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20120429GRAATB18

00:00

Good morning and welcome everybody to this Tibetan Buddhism with Gelek Rimpoche talk. We have been talking about what practice means. The practice begins with learning, not necessarily meditating, because in order to meditate whatever you want to meditate you have to have some idea – although keeping the mind stable and being able to focus is a very important practice. I am not denying that. But when we talk about Tibetan Buddhist practice, just simple sitting alone is not – good enough. Sorry to say that. It went out of my mouth: not good enough. Now I have to say “I don’t mean that”. But really, Tibetan Buddhism has a purpose. You have a goal that you want to achieve. There are at least 3 levels of goals.

The first level is overcoming our negativities. In order to do that we have to overcome the thought that makes the negative actions function. So we call the first call making ourselves free from the suffering, by cutting through the cause of suffering. That means not only the negative actions, but negative thought and emotions that force the individuals to engage in negative deeds. If you do that you are bound to have negative results. This result is suffering. That’s the way you deal with it, by cutting through the causal level, rather than challenging the symptoms themselves.

The symptoms are the effects. By dealing with the symptoms you get relief but you can’t get rid of them. When Tibetan Buddhists look at the goal of getting rid of suffering that will be first. The second is that not only we should get rid of suffering, but also the cause of suffering. According to the Buddha, our life is divided into two: samsara, the cycle of existence and nirvana, being out of that. Buddha says that samsara is suffering and nirvana is peace. That is a Buddhist slogan or logo. All samsara is suffering. When you get totally free from that you are getting out of samsara. That is the second goal. The third and ultimate goal is to become Buddha.

Buddha says: I was just like you. We were the same human beings with the same problems. I happened to be putting in a little enthusiastic effort and unfortunately you have been a little lazy. When I can become Buddha, why not you? We are the same, no difference. Remember, Buddha is not the Son of God, but just a human being who went through the struggles just like ourselves and he managed. Then he said, “If I could do it, why not you?” So that’s the ultimate goal.

The practice is geared towards achieving either one, two or all three goals. Everybody will put the focus on the best goal. No one would like to settle for less than best. They recommend that to be your goal. Are you going to achieve it? Who knows. It really depends on the individual. However, even if you don’t get to the ultimate goal you get to some level. Earlier, Tibetan teachers have told us that when we do a Tibetan Buddhist dharma practice the individual actually should achieve result that looks forward to the future, meaning the next life. We are talking about the changing of lives – the big change. Why? Because you should be sure that the next life is going to be a perfect one. That’s why looking forward. It is often said that then you will be received by the dakas and dakinis and gurus and yidams immediately upon the end of this life. We even pray for this.

The best to make sure that’s going to happen would be to become a Buddha at that moment, utilizing the stage of death as meditative state, withdrawing the individual from outer interference to the deepest inside and utilizing that opportunity and transforming the mind itself and the individual from the ordinary into extraordinary. That is making sure. I am trying to make it a little less explicit than what I started to say. I have to balance that a little bit in between maintaining secrecy and giving you understanding. That is the best goal.

0:11

This is very hard to get. Even if one doesn’t get to that, at least have no fear, no fear of suffering, of all kinds of things, fear of annihilation, fear of going through what we call in Buddhist language the “narrow passage of the bardo.” This is described almost like something like a little torture chamber. If you read the Tibetan Book of the Dead you get all kinds of funny explanations, which are not necessarily correct, and besides that, this is not exactly going to happen to everybody. Everybody is a good person, basically, no matter how bad you may be. You are very good persons. All of us are kind, good, caring, compassionate, not necessarily self-absorbed. Some of us may be, but most of us are not. Narcissism – that is probably a term that is more accurate than pride. Basically we are good persons. Good persons are bound to have good results, but not necessarily all the time. A lot of people do suffer. I am just talking from my background of reincarnation. To me it is certain that death is not the end of the individual. The individual will continue. We are simply losing our present identity. The physical body we have is like our identity. We have the Secretary of State issued photo ID called “driver’s license.” That proves our identity. Truly speaking it is just a little piece of plastic. So who are you? “I am a little plastic”. That’s what we show and people buy that! But the actual thing identifying us is our physical body. When we buy the individual entity within the identity, the physical body, separates. It is not easy to separate. Entity and identity have been together throughout our life, even before we were born. So when you have to separate there are difficulties.

One is physical form and the other is formless. Mind does not have shape, color or physical form at all. The body does. When you are separating them it is a little difficult. How much difficulty doctors have in separating Siamese twins with one head and two stomachs or the other way around. Here you are separating mind from the physical body. That is hard. It is not that easy. Nor is it that difficult either.

When you are continuing, what happens thereafter? That is the issue we are talking about. Not only is it about being free and happy in this life, but also in the life thereafter. The third goal is total enlightenment, as I told you earlier. In order to get to that level, whatever you are meditating on has to have powerful meditations. It has to be on the point and effective. It should be an active meditation rather than a passive one. You have to be attacking the suffering. You have to be attacking the cause of suffering. It is important to know how. That’s why learning is important. If you don’t know you will be simply shooting arrows into the forest without target. Who knows where they go? Virtually nothing happens. You can keep on shooting. People practice shooting in the forest and most of the time no one gets hurt, except occasionally.

It is important to know that the object you want to destroy is the First Noble Truth and the Second Noble Truths. These two negative truths are the target that our practice would like to attack, hit and destroy. That’s why a little knowledge is necessary.

They asked Buddha, “Why do you talk about suffering? Do you want to frighten people?” Buddha said no. The purpose of talking about suffering is to know and to acknowledge.

The purpose of the Second Noble Truth is to understand and avoid. The purpose of the Third Noble Truth is to gain within you and make it a part of you. The purpose of the Fourth Noble Truth is to act and function. All the Four Noble Truths have their own purposes.

0:21

For the last couple of Sundays I talked about the Truth of Suffering. Buddha said that this is not done to make ourselves frightened, or to paralyze ourselves by thinking a lot about suffering. Nor do we want to torture ourselves. But whether you think, acknowledge them or not, we have them. They are functioning every day with us. Sometimes they are a little more severe, sometimes a little less. Sometimes some little joy goes up and you will be saying “alala” or whatever. Sometimes it is a little more severe and you have a little long face, bending down, without looking around and being more serious and sometimes it is even worse. That is happening with us every day, whether we accept or acknowledge or not. It is there. Knowing that will not increase the suffering. Sometimes it does, actually. I wanted to say that knowing will not increase our suffering. Acknowledging suffering gives us the opportunity to work with it. That is true. Knowing sometimes seems to intensify it. Mind is such that if you forget it, you are not so much aware of it. Mind is not directly focused on it and dealing with it, so it looks like a little more relief. But it is not. It is there very much and it is nagging us all the time. All the time.

Human beings are such wonderful persons. We have so many ways of handling it. We really know how to handle it very well, because we suffered tremendously, in life after life. So we are really good at it. At least we will say, “Well, it was a good learning experience”. Or we might say, “I learnt [my lesson].” Also physically, we do all kinds of things. We have a lot of alternatives, artificial, no doubt, but there are alternatives like facials, make-up, and all of those things are some kind of human mechanism trying to not be in intense contact with the tortures we go through. Look at ageing. The early Tibetan teachers said, “There is a wonderful quality in aging. It is coming very slowly and gradually. If it came overnight, if a 20 year old person over night started looking like an 80 year old, how will that person feel?”

We make it as easy and light as possible, but on the whole it is there. Is it permanent? No, I really want to say this clearly. Can you get rid of it? Sure you can. If you cannot, who else can? Buddha did get rid of it – as a human being. Thereafter millions of others did get rid of it. What do I mean by “getting rid of it?” Are you not getting old and will you not die? Yes, you are going to get old and die. But you don’t have to have that much suffering. Even with human beings sitting next to yourself you know. Look at them. Some take suffering so seriously. They are tortured so much. Some take it more lightly and are less tortured. Some are bothered, some are not. They are not immune, however whatever happens doesn’t have to hurt the person. Getting free of suffering doesn’t change the physiological processes. It changes the psychological experiences.

It is structured that way and it is dependent arising. It is originally made into that form. Though it is not inherently existing, it is functioning. You are not going to change that. That will continue. But the relationship between the individual and that physical condition is something else. The pain and suffering does not affect the individual that strongly. That is the difference we see. Mechanically, we take pills, tranquillizers, medical marihuana and all of those. I told you human beings have so many ways of coping. Who else besides human beings? Honestly. But it is all there. There is a difference with the spiritual practice. You have to get totally out of it. You can have total freedom.

0:30

Either this morning or last night I was looking at some books and I saw certain things. The last time I looked at these it was 60 years ago or so. I was revisiting. I had memorized all those books, but when I look at it now it looks like brand new information to me. Buddhists have a term that in Sanskrit is called “arya” and in Tibetan phagpa. In English they call that “special person”. All others are ordinary persons or so so kye bo in Tibetan.

Special persons are free of the suffering of illness, aging and death. They don’t have uncontrolled illness, aging and death. That means they are not controlled by negative emotions. They go through with what every human being goes through, but they don’t go through with negative karma and negative deeds. They go through a controlled situation, with compassion and love. Does that make sense? Maybe not. But think a little more. People who fall into this category, the aryas or special people, have the choice over when to be born, where to be born and how long to live and when to die – all of those. They have that in their own hands. The rest of us are controlled by our karma and negativities. That’s the difference between the special and not so special persons like us.

So when you ask: can you be free of all this suffering? This seems to be the answer of how you can be free. Special people do have control over their lives within their own sphere. However, I don’t think they will accept a lot of last minute changes. When people do construction work and you try to change something last minute you get into a lot of trouble. Your bills will go up a lot, people will get upset and all kinds of things. So I don’t think the special ones will have much last minute changes. It is like we are buying a plane ticket. You buy the plane ticket early. You have it, you have done it. But if you want to change last minute the airline will give you trouble. They charge you more money, sometimes double the amount and sometimes they kick you out. It must be something like that. Even the special persons have different high rankings among themselves.

I don’t want to call it high ranking, because people don’t like it, but it is something like that.

Then you get better and better, no doubt about it. So the answer to the question: can we get totally free - is definitely yes. That doesn’t mean you will never get old or sick or will never die. Yes, there are people like the “highlanders”. If you really look some of the mahasiddhas lived up to 200 years in the forests and caves. This is not very strange even in India now, traditional as well as modern India. But these are very exceptional cases. They do exist. But for us it has to be something reasonable. It will go much more according to the modernized, scientifically developed way.

So the purpose of the First Noble Truth is to be able to see, understand and then deal with it. The question is how to deal with it. And the only way is to deal with the causes. The symptoms do remind us. So we know what’s happening, right? But then, when you do take the cure you are looking for what causes this. People who have food allergies know what causes their suffering, for example gluten or dairy. So then they can avoid eating that. When you know you will avoid eating and you won’t have the symptoms of suffering.

0:40

Just like that, at the First Noble Truth you recognize and acknowledge and develop dislike and the wish to reject that and you look for how to reject. Then you see what causes it. So when you practice Buddhism you see the suffering and you decide you don’t want to live with it. That is your target. Get rid of it. How? Don’t look at the symptoms, but at the cause. If you have food allergies, look at the wheat, not at your stomach. Just like that. Look at whatever is the cause. The first two truths, the Truth of Suffering and the Truth of the Cause of Suffering are called the two negative truths. They are known as “Noble Truths”. It is truth because it is what it is. That’s what I read this morning. It is “noble” because special persons see it. We don’t see it. They give you an example. They say that ordinary eyes cannot see hairs in the palm of the hand. Are there any? Probably. But ordinary eyes cannot see it. Likewise, we cannot see the suffering as clearly as the special persons. That’s why they are called Noble Truths.

We will talk to you about this continuously next week and go into the Second Noble Truth. This is about everyday life, our everyday mind functioning. We will be talking about anger, hatred, jealousy, fear. All of those come under the category of the Second Noble Truth. This is exactly what we have in our life, both on the mental and physical level. The physical level is difficult, not doubt, but easier than the mental level. That is very, very difficult.

0:45

I would like to say thank you for today and also wanted to tell you that we will have our summer retreat this year from July 5th through to July 15th. So it is 10 days. We will be talking the “Bodhisattva’s Way of Life” completely, with teaching transmission and oral transmission combined together, all 10 chapters. The Bodhisattva’s Way of Life is all about love and compassion. It tells you what that really is and how one individual gets that. How does one individual live with this and improve this? What are the activities?

I wanted to let you know that so you can save the dates. I was told a number of times that I should not talk about one retreat before another, but I think it is very important for people to know and if you have time and mark the dates it will be very useful. I don’t think we can do this complete teaching on the “Bodhisattva’s Way of Life” very often. Forget about very often. For the last couple of years we tried to do it, and did a couple of chapters, but didn’t even touch Chapter 9 and 10. It is difficult to do. Now we are setting up a period to do it all completely in 10 days, with teaching – and oral transmissions.

The time is ticking, but are there any questions?

0:48

Audience: You said earlier that you may have no control over what happens to you but you can get complete control over how you handle it. Can you elaborate?

Rimpoche: Right, exactly. That’s what I have been saying. You may not have control over the situation, like aging, illness and death. You have a certain level of control actually – everybody does. But how it affects the individual makes a huge difference.

How do you prevent falling into the consequences of suffering when the karmic result comes in? People normally purify. Karma can be purified or neutralized, so that the consequences may not necessarily follow. Some people say, “That’s not true, I purified a lot but I still suffer a lot too.” Yes, perhaps we have a lot of bad negative karma too. At the same time, when you say purify just saying “I purify” is not enough. Even purifying perfectly once or twice is also not enough. It has to be done repeatedly. Until you get the sign of being completely purified comes it still has to be purified.

After purification, hopefully there will be no negative consequences. It is not that it has completely gone, but there will be no negative consequences. That’s the number one goal. Number two: even if the negative karma goes through, hopefully it is light and short-lived. That also depends on our psychological level. Sometimes it comes back all the time, the same old thing repeating again and again. It’s what the Indians call asad – the nature of the person. You want to repeat again and again. This is something very deep and important and we will still be looking and talking and thinking and meditating and gaining control. That is probably our challenge.

Thank you and we will conclude with the Four Immeasurables 0:54 – 0:56 end