y Taming the Wild Elephant — 1998-10-29

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 the metaphor of taming a “wild elephant” to explain why Buddhists work with the mind. Rather than appeal to faith, she grounds the teaching in logic—an untamed mind creates suffering through misconceptions about reality—and invites listeners to verify this directly. She traces the mind’s non-physical nature, explains karma as personal responsibility (you create your own reality), and shows how delusions distort perception. Using concrete examples, she illustrates these principles: chocolate cake that shifts from irresistible to disgusting; anger toward someone who is actually a mirror for your own delusions; attachment masking genuine love. She addresses enlightenment in a single lifetime, distinguishes attachment from love, and describes meditation techniques. The teaching includes Q&A and closes by showing why this work matters: minds meditating in prisons find peace despite noise, proving happiness depends on internal clarity, not external circumstances.

File metadata (for organising)

File: 01 1998 10 29 TWE.mp3

UUID: de93f88b-0e6e-4adb-98b2-a49e315d8f82

Teacher: Ven Robina Courtin

Collection: y Taming the Wild Elephant (Ven Robina Courtin)

Date: 1998-10-29

Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide

Duration: 90.8 minutes

Words: ~16,670

I don’t know if you’re coming. Okay. Well, I think we did it last night, so we have to have a variation tonight. We talked about taming the mind. We’ll do more tonight.

I suppose the question would be why would we want to tame our mind, you know, these wild elephants? What would be the reason? I think again, as we were talking last night, it’s very easy for us when we think about something that’s called religious, you know, to get this holy sort of feeling that we ought to be kind of good and quiet and renounced and smile and all this, you know. But somehow, as we were saying last night, what is really stressed in Buddhism, what Buddha is really emphasizing is that we look at the very logical reasons for why we do what we do, and we make the very clear choices. So as he would say really is, you know, I mean, Buddhism has got a very extensive presentation of its view of reality and philosophy, very clear presentation of the mind consciousness, very detailed methods of how to tame it, how to transform it.

But as Buddha would say, don’t believe a single word he’s saying. It’s not a question of blind faith, it’s not a question of disbelieving it, which is the tendency we have, I think, when we call something religion. When we call something scientific, we kind of have this delightful view of going in and analyzing checking and then establishing some truth. Well that’s exactly precisely what Buddha is talking about. What we’re dealing with is truth.

What we’re trying to find actually is truth and why we want to find truth, and this is where it’s linked to the mind, is where psychology intersects with philosophy in Buddhism. The reason we want to find truth because Buddha is saying the extent to which we suffer is the extent to which we don’t see truth, the extent to which we make up fantasies. And where we make up those fantasies about reality is with our mind. And so the job of a Buddhist, as I said last night, is, you know, to work on the mind as Lama Zopa says, the workshop is in the mind. So the reason to want to tame our mind, work on our mind at all is because according to Buddhism, that’s the source of our happiness and the source of our suffering.

Very clear, very clear. This is an essential Buddhist statement, you know? And much of Buddhism is describing how that is actually so. Not some religious idea that we ought to believe, like I said, but something that through looking we can establish for ourselves, you know? So like we were saying last night, think the mind, what we’re working with, is what’s inside us, you know, thoughts, feelings, emotions.

This is our mind according to Buddhism. The mind isn’t the thoughts and it’s certainly not your brain. It doesn’t come from anyone else. It doesn’t come from God or Buddha, not created by somebody. It’s non physical necessarily.

Whatever is labeled mind or consciousness, love, hate, kindness, compassion, joy, unconscious, subconscious, spiritual, soul, these words although Buddhism doesn’t use them, but whatever maybe vaguely, you know, whatever you refer to as that, all of this spectrum of inner experiences, that’s your mind And that’s what you’re working with. The level whatever level we’re at, you know? So it happens to be, according to the way Buddhism would say it, we as a human, just necessarily, we function at a very gross level of mind. But of course, in Western materialist terms, this is all we are, the conceptual sensory being, you know. In Buddhist terms, this is the tip of the iceberg.

And these so what so why the mind needs taming according to Buddhism isn’t just because we’re bad people and we’ve got to be quiet and mindful and holy, not like that. It’s because the way Buddha is saying is that the way we’ve been the way we the way we miscon according to him, the misconceptions we have about how to get pleasure and the misconceptions we have about what causes suffering. Well, the conceptions we have are misconceptions. And so because of this, the mind is constantly searching in the wrong directions. It’s appropriate to want happiness.

It’s appropriate to not want to suffer. Buddhism is saying. Totally appropriate. And in fact, Buddha is saying this is our potential, to be free of suffering and completely full of happiness, as we were saying last night. But the methods we use are completely up the creek, you know, back to front, upside down, wrong direction, won’t ever get what we want.

And so this entire process of misconceiving the way things are, of looking at the wrong things, pointing at the wrong things as the cause of happiness and the cause of suffering, altogether, somehow this whole scenario brings causes the mind because it never gets what it wants, because it’s always and therefore always dissatisfied. The mind is somehow out of control. And if we just have and all we have to do is look at our so called, you know, the unhappy emotions we all have and it’s evidence to us. It’s not a religious statement. We just have to look at when someone says something we don’t like, when something very delicious comes along, when someone takes something that we consider ours, you know, attachment, anger, jealousy, whatever you want to call it.

It’s evident, isn’t it? The mind is uncontrolled. We just have to look at two people fighting and it’s evident. Their minds are uncontrolled and it causes suffering. So the very logical first reason why we would want to tame this wild elephant of the mind is because, you know, an untamed mind is what causes suffering.

It causes us to it causes our own suffering and it causes us to harm others. It’s something very evident to us. So there’s a practical reason, you know, and the practical reason this is the practical reason. It’s not a religious reason. It’s a practical reason.

Because if we look at our own mind, even a vague kind of, you know, outburst of anger, even just in the mind, not even coming out of the mouth, we can see how incredibly disturbing it is, isn’t it, to ourselves, not to mention anyone else. And really, is a very the basics basic statement that Buddhism is saying, if we really looked at our minds, even in a superficial way, looked inside whenever we felt what we call anger, we call it attachment or jealousy or pride, all these others, you know, the stress, the anxiety we all experience, if we just looked at that, really felt it for what it is, then the conclusion would be, of course, who wants it, you know? Do we enjoy? You know, when you say, God, I felt jealous yesterday, it was so great, you know? I mean we do not say that, do we?

We hold on to it, we believe in our right to be jealous, we blame everybody else for it, but we know it’s awful. We know it just is so painful, it breaks the heart, doesn’t it? Any of these so called words, you don’t need God or Buddha or great philosophers to tell us that anger makes us miserable, jealousy makes us miserable. You just look at a dog, and you don’t even know the words that you can tell. Same thing.

So somehow it’s something fairly evident, isn’t it? And all Buddha’s saying is, the most practical level, all he’s saying is, well, listen guys, you don’t need to be. You don’t need to be angry, jealous, attached, and all the rest. But what’s interesting is because we have this view that is very fixed in believing that that person causes me happiness and that person causes me suffering, then actually what we’re saying is we don’t really have a choice, in a sense, isn’t it? We’re giving our power to outside objects, to even that chocolate cake, you know?

When the delicious chocolate cake comes along and sits in front of us, the stomach is empty and you like chocolate cake, we really do feel, we don’t think of it this way, but it’s a powerful feeling, isn’t it, that we don’t have any choice. Somehow the cake is there demanding to be eaten, isn’t it? I mean, look at the the regret we have when we’re struggling to kind of, you know, control eating too much fatty stuff. And that third piece again goes down, you know, and you kind of we all know this is a simple one. We know the uncontrolled mind, and we know it’s not the hand that just went out there from its own side while you’re watching and your hand just rushes out.

Your tongue doesn’t just leap out of your face and eat cake, you know, does it? The tongue and the hand do exactly exactly what the mind wants, although the mind but we can see, you know, that there’s this argument inside, you know, the better part of us which wants not to eat too much, this kind of very tiny voice when the stomach is very empty and the mind is very full of attachment. It would take wins every time, isn’t it? So it’s kind of at this level, not even to mention anything deeper than this, know, it’s so evident that an uncontrolled mind causes suffering. Somehow losing power I mean, we all want to be in control in a positive way.

We all want to be in control of our lives. It’s so obvious, you know. We don’t want to have we don’t want to be overwhelmed by circumstances, you know. This is we really know this is suffering. So I think even just at this level, not to mention deeper things like emptiness, karma, compassion and all this, you know, it’s so clear to us if we could have some control over our own minds, we’d be happier.

Because we all want to be in control, we want to have power, we don’t want to give our power to something else, somebody else, and we know that’s like a nightmare. So when you’re totally attached to someone else, overwhelmed with that enormous desire for somebody, Part of it is like a nightmare, isn’t it? Because there’s that unbelievably strong feeling of having no control, having no say in it, being compelled to follow that energy. The same with anger, the same with all these emotions. Because, you know, in a sense, we do have the philosophy already there fairly implicit, that it’s reasonable and normal and human and this is just the way life is, and nobody’s ever taught us methods to be any other way, you know?

I mean, our mother’s taught us how to write and read and walk and talk. She didn’t panic when she discovered her child couldn’t walk, you know, because she had methods to show you how not to walk. But she doesn’t, most of us. We didn’t learn methods to lessen anger and increase patience. We kind of reinforce, and this is the Buddhist picture, we continually are reinforcing and having it fed back to us, and so thus reinforcing all the more these views that this is who I am, this is my personality.

As soon as we say that, it’s concrete, isn’t it? Since tiny kid, you displayed the fact that you couldn’t walk, couldn’t talk, couldn’t write, couldn’t read, couldn’t do anything. You’re a disaster. But your parents don’t panic. They know that it’s an evolutionary thing that you teach them methods and slowly this child will grow.

But you know, emotionally, it’s not like that, isn’t it? It’s sort of interesting in our culture. Emotionally, my god, this is who my child is, look at them, angry, jealous, freaked out, what can I do? So we already kind of we’re already up against it. And what this is interesting, what Buddhism is saying, the very source of what’s called saṃsāra, is simply being stuck in this state of the uncontrolled mind.

This is all it means. It’s not some place you go to. It’s not some big naughty city where you have pleasure and you shouldn’t. saṃsāra, which is a state of mind, right, of suffering. So somehow having, you know, being caught up in so called saṃsāra is this very state of having this uncontrolled mind and these misconceptions so deeply ingrained, all based on these misconceptions, for example, that believe instinctively that the cake is the cause of happiness and that person who’s mean to me is the cause of suffering, so already giving the power to everybody and everything else, already kind of just like stuck here.

But all of this is based on the fundamental misconception which in Buddhist terms is the source of all of this in the first place. It is the one they label simply ignorance or unawareness. Tibetan it’s is ma rigpa. Unawareness. And as a complete unawareness according to Buddha of the like we’re saying, the true nature of how things actually are.

Living in a fantasy world, you know? So this unawareness, this fundamental ignorance or an often colloquially called ego grasping, its nature is to cling hugely, fixed, concrete, solid, real me ness here. And so this is what we’re saying here, you know, that we cling. We don’t cling to the fact that I can’t walk and can’t talk. It’s just a thing that you can’t do, but you know you can do the opposite.

You can learn the opposite. But we do cling to this is who I am, angry, hopeless, jealous, no good, special, proud, fantastic, intelligent. Whatever the story is, we’ve conjured up this picture and we carry it around like a heavy burden all our lives, reinforcing it and having feeding it out to others, then feeding it back to us. And this is it. We paralyze.

It’s like we are paralyzed in this view of who we think we are. So already we’re up against it, you know. And then we concretize everything else. This very this kind of this way of concretizing things, this colloquial way of talking about the way that this unawareness functions. It’s something absolutely pervasive in us, something completely ingrained, you know, that we cling instinctively to this sense of a concrete sense of me.

And the implication of this is that it’s permanent, it’s solid, it’s real, it’s who I am and therefore unable to change, isn’t it? So we throw our hands in the air and panic. And we’re stuck in this one. It feels incredibly real. And then it causes us to have all the other misconceptions that all the delicious object out there out there.

Life is out there, you know, it’s how we see it, isn’t it? We don’t think we are life. We don’t, you know, we don’t think that we’re even anything to do with life. Life is sort of out there to be got or to be avoided, isn’t it? Nice life or ugly life, and it’s always out there.

This this kind of innocent victim plonked into this delicious or ugly world, you know, waiting for the punches or kisses somehow, isn’t it? As if we had nothing to do with it. This is what’s interesting in the Buddhist view. This brings in the whole concept of karma, you know, which is in a sense Buddha’s not in a sense, it’s in fact Buddha’s explanation of how things are, of why why why anything, why me, why Bosnia, why, Sudan? Why starvation?

Why war? Why violence? Why beauty? Why rich? Why poor?

Why anything? Christians will say, God, this, this, this. Einstein says something else. Marx says something else. Well Buddha says karma, cause and effect.

It’s the principle, it’s called a natural law. In Buddhist terms, you know, what Buddha is asserting, and this is again where one has to check up and not just believe it or reject it, what he’s asserting is, it’s not as if he’s decided, you know, karma is a nice idea and he says he’s gonna plonk it on top of everything. He’s saying karma is the explanation of how things are. It’s Buddha’s take on reality. It’s Buddha’s take on why sentient beings have this and that.

If I look into my mind and I see anger, the reason I have anger, why someone punches me in the nose, why someone is kind, why I’ve got a human body instead of an animal body, why this, why that, why anything, is answered in Buddhist terms by this concept of karma, you know, is one of the most kind of profound in the sense of detailed and extensive teachings and profound in the sense of hard to, you know, subtle teachings in Buddhism. So the relationship of that to to everything, the relationship of that to the mind and to why and to what and how is absolutely vital in terms of practice, you know, because what Buddha is saying is that okay, yeah. Many, many levels it functions at. The simplest level, if I look into my mind and I see this anger there, the usual response is that I’m angry because he said some words, he made me angry, I’m angry because my mother had anger and I’m her child, I’m angry because the Catholic nuns were mean to me, I’m angry because whatever it is, you know, I’m angry because whatever, the cake was the wrong color, isn’t it?

This is the way it feels. We don’t think we’ve made this up. No one taught us this. It’s something instinctive from the time we kind of popped out the womb. My mother can assert to that, but being a definite display of anger.

Didn’t have much didn’t have much time to teach me, but I knew already. Pretty well learned. So what all Buddha is saying is you’re well you’re well versed in anger, not because your mother and father had it in their genes, not because God made you that way, you know, it’s because you you’ve the anger is a propensity within your consciousness. It’s within your own consciousness. Now this is where coming into this is where it’s important to get an understanding of what the mind is in a few essential points.

I can’t remember whether we did it last night, but it doesn’t matter. Today’s another day. So, okay, your consciousness or your mind, like I said before, is not is not physical. This is something crucial central in Buddhism. It is not physical.

There’s not an atom of anything physical about anything that in Buddhist terms is labeled mind or consciousness. And that part of you that is mind or consciousness, and these words are used synonymously, is the entire spectrum of your inner experiences. The capacity within us to be aware or to be conscious, at the simplest level of eye consciousness being aware of orange, you know? Ear consciousness being aware or being aware or cognizing sound. Tongue consciousness being aware of or cognizing or experiencing taste.

So clearly, the part of you that is called consciousness, functions in this case through the body and is absolutely dependent upon a working body. Your tongue can’t function. Consciousness, the awareness of taste needs the tongue, but it doesn’t mean it is the tongue. Clearly, to have a conceptual thought, it’s not untrue to say it needs a working decent brain, but in Buddhist terms, it isn’t the brain. Just because it’s completely interdependent with the brain doesn’t mean it is the brain in Buddhist terms, you know?

We’ll just touch on it here. But consciousness is not physical. So the part of you that mentally is the emotions, the feelings, the thoughts, the concepts, anger, love, positive, negative, whatever you want to call it, unconscious, subconscious, spirit, soul, all the way to the subtest level, as Buddhism would say, of our conscious awareness, which effectively is unconscious right now but is accessible to us eventually. All of this is our consciousness, our mind consciousness, and it’s not physical, this is one thing. The other thing that’s really crucial in Buddhism is that it doesn’t come from any other living being.

It’s an impossibility. I’m just saying that here, I can’t give too much proof of it to discuss, you know, but it’s an impossibility that any atom of your consciousness, your personality, your characteristics, your feelings, your emotions, which is quite a shocking idea in the West, because we’re absolutely the view of those materialists is we are the brain, the only physical. We’re made up of the you know, coming from mother and father. They produce who we are. They’re responsible, blah blah blah.

So Buddhist terms says that in Buddhist terms, it is said that consciousness or mind, your characteristics don’t come from mother, father. Egg and sperm, no problem. They provide the body. Thank you, mother, father, for coming together and providing me with an egg and sperm, which then is the basis of this physical body. But in Buddhist terms, you know, when the egg and sperm coming together, what causes them to stay together as opposed to go down to the toilet go out of the toilet, you know, with the rest of them, what causes that egg and sperm to come together and stay together is the entry of consciousness into it.

So that consciousness is simply a continuity of this present consciousness. So as you can see from now, if I trace back this perfect memory, Rabina’s consciousness, there has to be a series of moments, isn’t it? It’s a continuity of energy, a link, a chain of links, isn’t it, of mental moments. So we know it’s a continuous chain. This moment is linked to the previous, which is linked to the previous, which is linked to the previous.

There’s no sort of gap where there was no Rabina for ten minutes, you know? We know she exists now and she’s alive now, Consciousness has to be traced back in an unbroken way to some point. So in Buddhist terms, you get right back to conception. And what conception is, is simply the coming together and the staying together of egg and sperm upon the entry of consciousness into it. Consciousness is like the glue that keeps the egg and sperm together and causes it to grow into Rabina.

So the body comes from egg and sperm. No problem. Consciousness, Rubina, personality, potential. Hitler, whatever. I mean, pity help Hitler’s mother if she’s the blamed for Hitler.

Right? But in Buddhist terms, she had nothing to do with it. She just provided the egg and sperm due to past due to past relationship. You know, it was his mom. Right?

But he brought all the potential with him to do everything he did. Know? All that potential was there in essence from the very first moment of conception. So in this very real way Buddhism doesn’t say. Buddhism says that parents don’t create the child.

Clearly there are factors. There’s no question. There are interdependent factors. A seed, the apple seed, isn’t it, is the source of the apple tree. There’s no problem with that, we understand.

But you know, if you hold an apple seed here, twenty seven years later, what have you got? A very rotten little apple seed. You never get an apple tree. In other words, it needs appropriate conditions. And those conditions, if you don’t have them, there won’t be an apple tree.

Same with the mind. Consciousness is one aspect of Rubina, and it needs a body, it needs a mother, needs a father, it has external conditions. These are all vital. But the difference is in Western terms we say they are the main cause, in Buddhist terms they are just the cooperative causes, that’s all. The parents, the conditioning, you know, just like the water and the soil and the sun are the cooperative causes, without which there would be no tree, but are not the essential main cause of that tree.

You’d be very foolish to think that just by watering the ground, you get a tree. You have to have a seed there. So saying that the parents made you is like saying that in Buddhism. Parents are just the soil, the conditions in which Rabina’s consciousness grows. And Rabina’s consciousness comes from a previous moment.

So at the very first moment of conception, you can trace back the body to the egg and sperm, you trace back the consciousness to the very previous moment of this same continuity of consciousness. This is the way Buddhism would say. And this state, you trace it back, and then within, they say, forty nine human days, it was in a before that, not more than forty nine human days. It was in a previous body and so on. And you keep tracing this back, and you get back twenty seven eons, fifty eons, you know, and you’re not gonna find a beginning.

There’s no kind of kind of big cause of Ravina’s consciousness. It’s a beginningless continuity of energy because it’s like it’s like chicken and egg, you know? Each if you can establish that it existed at that moment, then there has to have been a previous moment. It’s come from a previous moment. That moment came from a previous moment.

That moment came from a previous moment. So you can’t find a big kind of ultimate beginning of Ravina’s consciousness or of anybody else’s. In the same way, interestingly, in a different way, different flavor on it, that Christians and other religions would say that God is the source of everything and is beginningless wasn’t created. Well, Buddhism doesn’t mean by that that it’s a special religious thing. It’s simply a statement of fact about every living being’s consciousness.

Because something can’t come from nothing, which is the other option. It either comes from some superior being, which Buddhism says just isn’t feasible, comes from parents. It’s not feasible in Buddhist terms for consciousness to come from any other being other than itself, and it can’t come from nothing. So it’s a beginningless continuity of energy. So the implication here is that whatever Rabina thinks and feels, because mind and consciousness are simply the labels, aren’t they, for whatever’s inside Rabina, all the thoughts and feelings.

So when we’re saying mind, we mean any any part of the too. If we can establish that there’s anger in Rabina’s mind, then it’s logical to say that anger in Rabina’s mind is a big is beginningless in that continuity of consciousness. It can’t have started at some point. Doesn’t mean it can’t end. There’s chicken and egg, but you can break an egg any time and quit, you know, not getting any more chickens, can’t you?

So Rabina’s consciousness comes from previous moments of this consciousness. It happens to be labeled Rabina just from that moment, you know, when it began conception. Just like this cup, all the material, we can trace it back, and you keep tracing it back, you’re going get back to the beginning, to the birth of this universe. But even in Buddhist terms, as the Dalai Lama says, sure, can have a big bang, but there have been many, many big bangs. You can’t have an ultimate one first big bang before which there was nothing.

Fundamentally, we can all I mean, it seems the most basic level, something can’t come from nothing. Something cannot come from nothing. It’s a contradiction in terms. If there is something, it has to have come from a previous something. This is all Buddhism certain.

So universes can come and go, people begin and die, but the material, the energy comes from something previous. You can trace back the physical to the parents, can trace back the mental, in Buddhist terms, to previous moments of that mental continuity, that mind stream. So every one of us has our own mind stream. So the concept of karma here is that therefore whatever’s in this mind stream, I’m responsible for it. Not God, not mom, not dad, not Buddha, not an accident, not a random set of events.

That’s an insane idea in Buddhism. That’s a terrible idea. But it’s just random, you know. So it’s a very fundamental level. karma refers karma is the law of cause and effect.

Kind of a chicken and egg. If there’s anger here, it’s come from previous anger. If there’s kindness, it’s come from previous kindness. So on. So basically, from this very point, Buddhism is saying that we are we are responsible.

Well, you can even say we are the creators. Not in that sense of kind of coming out a puff of smoke, know, magically making something overnight. It’s an evolutionary thing. It’s kind of an organic process, but we are the creators. If you wanna use that term at all, of our own reality, of our own first of all, our own consciousness from previous moments.

Then karma refers to not only that, but why even, for example, the subtle consciousness? Because consciousness has various levels, this is taking it from the more esoteric teachings now. There’s the grosser level of consciousness, which is the level we function at as human beings through the through the the concepts through the concepts and the Thank you, Tony. Just can’t feel me I was bending all the time. How does that sound?

Can I sit here like this and just talk? Do you all hear me? Okay. Good. Okay.

So we function at the grossest level of the consciousness. In other words, the conceptual and the sensory which in material, worsened terms is all we are, but in Buddhist terms is the tip of the iceberg. In fact, we have the capacity to be conscious at much subtler levels. In the long term, as far as Buddhist practice is concerned, and this is a very doable thing. It’s not something religious again, in the sense of being up in the sky mysterious.

It’s something doable. The longer term, what we’re trying to do is access subtler levels of our conscious awareness and for very practical for very practical reasons. Is that me doing that? What am I doing? How dare you, excuse me.

It is hot. Oh, that’s right, Tony, come on. Am I letting off sparks or something? Okay. Okay, thank you very much.

Okay. So we have these much subtle levels of awareness, and why we want to access them, in Buddhist terms, is because those these subtle levels necessarily can see reality directly. That what Buddhism is saying is the level we function at, the gross level, the level that we suffer at, when it has all these misconceptions, caught up in in a in a series of layers of misconceptions. So this is the nature of the sensory conceptual mind. It’s deluded, know, it’s off the wall.

It’s completely wrong in getting reality. So in order to see reality and to stop suffering, we need to access such a level. So right now, the gross level that we function at, like I’m saying, based upon this body, right, is just the tip of the iceberg, you know? I had a reason for beginning that now. I’ve forgotten.

Never mind. So anyway, karma. Go to karma again. Okay? So here we are.

What’s in my mind is the result of what I have done before. So not only that. What even Oh yeah, here we are, I remember now. The subtle Okay, yeah. Gross level of consciousness, subtle, and then there’s very subtle, if you like.

And when you die, what Buddhism is saying is that roughly death is sort of the throwing off at levels upon levels of the grosser, the grosser levels to the ever more subtle, eventually to the point where we get to the subtlest level of our conscious awareness. And that’s what leaves the body eventually. They call that the clear light mind, the indestructible consciousness, whatever, the very subtle consciousness. It’s what’s left, the subtlest level. And this is way beyond when you stop breathing, you know?

The mind gets much subtler, even beyond the cessation of breath, you know. And then eventually when the very subtle consciousness is then what’s left is that, and beyond which it cannot be subtler, and this is called the indestructible consciousness in Buddhism. This is what goes from life to life. And this also, in terms of karma now, is what holds or bears or is the ground for all the imprints or the propensities or the seeds that have been planted by everything we do, say and think. Buddhism is saying that every microsecond of every action or karma, it’s the meaning of the word karma, action, of body, speech and mind, what it does is leave, first and foremost, it leaves an imprint or a propensity or a habit or a seed within the subtle consciousness.

And everything we do, say and think cannot be lost. It’s energy that can’t be lost. It goes and it first and foremost is imprinted in this consciousness and so we’re constantly shaping, if you like, or molding, as Lama Zopa says, our own mind every moment. Thoughts with the thoughts first. But everything leaves an imprint in this consciousness, so, you know, then that subtle consciousness then at the time of death is basically programmed by the persons, the actions, the karma created by that person.

And whatever is most prevalent, the karma or actions that are most prevalent positive, negative, whatever, then it is what programs that consciousness to go into another body and take another form and have another life and do different actions, you know, whether it’s Hitler or a mosquito or a scorpion or a rabina or whoever. And in this broader sense again Buddhism is saying we are the creators even of this life. So back to the point that I was making before, when we walk around life feeling like we are just this kind of victim or this spectator, hungry for delicious things and frantic to get rid of all the ugly things, of totally consume through our senses life, isn’t it? Like we’re just this thing that got plonked here. I didn’t ask to get born, think, didn’t we?

It’s the commonest feeling. Whoever thinks that we kind of, you know, created the cause, as Buddhism would say, to be born in this body with this life and these propensities and meet those people and have this happen to me, it’s a very surprising idea. Well, this is what Buddhism is saying. We created the cause by our past actions. We literally programmed our mind to go into this life with this body and this mind and these situations to meet those enemies and those friends and be that poor or that rich or that sick or whatever.

In fact, according to karma, there is nothing that happens to any living being that is random. This is an insane and terrible idea in Buddhism. It’s like a nightmare to think that it can be random. Everything a being experiences, an ant, a scorpion, a human, every single thing we experience is the result, first and foremost, of our own past karmic actions. And they are the, if you liked, quite literally, creator of our present scenario, present happiness, present suffering, present sickness, whoever we meet, how they treat us, what they do to us, what they give us, what they don’t, whether you’re prosperous, whether you’re starving, whether you’re ugly, whether you’re anything.

There’s no accident. God didn’t do it, Buddha didn’t do it, mother didn’t do it, the Catholic church didn’t do it, and it’s not a random event. You did it, in fact. So you want to point the finger? Here is the person, but there’s no concept of blame.

There’s no blame here, which is the way we tend to think, you know. There’s always someone to blame, isn’t there? The way Buddhism is saying is that we created the cause. So of course, the implication of this is very liberating if we can really get it right, you know. The implication is, wow, if I’m responsible, then I can change.

But truly, if I am not responsible, if I’m this innocent victim who didn’t get asked who didn’t ask to get born, of course, there’s gonna be rage and why me? Which is half the time we suffer with this, isn’t it? Why me? The anguish we experience. Isn’t it?

We can’t get past this one. It’s we can’t comprehend why me? Any old any Tibetan are worth their salt, you know, because this is their deal, this this philosophy we’re discussing here, there’s something deeply it’s part of their life. It’s them. It’s how they look at reality.

It’s their take on reality. That’s a question they don’t ask. They don’t say, why me? They’ve their hearts are broken. They don’t want this country to be smashed.

They don’t, you know, they’re bitterly suffering from one million of the six million people being murdered, all monasteries and all the rest, blah blah, destroyed. But they don’t ask why me? They have an answer, why me? karma. It’s very it’s a very empowering approach to life.

Doesn’t have we don’t have to have this approach to life, but this is the Buddhist approach to life. Because it cuts all that nonsense of why me and if only this and blaming and resentment and bitter and suing and smashing and kicking and wars and all of this. It cuts it all. It’s absurd. It just completely cuts the need for any that.

It’s all meaningless. It’s an absurd idea if you’re really using karma as your basis in life. There’s something huge in Buddhism actually. Why you’re angry? It’s because you’ve been angry before.

Why you’re happy? Because you’ve happy before. Why someone’s nice to you? Because you’ve been nice to them before. Why you met them?

It’s because you’ve met them before. Why hypnot? Why you know, that so the whole thing too, which this is what comes to here, instead of this feeling we have, which is one of these fundamental misconceptions that Buddha is saying we have, which in fact is a big fat rotten lie about reality, is that we’re not an innocent victim. This is it doesn’t mean to be sound heavy, you know? We’re not an innocent victim out here having life thrown at us, which is how it feels.

We are participants, interdependent, all of us, are interdependent participants in this collective reality, in this case, this room, this country, Australia, whatever collective thing you want us to look at. Two people, one, you know, whatever. A person comes and punches you in the nose, you know, just coming from left field. No logic. Never met him before.

Of course, it seems reasonable to say, why me? In Buddhist terms, like I said, you’ve just forgotten the last punch, two and a half lives ago, you forgot, that’s all. This is two and half lives between punches. If a person punches you now and you punch them back, it’s kind of okay, you know, you’ve got what you deserve. We just, you know, we just forget them.

We just don’t have the this is the Buddhist approach, you know? There’s just several lives between punches. That’s all. So it’s a whole interesting view, it’s quite a different view of reality. Not something to be believed.

I mean, this is what’s interesting too, think, in Buddhist. I mean, immediately, we’ll say, well, how can you not, you know, how can you believe or not believe it? Who’s got clairvoyance into past lives? Well, what Buddha is saying is when we’ve accessed the subtle level of our mind, then we will have clairvoyance. Clairvoyance, seeing past, seeing beyond the senses, seeing beyond the conceptual reality is simply part of the deal in Buddhist practice.

There is nothing special. Of course it is special, but it is not unique, and it is also not some kind of momentary random flashes of seeing things. You know, the complete, really clear seeing of past and future is simply part of the deal as you develop your consciousness, as you subdue this crazy element of the mind beyond the sensory and the conceptual, begin to harness this energy, this powerful thing known as the mind, you know. And through meditation, through these very practical techniques, literally subduing completely the conceptual and the sensory level to then awaken the subtler level of consciousness which is necessarily capable of seeing past and future. This is what Buddhism is asserting.

Okay, in the West we don’t even assert a level of consciousness subtler than what we already exist at. We know there’s a vague area called dreams and it’s all very mysterious to us, you know. In Buddhist terms, that’s an example of when we do experience a subtle level of consciousness but we can see there’s very little control over it, isn’t it? These weird things seem to happen, you know, flying and going here and going there. But in Buddhist terms, it is accessible to us through meditation, and at that level when you’ve got the control, you really can function properly at that level and see past and future is part of the deal.

It’s part of the deal, you know, in your Buddhist progress. So then at that point, one would be, you know, be able to see past and future, see past karma, see future lives, and so on. This is what Buddhism says. But meanwhile, you know, and this is where it’s interesting too, just like anything you have to learn, you’ve got to first start, you’ve got to start conceptually, don’t you? So I can tell you, you know, New York exists.

Say you’ve never been there. You’ve never been there. You’ve never had the direct experience of it. But if you listen, I’ll tell you about it and you check it up and you think, Oh, it’s interesting. New York.

That sounds good. I like that. So then you check up. Well, I’m not going to jump in a plane and fly off. You might think I’m just an idiot idiot making something up, you know, so you’ve to check up.

You read other tourist books, don’t you? You check with other people who also back up what I say. You check your sources, you really check, and it’s still at the intellectual level. You can even get to the point intellectually, can’t you, of being very convinced about New York City. You can even explain else how to get there.

Youive never been there yet. You can have fairly clear conceptual understanding and inferential knowledge of its existence, canit you? Well, thatis exactly the same approach in Buddhism. You can’t recognize karma before you, you know, you can’t get to New York before you know how to get there. And how you know how to get there and even whether it exists is by talking to other people, so it’s only conceptual knowledge, isn’t it?

It’s not the real thing yet, but it can be very real knowledge, can’t it? That’s the same approach in learning in Buddhism. Conceptual knowledge is very powerful if it is pointing to something that is real. So conceptual knowledge, in the Buddhist sense, isn’t real in the sense that it’s not the actual experience, it’s only the discussion about it. Just like the conceptual knowledge about New York is not experience of New York, we know that, but you can see if the conceptual knowledge about New York is accurate, then it can lead you to the direct experience of New York, can’t it?

This is exactly the approach in Buddhist study, why especially in the Tibetan tradition, you know, there’s this huge emphasis on listening to Buddha’s teachings, listening to the descriptions of how to get to enlightenment, how to get to karma, how to get to this, how to get to that, things that we can only know directly at a subtler level. But we have to have conceptual clarity first. We have to have inferential knowledge first, and then a stepping stone. Just like, again, you want this delicious cake. You’ve got to have a boring old theory first, don’t you?

Two of this, and three of this, and a half of this. If you just see that theory, that recipe, right, and you don’t have any idea that that’s the way you get that delicious stuff, then you can’t see relationship, can you? It sounds very worrying. It doesn’t look like they’re all similar. These worrying words, that delicious cake, what do you mean?

You say these few words about karma, few words about emptiness. That and then the real experience? Completely different, totally different. But the correct recipe is what gives you that delicious cake. So the correct understanding in Buddhist terms, this is the emphasis in Buddhism, on the nature of reality, karma this, emptiness that, blah blah blah this, mind that, not just intellectual pursuit, such as some words that you’re imposing on something.

In Buddha’s terms, Buddha is asserting that from his own experience he has discovered that this is how reality is. Don’t swallow it. Don’t reject it. Check it out. Just like, you know, I’ll tell you about New York.

Just like Einstein says whatever those things he says, something, something, you know? You just don’t say, Oh, he’s a scientist. It must be right. Excuse me, you know? Do you know?

Have you checked up that it equals something, something, whatever he says? You check it out. Eventually, to discover the reality of that yourself, you have to do all the experiments and all the work that Einstein himself did, don’t you? Same thing with Buddhism. This is what Buddhism this is the approach in Buddhism to use.

That’s why he says don’t believe a single word I say. That’s useless to you. You’ve got to get to New York to get the experience. You’ve got to get to Enlightenment to get it. Learning about it conceptually, checking it out to see if it’s valid first is very necessary, to see if it at least stands up conceptually.

And the point is, this is what’s most interesting if you think about it, concepts, like I said, are not the real thing. The recipe isn’t the cake. If you think that you’re a cook because you know a book full of recipes, you’d be really in trouble, right? You’d be embarrassed to admit, wouldn’t you? I’m a cook, yeah, know all these recipes, please make me one, oh I can’t make one, you know?

You’d be totally in fear, you’d be chucked down on your ear. Right? It’s exactly the same with this stuff. But, this is what I’m saying, so the the the recipe, the mere words, are not the actual experience. But if the words are accurate, they lead to the experience, don’t they?

That’s the approach in Buddhism. So this is why, you know, in the Tibetan monasteries, there’s this enormous emphasis on conceptual clarity, on all the debating and the analysis. It’s not just meant to be some intellectual pursuit of having a head full of bright ideas, just like learning the recipes isn’t, just like learning the method of how to get to New York. Those exercises, those initially conceptual exercises, have a very real meaning. So concepts are powerful if they point to reality.

Do you see my point here? That recipe is powerful if it is an accurate one that will get you to the experience of cake. So words about so called spiritual, which we think is any any Oh, well, it’s this and it’s that, and it’s this and that, and we just Anybody can allow it to think whatever we like. No. You’ve to verify it.

You’ve to really prove what you’re talking about, and it has to be verifiable. As Dalai Lama says, listen, if you can actually, from direct experience, discover from your own direct experience of something that Buddha has said is actually not true, then you must throw it out. You must. It’s a load of rubbish. So, you know, what one needs is the emphasis in Buddhism to think, to listen, to check the theories.

This is again why, if you say you’re a Buddhist, don’t make up a bunch of ideas and chuck out the bits you don’t like and say, well, this is my, you know, this is my Buddhism. You can be a one percent Buddhist, but don’t twist it and turn it. Until you’ve verified it, you cannot say, this is not, and this is this, you know. If you don’t like it, that’s cool, but just leave it alone. Somehow, this whole approach, I think we don’t have in the West, which is what we call religion.

This is the Buddhist approach. So okay. What Buddha is saying is we have this mind, this consciousness because it’s at the moment completely caught up in a series of misconceptions about reality essentially. And that’s why we suffer. And that’s the uncontrolled mind and that’s why we suffer.

Suffer. And this is saṃsāra. And what he is saying is that this is true, this stuff, we are caught up in it. Anger is real. Jealousy is real.

This grasping in a permanent, solid, independent me is real, but it’s not ultimately real. It’s just temporary. It’s pollution. In fact, what Buddha is saying is the very nature of consciousness, the nature of mind, is pure and clear. It’s kind of like we all know, you know, water.

Two bits of H, one bit of O, isn’t it? Clear, pure stuff. We also know it can be very polluted. So sort of like, you know, identifying completely with the hopeless me is a bit like saying, well, that’s just the way water is, what can you You’re prepared to accept the polluted water, you know? But we know, that when it comes to water, if you’re really skillful enough, can find, isn’t it, the methods to recognize the nature of the In order to do what?

To remove it, so you can get back get to the clear, pure stuff, you know? Sense is what Buddha is saying, that our mind is innately pure, innately pure. And it happens to be, the way Buddhism is saying it, if you like, the H2O-ness of our mind is simply the the positive qualities, love, compassion, all the way to wisdom, clarity, joy, bliss. They are the pure qualities. When we have just those and all the pollution has gone, which is what Buddhism is asserting we can do, and that you do any less than that is just absurd.

But our natural potential is to be perfect, to be full of the perfect qualities. This is our natural state, he’s saying. So it’s a quite kind of it’s appropriate, in other words, in Buddhist terms, to have some kind of confidence. And that why, when you do all this work to stabilize mind, to subdue the mind, to get rid of all this rubbish, is only because it’s our potential. It’s innately who we are.

It’s sort of like a person who’s got the potential, huge potential to be a great musician. They’ll always feel they’ll always feel dissatisfied, won’t they? Until they can accomplish that, if it’s the potential that’s in you. You know that by, you know, the the presence of the teacher and the piano, they don’t make the musician in that person. The person has to have the potential there.

We understand that, don’t we? The potential has to be yours. The piano and the teacher simply are the catalysts that allow it to grow. So the and that person won’t be dissatisfied until they fully accomplish their music. You know?

That’s what Buddha’s saying. Our natural potential this is quite a powerful point in Buddhism actually. It may be just some intellectual concept, you know? That who we actually are, what our nature is, is a Buddha, enlightened being, perfect, non pollution, full of all the bliss and clarity and joy and wisdom. And until we get that, we will never be satisfied.

We’ll always have this sense something missing, which is a very valid feeling because there is something missing. That’s our own fulfillment. The sense of dissatisfaction, which is the nature of attachment, which right now keeps putting itself onto objects out there, things out there. So we are never going to get the satisfaction that is in our innate potential because we’re always looking to the wrong objects to get it. This is what Buddhism says.

So all these misconceptions, these wrong wrong take we have on reality is why we suffer so much and why we are never satisfied. Because we haven’t we’re not fulfilling the innate potential that we all possess. And it’s not something given to us, like I’m saying, by God or Buddha, you know? It’s something innately who we are. So just this, I think alone, if we can get a taste for this, is quite extraordinary.

Because it’s not saying we’re all hopeless creeps who got to drag ourselves up out of the mud and become pure. It’s almost like you’re saying you are innately pure, you just got to discover it. It’s not really like that but it’s a way of saying it, you know. Just like you know when you see a tiny acorn, you don’t put the oak tree ness into the acorn, you don’t inject it with oak tree ness. It possesses it all there, it just needs the appropriate conditions for it to grow.

It’s like that, we all possess Buddha nature, Buddhism is saying. Buddha just means fully awakened, the Sanskrit word, that’s all. That’s the term referring to the person who, having done this work, has achieved that natural potential. So it doesn’t come from god or Buddha. That’s not so interesting in Buddhism, you know.

It doesn’t diminish somehow this concept of a Buddha because Buddhism is saying every one of us can become one. It’s simply who we are. And so the subduing, I mean, very gross level, the first stage of practice actually is to subdue this kind of the conceptual and the sensory, not in a moralistic sense, but because once we’ve done this, we can then really harness the powerful energy of this human consciousness and really develop the phenomenon, our own power, our own capacity for bliss and joy and all the rest. This is what Buddha is saying. There a very practical reason to want to understand the nature of reality.

You wanna understand the nature of our mind, you know, and learn to harness it because that’s where reality is. That’s what reality is, Buddha is saying. Looks like it’s out there. Know? But actually, say, you know, the more we realize the nature of the mind, the more we realize the true nature, the ultimate nature, the ultimate way that the I, the mind, and everything else actually exists, the more kind full this person will become, the more the more real that will be, the mind.

And the less real everything out there will become. As long as Oka says, when we truly understand the true nature of how things are. This this mala, for example, when we really understand the true nature of this mala, he says, it’s what does exist is so subtle. It’s as if it doesn’t. It’s so subtle.

It’s as if it’s an illusion. I mean, this is a very tasty word, you know. Right now, what’s real is that delicious chocolate cake out there, there’s an empty nothing here. I’m hugely craving to get that real cake into me so I can feel full. That’s the feeling in there.

The schizophrenic sense of this empty me here has to be filled up from the outside. When we have some level even, not even the full realization, of of reality, of truly how things are in the way that Buddha is asserting, for example. But there’s an immense sense of fullness, if you wish, here. And there’s just this sort of, like, you know, delicious cake. Yes.

But it’s nothing to grasped at. It’s illusory in a very real sense when we realize reality. It’s like we are full and then out there everything is illusory. Not meant to be in a kind of a negative sense. Instead of now this concrete world out there that we’re frantic to consume or to smash if it actually offends us.

Always is empty here, always delicious out there, isn’t it? What Buddha is saying is it’s a complete, absolutely complete misconception. It’s a story that our mind makes up. And there are things that need to be changed. That’s the transformation.

The transformation is a one’s mind, one’s view of reality, one’s view of the cake, of the person, of the thing, of the me, of everything. And that’s the mind that’s the mind. You know, the mind is what sees and perceives and experiences and cognizes. And so that’s where the mistakes are, you gotta say. That’s what has to be transformed.

Not your nose, not your eyelash. They’re okay like my eyes. The mind, our view of reality. So as Lama Zopa says, you know, the workshop is in the mind. As someone’s ever said, you know, one way of talking about karma, one way of saying it is what it is, you know, it’s the opposite the way we experience it.

Like I said, we experience things, don’t we, as if, like I said, they’re out there separate from me, you know, happening to me. I have nothing to do with them. It’s like really, isn’t it, that chocolate cake, it’s as if we have nothing. It’s as if it’s out there, full of power and deliciousness, vibrating from itself at me, demanding that I eat it. It’s like I have nothing to do with it.

I’m not bringing anything to this cake, we don’t think, do we? The cake is all there, you know? But what Buddha is saying is, when we understand reality, is that we recognize it as a completely interdependent scenario, that your views of what cake are is really where the trouble is, not the cake itself. As Lama Zopa says, when you really get the reality of that cake, it’s as if it doesn’t exist. It’s so subtle what actually does exist.

In other words, what we are realizing is that it’s layers upon layers upon layers of fantasies, misconceptions, expectations, grudges, all these other stuff that we don’t even think of as a story at all. We don’t think we’re bringing a big fantasy. We don’t think we’re making up cake. But as long as I’ve just said, essentially, it is an it’s a it’s a hallucination made up by our mind. That doesn’t mean you you suddenly conjured up chocolate and cake and flour all at once.

No. No. There is flour. There is a thing called cake. There is flour.

There is eggs. There is chocolate. There is all the components. But what Buddha is saying is we have a view of what we think it is, but we don’t think we have a view. It’s like we’ve got a pair of glasses on that have got many weird lenses that cause it to look so strange, but we don’t realize we have even those lenses on.

We don’t realize that what we see is something made up by our mind. We think what we see is out there real in and of itself from its own side definitely. We don’t see when you see a person, it’s the same thing. When you see a person who’s mean to you, you don’t think you’re making up a story about this ugly person, do you? When you see them as horrible, you hear their name as horrible, their voice is horrible, their words are unkind, the pain you feel, it all feels so absolutely real, doesn’t it?

You don’t think for a second that your mind is making up anything at all in relation to that person. What Buddha is saying is, excuse me, because there is anger, for example, just for example, in in this mind here, in my mind, then what I see is a story made up by anger. That sounds shocking because you think that, excuse me, they were mean to me. And we’re we’re even being it is true, they were mean to you. But as Lama Zopa says, when you have removed the misconception called anger completely from your mind, when you remove those glasses, the lenses, the crooked lenses, and you see things clearly, you don’t when you when that person is mean to you, you don’t see an enemy at all.

You won’t see an enemy because enemy is a projection of anger. Enemy is a projection of the hurt me, and that’s the view. See, don’t all our emotions we feel right now, we don’t see them as viewpoints. Little Buddha is essentially saying that everything is view. Everything is how you see something.

That sounds shocking to us. You know, it sounds like copping out and just blaming me for everything. But to learn to look at the mind, to practice is to see this, to and this is getting to the nitty gritty of it. This is getting to reality. This is getting to emptiness.

Or as Lama Zopa says, everything is our karmic appearance. Due to past karma with that person, past actions on your part with that person, first, you set it up to meet them. And then second, what you how you were with them last time left imprints in your consciousness that are now ripening, first and foremost, as an experience of hurt, anger, not fear, or whatever the story is that your mind is doing. That’s a story. That’s the fruit.

Those feelings of anger which you think come from him, those feelings of anger didn’t come from him, you didn’t notice him injecting anything into you, he just stood there and went green as a creep. That’s all he did, made a sound out of his mouth, you know, that if you hadn’t understood English, you’d still be smiling. So you know, how can he be the cause of it? Just because you hear certain words and you identify with Rubina as a creep and it freaks out Rubina because Rubina doesn’t like to be insulted, so Rubina feels pain. Right?

But the pain you feel comes from your past action, actually. You are literally the creator of that pain by having been mean to him in the past. You set up to meet him again, so you come together, boom. Complete collective karma, you know, no innocent victim here at all. And he sees you again and hates your guts because he kept in his mind the misery he felt and the hurt and the resentment last time you were mean to him.

So now he, without any volition, thinks you’re a creep and hurts you back. And he sees you as ugly and you see him as ugly. He blames you and you blame him. He’s completely insane. Buddhism is schizophrenic.

Buddhism says, that person is the cause of his present suffering by being mean, by holding bitterness, and I’m the cause of mine. This is the way Buddhism would say it. But we don’t we don’t think of it like this. It doesn’t seem this way, does it? It doesn’t seem like I’m making up a story that this is a person who’s mean, this I use the logic of ego: he said this and this, therefore I feel this.

So therefore I think he’s the blame. But Buddha says this is not the way to interpret it. Now it sounds shocking that what practice is, and this is if you say you’re a Buddhist, you’re using Buddha’s explanations of how things are and attempting through practice to change the way you see it. Slowly slowly. You’re changing your view, your take on it, just like the cake, like everything now.

But the way we see it now is this is the thing of karmic appearance, appears, isn’t it? That he is out there looking ugly. That ugliness is kind of an energy coursing through his veins along with his blood, right? Isn’t it? But what happened?

You were in love with him a month ago, weren’t you? He was a divine person, so blissful, so beautiful, so handsome, like beauty was coursing through his veins along with his blood. I mean what happened, you know? It’s only a month later, just like that cake two minutes later, after three pieces, suddenly it looked delicious, now it looks ugly. I mean it’s evident that we look at experiences like this, it is evident that what has changed is our mind.

The mind had one story when your stomach was empty, and the story made up this huge fantasy of delicious cake, completely and totally grossly exaggerating cake’s nature, cake’s value, cake’s capacity to make you happy. And that’s attachment. It’s a story the mind made up which we believe is existing in the cake. We don’t think we made up a story at all. And then when you’re full, another story comes.

Now it’s disgusting and repulsive, isn’t it? The smell of it makes you sick, you know? So what it appears now is ugly and pink. Right? It’s still warm for God’s sake.

It’s hardly changed at all. What’s changed? Clearly it’s your mind. A new story has come. This is what we’re doing all the time, is what Buddha is saying.

We’re constantly bringing due to what’s in our own mind of the various stories we have anger, jealousy, pride, this, that, and we’re constantly interpreting what we see. And then we say, that is that person, that is that object. As one lama said, know, it’s kind of like a child drawing a line and then becoming afraid of it. That’s what we’re doing every second. We’re making up our stories every second.

I’m not gonna say you’re saying, Mama’s over. We’re Everything is a story made up by our mind. It sounds shocking, you know? Because it doesn’t say that there isn’t a person there. It’s not saying person didn’t harm you, it’s not saying there isn’t chocolate cake.

What Buddha is saying is that what we think is chocolate cake and what we think is horrible person are huge projections. And this is why Lama Zopa says, When you’ve stripped away all the misconceptions stripped them away stripped them away from your mind, removed all the lenses, then when you see what exists it’s so subtle, it’s as if it doesn’t. It’s kind of tasty, you know? Both life is made up by our mind. It’s not meant to be just some kind of throwaway statements.

It’s said to be a description of reality. And they said that which we can’t see it now, if it’s true, indicates how far the mood we are following. As Lama Zopa says, one of our major practices is to stop believing in karmic appearances. Karmic appearance is simply meaning due to past karma, due to my past actions that have left imprints in my mind, my they now are everything I see is colored by those past actions, colored by the present delusions. And my karmic appearance is what appears to me.

Not what is there, but what appears to be there. Delicious cake, ugly cake. What appears to be there. Delicious person, ugly person. So as Lama Zopa says, the most powerful practice is to stop believing in your karmic appearance.

As Pabongka Rinpoche says, even you have no idea the meaning of emptiness, that this isn’t true. Because here we’re talking emptiness, you know? Even you have no idea, just to doubt. Maybe things aren’t the way they appear. It’s so profound.

It shakes the whole ground of saṃsāra. This is wisdom. This is talking wisdom, this is talking emptiness. We can see fairly evidently, isn’t it? But I can say, Oh, it’s a beautiful mala.

And he won’t look at it and say, Well, it’s a creepy mala. Don’t like bone, those tilly red beads, you know? So it’s fairly evident that his view and my view are subjective, are projections, aren’t they? Due to his certain like of things, he sees it as ugly, I see it as beautiful. We can fairly easily establish that beauty or ugliness are not inherent qualities of this object.

It’s fairly easy. But what Buddha is saying is even more than this. He’s saying that even mala is a projection. That’s a story the mind made up. It’s fairly easy to see that ugly mala is a story, his mind made up, the beautiful mala is a story.

But what Buddha is saying even more already is that even mala is a story made up by the mind. The cake is a story made up by the mind. So to see this in not a nihilistic way is really getting the meaning of it. Because as soon as we hear it, it sounds nihilistic. Oh, you mean there’s no marvelous?

Oh, alright. That’s too extreme. Not like that. So it’s an incredibly subtle point, no worries. And what this is said to be is a description.

These words are said to be a description of how we will see things when we remove the misconceptions from our mind which are the source of suffering. And when we have discovered the when we learn to see reality as it is, then we discover bliss. Because all Buddha is saying is the extent to which we get things wrong is the extent to which we suffer because we’re walking around in fantasy bubble with stories all the time. It’s like you’ve a fifty dollar coin, a fifty dollar note and you always are convinced whenever you see it that it’s worth a hundred. So you go out with all this excitement to get a hundred dollars worth and you only get five hundred dollars and you only get fifty.

The fault isn’t the fifty dollar note. The fault isn’t. The fault is your expectation. In other words, inflated its meaning. And that’s what Buddha is saying.

One of the key characteristics of all these deluded states of mind is that they inflate hugely, distort, exaggerate certain aspects. So attachment exaggerates the beauty of the cake. Aversion, when you’re full, exaggerates the ugliness of the cake and so on. All these delusions are what causes things to appear to us in a certain way, which is why the practice is to work on the mind. The unstable, uncontrolled mind is the one that’s always gravitating toward the objects and toward, you know, kind of rushing after that rainbow and then being disappointed.

This is saṃsāra, up and down like yo yo’s a thousand times a day. So the false isn’t in the object. The false isn’t even in the person who abuses you. It doesn’t mean they’re right. But the cause of your suffering does not come from you.

This is what’s mind-blowing. The cause of your happiness The cause of your happiness is your capacity to experience happiness and the imprints in your mind to experience happiness. The cake is the catalyst to trigger the happiness. And eventually, when we really practice working on the mind, we don’t need to depend on external phenomena at all for happiness. As we said last night, when you really began to access the subtle levels of your consciousness through meditation in Buddhism, then you access your capacity for joy.

It doesn’t depend upon sensory objects. It doesn’t mean you don’t enjoy them, you do, but they’re like, you know, icing on the cake. You’re happy anyway, you just get extra happiness. You depend upon the cake for happiness, that’s when you’re in trouble. And that’s what attachment is, and that’s why we all suffer, because we are totally dependent like junkies on objects and things and sounds and smells to make us happy, which is why we’re always searching for them, always grasping at them, always clinging to them, you know, having this fantasy about them.

And that’s why we suffer because they don’t have that capacity. It’s simply a mistake. That fifty dollar note doesn’t have the capacity to make you happy. It doesn’t have the capacity to give you five hundred dollars worth. So cake, it’s not its job to make you happy.

That’s why you’re always disappointed every time you have it. Just check next time you eat, you know. Yeah. A bit of a taste for a while, you end up with a full stomach mostly, you know. I’m guilty because you ate too much.

A month too late or something? Any time for questions? Anybody wanna say something? Yes. I understand.

When you’re looking at your own mind, it’s not as if, you know, I could walk in and definitely be angry. That’s not a problem. That’s not the issue here isn’t in terms of your mind, when we are talking about the mind, are talking about each one of us about our own mind, so here we are using you as the example, your mind. So the issue isn’t whether I’m angry or not, that’s my problem, I might very well be. Anyway, what’s interesting is you’ll be that much clearer about whether it is me being angry or not when you can see your own mind.

So when you’re really aware of your own mind and every experience that you have, you see it as simply a catalyst to show you your mind. In other words, your awareness is mostly inside you, not in a selfish way, but in a practical way. And when an angry Rabina walks in, you’ll see it instantly, but you won’t be disturbed by it because you’ll know it’s mine. Right now, because there’s anger in your mind and then I walk in angry, all I do all I do is hook your anger and your anger lashes out so you hate mine. That’s why we get caught up in all the rubbish.

Because if you upset me at all, now going to my mind now, if you upset me at all, that shows to me that I have those qualities. Very clearly, it’s logic, you know, it’s like you are simply a mirror to show me mine. And from the point of view of working in this way, on the wisdom side, that’s what our job is. Our job is to all the time see everything out there that happens to us in the day, the traffic, the person, the lover, the happy, the sad, everything that happens out there, the cake, the people, everything that happens out there. Right now, with attachment and delusion, they are frantically hooking into all those things.

So we blame the person who is angry, we love the person who is beautiful, we are constantly hooking. When we are looking at our own mind, really practicing internally, really being our own therapist, really looking at our own mind well, we see everything that happens out there as a catalyst, the real thing is what’s happening in here. So when you’ve got that stability to keep your awareness in what’s going on in my mind every minute, the second you walk in the room with anger, instantly I notice my own, or I notice the lack of it. And then there’s space to see you clearly, then there’s space for compassion, then there’s space to get the hell out of that door because I don’t want to be punched by this maniac, whatever it is, you know? But there wouldn’t be a disturbance if we’re really working on our own mind, we wouldn’t let anyone hook our rubbish.

We’ll only have space for kindness and wisdom. See what I’m saying? I mean it’s the toughest job on earth, come on, we all know. It’s the hardest job on earth, it’s like an unbelievably sophisticated job, but this is what we’re talking about, this is practice. And sanity and clarity and stability and joy and all that won’t come stably until we can begin to do this.

In other words, this is what is what’s whatever the talk was, this is what harnessing the wild energy, or what did it say? Thank you, that one, taming. This is what it means, taming the wild elephant of my mind means noticing my mind every second. If you walk in and you’re handsome and, you know, and I see the attachment going out like a magnet, that’s noticing my mind, and not putting it onto you, not kind of blaming you for making me happy, which is what attachment does. Just the same if you walk in with anger, not blaming you for disturbing my peace, it’s what we do all the time, philosophy in our culture.

We think it is valid that when you walk down the street and cars are too loud, so we’re allowed to sue them because there’s noise pollution and this pollution. There is a reality in that, it’s inappropriate to harm. But in terms of my own peace of mind, so using these guys prison is a very good example for me, and when they can be happy in that situation because they know they don’t have a choice, that’s when it shows starkly, and this is what they’re seeing, some of them starkly, that their happiness depends on their mind, not on being in prison, not having insane demented noise of eight hundred berserk people around you day and night. That doesn’t depend on your happiness, your happiness doesn’t depend on that. And for us, because we can find peace and we can find nice cake, we’re still hooked into believing that cake and peace are the cause of happiness.

And then that’s why we keep blaming the noisy cars and the mean people, because we haven’t yet realized that it actually is dependent upon our own mind. And it’s only when you don’t have a choice, and this is why these guys in prison for me are very inspiring, because they don’t have a choice. Like my friend Paul, who meditates every night, as he said, in the morning he gets up early, you know, no problem because it’s quiet, he can’t tell it, you know, in the night, different story he said, Rabina, with eight hundred other men wide awake and wound up. And he says, and they all say, it’s like even Arturo, who’s in his cell all day every day, this one guy, he’s in a section with just sixteen men. The noise is unbearable, just sixteen people.

Unbearable, it’s like shouting, screaming, reverberating concrete and spiel, day and night. This is other Paul, Paul is in a section of eight hundred other guys, and it’s at night time, now he wants to practice. He can’t say, Excuse me, I’m trying to meditate, guys, you know? Eight hundred people, right? So what does he do?

He meditates. He meditates every time, concentrates. And he actually had this very extraordinary experience one time, quite remarkable experience that even most of us in the dead of night, in the peace of the mountains wouldn’t get, you know? But somehow he got it, you know? So when you don’t have a choice, it’s often the best time, and this is where these people, and they say it in just humility, because they actually have discovered they can be happy in these appalling situations.

So when we can do that even once a day, it is like a miracle. That’s when we begin to really discover the incredible potential of our own marvelous human mind, you know. But as long as we keep getting hooked by the noisy traffic, the not fair people, the pollution, the this, the that, the bad food, the mean this, the lovely this, we are just stuck fast in saṃsāra and that is suffering. I mean, this makes sense, isn’t it? It’s just that it’s super difficult.

What do you think? True or not true? I mean, anyway, I gave you a very long answer. Excuse me. Is it communicating?

Yeah. I’m Oh. But I think I’m wondering too is Where you’re pointing? When point when you can trust Yes. Yes.

You can trust your own judgment when you lessen your own delusions. The presence of delusions which pollute your eyes and cause you to see this and that and cause us to get glued to the other person, literally causes us to not be clear about what’s mine and what’s yours. Look at our relationships. You know, if you and I were in love, as long as we’re all kind of doing nice things to each other, it’s just divine joyful we, the way that all the stuff happens, it’s like a nightmare. And I can’t I haven’t got a clue whether it’s you or me.

It’s like a nightmare, isn’t it? You’re just feeling like you’ve been dragged by this other person and you have no understanding, you can’t see whether it’s you or me because attachment glues us together and it’s like a nightmare. Or the same with anger, you haven’t got a clue, your mind is so freaked out. So it’s the presence of those delusions that prevents us from seeing the other person clearly, seeing anything clearly. So the answer is: lessen our own delusions, therefore we’ll eventually, literally, what wisdom in Buddhism is, is the, at whatever level, is the capacity to see accurately what is there, whatever.

So that can only come when you subdue the mind. That’s exactly what has to happen. Well, first of all, we should be clear about what we mean by love, isn’t it? So we have attachment and we have love. Attachment in Buddhist terms is necessarily polluted, deluded, the cause of suffering, the cause of harming others, and it’s the grasping, it’s coming from the wrong eye, it’s grasping at another being.

So that’s there. Love is the wish that you’d be happy. It’s joyful, it’s altruistic, it’s warm, it’s connected, it’s we, it’s the source only of happiness. I’m not talking about thinking yet, but love, if it’s an imprint in being a little child’s mind, we can all see some children naturally won’t harm a snail. That’s because of the imprints in their mind.

They brought that with them, so there is love there. They might I mean we’re now giving it a label, but just because you you you can know love without labeling it. We’re just giving it a label now because it’s helpful to communicate. A child, we can see, look at the children who stomped on snails, look at the ones who cried when the snail got hurt. It’s obvious the imprint of love, the wish that that snail be happy, is in the mind of that child.

Reminding a child will then help develop that love. So first of all, what I’m getting at here is, we have to distinguish between what is attachment and what is love. Right now though, is what I’m saying, they come together as a package. There’s this fierce sense of I, that when I’m with my mommy, you know, I’m hugely attached and want what I want, and when she gives me what I want, I’m all smiley lovey dovey, even when I’m baby, to my mother. So okay, even there is attachment there and there is love there and it’s raw in the child.

But as we get older, so then okay, Buddhist view is love is appropriate and necessary and human and valid, and you’re not gonna stop loving, that’s insane to stop loving. Love, in the sense that I’m now defining it, is necessarily beneficial. So the more love, the better. It’s obvious, affection and love is fundamental, it’s clear. So it’s obvious that as we are deluded beings, with attachment, we need love.

Of course we do need love. And a child who is loved instead of abused, it’s obvious that child will grow into a wholesome human being and will have the capacity when they get older to observe their own mind. But if a child is abused day and is not loved, it’s obvious that they can’t see their own mind, it’s obvious that that’s just attacking their own anger, their own attachment, their own insanity, and increasing those qualities all the time. It’s like you’re pouring water on all their delusions, which makes them suffer and go crazy. But indeed we can even still see interestingly, this is the point here you can see some children who’ve been abused and insulted but somehow are able to heal very quickly.

In Buddhist terms the reason would be is because they have wholesome qualities within their mind, They don’t identify only with their delusions, whereas another child who suffers bitterly and never heals is because the delusions in their mind are very strong. While some people, even at the age of fifty still can’t forgive their mothers for hurting them or their fathers, we hold on to blame. That’s because of the presence in our minds of huge delusion. But if we can forgive, it’s because of the presence in our mind of love and kindness. Of course we need love and affection, but in the absolute, in the ultimate sense of need, the way we tend to put it in the West, it’s like you can’t survive without it, it’s just not true.

To some of us, look at our experiences, you know, being abused and hurt, and we even have from that to forgive and to love, mean, it shows the imprints in our own mind. But on the human level and relative level, it’s appropriate to say we need love, there’s nothing wrong, this is not contradicting that. But there’s a difference between being addicted to something and simply kneading on a conventional level of reality. By definition, you are there and I am here, so to have human warm contact is obviously appropriate. But when I become addicted to you affirming me, which is my attachment speaking, it’s like being a junkie.

That’s not happiness. We don’t need that, that’s poison. I mean, are we communicating at all? Okay. Yes.

Yep. Are you allowed to ask questions? You’re a worker. Okay, come on then! Become a what?

Oh, okay. Yes, sure. Yeah. If you’re not attached? Why wouldn’t You mean Yeah, but listen, if you were a Bodhisattva, if you were a highly developed person, let’s say, who had given up attachment completely and had only have love and joy and kindness and compassion, honey child, you’d have a thousand wives, they would and you would love them all perfectly and you would make them totally satisfied and completely happy and it’s got nothing to do with attachment.

It’s because you’re full of joy and full of patience and full of love and full of wisdom. No, that’s completely, totally mistaken. Your view of non attachment is hideous. That’s okay. This is the I think what I’m tend to think that non attachment is indifference and I accept that that often when people are trying to be Buddhist, we end up becoming indifferent and every reason for your wife to beat you up for being uncaring because you have the wrong view of detachment.

Non attachment doesn’t mean you are indifferent, it means you are full of love which is genuine altruism. So you’d be the most loving person to be around. An attached person is a pain in the bum to be around, because they’re always grasping and cringing and blaming and miserable. A person who’s full of love, who is a person who is detached. Is a person who is joyful to be around because they are kind of blissful and happy and funny and smiling and forgiving and relaxed.

So giving up attachment, if you are practicing properly, means you are a marvelous loving human being, not an indifferent one. That is appalling. Now maybe initially, when you’re really at the level of practicing non attachment, it is Yes. Don’t have a relationship. It’s too Because we are so addicted now with attachment, it’s mixed with love so completely, that it is sensible to go off and be a monk for a while or for a life or two.

It is sensible to go to the mountains and do some retreat to get some space. But when you’ve really accomplished non attachment, honey, you’ll be a blissful wonderful person. Do you see what I’m saying? Okay. Are you finished?

Am I finished? Yeah. So the thing but but what we so the first point you said was if you were gonna get enlightened, can you get enlightened in this life? Well, the I lived at all in my life. Okay.

The person who could do that would be a person who has done all the work in a past life. That’s all. You have to have done the work at some point. So, they say at some point you need to have you need to go off to the mountains, be celibate, be all these things, give up all the external objects. While you’re learning to give up being a junkie, you need to give up the junk here, you know, it’s reasonable.

But when you’re really accomplished, having done that at some point, having got the realizations, like I said, can come back and have, you you can be just a fine ordinary person, because you’ve accomplished it all from the past. Look at age of seven, give him a piano, could do it, you know. He’d done it all before, that’s all. He’d done all the work before, he fell into it again. So it’s all a question of where you’re at.

This is why they talk about, you know, methods like Dzogchen and Mahāmudrā and all suddenly getting spontaneous realization. Of course it’s spontaneous realization, but it’s not because it’s just out of nowhere, out of the sky, you’ve done masses of work in a past life, such that just hearing the teachings again, BOOM! You realize emptiness. It looks like it’s suddenly you didn’t know it, suddenly you know it. But it’s just the same as suddenly, you know, a little sprout pops up over the ground, it’s like spontaneous realization of thing, but you just forgot that it was growing under the ground for fourteen years.

It’s not spontaneous in the absolute sense. Are we communicating? I mean, you don’t think I’m answering your question but I am. So you want you finished now? Yes.

Okay. Somebody else? Yep. Go on, Carol. What are you that?

What are you telling me loving yourself and all this? What’s all this mean? What does that mean? Describe that to me. We never stop thinking about ourselves.

I know what you’re saying, but I’m debating with you purposely now. We never stop thinking about ourselves. Endlessly, endlessly, endlessly. Poor me, I this, I that, he this, she that. I’m not trying to be mean about us.

So interestingly, when you love yourself, you don’t think so much about yourself because you don’t need to because you’re full and you’re content. So yes, as Lama Zopa says, the best method to love yourself is give up attachment. The best method to love yourself is be kind to others, and it sounds kind of heavy. But actually it’s valid because right now with self-cherishing and self grasping, there’s every reason to have compassion for us because we are using the wrong methods, you know. So yes.

Question? Okay. Okay. Somebody else? Is there something to say?

Yes. I understand, yeah. Sure. Well the way we say it is that a bird needs two wings, okay? And one is the most of what I’ve been talking about here is all this wing called wisdom.

It’s all the work of knowing your own mind, seeing it, you know, lessening the delusions, seeing the way we see things, seeing that it’s our own perception, not blaming others, accepting karma, all this stuff, that’s this work. And this one they say, if you just did this job, you’d achieve what they call nirvana, which is liberation from suffering and you’d be an astonishing being, blissful, joyful, wonderful, happy, full, content, amazing person because you see reality as it is, no longer any misconceptions, no longer any fantasies and you’re blissful. And then this other wing is the one of compassion And so from this point of view, everything out there is like an illusion and you see it as a catalyst to help you see your mind. From this perspective, everybody else out there is the point and you are not, you know? But you can do them perfectly together.

The more you do this one, the better you do this one. And this one is working for others, having compassion, benefiting others, blah blah blah, all that stuff, you know? But you can only really be successful at this one when you’ve done this one. So there are thousands of meditation, I mean the type of meditation techniques that are existing in this tradition, there’s an awful, I mean there are different kinds, you know, but there are an awful lot of them that are really like being your own, like Lama Yeshe says, learning to be your own therapist, they are like inner analysis. You are using, let’s say we are talking Buddhism here, his different views of reality, about compassion and this and sentient beings and all this stuff, you are using those as like the arguments to argue with ego’s view that’s got this caught up miserable neurotic view now and learning slowly to expand the mind, to see things differently, to see the kindness of others or whatever the meditation is you’re planning to do, you know.

There’s many many many techniques to meditation, absolutely, using visualization, all sorts of things, there are lots and lots. In general, is that what you meant? Yes. Okay. Yeah.

Somebody else? Yes? There are hundreds. For which kind? For wisdom or for compassion?

How wonderful. Taming mind. Yeah. Well, I mean, gosh. There’s so many, you know.

You know, if you you know, you haven’t heard this stuff before? What is it? Bits and pieces, okay. Well, it’s all quite useful books around and there’s one very practical one you can start off with called How to Meditate. Have your bookshop got How to Meditate?

Down there. There you go. How to Meditate. It’s got about thirty different techniques in it and it takes you through just a bunch of certain ones you use to help subdue the mind, certain ones to visualize, certain ones for there’s different ones that will give you a flavor of different techniques, you know? And then go from there sort of thing.

Lots and lots. Somebody else? Lots and lots. Nobody else. No.

Yes. Yes. Yeah. I hear you. Very interesting.

Okay. Well, just let me give you the kind of store the overview. Just the way again, just a summary of the way Buddhism would talk about mind in general. Just to give you a few pointers. That’s all.

Okay. First of all, like I said, this is now taking it from the esoteric teachings. I’m mixing them a bit, but it doesn’t matter. You’ve got, if you like, gross level of conscious awareness and in Buddhist terms, for sure dependent completely on a working brain and a working nervous system and on working senses, you know, for the sensory awareness, for the awareness This is how Buddhism would talk, okay? The definition of mind or consciousness, and this is synonymous.

In Buddhism, the definition consists of two parts. The first part tells you its nature and the second part tells you its function. The first part is that consciousness or mind is clear and that implies it’s non physical, it’s non obscure, non physical. So this is the first point. The second point is that its function is to be aware, to cognize, to know.

In Buddhist terms these are used synonymously. So that’s the function of your mind. Okay, now what’s interesting is, and this is just words now, words, that the way consciousness or mind is aware or cognizes or knows is as a mirror, it reflects. So this is interesting because we don’t experience our mind knowing in that way at all, mostly because in Buddhist terms the gross level of our conscious awareness is the mental and that’s effectively conceptual, it’s thoughts about things. Now even in Buddhist terms that includes your emotion as we were describing, I don’t know if you were here today, but when you discuss anger for example, if I’m angry with you, sure there’s all that heat and that emotion, but when it calms down, the heat, and I’m sitting there on my bed or trying to get to sleep, what’s coursing through my mind he this and he this and you this, so it’s a highly elaborate conceptual story.

And if I wrote it all down, I’d see very vividly that anger is very very clearly conceptual. It’s this story that I’ve got about you, what you did to me, and blah blah blah, you know? So it doesn’t feel like there’s anything reflecting there. It just seems like this kind of grasping thoughts about things. So Buddhism would say, just some things there, that the gross level that we function at, which is conceptual and sensory, which is what we mean by human, what we mean by being a person, isn’t it?

And normally in the material sense when that ceases and you’re finished, you’re ready for the plastic bag and when the breath ceases for example. But in Buddhist terms, when the breath ceases at the time of death, your subtle level of awareness is now is now still existing. Your consciousness is in the body still, it is up to two days before the subtle level of your consciousness, which now, this is the point here, doesn’t depend for its existence upon the brain, upon the body. So we can see, I mean it might not sound such a convincing argument, but this is taking it from the Buddhist perspective, when you dream at night, you know, it’s evident, it’s not a sensory experience, your body is unconscious, but we can have very vivid experiences in dreams that might as well be true. We experience orgasms and bliss and fear.