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 Dai Lama's cultural center in America. All best wishes have a great day.
Speaker 3 00:00:48 This is episode 313. Understanding karma and causality in Ri
Speaker 0 00:00:59 Oh
Speaker 1 00:01:19 No being has total control over their lives. They are not totally subordinate to an all powerful being. The simplest minded Tibetan Buddhist believes that they believe in karma, which means the causality of their actions has gotten them to where they are and the causality of their actions will get them beyond where they are either to for good or ill. So I think there's a very strong difference between idolatry, which is the taking of one's own construction as ultimate reality, and the use of images to gain access to a sense of the presence of freedom, a sense of the presence of wisdom and compassion in the world. A sense of therefore an evoking of the wisdom and compassion in one's self and the exercising of that wisdom and compassion and the sort of deconstruction of, therefore, the possibility that one could sort of have a belief in or worship an outside form ofcy and wisdom and compassion and behave like a piece of garbage oneself and then somehow be irrationally pulled out of the consequences of that by some sort of golden calf, if you follow me.
Speaker 1 00:02:32 Which is I think really what idolatry is after, you know, the injunction against idolatry. You follow me? So, so the term idolatry is mis misused. I think there, and it's uh, it was very strongly misuse. Of course, you know, the term for an idol in Arabic is bud, because all through Iran and possibly even Mesopotamia, there were many Buddhas and there were many Buddhists, actually there were Buddhist monasteries in Iran, you know, Manny of the mania and fame considered Buddha, his ancestor as well as Zoro ster. And Jesus Buddhism was actually well known in the Middle East and the Muslims destroying so many Buddha images because those were the main idols. They were actually, actually the word for idol was became bud. And they destroyed India totally. Indonesia, you know, they went everywhere where Buddhists and they destroyed it. So, and then the Westerners, when they arrived, they saw, you know, these idols, they, because they didn't represent the idols they were used to, namely the Crucifixed cries, crucified cries, they freaked out.
Speaker 1 00:03:38 And particularly they had these women, you know, in the India, they had all these female deities, you know, topless. This really freaked them out. The idea of the sort of mother goddess sort of image in India, they got uptight and this, this is idolatry. But I think if we are more critical about it, we see that idolatry means the condensing of all into a particular object and then the considering one self empowered by that object through whatever ritual orientation to behave like a jerk and then make a barter about one zeal behavior back to the object. I mean, to me, that's the essence of ideolog in the essence of the beauty the Buddhistic teaching to be found in the Judeo-Christian Islamic tradition. From the Buddhist point of view to me, is that there is no one object in which the locus of ultimate power, love, freedom can be vested.
Speaker 1 00:04:33 It's something invisible and inconceivable to the human mind. And therefore the human being can only participate in that really by being ethical, him or herself by being loving, by being, just because it isn't here or it isn't there. And I, I actually wrote a, wrote a book which I never published being in academia and what not wanting to get in trouble in world religion dialogue, but I have, I wrote a theological book called The Idolatry of Monotheism, in which you could even say that one of the problems of the theistic traditions was not following this anti idolatry commandment far enough so that then the conceptual idol of, you know, God is a man and he's the one we know and he's a he and he's a father and he belongs to us and he only had one kid. And that kid is the one, all of this whole structure is manmade as much as any golden cow.
Speaker 1 00:05:27 And it's a block, it's a big block. And it's against the Abrahamic original thrust of, you know, it's this wind in the desert. It's like the force of power of nature. It's something beyond what we can say it is and uh, which would make them able to really accept the Buddhist and the Hindus and the Dallas and others the, you know, as in the same area without this kind of first circle business that they still do in the world, religion, this problem that they have about the exclusiveness of their system. But I didn't publish that book and not yet I will likes a good title. Catchy title is the, the Idolatry of Manias <laugh> Buddhism is this, as I said, this vast ocean of teachings and doctrines and many belief systems and metaphysical systems and psychologies and rituals and things that are religious like. But as I say, the fundamental aspect is really, it's a vast educational system.
Speaker 1 00:06:24 But there are all those aspects, you know, cuz there are levels and ways of educating and there is something called Buddhist hermeneutics. They have a hermeneutical that is an interpretive tradition, if you know this from, especially from Western, uh, uh, philosophy and religion. And one of the Cardinal Buddhist hermeneutical principle is that there are no teaching about relative realities is absolute only the teaching about the absolute is absolute. And that teaching is nothing but a pure negation. That is, its emptiness, selflessness. That's a negative statement. This is the cardinal principle. The reason I say that is therefore that no doctrine about relative reality has a kind of absolute status. There is an acknowledgement ahead of time that all doctrines about relative reality are heuristic useful and quite true enough to be valid in most relative circumstances without being absolute. Okay? So therefore there's an element of where descriptions of processes of life are considered heuristic.
Speaker 1 00:07:31 On one level, there's no former life and no future life. There is no such thing. And if you can understand that on the level where you could also understand that on a certain level there's no such thing as this life, there's no no here. Now, I dunno if you know that that's one of my favorite things, you know, be here now. There is no here. Now you try to find here and now you cannot if you don't look for it, there's a here and now when we don't look for it, there's plenty of here and now. Here we are, now we are. But if you look for here and now, you'll never find it. It's like a Cartesian graph or something, you know, or a line, you know, there's no point. You can't find any point on a line. There's no point on it. It's an abstraction actually.
Speaker 1 00:08:21 So we are living it, here I am. And now that's part of our istic habit. It's like I'm the absolute self. There's an absolute here and absolute. Now if we look forward to here and now, we will find nothing. That's a very important point. Now nevertheless, on the relative level, there are more accurate and more useful descriptions of relative processes and less accurate and useful descriptions of relative processes. The more accurate ones are those that emphasize relativity precisely, that are clear that it is irrational for non relational elements to enter into relations. It's in fact a kind of misuse of language. It's a, it's in, it's in it's crazy. How can your non relational thing relate? Okay? This is the axiom on the relative level of description to come out of nothing, to be a consciousness that arises out of non consciousness. To be a consciousness that be goes into non consciousness and becomes nothing.
Speaker 1 00:09:27 These thought boundaries to that consciousness that are irrational on the basis of all that we know about relationality, all that we can see, every process we can find something is always coming out of something else. Something is always becoming something else. Things are no thing. No thing is no thing. And so you haven't said a lot when you said it's no thing because no thing is no thing. And for how can one be the other? The, in other words, absolutistic language, self destructs. And you reach freedom actually, which is great. Then you stop worrying about dogma, but then you come back to describing the relative reality. Now, consciousness in the relative reality without having big investigated, it's something here we are, we have it. You are conscious, it's your problem. I am conscious, it's my problem. I can reduce it in various ways when I really look into it. But just on the surface I have it. It's something I have. If I pause it, there was a time that this something emerged from nothing.
Speaker 1 00:10:34 I have made a kind of hypothesis that runs contrary to everything I have ever experienced. I have never experienced anything become nothing. I clearly have never experienced nothing. Or it would not be nothing. It would be something, wouldn't it? The illusion of subjectivity is an illusion. It's an epiphenomenon of the brain that therefore human life is nothing but a material arrangement. And therefore those bastards have killed hundreds of millions of people in gulags. They have shipped them out of PanAm pen and Canton and Shanghai, and they have behaved atrociously towards human beings because they have reduced them out of existence. They become intellectual numbers to them. Right now you see the crux of this issue. That's where I started by bracketing the question of intimacy. What we tend to do is we tend to ize selectively. Philosophically, buddism is much more, if you look for anything, consciousness or non consciousness something or nothing with what they call intimacy seeking, analytic cognition, which is wisdom in its function, you won't find that thing.
Speaker 1 00:11:53 And you can say everything is no, including no thing. What that, what I wanna say that is that nothing is empty and everything is empty and it's all empty of intrinsic reality, of intrinsic identity, of intrinsic identifiability. There's a lot of sophisticated ways of intrinsic objectivity. So that done on the pre-analytic and in a sense, post analytic level with relative interactive cognition, conventional cognition, we're left with all these somethings. And among those somethings, consciousness is one of them. Not only that, but among them, consciousness is the most powerful of them. From the Buddhist experience by far more powerful than anything else in reality is consciousness from their point of view. We can discuss that, but it's very, although it's tied intricately with language in its sort of realm of real power, but relative power is not reifying it into an absolute, but it is a relative entity.
Speaker 1 00:12:57 If it makes sense to talk about material things, it makes sense to talk about mental things relatively speaking because that is how we experience things. So therefore, to solve this issue about the former and future life <affirmative>, as long as you feel you are there now on the relative level, which you do feel, and if you want to come up with a belief system that says that by the simple operation of exploding your brain, the mental, physical brain, you are going to be annihilated niag with no continuity. The burden is on you to prove that because that is much more abstruse on the relative level than that. You would have a continuity, as Hamlet said, forget Buddhism to sleep per chance to dream. I, there's the rub. If you could be guaranteed sleep, unconscious, oblivious, sleep, no problem. But you might dream, there might be a continuity when you'd let go of all of your sense fields, all of your normal routine mental energies as pure nexus of sense data, and you somehow create a further world out of those mental patterns you create.
Speaker 1 00:14:18 Did you ever think about whose eyes do you see within a dream? Did you ever think about that? Who made those eyes that you see within a dream? They're not these eyes, no wait, you're seeing you can fly over Paris in a dream tonight sleeping here in the village. You can see another planet, you can be in a heaven or in a hell whose eyes see that if you're in a hot place, whose skin feels the heat? What creates that skin and those eyes and the sound that you may hear in a dream? Did you ever think about it? Now, physically, you in your waking body, you were a being who was seeing something. You had census faculties of eyes and neurons in the brain and conceptual apparatus to interpret the data coming into the photons, coming into the neuron, blah, blah, blah. High bunch of organization there.
Speaker 1 00:15:06 And that's all you have a physical account of that. But then when you're sleeping and you dream up a new body for yourself and you start seeing and you start replicating precisely that pattern of subjectivity that you had when you were awake, but it's a different physiology, totally. Your eyes are not, your neurons are not firing in your eyes. If you put, uh, if you put uh, stethoscope on a huge pipe down, which sewage is flowing, you can say, oh, it's vibrating, right? Oh, great, it's vibrating. But it could be either sewage, the nectar of immortality, uh, h twoo, uh, oil, it's, it's still vibrating. It's all vibrating. It's all different things inside though. So the point is that physical account reducing one and the other two physical account does not explain why the imagery when left alone in the sort of, uh, hard disc that's been turned off cuz there's no inputs in it for a while cuz you're asleep.
Speaker 1 00:16:08 Uh, when you're, when the inner, uh, sort of, uh, processes are deprived of the stimuli, then the pattern of the stimuli can be reproduced somewhere in the realm of inner imagery. Furthermore, when you see things yourself, when your eyes are open, so the point about the Buddhist view to come back to this thing we can't solve the Buddhist thing about form and future life to them is the simplest explanation on the relative level of the process of life. Life is some is boundless continuity, infinity, mathematically people can come up with funny theories about it, but infinity basically means unbounded. It's unquantifiable, therefore, in fact cause it is unbounded, it is therefore not an entity. It's not identifiable in fact or refi. And therefore boundlessness in time and space is somehow the rule, these most intuitive, normal, sensible thing to assume. And that if we are alive and here and have a problem, that this is caused by something.
Speaker 1 00:17:11 And why our, just as our physical genes have come and caused a certain kind of a body that the mind itself had some kind of cause seems very logical to them, and the burden of proof would be on someone who would wanna say it came from nothing and it would become nothing is the burden of proof. And so if one begins to think like that, if you begin to feel like that, what happens is that one begins to develop to erode a certain place in one's conceptual structures where one is invested in limitation, usually out of fear. Because in fact we are afraid of future life. It's very frightening that we don't have to only worry about the next 20 years of like possible like auto accidents, but we have to worry about millions of years of a future auto accidents and worse than auto accidents.
Speaker 1 00:18:07 It's actually frightening people. You know, humanists, I've debated with American humanists. I love to debate with them. I go to their conferences sometimes and debate with them and they go to this big trip about mature people don't believe in immortality. They accept their nothingness and they go into a tomb in New Jersey and they're happy with that. And these other people, uh, they're so childish, they want to be immortal and fly around with their fairies and all that. And so therefore, future life is sort of wishful thinking on the part of primitive mankind and grown up isakov and other hard minded people have agreed to no further existence. Luckily, they're gonna croak and get off this polluted planet that they polluted with their hard mind and get away from their nuclear radiation that they're doing and all of this crap. And the the thing is that theirs is the one who says that plane, while they lose you, I won't be here if they are bound to the consequences of their actions, good or bad, infinitely on the one hand they would be delighted if they really would open their imagination to the idea of becoming infinitely perfected, becoming a Buddha.
Speaker 1 00:19:16 What agh that is by definition at least. I mean, I I didn't try it yet, but I'm trying to get there and I can imagine it at least it's a literature that helps us imagine it and it's amazing. But the opposite, once you have an infinite positive horizon, there's an infinite frightening negative horizon you can get into infinitely bad situation. If one intensifies the locked in on the self habit, then it compresses in on the self to the health state to the degree of the health state, the ultimate compressed state. So therefore, Buddhist, the people who believe in future life and former life is a natural corollary, are frightened of that fact. They are not at all being childish, indulging in some fantasy of their mortality that they know that the humanist people think and they precisely see the people who assume achievement of nothing. That's by just blowing their brains out to be really childish.
Speaker 1 00:20:16 But you don't have to go to the Buddhist thing. Do, don't, you know, pascal's wage. Pascal's wager is if there is no future life and you spend your time being virtuous and developing your mind in your generosity and becoming an angel, and you forgo certain pleasures and indulgences to do that, when you are nothing, you won't regret having wasted that time. If there is a future life and you indulge yourself to the hi in this life and wake up as a beast, a dumb rhino, a armadillo, a cockroach, you will deeply regret and you'll be around for millions of years to regret having failed to become an angel. That'll do. You don't need Buddhism <inaudible>, uh, based on the wrong view that, uh, that they'll be obl oblivious or obliviated by death. People commit suicide over the most trivial matters, loss of a romantic romance, you know, the lack of a partner, the, you know, um, uh, shame for a samurai kind of thing.
Speaker 1 00:21:27 I mean, people do it, uh, for, for commit suicide in our culture for very silly reasons. Uh, as well in the, in this Indian culture being a very spiritual culture, people are living in a way outside of their course bodies more easily. And someone to dying, dying for a principle is something that, uh, they're very happy to do or they're in a way more easy to do. Actually. It's, it's very interesting if you look in the <inaudible>. But, and also they can do it easily for a wrong reason, unfortunately, or for a less good reason than, than, um, as well as for a right reason. The wrong re of course, in this case, you have to understand the Brahman's point of view. The point of view of the traditional Hindu is that, you know, the cast purity is part of, uh, nature and it's against nature to sort of mix things up in this sort of democratic modern way.
Speaker 1 00:22:20 And it creates pollution and it creates, uh, it pollutes downfall of the, of the race. And I mean, they really have a whole like thing about it. So they feel they're sort of, uh, saving the decline of the cosmos in a way by doing it, you know? And uh, so they have real sincere reasons and they, and the fact that they're willing to die for some principle like that and make a sacrifice that they consider that to be virtuous has a sort of good grounding. Although in fact, I think of course it's quite a wrong perspective in that, in that light, but it makes you think of the Bud Savas. There are many budva stories about Bo Savas giving up their lives for, to share their body with some animal feeding an animal. There's one really crazy one where the Buddha jumps in front of a hungry Tigris who he perceives is about to devour her own cubs.
Speaker 1 00:23:07 And, um, he's a prince in that life and he's out walking the forest with his brother. They were out on a picnic and it's a very bad famine in the country at that time. And he looks and sees this mother Tigris in her la and about to, he can tell he's, she's gonna just about to eat her own cubs, you know, herself. And she's crazed, you know, with hunger. So he says to his brother, why don't you go back to the camp and get some of our sandwiches, you know, and get some of the finger sandwiches from the Camp <laugh> and we'll bring them here to the tiger and wouldn't that be nice? We'll feed the tiger. And he said, okay, sure, I'll go. The prince brother says, and then when the brother's out of the way, the prince makes a vow. Now, I, I'm so happy to have this chance to feed you with my body and the future life. I will feed you with the dharma and you will chain, and this time you will certainly be saved from this killing of your cubs, and you'll get a temporary staving of your hunger in future life. I will save your hunger for some Sara, your hunger for nirvana. Then he jumps off a cliff right in front of her shattering his body and, and she manges him down. <laugh>.
Speaker 1 00:24:10 Terrible story. People hear that story. They go and they think it's just terribly creepy. But, uh, the thing is, it's, it's of course it's irrational if, if, uh, a person is living for their COE body, but boan it's example like that and it would be irrational for someone. And you can't artificially change your perception if you have the perception that, and identify with yourself as your body, you know, this is me, I'm here, you know, that's, that's it for you. Um, f when you die, that's gonna be it, you know, and you have no feeling of yourself as a continuity beyond death or yourself as a continuity outside of their body. If you have no feeling for that, then that would be irrational to do. But, uh, if for but itself like that, who has the feeling that what he is is his generosity? You see, he is a body of generosity.
Speaker 1 00:25:00 He is a body of morality. He is a body of patience. That is actually what he is. You see, it's like that field of, of openness is what he is. So when he sees an opportunity to expand that field, he's delighted, wow, come on, lead them up, jumps off the cliff, you know, and of course it's difficult. He's delighted of course, because it's not that it isn't difficult, even for such a bon tabba, he has to like go through the pain and give up the body, you know, go into the death cycle and the whole thing. So it's difficult and that's what makes it a great gift, you see? But then he goes on as a joyous burst of generosity beyond the body, you see in his view. You see now, uh, oh yeah, now why I said that was now I once had a Sanskrit teacher who was incredibly annoyed by this hist literature.
Speaker 1 00:25:47 He used to say, okay, I hate that Buddhist literature. How can you like that stuff? He said to me, I said, what do you mean about? He said, well, they're all so terrible bunch of goody goodies. He said there was out there feeding themselves to demons and they're awe doing this, and it's such a bunch of damn goody goodies, so boring. He said, and I can see his point of view. They're so wildly goody, goody, you know, they're like ready to feed themselves to anybody. But then I, of course I pointed out to him at the time, I said, well, that's kind of boring in the abstract. I said, but if you are the beneficiary of one of those goody goodies, goody goody actions, I'm sure you'd appreciate it. Well, maybe I would send him, but he was unconvinced. But, um, in the Buddhist litters, like in the boar atara, there is written there in between the kind of teachings of generosity and patience about enduring these kind of terrible ordeals inflicted by others without anger or ranker.
Speaker 1 00:26:38 And by giving in these extreme types of giving, giving away everything, giving away body and life and whatever they put in now, and then these seemingly unbelievable little strictures where they say excuse, but by the way, don't do this ahead of time, don't do this. If you're just a beginning bon opera <laugh>, don't go doing this. When you could be using your human life to learn your wisdom and develop your patients more and do other things. You know, the first hungry tiger who comes by, don't just fling yourself out there at this. Be cool. It's not always that skillful member tiger who eats you today has to eat your neighbor tomorrow. I mean, they have all these things. And, and that's even more unbelievable to people in modern times. What they don't realize is that the power of that sort of philosophy and that culture, and that's bud as civiliz it, the enlightenment civilization of ancient India and other Asian countries was so great that people were able to live beyond their bodies and lives.
Speaker 1 00:27:31 You know? And it isn't that hard actually to, if you really, you know, as I say, you can even do it for wrong reasons. Look at all the Kool-Aid drinkers for the Jimmy Jones. Look at all the charges of the light brigades throughout history based on hatred. Um, and there are examples given in the Buddhist literature of various cults in India, of people who thought if they went and impaled themselves on a certain stake in at the high moon of a certain season in the right festival in front of the goddess Cali, they'd be transported into nirvana instantly by impaling themselves. Just so you know, on top there are in the Buddhist, they refer to those people as example of people who have taken life based on a wrong view, you see? And so, um, so I don't know, it brings up a lot of interesting issues anyway, so, uh, uh, but anyway, today we have to do cover a lot of territory because this is our last class and I was looking up in the thing, all the different things we have to talk about today.
Speaker 1 00:28:23 We, we therefore today we have discussed in, in four sessions Bud DMA and sang, and we got into the Miana, uh, in general and on the basis of the Vema ur therefore, today major thing we really have to deal with is that aspect of the miana known as the va, the tan triana, uh, which, um, I, uh, call the apocalyptic vehicle. That's my personal, I have my own personal quirks, and that's among them. It's, uh, I think fairly translatable as the apocalyptic vehicle. Apocalyptic does mean, you know, the end really what apocalypses means is revelation. So apocalyptic means sort of revelatory, uh, Buddhism in the sense that it is, it is the Buddhism that, um, the form of miana where conventional history as we understand it, is sort of canceled. And the idea that traditional state is sort of back in the past when the Buddha was alive, you know, and some people budha would go and talk with them, have an evening seminar, have a pre-practice discussion, and suddenly they were like this as long and they retained our headship, you know, and that's dismissed as well.
Speaker 1 00:29:34 That was the Buddha's time. And those people had exceptional good karma, and they met the actual real Buddha. And so that was great. And then, then they all died, you know, and now I'm just reading about it in a book and I'm an idiot naturally, and I'm a egotistical and I'm intend to stay that way. <laugh>, that's the way religious Buddhist behave. You see later, and then again, or maybe in the future I'll be reborn in my trans time. And then that time, you know, everybody, my traya has a much easier dharma dispensation. He, he, uh, he had everyone at that time has a lifespan of 80,000 years. And so he spends about 30,000 years hanging out in his father's company. He's a braman, not a chattier, not a warrior class. And, um, then he is invested with his father's sacrifice, jeweled, sacrificial pole, the, which is the symbol of a Brahman.
Speaker 1 00:30:23 It is this fantastic pole, of course it originally used to tie the animal that you slaughter. But anyway, by this time in the future, they have sort of very civilized brahmans and its all jewels and it's just a symbol of an access Monday he say he inherits that from his father, and then the minute he inherits it, he renounces the world like the Buddha. And in one day, on a night he obtains perfect enlightenment. He doesn't have to go to six years of heart citizenism like the Buddha did. And then what he does is he takes the poll and he smashes it in a hundred thousand pieces, and he gives the pieces to all these people who show up as his disciples. And then just by receiving a piece of the poll, they all attain enlightenment. They become our hands. So then people think, well, in the future I'll meet Buddha, my Traya, you know, and Buddhist pray to the Buddha mare, and they pray to meet the Buddha mare.
Speaker 1 00:31:04 And then they will easily attain enlightenment because they'll be in that traditional time of the future. Budd ii now, and this is in the Teva Buddhism looks back really to, to the, uh, historical Buddha Shak muni. And they, to them it's such a long time and so many lives before another Buddha will come that really they sort of missed the good time and they can just be monks and nuns and kind of just stay cool and some someday something good might happen. Maana mess Buddhism looks forward to the time when what has made up one's Buddha land. You know, when one has, having taken the vow of being a Bud Sava, which we discussed last time, where one vows to save all living beings and be a budva, transform the whole universe into a Buddha land, a bud averse, which is what the Budva does, then one looks forward to that time of fruition, millions of lifetimes in the future, when I and all those beings with whom I entwine, my destiny will come into a Buddha land situation, and I'll be a Buddha for their sake.
Speaker 1 00:32:02 And we'll all have this land where all will live for all and everything will be perfect, you know, or there may be some other Buddha land that I will visit in between there and that will be a benefit to me as well. But Va Buddhism, now, now where VA Buddhism fits in with that, Myana Buddhism is that, and why I call it apocalyptic, you know, know, and first of all, you know, it shouldn't be thought that, uh, that VA Buddhism is something different from Miana Buddhism. First of all, there are some people who it is of course contr. Everything is controversial in the universe. But, and there are some people who might argue that it's sort of a separate vehicle, but, uh, the mainstream view, um, is that it is actually just the miana. It is no different from the miana, but it has special power and efficacy.
Speaker 1 00:32:52 It is sort of an esoteric segment of the miana. It's an esoteric methodology within the Miana. In a way, it's the elaboration, the fullest exploitation of the highest technology of meditational practice that is exists within the miana. Something like that. That is really what bad means. Uh, the way it connects is that, and so therefore, like the miana is based on the individual vehicle monastic Buddhism. So that therefore it's, it's false to take a budva and say, I wanna save all living beings from suffering and establish all beings in nirvana. If you yourself have first not wished to achieve nirvana, if you yourself have not first renounced the suffering of the world, have realized that worldly successes and worldly satisfactions are dissatisfactory, they are, you know, unreliable. They always lose weight, they always fall apart. They, they're never sustained that, that pleasure. It just, just is always a new problem.
Speaker 1 00:33:49 It's one unending series of, of problems arising. Just when you think you've got the f it's a few more pop up, have you noticed? And so all worldly successes and satisfactions are in that sense, dissatisfactory. And one wants really a genuine and reliable satisfaction and bliss and happiness, and that is nirvana. So until one has realized that there's some sort of an extraordinary achievement like that, that must be achieved in order to really achieve personal freedom, personal until one has, in a way, as one Lama friend of mine used to say, I think gall very nicely, until you really feel sorry for yourself, you really realize what you're putting yourself through into Samara being an ego driven person up against the world, seeing it all as relating only to you and seeing only your aims in it and how it's not satisfying you and always batting against that.
Speaker 1 00:34:41 And therefore always being in that impossible situation of the Sama Denin. Until you really feel sorry for yourself in that situation and renounce that situation. And it's a not, that doesn't mean you become free of it, but you become, you decide, you see the, the, the light at the end of the tunnel. You see where your freedom could be and you realize that that's what you deserve is true freedom and true happiness. And until you see that, which interestingly it has said, when you do achieve the mind of transcendence or the mind of renunciation, at that moment you do, even though you have not in a way really change anything, it's a kind of achievement and you feel a kind of relief. You sort of, it's like you kind of, you're still on the rat race, you're still on the treadmill, but you sort of actually now see that there's a way of stepping sideways off the treadmill.
Speaker 1 00:35:32 You know, you're still on it, but so far you've always thought that you just had to keep going on it and you'd, you'd find something, you'd get up top on it, you know? And just from looking to the side and seeing that there's a place to step off, you know that there is nirvana, there's such a thing as freedom that you can really get to and it really will be happiness that you want. Just seeing that is a tremendous relief in itself, even though you haven't yet achieved it. It's just a great relief. And then they say, once you have achieved that relief, you look around you and you see other people and you see them and they have this glazed look on their face, you suddenly, I mean there was a normal look before, you know, cuz it was your look reflected back. But when you have a tiniest gap of freedom from that sort of look, preoccupied look of charging ahead to Worriedly, get to the next thing you know in traffic, in heavy traffic, then other people suddenly they look glazed to you.
Speaker 1 00:36:29 And you see that they're like running after an illusory satisfaction and that what they really want is they want this look off, they wanna see this gap, this break in the incessant treadmill, and they want also freedom. And that time only then they say, can you have a genuine wish to liberate others? And only then is your wish for their happiness, a genuine compassion. I mean, in a way, sentimental compassion is a genuine compassion and that has the mode of wanting others to be happy, but it's not considered genuine because it is so confused. It's coupled with such a confusion about reality that what it thinks it wants them to have that will make them happy is precisely what will not make them happy. You know, you know, if they want, do they want more money? Well, I want them to have the more money, but many times having more money will make them more unhappy or well, do they want more more mates?
Speaker 1 00:37:24 Well, no, but to having more mates will actually make them more unhappy. Do they want more food? Will I see more? Too much food will make them unhappy. Someone should tell me that and, and make them overweight at least. And so that's considered false compassion, only the compassion that begins to realize that what people really want is freedom. What they really want is that kind of inner happiness that comes not from achieving any sort of outside goal, but finding the natural nirvana, the natural freedom of reality, of selflessness, of emptiness and relativity. So there's a change. So in other words, the mayana in that sense does not at all go beyond monastic Buddhism. It has been wrongly presented that, you know, monastic or hiana, some people will say, which is a word that, or I call individual vehicle to make it sound not so bad.
Speaker 1 00:38:16 But there are wrongly presented that, you know, there were some monks that they were just really backward mons and so uptight and rigid and terrible monks, you know, so there's a Protestant way of looking at Budds and there's some awful monks. And then they were so uptight then the new teaching was for the lay people and for women and for things that the monks didn't do. And that was, you could just get alighted, like vem lair staying in your household. And that's so great, but that's wrong. Vem. Lati criticizes monks who are narrow minded. He also criticizes lay people who are narrow minded. He, he criticize gods who are narrow minded. It's the narrow mindedness. It's not being a mon laity. And so the Mayan and essentially has to have monastic Buddhism. It's, and which is based primarily on renunciation and on the awakening of true individualism.
Speaker 1 00:39:02 Again, Buddhism was translated over centuries as sort of being anti individualistic. And you know, the teachings and cultures of the east were sort of all anti individualistic and individualism is sort of a western disease. And so the thing is to all be one with the universe, which you can do if you turn east, you know, and you're going to be one with the universe and melt your boundaries and sort of melt into a puddle of cosmic soup. And which, you know, the pu I like it like, and the people who fear it think of it as typhoid infested soup, you know? And they're terrified of it. I'm losing my boundaries. I remember one friend of mine who was a Christian dialoguer and he, he went with some dialogue session and somebody wanted the dialogue ease to meditate. And the poor guy obviously must have had infinity because he sat, he meditated for minute and he began to feel his sense of self presence a little bit erode.
Speaker 1 00:39:49 And he jumped up and ran out. I said, why did you go Peter? What happened? He said, my boundaries were erodes, soak, erode really easily, you know, but so true ind So we think, I mean that's, that's the whole thing that the westerners say and but this is completely false. Buddhism and Indian culture in general, cause of the presence of Buddhism and Jism and other traumatic teachings is by far the most individualistic culture in the world by far. Much more so than our culture. American culture. Indians are really individuals on the one hand. They know how to be, be sort of part of a group to some degree and therefore they have this elaborate cast and all these weird group things to sort of keep these themselves under control because fundamentally they're madly individualistic Indians. Remember my example of the guy painted blue and everything?
Speaker 1 00:40:34 You know, you still find that today. You go down there, there'd be one guy burning himself with the caste system. There'd be another guy burning himself against the caste system and there'll be two or three more calmly sitting there painted blues, dark, naked, walking up and down, looking for free lunch with cow shit in their hair, <laugh>. And the other people are going, oh Ron, great, goodbye. He goes, it's a naked. It's like we are talking, some guy walks by here, dark naked, big tall guy, well hung, you know, walks by big tri in his hand, painted blue. He goes, rah, smoke his chillum and demanding his chapati. And we say, yeah, great, here's a chapati goodbye. And he goes by, nobody calls the police, nobody freaks out. He goes by, you know, and you just try it in New York, you know, we're supposed to be individualistic in the west.
Speaker 1 00:41:20 No way. So, so it is the, the monastic system in fact that is the monastic is the institution that anchors in a society sociologically true individualism. A society that does not have genuine generosities to support monasticism in the sense of support an institution where any individual who is so inclined can go and be supported by everybody else for life. Just because they say they're trying to liberate themself, him or herself. That is an individualistic society and a society that won't do that because oh, it's not useful to the group, it's not productive. You're just a parasite. You're eating my food. That's a society that is a collectivistic society. It can call itself liberal capitalist, it can call itself whatever it is, it's collectivists because there's no room in your imagination that your neighbors individual liberation is the most valuable thing in life. And if your neighbor's individual liberation is not the most valuable thing in life, then what makes your individual liberation the most valuable thing in life?
Speaker 1 00:42:19 Nothing. And in fact, you don't even know about. There's such a thing as individual liberation. So I don't wanna go too much on this cuz we did this in the class on the Sunga, but therefore Messianic Buddhism is based on individualistic Buddhism, monastic Buddhism, the individual's liberation being the highest aim of all be people. Then on that light then the Messianic vow, the's Messianic attitude is, well therefore all people should have that liberation. Therefore, I should do everything in my power to see to that all people become liberated like that. Therefore, I should in that sense, devote myself to become enlightened in order to save all people to make possible their liberation.
Speaker 3 00:43:14 The Bob Thurman podcast is produced through Creative Commons, no Derivatives license. Please be sure to like, share and repost on your favorite social media platforms and it's brought to you in part to the generous support of the Chat House US Men, membership community, and listeners like you. To learn more about the benefits it's BET House membership, please visit our websites.org, menlo.org and bob thurman.com. Tasha, for tuning in.
