Archive Result

20031103GRRU

RU-11-3-03 Daily Practice

Let me continue the discussion from last week about Contemplating Spiritual Topics: How to do a daily spiritual practice.

Last time I started with the Seven Limbs, especially the first. I went through who is a suitable field of merit or object of spiritual practice. It is entirely an individual choice on the basis of who you do your practice. It does not matter if you use a picture of Buddha or Jesus. So it is fine as long as it is a good spiritual business, with offering and purification. But make sure your object is not just a ghost. Therefore the first of the Seven Practice is:

I bow down in body, speech and mind

It is not a question of bowing down as much as admiring their qualities and also showing interest in developing the same qualities they have. As far as Buddhism is concerned, we not only look at Buddha as a some kind of role model and supreme being, but also as someone who can guide us on the spiritual path and not only that, also an example of what we can be. That is a little different from the western model. Buddha represents the ideal manifestation of the ultimate spiritual development. I am not saying that everybody should do this but as Buddhists that is what we should do. Therefore we look at the historical Buddha for the quality of his mind, his knowledge, his compassion, his love. We admire that and express that we would like to be just like that. If you think this is useful for you to incorporate in your practice that is fine. If you think it is not going to work very well with your practice, then you don’t have to pick it up.

If you admire something it is a sign that you want to have it. You signal that you wouldn’t mind having that or being like that. That is how you build up your aspiration. So this first point is much more than just bowing down. It is not just expressing your respect. Respect is fine. But more than that you want to become like that. You have a goal and a purpose. You put your energy in that direction so that it is not scattered all over the place, but focused.

We already talked about offering too. This doesn’t just mean taking money out of your wallet. If we have to limit all our offerings to checks and cash it would be pathetic. Even if you are as rich as George Soros or Bill Gates it won’t be enough to do anything. Generosity is mind more so than physical things. It is the mind of sharing, the mind of offering.

Imagery can become reality. Even scientists today confirm that. We spent a week end with the Dalai Lama in MIT, where people were trying to prove this. Don’t limit what you can give. You can multiply the offerings. They give fill up all the ground and the subjects to whom you offer fill the sky. It is an unlimited, huge offering. The quality is pure, the material is pure, to whom you give is pure. It is also pure in the way you give, without attachment and hope of return. There is even more to purity from the Buddhist point of view but I can’t get into it now. Keep it in your mind.

The next is purification.

I regret and purify all transgressions

If you think about it deeply it has a huge dimension. Purification in itself is fantastic, but the question is: Can you purify everything you have done wrong? My answer is that yes, it is possible, no matter how heavy the negativities might be, how horrifying it might be. Of course, if somebody has killed somebody else you can’t bring that person back through purification. The point rather is this: Is the person who has done the killing going to be blacklisted forever? No, that is not the case, because people are all impermanent. They change. Everything is impermanent and changes. We did something wrong, and whatever that is we can change that. Changing is in our nature. We are not permanent. We all were cute, nice little babies whom everybody loved a while ago. But we have changed and continue to change. We are young, then get older and then we die. Our consciousness changes. Our personality changes. Everything changes. Therefore our wrong doings can also change. This is one of the Buddha’s spiritual experiences. Whatever has been created is by nature impermanent. Look at anything and point out to me a single item that is permanent. You can’t. Even the seemingly permanent monuments are impermanent.

I have seen people taking the Statue of Liberty apart and repairing it. Our deeds, good and bad, are impermanent. Therefore they are changeable. We have opportunities to purify. Even in our own culture forgiveness is known. But some people don’t want to. However, it doesn’t matter if people forgive from their side, as long as you are seeking forgiveness with a pure mind. Whether the other person forgives you or not is philosophically speaking not at the digression of the person. The person has a right to refuse to forgive. But that does not effect the action of the person who is purifying. From the purifying person’s point of view it is important to seek forgiveness with a pure mind. From the Buddhist point of view it is actually not even recommended to go to anyone and seek forgiveness from them. We don’t have those little confession boxes where you sit on one side and agent 007 sits on the other side. But on the other hand that doesn’t save Buddhism from having issues with corruption. There is just as much corruption in Buddhism as in Christian churches. Eastern temples have their own problems.

The point is that purification does not depend on the other person forgiving you. Yes, you do have to do as much as you can to compensate a person who has suffered through your actions. You can give money, save a life, tell the truth. However, it is not required that your compensation has to be accepted by the person whom you have hurt. You are the one who is purifying, not them. You can purify in the presence of God, Buddha, other people, but you can also purify by yourself. There are certain specific purifications that may have to be done according to specific systems but in general the main requirement for purification is strong regret. If we don’t regret what we have done there is no reason why we should purify. If I am proud of what I did, why would I want to purify that? Or even, if you are not proud, but you don’t regret it either, you still won’t worry about purifying. But if I realize that I did something wrong, if I hurt people, then I will want to purify.

Good and bad are extremely difficult to tell apart. Who can say that something is good and something else is not good? Only those who know, God or Buddha. But the public or you and I can’t say that for others. Our knowledge is limited. So how can I make the distinction myself? There is one simple guideline: Have I hurt somebody? If that is the case that is wrong. If I hurt myself, that is also wrong. Some people think that they have the right to take their own life. But this is a huge mistake. You could also think, ‘I have brought you into the world, so I have a right to take you out.’ Forget it. That is definitely wrong. It is negative. All negative actions will have negative consequences and will need to be purified. Through purification you can neutralize that karma. Then you don’t get the consequences. That is the meaning of purification. That is why purification is one of the most important tools to establish a spiritual practice. Do it every day. We create negativities without knowledge, unconsciously, day and night. Even in our sleep we do it. We can dream of killing our enemies. That has also some negativity. It is not as big a deal as actually killing somebody, but still, it is a negativity. It is very important to analyze and find out for yourself if wrong doings can really be purified.

In western culture we carry a lot of guilt. We think that we have done something wrong and now we are helpless and hopeless and useless and we are going to have to pay for it. To a certain extent that may be true. But never forget that purification works. Don’t let it hang over your head. Don’t let it torture you. We are all human beings, with a great mind, with all kinds of spiritual possibilities, traditions and alternatives. We don’t have to torture ourselves with guilt. Therefore regretting and purifying all transgressions is one of the most important of the spiritual topics. Of course, if we are not interested in developing spiritually we don’t have to worry about purification. If there is no spiritual concern, then as long as the police don’t catch you, you could do whatever you wanted and you would be okay. But somehow we don’t feel okay, because we have a sense of spiritual responsibility. You know it is not right. But you need the information that you can actually change something that has gone wrong. You can’t bring somebody dead back to life. But from your point of view you can change what you did wrong. You can regret and purify.

I don’t buy into any guilt trips. If somebody puts a guilt trip on me I run away 500 miles, without looking back. People are fond of putting guilt trips on each other. They give each other pressure. I know somebody who told me, ‘If you don’t do your exercise, I won’t do my meditation practice.’ I said, ‘Absolutely fine if you don’t want to do your practice. It is your choice. Doesn’t make a difference to me. Do what you want. It’s your life. I will be happy if you do it, and unhappy if you don’t do it, but you can’t use this as a guilt trip on me. ‘ It is the individual’s responsibility. Don’t submit to any guilt trip. And purify whatever has gone wrong. Things don’t end there.

From whatever spiritual angle I look purification is accepted. It is known in Buddhist and Judeo-Christian traditions. The Christians may not exactly accept it the way I said but they do accept forgiveness.

The next of the Seven Practices is rejoicing. Buddha said that if you rejoice you can generate tremendous amounts of merit. You can rejoice in things that you did yourself and in what others have done. We can just sit here and rejoice in what Mother Theresa has done, what Dr. Martin Luther King has done, what Mahatma Gandhi has done and what the Dalai Lama is doing. Let them work and we enjoy and get very benefit just from that. I call this a great investment without risk. We invest a few minutes of our thoughts, looking at these people work, we appreciate what they do and rejoice. This is another spiritual tool. You can rejoice in Buddha and in Jesus. You don’t have to do anything yourself. You can just be a couch potato and keep in rejoicing in everybody’s wonderful deeds. But we don’t that. Instead we get jealous. When we try to rejoice, jealousy will pop up and say, ‘Yes, but..’ That is the language of jealousy. It is the job of negative emotions like that to take you away from rejoicing. The positive emotions will encourage you to rejoice. Just by thinking how well others have done you can get a lot of benefit. Whether their motivation is right or wrong is their own business. We don’t have to worry about that. We want benefit, not disadvantages. We rejoice in people’s good work. If on the other hand you rejoice in the actions of George W Bush, you get negativities, because it involves a lot of killing and destruction in Iraq. That is risky. You have to be careful in whom you rejoice.

It is almost the same as to whom you can take refuge. Also, it is great to rejoice in Gandhi’s work, but it not necessarily that great to rejoice in Gandhi’s persuasion of hurting oneself. You have to use your intelligence here. There is one side and that is Gandhi’s selflessness, only interested in helping his people. But do you have to rejoice in Gandhi forcing the Indian people to get beaten by the British soldiers? That is a different question. We rejoice in ahimsa, his system of non-violence. But we don’t have to rejoice in hurting. In general though we rejoice in Gandhi, because it has been great work he has been doing. So rejoicing in virtuous activities is a very profitable, risk free investment, except a few seconds’ of using your mind. Why wouldn’t we do that?

Then the next two parts of the Seven Practices are not that important right now. But the last one, dedication, is again very important. Therefore, on the whole I strongly recommend to pay attention to the first two, the third, fourth and the seventh.

Dedication is safeguarding your positive virtue. As I said earlier, wrong actions and right actions, both can be changed. We may create enormous positive virtue, but hatred can quickly burn it all up. Many of us may not be aware of it. But that is how it works. Actually, any religious service in any tradition carries these elements of the Seven Practices. There are praises, offerings, there is purification and there are sections of the service where you make yourself feel great.

These Seven Practices is something everybody can do without any difficulties, in your own living room or even in the bathroom and certainly in a place of worship, like a church, synagogue, center or wherever it may be.

So when you ask how to begin a spiritual practice this is what you can do. You can use this in connection with any tradition. You can use any object of worship anywhere.

Let me tell you some more about dedication. Once you have dedicated something it is safeguarded. Karma works like that. It is like a contract. It says that if you dedicate some positive virtue to a particular goal, that virtue won’t be exhausted until your goal has materialized. Without knowing we are subject to that contract. It is like when you get a credit card. You sign for it and you are bound by the contract. We are all subject to the karmic contract, from birth. It doesn’t matter where you are Buddhist, Christian, atheist or anything else. According to this the karma you have dedicated will not be wasted until you have reached to where you have been dedicating to. Otherwise hatred burns all virtues, just as purification burns all non-virtues. Virtue and non-virtue are equal in strength. We like to see the virtue win, but they are equal. Virtues have a powerful weapon called purification, and non-virtues have a powerful weapon called hatred. They cancel each other out. Dedication protects your virtues against hatred.

You can dedicate your virtue to whatever you want to. It is yours. But don’t dedicate it to something cheap. Dedicate it to something worthwhile, something that is hard to achieve, a good, long term goal. Buddha recommends to dedicate our positive virtue so that everybody may become enlightened. That doesn’t mean that you cannot dedicate your virtue to somebody getting healed, being successful and comfortable. It is your money. You can spend it on whatever you want to.

These are the spiritual tools you can use every day. Take the little prayer with the Seven Practices home with you. You don’t have to sing but think about them, meditate. You analyze for example if it is possible to purify. Then you check if you have regret? Did you do something right or something wrong? The analytical meditation will give you a good idea. If you are convinced that you have done something wrong, then have regret. You may concede that you have done something wrong, but you may not get regret, if you have pride. Then you have to activate your analytical thinking again. Why don’t you want to have regret? Ask yourself. You may say, ‘Because I don’t want to admit it. I am not convinced that I was wrong.’ You do that again and again until you are convinced. You will have some regret. But if you agree that you did something wrong, why only have a little regret? Might as well have good regret. How much are you willing to do? You have to keep on thinking like that. It will help to overcome negative addictions. That is spiritual practice. God and Buddha will help us. The spiritual masters will guide us, but the work is ours. We have to be honest with ourselves. You cannot really deceive yourself, because your mind is very well known to you. There is nobody to cheat, lie to or blame. It is within ourselves. Once you are convinced you have to concentrate on it. If you feel regret, build a strong regret and then purify.

In one way spiritual practice is simple. On the other hand it is complicated. Here we are making it as easy and short as possible. In Tibet there were volumes written on it and people would spend months thinking about it. For us it has been shortened to one line each. But you have to build the understanding of these lines. Otherwise there is no value in them. You have just a piece of paper after all, which you can throw in the garbage. It wont’ even do good as toilet paper. But if you work it through in your mind, these few lines are very powerful. It is the result of the meditation of many masters over thousands of years. That is how it was made short and easy, like a ready made TV dinner. But it is better than that, because it has great nutritional value.

That is all I have to say.

Q: How do you equate mind, spirit and soul in daily living?

R: That is beyond me, really. When I look at Buddha, I don’t look at him as an image. I see Buddha as a being beyond any image. That Buddha to me is mind, spirit and everything in one, without separation.

Q: Could thoughts and emotions happen simultaneously?

R: Yes. That is supposed to be the extraordinary quality of enlightened beings. They are simultaneously everywhere. I must tell you an interesting story here. It was about 10 years ago. The Greatful Dead did a performance together with a group of Tibetan monks in St. John’s Chapel in New York City. That is a huge place. I was supposed to give a very brief address, about 2 minutes and then light a candle, which was then supposed to be passed on the 5000 people audience so they could light their candles.

I was climbing up to the stage and Prof Thurman was holding me back, saying, ‘There are no candles. Don’t say anything about candle lighting.’ So I went up there and spoke about the extraordinary qualities of the enlightened beings. I said that they are simultaneously functioning in every way and everywhere. Because of that you can say that God is everywhere. At that level body, mind and speech function on the same frequency. We can’t do that. That is the difference between being enlightened and un-enlightened. For the enlightened beings you can say, ‘Wherever their mind is, their body is.’ And their mind has total knowledge of everything. Therefore they are everywhere.

When I came back down from the stage an African American gentleman approached me. He grabbed me and gave me a big, fat kiss on my lips. He said, ‘You are from Tibet, right? You did a great job explaining this, better than a Southern Baptist minister.’

That is all for today. Thank you very much.