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Transforming Negativity 19921006 GRAA ON 05JH

ANGER VERSUS PATIENCE

Driven by the wind of wrong attention,

Amidst a tumult of smoke-clouds of misconduct,

It has the power to burn down forests of merits,

The fire of anger - save us from this fear!

Attached to its dark hole of ignorance

It cannot bear seeing the wealth and excellence of others,

But quickly fills them with its vicious poison,

The snake of envy - save us from this fear!

The difference between love and attachment

Now there is a very strong question of the difference between love and attachment. 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 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.

Is it true it is wonderful, beautiful, great? There are certain kinds of love that are wonderful, beautiful, great. 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 analyzed within the individual. In general we can say pure love is great, it is universal love, kindness, compassion, wow, wow. But on the other hand we also have the love of, ‘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 I should not say love here, but 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 about this contaminated and uncontaminated and think about the attachment and the love. Think about the emotion –or mental faculty or thought – that comes up and affects the principle mind, making it impure or making it pure. On all of that you have to think and try to raise questions. Then 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 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.

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 that easily be dismissed. 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 be linked up before you have cleared for yourself attachment and love. Once you cleared that, then you can pick up that subject and see how it can benefit you. If until that, if you pick it up you will be ‘killing’ yourself.

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 ’ With words we can put up. 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 maybe very difficult for us. We can inject a lot of words, projected something and hold it but probably we cannot experience it.

The problem is: probably we don’t have pure love. Every love we have, somehow, one way or another, attachment comes in. 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 feel bad You don’t have to say 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.0:02:20.3

However, attachment is 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 like to 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, the other side, Then you may raise questions if this is attachment rather than love.? Can be used both ways.

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 or 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 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.0:06:07.7

In the Abhidharma kosha which is the metaphysical root text,

I explained to you that that which grows more delusions will be contaminated and that which does not grow delusion is uncontaminated.

Here the words go the other way round.

The contaminated delusions will make the delusion grow out of our ordinary human mind functioning. When we have not reached the Path it is probably contaminated. There will be no uncontaminated on any ordinary level of the path for the person who cannot obtain the path, whether it is the path of accumulation or action or seeing or meditation or no more learning. Any other path, until you reach there is contaminated. The moment you reach the path it becomes uncontaminated.

The second on the list is anger

Anger is the holding sort of mind to get back.

What anger is

Anger is the holding sort of mind to get back on the person. That is really what 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 onto the person that upsets you or makes you suffer. 0:09:38.2

You get back to him or her, somehow make that person to suffer.

We basically think that the object of anger has to be a sentient being, somebody with life. That everybody will think. When we get angry and hit the wall, we probably think there is no non-virtue. This afternoon I looked through Tsongkhapa’s Great Stages of the Path to Enlightenment, the Lam rim chen mo. He says,

Whether( the anger is directed to) sentient being or non-sentient beings, it does not matter.0:10:07.7

I just glimpsed at the one word in there and I didn’t see any reason for what he says. But when I think carefully it does make sense. Why? Because the anger affects the individual who is getting angry, rather than the whom you get angry at.

What does anger do? The smoothness of mind gets destroyed and the mind becomes rough and almost mean. So the effect goes to the individual. Whether you are angry at the table or whether you are angry at the person sitting across the table, the effect of that anger is experienced by the individual. You may have an additional thing by getting angry at a being, because you are hurting a being or you wish to hurt another being. That has a different effect. But anger as anger itself, even if it is not towards a sentient being, has an effect on the individual him/herself. Therefore getting angry at wall or table would probably have effect on the individual. The sutra teachings may tell you that if you are angry with this you lose this much virtues etc, I think it is a different subject.When you look at it, you’ll find that by nature anger will have the same effect on the individual, whether you get angry with a being or get angry with a non-being.0:12:16.6

I had given a lot of talks on anger in the past or I am going to skip over now.Anger is very difficult to get over .I don’t think anybody can totally get rid of anger till you reach the stage of the third path. Anger may be weakened and you get less angry and a lot of improvement will come. As probably many of you have experienced, somehow it might be, people who get angry a number of times, or an angry person, if he comes in contact with us, somehow there is effect. I have seen it with my own personal experience and I am quite sure many of you have noticed. Without realizing, without knowing, somehow it has a lot of effect.I am crediting that not to me but I am crediting that to the blessings of my Gurus, Yidams and Deities.That happens a lot of times though anger is very, very difficult to get out off completely.v0:15:12.5

What pride is

Of course everybody knows what pride is. And of course American life also emphasizes to be proud. I am going to talk of pride according to the Buddhist background.

Here we are not talking about ordinary pride, looking at yourself, appreciating and making yourself feel proud on things you did or are doing. This is slightly different. This is: not only being taking pride of oneself ,the individual self, but also looking down on others. People have pride for no reason, like, ‘My car is better than yours’, looking down on the other one. Or, ‘Me, of course, I am a better person than all of you, because I have more discipline, because I have more quality, I have better behavior; my voice is better than yours; I can act better than you do, I can say things better than you do; I can make a difference to the person better than you do’, All these sort of things. A lot of people think that way. We are using reasons and we look down on others. I think it is not so much being proud of your own qualities, but using your qualities,which you may or may not have, or which you think you have, to look down on others. That particular pride is we what are talking about.

The earlier Tibetan teachers have used an example here. If you climb up a high mountain-peak and look around. When you look down, under your view everything is so small. When you go into a certain very high business-center in Detroit and you go all up there with the elevator, even those tall high buildings have become low, so you can look down . Right? You can see everything is flat somehow, except yourself. If you take that sort of attitude towards a person and particularly making a reason that ‘I have these qualities and others don’t, therefore I am better’,. Making yourself to be better than others and looking down on the others, particularly looking down on others, is pride as one of the principal delusions we are looking into here.0:20:19.6

The earlier Kadampa teachers used to say, ‘Pride is one of the worst problems that we have to grow spiritual development.

They used to give examples.

During the spring, which side becomes green first in Tibet, the sides of lower attitude or the mountain-peaks?

The mountain-peaks will not become green soon, because it is colder there. Pride will make you be like that.

They also give another example:

Pride looks like a peak, something pointed.

If you want the water [the quality] to remain,

on the pointed areas it is not going to remain. The water is going to drip down.

But wherever there are little holes [or valleys] around,

the water will remain there

Also they use this example:

During the autumn period, when you collect the harvest,

the stalks which carry a lot of grains do not stand straight.

They are heavy and they bow down.

What does pride do?

Pride really disturbs individuals in their spiritual development. That is the basis. Within the pride, it is very interesting. If you look very carefully into this, you find that people get hurt because somebody said something or because somebody gave you a different look. Or you get hurt because of some words that you hear. That is very common with us. All the time we see it or we experience it ourselves. ‘I was hurt so much’. People going around with you, your companions may say something and you get hurt. Right?

What is really hurting? Not the individual pure being. What really is hurt is your pride. Look very carefully. The individual pure being does not get hurt easily that way, but the pride within us gets hurt. It becomes painful and you almost can’t take the pain. First you try to bear it, but after some time you can’t bear it, you burst out or you do whatever. A lot of what we used to call ‘I rinpoche’, ‘I the precious one’, gets hurt. It is not necessarily the individual being that gets hurt. The being is a pure being.

The mental faculty of pride suddenly pops up like toast pops up out of the toaster. Then you say, ‘Look, I have been insulted, I have been pushed down, I have been looked down upon’ or whatever. Any excuse that you can get, you use and it make everybody, including the individual self, miserable in the period. You can go on and on and on. And then all our normal emotional problems arise. For all of them pride is a key. The individual being is a pure being.

Normally, my way of doing, I always say, ‘I don’t know, I don’t feel, I am the ‘person-not-knowing’, a sort of putting myself down all the time. That is what I do. Here I tell you one thing. If you come into direct contact with your pure being, it does not matter whoever says what. If somebody says that I’ve got two horns I don’t care. I am not going to have two horns because somebody said so. It is not going to make any difference to me. Somebody can tell me, ‘You are ugly, terrible, fat’, as Allen Ginsberg wrote about me in a one-line poem:

A fat lama punches a junky

two blocks away from his hotel.

That is what happened to me in Holland a couple of years ago. I was walking near a hotel out there -really true- and two guys chased me

I ran up a little bit and there was a block, I couldn’t go any further. These guys told me, ‘Take out your wallet’. I had fifteen-hundred dollars in cash in my inside pocket and he was touching my back pocket. I ran up for a while and then there was nowhere I could run anymore, so I looked whether they were carrying any knife or not and then I said to myself, ‘I better hit them before they hit me’. They were going to rob me, I couldn’t go any more, because the house was standing there in front of me. So I hit with all the strength I had and the guy fell down straight-away. That is what happened. But I tell you, I was not angry at all, that is true. I was scared a little bit, I was scared, not angry. Then I was feeling a sort of what to do? He didn’t get up. I remembered the second guy, I looked, he ran away. That was okay.

So Allen said, ‘A fat lama punches a junky two blocks away from his hotel’. Anyway, it doesn’t matter, whether you are called what. This is an example. He tells me in the face, ‘Hey, you are a fat, ugly-looking lama’. Okay, fine, doesn‘t matter. It doesn’t make me thinner, it isn’t going to make me look better nor is it going to make me look worse. If he had said, ‘Oh, you are great, you look wonderful’ and this and that, it wouldn’t have made me look better, wouldn’t have made me feel better. If in true reality you encounter with the true self, the true I, it will make no difference any more. They are dry words, having no meaning , just passing through. So, no matter whoever tells you, ‘You look like a pig ‘ to your face, you are not going to become a pig. It doesn’t matter. 0:29:25.0

But we can’t take that, because our pride will come up and says, ‘How dare you call me a pig!’ And then you say, ‘I don’t know what to do. How do I react?’ And you go on and on and on and then thoughts after thoughts go round, so many delusions one after another: your pride gets hurt, you get angry, you get jealous, you become mean. All of them come up one after another. That is what pride does. That is pride’s problem. That is why it is counted as one of the root-delusions.

It is a delusion, totally, even in the direct meaning of the word delusion. You are deluded. If somebody calls you a pig, you are not going to have four legs and a flat nose. Not at all. Or if somebody says, ‘You are Miss America’ you are not going to become Miss America either. You will become a little happy, because the person put it in such a flattering way, made you Miss America. Probably you will feel a little bit happy, but you are not going to lose even an inch of weight, nothing is going to happen to you. Right? In reality it will make no difference. But we will take it very strongly and we will react very strongly and we will make the individual suffer. Because you keep on thinking, ‘This person insulted me’ for a little while. The anger will come up and there you go for a little while. After some time the anger will disappear and you begin to wonder, ‘Maybe I am looking like a pig. Do I?’ So you go and look again, and then you see a lot of faults on yourself and all this. Even the what I call chop-stick people – so thin – will say, ‘I put on weight.’ That is exactly what happens.0:31:59.2

So basically pride shows itself when you say, ‘I’ve been hurt’. That is the language I’ve been continuously hearing, ‘I have been hurt’. In the beginning, when I didn’t know the language at first, I thought, ‘Hurt?’ Then you begin to look and you see: you are hurt inside, not outside; not your physical body, but your mental body was hurt. The mental body that is hurt is not the pure being. The pure being, the wonderful nature inside, is not going to be ugly at all, is not going to look like a pig at all. Only the pride, which reflects on those particular words that you said, is the one which will make the individual unhappy. That one makes you think a lot and makes you suffer, makes you cry. All these are done by this pride, which will also bring a lot of other difficulties.

If you look into the Tara practice. Remember we did the eight fears connected with the Tara practice? In there Pride is one of them. Within Tara’s eight fears, I very often say, are the nightmares of the spiritual practitioner. Pride is one of them. They give you this as the fear of the lion. The lion hides in the corner of some mountain somewhere and remains there thinking, ‘I am the king of the animals, I am the biggest, I am the best, there is no one who can challenge me’. You feel that way and sit there and insults everybody. And anybody who comes near you, anybody who looks up in your face or against you, you are ready to kill them with your claws. That is the fear of the lion, given as an example for pride.

This is one of the nightmares of a spiritual practitioner, because we get hurt all the time. Just somebody may be saying something against you; or somebody could be just simply thinking, completely different from what you think you are thinking , and here you are, picking up each and everyone of them and getting hurt yourself. That is what it is. If the pride is not there, you are not going to get hurt at all, no matter what they say, even if they tell you something face to face. Your face may become a little bit red and your ear may become a little bit red and that is all. You are not going to get hurt. If you look politically, the Chinese always call the Dalai Lama the ‘Dalai Bandit’, robber and bandit and all this sort of things. He doesn’t bother. It doesn’t hurt him, whatever they say makes no difference. That is one example.0:37:23.9

If you don’t have big pride, no matter whoever tells you, even to your face, you don’t really (care).It makes no difference unless you are running for political office.Then you have to say back and forth or you will be the loser.That is politics.In the spiritual path, that’s what it is: if you don’t have pride, you are not going to hurt that much.

So Pride is always something we always have to pay attention to.

The pride comes from nowhere. Nowhere. If you are a cook and somebody tells you, ‘It is delicious, nice, thank you’, you’ll be happy. When they say, ‘Well,.........’ some dislike, you are hurt. You may not even say it, but if there is a little too much salt or too much sugar, or even too cold or too hot, then you get hurt. You get hurt on anything, for no reason. You don’t have to be called a pig, but on any work you do.If somebody praises you, you like , if somebody says a little bit, .even if it is a true problem, you can’t call that a problem, because you get hurt, even if you are actually making a mistake. If you keep on telling people ‘You are making a mistake’ and they’re getting hurt, it is their pride.

So pride is one of those very important problems that we have. Remember, it is like a lion. You know the American expression? Sometimes they say it is like a cat sitting in the corner ready to jump any moment it gets the opportunity. Don’t you say that? A cat sitting in the corner ready to jump looking for others’ faults. I think there is an expression for that. That is what it is.

A lot of people spend their life just doing that, looking for others’ faults all the time. Not looking back to yourself, but looking for others’ faults. That is the biggest problem. That way we never get any achievement within ourselves, because that is looking out, not looking in. You don’t look into your problems, you are searching for others’ problems, just waiting for somebody, whoever making a mistake and ready to say something. That is none of our business. We are not a universal policeman. If you were a sort of universal policeman, then you could look and say, ‘Hey, you are doing wrong’, but that is not the case. Our work is to look whether I am making a mistake, or whether I am doing okay or not.

So pride is one of the keys which makes you to look out rather than to look in. You don’t want to see your own problems, because you’ll get hurt. In a very polite way I used to call this ‘the sensitive button’. It is very sensitive, you can’t touch it; if you touch it, people will get hurt. That is what pride is. 0:41:35.0

Audience: There are things with other people that I know of: I am better than that other person in this, but in other things they are better than me. I know that I have this problem and that problem, I need to work on this, but in this area I know that I can do better than this person.

Rinpoche: That is not pride. That is a true statement. You may be acknowledging your capability, but you are not looking down on other people. So that is a true statement. You don’t have to push yourself down and say, ‘I know nothing’. In the Asian culture we have that. Aura used to get shocked when she saw the letters that I get from Asian people. Really, they extremely pushed themselves low, under the pretext of humility. Humbleness is a quality in the Asian culture. The more humble you can be, the more it indicates you there is not so much pride within the individual. Sometimes, in order to show that, people go out of their way to make themselves ridiculously stupid. When you hear that, ‘I don’t know this, I don’t know that’,it is not necessarily that person doesn’t know ; they try to be humble. In the West it is of course the other way round. If you know a little bit of something, you say, ‘I know everything’ and you call yourself an expert. True. If you turn on your TV and you listen to those so called experts on economy , politics and the analysts, there are millions who know the same thing even better.They have the cheek to say they are experts. We Tibetans used to say it the other way round:

If there is gold under the mud, the light will shine out in the sky.

It means: if there is a value there, people will recognize it, don’t blow your own horns. This is the difference between East and West, I think. If in the West you tell, ‘I don’t know’ they probably say, ‘Oh, he doesn’t know anything’ and people will just dismiss you that way. If you say that you are an expert, they’ll let you, though you may be talking completely ridiculous in the presence of that person. That happens very often.0:45:45.7

Why pride is a problem

Pride brings a lot of emotional problems, a lot of them. We introduced that earlier as ‘I Rinpoche. That is totally the pride. If you look into what I just mentioned earlier, out of these eight fears I said the lion is hiding in the mountains very carefully. In what kind of mountain the lion is hiding? Not in an ordinary mountain. It is the mountain of the collection of impermanence which the earlier Tibetan lamas used to call as ‘ the view of fear.’

What does that mean: collection of impermanence? It really means the skandhas. What is skandhas? Aggregates, the different ‘bodies’ we have: which acknowledges the form, seeing, sound, smell, sound, taste, and touch. The collection of those five skandhas is the real mountain, which we call and label as I. When you really search, ‘Where is I? What is I?’ you will begin to point to either the body or the mind or something which we look for inside,not outside. When you look inside and you are pointing to that, what you really catch is the physical body that we have. And we all know the body is not me, because I’ll leave the body and I go (when I die) We are talking reincarnation again.Therefore the body is not me. When you begin to point it out, you then probably say: the mind. The mind is also not me. Then it becomes the combination,. Actually the mountain is the collection of impermanence, the collection of aggregates. So this lion is hiding between those mountains of the aggregates. And wherever whoever comes near you, you are ready to jump out and use your biggest claws and hurt other beings.0:51:05.6

It is not only a pride of self, the individual, and looking down on others. It makes you more important, it gives you more meaning than ordinarily looking down on others. It is also looking on yourself as more important and valuable; a lot of self-cherishing and self-grasping in it. That gives you a little more close idea of what really is the ignorance which is functioning within the individual. This is also one true way through which you can also have a peep at ignorance.If you search through pride, you can peek (at ignorance) It is very difficult to see the ignorance, but pride is one way through which you can see it. That is why this verse, that says ‘sitting behind the mountain’, is not only simple poetry, but it carries a lot of meaning behind. It indirectly touches the sixth root-delusion: the deluded view. There are five different types of wrong views; the first one of them is this particular view. So pride is also linked up with that.0:53:28.3

It is very funny. If you look from the Buddhist historical point of view, a number of different teachers had pride. There was a great teacher called Ra Lotzawa, who had tremendous mystical power. Somehow incidentally he had that power.Somehow, it was actually incidental that he got that power. He had a teacher in Nepal, who was a very powerful, but a very, very crazy, wild chap. The Nepalese king tried to punish this person because he broke the law a number of times. They cut off his two arms and his two legs both, so he had no arms and no legs. The funny thing was that without arms and without legs this person got everywhere. At that time they didn’t have wheel-chairs, but somehow he got everywhere. That was Ra Lotzawa’s teacher.

One day Ra Lotzawa was passing through a Nepalese market-place, where somebody looked at him and said, ‘Hey, you look like having a great opportunity, you are a very valuable guy, why don’t you come and study with me?’ This fellow was also very funny. Ra Lotzawa looked at him and said, ‘I am riding an horse, I am not going to get off my horse to go and ride a donkey. No way. No thank you.’ That was his reply. Donkey and horse; which means he had his own great teacher and he was not going to leave this one and follow you, the donkey. That is what he meant. So this teacher got very badly offended, and said, ‘If I don’t destroy you within seven days, don’t call me a human being.’ So he was a little bit worried. He talked to many other people who said, ‘Oh, he is very powerful, he has a lot of magical power and mystical power, he does this and he does that.’

He got very scared. And he ran to his teacher and said, ‘What can I do?’ The teacher said: What can you do? I have no arms, no legs, not anything, I can do nothing, You should not have crossed this sort of guy. Anyway, I can’t do nothing, what can I do?’ Then he kept on insisting, got more scared, and then on the seventh day his teacher said, ‘All right, now I’ll put you in a little pot, a cooking-pot, a big clay-pot in which they put water. You get into that pot.’ Then on the pot he put a little slate and on the slate he wrote a mantra. I don’t know how; somebody else might have written it for him as he didn’t have arms. He wrote Om aka samaranza shamara raya sama raya peh. put Ra Lotzawa in that little clay-pot and it was covered with that little slate and he left him there. Just before midnight a small little tiger came flying with fire behind him, hit the door and broke the door into two. Another one came and hit the pillar. Another one came and hit the slate where the mantra was on, hit that, turned around and went back.

Ra Lotzawa began to realize that his teacher might not have legs and arms, but was equally powerful. He kept on chasing him round, so the teacher taught him how to do these magical-power tricks a little bit. Ra Lotzawa went back to Tibet and started insulting every other existing teacher. And to every teacher, wherever they were giving teachings like this, he started sending tigers and started hitting the people here and there. Now there was another teacher called Langlub Janchub Dorje, who was giving a big teaching where two thousand people were attending, and he started sending the tigers there. They hit a few people around. Then Langlub Janchub Dorje got a little annoyed and said, ‘Return these tigers back on him’; he said that from the throne. So all the tigers went back and hit him, he had to hide himself. Not only he was hit himself, he was unconscious for a little while. Then he woke up and after that he said, ‘Oh, well.., I thought I learned a lot, but still there is a limit; somebody else is better than me.’ So he had to go back to Nepal to find his teacher. To cut the story short, he had tremendous power later. No one could really challenge his magical power. That is Ra Lotzawa.

Ra Lotzawa also developed along with that tremendous pride too. He thought : he is the person, he can do anything he wanted to, he didn't have to bother with anybody else. He was very a proud person wearing extremely good quality clothes. His dresses always had to be first-class in quality and in make. He was a very proud person. There were a number of other great teachers or developed persons too, but no one could do anything.

In order to reduce his pride, what did the dakinis [angels] do? In his dream a number of dakinis came and showed him a number of different texts that he hadn’t even heard of. They asked a lot of questions which he could even understand what the questions were about. And then gradually he was able to reduce his pride.

Even a great developed person like Ra Lotzawa had pride and pride-problems. So a person like us, at our level, will definitely have it. No question. We have it. v1:02:57.1

The way to reduce pride

…you don’t have to put yourself down, but you must also gain respect for the others and also think that there is a tremendous amount of different qualities and developments you can really pick up. Most of our prides are normally false. Ra Lotzawa’s pride was really true, because no one could really challenge him. But others, we, can. So reduce that without pushing down your self-esteem.

The question this gentleman raised, is true. True acknowlement of your qualities is not pride, but if you think you are better than others, because, ‘I know one little trick better than the others’, then it becomes pride. You may know one little thing better than others, but others know hundred different things better than you, better than me. That is how you gradually put down/reduce pride1:05:33.0

Audience : inaudible

Vajrayana has lots of hints. That is one of the hints.

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you solved it half. Take anger. If you are angry, you cannot accomplish anything. You may break all the glass and china in your house, but you still accomplished nothing. And also anger is very expensive, extremely costly.

Anger, a force for a beneficial aim?

Lots of psychologists will tell you that if you don’t know how to get angry, you have a problem. A number of psychologists and psychotherapists try to stress that point. Sometimes it is even pathetic. They try to change the individual, to program the individual to be able to say ‘no’ to something, but if you look at the person, you will see that he has totally been destroyed.

That is what happened to a friend of mine. She studies a little dharma and most of her time she spends with her psychologist. When I last met her, she was so proud that she could say ‘no’ to somebody. Se said, ‘I say no and my therapist told me I am great’. And I looked at her. She looked a totally different, programmed person, with almost all her intelligence gone. It was not very positive, except for that she could say ‘no’ to somebody. This is a very pathetic situation, however people think it is good and great. That is a big problem in the west. It may have its good points, but I think that is over-emphasis on psychotherapy.

Our problem is actually our addiction to delusions. If it were not, the therapists would not be able to do anything. Actually, what the therapist does is giving suggestions and trying to work in the opposite direction of the problem. In trying to solve one problem, he is unaware that he may be creating a lot more problems.

Instead of working that way, take the path suggested by Buddha. Pick that up and pick yourself up. Our problems are actually negative forces which we got used to, addicted to. If you can cure your addictions, you have liberation in the palm of your hand.

The first step for you is to recognize your problems. The second step is to develop a dislike for them. Even by recognizing a problem, you solved it half. Take anger. If you are angry, you cannot accomplish anything. You may break all the glass and china in your house, but you still accomplished nothing. And also anger is very expensive, extremely costly.

I like to give an example. Say once in a blue moon you had a real good night’s sleep and you woke up well-rested and refreshed. You felt wonderful and happy. Your mind was clear and you looked forward to a nice productive day. Then suddenly something happened. That could be an argument before you left the house. It may be the way your colleagues looked at you. Maybe your boss scolded you or if you are the boss maybe someone irritated you or something was not done the way you wanted it. It may be the traffic. Whatever it may be, you got angry.

That the moment you encounter anger, you lose that clear, beautiful feeling which seldom comes. That is how anger is expensive. And it does not end there. Your mind now has become murky, moody, like a glass full of water in which you had washed off the mud from your finger. Your mind has changed, your face has become longer. That is what anger does to you.

What is the antidote to anger? Patience. Now, watch this. If you go in front of an angry person and if you tell him, ‘Be patient!’ what do you think is going to happen? If you are reminded of patience and you do realize it is the antidote to anger, you get more angry.

There is no question that patience is the required antidote to anger. It is. However, there is something amiss in the application and the missing gap is the recognition! The denial is very strong with you. If you can really acknowledge that you are angry, your anger gets reduced by fifty percent. The moment you recognize it, you may feel embarrassed, you may feel ‘weakened’. That weakening is not the weakening of the individual, but the anger losing its hold.

In the West several therapists use anger to boost up the individual. That is where it goes wrong. A number of well-known people asked me, ‘Rinpoche, if you object to anger, how do you propose to solve social injustice?’ Many of them think it was Gandhi’s anger towards the British that enabled him to solve India’s problems with the British. No. He introduced non-violence to end the British reign. If Gandhi would have been angry, he would not have been able to establish anything.

The Dalai Lama’s fight against communist China also depends on patience rather than on anger. And certainly Marten Luther King’s starting point was compassion. It is a mistake to think that you must use anger as a fuel. I want to make very clear to you: using anger as a fuel will not accomplish anything! Compassion as a force is much more constant and will be more successful.

When you reduce your power of anger, you may feel low. That however, is not the reduction of the individual being, but the reduction of anger. When you feel embarrassed and a little small, the anger power is reduced. At the height of anger the individual disappears. Only when anger is reduced, you begin to see the individual again.

Anger may be good for solving problems temporarily, but it may not be able to accomplish anything. Any demonstration, any social unrest created by anger, never, never is able to achieve much. What actually happens is that the other side waits for the anger to cool down and then begins to negotiate or invites someone to mediate. Ultimately the weaker side is the loser. This is because of fighting on the basis of anger and not on the basis of compassion. If you fight on the basis of compassion, compassion to oneself as well as to the future generation, you will be able to achieve something.

Recognition of anger

I am not talking about the effects. The effects we know. I can talk on the effects for days. It helps, but you don’t need it. We experience it ourselves. We know it. Perhaps we are even experts. I think so, we are quite experts on the effects of anger and attachment. But we may not recognize the anger itself. The moment anger is recognized, it becomes weak, it cannot affect the individual that much. So try to recognize it by looking into your mind.

First it will make the pure mind to become impure. And the clear mind will become a mushy, muddy mind. You are recognizing the nyon mongs, the delusion. Then, if you go beyond that, you will see that the mind really wants to get back on someone, ‘I cannot tolerate any more, I really want to hit back!’ Whether physically hitting or whatever, you see it wants to get back in different ways. That way you begin to recognize the anger.

If you are not careful you will dismiss the delusion, you will say, ‘I don’t have it, I don’t have it’. Because we don’t want to see the delusion within ourselves. We always like to see ourselves as best, ‘Everybody is wrong except me’. This is our normal ego-mind functioning that way. Everybody will think that way, everybody thinks, ‘I can do better than everybody else’. Maybe when you become specific, then you say, ‘Well, I am handicapped, I can’t do it, I haven’t learned it, I don’t have the background, I don’t have experience, I don’t have education’. Again you are blaming on experience, education, on something. You just don’t want to say, ‘I am incapable’. Everybody thinks, ‘I am the best’. This is the ego-way of functioning. When you begin to really search where the mind is which really wants to get back on someone, you may say, ‘I don’t have it! I am great’. You may come out in that way, but make sure that it is right, because definitely we all have a tremendous anger.

The anger not necessarily has to get back onto the other person, you can be angry to yourself, too. You want to get back onto yourself, you want to punish yourself. That is anger against oneself.

Then there is another thing. The anger can also come under disguise, e.g. under the disguise of purification, ‘Well, I am purifying myself’. A lot of people do say that, but actually under the pretext of purification you want to torture yourself. If you are not careful that can be anger too. These are the questions that I have for you to think on.

I don’t think anybody can totally get rid of anger until he really reaches a stage like the third path, the path of seeing. Of course, the anger will get weakened, you will be less angry and a lot of improvement comes. As probably many of you have experienced. I have seen it in my own personal experience and I am quite sure many of you have noticed it yourself. Without realizing, without knowing, somehow [the Buddhist practice] had a lot of effect. I am not crediting that to me, I am crediting that to the blessings of my gurus and yidams and deities. That happens a lot of times. Anger is very, very difficult to get out completely.

Questions and answers

Audience: You spoke of attachment and anger and the first step being to become aware of it. What is the next step?

Rinpoche: Why don’t we take the first step first? I don’t mean that sarcastic, don’t misunderstand me. Truly, when you go this way, first recognize them and then think about the second step.

Audience: There is a lot of support in society to expressing anger that has been suppressed for a long time. Could you address that?

Rinpoche: My personal feeling is that quite often there is a lot of misunderstanding. People who express their anger, who shout and scream and yell when someone in the traffic is giving one wrong signal, whether that is anger or not, to me it depends. I can’t say no. The definition of anger is that it really means, ‘The person did this and that to me and I really have to get back somehow!’ Keeping it in mind and getting back to it, sort of coming back on the person one time or another, no matter how much time it takes. That is really the deeper anger.

Whether just shouting and yelling and banging is anger or not depends on the feelings of wanting to get back. Without the harming attitude shouting might not necessarily be anger. I think we have to draw the line somewhere in between. I think anger has to have something which you cannot bear, loss or exhaustion of patience and wanting somehow some kind of revenge. If with that attitude you hit anything it is non-virtue; whether it is really anger or not, it is non-virtue, even hitting the wall or whatever it is.

If you ask me personally what do I do when somebody gives a wrong signal? If someone doesn’t go faster, I will yell. But am I really saying that from my heart with a feeling of frustration? I am not, to tell the truth. I try to act accordingly, try to go along with the people. That is what I do.

If I am angry, do I express my anger? I will not. I will not. If I am angry I will not express my anger. If you ask me straightforward, ‘What will you do?’ I will not. But I am not telling everybody should do that, because it depends on the effects. If you cannot control your anger and you keep on not expressing it, you can get hurt too, physically, emotionally, mentally and even spiritually too. I think the way and how you have to handle your own little anger, is according to the needs you have, at least from the physical, emotional and mental point of view. But as a delusion you will always try to withdraw from that rather than work with it. If you can manage it, sure, go ahead. If you can not manage you are better off to withdraw.

Audience: In order to cut the root of anger don’t you have to first recognize that you have it?

Rinpoche: Sure you do!

Audience: I intend to use rationalizations, saying I am not angry in order to avoid having to admit anger, because it is so upsetting.

Rinpoche: On the first day of this series of talks, we have mentioned that for each one of those delusions the first thing that you have to cut, is the denial. That is the basic principle we are following. So I am taking for granted people will do that. I won’t repeat it every time. From the beginning I set some kind of pattern how you work with this. You first have to acknowledge. Then by acknowledging itself you almost get grip on it. The moment you recognize that you are angry, you feel embarrassed of yourself, just using yourself as a reason or using others as a reason like, ‘I made a fool of myself; how can I show my face?’ That is how from the beginning we set a pattern of how to work with these types of delusion. First cut through the denial, then recognize and acknowledge and finally we are talking how to move it into the positive way.

The first two steps of cutting through the denial and recognizing is a basic principle pattern you have to carry all the time, with all the delusions you deal with, whether with the six root delusions or the twenty secondary delusions. That is how the delusions’ power is cut through. That is the basic pattern. Then we talk the delusions individually: recognition and what is the positive way we can go through it.

Audience: (about denying anger while expressing it)

Rinpoche: I did not say that if you express anger, you are denying anger; I didn’t say that. Some people will recognize anger and still will keep on expressing it, helplessly or intentionally. Both ways are possible. Some people even though they want to, can’t help it. Some people recognize they are angry and still like to dramatize it more. It totally depends on the individual character. I am simply saying that you can sit down quietly, whether the anger has passed or is still going on, and you think about it, think what had happened, ‘What happened to me? What did I act? I made a fool of myself.’ If you keep on thinking that way, if you acknowledge a little bit, it may help. That is what I am saying.

There is no blanket pattern which covers everybody, definitely not. Every human being will have his own little pattern and will function according to that. Only oneself can find one’s own pattern and accordingly make use of it. Some people when angry like to smile and speak in a sweet voice. Some people that get angry have to get up and walk away, some people that get angry have to shout and scream. Individuals have different ways of doing, whether due to the influence of childhood or parents or environment or society or the individual himself. When you try to work with your own pattern, you also know the other side and you try to pick up the information and see which is helpful to you.

Audience: Are you saying that any expression of anger is non-virtuous? If you are angry and find somebody is wrong, you could confront the person constructively and deal with your anger that way, by expressing you have been hurt and the person didn’t recognize he made you angry. Will that still be non-virtuous?

Rinpoche: The moment you use the word constructively, it is difficult to say whether it is non-virtuous. We have to see what you mean by constructively. The moment you say the word constructive, you have to look at two pictures: the individual karmic consequences and the general effect, because we live in a society.

Audience: (about by not expressing it, suppressing the anger inwardly)

Rinpoche: That is a very important point. When we don’t express anger, do we suppress anger or what do we do with it? As Buddhist practitioner. I don’t think we suppress anger at all. You may simply avoid expressing it in an angry way. But at the same time that very energy which is restless and really trying to get back, even imagining to the extreme of some god coming out of the sky and hitting the other person by lightning, that restless energy I think we try to channel. We try to change it into developing patience rather than suppressing it and keeping it down.

When you say suppress inwardly, I have a question about it. In Buddhism, particularly in vajrayana Buddhism, attachment and anger are used as a path. So it is a big transformation rather than keeping it as anger and suppressing it. It becomes a path; that is why you have these terrifying deities. That looking terrifying is the result of the transformation. The five skandhas are transformed and become the five buddhas, and the five deluded feelings become the five wisdoms. So I don’t think you suppress at all. That is my personal feeling.

Audience: (..)

Rinpoche: Being where you are is very important; being what you are and as you are is very important, very important. Otherwise you try to be somebody else, which is not. And you will be caught in that dilemma. For whatever time you are caught in that, you will not be able to work out your own problem at all, because you try to be somebody else. And you don’t see your own problems. So to be what you are is very, very important, before anything else to go. And if you are yourself you can see what your problems are and then you can work them out.

Audience: (about self-hatred)

Rinpoche: Why you have to hate? Then you can do nothing. If I hate myself I can do nothing for myself. Why do you have to hate yourself, why you have to be flagged with self-hatred? Be yourself, the simple person ‘me’. Acknowledge my own problems, acknowledge my own benefits, acknowledge my qualities, acknowledge what I am. That is what I mean. Acknowledge my faults, acknowledge my qualities. We are not always fault, you know. We have a tremendous amount of qualities, a tremendous amount of positivity too. It you don’t acknowledge that, it is a problem. When you do not acknowledge the positive qualities, your positivity, then your negative problems will take over on you. That must be the reason why a lot of emotional problems arise. Because either you try to be somebody great and when you realize you’re not, it is a problem, or you blame yourself too much, you go to the extent that when you cannot match anybody else you hate yourself.

You know, in Tibet we don’t see this much emotional problems at all. In the West you find a jungle of emotional problems. Everything is either high or low. It is really a jungle. I am sorry, it is, I begin to see it.

I have experience with people who are angry. I always tell them, ‘Hey, you are angry.’ I try to acknowledge to the person he or she is angry. Sometimes for no reason, sometimes for some reason, valid or invalid doesn’t matter. If you say, ‘Anger is bad, don’t get angry’ it doesn’t mean anything, it doesn’t effect. But at the same time you hear you are angry, try to review, don’t get upset but try to review, think about it. And when you acknowledge your anger, your anger goes down. And you will notice yourself it will take less time.

Some people if they get angry they get angry for hours, some for days. But if you can acknowledge it, then the period of anger becomes shorter and shorter and shorter. At first you won’t notice and you may think, ‘Hey I have to watch, how can I watch, I don’t realize when I get angry.’ It doesn’t matter, the moment you realize it, you acknowledge it. And then you will be noticing it quicker. So the period of your anger will go down and down and down. So does the self-hatred. All the emotional problems will be like that.

When you don’t notice it, then it is huge, it is like a mountain falling over you. You know, when the emotions take over, it is really huge, it sort of completely overtakes me and you become so small, completely overtaken. You don’t know anything what happens.

It doesn’t matter if you recognize it an hour later, even then it will work. If you recognize it two hours later, even then it is okay. If you notice it half an hour later, that is fine, if you notice it ten minutes late, it is good. Keep on acknowledging it. After some time it becomes smaller and smaller and it does not become any more overflowing mountains. It becomes a tiny little thing. Don’t say, ‘Go away.’ It won’t go way, because the level of totally getting away is not yet reached. But we can sort of simply deal with these [disturbing emotions] and after some time it will be a tiny little one and you can say, ‘Hey, how are you? I didn’t see you for a long time, you want a glass of juice?’ That is what we can do by simply being aware. Aware means: be aware who you are and be who you are and acknowledge all this. Be mindful, in romantic language.

35

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