Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 101-minute session, Venerable Thubten Dondrub guides practitioners through the second noble truth, focusing on how to subdue delusions that bind us to cyclic existence. The teaching opens with motivation and refuge, then moves directly into practical recognition of the six factors that activate disturbing thoughts: the desirable or unpleasant object itself, inappropriate thinking about such objects, negative company, media and entertainment that feed delusions, familiarity and habit. Dondrub explains that since cultivating antidotes is difficult for beginners, the wiser immediate strategy is to identify and avoid these triggering conditions. He then explores how to develop both general and specific antidotes—particularly reflecting on the harmfulness of attachment and anger, and the benefits of peace and non-harm. Key themes include mindfulness as understanding whether the mind is virtuous or not, the difference between intellectual understanding and lived realization, the irreversible impermanence underlying all phenomena, and the importance of honest doubt backed by investigation rather than blind faith. The session ends with analytical meditation guidance and audience Q&A on brain chemistry, anxiety, worry, and different types of doubt.
File metadata (for organising)
File: Samsāra and nirvana week 3.mp3
UUID: c5acfb80-545e-4628-8ca0-b566ab798e54
Teacher: Ven Thubten Dondrub
Collection: DB Samsāra & Nirvāṇa (Ven Thubten Dondrub)
Date: 2018 (exact day not recorded)
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 101.2 minutes
Words: ~10,543
So sorry anymore. So we’ll begin with the motivation prayer. So there’s some, which is what, on page ten, if you’d like to join in. So visualising the Buddha in front of us, who is the source of these teachings and our source of inspiration and guidance, and hopefully of refuge, our source of refuge, and embodying all the qualities that we have the potential for, and we can motivate ourselves to achieve those qualities, those enlightened qualities, by thinking of all sentient beings surrounding us, trying to have that understanding that we’re intimately connected to all these beings, they’ve all been my mother many times, I’ve been in every possible good relationship with every sentient being countless times, they’ve helped me in every conceivable way, but also all these kind beings are suffering in cyclic existence, most of them trapped in the worst experiences of saṃsāra right now, helplessly, And even those who are experiencing the bliss of the god realms are not going to experience that forever. They’re going to fall into the lower realms of obvious suffering over and over again.
So thinking of all this suffering, how helpless beings are, how kind they’ve been, try and generate that thought based on recognising one’s own Buddha nature that no matter what I must use this in all future lives to achieve enlightenment in order to repay the kindness of mother sentient beings, helping them to be free of all causes of suffering, helping them to achieve peerless, everlasting happiness. So to achieve enlightenment I have to become firstly free of saṃsāra, and that to do that I need to understand the suffering nature of cyclic existence and its causes and how they can be eliminated and the path that leads away from that that leads to that elimination. So for this reason I’ll study this course on Samsāra and nirvana. I go for refuge until I am enlightened to the Buddha, Dharma and the Supreme Assembly. By the merits I create through listening to the Dharma, may I become a Buddha in order to benefit all sentient beings.
So then, thinking the Buddha is pleased with our motivation, we can imagine that the Buddha now comes to the crown of our head and when directly above our crown the Buddha then dissolves into blissful light so that that light can then pour down into us, blessing our mind to be able to understand the teachings on Samsāra nirvana, blessing our minds to be able to put them into practice and properly, correctly and blessing our mind to be able to eventually gain the unmistaken realisations that free us from cyclic existence and enable us to experience eventually not just the lesser nirvana of liberation from cyclic existence, but the great nirvana of enlightenment. So then just briefly we can do the nine round breathing exercise to further develop that peaceful state of mind, allowing our mind to become just that much more calm, clear, concentrated so that we can use that state of mind to listen to and think about Buddha’s teachings tonight. K. Thank you. Right, okay.
So we’re basically on the second noble truth, which is about the true causes of suffering. So the very root cause of all our suffering is ignorance, this mental factor that prevents us experiencing ourselves as we actually are, prevents us experiencing all things as they actually exist and actually gives a distorted appearance, experience of how things exist, but which grasps that that distorted appearance is true, is real. So that how that functions is a very big topic and I’m not going to go into that much at all in this course. There’s a whole DB module on that towards the end, or at the very end, on the nature of reality, but developing the wisdom of emptiness. But it’s because of that, and only because of that, that we have all the different disturbing thoughts, the different delusions.
Each of them is a byproduct of ignorance. Ignorance has this creates this very subtle fundamental distortion about reality and then each of the different delusions adds another kind of level of distortion. So attachment distorts the pleasant aspects of things, anger distorts the unpleasant aspects of things. Yeah, so there’s many many definitions of what the Buddhadharma is. One of the most basic ones, but very important ones, is that anything that subdues and helps eliminate, either directly or indirectly, our delusions is Buddhadharma and is the practice of Buddhadharma.
It is the key thing that we are trying to do is to subdue our delusions. If go through all the prayers and practices and they’re not subduing our delusions, then it’s really not Dharma practice. One can sit and meditate until the cows come home, but if it’s not in some way acting to pacify our disturbing thoughts, It really isn’t Dharma practice. So this is really quite an important topic, but we can only do it briefly at the moment. So we’re looking at the various delusions, particularly the six root delusions and most particularly the first two of desire, attachment and anger.
So I tried to talk a little bit last week about the definitions of them so that we can identify with them, because the only way we can begin to subdue them and eventually eliminate them is we have to be able to recognise them. Just like in an Agatha Christie novel, there’s always the guy or the person who’s killing everybody else, but to catch the thief or catch the murderer, you have to be first able to identify them because you could eliminate the wrong thing, bump off or put into prison the wrong person. So to be able to subdue our delusions, we have to be able to recognise them. So everyone’s got a handout on the which is called the Six Factors. Has everyone collected these?
Yeah, yep, great. So the Six Factors Activating the Delusions. So I’m just going to go through this first because as it says at the beginning there, well, what we need to do when the delusion arises is to apply the direct opponent because every delusion has its own specific opponent to subdue it, not suppress it but undermine it, to weaken the intensity of it. But to have these, we just naturally have the delusions in our mind, they’re there all the time or the potential for them is always there. But we don’t naturally have the opponents in our mind.
We have the potential to cultivate them, but we don’t have these opponents and what we have to, you know, in a sense create these opponent powers in our mind. They’re just not accessible. So I think this is something that many people really don’t get, that what we should be trying to do as dharma practitioners and what the precious human rebirth gives us the greatest freedom to do is to spend time cultivating these opponent powers. Because you can’t, like if one gets angry then you think, oh, I should apply the opponent power of patience now, ‘ but you can’t just create patience. Especially when you’re angry, there’s no way you can cultivate, you know, just suddenly create it out of nothing.
Patience has to be created when one isn’t angry, one has to cultivate it, it’s something that one has to work at, right? It’s just like, you know, you can’t go to the Olympic Games and enter, you know, some track and field event and you’ve never run-in your life. And you think, oh, I’ll try this time for the gold medal, you know, it’s just impossible. One has to have trained a lot. So to be able to pacify any of our delusions, one has to have spent a lot of time and effort cultivating the antidote and yeah, alright, that’s it.
So for us as beginners, we haven’t done that much, we may have not done it at all or we may have done a little bit, we’ve maybe spent some time. So that means that the antidote is very, very weak and unfortunately our delusions are very strong. So, conclusion is the wise thing to do is, although we do need to be able to eventually learn how to apply the antidotes, because if we don’t do that we’ll never get rid of our delusions. What we first have to do is recognise the various factors that activate our delusions. And as it lists here, according to the tradition, I mean, there can be infinite numbers of factors, but there are six general types of conditions that activate our delusions.
And so we need to be able to recognise those in ourselves because they vary in various ways with each individual and as much as possible try to avoid those conditions. So that’s easier than applying the antidotes. In the meantime we should be cultivating the antidotes, right? But until we’ve made those antidotes really strong, then the wise thing is to basically retreat from the conditions that activate our disturbing thoughts. And unfortunately even that is not always easy, but it’s easier than cultivating the antidotes.
But, yeah. And maybe just to make another point, in order to eliminate our delusions, well, the only way to eliminate our delusions is to eliminate ignorance. One doesn’t like eliminate all the different delusions separately, one eliminates all of them all at once. And the only way to do that is to eliminate the actual root cause, which is ignorance. So to develop wisdom to get rid of ignorance, one has to cultivate its antidote which is the wisdom that directly perceives the true nature of oneself and all phenomena.
But to be able to cultivate that wisdom one has to have a very calm, clear mind. But what do our delusions do? They make our mind very un calm and very unclear. So in order for us to be able to make our wisdom strong enough to destroy ignorance, we have to develop a very calm, clear mind. In other words, we have to be able to develop single pointed concentration and how does one develop single pointed concentration or one aspect of it is, one has to be able to subdue one’s delusions.
That’s the ultimate reason for subduing the delusions so that we’re laying the groundwork to be able to cultivate our wisdom that is going to destroy ignorance and eliminate all our delusions, all our suffering, free us from cyclic existence. Of course there are many other good reasons for just getting rid of our delusions because they’re painful and cause lots of trouble to ourselves and others while we remain in saṃsāra. So that itself is a good enough reason but the main reason is to get out of saṃsāra. In order to destroy the delusions, firstly we have to subdue them so that we can really develop our wisdom that is actually going to get rid of them. Does that make sense?
Yeah? Great. Right. So the first of the six factors is not really a factor that activates our delusions but because we have ignorance we have the potential for all of the delusions and since we’ve been in cyclic existence during time without beginning, the delusions have popped up and we’ve followed those. So one thing to understand is that every time we one of our delusions such as desire or anger or pride or jealousy or whatever arises in our mind, it generates an imprint of that delusion.
Right, so we create actually two kinds of imprints with our consciousness. There are the imprints of the delusions and then there are, you know, like acting on those delusions, you know, we act, we create karma and so we also create karmic imprints. So the imprints of the delusions, how they ripen as the delusion again, so the imprint of anger, when it ripens, is another moment of anger or series of moments of anger, right? And the imprints of attachment manifest as more desire, more attachment and so on. Whereas the karmic imprints ripen as, or the negative karmic imprints ripen as suffering.
Okay? So, we have these imprints, all of us have the imprints of every kind of delusion in our consciousness, with our consciousness, right? All of them. No exceptions. Because we’ve been around a long time.
Yeah. So then the question arises is why do because we’re not angry all the time, we’re not full of desire all the time, we’re not full of jealousy and pride, etc, etc, all the time. These just pop up every now and again. You know, for some people they pop up fairly regularly, but they’re not there present all the time. So the question is what causes these imprints to ripen?
Yeah. So there are five main causes or probably better to say conditions, factors that activate our disturbing thoughts or the imprints of those disturbing thoughts. And the first one, which is number two, which gets confusing, is, and this is probably the most powerful one, is the object. We can be completely free of desire, happily sitting here, very peaceful and no desire for this or that in particular, but then if we meet a particular object, and what one person sees as beautiful and desirable, another person may not. But in general it is what is labelled for the individual, the desirable object.
When that is there, desire can manifest. When it’s not there, it goes away. So this is one of the most powerful ways, you know, the beautiful object, the beautiful person, then desire arises, then there’s some unpleasant object, unpleasant person, aversion to that object or person arises. And, you know, someone’s smarter than us, more successful than us, more powerful than us, better looking than us, jealousy arises. They’re not there, we don’t think about them and whatever, the jealousy goes away, then something else pops up.
Or we see somebody, something inferior to us and pride arises. I’m so much better than this person, I’m so much cleverer, can do this much better blah blah blah. And they go away, we that fizzles out of our mind for a while, then something else pops up. So unfortunately in saṃsāra there are so many objects that activate our different delusions. So the skilful thing to do is to be aware of what kinds of people and situations and things activate our particular delusions.
And then the tricky thing is to avoid those people, those situations as much as possible. So in the case of unpleasant situations and people, there’s a strong wish within us to avoid those things. But of course, so that’s good, that makes it relatively easy because we just naturally want to avoid unpleasant people and situations if we can. But of course we can’t always avoid those people and situations. That’s why ultimately we need to cultivate the opponents.
But in the meantime if we can avoid them, that’s the wise, skillful thing to do. But of course, in the case of attachment, trying to overcome attachment and desire, usually it’s the opposite. We don’t want to avoid the objects of our attachment and desire because we’ve conditioned ourselves to believe that being around objects of our desire and attachment will make us happy. So that’s where the trick comes in of trying to develop the courage to avoid these things as much as possible. So that’s one big project you have as a Dharma.
If you want to follow the Buddha’s teachings and to benefit yourself, benefit others, it’s really important to honestly be able to recognise, to think about what things make me angry, what make me proud and jealous and dissatisfied and craving and whatever, and try as much as possible to avoid those things. Also to investigate those kind of objects and see what it is, what do I believe about those things to try to reduce the particular delusion. So the next one, these are not necessarily an order of power or anything, strength of activating the delusions, but another very potent factor that activates our disturbing thoughts is simply what we hear is called unrealistic thinking or inappropriate attention, which basically simply means thinking about the object. So if we think about objects of our desire, then the desire will arise. If we think about people and things that not in a meditative state, but just in an ordinary you know, thoughts pop up in our mind and we dwell on, think about people we dislike and why we dislike them and, you know, that person said that to me and blah blah blah and they’re like this and that.
And then so the anger will arise the more we think about it. And in fact, the way our mind works, the delusions in many cases can arise more strongly just by thinking about them than when the actual object is there. You know, we can make the object of our desire more desirable in our mind than it is in reality. And in fact, yes, we do that a lot. And we can make the object of our aversion much worse than it is, you know, when it’s not there.
We can make it much worse in our mind than it actually is and we can get really, really angry. You know, we can imagine situations that this person will do that they haven’t done and we get angry about things that they haven’t done. More angry. And then eventually we might actually end up believing they actually did do that at some time, can’t remember when, but it’s something our mind totally created. So again, this is another thing that we have to try to be really mindful of, that, you know, to catch and this is one of the most fundamental practises of Buddhism is to practise mindfulness to know what’s going on in our mind, specifically from the point of view, because mindfulness as it’s used in Buddhism is not just about knowing something like being aware or walking slowly or sort of touching something, you know, really, I’m very mindful of this.
And I know, I did one of those retreats, one of the first retreats where it took me so long to eat, got so bored and cleaning my teeth, know, I’m going to go insane if I clean my teeth any longer. But it was all very mindful and in one way it’s very good because you were very kind of aware of everything, and now I’m putting this here. But that’s not mindfulness, that’s just being aware, which has its good qualities. But as Lama Zopa Rinpoche always says, this is what thieves do, now I’m sticking this knife right in the middle of your heart, you know, for now I’m opening, breaking this lock very carefully so it doesn’t make any noise. Some thieves are very good in practising that kind mindfulness, but that’s not mindfulness because mindfulness is knowing what’s going on in your mind and knowing whether what’s going on in your mind is virtuous or not, whether it’s skilful or unskillful, meaningful or meaningless.
So, you know, that’s one of the fundamental things we need to try to do to protect our mind, to protect ourselves, protect others. And so to know whether my mind is, you know, dwelling on objects of attachment, aversion or things that bring up pride or jealousy and fears and worries and blah blah blah. And then of course again it requires this courage to let go of that stuff because unfortunately often we like to get caught up in all this rubbish. We’re completely habituated to it. So one way to try and break that, just simple way, to practice when one knows that, is just to try to focus on the breath, to change the object because the mind cannot hold two objects, separate objects at the same time.
So you either dwell on the delusion, you know, thoughts of delusion, or you try and focus on something meaningful. And a simple thing is just simply to focus on the breath or you can do many things, can start reciting mantras, visualise the Buddha, whatever, something like that. But the simplest can be just to focus on the breath. So another factor that activates our disturbing thoughts is the people we mix with, the society we mix with, the friends, family and so on. So if we hang out with people who have lots of delusions, disturbing thoughts, that will tend to activate ours.
If we hang out with people with lots of attachment, our attachment will awaken if we hang out with people with lots of anger, who spend their time criticising other people, making fun of other people and joking about other people, putting other people down and getting angry about this, that and the other, then we’ll be influenced. Might like to think we won’t, but in many cases we will and we may not even be aware that that’s what’s happening to us. But it happens. That’s why, as some of the people here who’ve taken refuge should recall, one of the commitments of having taken refuge is to avoid people who have no respect for spiritual traditions because if one hangs out with such people then their ideas, we would like to think, oh, I will save them and lead them to convert them and all sorts of things, but it’s more likely they’ll do it to us unknowingly. So this doesn’t mean we should develop a version for such people, but we should be really skilful and try to avoid being influenced by such people as much as possible.
This is why for us as ordinary people, ordinary practitioners just starting out, and one can be a starting out Buddhist, a start up Buddhist for many, many years. That is why having Dharma friends and going to Dharma centres is incredibly helpful. Incredibly helpful. I mean this is why Lama Yeshe devoted his life to encouraging his students to create dharma centres because they were all created by the students, you know, with no money, no idea what they were doing, just a couple of people starting a Dharma centre. You know, these happened all around the world.
Buddha House, which is now this fantastic beautiful place, started in a garage of one man. He offered his garage. It wasn’t actually, it was a shed. It was a shed in his backyard. So it was in there for years.
Good old Doc White was his name. Yeah, good old Doc White’s backyard. Yeah. So that happened many places. Because it’s so important to be able to hang out with people who are trying to do the same things as oneself and trying to develop an understanding of the Buddhist way of looking at things and so on.
So that can be really, really helpful. Because as it says here, there’s this famous saying that’s quoted a lot in the Tibetan tradition about the evil friend doesn’t necessarily have someone with horns growing out of head, meaning the evil friend is not someone you can necessarily easily identify. The evil friend looks like your best friend because they say, oh, come and get drunk and let’s sniff some cocaine and let’s do this and blah blah blah and, you know, everything you you’re okay, just take it easy and do all the easy things. Of course the easy thing is to follow one’s delusions, follow the self-cherishing thought. So that’s what our friends encourage us to do.
Some of our friends too. So then another factor that can activate our delusions, which is along the similar lines, is just the things we talk about, the things that we allow to bombard our mind. Like the different kinds of movies we watch, TV we watch, the books we read, the magazines, newspapers, all this kind of stuff, the things we talk about, all of that influences our mind. And can, you know, if we read lots of political stuff, you know, it’s very easy to, because you know, there’s always one side being put down and made fun of and criticised and so on. Yeah.
So again, the skill is in recognising these things and trying not to get involved with them as much as possible. Although if one is careful, certain, you know, one can watch terrible movies and stuff and just realise how terrible they are and how deluded they really are. And, but also see how they are presented as though all of this is perfectly normal and okay, which a lot of stuff these days is, you know, how, you know, all these incredibly violent movies where, you know, where the hero goes around just blasting people left, right and centre and that is the hero. Anyway. But one has to really check how things are affecting one’s mind, try to be more mindful of how the things one surrounds oneself and takes up one’s time.
What is it doing to one’s mind? Is it just activating, entertaining the delusions more and more or not? And then finally, fifth of the activating factors, which one could say is a result of all the other things, is basically familiarity and habit, that we are so habituated with following our delusions, you know, they pop up so quickly, so easily and without any mindfulness, any awareness, we just follow them. So one of the keys to be able to recognise all of these factors and to be able to deal with them skilfully is really trying to live a simpler life. A simpler, less busy life.
And, you know, this the way people live their lives now is just so much more busy. And I think people sort of take some pride also, to some extent, in being super busy. That this makes us feel really important because I’m just so busy. I have so many things to do. This means I’m very important and significant and my life is fulfilled and significant because I have so many, many things to do.
Okay. Any questions, comments, suggestions, recommendations, objections? Okay. Well, I think this is a very oh yes. The precious human rebirth.
Sorry, the precious human rebirth, yes. Yes, it just goes on to say, maybe I should make a little comment, because it’s talking about how our distractions and everything, all the movies we watch and everything, it just doesn’t give us time to practise and because we don’t practise dharma then of course our delusions just take over more and more and so it gets harder to subdue them. So it really depends on the decision to do things. And the reason I put that there is, as some of you have heard me say before, my teacher Lama Zopa Rinpoche, who’s depicted here in this wonderful photo, who’s coming to Australia soon and to Buddha House on May the twentieth, yes. Has many, many gurus, some incredibly famous and some just very simple monks, some who have taught him immensely complicated things for long periods of time, but one of his gurus is a simple monk who was one of his relatives, an uncle I think, who said one sentence to him.
Lama Zopa Rinpoche thought this one sentence was so incredibly wise that he took this monk as one of his gurus. And what this monk said basically was that all Dharma practice, all success, all realisation comes down to making the decision. We just have to decide, I’m going to do it. Now, That’s Of course, we have to make many decisions each day about that because that’s what we do all the time, you know. We have a situation and we can do the right thing or the wrong thing, right?
And we have to make the decision. And unfortunately, usually we follow the self-cherishing thought. But we have to make the decision, like to practice the Dharma, not to follow the delusion, not to follow the self-cherishing thought. It all comes down to having the courage to make the decision. That’s it.
And if we can do that, that’s it. Especially if we can make the super decision where, you know, we’re really not just one small decision, I’m not going to have another piece of chocolate, but even that one is good. But, you know, really where the mind has finally made this super decision, I am actually, you know, renouncing this life, renouncing attachment to this life, yeah, or something like that. Okay, right, quickly. So now what I’d like to talk about is how to actually cultivate the antidotes to the delusions.
So firstly I’d like to talk about the there are general antidotes to delusions and then there are the specific ones. So in terms of so there are general antidotes that work for all of the, or most of the delusions. So, one way to start Cultivate and, you know, these general antidotes are good to start with because they’re talking about the most basic things and one of the most basic ways to start cultivating an antidote to the delusions or any of the delusions is basically simply recognising how harmful they are. If we don’t, you know, why we follow our delusions is we are either completely unaware that they are harmful at all or we actually even think our delusions are helpful, are good. We don’t see any harm to them.
Alright? Or we maybe see a little bit, but basically what especially our tradition is emphasising is that we have to use our intelligence to develop, you know, this we have this wrong view that our delusions are either, like, neutral, there’s nothing wrong with them, or they’re actually beneficial, so we have to oppose that wrong view with the right view that in reality they are extremely harmful, now and in the future to ourself and to others. And it’s not enough just to say, Oh, they’re harmful. We have to know, we have to believe from our side that they are harmful. Alright.
And we have to put that information into that understanding into our mind again and again because it’s yeah, sorry. What we are trying to get as dharma practitioners, if you’re trying to practise the dharma, anyway this is what I’m encouraging people to do, is ultimately what we’re trying to achieve is what is called a realisation of something. There are many realisations to gain. So I don’t know, I should after forty years being a monk but I never studied a lot, what the actual definition of a realisation is, but I think I have a general idea of what it means. But, and it’s something very different from just understanding something.
It is very, you know, if one has any connection with the Buddhadharma, it is relatively easy to understand all of it. Even, you know, emptiness, to get a general idea of what emptiness is about, is relatively easy to get some idea of it. But then to get a complete understanding takes more time, but an understanding of something is vastly different than a realisation because the understanding of it doesn’t guarantee in any way that it will change our behaviour. It can, it will, I mean, yes, to some extent, but a realisation, it really brings about some kind of transformation in our mind that affects the way we live our life from that time onwards. You know, as I always say, sorry, that we all know we’re going to die but we don’t have a realisation of it.
We all understand that we are going to die, that every human being dies, but we don’t have the lived experiential transformative realisation of that, because if we did, we wouldn’t waste our life. Well certainly if we have any half a belief in what the Buddha teaches and we had a realisation of death and we could die at any time, we would not waste our life doing lots of negative stuff and meaningless stuff. We just wouldn’t. Having some understanding of that, that motivates us with effort to try and do good stuff, but nothing like when one has an actual realisation of it. We can understand that everything is impermanent, but it’s quite different to have a realisation where you experience things moment by moment, or there’s levels of experience of realisations of impermanence.
But, you know, it’s not just this thought, everything’s impermanent, you actually, to some degree, you experience it as something, you know, changing and changing. And it’s an experience that, you know, where you don’t get caught up in attachment and aversion to stuff, because you experience, we experience that it’s changing, no point to get attached to and so on. Why did I say all that? Yes, so we can say, Oh yes, I understand the delusions are painful and harmful. Yes, we all understand that anger is harmful, but we still don’t have the realisation of it because we don’t think about it enough.
We think about it too late, you know, when we’ve done something harmful, Oh yeah, that wasn’t very good. But we don’t have this experience in our mind, this realisation that can overwhelm all this negativity when it starts to pop up. So we have to work on it, think about it and really become convinced, you know, really one hundred percent about these things. So the faults of afflictions, why are they harmful, is that if we think about it, all the afflictions, you know, and let’s just focus on anger and attachment for the time being is that they are offshoots of ignorance. Know, ignorance is the very fundamental core, the Buddha says, of all our suffering, all of it.
And so, ignorance is misconceiving the way we experience ourselves, how we experience everything. Everything we’re experiencing is wrong in a very significant but very subtle way. And because of that, all the other delusions are there. So anger and attachment, they are by products of this ignorance. So they must be mad.
They can’t be good. There can’t be anything really good about them anyway. So each affliction or disturbing thought represents a particular false way of experiencing an object. And because it’s a false way of experiencing things, it can’t bring any benefit. How could it bring any benefit?
But particularly the thing to reflect on more and more from our own experience is to become convinced through our own experience and hopefully our faith in the teachings that the delusions, when they arise in our mind, are painful. Not just because the Buddha says so, but we need to check how when desire is in our mind, when anger is in our mind, it is painful, it is suffering. There’s nothing else it can be called. Pride and jealousy also is painful. And the law of cause and effect, the fundamental teaching of the Buddha, the fundamental insight of the Buddha says that a harmful cause, a painful cause only and always produces a painful result.
So if we let the disturbing thought arise in our mind, it suffering while it’s there, but it leads us to do more suffering, you know, create more suffering for ourselves in this life. It creates these negative imprints that bring can only bring suffering in the future. So why follow it? Where’s the benefit? There isn’t any benefit.
This is what we have to become convinced of. Because we have the habit, you know, intellectually this is what I’ve been trying to say intellectually we know it’s bad or we can start to see it’s bad intellectually, but that intellectual understanding isn’t strong enough to stop a habit that is within us. It can stop it sometimes, you know, a little bit every now and but we’re trying to really undermine it completely. So also remember every time we follow our delusions, mostly are we creating these negative karmic imprints that are going to bring suffering in the future, but every time something which is more easy to believe is that every time we follow a delusion, we’re creating the habit to follow it again. Every time we get angry, we’ve created an imprint of anger in our consciousness that will ripen as more anger in the future.
Every time we follow craving, we’ve got that imprint to have that again and again and again. So we have to think about this, sorry if I go on about this, but we have to think about this again and again and again as much as possible. So of course another fault of the afflictions is not only so these are all from the point of view of harming ourselves now and in the future, but of course our disturbing thoughts lead us to harm others. Obviously our anger does but our pride and jealousy can and also our attachments can, our desire for other people, things, our attachment to people and things can lead us to all sorts of unskilful actions that harm others, including the people that we are attached to. So these are some of the basic faults of every one of the afflictions has these faults, right?
So by thinking about these things more and more in relation to each of the delusions, when the delusion comes, arises again, hopefully some of that understanding that there are all these harms associated with it can begin to counteract that energy because usually when the delusion arises we sort of, we just fall into it. Just fall into it. But if there’s something, there’s nothing holding us back or very little, so we have to create something ourselves but it’s not some, it has to be something that we totally believe. Right? If we don’t really believe it, you know, Oh, I shouldn’t do this.
I shouldn’t do this. This is naughty. That’s not very good. That’s not very powerful, you know. It’s not like that.
We should really feel in, like, our very depths of our being that this is, you know, this is poisoning us, it’s killing us, it’s destroying us, that’s what it’s doing. I mean, who here would sort of willingly sort of take on some kind of cancer? You know, there’s a delicious chocolate cake but it’s somehow, it’s full of cancer. I know chocolate cakes aren’t full of cancer but you know what I mean, you know. If you knew that eating this would give you cancer or some kind of horrendous disease and you know it’s completely delicious.
Would we? Hopefully not. Maybe we would, if it was really delicious. But, yeah, we have to become convinced like that, that something can appear and it’s so wonderful to do, oh yes, I’ve always done it, but now we realise it’s poisonous. It’s worse than any physical disease, yes.
Reminds me of the same honey on a razor blade. Yes, right, yes, eating honey on a razor blade, right. Good point, thank you. I remember that one. Yeah.
So then on the other hand we should also reflect on the benefits of subduing our afflictions, our disturbing thoughts, of not following them. So the benefits are that we will experience a peaceful mind in this life, we will experience much greater peace of mind during this life. And we won’t create the causes of suffering not only for ourself but we won’t harm others. We’ll cause less and less harm to others. And we’ll be actually be able to be of greater benefit to them.
The weaker our delusions are, the more energy we will have to be of benefit to others. And being of benefit, you know, the Mahāyāna teachings are saying that benefiting others, working for the happiness of others, is the greatest source of our own happiness. Another benefit is that the more we subdue our disturbing thoughts we will be able to develop single pointed concentration more easily, which in turn means all aspects of our practice will become more easy, more effective. And particularly by subduing our disturbing thoughts it means that we’ll be able to have a peaceful death. And therefore if we have a good death, we will definitely have a good rebirth.
And if we’ve got a good rebirth, then we can, you know, continue the practice, freeing our mind of suffering. So the great Indian master Lama Atisha, who was responsible for reforming Buddhism in Tibet in the tenth, eleventh century. Tenth century, something like that, said, You must get rid of all your habitual thoughts when fettering passions arise. That’s his term for the disturbing thoughts, fettering passions.
Fettering, they’re like fetters which are like chains that bind us. Fetters. When fettering passions arise you must remember their opposing practice. You should not have the slightest gap in your remembrance. If even a tiny gap should appear, then the devil of fettering passions will enter.
Let whatever you do be a remedy for the fettering passions. This is actual religious practice. Okay, so then one of the general antidotes for all of the afflictions, as some of you already know, is having some understanding, some experience of impermanence and death. So the obvious one is that, especially if one has some belief in the mind and its continuity and so on, then to be able to remember, like, when a disturbing thought arises, especially if it arises very strongly, then if we can remember that I am going to die, I could die now. If I die with a mind of incredible anger or a lot of attachment, I will have this is a really bad state of mind to die in.
Because the type of throwing karma that’s going to ripen that will determine what kind of rebirth we have depends on the state of mind we’re in. If we have a good state of mind, then the positive throwing karmas are able to ripen if our mind is in a negative state, then the negative throwing karmas tend to ripen. So we do not want to die in a strong negative state of mind. So if we could remember if we had some realisation or greater mindfulness of our own mortality, especially that we could die at any moment, then that can be very effective in cutting through that mind that just wallows in the delusion once it arises. Of course, it’s not just enough to think, oh, I could die now, because if we just say the words we probably won’t believe it.
Because we have no realisation. But if we have some, you know, deeper experience of meditating on that and think like that, it can be very effective, especially if we actually have the realisation of if we’ve developed the realisation of our own mortality and how it really, literally can occur at any moment, then that is extremely powerful. But along with that is developing an understanding and a realisation of impermanence, that everything the Buddhist one of the actual what is it? Distinguishing features of the Buddhist teachings is the teaching that everything that has arisen depending on causes and conditions, which is everything in our world, including the world itself, including the universe, everything in our world has arisen depending on causes and conditions. And the Buddha said, Everything that has arisen depending on causes and conditions is manufactured, made, compounded, is born, is in its very nature impermanent, meaning it changes moment by moment or even more, it means that it decays moment by moment.
So it which means it comes to an end. But certainly, you know, here we go again. These nice flowers, they are impermanent so they look very nice now, fresh, might smell okay, but they’re decaying moment by moment. So the colours fade away, the smell stops, then at some point it becomes quite disgusting. It just cannot stay that way.
That impermanence is something that cannot be stopped, it’s irreversible. So if we really were mindful of that, if we had a deep understanding of that, a deep belief in that, especially a realisation of that, then we would not get attached to beautiful things because we know that beauty and the happiness and everything associated with it can’t last. We could enjoy it momentarily. We might even be able to enjoy it more with a realisation of impermanence than without it. But we wouldn’t get attached to it because we would know, we would experience that it, you know, we would know in a very deep way, not this superficial information knowing that this thing is not going to last.
It’s not lasting, it’s actually changing right now, all the time, irreversibly. There’s nothing there to cling onto, to be attached to, but we believe there is. And similarly for things that upset us, similarly we wouldn’t get so upset because what maintains anger and builds it up is this sense that I can’t bear this, I can’t bear what is going on. Why? Because it feels permanent.
You know, when something unpleasant happens, you know, it feels like it’s going to stop. We of course can intellectually know it will, but emotionally we grasp that it’s just never going to stop and that is unbearable. But if one had the realisation that it’s all changing, then we wouldn’t get so angry. We may not get angry at all. And again, with pride and jealousy, the same, you know, everything that makes us proud is impermanent.
Everything that we’re jealous of is impermanent. So why be jealous? Really? Why? What’s the point?
If it’s words, it’s not so powerful, but if we actually experience what those words mean, it would deflate everything. So this is something to work on. And I think it’s time to stop, isn’t it? Uh-huh. Pretty much?
Yeah. I haven’t got to the specific next week. I think we’re gonna have to go do the specific ones next week. Any questions? Please ask any question.
Who’s going to win the Adelaide Cup? Something, anything. Go on. Old belief systems. With safe session of the mind, do you believe there’s a physiological component like a chemistry that can drive that from the brain? Does that make any sense?
Make it go away? It can make greater that our our brain chemistry, like dopamine, serotonin, and it’s just where I’ve come from. You know, I’ve been trying to put that down, though, but, like, how would you say obsession Works. How how does that work? How does that work?
Oh, is it I don’t know. It just keeps coming up and I think, ‘I don’t understand’. Well, think an obsession isn’t that just a very strong habit? You have habituated your mind with thinking about something in a particular way. Yeah.
I guess where I’ve come from, sort of medically, was our brain chemistry there. Why? I Try not to believe that, you mean? More. If you use something more for me, I think.
I’m just trying to get a better No, Wendy, I think Remember that our ordinary mind, the ordinary mind that we’re experiencing now, the gross level of mind is very much dependent on how it functions very much depends on the brain and, you know, brain chemicals and all that stuff which I don’t understand at all or know about. Yeah, And also there’s that. And so depending on how the brain is functioning, the mind will get caught up in various things, right? And that in turn is dependent on our karma. So for karma to ripen you have to have the conditions.
For certain karmas to ripen, well, yeah, a particular karma to ripen you have to have the conditions, yeah. So for a particular karma to ripen, maybe to have an obsessive way of thinking about something that is a karmic result of something from the past, you have to for that to ripen, it has to occur in a particular kind of brain. Something like that. And maybe other also environmental situations as well. And so that karma ripens in that way.
I know that, maybe I’m weird, but I know that even anger even anger there’s something happening in my But that’s the mind doing that. The mind’s still doing it, isn’t it? Yes, or anger is your mind. The anger is a mental state. But of course that mental state has all sorts of physical, you know, effects and I’m not the right person to talk about all the bodies.
Yeah. Of course there is. Yes, definitely. No, I think that’s another example. Yeah.
It’s very complicated, Wendy. I don’t want to embarrass anyone with any examples, but I think what I was trying to say is, like, for example, there are people who are like psychopathic murderers or something, and that’s from past that is the result of past actions, that people have those, like, crazy impulses to be so violent and, you know, murderous and everything. And it seems, you know, the studies have been made of the brains of such people and that they are, you know, quite different in some ways. There’s various parts of the brain that are, you know, and so on and function. You know, my understanding is I mean, I may be wrong, but for that karma to ripen, then it, you know that person, you know, was reborn with that body, with that brain that is not functioning and therefore because of that the mind thinks in these really berserk ways.
But that, yeah. But also the brain has a great deal of elasticity, right, and things can change. Things can be the actual physical functioning of our nervous system and brain can affect our mind, especially for us as very untrained minds, but the more the mind is trained, the mind can then, you know, override or influence these kind of physical things or bring about some repair or override what could have been a dominating influence of some physical aspects of that person’s nervous system and brain and whatever. And as His Holiness always says that the more, what did he say, how did he put it? But basically, like the more one has trained the mind and subdued the mind, the more one is able to access subtler levels of mind, even subtler levels of the gross mind, but the more one can experience those subtler levels, the less the mind is influenced by the body and the nervous system and everything.
Whereas the, you know, the average person, we are completely influenced by our body and, you know, everything and also just the physical environment, like, you know, we all tend to be happy on sunny days and like on grey days, you know, it’s a bit more depressing, know, things like that. Even that affects us. And, you know, there are people there’s a whole symptom which is called what? SAD. Yeah, there are people who get really depressed you know, His Holiness, his brother suffers from this, know, he gets extremely depressed during, you know, when there’s no in winter, when there’s not enough sunshine.
What is that called? I know I have a friend who has Yeah. Sad, yeah. Tea break, otherwise Anyway, I just wanted to explain, so in homework, the meditation part of the homework, says to meditate on, firstly, on the first three of the six activating factors, right, and then the next three, then the antidotes to attachment and then the antidotes to anger. Well I haven’t talked about those yet, but what you can do is just meditate on the general antidotes which I spoke about, right, the faults of anger, the faults so I haven’t specified those yet but you can think about the general faults of the delusions and apply them to anger, the general faults of attachment and apply them to attachment but also from your own, using your own wisdom intelligence you can think up what are some of the harms of attachment, harms of anger, right?
And the benefits of not being angry, the benefits of not having attachment and so on. So to think about these things. And, you know, just to think about And someone mentioned that they in the homework that they weren’t familiar with analytical meditation and they were saying, Is it just really thinking about the topic? And basically it is. It’s nothing very fancy.
It’s really what distinguishes it from ordinary, you know, our ordinary thoughts and so on. Think it’s basically that, you know, we sit down consciously to think about this particular topic when you do analytical meditation and you proceed it by generating the good motivation, etc, etc, taking refuge and whatever, And then you try to focus only on that topic and then you dedicate the merit. And So there are different aspects of doing analytical meditation. One is just sort of trying to logically analyse whatever the subject is. And also what one is, like, so one is trying to get the realisation of that experience, you know, like the realisation that anger is actually extremely harmful or something like that.
But you can’t manufacture that. One creates the causes for it but you can’t force the realisation to happen. But what can happen as one is meditating is that you can have like a little insight, like a light bulb moment where something becomes very clear and like where you feel, yes, oh, I’ve really, oh yes, I’ve got that, something like that, some kind of little realisation and the idea is if something like that happens, you stop and try to single pointedly focus on that experience without any analysis. You just try and hold that light bulb flash because that’s what makes it sort of penetrate deeper in the mind and stabilise in your mind. But if that doesn’t, and after that fades away you go back to just analysing a bit more.
But one very important thing to do in this kind of analysis is because we’re trying to analyse the Buddhist teachings and hopefully in the context that one has some faith in them. Know, this is, you know, Buddhist meditation is done in the context that one is basically, has some I’m not saying everyone here has yet, but this is generally how Buddhist meditation works, that one has accepted that the Buddha’s teachings are true, but of course, and that’s in a general way, but we may not have, you know, we have all sorts of doubts and questions and this and that. So one thing one should try to be mindful of and practise in the meditation is you’re thinking about a different point and the Buddha says blah blah, you know, the teaching says this and you may be like superficially sinking, yes, I understand that and I agree with that, but then you may become aware that you actually don’t, that you have some big doubt. So then it’s really good to analyse why you don’t believe it and to try and overcome that. Because there’s no point pretending to believe the Buddha’s, there’s no great benefit in just pretending to believe the Buddha’s teaching.
That’s not going to help us very much. You know, we either really do or we don’t. So we have to be really honest. But if we have some fundamental feeling that the Buddhist teachings are right, then we’re trying to get rid of all our, you know, these negative doubts, but we need to recognise them, but then we need to try to think of arguments to contradict our own doubts, right? So that’s a very important thing to do, rather than just to chug along and think, Oh yes, this, your Buddha says yes, oh that’s right, that’s right, that’s right, oh yeah, yeah, I believe Ahma.
That’s why it’s very good to have questions and rather than, some people say, I believe everything you said, you know, I have questions whatsoever, I’m not impressed by that. Sorry. I mean, it’s great if one has a hundred percent pure faith in all the Buddha’s teachings but, yeah, I think it takes time to really develop, but blind faith is not so great. Better than nothing, but it is good to really think, you know, do I really believe this? And then if I have why do I doubt that?
And, you know, is that doubt valid? Have I got have I found a really good, you know, reason to disagree with that? Or can I find ways to undermine my own doubts? That’s important to try and do. Because what we’re trying to, you know, faith, you know, people can make jokes about faith and how it’s ridiculous, but there’s different kinds of faith.
There’s blind faith, but then there is faith based on strong reason. So that is what Buddhism, especially the Gelugpa tradition, His Holiness, is all about, of developing this faith or this understanding that is based on one’s own investigation. This is what the Buddha taught, you know, to check up, to investigate. Don’t believe what I say because I said it, but check it up yourself because once one has come to that belief yourself, it becomes very, strong. Because many people with faith, you know, things happen and their faith is destroyed, you know, their loved one dies and so they no longer believe in God, because God’s supposed to look after, you know, but so their faith doesn’t incorporate those things.
And same for Buddhists, if they don’t have the right understanding, Oh, I prayed to Tārā and she didn’t help me, so I’ve lost all my faith, but they didn’t understand how it works. It just doesn’t work like that. Analytical meditation is really, I mean, the Gelugpa tradition this has really emphasised how this is the most important kind of practice to do, to really use one’s intelligence to investigate things really as deeply as one can and to reinforce it again and again and again. Because that mind becomes really, really incredibly powerful. Like when you meet the great Geshes because they have studied the teaching so much and they have analysed them and debated them.
So they have these incredibly powerful, super precise minds that has really investigated the whole thing so much. I mean, some of them, yeah, they’re quite amazing. So their faith is just really unbelievable because they really understand stuff. Stuff, sorry. Any more questions?
Please, something. Ask me yeah. Yes. Just in a nutshell. In a nutshell?
Oh, I don’t know if I know it. The anxiety to anxiety and stress. What do you think it is? I don’t think anxiety has a specific antidote, because it’s not a delusion as such. But I think Well, a lot of anxiety and stress comes from overthinking, doesn’t it?
It’s really thinking and I think one of the ways to deal with it is not the only way by any means, but one thing to try to do is to be mindful of those thoughts and to be aware that they are only thoughts. Because what happens with a lot of, maybe not just only stress and anxiety, but with a lot of Many people I’ve heard it said by many people, read about this, that many people have no idea that you can change your thoughts. And people thoughts pop up into the mind and what we tend to do is, as soon as it’s there, we identify with that thought, you know, so it takes over our mind and controls us. But in dealing with anxiety, one has to try to be aware that this is only a thought. That’s all it it isn’t the reality of the situation at all.
It is only a thought about something, and it’s a thought my mind has created. That’s all it is. So one has to try to stand back and just, you know, see this is a thought and let it go. I mean, which is easy for me to say, but once you try, I mean, you know, with time, that should be able to reduce it. Because all the anx, you know, whatever causes the underlying anxiety and stress, or particularly anxiety, it’s reinforced and maintained by the thoughts that one believes.
So if one could diffuse those by just being aware that they are only thoughts. And kind of bouncing off of of his uncle’s advice of being able to, or making the decisions to do things, would it kind of tie in with his holiness as to remarks on worry? As if, like, if you can do Yeah, yeah. Well, that’s Śāntideva. Yeah, yeah, if you If you can’t do something, then don’t worry.
Yeah, yeah, because you can’t do anything and the thoughts aren’t going to help. To focus on those kinds of thoughts can be very helpful. Strong, but one has to do it pretty strongly. Stress is different than anxiety isn’t it? Stress is partly because one’s doing too much, isn’t it?
And you just have to recognise that, you know, one’s doing too much and one doesn’t have to do all those things somehow. Any other questions before Someone else you had a question, yes. Different kinds of doubt, there’s different kinds of doubt. Yeah, doubt. Yeah, doubt.
Yeah, there’s the doubt tending away from the truth and doubt tending towards. But by saying you can’t disprove it, that’s tending towards the truth. I guess so. Yeah, yeah, no that’s fine that one. Yeah.
But it’s, I mean, it’s good to be, I think it’s good to be conscious if the It’s okay to have doubts, I mean, do, you know. And that’s Okay as long as we don’t let them overwhelm us and we use them to, like, just check up some more to try because part of our wrong views and doubts come from either we don’t know enough or we have misunderstood what we supposedly know. So if we check up more you know, we can find out, oh, there’s all this other aspect that’s explaining it that helps us, you know, accept something. Okey doke. Thank you very much.
So we can dedicate the good energy of this time, that it becomes a cause for us to see how horrible saṃsāra is and become free of it, so that we can help everyone be free of cyclic existence. 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 Bodhimind, not yet born, arise and grow May that born have no decline But increase forevermore.