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Transforming Negativity GRAA 19920929OTape 04JH

V

ATTACHMENT VERSUS LOVE

It sweeps us towards the stream of becoming, so hard

To cross, and, conditioned by karma’s stormy blast,

Waves of birth, age, sickness and death convulse it,

Attachment’s flood - please save us from this fear!

In the unbearable prison of samsara

It binds embodies beings, with no freedom,

Clasped by the lock of craving, hard to open

The chain of avarice - save us from this fear.

Importance of the motivation

From the mahayana Buddhist point of view the difference between being mahayana or being Theravada-yana or being whatever yana, totally depends on the motivation. The motivation makes the difference (quotes):

The dharma that you practice doesn’t make that much difference.

The individual being, whatever you do, makes a lot of difference.

During the earlier period of Buddhism in Tibet the question rises:, ‘If somebody gives a little piece of food to a dog, will that be dharma practice?’ Yes, it is, because it is an act of generosity because you do not have self-interest. Normally giving food to a dog, a bird or some other animal without much self interest is an act of generosity. Therefore it is a positive, virtuous work. Whether it is from the mahayana practice or Theravadian practice from the Buddhist point of view only,it depends. If the person has a motivation of the mahayana influence then it becomes a mahayana-practice. If the person does not have the motivation with the mahayana influence then it becomes a non-mahayana practice. So it is the motivation which makes a lot of difference. It is not what you really do, but it’s the why you do it. That is an important point, raised by the earlier Tibetan teachers repeatedly. We should not overlook that.0:03:01.6

Perhaps the last couple of Tuesdays I did not emphasize much on that. Today, I thought, it is better to emphasize it. Though in these series of talks we are not going into a real deep-down Buddhist practice, we try to talk in particular about the individual and his/her negativities. It is Buddhist practice. It’s no way it’s not Buddhist practice.Other than not talking about what this or that lama said on the subject, it is Buddhist practice,

It is always beneficial for us to have the right motivation. Every time you sit down, hear a prayer, say a mantra, meditate or just sit down quietly, trying to calm the mind like in concentrated meditation, if in whatever you do you have a motivation that says, ‘For the benefit of all beings I would like to do this’, it is beneficial. Whatever you are going to do, whether you are going to discuss, listen, talk, practice, meditate or say mantras, from the beginning, if you made up the mind that, ‘I am doing this to benefit of all beings that can be benefited.

That is a sort of very general practice you can do. Even the moment you wake up in the morning you can do that. When we wake up, actually we should really rejoice that we found ourselves alive rather than dead, which very often happens with people. When you open your eyes, you should really rejoice what you see, your life, and be happy about it. Rejoice that you are alive and then make the motivation:

Well, I do not like to waste my time, in general, all the time and particularly not today.

I would like to do everything I do today, for the benefit of beings, whoever we can benefit.

If you keep your mind in that manner from the beginning of each day, it helps to build up any good work that we do during the day.0:07:19.1

Contaminated and uncontaminated actions

Somebody asked last week, ‘What does contaminated and uncontaminated mean?’ You know, I try to give all the answers with some quotations. I tried to remember one, but I couldn’t remember at all.

At the same time I would also like to answer another question. When we are talking about the negative and positive, we are talking about the

mental aspects. I don’t think we can call it emotions; but they are rather

non-virtuous thoughts and virtuous thoughts but they are negative and positive thoughts. What makes a thought negative and what makes it positive? I would like to talk on two of four books and hope one of them will have

the answer.Old Tibetan books do not have index so it is difficult to find the exact word of the quotation.0:10:00.8

What contaminated and uncontaminated really means is whether they bring on the delusions or not. Take anger as an example. If you act under the influence of anger and if that particular action, instead of reducing anger, helps to grow the anger more,. If that happens, that is contaminated.

The example really goes on attachment. Let us say attachment influences. If due to the influence of strong attachment the individual involved in an action which makes the attachment still grow more and makes it stronger it is a contaminated action. That really makes it contaminated.

If an action does not go against attachment, but if it does not contribute to the growing of attachment, it is uncontaminated.

In Vasubandhu’s Treasury of Metaphysics [Skt. Abidharmakosha] there are some lines on this. The 2 last lines talked about the 2 Noble Truths.

Out of the 4 noble truth, the truth of path and truth of cessation

The meaning of the two lines said that whether it is contaminated or uncontaminated, depends on whether it helps to grow that particular delusion or does not grow the delusion.That is how you look.0:14:16.0

The contaminated will make the delusions grow.

It is rather restricted here. It says:

Any functioning of our ordinary human mind, not having reached the path, is probably contaminated.

There will be no uncontaminated actions on any ordinary level,

which is the level of the person who could not obtain the path.

Whether the path of accumulation, or the path of action, or the path of seeing, or the path of meditation or the path of no-more learning:

until you reach any path, it is contaminated.

The moment you are able to reach the path-level, it becomes uncontaminated.

What is a delusion?

What is what we call delusions? There are 6 root delusions These are what we normally have very strongly . Buddha These are the [mental, verbal and physical] activities,which according to Buddha, make us suffer, causing the suffering in our life. Definitely they cause a lot of our emotional problems, very definitely. So I would like to talk about what we mean by delusions. What does it really mean?

Why we call attachment a delusion? Why we call anger a delusion? Why we call pride a delusion? Why we call ignorance a delusion? Why do we call doubt a delusion? Why we call wrong view a delusion? These are the six root-delusions that Buddha introduced. Let me repeat them once again, these are important. Attachment is number one, then anger number two, pride number three, ignorance four, doubt five, wrong view six. The two last ones are purely seen from the Buddhist point of view, not so much in general. The first four we label as the root of delusions in general.Some people even called

Delusions as afflictive emotions. The word in Tibetan is called nyon mongs pa. Out of the four noble truths, we have as first one the truth of suffering and the second one is the truth of the causes of suffering. When we really point to the truth of the causes of suffering, these are the actual mental aspects that we look into. Why we call them delusions? Why we call them negative?

Anyway, what makes it a delusion? The moment a delusion grows within the individual, the pure, clean and clear part, that really lucid part of the mind, is made impure and unclear, a sort of mixed mind. Are you with me or did you lose it completely?0:18:50.0

Put it another way: what does anger do to the individual? Let us say you had maybe for a change a very good night’s sleep and you feel rested.You feel good in the morning, you wake up nicely, very fresh and with a clean and absolutely lucid mind and looking forward to the day. That very seldom comes, not very often you get it. But if then you get somehow irritated and get angry, what happens to the individual’s mind? That clean, clear point of the mind has been disrupted. Instead of being clean and clear and looking-forward, you are irritated and there is no clarity.

I often give the example of a clean glass of water in which you stir a handful of mud. When you put your muddy finger in a glass of clean water, then the clean and clear water will become mushy and muddy. That’s what happens. Whatever gives that effect to the individual mind, those are the mental aspects which is called the afflictive emotions.That is what nyon mongs pa does to the individual. Any thoughts that arises ,those mental aspects which give that mushy result are called afflicttive emotions or, as I call it, delusions.

When you look in your mind, what do you see? You probably see nothing. The mind itself is not tangible. It has no shape, no color. But the aspects in the individual are there, are functioning with us, we all know that.

I normally give the example that mind is like a clean, clear lamp-shade which has no color, a sort of natural, crystal lamp-shade that has no shape. The mind almost looks like that. By nature it is pure, it is clean, it is clear, it is good. When we have encountered the natural mind – with no other aspects of mind coming in – then it is clean and it is clear. It is a good feeling, relaxed, nice. The mind is like that.0:23:30.2

But a lot of what we called mental faculties, such as anger, attachment and so on, made it different. These things pop up in our mind, suddenly come up by itself, with or without reason. If you get an irritation, you get angry – anger pops up. The moment the anger pops up, it looks like the bulb under the lamp-shade has been changed, and becomes a red lamp shade. Then when you look from the outside, the lamp-shade looks like a red lamp-shade. Similarly, if you remove the red bulb and put a blue/light green, that is the attachment color, when you look at it, that lamp-shade has become a blue lamp-shade. What is happening is that the bulb is reflecting through the lamp-shade, so you call it a red lamp-shade or a blue lamp-sh or yellow lamp shade. If you go and deeply look, it is clear that it is the influence of the bulb. But if you look from a distance you see a colored lam-shade.

That is exactly what is happening with the mind. The clean, clear mind is there, but when this mental faculty of anger pops up, suddenly it becomes red. Attachment pops up and it becomes a light-blue or green. It goes on changing. When the color changes, what happens? The pure, clean part of the mind gone. (Don’t look from the angle that it has become beautiful). The clarity has been changed: the clean glass of water has now becomes mushy and moody.

That is the effect on the individual. Our clean and clear mind has now become a disturbed mind. It is not so clear, it is not so pure. What made that happen? Those mental faculties, those thoughts that have come up, made this. These thoughts are called delusions or afflictive emotions. Why? Because that has the effect of affecting the individual”s pure, clean mind. You get it? That is why it is negative. It is destroying the clarity. That is exactly the effect to the individual.0:28:07.1

Similarly there are positive mental faculties that also pop up, just like the negative ones. Their effect on that mind is that the mind becomes more pure, more clean, more sincere. That is called positive. The reason why we try to divide the positive and the negative or good and bad, whatever you call it, is because of the effect that the individual is getting.

The reason for distinguishing good and bad, negative and positive, is not because it is the nature of the thoughts, but the effect that the individual gets. Is that clear now?

What attachment is

Attachment is one of those that brings a bad effect to the mind. Very strong actually. Then comes anger. What is attachment? I would like to talk about that a little bit more. I like to go according to the books a little bit rather than just talking straight-away. Here they say,

Attachment is: you look at an object, you really like it very much, then you become very possessive of it and you don’t want to separate from it. It is almost so strong that your mind is completely stuck in it. That makes you completely want to own it, to make it belong to you completely: ‘It has to be totally mine, I cannot let it go.’ That sort of very strong holding.

That is the basic, very brief and rough idea of what attachment is.0:32:14.10:

Now there is a very strong question of the difference between love and attachment. Is love good? I attachment good? Of course, if you don’t go into it in detail it is very easy: pure love is great, love with possessiveness -attachment- is bad. We can dismiss it that way. But if really look into your own individual mind, look very carefully and ask yourself, ‘What is the love we are talking about? What does that love do?’ We all say love is great, wonderful, beautiful.No one will like to say that love is terrible/miserable.Nobody will like to hear or entertain that.

Everybody will like to say that love is wonderful, beautiful, great. It is true: love is wonderful, beautiful and great. However, there are certain kinds of love are very miserable, extremely miserable. So you have to look into your own mind, sit down and try to divide: what is the beautiful part of love and what is the miserable part of love? That needs to be thought about and analyzed within the individual. In general we can say pure love is great, it is universal love, kindness, compassion, wow, wow. On the other hand we also have that love that has to be: ‘It has to be mine and mine only, if I don’t get it I will make sure no one else gets it!’ That is part of that miserable love we have.

Now that part of love, I should not say love here, but it is attachment. Between attachment and love there is a very, very small difference. The line in between is very thin. Where are you going to draw the line between attachment and love? You have to think about this, don’t just go blind. People do say that if you are in love you are blind. Right?

You really should not go blind. You have to be very careful. Think of the contaminated and uncontaminated and think about the attachment and love. Think about the emotion –or mental faculty or thought – that comes up that affects the principle mind, making it impure or making it pure. On all of that you have to think and try to raise questions. We can discuss them. I don’t have ready-made answers for you. If you have come here to collect an answer, you have come to the wrong place. We raise questions. I like to raise questions so that you can think and you can find an answer within yourself. And you can discuss it with your friends here and there. And then at the bottom-line of this you have to help yourself. 0:36:34.0

In order to help yourself,you have to make that distinction between love and attachment. It is not a gross difference; it is a very subtle difference. In a very easy way we can say the pure part is great and the other part not and then make two different names: love is good, attachment is bad. We can say that, we can simply dismiss it that way, but when it comes within our mind, when it affects us, the emotions that come up will not be that easy to dismiss. Intentionally we can say, ‘Attachment is bad, love is good’, but when the thing comes up in our mind, it will come in a mixture: love along with attachment; attachment along with love. So the individual mind has to make that distinction within the individual. You have to sort it out by yourself, pick up the pure part of it, enjoy it, but destroy the other part. That is called practice. That is called spiritual practice.

This is a very, very interesting part. If you talk about it very carefully and then you begin to see the differences, you can begin to pick up. Sexuality and spirituality also you should not linked up before you have are clear on attachment and love. Once you cleared that, you can pick up that subject and see how it can benefit you. Until that, if you pick it up you will be ‘killing’ yourself.0:38:48.7

Attachment is one of the strongest delusions, even stronger than anger. The example given in this book is:

All other delusions are like dust picked up by a duster.No matter how dirty it is, you can use some water and soap and it becomes clean

Attachment does not pick up the dust. It looks as if it is picking up oil. When you wash it with soap it does not clean. It is still stuck and the hand becomes sticky ,difficult to clean.

So the difference is very subtle and needs to be found by ourselves. I do not know how to explain it. I do not know how to say what is attachment and what is love. You have to find it within you, you’ll see it.

The basis on which you’ll find it, is -as I mentioned earlier- what makes it a delusion, what makes it to be contaminated. These are the tools with which you measure within yourself. Our mind is absolutely clear to ourselves, no matter how difficult it may be. Our mind is known to ourselves, to nobody else. I know my mind, nobody else knows. You don’t know my mind, I would not know your mind. You know yours, I know mine. That is our advantage. From that angle we should look within ourselves, see which is the attachment, which is the love and try to find the way out. As long as you remain in the same sense of attachment, you will never get out of this – what Buddha called – circle of life, samsara. You can never get out. You know why? Attachment is the glue to samsara, as Buddha always says. People get stuck to it life after life. You cannot get out of it, you cannot let it go. There is some sticky stuff, which makes you stick to it. That sticky stuff, that glue, is attachment.

I know this is a sensitive subject which everybody enjoys and everybody hates too. The point is to really look very carefully where the line between attachment and pure love is. We do have both within us. Just now attachment is completely strong in ourselves; it overpowers – at least in my mind – the pure love completely. 0:43:12.5

The love we hang on to and are attached to, the love we experience, is mostly attachment rather than pure love. So I don’t think we can really compare them much and say, ‘This is pure love and this is attachment’. We can say, ‘If you have possessiveness, it is not pure love.’ We can inject words, however I don’t think we can really feel the difference. When we look into attachment and love within ourselves, we notice that to feel it and to tell the difference is maybe very difficult for us. We can inject a lot of words, but probably we cannot experience it.

The problem is: probably we don’t have pure love; in every love we have, somehow, one way or another, attachment comes in. And that is why, no matter how we try to do our best, trying to project it, it is a little difficult. But we don’t have to feel bad. You don’t have to say on every moment of love you feel, ‘Well, I have great love, but it is attachment’. You don’t have to feel bad, because attachment is something very difficult, very hard and the glue of samsara.

However, attachment is also something which you also can use to develop the person. The bodhisattvas will use attachment as tool to help other beings. That is the good part of it. You may say, ‘That is not attachment, that is love’. Not necessarily. The bodhisattvas who have not reached the third stage of the path, who have not really come in contact with the emptiness, might not have overcome their attachment. Their basis of love – with this I am buying trouble for myself – their basis of compassion, their basis of the bodhimind is probably mixed.

So attachment is bad as well as it has a lot of good parts. It can be used both ways. And particularly in the vajrayana path attachment can be used as one of the methods and ways to develop. In the song of the dakinis it says:

As the swarms of bees gorge themselves

On the honey essence of the honey flower

May the perfect lotus expand completely

And satisfy all beings with the taste of essence.

I cannot talk this to you in detail. This is not the place to talk it. But it is an indication that even in vajrayana there are a lot of ways of using attachment. So, what we really have to do is transform the contaminated attachment into uncontaminated attachment. That is how it works.

Attachment will bring jealousy, it will bring anger, all of them. All your buttons get pushed, all the lights will go on: blue, red, yellow, all of them When it does that, it is a clear sign that it is attachment.

Then another kind of person will come in and say, ‘Hey, doesn’t matter, it is a delusion, I let it go.’ That is pretending, pretending to have overcome attachment; pretending . That is cheating yourself. A number of people will play that trick and say that I am over and beyond attachment. All my love is pure love. You can go on cheating yourself for a couple of years or years and life will go.You lose the opportunity to be able to work by yourself.There is opportunity, there is material; there are friends; there is a guide. There is everything there. If you don’t work now, when can you work?That is the question. This is the number one question I like to talk about now.Don’t ask me to give you the answer. I don’t have it. You have to find within yourself.

Then when you raise the question a second time, then we can talk about it.Then people may come up with something.If you do that, if you start thinking, you will comprehend something and you will have your own understanding of what attachment is and what love is. If you think, if you put efforts in it, you are going to get it. But whatever understanding you get then, whether that is correct or not correct, you have to check with other persons. Do not just think, ‘I feel it is good, therefore it has to be so’.No. Doesn’t work that way.You may feel this way or that but

this is what wisdom is. If we don’t use that wisdom – each one of us has it – we’ll never going to get the correct answer. You may simply feel it and then leave it there. That is not going to do much. Well, with whatever we do we are cutting the ignorance a little bit down. That is why in the long run it builds up a lot. But we could do better than that.0:46:47.8

So do the thinking, and whether the basic understanding you get is right or wrong, you have to discuss. Bring in the questions, think about it, read books, talk to other people. The love we hang on to and are attached to, the love we experience, is mostly attachment rather than pure love. So I don’t think we can really compare them much and say, ‘This is pure love and this is attachment’. We can say, ‘If you have possessiveness, it is not pure love.’ We can inject words, however I don’t think we can really feel the difference. When we look into attachment and love within ourselves, we notice that to feel it and to tell the difference is maybe very difficult for us. We can inject a lot of words, but probably we cannot experience it.

The problem is: probably we don’t have pure love; in every love we have, somehow, one way or another, attachment comes in. And that is why, no matter how we try to do our best, trying to project it, it is a little difficult. But we don’t have to feel bad. You don’t have to say on every moment of love you feel, ‘Well, I have great love, but it is attachment’. You don’t have to feel bad, because attachment is something very difficult, very hard and the glue of samsara.

However, attachment is also something which you also can use to develop the person. The bodhisattvas will use attachment as tool to help other beings. That is the good part of it. You may say, ‘That is not attachment, that is love’. Not necessarily. The bodhisattvas who have not reached the third stage of the path, who have not really come in contact with the emptiness, might not have overcome their attachment. Their basis of love – with this I am buying trouble for myself – their basis of compassion, their basis of the bodhimind is probably mixed.

So attachment is bad as well as it has a lot of good parts. It can be used both ways. And particularly in the vajrayana path attachment can be used as one of the methods and ways to develop. In the song of the dakinis it says:

As the swarms of bees gorge themselves

On the honey essence of the honey flower

May the perfect lotus expand completely

And satisfy all beings with the taste of essence.

I cannot talk this to you in detail. This is not the place to talk it. But it is an indication that even in vajrayana there are a lot of ways of using attachment. So, what we really have to do is transform the contaminated attachment into uncontaminated attachment. That is how it works.

And meditate, so that you may get another thought on it. And then check it again.48:48.4

Then your purpose will become better. The whole purpose is cutting down our miserable thoughts, thoughts that cause the miseries and problems.

You should think of attachment not only as attachment to a person or article or wealth. Don’t forget even attachment for food. Don’t forget A lot of people have a very strong attachment for food, we do. We eat and eat till we get sick. Right? I have a strong attachment for sugar, sweet. I used to eat it and Aura and Sandy used to stop me eating it. I could eat four or five apple-pies with two or three scopes of ice-cream on it and hot chocolate on top. Not one, never one, but two or three. When I was a kid in Tibet I used to chew rock-candies at night, go to sleep with them and the next morning when I woke up everything was sticky. We didn’t have bed sheets, but a woolen blanket with long hair and all the hairs were sticky. That was because of my attachment for rock-candies. I wonder why I did not become a diabetic until the last few years, because I used to eat that every night. People would give me gifts of rock-candies and I hid them. The attendants that I had in the monastery, would take the sweets away, so I used to hide them in between the books and that is how I got them at night. So, attachment for food, attachment for sugar, is definitely contaminated attachment.0:52:20.8

How to overcome attachment

When we try to overcome those negativities, point number one is to recognize that particular point. If you don’t recognize it, you are not going to overcome it, you are not going to transform it, you are not going to do anything. You feel something is there, you can visualize it as a negative feeling and you then visualize it has been transformed – what is we always do – but that is not very practical here. It is a vajrayana technique that may work within vajrayana to a certain extent, but practically here you have to recognize the delusions first and then you work with them.Therefore it is important to recognize Attachment.

What is attachment? What does that do? What is the effect on me? Don’t worry about others. I am sorry, I can’t say that; you should worry about others, but you also have to worry about yourself. My attachment, what does that do to me? What kind of suffering does it give? Recognizing is number one. Number one, always! If you don’t recognize it, you’ll never be able to work with it. So you have to recognize. You know, recognizing is a problem for us, because we deny. We have a tremendously strong denial power, because we don’t want to be the bad one. We say, ‘I am not the bad one, so I don’t have attachment, whatever I have is pure love’. Right? And we say, ‘I am the good one, so I don’t have anger. I must deny that I have been angry’. So recognizing is important.

The Tibetan earlier spiritual teachers give you an example here. If you don’t recognize and you want to shoot an arrow and you don’t see the target, it is blind shooting. The arrow may hit anything, anywhere. If you want to be effective, you need to recognize the object on which you are going to shoot, the target.

Likewise if you want to turn the negative emotion of attachment into pure love, first recognize the attachment. Cut all this bull-shit of denial in between. Everybody will say, ‘My thing is special. My attachment is special attachment’. Everybody thinks that way, everybody talks that way, everybody fools each other in that manner.:‘special’. Right? Cut through all this denial and recognize the plain, naked attachment. Then work with it, see its effects on the individual. Then you will be able to transform it, make it into the positivity of pure love. How? First find it.0:56:48.6

Second is Anger. I talk a lot on anger. There are a lot of tapes available.

I am not going into detail but will briefly mention what anger is.You have to recognize what anger is. Anger is rough mind, not a smooth mind.When you are angry, recognize anger, The object or person you are getting angry with is not anger; you are not anger. There’s the part that an aspect of the mind comes out which is called anger, which is called rough mind.It is a mind that wants to harm and to get back at the person. get back to the person.That’s what anger is. So being a little bit irritated is slightly different from anger

is There is the mind that is a little bit irritated and there is anger. They are slightly different. Anger really wants to get back to the person who upsets you or makes you suffer. You want to get back. That particular mind is what makes you suffer. You want to get back to him or her; you somehow want to make that person suffer. That particular mind is really anger.

Whether it is beings or non-beings, articles, you know attachment can be something really beautiful that you really want under any circumstances.If you don’t get it you want to make sure someone else don’t get it.People do that all the time. We see those in movies all the time.If you don’t get it, you want to harm it. You want to harm either it’s person or non-beings. That part of mind which is the roughness, the rough mind that is wishing to harm is anger.It is the sort of mind that keeps that feeling and somehow wants to get back and harm, whether a being or a non-being. You may or may not act but the thought of getting back , going to harm because you dislike a certain action.That is roughly what we are talking about. It is not the sort of irritated mind but if you get that bigger and bigger then you see people hit them back, throwing things… You see the relation. At the beginning part it sort of being irritated. At that moment, it might not be true anger.But when it goes bigger and bigger, then it goes on and on and on. Some even inherited anger. You might not be angry but your father’s enemy becomes your enemy .We should really look at all these anger. And recognize.1:01:19.1

I raised two questions: attachment and anger.I am not talking of effects. We all know that.WE know it and we experience ourselves. Perhaps we are experts on the effects of anger and attachment. But we may not recognize. The moment you recognize,they becomes weak.The moment you recognize your anger, it becomes weak.Try to recognize by looking into your mind.First the mind becomes impure and the clear mind will become mushy muddy.That is when you recognize the delusion.Then you go beyond that and you see the mind that really wants to get back or you think : I cannot tolerate anymore.I really want to hit back, whether it’s physical or not , just to get back under different ways.Then you begin to recognize the anger.If you are not careful, you will dismiss it.You said: I don’t have it because you don’t want to see the delusion within ourselves.We always like to see ourselves s the best.Everybody else is wrong except me.This is our normal ego mind functioning.Everybody thinks that way. Everybody thinks : I can do better than anybody else.Maybe when you become specific then you may said: I am angry. I can’t do it. I haven’t learn it, I don’t have the background; I don’t have experience; I don’t have education.You blame on experience and education. You just do not want to say I am incapable.v1:04:13.3

Everybody thinks that : I am the best.This is the ego way of functioning.So when you really search and want to get back, you said: I don’t have it.I am great.Make sure that you are right because we all have tremendous anger.The anger is not necessarily towards other person. It can be anger towards yourself.You want to get back to yourself.You want to punish yourself. You want to do that.that is anger against self.

That anger can also be disguised as purification.People said they are purifying themselves. Actually, you are torturing yourselves under the pretext of purification. If you are not careful, that can be anger too.These are the questions I have for you to think.I do hope next Tuesday we will be sharing more, exchanging ideas more rather than I alone talking.Everybody should not take the attitude of not saying anything.1:06:15.3

Questions and answers

Audience: I find myself sometimes attached to non-attachment and desiring desire-lessness and I especially find a conflict in the following. For example I wish to go to the university and liberate some animal beings from being experimented upon in the laboratory. If I go in there right now and liberate the animals from being experimented upon, and dedicating all virtue for the benefit of all living beings, can I detach myself from being arrested or beaten up? I probably can’t.

Rinpoche: You cannot.

Audience: I don’t want to deny it.

Rinpoche: The point is you wish to do a lot of things, but you can’t do all things.

Audience: I just gave one example. There is much more else I’d like to do, but I don’t know how to detach myself from abuse, those who are abusing and those who are being abused. While I sit here and try to meditate, that goes on. So I have a conflict with that too.

Rinpoche: You said: having attachment to non-attachment. I am not sure whether attachment to non-attachment is attachment. Probably not. In the old Tibetan monasteries we had this sort of little tricks, like ‘attachment to non-attachment’ and ‘the negative side of the positivity’ or ‘the opponent of the opponent of the positivity’. As a kid we talked that way, going double three of four times. When you do that, it goes the other way round. You said attachment to attachment-lessness. It will become non-attachment; it is not attachment, because it will not have the effect of attachment. Though you may be attaching to attachment-lessness, it does not affect the mind as the attachment affects it. It may cause unfulfillment of certain wishes, but that is not attachment.

It is non-attachment, because attachment will give certain effects to the individual’s mind, which probably this one will not.v1:10:39.1

These are the basic points actually on which you judge. The terminology we use, is virtuous and non-virtuous. I really don’t like that terminology. The main point where you judge: how it affects the individual’s mind.v1:12:24.7

Audience: You said that to attempt to integrate sexuality with spirituality before you understand the difference between love and attachment, is to risk killing oneself. That is very strong and I wonder if you could clarify that somehow.

Rinpoche: The example given here is the honey on the razor’s edge . If you lick that without separating yourself from the razor-blade, you cut your tongue. Killing yourself doesn’t mean you physically get killed. Killing here means: it will harm your spiritual life. Instead of thinking you are cutting through the attachment,instead of you thinking you are cutting through your attachment, in reality you are building it up It seems to some people it is so easy; it is like they have it on their finger-tips. Whatever they do is fine, just easy, but to some people,no matter how much you put in, nothing goes right. I don’t think it is the method. You may be applying the same method on the same thing. I don’t know, is it the personal level or maybe they realized emptiness or something?

Audience: Wouldn’t that go back to motivation being the most important?

Rinpoche: I don’t know how much motivation can make difference to attachment. We can’t say, ‘For the benefit of all sentient beings I would like to generate this attachment’. It does not work that way. So perhaps not so much the motivation itself.

Audience: I was thinking in terms of mind, sir. Without trying to be ‘esoteric’ about this, what I am talking about is a sort of selfless feeling of love that is generated with another person, a strong feeling of sexual love that is generated with another person, that is not necessarily focused on a me or a thou, but becomes more open.

Rinpoche: Then focused on what?

Audience: On openness, generated on the object experiencing that openness.

Rinpoche: I am not sure whether we are hiding between the words. What is that openness? Is that a strong attachment to physical feelings combined with mental relaxation? Is that what is referred to as ‘open’? Or is that openness a sort of big, universal open-space-like feeling?

You know, I think there are three things involved. It does matter, because, I think, that determines whether it is positive or negative from the angle we look at it. It becomes some kind of big, universal, open-space-like thing or even recognizing emptiness or something like maybe a positivity. It looks like that, but it can be a dark open pitch, which can be very negative. I don’t think these points here really play with motivation, though motivation is meant for determination. But whether by nature the act becomes positive or negative, I think that counts first. That is why I say: make first the separation between attachment and love 1:18:20.9

Audience: What comes to my mind is that any given individual will have a wide spectrum for sexual experience, some maybe base and some maybe a little higher than that. And at times at the highest experience that normal people like myself experience, there is a sort of transpersonal feeling in regard to -what I said earlier- not so much an I and a thou being involved. And at that moment there is a sort of feeling of openness and not a feeling of an I grasping at something; it could be a bigger, expansive I, I suppose, grasping at something, at another person, at oneself, at pleasure. And then to take that sort of feeling that you learn through sexual activity and to try to integrate that feeling in terms of opening your mind and heart to other people when you are not involved in sexual activity, that is what I see as and what I mean by trying to integrate sexuality with spirituality. Is that in itself dangerous?

Rinpoche: Non-involvement of sexuality, trying to share that way, I don’t think is dangerous at all. But, whether that particular experience is negative or positive, depends on what that does to the attachment of the individual, whether that raises the attachment to a person or a thing or an act. If it raises the attachment, it is contaminated; if it does not raise the attachment, it is not contaminated. We can’t say it is positive, but could be changed into positive. There is a possibility of changing it.

I am sorry, a lot of people may not like to hear this. I don’t mean to try to shut you people out, but when you openly raise questions, that is what I feel.At that moment, whatever the feeling, whatever it is, it can be said to be above class. The action itself cannot determine whether it is contaminated or not. The effect on the individual will determine whether that is attachment or pure love. It does not matter so much whether it is focused on the individual or whether it is open and just for all. That does not really matter.1:21:54.1