Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 90-minute teaching, Ven Robina Courtin uses difficult relationships as a laboratory for Buddhist practice. Enemies are our best friends, she argues—they offer the clearest opportunities to see our delusions. The core focus: attachment, that neurotic sense we are incomplete and need someone external to make us whole. She distinguishes sharply between attachment (grasping delusion) and real love (wishing for another’s happiness), explaining why these mix in most relationships and why attachment collapses when the other person looks elsewhere. Her remedy is singular: know your own mind clearly, take responsibility for your emotions rather than blaming others, develop both wisdom and compassion. She also critiques the Western habit of confessing everything as often immature dumping rather than genuine practice. The talk moves into death contemplation and karma, but remains grounded in practical self-knowledge as the foundation for real change.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 02 1998 10 31 StB.mp3
UUID: 6ea699c8-7baf-45fa-8966-3bf47843f65a
Teacher: Ven Robina Courtin
Collection: y Steadying the Boat (Ven Robina Courtin)
Date: 1998-10-31
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 90.7 minutes
Words: ~18,486
The best time to practice forgiveness, the best time to practice compassion, so our enemy is truly our best friend. This is really putting our money where our mouth is. Just saying we’re Buddhist and feeling nice and holy is not being a Buddhist. It’s like doing push ups until the time it starts hurting, it’s just pretending to do push ups, you won’t get any result. The proof of practice is when someone is mean to you, the proof of practice is when it hurts, because for eons, the Buddha is saying, these delusions have been stuck in our mind, we’re deeply in these grooves of self pity and misery and poor me and not fair and attachment and grasping and anger and jealousy.
We’re deeply ingrained, so it needs much energy, much inspiration to shift those grooves, to weaken those grooves, to grow new grooves. This is practice, you know. So have the big view, have the story, have the big picture, listen to the teachings, have this, but then in your face, in the day, every day, on the ground practice is being patient in the face of someone being mean, being generous in the face of not wanting to give. This is what practice is, this is real practice. Do you see long term relationships that come to an end, if you’re truly practise it, you view them as your problem, your fault?
It’s not a question of all, mean, no, see the thing is it’s not a question of taking on responsibility for something that you didn’t do. If the person did bash you up, let’s say, you you don’t think either, oh they didn’t really bash me up, or oh well I deserved, must be a bad person, that’s too extreme. It’s more the one of accepting the responsibility of the karmic relationship, which means you’re part of the deal from a past relationship that you had, you created the cause to be harmed now, so you’re responsible for your past harm, sure, so you set it up by your past actions that you have this person in this relationship and that you created the cause by harming them in the past, and their feeling of anger and hurt before, and they’re holding that in their mind, and they’re now seeing you as awful and having to bash you. So you don’t take responsibility for their bashing, that’s their problem, that’s their mind, that’s their anger, that’s their fist, they’ve got to work on that, but you take responsibility for the fact that you’re part of the deal, it’s an interdependent scenario, it’s not like this innocent victim here who was unfairly bashed, on a relative level you did nothing at this moment for that person to bash you, that’s true, but the bigger picture is saying that you must have, otherwise they wouldn’t be bashing you.
Do you see the difference in what I’m saying? This is the view of karma. You speak to any Tibetan. How then do you use that way of being changed in that situation? Sometimes you can’t change a situation, that’s the point.
If you can, fantastic, you know. If there is something to be changed in that relationship, then great. Working in this way of taking responsibility for our own emotions, our own feelings, and our own past karma, let’s say, is very profound. Already it’s going to bring you some peace of mind, it mightn’t actually help the other person at all, that’s up to the other person, but at least it’s bringing you some clarity and some less victim mentality and less rage and less anger and smash, smash back, and if there is, even with that response, ideally if there’s any change to be made, it’ll give the space for some change, Maybe the other person isn’t into that space and doesn’t want to change or can’t change, so at some point you’ve got to say, See you later, mate, you know? Isn’t it?
It very much depends. The whole key, what we’re talking here, is this incredible, a very powerful one of learning to see your own mind, of seeing what you’re thinking. Two things: having, if you’re a Buddhist, this view of karma, which is something, at the moment initially, if you don’t have the clairvoyance to see it, a recognition that this is why you’re in this relationship, because you’ve had this relationship before, and then due to harming each other before you’re in this mode again now, or whatever it is, you know, the broader picture, but the present one is the super learning to have this very strong awareness of where you’re at at this moment, which is your own attachment, your anger, your hurt, whatever it is, your own little story, coming from this I, you know, I this, I that, whatever the story is. Do you see what I’m saying? Knowing that one very well, knowing yourself very well, and then on this basis of course having some sense of where the other person’s at, so much of the time now when we have really traumatic relationships, we’re so caught up in the attachment and the neediness and then the hurt when they harm us and the blame, that it’s impossible to even differentiate between me and him, or whoever it is.
We can’t even get any space, it’s just this kind of awful pain and it’s this big glob of stuff, isn’t it? So the job is to be more and more clear about me, about what I’m feeling, what I’m thinking, where I stuff, what’s his stuff, and not getting it caught up, because that’s what happens when we have attachment, you know, we over exaggerate both the blame on this person or we over exaggerate the blame on ourself, because we’re all kind of this big mixed, confused load of rubbish, and this big soup of emotion, so the clarity that we have to develop is to see what my part of it is, and then take responsibility for that one, you know, and then give the space to the person, this is the ideal, to be the way they are, and if they’re going to keep bashing you can ask them to stop, I mean, just talking theoretically, and that’s fine, it’s appropriate to expect them not to bash you, but in the end if they can’t stop bashing you, I mean it’s insane to stay in a relationship, unless you can work with them, unless you’re so highly developed that you can afford to be bashed every day and actually develop compassion from it, if you’re highly developed like that, it’s the best relationship for you, fantastic, do you see my point here?
Now who’s at that level? Most of us aren’t, so then it’s fine, you have to have the courage then, because what happens with most relationships, the Buddhist approach would be so much strong karma between you, so much attachment that just compels us to get glued together again, right? Look at the suffering relationships, people just like traumatising each other emotionally and physically, and they never leave, They keep blaming, they keep hating, but they keep coming back for more. They go off, they go have mental breakdowns and talk to other people and loathe each other, they keep coming back for more. I mean, it’s insane, it’s awful, isn’t it?
That’s the real suffering. Suffering. That we’re unable to have any clarity about where we’re coming from, have no self respect, but have full of rage and blaming, but like a magnet, like a moth to the flame. This is because of attachment and anger and jealousy and pride, all these different emotions, and locked into this powerful karmic relationship. The really intelligent one would be, even though there’s love for this person or whatever you want, even if the person does have some emotion, you know, if they’re going to keep bashing, you ask them to stop, simply speaking, and if they don’t, then if you can work with it and not blame and love them more and never gossip about them to somebody else fantastic, allow them to keep bashing you if you’re that advanced if not, excuse me, I’m going to go, see you later that’s an intelligent and appropriate thing to do, you know, but look how we are, we don’t do that, you know, we keep going back for more, and then we keep setting ourselves up for more suffering, and then we keep being the victim, and we keep blaming them, and then we keep gossiping and putting them down to everybody else, and all our system is set up with all these monsters who do all this terrible bashing and all these victims who have all this bashing done to them, and it’s just sort of so yuck and gluey and confused and, oh, it’s just awful, you know?
Do you talk about attachment as a negativity all the time? Yes, that’s the Buddhist approach, I should define what it is first, then you know we’re both talking about the same thing. I’ll do that in a minute. I will. I’m just chatting away here, but it’s not an easy one, isn’t it?
The key to it, all this, the first step, is to know yourself, to be clear, to know what your delusions are, to know what your part in it is, to know what your faults are, to know your virtues, to know where your responsibility is, not even talking past karma now, present, where you’re at now, to know that clearly. Then there’s more intelligence, instead of all the time hooking everybody else or being hooked by everybody else all the time, getting involved in each other’s emotions, all being mixed like two people in a relationship, there’s no way you can know it yourself because you’re so locked into believing we, but in a negative way. It’s very hard, so to know our own mind, to know our own mind is so incredibly important. It’s the first tip, you can’t do anything until we can do this. There’s no way we can do anything until we can do this.
It’s okay, attach it. The Buddhist take on the mind is like this, these are the words, you know, that you’ve this consciousness, this mind, and essentially it’s got two components in it, positive energy and negative, it’s a simple way of saying it. What in Buddhist terms so called positive mean is the thoughts and the words and speech, the speech and the actions that come from those thoughts that are essentially, if you like, connected to other. They’re connected to other, they’re altruistic, so they’re the things we all know: love, kindness, generosity, patience, these words that are inferring relationship with other in a constructive way. Then the ones that are negative, so called negative.
The positive ones are positive in the sense that they leave positive seeds in the mind that will bring you what is called happiness, now and in the future. The negative ones are the ones that are coming from this fractured, deluded, mistaken sense of I, which is very ingrained in us, that causes us to have this sort of frantic sense of a hungry I, that then causes us to have I want, which is this kind of neurotic neediness based on this fractured I. Because fractured, therefore it’s kind of mistaken, it’s not accurate, it’s sort of this little me out here all separate and lonely and alienated and bereft and sad and empty, that therefore has I want very hungrily on delicious objects and gorgeous people and lovely things and needs people and things to bolster up this little fractured I and make it feel like it’s real? Well, that’s attachment. It’s necessarily a neurosis, necessarily a cause of suffering.
This is the way Buddhism would use the word attachment, and maybe many of the ways we use it we don’t necessarily mean it in a negative way, but the way Buddhism uses it is as a negative, a deluded emotion that’s a pretty pervasive one, and there’s this massive neurotic neediness on the basis of thinking I am nothing, because you’re only hungry when you’re empty, right? So if you’re always needy, the assumption is there’s something missing here. That’s a mistake in Buddhist terms, it’s not like that, you’re actually a blissful, amazing, astonishing being, but there’s this view of I as nothing, as empty, as miserable, so that’s the I we’re carrying around, that’s the fundamental mistake, and so then what it gives rise to spontaneously is therefore, because I am nothing, I need something, so I need this gorgeous person to make me feel happy, I need those delicious things, that best object, the good reputation, the job, the money, and whatever it is, or the politics or the views, or whatever it is that attachment dumps itself on, and the attachment, the energy of it is that I must have that, and then if I fill myself up with it, I become full again, but it’s like basically in Buddhist terms attachment is like being a junkie for everything now, because you’re depending hugely on that fix, and what you call happiness is the getting of that fix, but actually all you can see when you’re looking on is it just leads to even more frantic grasping, and even more craving, and even less satisfaction.
Attachment, in Buddhist terms, brings the opposite to what it looks like it actually brings suffering, because it’s like being a junkie. It can only bring more craving and more grasping, and the more you get the fix, the more you crave for the next one. That’s attachment. So what Buddhism is saying is when you give that up, which is the biggest, painfulest job of all, takes a long, long time, it’s a slow evolutionary process, it’s this huge healing, if you like, of this neurotic fractured eye, and then you become like a full person who recognises their own reality and is therefore logically kind, loving, generous, patient, because that comes naturally from a non miserable eye, you know. Do you see what I mean?
Attachment then gives rise to anger, as one Lama said, Anger is the response when attachment doesn’t get what it wants, it freaks out. What’s jealousy? When mine is taken by someone else, all these other deluded emotions, the so called negative or suffering ones, are all coming from this attachment which in turn comes from this mistaken sense of a wrong I. So this whole infrastructure is what Buddhism means by suffering or saṃsāra, so it’s the changing of that, and the discovering, if you like, of the real I, which is actually huge, in a sense almost you can say when you’ve really gotten rid of attachment, your I becomes as big as the world because the I now identifies with all others, there’s like a huge sense of we, and that’s love and kindness and compassion, but there’s a real clarity about who you are yourself, but it’s a humble one, it’s a natural one, it’s a confident one, it’s not a freaked out self conscious one, which is what it is now, you know. It’s just a way of talking about it.
Does that make sense? Very well, please. Yes, okay. This is the source of our suffering, this fractured I, and then of course we mix it right now, you know, I go and fall in love with that person, and there’s this little hungry I in there, and this person having his little hungry I falls in love with me, so there’s nice, what looks like a really nice mutual little kind of thing, but when it’s mostly attachment, you get this huge grasping and huge sensory experience, but when the attachment starts to die down, what comes? Is this boredom, or your blame, or your anger, you know, there’s not much love there love in Buddhist terms is defined, if you like, as the wish that somebody would be happy, it’s the genuinely altruistic feeling inside us that’s connected to another person in a healthy sort of way, attachment’s not a healthy one, but unfortunately right now they’re completely mixed, so attachment often can look like incredible love, so if I really love that person, if I say if I’m really attached to that person, need him hugely, he looks so divine to me, you know, and of course I love him hugely, I want him to be happy every day, there’s no question, I do actually love him, but the love and the attachment are mixed together like water and milk, and you can’t see the difference between them, so you’re kidding yourself, you’ve this huge love, but watch what happens when he looks at someone else and looks just as happy, and smiles, but he’s looking at someone else watch where your love goes, it just drains down the toilet and it fills up with attachment and fury and anger and jealousy and panic and all the rest, isn’t it?
I mean, love is finished, you know? Isn’t it? So true. Yeah. So, you know, this is where This is only where they’ve looked at someone else.
That’s right, not to mention doing it. That’s right. We can see the pain of attachment. This is really why it’s a good analogy, it’s a hard one, it’s a good analogy to say it’s like being a junkie. If you see a person, not even a junkie, just anything, anything, as soon as attachment gets what it wants, if you’re hungry and you get the cake, then you can afford to say you feel good, right, if you didn’t overeat, if you just only had one piece and you got almost a little bit of happiness there, then you would feel real content, but watch what would happen if you suddenly didn’t get cake or food one day, two days, ten days, what would arise?
Not to mention the body getting skinny, but the mind freaking out completely, right? So you even check how you just don’t get what you want even in moment, you’re in the traffic, and suddenly you’re thwarted, the attachment is thwarted, the red lights come, the people come, watch the mind, you know, instant change, instant freak out, instant anger, panic, hysteria, fear, you name it, you know, and this is life right now, we have attachment and our pursuit is mainly to satisfy attachment, and that’s what we mean by happiness. No, that’s what I’m saying. This what I’m saying. There’s no jealousy.
I’m in love so I’m happy. No, but it doesn’t work like that, does it? This is where, too, you have to have some intelligence about it, that a relationship is something where you make it mightn’t be written down, but there is an agreement, usually there’s an agreement in our relationships in this culture that they’re monogamous. Now if there is that agreement, and the person keeps breaking it, it’s like you’re going ask him to stop bashing you, and if you can stay in that relationship and have him do all those things and you use it as a huge learning to help you give up attachment, then you’re an amazing person, that’s fantastic, but honey, normal speaking, if this other person isn’t prepared to work in their part of the bargain and have monogamy, it’s a reasonable expectation, so of course you leave, but you don’t sit there and be a victim, that’s absurd. Do you see what I’m trying to say?
There’s a reasonable thing to have this relationship where you have an agreement, don’t bash me, don’t go off with other people. Now, what happens mostly is we freak out completely, we start manipulating him, we get angry, we have mental breakdown, we start blaming him, we bad mouth him, we abuse him, we get jealous, we make a mountain out of it, we go off to sleep with somebody else, we manipulate, we use it as a game, we get bitter, we fight, and we keep staying there and begging for more suffering. That’s what’s insane. So if you’ve got any self respect and any integrity, you know, even if maybe a person already has an agreement and they break, maybe it’s appropriate to leave immediately, you know, goodbye, maybe your heart’s breaking. When it’s not coming from attachment we’ll do what is more appropriate, but even now when it’s coming from attachment we’ll even allow things that are outrageous to us to keep happening to us, and then we keep blaming the other person, that’s the problem.
So taking responsibility for it will probably mean you’d leave, you know, your heart would break because it’s not appropriate. You don’t blame the other person, but you take responsibility, and you make the move rather than being the victim, which is the way we tend to be now because we have attachment. We’re looking like we’re being martyrs, you know, but a martyr is a person who’s got attachment. And then it gives rise to all the other things, and they all become this manipulation, these games and everything. It’s all so insidious, we can see it, and it’s what’s giving us a mental breakdown and what causes us to harm others.
This is the thing to see. That’s right. That’s why I think, I mean, you know, it’s so hard to have a relationship. I mean, it’s easy to be a nun. People think I’ll sacrifice something.
I tell you, I mean, it’s actually much more easy, you know? I mean, it’s much more selfish. I just do exactly what I want, when I want, go where I like, and I go home and I cook my lunch and I just go and I have no problems, have no children and no mortgage and no insurance and no jobs and no worry about money and nobody in my face every day. Good luck to you guys, I tell you, I mean it, I’m not being horrible. Good luck to you.
If you can do it, you can get enlightened in a life, I think, if you can really have a good relationship. It seems to me every day you’re confronting attachment and anger and jealousy in your face every second. I mean this is where the thing about attachment, I meant to make it sound depressing, it builds up a big fantasy, because you feel this attraction to this person, you’re in love with this person, you know, and this is what’s interesting, the way Buddhism describes these various deluded states of mind called attachment, anger, jealousy, pride, one of the characteristics of them all, and you check it, is that they hugely, to the extent of them that they are, big or what, they exaggerate particular qualities of the object or the person, so anger, it’s obvious, what does it do? It’s the state of mind in us that exaggerates the horribleness of the person. Even when the anger subsides an hour later, look at them and they don’t seem so bad, do they?
We all know this experience, or when you’re really allergic to carrot cake and it looks disgusting to you, or when you’re ill, you know, when I had hepatitis, for example, every piece of food, just the thought of it, I practically vomited they looked so disgusting, the things that I would love completely once It looked so repulsive I couldn’t even believe it. Now that’s the mind with a really grotesque picture of something that another time looked so delicious, and this is what delusions do attachment completely inflates the beauty of that person, I mean it is so evident to us, but because, and so what attachment is doing, if we really have to, this what you have to analyse deeply, like Lama Yeshe says, learn to be your own therapist, know your mind so deeply, you know. When you really look into and analyse attachment, if you’re brave enough, what you see is it’s a huge fantasy the mind has made up, all based on this little fractured eye that wants to get whole, and the complete conviction attachment is the conviction that he will do it, that the presence of him will do it. Actually a story, an elaborate, elaborate story your mind is writing so quickly, so fast, of all the things, and it’s this huge set up.
Really, to learn how attachment is suffering is to learn that when you get the object you won’t get what attachment thinks you will get. That’s why you get bitterly disappointed when the whole thing collapses, because attachment made a fantasy, and it’s hard to see this, It’s really hard to see this because we’re so addicted, we’re such junkies, that even though the evidence to everybody else is that the junkie is like a completely suffering person, and how they could possibly call that fix happiness is insane, it’s evident to everybody else, but this is what is so hard, to see how attachment is a liar. It’s a huge lie the mind makes up about the person. Now, why a relationship will go beyond, will last beyond the attachment is simply because there is also love and kindness there, that’s all, and the one that doesn’t is simply because most of the, you know, there was like eighty attachment, twenty percent love, so the love was very short, when the attachment left, there was nothing left there. Many relationships are like that, aren’t they?
You can’t believe, you look at this person now, you can’t believe you had this incredible fantasy about this person! It’s astonishing to you, shocks you, doesn’t it? Interesting. So we can see from our own experience how attachment inflates, makes up a story, makes it bigger, makes them more delicious than they really are, but because we’re totally used to this, we don’t see the fault of it, we just think it’s normal, you know? It sort of sounds scary to have to give up attachment because then you think you’re going to lose all the pleasure because we think the pleasure comes from the attachment.
Interesting. But the main one is that attachment, when you get the object, you don’t get what attachment thought it would get, and that’s why many relationships, most people can’t better look at that, you know, because they know the bubble has burst, and if there isn’t much love there, then it’s a very boring life, isn’t it? What are you left with, you know? Just the mundane, boring look at the number of suffering relationships, look at the number of suffering people. When the bubble has burst, what is there left?
It shows the suffering of it, and we all keep stumbling into it, believing that happiness will come, then we die. Something more has got to come, you know? We’ve got to look at something more in our own minds to see all these fantasies, in other words saying what a lie is or what a delusion is, is a fantasy, attachment’s a fantasy, anger’s a fantasy, jealousy’s a fantasy, it’s a misconception, it doesn’t relate to reality, so by changing these, which is really what is painful, by coming down to earth you actually discover the beauty of the earth. I mean it sounds boring like coming down to earth, doesn’t it? When you discover reality, what Buddha’s saying is then you’re really going to get blissful.
When you’ve punctured all these illusions, then you don’t just see things boring. We think we have to keep dressing everything up to make it delicious because what’s already there is boring, but actually what Buddha is saying is the dressing up is causing suffering. When you stop all the dressing up and you see what’s there, it’s actually the very fact of seeing reality as it is, what itself brings bliss. The mind is blissful then, because whatever is can become a source of bliss for you. It’s interesting that sometimes I say, It’s terrific when kids are growing up and going.
Certain people say, And other people say, I’ve been told that I’m not a particularly good mother or that I don’t care you know, she’s doing this too much and I’m selfish and things like that. It’s very interesting responses that you get from different people. You can see that that mind stream is so Which mind stream? Somebody else’s. Well, think we shouldn’t talk about somebody else’s mind anyway, just worry about our own.
I mean, you know, we walk with delusions. We have to know what we think ourselves. And we can learn from that too. But when you’re trying to help her, it’s not the same, Oh, you’re upset, please. No, of course not, that’s right, exactly.
No, you have to have the wisdom to know how to help a person, and that means we have to listen to a person, and that’s why, it’s kinda like, yeah, if you’re a musician, and you’re teaching this five year old how to play piano, you have the whole picture in your mind, you’ve got it clear, you can see their potential, you can see Bach there, but you don’t tell them, are you gonna become Bach, you guide them according to where they’re at right now, with skill, Which is why in the Buddhist approach, the only way to help any human being is by first knowing your own mind, by being your own therapist, by really knowing your own mind deeply. The more you know your own mind, as you look at someone else, okay, we’re using Buddha’s model of the mind here, that’s what we’re choosing to talk about, you’re using that one, you’re using that to know your own mind, So when you see how your own mind works, and all your own games, your own delusions, your own garbage, then you work with somebody and you’ve developed some compassion and patience for yourself, then you work with someone else, you’ve got this model to work on their mind, and you see it more clearly too.
So you guide them according to where they’re at now. You don’t give them the whole big picture down their throats, know, and that’s just not appropriate. You guide them, but that’s based on your wisdom, and you can only have that wisdom by knowing your own mind, isn’t it? And to that extent, you can only help another person, not more. When it’s what we’re talking about, you’re communicating.
Really, something that’s so important, this is why in Buddhism it’s so stressed. To rush out and want to help everybody is great, we all have well meaning, we all want help people all the time, of course we do. That’s why we use this analogy that a bird needs two wings, a fully enlightened being is like this bird with two wings, you know, wisdom and compassion. So the wisdom one, which we’re talking about here mostly, is the one of working on your own mind, knowing your own mind, seeing your delusions, understanding potential, understanding your true nature, all this stuff, deeply, deeply, working on yourself, being clear, knowing your barriers, knowing what’s yours, knowing what’s theirs, lessening all the rubbish, all the glue, the garbage, all the manipulation. The more clear you get this, the more directly and clearly you see things, it’s wisdom, the more happy and clear you become, and then you can bring it to this job, which is the one of compassion, benefiting others, then of course you’ve got some tools to use now, haven’t you?
We all just rush in, you know, when we all mean well, but because we don’t have the wisdom to even see what the person needs, we say all the wrong words, we do the wrong things, we mean well, but that’s not enough, you need wisdom as well. We need both wings of the bird. I think it’s time for a tea break. God. It’s lunchtime already.
What time is lunch? Twelve thirty? Twelve thirty. That’s now, basically. Twelve twenty.
Any more questions? Went like a dream, didn’t it? Any more points to make, Peter? Where all this is going? I have no idea.
Okay Audrey, I hear what you’re saying. There’s very many ways of working, many there are many medicines you’re going to bring to work on your mind. The approach in Buddhism is that the more you’ve heard the different teachings about impermanence, loving kindness, karma, emptiness, all these different things, according to the situation where your mind is at, you’ll use this one or this one or this one as the appropriate antidote. Maybe one time the best antidote is simply just to forgive, just to think of suffering of the other person, and that’s practising this wing, the one of compassion. You just decide, look, they’re suffering more than me, and that’s what arises most in your mind, or you know that’s what you’ve got to most do.
Another time, the best one is to simply practice patience. Another time, the one is to see, Well, this is impermanent, it’s going to change, it won’t last, no point in freaking out, let it go. Another time you think, Well, come on, Robina, don’t blame this other person, karma is the approach, so each one you’re using according to your own mind and which is most prevalent, what delusion is most prevalent, you use the different methods to be the antidote. You have to know your own mind well. Sometimes you might just say a mantra that’ll kind of help you subdue your mind.
Sometimes you look at the sky to give yourself some space, because your mind’s all anxious and worried, you know other times you just shut your mouth, because the best thing is to say nothing other times you have to be brave enough to say something, because you know it’s important to say something each time you have to know which antidote to use for which situation, which medicine to use at which time, knowing which is best for you at that time or what’s most appropriate for that person. Do you see? Every time it’s different, every time. That’s where hearing all the different teachings gives you all these different methods, these different approaches, different viewpoints, that’s all, different ways of interpreting, you know, isn’t it? It’s like your cup breaks.
Maybe it’s appropriate to tell the child off for being clumsy with your cup because it’s for the child’s sake, but in your own mind you’re practising impermanence. Okay, really good, let go, doesn’t matter, I don’t need a cup, you know. I don’t depend for my reality on the presence of a beautiful cup, how absurd, that’s attachment, you know. So you give sort a little talk. Do you see?
So many different methods, based on both wisdom and compassion. One I think for us in the West so common, it seems to me, so needed, you know, Is somehow this confidence which can grow slowly, and I think it’s something we can see logically, we have to look at it. This confidence that I can do it, this confidence that I can change, that I can bear suffering, that I can learn to turn around jealousy, that I’m not innately jealous, innately angry, innately hopeless, innately this, innately that, which is how we feel. And this is Buddha’s view of what ego is, it’s like this clinging to this instinctive view of this is me, which implies I can’t change. This is one of the deepest delusions of all, deeply ingrained in us.
We follow that instinct all the time, which is why we freak out, why we can’t cope with the pain, why we can’t cope with the hurt, which just overwhelms the sense of who we are, doesn’t it? For us to slowly learn to see how in Buddhist terms it’s saying that it’s just logical, not just some religious thing is shoved down your throat, it’s a logical thing, that you have the capacity to change and grow and become strong, and what is that logic? How do you say that? My feeling is, if you think about it, if once in your life only you’ve remembered being patient instead of being angry, That proves, isn’t it, that if you like, the seed of patience is within you, so if you can do it once, you can do it a million times. The other thing is to see, too, that proves that you can change, change, that’s all, but I know in my own life anger since a tiny child was one of my main things, right, it was so easy to be angry, I would just express instantly whatever I felt, it was evident to everybody else and to myself, I couldn’t hide it, that anger was one of my delusions, I saw it as a big problem, but because the sense of I that I had was an angry Robina, it was like my middle name, you know, I believed it was me, and of course, with the pride as well, you upheld it, you became proud of it.
You hold this view, I am this, I’m depressed, I’m angry, I’m no good, we’ve all got a picture, and the irony of ego is that it clings to that picture, which is always the miserable one, it’s kind of ridiculous, isn’t it? Then the implication of clinging to it is this is who I am, you’re setting it up every day, you’re reinforcing it by believing this is who you are, although you hate it. Other people see you this way and you feed it back to them, so it keeps being reinforced. All Buddha is saying is it’s true there is anger there, but it’s not the real you, that’s all. It’s kind of like this analogy of the water, the pure H2O polluted by all the other junk, you know, and all Buddha’s saying is that our true nature is like pure water, true, it’s pure, it’s blissful, it’s all the perfect qualities, but it’s polluted now by anger, jealousy, and all the rest.
The pollution is very real, maybe it’s even majority pollution, but it doesn’t mean it’s the real you. This is the point, it’s not the real you. You can remove the pollution, and that’s what it means by not the real you. It’s real, but it’s not the ultimate real you, which is how we tend to think. So it’s like having this confidence is what gives us the confidence, if you wish, to deal with it whenever it arises, and the panic that arises, the freak out that arises when the old delusions keep smashing out, you know, and you pick yourself up afterward, you give yourself a little talk, and this is much of what practice is, being your own therapist, this is not the real me, even though it feels like it, I know I can change, I’ve done it once, I can do it again, and so you have the confidence, you make the determination, and slowly, slowly you look back, and suddenly you start to see some changes come, you know, that the pollution is in fact a little bit less now, but you’ve got to have that confidence first.
If you don’t believe you can change, of course you’re never going to try, you’ll only identify with the anger every time it comes, and you’ll just keep sinking more into it. It’s like having an enormous sense of self respect, really, that it is not the real me. It’s true, it’s there, and it’s having the courage to own it instead of blaming somebody else for it, of course, and then knowing that you can change, and it’s simply a question of just constantly doing it every day, noticing in your mind when impatience arises, when the jealousy arises, when the freak out arises, whatever it is, first it’s even seeing it is the point, right? Owning it as yours, not identifying as you, but seeing it there, and then slowly, by identifying with the better part of you, the positive part of you, identifying that that’s the real you, although it’s hidden right now, then you slowly will affirm that part of you and you will lessen delusion. This is just logic, you know, and it’s work that we have to do ourselves.
So it is important, if we’re fractured from being harmed in our lives, we do need someone to show us love, to show us our potential, to tell us that we’ve got this potential, but in the end, we can’t keep having them tell us. We’ve got to start feeding that back into ourself, don’t we? That’s the job of our mother, you know? But it’s kind of like we haven’t weaned ourselves from our mother, we still need people to keep telling us we’re wonderful, but we never believe it, that’s the irony. We keep wanting them to say it again and again, but what we’ve got to do is use that love people give us as nourishment to feed our own heart, to grow our own self, it’s how it should be with a child.
At the beginning the mother has to nurture the child and love them, and yes, darling, I know there’s a problem, it’s alright sweetheart, you can do it. Slowly the child can take it away and learn to grow themself. That’s the ideal. All we’ve to learn to do is learn to feed ourself, know our own good qualities. It’s not pride, it’s just practical, to know our own good qualities and then to have the courage to grow them, not just rely on other people to tell us which is what attachment wants.
Attachment’s like this baby, you know, that needs the external all the time, but like we’re just like bottomless pits, isn’t it? You know, he tells me he loves me once, I’ve got have it, me again please, or tell me again please, you know, doesn’t make any difference, you only feel love when someone this is the point, isn’t it? You only feel you’re loved if someone says, I love you, but feeling loved means you’re able to use that love to nourish yourself and become a whole human being, and then if they die you’re not gonna collapse with them, you know, you’ve grown yourself. That’s really the point, it’s like the love that someone gives you. We now, with attachment, are like the junkie who needs it every time to feel anything, but using love that people give us in a correct way is like nourishment that feeds our heart and grows the heart, so eventually it doesn’t matter if the person says it or not, even if they leave you, your heart might break temporarily, but you’ve grown yourself, you’ve nourished yourself from that relationship.
That’s the real way to use, if you like, a relationship. The other way to use it is like the junkie we use each other as junk, and that’s why it’s so suffering. One is attachment and one is intelligence, one is love. It’s recognising the interdependence, because we do have this extraordinary potential, every one of us, you know? And it’s there innately within us.
God didn’t do it. You know? Our mother and father didn’t do it. It’s not some accident. It’s simply who we are.
So I’m just going to enjoy some lunch. How long, Absolutely. This fits really well with the whole Buddhist approach, which is that we have this continuity of consciousness, right? This mind is a big this continuity of consciousness, which is ours, like our own river of consciousness, carrying with it all the pollution and all the good stuff, whatever we’ve done in the past, and continually experiencing the results of all that. And that life and death Because Buddhism asserts we’ve had countless lives, there is an importance on every moment of life.
It’s not because you’ve had many doesn’t mean this one isn’t But in the broader scheme of things, given that you’ll have another one as soon as this one’s finished, then it’s not the same sense of anxiety, if one is using Buddhism properly, about maintaining the perfection of this life and seeing this is all there is and making it all perfect and keeping it alive at all costs. I live in America, and I heard recently that something like eighty five percent of all insurance, medical insurance, is spent in the last few years of an old person’s or a sick person’s life, which kind of indicates a certain kind of crazy approach, doesn’t it, to the overall. So it doesn’t mean you don’t care about a person when you have the Buddhist approach, but an interesting example, just to show the emphasis in Buddhism, just thinking about it myself, for example, this old woman just happens to be mother of one of our Lamas, of Lama Zopa, and you just heard when I heard about how she was old and was dying, because there she is a Buddhist, all her life she happened to be after her son, she has many children, her son, Lama Zopa, became a monk, and she became a nun herself eventually, and just practiced, you know.
She’s a Sherpa, lives up in the mountains in Nepal, completely primitive life, extremely primitive. But there she is as practitioner, very holy person, very blissful old lady, you know, very strong, lived her life kind of cutting wood and making fires and just some of her fingers missing from chopping them off, just really kind of rough and ready, but this pure mind, very blissful. So, already even her life was indicating that what was more important was the mind, was her own development and was her capacity to be compassionate to others, rather than the external reality. Already that’s the sign of what a Buddhist would, you know, Tibet, for example, is a classic example, it’s medieval physically, but mentally and spiritually, it has been highly developed. So even there, there’s an indication of what is considered more important.
And so the whole approach to old age and death is simply part of the deal you don’t deny it, you don’t pretend it’s not existing, you don’t try to cover it up by having the wrinkles taken away and all the things that we can see in our culture because there’s this enormous fear of death and fear of health, as if it were a mistake but the Buddha, so this is old woman, and then as somebody said when she died, when she was very ill, she clearly would have had what would have been diagnosed in the west as, say, cancer and God knows what, blood was coming out, she was really very sick but because she accepted death with a really ordinary, totally part of the deal so there was none of this incredible crazy view of denying it or spending fortunes in hospitals and trying to make it all better and cutting pieces out and putting new ones in because death is coming, so what you try to concentrate on is the quality of your life now in terms of what you’re doing and how you’re developing your own self and how you’re benefiting others so that you can die with a happy mind.
And a happy mind at death is said to be one of the most precious things, because the mind being happy and content and not grasping and accepting at the time of death is what will activate all the positive seeds that you have planted during your life, which will be the seeds that will determine then the next life that you will have. And so the emphasis on death in Buddhism is on how you die, and which is in turn based on how you’ve lived your life. It’s not a question of trying to push it away and not, you know, and all this. And so it doesn’t mean so that, you know, in the way she would have been I mean, I remember at the same time hearing about the mother of a friend of mine in England, old lady too who had some kind of cancer put into a nursing home, unbelievable costs, it was part of a body, I forget the liver or something was cut out, a new one put in, incredible trauma because of this, and she died anyway, I mean, it does indicate we’ve got some genuine wish to make people better.
There is an altruism there, but it’s just, in the Buddhist approach, it’s anxious and completely neurotic and not living in reality and living in an enormous denial. And so then the emphasis in the mind becomes massive anxiety and mental breakdown and God knows what, because we’re not looking at the reality, which is death will come. Death is one certain thing, isn’t it? There are a lot of meditations we do in Buddhism. One of the very first ones we would do is to learn to look at the reality of death, not to make us scared, but simply to face what we obviously don’t like to see because we have this strong clinging to a permanent me, which is very deeply instinctive in us.
And so the approach to health in Buddhism, too, if one has a very strong mind and much positive energy from, say, past practice, this is the way Buddhism was saying, an accumulation of positive energy within our mind now, then a person with a powerful mind can actually change their body, they can heal their body, you know? But it’s not seen the ultimate thing. There is an approach, a very powerful approach, in Buddhism, given this view that karma, that everything we experience is the fruit of our past actions, and that given that, more specifically, that something labeled suffering, like ill health, whatever it is, you know, we label suffering, is the result of our negative karma, and given that the idea is to clean up or purify or get rid of the seeds, either before they grow, or when you have the growth of them, cause sickness and cause suffering, you actually work through it in a very positive way, in this way purifying hugely your karma, thus causing you to get an even better life afterwards or even whatever, it’s purification, then there’s a very healthy attitude towards ill health. If you can fix it, fantastic.
If you can’t fix it, then it’s all an opportunity to learn and grow and purify and become even a more a better spiritual practitioner. This is, generally speaking, the approach. So if a person’s really working with Buddhism in their life, then sickness just becomes a precious opportunity. If you can fix it, fantastic. If you can’t, then it’s an opportunity.
Any Tibetan worth their salt, if you talk to any of these Tibetans who’ve been through the suffering they went through in Tibet, this is their attitude, you know, to suffering, to problems, to death, to whatever it is, that if you’ve got the strength, if you’re really working with karma and emptiness and compassion and all this stuff, then you actually, as the Dalai Lama said, you actually learn to be happy when you have problems. So this is the general kind of approach, taking Buddhist philosophy and making it something you work with in your life, then every single thing that happens to us, a person being mean to me or cancer, whatever, it’s, you know, if I can fix it, fantastic. If not, then fantastic. You work with it, you know, and you’re purified. So But it’s not a thing, because like I said, with karma, whatever you experience that’s labeled suffering is fruit of your past negativity.
So by the very experiencing of it, you are purifying it. And to have an attitude towards it in that way as something good increases your purification. It’s sort of like every time someone insults you, if you accept it as your karma and you know it’s good for you because you’re learning about your anger, so therefore you let go of your anger, you’re not just purifying that moment, but you’re purifying a whole pile of other energy of anger and you’re moving your own direction in a very good way. So the same with sickness. It’s seen as a very important thing.
And in fact also, too, the Buddhist approach. You know, like I said before, one of the first contemplations we need to do to really wake us up, to want to practice, to want to use this precious life, is to see that it is precious, that we must have worked very hard to get it, so what a tragedy to waste it. And then another one, also a meditation for you to increase that energy, is to actually contemplate, as we say, impermanence and death. So impermanence in general, like I’m saying, the things come and then things go, is simply reality. Intellectually, we all know it, but emotionally we try to deny it and don’t want it.
It makes us miserable, you know. So most of all, of course, specifically in relation to our own self. We all know exactly we’re going to die. There’s not a single Buddhist person mean, we’d be embarrassed to admit we’re not going to die, but if we check how we feel, we check the attitude we have, you know, it’s as if we’re not going to die, because it comes as an enormous shock when somebody else dies. It comes as an enormous shock when we die, when we’re told we’re going to die.
In other words, this is what Buddha is saying, that we’re living in denial. A lot of the misconceptions in our mind are like living in denial of reality, and it’s as if reality is too painful for us or something. So because of attachment, this fear sense of this kind of unhappy I, it’s just not a very palatable thing to think that I will disappear. It’s kind of crazy, you know? So we live in denial.
We try to bolster up this life as long as we possibly can, to the point where in the West, these people who cut their heads off and put them in fridges, because this belief that the head is the brain is the mind and that’s all there is. So imagine trying to whereas the Buddhist ones, no worry, just create morality, you get a much better body next life anyway. You know? I mean, it’s quite simple to get another decent body. If you want to be rich next life, just be generous now.
Really, I’m not being flippant, I’m being very serious. If you want a really good, beautiful body, you’d be moral. You want people to all love you and adore you, be patient. Know? I mean, can set it all up perfectly.
You can be the most beautiful, lovable, divine, handsome, rich, beautiful, rich person in the whole world. You just have to know what the causes are. I mean, it’s sort of flippant, but it’s not. And death is actually we could talk a bit more about that. There are different ways of meditating on death, as we put it.
There’s this approach where you contemplate, first of all, sort of all these meditations are very structured in this approach, where you first contemplate that death is definite. As I said, it’s completely obvious. You say, well, excuse me, I know that. What do you mean contemplate it? But like I’m saying, it’s like we know it here but we don’t know it here.
So, you if you’ve said to Princess Diana, well, I always think of Princess Diana and Gianni Versace for some reason, these two people in particular, you know? Then, of course, death is definite. They’re going to die. Yes, she’d agree with you. She’d have a conversation and she would agree with you and she’d know it all the more because she was dealing with lots of suffering people.
So when you do this first contemplation, the first level, you contemplate again and again all things that we know evidently but which we don’t quite know in our heart. So it’s only about contemplating again and again how death is definite. The one certain thing in this life, even from the the one certain thing from the moment you’re conceived, the only certain thing is that you will die. So all contemplating again and again until somehow the truth of it hits us more deeply, not just here, but in the heart. Microphones.
Okay. Just rubs against everything. What can I do? Nothing. I just have to put up with the sound, I’m sorry.
Then, the second point, which is more, you know, close to home, is that the time of death is uncertain. And this is the one we can see where we can pretty stumble, you know. We all know it intellectually, we know we do not. We know, actually, we know when we’re going to die. If there’s someone in this room who’s clairvoyant who can tell you precisely when you’re going to die, you’ll know how many moments you’ve got left in life, so can plan it very nicely.
Like we know when four o’clock comes, we can plan it very nicely between now and four, but we don’t know when death will come. It’s a fact, you know, it truly is a fact for ninety nine point nine percent of us. But we act check how we act. We act as if we’re very certain when death is going to come, and it’s a long way off. Which is precisely why, when someone has been told they’ve got cancer or AIDS or going to die in six months, there’s this profound shaking of the entire reality, isn’t it?
I mean, whether you’re one of these people or whatever, people talk about it. Anybody I know who’s been told they’re going to die, I mean, they make a whatever they call spiritual or whatever, they make a profound shift in their life, you know? Because suddenly, and all Buddhism is saying is, as Lama Zopa says, you know, we’re all dying, but we act as if we’re living, and I’m going to go to see a dying person in hospital. You think about it, what does it mean? What does it mean I’m a living person?
It means I feel good, doesn’t it? It means I feel healthy. But, excuse me, Diana was very healthy. Gianni Versace was very healthy. He walked down that shop in the morning, went out his gate, down the shop, bought his newspapers, had a coffee, came back, and he was a living person.
There he was, fifty, at the peak of his power, the peak of his handsomeness, the peak of his fame, the peak of his success. He was as living as you could possibly get, if you see what I’m saying. He really felt alive. But excuse me, you know, it was a complete joke. If his friend said to him as he walked out the gate, honey, you’re going to die in ten minutes, he would have laughed uproariously, right?
In fact, he died in ten minutes. In retrospect, we can see he died in ten minutes. So it’s not just dying people who die. Living people die before dying people. It’s just a concept, it’s clearly an absurd concept because as Lama Zopa points out, just a slightly broader perspective, it is absolutely clear that we are all dying.
I mean, to think that we’re not is just an absurd idea. It’s so small view, know, such tunnel vision. So all and the need to look at this again and again is again not to freak us out, make us feel depressed, make us think, well, I’m going to die, what’s the point of life? Which is sort of how we’re acting now, as if we’re going to die, not going to die, therefore life’s important. And we think, oh, if it’s all impermanent, going to finish anyway, what’s the point?
That’s how we think. But it’s complete misconception. So this misconception is what causes us to suffer, you know? So what we’re trying to do, in a way what Buddha’s trying to is get us to poke our heads out and see reality, then act accordingly. That’s the point.
It’s not just a question of knowing, oh, okay, I’m going to die soon, so then? The point is, the next point in the contemplation, which is what is important at the time of death. It’s very reasonable thought. This is the question, what is important at the time of death? Well, Buddhist view is this, as we’re saying, given that your consciousness is a continuity of energy, and given that every single thing in it, everything that happens to you, whatever, nothing outside of your experience, everything within your experience, given that, you know, that creates the causes for your future experiences.
Given that your mind is a continuity that will continue after this death, right? And then more specifically, given that so called deluded energy of body, speech and mind coming from this fractured unhappy eye that causes attachment and anger and harming others and pain and neurosis for our self, given that that brings suffering and that the opposite brings happiness, and then you check up and you think, well, do I like suffering? Check from your own experiences. Do I like being ill? Do I like pain?
Do I like people rejecting me? Do I like being paranoid? Do I like having my money stolen? Do I like being in a war zone? Do I like being raped?
And the answer clearly is no. So all Buddhism is saying is given all those things, then it follows logically that what is important at the time of death is simply the imprints of the virtue you have created in your life. That’s it. It comes right down to precisely that. That’s what’s important.
So we all know, when we’re trying to do any job, do anything, you’ve to have your priorities clear, you’ve to know what the methods are, and then you follow those methods. Well, that’s all we’re talking about here. We’re looking at what the methods are to help you improve your lot right here, and then given that your mind will continue after this life. It’s a common sense approach. Okay, there are a lot of givens here.
If you would have never thought of reincarnation before, it’s a big fat given. But this is the approach. So this kind of contemplation sort of wakes us up. So in other words, we don’t need to wait for a wake up call called a doctor telling us we’ve got cancer to start thinking about the importance of life. This type of contemplation, this is part of the Buddhist deal, is to wake up ourselves before.
But again, many of these men I’m writing to in prison, in in America, many of them with appalling lives, appalling suffering. As I said, one of them said, there’s this wake up call. Wake up call, you know. They were so happy to get this wake up call. And any wake up call at all will do us, you know, sort of to deflate our fantasy bubble of unreality about anything.
Anything that could help us see reality more clearly and help us therefore turn our own energy around because we see that the other methods don’t work, then fantastic. The way is meditation laid out? In the Lamrim. The Lamrim. Which special?
The whole Lamrim. This is the All I’m talking about is the Lamrim. Every word I’m saying here. All the words I’m saying are just from the, you know, speaking in an informal way. What I’m doing is, as you know, I’m padding out from my own experience, using experiences we all know.
But using the reference point I’m using, the interpretation of the ordinary experience I’m using, is Buddha’s view, which is laid out in the Lamrim. So what you do is that’s like the bare bones, and how you meditate on this stuff. If you go to a retreat and do a retreat on the Lamrim, this packaging of the Buddha’s teaching, here, well then, okay, so you know. So you take the bare bones and you pad it out with your own experiences, because what we’re talking about here is not something in the sky, not something in a Buddhist text hidden away somewhere. Death and impermanence is evident to everybody, you know?
So you just pick up the points. You pick up the points and then you pad, you simply sit there and you do a little thinking. You contemplate, you’re talking to yourself, or you can read the obituary pages. Now, depending on how you read the obituary pages, I remember thinking, you know, when Frank Sinatra died. Of course, because he’s a famous person.
When you read all about this stuff, you don’t read it with the view of this could be me, this is death and impermanence, thinking how he felt before he died, observing the way he lived his life, wondering about what karma he created, and relating it to you. What we think is all gossip. Oh, Frank’s an adult. Oh, his wife is there, oh, and his daughter is there, oh, God, she’s looking old now, know, and all these people, there’s Owen, he knew the Matthew, goodness, he had a relationship with Jack Kennedy, all that. It’s all this gossip mind.
We see it all as gossip. It’s something out there that happens. It’s not something that you read it, by the end of it, you should be galvanized by the fact there’s another person who lived his life like a dream, who created negative karma, let’s assume, you know, who didn’t have a thought of karma. There he was even on his deathbed, his wife saying to him, Hang on, hang on. And I was so shocked by that, know, this old man trying to die, freaking out completely, not wanting to die because he’s so permanent, grasping I, Frank Sinatra.
And there was his wife telling him, hang on, you know? And he’s he can’t, the poor bloke, you know? So then imagining where his mind is, imagining the state of mind that he’s dying at, probably huge grasping, huge whatever it is. I mean, seemed to express I’m not trying to judge Frank Sinatra, he could be beautiful, I know. But, you know, showing anger, showing and you think about all that.
This is the approach, you know. You use this so called philosophy as your way of interpreting what is happening in everyday life anyway. Who’s we? You talk about yourself here. You, you mean.
Well, Well, wouldn’t do a whole hour, you’d just get bored unless you’ve the means to do it and the concentration, you know? What all these contemplations are are simply just like ways of reassessing. In other words, if you’re sitting along and your life is all wonderful, which is what happens, and then somebody says you’ve got cancer, what’s happening in your mind now is suddenly you have to rethink things, don’t you? What is the value of life? What is the point of life?
Well, this is all Buddhism is getting us to do if we’re using in our life, is to rethink things before we have to get cancer. That’s all, in different ways. You know, we go along thinking life is just dandy, and then someone comes and punches you in the nose or smashes your car, so you have to rethink. So the rethinking is either, this is not fair, I’m going to get a bigger car with stronger metal, and I’m going to get bigger insurance. The other thinking is, oh, well, is impermanence, what do I learn from this, and how interesting.
We can all see this, what we’re doing all the time. Everything is simply you’ve got an interpretation of everything that happens to you. We have a certain interpretation. So if the interpretation is called anger, then you use that method. If you’re a communist, you use that interpretation.
Everything is an interpretation. This is a Buddhist approach. We have a view. Everything is view, you know? So what we’re talking here is Buddha’s view.
That’s why you don’t have to accept Buddha’s view or even use it at all. We’re here listening to it. If you say you’re a Buddhist, then what your job is more and more, by checking up on Buddha’s view, seeing if it’s a valid view of reality, seeing if it is in sync with how things are, then if you then decide it is, and you like the idea of getting to Paris, France, then you start making that your view. Not just once a day or twice a day, but eventually every moment. Because every moment your mind is always working.
Every moment your mind is always having an interpretation about something. You know, so it’s mostly attachment view, anger view, jealous view, poor me view, and it’s not fair view, I’m tired view, and now I’m going to have this, and now I feel like a chocolate cake, and then we just float through our life and we suddenly die and we get a surprise, you know? It just went like a dream, isn’t it? You understand? So it’s like waking our minds up, galvanizing ourselves into action, seeing the benefit of this life, seeing the potential we have, recognizing the powerful potential we’ve got with this body and this mind, and using all these things in our life to wake us up, to want to use it, to want to get the results.
It’s kind of like that really. But anyway, did I answer your questions about death before? Death and health? Did I? Or do you have more to discuss?
Well, yeah, the whole body of karma isn’t so much that we make a choice in the sense that we mean choice of being like a clear volition. It’s very obvious. So what the Buddhist approach is this, that here we are Okay, for example, Now, here we are going along in our life and we think we’re nice people, and we are nice people. Obviously, in this room we’re all nice people. No one’s kind of sitting there about to murder somebody, but we never know karma could rather.
We’re nice people, you know? We try to do our best, we’re really trying to see the meaning of life, we’re trying to be kind, but we all have admit too that, you know, there’s anger there, there’s jealousy, all this kind of stuff, and it’s all human. And when it arises, because it feels so real and we don’t feel we’ve got a choice over it, it’s rare that we think, my God, I have to pull this CD out immediately because I don’t want to have the unbearable stuff and it will come from me as I keep being angry. We usually hold on to it. We usually believe the story it tells.
It doesn’t get that violent. Mean, some of my Mexican gangster friends in prison in California, know, when they don’t like somebody, they go knife them, or they go shoot them, or they go gang rape them, you know? This is their style. That’s more radical, right? So when they make a turn now in their lives and they say they don’t want to harm people, they really mean it and they’ve got a decent contrast, you know?
For us, it’s harder to see somehow. And so, okay, using them as an example. But when my friend Arturo was there in his gangster mode from the age of eleven, completely seriously, you know, harming his enemies and shooting them and stabbing them and doing whatever he did, and then in prison, really taking you know, just cutting throats of the people he didn’t like and whatever, because that was his method, he really thought that was the method that was bringing him happiness. This is a good example. So, he didn’t see at that time, and this is the Buddhist approach, that what he was doing, he was doing it because he wanted to be happy, he was doing it because that was the method he used, because it was what everybody around him did and that was the moral code of his gang, and that’s what you did to get happy.
So, what Buddhism is saying is, actually, what he thought was getting him happiness, even then didn’t get him happiness, and now he’s seeing this, it made his mind freak out. But in the future, what he’s just doing by doing that, if he allows all those karmic seeds to grow, he’s bringing himself the future result of unbearable suffering. I mean, even if he doesn’t get a lower realm rebirth, but when he’s a human, he’ll have people harming him and shooting him and illness, because illness is one result, a residual result of the karma of killing. So when you do an action of killing, because your motive is saying I’m doing this because I wanna get what I want, all the people in wars, then if they knew, let’s say karma is right, let’s say killing is negative and does bring you unbearable suffering in a future life, then of course, who would do it if we could see that? But who can see that?
Buddhism is saying, because of misconceptions deeply in our mind, the methods we use now to get happiness are actually the methods that are going to bring the direct opposite. But we don’t see that now. So a person who’s into stealing, they actually look like they get a good result, they get more money. Well, it’s a good idea, let me steal again. I mean, many of my friends are in prison too, for stealing.
But look, that even more is more insidious. It looks like quite pleasant, you actually get the result. But the Buddhist approach is if you steal, then it’s guaranteed that in the future, karmically, you will not have. Because that’s the imprints that you’re creating in your mind. You’re creating a meanness and an ungivingness in your mind, and then produce the result of you not getting.
So, this is the karmic approach. If we could all see this, then of course, indeed, who would choose to kill, to lie, to steal? Because we can’t see in the face of it the karmic result, then we we think we’re choosing the opposite. So, of course, if we could see this. Like every time you stole, you’ve got an electric shock, which we’d all be moral, we’d all be perfect people, you know?
But this is the way they say karma is, one of the tragedies of karma is that having had the habit in the past, you get born with that habit and you keep doing it. And the tragedy is, whatever the habit is that you have to do, that action makes you feel good. So there’s a friend, you know, people who kill. Lots of humans kill so many creatures. They go fishing, they kill insects, we all do, mosquitoes.
We kind of have a mental breakdown with anguish every time we do it, because we see the suffering. But if we could see the suffering of that creature, and put ourselves in the creature, in the place of the ant or the mosquito, we would never kill again. Or if we got this terrible electric shock every time we kill, we would be perfect people, we’d be blissful. But this the problem. And so all the Buddhist approach to morality is, is learning to see, to even think about, because of the delayed reaction between the action and the result, to think about how killing and lying and stealing, forget even about how it harms others for the moment, but to try to get to see how those actions leave imprints in our mind that cause us to do that again, and that eventually bring us unbearable suffering.
And so it’s said in the teachings that the result of doing these negative actions brings you suffering rebirth, not to mention suffering even within a human rebirth. Now, this is where it sounds religious and this is where it sounds moralistic, but this is Buddhist philosophy, so it needs thinking of that. So then, if we’ve got any kind of conviction now, you know, given and this is where we’re not even thinking about compassion yet. This is the one about thinking about death. Don’t even think about compassion yet.
We’re trying to get it into our thick skulls that our negative actions and our delusions bring harm to us. And if we could get that, we would be amazing people. Then we can afford to be compassionate and not want to do it for the sake of others, you know? So it’s not as if you choose. Who would?
Nobody if they knew. If we knew the results of taking poison of course, we avoid taking poison. If we knew the results fifty years ago of spraying aerosol cans, and even now it’s a bit of a faith thing, I wouldn’t have a clue what a hole in an ozone layer is. I have no idea. I just have to accept that these people know what they’re talking about and so I just, to avoid causing problems, I don’t spray cans, let’s say.
But if we’d known, this is the thing, that that causes these awful things in the environment, then clearly we wouldn’t do it, that’s why we don’t do it now, we’ve learned from our mistakes and that’s the one of karma. Are we talking about the same thing here? Are we communicating? Yeah. In terms of karma and how it ripens, this is where, you know, like I don’t know about holes in ozone layers, all I can afford to do is read what people say and assume because there’s a bunch of knowledge that people seem to support and people I’ve checked to some extent.
So I have to give them, this is where we’re having faith. I have to have faith in them. I have to give them the benefit of the doubt. So it’s kind of like that with karma. I think there is a sense we can see in our life if we have any morality at all, even if we’re not sure that killing will cause you to be born an ant, let’s say.
That seems a bit far fetched. But we can all somehow, we have something in us that recognises that killing is harmful, brings suffering, you know? Somehow we can see lying or even as soon as we say the word lying, stealing, killing, you don’t have to be God or Buddha or a great philosopher to sort of get a sense, you know, if you’ve got some morality at all, that it somehow brings something suffering. So all Buddhism doing is extending that. So if you’re a Buddhist, you know, you attempt to live by this code of morality for your sake and the sake of others, you know.
So, okay, the wannna karma is a big leap. That’s not a little bit of holes in the ozone way. But, you know, this is where I’m prepared to say I accept what Buddha says there. I can’t see it’s true for myself, but I think about it to the extent that I can. It doesn’t seem an illogical kind of presentation of reality that consciousness is this and this and this and and karma is this and this.
But meanwhile, I can definitely see, this much I can see, that my being less angry now, at least, brings me more peace of mind. And I like that. That feels better. That feels comfortable. It’s hard work, but I know it’s worth it.
Not gossiping, not bad mouthing people, not holding on to blame, not being jealous. I can see for myself, and this is good enough, you know. I think already if we could just see this, the peace of mind it brings us now. I mean, my friends in prison, you know, these ex gang these gangsters. Four of them are I mean, many many people I’m writing to, four of them are Mexicans who’ve been in heavy duty gangs, heavy duty violence, some of them multiple murderers, you know.
They all can see. They all can see their minds. They were fed up with the lack of peace. They were fed up with their own mental suffering, fed up with the pain, the paranoia. It just it was unbearable to them.
Know? This has been the first main motivating thing. And then also full of overwhelmed by regret, with regret, from the harm they’ve done to others. Well, that’s very profound, to have both of those things. But I think if we can learn from our own suffering, but we don’t want more suffering.
Already that’s incredible. This is amazing already. So it’s a leap, certainly, to see that due to negative actions. In other words, when you look at an ant or a scorpion or a lion or creatures who seem to have a very suffering life, narrow minds, sort of confined, stuck in their antness. And to try and imagine, Sid just thinking this ant out there, oh, how fascinating, he’s part of the ant kingdom, you know?
Oh, look at how they harm each other and everything. Oh, how fascinating, this is nature, you know, we talk now, this is the Western view. The Buddhist view is what you’re seeing there is the manifestation of the deluded energy of a sentient being just like you, whose mind is now in an ant body with an ant view of reality and an ant’s suffering. Or a scorpion, you know, do think look at a scorpion, its body itself, isn’t it? It’s poison.
It’s a weapon. So you either have the view that God made it for our benefit, you know, which is how I was taught as a Catholic, or you have the view that it’s just a physical thing, doesn’t have any kind of special being and it hasn’t like everything, it hasn’t been anything else and won’t be anything else but just is this ant or scorpion for a few months or a few years or however long scorpions last but in Buddhist approach, it’s a continuity of consciousness which possesses beginningless and endless just like yours. It’s the expression of its negative energy. Now if you check a scorpion, its body itself is actually poison. So if it has created its own suffering, well, try and imagine that that has to be some heavy diluted energy, its mind is so paranoid, it creates such negative karma, isn’t it, that you think whoever sees it instantly wants to destroy it, there’s only other scorpions maybe who like scorpions, that’s about it, right?
Any being, so like the fact that even we can walk into supermarkets and be in a room here and people can love us and be kind to us and not want to stomp on us immediately is the result of such good karma. We must have been so moral, so kind in the past. This is again why we wouldn’t weep if we thought how much we would have to have created, to be a being who nobody wants to stomp on, how miraculous, so think of the energy a scorpion must have created, to be through its little mind, to zap into the egg of a scorpion mummy, and then become a scorpion, itself the manifestation of its own energy, this is the one on karma, learn every time you see a scorpion, every time you see a rat, every time you see a dog, time you see a mouse, every time you see a mosquito, whatever. You think of the energy. What did that energy I’m just talking about it in very kind of vague ways here, you know.
Somehow you see it in a new way, and you see a suffering sentient being. You see your you know, you see it’s been a human before, it can be a human again. It’s got Buddha nature, and look at it, you know, made a mess. Didn’t realize the nature of its actions, so now due to it following its own deluded ego, trying to get what it wanted, trying to avoid, you know, and harming others, it’s now look at it, you know, it’s now a scorpion. This is the Buddhist approach.
Yes. Yes. That is that’s the length of your life, for example, is the result is is due to your past karma. So, for example, the way let’s just give an example of a killing. Killing is one of the actions that we do that we can see harm to other beings.
Now, it ripens in terms of karma for oneself. So, let’s think of the child. There’s a child, let’s say. So, that person from the past would have had the habit of killing, would have, let’s say, been born in the lower realms as a result of killing, that karma was cleaned up, it finished its karma, its petrol tank ran out of killing karma, and it got another human life. But once you get another human life, let’s say, or another positive life, which is a result of morality, then there are various residual results of karma, of killing, that continue in that life.
The worst one is, let’s say, the habit to keep killing. You have the know, it says that in kids, you can see some kids automatically jump on snails and ants and start fishing and don’t see any suffering, don’t see the suffering that they’re doing. That habit to keep killing is an imprint in their mind they brought with them. Also, one of the ways that karma of killing ripens in a person is their life gets cut short, they get killed, or they get serious illness. A lot of these distinctive factors operating in this tiny life, so we have there’s nothing else to do.
Yes. Well, way you said that, if that’s what I’m saying and that’s how you want to say then that’s roughly correct. That whatever happens Buddhism is saying that whatever happens to us, positive or negative, is a result of some actions we’ve done in the past. There’s nothing that happens to us that happens randomly or because it’s God’s will, or because it’s an accident, and as I said, random, or because there’s just no cause for it. Everything has to have a cause in the mind of that person.
So one of the residual results of having harmed others is that your life gets cut short. You die, you you get killed young, you’re aborted, you miscarry in the womb, you know, you die when you’re eleven in a car accident, you get sick, whatever it is, you know, whatever it is. This is the one of karma. Now if you can fix it, fantastic. You can get medicine to fix it.
You can purify. The Buddhism would say, for example, you might have the karma to die at the age of sixty four in a car accident. If you had the clairvoyance, you’d see it all that now. But by you practicing now, by you changing by you turning around yourself now, by you practicing morality, by you cleaning up your own act, you would alter that karma. Nothing is fixed, you know.
You can change it. You see, it’s kinda like you’re putting in Yeah. You’re changing it. So there are many practices we would do. For example, if a person’s sick, they’re given many practices.
We call them long life practices. You do certain meditations that can help sustain your life. You do certain things like go save the life of other creatures, of animals, by helping other people. You’re already purifying your karma to die. So anything we do can alter whatever the karma is there.
So nothing is fixed, you know, you can change things. But some karma is very strong, and you can’t change it. It’s too late. It’s sort of like that analogy I use of a person up on the mountain seeing you and me driving from different sides and calculating. If you keep going like you’re going, and I keep going like I’m going, we’re gonna crash in two and a half miles, just saying, you know?
Now, if you put your foot brake put put your foot on the brake way back, you’re gonna avert it completely. But maybe you don’t put your foot on the brake until just around the corner, it’s kinda too late. You’ll lessen it, but it’s too late to really change it. So the karma’s like that. If your death is imminent in two months due to karma, but you can’t see it, and you start practicing now, you maybe already will purify a huge amount, but it’ll maybe get to the point where perhaps you’ll still get very sick, might die.
But you also think, as soon as you But if you keep creating negative energy, you can almost hasten it. It’s like putting your foot on the accelerator. You’ll make the action even more extreme. karma is a highly dynamic thing. If you laid it all out now, didn’t change, all this would happen then, this would happen then, this would happen then.
But by fixing and by changing things, by acting differently now, you alter the whole thing, alter the whole scenario. This is the whole point of what practice is in Buddhism. Given that the suffering we have is a result of our actions, and given that we don’t want suffering, then it follows the most basic level of what practices is to purify the karmic seeds before they ripen. Very sensible. If you discover you have a whole pile of poisoned seeds in your garden, and you don’t want all these poisoned trees growing, you try and pull them out before they grow.
Right? Well, that’s the whole idea. One approach to a calming, you know. So we very practical approach to practice is one of purification, purifying. And what purification basically means is doing practices that turn around the negative energy, you know, a very positive way, for one’s own benefit.
Not to mention the benefit of others. We’re just talking here for our own benefit now, how to clean up one’s own act, you know. It’s kind of like you discover you’ve been eating junk food, and it’s poisoning your system. So what do you do? You go on a fast.
You clean up. You go you purify. This is sort of the approach to practice. Very practical down to earth way. What can I do?
Such a heavy microphone. What’s up? Have you got one? I I tried this. I have every fold.
They all seem to touch something. Yeah. I bet it will. It just flops over because it’s too heavy. I’m sorry, you just have to have all these noise.
Yeah, go on. Could you talk about the role of therapy in wisdom, sarcasm, or Sure. Well, basically, the Buddhist idea is anything that helps you see your mind more clearly can only be good. If anything you do that helps you see your mind but then you blame somebody else for it, it can only be bad. So it depends on the therapy.
Depends on and therapy is not an absolute. It’s a question of the person you’re working with. It’s a question of the methodology. It’s a question of their philosophy. Generally speaking, to say that anything you can do to help you see yourself more clearly and to take responsibility for it can only be good.
So if the therapy you’re doing is doing that, then fantastic. If it’s not, then not fantastic. Do you see what I mean? Anything we can do, fantastic. Anything.
Standing in your head does it, then that’s fantastic. You know what I mean? I don’t want to give all these I don’t want to go into saying what I think about this one and that one. I don’t have any opinions. I mean, you know, there are some people for me who are truly excellent.
One of my dearest friends in the whole world is a therapist. She happens to be a Buddhist, but she’s a really excellent therapist. She really helps human beings’ minds, you know. Some other people, I’m sure, therapists, lot of rubbish. I mean, it’s just, you know, like anything, you have to be very selective.
And I think but in general, I can certainly say, you know, that for us in the West, like I was saying yesterday, I think we have the either we vomit everything out our mouth, express it all, or we seem to suppress it all. We don’t seem to have any other method. We don’t seem to know how to see what’s inside us. And we don’t seem to see the virtue in controlling it, you know. We just seem to think it’s important to express it all.
Somehow, you know, for me, for myself, a person who’s expressed everything she felt all her life, thinking it was important and virtuous, realizing it’s not that I was harming many people with my own garbage, you know, and and definitely harming myself. So what I’m getting at here is that I think for us in the West, to have a person who is a friend, call them therapist, whatever, who is there in a really clear way to help you see yourself more clearly is a fantastic friend to have, you know? But that has to be the real job of a therapist, not to be there as your mommy, kind of, you know, turning into a certain thing, but actually being this catalyst for your sounding board. And the person who has to hear you is yourself. That’s the real point, isn’t it?
The therapist is just this person who skillfully guides you to hear yourself more clearly. And if they’re really doing their job well, that’s what they should be doing, and that’s fantastic, I think, to start to get some sense of who you are, some kind of belief in yourself, some kind of confidence, some kind of recognition of your delusions, of your garbage because we’ve all got it, and some kind of ownership of it, responsibility for it, then it’s amazing. It can only be helpful. And why I think we need this very badly in the West, you know, We tend to just express everything to everybody, have no sense of whether they’re even able to listen to it, whether they even want to listen to it, you know? And then wonder why we get hurt by people because we open ourselves up so hugely to everybody, and everybody else has got their delusions too and their projections, so they projections, so they kind of dump it all back on us.
So you gotta be very selective whom you speak to, I think. And I think this is definitely something, you know, that if we understand karma, the Buddhist approach is that everything you express, it creates powerful imprints, you know, not to mention the harm it does to others. Whereas we tend to think, especially thoughts, we tend to think, well, it’s only the mind. We just we actually diminish it, you know. The Buddhist approach is mind is literally everything.
Because mind, how you think, causes you to act and speak in a certain way, isn’t it? And so to be so careful about what we say I mean, for two reasons, I can see a person like me in my life, you know, expressing everything I wanted to express. That’s great for me, but half the time, I’m just harming so many people, you know, dumping on other people my garbage, you know, being bullying and bossing and angry, hurting other human beings. So many people, for example, who, like, you know, who don’t express what they feel, feel it’s necessary to express it as if there’s some innate virtue in that, But it’s not. Be happy that you don’t shoot your mouth off.
You might suppress it. That’s some That’s another story now. But at least you create the virtue of not harming others with your speech. So don’t think you’re not doing a good excellent thing if you don’t express. As to whether you don’t admit to yourself, that’s another story.
But expressing it isn’t necessarily the way to bring it to yourself because I didn’t see myself very clearly even though I expressed everything. So it’s a whole new mode of being, I think, to learn to allow to arise in your mind what is inside you, and for you to see it yourself. Okay. Maybe initially, we need to say it to a person called a therapist or our dear friend whom we can trust with it, so that when we can hear it back ourselves, all that person’s doing is helping us hear it better. But eventually, we’re the person who has to hear it, and we don’t need to speak it to hear it.
And if we can work with it ourselves in our own mind, like be your own therapist, as Lama Yeshe said, then fantastic. That’s the best mode, you know. But we really believe there’s a virtue in expressing everything, so we think our relationship is total honesty, so I have to say everything to him, and he has to say everything to me. I’m sorry, it’s just absurd, frankly, You know, because all negative stuff comes out, just because I feel angry with him, because he eats breakfast the right way, he squashes know, makes noises when he eats his eggs, I feel it’s my right to say something to him. It’s so inappropriate, you think about it.
How dare I? How arrogant of me? Just because I don’t like a certain habit he has, who do I think I am? It’s really quite arrogant. The learning in that one is okay.
I’m irritated by something. That’s the point. I’m irritated. My irritation is the point, not his eating eggs a certain way. It’s my irritation.
So that’s not very happy. It doesn’t make me happy. Demanding he’d be a certain way is just completely invasive. Right? He has a perfect right to eat his eggs as he wishes.
So what do I have to work on? My irritation. Turn that around. I don’t have to speak a single word. He might never know.
And it’s perfect. You think of the harmony in that relationship, that if he never actually knew I had a problem, and I sorted it out, and I passed on from it. How miraculous. But look at how we mostly try to deal, quote unquote, with problems. We just make them like into Mount Everest.
We put in all a cloying kind of pretending to be nice way, you know, tell him as if it’s our right to tell him, as if he is doing something wrong. I mean, you think about it. It’s really tyrannical, you know. This is how we are with our stuff. We think it’s called communication.
It’s not at all. It’s just dumping our own rubbish on somebody else. It’s trying to manipulate to get our attachment to get what it wants. Whereas, the problem is called your your irritation, you know. The problem is called your anger.
Okay. If the person beats you up, like I’m saying, it’s appropriate to not have them beat you up. That’s maybe going a bit far. And you can ask them not to beat you up. But like I said, you know, they don’t they’re gonna keep So, you know, your choice is, if you can’t cope with chain if you can’t change your mind and, you know, put up with the eating the eating of the eggs, then you have to not be there when he eats his eggs, you know, until you can work on your own mind to make it better.
This is what practice is, truly. And if we were able to do this, ninety percent of our problems wouldn’t exist. They’d just be in our own mind, and you’d work with them yourself. Because we really believe everything is relational, and we really believe that our problem is coming from what he did, because we really believe that the outside is the cause of my suffering, then that’s why we do the way we do now. It’s completely schizophrenic, you know, and it’s so immature.
It’s dumping everything on everybody, taking no responsibility ourselves for any feelings at all, good or bad. It’s almost like when you’re in love with a person, you’re blaming them for making you happy. It’s like that. It’s the same trip. You’re dumping it on them.
They are causing your happiness. And you dump it on them when they they cause your suffering. We’re not giving any validity to our self at all. This is what we need to learn to do. This is where sanity comes from.
This is where happiness comes from. This is where kindness and peace of mind and all the rest come from, your own mind, you being your own therapist. So practice, you know, once in a day, not saying what you feel to somebody. Because actually, you think about it too. We have this huge need.
Even you you know, you’re out in the in the car, something dramatic happens, you know? You check what’s happening in your mind. Within three seconds, you’re telling the story to your friend. You’re through it already, aren’t you? You rush home.
The first thing you do is you tell somebody about it. Because it’s almost like until you until it comes out your mouth and somebody else hears it, it’s not a valid experience. But it’s your experience. You’ve had it. No one else necessarily needs to know about it.
It could be interesting to tell other people, but it’s mostly gossip. And it’s the same with the bad stuff. The second you have a fight with somebody, you can’t bear it. So the first thing you’re doing in your mind is telling your friend about it and you’re trying to get someone to support you in your position on it because the ego can’t bear it, you know? But this is where we really we’re like we’re still it’s like we’re two years old, and every time something happens and, you know, Johnny hits me, and around, mommy, mommy, he hit oh, darling, I’m so sorry.
We want mommy to take it all away. We have to work through it ourself. We this is what it means, being our own therapist, you know. We’ve gotta grow up. Our mind is our mind.
Our experiences are our experiences. Now, you know, if you think about it, the really pure way, the only reason to speak to somebody is if what you’re gonna say will benefit them. You check that. We’d virtually not open our mouth once a day, I think, if that were really our motive for saying something. Now, I’m not trying to say we don’t have to express ourselves.
I’m trying to say we’re all perfect already. We do need a person. We do need to tell people our problems. But again, I think even when it comes to that select a person, a person who is your dear friend, who does love you, who does support you, whom you can trust. We tell anybody.
I mean, sometimes you sit on planes, you know. I mean, it’s almost embarrassing when you hear a person in front, within ten minutes, their entire life has vomited out, you know? I mean, I’m not trying I mean, I am being critical, yes. I am being. But it shows how we had this immense neediness to be validated by somebody else, anybody sometimes, anybody.
So there’s this child coming out of the mouth the whole time. And As soon as somebody hears us, we kind of feel we must be real now. This shows how fractured our little eye is, isn’t it? Actually, they have in many cases as the other. You mean in a good way?
Oh, yeah. Fantastic. I’m not criticizing that at all. That’s marvelous. That’s marvelous we do that.
Absolutely. No question about it. If we if we have a friend like that, that’s fantastic. But I’m just looking at the negative side, way you know, the the unfortunate neurotic side that we tend to have, you know, that we seem to think in this culture is a virtue. That’s what I’m saying.
Of course. Yes. There are these marvelous. And if we do have one friend like that, how rare, how fantastic, to have a friend who truly does love us for who we are, and that we can actually say anything to that person, you know? But see, again, this is something interesting, I think.
If we can see, like with the therapist, a friend doesn’t matter, the purpose to speak to the therapist, the purpose to speak to the friend is to actually help ourselves clear it out. It’s like having a sounding board, so by the end of the conversation, you’ve got a bit of clarity about it. That’s fantastic. That’s the way to talk to a friend. That is the way to express our feelings, because that makes it a valid thing.
But I’m just criticizing the way, because of attachment, we continually have this terrible need to express our feelings because we can’t hold them within ourself, because they’re not real until somebody else hears them. And that usually is certainly with criticism. When we get angry, we have to say it to somebody, you know. We have to shoot the mouth off. We have to express everything.
Whether it’s fear, whatever it is, you know? So that’s what I’m saying. It’s not necessarily beneficial. They’re only it hurts us, and it hurts others, you know? And then it causes us to get harmed because we’re making ourselves vulnerable to other people who’ve got their own problems, you know?
So I think to really be more selective, to have more wisdom, basically, in what we say to each other, you know, is so important for our sake and the sake of others, actually. Yes. Right. Yeah. Exactly.
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah. In the long term, you mean?
The techniques? Sure. Know I use the way I check this, so I’m not through the Yeah, you’re right. It’s like kind of classic Buddhist practice, Pure Tibetan Buddhist, you’d listen to these various So what I’m doing here is sort of talking in a very western, easygoing way based on Buddhist philosophy using my own experiences, experiences we all know. If you listen to a Tibetan lama, they wouldn’t be talking like this at all.
Wouldn’t it be true? It’s different, isn’t it? It’s because their style is different, their culture is different, their experiences are different. The principles we’re talking about attachment, anger, jealousy, pride are the same. But the way they express is very different.
So I’m talking in our way because this is my experience because I’m the same as all the rest of us, you know, Western Australia, whatever you want to call. So, okay, the formal way I mean, what a practice is, in Buddhist terms, would be you’d listen to the teachings. You’d get the overview. You’d get the whole guide. You’d get what Paris, France looks like.
You’d get the path to it. You’d hear all the teachings. Slowly, slowly get together a picture of it all. And then and then also, there are ways even if you meditate on that stuff, you contemplate that stuff to make it go more deeply inside. There are formal we even call them analytical meditations, you know?
It’s basically a thinking process. You re- you re-shift, you’re re-evaluating your thinking. Then you’ve got other meditations where you’re training your mind. We did one in the right at the beginning where you simply learn to concentrate, which is sort of like and I was going to talk more about meditation, which I will now. You’ve got meditation which we call there are basically two modes of meditating.
And meditation, really, is simply a way of using your mind where you really intensify. First of all, you know, you’re intensifying something inside. You’re getting more clear inside. You’re seeing yourself more clearly, and you’re purifying and doing all this stuff. So there are two main ways of meditating.
One is called, like I said, stabilization. And that’s where you use techniques to simply learn to focus the mind. And this is where, in a sense, you’re trying to sharpen the knife to make it a decent tool, which is necessary. So you’re gonna If you have to look deeply into your mind and know your mind and turn your mind around, it’s gonna be a very clear, clear mind, you know. So then the first mode of meditation is simply to develop concentration.
So we use one example, or just simply watching your breath. Now the results that come from that in the long term, in the real long term, in Buddhist terms, is you develop a very subtle