Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 98-minute session, Venerable Thubten Dondrub explores how to recognize and work with disturbing thoughts—the mental habits and emotional patterns that obscure our mind’s true potential. He begins with the foundational claim of Mahāyāna Buddhism: our mind possesses Buddha nature, and the path to happiness lies not in self-cherishing but in developing genuine compassion for others. Moving into practical territory, he walks through the ten non-virtuous actions to avoid, then pivots to what he calls “indirect” and “direct” methods of subduing delusions. The indirect approach involves moral discipline and not reinforcing negative patterns; the direct approach requires becoming intimately familiar with how anger, desire, jealousy, and pride actually *feel* when they arise, so we can recognize them in real time and stop identifying with them. He emphasizes mindfulness—not as trendy body-scanning, but as the Buddhist virtue of knowing whether our mind is under the control of delusions or operating from love and wisdom. He stresses the importance of study, meditation, and community at a Dharma center, and offers practical homework: review your own past, trace the suffering that followed your negative actions, and sit with watching your thoughts arise and pass without grasping them. Pitched at sincere beginners in a structured Buddhist course, though at times pitched higher than that level admits.
File metadata (for organising)
File: Mind and its potential week 5.mp3
UUID: 12ce4c3b-1a9e-4fcd-9604-22f95b1fdbc6
Teacher: Ven Thubten Dondrub
Collection: DB Mind and its Potential 2017-18 (Ven Thubten Dondrub)
Date: 2017 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 98.1 minutes
Words: ~11,165
So welcome everyone to our fifth class. Oh, we’re all close-up. That’s nice. Cosy. So welcome to our fifth class on Mind and Its Potential.
So the purpose of this Discovering Buddhism course is to discover Mahāyāna, particularly what Mahāyāna Buddhism is about. And Mahāyāna Buddhism is basically about our mind and how our mind has Buddha nature. And if we realise that Buddha potential we’re in a perfect position to benefit others. And I think one of the fundamental arguments and tenets of Mahāyāna Buddhism is that, and possibly of all spiritual paths actually, is that benefiting others, working for the happiness of others is the real way to experience happiness, oneself. Since beginningless time we’ve been following the self-cherishing thought, always thinking about ourselves first and trying to be happy ourselves but in a wrong way.
But because of that obsession with ourself and our own problems and our own wish to be peaceful and happy and blah blah blah, we ignore others and we get caught up in attachments to some people and aversion to others and indifference to the vast majority. And we just remain very ordinary suffering beings. And what the Buddha is saying is that the real source of happiness is caring for others, developing love and compassion for others. So since this is the essential method of the and to be of real benefit and lasting benefit to sentient beings, we have to become Buddhas, which means we have to eliminate all of our faults, all our negative tendencies completely forever and awaken all our positive qualities totally, so that so that they are always functioning, never never decline. And it’s in that situation that we’re experiencing perfect happiness, perfect peace, perfect contentment and well-being, that we’re able to help others, every being without exception, achieve that state.
So the wish to do that is bodhicitta, is the bodhicitta motivation. So please as much as you can try and generate that motivation for being here and listening to these attending these classes and trying to put what you understand and agree with in the classes, and I hope there’s a reasonable amount you do, into one’s daily life. So on page ten there’s the traditional prayer we say, and to make that more effective, especially if one feels that connection, we visualise the Buddha in front of us as our source or possible source of inspiration, refuge and guidance. And at the same time trying to have hold in our heart, in our mind an awareness of and concern for all sentient beings, particularly since we’re not able to really think of all sentient beings now and visualise them, all of them right now, at least thinking of those that we’re most connected to in this life. So our mother on our left, father on our right, then the rest of our family and all our friends and helpers behind us, harmers in front, and then as much as possible all other human beings at least thinking of, no, what did I say, all other sentient beings, at least the human beings of this world.
And also if you are beginning to believe that animals have consciousness like us, then try to think of all those animals as well. Because some of those you can also put in the group of your family, friends and helpers behind you because sometimes animals can be a great help to us in all sorts of ways, not just human beings. Anyway, we say the prayer twice in Tibetan, one time in English. I go for refuge until I’m enlightened to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Supreme Assembly. By the merit I create by teaching the Dharma.
May I become a Buddha in order to benefit all sentient beings. So then we can imagine the Buddha is very pleased with our motivation and shows this by now coming to the crown of our head. And when directly above our crown the Buddha dissolves into blissful golden light so that that light can then pour down into us, blessing our mind to be able to understand the teachings, blessing our mind to be able to put them into practice, blessing our mind to be able to eventually gain the unmistaken, undeclining realizations. So then we can reinforce that positive state of mind by just briefly doing the nine round breathing exercise for one or two rounds. Combining it if you feel comfortable to do so with visualization of with with the in breaths, breathing in very calming, blissful white light.
And with each out breath, imagining breathing out all your disturbing thoughts in the agitation, negativities, and so on, in the form of really ugly thick black liquid that totally disappears. Okay. Thank you. So tonight’s topic is talking about it’s actually it was originally a class six, but this will be class five, which is how to work with the mind, working with the how to work with the disturbing emotions or disturbing thoughts and how to transform them and so on. And also cultivate the positive ones.
So just very briefly, before getting into this, quite a few people have mentioned in their homework that they’re having some difficulty with the reading matter. So I’d really like to apologise for that because the reading matter is quite difficult in most of the courses unfortunately. Putting these courses together actually did take a lot of work on behalf of a small group of people. And the idea was to try to mainly select articles that are teachings of our main teachers, Lama Zopa Rinpoche, who is the head of the FPMT, the spiritual guide, and Lama Yeshe, who is the founder of the FPMT. But particularly Lama Zopa Rinpoche who is my Guru and is the greatest Dharma teacher in the entire universe, unquestionably.
Although having said that, the way Rinpoche teaches, Rinpoche is so his mind is so totally into the Dharma that he manifests I think not knowing that all of us are not quite the same way into it as Rinpoche is. So he refers to and also Rinpoche is a great tantric practitioner so his teachings are full of tantric references which for the beginner just leave everyone lost. You know the terminology Rinpoche uses and what he’s referring to most people don’t know about, this is really in a sense for beginners this course, but not entirely. I mean in many ways it is meant for beginners but I think I teach it at a too much, too advanced level but I can’t help myself because I find if I teach it any more simpler it becomes it doesn’t do justice to it. So and even if you don’t understand it all, it doesn’t matter.
It takes a long time to put the Dharma together anyway. Yeah, so there’s lots of references in articles because they’re extracted from a much longer teaching by Rinpoche on various things. So don’t worry if you don’t understand them on the terminology. Just, but it is good if you can to try to read them again and again because of course the more you read these things and especially after you’ve heard something, some of my babble and other things and done some of the meditations which I would really encourage people to do as much as you can, this is really what it’s all about. Then some of this starts what really didn’t seem to make any sense before can start to make some sense.
But even if it doesn’t, don’t worry, it’s okay. Yeah. And I don’t understand how it first articles anyway. So It’s alright. Yeah.
So we have a mind, it’s not the brain, it’s not a product of the brain, it’s in a sense it, yeah, I mean the materialist, what is it, the scientific materialist view, so that if it does acknowledge that mind exists it argues that mind has evolved out of physical matter. But this is certainly not the Buddhist view that if anything you could say that physical matter has evolved out of consciousness but that’s not true either. Basically the two things, physical matter and consciousness exist at the same time simultaneously. You can’t say one comes out of the other. They’ve both existed at the same time.
But really the most important thing is our consciousness, mind, and our mind has this amazing potential because it’s what knows, so if it is able to do it, it can know perfectly unmistakenly everything all the time. And when the mind is free of all that’s obscuring it, it knows it with only can know it with love and compassion and all virtuous qualities, positive qualities. All of our negative disturbing thoughts or afflictive thoughts which are in Sanskrit are called klesha. It might be a useful one of those jargon words to know, klesha, and the Tibetan word for it is nyon mong. Nyon mong is a delusion or afflicted mind or a delusion.
Oh no, I’ve lost my point. Yeah, so all of those afflicted thoughts are reflections of our ignorance. We have this fundamental ignorance obscuring our mind that fails to see the true way things exist and then on top of that because of that fundamental mistake all these other mistakes are made that lead to the delusion of desire that exaggerates the good qualities, anger exaggerates the negative qualities of things and so there’s these layers of mistaken experiences that we have. And these are all suffering. They are all painful experiences.
They bring about painful experiences, lead us to create negative actions that bring more, that create negative imprints in our mind that can only ripen as suffering. A suffering cause can only bring a suffering result. All the good qualities that we have that manifest from time to time, these are all reflections of the true nature of our mind. All our negative tendencies of pride and jealousies and fears and worries and aversions and whatever, all this stuff, these are all due to our fundamental ignorance. Are not true aspects of our mind and so they can be removed fortunately.
And there are beings who have practiced and have removed them. But it’s not, it is a lot of hard work and it takes a long time to eliminate those disturbing thoughts. One thing to understand is that our disturbing thoughts, you don’t sort of like, let’s just say there are five, with ignorance there are six major disturbing thoughts but you don’t eliminate them one by one. You don’t eliminate anger and eliminate attachment and pride and jealousy and whatever. What one has to do to get rid of all suffering is one has to remove one’s delusions but you have to remove the cause of the delusions and the cause delusions is ignorance.
So one has and when that is removed everything else is removed. All the delusions go at once and also all the negative karmic imprints generated by following those delusions are eliminated. There’s no basis for them, there’s no way they can function. But to eliminate ignorance is a big job because our ignorance is what it’s doing, distortion it’s creating is something very very subtle. But in order to eliminate our ignorance, firstly we have to subdue our delusions.
While the mind, our is like that, we can’t eliminate ignorance. So we have to quiet, not repress and yes, yeah, not repress our delusions, we have to subdue and pacify them. Right? And even before that, before being able to really effectively subdue, you know, really be able to control our delusions, we have to stop engaging in negative actions. Because every time we engage in a negative action with our mind itself or with our speech or with our body and because it’s all, you know, every negative thing we do with our body and with our speech of course ultimately is motivated by our mind.
Now when I say mind I’m talking about it motivated by our mental consciousness, being under the control of some disturbing thought. Every time we follow a negative disturbing thought, not only is there suffering in the moment because that’s the nature of our delusions, our mind is blissful, you know when the disturbing thought comes it blocks that and there is suffering. Suffering. So every time a disturbing thought arises there is some suffering, the unpleasant feelings happening and then we act on those disturbing thoughts. We engage in negative actions and that brings more suffering and confusion and problems in our life You know like for example we may get angry and that has unpleasant feelings and then we say something to someone with anger that upsets that person and leads to a chain of events that cause all sorts of problems in our life.
Or you know this person that we say something really nasty to could have been a friend or it could have been at least a kind of neutral person in our life but now we’ve turned them into an enemy because we said something really nasty. So we’ve created this problem in our life. We’ve turned someone who could have been a friend or at least a neutral person into someone who dislikes us and is against us. And that can lead to all sorts of problems. But worse is that we have this negative imprint in our mind and that can only ripen.
If it’s not purified, the only way that negative imprint can ripen is more as suffering. Yeah. So, so every time we follow a disturbing thought, apart from what happens in this life which is easy to understand, two very significant things happen that only the Buddha understood and taught and what we need to try to be aware of and have some understanding and faith in and think about, which is that, for example, every time we get angry and follow that anger, we create an imprint, a new imprint of anger in our mind. In other words, we reaffirm our anger. We reaffirm it or even strengthen it.
At least we reaffirm it in our consciousness every time we get angry. And you know, we can be angry without showing it. You you don’t have to be screaming and yelling and thumping at people. One can be angry and it’s creating these imprints in the mind, these imprints of the delusions. But if we act on our anger in various ways, mentally or physically or verbally, that creates another imprint.
So we’ve got the imprint of the delusion and by acting on the delusion we create a karmic imprint. So it’s a double whammy every time we allow our mind to get into a negative state. Well it’s a triple whammy because by getting into a negative state we’re unhappy in the moment, but then we are creating causes to be unhappy in the future. Conclusion we should come to is don’t get angry. Or, but not only don’t get angry, we should try as much as possible not to let our mind fall into any of the disturbing states of anger, attachment, desire, pride, jealousy, fear, worry, and that whole list I gave you of disturbing thoughts.
Yeah. Because they are just a recipe for disaster. They are the actual causes of our suffering. Not that we don’t have enough money, we don’t have a girlfriend, boyfriend, we’re not famous, beautiful, sexy, blah blah blah. None of those are the actual cause of any of our suffering.
It’s that list I gave you. Not that list. That list is not the cause, but the delusions that that list refers to in our own consciousness. And we all have the potential for them. We all have the potential for all of those delusions because we’ve followed them in past lives and so we have the imprints for them in this life and also we have the imprint, we have ignorance.
So because of ignorance when the conditions come then we generate delusions anyway. Okay. So what we need to do is yeah. So the dharma is all about working with our delusions, either for our own sake or eventually for the sake of others, because recognising that if we control our, if we don’t control our delusions, if we don’t take care of our mind, not only will we bring suffering to ourselves, but to others. And if we don’t control our mind, we won’t be able to benefit ourselves, we won’t be able to benefit others in this or future lives.
So there are many ways of working with our mind. There’s the direct ways, which is particularly through meditation, but also our meditation is only going to work if we also have put into place in our daily life some of these indirect methods. So there’s many, many things to talk about, but I’d just like to focus on a few things that we need to think about and work with in working with our mind, especially cultivating, like in relation to subduing our disturbing thoughts. So one of them is practicing virtue. This is the Gelugpa tradition, this is what Lama Tsongkhapa emphasised which is the very basis, the very basis of the spiritual life is living a moral life which means basically avoiding negative actions and as much as possible and cultivating virtuous ones.
But Buddhist psychology, the psychology of the Buddha, the way the Buddha taught is that he always emphasised that firstly what we have to stop, what we have to do is stop doing negative things. Because if we do lots of good things but we still continue to do negative things that will undermine the benefit of the virtuous things. Yeah. And not doing negative things is good, is virtuous. Virtuous.
That is extremely virtuous. That’s the basic virtue to cultivate in following any kind of spiritual life, Buddhist or anything else, is avoiding negative actions. And there are many things that we can all agree with which are negative, but there are other things which we before we meet Buddhism may think as virtuous or okay, but the Buddha said are not. And I think the more we purify our mind and our mind becomes more sensitive, we can start to understand that there are many things that we should avoid doing because they are really coming from these motivated by disturbing thoughts. And the more we purify the mind and the more sensitive our mind becomes, the more we can realise without sort of any kind of teaching that my mind, I’m doing this with a disturbed mind.
As I have said billions of times before, maybe not billions of times before, but my little analogy is that for example, before I met the Dharma I was a chain smoker. And I don’t know, think the spokes probably smoked about forty cigarettes a day at least. When you were at that point, when you smoke forty one cigarettes a day, you cannot tell any difference whatsoever. Then I gave up and after some time once I’d given up, even when I was around people who smoked, it was really horrible. Cigarette smell, cigarette smoke stinks.
And often people who smoke, their clothing stinks and everything, and it’s really quite unpleasant. And it’s because, and that’s just a very gross thing, you become sensitive to it. But when your mind is like, when your mind, when your mind’s like that, it can’t tell that it’s got like that. It’s become desensitized. But when your mind is like that, then even the slightest thing you can feel.
Which could be an argument not to follow the spiritual life because you will then start to become more sensitive to your own suffering and many people say that. But the only way we can stop our suffering is to first be aware that we are. Right. And most people don’t want to know this. And the more aware you are, the more aware we are that we are suffering, and the more we feel the more we will be motivated to stop.
To really find the cause, not just have a band aid and take some drug or alcohol to stop temporarily. But we have to stop it forever, completely, because nothing else is satisfying. Anyway, yeah. So we have to stop engaging in negative actions because they’re just miserable. They’re motivated by delusions and they don’t solve their problems.
Are creating suffering for ourselves and suffering for others. And as I was saying, every time we follow a disturbing thought, every time we engage in some kind negative action with our body, speech and mind, then we are just following our disturbing thoughts and reinforcing them. Every time, you know, a lot of psychologists say it’s very important to be angry, you should express your feelings and you should be angry. But there have been experiments done and some psychologists have discovered that surprise surprise, the people who allow themselves to get angry a lot, guess what happens? They get angry more often.
The Buddha could have told them that two and a half thousand years ago. Yeah. Expressing your anger doesn’t get rid of it. It just encourages it. It just reinforces it.
And the same with all the delusions. Yes, we have to deal with it in a skilful way. Yeah, we have to pacify it, subdue it, not repress it or deny it, but we have to acknowledge this is anger and realise that it is painful. And the same with all the delusions. Actually anyway, so maybe I’ll just go back.
What are the delusions? So we have ignorance, I won’t talk about that anymore because that’s a very complicated subject, but because of our ignorance, because we experience ourself and everything in a false way, that is the basis for the delusions. So one could say because of ignorance, the next most important delusion, and ignorance is the most difficult to get rid of. The second most difficult to get rid of are afflicted desire and attachment. These are slightly different but they always tend to go together.
So what a desire does, which I think I’ve mentioned think there are things which are conventionally pleasant, attractive, beautiful, you know, good, so on, tasty, sound nice according to convention. Let’s not get too complicated into what that means because conventions can vary from culture to culture and within the culture from time to time, but in any person’s particular life, in their particular environment, whatever that one is existing in, are things that we consider conventionally good and beautiful and desire, you know, leave that word out, pleasant etc. But the nature of afflicted desire is that it exaggerates those things. And I would like to emphasise this term afflicted desire because we have this word desire in English and it can have many meanings. One can desire to practice the Dharma, one can desire to be a good person.
So that’s okay, that’s not afflicted desire. Afflicted desire is a byproduct of ignorance and its object is a pleasant thing, conventionally pleasant, beautiful, good thing, but because it is pleasing to me, to me, we exaggerate how good it is. We don’t question because it’s making me happy, it must be fantastic. Yeah. And it must be good.
The drug addict says because this drug is making me happy, it is good, these other people, the police saying it’s bad, the government saying it’s bad, my parents saying it’s bad. They just don’t want me to be happy, they’re just creeps. It’s making me happy so it must be good. It must be good because I’m happy. Or everyone says this person is bad but this person is nice to me so they must be good.
In some cases you may be right. Anyway I’m just trying to generally sometimes trying to explain that dharma is just too complicated, too hard. But anyway I hope you know what I’m trying to say yeah. But that’s what our delusion is doing, it completely exaggerates and mixed with that exaggeration is believing at some level, you know the delusion itself, remember we can have a delusion and in the next moment or the next couple of moments there can be some clarity but then the delusion comes again because our mind is changing like whatever. So, you know, like if you’re eating an ice cream or something, while you’re eating it you’re saying, oh this is delicious, delicious and making me so happy, and there’s some part of delusion that is saying this is so wonderful and I have to depend on ice creams for the rest of my life to be happy because the delusion is telling you the desire, the afflicted desire is saying this pleasure is permanent.
So in the moment, of course it’s not, one part of our mind knows that eating an ice cream will not make us permanently happy. But when we’re unhappy and we’re looking for happiness in something like in chocolate or ice cream or drugs and whatever and alcohol and blah blah blah, at the moment there’s something that is kind of saying this is you know, if I rely on this I will always be happy with it. Something good will happen from it. And that’s a lie. It’s delusion.
We are deluded, afflicted desire is a delusion. It is a type of knowing, it is clear in the sense that it is a formless consciousness or state of consciousness that is knowing something, but it’s knowing it wrongly. The knowing is exaggerating something and seeing permanence, lasting that cannot last. So it’s a false kind of knowing that our delusion itself, while we’re deluded, we believe it. Our mental consciousness grasps that that is true.
So that unfortunately apart from ignorance, afflicted desire and attachment are our two, the most difficult delusions, the most problematic but the most subtle because anger, most of us agree anger is not a good thing. But we all think afflicted desire is terrific. How could we be happy if we didn’t desire stuff and get attached to it. Of course with afflicted desire there always goes, tends to go, attachment which is where you get stuck and dependent on that thing, person, situation, belief, whatever. You exaggerate how important it is and you hold on to it and you can’t bear to let go of it.
And so it weakens you and becomes dependent. So again another thing I always say is to check out yourself these things that one can easily detect I think that when one is angry it’s actually quite an un pleasant experience to be angry. You get all hot and red and you know and when you sort of actually stop screaming and yelling you can feel your body you know vibrating depending on how angry you’ve got and whatever. And you look when we’re angry, whatever good looks we’ve got have disappeared because even the most attractive people look really ugly when they’re angry. Angry anger is a really ugly delusion, but they all are.
But we desire you know, we we want to follow our desire because like there’s all this it’s saying all these nice things and nice people and stuff to make you feel nice and happy. So how can one, you know, I mean we would like to think the Buddha’s got it wrong there that desire is not bad and suffering, but this is all based on a negative cause can only bring a negative result, right? And a suffering cause can only bring suffering. It’s never going to bring happiness. It’s impossible.
To the deluded mind following a suffering cause can look like it’s bringing happiness, but in reality it’s not. So check up. When we have an afflicted desire for something and we meet the object of that desire, then there is happiness, right? So we associate following afflicted desire with happiness. And since we ‘ve been doing it, not just all this life, but since, guess what, beginningless time, there is a very strong imprint that associates our afflicted desire with gratification and happiness and well-being and also me feeling good.
Because the nature of a desire and whatever desire, it makes me feel good and it makes me feel real and sort of strong and yep, real actually, apart from happy and all that stuff. Where am I going? Oh yes, but check up when you have a desire and you don’t meet the object. What is that experience like when we crave something but we don’t get it? When you’re hungry and you can’t eat, or you’re thirsty and you can’t, or you crave something, an object, or you desire a person, or you crave some recognition from people.
You crave that they recognise that you’re this nice guy, that you’re clever or you’ve done something good and you just don’t get it. What is that experience? Is that a happy experience or not? It is not a happy experience. And the more we crave, the more we desire, the more unhappy we become.
If we can’t get the object. So that is the nature of desire. The nature of desire is not, it produces when it’s there, there is an unpleasant feeling. There is disturbance in the mind. A new disturbance.
So that can never, the Buddha said, he may be wrong but I don’t the Buddha isn’t wrong, but yeah, suffering cause cannot bring any real happiness. It cannot, this suffering in the mind cannot somehow lead to happiness in the mind. It is impossible. If it’s possible, then don’t bother coming back next week. Don’t bother coming back here ever again.
Don’t bother reading any Buddhist books anymore because that’s the that’s the essential point of the Buddha teaching. Well, one of the million essential points of the Buddha’s teachings. Check up. Try not to check up with that mind but a clear open mind. Check up your past feelings.
That’s your homework by the way. Check up what it feels like when one is desiring something and one cannot get it. So that’s not Buddhism, that’s your own experience. So the more we understand that our disturbing thoughts are painful the very moment they arise, since the nature of our mind is not to want happiness, I’m sorry, not to want suffering, there is that, always, this is a feature of the consciousness of every sentient being, No sentient being wants suffering and when we recognise that this is suffering or that this is the cause of suffering, we will not want to be involved in it. Well, unfortunately we are more complicated than that, but the part of our mind that recognises this is suffering and this is the cause this is the cause of suffering, that mind, which is a smart, wise, good mind, that aspect of our mind will not want to engage in it.
The trouble is there’s all this rubbish in our mind, imprints from the path that still wants that thing. But we need to listen to this wise mind. That’s the battle. That is the, you know, otherwise practicing Dharma would just be so easy. Because if we let it, our wisdom mind can recognise, oh yes, the Buddhist teachings are true, this is true, anger is painful, so it’s ridiculous not to follow it.
But there’s all these other stuff in our mind, from ignorance that’s saying do it. It’s because it’s easy. This is called our self-cherishing. Our self-cherishing tells us that if anything is quick and easy, it’s good. Because we all want quick easy happy.
Easy happy now. Easy happy now is our mantra. Easy happy now. Instant happiness. Whatever makes us happy instantly, easily is good.
So getting angry, having desire, pride, jealousy, all this stuff, robbing banks is good. Because it’s easy, happy now. The quickest way to become a robber bank is the quickest way to become a millionaire. And so our delusions say do it. Part of the mind says no, this is not a good idea, but if one’s had strong robbing instincts they will say Do it.
I think I’m getting a bit carried away. I think you know what I’m trying to say. Yeah. So what I’m trying to say is please spend some time to check up on thinking about, you know, not these abstract things anger, afflict desire, attachment, pride, jealousy, but one’s own anger, attachment, pride, jealousy, when one’s experienced in the past, look back and try and see what did it feel like when I was jealous and proud and angry or had aversion which is a type of, you know, a subset of anger. When I had desire attachment, what did that feel like?
Try to really go into that. And the more we let ourselves and also when those delusions arise rather than focus on the object of the delusion, try to focus on the delusion and try and see what it feels like. And when we become more sensitive to what it feels like we won’t want to keep that feeling going. We won’t want to follow that disturbing thought. Yeah.
If we focus on the chocolate cake, you know, that’s delicious. That’s happiness. But one has to try and focus on the delusion saying I have to eat this, I have to eat more. Which is not to say we can’t eat chocolate cake and things, you’re right. But there’s a time when the mind gets out of control about the chocolate cake or anything.
We should enjoy life and stuff, but the trouble is in trying to enjoy it, the desire and the attachment gets out of control and says all this is good, so more will be better and a little bit more. So we have to try and develop this skill where we know when to stop. So this is all about practicing mindfulness. Knowing what’s going on in the mind. So mindfulness has become a very popular thing.
Everyone wants to practice mindfulness and there’s lots of mindfulness gurus and mindfulness books and a lot of it is not mindfulness from a Buddhist point of view. It has really nothing to do with Buddhist mindfulness. Because mindfulness is a mental factor. In Buddhist context, I’ve forgotten the Tibetan word for it anyway, but it is referring to a mental, a virtuous mental factor, right? So mindfulness is, but basically fundamentally, the most fundamental aspect of mindfulness is it is a mental factor that is, knows whether, is conscious of or aware of whether one’s mind is in a virtuous state or a positive state or a negative state.
Or to put it in another way, it is that mental factor that knows whether the mind is under the control of the disturbing thoughts of anger, attachment and so on, or whether a virtuous mental factor is operating such as love, compassion, tolerance and so on. So actual mindfulness from a Buddhist perspective always has a moral component to it. It’s not just about now I am picking up the cup, now it’s approaching my mouth, now I can my lip can feel the cold glass and now the cold water is, you know, oh, and now I’m slowly that’s not mindfulness. It’s nice and it can calm your mind down, but that’s not mindfulness. Mindfulness is basically knowing whether your mind is out of control or not.
That’s the fundamental aspect of mindfulness. And then, for example, when one is meditating, mindfulness is a vital aspect of meditation because when we meditate we’re trying to do something virtuous. We have a particular object of meditation and we have virtuous motivation for concentrating on that object. So mindfulness is that mental factor that is aware, am I, is my mind focusing on that chosen object or not? And then with mindfulness there’s another mental factor that works together which is if mindfulness detects oh my mind is out of control or I’m not focusing on the object of meditation, then there’s this other mental factor called introspection which comes along which tries to correct the situation in the right way.
So mindfulness is vital in meditation and the more we practise meditation, the more we spend time on focusing our mind on the Dharma, then the more, and we do that mindfully while we’re doing it, the more we are likely the easier it will become to be mindful in our daily life when we’re not meditating, when we’re not formally focusing on the Dharma. Either like one can be formally focusing on the Dharma by for example listening to teachings hopefully or meditating on the Dharma or reading the Dharma. These are the three formal ways we could be focusing our mind on the Buddhist teachings. But we can’t of course do that all the time, that’s not we’re not expected to anyway. But the more we do that and we do it mindfully, it becomes easier to be mindful in our daily life.
Because also another aspect of mindfulness is just simply remembering. We are remembering what we’re trying to do. You know in meditation we have an object of meditation. So for example the simplest object of meditation is the breath. So mindfulness of the breath involves remembering to keep your mind on the breath, not on the fridge or the noise outside.
Or what I’m going to have for breakfast tomorrow, but one has to remember I’m meditating on the breath. Or I need to remember that I’m doing this particular kind of breathing meditation. So the more we meditate on or focus on knowing about our delusions, the more we can be mindful of them in our daily life. Because it’s one thing to understand definitions of the delusions, explanations of the delusions, and it’s one thing to be able to recognise them in other people. We can all very easily recognise anger and pride and jealousy in other people, but it’s not so easy to recognize them in ourselves.
We can be completely angry and totally in denial that we’re angry. Or have lots of attachment and be in complete denial, be completely unmindful of our attachment or desire and this and that. Yeah. So if we’re not, if if we’re unmindful of them, there’s no way we can stop them. There’s no way we can deal with them.
We’re under their control. So we have to yeah. So one way to deal with our delusions is to to begin to subdue them and work with them is to is to allow ourselves to spend time to acquaint our ourselves with our own delusions, not other people’s delusions, but our own delusions and what it feels like when we’re under the control of them. So that we can learn to recognise our own delusion as a delusion. Oh, right.
But also, but again this depends on having a lot of faith and perhaps knowledge of the Buddhist teachings, but as I’ve tried to say, all of the Buddhist teachings are about the mind and how the mind is beginningless and endless and there’s this ongoing continuity and there’s just too much to say. I can leave that for the time being. So one way to deal with one’s delusions is to be able to allow oneself to be familiar with them, not just the words, but you match those words with trying to identify states of mind that oneself has fallen into. So that then when they arise later on, in the moment you can to recognize, you can remember, you can be mindful of that this is anger, that this is pride, this is jealousy, this is desire, this is attachment, blah blah blah. So another way to help us deal with our delusions is a meditation which is just watching the thoughts.
Generally when we meditate we’re trying to let go of all extraneous thoughts or when we’re doing analytical meditation where we’re thinking we try to let go of thoughts that are not connected with thinking on the particular topic. But in this meditation it’s just it’s not so easy to do actually. It sounds very simple but to do it properly, correctly is not so easy unfortunately. But it’s like a bit of an extension of breathing meditation where you focus on your breath and let all extraneous thoughts go by. But then if a thought arises what you try to do is rather than just kind of not ignore it, but try to just observe the thought as a thought.
Not get caught up in the thought but just try and see it and it tries to be objective about it that there’s the subjective viewer, observer, me or my mind observing there is this thought. And you just watch it arise, it has some energy, but if you don’t identify with it, because the trouble is when our disturbing thoughts arise, what happens is we identify with with them, we become this desirous person. Before the desire arises, we were not a desirous person, but we identify with the desire and we become this desirous person. This is me, so I have to follow it. This is me.
Or before the anger arose I was not an angry person, then the anger arises, then I’m an angry person. This is me, this is my nature, so I follow it. Like with all the delusions, also it works with good thoughts as well fortunately. But here we’re trying not to identify with the thought, we catch it as a thought and we just observe it and let it fade away. So seeing that, and that’s not always easy to do, but if we give ourselves the chance to practice this and having some experience of it happening, this can give us a lot of hope and confidence that we have some ability to work with our mind.
Because many people, you know, I’ve heard this in interviews with psychologists and whatever who have been dealing with patients and teach various things sometimes associated with Buddhist teachings. And people are absolutely astonished that they actually have some ability to control their thoughts. And sometimes people are completely astonished of what their thoughts actually are. They were never really mindful of their thoughts. The thoughts are there and they’re controlling them but there’s not any real awareness mindfulness that they are just thoughts.
We don’t have to follow our thoughts. There is no obligation, you know, to follow our thoughts, especially our negative thoughts. We should follow our good thoughts but there is absolutely no compulsion, well maybe there is some compulsion, but there’s no obligation to follow our negative thoughts. But we do because we lack all mindfulness and also any confidence or belief or understanding that we can work with our mind, we can subdue it. We don’t have to be the slave of our thoughts.
So doing that practice can be very helpful. Especially combined with, you know, this allowing ourselves to be more familiar with how painful the thoughts are, those negative thoughts are. When do I have to stop? Who’s stopping me? At what time?
According to me, I’ve got six according to this. We can bargain. Oh dear, so many things to say. I’ll continue on with this topic next week anyway but Anyway, so in association with practising mindfulness, being mindful of what is going on in the mind, being aware of what is going on in the mind from the point of view of understanding what is positive and negative. It’s really good to have Dharma friends, you know.
That’s why Dharma centers are really important and why I would really encourage people who have any interest in following the spiritual life of trying to follow Buddhadharma is to connect with a Dharma center such as this wonderful Dharma center, Buddha House, and come along to things because you have like minded people. And there’s various things to encourage people to be mindful and aware of the Dharma and what to do. That’s why Lama Yeshe devoted his life to creating this whole organisation because he saw how incredibly important it was for people who are trying to work with their mind to understand the Dharma to be able to come to a place where they can do that, but also meet people trying to do the same things. Because it’s good to meet people who may be more advanced than oneself in the practice, but it’s also good to meet people at the same level and maybe even people not as good at you, because it all can be very encouraging. If you only mix with people more advanced it could be depressing, but so it’s nice to meet with people who are struggling like oneself but still trying to do it.
So that is extremely helpful, extremely helpful to have dharma friends of various kinds. But it’s also very important to study the dharma, to acquaint the mind, to bring the mind to the dharma because the wonderful feature of the mind which can be both, well, it’s a wonderful feature of the mind but which can be good or bad, but if we allow our mind to be acquainted with negative stuff, our mind will become very negative. Yeah? But if we allow our mind to be acquainted with good stuff, our mind will become good. That’s the mind takes on what it what it what is familiar with.
So if we allow ourselves to become familiar with the dharma, it will. We will become more and more mindful of the Dharma. In all senses of that word we will remember the Dharma, we will become conscious of the Dharma, our mind will become full of Dharma understanding and experience. And so there are three ways to do that which is to listen to teachings which I encourage people to do. These days, this sounds like promoting me or something, it’s not really.
I really believe this myself. These days of course you can watch all sorts of stuff on YouTube and whatever and it’s all extremely good of course but you can also overload your mind with that. But also I have some problem with all of that, I have to confess. Maybe it’s just because I’m an old fuddy duddy, I am an old fuddy duddy. But from my point of view, I mean it is very good and I would encourage people to do this to some extent, but from my point of view the problem with it is that it’s too easy.
To just sit there, you know, in your armchair or lying down, you know, eating chocolate and drinking tea and coffee and things and you know, half asleep and watching things is wholeness or whatever, Dharma things. Or even if you’re not doing that, I’m sorry I’m exaggerating, even if you’re paying great attention attention and everything, but it’s very easy. Whereas to come to a teaching, especially sitting down and everything and paying attention, it requires much more effort and because of that it has more impact impact on your mind. Definitely, definitely. There is, you know, was a yeah.
But also you’re hearing an actual human voice, not a recording. To hear the Dalai Lama’s actual voice is different than hearing a recording of it, I believe. And I believe it has a different impact than just a recording. I may be wrong, but that’s what I believe. Nothing can replace real human contact and I think what is really scarier in our society is that is dying out.
We will soon have robots looking after us, operating on us, taking care of us when we’re old. I’ll probably be replaced by a robot teaching I’m just an old fuddy daddy, I’m sorry. Don’t think anything can replace human contact. And we have some, you know, something happens between us. So I hope that’s good.
It’s meant to be good. But I don’t mean just me, I mean listening to a real person, you know, I am a real person. I am not a robot. Listening to a real person teach the Dharma is much more effective, beneficial. Of course the more realised the real person is, I’m just dodo duck but anyway.
So listening to the teachings is really important, Meditating on them and reading the teachings. Reading the teachings, those three things is how to acquaint your mind with the Dharma and all of it makes you, helps you to become aware of your own mind. And then the more you acquaint, you do those formal things, let your mind do those formal practices, then the more one will be mindful in one’s daily life. One will remember this stuff and by remembering it one can act on it. But if you can’t, if we can’t remember these things we won’t act on them.
And we get, you know the more we study this stuff that we get a clearer and clearer idea of the whole lot. What the delusions are, how they act and so on. Okay, I’ve got to stop. Yes, you must ring. Yes.
Fantastic. So grab a cup of something to drink if you wish and migrate to your group. I hope everyone knows what group they’re in. Peter is there a Pauline and Right. So, in subduing, what we’re trying to do is subdue our thoughts.
So one indirect way is by not engaging in negative actions of body, speech and mind. Avoiding that there are four negative actions of body of which is killing, stealing, sexual misconduct and no there’s three of body, so that’s it. Then there are four negative actions of speech which is lying, harsh speech, what is it? Divisive and meaningless idle gossip. And then there are three negative actions of mind which is Covetousness.
Covetousness, which is like an extreme form attachment due to the delusion of attachment you have covetousness and then there is ill will and wrong views. So covetousness, there are many factors that might define this but I don’t know this is getting into too many things. Anyway, there’s too much to talk about. That’s another course. The next one coming up is karma so we’ll talk about all those things in more detail.
But so what was I saying? Virtue. Mentioned the ten non-virtues. Yes I know, but why did I mention those? Those?
We need to avoid those actions. By avoiding them, by not doing those things, it means we’re not paying attention motivating them. We’re not feeding those delusions. We’re not putting new imprints of those delusions in our minds. So that itself is an indirect way starting to work with our delusions.
But what we really need to do is more directly meditate, subdue them and so there are specific methods to deal with each of the delusions but there are also some general things I want mention now very quickly because there’s not enough time and I’ll try to go in a little bit more detail next week. But one of the things I already mentioned is firstly being acquainted with know oneself actually feeling the pain, the suffering nature of the different delusions that one has. Becoming acquainted with that so that one is convinced rather than just having some belief that oh the Buddha said attachment is bad for me and anger is bad for me and pride is bad. If you can actually yourself personally recognise that these are uncomfortable states of mind to be in, then why be in them? But especially if one starts to develop faith in the which is the fundamental teaching of the Buddha which everything else is based on which is the teaching on the law of cause and effect.
That our actions or everything we experience has a cause and the nature of the cause determines the nature of the result, the nature of the experience. So if we’re experiencing suffering there is a cause and we have, our mind has created the cause, not something else has created, there’s the conditions remember, but the actual cause, the real trigger for our mind to go into that particular experience, that particular feeling. Our mind has created it. Yeah. And, so the nature of the cause determines the nature of the experience.
So if we are, if we start to realise that our, these thoughts that we’ve followed blindly in the past are actually painful. We have to acknowledge that if the Buddha is right, if we have any faith in the Buddha’s teachings, then if we follow these painful thoughts, these disturbing thoughts, they’re only going to bring more suffering. They may give some illusion of comfort in this life like if someone’s giving you a hard time and you yell at them and insult them and they shut up, oh success. But it’s not real success. One hasn’t solved the problem.
One’s put a really nasty imprint in one’s mind that’s going to produce a whole lot more suffering than what this person said to you. Yeah, so there’s that. So that applies for all the delusions to become familiar and then the other thing is more directly to work with the delusions is to understand the suffering results that come from following the delusions. Yeah. So one thing that doesn’t require any Buddhist faith is just to check-in your life and also here it can be valuable to use the experiences of other people that what happened when I followed that kind of behaviour?
What were the results? Actually my teacher Lama Zopa Rinpoche said one of the best meditations you can do is to keep a diary of all the suffering results of your negative actions. Yeah, I’ve never done that but I should, but I recommend. So maybe you should, we could all start doing that. Yeah.
So we can see the suffering results in this life but what we can’t see, but what this is where some faith in the Buddha’s teachings comes in that the Buddha is saying that when we engage in these negative actions motivated by delusions we create these come, create apart from all whatever problems and suffering that happen in this life, this is nothing compared to the fact that we generate these karmic seeds or karmic imprints or karmic potencies in our consciousness every time. Whether we believe in it or not, it doesn’t happen just for Buddhists who believe, this is happening for everyone all the time and those karmic results can be purified and eliminated, but if they’re not they will ripen at some point. Usually not in this life but in the future life and the only way they ripen is as suffering. And the Buddha taught that the suffering result is far far greater than the energy that went into creating that negative and last far longer. Yeah.
So we, for example, we try to stop difficult situations with anger but the anger then creates a negative imprint that produces, when it ripens, produces far more suffering that lasts far longer than the suffering thing that we were trying to stop, the problem we were trying to stop. So it doesn’t make, if this is true this is what the Buddha taught, if this is true then there is absolutely no point to get angry, absolutely no point. And so in also in relation to anger, there’s endless faults with anger but also this is true for all the delusions, we follow them, we generate these negative karmic imprints. So those negative karmic imprints not only ripen the suffering but while they are passively, you know, before they ripen, they’re not actually causing any active suffering in our mind but what they are having, what effect they are having is that they are obscuring our mind. The more negative imprints we have the more obscured our mind becomes.
So it becomes, you know, and the more obscured our mind the more difficult it is to make the right decisions. The more obscure the mind the more difficult to have faith in the Dharma, to have understanding of it, to be able to practice it properly, to get the results. More difficult it is to get the results. We don’t need to obscure, our mind is already obscured, we do not need to obscure it anymore than it is. So with all the delusions what we need to meditate on and this is your homework is to think this is what the Buddha says you I mean you can check out but the Buddha says some of it we can check up is that the moment the delusion arises suffering.
There is confusion in our mind. We’re not seeing ourselves and others and a situation clearly, correctly. Because of that, so that’s one problem, we act on it and we cause more suffering in the future of this life. But what is worse, we create the karmic imprint that ripens us great suffering in the future, and also we’ve put an imprint of the delusion in our mind, so that that delusion will, you know, arise again at some point in the future and will create more negative karma, which brings more suffering and saṃsāra goes on and on and on like that. So this is what we need to think about and sort of try to see the truth of this or the logic of it, we can therefore have some faith that this is true, this is what the Buddha discovered, this is why the Buddha appeared in the world to teach us these things, because we can’t directly see this.
There’s no way, especially now, that we can see this working. We do have to have some faith. But there is also some logic to it that why is there suffering? Why do we suffer? There is a cause.
What is the cause? What is the cause? And the Buddha says it all comes from our mind. And what aspects of our mind? Our delusions.
Other people cannot make us suffer. We’ve you know, there can be the conditions, but if other external things were the cause of suffering or cause of happiness, well let’s go to suffering, if they were the actual cause, then the Buddhas would suffer. You know, the Buddha actually had a, you know, from an outside from an external point of view, if you study his life, he had lots of problems in his life. He was accused of raping a woman and making her pregnant, cousin gave him a hell of a bad time. What was his name?
I can always never remember his name. His name was The one who threw a rock on him and made a mad elephant charge him and No, I’ve forgotten his name. Anyway, and a lot of them this was most shocking of all I think is that at one point a lot of the monks were fighting amongst themselves, disputing, and the Buddha tried to, he came along and said, I’ll resolve this, and he said, Go away, we’re not interested in you. They were the monks, his followers. So he went away and left them for a time being.
But did this make him unhappy? Was he crying in the forest all alone because his monks had rejected him and somebody had accused him of raping? No, he was totally blissful. No, because no delusions, no delusions. But when someone says boo to us, it just looks a little bit kind of strange at us, we freak out.
Because we’ve got so many neuroses and delusions and wrong views of self and we’re so desperate to be loved and acknowledged and affirmed and when someone just with one little look doesn’t affirm us, we freak out, know, and project and do all sorts of weird stuff and suffer. And then we try to solve this solution by, you know, disliking the person, rejecting them and blah, blah, blah. Anyway, yeah. So we need to understand that it’s our delusions causing the problem and we need to pacify them. We have to recognise them, we have to acknowledge it and gently, gently, compassionately work with them by seeing their faults.
All the things that can come from them. If we can recognise that they are suffering, then they can only bring suffering. I’m really sorry, I know we’re supposed to meditate and I promised we would meditate but I talk too much. But you have to go home and meditate, work on it. I know some of you are having some difficulty with this, but this is why it’s very good at least to come to our concluding Sunday retreat in a Fort no, it’s next week, isn’t it?
Next Sunday. Already. Yeah. So if you can manage it, that would be great. It’s not this Sunday, next Sunday.
Sunday week. Sunday week. Sorry? This homework is due next Tuesday, ideally, yeah. And this is the last homework anyway, you don’t get homework next week, next Tuesday.
Where am I? Oh, so very quickly, the antidotes to, and I’ll talk about this in more detail next week, so this was a general antidote of medit thinking about the harm, all the harm that comes from following the delusions. And I’ve only mentioned the harm to oneself, one can also reflect on the harm that you bring to others in this life, because that’s something we can see. And so the specific antidote to anger is patience, developing patience. Again, main way to develop patience is seeing all the faults of anger.
There are some other methods, but the main way is developing patience. But also it’s very helpful to understand that what patience really is, you know, it’s got this label ‘patient’ so it sounds like separate thing, but ultimately what it comes down to is when you are being patient, one is being compassionate to oneself. Because one does What is compassion? Not wanting suffering. But when you’re angry, you’re creating the cause of suffering for yourself.
So if you’re really compassionate to yourself, you won’t get angry. And also, patience is being compassionate to the other person. If your anger is directed to another person. Because one realises the person who is harming you, or trying to harm you, is suffering. Because the only reason people cause harm no one in a happy state of mind, in a virtuous state of mind, causes harm.
You just don’t do that. You can’t do it when you’re in a genuinely peaceful, happier state of mind. So if someone is causing harm, they are suffering, and the only valid response to suffering is compassion. That is the only valid response, the only meaningful response. That’s the natural response of a pure mind is compassion.
Otherwise, would have come and beat us all up if the response, the valid response to nastiness was being nasty to nasty people. But it’s not. So the direct antidote to if one suffers from jealousy is to develop rejoicing. To rejoice, we are jealous of people’s good qualities, but our jealousy actually, the good qualities and success of other people, we use that in our confusion to make ourselves miserable. This person is happy, better looking than me, more successful, I hate them, I’m so jealous, so we stab ourselves in the heart.
This is ridiculous, because that’s not going to make them less successful or uglier or whatever. We’re just making ourselves miserable. Miserable. We should rejoice. I will try and talk about this next week.
There’s lots of things to talk about next week. Especially if we’re trying to practice the Dharma, because what do we want as trying to practice the Mahāyāna Dharma, trying to be baby bodhisattvas, we want people to be happy and successful. And if they are, it is completely ridiculous to be jealous. From a non spiritual point of view it’s ridiculous, but if we’re trying to follow the dharma, it’s doubly worse. It’s totally counterproductive to following spiritual life, to be jealous of others, whatever success, worldly or spiritual, they have.
Oh, I’ve got to stop, don’t I? No, I’ll stop. I will stop. Actually, there should be a whole course just on the delusions. It should have been included in Discovering Buddhism.
Any questions before we stop? Sorry. No. I haven’t confused people too much or bombarded them. I have bombarded you haven’t I?
With too much stuff. Great. By the way, guess what I’ve got? I have a CD, it was just given to me, of this television programme I’ve talked about, about the gorilla Koko, because it was on TV. I don’t know if any of you saw it?
Did you? So this was made many years after the article I read, so I haven’t seen this but I hope we can make it available so you watch it because if it’s got anything of this gorilla, fine female gorilla, then there’s no doubt that she is a person. She has a mind. It’s not a fluke, it’s not an accident. And there were three little, you know, not long ones, but three different YouTube of of Koko.
Right. I don’t think Koko is alive anymore. That she would have died a long time ago, but Yeah. A No, no, no, wasn’t her. No, no, no, no.
This person wasn’t, especially when I read about it and wasn’t famous, she was a young researcher who just, you know, this gorilla who taught her sign language. Yeah. Oh I doubt if they would have that because that would just happen one day in nineteen seventy seven or ‘seventy six or something and that wasn’t, there was no videoing of that at that time, this would have been later when possibly as a result the magazine article, National Geographic. Anyway, we better stop, sorry. You don’t really want to go home do you?
Sorry. Quick dedication, 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 not yet born arise and grow. May that born have no decline, but increase forevermore.
Thank you very much for your patience. Hope to see you next week. And if you we do three prostrations.