Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 75-minute teaching, Ven Robina Courtin uses stark examples—her correspondence with incarcerated men, the junkie analogy for attachment—to make Buddhist philosophy visceral. She teaches that every being has the potential for complete wisdom, limitless compassion, and unshakeable bliss, but delusions obscure reality. Attachment is not a function of the senses but a conceptual elaboration of the mind. Through detailed analysis—dissecting the chocolate cake, the role of mental consciousness in exaggerating desire—she shows how attachment creates suffering even in comfort. She contrasts Western practitioners in sensory abundance with prisoners whose deprivation forces genuine practice and renunciation. A core theme: distinguishing love from attachment requires both textual learning and ruthless introspection. Real practice begins when you don’t get what you want. The Q&A covers attachment to ideas and the irreducibility of giving up attachment—there is no shortcut.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 01 1998 10 28 HM.mp3
UUID: eb929462-efcc-4d3f-af5a-7f8d244d8636
Teacher: Ven Robina Courtin
Collection: y The Heart of the Mind (Ven Robina Courtin)
Date: 1998-10-28
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 75.1 minutes
Words: ~13,290
So way beyond our even the wildest imagination of what is possible as human beings certainly coming from our Western culture. Even comparing it sectarian with other religious views. What Buddhism is saying is we have all the innate potential to become this Buddha which is another way of saying that is to become perfectly happy. A way of describing that state is in three main ways: one) have complete wisdom wisdom that sees perfectly all reality as it is, which usually in so called religious terms we give that job to God, don’t we? God knows everything.
Omniscient, we say. Well, that’s a quality of a Buddha and that happens to be our potential. Omniscient means seeing everything as it is, all reality with nothing missing, nothing left over. Another way of saying that is seeing all past, all present, and all future of all living beings’ minds. This is a quality of a Buddha’s mind, which is our potential when it’s fully developed.
The other aspect is infinite, limitless compassion limitless, if you like, empathy with every living being, as if they were oneself. And a particular quality of a being who’s like this, who’s got these qualities, is logically, absolutely, sublimely, perfectly, completely, continuously, irreversibly blissful. So called happy. In other words, happy. You want to be happy?
Well, what Buddha is saying is, It’s possible. You can be happy. And it happens to be, That’s how happy you can get. And once you’ve achieved this, or even before that, it’s already irreversible. In Buddhist terms this is a logical thing.
This is something logical that can be stated, be shown, can be thought about, debated upon and eventually experienced. It’s not something religious in the sense we tend to think religious as something holy and superstitious and beyond meaning and not sure how to do it. This is not the Buddhist approach. This is why it’s so important to hear Buddhist teachings again and again to listen. This is something that is stressed especially as we know in the Tibetan tradition.
It’s not enough to say I’m a Buddhist and do some meditation and smile at people and feel good. That’s certainly better than nothing. There’s no question about it. But what we really need to do is hear very clearly and deeply again and again listen to Buddha’s teachings. He’s listened to, first of all, his explanations of his model, of the way the mind functions, what your mind is, what it’s capable of, what its nature is and then how you do the work.
To listen to Buddha’s explanations is incredibly important on the nature of reality, so called philosophy. And where these two perfectly intersect which is an interesting approach we don’t tend to have this understanding in our culture, you know. Where Buddhist philosophy, his explanations of how reality is, and Buddhist psychology, the understanding of the human mind, where these two perfectly intersect, is that what Buddha is saying is the extent to which we don’t see reality as it is is the extent to which we suffer, number one. And the extent to which we don’t see reality is, is the extent of the presence within our own mind of the delusions, the misconceptions, the delusions called ignorance, attachment, jealousy, pride and all the rest. Because it’s the presence of these that literally obscures us from seeing things, seeing reality as it is.
They literally are what cause us to feel separate from everyone else, to be cut off, lonely, alienated, kind of here and world and delicious lovely life is out there, you know? And it’s presence in our mind of these pollutions, these delusions which causes that, which is labeled saṃsāra. This state is called saṃsāra. So it’s the removal of these delusions, removal of the misconceptions from our mind, the veils from our mind that one, cause us to see reality as it is, which then causes us to be blissful. Because seeing things as they are is not living in a fantasy world.
And right now, another way of saying it, Buddha saying we live in a complete fantasy world. We’re living in a fantasy world. We’re seeing things as we this fantasy we have built up. We’ve created created a fantasy with our own minds and we all know and we say My God, she lives in this fantasy world. We know the person is really off, you know?
They’re not happy, they’re suffering. And another word, it’s very interesting, the word these delusion for these states of mind the Buddha is saying are obscuring us from seeing reality as it is and obscuring us from being blissfully happy I. E. A Buddha, you know? These are called delusions and it’s a good word.
Again we say My God, he’s so deluded. It means he really doesn’t see things as they are. He’s got this fantasy. So they’re very tasty words actually. So it’s really important to see the whole Buddhist approach in this very practical way.
Reason to go meditate, reason to look at your mind, the reason to learn to give up anger is not because God or Buddha said you should and I ought to be a nice person and guilt guilt, you know? Nothing to do with that. It’s a practical issue. And I think if we really see this, then we’re prepared to persevere. Like anything else that’s called practical, we’re prepared to persevere, you know?
Because it’s something where it’s doable, we see the goal, we understand why we’re doing it, it’s on the earth, you know? So saying you can become a Buddha who sees all past, present, future and has an affinity with every living being, empathy with every living being plus the third quality, the quality of the power of a Buddha is that that being is capable because of the wisdom they’ve developed and because of his enormous compassion. They have the power, effortless power, to manifest their own consciousness in countless forms throughout countless universes for as many eons as exist. Again, you know, we’re talking way beyond just being a nice person here, isn’t it? This is what Buddha is saying is the potential of every living being.
Now it might sound a bit depressing and sounds like who wants to be like that anyway? But in a sense it’s interesting, you know. Buddha is saying and this is what one has to do is really look into this and try to see the logic of it in order to have the energy to want to do it. In a sense what you can say is if that is our potential and Buddhist teachings lay it out very clearly and is there for one to listen to and think about and study and really get conceptual kind of clarity about which then gives you the energy to want to pursue it. What Buddha’s saying is that, in a sense you can say, until we achieve that potential, if that really is our potential, this full awakening, then we will never be satisfied until we get it.
There will always be something missing, won’t there? And we can see the very nature of the major way we suffer, which is called attachment in Buddha’s terms. Nature, its taste, is dissatisfaction. This is the key quality of attachment, the reason we suffer in this constant, pervasive, moment by moment way, you know? And what causes us to therefore do all the actions and say the words and have the thoughts that we do in our ordinary lives?
Mainly it’s like the energy that propels us from moment to moment, isn’t it? It’s this one of trying to fulfill, to satisfy this constant aching sense that something isn’t right. Something else will do it. Always something else will do it, you know. Something isn’t right.
Dissatisfaction is the very nature of attachment, which is the characteristic. In fact, Buddhism says we actually exist in a desire realm, you know, a realm of desire. Desire means wanting, needing, and not having. And why you need something is because you’re dissatisfied, isn’t it? If you don’t need something, then it means you’re satisfied.
So that’s why we just check the very nature of who we are, having these senses, all their different senses. We need, don’t we, to kind of fill them up constantly in order to, in this constant wish, search for satisfaction. Isn’t it? If you think, you know? Right underneath everything, it’s there there all the time, this kind of constant nothing is quite right, you know, always wanting something more.
So people even, you know, it’s interesting in the Buddhist tradition of meditation, you listen to the experiences of people who haven’t even gone all the way to achieving what they call single pointed concentration. I remember doing an interview in Manresa with one of our Swiss monks, Rene, a couple of years ago. He was in Spain at our center meditating to try to achieve so called single pointed concentration, shine. It goes in nine stages. And as he said, he touched just briefly, every now and again he would have touched the fifth of these stages.
He said there’s no question that the utter contentment I forget his words, you know, but this is the notion, the absolute contentment, satisfaction, pleasure, joy these words, not something holy, you know? Absolute contentment, meaning beyond dissatisfaction — the absolute contentment and fulfillment that he experienced was so superior, he said, to any experience of pleasure that he’d had through the senses. And this is exactly in a sense what Buddha is saying. Truly the potential of our own human mind, even a simple level of satisfaction, forget about being Buddha, know, even just achieving single point of concentration, unbelievable.
Getting exactly what we want. They even say in the texts, you know, when you’ve achieved this single point of concentration which Buddhism says we’ve had countless lives before, but we’ve lost it. We only got halfway up the mountain and fell down again, so we’ve lost it. Says in the text that actually when you’ve achieved this state, the physical and mental ecstasy, they say, is just beyond our I mean this is now paraphrasing but the words physical and mental ecstasy are how they say it. Beyond our imagination.
Again, as Renee said, so infinitely superior to the pleasure that we usually get now, the joy, the happiness, the contentment that we usually get now. This is something very tasty, I think, just to even hear this, you know. And again, don’t think of it as something like being in heaven. You can get it in this body, you know? Nothing to do with heaven.
It’s to do with beginning to understand, in Buddhist terms, the causes, the actual appropriate, actual causes of happiness and learning to begin to taste them. This is why it’s so important to hear all this stuff in a religious sense. I mean it is religious in the sense that it’s a spiritual path, but I’m meaning religious in the sense that we tend to mismean it as something kind of holy and magical and mystery up there somewhere. It’s really important to hear this stuff as something doable, actual, on the earth, real, scientific, findable, pointable, tasted, something we really can taste. This is the point.
And this is why I think Lama Yeshe is in constant stress to us Westerners who have these incredibly intelligent minds, you know, to taste, to go beyond the words. Don’t underestimate. But we do need to get the taste. Because once you’ve got the taste of something, you’ve got the taste of your own mind’s potential for satisfaction, my God, what a miracle, you know. Unbelievable.
Just unbelievable. And this is the point. On one side, this is the point. We can say that Buddha’s there’s this Mahāyāna statement saying that a bird needs two wings. A Buddha is a fully enlightened being who has two wings developed.
Actually, there’s this third aspect of the power. But the one aspect is the one of wisdom and the other one is the one of compassion. So the one we’re talking here now is this one. When we look at the nature of the mind and how to develop it and all this, we’re talking about the wisdom one. Essentially you can say, you know, that this one is to develop one’s own qualities.
This is the first part of the path. And it’s on the basis of this then that you’re really able to do this one which is the work for others, the practice of compassion, you know? Until you’ve this one properly, forget about this one. Your compassion is too limited. It’s just sentimental.
Because the work of this one is removing one’s own suffering, getting rid of one’s own dissatisfaction, developing one’s own enormous amazing potential. Every living being possesses it. It’s something we absolutely have to know, you know. Just of learning to do the work, which is the hardest job on earth, to discover that potential. So if we have this potential forget even about all the way to Buddhahood if we have the potential to achieve liberation, simply freedom, simply freedom from suffering freedom from dissatisfaction and all the other stuff that comes from it anger, jealousy and all the other pain and misery.
If that is truly our nature, not even to mention the one of this wing as well, this is our nature, it is true that our potential is to be utterly satisfied, joyful, blissful, clear beyond delusion, beyond attachment, beyond anger, beyond jealousy which is what Buddha is saying if it is true, then, you know, first we have to even know, Would I like that? We have to know we want to like it. Do we want to be blissful and clear and happy and content and kind and loving? I mean, we want that? It’s the first thing.
It’s really important to really have it in our own face and ask that question and answer it. Then by looking and listening and looking at the Buddha’s path and listening to the teachings and thinking about it and getting some kind of confidence that it is so, that that’s my potential, then doing the job. The way we’d say is in Buddhism that half for most of us, I think, why we’re even here, even whether we call ourselves Buddhist or whatever, you know? Much of it’s just sort of because of the we’ve done. We’re just carrying out the old imprints.
Why a person keeps killing and lying in this life. They didn’t make a great big career decision sometime, it just sort of things happen, you know? Life takes care, doesn’t it? You get stuck in a certain groove. Well that’s fortunate for us we’re in the groove called spiritual doing a little bit of this and being a bit kind and trying to work on our minds and supposedly Buddhist or whatever, isn’t it?
So it’s because of the past work just like the person who did the habit of killing and lying. So it’s our own past work but that’s not enough, it’s going to run out, you know? We can’t just work on impulse, we’ve got to really look at it and be fresh and clear and sharp and on the ball and inspired to want to put enormous energy into it. And in order to do this we have to think about it, use this mind of ours, you know. Think about it.
Really look at this and analyse what is the mind, what is its nature, how is it so that its nature is naturally pure? That’s what Buddha is saying. We’re naturally deluded. This is not our true nature. It’s just temporary pollution.
It’s very true, we are. Look at saṃsāra. But it’s not who we really are. It’s a correct way to say it. It’s not our true nature.
I think this is already a sublime point if we can just get it, you know? But because of the presence of delusion, because the grooves are very deep, because it’s our habit, then we of course identify, don’t we, with this junk, with this groove that we’re in. Well I’m I’m this and I’m lazy and I can’t be bothered and I’m tired and I get angry and I’m a bit hopeless and I steal or I lie or whatever it is we do, our habits. We articulate in a very unconscious but spontaneous way story of who we think we are. And we reinforce it every day, don’t we?
So therefore it’s what we show, it’s what other people feed back to us, so the whole ball keeps rolling. So then part of us kind of says I don’t want to be this way but it’s an effort, we see it’s an effort to climb out of these old habits. But this is exactly what practice is. This is what practice is. Learning to kind of we have to energized to want to do it.
And that we can do only by really thinking. Somehow this is the irony, isn’t it? Because our lives aren’t so suffering that it’s harder to see that we’re suffering. I I can’t help but all the time to talk about these particular people in my life at the moment where I’m living in America. There’s a bunch of guys in prison, you know, a whole bunch of them, quite a lot at the moment.
So many of them, their lives are like beyond your imagination. I mean, just now, getting a letter from one that had been passed on to me, just arrived here. Young man, twenty five, Mexican, in for life. So many of them like this. California, the prisons are full of fifty percent are full of Mexican ex gangsters or gangsters.
You can’t even imagine violence and the suffering of these men’s lives, you know? That they’re karmically caught up in, and at the same time having some of the ones who write, certainly the ones I’m writing to, want to be Buddhist, incredibly good hearts, you know? So having a life where you’ve got such suffering, where you’ve either murdered or been constant violent, unbelievable violence since you were a tiny kid. Somehow so much suffering. And what always is so inspiring from these men, these young men, many of them twenty, know, seventeen some of them, is because it is so evident to them that saṃsāra really is a horrible place.
It really is suffering. It is grotesquely suffering. In these prisons forget about desire energy. Forget having even the remotest satisfaction of any of your senses. The food is revolting.
Externally everything is so grossly ugly. It really is this grey stone, you know? The environment is so overwhelmed by suffering and arrogance and aggression and violence. It’s just unbelievable. There’s nothing to see, nothing to do, there’s no pleasure.
You can’t have friends. There’s virtually nobody you can trust. There’s just violence. So you either go crazy, you totally get involved in this, or like so many of ones that I know, they get exhausted, they say. Exhausted with the suffering.
And that’s a quality they talk about in the Buddhist path called renunciation, that we need to have. As Lama Zopa says, when you’ve got renunciation you are so exhausted by the suffering. You are fed to the teeth with suffering. Now most of us can’t say that. Maybe we can.
We’ve had enough suffering. And that’s sadness of our lives. We are in a reasonably pleasant sensory world and we can get the food we need, the money we need, the friends we need, the love we need, the words we need, the music we need. We constantly can fulfill our senses. Can fulfill our needs.
And if you think about it, that’s what we spend most of our lives doing with the greatest respect, you know? Satisfying our needs. So we’re constantly sort of it’s almost like averting or waylaying this deep, this unsettling dissatisfaction just below the surface. We’re constantly filling it. You’re hungry, you get a meal.
You need some love, you talk to a friend. You need some money, you go to the bank. You want some sun, you go to the beach. You want some sleep, you go to bed. Now these guys in prison, somehow it’s just an example.
Virtually no freedom to do anything. I mean really this is what shocks me, somehow, some of them. It’s very interesting and that’s the suffering of being in prison. Especially some of them who are in their cells twenty three hours a day for the rest of their life. So you either go completely crazy or you start finding something else.
And the ones who do, I tell you, it is so inspiring. The Dharma they find, their own what they’re finding is not even the Dharma outside because there isn’t anything. They can’t even get caught up in nice pretty Tibetan things, you know, and say I’m a Buddhist. Not like that. There’s no color, there’s no smells, there’s nothing pleasing, can’t meet other people.
They find it in their own minds which is exactly where it is. But when we’re so caught up like we are, fortunately due to our past merit, this is the irony, we’re so caught up in a pleasant world that tragedy is, as Lama Zopa says, our prison of attachment, anger, jealousy, pride is so much worse than their prison. This is sort of awful to even hear, isn’t it? Because we’re kind of lulling ourselves into believing life isn’t so bad. Whereas these guys, they cannot pretend life is not bad.
So they have to go inside. And so the joy I mean, it’s rare to find people who practice Dharma, and I really mean this, who are joyful about it, who have intensity, energy, who have inspiration. And this is what I’m hearing time and time again in these guys that I write to. Not all of them, I’m not saying, but some of them, you know. Like one guy.
I mean just this is incredible. For me this is one of the most inspiring things about having any communication with him because it’s kind of helping me wake up and not waste my life, you know? And just float along saying I’m a Buddhist. Because if we’re Buddhist, no one said we have to be. Maybe even some of us here aren’t Buddhist and that’s cool, you know?
I’m not saying anyone has to be a Buddhist. But if we do say I’m a Buddhist then it means we really have to practice to the best of our ability. Practice practice doesn’t mean just sitting there looking holy. It means dealing with your dealing with anger, dealing with jealousy, dealing with pride, dealing with the one underneath all of them called attachment, you know. Somehow for us because we’re able to satisfy our attachment so easily every moment every day, which is what we mean by happiness, then it’s very hard to work on it.
But if you’re living in one of these cells, know, by ten foot cell twenty three hours a day for the rest of your life as far as you’re concerned, with virtually no freedom virtually freedom to do nothing except be in that cell then somehow you’re really looking, aren’t you, at not getting satisfaction. So you to go inside, you know. Because there’s so little choice, then they somehow get something. In other words, to be in a world that is pleasant like ours and to really also practice is incredibly sophisticated, incredibly pure, is incredibly difficult. Because you know, as another prisoner, a friend of mine who’s in for life too, as he said, you know, that car accident he had when he drunk was the wake up call.
So now here he is in prison, given up alcohol, runs the AA groups, such a solid, determined, good human being, and has discovered the Dharma, his relationship with Tārā, discovering his own pleasure. So the smallest thing makes him so happy. And he puts all his energy into study, thinking, meditating, contemplating because have nothing else. They have nothing else. And because they put all their energy into it, so they find the bliss of their own minds.
So to be able to have what we’ve got and to really practice is actually unbelievably difficult. Because the power of attachment looking at our mind again and again like Lama Yeshe said, I can tell you about attachment for one whole year and it will make no difference until you start looking deeply inside yourself and building up something there to really understand the powerful energy of attachment, which is the source of our suffering. Quite literally the source of our suffering. It’s the hardest thing in the world, you know, because it’s always being satisfied. So the analogy for me that’s so perfect and it sounds quite shocking until we really look deeply at our minds is we’re basically like junkies.
Buddha is saying we’re junkies. We to think a person is an alcoholic or a junkie, they’re suffering. Those of us this is the whole point in the West, those of us who aren’t junkies and aren’t alcoholics and don’t smoke cigarettes a day or whatever, our attachment is kind of like okay. But in Buddhist terms it’s not. We’re all essentially junkies.
But our being a junkie is for every object you can imagine of all your five senses. It sounds quite shocking to hear it this way, but the more one looks at the mind, one’s own mind, and sees the nature of attachment and how truly insidious it is, it’s not a question of guilt or shame, it’s just a question of seeing the human mind. What Buddha is saying is, eons we’ve been stuck in this groove, you know. So to really learn to look at the suffering of attachment, sometimes this is the thing, isn’t it? The best way, like these prisoners, is when you can’t get what attachment wants.
Essentially our lives, called what we mean by a happy life, is a person who is able to get what they want. You think about it precisely that, isn’t it? When you can get what you want every bit of the day, you had a good day. That’s a good day, isn’t it? The sun shone, people were kind to me, you know, no one stopped at the wrong place in the traffic, all the lights were green, everybody paid their bills on time, you know, everything worked well.
That means your attachment got what it wants, so you feel blissful by the end of the day. Look when one thing goes wrong, what happens isn’t it? Freak out. That’s because attachment didn’t get got what it didn’t want. So that’s what we mean on this earth, in this life, and this is what Buddha was saying, is saṃsāra.
This life isn’t, this earth isn’t saṃsāra, our mind, this attitude is. What do you mean by definition? Happiness is getting what attachment wants. And by definition suffering is when attachment is thwarted. Now in Buddhist terms, what we mean by happiness is in fact suffering for this precise reason.
It’s like we’re all junkies, right? Just imagine, we’re all junkies, and we’re living in a world where it’s really easy to get junk. It’s everywhere you turn. You can pick it up, it’s very civilized, people give it to you, you know you have enough money for it, it’s always there, you can get it whenever you need to fix, you just very politely get your That’s what we’re doing with every one of our senses. You check, you know.
Every one, all the time. All the time. It’s the motor, this wish to be happy. Wish to be happy is valid, but this way we get it, the way we get our happiness. So the wish to be happy is perfect and the thing is now we mix it with attachment.
This is what’s really hard. So that’s why, as Lama Zopa says, when we hear Sorry guys, you can’t be happy, as Buddha says, until you give up attachment, we kind of go What? I’ve got to give up my happiness? I’ve got to give up my heart? Because we actually mix attachment with happiness.
We see them all as one big kind of pleasure we get and joy and happiness and attachment all come in this big kind of package, you know, and belong together. And this is where we need a lot of analysis to be our own therapist, as Lama Yeshe says. Needs a lot of work to look at our own mind. Not to see it superficially every now and again but to really look deeply. To really unravel the workings of this complicated series of thoughts and emotions that we have that is the package called me.
And this exactly is what practice is. Because what Buddha is saying, right, is very clear. There are two types of states of mind, if you like, us. Simply speaking: positive and negative, you know, good and not good beneficial, non beneficial productive, not productive positive, negative all these words. And what do they mean?
They’re very tasty. They’re not kind of God saying I am now going to impose that is good and this is bad. Not like that. What Buddha is saying is these are something innate. Something innate.
So something that’s what is called negative is necessarily coming from a delusion, from a misconception, from the wrong place, the wrong view, the deluded kind of mis deluded nonsense called ignorance, which in turn gives rise to attachment, jealousy, pride and all the rest. So anything that’s called negative or non beneficial or non productive is necessarily something coming from the mind, speech or body from there. That is what negative means. So it can only cause suffering to yourself and others. Not a possibility to ever cause anything but suffering.
And then what’s called positive is necessarily the absolute opposite. Now we don’t experience them in absolutes like this because they’re always mixed. They’re like, you know, they’re water and milk mixed together. So sometimes, for example, the one called love which in Buddhist terms is altruistic, beneficial, positive, constructive, can only bring happiness to me and others. Necessarily.
It is an impossibility that love which Buddhism would define as the wish that another person be happy. It’s an impossibility this can ever cause suffering. As I said, we don’t experience them in this absolute sense. It sounds so extreme. It’s because they’re always mixed.
Love and attachment are mixed. Sometimes the mix might be fifty percent love, fifty percent attachment. It might be eighty percent love and twenty percent attachment. Much of the time maybe it’s eighty percent attachment, twenty percent love. In other words, we mix them together.
They’ve always been mixed for us. So we don’t see them so clearly. It’s really hard to discriminate between attachment and love. That’s what our job is. If we have this potential to be happy, if as Buddha is saying, the removal of attachment will be the source of your happiness, then we have to know how to discriminate, don’t we?
We have to know. So how do you know? This doesn’t come from sky, you know? You don’t start getting a blessing when you sit there with your eyes closed looking holy. It comes from listening to Buddha’s teachings again and again and again.
Getting it really accurate, thinking about it, discussing it with each other and then using that as your basis, looking at your own until you begin to discover it. It’s exactly the same in an analogy I use, you know. It’s like your mind is this massive green stuff. Then someone says there’s got overwhelmed, overgrown green stuff out there, all this mixture of everything. And someone says you can make a beautiful garden out of that Robina.
But if you don’t know botany, what use is it? You can’t just rush in there and pull this out and grow this one. You have to know what you’re doing. So you’ve to do the boring old thing of going to school and learning all about weeds and herbs and flowers, don’t you? Then you know what you can do.
You have to know to reckon, you have to know how to discriminate between this and this. They look the same right now. You have to learn the theory which is a bit cold and boring. It’s exactly the same with the Dharma. You have to know.
I mean everybody’s got a different way the mind works. Einstein says one thing and Marx says something else and Christ says something else and Buddha says I mean there’s a million views. There’s no absolute about what it is, it’s how you see it. You have to know which one you’re working with. So if you say you’re a Buddhist, you’re working with Buddha’s view of the mind.
So you use the various texts of the Buddha and the lineage lamas, the lineage masters let’s say who’ve passed it all down of the teachings to look at what they say about what is the mind and what it isn’t. What is delusion? What is virtue? How does delusion cause suffering? I mean how does it is a very good question.
We should look at this. How is it that attachment causes suffering? Don’t just say Oh, attachment’s wrong. I shouldn’t be attached. Oh God, I’m so attached.
Not at all. Buddha says don’t believe a single word I’m saying. He’s saying check it out, you know? So what is attachment? How does it cause suffering?
That’s what Lama Yeshe says, can tell you for one whole year. We can all go yeah yeah, you know? But until we know precisely what it is and what it isn’t, how on earth can we get rid of it? It’s a perfectly valid question, isn’t it? But how do we know?
By listening and then by looking inside again and again and again until slowly we start to go Wow! That’s attachment, you know? And that will keep growing because it’s super super subtle. It goes to ever subtle levels, you know? And this is our ongoing job as a Buddhist, recognizing what’s in our own mind, recognizing the delusions, recognizing the virtues and seeing them as exactly what they are.
Delusion is why you suffer and the virtues are why you’re happy. So if you want to be happy and any commonsensical person would want to be happy then it follows logically. Give up attachment, develop love. It’s just logic, you know? It’s not religious, it’s logic.
We need to look at it this way, cut this way, be sharp and clear like this, you know? Then there’s an energy in our practice, such as this airy fairy thing of being a nice person. We pretend we are nice people, not being horrible. It sounds really brutal sometimes. We are nice people.
There’s no question, you know, but it doesn’t mean we’re not overwhelmed by attachment. A bunch of junkies who don’t need to freak out and be berserk and look disgusting and steal and lie, if they had junk all over the place and were rich, they’d be polite and quite polite and friendly too. What I’m getting at is this, and this sounds very brutal, but the more we look at our minds, more we see the truth of it. A good example, Ribur Rinpoche, this one old lama, one of Lama’s Opa’s lamas who didn’t escape from Tibet, was stuck in Tibet, you know, and so was tortured brutally for a long time. But because he had been a practitioner of this stuff, because he deeply on his mind, had a comprehension of karma, understood the nature of suffering, before they all got chucked into prison, you were to see him, you know, and then as he would talk about, as he said, one of these aristocrats who enjoyed their picnics every day, you know, that’s what seemed to be what aristocrats in Tibet did have picnics, that’s how he said it, you know.
So you’d see one of them, presumably a very pleasant person too, the result of a lot of merit, very kind man, person, whatever and then you see this person called Ribur Rinpoche both smiling, friendly Tibetans. Now when everything’s going cool, when everything’s fine, when you’re getting what you want, you don’t see a problem, do you? But what’s the difference? But as as he said, as soon as they got chucked in prison, then you see the evidence of who’s been working on their mind. Because the person who hasn’t been giving up attachment, because now they don’t get what they want, freak out, break down.
This is the point, this is why I’m saying our prison, it’s why Lama Zopa is saying our prison is worse than these guys in prison. He wrote this letter to this one prisoner Arturo, who’s now a twenty two year old Mexican. Your prison is nothing. And it’s going to sound like of Oh yeah, very religious. But it’s true when you think about it this way it sounds shocking.
We get defensive, I’m not that bad, come on, you know, we think I’m a nice person. But as long as you’re getting what you want, of course you can afford to be a nice person. We’re all nice people now, not be horrible about us. But what would happen if suddenly one of us started on a rampage and shooting we suddenly had be holed up here for six weeks without food and then we’d start all the delusions in us would start to come to the surface naturally, I mean naturally, I’m not trying to prove we’re all horrible. Whereas those of us, let’s say some people in here might have really been practising, they would be different, they wouldn’t be angry, wouldn’t be miserable, wouldn’t be depressed, would continue to be generous, would keep smiles on their faces.
They wouldn’t be suffering. And that’s the only way you can tell the difference. So that’s what we have to get to in our own mind. And that’s why the best time to practice is when you don’t get what you want. That’s the beginning of practice.
That’s the beginning of practice is when someone thwarts you, someone’s mean to you, someone’s lies to you. You can’t get what you want. The food isn’t just how you like it. The bus doesn’t come on time. The person does stop in front of you.
The traffic’s always red. Simple little things in our daily life. These are truly the test of real practice. And that’s why the Dalai Lama says actually when we should be happy is when we have problems. There’s logic, absolute logic to this.
If the job we’re trying to do is recognize attachment, see how it causes suffering and slowly give it up. Because this is exactly the heart of Buddha’s practice at the simplest level. We’re not even talking about realizing emptiness yet. We’re talking about subduing our own mind such that whenever, whatever happens, it won’t matter because we will have found the happiness within ourself, which is when we’ve given up being a junkie. When you’ve given up being a junkie, you’ve given up the craving and this fix, haven’t you?
This huge I mean the person who’s a junkie calls happiness getting the fix, right? But anybody else looking on can see it’s insane. The whole deal is insane. The whole scenario, isn’t it? Best to have not want to be a junkie at all, isn’t it?
That’s clear. Well, that’s what Buddha’s saying: Best to give up attachment. That’s exactly what he’s saying. But it seems too awful because we’re so locked into this story of getting what we want. Not just every now and again, having a nice drink, but every microsecond our energy is propelled in this direction.
It sounds kind of heavy, but this is what comes the more we look at our minds. Until we do this, in a sense we can say we’re just kind of we’re doing good things, sure. In other words, it’s hard work to practice. And why wait to get chucked into prison? Why wait to get cancer or AIDS?
Why wait for your loved one to leave you, for your best friend? Why wait for your house to break down or the money to all leave out of the bank? Do you see what I’m saying? Why wait for the heavy times to get the wake up call, as Paul called it, as my friend who’s the alcoholic. It was his wake up call, he said.
But be sophisticated and give ourselves our own wake up call before it comes. Start right now, you know, seeing the way to really practice every day. Are people laughing? Why are you laughing? It’s hilarious.
What’s hilarious? How ridiculous we are you mean? I know, it’s embarrassing isn’t it? True. Has somebody got some questions?
Are you ready for questions? Absolutely. Look a whole hour I talked very fast, so you’ve got an hour and a half’s worth. Two issues. One is kind of perception of the sound of one hand clapping.
Is how can Sounds very difficult for me. Not at all. I know. Can one get attached Uh-huh. To non attachment?
Yep. If you do, then you won’t ever get it. Right. It’s just a it’ll be like a mess. You won’t won’t be successful.
A again. A conceptual thing in the mind you’ve got to overcome. Which is what it is? Well that’s the notion of attachment to non attachment. Well I wouldn’t worry too much about that.
My feeling is it’s like this. My feeling is it’s like this. If you are listening to Buddha’s teachings in a valid way and you are practicing in a valid way, then because there is still attachment, even as you’re practicing, it’s bound to be there is some attachment there. But if you’re doing the right thing, then the attachment will eventually go. It will sort itself out.
And least better to be attached to something that will get you to become non attached than to be attached to something that won’t. Meanwhile Steady from that, as you’ve been saying, in the West, there seems to me that in the East and the West over the last two or five years we’ve been searching for more attachment as it were in all sorts of directions. The attachment ness has exploded. Absolutely, that’s exactly right. What is your comment on that?
It’s true, it just shows, it’s indicating that as the Buddhist would say that these degenerate times and by definition degeneration is increasing of attachment. So in a way what we see as good, which is sophisticated external objects, incredibly sophisticated things like computers and all this, they’re the manifestation of a highly developed conceptual mind and born out of attachment, the wish to be happy. But it also includes things that are good and bad, like nuclear bombs, computers, whatever, but it’s an indication. I mean this western world especially, this so called technological world we live in, is literally the manifestation of attachment. Literally.
It’s obvious that if we compare this present world with say, let’s say, just generally speaking, Tibet of sixty years ago, which was medieval, it was evident that theirs is not an attachment world. It doesn’t mean they didn’t have attachment because the emphasis was on the mind. You have these great yogis and yogis in the mountains seeing the universe and being blissful and flying in the sky, whereas here we are having to make airplanes fly in the sky. It’s a manifestation of attachment energy because attachment by definition puts itself onto the outside. So then we’ve absolutely fied the outside, haven’t we?
So our attachment has made all these marvelous objects in the wish to be happy because it’s obvious we think they’re the cause of happiness, that’s why we’ve made them. Doesn’t it? It’s exactly what’s happening, and it’s just going to get worse. But of course the more we do this, the less satisfaction we get. And then that just these monsters we create turn against us, you know?
Isn’t it? It’s interesting. Anybody else? What about the attachment to ideas, maybe like political ideas? Yes, sure.
I I think we’ve got to look at the different kinds of people we are, you know. I can see for myself I’m not so into objects, not because I’m so renounced, it’s just the karma I have, but I’ve completely got attachment to how I like things and ideas and ways of doing things. That thing, we can all look at our own minds. Some of us are into sex, some are into sort of beautiful objects, some are into money, and some are into this one. So just the same just and can be even more destructive especially when it’s kind of concepts you know sure but definitely it’s just it’s a question where you put your attachment isn’t it the way it functions in each person?
Well that’s just not minding our own business which is why we adopt attachment. That’s what attachment does it’s always pop outside you know so we’ve got to stop thinking that. Just look at ourselves, isn’t it? I agree with you. Really, I mean, you think about it in a practical way, I mean I’m glad for example my mother had attachment for me otherwise she would have killed me.
If you think about it, I’m just using an example, I was this wretched child, impossible to put up with, so because she had attachment for me, she continually loved me. But I’m not surprised some mothers beat their kids, just means they haven’t got much attachment for them. So look what happens when you haven’t got much attachment. I’m sort of sounding funny, but actually you think about it. It doesn’t mean it’s good to have attachment, but at least that kind of the love that is there is able to come through, but the attachment causes you to persevere and always think your kid is gorgeous.
When I look at somebody else’s child, they look boring to me. That’s attachment talking, you see that they’re so gorgeous. Or you know, you’re gonna have a couple of friends, better to be attached to a friend who’s gonna help you practice something that’s beneficial than be attached to a friend who’s gonna turn you into a junkie. So still there is attachment there, but if you’re doing all the right things, it’ll slowly go. That’s all.
Meanwhile, you have it, you make the most, don’t get guilty about it, you know? But learn to see it. It’s great. I find that really hard work trying to work out the difference between love and That’s it. Unbelievably gentle.
That goes with friends, with That’s right, everything. It’s the most difficult job, really. It is just hugely difficult. It really is difficult. Well, let’s talk about it.
And in a practical way, I reckon what I like about Buddhism is the practicality. Exactly. And know, you’ve gotta try to when you’re, like, involved in an encounter with a, say, a child or friend or whatever, and you get that you know, something horrible happens, to try and catch yourself and ask yourself why am I hurt or why not, whatever. And then you start to get a glimpse of the attachment and still enormously to understand the difference between one and Exactly, the hardest job on earth. It’s the hardest job on earth.
So I mean, first of all, this is why it is important to hear, let’s say, the clear explanations of one and another. That’s just intellectual in the beginning, but you gotta start with a decent theory first. You have to, you absolutely have to, so let’s even talk about it for a moment, you know? So first of all, what’s interesting about all the so called delusions, the way Buddhism talks about them, they have different characteristics, whether they’re called anger attachment or anything else, they all share certain characteristics. And one of the key ones in all these so called deluded emotions we have is they exaggerate, they inflate an aspect of the object.
And it’s very tasty there. So attachment obviously completely exaggerates the deliciousness or the beauty of something. Mean, to the same example for me, the simple example of your piece of chocolate cake in front of you. Now you check, you know? When you’re hungry this is really such a clear analysis and we do it a thousand times in life, but we never do it this, you know.
Here we’re trying to distinguish now between attachment and pleasure even. Even pleasure, which is even harder than distinction between love, because love is something altruistic. Pleasure is just this joy and joy that we feel, which in Buddhist terms is totally valid, is not wrong. If it were wrong, might as well cut your head off and die now. It was a disaster.
The point is to be happy, which means to have pleasure. So okay, how do you distinguish? Let’s just look. Let’s just analyse different things. There’s a cake coming.
Your stomach is empty. You like cake because of the habit of having eaten it. So the mind which bit of you experiences attachment? So just check. You’ve got your tongue involved, you’ve got your five senses, you know?
And as Lama Yeshe says too, which sounds very shocking to us Westerners, You people, he says, think attachment has got something to do with the senses. He says it has nothing to do with the senses, which is truly shocking. Because the senses are just these dumb animals and you check it’s true. So what is it? First of all, your stomach is empty.
Then you think, the mind thinks, Oh, I’d love some cake. Then you smell it in the kitchen, so that’s your nose. Now your nose isn’t detached, just this dumb animal that smells smell, that’s about all it can do, you know? Then your eyes see it when it comes, when a person brings it to the table, and you see this shape, this brown whatever it is, and because of the ancient habit in the mind of projecting a certain meaning onto this, you see and what does it do? It looks delicious to you.
Doesn’t it look You don’t think, Oh, I really like cake. You don’t think that delicious has anything to do with your mind. You think delicious is in the cake. Already this is a thing. Even though your eyes, all they are capable of seeing is brown, is shape and color.
Your eyes can only see shape and color, right? It would have to be true that because I don’t care for chocolate cake very much. That’s it, so it doesn’t look so delicious to you. Precisely, and this is exactly the point. That’s it, exactly.
So straight away there it is. So you’ve got your tongue, which is the point of all this whole exercise, is to get it in the mouth, right? So your hand feels it, then you put in the mouth and the tongue tastes it. Now, your tongue, think about it, how can it possibly experience what we call attachment? So we’re going look at what attachment is in a minute.
So it’s not your tongue, it’s not your eyes, it’s not all rest of your senses. So where’s the problem? The problem So what is attachment? Okay, the attachment. So where the problem is, first we have your mental consciousness.
In Buddhist terms you have two ways of knowing. You have your sense consciousness and your mental consciousness. That’s it. Now we’ve chucked out the five senses, they’re not the problem. They’re the doorway through which you have the cake, but they’re not the problem, they don’t experience the problems.
So where is that? That’s in this mental consciousness, this kind of great big soup of complicated feelings and thoughts and emotions and projections and needs and all this stuff. So then that’s where attachment is. Now what attachment is, because okay, you have the taste, then there’s some pleasure, we agree? There’s some pleasure there.
Very temporary, because by the time get your third piece it’s now disgusting. So the pleasure is very brief, right? But there is still some pleasure there. It’s not what we thought it was, even though we built it up hugely. So that’s even the pleasure, simply the pleasure based on the meeting of cake and tongue, that is not a delusion, that’s simply your human right as a human being, to have pleasure, to have joy.
Now that’s not the problem. Your tongue isn’t the problem. So where’s the problem? That’s in the mental consciousness. So the part of the mental consciousness, when we’re narrowing it down now, where the problem exists is called the deluded part.
And in this particular case it’s called attachment. And specifically attachment is a mental state, and what’s most interesting, and this is very shocking to us as well, this attachment is a conception. It is a bunch of thoughts about the cake. It’s a bunch of thoughts your mind made up about, first of all, I, this little hungry I, that’s where all the conceptions were in the first place, desperately wanting this piece of brown blob, Isn’t it? So that’s what characteristic of attachment in this case and all the delusions is that it exaggerates.
And what is doing the exaggerating? Knock your tongue, no, knock your nose. It’s the mind, the thought, and it’s the thoughts. It’s thought. Now this shocking, especially when you come to something called sexual attachment.
It sounds insane to hear what Lama Yeshe says, that attachment isn’t a function of your senses, it’s exactly true again. You analyze, and that’s why we have to be our own therapists, as Lama Yeshe says, to do this kind of analysis, to really not just in your meditation but when you meet the cake. That’s the difficulty. But you’ve to do it first. So then you start to see that attachment is a concept, is a bunch of thoughts, but why there’s this huge emotional component, why the mind gets so excited, why you have no control at all, and why you don’t even think that it’s all thoughts, because it all happens so quickly, is only because we’ve been doing it for eons.
It’s just the groove we just go into without any volition at all, but it is still thought. And that is what is most interesting when you really start to see your mind. First by hearing and thinking and listening to the teachings, then you start looking at your own mind, when you start to see that attachment is a bunch of thoughts your mind has made up, it’s quite shocking. But it’s also very liberating because then you start to realize, Well if it’s just thoughts, then I can start to harness them and change them. And that’s what giving up attachment is, although it’s impossibly difficult, because it’s so deep, you know.
So this is just analysing a little bit. Attachment is first but it’s all based on the misconception, the fundamental root that’s what they mean by the root of saṃsāra. It’s the fundamental bunch of thoughts, the deepest ingrained ones, which is the thoughts that have made up this self existent, solid, real, independent, out here, stuck, separate, lonely, bereft, empty me ness. And that’s what gives rise spontaneously to I want, and then it dumps itself, it just projects itself onto any object that is around, be it cake, bodies, politics, doesn’t matter what the object is, that’s not the point. The object isn’t the point.
Hers is not chocolate cake, it doesn’t matter. The object is irrelevant, you know. The point is this huge mental process we are locked into. And the point is once we start to hone, to calm down the emotional component of the delusions, whether it’s just over the cake, I mean my mind gets excited when I’m thirsty over my hot water, you know? Nothing fantastic.
And you can see the excitement, which is the mind frantically saying I’ve got to have it. Because another characteristic of all delusions, they’re schizophrenic, as Lama Yeshe puts it, he’s not very polite, we all say dualistic. Lama says schizophrenic. And attachment all these delusions, are schizophrenic in the sense that the I that we have made up feels actually separate and therefore lonely and therefore hungry. So therefore has this huge emotional part of it is this excitement, because the attachment is a story that’s completely an inflation and a complete exaggeration based upon the extent of your needs on the object called the cake.
So then the cake is why it looks so fantastic to us. It looks so delicious. And what’s happening in the mind, and we never see it, is what attachment is believing implicitly is that when you get the cake, then you’ll get the happiness. And that’s why you’re so disappointed every time. But we never ever check it like this, do we?
We never analyse it like this. This is the kind of analysis Lama Yeshe means. This is what Buddhist meditation is all about, this is what practising Buddhism is, doing this kind of analysis, breaking down the lies that our mind tells us, until eventually we get it. That’s what a realisation is, you know? And all we can do is keep doing this.
But we have to analyse more and more clearly all the time. It’s okay to distinguish between attachment and love, let’s say, forget about attachment and bliss and sexual pleasure, forget that’s just like forget so difficult, you know? But even attachment and love, like you’re talking. What is definition love is virtuous. Virtuous doesn’t mean you’re a holy person, you know, it simply means beneficial, positive, something that is necessarily not coming from delusion.
It means it’s necessarily coming from the appropriate, correct way of seeing reality. This is what’s interesting about virtue and non virtue in Buddhism. Non virtue is what comes from the wrong views and virtue is what comes from the right views. It’s how things are. It’s connected.
So if you even think, a simple way to analyse, if you feel uncomfortable, then it has to be delusion that’s present. If you feel kind spacious and wee and warm and focus on the other person, even for a moment, then that’s virtue. So that’s one way to distinguish between love and attachment, although they come together all the time, so you’ve to try to analyze which percentage it is. You’re getting what you want, you think you’re warming up. Precisely, That’s exactly right.
The test of if you love a person, and that’s why the equanimity meditation, when you begin to practice this wing, the very first meditation we need to do, which is development of equanimity, which is the state of mind through much analysis that has really realized that the person labelled enemy, labelled friend and labelled stranger are actually from their side actually equal. Meaning you’ve cut through, you’ve pierced the bubble, the lie of definite friend out there, definite enemy and definite stranger. When you can see this, then you realize that as Lama Zopa says, the reason we love a friend right now we do love them, there is love there, but because they keep giving me what I want, then I’m prepared to love them to death. But you wait if he starts looking at my best friend. I will not love him anymore.
My heart is full of pain and I’ll be struggling not to want him to be unhappy. So that the test of when you really love somebody in a with a stable reason, as Lama Zopa puts it, and we don’t think you have a reason for loving somebody, it sounds sort of like you don’t have reasons, that’s too intellectual, it’s got to be felt, you know? But genuine love, the test of it because love is simply defined as the wish that another person be happy, and eventually develops into an incredible kind of affection, genuine affection, meaning a sincere wish that they be happy, and a happiness when they are happy. Now clearly, when that man is smiling at me, the joy that I get that he’s so happy because he’s smiling at me is unbelievable. But honey, you wait till he starts looking at you.
And he’s still smiling, he’s obviously happy, but look at the torture in my heart. So that’s the proof. That’s when you can see that you truly do love a person. That’s the test, and that’s why we have to have people be mean to us. As Geshe-la said one time, I’ll never forget, he leant forward on his throne and he said, Bodhisattvas need their enemies.
So a person who’s a Bodhisattva would choose to go and live with the person they dislike. I mean it sounds demented in our society, doesn’t it? And you couldn’t tell the difference, you would think they love the most. Because that’s the only way we’re going to truly wrench out completely this attachment, you know. So this is why, unfortunately for most of us too, know, being in our ordinary lives, in our prisons, of attachment and jealousy and anger, we bring our practice even into that.
We’re happy to say we’re Buddhas, you know, we’re happy to be kind to other people, know, but until it gets tested, we can’t really say it, until it gets tested. In other words, we only go as long as our comfort zone is not threatened, we’re prepared to say we’re practicing Dharma. For me the analogy is like you say you do your push ups every day because you want to get fit, but you do them only to the point where you start puffing and panting, do you see my point here, then your push ups will never make a difference, will they? You have to hurt. For the muscles to grow, they have to hurt.
You have to sweat, you have to puff and pant. That’s the proof that you’re going beyond, and you have to go beyond your limits to really grow your body. Well you have to go beyond your limits to really grow love and kindness and really give up attachment. And that means we have to feel the pain of it. The pain will pass, like you know.
When you’ve fully developed your body it doesn’t hurt to do the push ups anymore because you’ve now trained yourself. It’s the same with giving up attachment, learning to be kind, learning to be patient. And that’s why practice is really a struggle. Practice is really painful. Truly it is.
And it’s not meant to be masochistic, but you can understand it if you look at it this way. So distinguish between the delusions. Because there’s a trouble we get into something called spiritual, especially Buddhism, you hear these words called detachment, know, and we end up giving up everything, we become just cold fish. I mean how depressing. Would you like some tea?
Oh I don’t care. Would like some coffee? Oh I don’t care. I mean don’t be ridiculous, like tea, like coffee, but you know, don’t be attached. We’ve got to kind of be human.
I mean what shocked me when I first met all the Tibetan lamas, after having for a while a concept of Buddhism about Zen, I was doing martial arts, I had this concept, I mean it’s not Zen’s fault, I put this ridiculous idea that it was all aloof and detached and kind of walking slowly and I never walked slowly. So, you know, and then I met these Tibetan lamas, they’re kind of all like Lama Yeshe laughing loudly and falling over the throne and joking. I was a bit shocked by this behavior. I couldn’t believe this was Buddhism, you know? But then it kind of dawned on me, what’s there is just this unbearable total kind of genuine love and compassion.
Just real, real human being, you know. It’s very interesting. So yes, the distinction between delusion and non delusion is so difficult. But one interesting little taste, you know, like I said, one interesting indication maybe is, for example, if you feel kind of the heart beating fast in a negative way, or you kind of get irritation, or suddenly you’re with that person and they suddenly feel a bit separate from you, that’s a sign of delusion. But if feel warm and close, that’s a sign of virtue.
So if you think about it, what virtue, love, kindness, generosity, patience, any of those words, it’s necessary there’s a warm feeling of we. It’s a simple way to say it. But when there’s other delusion, there’s definitely a separate person out there. And when it’s attachment, they’re fiercely separate but you’ve got to get them in all the holes to fill him up. You want them to be kind of but there’s a separate out there, the cake is separate, you’ve got to get it in.
But when it’s warm, when it’s kind, relaxed, spacious, even with the cake, then you enjoy it better anyway. There’s no excitement. And that’s the trouble. When we think about giving up attachment we kind of get sad and we think we’re going have to give up the excitement. And we do in a way, but don’t mistake that because actually, you think about it again logically, if you’ve given up all the fantasy in your mind about what you are and what cake is, and you have got an empty stomach, and given that you’re in the human realm, your stomach will get empty, so then when you smell the cake you’ll get such pleasure.
Your nose doesn’t go frozen when you give up attachment, it doesn’t fall off. Your tongue doesn’t become concrete and not taste anything when you give it up attachment. You see my point? Your tongue will still taste, but because you’re not so frantic about it and excited and grasping and fearful of not getting it, you’ve gonna actually get pleasure. And that’s why Lama Yeshe, when he says, Oh, the more pleasure the better, dear, with all life, you know?
But he’s being deadly serious. The point is more pleasure the better. What a person who is a Buddhist who has given up attachment is person who’s so absurdly happy you wouldn’t even believe it. I mean it sounds ridiculous, but they are a blissful person, they’re in touch, as Rene said, sitting in boring old meditation in the mountains in Spain, you know. He experienced such joy way beyond anything he’d ever had through his senses.
You’ve got to hear that, you know. So it’s nothing to do with giving up pleasure, that is insane. It’s giving up the frantic grasping, it’s giving up being a junkie, know. It’s finding pleasure, finding your own joy, that’s what it’s about. And if we even know this, then somehow there’s some energy to want to do it.
Otherwise it’s a scary job to do, you know. And of course in the beginning, plenty withdrawal symptoms, there is no doubt it’s painful. There is no question. But you know, just like when you’re doing those push ups, you don’t freak out when the pain comes, do you? You’re actually happy when you go away from those push ups and your muscles are all aching.
You’re glad. Why? Because it’s a good sign, because you know something’s happening. When you go on a fast and all the yuck comes out of you from eating all the junk food, you’re not depressed because you smell and everything. Do you see my point?
You’re glad because you know it’s a sign of growth. That’s exactly the same when you feel the pain of attachment being thwarted. Although it’s like a nightmare, you know, slowly, as Lama Zopa says, we start to like it. We start to like problems like we like ice cream, he says. That’s what we have to learn to do.
And there’s logic to this. It’s just that it’s the most difficult job because the one we are absolutely caught up in is the one of getting what we want. That’s what they mean by the eight worldly dharma. It sounds so kind of forbidding, you know, an odd eight worldly dharma. It’s not an odd phrase, you know?
All this is breaking down into eight different ways. Attachment, how it functions, that’s all. Being happy when you get what you want. Being unhappy when you don’t. Being happy when someone praises you.
Being unhappy when they don’t. Isn’t it? You think about it. And you think, this is what’s so outrageous too, it’s another way of saying it, that what we mean by success in this life, you think about it. It’s simply when you’ve got a bunch of very good sense objects, that’s all.
Or when lots of people like you. When someone says you’re a nice person, that’s what we mean by success, isn’t it? It’s insane, you think about it. It’s got nothing to do with who you are at all, whether the person sees it or not. That person relies upon somebody else to tell them they’re working.
It’s like this mad sort of circular thing, you know. We all depend on somebody else to say we’re a nice person. But where’s it all begin? You start realizing we ourselves are who we are, and whether a person sees it has got nothing to do with anything. Whether we have a nicely designed cup or not that we can identify with being as mine, I must be a special person, I’ve got the best design.
It’s an insane idea if you think about it. But that’s how we are because this is delusion, this is saṃsāra, this is attachment. It’s schizophrenic. Maharishi had such good words, I tell you. We are who we are, you know.
Our mind is our mind. Our qualities are our qualities, and we have to discover them. This is the point. And when we discover them, then sanity comes, you know. Sanity comes, you know?
Then there’s contentment, then there’s fulfillment, then there’s wholeness. And that’s what giving up attachment means. And this is the job, you know? This is this wing. This one, there’s compassion.
But it only comes from the success of this one. And as Lama Zopa says, you know, they say in the teaching, isn’t it? The first realization you need to get, first stage of level of realization, just called renunciation. Again it sounds so forbidding, you know, God, gonna give up happiness, what a drag, renounced, you know. Nothing to do with anything, it’s ridiculous how we interpret it.
Genuine renunciation is like you’ve given up the causes causes of suffering. And that means you are exhausted from the suffering. You’re fed up to it, fed up with it. You cannot stand more suffering. And that is based on the clear intelligence that your own delusions are the cause of your suffering.
And so as Lama Zopa says: When you know that, that even a moment more of attachment is like being in a septic tank. It’s truly repulsive, you know. So you would never dare even have another split second of attachment. That is renunciation, is this fierce love of yourself in a very literal way. It means such self respect, such understanding, such intelligence that you know finally why you suffer and you are fed up so you never want to suffer again.
That’s renunciation. Then you have a perfect basis for genuine compassion. Because what compassion is, we tend to think it’s a sentimental feeling of poor people suffering, you know? It’s far more than that. It’s like renunciation renunciation is based on the intelligence that knows why you suffer, which is your delusions, compassion is based on the intelligence in your mind of why they suffer.
And that is because of their delusions. So you find it unbearable, your heart breaks for the person person who’s torturing you and for the person who’s being kind to you. Same thing. So Ribur Rinpoche, because he understood karma and because he realized the cause of his own suffering was not this person torturing him, but he knew because of karma that he must have tortured this person before, and that this was literally his own torture coming back at himself. So why blame this poor person?
And secondly, he also would have felt unbearable remorse because he realized the harm he had done this person in the past was the catalyst for this person to harbor this rage and anger in his mind and now have to just compulsively harm him back. And then thirdly, because he was going to suffer unbearably in the future, every reason for Ribur Rinpoche, as he said, transforms suffering into pure joy. Only have compassion for this person for logical reasons, coming from renunciation and emptiness and compassion. And this is what our potential is. Look Buddha’s saying, know?
Not just some people. We all see the holy ones up there, Mother Teresa, oh, this holy person sort of inherently holy. Well in Buddha’s terms she’s not inherently holy, it’s just because she worked really hard in a past life. Some skinny old lady could do so much good now in this life just because of her compassion, from all her aspirations and prayers and practice in her past life. They’re not up there somewhere, separate from us.
Every time we see a person who’s like, you know, these lamas that I want to recall, these people who seem so kind of way beyond and above, we just have to use them as examples, not use them as, you know, people who say, Oh, I can’t become like that. That’s the example of what we can become. That’s the whole function of the guru, isn’t it? The person who shows us by their very actions how we can become. We should get energy from it, you know?
Because if Dalai Lama is the proof of the pudding, well thanks, I’m prepared to try that recipe. It’s logic, isn’t it? If he is the result, then thank you, I’d like to try those methods. And if I can become like him, thank you very much, I want to try. Logic, isn’t it?
We’ve got to want it, and we’ve to know we’re capable of it, and then we’ve got to listen to the teachings and try it out and start to hurt. And then with the hurting, just like when you go on that fast, just like when you say No more chocolate cake. It feels more painful than having chocolate cake, doesn’t it? But the second you say No more chocolate cake, in other words, the second you discipline your mind, and you start to taste your own potential instead of craving for taste of the outside object, then you find happiness. We all know it.
It’s kind of interesting. When you give up all your power to the object, which is what attachment does, it’s like this little baby, then there’s no pleasure at all. The more you see the cake as delicious, the more miserable you are. You check. When you’re overwhelmingly attached to that person, it’s like a nightmare, isn’t it?
You think it’s the cause of the pleasure, it’s the cause of your insanity. When that lessens, you start to see this human being there, then the love can begin to grow, if there’s any love there. And if there’s not, it’ll be see you later. That’s why relationships break up because there’s not enough love there. There’s just the attachment.
It lasts as long as it keeps getting what it wants and then it gets bored and it throws it out, you know? And we taste our own potential, which is painful because we have to say no. And that’s basically practice at this very first level we’re talking here, the so called Hīnayāna part of the path, you know? The renunciation level, right at the first stage. It’s all very fine talking about bodhicitta and tantra, really.
At this part, it’s cold turkey basically. It’s saying no, you know. It sounds shocking, but there’s no shortcut. There’s no shortcut, you know. The only way to give up attachment is giving it up.
There’s no shortcut. Which is why it’s painful. And we have to try, even once a day, better than nothing. Just once a day. Be happy when you don’t get what you want.
That’s all, that’s already fantastic. That’s purification. Is it time to finish nine o’clock? Is that time? Boss, Lindy, are we over?
What? Any more questions? Any more questions? We get it. Touch.
Yeah, we get it. Touch. No, you would not for long, I promise. Just one or two days is enough of me. No more questions?
That’s it? Finished? No? Enough? Is that enough time?
You got your money’s worth? Remember though, did talk fast, it’s like it’s nine thirty. So should we sing a little prayer? Just to dedicate. So remembering, here we have all been, you know, for an hour and a half, an hour and a half, just all listening, each of us listening, including me, to Buddha’s teachings, right?
And that means as many seconds, as many moments as there have been in this an hour and a half, is as many karmic seeds each of us has planted in our mind. And that already enough to make us weep with happiness, you know? That for an hour and a half we’ve been practicing huge virtue: thinking, checking, listening, analyzing, aspiring. And you think you walk out the same person, you’re a completely different person that’s walked in this room an hour and a half ago. An hour and a half of new seeds have gone into your mind.
You’ve nourished the seeds you planted before. This is amazing, you know. This is practice. This is practice. Be happy.
So make this kind of dedication that we nourish these seeds so they definitely grow in the future in the development of our innate potential. Every one of us without exception. To be a Buddha, an awakened being for our sake and the sake of every other living being. We just, you know, sing dedication prayer that expresses that idea. Thank you everybody very much.