Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 102-minute talk, Venerable Thubten Dondrub explores the fundamental nature and potential of the mind according to Tibetan Buddhist teachings. He begins by establishing proper motivation for practice—moving from basic aspirations for a good rebirth through renunciation, liberation from suffering, and ultimately to bodhicitta, the wish to achieve enlightenment for all beings. He then addresses common misconceptions about mind and rebirth, explaining why the mind must be a formless, non-physical phenomenon separate from the brain. The core of the teaching unfolds around Buddha nature: Dondrub argues that since mind is “that which knows,” every mind—whether human, animal, or insect—possesses identical nature and therefore identical potential for all positive qualities: love, compassion, wisdom, concentration, and every other virtue. He shows logically why this potential can never be lost, though it can be obscured by ignorance and delusion, and demonstrates that these obscurations themselves must be beginningless, making liberation possible. He maps the potentials of the obscured mind into six realms of saṃsāra—human, animal, hungry ghost, hell, demigod, and god realms—before turning to the mind’s blissful nature, which he illustrates through the peaceful feeling arising in meditation. He concludes with a simplified path to enlightenment: recognizing ignorance as the root of suffering and gradually learning through study and reflection that things do not exist as they appear, thereby removing the basis for all delusions. The session includes a guided meditation and is suitable for practitioners new to Buddhist psychology as well as those with existing familiarity.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2015 06 30 DB Mind & its Potential Week 3 30062015.mp3
UUID: 9fe1b0ef-a6f8-4f26-baa1-2bf8620edbe7
Teacher: Ven Thubten Dondrub
Collection: DB Mind and its Potential (Ven Thubten Dondrub)
Date: 2015-06-30
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 102.2 minutes
Words: ~10,215
Thanks. So welcome everyone to our third class, I think it is, third class on mind and its potential. So to make this time as meaningful as possible for ourselves and others, but also from Buddhist point of view to make this action of listening a Dharma action, that is something that becomes an actual cause for us to be free of suffering, a cause to experience genuine lasting happiness, then but we don’t need those. Thanks though, it’s already in here. Yeah.
We So a dharma action is something that becomes a cause to be free of suffering, a cause to experience genuine happiness, and I think this is what we all want, our actions not to become a cause of suffering, but instead to become a cause of happiness. If this is what we want, then we have to practice and listen with the right motivation. So from a Buddhist point of view, the most fundamental Dharma motivation is wanting to listen to and practice the Buddhist teachings in order to bring about a good rebirth, in other words, so that we can develop a mind that lets go of our obsession with the things of this life, seeing them as the only things existing and all important, so developing that mind of renunciation or letting go of our attachments to the things of this life so that we can really take care of our mind. It’s by taking care of our mind that we will be able to die well, have a good rebirth. So this is the basic Buddhist motivation, Dharma motivation.
A much deeper motivation of course is wishing to take care of one’s mind so that one can be completely free of all causes of suffering, to become free of saṃsāra. But the greatest motivation we can possibly have is to go beyond just thinking of ourself and to open our hearts and minds to an awareness and concern for all living beings, realizing that just as I want to be free of suffering and I have this deep wish to experience genuine happiness, It’s exactly the same for every living being, without exception. We all have this wish. This is what unites us. There’s many superficial differences between human beings and between human beings and other sentient beings, but what unites all sentient beings is this fundamental wish to be happy and not to suffer.
And the point is to remember that actually our happiness, our well-being, our mere existence arises depending on the existence of others and particularly the kindness they show us in countless different ways. And particularly the kindness of a mother, which every sentient being has been our mother, and this follows logically from understanding that we have a mind, not just a brain, and a mind that is not produced by the brain but its own unique phenomena, beginningless and endless. So every sentient being has been immensely kind over and over again, and yet sadly they’re all suffering in saṃsāra and that suffering is not just the suffering that can be experienced in the human realm, but the Buddhists teach that we can experience far greater suffering in other rebirth states. And the vast majority of beings are experiencing these as a reality right now. So if we think about these things, especially if we have any belief in them and think about them more and more deeply, we can generate the most profound motivation for practicing the Dharma, which is the bodhicitta motivation, wishing to achieve enlightenment, recognising that it’s only as an enlightened being having a mind free of all limitations, all negativities, a mind that has awakened every positive quality fully, completely.
It’s only in that state that one is in a position to be able to effectively repay the kindness of others by helping each being without exception to become free of the causes of suffering and helping them to achieve peerless, everlasting happiness, which is Lama Surya Das’s key phrase, code phrase for enlightenment, Peerless everlasting happiness. So we can try and generate that motivation right now. To actually generate that motivation can take many, many, many, many lifetimes. It’s even more difficult to generate than the wisdom that directly perceives the true nature of everything. But at least by thinking along these lines, we can generate some kind of facsimile of bodhicitta right now or what my teacher Lama Zopa Rinpoche calls the effortful bodhicitta.
And to help us do that we can visualise, if you find it helpful, The Buddha in front of us, as someone who has achieved what we’re trying to achieve, someone who has realised their Buddha nature, and so we can think the Buddha is appearing there to remind us of our own true nature and trying to inspire us to realise that Buddha potential. And at the same time as we think of the Buddha in front of us, we can try and think of all beings surrounding us, at least because it’s very difficult honestly to think of all sentient beings or try and visualise them, at least we should start off by thinking of the people that we’re most connected to in this life. So our mother on our left, father on our right, the rest of our family, then all our friends and helpers behind us, harmers or people who dislike us or whom we dislike in front of us, and then as much as possible, thinking of all other beings of cyclic existence. So with the thought that no matter what I must use this in all future lives to achieve enlightenment and to achieve enlightenment, I have to understand what my mind is, what its potential for happiness and suffering is, so that I can eliminate that potential for suffering and realise that potential for happiness.
So for this reason, I’ll study this subject. So if you’d like to join in the prayer, the traditional prayer, it’s on page ten. I go for refuge until I’m enlightened enlightened to the Buddha, Dharma and the Supreme Assembly. By the merits I create through listening to the Dharma, may I become a Buddha in order to benefit all sentient beings. So then imagine the Buddha is very pleased with your motivation for practicing and the Buddha shows this by now coming towards the crown of our head.
And then we imagine that when the Buddha is directly above our crown, the Buddha dissolves into blissful golden light so that that light can then pour down into us, blessing our mind. So then briefly we can do the nine round breathing exercise just to enable our mind to become that much more calm, clear, concentrated so that we can use that more subtle level of mind to listen to and think about the Buddhist teachings tonight. Okay. Thank you. So from looking at people’s homework, and I thank you very much for to most people for doing it and those people who didn’t do it, I would really encourage them to do it as much as possible.
It’s also very, very helpful for me to see what people write because I can see whether people have understood what I’ve been trying to say or completely misunderstood it and I’ve noticed that quite a few people seem to be struggling with this course, thinking it’s quite difficult and particularly all sorts of, particularly the thing of beginningless and endless and future lives, but also mixing up the mind and the brain. So if I was to try and answer all of those, clarify all those things, I should, but it’s very difficult to go through it all again. But if one really got a sense I can’t claim I really understand what the mind is according to this. I think I have some idea. I hope I have.
But if one has the right idea of the mind as it’s explained in the Buddhist teachings, then it just logically follows that there is future lives, that there is rebirth. Mean, is the easiest way to understand rebirth, that we have a mind that is formless and indestructible, if it’s formless like space, if it exists now and it exists like space, something non physical, you know, then it goes on forever. Nothing can stop it. I mean, one really has to try and think about, you know, are my thoughts physical in some way? And if they are, how do those physical thoughts exist?
Are my feelings something physical? Because this is what scientific materialism is saying when it says it is the the they never say it’s the brain as such, but it’s a byproduct of the electrical impulses or chemical reactions within the brain. Yeah. But is is love just a chemical reaction in the brain or an electrical impulse? That may occur, of course, when one is experiencing love or hate or jealousy or kindness or patience, electrical impulses are occurring.
There’s no question of that. There are chemical reactions occurring in the brain, in the body and whatever, but is that thought? Is that the feeling or is the thought, the feeling something else? And Buddhism says it’s something else that is not physical in any way whatsoever, but it exists. It’s existing like space.
So let’s just assume that the mind, because if we don’t assume the mind exists according to Buddhism, there’s not much more point talking, we might as well finish the course right now. So let’s consider that it’s existing. So the mind is knows what experiences. Only the mind can do that. It really knows things, and there are countless ways, I don’t know about countless, but many, many ways of knowing and experiencing.
We know through our senses, we know through thinking, we know through directly perceiving. Right? Many ways of knowing. So all of these are aspects of the mind. And all our experience involves feeling either pleasant, neutral or suffering feeling.
This is occurring every single moment. There is some feeling arising with our consciousness. Tonight I’d like to talk a little bit about the potentials of this formless mind or consciousness, this stream of consciousness. Maybe just before I go, I’d like to try and make one tiny attempt at clarifying the gross, subtle and very subtle minds, because maybe the way I’ve been talking about it gives the impression that these are like three separate minds. But of course they’re not three separate minds.
The gross, subtle, and very subtle minds are all aspect of just our mind, of our mental consciousness. Right? So the gross mind is an aspect of the mind as such. It’s the grossest aspect of the mind. But the point is when the gross mind is operating, the subtle and very subtle minds are not operating.
They exist because they’re the foundation of the gross mind. But in a sense, when the gross mind is operating, it is obscuring the very subtle mind. But that’s the only way we as deluded beings can know and experience things through the gross mind. But again, when we use this term, one shouldn’t think that the gross mind is somehow a bad mind, that you know, is the terrible mind and the very subtle mind is the really good mind. That’s a little bit true because the gross mind is controlled, it is the gross mind that can go under the control of the disturbing thoughts.
But the gross mind also is able to express love, compassion, etcetera, etcetera, all the good things. But only in a gross form because that gross mind is obscured. So these are the levels of mind, and again, because our way of experiencing life is so much in relation to physical stuff, When we try to think about the mind, which is nonphysical, it’s very difficult because we only have physical examples to think about. So as soon as we talk about three levels of mind, we get this idea of three things, three separate things, but it’s just all aspects of the one mind. But at the time of death, the gross mind ceases to function because from a Buddha’s point of view, what is its function because from a Buddhist point of view, what is its obvious support, which is this body, the brain and nervous system, collapses.
The body stops working for various reasons, old age, sickness, what is it called? I just heard that wonderful expression for high impact lead poisoning, being shot, high impact lead poisoning, something like that. So because of things like that, the body ceases to function and then the gross mind stops. But during the death process, the subtle mind becomes manifest because it’s always there. But then that also ceases during the death process and that’s when, at the very end of the death process, the very subtle mind becomes manifest.
It’s always there, but it’s not manifest. And it’s just manifest for a moment or a few moments depending on our karma and level of practice, and then that very, very subtle mind leaves the body. And again, leaves the body is a very interesting expression, but maybe we shouldn’t go into that because I’m not sure, leaves the body. Conventionally it leaves the body, but maybe all it does, it doesn’t go anywhere, it just gives rise to a new experience, a new body, and that body appearing in a new place. And for those people who did the Tantric course, what I tried to talk about and emphasize in that module of DB is that the amazing thing about highest yoga, the highest level of tantric practice, it’s all about simulating the death process without dying.
And the purpose of it, to simulate the death process in a very powerful way, is through the power of concentration, one forces the gross mind to cease, and then the subtle mind to cease, and what is left is the very subtle mind. So it’s only in Tantra that there are these techniques to do that. There is no other system in Buddhism or outside of Buddhism where that exists. And this is what Tibetan Buddhist lamas have preserved practice for hundreds and hundreds of years. It only exists in, you know, these teachings died out in India and other places.
They weren’t made up in Tibet, they were preserved by the great Tibetan practitioners when they brought this practice to Tibet from India. And this is what the great lamas now practice, very, very intensely, some of them. So if this isn’t true, these people are all lying or crazy, and if you check them out, if you check his holiness out, he’s not someone who lies and he’s about the sanest person on the planet. There’s nothing crazy about his holiness, the Dalai Lama, there’s nothing deluded about him. He’s dedicated his life to practicing this.
He’s the greatest, probably the greatest expert in tantric practice on the planet. Yeah. Much Buddhism? Me? What?
Much Do they also have to How much what? How about Japanese Buddhism? What? In Japanese Buddhism, there is one school of Japanese Buddhism that has one part of one part of Tantra. Yeah.
But not highest yoga Tantra. And I’ve forgotten the name of the school. What school it is? Anyway. Yeah.
And these Lamas are teaching this, you know, to people now and passing it on. And it works. Not not that I’m you know, not that I have any experience of it, but okay. What’s the purpose of it? Purpose of what?
The tantric. To achieve enlightenment. Because when you can contact the very subtle mind, then that mind is free of all these disturbing thoughts, it is this immensely subtle mind that is able to directly perceive the nature of reality very, very quickly and generate bodhicitta and through these things, think it takes a long time to explain, but the whole purpose of it is with that very subtle mind, one can achieve enlightenment very quickly. Is this through a dedicated physical practice? Sorry?
A dedicated physical practice? I’m quite sure what you mean by physical practice. In a nutshell, how is it performed? Mentally. You do it mentally through yeah.
Through developing, you you have a very powerful meditative concentration, doing visualisations and all, it’s all related to working with the subtle energies, the winds in the chakras and all of that. But that is all done mentally. No, no, no. In some cases, there’s a little bit of that physical yoga in some cases, mainly not. There are different ways of doing it, but it all involves mainly the mind.
My understanding is that most of the physical asanas are done anyway for the preparation to get your body to prepare to Yeah, originally, yeah. To the next level of stool. I got a bit off the track. Well, it’s not really off the track, but I didn’t mean to talk about that tonight, but okay. What I’m trying to talk about is Buddha nature.
So we have this mind and it has these different levels and the nature of the mind is completely pure and perfect. Every mind, One thing that’s also really important to try and think about and see how this follows is that there are not different kinds of minds. If mind exists as the Buddha taught, that is that which is clear and it is this stream of consciousness which is formless and knowing, then there is only one version of that. There are not different versions of minds. They’re all the same.
It doesn’t mean there’s just one mind, but all minds have exactly the same nature. They are clear and knowing. If you buy, go shopping for a blender, a fruit, what do you call them, fruit juicer or blender or one of those kind of things, you can get one brand, it’ll chop and whiz and zac and do all those things and this other brand will do this, that and the other and this brand only does one thing, it whizzes and that’s all it does. This one whizzes six times and then you can get thermomixes for a whole lot much more money which will even cook what they’ve whizzed, yeah? So because these are all physical, so you can add physical things and take physical things away, yeah?
But the mind isn’t like that, no? The mind is what knows. Sorry if I keep repeating that book. I think that’s a wonderful expression. It blows my mind.
The mind knows. And if you think about it, if that’s what this phenomenon does, and if you think if there’s nothing stopping that phenomena from knowing, if that’s all a mind does, it knows, and there’s nothing blocking that from doing that, it wouldn’t just whiz three times or chop. It would do everything. It would know everything. Why would it know this but not that?
If that’s if that’s what it does, it knows. Right? I’m just simple minded, but that seems very logical to me. If there’s nothing blocking the mind. Of course, if there were things blocking the mind, sure, it would be able to know this and not that.
But if there’s nothing blocking the mind, and the mind is what knows. So that means all minds are the same. They all have the same potential to know. There’s not different potentials. Of course at any point, minds are different in many ways depending on the amount of obscuration.
And then also in terms of how much of the mind has been trained and practiced in various techniques. So among humans, you know, there are many different, you know, minds are different in the way people think and whatever and function. Sure. But the nature of the mind is the same. So a child’s mind is very different from an adult’s mind, but when a child’s mind becomes an adult’s mind, it can know the same things because the nature is the same.
There’s no difference in nature between a child’s mind and an adult’s mind. And so this means there’s an if yeah. Okay. I’ll get to that point. Well, no, I might as well say it now and repeat it later on.
This also means that a dog’s mind is exactly the same as our minds. There’s no difference between a dog’s mind and Einstein’s mind. Absolutely no difference whatsoever in nature. The nature of a dog’s mind is exactly the same as the most brilliant human being’s mind. It’s just clear and knowing.
And what that also means is if, know, I’ll get to that later. I’ll try and get to that later. So if the mind is that which is clear in knowing, also follows from my understanding that our mind possesses every good quality. All minds, not just some minds, but every mind possesses every good quality. Whatever good quality you can think of, every mind possesses that quality or at least put the potential for it.
So every mind has the potential for love, compassion, wisdom, single pointed concentration, patience, perseverance, generosity, tolerance, forgiveness, blah, blah, blah. Any good quality you can think of, our mind has it and every mind has it. Because why? Do you not want to know why? Why every mind has every good quality?
Because all of these good qualities are ways of knowing. So if a mind is something that knows, it has every way of knowing. It has that potential, Especially if you think if there’s nothing blocking the mind from knowing, then my argument is then if your mind is unobscured, completely unobscured, then you would know who you are completely. When we say no, our knowing is so remote in a sense. It’s so secondhand because it’s mixed up with thoughts, concepts.
So here we’re not saying we would intellectually know who we are. We would be experiencing directly, vividly, in a way we’ve never experienced before, who we are without the slightest mistake, because mistakes come from obscurations, something stopping something knowing. We would know one hundred percent all the time in a total way, We don’t know anything now who we are, and we would know other people, who they were. One would really know what was going on. You would know everything properly, unmistakenly, and you’d know you’d know it.
So if someone was screaming at you, you wouldn’t hate them. You wouldn’t hate them because you’d know exactly why. Exactly why. You would experience exactly what was going on with this person, and then you would feel compassion because that is the, you know, valid, correct response to suffering. And people scream at you not because they’re happy, because they’re suffering.
And yeah. And so you would love everyone, and you have compassion for everyone, and you’d appreciate everything. You could enjoy it, you wouldn’t get attached to it because you would know it’s impermanent. You would know not intellectually, oh, this is impermanent, this little thought, that’s impermanent. You would experience it as, you know, just shimmering, changing moment by moment, nothing to get attached to.
It’d be impossible to have the thought of attachment. But you could enjoy things, you could really enjoy things. There’d be no rubbish in the mind to stop one totally enjoying and appreciating something. Alright. Be quite nice.
So this is our Buddha nature in a simple way, that our mind has, each mind has all of these potentials, and it’s possible not to have, somehow for one mind to have one potential missing. Of course right now there are people who are labelled as sociopaths, what’s the other word, psychopaths, right, who seem to definitely have some aspects of ability to empathise with others and so on quite missing. But that’s because their brain isn’t working properly, so their mind isn’t working properly. So that aspect isn’t working, functioning, either only just a little bit or maybe not at all, but it doesn’t mean the potential for it is missing. No, if you’re a psychopath, I would definitely say it’d be very difficult while you’re a psychopath.
I think you’d have to give that up to generate bodhicitta, that’s for sure. Yes, right, okay. Yes. Yeah. So anyway, this is my argument.
There’s no way the mind, any mind, can be missing any of these potentials simply because the mind knows. If it knows, it means it has all these positive potentials. If it has this potential to know, it means it has the potential to know in every way. So technically in the Gelugpa tradition that we follow here that Buddha House is related to, the Gelugpa tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, the definition of Buddha nature is it refers to, maybe not the definition, but what Buddha nature refers to is the empty nature of the mind. Because the mind doesn’t inherently exist, enlightenment is possible.
So to explain that, which I can’t, is very profound, and to say that that’s what Buddha nature is, is a bit dry and boring. It doesn’t sound very encouraging. Just to say that because the mind is empty of inherent existence, one can achieve enlightenment. So a more simple direct way of explaining Buddha nature is what I’m saying. Mind because it follows also because the mind is empty of inherent existence, it has the potential of all these good qualities.
But this is one way of looking at what our Buddha potential is, our Buddha nature. Our mind has the potential to experience great love for all beings, great compassion for all beings, everything. And of course, because the mind is that which knows, if there was nothing stopping that process, then it can know the true nature of everything, directly perceive how oneself, all phenomena actually exist. But, but the trouble is this amazing mind that we have that has this Buddha potential, And of course that Buddha potential, although it can be obscured, can never be removed in any way because that is the very nature of the mind. It’s not something extra or some kind of nice covering that the mind is made up in a sense.
Here we go talking about it as though it’s something physical, which it’s not, but in a sense one could say the mind is made up of love and compassion, kindness, wisdom, concentration, etcetera. If you take those away, there isn’t anything left And you can’t take them away, you can’t separate these things from the mind anyway because you can’t, you know, take away qualities from a formless phenomena. That’s it. So our Buddha potential can never be harmed in any way. It can never be reduced, it can never be eliminated, because that is the mind in a sense, or that’s the very nature of our mind.
But what can happen and what has happened is unfortunately that Buddha nature, that Buddha potential can be obscured. So our mind is obscured. People find it difficult to understand that the mind is beginningless but what also blows the mind is to say that these obscurations are also beginningless. They never started. And I will try to demonstrate why this has to be.
So I’ve tried to explain this many times before, but I’ll do it again because not everyone has been present to these wonderful explanations. But if we accept that the mind has Buddha nature, has all these good qualities, if at some point in the past and our mind is obscured right now, which I think everyone can admit because we’re not Buddhas, we’re not omniscient, we’re not clairvoyant, we don’t have great compassion for all sentient beings all the time, so this means our mind is obscured, right? So if our obscurations aren’t beginningless, it would mean they had to start sometime. Right? So let us just let just leave aside the question why these obscurations started because that gets tricky in itself.
But if they started here in the history of my mind, here’s my mind going along and my obscuration started here, that means, and I’ve been obscured ever since, but before that, my mind wasn’t obscured. What would that mean? It would mean I was a Buddha before because there was nothing obscuring my mind whatsoever. All my positive potentials would have been fully functioning, so I was a Buddha. So then I I was a Buddha, da da da da da da, and then when they plonk, I’m suddenly totally obscured.
Before, I knew everything perfectly, unmistakenly, and then suddenly I haven’t got a clue about anything. How is that possible? That is impossible. Because the nature of enlightenment is that once you’ve achieved it, it is irreversible. It is undeclining, irreversible, ongoing.
Because the whole point is that once one perceives things as they are, not just in a flash, but completely, totally, because everything, every obscuration, every limitation has been eliminated from the mind. Once the mind is working a hundred percent, nothing can stop that. Once you’re perceiving things as they are, how can you start perceiving them as they aren’t? It’s impossible. That’s the whole point of achieving enlightenment.
It’s irreversible, because it’s an awful lot of work. It’s bloody hard work to achieve enlightenment, and that takes an incredibly long time. Why would you bother with it if it didn’t last? Does this mean enlightenment? Depends how you use the term permanent, but it means it’s everlasting.
No. No. It’s permanent. The state of enlightenment is permanent, but the the mind that is is enlightened is changing moment by moment. But it’s not It’s lasting, it’s everlasting.
Since it’s impossible to become a Buddha, to be enlightened and then lose it, it can’t be possible that my obscurations started because it meant if they started, it meant before that I was a Buddha. So what it does mean is the obscurations never started. Just like in this moment now, my mind exists with Buddha nature and right now that mind which has Buddha nature is obscured, in the moment before that, it was the same. There was a mind with Buddha nature that was obscured going back and back and back without beginning. But although our obscurations are without a beginning, they are not endless.
Some people think, though if my obscurations are beginningless, it must mean they’re endless, but it doesn’t because the whole Buddhist teachings about following a path that ends all the different levels of obscurations. A baby is born with tons of obscurations. Tons. Several tons of obscurations. That’s what it means to be in saṃsāra, is we bring these with us all the time.
A baby will definitely know. I think a baby may know a lot more than you think they do. But again, there’s ways of knowing. There’s unconscious ways of knowing. One can be knowing that when you’re unconscious, you’re still knowing something.
You’re still experiencing something at a very subtle level. You know, I think we’ve all had the experiences of like, I don’t know, maybe you cut yourself and you don’t know. You don’t know it at the time, and then you look, I’m bleeding. Oh, and you feel it. Does that mean the feeling started just when you noticed it or it was always there, but you just weren’t conscious of it?
You know, like many examples, like when we’re sick or something and we’re lying alone and sick. Oh, it’s horrible. You know? Oh, poor me. I’m sick.
I’m sick. It’s so painful. It’s terrible. And then some a friend comes along and talks to you and, oh, and you don’t notice your sickness for a while. Then they go, oh, oh.
So there’s many ways we experience the same know the same thing, you know? Many, many ways of knowing, experiencing. But this gets very complicated and difficult, but the imprints that are obscuring our mind, these are not consciousness, so they’re not ways of knowing, but they lead they affect our consciousness eventually when they ripen. But don’t ask me to explain that. Okay, where are we?
What do I have to say? Oh, lots. Right. So our mind obscured by having these layers of obscurations, this is what constitutes saṃsāra. saṃsāra, well, yeah, one way of defining saṃsāra is that it is our mind under the control of delusion and karma.
So we experience suffering because of the ripening of karmic imprints. Karmic imprints exist because we have all these disturbing thoughts of anger and attachment and pride and jealousy and so on. So the karmic imprints obscure our mind, our delusions obscure our mind. The reason that the delusions exist is because of the fundamental delusion of ignorance, that although our mind has the potential to know everything directly and exactly as it is, our mind has been obscured beginninglessly by ignorance. This mental factor that because it’s there, forces the mind to perceive or experience things in a false way.
We experience ourself in a false way, we experience everything in a false way, but as we’re experiencing things in a false way, the very mind that is creating that illusion grasps that that illusion is true. So we never doubt what appears to be reality for us. And since we all have the same delusions, the same kind of ignorance, just as our mind in its nature is the same, all our obscurations are the same and work the same, we all experience ourself in the same false way. We all experience the world in the same false way. And it appears as though I truly exist from my own side, under my own power, as though I was an independent phenomena, independent of the body, independent of the mind.
As I often say, to illustrate this, most people, most of the time, of all cultures everywhere, live their life trying to be happy, ignoring their mind. How am I going to be happy? By having lots of money. Because with lots of money, I can buy nice things and necessary things, and then I’ll be happy by having a relationship with a nice person or several or many nice people and blah, blah, blah. All these external things.
This is how we constantly It’s just such a simple point, but this is what we do. We think we’re going to be happy by having this stuff whatever out there, and I’ll be free of suffering by controlling all these things. If I can control this and that and that, I will be free of suffering. And all of that is done without hardly any thought of working with one’s mind other than maybe getting an education so I can make money. But we don’t take care of our mind.
One can be highly educated and completely berserk, completely out of control. And in fact, I think anyway. Yeah, so this, oh yeah, I almost lost my point. So this shows how we believe I can be happy without taking care of my mind. Because I am something separate from my mind, but we’re not.
We’re not our mind, but we’re not something different, separate from it. But we think we are because it feels like we are, because ignorance creates that illusion. And then we look at stuff. It looks as though it’s out there, completely separate from our mind. It’s really out there like that.
It’s really, whatever I experience is real. If I think it’s good, it really is good. If I think it’s bad, it’s really bad. It’s really this, it’s really that. Because that’s how our mind creates that illusion that it’s really like that.
But the Buddha discovers it’s not really like that at all, at all. But because things appear to be really nice and really bad, really beautiful, really ugly, we have all these delusions. And we act on them, engage in negative behavior, create negative imprints, and those negative imprints ripen to bring suffering in this life but also throw us into other rebirth states. So one aspect of saṃsāra is that because the mind is controlled by delusion, karma, we die and the mind experiences rebirth. Just like our mind now, the gross mind, is arising.
It needs this physical body and we are so attached to these physical bodies when we die, our mind grasps for this solidity once again. We crave for I to be real, to be solid, to reincarnate, to go into the carne again, the Latin word for meat, to have another body. So according to Buddhist teachings, the only reason, if we take rebirth as a human being, the only reason a particular sperm fertilizes a particular ovum is because, at a particular time, is because a consciousness has joined with those two physical substances. People have sex lots of times but they don’t get pregnant every time. That’s because the consciousness isn’t present.
But when there is a consciousness present that has a karmic connection with those beings, then fertilization occurs according to the sutras. One, of course I’ve never left enough time to talk about this major topic of saṃsāra, but not only can our mind take rebirth in a human form again, depending on our good karma, what the teachings say is that just like our pure mind has this potential to achieve enlightenment, liberation from saṃsāra and enlightenment, because that’s the nature of our mind, The obscured mind can give rise to many suffering potentials or limiting potentials, one of which is the human existence, but we can be reborn as animals. Because if you accept the argument the mind exists, that it possesses, every mind has to be the same because it’s just simply clear and knowing and therefore it has every good every mind has the potential for every good quality, that is every mind has put in nature, then if you can accept, admit that animals show signs of having consciousness, that they have awareness, that they have feelings, that they have some intelligence, then that they have, therefore, mind, therefore, they have a Buddha nature, then you have to say that although this this mind is in an animal form now, at some point, it must have been in a human form in a previous life.
And it also means that if this mind can be in an animal body now, my mind can end up in an animal body in the future. That’s definite. Because you have to ask, if if if that animal has a mind, then that that mind is exactly the same as mine, my mind, and if if that’s the case, why is that mind in an animal body and not a human body? And the Buddhist answer is karma. If you obscure if you engage in negative actions and obscure your mind, you’re not creating the cause to have this kind of body because with this body, which has this particular nervous system and brain, the mind can operate the gross mind can operate really quite well.
But in an animal body and an animal brain, the gross mind doesn’t operate very well at all except for a few things, but not in ways that help you get enlightened. Whereas the gross mind of a human being, with that mind you can achieve enlightenment. You can work and achieve enlightenment. You can get out of saṃsāra. You can get a good rebirth with a gross mind of a human being.
For a dog, it’s very difficult even though it’s the same kind of mind. But it just can’t work the same. It’s got the potential, but it doesn’t have the conditions. And then if you can accept that, then maybe one could accept that if one engages in more negative actions, then you could obscure the mind even more and end up in an even more suffering rebirth than an animal. And this is a rebirth called the hungry ghost realm, which lasts where one is born with an incredibly suffering body that lasts for thousands and thousands of years and one is tormented by hunger and thirst all that time, but you don’t die.
You can’t eat or drink, but you don’t die. Sounds unbelievable. Sounds like a fairy story. Sounds like some just one of these creepy religions making something up to scare us. But since the Buddha has great compassion, I don’t think he makes up stories to scare us.
And although it’s very unbelievable that in one way that one could have a body where you don’t eat anything or drink anything for thousands of years but you don’t die. But also if you watch various programs on TV, you can see that in the depths of the ocean where, in some places the water is boiling, there are types of fish that live there. And like if our body was to go, you know, we can’t go down into the depths of the ocean because we would die because of the pressure. But there are fish who live down there happily. I don’t know if they’re happy, but they’re down there.
They’re creations of science fiction. They’re fish on this planet. But they have a body made of stuff like our body, but it can stay down thousands of meters below the ocean. Ours can’t. So if that’s possible in this world, you know, why couldn’t it be possible that somehow you could have a body where you’re just starving and starving for thousands of years, but you don’t die?
You’re just totally miserable, tormented. And then of course, the teachings say that there are the hell realms where one experiences just unrelenting torment. I won’t go into those. But again, if one engages in really heavy negative actions when the mind and if you check to do really negative actions, the mind, especially if you think we have Buddha potential, to do something really, really horrible, the mind already has to be in a very obscured state to do it. And for these people like that young man to walk along a beach and shoot thirty eight people he’s never met, never seen before, Thinking that this is gonna be of some benefit, I I don’t know to who.
No. You have to be really obscured to do that, And you’re not creating the cause to be a Buddha that way. You’re creating the cause to experience the very opposite. If anything is logical in the world, it’s that. And if you think about us, we human beings, if we are honest, sometimes we behave like human beings, like nice human beings.
What it really means to be a human being, which means to be kind and compassionate and have that ability to have some awareness beyond ourself, to be concerned for others, to be really humane. So sometimes we’re like that. We can be like that. But sometimes we behave just like animals, Like dogs fighting over a bone. Sometimes we’re like hungry ghosts, just full of craving.
Sometimes we like being in the hells when we experience lots of depression and so on and you know, whatever. But in this world, e even when we’re really, really down, there are so many things that can mitigate that. Just the beauty of this world for a start. I mean, there’s still some beauty in this world left, fortunately, but there’s also nice people. We can have friends to be kind to us, all sorts of things.
But imagine if one has to experience that state of our own mind, which we’ve probably all experienced to some extent for some time in this life, if none of that was there, one found oneself in an environment that was just completely awful. And we only had to experience just our negative mind with nothing whatsoever to modify it. Nothing and everything to encourage it. So that’s hell. But also sometimes in this life, we can be really happy and blissful and excited.
So this is like the god realms because as well, when our mind, even though it’s obscured, is not so obscured, we can experience the bliss of the various kinds of god realms that the Buddhists talk about. There are the demigod realms where one has a kind of semi god life that lasts quite a long time, but then there are the god realms of incredible enjoyment and beauty and long life. But these are all realms of the samsaric mind. They’re all impermanent. They don’t last.
One dies. In the teachings it says one can be reborn as a god for millions of years and thinking that you’re going to live like that forever, that you’ve achieved enlightenment because it’s so wonderful. But then the karma runs out and one gets reborn, you know, as a worm, as a human in the hungry ghost realm. saṃsāra just going around and around. So these are the potentials of our mind.
There’s the potential for saṃsāra, which we’re experiencing now, but there is also the potential for nirvana, complete bliss, complete freedom from suffering, but also the potential for complete enlightenment. Where not only are we free of all causes of suffering, but all our positive potentials are fully developed. Can I talk a bit more? Oh, I have to say this other thing. Can you take can you handle this?
You have to say yes, don’t you? You don’t have much choice. Sorry. Just quickly, because it’s part of the homework. Otherwise, if I don’t say it, I’ll maybe take a break, but I’ll talk about it afterwards.
Yeah. Probably everyone wants to go to the loo. Sorry. And have a cup of tea. Right.
So just quickly, one point I wanted to make is also maybe just to remind people to pick up their new homework, collect their old homework, and there’s also a handout sheet, a handout which lists the realms of saṃsāra, of cyclic existence. There’s the desire realm, the form realm, and the formless realm. You can ask me about that next week. Too much to go into now. But just quickly, in talking about the potential of our mind, I’ve been trying to say that we have the potential for every good quality simply because the mind is that which knows and our mind has the potential for wisdom to directly perceive things as they are because that’s just what knowing is all about.
And the third aspect of the mind I just want to briefly talk about, I’ve given this little splurge many times before, but it’s the blissful nature of our mind. Right? We are always trying to look for happiness, but we’re looking for it in the external world. But the Buddhist teachings are telling us what we are looking for, this everlasting happiness free of all suffering, that potential exists within our mind all the time because the mind is that which knows. It has Buddha potential, it has all these good qualities, it has the potential for wisdom.
But also the very nature of our mind is blissful. And again, although the bliss of our mind can be suppressed and obscured, the potential for it is always there. That is the very nature of our mind. The mind, it is liberated and enlightened, is utterly blissful. And my little proof or indication that this is true is that if you stop, you know, and I have to have my sorry, bore everyone with this.
Before we sit down to meditate, our mind is like that to some extent. There’s some agitation in the mind. But if one then sits down and meditates and one is able to meditate reasonably well, focusing the mind, what happens is that because the mind is focused on something neutral like the breath or some positive type of meditation on some virtuous, meaningful topic, since the energy of the mind goes into that, it can’t feed all this agitation. And so that agitation, since it doesn’t have a life of its own, it doesn’t truly inherently exist, it arises dependently and it depends on being fed by being paid attention to. If we don’t feed it and we feed, the energy of our mind goes into something meaningful in meditation, then that agitation dies away.
Maybe not completely, but to some extent. And my question is, if you’ve done that in meditation, what is the feeling when that happens? When you can experience your mind becoming a little bit more calm? Is it a suffering feeling or a pleasant feeling? Pleasant feeling, yeah.
At least slightly more pleasant than what was going on before, hopefully. Yeah. And so when we meditate, we are not putting anything into our body, right? We’re not shooting up something. We’re not putting anything into our mind.
In fact, what we’re letting, we’re letting go of stuff in a sense. And the mind is returning to its natural state of being calm and clear, and when that happens, the experience is pleasant. That, to me, indicates the nature of our mind is blissful. Of course, when we just do some basic meditation for ourselves as ordinary practitioners, we don’t experience, I certainly don’t, maybe you do, some incredible bliss, but the mere fact that one experiences some more pleasant feeling indicates that that is the nature of our mind. And even the very gross mind, when you achieve even a little bit of calmness, there is a pleasant feeling.
So imagine what one could achieve, what the actual potential of the mind is if one could achieve a state of mind of utter calmness and complete clarity because there’s nothing obscuring the mind. Imagine what that is like. And imagine if it was not the gross mind, but the very subtle mind. So part of your homework is to check that out, to think about that and check it out. Check your state of mind.
Just check academically, do you think this is possible? Does this help to indicate the mind, the blissful nature of the mind. And then to check your own mind when you’re meditating, has your mind, when it’s become a little bit calmer, become a bit more the experience is somewhat pleasant, enjoyable. Yeah? And then reflect, maybe this is the true nature of my mind.
To be unhappy and miserable and sad to be suffering is not the true nature of the mind at all. Even though we experience a lot of it, it is not the true nature of our mind. Just as we experience delusions regularly, we all experience attachment and desire and getting upset and jealous and proud and blah blah blah over and over again. So these are very, very frequent common states of mind. They are very unnatural states of mind.
They are not the true nature of our mind at all. The true nature of our mind is to be kind and compassionate and loving and generous and peaceful, believe it or not. That is the true nature of our mind. Even though we’re maybe not in that state much, that is the true nature of our mind. And just very quickly, to explain in a very simple way how to achieve enlightenment, which normally takes great scholars enormous volumes, I’m going to explain it in a few lines.
Sorry. But the source of all our suffering is our ignorance, this mental factor that means that we experience ourself and everything in a false way. So if we can remove that, then if that can be eliminated from the mind, then since that is the basis for all our disturbing thoughts, they will cease immediately and also the negative imprints generated by them completely are eliminated because there’s no basis for them. Them. So the key question is, can ignorance be removed from the mind?
One can learn fairly quickly if one practises the teachings that it’s possible to subdue the disturbing thoughts. The question is, can they be eliminated? And the argument is that they can be eliminated if the basis is eliminated, which is ignorance. So the question is, can ignorance be eliminated? And the answer of course is yes, that’s what the Buddha discovered.
And how can it be eliminated? Well firstly, ignorance is perpetuated because we know we’re ignorant. We have no idea until we meet the teachings that we are ignorant, because even the most brilliant person on the planet is ignorant in this sense. Know, Mr. Einstein was ignorant.
He had ignorance, this ignorance obscuring the mind, perceiving things in this false way. And so because we don’t know that we are ignorant, our ignorance continues because what ignorance does, it does two things. It leads to this false appearance of things, but on top of that, it grasps that that false appearance is true. My teacher, Lama Zopa Rinpoche, says that of those two things, the main problem is not that experience these false appearances, but we grasp that they are true. And we grasp that they are true because we never question ever that what appears to our mind is false, especially in a fundamental way.
I mean of course we can admit we’ve made mistakes about small things, but we never question that the fundamental way we experience ourself and the world could possibly be wrong in any way because everyone agrees that we’re experiencing everything the same for a start. So basically, without going into I mean, anyway, how ignorance is removed is by being aware that we are ignorant and then starting to check how we experience things. And we can, even though we are ignorant and experiencing things in a false way, our mind still has this intelligence that is able to think, well yes, things appear that way, but do they exist that way? Can they exist that way? And especially being supplied by Buddha’s teachings, because the Buddha investigated this very carefully and taught it, we can learn to check the way things appear and start to realise that although something appears this way, actually it couldn’t exist that way.
And the more we understand that at a deeper and deeper level, then that, we will destroy that grasping at those appearances, and once we stop grasping that those appearances are true, there’s no way from their side they can sustain themselves because they don’t truly exist. They don’t inherently exist. They only exist depending on our mind believing in them, and once we stop believing in them, they cannot exist. So ignorance can be removed because it doesn’t have a life of its own. It doesn’t inherently exist.
It doesn’t exist from its own side because nothing exists from its own side. And so ignorance can be removed, which means delusions can collapse. They just simply cannot exist. And as the great Bodhisattva Śāntideva says in his wonderful book, The Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life, he says something along these lines much more poetically though, If you defeat an army, the soldiers can run away, will run away, but they can regroup, regain their strength and attack again. But if you eliminate the delusions from the mind, where can they go?
So how can they come back? So once one’s eliminated ignorance, there’s no way it can come back. Once one’s realised how this is just an illusion and that nothing could exist the way that illusion is pretending to things are existing. Once one’s destroyed that, it it it can’t come back. So a liberation and enlightenment is possible.
It’s so simple. So simple. You see, Buddhism is simple. You don’t need the big books, just but there are very big books explaining in very very technical terms how to achieve enlightenment. Any questions?
I had a nice list of questions to discuss. There won’t be any time tonight, so you have to ask me lots of questions Sorry about that. Or is there time? No. There’s not really time to discuss.
We’ve run out of time. Well, yeah, there’s a mind of regret, which is a virtuous mind, not an obscuration, but guilt, a sense of guilt is an obscuration. I think you have to define guilt. Guilt. I may understand it differently.
Well, guilt is a product of ignorance and it makes you feel bad. Well, in English, I don’t know the Sanskrit or the Tibetan terms or the Chinese Buddhist term for this, but in English we have different words, unfortunately they probably both mean the same, but we have to use different English words to distinguish between different Buddhist concepts and the tradition now in the English language is that regret refers to a virtuous mind that recognises an action as negative and realises it brings suffering. And that is a positive state of mind. And it motivates one to avoid negative actions. And it’s part of one of the four opponent powers that one necessarily has to cultivate to purify the mind.
There is another state of mind which is similar but is actually quite harmful and this is what we call guilt, a guilty feeling, which is where you think, Oh, I’ve done something bad. Oh, this is terrible. I am terrible. Oh, this is very bad. I’m terrible.
And that state of mind just makes you depressed and doesn’t encourage you to do virtuous things. So there is a difference. So we use regret for the positive state of mind, whereas guilt is used to distinguish this other more deluded state of mind. Okay? Difference between obscuration and delusion.
What is the difference? Well, a delusion is an obscuration, but not all obscurations are delusions. Karmic imprints are obscurations but they are not delusions. The imprints of delusions are obscurations but they are not delusions. A delusion is an active state of consciousness such as ignorance, attachment, craving, hatred, pride, jealousy, these are delusions.
So these are mental factors, are deluded false ways of knowing. Whereas karmic imprints, these negative karmic imprints obscure the mind, but karmic imprints aren’t consciousness. That’s a worried looks on people’s faces. I think we might have to have an early minute. Sorry.
My bad timing. Okay. But we’ll we’ll have to meditate for a few minutes. Okay. So we can begin by sitting comfortably in the correct posture as much as possible.
So just calm the mind by doing the nine round breathing exercise just one time. Just the nine round nine round breathing cycle. So then just check your own mind, reflecting, although my mind is obscured right now and subject to the arising of different disturbing thoughts of anger and attachment and so on. Just check whether you believe, feel that your mind does have, despite all these delusions, does have all the potential. That your mind does possess the potential of every good quality.
There isn’t a single positive quality lacking in your own mind. Just ask yourself if my mind is that which is clear and knowing. It must have every good quality. It must have the potential of every good quality. It must be able to know in every possible way.
And then ask yourself, why am I not experiencing all these good qualities all the time? And then consider that the answer to that could be that I have no real control over my mind, that my mind is constantly taken over by disturbing thoughts. And it’s these disturbing thoughts that constantly get in the way and obscure all my good qualities. Just imagine how wonderful it would be if there was nothing obscuring my mind. How wonderful it would be if all of these positive potentials of my mind were fully functioning, fully active all the time.
And then recognize as clearly as you can that right now I have a precious human rebirth, which is the optimum chance, the very best chance to begin to free my mind of all these disturbing thoughts, all the obscurations. The optimum chance to free myself from suffering. The optimum chance to stop causing harm to others, the optimum chance to begin to be a vast benefit to other suffering beings. So bring this just brief reflection to a conclusion by making a strong determination to be more and more mindful in daily life, especially from the moment one wakes up, to seize this opportunity, to take care of the mind, to protect the mind from disturbing thoughts, to cultivate the positive qualities of one’s mind more and more. So then we can dedicate the merit tonight, plus in with a prayer on page page ten.
Due to the merits of these virtuous actions, may I quickly attain the state of a Guru Buddha and lead all living beings without exception into that enlightened state. May the precious bodhicitta mind not yet born arise and grow. May that born have no decline, but increase forevermore. Okay. Thank you very much.