y When the Chocolate Runs Out — 2015-08-02

Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.

About this talk. In this three-hour-sixteen-minute teaching, Ven Robina Courtin tackles what happens when attachment doesn’t get what it wants. She begins with the Buddhist view of meditation: not relaxation, but developing focus and insight. She explains the two main practices — concentration and analytical meditation — and how concentration training is foundational for real change. She then leads a guided visualization of Green Tārā, using the deity as a mirror for compassion. The second half pivots to attachment itself: dissatisfaction, craving, and the habit of distorting reality. Using direct examples — killing a mouse, euthanasia, self-defense — Robina unpacks how motivation shapes karma, why pleasant feelings aren’t proof of good action, and how past karma creates present circumstances. Aimed at practitioners with meditation experience, though the Q&A welcomes newcomers.

File metadata (for organising)

File: 01 WCRO 2015 08 02.mp3

UUID: 3461ca11-3e5c-4ab1-8258-92532de83473

Teacher: Ven Robina Courtin

Collection: y When the Chocolate Runs Out (Ven Robina Courtin)

Date: 2015-08-02

Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide

Duration: 196.8 minutes

Words: ~32,908

Can you hear me? Yes. Coming out. Is it? Yes.

Okay. Well, let’s start with a few thoughts, a little prayer. Bring us in the right direction for this hour. Kind of focusing, like, stating our goal. You know?

We always need a goal. You know what? You need to go you know, sitting on the couch, you gotta go to the kitchen. That’s your goal. So that puts you in the right direction.

If you’re not sure where you’re going when you stand out, you walk around in circles. Very confusing. So we need to put we’re stay in our purpose. What’s our purpose for this hour? Well, we’re gonna first talk a little bit, in brief, about the meaning of meditation because there’s many, many thoughts about it, but we’re use the Buddhist view of meditation and the reason why we should do it, and then we’re gonna do a little bit.

So the reason we’re gonna do this in the long term, Dalai Lama always would say his holiness would always say, always aspire to do what is most beneficial. And if we can, long term, better than short term. Of course, for Buddhists, that’s kind of like countless lives. You know? Long term goal is our own perfection, our own the development of our own amazing, marvelous, perfect quality.

Buddha says we’ve all we’ve all got that potential. So we think that’s the long term goal. So we’re here to develop our long term, our per our goal, our our potential. Rid the mind of all the rubbish, grow all the goodness. And even why that?

So we can help others. We’re all living this world together. So think like that. That’s our reason to be here for the second hour. We’ll sing a little prayer in Tibetan that expresses that.

And the first two lines of the prayer are expressing for those of us who kind of identify with being Buddhist, it’s expressing our it’s reiterating our reliance on the Buddha and the Dharma, his his teachings, just reminding us, you know, keeping us on track. So let’s just briefly talk about get clear the what what meditation is, you know, according to the Buddhist tradition. Because everybody in the room will probably have a different definition, and we’re allowed to. We’re the boss of our lives, not Buddha. But if we’re gonna do, quote, unquote, Buddhist meditation, we better be clear what he means by that.

Otherwise, we’re just making it up, and that’s just plain silly. You know? So it’s kind of interesting that the Tibetan works extremely interesting. The Tibetan word to meditate, the verb to meditate is always a shock to hear what it means. It’s not what we think at all.

It’s the verb to familiarize, to become familiar with. You know? So what does that mean? Well, two things. Two things.

And while we understand this, we then you know, we we need some context. The the the purpose of to meditate to become you’re trying to become familiar with two things, that which is virtuous and that which is true. So, basically, this is the entire Buddhist path. You know, Buddha talks you hear about the wisdom teachings. You hear about wisdom.

One of the key things the Buddha is saying is the extent to which our minds are caught up in neurosis and delusions is the extent to which two things, we are miserable and therefore nonvirtuous, therefore harming others. In fact, they’re all related or, you know, when you hear virtue and nonvirtuous, Buddha is very clear about that. It’s just a it’s a technical term for actions. Nonvirtuous means an action that you do that harms another. I mean, look at the world.

You know? Non virtue and virtue is an action you do that benefits another. So the the reason sentient beings harm each other, Buddha says, is because our minds are full of neurosis, self centered nonsense. Ego ego trips, you know, attachment of anger and fear and jealousy and depression, low self esteem, and all this. We know that stuff backwards, upside down.

So really what Buddha is saying is right now, being a deluded, a sentient being, being in saṃsāra, we are very familiar with the neuroses and therefore very familiar with non virtue. And then in turn, because of all this, we are then out of sync with reality. So familiarizing our mind with how things do exist, which, you know, brings us to become virtuous. They’ve got this utter connection, which is very surprising. To think of being a good person and think of being a wise person, those words, we don’t connect in our world at all.

But wisdom for the Buddha is the extent to you know, ignorance, as you said, would you caught up in a nonsense because they lead you up guardian path and cause the world to appear all wrongly. So wisdom, as it were, is about ridding your mind of rubbish and growing the goodness? It’s not a complicated idea, actually. It’s very down very down to earth. So the purpose of any kind of thing that’s called meditation is for this.

In the end, all of Buddhist practices are this. So there’s two kinds of meditation. Buddhism, millions of techniques, but two main modes, two main ways of using our mind because our mind meditates, not the body. You know, one of the first kind is is a crucial one, and this is coming from the Hindus. You know, these amazing Indians more than three thousand years ago, the Dalai Lama often refers to.

They’re the ones who came up with this extraordinary technique that enables a person to plumb the depths of their own mind to degrees of subtlety and refinement that we don’t even posit as existing in our culture, in our models of the mind. So this is astonishing that these amazing Indians came up with this, and Buddha came out of that tradition. And this this this technique is known right now as mindfulness. It’s it’s based on this technique, which is a skillful psychological technique that enables us to focus the mind. But it’s just the beginning.

It’s not the end result. And then on the basis of that, we need to do the second mode of meditation, which is the one that helps us get the wisdom. We just they call it insight. So it’s a great word in English. In many other languages, there’s no good word for it, but it’s really a great word.

Getting insight into how things are. You know? So there’s and there’s many ways of doing that one. There’s one method of getting insight. You you learn it’s they call it in in Tibetan in Tibetan Buddhism, they call it analytical meditation.

And we’ll go, wow. What’s that? Analytical meditation. Well, I’m really sorry to disappoint you. Using twenty first century language, it’s called to think.

It’s a fancy fourteenth century way of saying to think, familiarizing your knowledge with it, familiarizing yourself with something by analyzing it. That’s a long phrase. It just means to think about it. And guess what? We call it learning.

So it’s nothing cosmic, and I really mean this. But the when we hear the word meditate, I can’t describe how we use that common sense. Unbelievable. You know? So there’s two so there’s okay.

So the anytime you sit down here in the room, some of you come on this day, other you you’ll do a little analysis. You’ll do a little analytical analytical meditation, won’t you? Because someone will sit there and go blah blah, and you should think about it, don’t you? Well, guess what? We all know that one.

We know that one. And that’s all we have to learn to do really well. Why? Because we’re trying to familiarize ourselves with the Buddha’s view of the universe, which is what we’re choosing to do if we’re Buddhists. The first one, though, is the concentration one.

And that’s actually crucial. You can’t think about anything if you can’t focus. You know? So it’s practical. But so, okay, this brings us then.

If we think about the concentration technique, one of the biggest misconceptions about its purpose is to relax. Listen. We are all mad, so we need to relax. But this is absolutely, clearly speaking, totally not a relaxation technique. This is one of the biggest misconceptions that leads people to sort of such chaos.

It is not a relaxation technique. Listen. Eventually, when you’ve accomplished this, you’ll be so relaxed. You won’t believe it, but it’s not the goal. In fact, the beginning, because our mind’s like a wild dog, we know that.

And, you know, from the second we wake up until the second we go to sleep, we know there’s nonstop raving on underneath the surface until, of course, it vomits out the mouth when it’s really severe. We know this, and we take it for granted. You know? So we can so the and then, of course, all the stress and the dramas that are going on, then we naturally desperately wanna go. Mhmm.

We want it to go away. And so we hear that meditation will help us relax. But it’s not the perk not the point. The point is to to learn. The key point is of this concentration is to practice this skill to not constantly follow every thought, mindlessly sink into the conversations until you go nuts, which is what we’re doing all the time.

If the goal is to you can’t make first of you cannot make all the thoughts go away even immediately. There’s utter nonsense. So usually, we think we’re a complete failure because, actually, we think we’re even our minds are getting worse, but they’re not. So we’re noticing. The goal isn’t to stop all the thoughts and make them go away.

And the second, isn’t to relax and just sort of you know? In fact, any you speak to any serious meditator, they say you’ve gotta use incredible effort, mental effort. Why? Because the mind, we do not want to not follow our thoughts. We are addicted to following our thoughts.

We can’t stop following the thoughts. So the goal is to practice focusing on something. Short term, you you take something, the concentration technique. You take something simple like the breath, and you’re using it as your focal point. And you you just you decide, you know, for, like, five minutes, ten minutes, and believe me, that’s good quality to to pay attention to that thing.

That’s it. That’s that’s it. It’s it’s a an agnostic could do it. It’s not religious in any way or form. You know?

It’s a technique. It’s a skill to develop. So you need to be really alert. Because if you sort of sit and then sink and some people some people can sit very quietly. So and they often think they’re good meditators because you can sit there forty minutes without moving.

I’m sorry. No. That’s not a sign of success at all. The sign of success is if fifty times a minute, you grab yourself, you catch your mind wandering off, and you bring it back to the breath. Fifty times a minute.

If you do that, you that’s a successful meditation. But but but sort of sinking into the comfort which some people can have, and then sinking you have a good meditation because your mind sort of becomes quiet. It’s called dullness, and it’s it’s it’s absolutely the opposite of success. So it’s really important to be clear what you’re trying to achieve. You know?

Because the biggest the when I teach this to get this this this this technique, concentration meditation, they talk about the two main obstacles to the success of getting the single point of this. And this and we and we run between these all the time. It’s either when you sit down, your mind gets overexcited, you can’t stop thinking, and you you can’t focus because your mind has gone berserk. We understand that one. But, you know, you try to go sleep one night.

Four hours later, you know, it’s berserk. That one we know. Overexcitement. The other extreme when you sit down is your mind becomes dull. And if you, you know, if you if you don’t completely go to sleep, then you think it’s a good meditation.

But often, it can easily lead to going to sleep. So dullness and excitement, these are the tendencies of our mind. So we’re trying to sort of find this invisible place between these two, which is what concentration is. You know? So concentration and this is my way of saying it.

You know you know yourself when you’re wide awake and wound up, the mind’s really sharp, isn’t it? You get lots of jobs done. Well, that’s that’s excitement mode, but we make it useful if we can in our daily life. And you’re really, really sharp. Many things do this, do that, fix this, fix that.

You’re on the ball. You know? That’s there’s a sharpness there, which is a brilliant quality, but the mind’s berserk. So concentration, you gotta keep the sharpness but without the berserk. And then you look at the dullness when the mind calms down, but you become dull and sleepy, but you’re also fairly quiet.

So with with concentration, you want the quietness without the sleeping and the sharpness without the berserk. Can you hear that? And that’s almost impossible. So it’s like they talk about this technique is divide is is described in nine stages. And if people you know, it takes years to cultivate it, years up in the mountains, giving up friends and rock and roll.

Believe me. Put us at home in between doing things. This is astonishing thing. And it needs enormous rigor. It needs the right place, the right environment.

It needs a lot of a lot of past practice, a lot of past, you know, years and years to really be able to do this. And it’s phenomenal energy that takes to find this invisible place in the mind where we don’t we’ll never have it, you know, while we’re wide awake and wind up or dead asleep. You know? So it’s a it’s an extraordinary technique. It needs great discipline, a lot of morality, a lot of perseverance.

Really, it’s incredible. And we all got potential for this. But we can start. We can just start with five minutes in the morning to start your day. Fantastic.

So it’s not a relaxation technique. Some people, it’s not great effort to sit there. Your legs are hurting. You know, your mind’s irritated, but you make the effort to pay attention to that one thing. You notice you’re still berserk, you bring your mind back to the breath.

As I said, if you did it fifty times a minute for three minutes, but you brought your mind back to the breath, you didn’t space out, then that’s a successful meditation. It’s like you’re training yourself. It’s a training. You know? And the other trouble because of we’re all got so much attachment for comfort because we know our minds are berserk.

That’s how marvelous we’re looking for techniques to stop being berserk. That’s fantastic. Then we sort of get a bit like a junkie when it comes to meditation sinking, oh, that’ll make me relax. That’ll make me stop being berserk, and we humrily do it, hoping all the pain will go away. You know, I heard some one person say one time, oh, I tried to meditate yesterday.

It didn’t work. That’s like if you’re gonna go to the gym and look like Arnie Schwarzenegger overnight. It’s bizarre. You know? And that shows our attachment because we can’t stand the pain.

We just desperately want it to go away. But treating meditation as a quick fix is like, again, a nightmare. Totally not the point. It’s a long term thing. And in fact, you know, in the first of the nine stages, when they describe in, you know, brief, like, this technique.

They say, one of the signs of success at number one, when you start, one of the signs of success is you think you’re getting worse. But actually, you’re not. It’s like when you go to the gym. You you you’ve discovered muscles you didn’t know you had. The pain is much worse than it was when you’re sitting comfortably watching telly the day before.

But you know you’re not getting worse. You know it’s this good sign, and that’s the way we think here. Because what we’re trying to do is focus this crazy, my dear, that you’ve never tried to do. It’s not our culture. So it’s an astonishing thing we’re trying to do.

But then also the bigger point is the focusing will bring for us, and we absolutely have to to do this. And this is brings us to the second mode. We’ve gotta become familiar with the contents of our mind. But the Buddha’s view is we can radically transform this mind. We can radically reconfigure all of our thoughts.

This is what the process is in in, you know, Buddha’s technique every day, being your own therapist as Lama Yeshe puts it. So if you can think of these two modes in a simple way, the first one, you get a bit of focus, few minutes to focus your mind, then you go to the second mode, and, you know, if you’re, you know, doing your your Buddhist studies, let’s say, you go home, you do your focus, and then you take the topic that you just studied. And you go through and you familiarize your mind with it. Well, it’s called homework. You know?

We all know it. If you learn the piano, you go home and you familiarize yourself on the piano for ten minutes until it becomes more experiential. Well, that’s all you’re trying to do here. You know? So in a casual way using the second mode, you don’t sit down, open it, you you you bought these books and get the business of karma, this one, that one, think about.

You think about your problems. You had a drama with your boss today. So you go home, sit down, sit quiet. You know, instead of vomit it out to your husband or somebody, which is the usual thing we do, you go home, you get your focus, and you sit there and you think it through with the wish to try and comprehend your part of the deal, what happened, he said this, you said that, and then taking responsibility for your own part, your own anger, your own hurt, your own resentment, thinking it through. That’s a really intelligent, amazing, wonderful thing to do.

This is a practical way of using the skill that Buddha’s talking about that we can do. I mean, Buddha doesn’t own this approach. We do this every day, but he runs with this as expert of this approach. You know? Are we human again?

Yeah. That’s not cosmic. It’s just hard work because everything in us, when we’ve got all the delusions, everything in us wants to blame everybody else. We can’t bear to look at our own thoughts. And the usual familiarizing we do now, if the boss is mean to us, we just become obsessed with what he did was wrong.

We we we become familiar with anger. We familiarize our minds for hours with anger and hurt. Here, we’re trying to familiarize our minds with with with responsibility, our self recognize our own delusions, and learning to try and change them. And that’s how it works. It takes great mental energy to wanna do that.

Great discipline. So there’s another kind of meditation where we they call visualization. These are used a lot in Buddhism. So, you know, in the body, a path where you all these techniques for for developing compassion, one step at a time, this series of, like, little eleven techniques, like, one package. And they’re very simple.

They’re just using your thinking. You get some focus, but you’re thinking things through. So equanimity, for example, you know, you visualize in front of you an enemy, the mean boss. To the left, your beloved because, you know, you haven’t had a fight yet, so you adore him. And to the right, a stranger, the next door neighbor who’s faced you just know enough to put them there, enemy friend and stranger.

Well, for the good of you, that’s the contents of the universe. There’s no fourth category. The objects of our attachment who appear gorgeous to us and wanna go towards them. There are the objects of our aversion who upset us and hurt us and we don’t like. Use the label enemy.

It’s okay. And the other one, ninety nine point nine nine percent, we couldn’t care this about them. They’re drop dead. They’re called strangers because they’ve rather hard or helped us. So these are point to these three main delusions.

So that type of meditation, you you get some focus, but you’re not trying to stop the thoughts. You’re trying to use your thoughts in a coherent way. So you visualize an enemy, a friend, or a stranger, and you think through these different logical things to argue with egos and trans misconceptions. This is a a massive job that you’re trying to do. What we have said before about the boss, you’re trying to do that.

You’re using logic to argue with ego’s misconceptions. That’s really a way of putting it, and that means proper good intelligent thinking. That’s the meaning of, quote, unquote, analytical meditation. It’s just using the ability to think things through. But because the the word meditation there, it throws us.

You know? Because we’re so convinced it means no thoughts. So we just you know, from a Buddhist perspective, we’ve got the wrong definition. You can have your definition. No one says you can’t.

So in vajrayana tradition where we have the the different Buddhas, you know, then we also have visualization there. You’re visualizing a Buddha. You’re imagining certain things happening. You’re using your sinking, basically, but also your your creative your ability to be creative, to think something and imagine it. You know?

We do this all day. We say, well, you know, I can’t concentrate. I want to visualize. Well, it’s time and nonsense. This is too much information as usual.

Remember when you’re in love, I remember. When you’re obsessed with somebody. You’ll be in the middle of the MCG or the or the Adelaide. No. No.

No. No. Thank you. It’s it’s quite packed out here. You guys are fanatics, aren’t you?

Yeah. Okay. So when it’s packed, many people? Thousand, eighty thousand, or it’s not because the MCG? Okay.

Well, it’s if you were in love completely in the throes of the perfect blissful beginnings, I promise you, you would have single point of concentration in the middle of whole screaming. And you won’t say, would you be quiet? I’m trying to concentrate. You don’t need to because nothing will take you away from your single point of focus, the same when you’re angry. Are you familiar with what I’m saying?

Yes. No one needs to say you don’t need to say, stop. I’m trying to concentrate. Please be quiet. Because we are we we are excellent at focusing on non virtue, on delusions, on misery, on anger, on hurt, on attachment.

And we also are brilliant at visualization. When you’re in love and all the fantasy, you have detailed movies all laid out, all the players. So we have excellent visualization, and we have excellent concentration. It’s just that we’re using it for neurosis. That’s all.

Are we familiar? You see what I’m saying? Yeah. So we know the techniques. Don’t mystify them, please.

It’s just that it’s boring to think about good things. It’s boring to argue with your delusions. Do understand? Who wants to? We’d rather not.

So that just proves at the moment Buddha’s point that at the moment, we’re totally familiar with non virtue neurosis and and the other one. La la land. You know? Not true. Okay.

We’ve got the good qualities. I’m not saying we’re totally evil, but you understand my point. So we’re just using the skills we’ve already got to change our lives. That’s all. It’s hard work.

It’s just hard work. So we we can do a little meditation. What is the time? Does anybody have any questions before we do a little meditation? You don’t need your help.

Okay? Have you ever done any of people who come on the Sunday morning one? You ever done the visualizations of the Buddha? Have you ever done those? Should I do one of those?

You don’t have you you might like it. You might. You never know. We’ll we’ll do one. So the general meaning, just not without talking too much, all these pictures, you know, strange of them.

Look. You know, look at this stuff. Isn’t it? Most unusual arts. Right?

And, of course, immediately, we think, oh, it’s esoteric. But it’s just it happens to be coming from India, coming from a lot of influence, Chinese influence, and it’s Tibetan. And it’s this tradition of representing certain and these Buddhas simply represent certain psychological qualities. That’s all. It’s an elaborate psychological language, actually, surprisingly to us.

So, you know, there’s a Buddha. We’re gonna do the one Buddha. The three essential qualities of enlightened being, they say, compassion, which is the wish to benefit others, in empathy with their suffering and the wish to benefit. There’s wisdom to know how to benefit. But there’s a third one, which is a crucial one, which is like the action energy, the ability to do it.

You know? So in daily life, we need this. It’s so clear. So the or is the is the Buddha Tibetan word for. Where is he using here?

Somewhere. He’s he represents compassion. Mañjuśrī, he’s got a sword cutting through ignorance. He represents wisdom. And then there’s a third one called Tārā, female Buddha of green, and she represents the she’s one of the ones that represents his action energy.

The the ability to get things done, to cut through the obstacles, to make things happen, courageous action energy. We all need that one, aren’t we? So why don’t we just do that one? And you might be familiar, but just get, you know, get used to the idea of it. So the other crucial point to understand that makes this stuff make sense is Buddha’s fundamental point, which takes time for us to think about the way the mind works.

The Buddha’s view is every millisecond of every thought we have does not go astray. We we we program it into our mind. Every millisecond of every thought or even all the unconscious stuff, every second of what our mind does stays there. We we store it away. There’s a really important point.

There’s no thought that goes astray, which is the utter opposite. And not just that, but then eventually, because we’re building up habits in our mind, these will produce their future results in that mind stream. Whereas our world, we think, oh, my it’s only in the mind, we’ll say. I remember even one this is like a very funny story, but outrageous, but funny. I remember one time meeting the New York Times, this lady in Brooklyn went into her husband’s computer and discovered he was part of a cannibal thingamy.

And then they were gonna they were planning to kill and eat her. She got quite a surprise. She called the FBI. And the defense of the husband, the lawyers, all defendants say, but he’s allowed to think this way. He didn’t do anything wrong.

You’re allowed to think what you like. It’s just fantasy, which shows the insanity in our world of having no awareness that as puts it. This is the point. But what does most humans, he says, this earth have no idea that what goes on in their mind plays any role at all in their lives. That’s that’s the insanity of our supposed intelligent culture.

We really don’t think it matters what we think. We think we’re allowed to think what we like. We see no connection between thinking and actions, which is beyond insanity. Whereas Buddhist point, the exact opposite, everything comes from the mind. Everything exists, I was over says.

There’s a statement, there’s a saying in Tibetan. Everything exists on the tip of the wish. The thought is the beginning of whatever you do. Listen. My walking out that door will not happen until I have the thought.

Excuse me. My legs will not pick me up. If I don’t have the thought, I will walk out the door. But if they did, I’ve been a surprise, wouldn’t I? Do understand?

Everything is coming from the mind, but we’re not used to that because everything just automatic, we don’t notice. And this is Buddha’s deal. So every thought we have so we’re gonna sit here for twenty minutes, maybe what we’ll see, what’s left. We’re gonna think some thoughts. We’re imagine, think, aspire.

That is stupendous because we’re trying to think of virtuous things and positive and optimistic and powerful. You think you’ll hear the words. Don’t think you know, you might sit there and be distracted. Do your best. Don’t think it wasn’t because you didn’t feel good.

That’s the other thing about meditation. The third mistake. We we assume it’s a good meditation. You end up feeling good. I’m sorry.

You feel a lot better than doing other things than sitting there with your wretched eyes closed and legs crossed. Gotta have a good meal. Gotta have fun. I watch a movie. Not to mention other more exciting things.

Yeah. Feeling good is not the criteria of success, believe me. It’s a bonus if you do, but it doesn’t mean you have a good meditation, please. So here, the purpose isn’t to feel good. It’s to think things through.

And by having the thoughts that we’re gonna have, and if you’re, you know, you’re listening to those thoughts and using making them yours, then you just did some amazing work. You put these amazing seeds in your mind, but they will bring fruit. I mean, do we understand that? If you sat there for one hour studying your musical thoughts, studying music, which means thinking musical thoughts, you know it’ll bear on your next next day’s piano. So we do know intellectual thoughts, creative thoughts bring results.

But for some bizarre reason, don’t think emotional ones do. Spanish schizophrenic. I’m sorry. Most peculiar. So we’re surprised if a person has angry thoughts every day that they get angry.

You’re not surprised if you have musical thoughts every day. You play a bit of music. It’s very weird. You know? Okay.

So it’s just relaxing meditation. If you don’t like it, you can just face it and think what you like. You’re the boss. You’re the boss. I’m not forcing you to think anything.

So let me just briefly mention that the classical way to sit has been found from the great meditators for centuries. It’s got it makes it you know, the body doesn’t meditate, crucial point. But the body being in an appropriate position makes it very conducive for the mind to do a good job. So let’s look at the main points, and we do our best. Well, the ideal scenario, all the greatest meditators from centuries is to have the legs in what they call full lotus position, which, of course, is very Asian for us.

We don’t sit like that in our culture. We sit in nice comfy chairs in the in the modern culture. But there’s a great benefit to it, apparently. The subtler all the subtler energies are all nicely aligned when the each insip on the other thigh and something just propping up underneath your coccyx. But the practical issue is because these great meditators spend hours, days, weeks, many of them in deep meditation.

You don’t topple over them. So it’s very practical. You know? So if can do that, fantastic. I remember his holding us a down, I might say it one time.

Just for start your session with your legs in full lobes is really auspicious for the for the ability to be able to do so in the future when you become a serious meditator. But if you can’t, then there’s one leg up. If you can’t do that regular, if you can’t do that like the rest of us in chairs. You know? So if you secondly, if you are sitting cross legged, the cushion where your bottom is.

The ideal one is to have your legs very flexible and be able to you have them all flat and you in steps up, and then under the some of your coccyx, so a little cushion popping you up. But, you know, but every person has to find a way suits them with their cushions. You know? But if we’re sitting in chairs, it’s really important that you plant your feet firmly in the ground, and you don’t slump into the back of the chair. So in this little meditation, keep yourself upright.

Hold your own body upright. Because if you sit in the back slumping, slumping makes the mind dull. So stand sit upright, not sitting against the back, and hold yourself up. That’s important. Your legs firmly planted on the ground.

The next one is your hands, and there’s different gestures they call them or mudras, but this is a classic one that we’re first taught. Left underneath, right on top like this, thumbs touching, forming a triangle. And I did hear way back when, and I can’t quote the source, that these two thumbs are some subtle channels related to compassion, body, cheek, or touch. I’ve heard something like that. But if you prefer your hands like this, wherever you like, it’s okay.

Then your your shoulders, they always say keep your shoulders nice and upright, but square but relaxed. So I add a little bit there. I find it helpful to think. Imagine all your skeleton. Think of it as hanging on a hanger.

Everything’s straight, isn’t it? Because they also say your spine. Sorry. Your spine, absolutely straight like an arrow, and the head of this the arrow is the coccyx pointing directly into the earth. So if you think of your whole skeleton absolutely straight, and then all the, you know, like, hanging on a hanger, and then all the soft bits sort of relaxed hanging on the bones.

So they are they are completely soft and relaxed. So keep your body up, your shoulders square, back upright. But but soon see what happens. As soon as you do that, it tense your muscles. So keep upright, but flop your muscles, especially the abdomen.

Keep upright and then flop the muscles. Upright, but relaxed. It’s a really important one. Shoulders square, but relaxed. And then the the main bit is your head.

Several bits there. First of all, your head tilted forward. Chin tucked in a bit. Very nice. It almost enhances the feeling of looking inwards, isn’t it?

Next one is your jaw. Jaw relaxed. Lips slightly apart, and then oddly enough, but it’s got logic to it, the tip of the tongue resting behind the top teeth. Just near the palate. Apparently, this is very practical too.

If you meditate a lot, this prevents you from dribbling and swallowing your spit all the time for the serious meditators. Lips slightly apart. Draw relaxed. Important. Tip of the tongue behind the top teeth.

Breathing through your nose. Finally, your eyes. All the great meditators who do days and days and weeks and years of meditating, includes, of course, daytime, for them, it’s best to keep your eyes open. The light coming in keeps your mind sharp. But we don’t have enough inwardness.

You know, we’re too scattered. We’ve gotta just get caught up by the outside objects so we haven’t got concentration. But so for us, maybe not so good, but you gotta find the way that works for you. But if you don’t have them open just for this short period, have them likely closed. Then finally, the eyes beneath your eyelids should be looking down as if you’re looking along your nose towards the ground.

So settle into this now in a very unselfconscious way. Your back upright, shoulders square, but relaxed, head tilted forward, chin tucked in, jaw relaxed, lips apart, tip of the tongue try the top teeth, breathing through your nose, eyes looking down as if you’re looking along your nose at ground. Now settle into this position. Okay? Very unselfconscious.

So we just first of all, we’ll just do take two or three complete full breaths. Okay? Not loud, not forced. Feel it all the way down to your abdomen. Okay.

And then just do two or three of those breaths. And then for one minute, we’ll just watch the breath, and then we’ll do the the meditation. So just locate two or three breaths. First locating the sensation of the of the breath as it hits your nose as you breathe in there. Just two or three breaths anyway relax yourself, and then locate that sensation.

And for a minute or two, we’ll do some focus. Let’s first locate that breath. Breathing out strong, not loud. Okay. So now for, like, two quality minutes as if your life depended on it.

Okay? As if you’re walking on the edge of a cliff. There’s no way you’re lose attention. But at the same time, relaxed. You know?

Focus sharp, focus alert, but relaxed. So just pay attention to that sensation. That’s it. That’s the job to be done. Pay attention to the sensation at the nostrils as you’re breathing it out.

That’s the job to be done. Two quality minutes. And now with this focused mind, we’re gonna just imagine. We’re gonna use our creative imagination and think a few things. Think some things through.

Okay? You in front of us, you you imagine the presence of the Buddha. Enlightenment. Enlightened energy is all the perfect qualities developed and all the rubbish gone. And this is personified in these kind of, you know, in these pictures.

So imagine it represents that. So you visualize, imagine this female form. She and her name is Tārā, means liberator. Grief, if you’re familiar with the images, if not, just do your best. But imagine it means that in all the enlightened qualities of infinite compassion, infinite wisdom, infinite joy, infinite goodness, but in particular, hear the aspect of action energy.

It’s often depicted as female. Green is also that one too, like action, air energy. So she’s got, you know, like these pictures you see, very blissful, very beautiful, radiant, sitting on a multicolored lotus. Her left leg is in as if she’s meditating, and her right leg is resting out on a little multicolored lotus. Sometimes you see statues of Kuan Yin in that action.

That’s the same one showing the action pose. Her leg is resting out the right leg, showing that she’s ready to leap up to help sentient beings. You know? It’s action energy. Same here, Tārā, rest rested on middle multicolored lotus.

And her right hand is over her right knee. Imagine. And the palm is up. Then the thumb with her thumb and her ring finger, you imagine, she’s holding the stem of a blue utpala flower that blooms at her right ear. Just imagine this.

Her left hand is at her heart with the fingers pointing up. I think it’s called the.

I forget. The Three Jewels maybe. Angeli. Who? Angeli.

I don’t know what that means. What’s English? I don’t know. Enlightenment or refuge. I forget what you’re to mean.

I’m sorry. The little fingers are poking up, pointing up, and then her, again, her ring finger and her left and her thumb are holding the stem of another blue utpala flower, which glimps at her left ear. Just imagine. Very blissful face. So if you happen to have a spiritual teacher, if you feel close to a certain teacher called your lama or your guru in Sanskrit and Tibetan, then you feel it’s them manifesting as this Buddha to show you your potential.

You think it was like a mirror image of your potential. Like, Like, if you, you know, if you wanna play tennis, you look at Federer or Serena every day. You try to replicate what they do. Same meaning here, you know, by imagining the presence of this Buddha representing these qualities. It’s like giving you the courage to help you develop those qualities in you.

That’s the function of this kind of meditation. She’s sitting there very radiant, and you can see the pictures like in rainbow colored kind of clothing on the lower part of her body. Upper part of her body, usually in the pictures, you see she’s naked, looking actually beautiful. They say in the aspect of youth, about sixteen years old, you mean gorgeous. It’s meant to energize our minds, these these these meditations, make us kinda happy and positive, optimistic.

Blissful face. You know, you can see in the pictures kind of her hair, partially held up up in a top notch, long black hair down the rest of the back, rest of it down the back. This kind of five pointed crown like a tiara. You don’t visualize all the details, don’t worry. If you see that it’s got this meaning, enlightenment, all the perfect qualities, but the aspect is this one of action energy.

Action energy. So we now imagine we just imagine from her brow, she very happily, kindly sends very powerful beams of of white light, like laser beams, so powerful that enter our brow, that instantly fill us, instantly fill us, those radiant white light. And you imagine what it does is completely purify all the imprints in the mind left there by any action we’ve ever done since beginning this time of harming others with our bodies, since countless lives, You know? All the harm we’ve ever done with our bodies, all the imprints left in our mind from these actions, imagine totally eradicated. Not only that, all your sickness and heaviness of your body, you’ve got sickness.

Imagine it’s completely purified by this blissful white light filling you. Not one atom left. Imagine it. And, again, Lama Tārā so compassionately sends radiant laser beams of white light that enter our brow forcefully, filling us. This time, completely filling us with our marvelous potential, which is effortlessly capable of only using this body to only benefit others.

Only benefit others. Imagine whoever sees you, hears you, touches you, smells you, tastes you, You know? They’re only benefited by your body. Can you imagine this? Full of this marvelous potential to be to be beneficial to sentient beings with our bodies.

Full of this radiant white light. This potential. My potential. So now Lama Tārā so compassionately this time sends radiant laser beams of red light from her throat, powerfully penetrating our throat and instantly filling us. This time, purifying every atom of all the imprints of all the harm we’ve ever done since the beginning of this time to sentient beings with our speech.

All the rabbiting on about nothing exhausting people, all the harsh speech, the abuse, you know, all the all the just nonsense talk, all the lies, you know, you can see the confusion, speaking things that aren’t true, and then maybe one of the worst for us humans saying bad things about people behind their backs. All this nonsense since the beginning of this time, all the harm that we caused with this to ourselves and to others, eradicated by this radiant red light. Again, so compassionately sends these red beans entering into our throat, filling us instantly, and with what? Our potential. Our amazing natural potential, whereas they call it, the power of speech.

This is the main gift of the Buddha, actually, and our main gift if we if we learn, the power of speech. The ability this is our own potential. Imagine this. So now such that any sound we utter, even saying, good morning, even laughing, any sound we utter, imagine this, this marvelous potential to only benefit whoever hears us. So such that whatever we say, no matter what it is, can only be a benefit to those sentient beings, the birds, the ants, the fish, the dogs, the humans, whatever we say, the power of speech.

And this is gained from, of course, developing wisdom in the mind such that our words are useful, not just rubbish, but also from controlling our speech, from not consciously not harming, not not bad mouthing, not abusing, not lying, not rabbiting on about nothing. Just controlling the speech. Silence is such a powerful, powerful way to purify our speech and then developing wisdom. And then the words you do say will have power and be of benefit. We imagine this from marvelous humor.

So imagine full of this blissful potential to be to of the power of speech to benefit sentient beings with our speech, the most precious gift we can give. For this in his full potential, my potential, which red light. Now, again, so compassionately, said this time from her from her heart chakra, the center of her heart. Okay? In the center of the chest, these powerful beams of radiant blue light, blue like the sky that enter our heart, instantly filling us.

And this time, instantly annihilating every atom of every imprint of any of all the negative thoughts, all the neuroses, the ego grasping that cling so primordially, this unhappy fractured sense of self. Then the attachment of bottomless pit of junky craving to get what that self wants. Then the panic attack of the anger and the fears and the depression and the despair and the anxiety and rage when it doesn’t get what it wants. There all the other dramas. Yeah.

The the the jealousy, you know, the arrogance, low self esteem, all this stuff we’re so familiar with that we think is at the core of our being that which is is absolutely not. So imagine this blue light instantaneously eradicating all of this, from this blissful blue light, our natural potential to be free of all this nonsense, which is the source of our misery and the source of why we harm others with our body and with our speech. Utterly gone. And now that Tārā again sends this radiant being to be much interest and fill us instantly with what? But our potential.

Nothing but this. Because this is what Buddha says is the core of our being. Indestructively is the goodness, infinite wisdom, infinite kindness, infinite compassion, infinite empathy, infinite generosity, infinite courage, infinite confidence, and naturally blissful. Only reason is I have fears and dramas because of the neurosis. They’ve gone.

Nothing but bliss. It’s our natural state. It always marvelous qualities, our own natural potential, fully developed. Imagine this for this beautiful blue light. So now imagine, you know, we now visualize Lama Tārā sending together, the three of them, white to the brow, red to the throat, blue to the heart.

What this does is remove even the sort of like like the second wash, you know, Your second rinse. Sorry. Cut this clean everything’s clean. You need one more rinse to completely get rid of even the smell of the delusions. And this is removing all the obstacles to our own perfect potential of.

Imagine this. The three coming together and man and now manifesting our own perfection. Imagine this. Imagine this. So now we imagine that the lotus that Lama Tārā is sitting on or the one with her wrist right foot is resting on the little one.

They both just dissolve up into her body. Imagine this. Unless she very happily comes and sits above our heads. Imagine that. Facing the same way as us.

Just imagine. And then imagine she just dissolves into our body. And we imagine that all the energy of of Cara, her body, her speech, and her mind, all the energy of our Lama, body, speech, and mind merges with mind. Just imagine this, The energy and mind merge. And just for, like, about a minute, no thoughts.

Just kind of bliss out. Imagine. You know, you’re as vast as space. Imagine this. So now you think, well, I’ve become Buddha.

This is great for me. What about everybody else? All these eons of time I’ve been working on becoming a Buddha. Now I’ve achieved this. So do my job.

What else? No choice now, which is to be a benefit to others. There’s no longer a sense of a separate self. It’s like when you become a Buddha, it’s as if your sense of eye now encompasses everybody in the universe. Your eye your your sense of eyes is big as space.

No longer a separate sense of self, which is one of the fundamental delusions. Therefore, longer delusions. There’s and only in infinite empathy, infinite wisdom, infinite capacities to be a benefit. It’s all good. Says it’s our natural potential.

So we’re imagining this. So now we think of all the sentient beings. We divide them into the three categories, enemies, friends, and strangers. Remember, there’s no fourth category. So you visualize right in front of you, even just one right now who’s upsetting you, hurting you, offended you, what and one one in front, you know, the object of your aversion.

And then you can think of all the others there, your enemies. You might use that word, but think of what it means. The ones that irritate you, annoy you, upset you, even harmed you badly. Put them right in front. See them there.

We’re just the one you’ve got problems with right now. That’s enough representing the others. And to the left in front of you, your beloveds, the ones you adore, and you think of when you you wanna rush towards them. You fill you with good feelings, you know, your your friends, your object and your attachment. To the left, you can’t do that.

And now to the right and everywhere else, the strangers. This is the third category, and it’s ninety nine point nine nine nine percent of the universe, the ones we don’t care about. So why do we you know, what is how we feel about the the friends? We adore them because why? Because they fulfill my attachment’s needs.

Why do we have hurt for the for the enemies? Because they don’t fulfill attachment’s needs. They’ve harmed me. And how why are we feeling different to the ninety nine point nine percent of the universe? Because they’ve neither harm nor help me, which shows how utterly self centered we are.

It’s kinda embarrassing to see this. We think it’s normal. You know? What is it? It’s not.

It’s mental illness. So we met all these strangers now to the right, above us, below us, behind us, to the right, to the left, in front as far as you can see, all the trillions of strangers. And think of them all in realms of existence, but only in the form of humans, which is the form they can get enlightened with. Feeling space, trillions of these humans, friends, enemies, strangers. So now I think, you know, what’s motivated me for countless lives to become a Buddhist is compassion for sentient beings.

Now, you know, pretending I’ve achieved it, no choice must benefit. No choice by nature now. So instantaneously, imagine from our heart sending out trillions of tiny green Taras. The first, focus on the enemies. Send towers out to the enemies.

We and visualize first. Now visualize. Entering into their hearts. Tārā entering into their hearts. Taking away their pain.

Relieving of their of their suffering, which is why they have others. Giving them everything they need. See them joyfully, and then turning them into Buddha, into their Tārā. So just do this for about a minute as, know, to the friends, the enemies, and the strangers, all above, below, behind as far as you can Tremendous of Tārā’s going out, taking away their suffering, giving them everything they need, their happiness, and turning them into Tārā, which is their potential too. Imagining this, delighting in this, watching this.

As we sing just for one minute, Tārā’s mantra. If you don’t know it, just listen and focus on the visualization. And even you can imagine if you like all the sound goes out raining down, green blessings blessings onto all these such things. So you now imagine all these transformed beings, all these trillions of Taras, all the directions, all dissolving in green light, all absorbing to you, enhancing even more brilliantly your own Tārā nature, Your own good nature. And relax.

That’s it. Finished. So, you know, doing that might make us feel good, optimistic, which is fantastic. It’s a little booster. So to think about your negativity all the time, kind of uplift you.

But that’s not even the main benefit. And this is something we really find hard to think about in the west because we’re so addicted to feelings. We think the success of something is good feeling. But the point is you’re sowing seeds. The real benefits long term.

And we don’t think that way. We do if we’re playing piano, we just had one hour of practice, we would know we’ve just planted wonderful seeds in our mind that will enhance our piano playing. Because some like I said before, it’s fascinating. We don’t think that when it comes to thinking emotional things. Are you seeing what I’m making?

You’re really seeing? I mean, we’ll just practice thinking virtually for one hour. We should be in this, the practice. We have to accomplish it here, but it’s one step towards it. We get this when it comes to creative and intelligent intellectual thinking.

We call it learning. We call it study. Do understand? Familiarizing your mind with something. We know it doesn’t disappear, and you wake up tomorrow back at square one.

We know that. Same here. Gotta understand this. It’s fascinating how we make this distinction between emotional or, you know, positive thinking, love, compassion. We don’t think it’s that at all.

Very interesting, I think. So be delighted for one hour. Whatever you know, we’ve sown seeds from this. We just planted amazing seeds to stop you know, to to develop to to rid the mind of all the rubbish, to grow all the goodness, and to be a benefit to others. We’ve just done the entire path in life.

We dropped it now very happily. Okay? Truly. Well, you got a sample. So we’re delighted.

Okay? And we’re Do a prayer. We’re done. A little dedication prayer. Picking how you know, these one hour, sowing all these seeds, listening, thinking, working things out, processing.

How fantastic. One hour practice. What our reading, and what our sowing with that with flowers. So we’re delighted. So we think, you know, keep moving, nourishing these seeds, never giving up.

So we eventually will develop our fantastic potential so we can be a benefit to others no matter how long it takes. Okay. Goodbye. Thank you. Go away.

Yes. You’re not on. Okay? No questions? To make a commitment.

It’s like you signed a contract with somebody. You understand? When you take certain practices, you commit to do certain things in the morning and certain things at night. Sometimes I’m lazy, but I always do them. Sometimes they do quick, sometimes they do long.

Do understand? But it’s basically this this kind of practice that we do with different ones and other types of things we do as well. You have something in the morning or something at night. It’s a day. That I said.

We need to know. If you say you’re gonna be a great piano player, you know you gotta sit there at the piano. Because the same here, you gotta work on your mind. Because the the difference here is every second of the day, you could say it’s practice because you work on yourself all the time, aren’t you? You should be, shouldn’t you?

Would you say you’d be a Buddhist? Put your money in your mouth. What do you for an answer? Good job. Okay.

Okay. Enough? Yes. Can you speak to that mindful Yes. Practice.

Yes. Sometimes I find, for example, that I’ve got a focus on the brain. Yes. And there’s other stuff going on at the same time. Well, of course, is your thoughts, isn’t it?

Yeah. That’s right. Yeah. But but that’s the point. You can’t stop them.

This is this is what I was saying before. That’s what’s happening all the time when we never pay attention, do we? No. So here we are. You’re trying to focus on the breath.

So you you’re noticing your thoughts. Right? Yes. What so are you suggesting that’s wrong? No.

No. Wrong. What do you what’s your point there? Well, sometimes I can focus on the brief briefly and and other thoughts will go away, and sometimes I’ll be there alongside the focus of the Yeah. So what’s what’s what’s so what’s the conclusion for you from this?

What’s your point from that from that observation? Are you are you asking a question? Is that good or bad? Yeah. The question is is is if if I’ve got the breath there and all the other rubbish But the other rubbish the Why would you assume that wouldn’t be there?

This is my point to you. Why do you have a see, you seem to have an assumption that because you’re watching your breath, you shouldn’t have thoughts. Is that what your assumption? No. Not an assumption.

Okay. What are you saying then? I was there was a question about whether whether I should be for example, trying to have a sharper focus or a narrower focus on the assumption is your no. It seems to be your assumption from your question. Your question is you seem to be acting as if you shouldn’t have the thoughts.

Is that wrong, you’re suggesting? What what’s the because the point is listen to me. The point is this. Yes. Yeah.

Join the human race. You’ve got millions and millions and millions of uncontrolled thoughts. And all so why would you think they shouldn’t be there? Why would you think you’re failing if you because the point is the reason we’re doing concentration meditation for the long term eventually is to be able to finally have such powerful attention that you go to and this is the Buddhist view, to suck at levels where the sinking has completely stopped. That’s what we’re trying to achieve.

So of course, your mind is there. Of course, the thoughts are raging on. But you don’t pay it. The point is first step is you’d stop paying you don’t pay attention to them. You’d let them feel like being in a football crowd.

You don’t ask them to be quiet, but you don’t pay attention to them. You’re paying attention to one thing, and that’s the practice. You’re going beyond the usual one, which is where we are absorbed in all those thoughts and never stop them. But here, we’re aiming in the long term to get this phenomenal subtle level of of of focus. Do you understand what I’m saying?

I do. So the thoughts, of course, they’re there. Of course, they’re there. They’ve been there for the beginning of this what it says, and here we’re now trying to train the mind to do something different with it. So the goal of watching your breath what do you think the goal of watching your breath is?

What do you think the point is? There’s a really good point. It shows these things sort of simple, but we make it we we we seem to have a anyway, it’s interesting. It’s such good. What do you think the purpose of doing your breath is for?

Why are you watching it? To enhance your capacity to be aware of what your mind is doing. It’s to focus the mind. No. Even more simple.

The reason okay. It’s like you’re honing it’s like you’re sharpening the knife. Of course, eventually, that knife, you must do something with it. So you’re right that you’re leaping ahead. The goal is to simply focus.

Nothing more and nothing less. With that focused mind, you then can do good things. That’s the second point. The goal is merely to focus on the breath. So why is so you can begin to get control over your mind?

Yes. That’s the point. You’re right. But the purpose at that moment is to simply have all your attention to sharpen your attention on the breath. So what you’re saying is there are lots of thoughts there.

Well, exactly. Why would they go away? Maybe this is beginning this time. The the the the energy of those thoughts is stupendous, which we can see. So what’s happening either two things will happen when you do your watching the breath.

Either you you’ll you’ll you’ll you’ll you’ll rush into all the thoughts and have a chat, chat, chat, or you start to become sinking and dull. This is what they say, and you couldn’t see that. So we try to do neither of those. Every time you find your mind chatting away, you bring your mind back to the breath. Every time you feel yourself sinking, you bring your mind back to the breath.

You readjust your attention. The goal is to pay attention to that one thing. The long term result is incredible sharp focus, incredible sharp focus. And with that, you can then do then you can do the second mode, which is do the analysis to get rid of all the rubbish in the long term. Yeah.

Can you hear does it make sense what I’m saying? It does. So they don’t act like it’s surprising your thoughts in there. So now rephrase your question. If you heard me think what I’ve said that makes it different, can you ask the question again with this in mind?

Yeah. If if, for example, I’ve I mean, there there are times where I would completely lose concentration on the bread. Of course. That’s natural. Go down a rabbit hole of thought.

That’s exactly right. And there’s other times when I’ve got concentration on the bread, but there’s also other stuff going on. But that’s natural. That’s natural. That that’s your cause of thoughts.

Yeah. Yeah. But don’t say that like it’s surprising. That’s natural. Yeah.

Because you haven’t got focus yet. Yeah. The question is if if that’s what’s happening Yeah. The thoughts are all rising on. Yeah.

So I shouldn’t be thinking I should be trying to have a more single focus single point of focus. See, that’s my point. You’re assuming it’s wrong. That’s I keep saying to you. No.

It just means you haven’t achieved single point of concentration yet. Yeah. That’s all. So you keep practicing. It’s not like you’re saying, well, you know, I’m supposed to walk on the tight rope, but I keep falling off.

Should I try harder? The answer is yes. But even but don’t hold your breath. To get to the subtle level of concentration, you can’t imagine what your mind would be like. We don’t even posit such a state in our culture.

You would if you have accomplished this nine stages of single point of concentration the way the Hindus and the Buddha talks about, you look like if we saw you in that state, you’d look like you were dead. Total no brain activity. You could stay there for months and and unwavering. It’s a state of mind we don’t even posit as existing. So way to go.

Of course, if you thought to raging one. So that, again, two points. The two main obstacles, you space out and become sleepy or you go blah blah blah. So you keep every and and this is why you have to be bringing your mind back to the breath. That’s it.

You keep adjusting to bring your mind back to the breath. But don’t be surprised the thoughts are there. It’s gonna be a long time before we harness that energy. You see my point now? A little bit.

Yeah. So, I mean, you’re you’re really saying just Keep doing it. More practice rather than a different technique. Yeah. Just I’m funny.

So that that there’s an assumption in there that you should have achieved it already. It’s like, you know, I use these simple analogies. You know, you start playing the piano. How long before you can play like that? It’s probably thirty, forty years.

Would you agree? Yeah. So you don’t go, oh, I can’t play the second or third time. Should I change my method? No.

If it worked, you gotta wait thirty years. You just gotta keep doing it and doing it and doing it because that’s the process. That’s what is involved in it. It’s not a mistake. You see what I’m saying?

Yes. Yes. I think it was very helpful. Yes. Hello.

Hello. I’m thinking about the the enemy, the Branded stranger. Stranger. Yes. How do you practically or, I guess, approach Yes.

Being around the enemy Yes. When you’re, I guess, thinking in a workplace situation Exactly. Exactly. And approach then as a person with the the mindset you just spoke I understand it’s and separate. And I have you practically, I guess, address the negative behavior or the poor I understand you.

It’s a it’s a mind field, isn’t it? It’s a it’s a mind field. You know? So what the the assumption here about there’s this one meditation that we use as a it’s like a foundation to beginning to develop love and compassion for sentient beings. And so the the the assumption, the one is this one of equanimity.

And this is this this could be one approach. There’s multiple. There’s, multiple tools in the toolkit. And this one of equanimity means precisely what we’re trying to do when we is or we visualize if we did do this meditation on equanimity, we we visualize the enemy, the friend, and the stranger. And then the sinking we’d have to do to get this equanimity okay.

Equanimity, very specifically in this context, is this heartfelt recognition when you’ve got it. It will be a genuine recognition that this wretched person at work who is abusive, does harm people, and your beloved at home whom you utterly adore, who wouldn’t hurt a fly, and the stranger down the office down the road, you can hardly even recognize. Yeah? That right now, when we observe the difference in our feelings towards them, just say affection, love with a friend, aversion for the enemy, couldn’t care less about the stranger, that these three responses are totally artificial. They’re based on I.

So that the the equanimity one, you do logical analysis to argue with those entrenched misconceptions. What you’re trying to do is recognize the simple one fact that this enemy and this friend and this stranger from their point of view are identical from one point of view. They each wanna be happy and they each don’t wanna suffer. Just that alone is profound. So even though there’s this person being a creep, harming others, harming you, we know the world is like that.

This is a starting point to give yourself some space. You know? So then, of course, out of this will come some wisdom, and this is where what wisdom is. And wisdom, we only get the more we work on our own rubbish, the more wisdom we have. So you can see this person, you’re objective about it, not emotional.

And you think, well, can I help them? Not help others being abused by them, but how can I help that person? And that’s already massive because we don’t wanna help the harmer. We wanna help the harmer stop helping and harming others. Yeah.

But we also recognize that a harmer harms themselves. This another point can really help us see them more as human. And if they really are harming, we know people harm. They but for their sake, you see, can I say something or do something? So straight away from me for their sake, and that’s a real big shift.

That is. That’s huge. Even if you’ll see them as more human, you’ll know they’re harming others, but you’ll also know they’re harming themselves. And that’s what I’ve said to me before. That can be quite fierce, like a it’s like tough love, like a kid, knowing all this.

You’ve gotta do that sometimes. But the point is, if your words will be more from the duck’s back, don’t waste your breath. Another aspect of it is because we’re also anxious because they’re having others. We wanna make it all nice. Mhmm.

You can’t sometimes change anything. You gotta be very brave in the face of other things happening like this. So there’s many different approaches. Do understand? Yes.

Yes. Not easy. No. Not easy. Thank you very much.

What else? I’ve been seeing them suffering because they’re harming because they are suffering themselves. So what’s your question? So when I can see them as suffering, then I think you can That’s what I just said to him. Did you hear me?

Yes. Good. You just agree with me. She’s agreeing with me. I’m very good.

She’s agreeing with me. Good. Thank you. You have to, but she did. What else?

Anymore? Maybe it’s time to go home. I don’t know. Can do what you like. Jesus.

Sticking around. Anymore questions, you sure? We’ve got the rest of the day for those who are staying on, but anybody who’s leaving now, you got any questions? Doesn’t matter what the question is. Stupid question.

I don’t care. Yes, darling. I don’t ask stupid questions. You know that? What’s the reason?

I said I don’t ask stupid question. You said didn’t you say that’s not such stupid question? Was that something? No. I’m sure I’d say that.

I’m quite sure there’s no such thing as a question. I’m not gonna talk about going to a cave today. Oh, that’s good. Okay. I was wondering well, now my my phone’s right.

You know, with meditation, I I guess, I’ve had different things, you know, and I I haven’t extensively practiced Uh-huh. Under, you know, Buddhism and I understand. In terms of thoughts and what to do them Yes. Yes. When you’re trying to say practice things pointed out.

What do you call it? What what people call them. It’s simple concentration. Yeah. Like, is it that you’re not supposed to ignore them in terms of you’re supposed to pay an attention to them, but you’re not supposed to ignore them and sort of suppress them.

No. No. That’s the point. No. That’s the point.

Again, it’s such a helpful point in these points. Okay. If you’re driving to work, your goal is to drive to work. Right? And everything you do has to get you to work.

Every turn you take, every decision you make has to be to get you to work in the end, isn’t it? Do we agree? Do you agree? You see lots of side streets. You notice them, but you don’t get distracted by them.

You don’t stop and look at the pretty tree. Well, you might if you want, but you keep moving. You got you can’t help but notice all these things. You can’t help but notice, but you don’t pay attention to them. You’re paying attention to your goal.

That’s it’s a simple statement. Of course, you gotta notice your thoughts. But the goal here isn’t to do any work with the thoughts. You can’t help but notice them. That’s fantastic.

We’ve got to notice them. But you don’t start noticing them. You don’t stop and start looking at that shop. Oh, I’d like to buy that dress. That’s not the goal today.

The goal is to get to work. But you might keep it in your mind, and then during the day, you’ll notice all this anger that popped up this morning. You saw it, and you thought, oh, that’s interesting. You still stay focused on your breath. Of course, you gotta notice your thoughts.

In the long term, like you said, that is the point, because then you’ve got the skill to sit back and observe this crazy anger, the jealousy, the fears that that are popping up out of nowhere. Because the fact is they are already popping up, but because we’re not paying attention to anything, we don’t notice them. So that in your meditation, even for five minutes, the goal is just watch the breath. Just watch the breath because you’re training yourself to get focused. Then in your life and your in your meditations and your work, you then do something about it.

Of course, you do, but not at that point. Are we communicating? You sure? You look doubtful. I’m I’m just thinking about it.

Okay. The subtlety of it, I guess, because I I suppose I hard to notice, yeah, without following them. But, I guess, it’s a subtle thing because I’m also conscious that you’re not supposed to not notice them. Tell me, I think you’re making so complicated. What are you telling me?

What are you I mean, how often do you do this mindful meditation anyway? Every day. Well, good. So what what’s the activity for you? How long do do it for?

It varies. How long roughly? I can between fifteen minutes and an hour. Well, that’s completely insane. Ninety nine percent, that’ll be wasted time.

And my suggestion Thank you. Most people haven’t got ability to try and focus. Five minutes is good quality, darling. If you know what you’re doing, if you know that you’re trying to just watch your breath, five quality minutes is incredible. An hour, unless you’re a great meditator, I’d say ninety percent of the time you’re spacing out, wasting your time.

Better to go have an ice cream. I’m not being I mean, this might sound a bit rude if you go to mindfulness meditation techniques, they tell you to do this, but ninety percent of the time you’re not doing the job, which is to simply focus your mind, darling. You’re not supposed to sit there, look at all your thoughts. That’s not the job. You can have a job to sit down and work through a particular problem, but just notice all the chaos.

There’s no point in that. There’s no benefit in that. It just makes us more miserable. You’re sick in it. You’re depressed.

Are we communicating or not? No. You’re not, obviously. Why are you try what are you trying to achieve with this meditation you’re doing? What’s your purpose?

What’s your goal? What are trying to do? This thing you do for one hour every day. What’s your goal done? What are you doing it for?

What are you trying to achieve? What’s the point? Why do you do it? Now I’m making her cry. But it’s actually this is a really good conversation, people.

Thank you, you too, for being brave to bring it up. Thank you, precious girl. I think we’ve got to just don’t understand what we’re doing because we’re so caught up in our misery and fears and so thinking we shouldn’t have them and don’t know what to do with them. We’re thinking we’re just if we do this meditation, it’ll all go away. It’s like we’re junkies trying to make the pain go away.

We can’t. We’re gonna have the courage to know it is our mind. It’s not permanent. It is junk in there. Join the club, you know.

And concentration is simply to develop the skill so that eventually you can when you come out of the five minutes and watching your breath to get focused, you can work with the delusions when you start to see them, when you do start to see them with a more intelligence. And then we learn to know how what to do with them. And that’s why mindfulness on its own is not enough. It’s like you’re being mindful. You got all this massive overgrown green stuff out there, and you start being mindful and watching it.

Every day watching it and almost like a bit of perfect vision of everything in the garden. But if you can’t label one thing in that garden, what the hell are you doing looking at it for? It’s just idiocy. You gotta have intelligence. You gotta imbue your watching with might with with with botany.

Then you know what you’re looking at. There’s a weed. There’s a flower. And then you have to know what it means a weed. What am I supposed to do with a weed?

What am I supposed to do with a flower? That comes from learning. Buddha’s case, Buddha’s model of the mind. You’re learning to focus so you then know what to do with what you’re seeing. If we don’t know what to do with it, we’ll just drown in chaos and kill ourselves.

People do. Because we think watching my mind will make it all go away somehow. It’s only half the thing. Are we communicating here? No.

We can’t. Really, we gotta understand what we’re doing. It’s not complicated. It’s only because in the west, we have this bizarre, in my opinion. I’m trying to be, you know, Tom Cruise here or anything.

These weird ideas about what thoughts and feelings and emotions are. You know? And we’re very scared of what’s inside us. We’re get guilty and ashamed, and we’ll do anything to make it go away. We’re have courage to look into digging deep, to get knee deep in the weeds.

Oh, look. Another weed. Great. But as long as you know what to do with the weed, and that’s what’s difficult. That’s where you got out the Buddhist.

I mean, if you’re using the Buddhist, don’t know what Buddha means by these delusions. Yeah? Yeah. What? Yes.

What? Well, I wanna get an opinion too as well. I don’t need your opinion. It’s my job, not yours. Give me your question.

I don’t want to hear your opinions. Excuse me. You’re being very blunt. It’s nothing. I don’t this is not Darwin, you gotta be here for the rest of the day.

Oh, yes. Well, then keep your person delayed because some people are gonna leave it now. Yeah. What? Let’s comment.

I don’t wanna comment. Thank you. Yes. Problem with dullness to try I can I can feel it coming? Yes.

Maybe when we sat down today Yes. And I thought I’m gonna fall asleep, and then I took a break. Good. That’s it. But I can’t always do that.

No. Well, Wendy, open your eyes and do the dishes. God almighty. God, help me, please. You people calm down.

This is a tick a communist can do. This is not religion. Happens quickly. Of course, does, darling. Sam, this is still it’s true.

It could be a some people I know, as soon as you sit down and go to sleep, it’s true. So you gotta have to look into it, finding the methods to work with it, you know. We’ve gotta demystify this stuff. I beg you. This is just practical psychology, please.

It’s not bloody religion. Oh. Great news. What? Great news.

Thank you. Oh, my pleasure. It’s like we’ll talk with ourselves. You know? Any more questions?

Is the focus meditation like preparation for the thing? Yeah. That’s all. You’re trying to train your mind to be focused so you can do something with it to sort the rush out. That’s right.

I mean, if you don’t have it, you gotta be just reading your music class, you learn all these new bits of information theory. If if you don’t have focus when you get home, you don’t you can’t focus on what you’re doing. You can’t internalize one ounce of information, can you? So it’s practical to get focused because I’m on the berserk, get some focus, then we can use that focus to sort the mess out. But that’s, you know, that’s like learn how to be a botanist.

So the focus, it’s on its own. People think of it as like a miracle on its own. As long as I was saying, thieves need mindfulness. So another question. Yeah.

Can you do your sinking meditation while you’re washing up? Darling, do it twenty four hours a day. Okay. Thank you. Of course, you can.

Listen. When I became the first Buddhist, I thought this the idea of sitting down, watching my breath, I couldn’t imagine anything more boring. I didn’t sit for seven years, I was a Buddhist nun. There’s lots of practice. I did a walking on the drive behind the car at the dishes of my eyes open.

Your mind works all the time. So then, oh, maybe next life, I’ll get some focus. You could get focus otherwise too. Play tennis, you’ll get focus. God almighty.

You know? Do you see what I’m saying? Focus is just a the copier this needs, and the dog has focus. This is a technique that you can use to be a good gardener, to be a good chemist, to be a good violinist, or to be a good be your own therapist. But you gotta have a model of the mind to utilize to to enable to know what to do with what you’re seeing.

And here we got the Buddha’s model of the mind, which is a very distinct model because Buddha’s saying, you know what, guys? You can read the mind of all the rubbish, and you can grow all the goodness. That’s what he is suggesting, and that’s that’s the basis of all his techniques, which is a marvelous view. It gives you great courage because, you know, you can change your mind. You know?

Okay. Are we communicating with you? Yes. Okay. Alright.

So our purpose for today is listen to Buddhist teachings, see if there’s some tools we can take from it to help develop our you know, using our daily lives to work on our minds. Be your own therapist. This is the job of being a Buddhist. This is the job of being a Buddhist, Buddhist, to learn to know the contents of your mind, label them accurately, and solve them out. I mean, it’s highly complicated concept to that’s just a difficult job to do because we’ve never done it to, and it’s scary as hell.

So we have to be brave. We’ll reiterate our reliance on And we do another prayer, which is offer making an offering. So maybe the thoughts start with every everything start with the thoughts. So if you’ve done in the thoughts, it’s huge, good or bad, negative, positive. So we’ll think just imagine making an offering to the Buddha.

Just imagine it’s always stupendous doing that, thoughts. So imagine all the objects of the universe piling up and making an offering to the Buddha as if he were here himself as a request for the teachings. It’s very, very auspicious. And so let’s visualize all the marvelous things of the world are offering to the Buddha. So now, just keep doing the job of looking at this mind of ours.

So the bottom, the long term goal, remember Buddha saying, and as a concept, it’s incredibly simple. But because it’s so profoundly and utterly and radically difference, all the views we have in our mind now, we almost can’t we literally can’t hear it. We’re intelligent. But because our minds are full of misconceptions, this what is key point. Okay?

So what this is, what he has found from his own experience way back then, two and a half thousand years of coming out with amazing vision, using these incredible skillful techniques of being able to focus the mind to the subtest degree. And then using that skill to sort out the contents of his own mind, what he has found to be true is that the delusions, neuroses, which we in our culture totally think at all and reinforce as as good qualities that could be abnormal if he didn’t have to be able to to They are the source of our suffering, of our pain, their liars, their deceptions, their delusions, their maniacs. And thank goodness, his amazing finding, which is like mind boggling. If science found this, they’d be selling it for ten trillion dollars a minute. But Buddha has been quietly telling us for two and a half thousand years, but you know what, folks?

The delusions are adventitious. That means they don’t belong. They’re like extra bells and whistles. You can remove them. This is all he is saying.

It’s so mind boggling. But why? Not because we’re stupid and can’t hear it. It’s because our minds are full of the opposite. This is the way ignorance works.

Buddha says, is this you know, in the in the model of mind in Buddhism, the mid you know, model of the mental mental consciousness, how mental consciousness functions. It’s a you know, in the literature, deep and vast body of knowledge about the way the mind works, and we’re not discussing the brain here. This is like brand new in our culture. We’ve never heard of such things. The way the actual cognitive process works is phenomenal how they describe it.

Phenomenal. I lost my thought from reading. Thank you. So yeah. But there was one particular never mind.

Never mind. Yes. Yes. So in this model of the mind, this Buddhist model of the mind, the make the way the mental consciousness functions, it’s it’s he he divides the contents of our mind into three categories. That’s it.

This is not how we talk in our world. You know? There are there are three categories. It’s negative, positive, and neutral. There’s no fourth category of the contents of our mind, and we’re talking thoughts.

We’re talking concepts, but to the subtlest level of conceptuality, way more subtle than we would think of as conceptuality. The the negative ones and these are technical terms, by the not moralistic. The negative states of mind generally known as nonvirtuous states of mind, sometimes different context. Delusions, I think he would have liked the word neurosis. He would have loved the term.

Would have would have loved the term. It is so accurate. I can’t tell you. Mental illnesses. Not joking.

It’s a brilliant term. Would have would have adored it. They call it mental afflictions. It’s another way of saying it, an affliction. You’re afflicted with a mental illness.

Well, good. Mental afflictions or afflictive emotions. But mental illness is just perfect. I’m telling you. I think that’s the best term.

That’s a bit shocking. You hear that you’re mentally ill, isn’t it? I know the whack goes down the other end of the spectrum. You know? They’re mentally ill.

The Buddha’s basically saying so so outrageous. But having any ego grasping, any attachment, any anger, any jealousy, any pride, any low self esteem, any anxiety, any worries, you’re mentally ill. This is essentially what he’s saying. But he says, you know what? That’s the point of it.

Hey, babies. Here’s some methods to get rid of them. That’s all. That’s all what we’re saying. So simple.

Are we can we take it? So that means because we can get rid of them, we’ve gotta be brave to know to be able to identify them. But because in our view, in our instinctive belief, and which is reinforced in our culture’s view of the mind, so, again, I’m not being doggrous here. You’re considered you’re considered mentally ill if you don’t get angry. You’re considered mentally ill if you don’t have a panic attack.

Because we because we assume we look at the world. We see humans since beginning of this time. So we observe that everybody has anger, jealousy, depression, low self esteem, you know, insecure survival. So, of course, we take that as our given. We take that as our base, which seems reasonable.

The Buddha’s Buddha’s context is bigger, and he has found he’s just amazing. People can hear the psychological way to blow our minds. From his own direct experience, having used this technique that the Hindu has invented to enable a person to get primordially subtle focus focus to a degree of mind that we don’t even posit as existing, the subtlety of focus. But you then use, like, this profound laser, like a like a microscope of your mind. Then then based on having knowledge about the model of mind, the way it works, what it is, what is a negative mind, what is a positive, what is unusual, what are they how do they function, how do they, you know, come together.

It’s astonishing in the literature. Remarkable. Then you these two tools is what you need. Then he says, use all this, follow my steps, and you’ll end up getting your own nirvana. nirvana means the removal of the rubbish.

That’s it. That’s a place like heaven. He posits places like heaven. Different different realm of existence. No problem.

But the end result, he says, is we can remove these delusions. And then the other one, you combine that with bodhicitta, and that’s the two wings of the bird, then you become a Buddha. So interesting. I’ve got this, you know, but can’t hear it. All we hear is religion.

Holy, worldly. Mindful, slowly. Remember the Dalai Lama saying, one time in Los Angeles. I’m kind of paraphrasing. Something about mindfulness or something on he said, I don’t wanna know about slow, patient, mindful.

I want a man of action. Long term patience, he said. So nice to hear that. So okay. So what we’re saying is from his own experience, and this is again we’ve gotta remember this.

He is not a creator. He does not posit a creator because the only one can hear religion. I know as soon as we hear morality, ethics, we get we lose the clock, you know, become some body of knowledge, some body of instructions imposed upon me from above. This is our view, what we think religion means. You know?

And we’re not supposed to know what it is because God’s got his plan. I’m not being rude. You love God. Please love God. Have you, you know, faith in the creator.

Perfect. Nothing wrong. But it’s not what it’s deal. That’s all. So even the starting point, this point, even alone is incredible.

The view of what is morality. This is one way of framing all of Buddhism. It’s a practice of morality. Another way of framing Buddhism is a practice of how to get happy. Another way is how to get stop suffering.

Another way is how to, you know, stop harming others. There’s different ways of framing Buddhism. Another one is how to get wisdom. They all come to the same thing. They all come to the same thing.

All the methods lead you to the same thing. They’re all doorways that lead you to the same thing because they’re utterly related. You know, like I said, we this morning, the the the the the term to meditate in in the term gong, to familiarize your mind with two things, that which is virtuous or ethical or moral is also known as, and that which is true was a bit of a shock. Know? Buddha says he’s found the truth.

I mean, what says they found the truth, but you’re allowed to say you found the truth. You start shutting down people’s throats. Buddha’s not shutting it down our throat. He says, this is what I found to be true. You go check it out for yourself.

And that’s why because he’s our creator. That’s why but every word in Buddhism is from Buddhism findings like a scientist. And what it takes us time to hear this. You know? If I I’m standing here telling you about relativity.

Come in with your intelligent hat on, first time, not your not your holy hat. You hear every word I’m saying, even though you might never heard it before, and you’d know you’d know because you’ve checked out that Einstein’s a valid guy. You would know that what I’m saying is from my own findings. You know I didn’t have a dream last night. You know it’s not from revelation.

You know I didn’t have a vision. You know I’m not hating it up. You know I’m not speculating. If I were all of those things, you’d throw me out the door every time. You know, it’s from my own experience, and we call that science.

But our biggest mistake is this. We say, oh, yeah. It’s science. Oh, excuse me. Whose science is it?

Have you proven that one plus one is two yet? If you have, it’s your science. If you haven’t, it’s merely belief. So we think science is because one person has has proven it. Well, one person more than as Dalai Lama said, all you need is one person having seen reincarnation.

That’s enough to prove it. The same as relativity, but we don’t we don’t you know, but we’ve gotta do it ourselves. We don’t use that same logic. It’s the same. So, you know, it’s as as long as I could say, you know, as long as she said, you know?

So being a Buddhist means you listen to what Buddha said. You read the books. You listen to the Dalai Lama. You read that news by other people. But you gotta be confident that they they know what they’re talking about.

And I’ll tell you, there’s a lot of rubbish that’s published because in the west because it’s Buddha because it’s religion, we don’t think you have to prove it. So one person goes to one weekend course, and they start to write books. You know? Because we think you’re allowed to. We think I’m allowed to think what I like.

But if it was science, you would not be allowed. You’d actually laughed out of the room. That should be the same here. Quite shocking, actually. So so much stuff that’s published is just plain rubbish.

You make up their own tricks. What I think would say is outrageous. So you gotta be confident. You talk to a place like this, and you gotta be confident that what you gotta hear there is valid. Otherwise, you’ve been let up guard in the past for centuries.

You know? You gotta be confident. Of course, the Buddha House will tell you they’re valid. Don’t just believe it. Check it out.

Check their reputation. If this keeps going, we’re gonna have to change the microphone. Do we have another microphone, do you? In the whole house, not any other microphone. Okay.

I’ll try to be really still. Is it recording? Is this the recording one as well? Yes. Yeah.

Oh. I was gonna just take it off and shout. Yeah. But we need it for recording. That’s okay.

Alright. I beg your pardon? You mean you be patient? Who says I’m being impatient? Typical bloody religious idea because you shout, you’d not be a calling impatient.

What’s your own mind? Okay. So Buddhist from his own direct experience was incredible. This is a logical deduction. You know?

If it is true that every word that is Buddhism, includes karma, reincarnation, clairvoyance, manifesting your body in millions of forms throughout space, manifesting your mind in millions of bodies throughout space, all the things the Buddha says are possible, If it’s true that he’s found it to be true for his own experience, then the logical deduction is, well, I’m a human being. That means I can do it too. But the first thing we say is, I I have to prove that, you know, because we haven’t thought it through logically. So what is either a maniac who has made it all up? The only other option is always right.

There’s only two options. This is a very interesting point. So it’s up to us to be confident that we’re prepare to work with Buddha, and it’s gonna take lives to get to it, he says, to see what he says is true, to verify, because that’s what practice is. Practice has got two aspects. Practice of anything.

You listen to the violin teachings, the theory, you go home, and you do you do your homework. And you gotta do two things. You gotta make it your experience, and you gotta verify it. Two together. One step at a time.

See, if you’re a Buddhist, you’re taking you listen to the clay you go to the places, you check the teachers, you check the place, you check the body, you check the things, you have confidates. Then you put your money away in your mouth as you start learning it and listening to it and internalizing it. Because that’s what really being a Buddhist is. Sitting there watching your bloody breath, excuse me, is not being a Buddhist. Please.

Thieves need mindfulness. You’re usually a noggin to think through what the Buddha is saying is, how about the thought of rubbish, misconceptions, maniac thoughts. So we need to recognize that, take it as our working hypothesis, then listen to Buddha’s view of reality and bring our minds into sync with that view. That’s what being a Buddhist is. What being a violinist is you bringing your your skill and musical knowledge and hand and everything into sync with the violin musical people.

You’re buying into violin music and you’re becoming one yourself. It’s the same here. Same here if you decide you’re gonna be a Buddhist. You don’t have to be. You listen first.

Then you take it on board. You take refuge. You commit yourself to following that path, you know, because you’re following those thoughts, internalizing those thoughts. So being a Buddhist means internalizing Buddha’s views. That’s what being a Buddhist is.

Not watching it break. It’s one tiny technique that would have taught that has marvelous results and benefits, but as a as a tool only, not an end in itself. That’s what the Hindu said. That’s where he diverged. The Hindu found such as they were the ones who created this technique that brings unbelievable experiential bliss and clarity into their voids, and they even call that the end result.

It’s so marvelous, the end result of single point of concentration, that actually they think it’s the end result. They call that. But it’s just the beginning. Way more to do than that. So what to do when the attacker when the chocolate runs out?

The fact is it’s gonna run out a thousand times a day. So we better be ready for it. You know? And there’s different ways of dealing with it, different ways of giving up attachment, giving ways of understanding attachment. For the Buddha and the four noble truths is one of these packaging of the teachings.

Effectively, main delusion is is attachment, the main neurosis, the main nonsense, the main delusion, the main mental illness. But it’s not the root one. That’s in fact the main voice of the root delusion, which is called ego grasping or known in Tibetan as marigpa, ignorance, unawareness. But effectively in daily life, the main cause of suffering is attachment. And as Mali as she said, I could tell you about attachment for a whole year.

You never begin to understand it until you start to look deeply inside. You know? That’s true. Attachment. Unreeable.

So let’s look at what it is. This is actually know, it just takes time observe it. It takes time to identify this serious mental illness and join the club. It’s the definition of being a saṃsāra person. So in this model of the mind, mental consciousness, the mental consciousness, or the sensory consciousness, but the way the mind functions in two ways, sensory consciousness, mental consciousness.

And like I mentioned on couple of the previous days, we’ll do it again here. Just this alone is showing how the sensory consciousness functions really gives us immense insight into the way the mental consciousness functions. You listen. I’ve done this before. I’ll do it again.

You listen. It’s very fascinating. This really indicates the way the mind works for the Buddha. You know? I’ll look at a cup.

I’ll go, no. I’ll listen to the music. I’ll hear that one note of a trumpet. I’ll go, wow. Miles Davis.

You sound right? Even after the rough time. It’s very funny. I’ve been, you know, I’ve been a jazz fan, Miles Davis, all those people. And then I became a radical feminist, so I got up with my own music.

Naturally, of course, I got a serious radical feminist in the seventies. It’s thirties thirty seventies. I gave up all my own music. Of course, I did. Completely gave it up.

And then slowly, I realized I couldn’t hate keep hating the half the human race. So I eventually became a a Buddhist and then, you know, then we often did my Vagasatra retreat for three months in Tuśita. And I I hadn’t listened to any music. Any music, I’d say, listen consciously, especially jazz for possibly four years. I came out of retreat, and I sat in a cafe in Darmesala, and John Coltrane came over the loudspeaker.

I really fainted. You understand? Yeah. I really fainted as bliss because of the intensity of my of my attachment to sound and that particular music. But the point I’m getting at is this.

That’s just an external story. The point is this. What happened is this. A million things all happened in that second, but we don’t process it like that. If you’re a neuroscientist, you look at all of this going on the brain.

Well, they do the same in Buddhist psychology, but not the brain, but the concepts, the thoughts, the the structure of the mind. It’s fascinating in Buddhism, The mental consciousness. So what happened was this. Ear consciousness is working. Okay?

And then in a millisecond quicker than Google, it’s a great analogy. Quicker than Google that that the ear consciousness, which is only capable of cognizing sound, nothing more. It’s like a dumb animal. The senses are like dumb animals. All it can cognize is sound.

But where where why is the bliss? Why wow amazing John Coltrane or whatever? Why? Because that what happened was the ear consciousness heard the mere sound and they’re instantaneously triggered by mental consciousness, which is where everything is stored. And as I said before, the good news of your mind is amazing.

It’s like every minute you see, hear, taste, touch, smell, or think about anything, you’re taking millions of pictures and storing them in your mind. Or like you’re you’re making a movie and the next live you run it, you play out the movie. Not the brain. We’re talking the brain. We’re talking the mind.

So all that information was stored in my mind from past listening, from recognizing, portraying the saxophone, this and all, that song there. There’s Miles Davis playing with him. All that body of knowledge is where in my mental consciousness. That’s what the workshop is as long as ever since. So what it is is a whole bunch of viewpoints, opinions stored in my mental consciousness, stories that I have made up about that sound.

It’s not even a sound at all. It’s the mental consciousness making a story. If my sister Janet had been there, she was so disgusting. She just can’t stand jazz. So right there, you can it presented us.

Write that into we should have a realization right there. Because everything in the mental consciousness is what interprets everything in the universe. Everything comes from the mind, what it says, and he’s not kidding. So we have to, therefore, know the mental consciousness, its contents. And you start, you know, you start to study the mental consciousness.

You know, when Alekka and I were back in England, it was, like, the early the late seventies, we studied together with Geshe Thubten Gyatso. We did Acharya Geshe’s amazing program, the the Geshe program. Incredible. Now the first put this model, this whole system based on his own training in the monasteries. Moves out the first time he got his program to start the study.

We did the first couple of years together. And you we we learned the model of the mind, it’s called Lorig, awareness, this model, this this text about the mind coming from the Hindus, basically. And there’s the two. The psychological model of the mind, which is the stuff that we’re talking about here, the contents, the fear, all the all the attachment, the anger, the love, the kindness of this and that, the the the emotional components, as well as all the technical components we’ll discuss. That’s the psychological model, which itself is already fascinating.

But this but what they call the epistemological model is outrageous, so complex when you first read it. You’ve got to do what they’re talking about. This is how the mind works, how it functions. It’s utterly fascinating that the bricks and depths of the literature in Buddhism. Ninety nine percent of people in Buddhist have no idea.

And then being Buddhist means being mindful. And the whole was mindful. Remember thieves need it too. So this gets us to the model at the moment. You’ve got negative states, which are neurotic, liars, delusions, afflictions, mental illnesses, neuroses, the cause of all your pain.

And because they’re liars, they lead you up garden paths and cause you to harm others, and therefore perpetuate suffering until endless time until you pull them out. Then you have the positive ones, which are the source of any happiness we experience, the source of any good we do to others, and are at the core of our being It can be fully developed. That’s what can be rid of. That’s Buddhist outrageous point. They’re adventitious.

Predictionary. It means they’re not at the core of your being. This is what’s so outrageous in Buddhist psychology. He’s saying we can get rid of them. This is beyond insanity.

There’s no concept like that in our culture. Look at yourself, and it’s like a joke to say you can get rid of the anger. We have no methods. You know? We have no means.

There’s no model of the mind in our culture that we ever dare to assert such a point because we haven’t discovered it. Buddha’s been quietly telling us all the years. So there’s two aspects of these negative states. This is why truth and morality come together. The two main functions.

And this is indicated by two of the many synonyms for the negative states. One one is disturbing emotion. Check the last time you’re angry, jealous, depressed, low self esteem. It was disturbing. It was painful.

And the other one is the word delusion. This is amazing. I go to different countries. You know? It was not in most languages.

There’s not a really good word for this. This is a perfect word to describe exactly for this point. If you’re accused of being delusionary, you’d be very offended. Why? We know perfectly well why because someone says you’re not in in sequence reality.

You live in la la land. That’s exactly and I mean exactly what we’re saying. This is exactly what we’re saying. I can’t tell you how precise that is. Delusion is a brilliant word.

The delusions is not these these disturbing emotions are delusional. Or no way to put it, the extent that you’re caught up in attachment, anger, pride, jealousy goes up and says anxiety, blah blah blah, you name it, is the extent to which you’re disturbed and out of sync with reality. So to just to understand technically and experientially how that’s true from your experience is is is the key to success. Then we can understand. And then so the third the other aspect is is that these what we would call emotions.

What we mean by emotions when it hits the body, you know, and and and all the excitement happens. And the and the blood races and the heart races and the spit comes out of the mouth or, you know, all the other body feels like a lump of lead. You can’t get out of bed one morning because you’re so depressed. And so it hits our body. We don’t know we have feelings.

In fact, because we’re so addicted to the body in our culture, we make the body the boss of love, and he says, we don’t even think there’s a reason to notice our thoughts until I hit the body. It’s like Vesuvius is about to explode. You go, what do I do about it? We’re too late. I’m sorry.

Way too late. Like a joke. That’s what the best we can do. We spend our lives not paying attention to our minds, notice when children are angry or depressed, feeling guilty about, so I shouldn’t have it because my life’s so nice until you can’t bear it anymore, and you gotta go to the therapist. So for us, it’s like damage control, which is disastrous way.

We don’t treat our computers, our cars, our houses, our bodies like that. We are we have brilliant preventative method before to make sure your computer never breaks down, to make sure your list doesn’t break down, your phone continues to work, your body works nicely, your car works nicely. We don’t wait till it collapses and wheels fall off on the freeway before you go to the mechanic. What we do with our minds, pretty demented. What is this right with a method that helps you understand your the content of your own mind that they’re yours, and you can, you know, maybe you can and they have methods.

Judy, what’s going on? You’re the tech guy. Fix it. You don’t have a tech person. Have to get out of the noises.

I’m sorry. I don’t know what to do. Nothing to do. Does it happen every day with? I just think it’s something else to do.

I’m trying to somehow not to move. It’s impossible. You can’t say that. You mean that it doesn’t move? It’s just the Are we so far?

Yes. Okay. So because you see in our culture, we assume they’re normal. That’s why we’re so scared. That’s why we can’t stand.

That’s why we do mindful because we heard it’ll make us our minds better. We’ll make it all go away. That’s why we get distressed and ask questions while I meditate and still doesn’t go away. Because the assumption is we’re death we are desperate for the pain to go away, aren’t we? We can’t be a bit jealous, angry, depressed, and because we believe it’s in the core of our being, and because we believe it’s that’s gonna happen.

Of course, gotta go mad. What what do think is gonna happen? So I’m not ready. Venable. Venable.

Just don’t use it. Can you just do it with that that? Because it is recording up here. How do you know? Yeah.

I’ve got my own recorder. If you if it’s annoying you, if you you don’t mind Not annoying me. It’s supposed to be not touching a problem. Yeah. It’s a new one.

It must have some loose wire as well. Let’s try something. Let me check this Okay. So because we have an assumption, this is who I am. That’s why we panic.

Is it not? Like, you had this hideous scar on your arm and it makes you look ugly, you don’t like scars. Dreadful, ugly looking thing. You know? You try to cover it every day, wouldn’t you?

And and because and this is the point because you believe it’s what you are. It’s really it’s you believe it’s you. You believe it’s your nature. You believe it’s in you, you can’t change it. But one day, someone says, I’ve got a minute.

Put a bit of this stuff on every day. In five years time, it’ll walk it’ll wash off. Well, you’d certainly be seeing this very differently, wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t you wouldn’t see this permanent any longer. You wouldn’t mind seeing it.

You learn to live with your ugly old scar because you’re really excited because you’re applying minutes to lessen the scar to eventually get rid of it. You have a very different approach to it, would you not? Same here. So when we have confidence by listening, thinking, analyzing, reading Buddhist teachings, thinking of the meaning of the word, the delusions, the adventitious, which means they do not belong. They are bells and whistles.

We don’t need them. Then you have real courage and won’t mind seeing your mind. You won’t mind. You’ll be glad to see the next level of anger. You’ll be glad to recognize it.

You won’t be so scared to raise your voice in case people think you’re angry. You understand what I’m saying? We’re such scaredy babies. We try to be Buddhist or holy, holy, walk slowly, mindful. Don’t raise your voice.

Don’t make up your enemies. We don’t hear it properly. I exaggerate sometimes to make the point, you know. Because in our culture, we either vomit it all out, uncontrolled, or we or we suppress. We’ll go to the third one.

Great. This is the one about what to do with it when they you know, how to deal with attachment. How do what I said in the in the subtitle there, whatever I said, that one. That’s what we have to do. How to be brave in the face of attachment attachment not getting what it wants.

This is what we’re discussing here, which is advanced level. It’s an advanced level of practice. Okay. That means we have to understand what attachment is. You know?

Or we go to delusions. This is ridiculous. Just a minute. So, okay, there’s sort of a depth at these delusions, how they function, how they are different different from the virtues different from the virtues. Okay?

So these three categories, they’re so distinct. You’ve got the negative, the positive, and the neutral. There’s no fourth category. In in all of the billions of thoughts in our mind, there’s only these three categories, which already comes to mind. Yeah.

Because you well, it’s not too difficult, but I can sort that out. So the the the neutral are are fascinating. They don’t mean they’re not important. It doesn’t mean that at all. There’s many, many, many of these that I like I like to call them the mechanics of your mind.

They’re the part of your mind, the different parts of your mind that are actually essential just to existing, actually essential to do anything properly, whether you’re a sniper or a meditator, whether you’re washing the dishes or stealing something. And this is, for example, in the model of the mind, I mentioned that, you know, we started together, me and like, years ago. You know, you you you learn the different contents of the mind. It’s like this is text that you study fifty one states of mind. We call they call them mental factors.

We call them states of mind. There are actually thousands of states of mind in there divided between the negative, positive, and neutral. But they they plucked out these fifty one as crucial ones that are necessary for a person who wants to learn to meditate so you can become a practitioner, so you can get realization. So there’s you know, pluck out fifty one. So there’s one group called the always the five always present mental factors.

So one of those, for example, is called recognition or discrimination. And it’s a type of it’s an it’s a it’s a sharpness and ability of the mind, like an intelligence that every millisecond is working that enables you to distinguish anything from anything, like red from blue and pink from white and square from round and this from that and left from right. Every millisecond is working. And this one, of course, is a crucial one if you wanna practice morality. You gotta know this is used to even help you identify the difference between a negative state of mind and a positive.

Your own. If that’s not working well, you’re in la la land. Mhmm. You can’t do anything. This is called discrimination or or never mind.

What was that? I think it was Recognition. It utterly necessary state of mind. But the point is this, a sniper needs it or a meditated that that means in its nature, it’s not virtuous or non virtuous. There’s a particular meaning here about virtue and non virtue.

Virtuous state of mind is what, for example, is love, compassion. So love is what? Defined as a thought. It starts with a thought. I’ll get into this in a minute.

It starts with a thought. May you be happy. It’s the wish that someone else be happy. That’s it. Bare bones love.

And, of course, you develop your infinite levels of of of affection. And then the great love, if you like, which is what can I do to make people happy? Then the other one is compassion, which is the thought, may you not suffer? And then the great compassion, such as some nice words, it’s a technical term, great compassion. Not only, oh my god, look at that suffering, but what can I do to help?

That’s the action of the that’s the attitude of the body suffering. So these are these are virtuous states of mind, and these in their nature, Buddha says, are virtuous. In their nature, they are the source of my happiness and the cause of me helping others. In their nature, in their bones, what they are in their by definition. And the Buddha says, they are at the core of our being.

They are indestructible. And when we’ve fully developed, the word Buddha, in Tibetan. San implies the utter eradication of all the neuroses, which are disturbing and liars, and the the full development of all the goodness. This is Buddha’s finding just outrageous, radical, insane concept. So if the purpose, therefore, of every single practice starting in junior school is to lead you to that.

So the neutral ones are crucial. You don’t have recognition that you can’t do anything. You’re useless. You you’re a completely insane person, lock you up and protect you from the world. There’s one one example.

There’s many like that. Like that, this is interesting too. Mindfulness, which is used in a very different way now. It’s okay. Not complaining, but it’s not the correct meaning of the word.

Mindfulness is one of these many technical parts of the mind. It’s neither virtuous nor non virtuous. The bare bones of meaning of mindfulness, love, yes, would always call it call it memory, and that’s the correct usage. And all it means is not forgetfulness. You got a good memory.

You stop it because have a little box in there called memory. You pluck into it and pick up things that you did when you’re five. Not that memory. It’s the ability it’s not even it’s the ability to notice and not forget what you’re doing every second. So if I say I’m gonna walk out the door and I get halfway there, and we all know this one.

What was I doing? You know, I’m talking about what was I saying? That’s that’s my lacking mindfulness. Mindfulness doesn’t mean walking slowly. It doesn’t mean be Michael Rubina.

Stop that. We do like a bit stick and beat each other. You know? So heavy. Mindfulness is meaning slow or moral or kind.

Thieves need it. It’s a technical part of your mind that enables you to keep incredible not forgetfulness. It’s best to be calling it not forgetfulness. Because that’s the point of our mind. Crazy delusions all over the place like a duck’s breakfast or dog’s breakfast or the most grandma used to say.

Isn’t it? We we forget what we’re sinking and doing all the time. It’s one of the major problems that we can’t meditate or we can’t focus because we forget what we’re doing. We scatter off in our conversations. We go to sleep.

So mindfulness is a massive state of mind, but it’s not forgetfulness. That’s all. That’s all. I’m not religious. I’m holy.

Things needed. There’s many of these states in mind. They’re called neutral, but they’re brilliant and necessary. We need to sharpen them and grow them. Then you got the virtuous ones, which in their nature are the source of happiness and the cause of helping others.

And what’s interesting what’s utterly interesting is they’re relatively in sync with reality. There’s logic to that, and we understand that it really helps. And then there’s gut motorosis that are totally common. And this one’s interesting. They’re not just humans.

Buddhist psychology refers to all living beings because it’s trillions of beings, all realms and existence, all kinds of sentient beings. Gods, they’re sentient beings with subtle light energy. There are humans. There are animals. Trillions of them, you know, we can see.

Creatures. All the ones living in your paws, you know, they love there’s billions. We’re like we’re like a walking zoo. It’s like we are. We saw we saw big pictures of all the stuff on our we’ve been revolted.

You know, when you’re when you’re kissing somebody, kissing all these creatures and eating them. We think it’s so clean and pure. We’re not we’re disgusting. Sentient beings. Okay?

Your your previous mothers living under your armpit. Sentient beings. The animal realm. Then you got the the spirits born motivated, overwhelmed by attachment, and, yeah, that hells. Trillions of any being suffering, Buddhism.

Buddhist psychology refers to all of them. And we’re all in the desire realm, which is, you know, experiences of bliss, which is when attachment gets what it wants, the humans and the and the gods, all the way down to when attachment doesn’t get what it wants, which is the hells. There’s psychological states of being, and the Buddha’s model refers to all of them. Buddha’s view is vast. It’s outrageous, Buddha.

So we have to know the difference. First, intellectually, you can’t possibly see your own mind. You can’t possibly play all that complicated notes on that piece of Bach if you haven’t sat and learned your theory first. Don’t jump ahead of yourself. You know?

Good to be do focus. You get what you’re looking at, you’re in trouble. It’s like you’re more like you’re miserable. In the monastery, there’s the kids, mindfulness, kids. They’re kids of the stuff, the context of the mind.

They teach the Buddhist psychology. So they learn to know the context and learn all about it. And then as they get older, then they learn to meditate. We jump ahead of the cells in the ways. We think meditation is everything.

Focus questions, dzo, before we go into detail? We shouldn’t go to detail yet. We’re gonna get into attachments. We’re gonna rub our noses in attachments. So any questions to clarify what I’ve discussed so far?

Yes. With the virtuous state of mind, the first one is recognition. Every time No. It’s not a virtuous state of mind. Neutral.

Oh, okay. In the category called the five always present states of mind, and they are all neutral They’re neither virtuous nor non virtuous. And there’s one of them there’s one of them as this example. This will show how they work. It’s this capacity to distinguish between any every millisecond that’s working.

They’re able to do any job at all, good or bad. So it’s one of the ones that’s called neutral in the sense that it’s not in its nature virtuous. All virtuous states of mind are are connected to others. They’re related to sentient beings, and they connect there’s a connectedness there. You know, you can see that.

Do understand? That’s sort of true. Yeah. You see what I’m saying? The first of the in the text called mental minor mental factors.

In the fifty one states of mind, there’s one group called the always present, the five always present, and then one of them is called recognition. Just to give you the idea of a neutral state, how it functions. Can you see the difference? Can you see what I’m saying? Okay.

Any questions? Okay. What’s the other one within that? Other what? Recognition and mutual state one.

That’s part of the mutual state. Yeah. There was another one. You know, I just use one. Then my thought is another.

Yeah. Which is called not forgetfulness. I said I use two different words, discrimination or recognition. They’re both translations of the same one. So let’s talk about text, please.

Such a simple word, and we use it in such a different way in our cultures. You gotta throw out your definition, please. I beg you. You can’t keep using your definition because you’ll get very depressed if you do. You know, it’s like if you learn the word if you’re learning music, you learn about getting a flat of being b flat.

It’s hard to hear that people live in flats, and you didn’t know the different definition. You get really confused. How can I live in a b flat? What’s we can’t conceive that. You just gotta open your mind to know there’s another definition.

It’s called a house. Well, it’s never even apartments because we’ve Americanized. Or, know, you you you have a you learn geometry and the table is flat. Same word, same spelling, same sound, different definitions. The same here.

Okay. Similar word. We all we we virtually use it synonymous with love, with pleasure, with a good quality. We use it this way. We’re allowed to.

But just remember the definition when you hear Buddha say. It’s different. It’s different. It’s different. It’s a delusion.

It’s a misconception. It’s a lie. It’s it’s it’s it’s disturbing, and it’s the source in daylight of all the others. It’s massive, I tell you. And so that we don’t even give it a name in our culture.

We do what is extreme. We call it addiction. Junkie mind. Addiction. So we do have a word for it, but it’s only when it’s extreme.

And all Buddha saying is we are all junkies. It’s just a question of degree, and that really is a perfect way to put it. So, okay, what is it? Well, first, let’s look at the hierarchy. It’s like a hierarchy of these delusions.

Think of it this way. The root delusion, they call it that. The root one. The one such that when you’ve realized emptiness, which we’ll talk about, that’s what cuts the root delusion. Then you then the beginning of the end of saṃsāra.

And until you’ve cut the root of saṃsāra, which is this ignorance, until you’ve cut that neurosis out of the mind, which is what you do when you realize emptiness, until then, you’ll never ever ever ever ever ever ever stop suffering. That’s the one finding that would have found. It’s amazing when he did this radically. He went further than the Hindus, and he discovered that you can read the mind even in that one. The root one, the one that clings to the neurotic self.

That’s the main one. On the basis of that, we have attachment. So what attachment is multifaceted, I tell you. It’s got multi different functions. You can say the first level of it, and we’re bored with this program from countless lives and practicing it to perfection.

It’s even the cause of getting born. This wonderful book of love is that you can download for free. F b m t dot org slash death. I really recommend you do. It’s this book I worked on the last few years that blew my mind.

It’s about how to help people at time of death. Teaching. Did you know? They put in a really structured orderly step by step way like a handbook. It’s incredible.

The teachings are amazing. And when they describe the death process in great detail in Buddhism, it’s utterly fascinating. Attachment is the main cause of all your suffering of death, but you’re treating like a vampire to the status quo and to yourself and your body and your friends and your beloveds and everything else. And then it you know? And then and how you even die.

You die when the mind goes through the process of deconstruction, leaves the body eventually in this into into this intermediate state. We’re going to detail now. And then what drives you to the next birth is just this powerful energy of attachment and desire. So even when eventually your new mommy and daddy your new mommy and daddy hop into bed and do their trip, and you’re in the intermediate state, you know, the karma ripens between you. And what drives your little consciousness to their egg and sperm is this intense because of past habit of sexual attachment, this intense craving to be in union if you’re be born a girl with your daddy.

That’s what they say in the text. We’re gonna love this. You’re be born a girl, you’re driven by this pride. More, you’ll roar, powerful sexual attachment to that. Then you get there, and all you can see is a sex organ.

You freak out, and that caused you to die. You zap into the egg and egg and sperm. Off you go. Just mention that here how deep attachment it it causes even birth. Not God will hold you or a special gift.

As long as I was quiet, he says, and now you can see, of course, how saṃsāra is, you know, caused by karma and delusions. So the karma the past habit drives you to them, the past connection with the parents, and then attachment is the motor that gets you there. Great. Attachment is a primordial, massive, vast creator of this body. What else is it?

Look at it. This the bag. It’s, you know, it’s a walking sewer, one thing. It’s a bag of bones, and it’s a walking desire thing. Five of five senses that demand that the attachment in there in the mind demands the craves, the fulfillment of its of the five senses need.

You know? They’re alive trying to do that. But it’s a desire realm because it needs driven by attachment. So we get born, and one of the first ways attachment functions in the deepest, most primordial level from the habit having had it in the past is that it’s the energy of it is dissatisfaction. That’s sweet word.

Dissat the simple word. This is primordial, and you’ll recognize it. Primordial constant feeling every millisecond that I never got enough. There’s never enough. And that means I am never enough.

No matter what I do, it’s never enough. No matter what I achieve, it’s never enough. No matter how hard I work in my practice, it’s never enough. The default mode of this one is dissatisfaction. This is the worst disease.

We see somebody who had it so plagiarly shockingly. Dissatisfaction. It’s like misery in its nature. Then it gives rise naturally because you’re dissatisfied. You think something’s missing, isn’t it?

So it causes hankering after something. And the first level of attachment is the objects of the senses. Of course it is. Food, bodies, clothing, you name it, whichever one you’re attached to. Attachment is the same, just read to the object.

Use your past karma. Or it could be you’ve got any karma to kill. Let’s say you you you you, you know, you become a fisherman. Attachment killing fish. Attachment, that’s the cause.

You don’t hate fish. You love fish, but you’re attached to killing them because of past habits. Attachment is primordial. And if we are not working on our minds, the default mode of saṃsāra in life is to do what attachment wants. That’s it.

By definition, for us attachment is when attachment is you don’t mind the noise? Okay. So attachment has the the function of dissatisfaction, which causes craving, hankering. Because of course, you feel empty. There’s something missing, so you look for something to fill it up up the baby hole, isn’t it?

The obvious one is the objects of the senses. Food. For most people, it’s rare to find a person not attached to food. You know? It’s obvious because the body is the most primordial object of that.

And attachment body itself and how it is and looks and should be and it could only not this and that that blah blah blah. You know? And then attachment to other things, other objects, houses and possessions and money and things. And then attachment to people, massive, primordial, huge, vast, nonstop. Then there’s a subtle and then the other thing, the other function of attachment then, there are the objects.

Then the other touch function of attachment, there’s a there’s a dissatisfaction. There’s a craving. And looking, search for the object, you get the cake. There it is, a square grand ganache. With the eye consciousness sees, and then instantaneously trickles trickles you Google, and that comes divine, delicious, profound, wow, wonderful, dripping in divineness chocolate cake.

When I get it, I’ll get happy. That’s the chocolate cake we see on the plate. That’s a fantasy. You’re mad. It’s not there at all.

That’s not until the cake on the plate. It’s a story your own attachments are made up, and we believe that’s a tragedy. Bad enough, as Lama Tsongkhapa says, with all these delusions. He was talking to the way. This is how they cause suffering.

They they make up a massive, big, gigantic, absurd, exaggerated story. As I was able to just decorate on top of what is there on that plate. In this case, attachments and delusion makes up a big story that decorates on top of what is there layers upon layers of characteristics that just aren’t there. And this is how all the delusions work. They exaggerate.

They distort. They embellish. Because it’s so we’re addicted to this, we don’t think it’s true. So bad enough as Lama Tsongkhapa says, bad enough that attachment causes the cake to look more delicious than it is. Bad enough that.

But second, we don’t even know attachment’s doing that. We actually think that the cake is that and then we believe it. This is being. This is being in. From ancient primordial habits, it’s beginning this time.

So we come into the slide fully programmed with all these things. Is dissatisfaction. Then it’s causes hankering and craving. Then it manipulates to find it. Then it gloms onto the object and makes and this is the biggest one, makes it look more delicious than it really is.

What we do love with Fred? I mean, tip of his hair to his toenails, he’s divine. Even his shit is divine. Excuse me. You’re exaggerating.

That’s a tattoo. I know it’s very gross. I’m always gross. I’m just saying now. But, you know, excuse me.

I have to say this. You know, you go to the toilet. You don’t mind your own shit, do you? Nobody else is gonna stand. That’s attachment.

Our shit smells nice. That’s attachment. That’s the depth of attachment. But it’s me and mine that’s delicious. Can you hear that?

It is a gross example, but we all recognize it. That’s attachment. Can you hear me? I’m full of remorse. I’m gonna try and change it.

One shush. Ravenna? Yeah. Okay. Go.

Yes, darling. What’s the question? I just wondered if our attachment based on our fear of locking. Attachment is fear of loss. One of the aspects of attachment, not based on it.

Okay. Fear. Okay. Fear of loss. Exact that that is attachment, not based on it.

That is one of the functions of attachment is terrifying because attachment’s a junkie. Okay? Attachment is a junkie that believes I’m nothing, believes it’s based on his dissatisfaction, I’m not enough. So therefore, we’re craving junkie to find something to fill up the hole. Therefore, panning attack, the thought of the thought of not getting it is like a is like a nervous breakdown.

So especially when the attachment is so strong, you’re going to get you’re to go to buy the next one in heroin. You gotta go to meet the new boyfriend. You’re probably obsessed with him. And the terror and horror of it not being there, that’s a function of attachment. That’s That’s why we get upset when you order chocolate cake to get carrot cake.

That’s why you get upset when you drop something. You’re not supposed to drop something because you’re attached to being a good person. That’s why we get upset every millisecond because attachment doesn’t get what it wants. That’s our problem. Can you see what I’m saying?

It’s not based on it. It isn’t. It’s a function of it. So it’s junky. Best one to call is junky.

Best is to call it junky. It is a perfect word. We only think those people found that in the spectrum of junkie in our normal. No. And another way of putting it is this.

If you have any pride, any arrogance, any low self esteem, any depression, any anger, any jealousy, it’s because you are attachment. No attachment, the whole lot collapses in a heap of nothingness. Anger, the main one, is the response. The response when attacking those QA ones, anger, panic attack, freak out. Or for the lot the volatile people, the quiet ones, turns into despair and depression.

And these aren’t happening in a little time today. It’s so subtle, the level of way that it takes that. So subtle. Let me say it. In other words, attachment is a default mode.

Attachment is the assumption we live our lives with. The assumption another way of putting attachment is this hysterical craving to only get the nice things. I know where to put it. It’s a hysterical craving to get what I want every millisecond. That’s a tactful.

It’s a source of all the pain in daily life. You didn’t have it, you’d you’d be in this. So deep. So primordial. And it’s not the root delusion yet.

It’s the main voice of the root delusion. When you’re rushing sense of a fractured, lonely, beret, nothing I, which is itself the biggest thing to you all. This is what is the other mind. Isn’t it interesting? Don’t you agree?

Are we recognized? Do we recognize? I recognize. How can I say it if I didn’t? So we don’t hate ourselves for it.

We’re so blissful that we can talk about it. We’re so blissful. It’s like you just won the lottery. You found the problem. You know, you should go get a prize.

You’ve dislocated the problem. Now you know what to do. The suffering comes because we don’t think there’s an answer. The suffering comes because we’re panicked about it. We shouldn’t have it.

I’m bad. I’m guilty because that’s our view of morality. Because morality is just imposed by somebody else. You shouldn’t be like that. Don’t hear it that way.

And this one takes such a long time. You know? What time much? Twelve thirty. We must have a g grade.

Aren’t we? No. No. We got that earlier. Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. Oh, sorry. I forgot to hear it. Okay. So now let’s put that aside for a second.

We’ll now go to the Well, so does Buddha. Have a look at his little ten list of ten don’ts. Same thing. Don’t kill, don’t lie, double don’t double the wrong partner, you know, few other things. He’s got a slightly more, you know, radical view of don’t kill, like, don’t kill anybody.

Don’t do even an ant, even a wasp, you know, whereas Jesus taught, I’m a be rude if you didn’t, that God made those creatures for us to do what we like with. There’s a big difference there. But never mind the general approach. And, you know, yourself, your grandma will tell you the same thing. A good communist will tell you the same thing.

So the general idea of don’t kill, don’t lie, don’t steal, meaning don’t harm sentient beings is is the attitude of a decent person. We can see this. I would have did not invent this, but look at the difference. I asked my Jesuit priest friend, please tell me what is a sin by definition? And it’s brilliant.

The answer is so clear and this is the difference. He said, by definition, a sin is doing what God said not to do. Don’t be like that. Don’t laugh at it. It’s totally perfect.

But that’s because you have a belief. There’s a being out there who’s a superior being who created the universe, whom you have total faith in. So, of course, if he’s the boss, you do what he says. I’m not complaining. You’re a perfect Christian.

You do that. But this is the difference. Now you look at the materialist view. I’m sorry. It’s exactly the same philosophy.

It’s exactly the same. When I’m in my mommy’s house when I’m a child, she says, don’t do that. And I’ll say why not? We know the answer because I say so. And this leads us to our most primordial level of attachment.

Junkies for praise. Junkies for being seen as a good girl. Why? Because we believe primordially that being a good girl is doing what mommy said, doing what the world said, doing what daddy said, doing what god said, doing what everybody else says so that they can reflect back to you that you’re a good person. Oh, that’s what motivates most of us.

Attachment of reputation, it’s called. Attachment of praise. We’re duckies because we assume that being a good person is what someone else says is a good person, and I need to be seen as a good person, which is why when mommy didn’t see me do the naughty thing, oh, I got away with it, didn’t I? They’ve all got that dualistic view. In other words, for us, morality, which is why it’s a mind field for us, is is is instructions imposed by someone out there upon me, which implies punishment and reward, doesn’t it?

Buddha says it’s lot of rubbish. It’s infantile. It’s childish. So it’s like so you go to the doctor. It’s like, you know, the doctor says, don’t smoke or you might get cancer.

That’s like going home, and I noticed the doctor’s not there. I’ll get my Marlboro’s out. Oh, I was like, I can smoke. I won’t get cancer. Because we think of it as punishment and reward.

How absurd, petitions. There’s no such concept in Buddhism as punishment and reward. That’s ego’s view. Don’t blame me a Jewish or a Catholic mom. Blame yourself for this idiotic delusion, which is a function of ego grasping.

It was like an infant who thinks you’re a creep and you crave all day and night to be approved of by others. So you better learn the rules of the world and do what they say then you’ll be praised and judged as a good person, won’t you? That’s how we all know. That’s how it works detachment. The most primordial based on this assumption, this dualistic philosophy.

There’s stuff imposed upon us. This this is ego, Buddha said. We all make it up, he says. We made up the viewer creator, he said. There’s nothing rude about it.

Have a have faith in our creator. Incredible. If you’re really a perfect Christian, you do everything God said, and you’ll accept his will. That’s amazing, powerful, but it’s just not good. The Buddha says, what’s what’s then for Buddha is morality?

It was not what God said you should do. What is it? We just guess what, people? It’s a convention. It’s a natural convention.

It’s a you know, looking around the world, and we can prove in this room we do a bit of research and do a survey. Do you like getting killed, lied to, stolen from, punched in the teeth? We know the answer. Good enough. Buddha says that proves it’s a negative action.

A negative action for him is a conventional truth. It’s an action that harms another. Guess what? Hardly rocket science. Nothing to do with the fact that he said it.

He’s like a doctor. This is a powerful important point. And this is touching on the. The Buddhist point is this. Killing is an action that harms another.

Just, you know, check the mouse. Do they like it? No. The dog? The human?

No. Nobody wants it. Good enough. That’s what defines it as negative. But now the tricky part comes.

And this is crucial to understand. And I’m sorry I left that teaching out of the books. I was trying to stick it to keep it to fifty twenty five sheets. I I should have put this one in. I didn’t.

It’s to understand the Buddha’s essential point that, yes, a negative action is one of the times another. First level. First level. First. But why he would exhort us not to do it?

You should ask that question. You should say, well, why shouldn’t I do it, Buddha? So we assume because Buddha says a negative action is one that harms another. The reason not to do it is because it harms another. No.

Too advanced. And this is his main point, and this takes so much time. Guess what Buddha says? When you kill a Venus sweetheart, you harm yourself, baby. You distort your own mind now, and then you sow seeds in your mind that’ll ripen in the future.

You being born a mouse. You getting killed. That’s hard to hear. That’s hard to see, but it’s all in Buddhist literature because carbon for the wood is a natural law. You didn’t make it up.

What a lot of rubbish. It’s not revelation. It’s observed to be true. It’s a natural law like botany or gravity. It occurs.

It runs the universe. So we gotta understand how will my killing that mouse in my kitchen harm me. That’s the crucial question. When we get this, then we understand Buddhism and morality properly and intelligently and can use it as the basis of our own decisions in daily life. Not guilt, not shame, not blame, not punishment, not reward, which is the childish one, which is the main function of attachment in the deepest level, which we all have.

So let’s look analyze how when I kill that mouse, how it harms me. Because junior school entry level into Buddhism is don’t kill, don’t lie, don’t steal, don’t this, don’t that. Why? Because it will harm you, Ravina. Don’t believe it.

Analyze it. Prove it to be true even intellectually first. But just vaguely, oh, it’s wrong. You could really do it because you wanna be seen to be a good person, which is the main attachment, the worst attachment, the hardest one to see. It’s only taught in the body’s type of path when they talk about the.

That’s what it means. This weird phrase, but eight different ways it works at this primordial level. So why is my killing a mouse, how does it harm me, please? This is a brand new idea in our world. Okay.

You’re absolutely right. This is the deepest one. This is we have to figure that out. This is also telling us how we should listen to Buddhism. You know, I never say the words I had faith in Buddhism.

I never use that word. They use it, but I don’t use that word. Just have to believe in it because we have a misunderstanding what that means. You know, you’d never say I believe in mathematics, would you? You wouldn’t, would you?

You would never say it if you laughed it. Then I ask you to please explain it. Oh, no. I can’t do that. I mean, what good is it?

I’m tired of you like two oranges. I don’t even to do this. What’s the point of eating? Does it help you? Useless.

Ugly use. So okay. Let’s look at this. So in order for any action we do to be a good or a bad action, a negative or a positive one, a complete one, they call it. There’s various ways.

It’s a complete action. There needs to be four things in place. So let’s use the example of a mouse in my kitchen. The first one is there has to be the object there. That’s called the the mouse is there, the object, living a living mouse.

Second one is called intention. That’s what three parts Two a, b, and c. A is recognition, that state of mind. I I have the intelligence to recognize that is the mouse I’ve had to kill. That one has to be there.

Recognition. Next one is two a, to b, which is called intention, the same as the main heading. Now this word is incredible. This is a meaning of karma. Intention is one of the five always present mental factors.

Intention is the best way to describe what meaning of karma is. Intention is the thought. As long as ever says, everything exists on the tip of the thought, the wish, intention. That’s the real meaning of karma, intention. That everything comes from that intention.

And that’s called not motivation. Please don’t hear it. No. I’m not saying motivation. We use intention like motivation.

You I’ve got good intention. That’s not the point. Intention is bare bones here, like will, volition. And intentions is sounds like this. I will kill the mouse.

Simple bare bones fact. I will walk out the door. I will eat my lunch. That’s intention. But what’s interesting, we all know that there’s always as we would say, there’s always a reason implied in that for why you’re gonna do what you’re gonna do, isn’t it?

Why you gotta walk out the door a bit? If I said, oh, no reason, you’d think I’m insane. There’s always a reason. We say a reason. They say motivation.

Do understand what I’m saying? Mhmm. So you say to me, well, how do wanna kill the mouse? Oh, I don’t know. Just why not?

No one would say that. There’s only gonna be three reasons. Only ever. Three main delusions. Either attachment.

Oh, I’m a little mouse. He’s dying to cook his little legs for lunch. Kill him nicely. Be careful. That’s called attachment.

Kill him with attachment. Fisherman is that. Most of us, though, we can see the second motivation is anger, aversion, disgust, remoting. How dare a mouse be in my kitchen. You look at the motivation of what most people kill.

It’s anger, outrage, anger, aversion, disgust, anger, variations of aversion, the bare bone state of mind directly to attachment, disgust. Does. Predictable. Predictable. Pact completely into the intention.

Simultaneous their lives. The two b two c. Then two c oh, that’s that’s motivation. Two a is reckon intentions. Generally, two is called intention.

We’ve got three parts. Two a is that’s the mouse I wanna kill, recognition. Two b is I will kill the mouse. Two c, why? Aversion.

And this is the most important one. Third point, action. You kill the mouse. Fourth, rejoice. The mouse is dead.

He died before you. All those pieces in place is quite precise that constitutes what they call a complete action. That’s such that the powerful seeds and plants in the environment, everything you do and say brings us with. It will leave seeds in the mind, but if you leave them, they will multiply massively and eventually ripen as many lower realm rebirths for you in that consciousness, next future lives. That’s what we call a complete action.

A virtuous action, exactly the same. So that’s seeds, little same components. Let’s say it’s saving the mouse. What’s your name? Betsy has a mouse in her kitchen, and she can see the dog in the cage running after it.

So exactly the same. One, there’s that mouse she’s gonna save. Two, intention. Two, a, that’s that mouse she’s gonna save. Two, b, intention.

I will save the mouse for being killed. Two, c, compassion. To three, she gets the action, grabs the mouse. Four, it gets saved and she rejoices. That’s exactly the same.

You understand my point? That’s a complete virtuous action. Do you see what I’m saying? Now the key point in here is so fascinating. The key point the key point and you’ll see that another example would say Jay?

Yarick. Who? Yarick. Yarick. Where’s that come from?

Polish. Who? Polish. Polish. Okay.

So Yaruk’s got a mouse in his kitchen. We can do this one. Another variation. Listen carefully. First first is the object.

There’s that mouse I’m about to kill. He recognizes. No. Sorry. There is that object there.

Then two a is to intention to intention. Two a, that is the mouse I’m gonna kill. Two b, I will kill that mouse. Two c, now you listen to this. His motivation is compassion.

Because the mouse is suffering, and he thinks killing it like many people do will help it. Yeah? You with me? Motivation is compassion. Persia was motivation to save the mouse, but his is to kill it, but his motivation is compassion.

And we can see that people are very sincere in that, aren’t they? Do understand? Do you mean grandma killed a mouse? Isn’t it? It’s not called putting grandma down, but it’s the same.

Putting her to sleep, same as pussycat, you know. So it’s his motivation, compassion. Three, he does the action. Four, it’s dead and rejoices. Do understand?

His action and mind are identical, don’t they? And there’s only one piece different, the motivation, and this is the one that makes all the difference. That one that one in mind, the anger, the aversion, the wish to harm, they’re kill, that’s what pollutes the entire action and programs my mind in intention to kill, as Betsy says, to keep killing, to have the experience always kinda right. We go into detail. What is the tendency to keep doing it?

Hardly rocket science. You wake up next life, you wanna kill immediately. You get born in a place where you kill and it’s called natural. Two, the other one’s called experience similar to the cause. I’ll wake up the next life and I’ll get killed or I’ll die young.

Third one is the environmental result of killing, which is like, you know, the the food’s polluted, the air’s polluted, it’s disgusting, it’s around about, you know, people die young. And the main result of killing, of course, is lower realm. Four ways of karma ripens, The type of rebirth, intent the the the the tendency to keep doing it, good or bad, the experience similar to it, and the environmental result of it. This one is a natural law that runs the universe. No one’s out there pulling the strings.

No one’s out there judging or rewarding. It’s a natural law that merely occurs and what runs it is beings’ minds. We are the bosses of what’s most outrageous. The main difference with his action and mine was the motivation. So even though he’s deluded, let’s say, and the mouse takes a worse rebirth, he put it from actually, put it from the frying pan into the fire because that’s what Buddha would say.

The way that what’s on the mouse’s mind at the time of its death determines the next rebirth. So say that the body of a mouse is already freaking out, and then he comes along and kills it. You’re having a quick panic attack, which triggers a negative seed, throws it into the lower realms again. So he didn’t actually help the mouse at all. He put it from the frying pan into the fire.

But the point here is even though he had no wisdom, even though he caused the mouse more suffering, his compassion was so strong. And this is even, you know, it’s you mean well. So for him, the karma’s not that negative. Even you could say he created a positive karma. Okay.

It’s ignorance. There’s no wisdom there. Not enough. Compassion’s not enough. You need wisdom.

But nevertheless, the power of motivation is the key point here. That’s the factor that that that shapes that action. In my case, it’s obvious. We wish to have. We wish to kill.

Of course, it’ll keep increasing the habit. Of course, it’ll keep increasing the because, you know, you kill sentient beings. Don’t you don’t kill a tree. You don’t kill a a vase. You don’t kill a bookshelf.

You don’t say you don’t fly in the air or kill the air. You kill a living being. Right? And karma’s personal. You’re gonna bump into that person again and again.

Guess what? They told that person, how dare you kill me forty two lives ago, I’ve been in the kitchen It was a natural law. All of this for the Buddha is logical. All of it is explainable. It’s all there in all the literature.

If anybody wants to study and learn it, Not made up. It’s not revelation. It’s not speculation. Buddha says it’s a natural law. It occurs.

It’s all there for us to learn. So at the beginning, of course, you can’t learn all that in a second. You take it as your hypothesis. Why I say, I never say I believe in. I take Buddhism as my working hypothesis.

And if Buddhism is valid, a decent system, it has to be intellectually coherent. First. First. Let me take it one step at a time. I’m saying each step of the way.

Are we communicating? Mhmm. So a negative action for the Buddha is one that harms another, but he gets us to not he exhorts us in the beginning not to do it because it’ll harm me. And that is the hardest one to hear because we think religion is all about others, all that just sound like selfish, you know. But this is unbelievably important work to do.

This is the wisdom we work. This is the retreat mode, really. This is the work on you. First of all, first, before you look at your mind, this is junior school. High school is looking at your mind.

This is junior school. Behave nicely. Back off. Don’t harm others. Why, Raveena?

Because it’ll harm you, Raveena. It’s gotta be motivated by your wish to be free of suffering. That takes time, and you can’t know that if you don’t think about Buddhist teachings on karma. You can’t just say, oh, it’s karma. What do you mean?

Besides, I always mathematics. What does it mean? Oh, I don’t know. No good no use to you. Not helpful.

Put out the details to you. It’s all there in the literature. I can you learn it if you want to. You have some confidence. You may can’t prove it yet and see if that’s still strange.

You’re using this as your basis but not wanting to kill because you know what? Your compassion is great, but not just that one. First, you got compassion for yourself. That’s the wisdom we I mean it. We don’t have it.

We love to hate ourselves, beat ourselves up, rude to ourselves, abuse ourselves. Wrong. Wrong. And that’s the punishment reward mode. Wrong.

Not like that. We should have such compassion for ourselves like we do when it comes to eating the right food. Not put you down for eating the right food. They praise you. But as soon as you say you’re not gonna do harmful things because you wanna be a bit happier person, I think you’re being selfish.

Ridiculous. Total nonsense. You’ve gotta know what causes you happiness first. You gotta know you’re sick up to here of suffering. That’s gonna be your motivation first.

It’s called renunciation. Renouncing suffering and its causes. You gotta be up to the up to your teeth in suffering and sick of it. That’s your motivation. Not guilt, not shame, not this, not that, and not only compassion.

That’s too advanced. That will come eventually. Got to recognize and this is the basic one of morality. Buddha’s teachings of morality. It’s a natural law, and it’s all outlined there.

It’s up to be trying to think about it and use it. Of course, I have compassion to it. You see the mouse. You you’re so caught lucky you would be cautious about, you know, jumping into a fire. You know, you can’t stand the suffering.

That will be your first motivation, isn’t Oh, I’m not I must save the mouse from the fire and jump in. No. You’re not ready for that. You have to see the fire and now you can’t bear the suffering. And you can also have compassion then for the mouse as well.

First, protect yourself from creating ego karma. But you’re saying, fuck, it’s just sinful and you’ll get punished. We just have a look at our all the time. We wanna be since approved of and what if we wanna hide our naughty qualities. This is this is the the dualistic view of ego.

Very demons on us. We’re gonna be our own boss. We are the boss. We are the punisher and the rewarder. Okay.

So we’re communicating. The cat because it’s gonna take okay. The cat instinct the spooky kill not to kill. Just put in Buddhist words. We do that.

The cat has got the tendency to kill. That’s why she’s got the instinct to kill because she came into this life due to past killing with an instinct to keep killing. So, yes, she’s got the instinct to kill, then then that’s what he said. Instinct because it is a cat. Instinct because she’s killed before and she’s born as an animal that hasn’t had hasn’t been seen to kill.

Because I did I’ve got the mouse and put it outside eventually. So what’s your question about that? And I just want to know what would happen to the calmer of the cat. Well, you prevent it. So you’re doing a a complete action.

How how kind you are? What if it had? Okay. Well, cold killing power. Lower realms.

All lower realms to the cat. Of course. What else? I’ve never said it before. I feel safe.

You have one little action. How kind I’m not I’m I’m that. I’m saying the mouse will just get the result of its karma. The cat will just create more karma. Do you understand?

Do you understand? It’s very amazing. Yeah. So from a common point of view, that chicken’s burning catches killing the mouse and eating it or the cat crying with the mouse? We just made that that’s our our scientific explanation for why cats do it.

You see the cat’s thinking, oh, that’s just they have it to kill. And because they never know the way to get through. It’s true. But it’s they have it to kill. It’s the most thing.

So the main one there one of the one of the things one of the various factors that make the action of killing let’s say killing worse. And one is the depth of the habit. So the cat farm all the you occasionally kill a mouse. But she’s defined as a killer. It’s her job.

You know? That makes her killing kinda more heavy. But the other one is the way the creature dies. So if if she gets to the leisure, which the mouse does, that’s hideous. That’s it’s called torture.

And the fishermen do that. They don’t know they do. They think they need this. A all the fish die slowly. They die agonizing them.

Fish die agonizing them, slowly die from no water. That’s called torture. That’s heavy karma. But out of the ignorance, we don’t even realize it. It makes it even worse.

We don’t even realize it’s negative. That makes it even worse. Yes. Okay. I’ve got a question for you.

Well, I hope you have. That’s why you’re speaking. You’re a Asian. What about it? I’ve worked in the We just described it here.

Extrapolate. We just described exactly he did use a native, didn’t he? Didn’t he? What, dear? Suffering can’t Excuse me.

Did you hear excuse me. Did you hear my point? Don, I have to say this to you. Did you hear my point to Yara? Did you hear it?

Obviously not. He just did the euthanasia on on a mouse, didn’t he? Do you remember the story? His story. So explain what I said about Yara’s section.

Can you explain it? No. You can’t remember? No. What do you remember I said about the RX action?

What was his action? What was his motivation for killing the mouse? Do you remember his experience? I gave you an example. Right.

Isn’t that called euthanasia? Is it called euthanasia, darling? Compassion. Yes. No.

No. Is the action of killing somebody with a compassionate motivation called euthanasia? Is that what we call euthanasia? Yes. Well then, you got your question.

You got your question answered. But it takes us time to hear it, doesn’t it? What’s missing for you in what I told him? What’s missing? I can’t remember.

Well, tell me. I’m fine. Well, think about it when you’re clear and speak to me Could I answer the question perfectly here? Because we’re you know, before you refer to humans, you somehow think it’s different. Mhmm.

There’s no difference. You had a mouse who was suffering. You have a grandma who’s got cancer, and she wants to die. Mouse doesn’t say it. But out of compassion, he kills the mouse if he is helping it.

Right? And out of compassion, you wanna kill your grandma. Right? Same. What’s the difference?

Right there. What’s the difference? What’s the difference? When I talk about sentient beings, it’s not That’s right. That’s all I’m talking about.

What else am I talking about? Not about trees, sentient beings, grandma’s and and mouse. You hear me? So therefore, the conclusion is you might kill your grandma out of compassion or very nice for you, but don’t think you help your grandma. That’s the problem.

We’ve assumed because we mean well that our grandma gets a benefit because the Buddha would say we’ve a series of misconceptions there. The misconception is the mouse will die and it’ll be stopping its suffering. Your misconception is that your grandma’s cancer will stop. That’s true. But you don’t know that she won’t take her birth rebirth, do you?

Therefore, how the hell you helped her? Russian roulette. So back off and mind your own business. Help your grandma die nicely and peacefully and then hear the Buddha’s name and and love her and take care of her and nurture her and make her calm and peaceful best way to die when she’s ready. Only the fuck is no moral rule there that says you shouldn’t kill.

It’s only because you lack the wisdom to know what will happen to her after she dies, isn’t it? Can you hear that point? Same as him. No difference. No difference, darling.

So we call that putting it down. We call this using agent. Can you hear the same though? Can you hear us the same? I do.

Good, darling. Do you have a question for me now? Now that you’re clear. I know you are. So what?

It’s a big issue. I know it is. So what? I’m giving you the Buddhist answers. It’s up to you to decide.

I know you’re in the medical field. You’re kind and helping people. But if I’ve given you the basis for some new thinking, I mean, you’re a Buddhist, don’t you? I understand what you’re saying. Why are you worried about them?

Oh, to not just being biased. What? I don’t wanna have a fight. We’ve done any fight. I’m taking him here.

Do mean fight? You mean here? No. It’s called debate. You’d like to say something, please say it, I’ll answer it.

No. I don’t get it. So why worry that you’ll feel that you’re in? You know that you know what your view is, you can’t dump it on other people, but it would inform your actions, won’t you? Wouldn’t that inform your actions or do you kill people now?

You don’t kill people. I don’t kill anybody. Okay then. So why are you worried about it for the medical field? Why is it difficult for us?

Just be quiet. I understand that, darling. I do know. If you’re hearing a bit now clearer, this is the Buddhist approach. So if you have the wisdom to know with certainty that you’re clairvoyant, that woman you’re about to kill now will take a really good human rebirth and meet the Dalai Lama and become a good Buddhist, then you not only is it a compassionate action, it’s a wise action.

But who’s got that kind of wisdom? You haven’t had any problem? Can we? So that’s the reason. So in other words, if I’ve got a headache, would you got a couple of pills, you sort of forget which one was the cyanide.

You would just maybe mean well and give me a pill, would you? That’s what you mean well. You would not give me a pill. You’d rather I have my headache than die and agonizing death because you haven’t got the wisdom of clarity of certainty that that pill will help me. That’s the point about it.

If you haven’t got certainty that that person you’re about to kill will take a really good human rebirth and have a decent practice. If you haven’t got that certainty, then you have no right to kill up against arrogance beyond belief. By helping them, supporting them, loving them, and not being afraid of the fact that we’re gonna bloody die. So what? It is natural.

It’s only because in our culture, it’s our fear and suffering because we can’t bear the suffering mostly. Mostly, you know, because our compassion is mixed with huge attachment. And those attachments are junkies that can only be the nice things. Therefore, is wrong. We’re panic stricken and have to end this.

It’s completely absurd. Suffering is actually purified karma. That mouse were to die naturally, helping it from hearing mantras, keeping it in a safe place, making it feel calm, the same with your grandma. That’s an amazingly powerful action. It’s our own fear of attachment because attachment isn’t polluting our compassion.

It pollutes our compassion hugely because we can’t attachment is a junkie that only wants the nice things. It only wants everything you’re lovely and pink and cute. You can’t bear to see suffering till we think we’re gonna finish it and make it all go away. See what I’m saying? Malaria, mosquito Uh-huh.

It’s all been. Well, I mean, how how long does it peak at malaria mosquitoes in Australia? That’s that’s One possibility, isn’t say there’s something that can kill me is about to Yeah. Why why should you assume you should kill it? Where’s the logic that says you should kill it?

Aren’t there many other things you could do to stop it from biting you? Why do have to kill it? Okay. Yes. This is our trouble in our culture.

From our Christian culture, we we were told that God made these creatures. They don’t have souls, and so it’s okay to kill them and eat them and whatever we do. And then that’s invaded our culture up until now. Now the scientific one, reinforcing it by saying they don’t have brains, so they don’t suffer. Maybe people are finding that some creatures might suffer now.

So that’s what assumed that it’s a right to kill the creatures that we don’t like, isn’t it? So that was so automatic, and this is why you asked the question. I never we have to why should we assume that killing it is the only answer? There’s a lot of things you can do to get in the sea that stop fighting it, for god’s sake. Okay.

Well, I had a redback spider living happening in my wardrobe. I understand. Yeah. I thought it might, you know, but hurt one of my cats or something. You killed it.

That’s right. I put it outside. Well, very intelligent. Well, knowing that it would probably die in the cold. But you put in a workplace outside.

You’re really thinking about the red bag. Isn’t it? Well, I So you you can’t wean it down. You can’t make it really perfect. That’s this is naive.

Okay. Have a pie that’ll eat you up for breakfast. You don’t naturally it’s okay. Naughty pussy. But, yes, certainly, you are valuing the cat more than your the the red bag because you’re attached to the cat.

That’s why we that’s why we even try to save the cat. So that’s for sure true. And I thought you’re right. It’s true, actually. Totally attached to our self and our cat, the people kill the mouse, kill the redback, kill the cockroach, kill the enemy, kill the rapist, kill the meanie, kill the bomber.

That’s what that’s what the basis of all actions are harming others just because you’re upsetting me and my people. Attachment. One of us could dissatisfaction. No. It’s the it’s the habit of always trying to get more.

So that assumes you never settle what you’ve got. That’s habit of attachment. Habit. Just have it going. There’s no bigger reason than mere habit you’ve trained.

We’ve trained our minds in default mode. So because the real one of our not enough is, therefore, you gotta do more. The real one of them never fully enough, like you gotta eat more. Same thing, isn’t it? So was a status quo is never enough.

That’s the way attachment thinks. It’s a habit, and it’s very profound for us in our culture. You can see it. Whether it’s, you know, I always use that store. I’ve got this recently reading about I saw on the television, one of those programs about people who who’s same thing.

Two of them. One of them was this girl who’s, like, six hundred pounds. Very good. American girl. And she died again.

She she couldn’t cope, you know. And her mother she’s the way her mother said it was so beyond simple and sweet. Well, she’s always been like this. She never felt full. It’s so profound, you know, that shows attachment.

Clearly, the body is getting enough. But the mind is we’re not what it’s the mind that’s dissatisfied. The body’s not. But the mind is dissatisfied. I’ve never got enough.

This woman the other little American girl had, like, you know, hundred and twenty seven triple zed breasts. I’m not joking. You see photos like a comedy. Obsessed day and night with her breasts. She can’t get any surgery anymore anywhere because she’s just so absurd.

You know? But Millie said, did you get some Mexican hat? She’s not satisfied. She wants to be depressed. So they’re like, out here, she’s a skinny thing.

It’s like, comedy it’s comedy, but it’s not tragic. That’s the way it’s actually true. And it’s default. It’s a default assumption. Deep in our bones, I’ve got enough.

I haven’t got enough. What I do isn’t enough. No matter what I get, it’s enough. That’s it. It’s the it’s the it’s the nature of attachment.

It’s what drives us to their hanker, isn’t it? Yes. Before we put a stay in a situation of I was thinking about last night about, I don’t know, like, being in a war a war’s a country that’s at war at the moment. Yeah. You’re in a war zone.

Okay. Yeah. In a war zone. And being attacked and What? Being attacked?

Being attacked by somebody. Yeah. The the Kill your question. Yeah. What what would Buddha say to do if you have the opportunity to you know, you’re gonna be, say, shocked.

Okay. So say they’re gonna talk about the red back, isn’t it? Same discussion, isn’t it? Same discussion. Right?

The sentient being is attacking you. Yeah? Right? Okay. So you first thought And your and your friends and family Oh, forget them.

That’s just an excuse. Don’t worry about them. It just makes it that makes it noble for us. I’m good for the sake of others. Forget it.

You’re not. We aren’t. We sort of are because we’re attached to them. No. We are because we’re attached to them, but it’s all attachment.

So the bottom line is if you’re in a situation where you’ve actually hurt, harmed, whatever, then because if we’ve never practiced looking at our mind, what arises massive ego grasping, which we in the world call instinctive survival. Because what will arise in the mind is massive attachment to me and knowing. And therefore, what arise will be anger and panic. And if we can, we would do something to harm that person. That’s that will be natural and spontaneous.

But most of us don’t, that’s why we get killed because we’re husbands at it. You know? They’re they’re good at it. We’re not. So we’re useless.

But this panic completely isn’t there. So first of all, if you someone kills you and you die with panic and rage, straight to the lower realms. That’s the first point, what I would say, because your mind panic attack. And I’ll describe that more. It sounds so brutal.

I am so brutal today and later. I don’t know why. Somebody must have stirred me up. So the other one is if you do, let’s say you’re trained. Let’s say you’re trained and using guns and you you shoot them.

Well, you know, it’s because you’ve trained well in shooting. And the reason is so what would be okay. Let’s look at the what about killing the mouse or anything. What would be the motivation in your mind? Not the intention.

The intention is to kill. What’s your motivation? What motivates that action? Well, that’s what I was thinking about. It’s self defense.

Darling. Okay. So just give it a name. So it’s it’s attachment to you. Yeah.

Yes. Yeah. What what do wanna guess? It’s called attachment to I. It’s attachment to me.

To protect me. Okay. So it’s called attachment to save me and to kill somebody else instead. Well, that’s not cool. That’s my heavy duty, darling.

So if your motivation is more mixed also with compassion, maybe, you know, it could be if you’re a really brave person. It might even be compassion, not just for the people. That’s normal. Most people have wars because they have compassion in one group and they have the other. So it it everything that is in your mind.

And if you haven’t trained, it’ll be just natural instinct, fear, and panic, and anger, and rage. If you have trained, it could even be compassion, and you might even shoot that person to stop him from rampaging and killing other people out of compassion. So in. Not the other people dying. That will only do if you’ve got either that will only do let’s say it’s your son and you know he’s a maniac and you really got wisdom and you can’t bear the thought that he’s killing all these people.

You might even out of compassion that he can kill him to stop him, make his sake. That’s a profound action of compassion. Doesn’t mean you’re gonna help him. He might go to the lower realms because he’s a rampaging maniac. So it’s all to do with what’s going on in your mind because Buddha says it’s a natural law.

There’s no judgment or reward in a court somewhere where you give you a reason to get off something. It’s whatever goes on in your mind determines the nature of that karma. So we have to do our mind. You know? Do you understand?

Do you understand, darling? It’s not easy. Do understand? Yeah. Can I ask one for Yes?

I will. This is gonna sound ridiculous, but I think about it. Okay. But what what about in the case of moths attacking all of your clothes? Same thing.

Same. There’s no difference. Just the same. You wanna you you value your clothes more than once. Well, you’ll be like a friend of mine when she was in her retreat the demo.

It was during a demo after years and years and years of retreat. And she spent months she was telling mom was over here. Had She had she had she she stays in this little house in the middle of nowhere up in near Big Sur in the in way of the mountain. Mama’s over said it was just even the even he says, even the birds were quiet. It’s like perfect retreat.

She’s a long term retreat. She was. And she had she you know, big pack pack kilos of rice and all these things for her food for the years in retreat. And then she got she discovered moss. I mean, moss Weight of this kind of thing.

Yeah. No. Moss. She had moss. Yeah.

Anyway, she spent weeks. So we have to try and know. You have best. Is it my karma, so they constantly touch on me? Yes.

Of course, it is. There’s no set of being you won’t meet that hasn’t there’s no thing any sentient being will do to you that you haven’t done to eat in the past. All the goodness, all the kindness, and all the killing. So we keep meeting creatures that we feel we have to kill as well. We’ve got a tendency to kill.

So you’re gonna keep meeting beings who need to be killed. So we’ve gotta look at it. Yeah. And we purify. That’s why you gotta purify karma.

Let’s talk about the teachings of how to purify. There’s no kind we can’t purify. So by regretting the actions of killing, you don’t want the future suffering, by having compassion, by doing a practice, and by vowing not to do it again. By doing that, you you you change your own scenario. You’ll maybe stop it you’ll stop meeting moths that need to be killed.

Could you purify? You hear me? Can you say that again? I yeah. Of course, I will.

Yeah. It’s in all of the teachings. Judy, can’t you put them there? I just can’t I’m coming. I hear you darling, but I’m telling you this, but it’s in the teachings.

Read it carefully. What I’m saying is that. Cut off. Are you hearing? It’s in these teachings.

You’ll fold up. Read it slowly tonight and get the feeling of rain. I’ll say it again. I’ll say more actually. As Omi Yissi said, you know, we create negativity within our mind.

So we purify it by creating positivity with our mind. So every single thing our mind does, we’ve seeds. So given that we’re coming to this life program with certain negative seeds, you know, going above, which in your case, you’re suggesting killing, maybe moths. You know? There’s some tendency in your mind to kill.

I mean, some people never meet moths to kill. I’ve never met a moth yet. I’ve had to kill. You know I’m saying? So it’s obviously your particular one.

That means you’ve got some two things. You’ve got a tendency from the past to kill. You know? Second, you’re a sentient beings whom you have personal history with. There’s no sentient being we meet that we haven’t got strong, powerful past history with.

They call it karmic connection. Because karmic is a natural law. Nothing can be random. It is a law. It can’t be random.

You know? So every single being we meet and how they treat us and how they see us and what they do to us is the fruit of what we’ve done to them. It’s called experiences similar to the cause. So you when you see these moths as your karmic appearance, welcome home moths, all these beads, so you have to really take this as a father. You try your best on your heart.

But if you regret killing, which means I’m I regret killing, guess why, more the past because I’ve sown seeds in my mind, and I don’t want you to suffer. You have to think that through. Don’t wanna be bored with no reals? No. Don’t wanna be bored with another habit of killing?

No. Don’t wanna get killed? No. Don’t even allow you by that’s the result. So you think I regret it because I don’t want that suffering.

Second, you then have compassion for the moral belief. Third, you do practice purifying. Fourth, you make decision to change. That’s a process of transforming your mind so that you you’re you’re shifting the whole dynamic. So don’t be surprised if you do this every day that you won’t need any more loss to be killed.

You see my point? Yeah. But read the teachings in the end and then learn the fact that it’ll work because we create everything. Our minds do it. Hold on.

Yes. It’s time for lunch. For that pleasure. Sorry, Tal. I’ll just say this to you.

Okay. Alright. One of the always present of the five always present mental factors is called feeling. Not the way we use the word. This is so interesting.

And there’s only three kinds of feeling. One is called a pleasant feeling. One’s called an unpleasant feeling, and one’s called neither. Neither neither positive nor now the now the pleasant. It’s not positive.

Pleasant or unpleasant. So their polite words are happy in something. So one day, you can see some person has headache all day. They’re living in hell all day. It’s possible, isn’t it?

That’s every as many moments as you wanna count is as many fruits of past negative actions that are ripening as unpleasant feelings. So necessarily an unpleasant feeling as many little moments of of them there are is the fruit of a past negative action, logically, by definition. And every millisecond of a pleasant feeling is the fruit of virtuous action. This is a technical explanation by the Buddha. So we’re locking around for countless lives these bank vaults of seeds.

Because every single thing you think you do and say leaves a seed and you lag it from life to life. And then at some point, the condition will ripen and they the condition will come together and it will ripen as your happiness or your suffering. Pleasant feelings, unpleasant feelings. Technically, minute by minute. So everyone that ripens is a pleasant feeling, whatever degree of pleasantness, is the fruit of a virtuous action you planted in the past.

Everyone that ripens is an unpleasant feeling, that whatever degree, is the fruit of a negative action you planted in the past. So then pleasure is the fruit of past virtue. So rejoice in it and delight in it. But what happens is we get greedy and attached to it, and then we start to think, okay. This is an interesting point.

The fisherman due to partners, a friend always quote me the story of this boy’s kid, son of a friend of mine. From the time he was a tiny boy, as soon as he met fishing, he, like, instantly fell in love with us. It’s like falling in love. Meaning, he had strong karmic imprint to kill. It ripened in the scenario for fishing.

So because of the strong imprint of killing from having been in the lower realms in the past, the tragedy is he would he didn’t clean up all the karma. He finished the main part of the karma, but this life, he’s got the residual result, which is a tendency to keep killing. That’s a tragedy. Look at most human. So the the the the karmic input, the habit in the mind, the tendency in the mind is triggered instantaneously.

Instantaneously, attachment is triggered. And one of the functions of attachment is to make the object look delicious. So all this happens in a millisecond. So he makes this scenario, triggers the memory of having done it before. He doesn’t call it that.

But like when we meet people, like your old friends, isn’t it? Karmic history with each other. You know? So he was fishing, karmic history. Then second, attachment makes it look divine.

Third, this is a tragedy. This is a tragedy. Attachment, if not to delusion, it triggers good feelings in the body. So the good feeling isn’t the fruit of killing. You see what kind of fisherman is?

You see it? It looks delicious. You want it and so it it gives a good feeling. Naturally, all of us, oh, that must be the cause of good feelings. I’m gonna do it again.

Is it is it is that not how we are? That’s saṃsāra. Buddha says this is wrong a wrong analysis. But good feeling is just a is that attachment, unfortunately, triggers the bank vault of good seeds, and up comes the virtuous seed that now ripens his good feelings. So he basically p you know, p I s s e s, his virtue down the toilet every second he kills, thinking that killing is the reason why he feels happy.

He just wasted up all his past virtuous seeds, and then what he’s doing every second because he’s killing is sowing filling his bank vault with negative seeds, which will now arrive at his lower wrong suffering. This is a tragedy of following a test. It’s a wrong analysis put us in, and it’s really hard to hear it and very hard logically, analytically to understand this. And that’s what we have to do to that level of detail. Because the good feeling we have when we eat cake isn’t from the cake.

It triggers it. It’s a sensory experience. It triggers it. It’s merely a catalyst. The good feeling he gets from fishing is merely a catalyst that triggers his his his bank.

If he didn’t have any car, he’d have good feelings. He’d never let’s say he had headaches all day. He’d never enjoy fishing because he wouldn’t give a good feeling. So better to have a headache all day because he stopped killing. If you, you know, you eat delicious chocolate cake, but you’re feeling disgusting because you go to fever, it won’t give you good pleasure.

It’ll give you it’ll it’ll trigger your negative seeds and you’ll vomit. So it’s clear that can’t be that cause of happiness. But the tragedy is we’ve got these bank vaults of good seeds, and we’re in this body made of by desire. So the wrong assumption of this is we have all these wrong philosophy that says that eating cake causes happiness because it does seem to trigger a good feeling, but it’s not the main cause. Are we communicating here?

That’s why we’re study Buddhist teachings. It’s like technical. It’s not science. It’s technical view. You don’t have it when you talk about these things.

karma, delusion, meditate, blah blah blah. You know? Believe it, analyze it, understand the the nuts and bolts of it. Which is the point. Then we’ve got something to inform our actions, you know, because you understand the technicalities of it.

Or if you’re a nutritionist, you understand food well. You’re not they’ve got a clue Is this a skill to help you decide what food to eat? Will this the skill to help you decide what actions to do and not do and not believe in your feelings? You know, when I smoke my eighty Marlboroughs a day, I’ve got good feelings. I didn’t see any cancer.

The world’s such a stupid thing. Now learn, you know, later. My mistake. That you know, this is not cognitive. Takes years for for cigarette smoking to bring the result.

It feels like a very good feeling when you do it. Same logic here. You We’ve gotta inform our actions with some wisdom about how karma works. Because you if that’s the one we’re taking on board in our life, the nuts and bolts. So we have to have the nuts and bolts of calmer down, We have to have the nuts and bolts to put his mind model of the mind down.

They’re the two main tools we use in our life to inform every decision we make. So the plan is to have lunch or share lunch. Right? People can share their name or whatever you wanna do. So the thing is we’ve we’ve got marketing minutes put aside.

So as long as it takes I want all I want is at least thirty of those minutes, if not the whole lot, to be a conscious discussion. You know, when Elekta and I studied together from, our philosophy teacher, he would tell us all the time, twenty five percent of what you get comes from listening. Seventy five percent comes from what they call debate, we call discussion. Debate, thinking about it, think meditating on the cushion about it, sinking it through. That’s where all the knowledge comes.

And I remember we used do these hours. We had exams. We do these hours of discussion with each other. You know? That’s where all the stuff really went in deep.

I’ll never forget it. So at least thirty of those minutes, chat about the weather, chat about Port Adelaide, and It’s alright. I’m not. Anyway, we were all swaddies way back in the beginning. My sister, Jen, total fanatic.

She’s a complete insane all the suffering that you need, but I expect we think of all the experience and the joy of receiving this delicious food. That’s it. Forty five seconds of new thoughts transforms your action. Okay? So do you see for the moment?

Complete and join and have a good discussion about what one or more of the topics we’ve covered. Like, even just one and go into it deep. It’s really helpful. Two of you, three of you, six of you, whatever. And if you don’t wanna talk, that’s okay.

But it’s a really good exercise. And I’ll see you in about nine just get back at two o’clock. Two o’clock. Wow. Maybe these are still requiring.