Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 110-minute final session of a five-week Discovering Buddhism course, Ven Thubten Dondrub offers practical guidance on working with the mind as the foundation for all Buddhist practice. He begins with a vivid analogy—the mind’s three levels compared to a car’s gears, stuck in first when our potential is to reach top gear—then systematically walks through how awareness arises, the progression from wrong concepts to logical inference to direct perception, and the crucial distinction between mindfulness (which carries moral weight) and mere awareness. The core teaching focuses on two paired practices: calming the mind through meditation and observing it through mindfulness, so you can recognize disturbing thoughts as they arise and apply specific antidotes—patience for anger, non-attachment for desire, wisdom for ignorance. Dondrub emphasizes that negative emotions must be addressed first as the foundation for building positive qualities, using the analogy of laying a solid house foundation. He closes by reflecting on the rarity and fragility of a “precious human rebirth”—having the freedom and conditions to practice—urging students not to postpone such meaningful work until circumstances become harder. This teaching is directed at practitioners new to Buddhism who have completed introductory coursework.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2015 07 14 DB Mind & its Potential Week 5 140715.mp3
UUID: 86edb5aa-cd0f-4667-9fd6-92468eefbf1d
Teacher: Ven Thubten Dondrub
Collection: DB Mind and its Potential (Ven Thubten Dondrub)
Date: 2015-07-14
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 109.6 minutes
Words: ~11,995
Impermanence. It’s impermanent. Correct. So good evening everyone. Welcome to our Thursday night, no, Tuesday night.
Tuesday night, Discovering Buddhism, the Mind and Its Potential, our last class before our great retreat. So I’d encourage everyone if they can to come to the retreat on Sunday. While I think of it, if you are planning to come, please bring the student material with you and fill out the two, if you’ve done all the homework, please fill out the two forms because then you’ll get this just amazing certificate which you can frame and impress your friends with. They’ll be so envious when they’re so impressive, this certificate. Actually, it’s quite nice.
I wish I had one myself. Yeah. Okay. Right. So all of these subjects of Discovering Buddhism are taught from the Mahāyāna perspective and the Mahāyāna perspective is that all sentient beings have Buddha nature and all sentient beings have been our mother, all sentient beings incredibly kind to us, but the vast majority are trapped in saṃsāra.
There are some sentient beings out of saṃsāra, bodhisattvas, anyway, that’s getting too complicated. So just roughly speaking, all these kind mother sentient beings are trapped in saṃsāra, experiencing incredible suffering quite helplessly, and in their confusion they are, and this also includes ourselves, over and over again creating the causes of suffering to perpetuate their cyclic existence. But we are fortunate in that we’ve met the Dharma, hopefully we’ve developed some faith or a lot of faith and refuge in the Buddhadharma and Sangha. So anyway, although we have suffering, we have incredible freedom and although our mind is obscured, it’s not so obscured. So we have incredible capacity, ability and conditions to recognise our situation and free our mind and not only for our own sake but especially for the sake of all these kind beings.
And to do this is what the Mahāyāna teachings emphasize, what the Buddha emphasizes, is to repay the kindness of sentient beings is by far the most meaningful, beneficial, satisfying, wonderful thing that we can do. Of course it’s beneficial for others, but it’s definitely the most beneficial thing we can do for ourselves is to repay the kindness of Mother sentient beings, achieving enlightenment, and that involves giving up all our self-cherishing and cultivating all our positive qualities. And to do that, it’s all about working with our mind. So the more we understand what is meant by mind in a Buddhist context, because in other contexts it means something quite different, but there is a very unique view of mind in Buddhism. So it’s so important and helpful to understand that what the mind is as the Buddha understands it and therefore the incredible potential our mind has to bring incredible benefit but also great harm to ourself and others.
So that wish to achieve enlightenment for the sake of others is called bodhicitta, so this is the very best motivation we can have, so we can try and lead our mind in that direction right now. And to help us do that, there’s the traditional prayer on page ten that we can say, which comes from the mind of the great Bodhisattva Lama Atisha, one of the truly great masters of the Mahāyāna tradition who lived in the eleventh century, a great Indian master. And as we say this prayer, it’s helpful, especially if we feel that connection, to visualize the Buddha in front of us as our source of refuge and inspiration, thinking of the Buddha as the embodiment of the Three Jewels and the embodiment of all perfect teachers of the past, present and future, and reminding us of our Buddha nature, inspiring us to realize it, and at the same time, we try and think of all sentient beings surrounding us, trying to have a sense of their living presence, particularly or at the very least, thinking of those that we’re most connected to in this life and trying to have that recognition of how they are only kind.
The essence of all these beings is basically they’re only kind, but they’re only suffering. I go for refuge until I’m enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, 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. Think the Buddha is pleased with your motivation to benefit all beings and it shows this by now coming towards the crown of one’s head, and then when directly above our crown, we imagine that the Buddha dissolves into blissful golden light for the purpose of that light then entering into us, blessing our mind. Blessing our mind to be able to understand the teachings, blessing our mind to be able to practice them, blessing our mind to be able to eventually gain all the realizations that bring about enlightenment.
And then just briefly, we can do the nine round breathing exercise just to let our mind become that much more calm, clear, and concentrated so that we can use that level of mind to listen to and think about the Buddha’s teachings tonight. K. Thank you. So tonight I want to talk about, mainly about how we can work with our mind, but just as a few other things I want to say before that, in relation to, which I can’t obvious is, the that map, that chart of the mind, which is at the back of your student material towards the end. But before I do that, as I was looking at the homework tonight, I got a small inspiration about another analogy about the three levels of mind.
It was not a complete analogy because my analogies are never perfect or complete, but I thought it might help. It may confuse. But it’s a little bit like the gears of a car. Right? So when you get into a car, you start off in first gear.
Yeah. Right? So that’s like the gross mind. You’re at the grossest level of mind, but and it sort of chugs along. But the purpose of a car engine, being in a car, is not to remain in first gear, that you can actually get into third gear.
Let’s just say there’s only three gears because the analogy doesn’t work. But while you’re in first gear, you can’t be in second gear or third gear, but it doesn’t mean they don’t exist. They’re there, or the potential of them is there, and actually the potential of the car is for you to get into third gear. That’s the ideal, is to be in third gear all the time. So it’s a bit like that.
Ideally we should be experiencing, we should be Buddhas, we have Buddha potential, we could be experiencing this most subtle level of mind, but right now we’re stuck in first gear. We’re in the gross level of mind and while we remain in that, we will never be able to experience Top Gear. Not the TV program. Did that help? That was, you know, I don’t know if it did something like that.
And of course, in that analogy, a car was specifically designed to go into top gear, but our mind wasn’t designed by anyone to go into clear light. That’s simply the nature of the mind. Okay. So I just, in that chart of the mind, I hope everyone’s got in front of them, it’s not actually paged, but it’s, where is it? Can someone explain where it is?
Oh good, after page forty. Right. Which means secretly it’s page forty one, right? So anyway, in there it says the conditions for awareness, right? So for a moment of awareness to arise, one needs these three conditions.
So for example, for a moment of eye consciousness to arise, it requires three factors. There has to be the base, which is the sense organ, the I organ itself, the physical I organ. And there has to be the object, and remember the object of eye consciousness is shape or colour, so there needs to be that shape or colour and for that first moment of eye consciousness to arise experiencing that shape or colour, there has to be a prior moment of consciousness. So when those three things come together, you have this moment of experience, this moment of awareness with each of the five sense objects. Just very briefly, you can see that the mental consciousness is divided up into conception and perception on the right hand side.
So these are different ways of knowing. So there are different ways, these are the basic ways, there are seven ways that we know and experience things. So mostly, we know things through conception. We can know things conceptually, but we can have these wrong ideas, we can have wrong concepts about something, such as according to Buddhism, according to the Buddha, things arising depending on causes and conditions, such as everything here, or everything in the world practically, just to keep it simple, everything on this table has arisen, and the table itself has arisen by causes and conditions, so it’s impermanent. But we can have the wrong concept that everything here is permanent because without thinking about it in our normal experience, everything looks permanent.
It doesn’t look as though it’s changing. Because impermanent means not lasting, impermanent doesn’t mean what do we think of not lasting. Impermanent means changing moment by moment. So things don’t appear to be changing moment by moment. They appear to be permanent, not changing moment by moment.
They appear to be static. I always boringly give this example of flowers. Look as though they’re permanent, always like that. We have that concept, but of course in a few days we will say they’ve died. Gross impermanence will be obvious because subtle impermanence of the things that are changing moment by moment is occurring.
If we don’t see that and most people don’t think about it, they have the concept that everything is permanent, and especially most of us hold to the concept, the wrong idea, the wrong way of knowing that I am permanent. We have that wrong idea that I’m not changing moment by moment. I’m not growing old. I’m not gonna die. I’m permanent.
So there’s that we start off with that wrong idea and with many things, but we may not know they’re wrong ideas, we may think they’re right ideas, but we have these wrong concepts about everything. Of course the fundamental wrong concept, which is the source of all our suffering, is that everything truly inherently exists from its own side. But anyway, one can then start to hear the Buddha’s teachings and because maybe the mind is a little open and one has some connection, one starts to doubt one’s wrong concepts, or one’s concepts which happen to be wrong that one’s been holding as true. For example, I’ve been trying to talk about how because the mind exists, there are future lives and past lives. So many people here seem to have a lot of trouble with that idea, that’s fine.
But hopefully if you hear about this, think about it more and more and more, maybe one will start to doubt one’s belief that there aren’t future lives. And of course there are three kinds of doubt. There is the doubt tending towards thinking something which is true is wrong. There’s a sort of middle doubt where you’re wavering doubt where you’re not really sure at all. And then there’s the doubt that tends towards thinking what is true is true.
One can go through those phases where hear the Buddhist teachings and they say everything’s impermanent, and you hear that and you think, oh, that’s probably wrong. And then you think about it some more and more and you think, oh, maybe. And then you think about it some more and you think, oh, maybe that’s true. That’s possibly actually quite true, but you still doubt it because look, it looks so permanent, so solid and so static. And then the next way of knowing is, especially this is from a spiritual, particularly in following the spiritual path, what happens is we have presumption.
We presume things to be true. We don’t really understand why, but partly because of maybe past karmic connections and because we believe the teacher and the teachings and whatever. We think, Oh yes, everything that depends on causes and conditions is impermanent. One doesn’t really understand that, that one presumes well there are correct and incorrect presumptions, but the good step is having this correct presumption that Buddhism is true or most of the things in it are true. But one doesn’t really know why, but one just presumes, one assumes, presumes it’s true.
Then, and because of that, one studies and the teachings more, listens to the teachings more, and then one develops this incredibly important way of knowing which is called inference, logical inference. That one has reasons for believing, solid reasons that one understands why, for example, things are impermanent. And this is what the Buddha said, Don’t believe what I say because I said it, but check your self because if you check and come to some logical inference yourself, your belief will, which is based on logic and rationality. Ration. Rational.
God, my mind is falling apart. I keep thinking of war rations. Ration. Yeah. Rational.
Ration. Ration. Rationality. Ration. Rational, you have rational reasons for believing we believe.
So that is incredibly important, and this is what His Holiness, the Dalai Lama emphasizes so much how important it is to study the teachings, to think about them, and this is particularly what the Gelugpa tradition, which we follow here, emphasizes, how it’s so important to study the teachings, to think about them and to do analytical meditation where you try and think and question and overcome one’s doubts and not just simply blindly believe. And then on the basis of that logical inference, then eventually one can achieve direct perception of the truth. So this is what Buddhism claims, is that not only does one achieve a belief in something, that rational belief, you may start off with blind belief, but then one can achieve rational belief, but beyond that, that can be substantiated by purifying the mind, training the mind, the mind, the mental consciousness has this ability to directly perceive things, not just conceive, not just generate correct concepts, but generate direct unmistaken perception. So in the teachings it says it is possible not only to intellectually know correctly that things are impermanent, one can reach a point where the mental consciousness can directly perceive phenomena changing moment by moment.
So then you don’t have to believe it. You’re just like you know, it’s not blind faith that this is red. You you directly see that this is red. You don’t have to give lots of or reasons for it. One is directly perceiving red as red, and we can achieve a level where our mental consciousness can directly perceive things changing moment by moment.
I mean, is just an example. One can directly perceive all the things that the Buddha taught, or at least this what is propaganda that this is the case, because the Buddha directly perceived them. And within perception there’s ordinary perception and then there is yogic perception, yogic direct perception. So this is the highest one that one achieves when one has developed single pointed concentration. So these are the stages of ways of knowing from the most obscured, false way to the most subtle, direct, profound, perfect, unmistaken way.
So this is the potential of our, yeah. So while we have these mistaken ways of knowing, having wrong views, of course we’re going to suffer and create the causes of more suffering. So if we can lead our mind through these stages, then we move away from mistaken beliefs and experiences to liberation and enlightenment. Alright, okay. That was that in a nutshell.
Right. Any questions, comments on that? So once one starts to get some idea, belief that the mind does exist, or at least one has the doubt tending towards that it’s probably true that the mind does exist as that which is clear and knowing and is not the brain or just a byproduct of the brain. Once one develops some faith along that belief, along that direction, and understanding that it is our mind that gives rise to all our experience, then what comes with that is the realisation that I have to work with my mind. I have to take care of my mind.
If I want less suffering, more happiness, there’s no question that that’s the most important thing to do. There’s nothing more important to do than that because no matter how much of all the other things I’ve been doing to be happy and be free of suffering, of depending and money and possessions and power and influence and status and blah blah blah. You know, experiencing those things with a mind like that, how can one be happy? Yeah. No one’s managed yet to be happy with an uncontrolled mind, to be genuinely happy and satisfied and so on, lastingly.
The illusion can last for a short time, but not forever. And also, of course, the more we start to have some faith belief that the mind is in the mind as something formless, that what logically does follow is that our mind is going to go beyond this life. It’s not going to cease. The mind will just keep giving rise to experience. There’s nothing that can destroy the mind, so nothing can stop experience occurring moment by moment.
Death itself is not the cessation of things, death itself is an experience of the mind. So that makes it even more important to take care of the mind because all the problems of this life are not going to stop with this life, they can just continue, maybe even worse in future lives. Could be better, but could be worse. So what we need to do, the first thing, first thing, there always seems to be many first things to do. It’s difficult to say which is the most important, but in general, what we need to do is work on calming our mind, calming it down.
And the more things we do, the more we agitate the mind, and especially in the third world, not the third world, the first world, which we live in, life is becoming more and more frantic, it seems. People do so much more and there’s so much more stress and competition and everything, it seems, and all of this is just a condition for the mind to be really, really agitated. Even hundreds of years ago in texts written for monks, it says things like, even a monk doing lots of virtuous things, this can be an obstacle to calming the mind. Yeah? So just doing ordinary things is also yeah.
The more stuff we do, the more to think about. Of course, is good to do virtuous things, but the more stuff we do, the more agitated the mind is. So one thing we really have to try and do is set aside some time to work on calming our mind, doing a little bit, at least a little bit of meditation regularly. This is really good, really important. Just calming meditation or where one learns to focus the mind at least a little bit, a little bit.
Even that takes quite a bit of work to be able to do that. One shouldn’t be discouraged because when one starts to try to meditate and focus on something, one able to do it, because our mind is not used to that. It’s not as though meditation just happens spontaneously. I don’t know about many, but some people seem to believe that meditation is something that just happens. You sort of sit down, close your eyes, and then you enter.
People think you should then enter this because you said, Now I’m meditating, that’s just spontaneous. It’s gonna mean you enter this incredibly calm, peaceful, concentrated state where you don’t do anything. Anything. No effort is required. This is rubbish.
Meditation requires a lot of effort because that’s going on. That’s not going to stop by itself. It requires a lot of effort to calm that down. Work. It requires work.
But it so if we if we work at it, it will work because that’s the nature of the mind. If you let the mind become familiar with something, it it will be able to experience it, to know it more and more, And then it becomes more and more easy. It becomes eventually something that starts out being incredibly difficult and may feel very, what’s the word, unnatural to us. And what’s the other word? Sort of, I don’t know, hypocritical or something, like meditating on loving all sentient beings when you know I hate most people, but here I am meditating on everyone.
I love everyone. So one can feel very hypocritical and it’s very unnatural and not true and blah blah blah. But if one allows the mind to be familiar with these ideas more and more and more and more and more, then the resistance to all of that fades away more and more and more, and the mind takes on these good qualities more and more and more until eventually it becomes effortless. It becomes spontaneous. It doesn’t become something artificial and fake.
It becomes completely genuine. Of course, unfortunately, opposite can occur. If we allow our mind to be familiar with what is negative, our mind will become more and more negative. That’s the way the mind works. So we need to let our mind become more and more familiar with its true nature, its Buddha nature, because we’re already far too familiar with our deluded nature.
We’re very familiar with that, but we’re not familiar with our Buddha nature. So So that’s what it’s all about, becoming familiar with that, giving the chance to recognise that, Did you do the meditation? Looking at the possibility that, yes, I may not be the most I may not be Mother Teresa right now, but I have the ability to be kind and patient and a little bit compassionate sometimes with some people. Sometimes I can be generous, sometimes I can be intelligent, sometimes I can be so that means if we can do that for one second, it means we have the potential to do it all the time. If we can be nice to one person for one second, it means we have the potential to be kind all the time to all people.
So if we think about that, we can see we actually have Buddha nature, and every sentient being has it. At least it’s worthwhile to at least think all human beings have it. So that’s what we need to be familiar with, to give ourselves a chance to be familiar with that and for those qualities to give some space in the mind figuratively for those qualities to blossom because they will if we give them the chance. If you don’t give them the chance, it’s just like a garden that you ignore. If you ignore the garden, the weeds grow.
It’s very difficult growing flowers and vegetables, but weeds, don’t have to do anything and they’ll grow like crazy. So our mind is like that. If you don’t do anything, the delusions just go berserk. You don’t have to educate them, you don’t have to train them, you don’t have to meditate on being angry, it just comes. Yeah?
But to be kind and patient, we have to train the mind. Yeah. So if we don’t take care of our mind, just the delusions go rampant, and our our Buddha nature gets, you know, shrubbed out, overgrown. So as well as calm, and in terms of calming the mind, the way we live our life and our attempts to calm our mind by meditating and so on, these things have to be in balance because if we live a completely wild life and every now and again we sit down and meditate, not much is going to happen, it’s not really going to work. If we lead a really super busy, berserk life or a negative life or a combination of both and then try and meditate or whatever to work with our mind, that these two things are in conflict, it’s really important that we try to live a simpler, quieter, it doesn’t mean boring, a simpler, quieter, more relaxed life where we focus on what is really important, and as I’ve been trying to talk about for the past few weeks on Thursday nights, the very basis of that is living an ethical life.
So that’s incredibly important. So then along with that, yeah, anyway. Millions of things to say. Anyway, is just condensation, condensed version of the whole path to enlightenment. As well as just practising just calming the mind.
It’s also because one can do that without any sort of religious beliefs or religious intentions and so on, or any necessarily moral or ethical purpose behind that. But I would say generally, even if one doesn’t have any moral purpose for calming the mind, by living a life or training to calm the mind, because we have natural Buddha potential, we will tend to be a more moral, decent person if we have a calm mind. The more our mind is agitated or like that, that is the best condition or the worst condition for our negative tendencies to arise. Anyway, so in addition to working on just calming the mind, what is also incredibly important is to start observing our mind, developing mindfulness, which is a really vital aspect, one of the most vital aspects of Buddhist practice. In English we have these, or we’ll probably have more than, anyway, we have these words mindfulness and awareness and sometimes even in Buddhist context these words are used interchangeably, but from my understanding I think they’re quite different because the term that is translated as mindfulness always has a moral or ethical connotation, whereas awareness just simply means you’re conscious of something going on within your own mind or outside, but it has no moral quality whatsoever, as people have heard.
Anyway, my teacher, Khensur Rinpoche, makes the joke that it’s like a very good thief has to be very aware. To steal something, to get into someone’s house, steal it, get away without being caught, you have to practice a lot of awareness of what’s going on, but there’s no moral quality there because if there was, they wouldn’t steal it. So there’s no mindfulness there at all. There’s a lot of awareness, but absolutely no mindfulness because if one was mindful, one would realize, Oh, stealing is not a good thing to do. It’s not good for me, it’s not good for other people.
So mindfulness is being aware of the thoughts and feelings arising in the mind and knowing whether they are beneficial or not, virtuous or not, positive or negative. And what goes with that mental factor of mindfulness which we need to cultivate is this other mental factor which is sometimes translated I can never remember the Tibetan term for it or the Sanskrit, but it’s sometimes translated in English as alertness or introspection. And this is the mental factor that having recognised that, for example, one’s mindfulness has recognised that the mind is in a negative state, then this other mental factor comes along and does something about it, tries to overcome it, has the wish, the intention to overcome it, recognizing this is harmful to me. Or in the case of if it’s a virtuous, positive, meaningful state of mind, then alertness, introspection will want to reinforce that state of mind. So this is really incredibly helpful to cultivate in our daily life more and more, to to know to be more aware of our thoughts.
Yeah? I mean, if if our mind is racing like that during the day, it’s difficult to be aware of them. If the mind is a bit calmer, it’s more easy to notice particular thoughts arising and also the feeling tone of those thoughts, because every thought, every moment of thought, has a feeling. And one can start to distinguish that this way of thinking makes me feel bad. Actually, it’s unpleasant.
And when we actually are sensitive to that, we will be naturally a moral person. We won’t be moral because I’ve been told by somebody that this is good and this is bad. We will feel that this is an unpleasant feeling. We will know from our own direct personal experience that this hating someone is painful. Being jealous is painful.
Being proud is painful. Having lots of afflicted desire is painful. The Buddha didn’t say these things just to be a pain in the neck or a killjoy. It’s because the Buddha directly perceived that is the very nature of these states of mind. They are painful, and they can only bring more pain, more suffering, more dissatisfaction.
So it’s really incredibly helpful to have this mindfulness in our daily life. And to have that in our daily life, we need to cultivate it in meditation. And to develop more powerful meditation, mindfulness is an essential factor because meditation involves keeping the mind on a particular topic, particular subject, and to be able to keep the mind on that subject, one has to be mindful. You have to know, is my mind staying on this positive thing I intended it to or is it not? And what’s interfering?
So the more we cultivate that mindfulness in meditation, our meditation will become more effective, more powerful, and it will have a more lasting effect in our daily life and enable us to be more mindful in our daily life. And yeah. And by being more mindful in our daily life, somehow I think I was saying last week, wasn’t I, that yes, when a particular mental factor arises with the primary consciousness, if that is a virtuous mental factor, it tends to bring all the other one virtuous mental factors with it. They all sort of cooperate like a team to strengthen that state of mind, or if a negative mental factor arises, the others tend to feed it as well, come along with it. So if one cultivates this basic virtuous mindfulness, then in that state, one’s memory of whatever Dharma practice one has heard or studied will tend to arise, so we’ll be able to utilise it in our daily life.
If we don’t remember useful Dharma things we’ve heard in teachings or read about, if we can’t remember that, we’re never going to be able to apply it. The only way we can apply something in our daily life is by remembering it, and mindfulness helps that. That is what it’s all about. So particularly we need to be able to recognise our disturbing thoughts, to know what the disturb in general. This is why in the teachings, it explains what the disturbing thoughts are and defines them.
So it’s useful to have that what you could call academic knowledge of the disturbing thoughts. But the reason for having that academic knowledge of what desire is, what attachment is, what pride, jealousy, anger is, is by knowing that definition, it helps one to be able to then recognise that actual state of mind within one’s own mind when it arises. Alright? Because it’s amazing how our mind works that anger can arise in our mind, and we don’t even recognize that we’re angry. Desire can arise in our mind, but we don’t consciously see it as that.
I mean, we can do that, of course, but sometimes so involved in that state of mind that that is reality. When it ceases, you can come out of that when the bubble bursts, you can come out of it and think, Oh, wow, what happened there? But when one’s caught up in it, one is hardly aware of what’s going on. So that’s why it’s so important to study the dharma to help us to recognise our own states of mind. And the reason to recognize these states of mind, especially the negative ones, is so we can then do something about it.
But if we don’t recognize the disturbing thoughts as disturbing thoughts, what can we do? We’re lost. Over the years, friends and people I’ve known who are psychologists and whatever, Buddhists who apply their Buddhist understanding and psychology to their clients have mentioned that there are people who have been taught to practice mindfulness and watching their thoughts and have been absolutely amazed that they could do this, that you can actually know your thoughts, but even more amazingly that you can change them. There are people who have no idea that they actually have the ability to change their way of thinking. People are so caught up in the the habit of their own destructive way of thinking, they have no idea that it’s possible to go beyond it.
And if you check your own mind, your own experience, I think it’s very common that when we get depressed and lonely and unhappy and our mind sinks into that, that becomes reality and it feels like, to use the word in a vague way, the English way of using the word feeling, it seems like that that’s all there is. When you’re unhappy and down, it’s always going to be like that, and there’s nothing you can do. I mean, intellectually, may know something, but there’s that emotional kind of attitude that this is it. I’m stuck. This is this is life, but it’s just a bubble of thought.
It’s just a it’s just a state of mind. That’s all it is. I met the Dharma sort of by accident. I kind of fell into it. You know, I was actually trying to rescue a friend from this weird Buddhist cult, you know, just Buddhism, you know, save him.
But I ended up staying in this Buddhist center, and I don’t want to get into too much gory personal details and things, but before that, I was pretty unhappy, pretty miserable. I’d sort of given up on finding any meaning to life and finding any meaningful thing to do, So when I went to this centre, I was in a better state of mind than that, but it was momentarily. But somehow, this is when I connected to the dharma. I’ve been to the center before and vowed I’d never go back, but I went back to rescue this friend. So somehow, because the people there were talking about the mind and everything, and I’d always believed I had a mind, but I’d never thought about its implications, somehow I got some vague idea at the time that this state of mind that I’d fallen into, which was not a happy one, I somehow realised that that’s all it was, that it was just a state of mind.
It wasn’t reality. It wasn’t my complete reality, that it was just a little bubble that I got locked into or was in the process of locking myself into without any awareness. That really completely changed my life, that somehow I had some sorry, I’m not trying to make this sound like I had some major, major highly enlightened experience or anything, but at my very gross level at the time, it was very enlightening and liberating to see that somehow I could change that, that my mind had far much, far greater potential than that boring experience. Yeah? And the trouble is not knowing we perpetuate these boring, painful ways of thinking and behaving, But our mind is far greater than that.
It has this amazing potential. So it’s really important to be aware of our mind is like this sky that is, you know, with all these clouds coming by. And you can think that clouds can be permanent, but, you know, they just move on. And even the the ugliest clouds, you know, the most negative thoughts, they don’t change the true nature of our mind. The Buddhadharma has wonderful explanations of all the disturbing thoughts, all the good positive thoughts, so it’s really helpful to understand those, to be able to understand what afflicted desire is, not to confuse it with virtuous desires, but to really know what afflicted desire is.
It exaggerates the good qualities. Conventionally there are things that we can say are conventionally pleasant, there are things that are conventionally unpleasant, conventionally beautiful, ugly, good, bad, but afflicted desire exaggerates the good qualities of the good things. It totally projects onto them something that far more than is there conventionally, and grasps that it’s permanent. It’s always going to be like that. And we lock ourselves, and that becomes reality.
And with that goes attachment where we get dependent on that. Completely stuck and unable to separate from it. And if you think about it, if you check, you know, and all our delusions are they illusions. They create illusions, and they’re lies. They’re lies.
Because attachment and desire tells us One big problem with all our delusions is it’s always leading our mind out there and telling us there’s something, especially desire and attachment, telling us there’s something out there that is beautiful and wonderful. The obvious message of desire and attachment is that happiness and beauty and goodness is out there. There it is. It’s somewhere out there, and then you find, Oh, that’s part of it. It’s always out there.
So that’s the obvious message of attachment and desire, which is a lie and leads to all sorts of problems. But the secret message of attachment and desire, which is worse, much worse, is that every time we follow it, we are telling ourselves that there isn’t any happiness and goodness and beauty in here. It’s out there, not in me. So don’t look for it in here because there isn’t any. It’s out there.
Other people are beautiful, are happy, and blah blah blah, but not me. It’s out you. If you want to be happy, you have to find it out there because there’s nothing there. That is a terrible message to tell ourselves. But that’s what our attachment and desire tells us and we believe it.
Every time we follow it, that’s what we believe. We’re believing it. And with anger, you know, anger tells us, everything bad is out there and it’s all your problems and it’s not my problem. It’s got nothing to do with me. I’m totally innocent, completely pure, nothing wrong, but that’s a false message in that case.
So we really have to learn our delusions, know know what they are and academically in a sense from the teachings, and then recognize them within ourselves and also really feel what those delusions are like. And the purpose of all of that is so that we can overcome them. So the first stage is subduing them, not repressing them. There’s no value benefit. It’s psychologically harmful to suppress our delusions.
What we need to do is pacify them or subdue them or diffuse them, Like, you know, a balloon full of air, you let the air out. Rather than squash the balloon, you have to let the air go out. And the way to do that is to learn the different antidotes because every delusion that we have has an antidote, an opposite state of mind. And remember, the mind can only be in one state at one time. So if we have no understanding and no experience when our mind falls into a delusion or a delusion arises in the mind and takes it over, that’s it.
We’re stuck there and we feed that delusion. We pay attention to it and so that feeds it, so it just keeps going on and on. And as I said, all the other delusions can come along to reinforce it. So all the energy of the mind just feeds that and each delusion, it arises depending on many, many factors. Our view of ourself, the view of something external, so many different factors arise and on the basis of all those factors arising a particular delusion, you label that a particular delusion.
A delusion isn’t something separate. It’s something that arises depending it looks like in this analogy that the delusion is something separate and all that, but the delusion is what you label on all of that stuff occurring. Know, saying, Oh, this is wonderful. If I have that, I’ll be happy. If this is permanent, I’ll be permanently happy.
You think all that and I’m unhappy. This is so beautiful. You think, think, think. It’s not even really conscious, and all of that is desire. And so the more you think all of those things, you have desire going on all the time.
Yeah. But if you start thinking something else, if the energy of the mind, instead of being one hundred percent into that, you somehow can put some of your energy of your mind into thinking another way, which is, for example, in the case of anger, anger arises because of all those negative thoughts. If you cultivate patience, patience is called oh, this is perfect. That’s anger. This is patience.
Patience arises by thinking you know, anger arises by you thinking, oh, this person is very bad. They just said this terrible thing to me, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. And you think all those things and all of that is anger and it’s all permanent. You grasping that this is permanent, I can’t bear this, what this person is saying, this is so painful, blah blah blah, and so you get angry. But if you think in a completely different way, although this person is probably suffering and miserable and that’s why they’re angry with me and yelling at me and blaming me, If you think in a completely different way, then patience can arise.
Well you focus on that, you focus on that thought and not so much those thoughts and so these positive thoughts undermine these negative thoughts and the anger dies. It doesn’t exist anymore and that state is called patience. So you haven’t suppressed the anger. You’ve undermined what causes it. You haven’t fed it.
Something like that. The antidote to attachment is strangely enough, wonderfully enough, called non attachment. But attachment arises because we focus on telling ourselves that this is wonderful, I’ll be happy, blah blah blah blah blah. We don’t check any of that, and so non attachment arises from thinking about all the faults of being attached. Attachment and desire don’t think about any of the faults or problems that could arise, but if we think about in the space, because the mind is changing moment by moment, so we have to catch those moments where we can think in a different way.
And the important thing to understand in cultivating or practising the antidotes is taking the example of anger. If you’ve never thought about the obvious way to develop patience to overcome anger is to realise all the harm it brings to oneself and others now and in the future, from many, many points of view. But if one has never done that, then there’s nothing, there is no antidote, there’s no anti information, opposite information to the information that sustains anger, which is that being angry is good. I have to be angry. We kind of are telling ourselves when something happens, I have to be angry in this situation.
And you can read in newspapers where we are told sometimes we should be angry about certain things. It’s necessary to be actually, I heard this on the radio today about something, some something happening, and the person was saying people should not only be blah blah, they should be angry about it, but we shouldn’t. We’re angry. But that’s what our mind’s saying. I have to be angry about this.
This is essential. The what the essential way to deal with this is to be angry. This is good, but one has to think about all the harm to realize there is the harmful side of anger. In fact, anger is only harmful, but one has to cultivate those thoughts. You just can’t sort of say that, oh, you know, you’re angry, and then you look up a book and say, oh, angry is bad.
Oh, you stop being angry. Anger is bad. Oh, stop, go away. Doesn’t work. Why?
Because those are just words. The Buddha says, Oh, and I like the Buddha. He’s true, so, you know, Oh, that must be right. Anger is bad. I shouldn’t be angry.
That doesn’t have much power to change this habit that is beginningless to get angry. There’s just words, there’s a little of here. This understanding is on, it’s like lipstick. That’s all. Lipstick dharma.
The only way one can overcome the power of our delusions is to reflect as deeply as possible and as awful as possible on these things because that builds up this energy in the mind, these imprints in the mind. And the way the mind works is when you get angry, if you’ve built up that antidote, that anti energy through reflection and study and listening to teachings and meditating, somehow mysteriously when you start to get angry, those imprints start to arise and come along and do battle. So this is what Dharma practice is basically about, learning antidotes to our delusions, what our delusions are and the antidotes. All the teachings of the antidotes. Yeah.
So before we take a break, if you have questions, any question, comment? Antidote of the ignorance? Wisdom. The wisdom that realizes that directly perceives the true nature of yourself and phenomena. Think it’s really hard to to teach wisdom because wisdom is collection knowledge instead of just an antidote.
Sorry? For I I think it’s really hard to teach wisdom. I kind of it’s difficult to find a way to teach wisdom. Don’t worry. There are great Buddhist masters who know how to teach it.
They teach the causes of it. Course, wisdom itself is something that arises within your mind. That is a state of consciousness. The wisdom is a mental factor that’s directly perceiving things as they are. It is this direct perception.
But to achieve that direct perception, it arises from developing correct inferential understanding and that can be taught. Yeah. In terms of mindfulness, as you said, being related to morality and ethics, is it kind of misappropriation of the term in non-Buddhist context? Like, there’s whole industries about mindfulness meditation Yeah. And that’s being applied to business situations Yes.
Yeah. Military where the cyber attacks Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah.
No. That’s what I’m It’s it’s really yeah. Not right. Well, I mean, it’s yeah. It’s it’s it’s really they’re talking just basically about awareness.
Well, some of it is just awareness. Yeah. But, yeah, we need mindfulness. Could a basic oh, sorry. I was gonna say, could a basic understanding of emptiness also be an antidote to say attachment and desire?
To some extent, yeah, a little bit, yeah. Depends what desire, how strong the desire is and how strong the understanding is. Even having some presumption, which is basically kind of blind belief in something you don’t really understand it, or maybe that having or at least having a little bit of understanding of something like emptiness, even a little bit of understanding, yeah, can can be helpful. Yeah. Definitely.
Because I found when I started reading about that, I mean, well, basic understanding, I suppose, that really helped with attachment. I mean Mhmm. It’s like realizing that things don’t have intrinsic value, that they don’t have value from their own side. Just I don’t know if that’s gonna be helpful or not. Yeah.
Yeah. No. It can. Yeah. It can.
But, unfortunately, not in all cases. By emptiness, there was an. Yes. Yeah. Okay.
Yeah. Yeah. Translated in English as emptiness or voidness or suchness. Yeah. Did you have a question?
Think. Without having desire and passion and all those in one attachment, do we just stand still? Don’t don’t we need those things to move forward in No. No. No.
Does it conflict? No. No. You you can have you can have a wish for something, a desire see, we don’t have in our language the words, the right words to distinguish, but desiring something doesn’t have to be an afflicted desire. Know, wanting to achieve something positive, such as practising the dharma, is not an afflicted desire, is not a disturbing thought, it’s not an afflicted state of mind.
Would a spy be a better way to use? Better one to use? Yeah. Maybe. Well, aspire, not not necessarily aspire because something that’s something very, you know, aspiring to something.
Just want something, wanting something. Or in the case of the dharma, you’re aspiring to it. Yeah. But that’s why I was saying you have to think about what afflicted desire actually is. Yeah.
One has to be able to really recognise what it is and to see that that state of mind one doesn’t need in life at all. In fact, it’s an incredible obstacle, even to ordinary life, to have attachment and afflicted desire. Most people think if you if you don’t have desire and attachment, you know, you’ll just be a, you know, a blob. But you you look at the great lamas. You know, I’m not I’m not sure if they’re entirely free of of attachment and desire.
One one should believe they are, but if you know, they certainly have much less. At the very least, from even just an ordinary point of view, they have far less desire and attachment than we ordinary beings have, and you see their life. These people are not blobs, they’re not miserable, they’re not slobs, they are not lifeless, colorless people. Quite the opposite. This wholeness is not a blob.
No. I I didn’t mean it like that. I think it’s just wanting to attain and be successful, continue improving and wanting to achieve and go at the Yes, but that’s not afflicted desire. Well, it depends what you’re wanting to achieve and why you’re wanting to achieve it. If you want to achieve it so you’re better than everyone else and you become rich and famous, that’s different, but that’s that’s an affliction, but if one is wanting to be, you know, awaken one’s positive qualities and be beneficial, this is not an affliction.
It doesn’t afflict your mind. It doesn’t disturb your mind. You have to check out. Oh, thank you. You’re scaring me.
Tea time. Coffee time. Thank you very much. So just very quickly, in just a very general way, so what we need to do if we start to see the importance of working with our mind, the way to do that is to work on calming the mind as much as possible so that we can observe our mind, develop mindfulness, so that we can learn to particularly pacify our disturbing thoughts. The Buddha Dharma emphasizes a lot, some people find this a bit, I don’t know, they don’t like it, but I think the Western approach is we have to always emphasize the positive, be jolly jolly and only think about the good things and not the bad things.
But Buddhist psychology works from the point of view that it’s really vital, the most important thing as practitioners, especially at the beginning of the path or the beginning of the practice, is to emphasize dealing with our negative emotions and avoiding engaging in negative actions of body, speech and mind. Because if we don’t do that, no matter how many good things we do in life, how much good we do with our body, speech and mind, and if we only focus on that but we don’t deal with our negative aspects, then those negative aspects will always undermine whatever positive things we achieve. We will do some good stuff, develop, you know, work on our good qualities, but if we don’t deal with the negative, that negative stuff will wipe all that out, undermine it. Buddhism emphasises that we really have to work on the negative stuff. That itself is being positive and beneficial and it lays the foundation for all the other work we do to be really successful and long lasting.
In the teachings about the Lamrim teachings of the graduated path to enlightenment, the teachings give this very simple but very useful analogy that it’s like building a house, that you have to start from the beginning and you have to have the foundation first and you have to have a good foundation because if you’ve got a good foundation, all the layers of bricks that you put up on that foundation will be really solid. You’ll have really good walls. But if you don’t have a decent foundation, no matter how strong the wall is and well built, it will fall down because there’s no solid foundation. So one has to start at the beginning and get that beginning part established really well and then you can build on that, and what you build on that will really last. But if you try and do all the fancy stuff first and not the basic solid stuff, it will all crumble eventually.
You may think you’re going somewhere, but then it crumbles because the foundation hasn’t been laid properly. So this applies to working with our negative emotions. This is something that we really should emphasize a lot. This is why in the teachings on karma, the Buddha taught about avoiding the ten non virtues. It’s so important to avoid those because avoiding those ten non virtuous actions of killing, stealing, and lying, and sexual misconduct, and divisive speech and harsh speech and meaningless idle gossip and so on.
By avoiding those actions, it’s an indirect way, it’s the first step in subduing our disturbing thoughts because every time we make this conscious decision not to engage in one of those actions such as killing or stealing or sexual misconduct or lying, in order to avoid those actions, we have to stop following the delusion that is pushing us to engage in those negative actions. Right? So that means it is an indirect way of subduing the delusions. Of course, we learn to subdue the delusions, they won’t even arise the wish to engage in these negative actions. So that’s the first step.
So apart from dealing with our negative tendencies and thoughts and feelings, of course working with our mind involves cultivating the positive potentials as much as possible, developing a good heart as His Holiness says. So developing a good heart covers all those things such as developing the quality, our potentials for generosity, morality, kindness, compassion, and so on, and bodhicitta. Those potentials exist within our mind and yes, so there are methods we can learn, methods we can learn that awaken those qualities more and more. Just in a simple way, we all have the potential for compassion and we all have some ability to be compassionate now, but the very powerful way to awaken that potential comes basically from meditating in order to develop, doing analytical meditation that develops an awareness of how much suffering exists. We develop real compassion for ourselves by meditating on developing an awareness or mindfulness of how much potential for suffering we have, how much actual suffering we have, but more importantly, how much potential we have for it, because we’re in saṃsāra, because we have ignorance, because we have all these delusions arising over and over again.
We develop compassion for others by realizing how others are suffering, even the ones who look happy, even the ones who conventionally are very successful are suffering in so many ways. And that even what we as ordinary people label happiness is a subtle kind of suffering because it doesn’t last. It’s not fulfilling. So one has to think about those things and think about them regularly and deeply because when one does that and then you start to interact with people, you see the truth of it and then you feel compassion for people. You experience the wish may they not suffer, and I want to help them not to suffer.
I want to help them not to create the causes of suffering, which is what compassion is really all about. So we have to cultivate these things. And then also, what is of ultimate importance is not only do we have to try to pacify the negative potentials of our mind and develop the positive potentials, but also there’s this incredible quality of wisdom to develop, or insight, or penetrative insight, which is related to our basic quality of intelligence. This is one of the fundamental mental factors that all sentient beings have, which in Tibetan is called sherab, which can be translated as intelligence. And what is intelligence?
All intelligence relates to this basic ability to be able to distinguish this is right and this is wrong. This is beneficial and this is not. This is meaningful. This is meaningless. This is true.
This is false. This is virtuous. This is non virtuous. That’s what intelligence is talking about in a Buddhist context. It’s the most important kind of intelligence, and that ability to know that, to be able to distinguish that.
And from that arises the wisdom that is able to see that, Oh yes, this looks permanent, but it’s impermanent. And there’s that general wisdom that can arise that realizes just because something looks one way, it doesn’t mean it actually is that way. As Shakespeare said, one can smile and smile and still be a villain. He was a pretty smart guy. He was quite wise, Shakespeare.
Yeah. And so that leads to the highest wisdom where one is able to cut through the illusion that things appear to exist as though they are truly existent out there from their own side under their own power. Things look like that to us right now. Everything appears that way. And by appearing, I mean not just to our eye consciousness, but when we hear a sound, that sound seems to be really there from its own side under its own power.
Like when we hear a beautiful sound, it seems to be the beauty of it is there. It really is beautiful from its side, not not depending on me calling it beautiful, but it really is. Or that irritating noise is really irritating from its side. It’s got nothing to do with my mind, it really is irritating. But if it was really irritating, everyone would find it irritating.
And many people probably do find it irritating, but some people might think it’s beautiful and make musical compositions about it, which people don’t, which I find really irritating. Yeah. But this is such an important quality to develop, and like everything, intelligence is not something fixed. The more one uses it, the more it increases. To use this ability to check things rather than to blindly believe that whatever appears right now, you grasp that that’s it, but to use one’s ability to think and analyse and check.
Finally, the last thing that we need to do in working with our mind is to purify our mind. To use this time to purify our mind of the negative imprints that we’ve put into it, unfortunately, in this and past lives. Because we’ve put all these negative imprints by following our disturbing thoughts and we followed them because we weren’t mindful of them, because we didn’t understand what those disturbing thoughts were, how destructive they are of our happiness, not only in this life but in future lives. Oh, okay. Sorry.
There’s not gonna be any discussion. There’s no I’m sorry. But in conclusion, because I have to mention it because it’s in the course outline of the things I suppose to cover. It’s also helpful to understand that or to recognise that possibly we have what is called in Buddhist context, a precious or a perfect human rebirth. So a precious human or perfect human rebirth doesn’t refer just to being a human being or having a human rebirth.
It refers to a human being who has what is called the eight freedoms and the ten endowments or ten encouraging factors. So these are the eight freedoms from the greatest obstacles to practising the dharma, and having the ten encouraging factors that make it as easy as possible to practise the dharma, to free our mind. So if we recognise that we have most or all of these eight freedoms and ten endowments, it means that we are the most fortunate human beings on the planet in the universe. Not just the most fortunate human beings, but the most fortunate sentient beings, because it means we have the optimum chance, the optimum chance to free our mind from suffering. Because everyone has Buddha nature, every sentient being has Buddha nature, but the vast majority are in the lower realms where there’s too much suffering.
They are overwhelmed with suffering, so there’s nothing they can do to free their mind. And there are beings in the god realms and they have too much happiness, so they don’t see the need because they think that happiness is gonna go on forever, and it’s not. But it feels like it’s going to go on forever, and they’re having a terrific time, so why waste the time doing all these boring Dharma practices? But as a human being who has the eight freedoms, ten endowments, there is the optimum chance, because the eight freedoms are very quickly being Well, all human beings have the first four freedoms, is not being in the three lower realms and not being in the god realms. Actually, this is a big subject.
Have to zap through it. But basically, having the eight freedoms means one what else is there? One is free of I’m blank. Well, if one is also one could be a human being that has been born with some kind of physical or mental handicaps that make it extreme so for example, if one is born blind or deaf or mentally disturbed, then there’s no way to practice the Dharma, no way to change. It’s extremely difficult to do those things.
One can be born and hold on to extremely wrong views, that one won’t even consider the possibility of the mind existing or that there are future lives or that karma exists and works. So if one holds to those wrong views, then it’s very, very difficult to work with the mind in this very long term lasting way. So if one is free of those limitations, there’s this incredible freedom to work with the mind. And also, especially if one has the encouraging factors of meeting the Dharma. Most people in this world will never have any contact with Buddhism.
They won’t even hear the word in their life. So not only that, one of the most encouraging factors, of course, is developing faith in the teachings. There are people who meet Buddhism, but they never develop any faith in it. So this is one of the key and encouraging factors, endowments, is to develop some actual faith that the Buddha’s teachings are true because then one will want to practice them. And if one has basically a healthy body and a healthy mind and one has met the Dharma, has some faith in it, one has Dharma friends to help you and you meet teachers who can teach the Dharma and encourage one in the path, then that’s it.
One has the optimum situation, and you have places like this. You know about them where you can come and practice and meet Dharma people. You can see Dharma images, obtain Dharma books, etcetera, etcetera. So how how many so how many people in Adelaide know about this place or or use it? Hardly anybody.
It’s here. Buddha House is well, it’s been in a few places, but it’s been in Adelaide for years and years and years, but most people wouldn’t know it exists. Most people a lot of people probably don’t even know that Buddhism exists in Australia in in any way. But if if one knows about these things and has access to them, then one can use them. And therefore it becomes as easy as possible.
Practising the Dharma unfortunately is not easy. Changing the mind is not easy. But if one has all these freedoms and all these encouraging factors, one has got the optimum chance. And as the analogy goes, if a beggar, some very starving, miserable beggar, finds a giant diamond and they don’t know what it is and they keep this thing all their life, but they don’t recognize that what they’ve got is this unbelievably valuable diamond which could completely transform their life and bring them at least worldly happiness and some food and comfort and blah blah blah, but they don’t recognize that so they remain miserable. So just having a diamond is not very beneficial if you don’t recognize its value.
So having a precious human rebirth, having all these freedoms and endowments, that if we don’t recognize the meaning of them, we waste it. So this is why we have to recognise that possibly we have this kind of rebirth, that we have all this freedom, the ability to practise the dharma, to work with our mind. And such a freedom is very, very rare. Because nothing happens by chance, one has to have created the cause, and the causes are extremely difficult to create. It’s taken many lives to create the cause for this life.
So I’ll just repeat when I the the first teaching I ever received, it was a month long teaching from Lama Zopa Rinpoche in 1976. During that course, Rinpoche gave this analogy when he was talking about the precious human rebirth, oh, very quickly, time to stop. About, you imagine a man who has a wife and one beloved child, and in order to take care of his family, especially his child, he leaves them and goes off in the desert looking for gold and he spends years looking for gold, very lonely and missing his family and having a very hard life, but eventually he gets enough gold, comes back and gives it to his only beloved child, and this child has no idea what the gold is and just throws it away. Rinpoche says, So that means that the man, the father, has wasted all of those years of suffering. It’s been completely wasted.
And the child has wasted all their possible chance of happiness. They’ve thrown it away. So that’s a tragedy. But for us to have a precious human rebirth which took many previous lives to get and then not use it in the most meaningful way, which is to take care of our mind, cultivate our mind, awaken our Buddha nature, that is a far, far greater disaster. Because if we don’t use this precious human rebirth, when we’ve got the opportunity, how are we ever going to get anywhere in the future with a worse rebirth?
My wonderful analogy is it’s like a young person who’s completely young, strong, fit, healthy, who always wants to climb like Mount Everest, but they say, I won’t try and climb Mount Everest now when I’m young, fit, healthy and strong. I will wait until I’m ninety years old, then I’ll try and climb Mount Everest. That’s really stupid. I forget the analogy. Do I need to explain it?
No, good. So we don’t wait till the conditions are incredibly difficult to try and do something. We should try and do something when it’s as easy as possible, and right now we have it as easy as it ever will be. It will never be as easy to practise the dharma to free our mind as it is right now. It may not feel like it, but that is the reality.
Check up. You look at the rest of the people in the world. Some people want to be dolphins, but a dolphin can’t practice the Dharma. And this is not to say this may sound like some kind of elitist thing that someone with a precious human rebirth is better off, a better person than anyone else. It doesn’t mean that at all.
It just means momentarily, we’re in a better position to free our mind and benefit everyone. But we can lose that at any time because, of course, we’re all gonna die, and we could die at any moment. And then the opportunity is gone. On that happy note, thank you for this course. But the idea is to think about these two, to inspire one to seize the moment, to take care of the mind.
Even for yourself, even just to get a good rebirth, but more to get out of saṃsāra, but especially to be in a position to repay the kindness of mother sentient beings. Because you look around the world, the people are miserable, are lost. The strange ideas people have thinking this is gonna make them happy. It’s really sad. It’s tragic.
And I would just like to thank everyone for coming to the course and I really appreciate people who wrote lots of very interesting comments in their homework. Not everyone, but many people wrote and seemed to get some benefit out of the course, so that’s great. So, yeah, good. Thank you. I hope you come to the retreat on Sunday, which does start at nine o’clock.
That’s part of the retreat. We cleverly incorporate the usual nine o’clock Sunday meditation with our DB retreat. You may think a whole day meditating could be just a gruesome experience, but it’s not. It’s only a little bit gruesome. Most people have enjoyed.
It’s not a difficult schedule or anything. A good time is had by all usually. There’s always a first time. Yeah. Okay.
Thank you very much. So we can dedicate the merit just quickly over this time. Page ten. Eleven. Through 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. Just to say,, If you’d like, take a copy of this little pamphlet which is over there because it lists all next two Discovering Buddhism modules that you might be interested in doing. The next one will be the law of cause and effect, isn’t it? Yeah.
Okay. Thanks. We won’t finish with it. It’s customary traditional according to Tibetans, prostrate at the end of a course because it’s auspicious to meet again. It’s sort of like we haven’t finished.
There’s more to come. Okay. I hope to see you in September. Oh, Sunday. Hey.
They stopped you?