Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 46-minute session, Ven Robina Courtin teaches equanimity—the foundation for genuine compassion—through a direct analysis of how we distort people with emotional projection. She identifies the core problem: we automatically divide others into enemies (whom we hate), friends (whom we love), and strangers (whom we ignore), but these categories are entirely false. Anger projects ugliness onto enemies, attachment projects beauty onto friends, indifference obscures strangers. Using concrete examples—Osama bin Laden, romantic heartbreak, the Dalai Lama—she shows how our mind manufactures distortion. She walks through the analytical meditation: visualize the three types in front of you and recognize that all beings equally wish happiness. Friends and enemies were neutral before projection; they wanted happiness then as they do now. A substantial Q&A addresses guru-student relationships, where attachment and projection derail practice; she warns against spiritual materialism and rushing into devotion, urging careful teacher-checking before commitment.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 13 Unknown.mp3
UUID: 4b5b159b-737f-47a0-9c15-7a852709a957
Teacher: Ven Robina Courtin
Collection: y Unknown 1988 9 Cassettes (Ven Robina Courtin)
Date: 1988 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 46.2 minutes
Words: ~9,476
Therefore, conclusion, you don’t like them. Therefore, you don’t love them. Therefore, you don’t want them to be happy. You don’t have compassion for them when they suffer. You even want them to suffer when it’s really strong anger.
You all can see that. That’s what an enemy is, isn’t it? But by definition, an enemy is a person who harms me. That’s it, me, it’s I centered, it’s obvious. Friend, by definition, is a person who benefits me, to whatever extent.
Not my neighbour, no, me. So it’s again I centered. So we want this person to be happy, etc. Then we look at strangers and who are they, which is ninety nine point nine nine percent of all the rest of the living universe. Strangers are beings who neither harm nor help me, that’s very simple, so simple, who don’t touch my life.
So therefore, conclusion, we don’t care about them, We couldn’t care less. This is how it is. This is the world, isn’t it? Giraffes are like it, dogs are like it, mosquitoes are like it, everyone’s like it. It’s just the natural instinct, because of habit, of all sentient beings.
So we’re trying to change this. Why? Because in this compassion wing, a way of saying is we’re trying to expand, literally expand our consciousness to encompass others. In the first one, we’re trying to remove all the insanity, to at least become our self, to some extent. Now we’ve become ourself to some extent, can start to even become others now.
First job first, please. In the first wing mainly we’re kind of removing all the weeds and the poison, here we’re trying to develop the flowers, trying to expand our mind to encompass others, trying to break down the barriers between self and other. So equanimity, how do you meditate upon it? What do you do? What kind of analytical meditation do you do?
Because like I’m saying, every word I’ve been saying in the room this weekend, they are just simply the basis of how you do an analytical meditation, and again, don’t mystify meditation, like I said, are two kinds: the first is concentration, the extent to which you have any concentration at all is the extent to which you can do the second kind, which is developing insight. How do you develop insight? By thinking something through, it’s nothing mystical, you know? Okay, when you’ve got subtler and subtler levels of mind, you deepen and deepen and deepen your insights, even eventually to the point where they’re non conceptual, it’s just at a much subtler level in your mind. We’ve got to start where we are though, which is the gross level.
So, you would imagine in front of you, and even as I’m talking, you do it. Right in front of you, in the front of you, eyeball to eyeball is your enemy, one person. So maybe we sometimes think, well excuse me, I haven’t got enemies. Well excuse me, check again. Even there’s a person who mildly irritates you, it’s good enough to put in the enemy category, okay?
So the person right in front of you, the enemy plonked, right in front in the middle, looking, there they are with your face, your face, you know? And then to the left in front of you is your friend, dear friend. And actually for this meditation, for this when you do it, or even thinking now, the stronger you dislike the person and the more you like the other person, the better. Much more kind of contrast, you know. And the third, over to the right here in front of you, you put a stranger, face of a person, even could be a person in the room who you haven’t had much to do with this weekend, but is a stranger to you but you can recognise their face.
About whom you are truly indifferent, okay, because they’ve neither harmed nor helped you. They’re the three people. So what you do basically is there’s different ways of analysing. Remember the key point here is to simply learn to break down the false view of enemy, therefore I don’t want them to be happy, friend I do want them to be happy, stranger I don’t care, to break these ones down, to get to a point of this objectivity that is able to say genuinely they are the same, from the point of view of wanting to be happy. This then, just this alone, this is what equanimity is, then it’s the basis for being able to say, may you be happy, which is love.
So equanimity is the very first step. We wouldn’t even sort of make this point normally, you just sort of go straight into do I love them or do I know, how do I love them, how do I love them, you know. We’ve got to really see that they’re all the same in their wish to be happy, which almost seems like a subtle point but it’s a very profound one, it brings a big shift in the mind when you can see this. What’s the analysis we do to break down the old views but that doesn’t see them as equal right now? It was because, again, because of our delusions in the mind that project the different picture onto each of these people.
Anger in the mind projects ugliness onto the enemy, attachment in the mind projects beauty onto the friend, and indifference in the mind, ignorance, projects indifference, nothingness, onto the stranger, isn’t it? And of course, like always, as we’ve discussed, when those pictures appear in our mind, we think the person is like that. So we look at the enemy, we think they are horrible. We don’t ever think that our own delusions in our own mind are the cause of why they look horrible. We think they’re horrible because he did this to me, and this, and this, and this.
We get this catalogue of reasons, don’t we? That’s the logic that’s the logic in our mind, isn’t it? He is horrible because he did these things to me. Therefore, I don’t love him. Therefore he’s different from my friend whom I adore.
It’s just natural, it’s so natural in this, but we never analyse it. But we’ve got to see the logic of why the ego does this, know, just all these false projections. Therefore we can’t see the enemy as a human being at all, can we? You can see how it really works in the world, you know all this talk these days with Osama bin Laden, he’s like he’s a new Hitler for everybody, everyone loves to dump all their negative energy onto one person, and it all feels so comfortable. Get rid of him, the whole world will be better, it’s like a big joke.
But also look how we project so hugely, when you read all the reports, I read all these different reports in the papers and the magazines, even the good well written magazines, there’s always this language that’s used, kind of like he’s this slimy, creepy, evil person. But it’s such an exaggeration, it doesn’t mean that what he’s doing is right. It isn’t right, I’m saying, it doesn’t mean that. But it’s this way we project, it’s so comfortable, know? Or by the words we use, and therefore it causes us to see that person in that way.
So every time someone sees a picture of Osama bin Laden, and you read the words, you see this slimy person, oh look at him, everybody talks this way, oh look at him, he’s got a creepy kind of look on his face, this creepy way he talks, so kind of quiet. But another person who’s gorgeous, who’s very patient and talks like he does, you think, aren’t they gorgeous, look how patient they are. We’re so all the time projecting, you know, using words that sort of it’s like all biased, we’re never really cleanly seeing what’s there. I mean if you show a bunch of pictures to somebody who’s never heard anything about Osama bin Laden and Hitler, and you show them these photos, they’re not going to say they’re going to see evil people. Okay, Hitler’s kind of his dumb looking moustache and everything, you know, he looks a bit sort of ridiculous.
But I mean Osama bin Laden looks like a reasonable human being, you know, he’s got his beard, he’s got his clothes on, he’s kind of he’s like a reasonable human being, he’s done many good things, he’s very generous with his money, he’s very humble, he lives a really basic life, he sacrifices all his happiness and pleasure, he really thinks about others, a group of others, it’s true, not others, but we’re all like that, there’s no difference. George Bush is the same, you know? Sorry, I’m not being rude. Okay, maybe he has got this kind of outrageous philosophy that really says it’s great to kill people, but many people think that but they dare not say it. Honestly, people who have wars think that but they dare not ever admit it.
They’re all kind of walking around thinking they’re so holy. So I mean, really analyse, you break it all down, you see it as life, you listen to it all, you start to see you see a more multifaceted thing happening there, you know, not just this kind of one dimensional evil person, they say he’s this evil person. It’s just so much emotion, know, so much kind of your own the anger in the mind, that’s what’s causing it. The anger in the mind of the people who don’t like Osama bin Laden, you know, there’s anger in their minds. The same in America reading about Timothy McVeigh.
Everyone who talked about him, this cold hearted, evil person. Well, I mean, you analyze him, I’m not trying to defend these people, I’m just saying have you analyze it. You You analyse Timothy McVeigh’s activities, he was very devoted and passionate about his cause, but just everybody who fights a war thinks exactly like he does, collateral damage, you know, children who die. He duly believed he was in a war, he had this determination to do what he had to do, just like a person in a war, but because the activity that he did wasn’t supported by anybody, by a certain government, therefore he’s seen as an evil person, so therefore people project this evilness onto him, they see this evil person. You can see how our mind’s working, we’re so emotional, we’re so extreme, we’re distort.
So it’s it’s how we see our own enemy, okay, not as strong as that maybe, but it’s the same type of approach. Because of various things that they have done, we then project this ugliness onto that person, and therefore you check this one, it’s like the whole time he’s walking around, isn’t it? This person, let’s say it’s a he. We think of them as an enemy all the time, they’re mean and nasty. So even when they’re being kind to their wife, they’re mean and nasty.
Oh, we know the real person, you know? Whenever they’re even just sitting there looking at the sky, or having their breakfast, or relaxing, or having a cup of tea, they’re evil all the time, aren’t they? Because that’s our view of them, so we concretize, based on a few bits of logic of ego, that the whole person is that all the time. When the person whom you loved once has now left you and is living with somebody else. I mean, when you see them smiling, it’s like a stab in your heart, isn’t it?
And you hate them, you know, or the pain is so horrible, cause they’ve left you and now they love somebody else. So when they’re even smiling and happy, and you see that smiling in a very unhappy way, don’t you? It’s like so painful to see them being happy, where somebody else sees a smiling person. So we can see how whatever emotion is inside us, it distorts what we’re seeing. We can see how that happens, you know.
So with the enemy here, we can see this person looks ugly, is ugly all the time, is ugly from the tip of their head to the tip of their toes, it’s all out there inside them, all the time, solid, you know. Well, it’s clearly not true. But because of this view, we therefore definitely do not want them to be happy, do we? We see them as different. We don’t ever think that that person wants to be happy, because as soon as we’re able to see a person wants to be happy, like me, or like my friend, it gives a great space, you know.
But we can’t even bear to think they want to be happy. We don’t even want to think that. Therefore, of course, we don’t want them to be happy, you know. It’s reasonable. So you look at the friend, you know.
And it’s the same kind of thing, you check, it’s the same thing, you know, because they have done a few things good to you, indeed many things, but sometimes very few, but because of past karma you have this strong attachment to this person, so the person looks just incredibly beautiful to you, you can’t believe it. And they’re beautiful from the head to the toes, right? They’re beautiful all the time, whenever you think about them, sitting in their house, walking around, doing this, on the toilet, they’re always beautiful. Your heart is sort of soft, you know? Wherever you think of them, your heart softens.
So of course, you’re just totally able to see that they want to be happy, and as soon as they’re not that your heart breaks, there’s this humanness there, it’s all kind of, okay, attachment helps it happen, but we can see there’s humanity there, you know? But because it’s attachment, we see them as more than they are, we therefore want them to be happy so much, but it’s based this is the trouble, this is the point, as Lama Zopa says, the reason we want them to be happy now, which is to love them, is based on something unstable, it’s based on attachment. So all that openness and warmth everything, and that is love we have, the love we have for them, the wish they’d be happy, it’s wonderful, but it’s based on attachment. You take away the attachment, you just don’t care anymore, do you? You leave them, they become a stranger almost.
Or if they leave you or something, they become an enemy, don’t they? So we can see now we even do have love, there’s no problem, we do have love, but it’s based on attachment. That person, before we fell in love with them, they wanted to be happy just as much as they do now, but we didn’t notice it, we didn’t care, did we? Because they hadn’t touched us. As soon as they touch us, we want them to be happy.
So we can say we want people to be happy, but it’s based on attachment. It’s the only way we know how to have love right now, for people we’re attached to. And all Buddha is saying is, we have the capability of having love, of wanting to be happy, every living being, but we’ve got to change the basis of it, and this is the one of friend, and stranger, you know. The assumptions that friend, enemy, and stranger have are that we believe in one hundred percent, you know, that block us, therefore, profoundly limit us, therefore. You know, at stranger, exactly the same, except this time you don’t care, one way or the other.
Especially if you’re very attached to a person, you can’t even look at the stranger, it’s so hard for him to get your face to look at them, they’re so boring aren’t they? Enemies you can’t stop thinking about them, it’s almost like your enemy is your friend, you can’t stop thinking about them, just like the friend. The stranger, you can’t even get your mind to think about them, they’re so boring, because why? They have neither harmed nor helped you. So conclusion, you don’t care about them either way.
So by getting a bit more objectivity here, recognising the basis, attachment and aversion, we then can start to go beyond that and start to realise that actually, that’s got nothing to do with how they feel. They feel, not just through my projections, which is one where there’s really extreme projections, you can’t see the other person at all as separate from you, not possible. They’re just an extension of yourself, that’s attachment, know, or aversion. But when you can lessen the attachment and aversion and start to see that these three people are equal in wanting to be happy. And it’s easy to prove, you know yourself, you are the friend, the enemy and the stranger for many people, right?
And you know there’s no difference in how you feel from moment to moment, it doesn’t matter whether people see you this way, that way. You you might not even know they’re thinking it at this moment. This is not affecting you at all, you know that consistently you want to be happy every moment, you’re the same every moment. Same for an enemy stranger, you know. I put up here my friend, my enemy, my stranger, parade them in front of you.
I don’t tell you who’s who. You’ve never met any of them. You can’t tell the difference, can you? We don’t see horns coming out of the enemy’s head, wings out of the friend, you know, and boringness coming out of the, you know, it might be three different pictures for you, so where’s the real view, you know, it’s just our own projections, completely. And then that causes us to therefore not care about the strangers, to hate the enemy, and to love the friend, so they’re completely artificial.
They’re not sound bases. Always blumbers over, says they’re unstable. So look what happens when the person you’re in love with stops loving you. It’s like death, isn’t it? Because why?
Because attachment is neediness, it’s dependent, has built up a huge story, a huge fantasy, huge expectations, so now they’re smashing your expectations, they’re not meeting them. That’s why even if the person’s five minutes late, you get mad at them, and you get jealous and freaked out. Because massive expectations, you know. As if unless they do that, I am nothing. So you depend, your whole life, your happiness is dependent upon this person doing what you want.
I mean, it is so scary if you think about it. It’s just unbearable, how can we bear it? We just think it’s normal. So look at how you feel when the person stops loving you. Okay.
If we we struggle with it, and that’s wonderful, that’s what practice is, and then we even when the person goes with someone else, it’s a pain from the beginning, but eventually we can love them, continue to love them, that’s fantastic. That is amazing. And that’s the job, know, that’s what we have to learn to do, go beyond the attachment. But most of the time, the ordinary world, animals, humans, when the attachment ceases, then there’s no love. Love ceases too, the tap of love just turns off.
You don’t care about them anymore. We can see that, you know, so it’s unstable right now, it’s artificial. So we have to try and get some stability of this equanimity, which doesn’t mean you have to leave your friend and move in with your enemy. Okay, if you’re a great Bodhisattva, you probably would, you know? But you know, normal people the way we are, you stay with your friend but you practice giving up the attachment.
You don’t give up the love, you increase the love, but you practice giving up the attachment, the expectations, the neediness, the manipulation, all that stuff. And when you’re with your enemy for five minutes, you practice just being kind of there, freaking out completely, attempting to sort of even know in your heart there’s a human being there. Or if you even have to keep away from it, that’s okay. But in your heart, you change. And then the stranger, while you’re with that boring old stranger, you see them as a real human being.
You keep your face in front of them, you listen to what they’re saying. But we can see even the impulse in us when there’s a lot of people around, you know, we’ve some people we’re close to, some we don’t care about, it’s so easy just to gravitate like a magnet towards the friend, isn’t it? So easy, just go like a magnet, you never think about it, and to absolutely avoid the enemy, and just be bored by the stranger. So even if we’re going, like, in a group, to make the practice, to practice, your best friend could be there, practice sitting next to a stranger, you know, practice sitting next to an enemy, listening to them, one you don’t like, who irritates you. Hear them, you know, listen to them, see them as a real human being, as separate from you, that is your own projections onto them, you know.
This is hard stuff, isn’t it? Here we are, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty in our lives, just floating along following our usual delusions. It might be Hitler delusions, you know? But that’s the instinct within us, just follow the feelings, you know? Follow the feelings.
Follow the feelings. So equanimity, first step. Then there’s a basis, you’ve got a genuine foundation for building up really stable love for sentient beings, which is the wish they’d be happy, you know? Like I said, you don’t have to leave your friend, don’t have to leave your children, no one’s saying that. Just change the basis of the relationship, make it healthy, slowly, slowly.
And when you lessen attachment for one person, you then automatically begin to help lessening the aversion for another. Lessening attachment meaning increasing the love, more stay, you lessen the aversion and therefore you lessen the indifference to the stranger, You’re more able to be with the stranger and actually enjoy their company, you know. I mean the Dalai Lama says whoever he meets is like his best friend, and everybody who meets him says the same thing. It’s amazing. I mean I’ve interviewed for our magazine many different people, seen many different people over the years who’ve been around him.
Police, you know, government officials, ordinary people, Christians, every kind of people. Everybody is in agreement, you know. So you feel like journalists, so many people who have interviewed him. They all say, when you’re with him, just the most natural thing in the world, he’s like your dearest friend. Like you really feel he’s, not in an artificial way at all, just genuinely caring, genuinely just from the heart, like he’s close to you.
Everybody says that. So we can see it’s possible, you know? Is there any questions about all that? Any questions? Yes, go on.
I understand. How do you deal with attachments and projections, how do you deal with that in the relationship with your teacher, your guru? Well, I think my observation, again not being mean about it, just looking at our minds and seeing the West and hearing people talk, that this is a very difficult one for people. This is a very difficult one because the usual mode we have is for the mind to get very excited, and that’s called attachment, when the mind gets over excited. I don’t mean to be horrible about it, got be all sort of boring, I don’t mean that, but the mind gets over exaggerating the qualities of somebody.
So even if they are a holy being, let’s say, like someone who’s really got qualities in their own side, and doesn’t play all the ego games and hook into our rubbish, even if they’re capable of very amazing beings, still we can have huge, many people have huge projections onto their teachers, which is why, and again I keep quoting America, I’m not trying to be rude about America, I’m very happy to live there and people are amazing, you know, but there’s a lot of talk about spiritual stuff there, a lot of people are suing their gurus. I mean I’m not joking, many people are suing their gurus because they feel they’ve been let down by them. Now the problem in this is one, they have jumped in too quickly, because that’s our excited attached mind, you jump in too quickly and you haven’t checked carefully. That’s why the Buddhist approach is you have to check so carefully. Mean there’s a supermarket of spiritual paths out there now, we know that, and so many people who are so called spiritual teachers.
Now okay, in Tibet it was interesting, was a very powerful system, you’d never ever say you’re a teacher, you’d be old before you became a teacher, and it was only because other people called you a teacher and they constantly requested you to teach, you know? But here in the West we don’t even have that concept. To say I want to become a spiritual teacher, I mean that would be an outrageous concept, because it’s arrogant beyond belief, you know? The word Lama in Tibetan, as I said, is a term given out of respect to a person who’s considered a spiritual teacher, so to say you’re a spiritual teacher yourself is at the height of arrogance, you don’t go and get a degree in being a Lama. So there’s a certain term in Tibetan for example called Geshe, at the Buddha house it’s a Geshe, that is a term you get from simply passing exams in a monastery, it’s pretty amazing, they’ve studied for twenty five years, they’re like a computer of knowledge, they’re extraordinary, and they very often are practitioners as well, but that you can say comfortably, yes I’m a Geshe, but you’d never say I’m a Lama, you know.
So in the West, it’s a very common thing. So of course, then we have all this emotion, all this attachment, we meet somebody and they say they’re quite charismatic and they say all these nice words, and we get all excited, and like fall in love, really, it’s like falling in love, get all excited, you know. Then Then you have all these words, you hear all these pure teachings about guru devotion and doing what they say, so we mix all that with all our attachment, not even looking into our minds, not realising it’s like being in love, and then we have all these projections and expectations of this And then because that person, let’s say they are a very skillful teacher, and they’re really trying to work I mean, they’re very skillful therapists. One of my friends said that these Lamas are like the best therapists she’s ever met, and I mean I mean them in the deepest of ways, cause they really know the mind deeply, these holy beings, this is my own experience, they really know the mind, it’s astonishing. So let’s say the person’s a valid teacher, and a person who’s got attachment is hooking like crazy, isn’t it?
Hooking like, that’s what attachment does, it gets you to hook and hook and manipulate and want them to love you, just like you do with a person who’s your boyfriend, you know. But this person’s not gonna be responding, they’re gonna be responding in a very clean way, in a very clean, unneurotic way. That can be misinterpreted by a person with attachment as being rejection or, you understand my point, so then they can get angry and start projecting and go crazy, know. And I’ve heard many people go on and on and on and on. Now okay, the other scenario is if the person isn’t a valid spiritual teacher then you’re in big trouble.
If they’re not a valid spiritual teacher and haven’t really got qualities and have got a lot of ego, then the person jumps in and gets all excited and says this is my guru now, then you’re in big trouble, you’ve got a recipe for disaster, know? Bad enough even if the person’s holy, you’ve got your own projections. So this is why it is so important to check carefully, and really not and this is where for us in the West we talk about feelings and following feelings, it sounds like a good thing, and so there’s a very particular way we’re talking about it here, that when it’s not a good thing, because if we can see how we have strong delusions that lie to us, that cause us to project onto other people our own anger, own harm, our own hurt, our own jealousy, you name it, then it’s that’s what I mean by following feelings. We right now in our life follow, if it feels good, we figure the person must be good, if we go to a person and get all excited, we figure the person must be good, But look at the number of relationships, if the person turns into being a rapist or a liar or they kill them.
Look at all the people who loved Hitler, they felt very good. Excuse me, they got led up a garden path, know, he’s a maniac. So feeling good is not the criterion for something’s being good, that’s what’s so difficult for us. So just because we get all excited, a lot of spiritual teachers are very charismatic, naturally, if they’re good or not good, if they’ve got qualities or not, they can be charismatic. Dalai Lama, would say, is quite charismatic, but somehow, what a relief, he’s a good person too, phew, we got the lottery there, he’s as clean as a whistle, you know, what a relief.
But some people are not like that, so then, that’s why we’ve got to be so careful, so, so careful. Especially you’ve got to have the really high level of practice where you’re starting to see the person as a Buddha. Again, even that, we can talk about that, say we’re Tibetan tradition, we’ve got Lamas, if we’ve got a lot of attachment, emotional, deluded, and so projecting like crazy, and saying we see them as so pure and whether we’re seeing them as the Buddha, again it’s like an emotional feeling, but then we see them picking their nose or something, doing something that we think they shouldn’t be doing, we get shocked and think oh my god, how can a Buddha pick their nose? So then we start having doubts, because again we’re basing it all on emotion. Whereas the real one, if we’ve really checked carefully, really got good strong, good karmic connection with a good person, we’re so fortunate that we have, and really checked carefully and really make all the prayers and aspirations do the right thing and practice and all that, then we’re able no matter what they do, because it’s so easy to project fault onto anybody, I mean you can project fault onto anybody all the time, that you don’t project your own faults.
And when you’re starting to see a fault, you you catch it and you know it’s your own mind, you see this is my own mind. And one of the key practices when you really have a solid relationship with a guru is to see whatever they do as a teaching for you. And what this really is a practice in, is learning to not believe in what you’re seeing, because our mind is projecting all the time, we can’t separate now truth from fiction, because our mind is so riddled with delusions. So the practice in seeing the person as pure isn’t just some kind of a holy thing, it really is actually learning to separate the deluded views from the truth. And if you see a person, let’s say, many people like some Lamas have a lot of students, so they can’t always be with every student.
Sometimes might feel that you can’t get a meeting with your lama, you keep making appointments and they get cancelled, you can easily start getting paranoid, that they don’t love you, they prefer this person, I mean the mind is just completely naturally like this, with all our delusions. That’s the commonest thing you hear all the time. So when you’ve really got real devotion, whatever it is that arises, even if you don’t get an appointment for two years, you see it as a teaching for your mind, you’re completely content with it, you have no projections, you know, that’s what pure view means. Now that’s a tough job, that’s a really tough job to do, so it’s not an easy thing to have a decent relationship with a teacher, even with the one that’s a pure teacher, not to mention one that’s a bad teacher. So it’s not an easy job, but that’s what the job is.
This is the job in general, is to have pure view, not dump our faults onto other people, We’re really trying to practice it very powerfully onto the Guru because it’s a very perfect one to practice very quickly. This is why it’s not enough to say you’re a Buddhist, don’t even know what attachment is. We say the word attachment, we say the word love, we have a vague notion, but until we are very precise and analytical in the way we’re trying to do here, like I’ve been saying, how can you learn to know the difference? You can’t possibly, until you hear the teachings. Until you go to the teachings and hear exactly Buddha’s view of the mind and how it functions, and you debate about it, and think about it, and then you meditate on it.
Until you do this, how on earth can you change your mind? You cannot. So it’s not an easy thing. Anyone else here? Yeah.
Absolutely, please do. Yes. I understand, yes. Okay. I meant to recommend books.
The thing is, there are many books, some written, especially the ones written the written books that are edited translations of the Lama’s teachings, and then there are books that are edited translations of many Western people, Western teachers. And so the way I’m talking here is just the Dharma, but it’s sort of I’m trying to think of a book to talk about the way I’m talking about it. I don’t know, there’s very Western there’s one book, there’s many books, of course there’s many books. Any book like the Dalai Lama, okay, he doesn’t go too much about karma in summer but he does. Dalai Lama’s books seem to range between two extremes, there are those that are the popular teachings, I’m not putting them down, they’re I’m The Art of Happiness and those kinds of books, that are really just very general, open, broad, wonderful, non specific Buddhist books.
Then there are the other books of the Dalai Lama because he’s an amazing scholar, and very detailed, very analytical, very precise. It seems sometimes that when new readers they’re a bit kind of complex, you can’t get your head around them unless you’ve had some teachings. So one should select, you know, which ones are appropriate. Then there are all these other books, a whole range of them, by again, like I say, different authors. Oh no, just lured me, let me think now.
Well the one that’s a kind of a classical presentation, in a much more detailed form of what we’re discussing this weekend, like I mentioned already, is a book called Liberation in the Palm of Your Hand by Wisdom Publication. That’s a very traditional presentation of this path, the Lamrim, very traditional. And it lists all the things about karma, but doesn’t talk about it so much in the way that I’m talking about in this kind of loose, easy going way here. Then you’ve got lots of those little books, lots of books that are commentaries on what they call the Lamrim which present these various stages. The ones that go on about the mind and karma in this way, I can’t say that I know too many, I’m afraid.
There’s a book by an American called Alan Wallace, Tibetan Buddhism from the Ground Up. That’s quite a practical presentation, I think. You know, kind of Western style of the path. Alan Wallace, I don’t know if you sell it here. Tibetan Buddhism from the Ground Up.
Oh gosh, I should look in the bookstore anyway, let me see what’s there. At lunchtime I’ll do that, and if there’s anything there that I recommend otherwise I’ll think about some more. I can’t say more than that right now. Yeah. Sorry.
Okay. Yeah, okay. I think the approach here is that the more we work on our mind, the more we lessen the delusions, the depression, the anxiety, the fears, the anger, the attachment, naturally we’re going to get a lot more energy, just natural. Why we don’t have much energy now? Okay, can be sometimes for some of us completely strongly physical, what’s physical problems, but for most of us why we get so exhausted, in Buddhist terms, is because our mind is full of all the pressures, and the delusions, and the stress, and the anxiety, and all the rest.
So obviously, as you develop your mind more and more, and you get rid of these, you just naturally get more and more clean, kind of strong energy, so you need less sleep. You can do more, you can achieve more, you have more stamina, more enthusiasm, more perseverance, more joy, more all these qualities, it’s just a natural thing. So Buddhism says it’s very much coming from the mind, so eventually when you get very advanced in your practice, you get to the point, like I said, you’re one of these great practitioners, they don’t need sleep at all. Generally speaking, that enough? Is that what you mean?
How do we relate the idea, say for example, of being an alcoholic and you’re going to the three, know, you’re doing the twelve steps, where they talk about it as being a disease, with the idea, the Buddhist idea, that it’s the mind. Well I think there’s no contradiction at all, it’s just a question of how you define disease, you know, mean Buddha’s not saying it’s not a disease, of course it’s a disease, attachment’s a disease. The difference is we can see, you know, like I said before when Buddha’s saying we’re all junkies, that’s just my phrase. He’s meaning it literally because desire is the problem, attachment is the junkie mind. It’s just a question of the extent of it, and it’s a question sometimes of the object.
So we can see obviously certain objects are far more powerful. It’s clear, you usually don’t talk about being a carrot junkie. Although we still approve that if you eat enough carrots you’re gonna die and get very sick. But just that there are some objects, obviously, that are more strong, that have a much more strong effect on the body. It’s just obvious.
So that’s clear. But the real emphasis in Buddhism is, once you’ve gone beyond the object, so you remove yourself from certain objects, because you have to do that, now you begin the actual job of cleaning of changing your mind, of seeing that it’s coming from the mind. The the body is a part of it, of course it is, it’s clear. I mean, depression, for example, the common view in the West is that it’s a physical thing, it’s a chemical imbalance, so you take your Prozac or your serotonin or whatever to balance that. Well that doesn’t contradict anything.
That’s perfectly fine. Buddhism, Tibetan medicine says the same thing. Tibetan medicine has its way of describing different, using different terms. They don’t talk about chemical imbalance, they talk about the imbalance of the elements. So you know, the elements in the body in such a way, the imbalance of this and there’s too much of this, and so you’ve taken certain herbal medicines that adjust the elements of the body, so that then your mind can have space to start doing its job.
Well, there’s no contradiction, the body and mind are absolutely interdependent. The difference is in the West we tend to say it is all the body, because we don’t even recognize a thing called the mind that is not physical. And the Buddhist one says the mind is the source, and once we work on that, with the help of working on the body, we can then begin to change. So even with depression, as long as we fine, take your serotonin, no problem. But as long as we believe it is only chemical, we will always be enslaved.
But if we do recognize it’s still physical, take your serotonin, which helps the body calm itself down, helps the mind get out of the funk a little bit, and so then you’ve got some space to work on your mind. It’s not just a question of relying one hundred percent, that’s the junky mind again. When you think I’m happy when I have my piece of cake, then obviously, logically, you haven’t got your cake, you’re not happy. Well Buddha’s saying you can be happy whether you have cake. You can find a way to be happy even eventually without having to take serotonin, because when you’ve worked on your mind, you’ve then purified even your subtler physical energies.
That’s what Tibetan medicine works on, that you do certain practices. You know, sickness, general, I mean, not even calling it mental things, just something like cancer, that comes from past karma, which is the mind. The actions we did in a past life create the cause for us to be born with the body now that has, you know, cells that go berserk. That’s due to our past karmic energy. We even created that.
So even with practice now, you take certain medicines plus you combine it with certain practices, purification practices, practices on compassion, you can completely heal yourself. Completely heal yourself of the physical things. So it’s just a question of how you the the perspective on it, what you see, you know? Where the real source is. It’s not just one or the other.
It’s obviously everything’s interdependent. Do you see what I’m saying? You poor girl. I know. Sure.
That’s it. I understand. This is why in this tradition we have these visualization meditations. Were you here for the morning meditation? Okay.
So can you even imagine how those kinds of approaches can work, or not? Because they’re not directly analytical, they’re more visualizing. They’re really working in the same, they’re using a different tool to develop the same qualities. So you know, for us, a balanced meditation would be some concentration with no thoughts, or tempting to have no thoughts, some kind of a concentration mode, some analysis, some visualization, so you get a nice balance. We all have to know, so certain times it is inappropriate to analyze, because like this train that’s running, as you just say, and it’s not effective analysis, it’s just going berserk, there’s a thermostat there.
And how do you get the silence, where does the silence come in? Well that’s in the first kind of concentration. We did the one this morning that was actually using the breath, were you here yesterday? Morning. And we did the very first five minutes of watching the breath.
Okay? Okay, don’t expect your mind to be silent straight away, that’s fantasy. But the aim of that meditation is to keep the attention on one thing, which implies not following the chattering. So that’s what you’re training your mind to do in those types of meditation, is harness the mind so that we begin to have some control over what kind of thoughts arise, which seems insane to us now because we have no control at the moment at all, but eventually when your mind is really advanced and you’ve got great concentration, the mind is this highly flexible thing that can think or not think thoughts at will. Can you imagine how amazing that would be?
But that’s what we’re training to do. First of all, there’s two different things. In the concentration mind, you’re trying to harness it, focus it, so you’ve got some control, and you can start putting your thoughts in a direction that you want to go. And then secondly, with the analysis, Buddha says now we’ve got this analytical mind, that’s one on a thermostat, out of control, one hundred miles an hour, and it’s all the wrong thoughts. So it’s triple trouble.
What we’re trying to do is still, given that we’ve got that, use it to begin to you know, by having concentration you begin to hopefully get some control over it. And then we get by sinking, by the analytical meditations, we’re starting to put in the correct thoughts, and whether they’re correct or not is up to you to decide, if you want to follow the Buddha’s way of sinking, okay? But if one decides and wants to think the way Buddha does, we call those the correct thoughts, just say having thought about them, then we start to change the neurotic thoughts with the good thoughts. So when the mind, even if it’s analytical, is full of all the appropriate thoughts, it’s already a peaceful mind. The mind is unpeaceful now, not because it thinks too much, but because the mind is out of control, and because all the stuff we’re thinking is deluded, or much of it is deluded, that’s why we’re unhappy.
Do you see my point? Yes, absolutely. Yes, sometimes you do more visualization because you really just feel you need that, sometimes you do more analysis because you gotta really sort something out, sometimes you just do more concentration maybe, you know? There’s a way of even concentrating on using the form of the Buddha, and that’s up to whether oneself develops a Buddha’s practice. You’d visualise the Buddha in front and you could then at some point, we did it this morning just using the lights and everything, but also you could set up the visualisation and then you could just train yourself to concentrate just on the picture.
That’s used often as a basis, instead of the breath often one uses the image as the basis for concentration, when one begins to develop a practice. Does that make sense? In general though, a good, intelligent mind is absolutely what’s necessary. We don’t have to use it well, that’s all. Nothing wrong with a lot of thoughts.
Nothing wrong with a lot of thoughts. You just have to control them and have appropriate thoughts. Does that make sense? Yes, selective. Yes, this may be the wrong approach, be selective.
I’m the same kind of person, and even in the beginning when I first became a Buddhist, so berserk energy, I couldn’t sit for the first seven years, I’d burst, couldn’t sit still. As soon as I had to sit down and do meditation, you know. So I just decided, okay, I’ll do my practices, but I’m gonna do them on the walk, when I’m walking, and when I’m sitting, and in the car, or whatever, and then using, also using my energy to try and do useful things. So there’s various ways, we’ve got of mental energy, lot of creative energy, use it to be beneficial. Don’t just try and suffocate the energy.
That’s what I started to do when I first got involved in being spiritual, I understand and I was starting to suffocate my energy, was becoming like hopeless and all kind of internal and kind of all passive. Completely mistaken. Wrong understanding, you know. This approach especially, okay, different approaches, there are different Buddhist traditions that use different approaches. I’m using here this particular one, the stress in the Mahāyāna, that it’s all grist for the mill, find a skillful way to use, you know?
Do you see what I mean? Anyone else? Maybe it’s tea time. Have a cup of tea, okay? See you at ten thirty or ten forty or something?
Thank you very much. In the tradition there are two main kind of packages of teachings. They’ve used different approaches, different ways of analyzing, different approaches to how to develop these qualities. This very first one, the foundation of it, as I said, is this basis, this equanimity, this genuine recognition of the equality of all beings in terms of their wishing to be happy. It sounds a very fine point, but that’s the way all these kind of contemplations go.
They’re very precise. They’re very accurate, not kind of broad based getting a good feeling and hoping for the best. It really is working deeply with the way the mind sees things and changing gradually. So in one particular package of teachings, the next type of contemplation to do, is a very odd one for us, but it’s just a way of, again, of expanding our minds and that is to think how all sentient beings have been our mother. This is a weird one for us because we think sort of Buddha’s trying to make us suffer, know, because we don’t I mean, it sounds a bit of an odd one.
What does this mean? Well, really it’s a numbers thing. What we’re trying to do, remember what I said, is to expand our minds. Unfortunately, we seem to have this tradition of not liking our mothers so much and blaming them for all the problems. Isn’t it? So it seems like a very weird contemplation to do.
But there’s some logic to it. So if wanted us to use that use another term, then it’s fine. As the Dalai Lama says, well, think of someone who’s nurtured you.. Well, here the main point, the very first step is to have some strong sense that we’ve got this connection with all living beings from countless, countless lives. And the logic here is, and again it’s not a way we think at all, but by contemplating again and again it can expand our mind hugely.
Some get to get some genuine sense that because we’ve all got beginningless mind, therefore we’ve had beginningless lives, so it follows logically we bumped into each other beginningless times. I mean, doesn’t sound like something comfortable for us. It doesn’t seem something at all reasonable. It’s an outrageous idea but it follows logically fitting with Buddha’s explanation of there being beginningless mind. If we’ve bumped into countless sentient beings countless times, it follows logically they’ve been our mother.
They’ve nurtured us in all kinds of lives, all kinds of times. This is something just a way of thinking this way, to try and learn to think this way again and again to get some genuine sense for this, some sense of the truth of this. They say that the person who’s really contemplated this very deeply, doing all the other meditations as well, is a person who Anytime they see any living being, an ant, a dog, a cockroach, doesn’t matter, it’s like this spontaneous feeling of, oh mother, kind of kindness coming to the heart. And it sounds funny, doesn’t it? We don’t think this way at all.
So the next idea that comes from this one, all these are contemplated very deeply using many, many ways of looking and changing the mind, changing the usual assumptions about reality. Is to then think, well, you know, to how kind how mothers have been kind to us. So my feeling is we should add another meditation in here about just how I mean, what does it mean they’ve been kind? Because we actually think the opposite sometimes. So I suppose if we look at some of our assumptions in the west, then it’s reasonable we think our mothers are to blame for our problems because obviously we think that our mother made us, don’t we?
So then because there’s a strong assumption that if our mother made us, and then she’s a less than perfect person, well it seems a bit shocking that she should dare go along and make us, isn’t it? She should have waited till she was at least a decent person before she made us. That’s how we feel, isn’t it? It’s very strong in us. Actually, it’s the basis of a lot of our psychological models in the west because we’re all desperately trying to find the reason for something.
Well, the first person we can turn to, obviously, is the person who gave birth to us. It seems Well you know, as we’ve been saying, the Buddha doesn’t have this view, know. That our consciousness, if you like, you can say we chose our mom. Sorry, don’t blame your mom. Know, that due to karma, strong karmic connection, there we were from the previous death, certain virtuous karma ripened.
We’re on auto pilot by now and then we go zapping, running like a magnet towards that mother’s womb. So who chose whom, know? Who chose whom? I mean, Buddha doesn’t say technically that we chose to have the actual volition like you choose to walk out that door, that same thing, but our karma, the karma we created set us up to be yet again after countless lives together, being with that particular mother, or that particular father, or whatever you like to say. So already, just this alone is a very profound point, know, can help us really shift the emphasis from this one of blame and all of the stuff that we tend to have, you know.
Because yes, of course our mothers are deluded. I mean, we’re surprised, they’re in saṃsāra like us, Come on. But when you have this shift of emphasis that you actually created the cause to have that mother, that father, that school, that scenario in your life, it’s a very different, different view. You can hear it even intellectually. But it takes time to psychologically come around to this one.
And so then the the the experiential implication of this is eventually, there’s a strong sense, as we talked about of karma, a strong sense of ownership, you know. So then immediately we we can have so even let’s say we’ve got a mother who hasn’t been so kind to us, it’s very common, of course. Plenty of mothers are unkind to their babies. We know that. We’re definitely in the west.
But nevertheless, you know, with this view of karma, with this view, yeah, of karma, there are still many ways we can see that person’s been kind. So what it demands that we do is really, really redefine what we mean by kindness. You check this one. Right now, our view of when a person is kind to us is is is defined by our needs being met, isn’t it? In other words, it’s defined by attachment.
So as long as a person gives you what you want, you call them kind. Do you see my point? We don’t ever think a person’s kind when they don’t give us what we want. You go to a restaurant and you order chocolate cake and the person brings the wrong cake or it’s a bad cake or it’s a cold cake or it’s a stale cake or whatever, something you don’t want, even she worked just as hard as she would have if she brought you the right cake. She wrote it in the pad, she walked away, she gave it to the cook, she thought about it, she presented you a plate and a serviette and a knife, excuse me, she did just as hard as work, but because you didn’t get what you want you don’t think she’s kind.
You’re rude to