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20000926GRAABWL

Side A of tape 104 of 09/26/00

The reason why I missed the last Tuesday night was because I was in New York, doing the Omega retreat with Ram Dass. He does that every year. It is a ten days retreat. So a couple of us go there and try to help him. I spent a week in Omega. It was wonderful. There were about 700 people attending for the whole week. The exciting thing is that Ram Dass is also coming here on October 6th. It is going to be an evening talk by him. Actually we will do it together. It is called ‘conversations’. I hope all of you are coming. You know about Ram Dass. Together with Timothy O’Leary and others he was one of the original founders of the LSD counterculture. In Omega he was telling me that they did not really do drugs. They were doing scientific research. They were exploring what human beings can do and how one can generate certain mind states. They did that with a very scientific approach in Harvard. There was a whole group of professors. Timothy O’Leary was already a tenured professor at Harvard. They were trying to find out what the human mind is capable of doing.

There is a lady called Laura Huxley. She is 90 years old and she also did a great work shop there along with us. Micky Langley, who has produced ‘Compassion in Exile’, was sitting with me. I asked him, ‘Who is that old lady?’ I did not know she was 90. She looked fantastic – trim, tip top, very European, chin up well-dressed. A lady close by remarked, ‘Old age is not that bad after all.’ However, we did not know at the time that she was 90. Micky said, ‘Her husband had given Ram Dass the book The Tibetan Book of the Dead at the time when they were doing the research project at Harvard. They were thinking that they were uncovering scientifically uncharted territory, until they got that book. They were very surprised to find that exactly what they were discovering was mentioned in that book. So it was not uncharted territory. That is how they then turned to the spiritual path. So Micky said, ‘If her husband had not given that book to Ram Dass, you would not be here today.’ I thought that was interesting.

Ram Dass then, during the conversation with him, said, ‘I, as a scientist, was looking for what the human capacity really was. We did research and we found you people. That is why we turned to you.’ He speaks slowly these days, having a little difficulty with his speech after suffering a stroke. So what had happened in the 60s has helped a lot to open things up for many of you today.

Then we are going to have a work shop with Ram Dass which will be more a seminar type of work shop rather than an academic one.

Recently I was at a conference about artificial intelligence with Ray Coswell. He told me that it has been scientifically discovered that the human brain is capable of having over a million things function together, simultaneously. They cannot figure out how it works, but they know that it can happen. I thought at that time, ‘Well, enlightenment. What else is enlightenment, if not that type of thing?’ We cannot comprehend that now. We begin to see that the capability is there, but we are not there. It is very interesting. We are finding this out through studies on artificial intelligence and computers and so forth. Can somebody really become enlightened through the use of a computer? Can somebody come to the understanding of sunyata through the understanding the theory of of relativity or the theory of indivisibility? Probably not, because it is all external. But will that help? Yes, tremendously. If you don’t go through the process internally though, you might not be able to really do it. But the scientific research will certainly help.

We are supposed to live in the so-called Kali Yuga or degenerate age. But for us it is a most exciting time. Traditionally, in the West, if you look at spirituality, what are you looking at? Worshipping, praying and lately, meditating. Meditation has come up recently. Before it was not emphasized so much. So ask yourself, what is spirituality to you? Mostly, it is some kind of mystical thing. Then, to some who understand a little more, spirituality becomes improving oneself as an individual. Becoming enlightened or free of suffering or something. That is better than just simple worshipping. That does not mean that worshipping is bad. Do not misunderstand. But it is better if you can work on yourself within you. Then, when our understanding increases, we find out that understanding ourselves means understanding what kind of ‘ill-effects’ we have. That is the terminology Ram Dass uses. He does not want to call it bad things, so he says ‘ill-effects’. These are, however, the negativities. Negative emotions create negative actions and negative actions create negative karma. Negative karma creates suffering.

So the understanding of spirituality gradually improves. It is happening in stages. There is stage 1, stage 2, stage 3, 4, 5. That is the level that we are on. We come to know that spirituality is no longer something mystical that has nothing to do with me. It is nothing that you are granted if you pray for it. It is not something that an entity outside of me makes happen. It is not that we are helpless and hopeless and can only pray and hope for the best, that if we do something good, something good may happen to me and things may get better. I think we understand better than that. We have come to the stage where we realize that we have something to do here. We think, ‘I have a responsibility, I am involved, it is Me, it is my life, my life, my future’, rather than just hoping for the best and waiting for it. We can do something, we can contribute, we can undo something. We are at that level. Immediately we then look at wisdom and how this can be done. The moment we wonder about how things can be done we will look at what the tradition says about that.

For example this artificial intelligence conference I attended which was called Consciousness and Computer. I talked about whatever little understanding of consciousness I have. There were a number of professors and scientists there, particular Ray Coswell. After I had talked, he immediately said, ‘What Gelek Rinpoche told us today is the perfect Eastern idea which we had rejected. We picked up scientific ideas, followed them and now these ideas have led us to follow exactly the same thing. So science made a big 180 degree turn around and is now saying, ‘Now we have to really look what the spiritual path is providing.’ We did not come here, looking for a spiritual path. We were looking for scientific things. Science has turned us to you.’ Those were his words. That is why I am saying that these are very exciting times. The well-developed scientific mind and the Buddha’s experience are now somehow meeting and complementing each other, rather than rejecting each other. Both came from a completely different direction, looking for truth. The scientists were looking with mainstream scientific methods and there was the counterculture methods of experimenting with LSD and they are both now somehow meeting the spiritual path which Buddha had experienced and shared. It is happening in the 21st century. If you don’t call that an exciting time, what else could you get? It is no longer the ‘other stuff’. It is no longer only scientific. It is no longer just counter culture. It is all happening together now and right under our own nose, under our own eyes. I think it is a great time, particularly for the young ones who will probably be able to see it. The scientific development is so fast.

During the Buddha’s life time, the things that he talked about and saw, it took centuries to come round and reveal themselves. Afterwards, it was half centuries and lately it has been decades. Now it turns around right at the corner. It is so fast. Good and bad, whatever is coming through technological and biotechnical development, it is right in front of us. Within some years it is going to be here. So the good and the bad, we have to take total advantage and precautions, particularly on ethical issues.

We are talking about the Bodhisattvacharyavatara, The Bodhisattvas’ Way of Life. Indirectly we are talking about the Bodhisattva ethics, like what a Bodhisattva can do, what they should and should not do, how they should think and function. We have been reading this verse after verse, very carefully. From beginning to end we are talking about how to behave as Bodhisattvas, together with the ethical implications. So we have to be very much aware of ethical issues in the context of these bio-technical developments. We should use these discoveries for our spiritual development while cautiously raising ethical questions. That is very important.

When we talk about morality and ethics, people immediately begin to think about sexual orientation and so forth. I don’t know whether you still have hang-ups on that or not, but I really think that was last century’s issue. Today there is so much more. The scientific development is so fast. Each and every scientist makes decisions every minute which will affect our lives 20, 30, 40 years from now. And it is not that they don’t care. They do care, but they don’t have ways and means of knowing anything. It is probably up to us as spiritual people to help them too. They need to help us, we need to help them. We have to raise ethical issues, such as human cloning.

When I was giving my talk at the conference, I said, ‘You have discovered the code of the human genome. That means we really know how to manipulate it. With cloning we are looking at a laboratory production of human beings, what else?’ We look at people and decide, ‘Well, a 100 percent Caucasian may be too white. Let us take some genes from here, some African-American genes. Or the other way round. Perhaps we don’t want people that are 5 foot tall. They are too short. Let it be 6 foot minimum. Then Tiger Woods looks good. Lets get some Asian genes in there too.’ If you think like that you are creating two categories of human beings, a right category and a wrong category. All of us here will be in the wrong category. You are either too white or too black, too yellow, too short or too tall. Then the IQ can be manipulated on top of that. If that happens – actually it is more a question of when that happens – is that right ethically? We are getting into the issue of gender, men and women, skin color, handicaps and so on. All that is way past, way ahead. There are really important ethical questions in there. I talked about that at Omega as well, in front of 700 people. Sharon Salzberg told me that I made that tiny, little issue of genes into a huge issue. She said, ‘I did not realize how big an issue it is.’ And it is. These are the ethical issues of the 21st century. From the point of view of the Bodhisattva’s way of life these are very important points. If we don’t, then we are going to be too late. They are making decisions every minute in the laboratories. When it is done, it is a done deal. You cannot reverse it. These are very important points and I am raising that quite often. I think we have to at least bring it to people’s awareness. Otherwise we would be spiritualistic, orthodox people who just keep on praying. Remember the line Alfred used to say, ‘You gotta pray just to make it today’. That is not the spiritual path we are in. We have beyond that level. We have to see all these things.

At the same time we also have to see very clearly what our emotions are doing, both positive and negative. I want to remind you once again: the word Dharma – in Tibetan Chö means corrected . What should we have corrected? Our emotions, in order not produce negative karma. We do produce negative karma constantly, continuously, every minute. Even when you are in the temple praying, putting your joss sticks on the altar, you are also creating negative karma along with the positive one of offering and praying. This is because of our lack of awareness and lack of understanding. We don’t have the understanding of how our mind functions, how our emotions function, how karma is created. No one in this room or those who are listening through the phone lines have any doubt that negative karma creates negative results and positive karma creates positive results. We know that. But we don’t know what is negative karma and we don’t know what is positive karma. We don’t know how it affects us, because we don’t have the awareness of how our mind functions. If you have that awareness every minute that you walk, talk, sit or sleep, then you know that every minute we are producing karma. Even when you are doing nothing, you are producing plenty. We have to be aware of it. I believe that is a different way of looking. In the digital age, when we are practicing the spiritual path, we really have to look from that angle. From the traditional angle, you would say, ‘You say that prayer, you meditate here, you do this, you do this, you say this mantra, chant this sutra and then sit there, think nothing, watch your mind’. Traditionally we could do all that. We had the time. But now we are living in the digital age. We really have to watch our mind, see how it functions. In order to watch your mind you have to know what you are looking for, rather than just sitting there and waiting what is coming up.

I have a friend in New York, a very brilliant psychologist – an Italian. He told me, ‘The Tibetans had all the time in the world, therefore their rituals were so long.’ He meant that we had nothing else to do, so we prayed so much [laughs]. I think he is wrong. However, there is a valid point in there. We do not have all the time in the world to wait when the waves of the ocean are going to end. We cannot wait here until the cows come up. We have got to act. We do that by watching our mind, how it functions. You have to know that you can do the shift internally. That is the most important thing. When I emphasize so much the internal things and the shifting of the mind, some of you may think, ‘Isn’t there any more room for prayers?’ There certainly is. But that alone might not be able to do it. Sitting there and meditating alone might not be able to do it. The more you know it, it is much better. It would be like an educated specialist working or an uneducated, illiterate person trying to deal with it. It makes that much difference. In one way a number of people think, ‘The spiritual is something where you can sit and watch.’ Yes, you can sit and watch. The cows may come home, but then again, they may not. You have to act. If you know what you are doing, it is like a specialist, educated person and if you don’t know what you are doing, it is like an uneducated, illiterate person is being given a huge scientific research project. Here it is, figure it out. That is the difference.

Do we have all the time to study? No, we don’t. Do we want to become scholars. No, we don’t. Are we interested in increasing the intellectual capability? No, we are not, we are already intelligent enough. We are all educated. But we need to know what we are doing. That is the reason why we study, why we talk, why we think. That is the reason why the people in Jewel Heart are being encouraged to think, to think, to think, rather than sit, sit, sit.

Have you ever had the experience of sitting in meditation in the Japanese zen tradition? If you fall asleep, you get it. They would give you a good hit in the back with a stick. Nowadays it has become symbolic. Nobody will really hit you. If you ask for it, you will get it. That is the funny thing. Then, if you are falling asleep, somebody will come and hit you.

End of side A of tape 104

Side B of tape 104 of 09/26/2000

We were at verse 22 of Chapter 6.

Verse 22

As I do not become angry

With great sources of suffering such as jaundice,

Then why be angry with animate creatures?

They too are provoked by conditions.

The idea is that, if somebody is harming or hurting you a little bit, you cannot lose your control completely and get upset and angry and hate these people. We say that we hate our enemies. Why? Because they hurt us. Then what about jaundice? Actually, I am sure we hate jaundice too. [laughs]. I am quite sure I don’t want jaundice!

Our body is actually a combination of many things. We do have the cause of jaundice within ourselves already. If we did not have it, we could not function. We do have all the different elements in our body. If these are not stable and balanced, then we get sick. It is like when you get yellow, you are sick. But even when you are not sick, the liver carries bile. You do have bile. When that is not balanced, then you get sick and get jaundice. So Shantideva is saying that we should hate our bile, because it is giving us a lot of suffering. When bile increases we get sick, we get jaundice. So we should develop hatred towards all the elements in our body. You may say, ‘Hey, I am not stupid. How can I have hatred for that? I get sick because of the imbalance of elements.’ But it is the same thing with the mind. Our mind is unbalanced, so we get angry. Just simply, because a person irritates you, makes you nervous, makes you shake, just simply because it challenges you, it that worth to get angry and develop hatred for that person? If it gives you suffering, it is the same thing as the body. The elements within your body will do the same thing. You could say that the elements being unbalanced is my own fault. I could not eat the right thing, I could not keep the right temperature. It is the same thing with the person who irritates you. They also did not do it purposely, but they also had the same pressure at work as I do. In other words to think that because they hurt me I must hate them is an invalid reason. Why should you hate other people for that reason or even yourself for that matter?

A lot of people hate themselves. They think, ‘I did not realize, I don’t understand, I missed the boat.’ How many times do we think like that? We do that all the time. That is not a valid reason to hate oneself. Yes, maybe I missed the boat. But that was due to circumstances. At that time I was under the impression of this and that or under the influence of this and that, etc. It is not that wanted to hurt myself and voluntarily did that. I had to do it, because I was under certain pressures. There is no reason to hate oneself for that.

I added up that last line of thoughts. Traditionally, self hatred is not an issue for practitioners. It is our issue today. Milarepa never hated himself, no matter how many difficulties he had to endure under the control of Marpa – or under the control of uncle and auntie earlier. We also have the misunderstanding that love and compassion are for other people, that I don’t have to worry about myself. In the sixty years of my life, all the Tibetan Buddhist books that I read, Mahayana, Vajrayana, etc. everywhere in the beginning it says, ‘I and all sentient beings do this and that…’ It never says, ‘All sentient beings except me do this and that’. I have never seen it or heard about it. Again, that is a Western understanding. We think, ‘Compassion has to be only for others. I have to be the one sacrificing everything.’ Many people think that way. That is a wrong thought, a wrong idea. Buddha thoroughly went against the traditional practice of people jumping onto a trident and dying from that, believing that they would be liberated. Buddha also did not accept the idea of burning oneself with five fires and sacrificing oneself. Truly speaking, Buddha would disapprove of what the monks had done during the Vietnam war. Although they did it for a purpose and we respect that, Buddha would have disapproved if he was there. He openly said in statement after statement that hurting oneself is not right. Buddha called that violence and said that his teaching were about non-violence. Violence against one other individual is violence. Violence against oneself is also violence. There is no excuse for that.

So there is no valid reason to be angry with oneself, none whatsoever.

Verse 23

Although they are not wished for,

These sicknesses arise.

Likewise, although they are not wished for,

The disturbing conceptions forcibly arise.

Our negative emotions come forcibly, helplessly. It is not your fault. Did you hear me? It is not your fault!! Really true. They come forcefully, just like illnesses. No one would like to become sick. Nobody would like to have their jaundice raised and become yellow. But it happens forcefully. Likewise, the negative emotions arise like that. So don’t blame yourself. Don’t hate yourself. You might have missed opportunities here and there. People do. But it does not matter. It comes and goes. At the same time, no one really wants to hurt themselves. We do hurt ourselves, but what we really want is to protect ourselves. Am I right or wrong? Think very carefully. It is true. We don’t know how to protect ourselves, that is why we get hurt all the time. How do we try to protect ourselves? By saying, ‘Don’t talk to me, don’t touch me! Right?’ Actually, if somebody did talk to us or did touch us, it might help. But when we are upset we will say things like that. We will say, ‘Get lost!’ It is the wrong method. More or less it is.

So our illnesses arise because of our karma and because of our negative emotions. When the conditions are right, negative karma will materialize. Karma is important. But it is not a monster. Nor is karma the Buddhist replacement of God in Catholicism. Karma is conditioned. It is impermanent. It is changeable. I create my karma. I can make a difference to my karma, because the karmic consequences start. I can do and undo everything. Don’t have that projection: ‘It is my karma, so I can do nothing.’ That is the wrong notion. You have to think, ‘It is my karma, so I can do something.’ There are good reasons to think that way. I want you to remember that karma is a dependent arising. It is not an independent monster. Karma depends on conditions. I have the right to choose to have or not to have the conditions arising. If I don’t know about that, then it is too bad. Ignorance is no excuse for whatsoever. Is it an excuse in a court of law?

Aud1: It depends.

R: So it is a dependent arising again. Sometimes you may get away with it, but more or less, I don’t think that ignorance is an excuse. The conditions are under our control. I create the conditions for my karma, whether they will make it ripen or not. You are in charge of yourself, no one else. I am my own protector, nobody else. This is really true.

You can also use it in the opposite direction, ‘I am my own trouble maker, nobody else.’

Nagarjuna said,

Dag ni dak gyi gön gyi chir

Zhe ne so chi gön mi gyur.

That really says straightforwardly: I am my own protector. A the opposite of that, the creator of my own suffering. I create my suffering, I create my joy and I am responsible. In other words: I am in charge of myself. Whether I want to do something right or wrong, it is in my hands. Nobody can force you to do something which you don’t want to do. This is true in our life.

Verse 23 says that the disturbing conceptions forcibly arise. Who makes them arise forcibly? Me. In Buddhism you are responsible for yourself – in good and bad. It is not that you are responsible for all the good things and somebody else is responsible for all the bad things, nor vice versa. It is interesting, isn’t it?

Verse 24

Without thinking, ‘I shall be angry’,

People become angry with no resistance,

And without thinking, ‘I shall produce myself’,

Likewise anger itself is produced.

Once it is in gear, then it goes. You don’t have to think, ‘I am going to get angry’, and build up the anger. It comes. Why? It is our habitual pattern. It is our addiction. We are very much addicted to get angry, to get attached and very addicted to get jealous. We don’t have to put efforts in for that. On the contrary: We have to put in efforts not to get angry, not to get attached, not to have jealousy. Why? Because we have to swim against the current. The current is our negative addictions. In the Three Principles of the Path Tsong Khapa says,

Carried away on the currents of four mighty streams,

Tightly bound by the inescapable chains of evolution,

Trapped in the prison or the iron cage of self-concern,

Totally wrapped in the darkness of misknowledge,

Born and born again in endless life cycles.

That is the born again Buddhists. Just joking. But that is what it is. We have to swim against the currents of our addictions. That is why it is hard. People sometimes ask me, ‘Where does that come from? Who gave that to us?’ Nobody. We did it. How did we do it? First was ME, ME, ME, then My, My, My, and then we already in the mechanism and things just take their course. Then it is like taking water from a well. When you collect the water, it takes a lot of effort to pull up the bucket with the rope. When you let it down, it goes zoom and it is down. That is how our life is. Where did we get that from? It was Me, it was my production. First Me, then Mine. My enemy, my friend, my attachment, my hatred. The root of all this is ME. If you can destroy ME, you will be okay.

Ram Dass will talk about that when he comes. He talks about three levels of I. That is a very interesting format. There is I, the ego, then I, the soul and then I, the enlightened person. But I will let him talk. That is how we function. Our problems are not created by God. We have created them ourselves. The solutions to our problems are also in our hands. In other words, you are not hearing anti-Christian things here, but you are hearing that we can make a difference to our life. Good or bad, it is my responsibility. If I want to be good or bad, that is my choice. I can choose and I can function. I have freedom to choose what I want to.

When you are making the choice, then you have to follow everything. It is like American law. The bills will come together. Sign it or reject it. You can’t say, ‘I choose this, but I don’t want to choose that’. You can’t say, ‘I like compassion, but I don’t want that wisdom.’ This does not work. It is packaged together. When the bills come from the Capitol Hill, they come to the White House. There can be no veto from the White House.

I guess I am going to stop here. I will see you again next Tuesday.

End of side B of tape 104 of 09/ /2000