
Now let’s look at the difference between a person in the desert, mother Theresa, Hitler. Let’s give you example. Or you. You know? So the second way your account ripens is called your tendencies.
Your act the court actions similar to the cause. We look into your mind. You look into yourself. You’re gonna see your attention alive, killed, steeled, loving, generous, intelligent, good at music, good at football. You name it, honey.
Now there’s the the immediate cause we think of this is our mommy and our daddy and our demons. Now that’s fine if we look at Maggie. It doesn’t work when you look at Hippra. We can’t find an evidence in poor Hippra’s old Austrian housewife mummy that she was a mummy murdering Jew hater. There’s no evidence that mother Theresa’s mother was a saint.
So that’s where our explanations of all genes and DNA gets a little bit it falls apart. If it’s a normal person, you’re a bit like your mother and father, it seems reasonable. You know? So the Buddha would say, Hitler’s mother has something to do with Hitler’s insane mind. Excuse me.
He brought it himself. He was fully programmed from the first second of conception with his habits. This basic this kind of karma is you just looking for your habits. They’re just about your habits. If you sit there for twenty years of this life playing football, don’t be surprised you’re good at football.
Right? So then the Buddha just tracks that back and says, you must have had a tendency to be good at football at the time of conception. Mozart could play piano from the time he was you know, he’d love to give him a piano at the age of three of not writing a sonata. You know? He obviously came fully programmed with music.
Hippo clearly came fully programmed with God knows whether he did. And mother three to her story too. So whatever’s in the mind is all the imprints of our own habits. You might share them with the mother and father. We say, I am this because my mother and father are this way.
No. You happen to have the karma with those parents who are good at football or fascists. You know? So you go to their womb and you join their club. You get my point?
But you’ve got you know, I’m angry, we say, because, oh, well, we’re being this tired of anger. Or we say because we’re being this tired of hurt her. We always have an outside cause. No. No.
What is it? The main cause of being is anger is her past anger. The main cause of her being spoiled. So this gets us to the third type of karma now, and it’s called experiences similar to the cause, which is all the stuff that happens to you. You get lousy parents.
You’re born in a desert. You’re born with people who hate you. They rape you. They love you. They cry to you.
They give you money. Whatever the thing is that happens to us, however we’re seen by others, this also is all the fruit of our own content. But even as a fourth wave karma rises, it’s called environmental karma. Whether you’re born in a desert, whether you’re born in an ugly disgusting place full of pollution, whether you’re born in a beautiful peaceful environment, that’s also the result of what one past action. So Buddha puts us squarely in the center of the being the main cause of all our experiences, of all our everything.
So it’s a very simple idea. This is completely outrageous. Whoever thought that you don’t. Whoever thought that you created yourself, it’s a really interesting concept. And that’s what Buddhist saying basically.
We are the cause of who we are, of the parents of everything. Right? It doesn’t mean they don’t play a role. It doesn’t mean that they’re right to harm us. That’s there’s no logic in that.
Gonna be causing. Because we’re so caught up with the blame victim mode, we assume I’m this way. It’s not my fault. I’m not asking it more. So then we hear that I’m the cause of it.
So we think I probably would just then say, oh, I’m the blame. So covers sorry. This is done in the first stupa. It’s assumed that this part here, but we’re gonna talk about it. So this is the Buddha’s view.
You know? This is view. So how else can you think about this, Peggy? No. You’re not Peggy.
You’re Peggy. Yeah. That’s right. So if you don’t know these words, how can you test them? You gotta know the words first, don’t you?
Then you can test do anything. No. That’s right. If it is really see, this is my feeling. I sound familiar to say this.
I can’t. I think it’s too like this. I’ll do this. Okay. If you think about this, in our culture, we we totally say, mommy and daddy, it is the scientific finding that we all accept as a truth.
No one accept. No one denies it. A total default mode. So then on the then so if it is true that my mommy and daddy decided to make Ravenna, So then they create this person who pops out with depression, anger, jealousy, and wish to lie, kill, steal, whatever you like. But then they tell me, I’ve gotta stop being responsible.
Then I go to my therapist, and I start my talk. I excuse me. If I’m really being consistent philosophically, my parents are the blame. So the instinctive feeling we have that they’re the blame is only because we believe they caught they created us, but you can’t have it both ways. If they really did create you, then they are to blame, and it is their fault, and you should sue them to the max.
And I am not joking now. You see, instinctively, we feel they are. Why? Because we believe they created us. And so you’re right to say, I didn’t ask you before.
You are right to say, your parents are the blame. It’s simply correct. Like, Frankenstein made his monster. You can’t blame the monster. It’s Frankenstein who made a mistake.
So it’s actually quite consistent, but it’s too much for us to bear. So we have this real conflict. I shouldn’t stop. I should stop blaming my parents. No.
Now according to Buddha’s view, yes. You gotta be consistent with what we think. You know? So Buddha’s saying, honey, you may just stop dying. I love that.
That puts me in the control. Excuse me. Now I can bloody do something about it. If really my parents made me, and I and even until recently, they said in science, you’re stuck with the brain you get. They’re saying it’s the greatest discovery of the twentieth century.
They thought they call it neuroplasticity. And with respect, this is because they did these these these these these experiments on the brains of meditators, who just by thinking about compassion, they alter the configuration of their own brain. It’s blowing their minds. The world has been telling us for two and a half thousand years if you change your heart. So it’s quite a a huge part to get to where even you can decide if you change your own brain.
I mean, we’re we’re making progress. His head had his head blown off. And then when he escaped, his parents were murdered. And I said to him, do you ever feel angry? He burst into laughter.
Angry? What for? He said and he said simply, he said, is that our fault? We can’t bear those words. All he meant was, sweetheart, it’s calmer.
And that means if you sow the seeds in your garden I’m sorry. It’s your garden. It’s so simple. So that also means that us own the flowers. Mostly when we think of the stuff, we think of the bad stuff.
You see, we agonize. Why do bad things happen to me? Bad stuff. Happen to me? We can’t bear it.
We never agonize why do good things happen. Why do good things happen to me? We don’t care why. Just give me more. You know?
And this is the view of attachment and anger, the two main delusions of day to day. Based on an assumption of innocent victim, we crave frantically the good thing, which is a second kind of suffering. And we frantically, the fear, put away the bad things. And why we say, why did that happen to me? What we really mean is I don’t like it.
We don’t we we we you know, then when good things happen, we greedily want more because we like it. So we have these wrong views saying, why does it happen to me? What we really mean is it shouldn’t happen to me. And if you did believe your parents made you, you’re right in saying it shouldn’t happen to me. Because you didn’t took anything to deserve it.
You’re right. All the words ego says are correct. I don’t deserve it. I’ve never met that person before. You’re right.
So no wonder we’re freaking out now. What’s the view that our mommy and daddy made us? It’s our luckyest view. That mommy and daddy may give that my brain is physical. And this would be awful consequence with that view.
Well, I’m happy to give you a of that. It puts me in control. It stops anger. It stops attachment. It stops fear, and it makes me If you look at that garden and you think it’s self existent and, you know, and you’re being this garden’s being dumped on you, full of weeds, ugly things, of course, you’re gonna feel miserable.
And if you think you can’t change it in your life, you’re gonna kill yourself right Yes. So listen, Jack. Suffering is not a broken nose. Suffering is a mental state of anguish and fear and resentment and anger and jealousy and panic. And the point is if you don’t have that, first of all, your experience of pain will be much less, which is a big surprise to us.
And really when it comes down to it, this is the point when we really follow this. Oh, where’s our mic? You want the mic? Okay. We’ll just do this one.
We’ll have tea break. Thanks, Amy. The point when you really got to the level of the level the Buddha says you can with the mind developing and the freedom of suffering, you’ll get to the level of being a bodysattva. And as Kirti said, I remember they said one time, for a bodysattva, the action of cutting off his hand and feeding it to a starving animal is inconsequential as a lead for a mother tree. We’ll go all the way to the the the greatest arena.
So all that’s proving, which is Buddha’s point, that everything comes out of the mind, even the experience of pain. And that maybe we’ll talk about that. But that you know, as long as we’ve computed the physical, it’s true there is pain because we have a mind which is linked with this body. But the more the mind changes and gives up delusions and fears and dramas, the less the physical self. That’s a fact.
But would that be you’d still feel the pain and just don’t No. You’d a different interpretation of it. Yeah. No. Because the experience of pain is not absolute.
Even now we can see this. If we were able to quantify the that some people can have capacity to pay this twenty times more for another because they just don’t see it the same way. So it’s still real, but it’s so determined by our mind. It’s so determined by the you know, you look at a person, a kid, who’s got a big victim mentality. Look at their screaming and yelling when they get a pain.
But look at another kid who’s less than your rocket. They’re straight away. They they just give it you know, you don’t even worry about it. It’s the same hurt on the knee, but it’s so much to do with our attachment and anger and all the rest. That’s the real thought of the pain.
So suffering is not referring it is suffering at the first level is the suffering of suffering, which is the pain in the knee, the bad things happening. I get so nervous when I get all these notes, I personally so I just have to just forget the notes. And by the end, we’ll cover everything in there. Whether you notice that or not, I promise you will. We will summarize it at the end, and I’ll show you how you’ve been through it.
Okay? Go have a cup of tea. Okay. So here we have this line. The beginningless continuity of.
Here the beginningless continuity of mental moment. And then we have the law of karma that determines the experience simply speaking, that’s the law that determines the experiences of that mind at any given moment. So so this mind, we can see it’s got this relationship with the body. You know? So it’s interesting in the more esoteric teaching Buddhist tantra, which is similar to the which is the Tibetan medical system is based on.
They they they describe in a very simple way, actually, this very intimate relationship between body and mind. You know? It’s not it’s being part of this level of the future, but I find it quite helpful. There’s this natural relationship between the physical and the mental, and our body and mind, obviously, are linked together. You know?
And the Buddha’s explanation of karma, especially if think about environmental karma or even even any other level of karma, is that this always the way our karma ripens includes the physical because the mind impacts upon the body. So for example, if you take any, like, any one action, let’s say, killing, and we look at the four karmic results, there’s four types. The first kind is the fully ripened result type of reverb. The second one is the tendency to keep killing action similar to the cause. The third one is the experience similar to the cause.
The fourth one is called the environmental result. Well, the first kind, if that ripens as the main cause, the throwing karma they call at the time of your death, well, that will program your mind and cause you to take like an animal birth or something. Then if it ripens as a tendency, you might have a human life like we’ve got, but it would have been through our mind. Some people we can see have a tendency to kill. Most of us kill something because it’s considered reasonable to kill mosquitoes and rats and, you know, According to the Buddha’s view, kill anything is inappropriate.
We can see in the mind, we have a tendency to kill. The third way of killing right would be that you get killed or you die young or you get sick. So that’s where sickness is a physical thing, isn’t it? So if, you know, some people can be born very weak with parents that get sick easily and and and the food, you know, real problems with their body. That’s the result of killing.
So that’s done by the mind, but it causes you to get in that particular rebirth to have be born to parents who’ve got very bad genes, where you’ve got, you know, certain illnesses in the in in the family. You get born into that situation, so you experience physical sickness. Well, the cause of you getting that birth, that physical condition is your own past action. The parents have got that gene, the DNA, that you’re born into. It’s like a house that you’re born into.
It’s a lot it’s a lousy, you know, a lousy environment. We get a bad, you know, sick body. The karma is yours. The fourth one is called environmental karma where even, let’s say, you live in this really ugly place where the water is polluted, the air is polluted, very violent. Or in terms of killing, you would, let’s say, the food wouldn’t nourish you.
It’d cause you to be sick. You know, you eat peanuts, and they kill you. Look at some people. They can’t eat peanuts. You know?
Look at is from the past actions. And even the the way the physical world manifests as beautiful, as ugly, as polluted, as as pure, that’s the collective karmic result of those beings who share it. So the the the elements themselves are like there’s no power. It’s the impact of actions of minds that cause the elements to be where they are, that cause the body to be the way it is. So everything that the word comes out in mind and karma.
Mind and action. Word karma means action. You listen to it. It’s a very explanation. Hugely this thing called mind and actions.
It’s a very, very different view. Very different from the creative view and very different from the material view. But if you like, it seems to me, if you look at the creative view and the material view, they share at least one thing that someone else made you, and you began in somewhere. At some point, you began. You’ve been and you’ve there.
And God did it or you can’t even get to it. Whereas Buddha would say, the the mind is beginningless come to you, and you don’t need creation. He says it’s an unnecessary addition. Right? But we create ourselves.
Minds do the job. So therefore, in Buddhist terms, there’s no concept of blame, of of of of punishment, reward, nothing like this. It’s a natural law. karma is a natural law. Yeah.
Actions bring their own results. Okay? That’s the general overview of torma. So the mind is the source. So in the in the second noble truth, whatever causes the suffering, Buddha lays it down to karma, the past action that that mind did that left an imprint or a seed in that mind that you didn’t pull out, so seeds will come and grow and grow and eventually ripen as a tendency, as an for us in this life, Fred’s punished, that’s the experience similar to the cause of past harm.
Fred giving me a hundred dollars. That’s the the result of my past generosity. So everything we experience, as I’m so is our karmic experience. So this is an interesting explanation. But if we look at our intuitive response, not that, the intuitive, instinctive one is all coming from the outside.
We instinctively feel like in this victim. We instinctively believe that mommy and daddy made us, and that it’s not fair for me. Don’t deserve to get you know, blah blah blah. This is the way this is we well, this is how we’re locked in saṃsāra. This just a philosophy.
It’s just a viewpoint. We’re brainwashed from many lives of having this view that now it appears truth to us. So when you hear Buddha’s view, it’s kinda shocking. First of it doesn’t seem to be true. We’re not used to thinking it’s true.
So it takes time to work with it, hypothesize it, to practice applying that explanation of your life. And that slowly slowly from this changes You stop being the victim. You get brave. You accept responsibility. You know?
Takes time. For one. This is the basis of practicing. The basis of practice. Applying the law of the.
So the two main causes of suffering, the past action, and then the cause of that even is the belief, because the mind the source of all of it, the source of the action we do with our body and speech is the mind. So let’s look at the mind. Buddha says we’ve got sensory consciousness, and we have mental consciousness. Sensory consciousness is that part of our mind, not physical, remember, that works through the medium of certain parts of our body. So eye consciousness is that part of the mind that channels through the medium of the eyeball, the knowers, and the lid open, all the other business to have a a a, you know, to have a visual cognition.
You see shape and color. You know? The ear consciousness is that part of your mind that functions to the meaning of the ear and the drum and all the other parts of the plumbing to have an ear consciousness, a moment of cognition of sound. You know? Now they just like but the thing is, as Ravi Yechi says, we make the body the boss.
But in fact, the sense of this dumb animals, They really have no power at all. We it’s our mental consciousness. This is where the workshop is, as long as that is. This is so this is what this is now the really tasty and how it functions. This is the absolute base.
This is the substance of what is the your karma and your mind. Now we’re getting the stuff of here that causes suffering. So the Buddha, again, is karma and delusions. It’s assumed that the delusion, the source even of the action is the state of mind. Obviously, my if we look into why is that noise coming all the time?
What’s happening? Okay. Mental consciousness. Mental consciousness. When the workshop is spent upon hearing.
That’s all the thoughts are, feelings, emotions, unconscious, self conscious, instinct, intuition, you know, good, bad, happiness, suffering. All of this occurs in the mental consciousness. That’s what we have to learn to know about. So what’s it made up of? Well, one way of talking, very simply, it’s made up of three state types of states of mind, three categories of states of life.
Very simple. Buddhist psychology is receptiveness. There’s positive, negative, and neutral states of life. There’s no fourth category. There’s positive states of life, which the the Buddha would say, in their nature, are at the core of our being.
They are actually the the almost as if you can say, speaking loosely, the very substance of this mind of ours is the positive qualities. They are at the core of our being. They’re like the h two o of the water. They’re the two bits of h and one bit of o. That’s what water is, isn’t it?
But what our mind is, broadly speaking, is the virtues, the positive states. You can say like that. Really lucid speaking. Then you’ve got the negative states of life, which the Buddha would say, and this is where he differs radically from all the materialist models of the mind. He said that I’m not at the core of our being.
They do not belong there. They are the source of all suffering and of all actions of harming others. And, fortunately, and this is the absolute basis of all Buddhist teachings can be removed. If they can’t, then Buddhism load of rubbish. The the assumption behind all of Buddhism, view of enlightenment, nirvana, cessation of suffering is that these sort these causes of suffering are not in the core of our being.
Can be removed. This is the point of Buddhism. This is what he’s saying. We’re so used to hearing it as religion. We just don’t get the means.
Mind blowing what he’s actually saying. It’s a shocking idea. You go to your you go to your therapist, and you tell them that you wanna have methods, please, to get rid of all anger, all jealousy, all depression, all low self esteem, and love and compassion, have love and compassion for all beings, they’ll think you’re psychotic and give you a pill, and lock them up. They honestly will. You So this is the point that makes it hopeful.
If it is true, the attachment of anger and jealousy and pride are in the core of well-being, which is what we say in the West, then why over trying to get rid of them? Because actually who you are, it’s like thinking a natural person has two hands. Well, it’s like thinking you’ve gotta cut your hand off. You gotta cut your anger out. And that’s how we think.
We think it’d be unnatural. We think we would be unnatural if we didn’t have jealousy and anger. We’ve so incorporated all of these negative states of mind into our explanation of what a person is, but it seems insane to think that you would even try to rid your mind of them. But this is essentially what Buddhist. This is what Buddhist religion is, really.
It’s not a problem. So if it’s true that they’re not at the core of our being, and if it’s true that the source of our suffering, and if it’s true, we’re sick of suffering, then it’s obvious we need to know precisely what they are and how they cause our suffering and how we get rid of them. Just the point, sort of, is it not? Practical stuff. There we go.
Can you hear me? I’m gonna rest like this. Okay. So okay. We have positive, negative, and neutral.
The ones we’re concerned with here in junior school, high school are the negative because they’re the problem. Like, if you wanna if you’ve got some bloody water and you’ve discovered that it’s full of pollution, you’re not concerned with the positive at the moment, are You’re concerned with the pure water. You’re concerned with the pollution because but the reason you’re trying to remove it is so you can end up with pure water, isn’t it? So you’ve got to concern yourself with these stages of practice with the yucky stuff. You gotta get your hands dirty.
You gotta taste your own you know, like I said yesterday, you know, don’t want swearing. Rock on your ears. A friend of mine is a therapist, you put your hands in your own shit. That’s what practice is. You gotta learn to understand the negative ones and how they cause you pain.
Because you if you don’t know what the problem is, how can you identify it? And if you can’t identify it, how can you remove it? You gotta get your hands dirty. That’s why practice is painful. Learning to know about your own depression.
Don’t just say I’m depressed, but learning to unpack it, deconstruct it, look at it, and investigate it is really quite difficult. But this is what we must do. It’s not a mystical process. Believe me. It’s just really hard work learning to understand the negative states of mind.
And why we want to is not to make you miserable. It’s to help you get rid of them. It’s the point. You must never forget that point. Otherwise, you get depressed and give up.
Much better enough. If we know why we’re investigating the garbage, going deeply into becoming our own therapist and really tasting how it causes pain, it’s then that we want to get rid of it. We will be so exhausted from the pain. This is the point. That’s hard work.
So I may concern the state is the negative state of mind. So remember what I’m saying is a radical thing, but they’re not at the core of our being. This is the fundamental point. If they were, don’t bother trying. This is the point.
If if they are at the core of our being, if we cannot remove them, don’t bother trying. Okay? Learn to live with them. If you can’t remove that pollution from the water, if the water is at the core if the pollution is at the core of what water is, then you must not remove it. Then you learn to live with it.
This is reasonable. You know? So what are the negative states of life, and how do they function, and how do they cause suffering? This is the problem. Now we’re getting to the point.
Which we’re not gonna match it too much into here. But we will. We will. We will touch on it. We have to.
The root one, the mother of them all, the root delusion as they call them, as they call it, is actually called simply ignorance. The very general words Obviously, it’s got a very specific definition here. In order to understand it, you must understand that. Ignorance. In Tibetan, makriba.
Unawareness. This primordial kind of primordial unawareness of how things actually exist. This is all of this is. You know? We’re gonna get into this.
It’s the deepest one, and therefore, the hardest to identify. There’s not even a name for it. Well, there is actually in our material as well. We call it instinctive survival. We think it’s a good thing.
We’ll call it egos. And its function is not often colloquially as ego grasping. And its function is to grasp, I mean, like, primordially, frantically, panic strickenly at the sense of self. We see it loudly when someone attacks us, insults us, hurts us, wounds us. That’s when the I, the sense of I rises like a sleeping lion.
And this immense clinging, believing in, grasping at this sense of self is is the root belief and the hardest to see. When we’ve uprooted this one, that’s the meaning of nirvana, cessation of suffering. It’s like you cut the motor for suffering. As long as that’s there, life continues. Rebirth after rebirth after rebirth after rebirth.
It’s like the motor that propels us forward from life to life to life. When that’s cut, when you’ve affected your realization of emptiness, as they say, which we’ll talk about, that’s your nirvana. That’s your cessation of something. All these people. So that’s I say there’s no colloquial use.
It’s very nice place. The then you’ve got effectively, the way the full level truth describes it, the main source of suffering from day to day is the main voice of that ego grasping. And this is the one called attachment. This simple cute word. And as long as he says, I could tell you about attachment for one whole year, and you will never begin to understand it until we build out something deeply, deeply inside.
It’s actually such a simple word that it’s spoken of in a very simple way, but it’s the the the depths to which it goes in our mind is mind loving. And it’s immense inner work to see how people live. And this too is extremely hard to recognize. It’s it’s the basis of all the others in this hierarchy. You know?
So on the basis of attachment, we then have anger. As one lama said, anger is a response when attachment doesn’t get what it was. It’s a default mode. And we it’s like we run between these two a thousand times a day, a thousand times a minute, back and forth between attachment and anger. And you wanna look at the two the first and second causes the first and second levels of suffering.
The first level of suffering, the suffering of suffering, is is is is what is what triggers anger. The second the the second level of suffering is is when attachment gets what it wants. So as long as we get what we want every day, that’s what we mean by happiness. And look what happens. The second attachment is thwarted.
The second attachment doesn’t get what it wants. Just that red light. That’s what we mean by the first kind of stuffing. We’re going between these two. We’re frantically grasping at the good things because we call it happiness.
We believe that’s what you know, we’re not to get it. Frantically, manipulate, we get what attachment wants. The second it doesn’t get it, it’s called the first kind of suffering. And we go between these two all the time, nonstop. And so, you know, look at your life.
If you wake up in the you know, by the end of the day, things have gone your way, you call it happiness. I’m not being horrible now. Look at this. See, this is not saying it’s not nice to have nice cakes and good boyfriends. The board is not complaining about that.
He’s saying our view of this is mistaken. Nothing wrong with cakes and boyfriends. So attachment and anger are the main two. Now we mightn’t think we have anger, but the the more fundamental word for it is the state of mind. Attachment is the state of mind, and the opposite is aversion aversion.
So that will manifest the second attachment doesn’t get what he wants. A split second. That’s that moment of irritation, that moment of annoyance, that second of frustration, or that rage, or that hopelessness of despair and depression, they are all aversion. Some go in and some go out. You understand what I’m saying?
It’s that second of of discomfort, of panic, the fear. Something’s gone wrong. Oh my god. This shouldn’t be the way it is. Why is this like it is?
I do not want this. Either extreme or the most tiny. That is aversion, and that’s exactly the response when attachment is stopped in its tracks. Can you hear me, people? We all know this deeply and well.
We’re having it a thousand times a day. And what’s fascinating about these delusions, this is really the key point the Buddha makes, which is so unique and interesting to Buddha’s view, that all of these delusions or these disturbing emotions, this is used synonymously, or these afflictive emotions is the term that’s often used, are rooted in fear. Their nature is fear, fear and panic, and anxiety. That’s their nature. It’s just that’s just their nature.
You know when a person is angry? Like I said last night, a person for five minutes being angry with a kid. We’ll just go, oh, it’s gonna be cute because of having an angry fit. You know? But he’s actually having a mental breakdown.
Quite literally, isn’t it? You look at it carefully. He’s having a complete mental breakdown. His eyes are wide with horror, screaming, yelling. His frantic paranoia for that five minutes, screaming out his brain.
It’s called a mental breakdown. And look at it. He’s having a panic attack. All delusions are panic. It’s so fascinating.
Robert Zappa says when you finally remove all the delusions from your mind, when you finally realize emptiness, when you rid your mind, receiver grasped finally rooted it out, as he says, there is no cure. The fear is the natural response of having all these illusions. And fear is completely the basis of pain. It’s complete horror. I observe my mind, but even I get the slightest cut.
It’s you you catch it. And it’s just panic. Oh, a part of me has been cut. You know? It’s like panic.
Everything is panic. We all talk about this normally. We all have panic attacks every day now. Everyone has anxiety. The reason most people go to therapists now because we have anxiety at age nine, ten, eleven, twelve, forget when you’re forty and fifty.
Anxiety, fear, panic. Buddha says it’s the natural flavor of these negative states of mind. It’s just natural to them. And that this is the the suffering of daily life, ordinary. This is the inner prison.
But I was underneath when he spoke to that prisoner. The inner prison for ordinary ordinary people lives like ours. Ordinary fears and and low self esteem and panic, and I can’t do it. It’s not possible. It’s too much.
It’s unbearable. What to do? And I don’t know what’s wrong and why am I feeling this and what’s gonna happen. I should be happy and this stuff that everybody experiences. This is the voices of these delusions.
That’s it. That’s the nature. We don’t otherwise, the positive ones, they call love, compassion, empathy, harmony, joy, contentment. By definition, we don’t suffer when they’re there. It’s the opposite.
Contentment means you’re not having a panic attack. Contemptment means you’re relaxed. When you’re loving somebody, love is not attachment. Love is delight or wish that person be happy, altruistic. The positive states of mind in their nature, so the two, okay, two main characteristics of these negative states.
One is they are delusional. We’re gonna go to this one. They’re liars. They’re misconceptions. They are fantasies.
They are misconceptions. They’re liars. They’re fantasies. They’re not they are you know, the extent to which we have any delusion in the mind is the extent to which we are not in touch with reality. This is Buddha’s essential point.
It’s totally fascinating. And they have the other characteristic of simply being disturbing, painful. We all recognize this. And then the positive states, by their nature, are not delusional to some extent. We’re explain this.
And they’re not disturbing. They’re not fearful. They’re not they’re peaceful and spacious and interconnected and relaxed. That’s their nature. And all Buddha is saying is that stuff is at the core of our being.
And a person who’s in nirvana, quote, unquote, enlightened, not to mention, is in completely has developed the positive qualities beyond which they can’t be developed further because that’s our natural state. And the negative ones are utterly removed. The word Buddha in Tibetan, san jie, these syllables mean that. The first syllable implies the complete removal from the mind of all the neuroses. Absolute removal is the Buddha’s point.
And the second syllable implies the complete development of all the all the good qualities. This is Buddha’s simple fundamental point, psychologically speaking. The enlightened mind is a mind that’s fully developed in the goodness and free of the rubbish. That’s it. It’s simple.
You know? Except it’s kinda outrageous that you heard the characteristics and the and the capability of a person who’s that kind of astonishing. But this is what we’re just saying is the potential of all minds. So we can see pretty easily that depression, loss of esteem are extremely disturbing to me when I have them. Just the habit of them is in their nature disturbing, painful, awful.
Do you want it? The other one, that they’re delusional, that is more difficult to see. That’s tricky. But this is really extremely tasty. When we can see this, I tell you, we are really on track in understanding how they cause suffering, how they’re liars, how they deceive us, how they.
Let’s look at that. So effectively, the day to day suffering is is rooted in attachment. That itself, like I said, is rooted in the grasp. But effectively, for quote for the four noble truths, Buddha say attachment is the main source of our pain. So this is where if we look at the second kind of suffering, which is, you know, the suffering of change.
That’s that’s when we get what attachment wants. So by understanding can also, therefore, understand that kind of stuff. So it just means thinking carefully about and it’s not that mysterious. We recognize it when we listen to it. Yes.
The part of the problem for us, though, in seeing this is because in our world, we talk about thoughts up in the head, concepts, and then we talk about emotion. We try to sort of hear. You know? Emotions. You know?
So to think and there’s an extra interesting part of Buddha’s. This is the key to understanding this delusional aspect. The Buddha’s point is that all states of mind, whether we label them thoughts, whether we label them emotions or even instinct, intuition, they all come down to being rooted in thoughts, concepts. Well, like I said before, they finally are all viewpoints, opinions, assessments of something. But it’s extremely hard to see that when we call when we point to things we call emotions, feelings.
We know you know, the Buddha is saying, we can change our minds completely. We can rid the minds of the neurotic emotions. That seems almost impossible to us because they truly do feel, don’t they, at the core of our being. We really do feel this is who I am. They seem to happen instinctively.
They’re second nature. No one taught us to be angry. No one taught us to be jealous. It just feels like who I really am. So we can be forgiven for thinking that they are really who we are, which is what the material world thinks.
The Buddha says they’re not. But they’re all he’s saying, and this is why, at least to explain it, we have to factor in karma. I find it so helpful that we come in the first second of conception fully programmed with all our tendency. Fully programmed. And what is the stuff you’re programmed with?
Why today are you fully programmed to play music brilliantly, to play tennis well? Because you’ve practiced it. So we can assume here using Buddha’s view that if you’re programmed with this, the first second of conception, it’s because you you practiced them before in this mind of yours, and you brought these habits with you. Like, you bring all the habits of yesterday today. If you woke up in the morning after, you know, a whole day of practicing piano, you woke up in the morning with no memory of any piano, then we can see that the habit is not is not meaningful.
We know it’s true. Everything we did yesterday, we keep we speak from the habit today. You know? And this is the basis of how you’re enlightening. When we know that it’s habit, all we’re doing is changing our habits, basically, the good habits.
That’s all. All a Buddha is is a person who’s affected goodness and with the mind of badness. That’s all. That changed their habits. They reconstituted the very the very being.
It’s not mystical. You know? But the key to this is looking into these emotions and seeing how the emotional component is just the packaging. It’s not the core of it. It’s just the packaging because of deep, deep Okay.
So how what is attachment and how is it delusional and how is it disturbing? And how does it give rise to anger? These are the two main ones. So attachment is such a simple word. Everybody in this room uses it in different ways.
So this is why it is so important to be clear about the definition. Because each of us in this room will use this word differently. But we have to be clear what Buddha means by it because he’s not meaning what we mean by it. So attachment So okay. Catch me.
It’s got a multitude, I tell you, of functions. It’s like a you know, as I I said, she says I can tell you about the whole year. That sounded shocking. You know? Just look at it.
It’s it’s basically at the most energetic level because it’s a deeply ingrained habit. Okay? It’s this it’s the main voice of this ego grasping. And what it is, if you like, is this frantic wish, frantic wish to get what I want every second. Frantic.
Desperate. Like a junkie. So it’s at the most energetic level, it’s funk it’s ex the experience of it is the experience of, as they call it simply in Buddhist psychology, dissatisfaction. So in other words, it’s at this at the level that we have, is up to aching sense of never having enough, never being enough. No matter what I get, it’s never enough.
So it’s this constant dissatisfaction, this constant sense of something missing, something isn’t right, something is wrong, there’s something missing, Aching aching sense of dissatisfaction. I think we recognize this totally. So what it then causes is this desperate, frantic hankering after something, usually at the grossest level with objects of the sensors, believing that when I get it, it’ll fill up this gaping hole and it’ll calm for the satisfaction. This has the aspect this attachment has the aspect then of utterly believing that when I get that object, I’ll get happy. It’ll fill the pain, stop the pain.
Then that causes us to manipulate to get the thing. It causes us to expect frantically that when I get it, I’ll get happy with it. If then if it’s a person and a thing, it causes us to then have all this possessiveness, so it’s mind. All of these are the functions of attachment, a multitude, has many aspects, many facets. So all the things we use in the West is terminology.
Control freak. Completely attachment. What it does? Manipulates. expectations, possessiveness, neediness.
All of this is a faction. All of this is a function of this attachment. So what it is this is the hardest part to see. It sounds so clinical. It’s like a joke.
But what it is at its bare bones, once this is all the way we just described now is is why we experience this attachment from day to day, these multifaceted ways of manifesting. This is all the really gross emotional level. Once we’ve got control over our mind, once we’ve got we’re done to get some concentration, think through meditation, once we’re able to step back again and again and looking beneath the anger, beneath the jealousy, beneath the the junky stuff, we get to this attachment and we begin to see how finally it’s actually, as Buddha is saying about all these emotions, all the states of mind, it’s bare bones. It’s a concept. It’s a thought.
And its simplest function, one of the things that it does, is it it it exaggerates the deliciousness of the object. So you’re gonna attach them to a cake. The most obvious function, like I said yesterday, it’s like attachment is like when you have your your rose colored spectacles on, that’s your attachment spectacles. When you’ve got your attachment spectacles, based on on this constant craving for something, something missing, then because of habit, it dumps itself onto a cake. Then you believe when I get the cake and you fill your mouth with it and your stomach, it’ll bring satisfaction.
And then, you know, you possess it as you know, you own it as your cake and you manipulate it again and all these things. You expect the happiness to come. All this is an aspect of it. It’s all happening in about a split second. But the way we really unpack all of this, unpack, unpack, unpack, unpack, we’ll get to the bare bones function of that attachment, which is to cause you put your honey you put your rose product spectacles on, your attachment spectacles.
What it causes is that cake to look extremely delicious, extremely exciting. A person, the person you’re in love with, which means attachment for, causes them to look divine, doesn’t it? So there’s this neediness, this hunger, this sense of missing. It hankers out for something, looking looking like a vampire. It grabs this person, and then the attachment suddenly fade because what this is where karma comes in.
You’ve got strong karma connection with that particular person, some history with that person. They appear nice to you. The attachment completely exaggerates their niceness and cause it to look so divine. And this is where the the the the the nice result of attachment comes, which is what we’re so attached to, which seems so painful, thought that we have to give it up, is it triggers and this is it triggers good feelings. It triggers good feelings.
It triggers good feelings. So because we’re junkies for good feelings, whatever causes that good feeling, we’ll assume it’s a good thing. So we’ll grasp at it, and it’ll look delicious to us. So we’re we’re tricked into believing it isn’t itself delicious. We’re tricked into believing it will cause any happiness.
We utterly believe this tragic story. And then what comes? Eventually, because this is not because this is a lie, it is an exaggeration of the cake of the person, a gross exaggeration. But we’re blinded by it and dazzles us. The cake looks so delicious.
The person looks so divine, sparkly, and bright. So because we’re junkies for good feelings and this object of attachment triggers very good feelings, then, of course, the story you will know about this person is unbelievable. Unbelievable. We’ve written this novel. What would our life map out?
Finally, I found happiness this day. We believe one hundred percent of that story. Your mind is racing so fast. So we could write down we’d have five novels written in the first week about this person in my life and this and how this and happiness. And blah, that house and this and children blah blah.
The whole drama, the whole story. You know? Whatever it is, the cape, the person, the event, the thing, the handbag, whatever it might be, ex attachment exaggerates. The stronger the attachment, the stronger the sense of dissatisfaction, the stronger the neediest neediness, the bigger the story, the more the grasping, the more the manipulating, the more the expecting. And guess what?
Because it’s not sustainable, because it’s not true, the bubble has to burst. And where you go, you’re crashing down into despair and aversion. Potassium has nowhere to go, but down to aversion or to ignorance. There’s the three main. That’s it.
This is saṃsāra. So it’s basically bipolar. I’m not kidding. You know? You describe bipolar, that sounds like saṃsāra.
Up and down like bloody yo yos. You know? Mhmm. You get what you want, you found happiness. And the more you think you found happiness, the more you think you can become like Mozart.
You’re really on you’re out of control by Polar. You think you can, you know, fly on the sky and be Mozart. And then, of course, because it’s a lie and a fantasy. If the bubble bursts and you go crashing down, then you wanna kill yourself. We all recognize this.
This This is up and down mind. This is called bipolar. It’s a great description. Buddha would have liked it. Not kidding.
We recognize, don’t we? Don’t we all recognize this? Go in the pub, people. It’s called saṃsāra. And this is what we think is normal life.
Buddha says it’s mental illness, and we should be in despair of tears in our own suffering, you know, caused by our own state of mind. That is the default hope. But it takes time the the to extract the essence from all this and not just chuck the baby out with the bathwater. So the simplest misconception misconception of all this when we hear Buddhist teachings is, oh, I’ve gotta get up attachment. As long as it’s over said, you mean I’ve gotta get up my heart?
I’ve gotta get up my happiness? So we end up thinking, you have chucked the baby out of the bathwater, you become renounced, quote unquote, which we think means being bored. It’s basically what people mean by renunciation is boredom, indifference. How depressing can you get? Not like that at all.
It’s we’ve gotta have such clarity in distinguishing all the different aspects of this attachment so it’s not to tuck the baby up and die for them. So when it comes to a person, it’s really tricky because along with this attachment is coming love. Love is perfect. Love is altruistic. It’s under the positive heading.
It’s it’s actually defined as the thought in your mind. The bare bones of love is a thought that wants the other person to be happy, may be happy, that delights in their happiness. That’s love, and we need to grow that to the nth degree. That’s completely a positive state of mind. It’s not disturbing.
It’s not delusional. It’s based on empathy. It’s it’s it’s based on a sense of interdependence. There’s a sense of connectedness with a person. There’s a sense of we, isn’t there?
And in in broad terms, that’s reality. Buddha says interdependence is reality. That’s how I think it is, interdependence. And virtuous states of mind are to some extent in touch with that because you’re connected to others with a sense of connectedness and harmony and space. Your sense of self reaches out and encompasses others, doesn’t it?
When it’s the delusions, you’re locked in your own insular, freaked out little prison call me isolated, lonely, empty, nothing, dissatisfied. So we dump it on an object, a person, a thing, and crave it. So attachment is completely neurotic, deluded, separate, lonely, direct. It’s completely opposite to reality. Opposite to reality.
Reality is a sense that there’s a sense of interdependence and harmony and space and connectedness. That is how things exist. And the virtuous states of life, to some extent, are in touch with that. So love is there. May you be happy, Fred.
You delight in Fred’s happiness. You want him to be happy. You see his suffering. You have compassion. So compassion is the thought, may you not suffer.
It’s empathy or someone’s pain. So love and compassion are there for Fred. Generous, patient, but it’s completely polluted by the attachment. That’s what drags it down. That’s what destroys the relationship.
Love doesn’t destroy a relationship. Attachment hurts. And then anger when he doesn’t do what you want. Attachment freaks out. And then jealous and then all the other pain that comes.
That’s what destroys us. Not love, not compassion. But we can’t see the difference. You know, we we almost we now virtually see them as interchangeable. Attachment of love seem the same for us.
We don’t even we can’t even distinguish them. You know? So once we can identify the attachment, we can learn to extract it from the from the love. We can grow them up and extract the so that’s that’s this is the basis of growing our minds for the world. It’s quite subtle, quite difficult.
Totally doable. You’re gonna be watching your mind like a hawk every second. It it is exhausting. But like any job, driving a car for the first time is exhausting, isn’t it? But guess what?
After a few times, it’s relaxing. Everything is easy once you learn to do it, though. Everything. But it’s only exhausting because we know how to do it. So we’re gonna be brave.
We’re see the benefit of doing it, and then be patient, and and and eventually, you can’t imagine not doing it because it becomes second nature. It’s reasonable, isn’t it? So I’ve gotta think about it carefully. You understand? Because you get it right.
It is a girl thing. Yeah. It’s it’s like yes. No. That’s right.
No. I think once you not first of all okay. If you’re driving on the freeway and you note you’ve gotta notice that you’re veering off into the wrong lane, don’t you? Sure. You gotta notice it.
And half our problem is we don’t even notice it until we crash. Oops, a daisy. I’m in the wrong lane. So we’ve got a first. Already, it’s amazing in our life right now that we, you know, we are driving, and we don’t even know if we’re crashing into each other until the big drama happens.
So it’s always too late. So then the thing is, first, we develop this skill to gradually step back from our life. We listen to these explanations, and then attempt to identify them, hopefully, before it’s a full blown emotion. But most of the time, it’s not until it’s full blown. It isn’t until it is when it’s full blown that we even then notice because we’re so addicted to doing these things.
So then gradually but then most of the time for now, we have to reel after the event and sit back and look at it. And then we have to assess it and observe the attachment part, the angry part, the jealous part, the hurt part, and identify our role in that relationship, that fight, whatever happened. So as we keep getting better and better at this, we’re observing the thoughts and the emotions before they’re fully blown, then the real work. Then we can get much more clinical and precise, and we can catch the infection before it gets too strong. And then and guess what?
That’s where when you understand the bare bones of attachment is an elaborate story about the cake, about the person. When you just start to identify to that level, then what do you do with the story? You change it because it’s thought. It’s concept. It’s a story.
It’s an assessment of the cake. So before the cake is stuffed in the mouth after the fourth time, then you notice, okay, that’s the first time you learn about it. But before that, when you’re looking at the cake, you’re watching your mind and you’re catching the story of a catam that’s getting all excited and is expecting the cake and you’re waiting for it to come and you’re seeing it and you’re analyzing how it looks so divine and you believe it’s so divine and you believe it, I’m gonna be miserable. You see you’re hearing those thoughts in only a few seconds. You’re hearing those thoughts.
And then what do you do with those thoughts? You don’t follow them. You put your hand. You keep your hand in your lap. You don’t believe in what the mind is telling you.
You don’t believe the lie about the cake. It it’s easy to say it. The word duckies even is for cake. So everything in this knows there was all the excuses. You can hear it.
Oh, I’ve got this at one piece. I’ll be alright. I wanna I’ll I’ll go on a diet tomorrow. Well, all this stuff, you know, because we’re feeling all the guilt and the shame and happiness. I get a split second.
But before you know it, there’s three pieces in the mouth. So the more you see, hear, more you hear the meaning of what attachment is, how it is an exaggeration, how it has the emotional component, all the stuff. And so you reckon you’ve got this awareness in yourself. You’re observing that part of your mind, and you’re hearing all the story. And you’re then so how do you rectify it is by arguing.
You’re basically being your own therapist means you’re arguing with your lives. That’s how you change it. You argue with it until eventually wisdom gets stronger and stronger and attachment gets weaker and weaker. So every time we give into it, you strengthen attachment. Every time I give into my anger and I believe it’s right that you’re gonna do the wrong thing and I believe you’re the blame and I believe what I’m doing is all the rationalization, I’m increasing anger.
But if I argue with myself, even though I’m crying, I’m arguing with it, I’m not following it. I’m analyzing how this is true and this is kind of this and this is blah. You know, this real analysis is just this discussion, being your own therapist. Because when we see them as not as emotion, but as thoughts, that’s what you’re arguing with, and that’s what practice is. You get my point?
Full on job. Every second in your meditation, in the daily life. That’s it. It’s it’s analysis. It’s arguing.
That’s where it’s crucial to go beyond seeing as just as an emotion, but as a series of thoughts, it’s a story, an assessment. You go I’m thinking about anger. We we accept the anger. That’s even more subtle. And I think that we’re gonna go to two, but we’re deal with the anger at his own conventional level first.
The one that doesn’t exist is the emptiness one, which is a much more subtle application. But the one of dealing with the anger and hearing hearing. In other words in other words, if, you know, you and I are having a fight or I’m let’s say no. No. Two examples.
Very important point of one. Let’s say you’re the kind of person who doesn’t express your angry thoughts. But let’s say I am that person. So with you, we’d ask you, even though you don’t express it, you’ve got angry thoughts. We know that.
We all do. We’d ask you to write them down on a piece of paper. Then with me, simply take record what I say and transcribe it. Now if we compare those two bits of paper, they come out pretty similar. Yours couldn’t be stronger than mine, couldn’t it?
Except I shout mine out my mouth, and I look angry or shit coming in the blood. So we’re so used to thinking it was an emotion, we tend to think, you’re very angry. But we when we get to the real basis of it, besides my body, it’s the thoughts. So what anger is that we both sat there and we get analysis of those words and what are words but thoughts and what are thoughts but a really elaborate description of something, our angry description of Fred or whatever it is. You understand?
So then we have to analyze, really sort out how our story of Fred is a distortion. It’s an exaggeration. It’s so we go, Fred did that. Now is this true? Yes.
Maybe Fred did do this, but our view of it, our assessment of it, that’s the angry part. So it’s not like there is war in Iraq, let’s say. That’s a fact. You can prove it. There are facts, and then there’s interpretations of facts.
There is a fact that there’s a war that we can prove, but the rest of it that we have, depending on our politics, is our interpretation of that war. It’s bad. It’s cool. It’s this. It’s that.
It’s an attachment of if you’re if, you know, it’s an attachment interpretation. It’s an angry interpretation. So we have to extract the facts from the interpretation of it, and that’s the tricky part. We’re so used to all the facts and the fiction all being caught up in the head together. So it needs a lot of clarity to hear those thoughts.
That’s why it’s good if you like journals, but you could analyze extracting the facts from the fiction of that. Yes, Fred. It did hit me, but the rest of it is my anger, my response, and then we can understand that the basis of the anger is a sense of a self, and the basis of this is an assumption that it shouldn’t happen. There’s a basis of no karma. You can unpack all this and do a really deep analysis of the actual mind itself, applying Buddhist psychology to it.
It does take time. It is exhausting. But like any job, once you learn it, you get used to it. You can become more and more thoughtful. Just like, you know, anybody who’s good at their job can analyze it.
You’re a great musician. You can analyze in depths that little tiny child playing a tiny bit of piano. You because you’ve got the knowledge of it. You you have a basis for analysis. So when you learn what the psychology of what the things are, then slowly on your own life, you you you put meat on those bones and you become very rich understanding of how it works and why it does this and how it isn’t true.
And you get you catch your mind all the time in extracting the truth from the from the lies, and that’s what we’re trying to do. It’s quite it is a tricky job, and it doesn’t it’s not a question of sitting there and being mindful and whole. That’s not enough. You’ve got to have imbue that mindfulness with some intelligence that can interpret. Whether you’re a botanist or a musician, you gotta have the knowledge, which is the basis of your interpretation of it.
And that’s what you’re trying to do being a therapist. It’s quite intelligent job that’s necessary. But there’s some kind of being mindful or whole, you know, with some other people. It’s so unconscious. That’s right.
That’s right. No. Because it’s habit. The point is, this is the this is why she says, be your own psychologist. Of course, there’s no one else who can do it for you.
Of course, you know, if you okay. This is the very specific way of talking about being a neurone therapist from the Buddhist the passive point of view. There’s all sorts of other ways of looking. But if you, you know and, of course, one has to do it oneself. This is the job finally.
So, of course, if we can help, if you have a therapist who thinks equally like you and you both sit there and analyze your anger together using Buddhist psychology, that’s very helpful. Of course, it’s marvelous. It’s always good to have somebody to help us. But in the end, it is it has to be who you do it. It must be.
And you can’t force it. If you just, you know, learn it for the first time, you can’t something like Mozart overnight. But only applied according to your name. Well, you can’t do more than that. You cannot possibly.
That’s right. We do. Totally. That’s what we do. And that’s try to tackle that But you can’t.
No. You don’t. And that’s where you can’t. And that’s where, as love is overseas, we don’t even think that our mind plays a role in anything because we truly do have the complete victim mentality, which is the view of ego grasping. We really do believe we’ve been nasty before.
We really do believe good and bad things happen to me, and I don’t cause it. So we are like junkies who just eat up like a pig all the good things thinking I deserve it and angrily pushing away all the agony thinking I don’t deserve it and dumping all the blame that goes on the outside. That’s satsara. Look at the world. That’s exactly the point.
So doing this is a takes a is a paradigm shift to make in the mind. This one of accountability, but beginning to know it’s possible. I mean, I don’t what I know is in my first day when I first became a Buddhist. I I mentioned last night. And Lameyashi, my teacher from the very beginning.
Because I had some confidence that he was a Buddhist teacher, he dug me in the deep end. You know? And, I mean, I was out of my brain in the first stages of practice because I was attacking my anger and my delusions really intense way because I trusted Lama in this particular position, this job. I wasn’t going out of my I was really, like, crazy. So that doesn’t look like spiritual practice, don’t think, does it?
But I know it was, and I knew I was practicing, and I had great respect for Lama for keeping me there because he was forcing this in my mind. Difficult. He put me in the deep end, actually. But it’s it’s practice. You know?
So, yes, of course, it’s tough. But you gotta have some confidence you want to do it and that you know it’s possible, and then be prepared to be brave. You know? So that’s why we’ve gotta get rid of the idea of a good practitioner that looks all holy and nice with a sweet smile on their face and all being mindful. Excuse me.
You know? I always like to tell the story. One of my friends in prison, Richie, he wrote to me first. He was a friend of the first one who wrote Arturo, And he’s this typical gangster, Mexican gangster, you know, spent his life chilling and raking and doing what they do. That’s what they do.
It’s a modus operando of Mexican gangsters. Meditation, wrote all about his anger and things. And one day, eventually, I met him. And it was in between the glass was there between me and him. There he was covered in his tattoos because all these Mexican gangsters come right there.
You know, they learn he said it’s all prison art for being, and they say they all learn all the all the really old arrogant typography, fonts, and they they make their own ink and their own needles. They do all this tattooing, you know, the colored tattoos, all their names and the gangs and things all over their body, all over his Anyway, there was Raveena. I said, how’s your anger, Raveena? He kind of blushed under his tattoos. Yeah.
And he said, well, Rubina, I’m sorry, but I had a fight with my celly this morning, his cellmate. And he said, I put his head down Victoria. But then he said, Rubina, I took him out of this. And I and, in I oh, this practice. I rejoice.
That’s practice. You know? That’s all relevant, what level of practice. I might look pretty much like a maniac when I when I was struggling with all this craziness in the beginning, but love how I had this great kindness. It looked awful.
I probably shocked people being a Buddhist nun, screaming and shouting. But I was really dealing with my mind. You know? I knew I was. I was, but it was so intense because I’d never done it my whole life.
I’d usually walk away from any situation I didn’t like. I didn’t stick around or leave it, But I knew I had no choice. So that’s it. That’s practice. Some of it’s hard work.
Help. You understand? It is the ego is violent when it’s attacked. That’s how we have even bad dreams sometimes. When, you know, you have dreams of violence and and water and things.
That’s a great dream. It’s the ego. The voices of ego are very entrenched. They’re junky minds. So, of course, that’s the world.
You just describe as the ordinary world, and that’s where we all come from. But at least we’re here knowing it’s possible to work on our mind. It’s a really tough job. I’m not sure. It is the toughest job for me.
When you begin to know it, that it’s it’s the it’s the it’s the basis of your own happiness, then you’re prepared to struggle. It’s like going to the gym. It’s intensely hard work, but you’ve got the vision of what you can become. You don’t just buy into the pain and give up. You know it’s a good pain.
And that’s why says, why don’t I you know, the all of the say this, and this is so important. So my situation, if you’d seen me, you’d you’d be shocked by this rude Buddhist gunmen fighting and yelling at people. I wasn’t really outrageous. You know? But I know I’d close my door at night, my office, and I’d be crying, doing my postpration, doing my practices because I knew it was my crazy mind, and I knew I had to be in this place with this particular person.
And I used to cry, wish this pain would go away, but I was really working on it. Love being in the gym, the pain. You know? I knew it was good even though it’s like a hell. I’m not kidding.
So this one time, this friend of mine, he’s been doing years. He’s like a professional retreat. He does, thirty years of retreat. You know? And he just finished one of his four year retreats.
And he said his his his anger and pride were, like, out of control. He said it’s almost like he was done crazy, and he was really distressed. He is a retreat. He went to Lava’s Oprah, and he told me. The room said, laughed and laughed.
He said, fantastic. The dirt has to come out. The dirt has to come out. The dirt has to come out. So one of the key things, you know, instead of this cliched idea that you should be feeling all nice and peaceful because you meditate, excuse me, they even say when you learn to do the simple point of concentration meditation, there are nine stages.
And one of the first signs of the first stage is you think you’re getting worse because you’re disturbing the peace of the ego for so long. You know? So my ego is completely rattled. Of course, it came out. My friend, raging.
So it’s very scary, but he was really it’s the dirt coming out. So we have to know this and have courage and know that it gets it’s when you’re changing eons of habits, not just a lifetime of habits, it’s really, really painful. Know? So when, like, your husband leaves you, you’re a Buddhist, you’re really trying to accept the karma and not to blame. It’s so painful.
It’s like a mental breakdown. Just to give it to the usual junk and blame and pity and guilt and and all that rubbish, that’s painful too. But this is almost more pain because you’re going against ego’s usual interpretation. It’s clockwork. That is bad.
I know that. It does it’s intense. I’ve made you say, and I say it’s intense. It’s like intense, but it is intense. I think you’re already recognizing what I’m saying.
But buying that rubbish. Don’t be scared. Okay. Don’t dump me dunk all other people. Dump on your pillow if you like, kick and scream.
But don’t be scared of what’s in there. We’ve got to see it. And if it comes up in a relationship, at least you can see it. Right? If you can’t see it if you can’t see the revolting cancer, you just pretend you’re healthy.
You’re in big trouble. You know? But the dirt has to come out. It’s not you’re in a big washing machine. That could come out in dreams.
It could come out by getting sick. Right. We’re gonna be courageous. I’m not kidding. People who do mom retreat say this.
We we think retreat also has to hold it. But you’re really, really, really to you know, really struggling with your mind. You’re seeing You’re seeing it working as an ego. And this is where you’ve gotta have confidence in your potential. You’ve got to know this is only the junk, and it’s gotta come out.
So you’re not scared. Right now, if you think it’s the real me or the panic and the fears come, and you think this is really me, you can’t bear to look at it. But if you know it’s not the real you, you have the courage to look at it. You understand what I’m saying? You have to identify with your potential.
You’ve got to know what your potential is. You’ve to know that this is not the real you, that the goodness and the clarity and the wisdom and the courage is you. That gives you the courage gonna Okay? You go and feed your attachment and have lunch. I’m gonna give it a break for an hour.
Alright? So I want you to have lunch. We have about an hour and a quarter or so. Let’s see how we go. But have your lunch and then go into little groups, three people, and you just take any one pieces of what you’ve heard here and rip it to pieces.
It’s really helpful to do that. Or just over a whole discussion, whatever you whichever way you’d like to do it. This just makes the whole day seamless instead of us rubbing on about politics or do Julia, she might lose a job or how Conan would got smashed by the cats yesterday. Did you see that? It was very fascinating.
They got completely destroyed. The swans beat this girl last week. The swans is my family’s thing. Then the dog cat Conan got destroyed. They talk about the football later.
Okay? Not the winner. Stick on the topic. And if you don’t wanna talk, that’s cool too. You wanna be quiet and think about it, you you can do that.
That’s cool. You don’t have to talk. Don’t talk about rubbish. You go for a walk. Absolutely.
You do that if you want. But if you gotta stick and have lunch, talk, talk about the stuff. If you don’t want it, you don’t need to talk. It’s really important to your own boss here. But stay focused in space.
You know? Keep up for the whole thing. That’s right. So let’s think about food differently. All Buddha wants us to do is radically think differently about everything.
So let’s think of the food not through the filter of attachment. So think of it as delicious nectar, masses of it, oceans of it, and then think we’ll do the bodhi cheetah wine that we want to offer it. One of the most important is to imagine offering it. So we think how marvelous all the delicious food, all these people who work so hard, all the creatures who die, all the insects and everything, whatever, whatever. Then we think if we could, we offer to all the holy beings and all the suffering shall be made in space.
Then we think of the more delighting experience and the joy of receiving.