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20150902JLGR5P13

OK, great. Well, welcome everybody, Or you should be welcoming me, because I haven't been here. I've just arrived. I'm really thrilled to be here. I was honored to be asked by the Rimpoche, actually really thrilled and grateful to have a chance to offer something back to someone who's been such an anchor in stormy seas. He's such a wonderful example of a good human being, of being a good human being.

So, I'm going to talk to you a little bit about, and sort of following in the spirit of Philip and Fredericka, myself, how I got here or what is it like to be here with you tonight. And then I'm going to really try to share with you something about my journey. I'm a psychiatrist by training and have also sort of gotten addicted to Buddhist teaching, so spent some time studying with Bob, as I'll tell you. So I'm going to talk t you a little bit about how I integrate and my view of how the worlds of Buddhist culture, Buddhist psychology and Buddhist mind science fit together with psychotherapy, neuroscience, neuropsychology, and the process of transformation, really. And then, hopefully, along the way I'll try to make some comments about the path.

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Maybe it's not going to happen in that order. We'll have to see what happens. But those are some of the things I wanted to share with you tonight.

I feel very much at home here. It feels to me like this is me, this place, because it's a Catholic monastery turned international Buddhist, whatever. That's kind of my life. I grew up -- my parents are very bookish, kind of Catholic school graduates. You know, Catholic Worker Party, Catholic intellectual types, Jesuit-trained.

When I was born, my father was starting medical school in Europe. He became a psychiatrist, of all things. I often joke that my becoming a psychiatrist is an inherent condition. And it feels that way. Maybe that's some kind of comment on karma; I don't know. But one of the things I observed about them is -- they were like a controlled experiment, right? My father had kind of broken from the Catholic culture that he was raised in, and went into this kind of material science. He was fascinated by science. He was a science teacher as a young man. He studied psychiatry and was very interested in the beginnings of brain science and the new kinds of drugs that were coming out. You know, of course given his background, he really was kind of an existential psychiatrist. He brought his psychology. But culturally, he really was drifting in the materialist direction.

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My mother, on the other hand, became a social studies teacher. She grew up in Sicily and he was born in Brooklyn. She had kind of deeper roots in a more traditional kind of spirituality. She never really said word one to me about God, Christ, anything, but you could feel it kind of emanating from her. It's what made her tick. And she stayed true to that and became a teacher, a social studies teacher, a history teacher; but also like the matriarch of our little family.

The bottom line is that she got healthier and happier, and he got more stressed out, burned out and sick. So, I said to myself, "Now, I love the fact -- I love what my father did, because I watched him training, and I watched him disappear into the internship and residency and then come out the other end and start doing psychotherapy in the house. He had his office in the house. So, I would see people coming and going. It was a mystery to me. What the heck is going on in that room? People sitting down with my father; I never sat down with my father. I sat down with him at dinner, or whatever, but we would just have philosophical debates now and then.

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But it really drew me, magnetically. The practice of one person sitting down with another person in that quiet way that therapy does. But I didn't want to become a burned out, stressed out, freaked out shrink.

So that was the predicament, really that I was born into. It was kind of old world/new world spiritual culture versus kind of material culture. So I went away to college carrying my Jung "Modern Man In Search of a Soul," or whatever it was. I sat down in my first religion class -- I was going to be a religion major -- and there were two professors. It was Religion 101, and they went to trot out all their faculty. It was the senior faculty and the junior faculty, so there was this duck-hunting waspy professor of African religion at one end of the table, and at the other end of the table, who was sitting there but wild Bob Thurman. Right? With his big flower hippie tie and his one eye and his hair was yellow. He looked like Hayagriva. The Dalai Lama calls him "Hayagriva." We call him "The Thurmanator."

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Anyway, so -- well, there was no contest. Bob was so much more -- you know, the world was created and destroyed as Bob was going on and on. He didn't fool around. He wasn't talking about the Preliminaries. Here we were, a bunch of college freshmen in this very preppy little place, and he was trotting out Vajrayogini, Yamantaka; he was talking about the subtle body.

Some of you may remember Lama Govinda's "Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism," which has pictures of the subtle body in it -- and oh,I love Lama Govinda -- what an amazing person. So, I was hooked, and that was that.

At that time at Amherst College you could -- I think it still doesn't have a core curriculum. I spent basically two thirds of my time there studying with Bob, under various guises. I guess if he had been at a university I would have become a Buddhist scholar and my life would have become very different -- much simpler.

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But that's not what fate had in store for me. I went to medical school, and then dropped out, because -- it was medical school. Who wants to go to medical school? What an insanity! And what an excuse for education (expression of agony from Joe). I'm sorry. But anyway, I also wasn't integrated enough. I didn't even have a meditation practice. So I sort of went back to Bob, and I helped him with some grants, and we went to India, which is where I met the Rimpoche, in '79. I met Bob in '73 when I was 18 and was very fortunate (?[00:08:06.24]) to hear his very eloquent sort of synthesis of his deep dive into Tibetan culture, but to hear it in sort of this compelling, beautiful English, western philosophical, spiritual garb. It's very beautiful. It's like a very nice aesthetic experience.

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But when I went to India, at one point Bob grabbed me and said, "You know, we're going down to South India." We got a car, went over and picked up Gelek Rimpoche in Delhi. We all drove down to Mundgod [00:08:46.17], where Ling Rinpoche, the former Ganden Tripa, the one before Lochö Rinpoche was doing his teaching.

There we were, sort of camping out in Nyare Khangtsen [00:09:05.18]). Bob and I were the only non-Tibetans there, and I would get dragged out, because I was the only student and be brought before Gelek Rimpoche, who would be sitting there on his throne in his little kangtsen), and he would quiz me every night; you know, and the teaching was being given in Tibetan. My Tibetan was and still is very poor; but nonetheless, he would grill me on what was happening, and that was my introduction.

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But I felt very lucky when he moved to the States. There were several times in my life when things just fell apart, and he was there.

You know, he was very different from Bob, who was very busy saving the world and doing whatever -- translating nine million texts. And this is one of the kinds of things that kind of brings me to -- sort of -- my own identification with Gelek. It's kind of like a better version of my Dad. He's the person who really does work in a funny way that's so very similar to what a therapist does.

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And so I had that feeling of being at home with him because of his qualities as a person. He's so present and practical and grounded and concerned and responsive. It really is like being in a therapeutic or healing field with him. And also because he has all this depth of inner training that allows him to do it and still have fun. He can still grow as a person and not get bogged down.

So I felt that even though I was very riveted by Bob, as we all are, that Gelek was more like a role model for me about my path forward; so that brings me to my relationship with Tibetan mind science.

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So, I love this thing about the five stages. It's so cool, isn't it? I mean, it's so technical. It's typical Tibetan mind science or Buddhist mind science. It's like analyzing everything, all these distinctions; but what is so cool about it is that it makes what would otherwise seem like a complete impossibility or mystical story, like somebody had a (?[00:11:38.15] sound of someone having an enlightenment experience). It makes it seem like a person could do it!

In fact, it's very challenging in that way. The whole thing about the Buddha's teaching style was that he really tried to demystify the Hindu yogas that he was trained in, and make them accessible to the uneducated. That's who he was teaching. You know, we're like that from a spiritual point of view. We may have eleven degrees, but from a spiritual point of view, we come from an underdeveloped country, right?

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And so the Buddha really taught Buddhist science in that way, without hocus pocus, without mystery in a systematic, step-by-step way, based on causality, in a way so that it could be something that could be mass-produced, or it could be mass-taught, or it could be taught to illiterate farmers whose lives fell apart and had to go somewhere for refuge, right? And that's why the Buddhist culture developed universities whereas the Hindu teaching tradition remained focused on this Gurukul[12:55:07], this family Sunday school type of thing where families educated their children, but it didn't ever become like a mainstream institution.

This whole approach to the science of transformation or personal healing to me is very -- you know, I just love it -- I can sink my teeth into it. And I'm not talking about the details. I'll talk a little bit about the details.

But just the very idea. Now, first of all, the example that these five paths are the heart of Theravada, Mahayana and Vajrayana practice. Right? That's interesting. We're all here -- you know, supposedly the Theravada people say Mahayana isn't Buddhism. Zen people say, Mahayana isn't Buddhism, let alone Tantra. Everybody's wondering how all these different forms of Buddhism relate to each other. They seem like totally different religions; but this is fascinating. The same structure is at the heart of all of these. And what is it a structure of? It's not a structure of esoteric states of consciousness (?[00:14:14.15]). It's a structure of healing and purification, right?

Of purifying afflictions that we all know, that we're all expert in, as the Dalai Lama says; we all know right here, we don't have to look in a microscope or a CAT scan. [And it's a structure of] cultivating qualities that we all have little glimmers of, but we don't know how to make more of, right?

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So, to me, this is one of the reasons why I was excited that he was teaching this teaching. Of course, I love Manjushri. Manjushri is very dear to me. That was the original teaching I got, my first meditation practice -- Yamantaka -- a sort of souped-up Manjushri. A Manjushri on steroids. And it’s so close to Tsongkhapa's story, and Nagarjuna's ?[00:15:12.28]) teaching, and so on.

But the heart of it being this systematic approach to spiritual transformation that makes it -- in a way, it challenges us. This map says that you can go from here to there. And this is how you go; from here, step A, to step B, you do this, then you do that, So what it does is it takes being a better human being, a spiritual person; it takes the magic and mystery out of it. It takes the personality out of it. It says this is a human potential, this is a path you can follow and here are the steps, and therefore it challenges us.

Because, as you were saying, Fredericka, even though you consider yourself at the beginning; wherever we all think we are, we must be somewhere; but the point is that we feel, once we get on this journey, that we're making progress. We're heading in a better direction. We're heading toward something better. A better way to be. And that's really where I think it dovetails very much with psychotherapy as a practice, as opposed to, say neuroscience or cognitive psychology, or other things that are about knowledge.

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This is a practice, and it's a practice between humans to teach, communicate, cultivate, and really in a way mass-produce relief and qualities. Better qualities. Better quality humans. And especially in this day and age when we've taken ([00:16:57.26]), whereas if you look at Nalanda, the Nalanda tradition, very much like the Catholic monastic traditions, this is where our modern Academy came from, were these great religious institutions that were Catholic, in the sense of opening their door. Mahayana and Catholic are really the same word in a different culture.

But we've taken, in the modern university, now it's just knowledge. You know, you walk through the doors of the London School of Economics, and it's -- whatever -- it's "Knowledge is Power," "Abandon all humanity, all ye who enter here." We throw out the old disciplines, we've thrown out the ethics, we've thrown out the contemplation, we've thrown out the wisdom! It's just knowledge.

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That's it. And what is the secret teaching of that? The secret teaching is, "You're -- forget it. You're just the way you are. There's no fixing you. As my learning-disabled nephew says, one of my favorite secret teachings, "There's no excuse for you."

But that's what our modern culture has told us. We're hopeless. Either we're hopeless, or really the whole project of improving your humanity inside out is a futile, naive, superstitious, sentimental endeavor. But we've gutted that out of our academy, and we've gutted it out of our lives, to a large extent. So, thank goodness Buddhism has kept it alive, and especially it's been so fully nurtured in Tibet, and in a way I see this sort of (?[00:18:50.20]), this practical system of how you purify your mind as kind of the essence of it.

I can certainly blab. I got that from Bob, did I? So, I wanted to say a few things. I heard that Bob gave an amazing, and one of his usual "knock-your-socks-off" things about the tantras, so thank you, Bob. And he has been long working on this stuff. Anyone who's curious about that should pick up his amazing book on the Five Stages, "Tsongkapa's Illumination of the Five Stages." You know, which he's been sitting on since I was an undergraduate. He started working on it then. And the Dalai Lama said, "Don't publish it. Wait." I don't think it was finished anyway.

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But that's an amazing look at the tantric psychology here. What I understand he did not do is connect this model, which is based on the Mahayana, and see the Mahayana and the Theravada map of the five stages as almost identical; you just add compassion and mix. Right?

The stages are basically the same, even the kinds of qualities that are to be developed, and so on and so forth. The wisdom is the same; as they say, you know the famous metaphor for Tibetan Buddhism is that it's a polyandrous family. You know, of course being a nomadic culture, supposedly Tibetans had not just polygamy but polyandry, because they were very practical people. So, it's a polyandrous family. One wife, one mother, wisdom; and three fathers. The three technologies; the three arts of renunciation, compassion and pure passion. Right?

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The Theravada, the Mahayana and the Tantrayana all have the same wisdom. That's why this map is the core of it; because it's the wisdom map. It's the map of how wisdom -- you know, whereas renunciation and compassion relieve -- and even pure, positive, deep visceral transformative states like awe and joy and delight and ecstasy and bliss relieve our afflictions temporarily and help improve our lives, and help us rise up in the world. As Nagarjuna said, "They help us ascend to a healthier, happier place; a place of greater opportunities, a more golden cage, right?

But the only thing that really frees us from the cage is wisdom. The transcendence; that's what the Rimpoche was saying this morning. That's why this is so important. And that's why it's such a beautiful element of many spiritual teachings that are not as well developed. In Buddhism, the wisdom aspect is very well developed, and this map of the five stages kind of tells you exactly where that stands.

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How do you cultivate wisdom? How does it help gradually wear away, wear down the afflictive emotions that are the afflictive blocks to freedom, and then ultimately wear down the cognitive, the mental blocks; the cognitive obscurations or blocks that are the block to omniscience that the Rimpoche was talking about earlier; that the Buddha's capacity to be aware of everything and relate to all things.

So basically, I just wanted to sort of cross-map them. Tsongkapa cross-mapped -- even though this is correct from a Gelukpa standpoint; that the bodhisattva stages only really start at the stage of the Path of Meditation; at the breakthrough, the first direct realization of emptiness, and then the other stages kind of pile on up there; they all sort of (sounds like bdloop [00:23:16.23]).

Geshe Ngawang Dargye, who used to run the "Library of Tibetan Works and Archives" on my first trip to India uses a different system, where the Bodhisattva stages start with what we would call the "Aspiratioal Spirit of Enlightenment," way down in the Path of Accumulation, and actually they developed. But most people agree with this model.

But I'm just trying to point out that there are different ways of staging and interdigitating the Mahayana path with these five wisdom paths that are inherent in the Theravada. But what I wanted to draw your attention to was the way in which Tsongkapa crossmaps it with the Vajrayana path, since that's what Bob talked about. And, since that's -- you know subliminally the Tibetans always kind of [keep?[00:24:14.01]) the secret under the hood. And the secret of the Tibetan technology is their view that there may be many paths, but they all end in one. And that if we want to really prrogress on the higher stages, we're going to wind up having to grapple with tantra.

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So that's why we open this teaching on wisdom, even though it's a Mahayana teaching on wisdom, we open it with a tantric initiation and we close it with a tantric initiation. That's the Tibetan way. There's always the secret sort of planting the seed for that more turbo-charged rapid practice.

So, Tsongkapa says that the Path of Accumulation covers initiation, which you had; coarse creation stage, (Bob explained what these things are. I'm happy to [take a few more questions][00:25:12.14], but basically what I call "role-modeling imagery," then re-envisioning the world through the eyes of your mentor and re-envisioning yourself through the eyes of your mentor; a very psychotherapeutic thing to do, right?

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And then the subtle creation; re-envisioning your internal environment. Your body, your nervous system, as the body and nervous system of your mentor, or a Buddha. You've started to plant the seeds already within your perception of your mind, your relationship with your mind, that you're open to the enlightenment that's in there somewhere, covered up with garbage.

Then we get to freedom of body; what I call (?Kaya______[00:25:59.17]). Bob calls it "body isolation." That's kind of the crossover from the creation stage to the perfection stage. And all of that, according to Tsongkapa's map, happens on the Path of Accumulation. So we're doing the same [thing], using a different technology, we're accumulating the qualities, of mindfulness, abandonment, and samadhi power, mind power. Those make up the basis of the accumulation path. And we're also accumulating compassion. So it's a Mahayana path, right? And we're doing it with the pure passion of out devotion to our mentor. That's the love engine that's driving the car, the vehicle.

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Then we have starting in the preparation the two remaining isolations; speech and mind, which are called the freedom of speech, the freedom of mind. What that means very simply, and I don't know to what extent Bob defined these, but Fredericka, you described how much you get annoyed by being in your own face. What the whole freedom of body is about is somehow not being in your own face. You know, being face-to-face with your mentor, your ideal, instead of being in your body, which is the locus of our survival instincts and of our reification, our delusional instinct for reification.

You are envisioning yourself in the mirror of your mentor's wisdom and also compassion for you. So you're free from your normal body image. That's what it means, "freedom of body." That's what body isolation means. You've got a few moments' break from being you in your ordinary sense of body. And the same holds for freedom of speech. The normal inner dialogue of 'Mommy/Daddy,' whatever, you know, praising you, blaming you, whatever they're doing. Pushing you here, pushing you over there, and the chatter.

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You get freedom from that. And you get freedom from all the energy that it stirs up, all the negative, afflicted, emotional upset, triggering, blah blah blah. And freedom of mind means you get freedom of mind temporarily from any state that is not blissful.

Right? So, because the mind is primarily, naturally clear, luminous; but also blissful. That was the Buddha's great discovery. That was his great teaching; that it's all there inside of us at the very heart of our being and heart of our mind. We just have to unearth it, get [rid of] the garbage that's covering it all over.

And we [achieve] freedom of mind so that we can be in that mind, so we can be free from all the garbage moods and afflicted emotional states that block our access to our bliss and happiness, to blissful openness. Then we have the virtual body stage. And all this is happening on the Path of Preparation. Virtual body corresponds to the samadhi power. I call it virtual body, Bob calls it "magic body." And what that means is basically your sense, your vision of yourself as a deity, in other words as a kind of equal to your guru, as having the potential to be as integrated or as grounded or as free as your guru is.

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But having that actually be an experience that's connected to a real flow of bliss and openness within you, that has a kind of anchor in your nervous system of what makes it real. That's the idea of the Perfection Stage. It's not just a theory. It's not just a vision of you as an ideal being. It's a taste, it's an experience, it's a reality that's etched into or taps into your nervous system or your real biological or natural potentials.

So that's the virtual body all happening there. Then you have illumination, which is the clear light; that's the kickoff of the insight stage where at that point you become a bodhisattva. Depending on where you are on the map, you're either on the eighth stage by Geshe Dargye's map, or you're only on the first stage according to Tsongkapa's map. But in any case, you're on the path of the bodhisattva. And then the learner's integration starts when you happen on meditation [00:31:15.06] stage and you really start cutting through.

So, in the Path of Insight you start to be able to deconstruct your afflicted view of the world, your neurotic view of the world. You'd have to get up from the couch and walk out of the office at this point, because you wouldn't be thinking like Woody Allen anymore. You'd finally be really like open mind, open to possibilities, clear and unbiased, but you'd still have those -- and you didn't have the coarse afflictions -- that is the gross rages and panics and confusional states, but you still had the subtle ones and you still had all the instincts. I think Rimpoche was talking about them as "imprints." Different people will refer to them in different ways, but I like to call them "instincts."

And then we haven't even really touched on the cognitive obscurations. Emotional trouble is what we call the afflictive obscuration. The kleshas, right? Klesha avatum (?[00:32:29.17]). The garbage that's emotional, right? That's blocking our natural bliss mind. Our pure bliss, open connective nature, our creative nature.

And then there are the cognitive ones. The cognitive blocks, the mental blocks that bias and distort. The distortions, the filters that prevent us from seeing everything and from having real freedom of mind. So we start to move in the learner's integration to the instincts of the afflictive emotions, and then we start to move to the cognitive obscurations. And finally, maybe there are still some more plant (?[00:33:15.28]) to be done in terms of re-integrating our clarity; the new clarity of mind that we're discovering with our embodiment; the way we re-inhabit ourselves. This is like an odyssey, right?

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This is the beautiful thing about the tantric path. It is like an odyssey in the sense that you take a deep dive. You start up here in your constructive, perceptual mind, the mind that we think is our mind, and then you gradually deconstruct that. You actually dissolve it in the creation stage, you know? You re-envision it in a way that's more transparent, and that's more easily dissolvable, where you can dissolve it without fear.

Because you made it. You know it's not -- you know -- everything. And then you dive into your nervous system, and then you slowly dive from the peripheral or coarse part of your nervous system into the subtle part of your nervous system. This is one of the things as a psychiatrist and as a geek; a neuroscience geek, I'm sort of fascinated with the way all this maps onto the subtle body nervous system, because to me that's very familiar as a person who thinks that the mind is somehow connected to a brain, right?

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So, you go into the subtle body, which are the three central channels, basically and then slowly into the heart center and into the heart drop, and when you get full access to the heart drop is when you get to freedom of mind, right? So you get to the middle Preparation Stage. But that's kind of like going for the Grail, right? In terms of the Hero's Jourey. That's dissolving the ordinary, leaving the ordinary, going into the extraordinary, melting into, merging with the extraordinary.

Then the rest of what happens actually, is how do you come back? If you deconstructed your afflicted, neurotic self, how do you live again? What kind of person are you going to be? And then that's where really the rest of the creation stage is not about "getting to enlightenment." You've already gotten to enlightenment, in a way. It's about integrating enlightenment with embodiment, with art, right? The art of being, of manifesting, of sharing it, right? Transparently broadcasting it.

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And that's where the interplay between the virtual body and the clear light mind is this integration process that you're doing. Very Jungian, right? So, I wanted to just share with you that take on -- I need to sit back; as Fredericka suggested, sit back a bit, catch my breath, have a sip of water. I want to share with you that take on mapping, crossmapping these five paths onto the tantra that Bob talked about. [I'll] sort of build a little bridge there for you

You know, and I think what I was going to say now -- I'd like to say a few words about one of my pet projects. One of the things I've been working on is using my son's sketchpad. I'm a terrible artist. My son's an amazing artist; my youngest son, Ananda. He's a blissful artist.

But I stole his sketchpad, I confess, and I'm drawing out the brain, and trying to -- because I have to give a talk in a couple of weeks to a bunch of brain researchers about how the subtle body relates to our map of the brain. In my view, this is a really important thing, because there are so many ways in which Buddhist science has anticipated modern neuroscience.

[00:37:35.18]

You know, the whole idea of impermanence and the constructive activity of the brain, the importance of the understanding of its plasticity and transformability, for example. Even in the understanding of the tantric version of the dyadic interaction between a role model and this eternally youthful plastic mind in us that can take in another way of being and kind of morph. We now think of that as being related to the limbic system and the way we resonate and regulate ourselves in relation to others. Very beautiful stuff.

But anyway, I'm interested in how this particular -- the tantric model we mostly associate with yoga -- the chakras and the channels and so on, how that is a map of what we call "the nervous system." It's just a first-person map that's designed for self-regulation. It's a map that maps neural functions where we feel them, rather than where the anatomic cell bodies can be located. Like, where's the habeas corpus? Where do we find the cell body? We're more concerned with the living being. Where do we feel the heart?

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Well, we feel the heart here, even though the cardio-respiratory regulative nuclei are up here somewhere. But we don't feel them there. The brain doesn't have any sensory nerve endings, so we don't feel our brain. Where do we feel our heart? We feel it down here. This is where we feel our midbrain. Right here.

OK, so I'm doing this thing, mapping the two, and why do I say that? I said it because I think that one of the ways in which I like to teach Buddhist teaching is to mix it up with western evolutionary thinking, western neuroscience, western psychology; because this is our cosmology. This is the way we've learned to think of our samsara. This is our conventional reality. One, I think elegant way to think about the path, in terms of the Five Stages and so on, is as really kind of a way of climbing into the depths of our nervous system. And as we climb into the depths of our nervous system, we climb into the depths of our evolutionary past, when that nervous system was formed, right?

[00:40:14.09]

So, you know, whether it takes incalculable eons to retrain the mind, if we have the technology to go back in history, back in time, that time machine; to go back to the level at which the problems originated, right? If we have emotional problems, and we can somehow dive into our limbic system, where our emotions are programmed; if we have passion problems, addictive problems, happiness problems, unhappiness problems, we go back into our reptilian brain and transform that, that would be a way we could accelerate the integration and the healing process.

And I believe that's exactly why the tantras are faster. Because they're not just operating up here on the level of the pre-frontal cortex, or something like that, you know, that newest part of the brain, that extra scoop that we human beings have. It's reaching down from that highest, most enlightened part of our nervous system. You could just let that trickle down, which is kind of what psychotherapy does. Slowly it trickles down over the years, and maybe this is inevitable to some extent; it takes a long time anyway. Whatever technology you are using, it just takes a long time.

[00:41:36.19]

But if you have tools that can deliver the wisdom, or the enlightenment, or the positive emotion to the parts of the brain where the software glitches are, right? Then it's probably going to happen more quickly. And that's the tantric model. The idea is that at the extremely subtle level, at the molecular chemistry of the heart, we're either creating samsara in our bodies and minds and nervous system, or we're creating nirvana. OK? But it's starting from there.

So the idea, the purpose of the journey, of the odyssey, is that we go down to where it starts. And we redo it. We don't wait for the medicine to slowly get in there over eons and eons. We sort of dive in, using the right technology, and speak to that part, you know, our waking mind, our explicit memory and learning systems understand English or whatever language we grew up in. They understand charts and graphs and concepts. Our emotional brain doesn't understand those.

[00:42:35.29]

It understands art. It understands experience and understands a person, a relationship. That's why therapy works. So, if we want to go into our emotional brain, we need to speak its language. We need to give it the food that it will grow on. That's what the guru relationship does. That's what psychotherapy does, and imagery and prosity [00:42:55.08], you know, poetry, mantra; that's the language that that inner child speaks. The inner animal in us speaks the language of states of consciousness; you know, passions, and different flavors of passion. So if you want to be a happy reptile, you need to learn how to do that, and not be a frightened, miserable reptile. Right?

So basically that's in short how I try to think of these things. If you look at the Four Noble Truths and you understand that we're unnecessarily suffering, we're at the origins, our minds are polluted by afflictions and confusion, distortions, distorted memories; the roots of that are two. One of the roots is in previous lives, right? our instincts. From beginningless time. Why is it that we're always moving forward and -- it's not just you, Fredericka. It's me and it's all of us. We can't stop. Why can't we stop and breathe? Because we're still in the jungle. Why are we still in the jungle? Because from beginningless time, we have been surviving. And that's the default. Our minds are on a negative default. They're on a self-protective default.

[00:44:27.22]

The way I understand the self-cherishing mind or the self-grasping mind is that self-protection is the primary function of a living being; or might be right next to reproduction. I don't know which is more important. It depends on the day, right? And so self-grasping is self-protection. That's what it is.

Who was it -- Dustin Hoffman? -- in "Midnight Cowboy" who says, "I'm walkin' here!" Right? And remember the cab almost runs him over? Our self-protectiive instincts grasp at ourselves because they know that this little bit of terrain, this little bit of life, bubble, whatever; has to be protected! Otherwise it's going to get eaten or run over or whatever, and so we have to have that as our default. That's the worst case.

[00:45:21.02]

You know? If you forget where the honey is, you're going to be fine, but if you forget where the bear is, you might be dead. So we have a ten- to a hundred-fold greater retention of negative experience and a weighing; a biased weighing of experience as negative, and this is why we identify with our worst-case sense of self. "I'm not lovable. Nobody loves me, everybody hates me, then we go eat worms."

It's because it's the worst case. If I'm unlovable, then I'm screwed! Like I have no place in the world, there's no excuse for me, I don't have a place at the table. But because that's my default, I'm going to be constantly having my finger on that worst case. I'm going to be constantly having my finger on my "poor me, threatened little me, traumatized inner child, wounded me;" even though I might scare the living daylights out of other people, I don't feel that.

[00:46:23.03]

So, those are the two causes of samsara. Our past evolution that biases us by default out of the factory, to be self-protective above all else, so we have this knee-jerk, reactive, self-protective grasping, and then the childhood. The trauma of childhood. Knowing that our life hangs by the thread of that one other person's attention, right? That's a pretty precarious thing. We can't even move, let alone feed ourselves. And so when Mommy goes to the bathroom, we could be dead. We could be toast That's why we screech when Mommy goes to the bathroom.

And that's why we have trauma. That's why we have neurosis. Because even the best parents can't relieve us of that panic. We hardly understand them. We understand when Mommy comes and picks us up. But if she's just talking to us from the other side of the room, what good is that. So we have that early trauma, and so when we have these tools, like the guru-disciple relationship, like the offering of a better image of ourselves, like the mirror of the deity, when your guru sees you as a deity and says, "You are Manjusri," he's holding out an offering, saying, "You could see yourself the way I see you. You could see yourself through the lens of your qualities or your potential qualities, instead of through the lens of your worst-case nightmare."

[00:48:03.02]

That's a lifeline to stop the survival race, to stop "the evolutionary hangover," I call it. Right? We have a chemical hangover from evolution, and we have a childhood nightmare that we're stuck in; that's what psychotherapy helps us with, hopefully. And this technology is a very powerful technology to help us get out of those things. And a big part of the reason the tantras are so effective and do so much more so much more quickly is because like some of the unconventional therapies, like Jungian therapy or Reichian therapy, they deliver the medicine to the level of the mind and brain where the illness is; where the software is off. They send it subliminal messages, right?

So Gelek Rimpoche and our young Demo Rinpoche were talking to us about the relationship between wisdom and compassion, shamatha and vipassyana, and the thing about the tantric tradition of practicing shamatha and vipassyana is that the two active ingredients in the pill are bound together in one experience. So we can embody compassion, feel the spirit of compassion by envisioning ourselves as a loving being and identifying with our mentor, getting the hit from our mentor, but also know that this new ideal self that we're trying on for size or play-acting or performing or rehearsing or whatever is like an illusion, is transparent, is void, is empty, and we can meditate on those things at the same time, right?

[00:49:56.19]

We can have a blissful experience, we can have a release of blissful chemistry running through our nervous system and feel great openness, and also at the same time, meditate on its emptiness; at the same time. OK? So that's why this technology works. It is because it reaches deep into our mind, and it brings both the active ingredients for healing and transformation, the wisdom and the compassion, to that very level, in the language of that level.

I have just one more thought that I want to share with you; one more of my personal meditative reflections, if you will, about my own relationship with these practices; and especially the Manjusri practice.

By the way, let me share with you something that I found very intriguing when I was looking at Geshe Ngawang Dargyey's "The Tibetan Tradition of Mental Development," you know that, Hartmut? Wonderful book. I recommend it to everyone.

He said the definition of the Path of Accumulation is that it's about realizing the teaching. The definition of the Path of Preparation is that it's about realizing the profound. Profound teaching, right? Ultimate reality. The definition of the Path of Insight is that it's about direct realization. Not through the medium of a concept. The definition of [the Path of] Meditation is that it's about the aftermath wisdom. Digesting that direct realization in our everyday life, working with the illusions that "boot up" again as our mind goes back to its habitual operations and slowly ironing the kinks out of them.

[00:52:08.02]

And then finally the definition of the Mastery [No More Learning] Stage is abandoning the two blocks; the blocks to freedom and the blocks to omniscience. So that's a beautiful little, nice little definition.

There are two kind of teachings, however, that always meant a lot to me. One that I learned from reading Lama Govinda's "Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism." I'm sure most of you have heard of this, but many of you may have not, and that is the idea that the real definition of Manjusri is the Jnanasattva; that is a Hero of intuitive wisdom, a Wisdom Hero. So, it's the heroic wisdom. It's the inner guide within us all, right?

And there's a beautiful teaching about the fact that the -- and this comes out of the Manjusri Namasamgiti, really -- and I may be going back to the Guyasamaja tradition earlier, that there were these five wisdoms, which is kind of the optimal frequency or the truth of the five aggregates. So if the five aggregates are working in alignment with the five wisdoms, then you're a Buddha. If they are guided by the five wisdoms, then you are a Buddha. If they're guided by confusion, then you're a person.

[00:53:42.20]

And so the idea that Manjusri is the essence is that subjective awareness that gathers up the energies of the five aggregates, the physical energies and the functioning of the way our minds work, and invests them or commits them and uses them to support or mount a new way of being that is totally guided and formed by those five wisdoms.

It's a very beautiful teaching, and it's traditionally done, visualized in the tantric way in terms of the humkara [00:54:19.26], the little "hum" syllable or some other syllable, and having five different rainbow rays of light. So there is the idea that your mind is not a single point, like a single syllable, but it's actually like this rainbow of wisdom and wisdom energy. It's a beautiful image.

So, that's one thing I want to share with you in a context, in a certain context that I'm trying to set up here. The other thing is another beautiful teaching, which comes up more in the context of the feminine side of Manjusri, who is Prajnaparamita, right? So, his objectivity, his wife, who knows what to tell him to do, who sees him clearly, is the objectivity, and in the context of that teaching, you have this very powerful tradition, which is important in the Manjusri Namasamgiti, it's important in the Yamantaka teachings, the notion that Manjusri, or that this Wisdom Hero, that the wisdom within us can vanquish or tame or transform all demons, right? In fact Tsongkapa's great sadhana for Yamantaka is called "The Triumph Over All Demons," or something like that.

[00:55:42.10]

So that's another interesting teaching that I've always found very, very simplifying, but also enlightening and informative. That is the teaching of the Four Maras, right? We have four demons or devils, but they're not outside of us. They're not like with horns or the snake or whatever, or other people, or the Evil Empire on the other side of the planet. They're right here, right? And so what are they? They are the Mara of Kleshas; that is addiction, being addicted to our afflictions; "Don't tell me what..." or whatever it is. The Mara of the Skhandas; that is being self-grasping or clinging to our aggregates, the way they are, in their afflicted, compulsive form; "This is me. Take it or leave it. This is who I am." How many times have we said that or heard that in a ridiculous argument?

And I hear that in psychotherapy all the time. "(?[00:56:50.11]) is me." Well, hopefully it's not you, because if it is, we're really in trouble. And that's Skhanda Mara.

Murkyu (?[00:57:02.14]) Mara, the demon of fear of death, specifically what Yamantaka is designed to overcome. The primal survival instinct itself, right? That's why he is in the form of the bull, because the bull is the fiercest domesticated animal. That's in the matador tradition, the great (? Mid-phraic [00:57:28.28]) tradition or the Roman legion -- the secret cult of the Roman legions' tradition is that the person can have no fear in the face of the bull, in the face of death is a hero, right? So that's why you have Yamantaka with this big flaming, crazy bull with the cute, little Manjusri on its head.

That's the matador, who's saying, "You're full of sound and fury." So, that's the fear of death; conquering the fear of death. Which really means taming stress. Stress is all about uninstinctive, reactive, physical threat protection.

[00:58:09.24]

And then finally, is I think the most fascinating and subtle one: Devaputramara. The Mara of wanting to be the child of God. Wanting to stay a child in the center of the universe. In therapy, of course, this comes up all the time. But it comes up if you're in a "my mind" and all of our minds.

Why do we hold on so tightly to our neurotic families? If they're so bad, why don't we just leave them? Let's forget them! Leave them in the dust! Who cares, right? Why? Because we don't want to give up our IOU card. A lottery ticket, right? Those few moments in childhood when the world really did revolve around us, because we couldn't do anything for ourselves. And what a nice feeling that was; or at least some of it was nice.

[00:59:11.20]

That's a position that we have evolved to be in. We're very eminently talented. Babies are so cute, right? I mean, they're irresistible, you know? That's the position of our infantile narcissism; you know, "I'm so cute, the world is now going to revolove around me." I'm waiting for that to happen.

And that's what we're all doing. On some level, our neurotic selves are hanging on to all this garbage, the shit that happened, pardon my French, because we're waiting for the payoff -- for the real parent -- when will the real parent arrive? And deliver us? And give us all -- as Laurie Anderson says, "Pay me what you owe me." "Give me all the love that you're withholding," and of course, they just were trying their best, probably or whatever. They probably didn't get much themselves, or whatever it was.

[01:00:08.12]

But we don't want to give them that. On some level, that's the Devaputra model. So, maybe it's a little simplistic, but I think that just for the sake of a thought experiment, I'd try it on for size this morning, comparing the Accumulation Stage to overcoming Klesha Mara.

The core of the kleshas is the Satgyadursti (sounds like?[01:00:35.26]); the view that we are our bodies. Once you identify with your body, you are a target, right? And you're also a dead person, because you know nothing is going to get this body. Even if nothing gets it, it'll fall apart anyway, right? So, that's the source of affliction. That's the cognitive confusion. And we have a natural instinct -- the cognitive part of our self-protective instincts is self-reification. Right? We think we're here.

[01:01:14.25]

Who was it who was saying this morning, you say that there's one self and many others -- it was you, Rimpoche, right? But of course the only reason why it feels like me or I is because we're somehow reifying that word as if it's a real thing somewhere that we can't find. Where's the barcode? Where's the rib or whatever really matches to that? We can't find it, but we're very clear that it's there when we say it. "I." That's the cognitive equivalent of our self-protective instinct. If you don't think you're anything, then what's there to protect?

So you have to be deluded into thinking 'This is the most important thing; this is the real thing. Everything else is not so real.' In order to put up the fight to the death to protect it, you have to believe that. So, evolution had its way about it when it put our afflictions together, right? It had its plan, which was to keep us alive, right? That's basically all it is. Nothing more complicated, I think, than that.

[01:02:24.13]

So anyway, supposing that the first part of it is that we get over our addiction to being compulsive, to being in survival mode all the time, and particularly this futile attempt to protect our body from the inevitable, then at the Accumulation Stage we would be fighting Klesha Mara. The outcome of the noble truths and the abandonments and so on, I think there's a ground for thinking of that. But that's the beginning, the first job is to clean up our addictions. To clean up the poison. To recycle -- to recover the river of our mind-body process.

Then we have Skandha Mara in the Preparation stage where we're really trying to see through the identification, the grasping of our aggregates. That's really what we're trying to do. Then finally, in the direct realization, when we're dismantling our self-reification, that's when we're dismantling the fear of death. When we realize there's nothing to die, because nothing ever was born as separate from anything else, or independent of anything else, then we realize this whole death thing is really just a mental trick that we're playing [on ourselves]; a nightmare that we're living in, and we really have to begin to understand ourselves as ecology, you know?

[01:03:53.11]

And then there's the hardest one; the Deva Putramata (?) of just gradually realizing that our appearance as a separate self that can be at the center of anything is an illusion, a trap; a myopic trap and that we're going to have a much better time of it if we, instead of identifying with our inner child, we really identify with our inner parent and we start taking care of this little part of the universe and then all the other little parts of the universe that we're always encountering.

That's just a thought experiment. But what I really wanted to share with you about those two teachings has something to do with the way that I meditate. For whatever reason, those two have served as a kind of guide. I remember when I was a kid, reading the Govinda, that I was so inspired by this, by this notion of the Hum Kara, the Hum syllable as the Jnana sattva that I went out and got some different kinds of silk cloth, and I sewed together a huge banner of the HumKara [01:05:15.22]. I think it's at Bob's house somewhere, up in Woodstock. Not far from here.

[01:05:28.19]

So I said the essence of the journey, of the tantric journey is that we dive into the well of life and awareness, which is the heart center, or the primal unconscious, or whatever you want to call it. And then we resurrect ourselves as a better person. And Bob likes to say that's how the tantras are better evolutionary vehicles, because we're dying and being reborn every day. Many times, perhaps. OK?

And so we do all of the evolution of many thousands of lives because we're looking it (?[01:06:05.22]). We're doing that kind of re-approximation; a little better approximation -- throw that out -- it's a creative process. Next time, a little bit better. We're starting over again.

So the essence of that on the level of the creation stage is that when you are practicing, at least at a certain level of the real creation stage, you're dissolving your deity body in stages, into the clear light, and then you resurrect out of the clear light as the beatific body, the bliss body, and then eventually you become the emanation body, or the embodiment of enlightenment.

[01:06:51.05]

And so, how I think of that process is, you probably know the eight-fold stages. I mean, most of you probably have a tantric practice and do this eight-fold dissolution where you're dissolving the materiality of the body; you know, the solids into the liquids, into the energies, into the breath gases, and then you're suddenly in the mind and space, right?

So, that's really a way of practicing death, practicing letting go of our identification with the body. But then, I like to think of the four luminous intuitions, the four lights as some people say, or whatever, as practicing the letting go of the Maras. And there is some textual basis or some sort of traditional basis for this, in the sense that each of those afflictions -- and this is where instinct theory and Buddhist psychology come into the tantras. The instincts in the tantric model are embedded in the subtle body at the level of the luminous intuitions.

[01:08:09.19]

So, somewhere deep in our nervous system, let's just perhaps say our "mid-brain," or hypothalamus, or brain stem -- whatever -- somewhere, we have these instinctive patterns. Right? In the tantric way, the moonlight, the luminous intuition or lucid intuition that has the quality of moonlight, the first one is actually generated -- the light is lit not by the moon, obviously, or some other special kind of special magical thing. The light comes from abandoning the desirous instincts. It comes from abandoning instinctive patterns of attachment.

OK? That's where the light comes from. When we purge, we recover the pure stream of our mind. We recover it from the pollution by the different levels of instinct. That's when we have clarity. So, the first level was to purge the desirous instincts, or the attachment-oriented instincts. The second, the radiant lucid intuition, which is the red-like one, is about the mostly aggressive, angry, self-protective instincts. And then the dark one, like midnight; the imminence of lucid intuition is about delusion-oriented instincts.

[01:09:45.12]

And then we get to the clear light, which is our natural mind, the essence of our primal mental process, function; whatever you want to call it -- if it were purged, or when it is purged of those afflictive instinctive paths. When it is separated from them. Purified.

So when I do this meditation, after the dissolution of the elements, I do the dissolution into the lights. And I meditate on the first light as letting go of the afflictive Klesha Mara. Then the second light of letting go of the Skandha Mara., the self-protective attachment to my aggregates. And the third, Murkyu Mara [01:10:31.08], the sense of obliteration, the fear of obliteration, self-loss.

And then practice the clear light as the alternative to being a child forever. Being the mother forever, or the parent of the universe, the parent of this little bit of -- right? And then, practice the resurrection in the kresha stage (?[01:11:00.08]) the resurrection is in terms of the five ambisambodhis, the five manifest enlightenments. So they represent the dawning of the five wisdoms. Usually they are envisioned in some kind of symbolic form, like the moon represents the physicality; the mirror-like intuition, the reflective intuition. The sun represents sensitivity and the quality intuition or empathic intuition.

You have the syllable which represents discrimination and the aesthetic intuition. And then you have the lights which go out representing the executive intuition or accomplishing. And then you have the appearance of the deity as the ultimate reality, the reality intuition: "I really am. I really am more than my inner child, or my wounded child, or my inner animal, right?

[01:12:04.23]

So, that's that. That's what I had to say. So I think that leaves us a few minutes. I personally need to stop at around nine, so we have 15 minutes to talk, if people want.

Fredericka: This won't take long. It's a housekeeping question. You just wrote the most beautiful book. And how did you do it? I mean, do you sleep? Do you get up at like four in the morning to write? I just am curious when you had time to get that book done?

Well, it just happens automatically, right Rimpoche? It's from cramming a whole lot of stuff and processing it in the processor and teaching a lot. You know, I teach a lot, and so it sort of becomes [part of you? second nature?] But actually I have a very hard time writing. I haven't actually gotten the flow into my fingers. But I'm working on it. Thank you.

Any thoughts? Reflections? Questions?

Ben Shapiro: You know, I've actually always puzzled over the subtle body parts and the chakras. It's just always been a shock to me since it obviously has nothing to do with any of our knowledge of the nervous system of the body. I never dug into it. Do you know the evolution of those? I'm thinking more of the specificity of the different types of things associated with different tantric rituals, because the instructions are not identical between tantric rituals, necessarily, except the Losai (?[01:14:09.03]).The losai are identical, but the structure at each locus could be different numbers of different components. Is there anything about that that you've come up with as you look into...

When you say "structure," do you mean like how many branches...

Ben: Yeah, how many branches.

Well, within the Tibetan core tantric tradition; that's the Kalachakra and Guyasamaja perfection stage science, and that's shared in common with the medical model of the chakras. There is a fair amount of consistency.. But different tantric cycles and different lineages do mess around, and I think the importance is that it really isn't localized. It isn't quite that. I mean the idea is an attempt to represent in naturalistic terms; in the terms of channels that are like reeds, you know, or centers that are like hubs, or flowers, branches that are like petals, or branches' drops [01:15:22.02], winds; these kinds of things, to represent the complexity of the nervous system as it's experienced.

And then probably, so how you represent that depends on what tool you're using to work on that, to do as my friend, Dan Siegel used to say, "microsurgery." You know, your own sort of psychosurgery on your nervous system. Maybe you wouldn't have just one map. We certainly don't have just one map of the brain. I mean, every time we look at the brain, we see different things, different angles. So maybe the point is what you're doing with that map. And the map is appropriate to the work.

[01:16:04.07]

But the main work, the reason why the two models are so disparate and seem incommensurate is because the methodologies for their construction are totally different. But also, the utility. The purpose of the tantric map, the purpose of the yoga map is not to dissect the brain and put -- you know -- cancer medicine in it, or something, or do psychosurgery, or just to know where this chemical comes from. The purpose of it is to live inside your own nervous system and work it through in a better way, a healthier way, a more integrated way; and so you would have to have a very different map for that. And instead of biofeedback, getting it from the EEG or something like that, you're using feedback loops that are built into the afferent nerve ending systems and circuits that are already there.

[01:17:00.15]

But I think -- this is what I'm working on right now for this talk -- I do think that they in a gross way can be cross-mapped. And I don't do that for the sake of reducing the tantric map, or for the sake of presenting a written-in-stone thing -- it's just a thought experiment to dislodge the extreme dualism that says, "Well, this is just some religious artifact that has nothing to do with the nervous system."

Because if you read the medical texts, they'll tell you what this does; this thing, the subtle body. It generates the energies and the drops that support the functions of digestion, respiration, circulation, reproduction; I mean, it does -- the map is designed to describe what a nervous system does. And it's designed with the same set of basic metaphors that Freud used in his topography, or that we use in describing the nervous system. So, it seems clear that this is a map of the nervous system, and I think it is for the sake of -- I think it's interesting to just further challenge the reductionism we were talking about, because this is a map that's very interactive; it's already interactionist from the get go.

[01:18:25.19]

But it's also body-connected. It's not a mind floating off without a body. It's a mind that is embodied in a human nervous system that's recognizably a physical structure. So that is something we don't have, actually, except maybe in alchemy. And Freud tried to do it in his project in 1895, but he had to abandon the project because he didn't have the data.

Audience: So, you are a psychotherapist as well as a Buddhist, and as a Buddhist you have this really clear understanding and a really beautiful way of expressing the simple method of applying method to your afflictions. Do you have patients who are non-Buddhists, and how do you describe to them the way that they can apply some techniques that will work for them as non-Buddhists?

[01:19:19.07]

Yes, thank you. I have lots of patients. I work in hospitals, I do clinical research with cancer patients and others, and certainly for hospital patients; or for people who come to me for stress reduction or mind-body, or they have cancer and they want to do something to help themselves.

I don't, obviously, send them to a dharma class, which is what I do with the dharma types that come into my office. I'll say, "Go to that class," or "Read this book." No, because you teach them the preliminaries. That's what you do. You teach them, you know, "Do you have an addiction that we can work on?" I teach them also using modern science, because one of the wonderful things that's happened over the last twenty years is the convergence of the language of modern neuroscience, and in this sense, health science and health psychology with Buddhist thought, in the sense that I often can just give a talk on the Four Noble Truths, totally in terms of the language of stress, stress reduction, optimal health and happiness.

[01:20:31.15]

Look at somebody like Dan Siegel. He's a crypto-Buddhist. He claims he's not a Buddhist, he claims he knows nothing about mindfulness. Maybe it's just from his past life, or whatever. But he's a Buddhist who doesn't use any Buddhism. And of course the Dalai Lama has often said, "That's how Buddhism is going to help. That's the Kalachakra vision, is that the secret technology of healing is going to somehow permeate; it's going to be in the water somehow, and we don't necessarily have to worry about who put it in and how it got there.

Any other thoughts or reflections? (Applause) I am sorry I have to run. We have a board meeting tomorrow for my Nalanda Institute, but I've so enjoyed spending this day with all of you wonderful people. What a great group. So it's been a real privilege. Thank you.