Archive Result

20121007GRAATB40

00:00

Good morning and welcome to this Tibetan Buddhism talk. My name is Gelek Rimpoche. As you noticed these couple of Sundays we have been talking about the Four Noble Truths and particularly the Fourth Truth, the Truth of the Path.

The Truth of the Path is really actually what the individual is supposed to do. The major purpose of how does one individual apply what to do. We talked last Sunday very basic application of those practices. To continue from there, as I said last week also, that little 10-15 talk that I have, one always has to remember when practicing that, because the actual application is that, rather than simply trying to meditate, trying to be holy, trying to be superior, trying to be pure, trying to be perfect. All that doesn’t really work that well. It is like the normal American life. You really have to roll your sleeves up and get involved physically, work in the mud and dirt and the field or whatever. It’s very much like that. Practice is also like that. You have got to roll up your sleeves and start engaging in it. Trying to be holy and sitting up and raising your eye brows and trying to be something uncommon and unusual is not that great. But that’s what we very much do. It’s not necessarily we are doing something false, but we sometimes do that. We think something positive and raise our eye brows, saying, “Wow, that’s great.” But that doesn’t make the practice perfect. You have to keep in mind what we said the other day, every time you sit down or not sit down.

When we talk about meditation, of course in this country that means you have to sit down cross-legged, keep straight, breathe straight, count your breath and this and that. This is the normal usual way. I am not criticizing that. The way I talk it sounds like I am criticizing, but I am not. That’s just not necessarily good practice of dharma. Nor, if you are not doing that do you have a good practice either. The practice, following the path, is really obtaining the antidote actions to one of our negative emotions that make us.

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Today’s subject we need to talk about is the fourth perfection. The first was generosity, then morality, then patience and today is the fourth, enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is one of the emotions that move the individual really to go on. Laziness is the opposite of it. We try to control or overpower the laziness. There are so many types of laziness. One of the biggest forms of laziness is the addictions we have. We get addicted to substances. We get addicted to certain habits. We get addicted even to certain ways of thinking. So the addictions are among the worst. You get addicted to television or the news or radio or entertainment. Actually, what’s happening is that you are postponing the things you need to do to overcome the three poisons, hatred, obsession and even ignorance. That is ego-entertainment, combined with fear and confusion. That emotion creates all other negative emotions. So we get addicted to those. When we get addicted we enjoy doing that. We enjoy engaging in them. Such addiction postpones the things we should be doing.

Actually, what we have been doing is not necessarily great. If that had been great by now we should have good results, because we have been doing this for life after life. But our addictions are such that it becomes easy and comfortable and enjoyable. For example, when you get addicted to anger, you don’t have to learn how to get angry. We don’t go to school to learn what anger is. We don’t do exercises of writing about what anger is all about. We don’t have to do that. We automatically become expert. We don’t have to be taught how to be angry. We don’t have to teach how to use negative words. On the contrary, we have to teach not to use negative words. Even in the media, when you are listening to someone talking, it goes beep beep and it cuts out certain words, because negative words are being used, as we all know. So we have to put in efforts into not using them. We don’t have to learn how to use them. We don’t have to learn how to engage in this. That is the addiction we have.

That addiction is not only applicable to things we are normally think about when we talk about addictions. People who get addicted to alcohol and substances and cigarettes, they keep on using them with the total and full knowledge that it is not good for their health and a number of our friends we see smoking cigarettes all the times, in the cold Michigan winter, outside the buildings, wearing overcoats and scarves and hats, shivering and smoking cigarettes, while continuously coughing, because they have to get back in quickly. We see that every day.

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We ourselves did it. Our friends are doing it. And we may be doing it. Then there are the substance addictions. How badly people get engaged with them! Sometimes they don’t even know what the time is, whether it is day or night. People even lose their lives, not only awareness. It is a funny way of saying it, but if you completely abuse the substances and when you are completely addicted, you have no idea you did you die, but you are dead. That’s what addictions do. Forget about pushing them away, but they are physically harmful. You lose your health, your wealth, your life. That’s what addictions do. It is very common and not a secret. We don’t want to see it and we don’t want to acknowledge it, but it is happening right under our own nose, yet we refuse to see it and acknowledge it. We pretend we didn’t hear what has happened. That’s what we do. That is what physical addictions do.

Mental addictions are even worse. They make the individual have no clarity. Then you become dull and lazy. You want to stick in that cocoon within you. You completely cut your intelligence out. You are unable to use it, even though you may be intelligent or very well educated – because of this laziness. You are not only postponing but it is overpowering you and makes you incapable of really doing what you are supposed to do.

This is one of our strongest problems – and it is enjoyable and it is very hard to cut. You know how much people have to go through when cutting their addictions. How many years people have to go to AA programs? It is great to have such a program. But it is very difficult for people to go through with it. You keep dropping out and dropping out and dropping out …..and dropping out. That really shows how laziness is taking over. You may say, “That is addiction. It is not laziness.” But these are merging together and complementing each other. Laziness alone cannot harm you that much. When laziness merges with addiction and is unwilling to leave it, that makes the individual totally wrapped up, like being wrapped up in a robe from crown to toe and being left there. That much is what laziness does.

When you just look at it, it is “I am just being lazy. I am not mean, I am not hurting anybody, I am minding my own business, I just may be a little lazy.” That is the excuse we give – a very good excuse, no doubt, but very harmful, extremely harmful.

0:16

It is very difficult to recognize that you have laziness. Then, even if you recognize, you like to dismiss it as something inconsequential. We do that very often. These are the hiding spots for laziness. First of all you have no knowledge of it and then you deny, deny, deny. Secondly, even if you are seeing and it is proved that you are doing it you are trying to make it into something that is inconsequential. “It’s not a big deal, just a simple, little laziness”, or “I was late, only by two hours, that’s not that big a deal”. We will dismiss that. That’s how we actually encourage laziness and its denial.

The subject of enthusiasm is huge and very detailed. As you noticed, during our summer retreat we had a big chapter of Bodhisattva’s Way of Life on that. Those of you who are in the lam rim practice, there is a huge section on it. Every day in our life, how is laziness really active. Everything becomes “tomorrow”. Then tomorrow never comes. Then something else, something else happens and that is one of the best ways to remain unable to do anything in our life. It is not the idea of not doing it, but it is the idea of doing it later, later, later. That way nothing happens. That’s because the addiction to some kind of funny comfort gets us.

I used to say that there is eastern laziness and western laziness. Where I come from, the eastern laziness is probably doing nothing, sitting somewhere in a corner with a nice, beautiful cup of tea, good sunshine and gossiping and chit-chatting about whatever, with virtually doesn’t make any difference. Traditionally, Tibetan teachers used to mention the Gesar epics. These are funny stories about a powerful hero who came here and did this and did that, almost like the novels and stories we read now. It is very good entertainment, if you need entertainment. But if you want to waste time, that’s the best too. Gossiping, talking about nonsense, that’s what it is. Scholars and teachers use a technical word, “Let us read the scripture today”, that means you are not going to read actual scripture, but you are opening the gossip column and start talking about it, gossiping here and gossiping there. That is good entertainment, but on the other hand it wastes a tremendous amount of time.

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Then there is another thing: wrong knowledge. Although wrong knowledge is the direct opponent of wisdom, but here the wrong information, the wrong knowledge, will make you completely stubborn. That stubborn-ness will insist that what you are doing is right. That is another type of laziness. Then the western laziness is to keep yourself completely busy with everything except what you need to do. There are people who engage themselves to totally that there is no time to do anything. They do so many things, volunteer here, volunteer there and rush here, rush there and do all kinds of things, but what they really need to do is deal with their own negative emotions. But you are not giving yourself time, because you made yourself so busy.

That is western laziness. You are doing everything but what you need to do. In order to avoid what you need to do you make yourself busy. That is western busy-laziness. The beautiful opportunity you have, the beautiful capability your life has, the beautiful idea your mind has noticed and presented is buried under the obstructions that yourself has presented as “my duty, my needs, my requirements” or something. In other words you are taking your own attention away from what is helpful, not only helpful for this life, but for lives.

0:25

Instead of overcoming anger completely, hatred completely, obsession completely, you divert yourself to something else, with the justification of keeping yourself busy, something which is “good, necessary”, bla, bla, bla. All that is laziness.

Now, enthusiasm should be protecting yourself from all types of laziness. Another laziness is – as I said earlier – leaving everything for later and for tomorrow. It’s not the idea of not doing it but doing it later. Everything is later. If you are going to do it, do it now. I can see I want to do everything. If anybody asks me anything I will say yes, yes, I will do it. But I won’t do it now. I will do it later. Then most of them I don’t do them. Later never comes. Sometimes “later” is right there, but then comes another excuse. For example you make up the excuse that something is not available, something is not right – there are all kinds of excuses. Even if that thing does become available we will find another excuse, that it is too late or some other excuse to delay.

If I look at my own life I can see that one of my biggest problems is laziness. I like to sit usually wherever I sit. I love to go through the routine of watching entertainment and sometimes you don’t stop at the end of the day, but the next day or by the end of the week and you begin to see how much I could have accomplished, but I didn’t, because of laziness. So laziness really takes you away from your own needs. It really has to be put right on it. But never think of tomorrow, never think of later. These are the invitations for not doing it. These are the excuses we put up. Right at that moment, do it. Do it right now. That is really the idea. I needed some kind of oral transmission of a traditional teaching, so I started that with one of my teachers and then, when a few pages were done, we postponed it till the next day. Then the next day it didn’t happen, and after a while there were only a few more pages gone and at the end I had an incomplete oral teaching. For years I kept a mark in my books and then eventually the marking was also gone. So it is almost like it never happened. That’s what “tomorrow, tomorrow” will do. Sometimes yes, it has to be tomorrow. But postponing everything is not good.

0:30

Particularly, the individual person who is trying to overcome negativities and building positive deeds, such as learning and building compassion, love and wisdom. So tomorrow is not something to be entertained. That’s also the reason why the Tibetan Buddhist tradition sometimes has daily commitments. When you have a commitment, then whether you like it or not you have got to do it, because you promised to keep your commitment. So no matter how late it might be, even after midnight or even two or three in the morning, we have to do it, because it is the commitment. Why is it so rigid? Because this laziness is so powerful. It is so easy to waster our life. If you let laziness waste an hour that will waste your day. If you let laziness waste your day that will waste your week. If you let laziness waste your week that will waste your month. If you let it waste your month it will waste your year and if you let it waste one year then your life will be ruined by laziness. That’s why enthusiasm is so important.

If you don’t have enthusiasm then even if you doing it like a commitment, then you only do it because you have got to do it, so you are doing it. It is almost like a heavy-loaded, tired donkey driving up the hill. Sometimes that happens with us. That’s because laziness doesn’t want to go forward and our commitment and desire and understanding and wisdom push us up. Laziness pulls us down and in between that the individual is feeling like a heavily-loaded, dead tired donkey trying to climb up hill. That’s all because of a lack of enthusiasm.

0:33

If you have enthusiasm all these problems will be overcome. You will be looking forward. You will enjoy doing it. It is so important for those of us who have the commitments of a daily practice, when you are tired and half asleep and half dreaming, you should never end it there, because then you don’t want to do it the next day. But you should really end it, when you are still enjoying it, with a little upper momentum of an upper stage. If you stop there you will enjoy and you will be looking forward to coming back and start doing it.

I don’t have to say it. We all know in our life, how much difference enthusiasm makes. Here we are talking about enthusiasm to do positive deeds, overcoming laziness. So that is one of the required tools we have to apply to make our practice life comfortable and move forward and be enjoyable. These are important tools we apply. You don’t really have to be Buddhist to apply that. You don’t really have to be a Mahayanayin to apply this. Enthusiasm is the key to success for anything, dharma or non-dharma, daily chores or mundane activities or whatever. It is the same thing, it is a matter of whether you apply it or not. It is one of the most important tools. I hope we all enjoy with that.

Thank you

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