Archive Result

46

20100711GRAAEquanimity

00:00 introducing program, 4 Immeasurables, Concentrated Meditation, introducing Rimpoche

05:00

Good morning and welcome. Today I have been given the subject of equanimity. When we look into our life, we see that everyone will agree that compassion and love is something wonderful. It gives us tremendous joy and happiness, satisfaction in life and we also know that anger, hatred, jealousy and obsession give us sorrow, unhappiness and difficulties. So it is becoming our goal to become a person who cares, who shares love, and gives compassion. We want to be a person whose life is completely run by compassion, love and caring.

When we look at our minds we find that it is not very open minded. If it is open it can accommodate everything, but our mind is quite rough. Talking about me and mine, there is strong feeling. When we talk about others, there is less alertness in our mind. In normal American language we could say we are not fair. We are not fair in any sense when it comes to my side and your side. Buddha recommended to equalize our interest between ourselves and others. Our mind has to be made extremely smooth, so that there is not so much difference between me and you and ours and yours. Buddha therefore introduced equanimity. That’s an interesting term in Buddhism. It means being equal to everyone – not just every human being, but even every living being. That may be a long shot for us, but we should have peace and harmony within ourselves and within our circle, our family, people close to us that we deal with every day.

What Buddha recommended is absolutely correct, but we may not be able to do it. However, we can begin with bringing harmony and peace within ourselves, within our family, within our circle. In order to do that you need to have peace and harmony without yourself.

0:10:56

A number of us have difficulty with that all the time. Many of us are angry with ourselves. Many of us are overly obsessed with ourselves. Many of us hate ourselves. Somehow we are full of regret about our life, thinking, “I blew it here, I blew it there, I didn’t do it, I could have done that, I should have done that”. There is so much “should” and “could” in our life. That makes us regret, then we are not happy and then we become angry with ourselves. Is that correct or not? Look within yourself and you will see that this is happening very often with everybody. Without equanimity you won’t get good compassion. You won’t get good love. As long as your mind is not smooth and soft and gentle you can’t really do much with your mind. Love and compassion is changing your mind from hatred and obsession.

People love to change. But you need what to change. Just talking about changing does not make much difference. Remember, for two years of the last presidential campaign we were hearing change every day, but now we are still in Afghanistan and more people are getting killed than ever before. Twenty-two Americans got killed today alone. This morning the news came out. So the war in Afghanistan is still continuing and we are still in Iraq. So when you talk about change you have to know what you are changing from where to where and how you are going to do it. Here also it is change. You are changing from hatred and obsession into compassion and love. That is really what spirituality is: making the individual kind, soft, caring, wonderful. It is the change from being angry, short tempered and so on. To me that is what spirituality is all about. You may seek the help of the Almighty or Buddha or whoever. You may meditate and train your mind. But that is the change that you are going to make.

In order to make that change your mind has to be soft and gently and comfortable. In other words: you should be comfortable within your own skin. When you are angry with yourself, you are not comfortable with yourself. When you are obsessed you are not comfortable in your own skin. These two rough mind, obsession and hatred, are your main obstacles. Then attachment, jealousy, anger, and so on come along with that. But the biggest problems are obsession and hatred. They make the mind rough and not smooth. If your mind is controlled by either one of these or both of these you are not going to comfortable with yourself and not comfortable with anybody else. It is not about the place where you are. Sometimes the change of weather will make you feel a little bit better, but that is only temporary. It is you, within your own skin, who is not comfortable.

That makes you miserable and that’s how you make the other persons miserable. You will make everybody who comes into contact with you miserable. It’s all your deeds. It’s all your fault (laughs) – nobody else. When you tackle this, that’s where you have to go. Make yourself comfortable within your own skin. Meditation helps. When you sit here at the beginning of these Sunday mornings you sit for a while. It is only very short, just five minutes. Other groups, like Insight Meditation, will make you sit and meditate for at least 45 minutes. It is also important, during the silent meditation period, not to walk around. Particularly the people sitting in front shouldn’t walk all the way through to their seat. That is disturbing the other persons. They should wait to get to their seat till the meditation period is over. You may be walking to your own seat, but you are startling everybody and they have to look and hear what you are doing. So please don’t walk and talk during this short period. Think that you are disturbing others. Meditation will give you a little comfort, at least let you take a long breath and a little mental rest. That is the beginning of making yourself comfortable within your own skin.

Then analyze: why are you not comfortable? What’s bothering you? The first problem is actually denial. Never forget that. It is the denial of your own anger or hatred or obsession. Then you try to make it right by doing all kinds of things to cover that up. Lots of people spend so much time on their make-up, or how they do their hair, put lip stick on or whatever they can do to cover up the pain that they have.

0:20

Otherwise, the pain will be too obvious. But no matter how much you cover it up, between the cracks or your make-up you can see the pain. Denial is the first problem. Tackle that. There is nothing to deny. People do get angry. That’s normal. We are human beings. We have been hurt and we get angry. So what. Recognize and then don’t let anger take your life over. You can deep on denying and put on more make-up and wear an artificial smile. But anger will eat you up from the inside and make you rotten. Sometimes you can see certain worms get inside a tree and eat it up from inside. The tree looks still nice from the outside and then it suddenly breaks. It is like that. Anger, hatred, obsession kill you from the inside. There is no point in denying. It is human to do so. It is not a problem for a human being to get angry. It is usual. On the contrary, if you don’t get angry, it is something funny. Getting angry is the usual thing. Recognize and realize that and don’t let anger take your life over. Challenge it. That’s important. Face it. Say, “Here you are. I know you. I have been with you all my life.” If you are like me, you will say, “I have known you life after life.” If you don’t know anything about life after life, say, “I have known you since my birth or since my conception. So what do want from me? ”

By knowing, acknowledging and facing it alone, the power of these negative emotions is already made weak. Denial gives them shelter. It is like allowing a swamp to be there for the mosquitoes to grow. Honestly. When you face them face to face, have a dialogue between you and you. But don’t do it in public, because others may say that you are crazy (laughs). That itself will weaken your anger or obsession by 50 per cent. Then you have a chance to deal with it. Justification to me is another form of denial. A lot of people would like to justify everything, “I did that because…..” We have a saying in old Tibet, “Even the son who kills his own father will have justifications for that.”

Justification doesn’t mean anything. You explain and justify and in reality you want to say, “It is not my fault.” You can give a million different reasons to justify wrong behavior. In a court of law you may have to try to justify yourself. But within your own mind you don’t have to justify anything – just acknowledge and change it. If you don’t acknowledge you will never change it. You are then happy with that and keep on justifying. There is no end to the justification. Remember the Tibetan example. That means nothing in the spiritual world. It is just giving shelter to denial. You are building your own comfortable cocoon in which you want to hide. The more you justify, the other person will see that you are building a bigger and bigger cocoon and try to hide. That is the biggest problem for developing equanimity: facing your own problems. So don’t deny, face it. Accept it, then let it go, change it. When you let that go you have to replace it with caring, love and compassion. That’s really what it is.

Begin your day, your week, your month, with that mind, making yourself comfortable in your own skin. Challenge the obstacles that don’t allow you to do that. There are plenty of them. See them one by one. Don’t deny. Face them, challenge them, argue with them, win. Don’t let them take over. Denial will make you rotten. Anger, hatred and obsession will take over. By the time you realize you suffer tremendously, not only mentally, but even physically. That’s what happens. Be comfortable in your skin. Begin with that mind, then change hatred, obsession and so on into compassion and love, caring. Mean-ness should change into kindness. Attachment should change into pure love. Hatred should change into compassion. Then you become an ideal, perfect human being, comfortable and respectable in the material world, a human being who knows what they are doing also in the spiritual field. We all have the right to be that. We all have the opportunity to be that. We all have the opportunity to pass that on to our children.

31:00

Nurture them with compassion and love. Don’t yap at them, but show them through your example. That is the best you can do to yourself and to your family, spouse, children, and so on. If you could that, that is the purpose of your coming here. That’s your goal – to change into that.

I should give you a chance to ask a question.

Audience: What about people who constantly commit crimes? For example terrorists seem to think that it is okay to hurt people.

Rimpoche: There are some people who are addicted to committing crimes. I don’t think they know that they are hurting themselves. The think they are releasing tensions and they think they are happier. They get addicted to that. Denial and justification prevents them from knowing. Today’s terrorists are different, I think. Many of them – according to what we learn from the news media – think they are doing something great for their spiritual development. They are told that if they kill certain people they will be rewarded by God and have 70 virgins waiting for them in heaven. They think God will stretch his hand out to pull them up. That is total misuse of people’s faith.

Faith is something extremely important, yet it is very easy to manipulate, extremely easy. If people stop using their intelligent mind then you are so easy to manipulate. Faith is very important. You have to have it. But what you need is intelligent faith. People don’t talk about, but intelligent faith is opposite of blind faith. All of us are educated, intelligent people. You have this wonderful mind, but if you have blind faith you don’t use it. You let somebody else tell you what to do. You act like a robot, waiting for the next instructions. Even in the traditional great religions, such as Christianity, Hinduism, etc, people sometimes do that. I even see many fellow Buddhists who tell me, “My lama or rinpoche didn’t tell me what to do.” I used to joke, “When you are hungry, do you have to go to the lam or rinpoche and ask whether you should eat or not?” That is the beginning of losing your intelligent mind. Those are the stupid lamas or rinpoches who tell their students what to do. Honestly. Who do they think they are? All people are educated, intelligent people. The lamas’ job is to show what is right and what is wrong. The people’s job is to pick up what they want. You don’t tell them what to do. They are not in the army! People have to do what they want to do. But you have to use your intelligence.

Intelligent faith is absolutely important in people’s lives. If you don’t have faith it’s not right. But if you have blind faith you go wrong. It will lead you into tremendous trouble. We have had too many incidents, like Jim Jones, Heaven’s Gate and so on. They were all problems of blind faith. Most of today’s terrorists, when you look at their profiles, are not stupid people. They are well educated. But look what they did! They not only destroyed themselves, but killed 3000 people at one time, in one building. That is blind faith. It is nice to talk but you have to remember: blind faith has problems. I will not be controlled by blind faith. I will develop intelligent faith. That means you understand what you are doing. You understand your goals and purposes, how you are going to get there. Then your faith is intelligent faith.

What you can take home is making yourself comfortable in your own skin by challenging your own negative emotions, by meditating, by bringing intelligent faith within you. You have faith in yourself. Thereafter you can function and you will be perfectly okay.

Thank you so much for coming 41:00 announcements, final dedication 45:24