Archive Result

48

Soundfile 20080904GRNYIWM

Speaker Gelek Rimpoche

Location Ann Arbor

Topic Mind and Mental Factors

Section 20 Secondary Delusions

Transcriber Hartmut

Date 1-10-09

My apologies. I couldn't make it to New York today. I am talking to you from Ann Arbor. I am doing this last talk on mind and mental faculties through the live video talk. At first I had planned to talk one more day after this, but now I will be starting next Tuesday the "Swift Path" or nyur lam. So I am trying to finish this subject today. Last time we got as far as stinginess or miserliness.

7. Deceit - gyu

Other translators call it trickery, dishonesty. It is part of obsession. We fall quite strongly under the influence of obsession, with the need to receive respect from others. We have strong obsession to gifts from others, which causes us to create long livelihood. In order to impress upon others, we even pretend that we have a certain development or certain achievements on the spiritual level, even if you don't have it. That is wrong livelihood.

There are five different kinds of wrong livelihoods. These are not big wrong livelihoods, which are wrong things we are doing, like killing, harming, robbing or cheating people and so on. All these are definitely wrong livelihoods.

Here they give you five small ones. The big ones are no danger for the practitioners. We are not going to kill anyone to make more money. There is not so much danger of that. But we are in danger of some pitiful little behavior faults. For example, pretending to be quite well developed, even if you are not. Or talking someone into giving you more. Trying to give someone some little thing, expecting to get a bigger gift in return. These are five are the obstacles for good spiritual practitioners.

For us the wrong livelihoods are more engaging in things that are wrong, particularly hurting people. Wrong livelihood is the major aspect of this mental faculty.

8. Dishonesty - yo

We know that one. Creating wealth through dishonesty is definitely not right. It is also part of obsession. It is trying to hide your own faults and problems, not letting others know about them. That is because it may hurt your own livelihood. We know that cheating people is wrong livelihood. This one is more about hiding your own faults and in order to do that, show other people's faults as much as possible, so that the question doesn't come near to you. I can't help thinking about what the late Allen Ginsberg told me. He said that the FBI director Hoover was himself gay. But he didn't want to talk about that, didn't want to get the subject to come near him; so he made a big issue out of gay-bashing, so that no one will doubt that he may be gay. 0:10.08

This is definitely a case of yo: hiding your faults in order not lose your power, prestige, pretending that you don't have these faults and projecting such faults onto others. The majority of people won't know.

9. Mental Inflation or Self Satisfaction - gyap pa

If you are looking at yourself, thinking, "I am young, handsome, beautiful, I am wonderful", that is not a problem. But appreciating yourself in that manner, while looking down on others is negative. It is almost like a superiority complex.

10. Violence - nam par tse

We all know violence is wrong. Physically, mentally and emotionally, violence is wrong. It is caused by a lack of compassion. You don't care what happens to another person. However they may feel or what difficulties they may be going through doesn't matter to you. You don't feel it, because it is not you, it is somebody else. You don't care. So you indulge in certain behavior knowing that it hurts someone. Even though you know about it you don't bother.

I must tell you a funny story. It was in the mid 1960s, maybe in 1966. I was working at the Tibet House in New Dehli. We had a museum to preserve Tibetan paintings and other works of art. We also had a library, not only to preserve and share the information. We also had an emporium. A lot of Tibetan cottage industries had come in India, organized or through individuals. They all needed an outlet for their products. So we set that emporium up in Dehli. We had dresses, shoes and all kinds of things. One of the sales girls was selling Tibetan shoes to an American tourist. She liked this particular shoe, but it was a little too small for her. She tried to force her foot into the shoe and that must have hurt. The sales girl said, "Doesn't matter, push more." The tourist said, "It is hurting." The sales girl kept saying, "Doesn't matter, push", hoping that it would fit then. Then the tourist replied, "It doesn't matter to you, because it is not your foot." That is what happens. You don't care because you don't feel it if other people are getting pain. That is violence.

11. Non shame

There is no hesitation for any wrong doing because you don't worry about it. You don't have any embarrassment. You are not thinking, "How can I do such a thing, I should be ashamed of myself." Instead you are thinking, "As long as nobody knows, I can do anything." This is shameless. Shame and embarrassment are virtues and non-shame and non-embarrassment are non-virtues.

12. Non - Embarrassment

You don't care about your own view of yourself such as thinking, "If I do I will be ashamed of myself", but you don't even care what others think. That would be thinking, "If other people came to know, how embarrassing that would be, especially if the Buddhas see me, how embarrassing; what would my spiritual teachers think of me, what about those dharma protectors and my other friends who are on the same path, who are also struggling and doing their best - what would they think of me? " Using others as reason for you not to engage in wrong doing would be a virtue. With these thoughts you are protecting yourself from wrong doing. That is a virtue. And the opposite of that is not having embarrassment.

13. Dullness - muk pa

Your body and your mind both are becoming quite heavy and unconcentrated. Letting it ago in that manner, not trying to uplift yourself - that is considered a negativity. Always, when there is some kind of heaviness or laziness, not wanting to do anything, you have to uplift yourself and do something better.

14. Wandering Mind

Not all wandering mind is a negativity. This one refers to the one based on either obsession and attachment. The mind is unable to focus on the focal point, always looking at some funny thing. Two days ago somebody showed me a video where John McCain looked at his running mates other end. That is the wandering mind this is talking about.

15. Non faith

That is not having intelligent faith in Buddha, Dharma and Sangha, karma, spiritual masters, etc. This is not blind faith, but intelligent faith. Because of not having that faith, the individual misses the opportunity to walk the path to liberation and its result.

16. Laziness

This is not just simply being lazy. It is being very fond of sleeping. You just can't get up. You don't only need your regular 4 - 8 hours of sleep. Some people sleep 12, 13, 14 hours and still don't want to get up. It is too cozy and comfortable in that soft feather bed or water bed or whatever. You don't want to do anything, submitting yourself to total laziness. That is not only for sleeping, but other wrong actions too. Some people are very fond of doing the wrong things and work very hard for them, sometimes 16 - 18 hours a day, but for the wrong thing. They are very fascinated with something and spend all their time, without getting any benefit, neither monetary, materially nor spiritually, but totally going into it. Many artists are doing that too. But artists are artists and have their own art interest. It has its own result. But a lot of people - like me - who are very fond of doing nothing, just sitting and watching. The time will go and I just sit and watch, enjoying my cup of tea, sitting in the corner nice and warm. That is laziness.

What does laziness do? You have a very strong desire, attachment and even obsession to some wrong thing and that cuts off all the opportunity to do something right. You hear in many places, many teachings, that laziness is the direct opponent to enthusiasm. We talk about that in lam rim, on the Bodhisattva path and everywhere. The bodhisattvacharyavatara has a whole chapter on enthusiasm and laziness. 0:24:27 We talked about it in detail then, so here I can make it very short.

17. Unconscientiousness

This means not protecting your mind from the control of negative thoughts and ideas, but unconsciously letting it go. Indians have that culture of aya ram gia ram - Ram has come and Ram has gone, let it go. There is no alertness, no conscientiousness. Let the mind go wherever it takes you, from the peak of samsara to the bottom of the hell realms, going everywhere, getting nothing done. That is unconscientiousness.

18. Forgetfulness

This is not simply forgetting. Because of negative emotions you are forgetting about positive deeds, anything you need to do positively. You have been overtaken by the negative influences. This is the particular forgetfulness we are counting here, not all types of forgetting.

19. (wandering mind??)

This is a natural wandering mind. All our five senses are completely overwhelmed by looking at external objects, such as forms and sounds and smells, tastes and objects of touch. Being overwhelmed by all of those is natural wandering.

(there is no visible separation between 19 and 20 or else it is all part of 19 and Rimpoche didn't address 20 = . Distraction (external wandering?? - see Ann Arbor transcript for the same talk is much clearer)

By the influence of negativity the mind is busy somewhere planning revenge and tit for tat and all that kind of thing is because of the influence of negative emotions. That is called "external wandering". Some people are very fond of some kind of meditation that gets you nowhere, simply sitting comfortably. There is a joy in that sitting and you are engaging in that joy. It is nice to have joy, but if you overly indulge in that it is almost like getting addicted to "pot" or something. It does the same thing. I don't mean that using pot and meditation are the same thing, but still doing meditation that way takes you away from the right thing you are supposed to do.

(This mental faculty also includes) pretending you are great when you are not. You give the impression to people that you are great. You are trying to say prayers and this and that. There is nothing wrong with saying your prayers, but if you are doing it with this wrong motivation then it becomes this signed wandering. Then wrong wandering: Ego and self pride, etc. That is worst of all.

Summary

The 20 secondary negative emotions, like anger, hatred, etc, are so called, because they are part of the 6 root delusions, but not complete, but very close to the 6 root delusions. 0:30:08

That is why they are called secondary. For example, hatred, anger, saying bad things, violence, and so on are almost part of hatred and anger. Those four make anger grow much stronger and stabilize it within the individual. It is recommended to look very carefully at each of these mental faculties, understand their nature and their aspects, on what they focus and how they harm the individual. These are the subjects for you to study and then avoid - if you are a spiritual practitioner. In Buddhism, spiritual practitioners are avoiding negativities and building positivities, watching their minds. That is the major work of a spiritual practitioner. That is why they are quite careful with this.

Thus I have completed the 20 secondary negativities.

The Four Changeable Mental Factors

Sleep

Regret

Gross Analysis

Subtle Analysis

These are by virtue neither positive nor negative. But they can change. They change through motivation, and through other mental faculties accompanying them, such as the five omnipresent mental faculties. They can especially be changed by motivation, by the mind running through them. Particularly, regret.

Regret

If you are regretting that you did something wrong, that is a great regret. It is positive. You can also have a regret of something good that you did, but due to the influence of non-virtuous friends you may be regretting that. If you do, that would be negative regret. This is not by the virtue of the regret itself, but by the virtue of the mental factors accompanying it, particularly the omnipresent mental faculties and the mind immediately before, during and after developing regret.

Analysis

Whether it is gross or subtle analysis, they can all be a great positive thing or the whole analysis can be a horrible negativity.

Sleep

This is something we put a lot of time in. Because of our physical condition we have to sleep, otherwise we will have a lot of trouble. When you are sleeping, this can be something extremely useful to build virtue. But it can also create non-virtue. This is totally in our hands and in how we manage our sleep. For example, before you go to sleep you can think over what you did all day, reviewing the day. You will see good things and you appreciate that and bad things, which you have to caution yourself about and regret, purify and make sure you don't repeat the same thing the next day. If you do that before sleeping then your whole sleep becomes virtuous, very profitable for you, physically good for you, mentally good for you, karmically great for you.

However, if you fall asleep under the influence of hatred or obsession, firstly you can't sleep well, secondly when you finally do fall asleep, the whole sleeping time will become negative. It may or may not be good for you physically, I don't know. But spiritually, for your karma, it will be horrible. The whole period is not only wasted, but went to the wrong side. It adds up negative votes for us for the time when our life concludes. So if alertness, awareness, conscientiousness, etc, are governing our life, that will make a hell of a difference. All these four changeables are becoming positive.

Sometimes sleep becomes different because of time and place. Sometimes the food you eat makes a difference. Everywhere in Buddhist literature it is considered terrible to eat without limit. Even if try to think and make your sleep virtuous you can't do it because you have either drunk too much and are intoxicated or you have overeaten, so you fall dead asleep, without thinking anything.

So all these four things are changeable. Conscientiousness, awareness, alertness, these mental factors have to guide us.

Summary of all Negative and Changeable Mental Factors

One should know what causes the negative emotions, what is their reality. We talked about the 6 root negativities and 20 secondary negativities. They are responsible for making these changeables going into negative. If they are negative, then we have 30 negative mental factors. Why are they considered negative? 0:40:01

The moment they grow within our mind this mind becomes rough, no longer smooth and becomes bad. Buddha calls them bad thoughts, bad ideas as well as afflictive emotions. Not only that: these negative emotions make us suffer during our life time, physically and mentally. In our future life they will take us to unwanted rebirths. So these negative emotions not only destroy me, but also others. So Buddha also chose to call them "contaminated", "those who tie us", "net", "devil's heroes", "chronic diseases", "obstacles", "dust", "dirt", "pain", "wrong behavior", "sin", "obstacles". Buddha used all these names to identify them. All the Buddhas don't like them and call them bad things. They don't want to associate with them. They hope and pray that we don't associate with them. Then the conclusion here by Kachen Yeshe Gyaltsen is:

Lets say the whole world becomes our enemy. What could those enemies do to us? They can harm our physical body or at the most they can kill us. But they cannot take away our virtue, nor can they deliver us to rebirth in the lower realms. So what they can do to us is very limited. But the enemies of the negative emotions can hurt us much more than any ordinary enemy. They can take our good deeds we have accumulated earlier. (Anger and hatred can burn our virtues). They obstruct us from developing new qualities. They cut down on our life, luck and fortune. They take us to the lower realms. With ordinary enemies you can talk and negotiate. You can bargain. But if you try to deal with the negative emotions that way you will lose. You have no other alternative but to defeat these negative emotional enemies. They hide in the deepest part of ourselves and from there hurt and destroy us. If there is something that can be called the real heart enemy who hurts us from the bottom of the heart, it is this one. If you are convinced of that, the task is to understand the causes of these emotions, what they focus on, what conditions they come in, what their mental aspects, are, what they do and then what are their direct antidotes. These things you have to learn from your spiritual teachers, great masters, from books and that is how we make the Buddhas happy and how we make our lives worthwhile. Otherwise there is not much point.

Kachen Yeshe Gyaltsen further says,

I know nothing, I am old, I am confused, so if there is a mistake here, I seek forgiveness from the learned people. I and all mother sentient beings may be able to obtain total enlightenment because of the little work I have done here.

He wrote this commentary, but still says that he knows nothing and is a dull, confused, old man. Similarly us here, we spent time talking about this and I tried to guide you, but still I am an old, confused man, so if there is a mistake, I seek your forgiveness. And I am glad I finished today. Although it was quite a quick run through, you do have the commentaries and the Tibetan books for those who can read. That gives you a very strong mental framework for how to function, not only in the spiritual path but for everything else. So that's that. 48:40

Next week I will be back and we are starting the nyur lam. That is a very good lam rim. I did the de lam during the Labor Day retreat in Ann Arbor. I didn't go into much detail. It became all joined together. But now I hope to do the nyur lam quite slowly, at least for the rest of the year, and maybe into spring next year. I have done a lam rim teaching in Ann Arbor in the beginning, in the late 80s and early 90s. The Cleveland and Chicago people drove up to Ann Arbor and we did almost one week end per month, sometimes two, for about a year. This produced the lam rim transcript we have. That was quite detailed, but certain areas we didn't really do, like the Field of Merit visualization. During the Labor Day weekend, I did that, not very detailed, but in an easy way. We did the lama chopa Field of Merit as well as the lam rim Field of merit, according to nyur lam and de lam. It is a little easier than the Field of Merit according to the Liberation in the Palm of your Hand. For the lamas there are only five groups. The early Kadampa groups are not divided further. But we did that quite nicely. We will produce a chart for that to use during the next teaching and a power point presentation. That will be easier. I avoided the Field of Merit the first time round and even this time I was about to, because to you who are those people, what are their names? The names don't make much sense to you. It looks like Tom, Dick and Harry and that type of thing. But still, we have gone through, without naming the lineage masters. If you want to know all the names of the lineage masters, you can read that longer lineage prayer, which we have available. Similarly, those different yidams: where do we put Guhyasmaja, Heruka and Yamantaka in the Merit Field? Then there are other Maha anu yoga tantra deities, then Yoga and Kriya and Charya tantra deities, then Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, then the Sangha: arhats and the dakas and dakinis, the vajrayana sangha, and then the dharmapalas. All of those we did and will be difficult to talk about this on Tuesdays and Thursdays. That is why I did that on that week end. But other than that, we will follow all other outlines, slowly, but not too long. It will be finished within 6 months. That is my plan for the next 6 months. The nyur lam is not too short and not too long. It is about 80 Tibetan pages. If you double that, it will be 160 pages. That is quite reasonable. Then I will bring in the de lam, which gives us the meditations. So I am looking forward to seeing you next Thursday

Good Night.

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