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 2 00:00:48 This is episode 302, the truth of karma and being here now under the jewel tree of Tibet,
Speaker 4 00:01:19 The first two stages of the path. One is the preciousness of human life endowed with Liberty and opportunity, which is the one that we have. If we're listening to this, and two is the awareness of the immediacy of death. And each one of those. Remember when we go on in our lifelong retreat from this time, we can spend days and months and years reflecting on them and we can bring them into our study of biology and history and natural history and so forth. And we can bring them into our experience of life. And so be meditating on them, not only in times of retreat or withdrawal meditation, but at all times. So these are the two, and now we move to the third one where by the combining of the first two of these themes, we've come into this sense of the intensity and the immediacy and the infinity of the moment and the preciousness of the moment to invest in our deepest, inner, spiritual, essential transformation.
Speaker 4 00:02:17 And being there. We now turn to the third theme near a PIO, which is the theme of inexorability of the cause and effect of evolutionary action, how we are being developed by what we have done and what we do not only physically done verbally done, mentally done also. And then how, what we now do in mind and speech and body will determine how we will become and the differences and the different forms and idiosyncrasies of all beings and all things and all worlds. In fact, depends on this inexorable causality of evolutionary action or karma, what is called karma, but it's not some mysterious thing. Karma doesn't mean fate, although in a way it occupies the place of fate, but karma means evolution, evolutionary causality. For example, if you have killed many beings in past lives, then you get a shorter life. You get a difficult existence.
Speaker 4 00:03:16 You end up in subhuman states of existence, of fear and crystallized, paranoia and agony and killing and destruction. If you have taken what is not given, you get a very spare and sparse environments, you suffer and you starve and you're poor, and you never have sufficiency in quantity because you took away from others in previous lives. If you commit sexual misconduct, you become ugly and you become in out of control. You lose control of yourself and you're exploited and abused by others and so forth in other lives. If you tell untruth, then you in the future life, you become where no one believes what you do and say and where you're always confused. And, and you don't know what is true and untrue and so on. So the ethical law in Buddhism is like a law of nature. It's like a law of biology. Just like for example, we know that if you train, if you become a runner and you run five miles a day, then your legs become strong.
Speaker 4 00:04:10 It isn't that somebody then rewards you with strong legs because you ran, they're running itself, changes the structure of the muscle, the leg, and you become stronger and stronger, no pain, no gain. You sort of do things and you pump up and that's the cause and effect. We understand that in the material reality and in a carmic reality, evolutionary reality, what we do and what we say and what we think affects how we become. And so ethics is actually a way of maneuvering through the causation of life, towards better forms of life. In fact, and negative ethics, we're doing bad. Things is a way of maneuvering backwards and regressing and degenerating our form of life.
Speaker 4 00:04:53 So we don't kill beings, for example, not because someone ordered us not to kill beings, although they might as well order us. And they were a reliable, useful person. It would be alright to do it for that reason. However, if you just do it because you're obeying someone and then if you think you can get away with it, you might do it anyway. But if you do it because you know, that is gonna transform your being, like, if you prolong lives, if you save other beings lives, you will have a longer life. You will have a vast existence, a more generous, more open existence. If you do it in that way, you have both enlightened self-interest collides with your ethical sensitivity and both reinforce each other, rather than both are opposed to each other. It's like study of biology, really the inexorability of ethical action of the law of carmic evolution.
Speaker 4 00:05:43 And when we do this, we realize, for example, if I have a happy moment in my life today, it is because I did a positive thing in a previous life or a previous time in this life. If I have a miserable thing today is because I did some miserable thing to someone else or to myself in the previous time. And in this way, we develop a very minute sense of responsibility to how we behave to what we do. And we don't blame others for what negative happens to us. We accept responsibility ourselves, which doesn't give us a sense of sort of self laceration or self belittling or something, but rather gives us responsibility, gives us power to do something about it, because if something happens to us, even an accident, and you just sit in, be whale fate, then you just heightening your sense of powerlessness.
Speaker 4 00:06:32 When an accident occurs to you think, well, I was in the way of that accident. Then you are taking a focus on what you can do something about namely, how you're gonna control your existence in the future. So it is a very powerful thing to become minutely and deeply aware of causality and the causal processes of evolution. It also lets us become more and more aware of the interconnection of ourselves, the interconnectedness of ourself and everything else that everything we do is infinitely ramified and interconnected with everything else. And everything else becomes infinitely connected and ramified with us. And this is really crucial to our positive development. We know we heard our beloved Baba Ramas for example, wrote the immortal B here now, which everyone loves a lot. Even if people haven't read it because of being born since the sixties, it's still a motto that resounds through our culture and is in a way very good for the more industrial mechanistic aspect of our culture, where we are being forced by authorities to defer all gratification.
Speaker 4 00:07:35 And somehow they'll be a fruit, a pie in the sky later after death or something like that. Be here. Now challenges that in a beautiful way and get something out of it. Now be present to reality now, enjoy and appreciate things now, because now is where you live. Correct. But now we must be careful here. We, and we had reached the now, before, when we thought of the precious human life ape theme, number one, and we thought of the immediacy of death, Arpaio theme, number two, then we got into the vastness of the now. And if you really integrate those two in your mind, really understand them and gain insight into them. You will be here now, totally intensely. But then how will you define the now if the now is just a nothingness, essentially, because you have an image in your mind that you didn't exist before you were born. And because you have a picture in your mind that you will cease to exist after you die.
Speaker 4 00:08:38 Then the essence of the now is that you are nothing. In fact, if you reduce everything to what is its deepest essence, now that deep essence will be revealed as nothing. Your awareness will be revealed as an illusion, some sort of surface consciousnesses and that deeper consciousness will just be nothing oblivion. So those images that normally we think, well, I, I didn't exist before I was born. We think that's reasonable. Oh, well, if we're a materialist, I won't exist after I die. We think that's reasonable because materialism says when there's no brain function, there's no awareness, but actually those two pictures of those vast, infinite past and infinite future as blank nothings mean that right now, there is a blank. Nothing take this as an example, if you are an ardent materialist who thinks that you will not exist, you will be oblivion, UND differentiated, non individuated oblivion at death. That same material is if they come to a moment of great agony in the present, if they're being here now, and then now suddenly is filled with immense agony because they have a cancer or they have broken something or they're on fire or whatever, then it would be rational for them to take a bullet and blow their brains out. And what they would be thinking will happen when the bullet goes through the brain is that the essence of the present moment will be revealed, which will be that it is nothing.
Speaker 4 00:10:03 So if you think of that example, you'll realize that if you indulge in the materialistic worldview, which your culture has subliminally placed and conditioned you to accept, actually, even though you may have some spiritual ideas, there's a deeper reality sense that you have that came in from your scientific education, where you think that the essence of this present is a black hole. It is a nothing. It is a radical singularity of a black hole. So then the now is nothing but a being nothing on the other hand, if you face the fact that nothing is nothing only, and therefore it's not an objective experience, it's not a location where you can be. It's not a place where you can hide. If you are experiencing what you are thinking, as you're experiencing it, as nothing, you're experiencing a realm of nothingness, which you mentally have conjured. In fact, you've made something out of nothing as a dark zone, as a sort of black hole, you made it and you're then dwelling in it, but it's a complete blanket. You wrapped around yourself and it's actually not nothing. It's a, what's called a realm of nothingness.
Speaker 4 00:11:23 So then what is the, now that you're being here? What is the here? It's nothing that now is nothing. So what do you have? Nothing, but you connect this with the inexorability of causation of evolution. You couple this with the vast ocean of interrelationships, that everything is a vast surface of interconnections you and all beings infinitely interwoven in an infinite fabric of life. Then the moment is as infinite as you can expand your awareness to encompass. And for example, right now, if you have a very tiny little flicker of thought of the jewel wish fulfilling gem tree, reality of the predominant power within relationality of love and compassion and light and luminosity and jewel, tenderness, and intimacy, the tiniest imaginative flicker of that can expand infinitely to become that in billions of worlds resonating in billions of consciousnesses of other beings. And if you have an infinite flicker of mind of darkness and fear and harshness and hardness and nothingness, then that can lead to the realms of that and can drag many beings into that kind of a realm and imprison yourself in that kind of a nothingness realm for infinite Aon of time.
Speaker 4 00:12:56 So this moment is infinity and therefore the energy that you have to turn away critically to see through the delusion of anything negative in this moment towards making the positive in this moment, even in the mint way has infinite consequence. Therefore, in a way is infinite.
Speaker 4 00:13:18 It's a wonderful thing. Famous verse from the king of Soma's Sutra, Sutra, meaning scripture or text sacred text, which says that one who understands causality understands emptiness. One who understands emptiness understands freedom. And one who understands freedom understands the importance of the minute is mindful of the minute as detail. I say wonderful, because we tend to think in our confusion when we're told that there's this and that mystical thing, and then, you know something about Nirvana or something about paradise or something about this and that plus state, we tend to think that there's some ultimate state that we hope to achieve getting away from all the suffering. There will be some place outside the world, some sort of vast infinity that will not have any differentiations in it. And we'll be there though. And then nothing can harm us and we'll be secure and safe.
Speaker 4 00:14:20 And therefore we sort of can ignore every kind of minute thing you see we've become sort of vast and infinite. We space it's spacious. You hear people talk about in our escapism, in our fear because of our egocentric delusion, in our fear, we reify states like that as being the states of liberation and enlightenment. But in fact, when we really realized the ultimate and the absolute, the void, the absolute freedom of the realization of the void, that freedom is also free of itself as a separated state. And therefore that freedom is free to be invested in the most minute infinities in infinity, in a grain of sand in infinity, in a pedal of a flower in infinity, in the tip of a hair in infinity of the tone and the timber of the tiniest gentleness that can be extended to another, that can alleviate their tension, their suffering to the tiniest bit that can open their happiness in the tiniest bit. That becomes infinity, compassionate infinity, not just wisdom, infinity, compassionate infinity that is into the infinity of every being's happiness.
Speaker 4 00:15:44 So this is the third theme in the arpeggio then where the first theme impressions of our human life endowed with Liberty and opportunity and intelligence, second theme of the immediacy of death, and therefore the intensity of every moment of that human life and the fruit personality of every moment. Now, then this gets linked instead of being isolated in some sort of a dull in disconnected moment, some sort of self CTIC hiding in some being and some place apart from connection with all beings, this gets connected with the infinity of time and space, the infinite past, since we've been here for an infinite past, there's no beginning to our having been here. We will be here in an infinite future. And we at all, other beings intertwined will be in that way. So the now then becomes of infinite significance in seeing that the way we are here with other beings is optimal, is positive, is leading to happiness and satisfaction and freedom and not to bondage and misery and frustration and suffering.
Speaker 4 00:16:52 So these are the three preciousness of human life. And now with Liberty and opportunity, immediacy of death, and therefore intensity of the moment, interconnectedness of cause and effect of evolutionary interwoven us of all things in infinite, pasts present and future. And finally, the fourth theme in the AEDO, the suffering of the SOIC or egocentric existence. And here we come up against what the, what I call the first noble truth. The truth of suffering that being misunderstood gave Buddhism its bad rap of being pessimistic or gloomy ran Buddha the bad rap of somehow being a killjoy. Some guy who comes up when you're slurping down that delicious vanilla fudge ice cream and says, oh, this is suffering. <laugh> something that we don't like to hear when we're slurping down that ice cream cone.
Speaker 4 00:17:54 So we have to carefully understand this. When the Buddha said all this is suffering, what he meant to say. And he did say in many other contexts where he was being more elaborate is that all this unenlightened living is bound to be suffering compared to enlightened living, which is infinite bliss. If he thought that this suffering was inevitable and we all we could have and all life would only be suffering, he would have kept silent. He would've probably frowned and looked Loomy and kept silent. Why would you tell someone if they're imprisoned for life, how horrible a situation they have, if there's no chance of they're gaining any freedom, you only tell someone, well, actually you're imprisoned under this and that confusion. You tell them that so that they can understand what's imprisoning them so that they can become free.
Speaker 4 00:18:57 The Buddhas great news. The Buddhas great insight was the third noble truth that there is freedom from suffering. There is an end to suffering. Not that it is suffering in a way. Everyone knows that it is suffering. Although different people pretend there's this and that thing later, it won't be. But in a way, it's no news that there is suffering. What is news is that there is an end to suffering that we can realize that it is only the unenlightened life that is suffering. And why is that? That is not mysterious. That is something we can easily understand. Now we're working in the fourth theme suffering. We can easily understand suffering. What is the cause of suffering as the Buddha saw it, every one of us here and now thinks that we here and now are it? I think I'm it. I'm the one. As my teacher used to say, my great old Mongolian teacher, original teacher used to say, everyone secretly thinks I'm the one they may claim to be very friendly and cooperative and selfless istic. But then inside, they really think I'm the one. Actually, everyone is the one in fact. But anyway, we all think we are the one. Now, when you think you are the one you immediately are paranoid because you immediately know that nobody else agrees with you.
Speaker 4 00:20:25 In fact, they are so messed up. All those foolish other people, they all think they're the one. And you know, that's for sure wrong just as they know you are for sure wrong, you know, that they think you're for sure wrong. It makes you paranoid. If you think yourself is the absolute thing, the one, the reducible thing like Dekar. Remember the one thing he couldn't doubt was that he was sitting there thinking and doubting. That was the absolute foundation of certainty for him. He couldn't question that he doubted everything else that he had a body that the world was this, that it was that, but that he was there thinking he did not doubt that. And we all feel that way.
Speaker 4 00:21:09 What sort of situation does that put us in I'm myself, all alone. The only one, the whole world disagrees with me. Although other people think they're the one I'm just father for their mill grist for their mill father for their meal. Naturally, I'm in conflict with all of them. And not only them as persons time itself, time comes to me at eventually in the form of death and says, you're not the one you're dead. It comes to me in the form of sickness says, you're not the one you're sick. You don't know what you are. It comes to me in the form of old age. And you don't even know who you are. Alzheimer's so everything is against my feeling of I'm. So it I'm the universe. My whole universe is me, but the universe doesn't agree. So everything I do is doomed to failure, pit yourself in a struggle against the universe and who will win. You will lose.
Speaker 4 00:22:13 That is what Buddha is saying to us in that he's when he says all this is suffering. He means this struggle of the egocentric person who thinks they're it. And the world is in conflict with that thought and that certainty and that absolute foundation of their egocentric progression through the world. They will always suffer. Other people won't agree. They'll lose their loved ones. They'll meet the hated ones. They'll be tortured by others. Death will torture them. Sickness. Old age, even birth is a suffering pounding you in the canal. Now, if this is the only way we could be again, I think Buddha wouldn't have mentioned it. He would've said we have to make the best of it. We have to sort of figure out how to bear with this suffering. If he had gone through his time and his investigation of self and of the world and his deep insight and his deep concentration, his scientific exploration, if he'd come up with the idea, well, that's just the way beings are. There's no way of getting out of that wiring. We're hardwired to think we are the one there's no way out of it. And so we're therefore inevitably pitted against the world and did against us the way out of it. So we just have to develop some sort of resignation to that, or sort of balance it and moderated by this and that palliative. There's nothing we can do about it. Then there would be no such thing as Nirvana. Then there would be no freedom.
Speaker 4 00:23:41 There would be no Buddhadharma Buddha teaching bud, a method, bud, a path enlightenment path. There would be no such path. There would just be palliatives. But what Buddha did was he looked, he took up the challenge. He said, well, if I'm the one and I put my absolute effort of being the absolute one into finding my absolute self, then I should find it because absolute is not to be obstructed. Absolute is what is real reality will come through if it puts itself out to do so. So he looked for himself as the one he put like laser, like diamond, like nuclear efficient, like energy into finding himself and you know what? He failed to find himself. He didn't find any one.
Speaker 4 00:24:48 He also didn't find a failure to find. He didn't find nothing as the one. He didn't find that what the one was reduced to was a, nothing he saw through the delusion of nothing, the escape hatch of nothing. He dove right through it and realized that nothing was itself. Just like a pain of glass, just transparent, cuz he couldn't obstruct everything. So they, he didn't find the failure to find either. He didn't find the self and, and the not finding of the self courageously sustained became the realization of the transparency, the openness of the self, the emptiness of the self, the openness, the infinity of the self. Therefore the self, the sense of the one became diffused over the entire infinite universe. And he realized that he was all of the beings being the one.
Speaker 4 00:25:46 He suddenly felt himself as the universe. Now, if you feel not just the universe in some vague thing, like you and the universe are all dissolved and destroyed in something, nothing. And then you can just say sort of you're the universe because you and the universe are nothing. That's a fake, mystical, irrational, fake thing. Although you can experience it actually, but that's not the absolute, he rejected again and again, that kind of Soma or state or altered state transcendent state as being the absolute. He rejected that cuz it's not the absolute because it's a state you go into in which you're isolated from the specific other beings of the world. And once it's a place where you go in and there's a boundary between when you are out of it and in it, then it's a state that has a boundary. Therefore it is not an absolute, it is a state that didn't exist before and comes to exist.
Speaker 4 00:26:33 Therefore it is created by effort, by cognitive effort. It is therefore not an absolute, it is a good metaphor for the absolute actually it's in a way what we expect of the absolute. But if it is itself, that is a distorted concept and it is not the absolute, the absolute by definition infinity. Like you could not go now from being in a finite realm into infinity because the infinity could not be excluded from the finite realm. You are. Once in infinity is in, therefore nothing can limit it. It has no boundary. So therefore it has to be everywhere. So all the, some things have to be the infinity actually finitude and interconnectedness are in fact sort of the surface of infinity. They're the surface texture of infinity. Similarly, the world of interrelationships of others and cells as all interrelated in inconceivable intertwined, relativity is the absolute is the freedom is the emptiness.
Speaker 4 00:27:31 This is what the Budha realized. But at the stage we're at now, suddenly you realize you're not against the universe. You are the universe, the universe specifically as other people in the universe. For example, therefore, when they think they're the one and they have happiness, that's your happiness, you and they are one being, you identify with all of them. You feel their feelings as your feelings and they're not against you and your bliss radiates into them as their bliss. And it radiates back from them. When many of them become blissful into a much greater bliss than you individually could even conceive of when we are imprisoned within the self enclosure of self preoccupation and egotism, and only seeing the world from my, the one perspective and feeling alienated from the universe and separated from it. Any state of existence that we have controlled by that perspective controlled by that imprisonment of self reoccupation will be suffering.
Speaker 4 00:28:42 Therefore, this, the purpose of this theme in the AEDO the fourth note in the Ario is to free ourselves from ambition, for any self-centered state, as a desirable state, an ultimately desirable state. In other words, we give up the ambition to become a God. A God still defined as a being that is greater than the universe and different from the universe and still therefore in a sense, finite in relation to an infinite universe, because even the vast God in relation to a particular galaxy or universe in relation to the infinite multiverse, call it, the inverse is still like a Firefly, like a, like a mosquito, like a tiny grain of dust.
Speaker 4 00:29:28 So even a God is crushed. It's only nothing but a particle in the toenail of another God in a different dimension, even a God who is born in a heaven based on generosity and love and joy, which the heavenly realms are made of because they enter that stage at a certain time, they will lose that stage at another time without realizing it in their joy and their giddiness of pleasure and joy. The God's, they will roll over and crush a couple of universes or something in between bouts of love making or something. And in crushing those universes, they created negative karma, negative evolutionary impetus, very, very subtly that attaches itself to their souls. And eventually that's the seed of their downfall from the heaven. And they become a human again. They become a subhuman being, they suffer in the future. Any egocentric being from the hell to the heaven is still the one pitted against the infinite and still loses.
Speaker 4 00:30:32 So then in this meditation and theme, which is very vast, we inventory all possible conceivable forms of self-centered existence. Take the social world, being president of the us, being a superstar in Hollywood, being a great artist and performer, Picasso being Jackson, Pollock, being whatever you can think of as like a, an ambition you could have about a worldly state in the human realm, still reflect. Look at the president in the United States, what are suffering, look at such and such a great performer as their finger, great violinist as their fingers become arthritic. What are suffering and the most difficult is of course, to look at the gods, the pleasures of the gods, which in the Indian imagination, Indo Tibetan imagination are incredibly delicious from a human sensory perspective. But nevertheless, if you see time, if you see the passing of an Aon as like a moment when you come to death after even 150 year life, it's like the whole thing has been a dream it's over in a flash at the end of it.
Speaker 4 00:31:42 It seems it might seem long and laborious at certain times along the way. But you know, when you come to the end, it's like, you just woke from a dream. It's like a moment all of life. You know? So even if you live a billion, Aons like a God's life at the end, it's like a momentary thing and you fall. And they say that the God's become clairvoyant a few God weeks or months before they die, which is like billion years in our time. Because the God time is very slow compared to ours, very vast. And the agony they experience in those few God months, which are billions of our time makes the whole trillions and zillions of years, they lived as a God meaningless, but it's hard for us since pleasure oriented people to really think of heaven as a suffering <laugh>, but it's necessary to do these four themes that we have now gone through in the very briefest of detail, again, to enumerate them preciousness of human life and die with Liberty and opportunity. Two immediacy of death, instant of intensity of the moment, three inexorable, causal interconnectedness with infinite past and future and present evolutionary involvement and four, the unsatisfactoriness of all egocentric states of existence, even the most seemingly vast and glorious and expanded.
Speaker 4 00:33:27 When we really encompass these four themes gain insight, as we now are doing just tasting the tiniest drop of it together, we feel tremendous relief. Interestingly far, from being depressed far, from feeling morbid or discouraged, we feel terrific relief. Why when you no longer desire to be a God or the president or a billionaire or a star or whatever it is when you realize the sufferings of all of those conditions, by thinking of them over carefully, then you won't waste your time trying to become that you won't invest in those futile vein ambitions or goals you'll realize they will not bring you happiness. You realize that a happiness comes from realizing your true nature from realizing your inner bliss of freedom. And you realize that your precious moments of the human life, each one of which has infinite impact and each one of which is never lost in its impact because of the inexorable causality of everything.
Speaker 4 00:34:44 You realize that you might as well be free in mind. Now you should orient and reorient and restructure your life to be free. You drop out in a way you become what is called transcendent. You renounce the home of the conventional routine, egocentric cosmology, egocentric society. It's living in the uneasy truths with all the other in egocentric beings. You, you leave that society as your home. You abandon it. You abandon that world and you enter the world of the wish granting gem tree, the world of individual liberation, the world of individual fulfillment. You put the full energy of every moment, bit by bit, as much as you can into the transformation of your soul, the opening of your soul, the Chrysalis, butterfly expansion, and flight taking of your soul. That is where you put the focus of your life.
Speaker 4 00:35:46 You declare to yourself. I don't know what the meaning of life is perhaps yet. I don't know fully what reality is yet, but I'm encouraged enough by the alternatives that I have heard from the carmic evolutionary scientific tradition from the enlightenment psychology tradition. I'm encouraged enough that I will determine to make my life meaningful, whether so and so says it's meaningful or not. It will become meaningful for me. I will create the meaning and that meaning will be love. It will be joy. It will be infinite. Positivity will be the meaning for me and for all other beings, that is the meaning that I will make for it. And I give up getting a million bucks. I give up being a big shot. I give up being controlling of the world. I give up possessions of all of these things. I give that up. I mean, not naturally.
Speaker 4 00:36:49 I don't wanna necessarily fling myself in the street. I'd be a burden on others. I wouldn't have a chance to study. And actually in the ancient time in India and Tibet, I could just fling myself in the street. But when I really reached this, Warrior's abandoned as Don one. Would've called it in a Western Sutra. When I reached ative transcendence or transcended renunciation, as the Tibetans call it the determination to transcend. Then you could just go out Eureka. You could say I'm released. I am not after any of this. You guys keep all of it, except please share a little lunch with me. Once a day, you have a begging bowl. You live Mendi, you're shining with relief. The word, you know, monasticism that we have in the west makes us think of some lonely person, living somewhere with a hair shirt, all dressed in dark, sort of looking like they're into death in a gloomy way.
Speaker 4 00:37:46 Looking like they're afraid of life, have no fun. Well, if they did have a tiny fun, they think it was the devil and start whipping themselves. And we have this kind of really dire thing. Like it's a big sacrifice, but in the enlightenment oriented civilizations, the monastic male and female monk and nun, the vacationing Mandiant is considered a great boon, a great happiness. The word for ordination is not ordination. It is graduation, liberation escape. You gain this inside and you say, okay, I'm gonna put my whole life towards transforming my soul. And as much as my own will resonate with euros everybody's soul. And when I become fully transformed as a Buddha, I will even be able to directly intervene in the confusions of others and help them become more aware. And you could reclaim that and say that and walk into the street and people would knock each other out to be the first to give you lunch. They wouldn't feel you had conned them, or you weren't pulling your weight or you weren't justifying your existence. They would feel honored to support you. You've become a true child of the universe and doing the universe's most essential work, the work of freedom and bliss, the work of discovering the universe itself, discovering its own reality.
Speaker 4 00:39:16 So now we have done the first four themes on the actual path of transformation toward enlightenment in the jewel refuge tree. Each time we do one of these themes, we gain a little corner of insight into it, or we deepen the inside. We already have, or we even imagine the inside of it, all the beings in the Juul refuge tree above us in the heavenly choir and the heavenly host, they flip out, they get so happy. They shine, they glow and they glee and they giggle and they send more intense light rays down to us. And we glow more with their blessings of light rays, as well as glowing with the blessings of our inner insight. And then our glowing then shines out to the beings around us who feel pleasure and warmth and security and refuge in the power of that glow. And we subliminally send on the raise of the glowing, as it reflects to them, the little seeds, the little pattern, the morphic pattern of our own new insight about preciousness of our human life without with Liberty and opportunity, immediacy of death, making each moment infinitely valuable and precious inexorability of causality making each moment extend everywhere so that we can, we can find all fruition in this moment and bring to bear all fruition in all future moments and acknowledging the vanity and the inadequacy and the suffering of all mundane states, meaning states experience by a self-centered person.
Speaker 4 00:40:49 So as to excuse ourselves from all mundane obligation, all conventional determination, all superficial motivation and ambition, this then resonates everywhere and freedom rings everywhere.
Speaker 4 00:41:09 And as we do that, the beings are so pleased in the jewel wish granting jewel tree branches in the high tree, they radiated, they dissolve, they dissolve the tree, dissolves. The lake dissolves the high top of the world dissolves and it all pours and floods into us in the form of rainbow light of diamond of Ruby, of Sapphire, of Topaz and of Emerald. We fill up with that light and then we dedicate the merit of that meditation to all the beings around us, infinite beings in the vast infinite field around us. And then we dissolve into light and we become one with them. We and the refuge field become one with them, all the mentor beings. And then somebody thinks, Hey, where'd everybody go? And we come back to our conventional site on planet earth.
Speaker 2 00:42:28 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, please visit his websites.
