Archive Result

31

2013April GRNL Purification

(ongeredigeerde versie)

Carel: Welkom allemaal bij deze lezing van Rimpoche, en we hebben het ‘Grote schoonmaak’ genoemd, deze lezing, want normaal in Holland, van oudsher is de lente in aantocht en dan houden we een grote schoonmaak, niet waar? Ramen open, boel eruit, alle rotzooi en shit naar buiten, en dat is een mooi thema voor het begin van de lente. En dat is ook een belangrijk thema voor ons in deze tijden: dat we weten hoe we onszelf eigenlijk een beetje zuiverder kunnen maken, en een beetje schoner van binnen. En daarom hebben we dit thema gekozen voor deze lezing van Rimpoche. Ik ben ervan overtuigd dat het jullie allemaal zal inspireren,- mij in ieder geval - en ik wens jullie veel luisterplezier en veel inspiratie. Rimpoche, the floor is yours.

Rimpoche: Thank you and welcome everybody. I’m very happy to be here, particularly seeing our old friends, and many of you are old friends. And very good to see you, Hanneke. And I can see a number of old friends that I have been seeing. And great that you are translating, thank you! And very good to see you. Where is An Mens? Oh, there you are. Anyway, a lot of old friends. I have seen you a couple of times, they are really old friends, that what I’m just mentioning here, many of you. So I’m very happy to be here. And it’s also nice to have good weather here, today is a little better than yesterday. And also it happens to be the time – all the time we celebrate the queen’s birthday – and now we are going to have a king. So that’s great. And it’s a good thing the queen has done so great during her time and also she honored her mother’s birthday. We always enjoy the 30th of April. And now her son is crowned and she is resigning, her son is crowned on the 30th. So this is great and good people know how to live their life, good people know how to manage their power, good people know when to get in and when to get out. And my subject today is after a long winter we have spring cleaning, I believe that is my subject today. So after a long winter we look around the house and we try to get rid of our rubbish and at least put away what we don’t use so much. And also the weather is changing. And our weather changes every day, it actually changes every day but we do or do not always recognize or realize it. But the change is there every day. Oh, by the way Marianne Matijssen says hi. Yesterday – I’m sorry, I’m getting off the subject - yesterday I was counting the original Jewel Heart people at the time of Helen. We were counting them yesterday. When you are looking at it, at that time people who were there those days were limited. Only Marianne Soeters, Piet Soeters and Helen, big and small, and Carel Weeevers a little bit later, a few days maybe, and Marianne Matijssen, Ed Houpperman, and who else originally?

Carel: Marianne de kok

Rimpoche: Marianne de Kok, Marianne van der Horst; Marianne Delhi and Marianne Meditation. Because at that time I knew three Mariannes, so I don’t know who is who. So Marianne van der Horst came to visit me in Delhi, so we called her Marianne Delhi and Marianne de Kok was teaching meditation, so we called her Marianne Meditation. And who else is left?

Carel: Fenneke and Len

Rimpoche: Fenneke and Len are a little bit, maybe a couple of months later, or maybe a couple of months means a couple of years. And then you came in. Anyway, so now it is wonderful, it was a table full of people, we used to meet in Marianne Soeters’ living room. So we have done this with a table full of people and that is where we have started and you people have come a long way, and we now have a building of our own, people work hard, people put a lot of efforts, a lot of labor in and particularly Ron and Karin. Where are you? Karin is here. Ron is way down there.What are you doing down there? And a lot of others. If I don’t mention your name, that doesn’t mean I didn’t acknowledge your efforts, so thank you. And some people even sacrifice their thumb too. And so all that, and thank you! And we are here and we are all enjoying, I think we should congratulate ourselves. While we are congratulating ourselves we should also remember Helen’s deeds and the efforts she put in, to be able to bring Dharma and the Buddhist teaching of the Tibetan Buddhism, with all kinds of difficulties. She did that, we should always remember that. And also we should always pray and dedicate, we should not only remember her but also the work she did, we should appreciate and dedicate our positive virtues to fulfill her wishes too. Not only not forgetting the kindness but remembering kindness and appreciation that kindness is done by people towards ourselves and our benefit and that is one of the beginning deeds of purification. And then also the question really arises to me is this: can we purify our negativities? Can we make this right, because otherwise I get confused. Many people will think if I did something wrong, I did something wrong. So nothing to be corrected. In one way it is true, because if we have hurt somebody - let’s say if we killed somebody - can we bring that person back to life? No we can’t because we have already killed. So even though you cannot bring them back to life, can you do something? The answer is really that you can do something. Or why? Because the deed whatever we engaged in is impermanent, it is not permanent, although to kill is to kill, you cannot bring back. But still it is impermanent, it is changing , it is changeable. There is almost nothing unchangeable. This morning we had a meeting with the kids, and they really had such beautiful, huge questions. Whether it was really the kid’s questions or the elders helped them, mobilized them or whatever it is, but the question really arises what mind looks like and how it happens when the bacteria or amoebe like the multiplication one becomes two And two becomes four, that sort of thing, what happens to the mind? The way it goes? And all that and whatever is done, is done, is it possible to redo or revisit, all that sort of questions, way beyond the kids can think. But maybe modern kids can do much more than we can think, but still these are the question we talked about and we talked about impermanence a little bit. And it’s very interesting that kids of this age even think along those lines and we are talking about impermanence.

But we are talking about it and I cannot show them an example of not impermanent. I don’t know whether they noticed or not but in my own thoughts I wanted to show permanent and impermanent because I have been able to say form and mind, physical form and mental, but I couldn’t show permanent or impermanent because there is no example of permanent, I could think of it at that time, this morning. So everything is impermanent. Impermanent means changing. It changes from minute to minute. Whether we recognize or not. When we are looking at it, when I was first coming to the Netherlands about 25 years ago and I didn’t look like ugly old face like today. Although I used to think I looked ugly then. But now when you look at it, I was not ugly then. So it changed from that non- ugliness into ugliness today. That is whether we recognize it or not, we do that all the time, every day.

(Vertaling: Vergankelijkheid, verandering heb je niet altijd door, dat zie je niet altijd. Toen ik zo’n 25 jaar geleden voor het eerst naar nederland kwam, zegt Rimpoche, toen zag ik er heel anders uit dan nu. Ik vond toen dat ik niet zo knap was maar als ik nu terug kijk denk ik “Wat was ik een mooie jonge vent!”. Mijn woorden).

Laughter

Rimpoche: What happened?

Translator: I made you a compliment

Rimpoche: Oh, thank you. I remember we used to go and drink beer, Carel and a number of us, and he had to carry that bottle, the big jar of glass, and bang, it broke once (laughs).You remember under the church, in the center. So anyway, those are good old days, and now it changed. And the changing does take place within the individual. In those days I was not diabetic, I could walk easily, so we used to walk everywhere. Now I can’t, I have to ride on a motor cycle and all that. But this is visible change. And there is a small change going on within ourselves. Within our body, within our mind there is always change. John and Hartmut and Bob Lindeman may not have been bald before, when they were young. Were you?

Bob:..

Rimpoche: So change. Those who are not bald become bald. Those who are nicely shaved, clean, beautiful become filthy, bearded, dirty beard covers the face

And those who are covered with a dirty beard shave it clean. All these changes took place. That change took place because it is impermanent. Last night we had Deventer, an old, big military place or church that is converted into a center which is really helpful. Although originally I thought I was going to be a center for people to get some ecumenical center, it doesn’t matter what the religion is, it doesn’t have to be Buddhist, it doesn’t have to be Judeo-Christian, it is just open, where people can go and get help, particularly people who are.., the woman who needs shelter for.., the battered woman, who really needs urgent place to take – I don’t want to say refuge – take shelter and feel comfortable and to feel safe. Something like that. And we went there, and I think it will gradually be a home?? And it also becomes like a meditation center as well as people who meet contemplative work, whatever they can do. It becomes a nice center. And it is good, making this thing. And also I saw there was a beautiful wooden thing, wooden cabinet, carved wooden cabinet, probably in the eighteen hundred, belonging to a great church, sitting there as the liquor cabinet or whatever, sort of sitting there. It could have been where it is convenient, where the wine is kept, communal.. Is it called communal or communion?

Audience: The chalice with wine?

Rimpoche The function is called communal?

Audience: Communion.

Rimpoche: Communion. Communion place where they must be keeping wine. Now it is over there and somehow it is a wonderful piece of old church, I was seeing over there, it reminds me of this impermanent. And it was part of a great church, it is a wonderful thing, and somehow one single piece flew somewhere over there. It reminds me of the same thing: good old Tibetan paintings, thangkas somehow out of 20 hundred or thirty six or seven or three sets, flew all over the world and you find one piece in America, one piece in Europa, one piece in South-East Asia. All of those tells the impermanence. As this great old tradition, great old arts changes, whether we call it change hands or change ownership, or change place, or change environment, everything happens, likewise both good and bad will also change, when the change takes over. Change is not only the old traditional great things go and fall to pieces, but also old negative things go and fall to pieces, as we see. Like the great churches, some pieces have flown all over. Similarly you can see the funny churches used by dictators such as the Napoleon, or all of those: again all over the place instead of remaining in France, or Hitler’s things remaining in Germany, it’s all over the place. So as the good things fall apart, so do the bad things also fall apart. This is natural. Can you prevent it? Yes, you can prevent it, but you can look after, you cannot prevent all things happening, but you can look after all these pieces all over the place. Some people take a great deal of care and preventive measures of getting destroyed. Some don’t bother, it takes its own course, as we see. Just as we see that in the material outer external things, the very same thing happens in our interpersonal matters. Positive karmas also get destroyed, because it is time consuming, we used them. Negative karma also gets destroyed because of the time, we used them. So all our sadness within our mind also has been a little bit healed because of the time. All our excitement also is reduced because of time. Talking about the time, this morning one of the kids question, example of a question, one of the kids asked what is time? I did not have an answer, honestly. I said “Well, time is not the clock or the watch or something, but whatever we are living”. It was a bla bla answer, I really don’t have a good answer for that. So in other words I’m telling you, those kids are really sharp and if you put one little thought, they give you that type of question. Anyway, as we see that, our negative deeds, our negative karma can go away, can really go away. Like purification, what does that do? It some sort of helps it to go away, it sort of helps them to clear, just like looking after old funny church, taking care of, it helps to preserve them. Just like that purification will help the individual to get rid of negative karma. It is not necessarily you restore.. as I said earlier if you killed somebody, you restore the life of that person back to the same old life, which is impossible. I can never be done. However the karma of killing might not be so severe that we pay for ourselves. The karma of killing may not be so be so increased like a 24 hour increment. It doesn’t grow so big in our life. So also maybe even completely prevent the consequences of the negative karma may not be experienced. That is also possible if the purification is powerful and strong, that is also possible. Important not to have attachment for those. Like when you do your spring cleaning and when you go through your rubbish, or maybe not rubbish, maybe your antique or whatever, if you go through and if you could throw them out. I don’t know how you do over here. In America there is something called ‘one truck two men’, so you can hire a truck and they will come with two people, two men. So also you look through and you will be able to throw them out. And I used to do that. For me, I really used to do that, and I’m good at that. I can pick up a garbage bag and all old things, whatever they are, old spices and whatever, the yeast, and so and forth, every old bottles I can throw them out. If you can do that, your cleaning will be successful. But if you look at one thing and say “Hey I need this. When do I need this? Oh maybe at Christmas time, maybe someday we need this, you can’t throw it away”, and then you will never throw it out. Some people will keep every junk in the house, you can’t even walk through, they have their living room, their storage room, kitchen, library and toilet, and bathroom all filled up with junk, right? So what has been holding, they can’t let it go. So the number one step is let it go. Yes, you may need it one day, but one day, even in a year, is 363 days you don’t need it. So why do you have to keep this thing for one day and keep it an extra 363 days, for what? So you really let it go, let it go, that is the most important thing. So if you are cleaning, let it go first. Similarly in the negative side of interpersonal matters: let it go, have no attachment. No attachment, no holding, no hanging, boem, out. Easy to say, easy for me to say and difficult for you to do. So we all admire non-attachment. We all admire it, we would all like to be non-attached. However,when the time comes, we do need it. We do need this extra battery, we need to keep it on the side. Why? Maybe some time you may need this, you need to change the battery, so there come two in the package, one is gone and one one has to keep, right? So that is exactly how we feel about attachment and how we look at it. We say: if we throw out this battery, what a waste. It is also true. But it’s also holding, it’s also attachment, don’t deny. As we see this, as an intelligent person, as an intelligent human being we should be able to let it go, we should really not hold, we should let it go. We have an old Tibetan saying, I don’t know if it makes any sense in the western language, whether in English or Dutch it makes sense. But the saying is this: if it is not useful, even it is a tooth in your mouth, you should be able to throw it out. I don’t know whether that makes sense or not. At least some of you laugh, whether it makes sense or not, but some of those old saying, cultural difference. In one culture it is a big thing and in some other culture it doesn’t mean anything. That happens. So anyway the whole idea is this: if it is not useful, even if it is a tooth in your mouth you should be able to let it go: that makes non-attachment. Why? Because attachment brings obsession. If you entertain the attachment, attachment itself may not be that bad, but then the obsession will come. When the obsession comes it is very bad. And when you see when people are obsessed with somebody or something, you know how difficult it is. When you engage yourself fin that, you may not see it, but all other people see you, and you yourself think “I am not attached, why should I be obsessed”, you make your hat higher than what it is, but in reality everybody else knows, except you. So when Buddha talks about it, Buddha talks about purification, not only Buddha talked about non-attachment, Buddha also even talked about regret for what we did wrong. Not only not having attachment but even having regret. Remorse about the negative action we have taken, negative deeds, even our normal human Western culture demands that too. When you are talking to your friends, when you are watching your television, when you are listening to your radio, you do understand what the society and the culture demands, and society and culture demands remorse for the people who are doing the wrong. Because, - I’m thinking of an example, because all this pity,- or not pity but serious crimes took place in the United Stated, like what happened in Boston recently during the marathon running, I mean just for innocent people lose their lives, but many of those athletes lost their legs, what sense is there? There is absolutely no sense in that. But you know the public always looks for remorse of those people who did it. And one brother died and the other is still alive, and people are looking whether they have remorse or not. Our culture itself demands this remorse. Remorse and regret is almost the same. I’m sure in Dutch there may be a difference. But either spiritually like what Buddha said, or culturally what people demand they would like to have regret. You will not regret if you have attachment. Instead of regretting, you may even rejoice, you never know. We do that, it is the people’s character, some people regret, some people rejoice, it’s an individual matter. So both the spiritual and the material world says you need regret and remorse and all that. But if the individual has attachment, they cannot regret. And you may think ‘I will have no attachment to my past deeds’, but you will have a big surprise. When it becomes a personal matter you will get a big surprise. Not only the attachment is not there, but also anger and hatred, sometimes anger and hatred looks like rejection, however sometimes it is very tight holding, you have a very surprise on that. When we come back from the tea break we will talk about it. Please enjoy your tea.

Welcome back everybody. Welcome back and thank you. After the tea break or coffee break or peepee break or whatever it is, and you have so many people coming back which means it is not so boring. I thought the talk might have been very boring and you people may leave. But anyway, happy to see all of you back. Now to continue with this: so regretting, not only non-attachment but there has to be regret of the wrongdoings because it hurts somebody. When it hurts somebody it’s not good. In the long run it will hurt yourself as well. One thing that is not clear to us, is when we hurt somebody and we think we did a great job sometimes, but subsequently if you really look, you hurt yourself. Like these wars we had, Afghanistan, Irak, all these wars. The people who created the war think they have done a great job for themselves. But consequently we have all these difficulties continuously. Even though Bin Laden is gone, there is continuation of those. And even now, if we are not careful we are going to discriminate forty million Muslims and make them the enemy. It’s already halfway through anyway, if we are not careful they become enemies, and they retaliate anyway. This Boston issue is also not somebody who came from the Middle East, somebody who is Tsjetsjenian born American, that’s what happens. Hurting others in the long run hurts yourself. And intelligent persons such as yourself, intellectual persons such as yourself, liberal persons such as yourself – last night I was talking about Margaret Thatcher, and I can immediately see that everybody doesn’t like it – so a liberal person such as yourself should know that. Hurting others hurts yourself. When you know that, you are intelligent, when you don’t know that, you are not that intelligent, I’m sorry. So, the first step towards purification is anything that we did to hurt either yourself or the others, or one other or many others, whatever we did, regretting is an important point. And regretting brings non-repeatable. Because when you are regretting what you did wrong, you don’t want to repeat that. I remember when I was a kid I got sick by eating an orange, one of these whole oranges, smashed with sugar and dried, it came from China or India or whatever. And I ate that and I enjoyed eating that. I got really sick for a long time. So I have very difficult of eating orange for thirty years thereafter. I can’t even stand the smell of oranges. Now I like orange juice. Not only I did not like orange, I became almost allergic to anything sour, not only orange, but lemon, lime. A lot of people enjoy that, but I become brr.. So that is how regret brings non-repeatable. If you keep on telling them don’t repeat, don’t repeat, if they don’t have regret, you enjoy repeating it because we are addicted, we enjoy repeating it. But if you really make strong regret, you don’t have to tell them don’t repeat, you won’t even touch it. So non-repeatable is not that difficult, but regret is the difficulty. If you build that, non-repeatable will come automatically. Third, the third point you really need is something to compensate with. If you hurt somebody you have to. You know in the West, Western culture it is very true, genuine, if you hurt somebody you pay for it. If you break somebody’s glasses or something you pay for it. If you break something else of someone, you pay for it. If you hurt somebody else for something you pay for it. So compensation is the third point we have to have. When you compensate, like say killing, when you have killed somebody you can’t bring the person in, because you have killed. But you try to do the best you could, next to bringing the person, whatever you can try to do, you do the best. Try to tolerate their nonsense a little more, be a little extra kind, be a little extra gentle, be a little extra patient, be a little extra whatever, whatever extra is needed. Or do something else for their benefit, try to help a needy kid, try to help a needy tormented person, try to help a little needy battered woman, or any one of those good society service, whatever you can. So try to do a little bit, whatever you can. And not only compensate but also you have to go against those very negativities you have, what we call antidote actions. Particularly you need love and compassion. Very particularly you need a little wisdom. Without love, there will be no compassion. One of the kids questions this morning was the difference between the love and the pity feeling. We won’t think about that, do we? The kids are thinking. So which makes me feel the Jewel Heart younger generation will do far better than we did. I think it is very great, anyway. Without love there will be no compassion. I am sure you are aware of it. But if you don’t, without love, if you try to build compassion, it becomes a pity feeling. Love brings the person closer to the person who you love. So that person’s suffering becomes more painful and more intolerable. Otherwise somebody’s suffering from somewhere on something is ‘oh’. When we say something happened to somebody; say a car has run over somebody on the street and we say: “Hey what has happened?” People stop and say “Something happened, let’s go and look, go out and look”. They come back and say “It’s just a dog or a cat run over by a car”. We say “Oh, so bad, but it’s a cat or dog”. Those dog lovers and cat lovers feel much more but the rest of us will say “it’s a dog, a cat, so bad, so bad”. We will say: “So bad”, but we will come back. And then it says: “it is not a cat or a dog but a human being”, they say: “Oh, it’s human being and there is a little bit more concern than a dog or a cat”. And then somebody says “It’s not just a human being, it’s so and so”. There will be a name and a face, and then it will become closer. And then they say: “No, no, it is not just so and so, but a family member”, then it goes “Oh my god what has happened?” So you see the feeling of the individual, compassion, care and concern you have love brings them more closer to you, touching your heart much more stronger than just somebody is suffering. Just like when we say there is an earthquake in China or the house collapsed in Bangladesh. So there we are “oh, oh, oh”, but it is just “oh, oh, oh”, and people die, people get hurt and all of them happened but our own feeling is slightly different. But if you say something happened in Belgium ,or something happened in Spain. Something happened to Spain and something happened to Belgium to the mind of Dutch. Belgium is right here, Spain is a little bit down there, so we see the distance, right? So exactly that is what love does. Closer, within you, the feeling of the compassion is much stronger. That is why Buddha taught us, compassion must follow the love. In other words love goes first, then comes compassion. It helps people to build it much stronger. So when we say compassion, the love must be there. Everybody enjoys talking about compassion, it is admirable. We look at compassionate leaders and we admire them. We may not enjoy Margaret Thatcher much, but we do enjoy Gandhi. But we have this idea of really being great, about this compassion; we all admire Nelson Mandela, we admire the Dalai Lama, we admire Mother Theresa. So all of those because we like compassion. But we must know compassion is based on love. Compassion with love will make you do anything, you are willing to do anything you have to do. Compassion without love will become sympathy, and will give you sympathy and will give you support and will give you kind words but will not go out of the way to help. So the good old saying ‘love must be true, mean what you say’. Unless you do don’t suit at?? me. It’s an old song, I’m sure many of you know. Anyway, now the thing is love-compassion and a little wisdom. So love, compassion and wisdom will be the antidote of whatever we did wrong, going against that, something effective, something helpful, something that makes sense, something that will make a dent, that’s what antidote action really is. And whatever we have talked like past deeds cleaning that is the real cleaning. And then maintaining. If you cannot maintain it, it becomes a mess again. So maintaining. Maintaining is: you have to maintain by love and compassion. Maintaining our life in the principle of love and compassion. The love principle, the compassion principle, in our life, contacting our life. In other words, try to be as helpful as possible. If not, don’t hurt anybody, don’t harm anybody, you don’t have a right to hurt even yourself. So thinking that, you have no right to hurt anybody, if that is helpful that is great. Thinking that and keeping your life contacting that way will help yourself tremendously. And a little bit of meditation, a little bit of keeping peace with yourself, with your family, your children. Oh, don’t forget mother-in-laws. So I presume you don’t have much questions! (laughs). Anyway, love and compassion will be my subject this time while I’m here. From tomorrow onwards all the sessions are love and compassion. So if you are not so busy you want to stop one or two sessions here and there. If you are not registered and you have time, and it will be helpful for you, and you are welcome. I’m going a little beyond the organizer’s thing, but still I think it should be okay, honestly. I guess that’s it. And I wish you a good happy spring. Hopefully it will be warmer tomorrow. So if you have a burning question, maybe one or two.

Question: You said in your book ‘Good life good death’ you write patience is connected with burnout, can you explain a little bit more about it?

Rimpoche: When you say that, I actually forgot about it, but patience is burnout, it’s very close. Do you need to say that question in Dutch?

People without love, compassion alone, can make very easy to burnout: “I have done enough, I did whatever I could, and nothing happens, now I’m not going to do it, I have my principle, I do this, I do that”. People do that, and that is a type of burnout. In reality what we are doing is we are showing a lack of love. But we don’t know that. We think we did great by saying I have been burned out. Burnout is really when you don’t have the love and then there is lack of patience, all of them will come out: there will be shortage of generosity, there will be a shortage of patience, there will be a shortage of enthusiasm, there will be shortage of concentration, even wisdom. Because you try to put a limit: “That much I can do, I cannot go beyond that, I am too tired, I am too worn out and I have to look after myself.” All this is true too, it is not that it isn’t true. It is true. But at the same time it also shows how weak your compassion is, how weak our caring is. Really. If your read in Buddha’s message, they talk about going to the hell realm for eons, just for one person. We don’t get it at all, we will not get it now at least, maybe in the future. But that is because of the love, the love will make all the difference, the love is the basis of not getting burnout. Love is the basis of more patience, love is the basis of more enthusiasm, love is the basis of generosity, love is the basis of even morality. You will love yourself, you will protect your morals, I mean, what is funny about it, it is common.

Thank you. And what you are going to take home today is love and compassion. Compassion is based on love. Without love, compassion is not strong enough. It also begins with the family. A good old Western saying is ‘charity begins at home’. It begins with your family, developing love, developing care, which you already have. But if it’s getting too old, or decreasing, make it increase, make it more fresh and renewing. Renewing your vow, renewing your commitment, renewing your love, and have a little fun. And honestly, do all that and compassion really begins at home, with your own children, with your own spouse. And don’t leave your mother in law high and dry on the side, and just bring them. Begin at home, and then neighbors, then fellow countrymen, fellow Europeans, then fellow human beings in the world. Expand it in that way. So that’s what you take home today. And use it, live well with that. And also we will conclude here by praying

‘May all beings have happiness.

May all beings be free from suffering.

May all beings never be separated from the joy that has never known suffering.

May all remain in the happy equanimity’

We will conclude by singing that, praying that. And don’t forget that at the door here, take it with you. Think about it, remain happy, free from suffering. And work with that, try to begin with your family and then everybody else.

Purification (geredigeerde versie)

Carel: Welkom allemaal bij deze lezing van Rimpoche, die we ‘Grote schoonmaak’ hebben genoemd. Normaal, van oudsher, als de lente in aantocht is, houden we een grote schoonmaak in Holland, niet waar? We doen de ramen open, we zetten de boel eruit, alle rotzooi en shit naar buiten, en dat is een mooi thema voor het begin van de lente. En dat is ook een belangrijk thema voor ons in deze tijden: dat we weten hoe we onszelf een beetje zuiverder kunnen maken, een beetje schoner van binnen. En daarom hebben we dit thema gekozen voor deze lezing van Rimpoche. Ik ben ervan overtuigd dat het jullie allemaal zal inspireren,- mij in ieder geval - en ik wens jullie veel luisterplezier en veel inspiratie. Rimpoche, the floor is yours.

Rimpoche: Thank you and welcome everybody. I’m very happy to be here, particularly I’m happy to see our old friends. Many of you are old friends. I can see a number of old friends that I have been seeing. So I’m very happy to be here. And it’s also nice to have good weather here, today it’s a little better than yesterday. And also it happens to be the time we are going to get a new king. All the time we celebrated the queen’s birthday, and now we are going to have a king. So that’s great. And it’s a good thing the queen has done so great during her time, and also she has honored her mother’s birthday. We always enjoyed the 30th of April. And now her son will be crowned on the 30th and she is resigning. So this is great. Good people know how to live their life, good people know how to manage their power, good people know when to get in and when to get out.

And my subject today is: after a long winter we have spring cleaning. So after a long winter we look around the house and we try to get rid of our rubbish and at least put away what we don’t use so much. And also the weather is changing. And our weather changes every day. It actually changes every day, but we do or do not always recognize or realize it. But the change is there every day. Yesterday – I’m sorry, I’m getting off the subject - yesterday I was counting the original Jewel Heart people at the time of Helen. When you are looking at it, the number of people who were there those days was limited. Only Marianne Soeters, Piet Soeters and Helen. And Carel Weeevers a little bit later, a few days maybe, and Marianne Matijssen and Ed Houpperman. And who else was there originally?

Carel: Marianne de kok

Rimpoche: Marianne de Kok, Marianne van der Horst; Marianne Delhi and Marianne Meditation. Because at that time I knew three Mariannes, so I didn’t know who was who. Since Marianne van der Horst came to visit me in Delhi, we called her Marianne Delhi, and Marianne de Kok was teaching meditation, so we called her Marianne Meditation. And who else is left?

Carel: Fenneke and Len

Rimpoche: Fenneke and Len came a little bit later, maybe a couple of months later. Or maybe a couple of months means a couple of years. And then you (Marion) came in. Anyway, it was a table full of people, we used to meet in Marianne Soeters’ living room. We have done this with a table full of people. That is where we have started and you people have come a long way. And now we have a building of our own, people work hard, people put a lot of efforts and a lot of labor in, particularly Ron and Karin. And a lot of others. If I don’t mention your name, that doesn’t mean I didn’t acknowledge your efforts, so thank you. And some people even sacrificed their thumb too. So thank you! And we are here and we are all enjoying, and I think we should congratulate ourselves. While we are congratulating ourselves we should also remember Helen’s deeds and the efforts she put in to be able to bring Dharma and the Buddhist teaching of the Tibetan Buddhism here, with all kinds of difficulties. She did that, and we should always remember that. And also we should always pray and dedicate, we should not only remember her but also the work she did, we should appreciate and dedicate our positive virtues to fulfill her wishes too.

Not only we shouldn’t forget the kindness by other people towards ourselves and for our benefit, but we should remember that kindness and we should appreciate it. And that is one of the beginning deeds of purification. And then also the question that really arises to me is: can we purify our negativities? Can we make this right, because otherwise I get confused. Many people will think ‘if I did something wrong, I did something wrong’. So there is nothing to be corrected. In one way it is true, because if we have hurt somebody - let’s say if we killed somebody - can we then bring that person back to life? No we can’t because we have already killed him or her. So even though you cannot bring him or her back to life, can you do something? The answer is really that you can do something. Why? Because the deed we engaged in is impermanent. Although to kill is to kill, you cannot bring the person back. But still it is impermanent, it is changing , it is changeable. There is almost nothing unchangeable.

This morning we had a meeting with the kids, and they really had such beautiful, huge questions. Whether those were really the kid’s questions or the elders helped them, or mobilized them, but the question really arose what mind looks like and what happens to the mind when bacteria or amoebae multiply. When one becomes two and two becomes four, then what happens to the mind? How does that go? And they wanted to know whether what is done, is done, or whether it’s possible to redo or revisit it. They asked all that sort of questions, way beyond what kids can think of. But maybe modern kids can do much more than we realize. But still these were the questions we talked about, and also we talked about impermanence a little bit. It’s very interesting that kids of this age even think along those lines. But when we were talking about impermanence, I could not show them an example of something not impermanent. I don’t know whether they noticed or not, but in my own thoughts I wanted to show permanent and impermanent because I have been able to say form and mind, physical form and mental, but I couldn’t show permanent or impermanent because there was no example of something permanent I could think of this morning.

So everything is impermanent. Impermanent means changing. It changes from minute to minute, whether we recognize that or not. When I was first coming to the Netherlands about 25 years ago, my face didn’t look ugly and old like today. Although I used to think I looked ugly then. But now when you look at it, I was not ugly then. So it changed from that non- ugliness into ugliness today. So whether we recognize it or not, we change all the time, every day.

(Vertaling: Vergankelijkheid, verandering heb je niet altijd door, dat zie je niet altijd. Toen ik zo’n 25 jaar geleden voor het eerst naar Nederland kwam, zegt Rimpoche, toen zag ik er heel anders uit dan nu. Ik vond toen dat ik niet zo knap was maar als ik nu terug kijk denk ik “Wat was ik een mooie jonge vent!”. Mijn woorden).

Laughter

Rimpoche: What happened?

Translator: I made you a compliment

Rimpoche: Oh, thank you. I remember we used to go and drink beer, Carel and a number of us, and he had to carry that bottle, the big jar of glass, and bang, it broke once (laughs).You remember, it was under the church, in the center. Anyway, those were good old days, and now it changed. And the changing does take place within the individual. In those days I was not diabetic, I could walk easily, so we used to walk everywhere. Now I can’t, I have to ride on a motor cycle and all that. But this is visible change. And there are small changes going on within ourselves. Within our body, within our mind there are always changes. John and Hartmut and Bob Lindeman may not have been bald before, when they were young. Were you?

Bob:..

Rimpoche: So there is change. Those who are not bald become bald. Those who are nicely shaved, clean and beautiful become filthy and bearded, a dirty beard covers the face. And those who are covered with a dirty beard, shave it clean. All these changes took place. Those changes took place because of impermanence.

Last night we were in Deventer, in an old, big military place that is converted into a center, which is really helpful. Although originally I thought it was going to be an ecumenical center, where it doesn’t matter what the religion is, it is just open. And people can go there and get help, particularly battered women, who really, urgently need a place to find shelter and feel comfortable and safe. Something like that. And it also becomes like a meditation center, where people can do contemplative work, whatever they can do. It becomes a nice center, and it’s good that this is established. And also I saw there was a beautiful carved wooden cabinet, probably from the eighteen hundreds. Before it was belonging to a great church, now it is functioning as a liquor cabinet or whatever. It could have been the cabinet where the communion wine was kept. Now it is over there and somehow that wonderful piece from an old church I was seeing over there, reminded me of impermanence. First this wonderful thing was part of a great church, but somehow this one single piece flew somewhere over there. It reminds me of the good old Tibetan paintings, the thangkas somehow. So many of them flew all over the world and you find one piece in America, one piece in Europe, one piece in South-East Asia.

All this tells about impermanence. In the same way this great old tradition, this great old art changes hands, it changes ownership, it changes place, or environment – whatever we call it-, similarly both good and bad will also change when the change takes over. Change means not only that the old traditional great things go and fall to pieces, but also old negative things go and fall to pieces, as we can see. Like the great churches, some pieces have flown all over. Similarly you can see the funny churches used by dictators such as Napoleon change: again the remains are all over the place instead of remaining in France. Neither Hitler’s things remained in Germany, they are all over the place. So like the good things fall apart, likewise do the bad things fall apart. This is natural. Can you prevent it? Yes, you can prevent it, you can look after it. You cannot prevent all things happening, but you can look after all these pieces all over the place. Some people take a great deal of care and they take preventive measures to ensure that things don’t get destroyed. Some don’t bother, they say things take their own course, as we see. We see this in the external, material things, and the very same thing happens in our interpersonal matters. Positive karma gets destroyed, because the time has consumed it, we used it. Negative karma also gets destroyed because of the time, we used that too. So all the sadness within our mind also is a little bit healed because of the time. All our excitement also is reduced because of time.

Talking about the time, this morning one of the kids asked “What is time?” I did not have an answer, honestly. I said “Well, time is not the clock or the watch or something, but whatever we are living”. It was a bla bla answer, I really don’t have a good answer for that. So in other words I’m telling you, those kids are really sharp and if you put one little thought, they give you that type of question. Anyway, our negative deeds, our negative karma can go away, it can really go away. So what does purification do? It helps it to go away, it sort of helps to clear the negative deeds, just like looking after an old funny church and taking care of it, helps to preserve it. Just like that, purification will help the individual to get rid of negative karma. As I said earlier, if you killed somebody, you cannot restore the life of that person, that is impossible. I can never be done. However the karma of killing might not be so severe that it increases 24 hours a day. It doesn’t grow so big in our life. So maybe we can even completely prevent the experiencing of the consequences of the negative karma. That is possible if the purification is powerful and strong.

It is important not to have attachment for those deeds. Like when you do your spring cleaning and when you go through your rubbish, - or maybe not rubbish, maybe your antique or whatever -, but if you go through, you have to be able to throw it out. I don’t know how you do this over here. In America there is something called ‘one truck two men’, so you can hire a truck and they will come with two people, two men. So also you look through your things and you will be able to throw them out. And I used to do that. I really used to do that, and I’m good at that. I can pick up a garbage bag and I can throw out all old things, whatever they are: old spices, yeast, all old bottles and so and forth. If you can do that, your cleaning will be successful. But if you look at one thing and say: “Hey I need this. When do I need this? Oh maybe at Christmas time. Maybe someday we need this, you can’t throw it away”, and then you will never throw it out. Some people will keep all sorts of junk in the house, you can’t even walk through, they have their living room, their storage room, kitchen, library, toilet, and bathroom all filled up with junk, right? They can’t let it go. So the number one step is: let it go. Yes, you may need it one day, but one day, even in a year, means that for 363 days you don’t need it. So why do you have to keep this thing for one day and keep it an extra 363 days, for what? So you really have to let it go, let it go, that is the most important thing. So if you are cleaning, let it go first. Similarly with the negative side of interpersonal matters: let it go, have no attachment. No attachment, no holding, no hanging on, boem, out.

Easy for me to say and difficult for you to do. We all admire non-attachment. We all admire it, we would all like to be non-attached. However, when the time comes, we do need it. We do need this extra battery, we need to keep it on the side. Why? Maybe some time you may need this, you need to change the battery. So they come with two in the package, one is gone and one we have to keep, right? So that is exactly how we feel about attachment and how we look at it. We say: “If we throw out this battery, what a waste!”. It is also true. But it’s also holding, it’s also attachment, don’t deny that. As intelligent persons, as intelligent human beings we should be able to let it go, we should really not hold it, we should let it go. We have an old Tibetan saying, I don’t know if it makes any sense in the Western language, whether in English or Dutch. But the saying is this: ‘if it is not useful, even it is a tooth in your mouth, you should be able to throw it out’. I don’t know whether that makes sense or not. At least some of you laugh, but I don’t know whether it makes sense or not. With some of those old sayings, there can be cultural differences. In one culture it is a big thing and in some other culture it doesn’t mean anything. That happens.

So anyway, the whole idea is this: if it is not useful, even if it is a tooth in your mouth, you should be able to let it go: that makes non-attachment. Why? Because attachment brings obsession. If you entertain attachment, then attachment itself may not be that bad, but then the obsession will come. When the obsession comes it is very bad. And when you see people who are obsessed with somebody or something, you know how difficult it is. When you engage yourself in that, you may not see it, but all other people see you. And although you yourself think “I am not attached, why should I be obsessed”, and you make your hat higher than what it is, in reality everybody else knows, except you.

So when Buddha talks about purification, not only he talked about non-attachment, but he talked about regret for what we did wrong. Not only we should not have attachment but we should even have regret, remorse about our negative actions. Even our normal human Western culture demands that too. When you are talking to your friends, when you are watching your television, when you are listening to your radio, you do understand what the society and the culture demands, and society and culture demands remorse from the people who are doing wrong things. For example what happened in Boston recently during the marathon: innocent people lost their lives, and many of those athletes lost their legs, so what sense is in there? There is absolutely no sense in that. But you know, the public always looks for remorse of those people who did it. One brother died and the other is still alive, and people are looking whether he has remorse or not. Our culture itself demands this remorse. Remorse and regret is almost the same. I’m sure in Dutch there may be a difference. But either spiritually, from what Buddha said, or culturally, what people demand, regret is necessary.

You will not regret something if you have attachment. Instead of regretting, you may even rejoice in it, you never know. We do that, it is the people’s character, some people regret, some people rejoice, it’s an individual matter. So both the spiritual and the material world says you need regret and remorse and all that. But if the individual has attachment, he or she cannot regret. And you may think ‘I will have no attachment to my past deeds’, but you will have a big surprise. When it becomes a personal matter, you will get a big surprise. Not only the attachment is there, but also anger and hatred. Sometimes anger and hatred looks like rejection, however sometimes it is very tight holding, you have a very big surprise about that. When we come back from the tea break we will talk about it. Please enjoy your tea.

Welcome back everybody. Now to continue with this: not only non-attachment is necessary but also there has to be regret of the wrongdoings because it hurts somebody. When it hurts somebody it’s not good. In the long run it will hurt yourself as well. This is one thing that is not clear to us: when we hurt somebody, we think we did a great job sometimes. But consequently, if you really look, you hurt yourself. Like these wars we had in Afghanistan, Irak, all these wars. The people who created the war think they have done a great job for themselves. But consequently we have all these difficulties continuously. Even though Bin Laden is gone, there is continuation of those. And even now, if we are not careful we are going to discriminate forty million Muslims and make them the enemy. It’s already halfway through anyway, if we are not careful they become enemies, and they retaliate anyway. What happened in Boston is also not done by somebody who came from the Middle East, it was somebody who is Tsjetsjenian born American, that’s what happens. Hurting others in the long run hurts yourself. And intelligent persons such as yourself, intellectual persons such as yourself, liberal persons such as yourself – last night I was talking about Margaret Thatcher, and I could immediately see that everybody didn’t like it – so liberal persons such as yourself, should know that hurting others hurts yourself. When you know that, you are intelligent, when you don’t know that, you are not that intelligent, I’m sorry.

So, the first step towards purification is to regret anything that we did to hurt either ourselves or the others. Whether it is one other or many others, whatever we did, regretting is an important point. And regretting brings non-repetition. Because when you are regretting what you did wrong, you don’t want to repeat it. I remember when I was a kid I got sick by eating an orange, one of these whole oranges, smashed with sugar and dried, which came from China or India or whatever. And I ate that and I enjoyed eating that. I got really sick for a long time. So I had great difficulty eating oranges for thirty years thereafter. I couldn’t even stand the smell of oranges. Now I like orange juice. Not only I didn’t like oranges, I became almost allergic to anything sour, not only orange, but lemon, lime. A lot of people enjoy that, but I become brr.. So that is how regret brings non-repetition. If you keep on telling “Don’t repeat that, don’t repeat that”, if we don’t have regret, we enjoy repeating it because we are addicted, we enjoy repeating it. But if we really have strong regret, we don’t have to tell: “Don’t repeat it”, we won’t even touch it. So non-repetition is not that difficult, regret is the difficulty. If you build that, non-repetition will come automatically.

The third point you really need is something to compensate with. If you hurt somebody you have to compensate for it. You know in the Western culture this is very true, genuine: if you hurt somebody you pay for it. If you break somebody’s glasses or something, you pay for it. If you break something else of someone, you pay for it. If you hurt somebody else for something you pay for it. So compensation is the third point we have to have. When you want to compensate for example killing, then you can’t bring the person back, because you have killed him or her. But you can try to do the best you can. Apart from bringing the person back, do whatever you can, do the best you can. Try to tolerate their nonsense a little more, be a little extra kind, be a little extra gentle, be a little extra patient, be a little extra whatever, whatever extra is needed. Or do something else for their benefit, try to help a needy kid, try to help a needy tormented person, try to help a needy battered woman, or any good society service, do whatever you can. So try to do a little bit, whatever you can.

And not only you have to compensate, but also you have to go against those very negativities you have, for that you have to use what we call antidote actions. Particularly you need love and compassion. Very particularly you need a little wisdom. Without love, there will be no compassion. One of the kids questions this morning was the difference between the love and a feeling of pity. We won’t think about that, do we? The kids are thinking. Which makes me feel the younger Jewel Heart generation will do far better than we did. I think it is very great, anyway. Without love there will be no compassion. I am sure you are aware of it. But if you don’t, if you try to build compassion without love, it becomes a pity feeling.

Love brings you closer to the person you love. So that person’s suffering becomes more painful and more intolerable. Otherwise somebody’s suffering from somewhere on something is ‘oh’. When we say something happened to somebody, say a car has run over somebody on the street, we say: “Hey what has happened?” People stop and say: “Something happened, let’s go out and look”. They come back and say: “It’s just a dog or a cat run over by a car”. We say “Oh, so bad, but it’s a cat or dog”. Those dog lovers and cat lovers feel much more but the rest of us will say: “It’s a dog, a cat, so bad, so bad”. We will say: “So bad”, but we will come back. But suppose someone says: “It is not a cat or a dog but a human being”, then we say: “Oh, it’s human being!” and then there is a little bit more concern than with a dog or a cat. And then somebody says “It’s not just a human being, but it’s so and so”. Then there is a name and a face, and then it will become closer. But suppose someone says: “No, no, it is not just so and so, but it’s your family member”, then we go: “Oh my god what has happened?” So you can see how the feeling, the extent of the compassion, care and concern you have changes: love brings others closer to you. When someone you love is suffering, it is touching your heart much stronger than if it’s just somebody who is suffering. It’s just like when we hear there is an earthquake in China or a house collapsed in Bangladesh. Then we say: “Oh, oh, oh”, but it is just “Oh, oh, oh”. People die, people get hurt, all of this happened but our own feeling is slightly different. But suppose something happened in Belgium or something happened in Spain. Then those two are different to the mind of Dutch. Belgium is right here, Spain is a little bit down there, so we see the distance, right? So exactly that is what love does. It brings others closer, within you, the feeling of compassion is much stronger.

That is why Buddha taught us that compassion must follow love. In other words: love goes first, then comes compassion. It helps people to build it much stronger. So when we say compassion, love must be there. Everybody enjoys talking about compassion, it is admirable. We look at compassionate leaders and we admire them. We may not enjoy Margaret Thatcher much, but we do enjoy Gandhi. But we have this idea that compassion is really great; we all admire Nelson Mandela, we admire the Dalai Lama, we admire Mother Theresa. So all this comes about because we like compassion. But we must know compassion is based on love. Compassion with love will make you do anything, you are willing to do anything you have to do. Compassion without love will become sympathy, and will give you sympathy and will give you support and will give you kind words but will not go out of the way to help. So the good old saying ‘love must be true, mean what you say’. It’s an old song, I’m sure many of you know.

Anyway, now the thing is love-compassion and a little wisdom. So love, compassion and wisdom will be the antidote of whatever we did wrong. It is going against that, it is something effective, something helpful, something that makes sense, something that will make a dent, that’s what antidote action really is. And cleaning past deeds this way is the real cleaning. And then we have to maintain it. If we cannot maintain it, it becomes a mess again. We have to maintain by means of love and compassion, by maintaining our life in the principle of love and compassion. The love principle, the compassion principle has to be in our life, it has to be contacting our life. In other words, try to be as helpful as possible. If not, don’t hurt anybody, don’t harm anybody, you don’t have a right to hurt even yourself. So if thinking that you have no right to hurt anybody is helpful, then that is great. Thinking that and contacting your life that way will help yourself tremendously. And a little bit of meditation, a little bit of keeping peace with yourself, with your family, your children. Oh, don’t forget mother-in-laws.

So I presume you don’t have much questions! (laughs). Anyway, love and compassion will be my subject this time while I’m here. From tomorrow onwards all the sessions are about love and compassion. So if you are not so busy, you might want to stop and come for one or two sessions here and there. If you are not registered and you have time, and it will be helpful for you, then you are welcome. I’m going a little beyond the organizer’s thing, but still I think it should be okay, honestly. I guess that’s it. And I wish you a good happy spring. Hopefully it will be warmer tomorrow. So if you have a burning question, maybe one or two.

Question: In your book ‘Good life good death’ you write patience is connected with burnout, can you explain a little bit more about it?

Rimpoche: When you say that, I actually forgot about it, but patience and burnout are very close. People without love, with compassion alone, can become burnout very easily: “I have done enough, I did whatever I could, and nothing happens, now I’m not going to do it, I have my principles”. People do that, and that is a type of burnout. In reality what we are doing is that we are showing a lack of love. But we don’t know that. We think we did great by saying I have been burned out. Burnout is really when you don’t have love and then there is a lack of patience. Then all of them will come out: there will be shortage of generosity, there will be a shortage of patience, there will be a shortage of enthusiasm, there will be shortage of concentration, and even of wisdom. That is because you try to put a limit: “That much I can do, I cannot go beyond that, I am too tired, I am too worn out and I have to look after myself.” All this is true too, it is not that it isn’t true. It is true. But at the same time it also shows how weak your compassion is, how weak your caring is. Really. If your read in Buddha’s message, they talk about going to the hell realm for eons, just for one person. We don’t get it at all, we will not get it now at least, maybe in the future. But that is because of the love, love will make all the difference, love is the basis of not getting burnout. Love is the basis of more patience, love is the basis of more enthusiasm, love is the basis of generosity, love is the basis of even morality. If you love yourself, you will protect your morals, I mean, what is funny about it, it is common.

Thank you. And what you are going to take home today is love and compassion. Compassion is based on love. Without love, compassion is not strong enough. It also begins with the family. A good old Western saying is ‘charity begins at home’. Developing love, developing care begins with your family and you already have it. But if it’s getting too old, or it decreases, make sure it increases, refresh it and renew it. Renew your vow, renew your commitment, renew your love, and have a little fun. And honestly, do all that and compassion really begins at home, with your own children, with your own spouse. And don’t leave your mother in law high and dry on the side, and just bring her in. Begin at home, and then include neighbors, and then fellow countrymen, fellow Europeans, and all fellow human beings in the world. Expand it in that way. So that’s what you take home today. And use it, live well with that. And also we will conclude here by praying:

May all beings have happiness.

May all beings be free from suffering.

May all beings never be separated from the joy that has never known suffering.

May all remain in happy equanimity.

We will conclude by singing that, praying that. And don’t forget that at the door here, take it with you. Think about it, remain happy, free from suffering. And work with that, try to begin with your family and then everybody else.

De grote schoonmaak – lezing van Gelek Rimpoche

Carel: Welkom allemaal bij deze lezing van Rimpoche, en we hebben het ‘Grote schoonmaak’ genoemd, deze lezing, want normaal in Holland, van oudsher is de lente in aantocht en dan houden we een grote schoonmaak, niet waar? Ramen open, boel eruit, alle rotzooi en shit naar buiten, en dat is een mooi thema voor het begin van de lente. En dat is ook een belangrijk thema voor ons in deze tijden: dat we weten hoe we onszelf eigenlijk een beetje zuiverder kunnen maken, en een beetje schoner van binnen. En daarom hebben we dit thema gekozen voor deze lezing van Rimpoche. Ik ben ervan overtuigd dat het jullie allemaal zal inspireren,- mij in ieder geval - en ik wens jullie veel luisterplezier en veel inspiratie. Rimpoche, het woord is aan u.

Rimpoche: Dank je wel, en welkom iedereen. Ik vind het erg fijn om hier te zijn en vooral om onze oude vrienden weer te zien. Veel van jullie zijn oude vrienden. Ik zie een aantal oude vrienden die ik vroeger zag. En ook is het fijn om goed weer te hebben hier, vandaag is het een beetje beter dan gisteren. En ook is dit het moment waarop we een nieuwe koning gaan krijgen. We hebben steeds de verjaardag van de koningin gevierd, en nu krijgen we een koning. En dat is heel mooi. En het is ook heel mooi dat de koningin het zo goed gedaan heeft gedurende haar regeerperiode, en dat ze de verjaardag van haar moeder in ere heeft gehouden. We hebben Koninginnedag altijd met veel plezier gevierd. En nu wordt haar zoon op 30 april gekroond en doet zij afstand van de troon. En dat is bijzonder. Goede mensen weten hoe ze hun leven moeten leiden, ze weten hoe ze met macht moeten omgaan en ze weten wanneer ergens in moeten stappen en ook wanneer ze ergens mee moeten stoppen.

En mijn onderwerp van vandaag is: na een lange winter hebben we de voorjaarsschoonmaak. Na een lange winter kijken we rond in ons huis en proberen we van onze rommel af te komen of we proberen op zijn minst weg te zetten wat we niet meer zoveel gebruiken. En ook verandert het weer. Ons weer verandert dagelijks. Het verandert echt iedere dag, maar we realiseren ons dat niet altijd. Maar de evrandering is er elke dag. Gisteren – sorry, maar nu ga ik van mijn onderwerp af – gisteren heb ik de leden van Jewel Heart ten tijde van Helene eens op een rij gezet. Als je dat bekijkt dan waren we toen met een beperkt aantal mensen, er waren alleen Marianne Soeters, Piet Soeters en Helene. En Carel weevers een beetje later, misschieneen paar dagen. En je had Marianne Mattijsen en Ed Houpperman. En wie nog meer?

Carel: Marianne de Kok.

Rimpoche: Mariane de Kok, Marianne van der Horst ofwel Marianne Delhi en Marianne Meditatie. Omdat ik toen drie Mariannes kende wist ik niet wie wie was. Omdat Mariane van der Horst me kwam opzoeken in Delhi noemden we haar Marianne Delhi en Marianne de Kok gaf meditatiecursussen, dus noemden we haar Marianne Meditatie. And wie is er nog meer die ik niet heb genoemd?

Carel: Fenneke en Len.

Rimpoche: Fenneke en Len kwamen een beetje later, misschien een paar maanden. Of misschien betekent een paar maanden wel een paar jaar. En toen kwam jij (Marion Wierda). Hoe dan ook, het was een tafel vol mensen, en we ontmoetten elkaar in de woonkamer van Mariane Soeters. We hebben dit gedaan met een tafel vol mensen. Dat is waar we mee begonnen, en jullie hebben een lange weg afgelegd. En nu hebben we een eigen gebouw, mensen werken hard, mensen steken hier een hoop tijd en energie in, vooral Ron en Karin. En ook heel veel anderen. Als ik je naamniet heb genoemd betekent dat niet dat ik je inspanning niet erken, dus dank jullie wel allemaal. En sommigen hebben zelfs hun duim ervoor opgeofferd! Dank je wel! En nu zijn we allemaal hier en verheugen we ons erover, en ik denk dat we onszelf mogen feliciteren. En terwijl we onszelf feliciteren zouden we ook de daden van Helen moeten herinneren en de inspanningen die ze heeft gedaan om de Dharma en de Tibetaans Boeddhistische leer hierheen te brengen, met alle moeilijkheden van dien. Dat heeft ze gedaan, en we moeten ons dat altijd blijven herinneren. En ook moeten we altijd bidden voor haar en onze verdiensten toewijden, we moeten ons niet alleen haar, maar ook haar werk herinneren, we moeten dat waarderen en we moeten onze verdiensten toewijden om haar wensen in vervulling te laten gaan.

Niet alleen moeten we de vriendelijkheid van anderen ten opzichte van onszelf en ten voordele van ons niet vergeten, maar we moeten ons dit herinneren, en we moeten het waarderen. En dat is een van de eerste daden van zuivering. En dan komt ook de vraag bij me op: kunnen we onze negativiteiten zuiveren? Kunnen we ze rechtzetten? Veel mensen denken ‘als ik verkeerde dingen heb gedaan, dan zijn dat gedane zaken. En gedane zaken nemen geen keer’. Dus dan is er niets recht te zetten. Op een bepaalde manier is dat waar. Als we iemand hebben gekwetst – stel dat we iemand hebben gedood, kunnen we die persoon dan weer tot leven wekken? Nee dat kan niet, want we hebben de persoon in kwestie al gedood. Maar zelfs al kunnen we hem of haarniet meer tot leven wekken, kunnen we dan toch iets doen? Het antwoord is dat je wel echt iets kunt doen. Waarom? Omdat de daad die we gedaan hebben vergankelijk is. Alhoewel doden doden is, en je de persoon niet meer tot leven kunt wekken, is de daad toch vergankelijk, het verandert, het is veranderbaar. Er is bijna niets dat niet veranderbaar is.

Vanochtend hadden we een meeting met de kinderen en ze hadden zulke fantastische, grote vragen. Of dat echt de vragen waren van de kinderen zelf, of dat de ouders geholpen hebben, maar er werd gevraagd hoe de geest eruit ziet en wat er met de geest gebeurt als bacteriën of amoeben zich vermenigvuldigen. Als een bacterie zich deelt in twee, en dan van twee naar vier, wat gebeurt er dan met de geest? Hoe gaat dat? En ze wilden ook weten of wat gedaan is, gedaan is of dat het mogelijk is om dingen over te doen. Ze stelden allemaal dat soort vragen, die veel verder gingen dat waar kinderen over na kunnen denken. Maar misschien kunnen moderne kinderen veel meer dan we denken. Maar hoe dan ook, dit waren de vragen waarover we het hadden en ook hebben we een beetje gesproken over vergankelijkheid. Het is heel interessant dat kinderen van deze leeftijd op die manier kunnen denken. Maar toen we het hadden over vergankelijkheid kon ik hen gaan voorbeeld geven van iets dat niet vergankelijk is. Ik weet niet of ze het in de gaten hadden, maar ik had in gedachten om ze te laten zien wat vergankelijk en blijvend is, omdat ik al gesproken had over vorm en geest en over fysieke en mentale vorm. Maar het lukte me niet om blijvend en vergankelijk te verduidelijken omdat ik vanochtend geen voorbeeld kon vinden van iets blijvends.

Dus alles is vergankelijk. Vergankelijk betekent veranderlijk. Alles verandert van moment tot moment, of we dat herkennen of niet. Toen ik ongeveer 25 jaar geleden voor het eerst in Nederland kwam, zag mijn gezicht er niet oud en lelijk uit zoals nu. Alhoewel ik toen dacht dat ik er lelijk uitzag. Maar als je er nu naar kijkt was ik toen niet lelijk. Dus is het veranderd van niet lelijk naar lelijk. Dus of we het herkennen of niet, we veranderen de hele tijd, iedere dag. Ik herinner me dat we toen uitgingen en bier gingen drinken, met Carel en een aantal van ons, en dat hij die grote glazen pullen moest dragen en dat er een keer een brak. Weet je nog, het was daar onderaan de kerk, in het centrum. Hoe dan ook, dat was de goede oude tijd, en nu is het veranderd. En de verandering vindt plaats binnen het individu. In die tijd had ik geen diabetes, kon ik gemakkelijk lopen en liepen we altijd overal heen. Nu kan ik dat niet meer en moet ik op een scootmobiel rijden enzovoorts. Maar dat is zichtbare verandering. In ons lichaam en in onze geest vinden er altijd veranderingen plaats. Hartmut en Bob zijn mogelijk niet altijd kaal geweest, wel? Dus er is verandering. Degenen die nu niet kaal zijn worden kaal. Degenen die netjes geschoren zijn, er schoon en mooi uitzien worden vuil en krijgen een groezelig baardje dat hun gezicht bedekt. En degenen met een groezelig baardje scheren het af. Al deze veranderingen hebben plaatsgevonden vanwege de vergankelijkheid.

Gisteravond waren we in Deventer, in een oude kazerne die veranderd is in een centrum. Eerst dacht ik dat het een oecumenisch centrum zou worden, waar het type religie er niet toe doet, wat gewoon open is voor iedereen. Een centrum waar mensen hulp kunnen krijgen, vooral mishandelde vrouwen die echt dringend een veilige plek nodig hebben waar ze zich veilig en comfortabel kunnen voelen. Maar het wordt ook een meditatiecentrum waar mensen contemplatief bezig kunnen zijn. Het wordt een mooi centrum en het is goed dat het is opgericht. Ook zag ik daar een prachtig kastje met houtsnijwerk, waarschijnlijk uit de achttiende eeuw. Het kan zijn dat het een tabernakel was waar de miswijn werd bewaard. Nu staat het daar, en op een of andere manier herinnerde me dat prachtige stuk uit een oude kerk aan vergankelijkheid. Eerst maakte dit prachtige meubelstuk onderdeel uit van een grote kerk, maar op een of andere manier is dit ene stuk hier terecht gekomen. Dat herinnert me aan de goede3 oude Tibetaanse schilderwerken, de thangkhas. Veel ervan zijn over de hele wereld verspreid geraakt: je vindt een enkel stuk in Amerika, in Europa, in Zuidoost Azië.

En dit geeft ons de boodschap van de vergankelijkheid. Op dezelfde manier als deze prachtige oude kunst van hand tot hand gaat, van eigenaar of van locatie verandert, zo ook zullen goed en kwaad veranderen, als de verandering eenmaal plaatsheeft. Verandering betekent niet alleen dat de traditionele oude dingen vergaan en uiteen vallen, maar ook dat negatieve dingen gaan en uiteen vallen. Je kunt zien dat rare kerken, die in gebruik waren door dictators zoals Napoleon veranderen: