Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 55-minute session, Ven Thubten Gyatso offers practical Buddhist guidance on recognizing and working with attachment, framed through the lens of relationship suffering and emotional pain. He opens with a personal memory of Lama Yeshe’s advice about genuine renunciation, then systematically unpacks why attachment arises — from innate seeds conditioned by pleasant experience — and traces its triggers: the object itself, our idealized projections of it, proximity, and social conditioning around partnership and happiness. He emphasizes that attachment’s pain can become a powerful teacher, motivating serious practice, and offers concrete methods: reframing emotional pain as “attachment crying” rather than personal failure; taking physical distance during acute separation; recognizing that the person we cling to is not their imagined perfection but an overlay of our own mind. His core teaching concerns emptiness — the absence of the inherent, unchanging self both in ourselves and in those we become attached to — as the ultimate antidote. He concludes with practical tantra guidance and addresses audience questions on mind, karma, and the difference between healthy desire and clinging attachment. Suited for practitioners working with emotional pain and those seeking a Buddhist psychological framework for relationship struggle.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 05 2010 02 04 D.mp3
UUID: 9cddfb62-df43-4323-90aa-39041a09306d
Teacher: Ven Thubten Gyatso aka Adrian Feldman
Collection: Misc teachings (Ven Thubten Gyatso aka Adrian Feldman)
Date: 2010-02-04
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 54.9 minutes
Words: ~6,427
That afternoon Lama actually introduced me to this American guy and Lama called me Doctor Adrian. Somehow that stuck. So she said, this is Doctor Adrian, he has just become a monk. He has achieved the renounced mind of Samsāra. And hadn’t even thought about what the meaning of renunciation but I just looked at my mind and I said to Lama, Not yet Lama.
And he sort of grabbed me by the shoulder and said Good answer, good answer, not yet. Long time you achieve renunciation. You work all your life you know. And he was right. Now thirty four years later, still working on renunciation.
So it doesn’t come easy. That was a great lesson actually from Lama Yeshe. Watch your mind. We are so habituated to seeing something attractive, wonderful, I need, I want, I must have, I’m, you know, etcetera. Okay.
I said the alternative to being a monk or nun, which most Buddhists attempt, you know, very few Buddhists do become monks or nuns. The alternative is to work on attachment while surrounded by the very objects of attachment. This is not entirely impossible but it’s hard, very hard. When we’re burning in the misery, flame of attachment, it’s like being in hell. We all know the pain of separation, a broken relationship or the grief of losing somebody who is close to us who has died and just wanting them to be there again.
It’s incredible inner fire of pain that’s coming from attachment. But the very experience of attachment, attachment, the pain, can motivate us, should motivate us to get out of it, to destroy it, to break this cause of suffering. And it’s going to happen. We’re all going to get burnt and we’re going to experience it again and again just as we have in the past. But instead of just feeling poor me and miserable and self pity, we should say ah, has a core, this is attachment, this is what those Lamas have been talking about.
Whereas it comes from ignorance, misseeing reality. Therefore it has a cure. The cure is not getting back with the person who has rejected me. The cure is not reviving from the dead, the person who has gone away or, you know, getting, recreating what I had in the past. The cure is to work on my own mind so we can be really energized.
Pain and suffering can be strong motivators to shake us out of our lethargy, out of our dream world, out of our unreality and do something about it. It’s really important. There are so many stories of people who have had major traumatic or painful experiences in their life and have used that to enter the spiritual path, to train their minds. So think about that. Think about there is hope.
I mean often we feel so. Life is useless. Without this person life is meaningless. I might as well kill myself or I’ll go and kill the person who abandoned me. And we read about every day.
It’s so sad. It’s so sad. Or I’ll kill the children so that he or she will hurt. Yeah. It’s so sad.
This is attachment. Attachment. That’s what’s causing these terrible events that occur within society. So now in order to deal with attachment we need to understand the conditions. Why does attachment arise in my mind?
We’ve mentioned that self centered ignorance has been the root cause. But the first cause is the seed of attachment in the mind. We’re born with the seeds of attachment. We, every baby, only has to experience pleasure and attachment arises. First to mommy and then daddy and my toys.
And there’s strong attachment. You only have to give a young child’s mother a hug and say my mommy and that child becomes so indignant. My mommy you know. Attachment, clinging to this source of pleasure. So, and then my toy, another child picks up my toy and all hell breaks loose.
So we’re born, we don’t teach our children to be attached. They have the seeds of attachment in their mind from past lives. Thank you. The self pitying, miserable thought of poor me only compounds the pain of having no pleasure. This thought can be overcome by the practice of giving the pain to our attachment.
So often when we are in self pity and miserable about having our being frustrated in not getting the object of our attachment, we should think that it’s the attachment. It’s this emotion in the mind. Not me, attachment, it’s this emotion in the mind, not me. Now we don’t identify with me, we say it’s attachment which is crying. And these are the problems that my niece said she was experiencing, crying, dreaming, tossing in the bed at night, even vomiting when thinking about the man who had rejected her.
And so instead of thinking, this is me, me, me, but think this is attachment that’s caused the pain and attachment’s experiencing the pain. This is like psychological method to not identify with the pain but say, oh that’s attachment. Sir, if you’re right, you caused it, you experience it and let it go. I mean, you have to try this yourselves. Don’t identify with your miserable mind as you.
It’s not. It’s just a miserable mind. It’s not you. So, the seed of attachment, anyway, is strongly there at birth. Then the object of attachment.
Obviously the other person or the object, we can be completely at peace and happiness, but when person, we may not have seen the other person of our attachment for weeks, months and we feel I’m okay but as soon as, not only we see them, even we just have to hear their name, somebody has to talk about them. They talk about my My friend, the one I want and immediately the mind is disturbed. Attachments arising. Oh tell me about them. What are they doing?
Etc, etc. But it’s not even if we analyze our psychology in being so attached when when the person comes or we hear about the person, it’s actually not the person themselves, it’s our idealized projection of what they are. They’re the perfect one. The perfect perfect father or mother for my children. The unfailing source of happiness.
My special perfect partner. The one with which I have a karmic relationship. So many people go to the lamas Lamas and say, Oh Lama, she’s so special or he says, We have this karmic relationship. As if people know all about karma. The Lamas say, Don’t tell me that, that’s attachment, that’s not karma.
Sure there’s some karma to connect. We’re all related to each other. We’ve all been each other’s lovers and husbands and wives and mothers and children etc. In past lives. We’ve all got that relationship.
But people are so convinced they know, oh, this is special karma. Not true. It’s attachment. So, perfection is an unreal elaboration by attachment. There is no perfection in this world.
When we think of the other person, our mind confuses the actual person with our projections. Now we really don’t relate people as they are, we relate to people according to our projections that we superimpose upon them. And when that attachment is like a knot in our heart, you know we hear the name and there’s knot tightness. Oh, I want, I need, I must be with that person. So for now we can stop our mind from being obsessed with the other person by saying attachment, there you go again.
Leave off your fantasies, give me a break. You can, it really, it is so simple to write, oh this is attachment, give me a break. Don’t identify with it. Don’t let your mind follow-up on that old fantasy, unreal fantasy. Let it go.
Don’t run to the bar and drown yourself with alcohol or drugs or whatever. Just work with your mind. We must work with our minds. Our minds are flexible, changeable things. And it’s wisdom, through wisdom we can take control of our lives and with love we can make our lives so happy, so much more peaceful than we could ever have imagined.
Proximity. Yeah, proximity, again I’m talking to my niece here, after a separation when you see mutual friends that you had when you were together with a relationship, you pine, you start crying and you want your friend to be with you. This is attachment. Even the houses, places you visited together, the special places where you laughed and enjoyed, these can bring up so much attachment and clinging and pining. They’re always reminding us of what it was and we start to live in the past.
Attachment prevents us from seeing the world freshly, newly. Let go that episode, see it from a new point of view without my projections. So during the acute pain of a separation, mostly we’re talking about attachment to another person but this can refer to any object. Can be useful to go somewhere else for a while, give yourself, your whole self a break by going away and just the distance will give you the ability to stabilize your mind and to gain some sort of peace, some sort of happiness from other sources and then maybe you return to wherever you were. So, that is an important method.
Go away, take a break and that can help. Not essential but it can be very useful. Social convention. So, we’re raised with the belief that to be happy we must have a partner, must have children, we must have a career, we must have a place in society, recognition, we must win whether it’s sports or art or even our sense of humor or whatever. We need to be on top and this, by being an accomplished person, will be happy.
And this social conditioning comes from every direction, from films, from literature, from television, from the relatives, especially from the relatives and I said to Even the pigeons cooing to each other on the roof. We said, Animals, they have happy relationships, why can’t I? This happens to those who are in the throes of misery of attachment. So it’s hard to resist the whole thrust of our social conditioning that to be happy I’ve got to have what everybody else has got. I talk about the happily ever after syndrome, the tales that young children are taught of how the prince and princess kiss after a lot of troubles they meet and kiss and they live happily ever after.
So, you know, we grew up with this concept of meeting the perfect prince or princess and living happily ever after. And it’s ingrained, it’s in our psyche. And it colors the way we look and search and try to live our lives. It’s a lie! So worldly happiness, worldly means happiness under the control of common afflictions, if we get to taste it, is not real happiness.
It’s just a lighter degree suffering. It’s like we have a headache and we take an aspirin or a Panadol and people say, How do you feel? Oh, much better. I feel great. You still got a headache but you say, feel good.
I feel I’m happy now. It’s a lesser degree. And so by craving experience some pleasure. We say, this is real true happiness. But actually it’s not really truly happiness because there is always an undercurrent of anxiety, of worry, even knowledge that it’s only a temporary situation and there’s doubts about our partner doing something with somebody else but superficially we tend suppress this underlying undercurrent of insecurity, of worry and we let go and say I’m really happy.
Remember a cousin of mine, we were very close. We were born within a few weeks of each other. We grew up, we very close together. And her husband, I mean I really liked him, was a nice guy but he was constantly going off with other women and often she would bring the kids to our house as a refuge to get away from this guy for a while and then get back again. Like this would go on and off through their married life.
And I was having dinner with them. I was a monk having a meal and she was, I remember she was saying to her, putting her family out as being the ideal source of happiness, I’m so happy. And I didn’t say anything, Hey, what about your whole history up until now? Do you think it’s not going to happen again? No, I couldn’t say that.
But in all sincere thoughts, think she was trying to say to me, real happiness is family, etc, etc. It’s just what we call peace and happiness, we’re honest, is just a lighter degree of suffering. There is always an undercurrent of worry and anxiety insecurity. Check out. See if it’s there or not.
So, that’s worldly happiness. But when the mind is supported by wisdom seeing reality, real happiness can occur with pleasure. We can enjoy pleasure without being attached. As I said, pleasure is not a problem. It’s attachment to pleasure that’s a problem.
Pleasure we’re trying to, you know, Buddhism wants to make everybody experience pleasure but without the hang ups of attachment and pride and clinging and so on. And that worldly pleasure, I mean, sensory pleasure, mental pleasure is the opposite of suffering. Buddhism is based upon compassion, wanting people to experience as much pleasure as possible but no suffering. We become addicted to the presence of our partners. A real psychological addiction to their presence.
And separation can lead to withdrawal symptoms that can even be more miserable than coming off hard drugs. So I said to her, maybe we should start up a group called Attached Anonymous. There are a lot of people out there hurting, hurting from broken relationships, hurting so much and it’s so useful to share our experience because then we’re like, hey I’m not alone. So many are just like me and that could be really helpful. Are there such groups?
Mean, maybe it’s a good idea, maybe Buddha House can start an Attached Anonymous group. So, we shouldn’t fret about withdrawal from the object of attachment. Unlike drug withdrawal, there’s no organic damage to our nervous system and the pain will pass. The pain is psychologically generated, it’s not some physiological thing and it will pass and we’ve got to recognize that and life will go on. But unfortunately so many commit suicide before they get a chance to realize that.
Inappropriate thinking, we’ve discussed. All right. So I go how to actually, we’ve already been working on how to overcome attachment by recognizing its causes. But on the last page, the real method, the perfect method to eliminate attachment is to see reality. As the self exists merely through the the force of designating I upon our body and mind, it’s suitable to say that wherever our body is, we are and whatever our mind experiences, we experience.
Now this means that the I that does exist is merely designated upon this body and mind. Like the body and mind are the basis of I, of me. And so me, I am established as a person simply by my name or by the label I, the thought, I in relation to this body and mind. And so if somebody calls my name, I say Here I am. I put my hand up.
I’m here. And that is a valid response to that name. But when we say Here I am, within this body there is no I. There’s nothing which we could, if we investigate, pinpoint as me. This body is just a complex collection of atoms and molecules.
It’s the transformed food that we’ve eaten over the last few years. There’s no essence which is me. Not even the chromosomes. They may be unique but they’re not me. Otherwise, time a bit of skin falls off, that’s me not on the floor.
Stop me. So there is no physical essence which is me but we believe somehow we have sense of an essential true me. And the mind, the mind is a constantly changing experience, emotions and happiness, unhappiness. Mind is a continuum of awareness going through different moods and has different levels of happiness, unhappiness, always changing. So it’s like a stream of consciousness.
Again, within the mind, although we have, again, have unique memories, but those memories were experienced by the previous continuum of this body, not this body. I mean the child’s body is not the adult’s body. Even in high school I think I learned that every cell in the entire body, even the bones completely change and after seven years there’s nothing left which was the same seven years before. Everything is constantly changing, changing, changing. So, this is not the body that we have when we’re a child.
There might be scars but even the scars are not the same, they’re continually changing. Scar tissue disappears and more scar tissue replaces it. So there’s no essence that goes through life but we all believe there is. We may not specify what it is but we believe it, there is a true essential me. That is a root ignorance.
And with the person we become become attached to, we see them as a true essential individual too. More than just the name. No, no. It’s the name which identifies him or her, that special, unique entity. That’s a projection of mind and me, the one who wants projection of mind.
So the basis of attachment is false. So there is no self existing in its own right either within our body and mind or separate from them. Attachment arises from wrongly conceiving one’s own self to exist in its own right and wrongly conceiving the self of the thing or the person who pleases us as existing in its own right. So this wrongly conceived I craves never to be separated from the wrongly conceived person. This is the fantasy.
This is the child’s game. This is the game of ignorance. So the ultimate, solution to attachment is to realize that we’re empty of being what we think we are and the person to whom we’re attached is empty of being what we think he or she is. We’re clinging to an idealized, imaginary person who does not exist. This is very subtle but this is the real solution to attachment because seeing the opposite is the cause of attachment.
So temporary, that’s difficult to generate that wisdom. It’s good to just have the intellectual thought. They say just to hear the word emptiness, not even Śūnyatā in Sanskrit, just to hear the word shakes our saṃsāra. Like it really shakes the concrete reality that we have lived since beginningless time. So, Śūnyatā, you should think emptiness.
Just if you find yourself really caught up in an emotional state, even you don’t understand the intellectual presentation of emptiness, say Śūnyatā or emptiness to your mind. Not nothingness, don’t fall into the trap of nihilism. Nothing is real, all is an illusion. That’s not what Buddhism is saying. All is not an illusion but all is like an illusion.
There’s a whole lot of fabrication going on in our lives but there is reality. There is conventional reality. This is real. But it’s not as real as we think it is. Things to think about if we feel that we’ve got attachment.
We’re not saying get rid of the person but we should think that we and the person to whom we’re attached must inevitably separate. Even if one of us is going to die or get bored with the other, separation is inevitable. If we do separate, even if we meet again in future lives, we’re not going to recognize each other. We’re not. Only if we’re highly advanced yogis will we recognize people from past lives.
Like Buddha, he recognized his wife as being, they’d been partners for five hundred lifetimes or something. And he knew it. So he was pretty advanced. But we won’t recognize that. And then we’ve had every relationship with each other.
Attachment makes it impossible for us to concentrate on anything positive whilst our mind is caught out thinking, thinking about the person. We can’t so hard to focus the mind on anything creative. Attachment’s never satisfied. It wants pleasure again and again. And that’s true.
Not enough. We want more and more. Cleaning to unreliable and ever changing friends obstructs our path to real happiness. And we can see this that those who we call friends and we cling to can actually become our enemies. They can often be hurting us and exploiting our friendship.
But why? Because we’re attached, we feel blinded. I’m not saying we abandon loyalty but we’ve got to be realistic. Each of us is fundamentally selfish and we’re out to get as much pleasure as we can from the world and we use each other. Just as I use you, you can use me.
This is reality and that doesn’t mean we don’t have friends but we just know it’s happening. Know it’s there and don’t be disappointed. When you person has really let me down or they’ve been using me, I hate them, they’re exploiting me. Look, it happens. Don’t give up your love for them but don’t cling to them.
As French, you don’t have to be attached and need their company. So be realistic in life. Indulging in attachment completely wastes our human life with its potential to mature in wisdom and compassion. The real importance of being human is to use our intelligence to cultivate our wisdom and our compassion. That we take to our next life.
Our reputation, our collection of baubles, our friends, everything, our career, we cannot take into the next life. But human intelligence gives us the capacity to mature our mind and we will take that into the next life. So the real purpose or what makes human life meaningful is inner growth, psychological growth of wisdom and compassion. This is making human life meaningful, not just indulging in the pursuit of pleasure and happiness. But if we look at what we’re doing, so much is oriented towards immediately, here and now, enjoy and go home and have a sleep.
But that you can’t take with you. And it only breeds attachment. Breeds this belief in the purity, wonderful world and exquisite glory in contaminated objects. Objects arising from karma and affliction. So we’re only cementing our place in the wheel of life.
Running after attachment, objects of attachment is childish, quickly leads to rebirth suffering states through the negative karma that we create. Friends are unreliable. One moment they’re our friend, next moment they’re our enemy. Friends become upset and angry even in joyful situations. So, it’s difficult to please ordinary people.
Those who have an ordinary person is those who have no method or no inclination to improve their mind. Friends can get angry even when we say something beneficial to them and they turn us away from what is beneficial for ourselves. So when the inevitable separation occurs, either through death or one of us rejecting the other, immense pain occurs in proportion to the amount of pleasure we may have derived from each other. When rejected, our frustrated attachment can cause us to become suicidally depressed or intensely angry and even murderous. And the examples are there in the newspapers every day.
So, look, I’ve talked a lot around attachment. I hope that you’ve been able to see your own experience in life in relation to what I’ve been saying. It’s really important that we do recognize and overcome our attachment. We all suffer from it. And I hope it’s been useful for you to listen but maybe you have some Yeah, yeah.
That’s true. It’s very tricky. Detachment, I’m not sure. It’s not abandoning the other for sure. It’s getting rid of the attachment in our mind, not the object of attachment.
And of course with the objects of other people’s attachment, How do we deal with that? Difficult. It’s difficult to work with our own mind, let alone someone else’s mind, but if we start with our own mind then we should keep it private. I don’t think we should there’s no need to tell people, look I’m working on it, on my attachment, etc. We have good communication and we can share the wisdom behind such a thing.
It’s a very personal journey. The spiritual path is totally personal and internal in our own mind. And I think it’s very wise and skillful to, in fact the Lamas give this advice, outwardly be normal. Go to the rock concert or whatever it is, go with the family and enjoy it. Super enjoy it and let them be happy.
This is love. You don’t want to go to the party. You want to meditate or stay, go to the party and enjoy it. Don’t feel miserable or feeling that you’re owed something and just observe, use it as a great opportunity to observe your attachment and your love. So, as we diminish our attachment we should enhance our love.
So it’s great. Actually everything is a great opportunity to train the mind. One time, Lama Yeshe was visiting the Nālānda Monastery in France where I went there in nineteen eighty and started, actually it was the first Tibetan Buddhist monastery in the West for Westerners. Lama Yeshe, my teacher, came to visit and he had this very bad rheumatic fever and very bad heart condition which eventually killed him. And he was staying at the monastery and the Lama, Geshe Chabplot Chok, who was the abbot, the local fête was happening in the village.
And it was a big thing in France, the village fête. And so Geshe Chabplot Chok invited Lama Yeshe to go to the Fate and Lama Yeshe was at times blue, you could see, he was not well and I saw him hesitating. Alright, we go. And it was incredible. He went to the Fête and he’s playing all the games, sideshows and the rolling your coins down and he’s getting and he had so much exuberance.
Know I was watching shouting and joy and laughter and we had this huge circle of people just watching us. Mean we became the main focus of entertainment in the fête. And I went to the Lucky Envelope Stalls. He made this whole production of Lucky Envelopes. It was just wonderful, so much laughter and shrieking. I remember the daughter of the guy who was running the store, she was sort of sitting up on the counter, this little girl, I don’t know, three years old, two or three years old, eating this ice cream and like she just totally forgot about the ice cream and was just watching Lama, she was astonished, the ice cream dripping down here.
So again, the love was so skillful. To me this was a teaching on how to enjoy life, to get in there and use it as part of your path. Used to say, Lama Yeshe used to say in Nepal to the western monks and nuns, there were about thirty five or thirty six of us there Kopan Monastery in Kathmandu, You don’t know how to practice Dharma. Look at you. You’re all sleeping on the ground on straw mats.
I want you to get rubber cushions, rubber mattresses. I want you to eat proper food, don’t eat rice and dal, eat Western food. And like you say, this isn’t renunciation, this is just some sort of superficial. You said, Westerners, you are brought up on pleasure, on comfort. Use comfort, if you don’t, you’ll go crazy.
So really this sort of advice that we got from afraid of pleasure, be afraid of attachment. Yeah. Well perhaps what I said before is don’t identify with attachment as me, not even mine. See it as something else. Attachment, ah, there you go.
Well, you cry attachment. You know, this pain, this hurt is your fault. You created it. So in that way talk to your mind. Don’t identify with it as you or your possession because it’s not actually.
It is something, temporary concern that arises in your mind and you understand where it came from and falling into the misery and this lower self esteem, I’m useless, I can’t do it, I’ve tried and that’s no good. That is falling into the wrong self grasping conception, miserable me. You should feel very strong. I’m going to become a Buddha. I’ve got no time for attachment.
I can become a Buddha. I have Buddha nature. So this affirmative view of your great potential and see attachment. Alright, something to deal with. Does that sort of answer the question?
Okay. In tantra, this is the way. This is why tantra is so quick. With tantra you get the empowerment to visualize yourself as the tantric deity, male, female, many different deities and you identify totally with being Buddha now. And this is a very powerful, very powerful method to deal with the disturbing emotions when they arise.
Just a question. With the you just said, I it’s not you, but when you say, I can become a Buddha, I Yeah. This or that. It’s it’s not a criticism of Buddhism at all, but it’s it’s one of those quandaries that I’ve always had about it where what are we? You know?
Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form. So we’re Right. Well, yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of confusion in the terminology but when you quote the Heart Sūtra, know, form is emptiness, emptiness is form, this is not saying that we are emptiness. It is saying that everything that exists has two natures.
It has an empty nature and a conventional nature. Form to the conventional nature of whatever it is and emptiness refers to the ultimate nature. So they’re one thing. Thing then. And emptiness does not mean nothingness.
That’s the nihilistic interpretation which is totally wrong. It means that whatever exists is empty of inherent existence. There’s your negation. So, we’re not negating whatever exists, we’re negating inherent existence. That’s what we’re negating.
So, the absence of inherent existence is our ultimate nature. Our relative conventional existence is our conventional nature. So, the I does exist. How? As a mere designation designation upon the body and mind.
Where if you have, you know, a human body and mind, alive, well, it has to be alive, you’ve put in mind, then you have a human being, you have a person. And how does that person exist as a person? Through mere labeling, through the mere name that’s given to the body and mind. The body and mind, there’s nothing there which is the person. The person is established by the name on the valid basis.
That’s all. So, when we say I will achieve enlightenment it is the mere I, the merely labeled I which exists, in dependence upon its base, can transform this impure body and mind into the pure body and mind of enlightenment. Transform the impure five aggregates of body and mind into the pure five aggregates of enlightenment. The body and mind of Buddhahood. So, when we say I can become a Buddha, we’re recognizing that the mind which is part of the basis of the label I has the potential to become enlightened because the ignorance and the disturbing emotions are just like superficial disturbances.
They’re not inherently part of the mind. And there’s no the poor, you know, the me that I’ve always identified is an inherent existing I, that doesn’t exist at all. Therefore, the person can become a Buddha. Do we come from a default setting of enlightenment and that stream of consciousness then becomes not enlightened and then we go back to that? Definitely not.
Definitely not. It’s impossible because a Buddha is, again, Buddha is just merely labeled. There’s no inherent existing Buddha’s. And a Buddha is a person who is their persons, their minds are totally free of ignorance and all of the ramifications of ignorance, the karma and other disturbing emotions that come from ignorance, and their minds have accumulated the vast collections of wisdom and compassion and so they unified wisdom and compassion. It’s impossible for a mind which is the unification of wisdom and compassion to become ignorant.
Impossible. So we were never Buddhas in the past. So to the echelon, if it’s incremental, it rises? Not necessarily. We can, until we gain the wisdom directly realizing emptiness, we can always lose realizations.
We can lose our intellectual understanding. We can lose our love. We can lose our compassion. We can fall. It’s only when we are in this in pure uninterrupted meditative stabilization that we have direct realization of emptiness.
Only then is it an incremental progressive rise towards Buddhahood without falling. And that’s a long way on the path. Until we get there we can always lose everything. Not totally everything, but lose a lot. That’s why I didn’t talk about it.
Sure I can. Time’s up! I didn’t include this to my niece by the way. Well if you read Śāntideva’s chapter, no no, Śāntideva’s Way of the Bodhisattva where he talks about meditation. What plagues the meditator is attachment.
You isolate yourself, you’re in retreat but your mind just goes off in fantasies of desire and attachment. So this is specific instruction given in the Lam Rim teachings for meditators who are experiencing attachment in meditation retreat. But it also can work in everyday life. That’s why I put it in. So it is to meditate like there is maybe just a fantasized body to which you’re attached.
And so, as you can imagine, it’s covered in blood or as a skeleton or as a corpse and etcetera, etcetera. And this, you use this consciously to diminish diminish your desire for the particular part of the body of the person of attachment, right? I’ve often told the story that when I was a medical student in second year medicine you start dissecting human corpses you’re in the dissection room for hours and hours, week after week, cutting up bodies and so you’re learning anatomy. And I noticed I used to catch the train and then the tram to Melbourne University and of course you always check out the girls in the carriage and the I noticed that I see a beautiful girl but then I’d start mentally dissecting you. Especially when you’re dissecting the face and you’re peeling back the skin and I thought suddenly they lost their attractiveness to me.
So you can try that. Yeah. I mean this brings up the scientific belief that whatever exists in, say, the human organism has evolved for a purpose. Right? There’s a survival reason for that to be there.
Now, mean, sure, Buddhism would say definitely to be born human you have to have attachment to being human. Attachment to the pleasures of human existence. That is one of the main causes to be born human. So, we’re born with desire and attachment for human type pleasures. And that indeed fascinating introducing karma and reincarnation into the picture of evolution.
I feel it can be done and answers so many unanswered questions. I’ll leave it to some other brain to write about it. So, I don’t like the word purpose because it in one way it makes one think of some divine purpose or some premeditated reason for existence. Whereas we didn’t have premeditated reasons for rebirth in Samsāra and nobody would have a premeditated reason to be born in hell, but most of us are born in hell. Oh yeah, but that’s right.
It has desire for milk, has desire for the comfort of its mother and the presence of its mother and it makes use of what’s offered to it. It has desire for food. I mean, we didn’t have but that’s not that simple desire is not necessarily attachment. Attachment is the whole what we’ve been talking about is the clinging, craving, wanting. When the baby experiences pleasure it becomes attached to that pleasure.
Its whole psychophysical organism is there to feed, to be looked after. That’s not attachment. It’s just the whole karmic conditioning, not just of humans but of animals or whatever. Whatever life pattern they’re born into. But we can survive without attachment.
We don’t need attachment for survival. In fact, makes survival difficult and makes life difficult. We can survive with love and with wisdom. And there are many like the Dalai Lama, he was born as a baby. He nursed his mother’s breast, etcetera, etcetera.
No attachment. Purpose? Compassion. karma isn’t the only reason for rebirth. Even before enlightenment, compassion is a big reason for rebirth.
And even we can in some way gain some sort of direction when we’re dying to just have the thought wherever I’m to think of the suffering, not your own suffering when you’re dying, but think of everybody else’s suffering. And think wherever I go in my next life, may I be able to help reduce the suffering of the world. Not just human suffering. And that would be incredible. That amazing karma will ripen then.
To be born in such a state, you won’t remember that intention. But the future mind which will be the continuity of your mind will have that tendency to want to help others. And we know a lot of children, you see, are all incredibly compassionate and some of them are incredibly destructive, you know, different. Alright? So, there’s some purpose there but it’s not attachment.
All right, so anyway, look, thank you for your attention and your patience and putting up with my talking. And it’s been a great pleasure to talk to you tonight. And I hope I’ve inspired in you to wish to seek further explanations of the mind and the disturbing emotions. And I hope that I’ve given you something that you can use for yourself and make your life and the lives of your family and all those who depend upon you happier. That’s what it’s all about.
So thank you very much.