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 DMAs cultural center in America. All this wishes have a great day.
Speaker 2 00:00:48 This is episode 309, Understanding selflessness and clear light.
Speaker 4 00:01:19 So what selflessness meant is something more direct. Now I like to, I think we can do together. The way I have found useful to explain this is that we do together a certain type of thought experiment, right? Together now. And that is everyone who is here feels that they are the main person here. Do they not? Each one of you is sort of at the nexus of your sense data sense receptions, input, sense inputs, which are, I regret, I apologize, my voice probably grading on your ears, looking around here and there, feeling the chair underneath you, Uh, tasting your, the well, the remains of dinner or your cup of coffee, your mouth smelling something or other. And, and the nexus of that is you and that event of you. And then there's some thoughts that you're aware of that you're thinking as you're listening and coordinating all of this activity and keeping yourself together on your chair in attendance and and awake <laugh>, all of it is shows great skill. And that's the main thing that's happening here, right? Each of you is the center of this event here, isn't it?
Speaker 4 00:02:37 And in a way, some of us maybe more feeling that we than others, but of all of us basically feel that we are the absolute center here. That there's something about us that is sort of special in here to each of us. And if we knew there's actually we each feel that there's something absolutely individual, meaning undividable, indivisible, irreducible, a sort of point of subjectivity that is sort of absolutely us, that is our soul or mind or you know, the core of our essence. And that is somehow completely inviable from anyone else here. And it's completely separate and has its own secret kind of thing. And while when we think in a group and we're being polite and nice and over in church or in class or whatever it is, well it's not really so special. Here we are. Let's hold hands. We're all one. But if any one of us got really mad, we would see how strongly they are the center of being here.
Speaker 4 00:03:39 If we got really mad, we would suddenly be, Ha, I am this. I'm that. Wouldn't we remember last time you were real mad. It was a certain, some people liked being mad was it feels as, it makes them feel kind of very absolute. You know? And I'm like, Wow. Vigorous. They feel, you know, because what that anger does is come and takes that center sense of center of being sort of an absolute unto yourself. The I am thing that has a real referent and sort of makes it sort of hum unfortunately makes it hum so much. Sometimes that center will take mere in consequential relative things such as your body and throw it against a wall or mad people you know, or wreck cars jump off cliffs, bang on each other. You know what they'll do? You know what you'll do when you're really mad.
Speaker 4 00:04:31 Although I should, I suppose speak for myself, I'm particularly bad tempered have been in my life and I bang my head a lot besides others' heads. So each of us clearly thinks we're the center as, as an old master of mine used to say, each of us somewhere secretly has this kind of idea. I'm the one who is the one, I'm the one, right? You all think that And obviously by a little check about the fact that everyone else thinks that each of us knows that each of us is wrong, right? If you are the one, I can't be the one. If I'm the one, you can't be the one. And then there are multiple sends here and then there are millions of the round. Everyone is the one.
Speaker 4 00:05:26 So there're all wrong. We're all wrong. None of us is the one. Not a single one of us is the center of this room, not a one. There is no center of this room. We are not the center of this room. We are totally wrong that we are the one here. Now, if once we think we're the one, of course we get into a terrible problem, namely first problem, I'm the one. But none of you agree with me. So that you do satisfies me because you don't treat me that I'm the one. Cuz you think you are the one. So why's you treat me if I'm the one? So I don't like you and you don't like me, right? Because I don't treat you. You're the one. You don't treat me. I'm the one. Cause we each secretly think we're the one. So then we get angry with each other. Or if I'm the one that I want, lot of things, you do this, you do that. And then we get greedy about this. Cause I'm the one, so I should have it all. Then I'm the one and I sneakingly suspect someone else has a little something. I get jealous of them.
Speaker 4 00:06:35 And then when I'm really indulging on the one, I get very proud. I'm the one when I'm feeling secure. When nobody's temporarily letting me know I'm not, then I get proud. I'm the one right now. It's not enough in this case to just sort of say, Gee, well I won't be proud. I won't be greedy. I won't be angry. I won't be jealous. That's good in a sense of calming down. If I start getting angry, I be like, Wait a minute, I'm making a mistake. I'm gonna cause harm here. If I start getting green, I waited. I shouldn't exaggerate here. I mean that's good, those kind of control things. But none of them can deal with the root of the issue, which is the basic mistake, the mistaken perception of the self as a self-sufficient, intrinsically real, intrinsically identifiable. There are all these different terms, but has it developed a very sophisticated psychology of identity and all of those types of a self. As long as we are addicted to assuming that type of self, not just assuming, feeling it, exiting within ourselves, then the I'm the one thing will come up. We can't stop it. It's the root of it. We can only to control and suppress its and manifestations. But we cannot stop it. We also cannot stop it by any form of meditation. There's no meditation that will stop it. Absolutely none. You can meditate until you're totally blue in the face, until you have a callous this stick on your buttock
Speaker 4 00:08:09 Until so many zen masters have beat you up that you're like punch drunk and you still think you're the one. In fact, as end masters tend to think they're the ones, did you notice that
Speaker 5 00:08:20 They sat there?
Speaker 4 00:08:21 My sota, you know? And then suddenly, hey, I'm the master. Because meditation alone can never cure this. I'm the one, in fact, if you meditate without dislodging the I'm the one, What is the real mantra of your meditation? You may be going mo mo mo, but what does mo mean? It means I'm the one, I'm the one. I'm the one
Speaker 5 00:08:43 <laugh>.
Speaker 4 00:08:45 So naturally, 20 years later, Eureka, you have a satori. What have you discovered? I'm the one.
Speaker 4 00:08:53 And now it's backed up by like your mind has become so totally lobotomized from thinking critically about anything that that the mantra's just full of the mantra going right? I'm the one, I'm the one, I'm the one, I'm the one, I'm the one, I'm the one. So you're tattling around. Everybody has to worship you. If not, forget it. Excommunicate them. So meditation alone cannot do it. I shouldn't pick on zen, I mean to bed. And any kind of meditation will be the same. Meditation is nothing but a tool. It's nothing but a but a arrow, it's a gun. It's a powerful weapon. Meditation, it'll hit what you aim it at. If you aim it and I'm the one, it'll hit that and it'll like become a massive explosion of I'm the one. If you aim it at, hey, I'm not the one, then it helps the insight about the self, which is the only thing that eradicates this. I'm the one business. It's the core. It's wisdom. It's called it's wisdom. Not some sort of vague in nutrition. Because wisdom at the beginning is counterintuitive. Intuitionally, you all think you're the one. I think I'm the one. My intuition, my apparently immediate habitual perception is yes, I am the one.
Speaker 4 00:10:13 So the wisdom that I am not the one is that first an intellectual knowledge that is a very simple knowledge. Every one of you here knows that everyone else thinks they're the one, somebody's wrong. We can figure out easily. We are not really, that's pure intellectual knowledge. That is the most powerful knowledge in the world. That is the most crucial knowledge. Don't tell me it says some intuition. Uh, feel this. No, it is that knowledge which is against what you feel your prejudice is like a person who has race prejudice or nationalistic prejudice or religious prejudice. Your prejudice is the, the, the race, the religion, and the nation is you. And you are the one that's your prejudice. That's your intuition. I'm it that is wrong. And the wisdom that I am just one of many, I am just a part of the scene. I am not as important as many others. I listen that that is something deduced at first by looking at the facts. Once you then have this thing where you clearly understand selflessness as an intellectual understanding, then if you meditate, then you can attain enlightenment. It shouldn't take 20, 20 years or 20. You don't have to sit in this in that way. You don't have to dawn this in that like black cloak or your ed cloak or your pink cloak. You, you can walk around town. If you're working on selflessness, <affirmative>, your life can become a meditation.
Speaker 4 00:11:53 It's an edu Basically it's an educational process. You know, when when someone has a prejudice, you know, on a lo another kind of example when someone is very prejudiced that they think such and such is the case, because they're brought up to think that condition, to think that then they learn, you know, like race prejudice, okay, all whites are stupid and inferior and ignorant. Let's say this prejudice that many people on this planet have. White people have noses that are too long. They have eyes that are too pale, they smell bad. Many people on this planet have such a prejudice. They're too violent. They, they make nuclear bombs. They conquer the world. They turn into yuppies. People have this prejudice, I mean it sounds unreasonable to us, but they have this prejudice. Then they study and they learn, hey, many white people were saints. Many white people were generous. Many white people smelled good. Many white people had nice noses. Many white people had nice eyes. They learn all this in a book. Some of them could do high jumps, some of them could cook nice vegetables. So they're not all that bad. But then they go out on a bus full of white people and they go, Ugh. Cause their intuition tells them, these white people stink.
Speaker 4 00:13:12 So that's the then a process of education. They have to hold the knowledge from their study that there are these nice white people. Some of their best friends are white people and they take that knowledge of the fact that there's no real difference. I mean there are differences among whites as there are among blacks and yellows and reds, whatever. But basically it's not a matter of the race. That knowledge that their prejudice is simply a habitual, addictive, conceptual conditioned mental and emotional state. And they can press then that's meditation. Then they meditate. And when they see a white person and all these things come up for them, they, they, they develop a critical seeing through and they try to see beyond the stereotype and they see the real live person there and they say, Gee, this person could be all right. They just need a little sun tan. They need a little something. They could be cool. You know? So that's a process of education. It's not if they just meditated without thinking, they just wake up from the meditation like 10 years later and they'd still think white people sucked cuz they had put no critical input against their presupposition. But the nature of white people.
Speaker 4 00:14:25 So this is where this process comes in, this thing about selflessness. Now the, the change you're here, which should be mentioned right away, which you nod at your head strongly against, which I'm delighted about, is the thing that the notion of selflessness is means that you're not there when you meditate on selflessness. Even when you hear about it. Actually, if you're predisposed about it, if you have some kind of karma, if you have some kind of intelligence, they say you can have kind of experiences as if you were disappearing or slipping away. There's a famous story about the great Tibetan master, Zon Kapa who, whose uh, class was like, uh, teasing one of his students because during his lecture about selflessness, the student had been like tugging at his shirt, like going like this and feeling kind of suffocating and talk about, said you guys are dumb teasing him.
Speaker 4 00:15:18 He's the one who was actually understanding what I'm talking about. He was feeling a little fear, like he was sort of losing control of himself. Like he was slipping away. Like what meant his normal hookup and routinized wiring system was something funny. And he was getting like panicky and nervous. There is, there are these stages of doing this. You know, when you begin this critical process, you have these kind of experiences because one lama, I had explained it, I thought rather beautifully, the great Tara Tooker, who some of you know, I think he said that the conventional self that is the purely relative self that we re that really is here. I mean see each of us is wrong, that we are the one, but each of one is a little bit right? I mean we're, each of us here, each of us is responsible for our little sector.
Speaker 4 00:16:02 Our part of being here, you know, none of us is not here. So we're not totally wrong just as we're not completely right, we're partly wrong and partly right. The part that's right is that each of us is relatively speaking here. We're not the one, but we're one of the ones, we're part of the scene. We're here interacting with others, right? So, but that relative self then the Tibetans, the Buddhist psychology that's called the conventional self or the relative self himself. Now that relative self is so used to, as Tara used to explain, it's so customed from Beginningless time to being intertwined with the absolute ized self habit. The notion of being an absolute sort of un the real wand. And so what one has to do is go through certain kind of experiences where air one kind of lets it go, which means that one lands in nothing, which means that one realizes one stays there. You see, it's like nothing is nothing you see, so nothing, you can't fall into nothing. But you can fear falling into nothing. If you're ratifying nothing as something you know, only when you realize that is nothing by sort of letting go into it, then you realize there's nothing to fall into and then your relative self is there. You see, it's just experience letting go of the absolute self in a way. So yeah, this is what apparently too, it's actually painful for us. Now this is why he said all contaminated things are suffering.
Speaker 4 00:17:41 Meaning contaminated means all unenlightened, all experiences tainted or contaminated by the distorted self is a suffering apparently. We really can't. When we are sort of locked up around this sort of absolute self image, this sometimes ecstatic cause we're sort of get mela maniac sometimes depressed, paranoid because we think the whole world is coming after us basically alienated because we think we as a sort of essence are separated totally from all of life. We viscerally think that we intuitively think that it's not that we don't logically think it, we intuitively think it. And that puts us up against all of life which makes us a permanent loser. Life will beat us. There's so many other people who are the ones, if they're after us as the one we lose. If we are greedy, we want everything. We won't get what we want. We're angry and fight everybody.
Speaker 4 00:18:37 They'll beat us. So, and even if when we experience something, even a beautiful thing, if I'm locked up in being it, I can't lose myself in the experience of that beautiful thing. I just like, I ah, lotus ha, I've seen 10 of those that's gonna wheel tomorrow. I've seen a better Chris anm yesterday. You I hear music, my mind busily is running on about tomorrow's whatever this I'm the one situation this locked up around this false core false self preoccupation makes everything miserable apparently according to Bud, if you have the any fraction of insight about it, you release a little crack in it. Apparently it is the greatest pleasure you feel tremendous relief. You feel such a relief. They say that when you have this experience, everyone else in the world for a time looks at first looks like they're haunted. You know those poets like Ts Elliot rts about walking London and everyone looked like they were dead <laugh> and I don't know if you remember in the Proof rock and these poets have written that and you know, and and Sufi mystics, they all say this kind of thing because they have had an experience of selflessness.
Speaker 4 00:19:57 And when you do, then suddenly it's the, apparently everyone looks haunted because they went around like I'm the one, I'm the one. And they're looking and trying to see something more interesting and trying to get out of this sort of locked cycle where the energy is all locked around themself in this total vicious circle of self preoccupation, paranoia, self dissatisfaction, dissatisfaction of anything else, alienation. So Buddha saw through that and he was just totally turned on what a relief. Not only that, but how easy it is for people to get away from their dramas of being the one and see through it. Now of course the key thing here, another the key point why then the Buddha established this whole huge educational system that is Buddhism really not a religion, really not a religion. I mean it can be a religion if that's useful to someone if they need a religion.
Speaker 4 00:20:52 But by the what the modern definition of religion, which is sort of a belief system. It really isn't. It's a disbelief system. It's a critical wisdom system. It's a create deconstruction of all beliefs. Yes, you may plug in a little belief in causality, in karma, a belief in the possibility of enlightenment, a belief in freedom and so on. These can be kind of useful, but if they're simply adoptive belief, they're actually harmful because you know, when I'm the one comes around and saying I'm the one who believes in freedom, it becomes a monster. You know, I'm the one who's a Buddhist. They around you should be a Buddhist that start belaboring people to be Buddhist. You ever notice a few people who got to be thought they were hot Buddhist to do, came around, You gotta come and see my guru and, and you got, you didn't do this thing, you don't have this initiation, you didn't sit with that master.
Speaker 4 00:21:38 You're nothing. Did you ever notice how they can sometimes be worse or they do? They think they're a big member. So believing it won't help. It's not the right view. What they call the authentic view. In the fault path is the view of selflessness. Only the view of emptiness temporarily. Relativity is good. Causality of former future life is good. Things about relative reality that are preferable to sort of the more alienating ideologies are good. But any ideology, quiet ideology is basically fed feeds into the ego addiction except the critical turning against the ego addiction. The only antidote is the wisdom, which is not a belief. So it's really not a religion. But I didn't say you must believe Buddha said Don't believe me, don't tell, don't gimme this. Like, oh, you got a golden face and you have a big lump on top of your head with extra brains in it or something.
Speaker 4 00:22:33 You know, Buddha had this weird head, you know, this huge thing because they said no one could see the top of his head when you saw the Buddha, it looked like his head was sort of like open to the heavens or something, you know, it was like this vast thing which in sculpture they made as a big lump on his head. You know, looked like somebody had hit him with a brick <laugh> and he had this weird, all these weird, he had this little tuft of hair and he had all these funny signs about his body. You know, he did, he looked like an extra terrestrial a little bit. But he said, don't believe what I say because you say, Oh, he's the Buddha. He must be. That's ridiculous. If a goldsmith accepted, some guy could dress up in a Buddha suit and go out and try to sell him gold and sell 'em, you know, fake gold.
Speaker 4 00:23:10 You have to test it, burn it, rub it on the touchstone of your experience, burn it in the fire of your critical wisdom, what I tell you. And then if it's worthwhile, if it measures up to your experiment, then accept it. But not because I'm a Buddha or don't be devoted to me. That's the Buddha said that it was quite unique among so-called founders of these kind of movements. He never said believe in What I say and precisely this is the reason. Because if you believe in selflessness, you are in trouble because you don't feel that you're selfless. So if your self habit comes around to believing in selflessness, what you'll do is you will become nis. You will believe that you're not there. You'll make this lack of self a real thing and you'll go around being a sort of nothing which will make you a bit psychotic.
Speaker 4 00:24:02 Not a very good thing to believe it. In fact, the the teaching of selfless means that the habit of delusion that we feel that we are an absolute real self is what causes all our trouble. What we therefore should do is acknowledge that we feel we are this real one and this real self. We should discover even magnify they say our egoistic views until it appears as high as Mount Everest. You know, we should really become aware of our self concern. It's great depth and power of it. And, but then what we should do is we should examine it. Okay? I feel like I'm the one, all right, let me find the one that I feel like I am.
Speaker 4 00:24:48 So the, the meditation on selflessness is in fact a meditation on the self. It is the ultimate attempt to find the self. You don't look for the selflessness, you look for the self. They tell us from the tradition that if we really look hard for the self, we will fail to find it. The self that is, that is absolute self-sufficient, intrinsically real substantial, et cetera, et cetera, intrinsically identifiable. It has like its own and distinctive identity in it. If we look for that kind of stuff, they tell us, we will fail to find it. But our accepting that on faith would be a vast mistake because we wouldn't have actually experienced its absence.
Speaker 4 00:25:40 The only way to experience its absence is to really try hard to find it. As long as we think it's there, we must try hard to find it. And then when we fail to find it, apparently we have to try hard not to find the failure to find it <laugh>. That's not just a trick, uh, no verbal trick. That's very important. When you fail to find it, you, that's when you get near all these nothingness experiences. They are there, there are lots of like experiences. There's Somali realms of nothingness and in the failure to find it, one can sort of find aha. So it's not there. I can't find it. So there's nothing there. I found that that's a terrible danger. We must have. Was it against? If you found nothing, it's not nothing that you found. If you are up against a wall that looks like nothing, it's not nothing cuz you are up against it. If you feel yourself singing into a black hole, that is nothing, it cannot be nothing because nothing is not a black hole. Nothing is, nothing cannot be found right? Isn't it? Of course these, those of you who know me, know that I'm getting so adult that I think the greatest thing in the world is to discover that nothing is nothing.
Speaker 4 00:26:47 It's really a very profound thing. Nothing is nothing. We don't know that we go through nothing and I'm feel afraid of nothing and nothing. This is dangerous and I become a psycho, I'll lose my imbalance. I I it's dangerous psychologically what does it mean? Might be nothing, but nothing is nothing can't be free, nothing to fear about nothing.
Speaker 4 00:27:13 So apparently Buddha was quite happy when he discovered it. Therefore, when you discover yourself, when you at a certain stage, if you fail to find the self and in failing to find the self, you fail, you don't allow yourself, your critical wisdom has become what they call this diamond cutter. This drill that cuts through diamond. You know, your wisdom, it can go through diamond. The hardest, the diamond, the hard diamond is you know, the the self habit. And this can cut even through the diamond of the self. You know, this sort of absolute self. And, and when you do that and then you don't let yourself discover an absence of that self, then what happens to you? They say, you know, who would be there to discover their selflessness? Wouldn't you disappear? Who would be there to discover your disappearance? Would you be somehow in some big lonely space and everyone becoming invisible? And the clear light and all this clear light is a bad translation actually for the clear light of death. Those of you know something. I was gonna say clear light. Clear light is a mistranslation, sorry, Evans wins. It's really a wrong translation. The translation is transparency
Speaker 4 00:28:26 Clear. It means it is clear in the sense of transparent, it is not light. There are served superficial levels that have br like bright lights of various kinds. But enlightenment is non-dual from where light and dark or non-dual is. Everything is transparent. So therefore nothing needs to be lighted. Let's see. That is to say, when you realize your selflessness, you suddenly realize that you are there with everyone else. All the other relative interconnected things are all totally present to you and they're not present and they're now present to you in this way where you have become eccentrically, present to it eccentric, you know, you're there not as located only in yourself. You're there in all of it, in a way also in yourself, but as in yourself, not as any longer alienated from the rest of it. It's all transparent. You're transparent, they're transparent,
Speaker 4 00:29:28 You feel everything in it. This is the why Buddhahood is inconceivable. They say because Ab Buddha is a kind of field, see, you or I are here and this is in, this is inconceivable and I don't know but, but we can, we can think about it, we can feel it. You or I are here, I'm just here. Right? That's why Buddha is a great teacher too. I know worldly teacher like myself, academic teacher, you know, philosophical teacher. We teach, but we are over here teaching blah blah, blah. You know, trying to be helpful, getting experience, critical dialogue. We try to bring you into we talk, et cetera. But still, I'm here, you're there, you know, and each of us is there. But if we were Budds, we would be everywhere.
Speaker 4 00:30:13 So we would be in Buddha is in all of 'em. And yet if we were just in you, if I, if I was a Buddha and I sort of wasn't in myself as SA Buddha, I was just in you, then I would, if you were confused then I'd just be over there with the confusion Wouldn't be much help. You know, there'd be this puppet over here, but I'd sort of just be over there. So Buddha's not just over there, but both simultaneously in himself and in others. As this kind of field being, I like to say a kind of cat scan being sort of a filled and aware of the psyche of other beings simultaneously present as an energy field unfolding all beings. And actually as a Buddha then this is totally inconceivable folding the universe, entire universe. But this is a little more maana.
Speaker 4 00:30:57 I mean this is incredible cosmic vision of the Buddha. Like when the Buddha used to teach in the Miana at the beginning of his teaching, he would do so he would stick out his tongue or something and then a ray of light would go out from the tongue and everyone in the audience would seize them suddenly that the same Buddha was teaching was opening his mouth to teach in billions of other world dimensions simultaneously. Millions of other assemblies. I mean this is miana kind of incredible vision that the imagination that the Indian people had opening openness, you know, to the, to sort of multiple reality. It was incredible. So Buddha is even more, you can see it not just like wall of people in this room or like Buddha talking to two or three people and, but it's an incredible event actually. But anyway, for the moment he was this kind of field type of being just within the metaphor of our present reality here.
Speaker 4 00:31:48 Who can be simultaneously there and other, and that's called compassion. That is how a Buddha is a perfected field of compassion. Wisdom having opened out the Buddha not to be locked into a sort of isolated center of self compassion then is that presence in others, which means feeling their feelings, which is not some sort of sentimental idea of poor others. I would like them to do this or you know that. But actually feeling what they feel and therefore just sort of being the remedy of what they feel or radiating the remedy to them of what they feel like. Good energy to their wounds in a way. Not just a scam passively knowing their problem but also a kind of energy machine that directs energy to that problem. But that's of course a physical metaphor. And the real problem that people have is not a medical problem, it is an intellectual problem.
Speaker 4 00:32:47 It is this emotional problem. It is this instinctual problem of I'm the one being at the center being the thing that matters. The only thing that matters that has beings when they're animals, they eat the other one. You know, that pounce on the deer and munch it down. You couldn't be a good lion and pounce on the deer and munch it if you thought the deer was the one. The deer is your food and you are the one, your hunger is it. And you, it labels you to take the life of that being. So this I'm the one is a very fatal amongst humans. It's sort of control up to a point. But then humans can get like that of course. And if humans do get like that from the Buddhist point of view, then they become more lion like. If they become more lion like then they be reborn as lions, they lose that precious human gentleness very easily.
Speaker 4 00:33:41 It's not just one evolution up and up and up to the stars. It goes down more easily than up. So once one has the human perch in the vast ocean of evolutionary forms, one has lighted like a bird on this delicate, easy to break branch of the human existence of which a tiny fraction of beings have at any one time in any one universe. Not to use that perch to realize selflessness, to become free of this drive of I'm the one and I must devour the other is such a tragedy from the Buddhist point of view. That's why Buddhist in their countries and cultures are always running around trying to tain in life. That's why they don't bother to make machines in Tibet. They didn't bother with the road systems. They were, they were postmodern from the 17th century. Cause they just wanna spend that time precious human brain time when the, when the brain is on, you know, if you die without having a cheap freedom from a human life, it's dangerous.
Speaker 4 00:34:41 Your instinct will drag you into bad scenes. They feel. So there's nothing to do, but day and night, moment to moment be focused on freedom. But luckily of course, in such a world as that they feel that the Buddha presence is so great around them that they don't get panic ears. That we have to be God lot to panic. <laugh> one can panic and they luckily don't because they feel that this freedom is so imminent in the human form. And the other hand they tend to get complacent actually into bed in particular. So this is a buddhahood then this kind of wisdom and compassion, indivisible, this is what they call Buddhahood freedom and love, indivisible, the role and uh, the role in Buddhist sculptures and in Buddhist orders of rituals in achieving, uh, selflessness. Although even the major function of rituals I think is not religious in the way that religion is defined in our culture as basically a belief system and sets of behaviors and institutions based on certain belief system.
Speaker 4 00:35:50 That's how religions are defined, uh, in our current, uh, society. And they're defined as therefore something that's kind of separate from life from the ordinary social life, secular political realm. And it's sort of a realm where people go who share a belief system and you become religious when you adopt a creed or belief system. And you may do rituals that illustrate that creed or belief system. I think about rituals is that there are a lot of rituals that are engaged in by the self habit. In other words, the way we shake hands is a ritual. It may be actually the way we breathe is a ritual. The way our blood circulates is a ritual. The way that we, uh, move and dress and et cetera mu our whole life in a way could be, you know, when if you go on the ritual thing, ritual are sort of routinized patterns of behavior that reinforce certain perceptions and ideas and so on, right?
Speaker 4 00:36:51 So ritual is in a way part of life and society. It's patterns of interaction. Right? Now, once Tab Buddha had seen this insight that I described, and I think we all had a sense of, I hope everyone has a sense of that now, once he had a vision of being eccentrically present in the world and how all beings were really that and how beings could recover their eccentric interrelated presence and thereby bring up their compassion for each other and be, develop their wisdom to counteract their egotism. Once he had done that, then from that different vantage point of enlightenment, everything about life and the world could be used to reinforce that insight. Just as the ordinary world is built on the basis of ignorance and egotism, the Buddha world could be built on the basis of selflessness and compassion. You follow me? For example, the ritual that was happening in Buddha's time, the major ritual was the sacrifice.
Speaker 4 00:38:00 The sacrifice involved getting some cows, occasionally a horse and once in a while a slave human and leading them into solemn place with a lot of mantras and hymns being recited and certain brahmins and this and that, people and coming around and then solemn things and the gods invited and then slaughtering of these animals. And then a barbecue of course afterwards, after the gods have had their share, then the priests have a barbecue. That was the dominant ritual in the Buddhist time, reinforcing that there is food for us, that we are the ones that we have our allotted food. Of course as a society we don't eat each other. We have boundaries of what we eat and what we don't, but we do eat this and this, that's correct and the gods are with us in that and et cetera. That was the ritual reinforcing a sense of us against them, reinforcing that sense of self against the universe and kind of making it bearable.
Speaker 4 00:39:01 That was the going ritual in Buddha's time. And the Buddha was very against it when he had his new insight. He said, to kill an animal is to be a killer. To be a killer is to reinforce in yourself the self habit, the unenlightened self versus the world. To think that that life, that's the ultimate statement, that that life is not as important as this life. That's the ultimate statement. That I am the one and you are not. So I can kill you. And that's the doggy dog level of life. To have it to sanctify, pretend this is a ritual and go out and say I'm gonna get something out of killing this animal is reinforcing all that is wrong from the Buddhist point of view. So the Buddha adopts rituals the Buddha creates, and the Buddhist create rituals of offering rituals, of releasing beings not to lose their lives.
Speaker 4 00:39:56 And there's, and then there's many elaborate things, but the basic structure of Buddhist rituals in general are new ways of celebrating selfless life, presence of nirvana freedom. That's basically what this, the Dr underlying principle within rituals within Buddhism, which in other words are ways of rebuilding the world on the basis of wisdom, having totally deconstructed the world that was there on the basis of ignorance. And the big shift actually in that is the shift from killing to not killing in every country. Buddhism, wind, blood sacrifice was the rule of the day. That was the big thing. The people who pretended to be the authorities. And I think still today, people who pretend to be authority but trust their authority by pretending to have the right of life and death over other people. That's how they subdue and terrify and subordinate people to them. So if they can kill, they are something powerful. That's just ignorance from the Buddhist point of view, it's the height of ignorance because in killing, they are killing their real chance in human life by killing others. They're destroying their own chance of human life and they're assuring their achievement of subhuman life again upon death in their life from the Buddhist point of view. So killing is bad enough in a war when you're angry in a situation where you're defending yourself, where your instincts have kind of taken you over. But sort of conscious killing out of ideology in ritual is considered a joke.
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