Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:14 Welcome to my Bob Thurman podcast. I'm so grateful. Some good friends enabled me to present them to you. If you enjoy them and find them useful, please think of becoming a member of Tibet house us to help preserve Tibetan culture. Tibet house is the dial Lamas cultural center in America. All best wishes. Have a great day.
Speaker 3 00:00:48 This is episode 305 motivation of the Bodi
Speaker 4 00:01:19 And this I'm calling according to a Tibet's own metaphor, the wish granting gem tree path. So let's begin by visualizing that let your habitual identity, and self-image go into sort of meditation pose comfortably unless you're driving in that case. Keep your eyes open and on the road and just let it happen, incidentally. So close your eyes or partially close them. Sit in a balance posture, breathe evenly and gently open up a field of vision above your forehead. Not looking with the eyes, but looking somehow up in the top of your forehead, like where the third eye would be. If you were a fierce day in the center of your forehead and looking up that way, sit comfortably, let yourself feel vast and spacious, calm. Let the world dissolve around you, whatever your habitual town and building, and body and era and country and planet and continent. Let these all kind of dissolved. Let yourself be sort of unsure where you are. Let it become a kind of gentle spacious voidness feeling of freedom floating, and then arise from that on top of the world on a grassy bluff, looking down over lake Manso, Rover, a giant crystal lake, you can barely see the far shores
Speaker 4 00:03:06 You're at 13,000 feet. There is clear and pure there's fluffy clouds in the sky in front of you is an island offshore, a jewel island with all kinds of mythic creatures, Pring around the kind of garden. The center of the island is a giant tree Springs forth from the earth like Jack and the beanstalks type of thing. Like going way up into the heavens out of sight. This giant tree is glistening made of jewel substance luminous like a Christmas tree, except in place of the Christmas ornaments. There are flowers, drones, and on them are seated. Enlightened beings, human and divine. And each of you can create your own tree here. You can have Budha. If you're a Tibetan Buddhist, you would have your own personal Lama or guru or mentor who would be dressed in the form of guru and Pache or ZK or SA Panta or mil REPA, Kapok Cark or his home as the Alma and then in his heart would be the Shakia Budha, the historical Buddha of 2,500 years ago. And in Shamo Buddha's heart would be a little Vada with his cons blue, the sort of divine Budha form, male and female.
Speaker 4 00:04:39 If you are a Christian, you might have Jesus there perhaps in his heart would be God on his throne. And perhaps Mary would be there perhaps in her heart would be Jesus. And perhaps in Jesus' heart would be some vision of God esoteric vision of God. If you're a Muslim, you could imagine Muhammad being there or as a Muslim, you can't have an icon, but you could still think of the prophet as he was historically in your own imagination. If you're Jewish, you could think of Moses or one of the great rabbis rabbi, a Kiva. If you're Hindu, you could have Krishna or Rama. Orita RAA. The Gaddes Shakti. Shva. If you're a Dallas, you could have LAA there za. Or if you're a humanist, you could have Plato, Socrates, PTAs, whoever is meaningful to you. Or you could have all of them there. If you want to have all the Pantheon of all the great teachers
Speaker 4 00:05:44 Could have your teachers of this lifetime, your third grade, French teacher, your history teacher, your civics teacher, whoever was a meaningful person to you who opened your eyes. You've taught you the alphabet taught you how to do this or that made you understand something new about your life, about yourself. Your parents could be there in the presence of such a person. You feel secure, you feel they have a superior knowledge to yours. You feel that you have learned from them. You could learn from them, whoever you want. I myself, think of his ho as the DMA, indivisible from all the teachers I've ever had very kind teachers, ER, ER, my own personal sort of history. All the teachers, I see them all fused in one being who looks like his Homa in a way, having thought of all of them as his emanations. And then he has fused with ZBA and then he has fused with Guer and then he is fused with Shaki, Buda, and then they fused with a Mandu and with RA that's my own pan. Don't worry if some of them unfamiliar to you, you put whatever is your Pantheon, so that you feel that you're in the presence of your highest mentors.
Speaker 4 00:07:11 And then you feel that they really are there. You don't just think you having a unstable vision of them. You think of them as really being there in this wish fulfilling gem tree, giant tree that fills the whole space in front of you, radiates Juul lights to you and these beings are there and they're looking at you and they're saying how nice, so and so is just meditating there. They're trying to pick themselves up by their own bootstraps, trying to contemplate, become more aware. There's traveling the path to enlightenment what a wonderful thing. And they smile down at you from their listening smiles, light rays radiate and flow toward you. And those light rays are diamond crystal coherent, light, laser liquid gentle though flowing Ruby, Emerald Topaz, Sapphire fire, the spectrum flowing toward you.
Speaker 4 00:08:08 Amethyst liquid Juul, light flowing into you, filling you up with light, making you feel energetic and buoyant lifting you almost from your sense of heaviness, driving out of your mind, your usual worries about your own self identity and self image like I'm. So and so I don't only understand this much in that your own self-imposed limitations, your own inner voice that talks to you and you think it's your voice. So you think it's your mind that is thinking these thoughts and habitual monologues inside are washed away by this Niagara of jewel light. It flows down from this gem tree and fills you up in a glowing listening being, and you become your whole potential, any sense that you have that well, I'm gonna listen to some teaching. I'm gonna meditate. And, but of course it's gonna be me doing it. I'll come out of it afterwards. And then maybe I'll go back later, but I'll be the same old me, that whole attitude dissolving, just floating out of you in the form of sort of dark, shadowy, little Scutty thoughts and just sort of dropping your thoughts and just embracing the light and feeling good in it. Feeling everything is possible. Feeling open to new understanding, feeling open to seeing your own faults in a new way and rising above them and using them to spring yourself into new virtuous qualities.
Speaker 4 00:09:42 And then you recognize around you. You've noticed in the field, around you on this bluff, that's looking over the lake out of which the great giant jewel tree Springs. You notice that all beings are around you all in human form and in the front row are the beings that you recognize and towards your left are the beings that you like and you feel attachment to in front of you are the beings that you don't know, and you have a kind of ignorant disinterest in and to the right of you a little bit are the beings that you don't like. And you're quite aware that they don't like you. In fact, just thinking of them being there makes you feel nervous and ill at ease and sort of restless and paranoid at first, so that you feel a version, even anger and hatred towards the beings in the one direction, you feel ignorance and disinterest towards the being straight in front and you feel attachment and fondness toward the beings toward the left. And you immediately think, why am I reacting like this with these beings?
Speaker 4 00:10:50 The ones I like now, I like, because they're nice to me and they're friendly and I get along with them and they do nice things for me. If they started being really nasty to me over a regular period, I would pretty soon move them over to the right category being, I don't wanna see beings. I don't like. So in fact, my liking them is just because they're nice to me, the beings in front of me, I just simply don't know them. They might be the nicest, most beautiful people and with great things that I might become very attached to them. If I got to know them and the beings to the right of me, who I don't like if they just mean to me is what it is. Maybe I was mean to them. Maybe they're getting revenge. In fact, I know now that some of the beings in the like category have been in the not like category and some of the beings in the most, not like category were very dearly liked in the past. So there's nothing intrinsic in these beings that makes them that inherently likable or inherently unlikable. It's just my attachment and aversion and my ignorance that separates the three beings into these three categories. So we try to sort of equalize, we are a little less attached to the attached ones and be a little less averse to the disliked ones and take a little interest in the unknown ones, realizing all of the great potential that they have.
Speaker 4 00:12:05 And these beings, all of them, all three of them are looking at you. And they're seeing you begin to glow. They're noticing that your usual form changes a little bit and you start to radiate and you start to luminesce and then the light flows out toward them as it overflows from you. And they don't see the refuge gem tree. They're not looking at it, they're looking at you, but in fact, the light of the wish granting gem tree from you, flows to them and they feel happy. Those who like you, they feel interested, intrigued those who don't know you, and they feel annoyed and competitive. Those who know you and dislike you, but that gives them a little stimulus and they feel challenged and quickened and awakened. And so back from them comes a kind of stimulating energy, whether it's competition or whether it's interest or whether it's fondness and love and gratitude. In any case, an energy loop comes back to you of encouragement just as you send energy to your mentors of feeling loving and secure and friendly and peaceful and grateful for their blessing. So this is the setting within which we set up the path of meditation in each of our sessions. And we can sometimes even keep it alive in our daily life, have a feeling that this heavenly host is there in the sky.
Speaker 4 00:13:30 The culture of Tibet was sort of like that our sessions here together, we're calling on this retreat Tibet's wish granting gem tree because the whole of Tibetan culture became like this after many centuries. So many people were visioning in their meditation sky, their mentor GU and Pache or Artisha or Z SA Panta or mil REPA. They were visioning in sky such beings as looking after their welfare, as concerned for them. Tara have look at dish Farra, the bud of compassion, the angels of compassion. And so they began to feel that these beings were always present in the space around them. And then to symbolize that they went onto the mountains and they carved on man pad Mahu, the mantra of great compassion, the letters on all over the mountains, and they carved giant Buddhas and Budva and angels and mentors and Lamas and deities and things in all the Hills and mountains. So as you would ride around to bed, you would be reminded all the time of the presence of all the enlightened beings shining upon you and lifting you up out of your ordinary negative habits and putting you into the mode of seeking your own evolutionary fulfillment of seeking happiness, of seeking to fulfill your deeper wishes for yourself and for all beings. And they created this wonderful culture out of that, where everything became some sort of way of reminding you of your highest aim as a human being in life.
Speaker 4 00:15:00 So this is the environment that we are dwelling in during this retreat. And we have withdrawn from the other environment of sort of the normal American Pantheon, where we have B 52 twos, overhead <laugh> and satellite dishes with big corporations radiating poor sitcoms and with politicians in the white house and with inadequacy and with hungry, starving people all over the planet and violence and hatred, everywhere, religious and ethnic and so on and a planet that is being polluted. And that it's future seemingly lost almost ozone layer depleted. We drop out of all that one. And we're in this different realm where all the bud Savas are hovering in the Starship, wish fulfilling gem tree and radiating their light around us. So everything is possible for us in this context.
Speaker 4 00:15:55 Now that we're in that we now turn to the path when we meditate or when we practice or when we learn something, or even when we spend the day we in the morning, we should always think about our motivation. Why am I here giving this meditation? Is it just because this is like my job, is it because I want to become rich and famous? Is it because I want to be healthy or have more fun? Is it some sort of self-centered purpose like that? Is it in fact something I want to get out of it right now in this life? Or is it because I care for all beings? Is it because I want to become enlightened and awakened for the sake of every being? Is it because I'm not anymore content to be just temporarily happy myself as an egocentric separated person, but I want to have the real deep happiness that comes from knowing that others I love are happy.
Speaker 4 00:16:55 And finally, knowing that everyone is happy, this motivation, which is our main topic of today, the motivation of the Bova, the will to perfectly awaken and become perfectly wise and perfectly compassionate and loving. So as to be capable of helping all other beings to become perfectly happy and perfectly wise, this is really the motivation with which I should do whatever it is that I do even every day. I should remind myself of the fundamental opportunity of the human being, my fundamental opportunity as a free human being, with access to the teaching of freedom. And I should be motivated everything I do oriented toward that for myself and for others inevitably creeps in, well, I just want a little more this or that, or I think I should, or I just want to like go through it. I want other people to think that I'm doing something or whatever it is. And all these types of motivation do creep in to our attitudes. And then unfortunately, whatever that motivation is, it condemns whatever we do to only serving that. And if it's a lower aim, then it will only have a lower result.
Speaker 4 00:18:06 And when we're learning, we should always try to avoid the faults of a learner, this certain type of pride thinking. I already know it all anyway. We should never think that even if we've heard it a thousand times, we should think I'm gonna learn something new. I'm gonna see it deeper. I don't really know what it is all about it really. I just heard the words. So we don't have the flaw of the covered vessel, however much beautiful things you try to put in the covered vessel. It just falls off and splashes on the floor spills because the vessel has a lid on it and nothing can go in it.
Speaker 4 00:18:44 And then the second floor of the vessel we should avoid is the leaky vessel by having no mindfulness and no memory, we hid in one ear and out the other type of thing, and our mind is wandering and we're paying no attention. And then the whatever grade, the thing is poured in that vessel, it just leaks right on out. Then the third floor of the vessel we should avoid is the poison vessel. It doesn't leak and it's open, but inside our mix, the poisons of egocentric, greed, delusion, and hatred, and we are doing something to gain power, to gain revenge over some people to be more powerful, we're doing something to gain profit. And so we're mixing it with greed or we're doing something to confirm our ignorance. We're just sort of finding new ways to rationalize our existing ignorance. So that would be the poison vessel.
Speaker 4 00:19:36 So we wanna avoid all of these things and be receptive and be attentive and mindful, motivated by learning for realizing the aim of our human life, which is to become free and wise and loving with that thought in mind. Now we run through our AEDO. Remember we are learning these stages of the path as it were a kind of, AEDO like a set of scales that you learn as a musician. And so the first set of scales lead up to the mind of transcendence, which we achieved yesterday and therefore main notes in that ape. And the first is appreciating our precious human embodiment endowed with Liberty and opportunity. What a wonderful life we do have free of major defects with access to the great teachings of liberation and omniscience and awakening with the time and the understanding and the assistance and the community that helps us put these into practice.
Speaker 4 00:20:47 So remember that note quickly hit it. I don't want to go back into it cause we have a lot of other things to do today. Then the second note is the immediacy of death. Remember that we shouldn't go on acting like we're gonna be here forever. Like we habitually do. We should recognize that we definitely will die just quickly sort of subtract ourself, identifying ourself as our body mind complex that we attach our name to subtract ourself from the relationships that we are in realize that we will die out of them. Possessions, friends, loved ones, name fame, all will be gone. Superficial knowledge, all will be gone. Then reflecting this certainty that we don't know when we will die so we could die at any time. Every moment could be our last.
Speaker 4 00:21:45 And then finally remember that when we do die, it is only the Dharma freedom itself, reality itself. Our knowledge of that reality, how we have incorporated those teachings of the nature of reality into our life, through openness and generosity and patience. And so on only those subtle, most inner qualities in their inner core of our being in our souls as it were, they will be the only thing to benefit us when we do die. The second note combined with appreciating our precious human life, the fact that any moment could be the last and that the essence of the moment is the deep inter condition of the mind. We turn to the third one where we interconnect that moment, that infinite moment to the cause and effect of karma, seeing how everything about our current moment is determined by all of our past evolutionary actions of body, speech, and mind, and then everything positive about it came, come from the positive actions and what is negative about it is created by our negative actions and therefore every action that we do now, even the subtles thought, which is a mental action, as well as a word, as well as a physical action leads to an infinite result in the future, either positive or negative, meaning that each little tiny thing in the present moment is infinite in its impact, tremendous intensity in this tremendous mindfulness of even the subtles most element in our being fourth note is the inadequacy of all egocentric life states, including being a God, including being a king, including being a billionaire, including being a star, including being whatever it is we think would be great to be, but envisioned as an egocentric being even including being a Buddha.
Speaker 4 00:23:44 If we think of a Buddha, some big being who gets to sit on a throne as some sort of a big shot as sort of the biggest egocentric being or something <laugh>, but meanwhile, being a totally selfless being, but we have notions of a Budha naturally because we can't imagine a selfless being it's unimaginable to us to think of how we could be here and yet just as well, be all the other people here at the same time and be all the people in the town and all the other people in the city and all the other people in the country and the state and the universe at the same time as being responsibly, a particular person here, or several different persons here, that's inconceivable to us, such a vast cloudlike being. So naturally we are a being that is enclosed in our own little envelope of our senses, our eyes and ears and nose and tongue and skin.
Speaker 4 00:24:35 And with our mind imagining things a little more than that, but still, we're basically enclosed inside this sheet of skin, this sheet of senses. And we imagine all other beings are like that. But here we reflect in our fourth note on the inadequacy of all states of such a being, if I think I'm something inside here and the rest of the world is outside there, it will always defeat me my struggle with the rest of the world. All the other beings will always be a losing struggle. And this is the teaching of suffering. This is the teaching that Samara the cycle of life based on self versus other based on the false habit of absolutizing the self thinking, I'm it, I'm the one.
Speaker 4 00:25:22 This is the deep teaching of the suffering of all of that. This fourth note is therefore the deep acknowledgement that all states even the seemingly highest states are inadequate are fundamentally suffering from the point of view of the higher happiness relative to the higher happiness, the absolute happiness, the Supreme happiness of enlightenment of wisdom, of the wisdom of selflessness. Once we realized these four notes, preciousness of our human life endowed with Liberty and opportunity, the immediacy of death and sensuality of the soul of death, the Dharma soul interconnection through cause and effect of evolutionary action, subtle, and course of everything infinitely and the suffering and frustrating inadequacy of all relative states of the egocentric being contrary to getting really super depressed, as you might think, we gain a great relief. We feel a wonderful buoyant energy of transcendence. We excuse ourselves from all poultry ambitions to be rich or famous or powerful or muscular or beautiful or whatever it is that is just a temporary state or even divine.
Speaker 4 00:26:53 And we give up any ambition towards any of that. So therefore all of the things that we do to go and make money to go and be famous, to go and be powerful, to go and have possessions, to be liked by many people, all of this sort of anxious activity that we nervously and expectedly do all the time based on these ephemeral goals that are ultimately worthless and ultimately unsatisfying we're free of all of that. We can drop out. We can just pick up our begging bowl and just hang out and go on vacation from all of the worldly obligations. It is a tremendous thing. That is why monks and nuns are actually always smiling and cheerful and why they have a kind of presence. People like to hang out with them because they don't have the same set of wants and desires that people who are seething with worldly ambitions have.
Speaker 4 00:27:44 So anyway, this is the mind of transcendence. We just kaleidoscope is what we achieved yesterday. Now, you know it, so now you have it and now you're kind of a free person spending your free time here today. Not because you're getting this or that, but because you're free and you're just like enjoying the prospect of greater and greater freedom. So you feel happy. You feel relieved when you think of your friends and you think of your ambitious friends studying and working and dreading and saving and investing and nervously looking at the internet. You realize that they're like insects in a way caught in a treadmill. So an and an visually rushing, grabbing something and rushing over the other place or bees running around, grabbing pollen, endlessly buzzing, nervously getting something. And you feel free of that. You realize the worthlessness of all of those aims, you feel relief and you feel pleased because you really respect yourself.
Speaker 4 00:28:46 Now you really respect your human embodiment, the evolutionary achievement, that you are, the awareness that you have of the suffering nature of any sort of habitual state and the sense of interconnection and the optimism that nothing that you do, even if the planet does get destroyed next week, if you are in a positive frame of mind, if you are aiming at the positive, you, you go on infinitely, you'll be reborn in another one and you'll be in a better state because you'll be more generous, more loving, more wise, more open. So you feel really cool. And then you begin to look around. And now we come to the stage of the path that we're focusing on today.
Speaker 4 00:29:31 Spirit of enlightenment of love and compassion, but it cannot be developed. People say, oh, I'm gonna be a <inaudible>. I don't wanna be a monk, or I don't need all that monastic stuff. All that hi, people will say that individual vehicle, or even people will call it the lesser vehicle or something derogatory like that, which never was a name of monastic Buddhism, the great profound and crucial tradition of monastic Buddhism. But hi, only referred to an attitude of some monks and nuns in ancient time, when it occurs in the Sutra of the Mah, in the scriptures of the universal vehicle, as they call themselves the great vehicle on which all beings are to ride, to reach enlightenment that Buddha created the expression individual vehicle refers only to those monastics who deny that the Buddha had such a great vehicle. So it doesn't refer to every Teva, monk, and nun at all, or anyone who is a monk and nun.
Speaker 4 00:30:33 This is an error. Like there was something lesser about being a monk and a nun. It is fabulous to be a monk. And a nun is one of the great things one can do for the world to be a monk and a nun. And for yourself, a person who really loved themself, it's like, I'm so fabulous. A being that I'm going to protect myself, I guess, wasting any of my time, making money, paying mortgages, producing children, growing food, any sort of thing. I'm not gonna waste my time doing that. I'm gonna just beg some food from people who like to do that. There are some who do, who don't think that there's any other thing they can do, although I'm gonna quickly disabuse them of that. Even as they're feeding me, I'm gonna say, well, you really shouldn't be working to earn the money to make this food, to feed me. You should join me and just drop out and be on vacation and seek freedom because that's what the human life is for is seeking freedom. Of course, many people will not do that anyway, even I urge them to, but they'll feel a little more free that I'm seeking freedom in fact.
Speaker 4 00:31:41 And so talk about self love and self appreciation. True self appreciation is why would I waste my human brain playing a video game? It's a fantastic engine of freedom and openness and awakeness that I have. Why would I waste that? Not meditating on ultimate freedom, not cultivating love and compassion, not being transcended and dropping out. Why would I spend any time not doing that? So being a monk and a nun is being good to yourself. Avoiding many sufferings in many anxieties and many preoccupations that people have, and they spend precious moments of their human life, doing nothing evolutionarily, developing, but just like making money or being more selfish or fighting with another or whatever they do.
Speaker 4 00:32:34 So there is no Nia, it's a bunch of institutions or something like that. Absolutely not. Tibet in fact is the biggest Hiana country in the world. It had the most monks and nuns and monasteries. It's the only one. If you're gonna go wrongly call hi, that I'm being ironic. There are more Tebo monks and nuns in Tibet than in all the other so-called Teva countries combined. Hi only meant individual vehicle only meant some person, whether they were a lay person or a Uck didn't matter, who had an idea that Buddha only taught a certain group of teachings and that Buddha didn't teach the great teachings of love and compassion, except incidentally, in terms of meditating on boundless love and so on. But didn't actually teach the Bodhi vehicle, the Buddha who was referred to even in the poly literature as a BofA, before he becomes a Buddha, somehow didn't teach the Bova vehicle. So some people have that attitude, they become literalistic and they dogmatically attached to some texts that are purported to be the text of the Budha. And they say, oh, another text, can't be Budha. Couldn't have done something around the corner that we didn't see.
Speaker 4 00:33:48 And then that's called he and mean kind of narrow minded attitude. Thinking that the Buddha is not this amazing being that can do whatever it takes that teaches anything that beings need to be liberated, not the founder of a dogmatic institution, some religion, but the ultimate teacher, the ultimate educator, who having realized that beings can find their freedom and make their life fulfilling and achieve their happiness. By learning only by cultivating, their understanding only was forced to be an educator. Couldn't just be a prophet. Although he did do prophecies, couldn't just be a founder of institutions. Although he did found institutions, couldn't be giving sort of orders from God, because he found out that the gods didn't really know what to do. <laugh> that gods asked him, what should they do? The gods were his disciples as a teacher.
Speaker 4 00:34:45 So the kind of attitude that says, oh, no, Buda only taught the thing that I know that I heard from Buddha. And that's what Buddha is, who think they know the Buddha, that's the narrowminded attitude. And there is otherwise no such individual vehicle, all of Buddha's vehicles were for everyone. So now we come to the cart of the Budha DMA. Perhaps if you wanted to say one word of what is the essence of Buddha teaching of the enlightenment teaching the phrase of Nagar Juna the great master of 2000 years ago in India, which Atisha the Bengali teacher who went to Tibet a thousand years ago said was his favorite expression, all expressions, Tibetan ING, where the most beautiful word in Tibetan, too Ning means the heart. You know, Don need Ningbo, meaning freedom, the womb of compassion.
Speaker 4 00:36:00 If there's anything that is the motto of Budha revelation of Budha gospel, it is good news. It is freedom. The womb of compassion, Kana or Ning J compassion, too many people think that bald Budha had found out was that the world sucks that everything is horrible and life is horrible. And that the Nirvana means the extinction of life. And therefore these people, myself included feeling frightened of all this pains and sufferings of life. And particularly when they go beyond the modern materialistic view, that there's only this one life to suffer in, and then you become nothing. And when they realize that there's an infinite continuity of your awareness, and you can never get away from your awareness and therefore there's the danger of infinite future lives in which you'll suffer. We become so frightened of that idea at a deep subliminal level that we long for oblation, we long for oblivion.
Speaker 4 00:37:07 It is selfish, but we think there's nothing we can really do for others to just sort of mention to them, Hey, why don't you get oblivion too? Cause we are just all gonna suffer together. Nothing we can do for you. And so let's jump into Nirvana and we'll be gone. And then we meditate. Or we do this in that practice. And basically we think that what Buddhism is, is some kind of marvelous, yogic, meditative technology of achieving an altered state. We can call it awakening. We can call it enlightenment many grand things, but we basically are waiting for the day when we will be obliterated. We talk about vast empty space and we think we are gonna leave the problems of life, of interconnection, of bumping into beings and things and stubbing our toe and having obligations and complications. And we think, wow, where am I go? Infinite space. I reach infinite solitude, infinite, quiet. I'm just, nobody bugs me forever. What a great thing.
Speaker 4 00:38:04 I know so many people in different centers, I used to tease them. You had a great session and it means like an intensive meditation retreat and you really were into it and you stopped your mind and you stopped your body. And then the only big bring down was the end of it, where darn it. You were still there. <laugh> you had to get up and wash the dishes, change your underwear. So you felt you made it. You didn't succeed. You hadn't achieved that. Enlightenment viewed as an oblation, as an absolute oblation, call it freedom, call it Nirvana call. But you're like, basically you're envisioning it as an oblation.
Speaker 4 00:38:52 This is completely wrong. This is foolish. This is breaking the basic law of the Buddhist view. The view of interconnectedness, which was Buddhist, great revelation. There is no non interconnected thing. There is no nothing. That is the essence of his teaching. There is no such thing as nothing. Nothing is the word for that, which does not exist. Therefore, there is no such thing. Therefore, no one is going to become nothing. You cannot become nothing. It is impossible. It is a MIS expression. It is a MIS mistake. It is mise precisely to get even a sense of how distorted our mind is working in our unenlightened state. We should think about how deeply we feel. There is nothing. We want to meditate and enter nothing. We can have experiences as if we're in a realm of nothing really concrete and no, almost we hit a conviction.
Speaker 4 00:39:54 Like it's a real thing in a place and no one can convince us it isn't. It is said it was very difficult once we really gain that conviction and that experience. But logically we can understand there is no such thing. And therefore, any experience we're having is the experience of our picture of such a thing. And the fact that we can make a concrete picture of something that could not be pictured, proves that we are living in a world of our own imagination. Rather than that, the world really is what we are imagining it to be.
Speaker 4 00:40:31 So there is no nothing near Anna S is not nothingness voidness freedom. These terms refer to precisely the fact that there is no absolute thing in itself within things that is the essence of them. It refers to the fact, therefore that all things are totally interrelated. There's nothing in us that is not related to other things, no mind that is not related. No speech, no body, no physical thing, no soul that is not related. There is nothing in us that is not related to everything else. That's what emptiness means. We are empty of any isolated essence of any non-connected essence. We are free of any such non-connected isolated alienated essence. That is what it means. Therefore, enlightenment is realizing that and therefore enlightenment is realizing our inexorable interconnectedness.
Speaker 4 00:41:27 The vast space is nothing but the surface of the relations of all things, all of the interconnected things are emptiness. Therefore emptiness is the womb of compassion. Meaning that realizing that emptiness, we are freed of the delusion that we have carried from. Beginningless time that there's an essence in us, an absolute one thing that's apart from everything that is the real us that we can sort of get back into and withdraw into and get away from all of the burdens of connections and obligations. And when we get rid of that sort of absolute ized place of self, what it gives birth to is that we don't find an absolute isolated place of self, which is a nothing, of course not. That's only the last trap. We break through nothing, which is our last reification in a way we break through it. And we find we are face to face with everything being face to face with everything.
Speaker 4 00:42:35 That aspect of everything that is most compelling of our attention are the other living beings, especially the ignorant ones who are suffering, who think of themselves as something isolated from the rest of the world and are therefore in struggle with the rest of the world who don't know their own emptiness, who don't know their own reality and freedom, and who think they're bound in their struggle to get away from their bondage of connection, into some absolute self center that is apart from everything. And they attract our attention because they are these points of agony and suffering. Even if they're human, that's relatively relaxed or divine. If they're in the lower states, they're like deeply compressed agonized suffering, which we think of in metaphors of burning or freezing or being crushed or dismembered and cut and severed and chopped, you know, like the hell visions. And so those beings who are suffering, those things become completely compelling because our mind through emptiness expands vastly and embraces them as us and their suffering is ours.
Speaker 4 00:43:48 At that point. Although, fortunately, because we know reality because we, we don't leave emptiness because freedom is infinite or solidly within that emptiness in a way, or we solidly are that emptiness. Therefore we can bear being aware of their theaters of agony as if they were virtual realities. We know they are virtual realities because we can therefore defy the supposed law of subjectivity by the fact that when we know the suffering of other beings, it's a virtual reality where we see them essentially, in a sense free of it while desperately riving in their constantly self-reinforcing conviction of being trapped in it, even all of their elements that are wound up in that tight tension still are ultimately space. They're free. It's like the space between the cells is like vast bliss. We see it in binary, double vision in a way we see them as suffering, realizing how awful it is for them.
Speaker 4 00:44:57 And therefore completely dedicated through compassion to helping them become free. And yet we are not dragged into their suffering because we also see a deeper reality within them, as well as everything else of bliss. So here enlightenment is not an escape. Enlightenment is not some sort of oblation. Enlightenment is fully being here now, but the now is of infinite duration. And the here is of infinite extension. It is not a here now that is an isolated, private moment of my own. It is a here and now that includes all the vast sky full of mother living beings. So that is voidness or freedom, the womb of compassion. And that compassion is our topic today.
Speaker 3 00:46:04 The Bob Thurman podcast is produced under creative comments, no derivatives license. Please be sure to like share and repost on your favorite social media platforms. This recording is an excerpt from the jewel tree of Tibet available through sounds true. Music for the Bob Thurman podcast is generously supplied by tensing Showga to learn more about the work and music of tensing Showga please visit his website. Thanks for tuning in Tasha.
