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 2 00:00:48 This is episode 315, insight and Calm abiding meditation under the jewel tree of Tibet.
Speaker 4 00:01:21 When this session, we will mainly continue our discussion of the liberating wisdom, the transcendent wisdom, Nia transcendent intelligence. We will discuss in that context therefore the role of philosophical thought in Buddhism and in the Buddhist path and in our meditative path, the relationship of <unk> <unk> and philosophy. But first, let's generate the wish granting gentry field. Let's meditate together for a few moments. Get in a good posture, calm down, slow the breath. Feel yourself melt, remembering that you only exist insofar as you don't look for yourself to be existing. When you look for yourself, you seem to dissolve into thin air. So take a good look for yourself, introspectively, and you begin to lose track of who and what you are and you feel lighter and you feel looser and you float into empty space and dissolve the world around you dissolves as well. You're no longer sure where you are, what country, what planet, what continent, what era. This is a feeling of focusing on the ultimate nature of reality where nothing exists as a thing in itself. Nothing exists as pinned downable by any concept. Everything exists in inconceivable matrix of relativity. Rest in this awareness as if you were in empty space,
Speaker 4 00:03:47 As if you were the empty space. From the empty space. We arrived together on the top of the world overlooking lake Manova on a grassy bluff surrounded by all beings above us shines the jewel tree. The wish granting refuge tree on the tree are all our mentors, Buddha, Socrates, Mary, the goddess, the gods, Krishna, Jesus. Our human teachers, mentors, people we admire even if we never met their conversing casually with each other. Sitting on the different lotuses on the tree shining, their lights flow down to us. We feel buoyed up, bathed, anointed, exalted, relieved, sued by the flowing jewel energy. The energy drives away all our self-doubts, all our anxieties. All our frustrations irritations, they'll flow out of us like darkness. The light reflects back from us to the beings around us. Friends, strangers, enemies, they start to glow. We're in our meditative shrine space. We think of boundless offerings radiating from our heart's. Wish to see the world perfected and see the world beautiful. We visualize beautiful forms, flowers, sculptures, beautiful objects streaming forth from our hearts, presenting themselves jewels, gems, presenting themselves to the mentor beings. Exquisite music emerges spontaneously. Clouds of incense, delicious foods, fruits.
Speaker 4 00:06:41 We salute the refuge field. Hail, but uh, wonderful to see you there. We take refuge in your presence. All the dead is we think of whatever negative things of bodies pitch in mind. We've done resolve never to do again. Regret having done resolve to do the opposite. Good things we rejoice in all the virtues of all other people. We're delighted when people advance wonderfully happy when they succeed. We request you beings to stay with us in the world. Thank goodness you haven't just gone until uncreate, quiescent, nirvana. We request from you the reign of teachings, the reign of <unk>. We dedicate whatever virtue we accomplish here for the happiness of all beings. Through our attainment of perfect brotherhood ourselves, we decide to give you the whole world. We reflect on the planet. We imagine that it's a little shining ball in front of us in space. We pick it up in our hands gently holding it up as an offering. You take it enlightened beings. We unenlightened ones can't take care of it Anyway, now we're established in this field given away the world. We ready to reflect on our PEs. The first scale that we learn,
Speaker 4 00:09:06 We rehearse again quickly is the scale leading to the mind of transcendence. First note we play on that is the note of appreciating our precious human life, endowed with liberty and opportunity. We reflect on that. We appreciate what an amazing embodiment we have. We're happy we're using it this one moment, focusing it on our higher evolutionary purpose of achieving freedom and enlightenment. We then move to the second note, the note of death, awareness of it in permanence, everything changes. This embodiment mind, body complex we have will not continue long. We definitely will die. We don't know when we will die. When we do die. Our spiritual essence is all that goes with us. So we should focus our effort on opening that. Third note, we think of the inexorable causality of evolution. What we are is reflecting what we have done, what we will be reflects on, what we now think and what we now do and will we now say and therefore each moment is infinitely pregnant with potential. It's an infinite ways to let it go in any negative direction. It's an infinite success to turn it even to the slightest in a positive direction.
Speaker 4 00:10:37 And the fourth note is the inadequate state of all states of suffering of the egocentric existence of self pitted versus the overwhelming other self versus the universe perceived as alien separated thing. The losing battle the self engages in against space and time and all of other being. And therefore any position within that, even that of a God is utterly unsatisfactory and therefore we excuse ourself from all ambitions, all obligations, all duties to accomplish any such worldly success, achieve worldly position or status, wealth, fame, even worldly knowledge. These four nodes played together. Give us the mind of transcendence to whatever extent we developed this mind. We feel suddenly more at ease. We feel as if some sort of pressure has loosened around the heart, pressure of need to accomplish, need to get somewhere, need to do something, need to get something. We feel relief. We are doing what is our highest possibility to do. We are focused even just thinking about our evolutionary development, our development of wisdom and compassion, our transcending intelligence and
Speaker 5 00:12:10 Encompassing
Speaker 4 00:12:11 Embodiment. We then turn to the second ario, the second scale based on this feeling of self-appreciation of self-release, the mind of transcendence. We look around us in the world, look at the beings around us, friends, strangers, enemies. We realize how driven they all feel. They don't have this mind of transcendence. We realize that we are interconnected with them. We feel sad for them that they don't have this sense of relief. They don't look up and see the wish granting gem tree. They don't realize the imminent presence of all the mentors, all the great enlightened beings throughout history, the holy beings, the benevolent deities, the benevolent angels for the most part, they're unaware of them. So we realized the need to develop our connection with visa beings. We turned toward the second note, developing the spirit of enlightenment, of love and compassion for all beings. The first note within the second scale is the note of equanimity. Look at the beings around us, friends, our friends of this life because they're nice to us. Strangers are strangers by the accident. We haven't met them and don't remember our engagement with them in previous lives. Enemies are those who are unpleasant to us and this life, although they have been friends and lovers and mothers and so forth in previous lives,
Speaker 4 00:14:02 We decrease a little bit the attachment to the beloveds. We decrease the irritation and fear of the unloved. We decrease the disinterest in the stranger. We realize that all our potentially our kin, our relative, our mother or our child, we develop equality toward them all. We don't allow a single one to escape. We think of someone who is the most hated person we can possibly think of and we also insist on including them. We insist that their happiness become our concern, that our buddhahood is for the sake of their happiness, even who is currently the most hated one. That's the first note. The second note is then the recognition of motherhood of all beings based on the infinity of our past existence, which we realized back when we were gaining the mind of transcendence and realizing the inexorability of evolutionary causality and the beginningless of life and the infinite interconnectedness of all beings. Here we reuse that particular awareness,
Speaker 5 00:15:16 That
Speaker 4 00:15:16 Expansion of awareness, particularly to focus on how we have been related to every being, how every being has been our mother in some life and we try to recover the memory or the imagination of the possibility of every having been a mother to us based on our equanimity of not differentiating between friend and enemy and stranger. We now develop a vision of everyone as our mother where we see them all as mother beings, even male ones having been female in previous lives, have been our mothers. Even our father of this life has been our mother in a previous life. The third note, Dennis, as we remember the kindness of these mothers, remember how they cared for us, how they gave their lives for us, how they held, embraced us, gave us their affection and their concern. When we reached the point of tears on that, we then meditate on gratitude. Come to the fourth note. When the fourth notice where we wish to repay that kindness we can stand for them to suffer endlessly. Life after life in the cycle of egocentric states of being from the hells to the heavens through the animal realms, the preta lok, the titan realms, the human realms, the God rems.
Speaker 4 00:16:58 We wish to repay that kindness wherever they are, do something, be the mother to them. But better than just being a mother, we have been the mother in their ordinary human lives in the past. We want to be the mother of their Buddha life, of their freedom and enlightenment of their second birth,
Speaker 5 00:17:14 Their
Speaker 4 00:17:15 Birth into nirvana, into the infinite life of nirvana. Then we come to the fifth step, the step of the exchange of self and another and in our wish to repay their kindness. We then naturally move into becoming concerned for them, becoming aware of them. We realized that from beginning this time we have been preoccupied with ourselves, with our own self-interest, our own self aggrandizement, our own self security, self-promotion. This has gotten us into nowhere but endless series of frustrating, insufficient and inadequate and unsatisfactory states. States of suffering. So self reoccupation and self motion seems to be a very unworthy master. A master that directs us into negative places. And then we are worried about our mother beings. So we decide to be preoccupied with their welfare and their happiness, which radically decide to change our pattern and exchange other preoccupation for self preoccupation. And this bring us to the six step where we consider the disadvantages of self reoccupation. We think of holy, endless terrors and horrors. We have experienced seeking our own welfare and benefit and coming up only with harm and destruction. We reflect on that thinking of the teachings of the great s Shante Deva
Speaker 4 00:18:49 Thinking of the mind reform teachings, how all the negative things happening to us have been created by our negative acts in the past, all driven by the inner demonn of self preoccupation. This leads us then to the seventh step where we think of the advantages of cherishing others, of being preoccupied with others, welfare and happiness. We realize how much we owe to others, how our bodies come from others, how our language and speech comes from others from our culture. How our mind really is made up by others, influenced by them, taught by them, modeled on them how our clothes are produced by others and brought to us even the money we think we have that makes us think we can do this and that we earned that as given to us by others from doing this and that others who created this in that industry or business or economy or we inherited it to everything we have and everything about us is due to the grace of others that even all our future evolutionary progress, our ability to become a Buddha is because we can develop generosity by giving to others morality, by acting properly with others, tolerance by bearing injury from others without anger and hatred.
Speaker 4 00:20:07 Creative effort by wishing to do something great for others. Meditative concentration by wishing to develop responsible control of our mind for the sake of others and wisdom to know the nature of self and others. This leads us then to the eighth step, the step of universal love where we then look on these others that we are so preoccupied with now. We've decided to focus our energy being preoccupied with them. We look upon them with love, that any happiness that we experience should be theirs. We reverse our usual habit of wishing to take in happiness from the outside and sl of suffering and instead we look at others with the will of giving our happiness to them like we were in love with them. Basically we look upon all beings now all our mother beings as beloveds. We will all happiness to flow to them from us. We can connect us with the famous meditation of giving and taking where our out breath becomes rays of light and these rays of light flow out to all the other beings around us and bless them producing for them whatever it is they want and need. Whatever fulfills their desire, whatever alleviates their suffering
Speaker 4 00:21:52 And of the inhalation, we move to the ninth step and we take from them their suffering. We look at them with compassion. We see what real sufferings they actually are experiencing and we will to remove that suffering and remove the causes of that suffering, take it upon ourselves. And so we can visualize here that on the inhalation, the suffering of all the beings around us in the form of a kind of dark, foggy, smokey cloud, drawn away from them, drawn into us, goes in with our breath, goes to the self-centered habitual focus in the center of our being, our self preoccupation, which is like a kind of stone or an anvil. And this darkness goes and falls upon that anvil and gets smashed and dissipates. Or we can think of the self preoccupation as a kind of black hole, a kind of nothingness in the center of our being, which is in a sense infinite. It dissolves that everything that we draw to us and so that in the amount of suffering we take on from other beings just falls into the void to the center of our being. So as we inhale, we take off the suffering from other beings thinking of specific beings at first beings that you know who are suffering and you think of drawing out of them their suffering as you inhale
Speaker 4 00:23:37 And as you exhale, you send out light rays of your own bliss at being able to help their suffering, your own happiness of your own sort of proximity to freedom, your own relief, his mind of transcendence. You exhale, love you. Inhale compassion.
Speaker 5 00:24:03 These
Speaker 4 00:24:03 Are the eighth and ninth steps of this aedo. Exhale, love as light. Inhale suffering through compassion as darkness.
Speaker 5 00:24:25 Burn
Speaker 4 00:24:26 Up the darkness for the fire of wisdom. Emit the light of love sending out your bliss. Then we move to the 10th note where we look at the condition of beings. We see how vast and infinite they are, they're suffering. We realize there are many Buddhas, but it seems that all the Buddhas have neglected and ignored these beings that we look around because there they are, they're still suffering in spite of their having been many people already attained buddhahood. So we reflect and we cultivate and we cultivated. We arise with our messianic resolution. We are not content to just say, well we can't deal with these mothers or someday in the future we'll deal with them or whatever we say, however long it takes, whatever it takes, I will be the one to become a Buddha for the sake of these beings. I will be the savior of them. I will bring to them whatever dharma they need to become free of suffering. I can't just say, well Buddha should have done it or the next Buddha might do it. I will do it as soon as I can, but I'll spend as long as I need to to do it, get it done.
Speaker 4 00:25:49 After all I will be with these beings, my mother beings for infinite future lifetimes. We will all be with each other again and again and this and that permutation and this and that form and this and that relation. So ultimately I vow that I will be the one to become a perfect Buddha, perfectly selfless, compassionate being who will effectively be able to help install them in their own buddhahood freedom and enlightenment. That's the 10th note. And when we have that 10th note, which should make us feel a little crazy, it's such an intense heroic resolve which seem utterly unrealistic and could not be genuinely achieved unless we have the feeling of the infinite intertwinement of all life, the infinite continuity of life. We have to eliminate all nihilism, all an nihilism, all notion that anything including our awareness or the awareness of anyone can become nothing. A kind of second law of thermodynamics in regard to the spirit, the conservation of spiritual energy that nothing is ever lost, everything only transforms and transmutes. We must have that feeling as a common sense feeling. We must have opened slowly that feeling in order to develop this messianic resolution.
Speaker 4 00:27:10 And then this leads to the 11th note in this arpio and this 11th note is the note of spirit of enlightenment, the relative spirit of enlightenment of love and compassion, the <unk> as they say in Sanskrit. And that moves over from the 10th by reflecting on the fact that there are many Buddhas infinite numbers of Buddhas that we are gonna become the infinite plus one Buddha. And that in order to really develop these beings, we have to become a Buddha just by doing give and take meditation just by wishing and willing and vowing to do it. We can't effectively really still do it, but only by becoming an infinite being and being aware of the fast president, future equally aware of the infinite as well as the finite. Only by becoming such a transcendent, non-dual cognitive dissonance, tolerating inconceivability, tolerating Buddha being can we possibly effectively establish beings in freedom and enlightenment. Therefore, we determined to become a perfect Buddha perfection of wisdom and perfection of compassion in order to bring all beings to freedom from suffering and the exalted bliss of enlightenment. This concludes the second scale. These 11 notes bring us up to the second main sort of element of the mind of enlightenment, element of compassion, of the spirit of enlightenment combined with the mind of transcendence then makes us ready for the actual quest of liberation itself
Speaker 4 00:28:53 Sets the ideal context for that quest, which is the third level, the level of transcendent wisdom. And the third aedo, which is the arpio of concentrating on the twofold wisdom of the twofold selflessness, the selflessness of subjects or persons or personal selflessness and the selflessness of objects or things. The objective selflessness like the selflessness of our hand or the selflessness of our body or the selflessness of our nose, our mind, the selflessness of our world, selflessness of all objects. And in meditating on these things, we have a four step process. The first note in that four step process for personal selflessness is we look to see what ourself would be if it existed absolutely as we feel it does. And we remember the time of righteous indignation, of injured innocence. As the time when we can observe ourselves being most full of a solid self, we recognize that feeling inside and so doing, we recognize that we don't believe in selflessness, we believe in self and put us Buddhas teaching of selflessness in fact challenges what we actually believe. We then resolve to look for that self to verify, to answer Buddha's challenge by verifying if the self we feel is there really is there.
Speaker 4 00:30:40 And then we resolve that If we look with all our might that if it is truly a solid self, it should solidly find itself. And if it does not solidly find itself, then it is not there as we feel it and Buddha is right and we are wrong. That's the second key, the commitment to that out one of those outcomes. No third outcome, no vagueness of outcome. And then the third step in there is the step of looking for the true unity of self and our life systems. We try to see if that solid self can be one of our life systems or all of our life systems. And together we therefore sort through our life systems and when we don't find any solid self as one with our life systems in the effort of looking for that we don't come up with some sort of solid non-self. But instead we melt and dissolve our sense of being. Our life systems melts and dissolves and we have a moment of space like equa poise, samati feeling of sort of freedom, feeling of what our fantasy of floating free and empty space might be. Little bit of relief associated with it
Speaker 4 00:32:02 But then we don't allow ourselves to feel that that's some sort of ultimate state. And then immediately even that state dissolves and we are back in the world of differentiated things and now they sort of have a kind of mirror image quality and and losery quality, a dreamlike quality. But everything is still there. We are still here our relative self. And then we look for the relationship of the solid self as different from the life systems. We try to find us how a self could connect and remain solid and fixed an absolute and eternal and really real the way we feel ourselves. And we go through the same process of looking for itself as related to our life systems and we again fail to find anything that could be so related and yet remain a thing in itself as we feel it is. And then we'll go through another space like Eco po Samati moment that way and then we'll come back to another dreamlike aftermath experience and we'll begin to have an initial understanding of personal selflessness through this. There's that ar Pedro. And then we come back again to looking at things because we might think, well there's no personality, there's no self like a me, like an identity, but I'm still here as a process. There's a body that's here, there are thoughts that are here, there's awarenesses that are here, there's chairs and tables and planets. There's an environment that's here.
Speaker 4 00:33:44 So then we look at things, we look at our hand, we look at a table, we look at a planet, we look at an atom, whatever object we like first we look at compounded things or things made of parts and we sort of disassemble them in thought experiments in our meditation. And we look to see if there's really an essence in them that makes them what they are. And what happens is they all dissolve under analysis as well. And we go into a sort of space like sensation about them and then we re perceive them now in a more elusory mirror reflection sort of way. And then the last thing we meditate on is we meditate on nirvana itself or space as an analogy for nirvana empty space. And we first that see uncreated things, things that have no parts or seem to have no parts. And then we said, we realized though that such a thing like space has directional parts, north, southeast, west, up, down southeast, southwest. And we begin to sort of disassemble the concept of space and pretty soon we realized that we never can find space. That space is a sheer negation
Speaker 4 00:35:04 And similarly we look at emptiness itself, the emptiness of our personality, the emptiness of all the things we've examined as if this place we feel we are when we are in our space like eco boy samma at first where we feel we are and we look at that and then we discover that even that dissolves when we look for it. So as experienced as a subjective experience, even seemingly non-dual, it cannot be an ultimate there. There is in fact no ultimate state and when we realize that we are free of seeking escape from the relational states and we somehow realize that all relational states are the ultimate state, that the ultimate state is all the relational states, we come into the awareness of non-duality, the inconceivable, the inexpressible, infinitely subtle and sophisticated awareness of non-duality. So these are the three our PEs, the three scales that we learn to play in the path to enlightenment. This concludes in a way and incorporates completely all the different levels of the path. When we fully attain at the instinctual level, not only the intellectual level, this realization of the twofold selflessness of emptiness of persons and emptiness of things,
Speaker 4 00:36:43 Then we will be Buddha and perfectly enlightened. And there is nothing beyond this. There's no sort of special secret gimmick. There's no way of just sort of dropping here and dropping there. There's no way to become a Buddha than by achieving this pr parak transcendent super intelligence. It said transcendent wisdom is the mother of all Buddhas. All Buddhas are born from her. She is the wisdom that gives birth to all Buddhas and she is the same for all seekers of enlightenment. <unk> looking for her. Zen is embracing her. Every kind of Buddhism is looking for her and perhaps the great translator of the project parameter, transcendent wisdom sutra into English in recent times. Edward Conza used to say that Sofia, the Nas goddess of the Middle East that surfaces in sort of underground Christianity, the gospels that she is the sister of prn par as a scholar. He says that and as a practitioner and in the context of our wish granting gem tree meditation where we're trying to approach it from the point of view of all spiritual traditions, not exclusively as a Buddhist, but from any direction then she is Mary, she is the mother of God, she is the Sophia, the wisdom goddess for the west.
Speaker 4 00:38:22 She's <unk> in India <unk> Tara
Speaker 4 00:38:33 Kali, the great goddess. But now we end this meditative part. Now we come back to the topic of wisdom and we get into the question of the role of intellect and intelligence in the path to enlightenment. Many of us in the west come to Buddhism from too many years of being in school and sick and tired of the whole thing, having crammed too many facts into our heads, having memorized too many equations and formulas and axioms and dates of battles, learning to do long division in our heads, et cetera. Generally sick and tired of overworking the brain.
Speaker 4 00:39:29 And so when we first hear about meditation or we hear about the teachings from the east, could be yoga, could be Hinduism or even Christian mysticism or Buddhism or Daoism, you know, moving meditation, martial arts, whatever we hear about, we hear about meditation and we think, ah, relief, pleasure. No more thinking, no more of this like wearing out the brain. And there has been a tendency in past decades, not much nowadays, almost all of the teachers of these traditions don't make this simplistic mistake that used to be very much part of most of the teachings, which was that the solution to everything is simply not to think too much. The traditions were introduced in this way so that people thought, well if I go and I sort of breathe and I dis-identify from any particular thought train and I let my thoughts kind of come and go and then let them go and then sort of a big silence will well up in my mind like a big resonating bell and somehow this big silence welling up in the mind will be the blessed silence of enlightenment.
Speaker 4 00:40:47 The blessed silence of fulfillment. They would go on retreats or they would take uh, classes in meditation and they would release their thought trains and they would get different types of silence. Certain type of energy would stop circling in there and it would flood the body. You would get a feeling of bliss or feeling of sort of buoyancy. The neural energies would go out of like the tight cycles of conceptualizing thought and they would go out around into the body and person would feel a kind of soaring feeling or a pleasure, a warm energy circulating feeling and people would naturally completely flipped out. They would think Eureka and this is it. You know, they would do this for one year, two years, five years, 10 years depending on how gung-ho they were and how much time they could afford to do it, what their pre predilection was.
Speaker 4 00:41:41 And then they would begin to notice that justice silence could actually become a kind of deadening or deadened state. It could become sort of a dullness. Everything could seem like too complex for them. They would become almost addicted to it, where going out in the world things would be like too irritating to them. The sound of the bus in the street sound of the jackhammer drilling and just too jangly for them other people's irritating behavior and some would just go back and back and sort of just run away. And some then many years later they would feel disappointed somehow what they had thought was this complete freedom because they were free of surface level of compulsive thinking in the mind thinking that was complete freedom turned out not to be complete. Freedom just turned out to be a kind of certain type of state of quiescence and of course different kinds of states of essence for different people and no one is fits the perfect a sort of symbolic model, but this is a kind of general tendency I can say the lucky ones.
Speaker 4 00:42:50 Among the people who discovered this went back into the yoga tradition or the Buddhist tradition or the mystical tradition and began to learn more. They began to learn about the ethics of these traditions and how you can't separate your meditative states from how you live in the world and how you interact with others. They began to learn about the sort of worldviews and the feelings about the nature of reality and it's almost like you could say the psychology of these systems, of these other traditions, of these other cultures and they began to question the ingrained sense we have of the superiority of the west, that we are the great intellectuals in the west, you know, part of that old other teaching about how the intellect was useless and you discarded it, then you just have silence in your mind and then that's freedom and enlightenment. Part of that ironically went along with the idea that the westerners were in fact the greatest intellectuals, the greatest scientists, and this was proven that the western civilization was because the western civilization invented the combustion engine chemistry, antibiotics, nuclear weapons went out and also conquered the entire world, subjugated India and China and Africa and South America and the Americas and killed off all the Native Americans, north and south, maybe a hundred million people at the time of Columbus according to the French demographers.
Speaker 4 00:44:15 But that was all unfortunate. We were sorry about that, but that power over physical matter was the warrant that as intellectuals and scientists, the westerners were supreme, Galileo, Decart, Newton, Einstein and Einstein still is the great genius, but then that all failed. The spiritual person felt who went for this kind of no thought meditation. So we abandoned that and we just emptied the mind and we recover some sort of mystical emotional sense of oneness with the universe, mystical wisdom and leave it at that. So ironically, I had many people come to me in my classes over the years wanting to know about the wisdom of the east, but then when challenged about the science of the west would become very aggressive and defensive about how it was superior. And I think overall the culture still is at that point.
Speaker 4 00:45:12 But the Indian and Tibetan traditions and Chinese and Japanese, but especially in Indo Tibetan mun, they introduced us to the possibility that the Buddha and the great Buddhist teachers and masters were the scientists of the earth. They were the supreme knowers of the nature of reality and they moved into the knowledge of the nature of reality through internal observation and empiricism, not through microscopes and telescopes and atom smashers and cloud chambers, but through introspective awareness about the nature of their own neural networks, not just the nature of their spirits or some vague and un material thing, the nature of how language and concept function and how thought works and how non-thought works, how altered states function and how the ordinary state functions in that case. Therefore, their view of the actual nature of reality might be superior. Their choice not to develop a super powerful potentially ultimately self-destructive material technology was perhaps a conscious choice that that would be a foolish thing to do. And they had plenty of emotional retards in their culture. Plenty of would-be generals and world conquerors and egomaniacs and exploiters and whatever the equivalent of corporations. They had plenty of that in the ancient world. Asian people were not saints and any more than a western people.
Speaker 4 00:46:47 When we go on the spiritual path, in other words, when we seek to enter the path of enlightenment, it has now become apparent I think more or less unanimously among all the different teachers that I have heard of nowadays, all my colleagues, it's become kind of unanimous that people have to engage with society, engage with the negative ethical actions and ethical patterns in our society, take responsibility for how our culture is exploiting other cultures and how it exists in the world. Engage with how like the stocks that a nonprofit meditation center might own given by a grateful practitioner might be in some company that is destroying some rainforest somewhere because otherwise the meditations in that center will not actually lead the people to higher liberation and freedom and happiness. There'll be some nagging element in the atmosphere that somehow the space in which their meditating is being supported by horrible bulldozers and chainsaws destroying the life of species and beings somewhere.
Speaker 4 00:47:58 So on the ethical side, there's a general consensus that we must engage and that the Sheila, as the Buddhist say, the ethical path is foundational to the meditational path and there is not a consensus on another element about this Sheila extending to the monastic life to the monks and nuns. A lot of us who nowadays go around and try to help people learn something about Buddhism, we might be tempted to call ourselves teachers, although it's very dangerous to think of yourself as a teacher I think unless you're a Buddha, in which case you wouldn't think of yourself at all and then you would be a teacher. There's a tendency among those of us who are teaching that many of us have been monks and or nuns at some time, but then in interacting with our society or because of our own inability to remain that way, our imperfection, our temptation, self-indulgence, we couldn't maintain that lifestyle.
Speaker 4 00:49:07 And then we came up with theories that perhaps in the modern time America being such a secular society and such a lay society that America's gonna have lay Buddhism and everybody's gonna be a lay person and we don't need monks and nuns in America. I myself held this view after having been a monk for four and a half, five years, fully ordained for only a year and a half of that, but still lived as a monk that way. 10, 15 years I held that view rationalizing in a way my own behavior and only through the study of history of the Buddhist institutions and the history of America and taking a good look at the militarism of America and taking a good look at the Protestant reformation, sort of the sociology of America, I suddenly realized that the monastic institution as invented by the Buddha, the sang, it's not exactly the same as the Christian monastic institution in its way of being ordered in its ethical discipline and so on, but very, very close, but not exactly, but we must use the words of course that were developed in the Christian like monastic.
Speaker 4 00:50:14 But anyway, that that tradition is an amazing social institution and an amazing invention really that Buddha invented and that in Buddhism in the world we need more of that. We need to acknowledge in a way that our universities and schools and colleges are a kind of monastery and that we should honor and support with sort of lifelong fellowships or longer fellowships. Anyway, people who are really on a vision quest within our society, they want to experience themselves in their life and they want to come up with true meaningfulness in their life under whatever religious framework or secular humanist or philosophical framework and that's what school is for for them. And they don't want to be pushed into graduate school as a dentist or a doctor or lawyer in some mechanical way before they have really come up with their own set of values and the monastic supporting people who are doing nothing.
Speaker 4 00:51:13 Obviously productive should be a kind of generosity that we should cultivate In medieval Europe for example, there was a high degree of monasticism and Martin Luther was a ex monk, he was a failed monk and then he got all mad at the church and at the monks and he came up with a theory that it was impossible to contain enlightenment as a monk or a nun that you couldn't purify your mind. You were such a sinner and you could only depend on the faith in God and the grace of God given to you freely all unworthy. And so because he came up with that theory, he said that therefore it's even wrong for people to be monks and nuns, they're fooling themselves thinking they're developing their mind, they're evolving their spiritual insight and therefore the Protestant countries based on lay people like princes and authorities using Luther's theory as a way of denying individuals the freedom to pursue their self perfection. You could say it wasn't that they were faithful people like Martin Luther was, he was a person of great faith. Princes and authorities were not like that. They just sought us a chance to dominate and monopolize the effort of people and to monopolize it and not allow some to have the freedom to pursue their spiritual life in a sort of extra social society, the monastic community. And so then they created the Protestant ethic and the Protestant atmosphere, which is what we are suffering from still in America.
Speaker 4 00:52:41 This is a sociological term. I'm not meaning this in a negative religious sense, I'm talking sociologically as Marks va. The sociologists call it the Protestant ethic. It's the ethic that everyone has to work to justify their existence all the time and that no one should be supported to pursue some sort of inner thing. It's like the Chinese zen ethic. Chinese culture had the same kind of thing in ancient time. So when Buddhist monks went to China, the Chinese people and the culture, them the offering of the free lunch, that was the basis of the monastic institution in India. So therefore the Zen masters adapted to that and they said, we'll just grow our own food then since the culture isn't generous enough to give us a free lunch, we'll grow our own lunch. And then, then they developed a no work, no lunch ethic in Zen.
Speaker 4 00:53:27 So it's not only a Protestant ethic, it's also a zen ethic and the idea that people who are monastics monks and nuns are gold bricking, they're not working justifying themselves, you see. So it took me 15 years as as an ex Buddhist monk to realize that my new attitude in theory, that we don't need to support people just to meditate, just to develop themselves and give them free lunch so to speak, was really an element of the un generosity of the American culture, of the industrial Protestant culture. I mean many people in the industrial, not Protestants, there's secular itself, but the the original came from the industrial revolution which was connected with the Protestant ethic in Northern Europe. So in our ethical turn, I think we have to move our consensus forward a little bit to embrace the idea of monks and nuns and to be willing as a community, we are after all a very wealthy country relatively speaking, and to be able to embrace the idea that some people would like to drop out, to have the mind of transcendence, to be on vacation from their worldly duties and develop their spiritual knowledge, meditative experience as their full effort of their life and we should be willing to support them and we should have that kind of generosity to invest in their liberation so to speak, not invest because once liberated they're gonna do great things for us just for them to be liberated.
Speaker 4 00:55:01 Thomas Bird was a Catholic monk. The Catholics have kept some monism alive in the eastern orthodoxy fortunately, but Merton used to write that he didn't want to be thought of as a prayer factory for the lay people that the monk had to sort of give back good vibrations in exchange for being given the free lunch. He wanted it really to be free and I appreciate that there is a kind of element where we can argue sociologically that the free people in the monastic community do give back a huge blessing to the community, but it isn't a quid pro quo. If it is, it's not a free lunch.
Speaker 4 00:55:40 Now we look from the meditation orientation to the wisdom orientation and here there's also a consensus developing that people do have to learn something. Former meditation centers that swore that they didn't need books or libraries now have libraries and study centers and that's a very good development based on the fact that the intellect is not the problem. Thought even is not the problem. The distorted intellect is the problem. Erroneous thought is the problem. In other words, all thoughts are not the same. There are creative thoughts and there are destructive thoughts, there are insightful thoughts and there are ignorant thoughts. There's prejudice prejudicial thought and there's critically wise thought. And so if we are going to meditate effectively, we have to make our thought more accurate. Now nowhere is this more evident than in the issue of realizing emptiness, the issue of realizing selflessness, which is after all for Teva, for zen, for Tibetan Buddhism it is the without which no way of enlightenment. It is a synonym of enlightenment, the realization of selflessness or emptiness.
Speaker 4 00:57:10 And nowhere is it more evident that we need valid inference about the nature of the self. We need critical investigation about the nature of the self and the body and everything really the nature of reality, but especially the self, which is kind of the core of our experience of reality in our habitual way is very simple actually. It shouldn't be complicated. People shouldn't be confused. What that means is that our feeling here and now as we sit on our retreat in the wish granting gem tree, each of us has a gut feeling that we are here simply each of us feels sort of a solid sense of presence about ourself. Even if we're not thinking we feel we are here, I feel I'm me even without thinking. Then when I add thought to it like oh I'm really me or I'm great, or many other things that I will add that builds up on the foundation of the gut feeling. What the Buddhist psychologists call the unconscious mise or the instinctual mise or the instinctual self habit. That instinctual self habit is just the feeling that I'm it, I'm the one, but everyone feels they're the one.
Speaker 4 00:58:39 We all feel that as a gut feeling because that's the unconscious mis know, the unconscious ignorance, the unconscious self habit that has driven the egocentric life cycle, the samsara since Beginningless time, every HIA monster thinks I'm the one and jumps on its prey to feed the one. And we all have that and that is intuitive. It is not imposed on us by some acculturation, some confused thinking. It's an instinctual feeling of self-centeredness. That instinctual feeling of self-centeredness is ignorance and that cannot be dislodged. In fact by simply not thinking. If it could be animals that do not have language and cannot have discursive thought in the same sense would be all un self-centered. They would be enlightened, but they're not. They kill one another. We can see that they're self-centered. That's why wisdom has the wisdom of learning, the wisdom of critical reflection and the wisdom of meditation in that order.
Speaker 4 00:59:53 Because what is it that you learn? It isn't just learning how many fish there are in the pond, how many atoms of this and that element and isn't that molecule. It isn't that kind of a learning. The learning and the learning of wisdom is the correcting of our instinctual distortion of our experience of life. We learned that the feeling we have of self-centeredness is based around a sense of solidity in the core of ourselves, which is a kind of investment, kind of habitual creation at a subliminal level. A feeling of sort of that there's an absolute in there that I'm, and that's me and I'm it. And I'm that one. We learn how that takes place in the first key. We observe how we feel that way. Then we investigate and analyze how that feeling relates to our concepts of relative and absolute and self and other and many things.
Speaker 4 01:00:52 Then critical reflection has to do with we investigate how that self could be there if it were there and then we can come to the clear knowledge, what is called the simplest way of describing it perhaps is what they call the royal reason of relativity. They use the famous Buddhist word, petite summit, pat dependent origination. But in this wisdom context they they're not really concerned with origination, they're concerned with the dependency part, the relativity part. So webe, we translated relativity, simply petite summit pat. The royal reason of relativity is that anything you can experience or relate to by the fact that you can relate to it, it is relative and not absolute. Uh, the royal reason of relativity is praised as a negation. In fact technically, which is all things are empty of absolute essence because they are purely relative as an example of a chair or a table or a body or a person, which we, when we, because we encounter it, we perceive it, we touch it, we investigate it, we encounter it, we relate to it. It is relative all things empty of intrinsic reality. That is the reality coming out of an absolute in selfness because they are merely relative.
Speaker 4 01:02:33 That's the royal reason of relativity. When I understand that which you can simply do because absolute and relative or opposite, once you can encounter something or it can encounter something, it's relating to it and that means it's relative. Absolute means it cannot have limit or boundary. It cannot have parts or pieces. It cannot come into existence or be created. It cannot be destroyed. Therefore it is infinite uncompounded. It can only be described negation as lacking all the properties. That relative things have an absolute by definition cause it's the opposite of the relative. So when I understand that, we can get a clear understanding, which is called like an inference.
Speaker 4 01:03:26 The classical example of an inference in Buddhist logic is there is fire on the mountain. Though I do not see it behind the trees because I do see smoke rising on the mountain and I know that wherever there is smoke, there is fire as in the fireplace. Now we know something that we don't intuitively see that as we can't directly experience with sight or something cuz it's obscured by the trees. We come to know that it's there and we'll walk over to that campsite, to that fire by seeing a sign of it in the smoke that's inference. So things are empty of absolute essence, although I can't directly see that. I feel even that they have absolute essence. I feel it about myself, I feel it about things, but I know that they're empty of that because they are merely relational
Speaker 4 01:04:36 Because I relate to those things. I can see them even if they seem to me to be absolute as I see them, I realize that my sense of their absoluteness is an irrational prejudice, a distortion because all relative things are not absolute by definition A or B, like any relative thing that I see here, I can take apart a watch or something is not an absolute watch. I can smash its atoms to smithereens by experience. I can take them apart and realize there's no absolute essence in them. I look at it again as a watch and it seems like a real watch, like an absolute watch to me.
Speaker 4 01:05:13 In other words, when we understand emptiness intellectually as I hope you now do or selflessness, then what you understand about yourself is contrary to your instinctual feeling about yourself. It's counterintuitive. You know that you can take yourself apart. You may have had experiences in meditation of dissolving or even without meditation. You may naturally have had this as a child in some state of intoxication. You just sort of melted into the woodwork and there was no you. You went down the cosmic drain <laugh> as people have had this experience in life, people have it naturally artificially throughout all cultures. People have had this experience. Sometimes it's frightening, but everyone has had that. And then you can intellectually understand nothing about you can be absolute because you can completely dissolve, you can take yourself totally apart. That is an inferential understanding. You still intuitively feel that you're absolute.
Speaker 4 01:06:19 Now someone might question of course, well I don't intuitively feel I'm absolute. They might say, or we might feel that ourselves. But just go and like stamp on that person's toe, run over their foot with your car, harm them in some way and they will go berserk. They'll be ready to kill someone. Come and destroy my beloved. I'll be ready to kill in self-defense. Perhaps I can, we can say justified in the worldly sense, but from the point of view of a feeling that my oneness, I'm the one you know has been violated to such a degree that I can kill, that's intense enough to be absolute. That's beyond relationality. That's why killing is the first negative path of evolutionary action and saving life is the first positive path, evolution of karma. You know, so someone might question whether they really do feel so absolute about themselves and there we can simply test ourselves by putting ourselves into some sort of extreme situation, either imaginatively or remember when we were in one.
Speaker 4 01:07:33 When life is threatened, when the dearly beloved is threatened, when the sacred thing is bless themed, when the arch crime is committed, then we are ready to kill. Being ready to kill means our sense of self ness emerges when we kill. Feeling that such and such is absolute is when it's worth taking the life of another. That's kind of the measure of it. Experientially, let's say even then we would logically say of course there is no absolute killing. There's no absolute killer or killed. You know, we can do that to thing too logically, but emotionally or instinctually when you want to kill is when you know that in you there is an investment of an absoluteness about your life essence. When death appears to us as an absolute that reveals that we feel we are absolute. But the point is therefore, that the correct understanding of selflessness, of emptiness, which we can have as a correct inference with reason, a premise, an example, you know, according to the canons of valid inference, the canons by which we live our lives, this is a good car because I have investigated the mechanics said so I can see there's no rust et cetera, therefore I buy it.
Speaker 4 01:08:58 Now that's an inference. We can't see everything about that car we don't know inside there may be something, but we act on that inference. So we live by inference and don't think that inference has no power. We gain knowledge of many things that are directly or intuitively obscured from us by inferring about them from our other experiences.
Speaker 4 01:09:20 So now we are in a position as a seeker of enlightenment, a seeker of knowledge of the nature of reality, a seeker of wisdom where we have an inference that all things are empty of intrinsic reality, separate absolute separateness, and that all things therefore are relative and interconnected. And yet we still feel intuitively and instinctively that we are separate absolute and in the sense that our essence is disconnected from reality. Now, how do we bring that inference into sync with our instinct or how do we bring our instinct around to that corrected critical knowledge? And this is vik. This is the role of vik.
Speaker 4 01:10:09 Now, there are two types of meditation you could say in all the Buddhist traditions, different sutra or Buddhist scriptures, discourses of the Buddha in neither poly or Sanskrit or Tibetan or whatever say it is, and they're called <unk> <unk> and sha means one pointed concentration type of meditations. And these are the kind of meditations where you do that valuable experience of divorcing yourself from your thought flow, dis identifying from your individual thinking patterns. You know, when I'm thinking, well, what shall I do? What will I, I go, I hope my house didn't burn down, whatever. You know, as you don't follow that, you don't identify with the eye that thinks that thought. You let it just fly away. You broaden your sense of identity, your sense of being. You become the radio rather than the particular channel in the radio, and then you eventually you calm down, you come into the quiet that I mentioned earlier that people found so fantastic when they first discovered it and so wonderful and it is wonderful actually, Shama, it's peaceful, soothing, calming, and also enables you to develop the ability to then think something that you put your whole effort into thinking without all this other chattering other thought levels and thought flows, distracting and chattering, jumping around, you get a ability to focus your thought in a concentrated way or maintain a state of non-thinking in a concentrated way.
Speaker 4 01:11:41 So shaa meditation is extremely valuable, but by itself, shaa meditation does not dislodge that instinctive sense of self-centeredness, that dis instinctive sense of absolute selfness by itself. It cannot dislodge that. In fact, unfortunately it can reinforce it because by disidentifying from all the thoughts and all the thinking, you come into a state of kind of silence and mental stability, which is what you're trying to do. But then your mind is simply standing still and you still are feeling I'm the one now with my mind standing still and you may feel even more solid. This is why there's been a shocking thing where we have discovered just in sort of local history as was discovered in many Buddhist societies, that many people who had long years of meditating could emerge from that even more selfish than when they went in and then demand to be worshiped as gurus and behave unreasonably and in fact even have magical powers because of the higher power of the mind that you develop when you develop real ability to concentrate and cause a tremendous amount of trouble far from being enlightened, loving, helpful, benevolent people. So gaining higher mental power by achieving mastery of meditations of this type by itself does not dislodge selfishness, therefore does not produce enlightenment.
Speaker 4 01:13:15 The type of meditation that produces enlightenment is <unk> vik, or which is zen. People also practice when they, what they call the great doubt, the koan type of meditation, you know, critical investigation of something to penetrate through, to break through awareness of it and seeing through is superficial way of being recognized, habitual way of being recognized. Starting from mindfulness on the body, mindfulness on sensation, mindfulness on the mind, mindfulness on phenomena for foci of mindfulness that is so foundational in all of the Buddhist traditions and going up to the samati and the meditation on transcendent wisdom at the other end of the 37 accessories of enlightenment, 37 different levels, including the first four.
Speaker 4 01:14:11 It is <unk> that dislodges the sense of self-centeredness by this inference so that we get to a situation where we feel very self solid and at the same time we know by inference that we are not that self solid and that our feeling is an error. Then we bring our shaa developed power of concentration, you know, our one pointed quiescent meditation type of concentration, and then we take this corrected understanding of the self and we place it on top like a hot steam iron or like a template and we place it on top of the distorted. I'm the one type of feeling and we hold them together with strong concentration.
Speaker 4 01:15:06 We sort of move it around by renewing the inference and renewing the critical correction and going round and round, but keeping on the point with the one points where we both have a discursive sort of surveying, investigating element in the vik. And then we have the sha bearing down on this one point, which is on the sense of the solidity of self. And when we do that in a sustained way, we can come to seeing through the self, the rock of self-centeredness, the rock which is the focus of self preoccupation, the seeming rock of self crumbles. It will dissolve and ultimately our intuitive feeling will become the same as our critical feeling.
Speaker 4 01:15:56 This is the process of achieving transcendent wisdom. Now most cultures and most parts of most cultures have philosophies. They have cosmologies, they have worldviews. People all have world pictures and models that support the way they live and the way they feel. And almost all of them reinforce the gut feeling of self-centeredness in people they sort of work with that of course they control it because they don't want everyone at each other's throats at all times. So they say, well yeah, you're self-centered, you're a gut feeling, but actually that's because you are a member of this chosen nation. Or that's because your God who is the real self-centeredness of all time supports you in being that way. Or you go to the sacrifice and you now and then give up something anyway, even though you feel you are the one or you are polite to other people because you realize that they feel they're the one, even though you know they're wrong, <laugh> your own children.
Speaker 4 01:16:54 You share your being the oneness because that's part of your clan. That's what most cultures and psychologies and philosophies do. So therefore this critical correction of the instinctive self-centeredness is not to be found sort of naturally by being with nature, being with culture. It actually is to be found by science. Really the Buddha in discovering it was functioning as a scientist. He was investigating himself, investigating the atoms, investigating the trees and the earth and the air and the water and the fire. He was investigating, looking for that absolute essence in everything that he also felt was in it. But then he understood why he failed to find it in a new way. That's why his enlightenment was a new thing.
Speaker 4 01:17:47 So then philosophy, the love of truth. The love of reality, you could call it, it's like the dharma philosophy. PLO and Sophia are like wisdom and compassion, wisdom and love. It's the same. Science originally was a branch of philosophy. So philosophy is in fact the science of reality pursued from the human subjectivity, not pretending that there is no human subjectivity, which materialist science has done for three or 400 years with rather fascinating results. So this is why wisdom has first a level of learning and then the level of critical reflection and debate and inquiry and investigation. And this is why the Buddhist traditions value words and speech and reasoning all of them.
Speaker 4 01:18:47 There of course is a time when you have reached a high stage where you have taken this critical awareness of selflessness and connected it with your intuitive conviction of self. And you've held them together so powerfully for so long. And for some it isn't that long. Different people have different speeds, you know, cuz they have different degrees of entrenchment of that strong self-centeredness. But when you've held 'em together long enough where things have eroded and things have dislodged, then it could be that you could carry on too long with sort of investigation. You could be wandering around, you could become distracted by ruminating over your inferences and your intellectual knowledge at that time. You have to bear down with the one pointedness at that time. You have to like drop out from all the circling and the cycling in order to develop this sort of non-verbal diamond drill of penetrating critical wisdom that isn't really thinking in verbal sentences and syllogisms and formula.
Speaker 4 01:19:52 It's just drilling. It's just drilling through the, through the rock of self-centeredness. And then there will be teachings that we will hear from people around that time where they tell people, be quiet, don't talk, don't ding. It's inconceivable and there is all this kind of thing. But it's a big mistake to take those types of highly advanced things which are for very sort of final moments you could say in the process of becoming free of self-centeredness. And say that right away you can sort of implement them and don't think about anything and just be here now and think that you're being here now will not be self-centered being here. Now it isn't mysterious this thing. It's not complicated. You know it perfectly well yourself. Look at sexism, look at racial prejudice. Look at religious prejudice. People get a strong gut feeling that such and such another person is inferior or somehow evil or no good because of their religious belief or because of their racial characteristics or because of their gender.
Speaker 4 01:20:55 They can reason they can read every book about biology or whatever it is, or philosophy and realize that they're all really same human beings. Then that gut feeling is still there and they sort of sit down next to 'em in the bus or on the subway and they like crawl away. And as we've seen in situations of great stress, this will become lethal. Jews in Germany will be massacred. These deep gut feelings are still absolute and they're not easily overcome. But we also know having tried in ourselves, probably most of us in some way to overcome some kind of prejudice, we know that we can overcome, that we cannot uproot that. We can continually review what's wrong with that gut feeling that we sort of inherited or we acculturated to or instinctively feel. We continually review the evidence against it and we kind of meditate on it and eventually we will experience the other in an open way.
Speaker 4 01:22:02 But if you took the racist, you know, KU Klux Klan person and said, sit down, don't think for a month and then expect the person to get up and be a total rainbow coalition member, we are being naive. He would have to sit and carefully think about the error of being a white supremacist in order to get up and join the Rainbow Coalition, which we hope they all will. There are so many wonderful texts and the last 40 years has seen an explosion of translations, some better, some worse, some good, some bad, some excellent in this part and a little bit less in that part. I've produced this kind of semi flawed thing, but semi useful thing myself to few of them. But there's a tremendous knowledge of the psychology of transforming self-centeredness into freedom, into love and compassion and wisdom. And the door is wide open.
Speaker 4 01:23:08 It's like a feast and a treasury of delight for us to study and learn these things. And when you read a sutra of this type or you read a treatise of this type, one of these many texts that I have here with me on this table of the path to enlightenment from the NMA order or the <unk> order or the <unk> order or the <unk> order or the <unk> order or from Chinese Buddhism or Japanese Buddhism. The many schools or Indian Buddhism or Burmese or Thai or Vietnamese or Daoism or Hinduism or Western mysticism, Judaic, Christian, Muslim or secular humanist, developmental psychologies, transformative psychologies, transpersonal, psychologies, whatever it is, don't think that you're reading in those things is not practice of the path of enlightenment. Don't think that that study and that learning or making notes and memorizing a little pattern, learning a little scheme so that when you meditate you can bring this scheme to bear on your focused reflection.
Speaker 4 01:24:11 Don't think that that learning and that making notes is not practice. There's a tendency in our current climate to talk about practice as if practice is only sort of sitting meditating in something like that when you are an ethical person and when you walk around the street and when a beggar asks you for a coin and when you feel revulsion and you don't wanna like support their crack habit or you don't want to give that coin or you feel a paranoia that if you give this one a coin, you have to give thousands of them a coin and you'll be become destitute yourself or you feel annoyed that the mayor doesn't take care of them or that the president doesn't take care of them or that there's been the wrong kind of welfare reform and all of these things and you're just clutching your hot little quarter in your pocket and then you suddenly remember the dharma and you think, what a wonderful opportunity. I can overcome this clutching sweaty palm with a quarter in it and I can reach this hand on, I can open the hand and I can place respectfully this quarter in this little cup and say, you're welcome. Whatever he wants to do with it or she wants to do with it, free and easy, whatever. And I can have the joy of giving this quarter.
Speaker 4 01:25:29 That's practice. That's not only practice, that's performance, that's the dharma in performance, that's achievement. And when you read and study the teachings of whatever enlightening, liberating teacher and you make notes and you remember it and you become critical about some prejudiced idea, you find that you, you discover you had about something that is practice and that is performance. Then when you enrich your meditation on the two sides by the wisdom on the one side and the ethics on the other side, then you are walking the path of enlightenment. Then you are living in the spirit of enlightenment.
Speaker 4 01:26:18 So in this session we have discussed some of the further ramifications of the wisdom, particularly after running through our whole ape. Now we then close the refuge field at the end of the session, namely by looking around in it, seeing the mentor beings up there high above us and in front of us and all around seeing all the beings around us looking all happy and delighted. And the mentors in the refuge field are ecstatic and enchanted because we have been thinking about these useful things. We have been meditating and reflecting about it. We have a sense now an overview of the, of the structure of the path. We know the different points where we want to really put in effort and invest effort and really like come to critical awareness of different ideas of our own.
Speaker 4 01:27:10 And therefore they just melt into light and then instead of radiating lights to flow into us, they become light that flows into us and they dissolve. And the whole sky and the clouds and lake manar river and everything just flows into us in the form of diamond, ruby, emerald, topaz sapphire light. They become one with us and we become one with the mentor, one with the Buddha. We feel the Buddha and the mentor is living in our heart. And then the light flows out from us to all the beings around us. Friend, stranger enemy that now have come to seem all of them more familiar. All of them are are mother beings, although temporarily behaving in these different roles with us in this life. Nevertheless, we are delighted with them. We're happy to be one with the refuge field and like the refuge field, we melt into light. Our meditative persona melts into light, flows out into them as we dedicate the merit of whatever we have done here to attaining perfect buddhahood as soon as possible for the sake of all beings. And then someone wonders, where is everybody? What happened? And now we're back in our ordinary reality. And then we are at the end of our session. Thank you very much.
Speaker 2 01:28:47 The Bob Thurman podcast is produced under a 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 Trio Tibet available through Sounds True Music for the Bob Thurman podcast is generously supplied by Tenzing Showga. To learn more about the work and music of Tenzing, please visit his website com. Thanks for tuning Insha.
