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19921110GRAAon Tape 8 JH08

THE CAUSES OF THE NEGATIVITIES

HOW THEY GROW

We have covered the six most important, rather powerful negativities that we very often encounter, including the ignorance. There are 22 secondary delusions. These 22 are actually within these 6 root delusions. They are pointed out separately in the old Tibetan ways As there is time constrain, we will stop here and look more into how the delusions are raised within the individual. What makes them rise within the individual? That is important.

As we have been telling earlier, the ignorance is the root of all. If there is no ignorance within the individual, then these negativities are not going to come up within us. They are totally rooted in ignorance.v0:02:38.9

The direct opponent to this particular ignorance is wisdom. As you know, ignorance is not just not-knowing, and knowing is not necessarily that particular wisdom we are looking into here. It is the wisdom that looks deeper inside. The true wisdom which really cuts through the ignorance, is the wisdom of knowing the fundamental true nature. It is not ordinary wisdom but great wisdom, knowing the true nature of every existence. In normal American language you say: [the wisdom] solving the mystery of life. I look at it in that manner. It is a mystery deep inside, the mystery of not clearly understanding what is happening. We are talking about this particular ignorance and the wisdom cutting through that, making it really known.

For that Buddha presented zero, zero in the sense of non-existence. Within the same breath I must say: when Buddha says non-existence it does not really mean things are not there. That has to be clearly understood. I must also say here: in absolute reality a person or phenomenon truly does not exist. That is the exact word Buddha uses: In absolute reality it truly does not exist. It is very complicated.

That does not mean that relatively we do not exist. Relatively we function and that is good enough to be able to function; absolutely we do not exist. That is the balancing point the Buddhists talk about. Absolutely not truly existing and relatively existing is where the balance has to be found.

We can talk about it, but you do not get that understanding or wisdom just by talking alone. Here you need a lot of meditation, practice, purification, blessings, all of them. Any support you can get, you need.0:06:33.

How do all these ignorance grow within the individual ?

These negativities are directly grown out of ignorance, nothing else. One of the earlier Indian pandits, a saint and scholar, Nagarjuna’s disciple, said and this is the Buddhist viewpoint:

Wisdom sees that all delusions and all faults

Arise from the view of the transitory collections.

Having understood that its object is the self,

Yogis negate the self.

Chandrakirti, The Guide to the Middle Way, ch. 6, vs. 120

This Teacher says, ‘All these faults, all our problems, including the daily problems that we face, including our emotional problems, are to be blamed on nothing but ignorance. All the faults of negativity or anything thereafter including all the sufferings we experienced ( Buddhism talks of tremendous amount of suffering because we have them) all of them could be traced to ignorance. To understand that is (fit) to be called an intelligent person. This pandit said.

When you look down to this ignorance deeply, we ask:what is this ignorance hanging on to? Within me it is the self. If you are a yogi, or practitioner, or a spiritual dweller, you have to destroy the thoughts of self-existence.’

Because from the self or I develops my, and from my develops my enemy, my friend and so and forth ,from there all these strong negativities grow. This is because root is there. But saying root is there is not going to help us at all. We know it but is doesn’t mean much to us. What are the causes? How is it happening? v0:09:44.9

SIX FACTORS CONTRIBUTING TO THE GROWTH OF DELUSIONS

1. The base

A delusion is grown from a seed. The seed is the imprint of the negativities that we have left on our consciousness: the continuation of discontinuity consciousness.. It continues yet is impermanent. That consciousness carries the imprints of every negativity we have and that is the root cause of karma. It is within us, we have the imprint. The imprint is not able to function if there is no condition. It is just like karma. In karma we talk about the original cause and the conditions. Likewise here, the imprints on our consciousness are like the original karmic seed and the conditions around are making them grow. So the number one is the imprint.

When you try to get rid of it, you have to come to selflessness. I do not mean selfish-lessness, but self-lessness. When we talk about selflessness, we destroying the basis of the foundation that carries these imprints. That is why selflessness, existence-lessness, emptiness or shunyata, becomes important.

Because that is where the imprints really got stuck.

Number 2 is The conditions

If you have got some chronic disease or illness, you may not be experiencing any pain or problems, but if something happens:

if you eat the wrong thing or if you have the wrong temperature; or

if something doesn’t agree with our body, the original pain grows, comes up and starts giving trouble. Likewise the original cause, the imprints on the consciousness, only grow when they are connected with external conditions. Without external conditions it doesn’t grow at all, no matter how strong the imprint might be. This goes both ways: both positive and negative. It is the karmic law, so positive or negative doesn’t make difference.

Karma is very straightforward and simple, not a complicated law. It is a nature law. If it works, it works for good and bad both. If it doesn’t work , it doesn’t work for good and bad both. It functions equally. No matter how many imprints you have, if you don’t have the right conditions, they don’t grow.

We do have a very strong imprint of anger, but if you don’t have the conditions to get angry, you are not going to get angry. Unless somebody does something to us, or even at least looks slightly different, or ignores us or shows some dislike, no matter how a strong anger we may have, it is not going to come up.

It not necessarily has to be an external cause, it can be an internal condition too. People get angry with and within themselves. Again that has conditions. You may think e.g. about your childhood, think about what you did , you think about your boy , then you get angry. Conditions always have to come in. No matter how strong the original cause is, conditions have to come in to produce the effect. This is a good thing. Here you have room to work. It gives tremendous room for the individual. That is important to the individual. You can work with your conditions. You can make sure the conditions do not rise. You can make sure to have the perfect conditions where the negativities cannot grow within you. You can do all this, you have room. Even a miracle can take place because of the conditions. Prayers can work, pujas can function because of the conditions. That is important. You have to watch carefully the conditions which grow the negativities within ourselves. Watch them carefully and try to block them. Even if a negativity comes up while we can’t help it, try to make it weak.0:15:35.0

A lot of people talk a lot of things. A lot people you tell you, ‘I can transform it.’ They talk about transforming anger, transforming attachment. These are not funny things; it is true. But first the question has to be raised, ‘Am I capable of doing that?’ That is a very important question, ‘Is this individual -point the finger to yourself- am I capable of transforming anger into patience? laziness into diligence? Attachment into positive virtue? Am I capable?’ This is of first and foremost importance. If you are capable of doing it, then it is the best way, the easiest way to deal with the negativities. But if you The earlier Tibetan teachers gave the example of honey on the edge of a razor-blade. If you like to lick, it will be sweet no doubt, but you may cut your tongue too. So that is the point. So, ‘Am I capable?’; that question you always have to ask first. If you are capable, great! If you are not capable, there is a danger of cutting your tongue. You can always experiment a little bit and when you think it is not going to work, you better withdraw.If you are not capable of doing it, it is dangerous.

Don’t be stubborn here. That is important. If you become stubborn, you’ll lose.

The capability of transforming lies in the vajrayana practice. The practice of Yamantaka for example is to be able to transform anger and hatred into the path. The practice of Heruka yab-yum -either the male, Heruka, or the female, Vajrayogini - is the method of transforming attachment and even passion can be used as the method of achieving enlightenment nature. These are the ways. This goes for each one of those delusions we talked about earlier.

Basically the easiest way for us is to avoid the conditions. That is why the vow of celibacy is used to avoid the conditions. That is the only reason.There is nothing great about that. It is simply: if you cannot handle it, you better not get involved .Avoid. It is as simple as that. 0:20:11.2

Vasubandhu, the earlier Indian pandit said in his root text Treasury of Metaphysics,

One who is not completely gone free from the system of the delusions,

when the conditions are nearby and then you have different thoughts,

That is how the negativities grow within us.

It completes the conditions and the cause.

That is why you avoid them by those vows, ‘I am not going to do this, I am not going to do that’. These sort of vows that people take help tremendously. That is why Buddhism recommends it strongly and praises the people, the nuns and monks, who honor their vows.

Taking vows is easy, keeping vows is difficult. When you take the vows you sit for a couple of hours and repeat a few words, saying, ‘I do, I do, I do’, but when you have to keep them day after day, night after night, it is difficult. I was a monk, so I know how difficult it is.

It also has to be good. If you become a monk or nun, you really have to be a good monk or a good nun. It is no use to be a half-half one, half cooked and half raw; a half-boiled egg is not necessarily great. If you look today, a number of people do that. As long as you are not involved with a woman you are considered a pure monk, and as long as you are not sleeping with a man you are considered a pure nun. That is not the only point here. To become a pure celibate, a monk has about two-hundred and fifty and a nun has over three hundred vows and each and every one of them has to be honored, which is not possible today; there’ll be nobody who can do that today. But at least fifty percent, and at least those actions that are by the virtue of the action a non-virtue, should be protected. And if you got one or two downfalls, you should be able to purify them within twenty-four hours. That is the great way to live, that Buddha recommended. That is very difficult today.

That does not mean that if you cannot become a monk or nun, there is no way to develop, no way to develop enlightenment or no way to become a buddha. That is not true. A number of earlier Indian great teachers and even a lot of great Tibetan teachers are not monks nor nuns. But to have a certain kind of vow is very important. 0:25:08.7

There is a tremendous number of lay-vows also.

Basically in Buddhism the vows are divided into three categories:

(1) The vow of self-liberation or pratimoksha vow;

(2) The bodhisattva vow which is the vow of committing oneself to helping others. In principle you are going to give up your narrow selfish interest and you somehow pick up the very open liberal mind of helping all beings and doing all sorts of things.

(3) The vajrayana vow is a very important, but a totally different vow.

In the vow of self-liberation, monks and nuns have a large number of vows, but lay-people also can take the five basic vows:

(1) I am not going to kill any human being,

(2) I am not going to make a big lie,

(3) I am not going to have sexual misconduct,

(4) I am not going to steal anybody’s property or anything of high worth,

(5) I am not going to use any kind of intoxication.

The last one added you can leave out.

There is a tremendous amount of freedom, you can select. Even the vow of sexual mis-conduct has room. You can say, ‘I am going to do this much.’ That is permitted. Buddhas recommended it. It is nothing new. Even the definition of sexual misconduct is interpretable.

In addition to that you sometimes hear in Jewel Heart that we take the eight mahayana precepts. That is a twenty-four hour vow.

You know what those precepts and vows do? Especially when you take a short term vow – not, ‘As long as I live’ or, ‘Till I become a buddha’ but for twenty-four hours – you can prevent a lot of things that you should not do. Preventing things helps. It is just abstaining for twenty-four hours. No emergency is going to happen that cannot wait for twenty-four hours. It prevents you from doing certain unwanted things and it builds up a habit of avoiding them.0:29:00.3

Another thing that happens is that you begin to learn how to change the habit. The changing of habitual patterns is the actual key for avoiding the conditions for the negativities. If you habitually avoid those conditions, no great harm can happen. Those powerful negativities cannot grow within you, because you avoid the conditions completely. Sometimes if in this case if you become a ‘Madam Positive’ it helps too. There are times that it brings good things. The bodhisattva called Asanga says:

If you avoid contact with the bad things,

gradually the delusions will decrease.

If you avoid the wandering mind,

if you avoid paying attention to and letting the mind go everywhere, if your awareness develops,

it builds up positivity within the individual.

By putting efforts into awareness it builds up positive good works within us.

If you keep your mind clean and clear, you will understand what really dharma means to you and how it helps you.

That is why it is recommended to remain in retreat.

The Retreat does not necessarily be a place where you retreat. You retreat or withdraw your mind from those causes and conditions.

If you let it go without control, then there will be no end to it. Not only no end; it builds up more and more. If alcoholic people keep on drinking, they will drink more and more. If they let go they keep on drinking twenty-four hours. The cigarette-smoker too. These things give you a little release sometimes if you have tension . It gives you a little relief or kick.The wife of a very well known painter in New York brought him to see me. He was smoking non stop.He said he was tense as his agents were not paying him. If you smoke or drink you go faster and faster and more and more. But if you put a full stop somewhere, you get the beginning.0:34:43.8

I told him that I used to smoke about thirty cigarettes a day for twelve years. When I gave up the monk’s vow, I went too extreme, rebelling against everything. I wanted to do everything, I even tried marijuana once.That was in Texas in 1977. After that I had one in India which is called BUNG (which was put inside an Indian sweet) was given to me without me realizing it The person who gave me told me it’s a blessing food brought from the temple and that I could not refuse it. I did not realized and I took a big piece. The guy who gave me said, ‘you can take half of it. Don’t take all’ I took it about nine thirty to ten. By twelve, everything was so absolutely clear for me that I could hear what people were talking 3 or 4 rooms outside. It sounded like they were talking inside my ears. Then I realized what I had been given.I was wondering how the nadi-system, the central channel and chakras, worked and so I sat down and started thinking on that. It is funny, everything pops up and you see it really clearly. The books will tell you that the central channel is red and white, but what I noticed was it was sort of rusty-reddish color inside and a sort of greenish color outside. Also the thickness was slightly different from what the books tell you.0:39:14.1

People said that trying to stop smoking is very difficult, but it was very easy for me. Once I had to go to Ladakh to accompany a very well-known young incarnated lama, who was the head of one of the Kagyu traditions. This young Rinpoche was put in the communist Chinese school and apparently he was a very good soccer player in Tibet. He escaped from Tibet, joined his parents in the US for a year and then he went back because of a large number of followers there belonging to that tradition, and a tremendous amount of monasteries, particularly in Ladakh and northern India as he was the head of all. He was invited to visit those monasteries. He was of course a great incarnated lama, but as he had very little opportunity for training they asked me to accompany him. What you do – in certain monasteries you will be requested to compose certain verses which they will hang on the monastery doors or inside the temple with the notation ‘written by so and so’. So you have to have somebody to do that properly as they would hang there for centuries. Also they have to give teachings, so they asked me if I could go and I did so.

If you smoke in Ladakh, it is terrible. In the culture of that particular land they look down on persons who smoke. They say, ‘Oh he smokes cigarettes’, which means: a person going through the street without a respectable home. It is not like the homeless people here, who are respectable but economically just don’t have a home. In Ladakh it means the other way round: a spoiled, rotten child from a rich family, who refuses to go home, just lie down in the street here and there; this type of people smoke cigarettes. That is cultural for that area. So I had to give up the cigarettes. I said, ‘Oh, that is a good opportunity for me to give up.’I was smoking a cigarette then and someone suggested that I could stop after finishing the packet I had. I said, ‘No, no. If I keep waiting for this packet to finish then I would never stop.’I even did not finish the cigarette I was smoking.’ I put it down and that’s it.You feel like smoking for a couple of times and I started thinking: how many hours I did not smoke. It was a little hard time and am I just going to blow those hours just for another puff?’I think better not. So the hours grow longer and the days and weeks come and months come and you see people smoking and you feel like doing it but at the same time you told yourself ‘ How can you blow up 3 weeks in a puff?’ If so, then I am crazy. You tell yourself.That’s it. After a little while, it’s gone. It doesn’t mean anything.You have 10 or 15 people smoking and you don’t feel like smoking at all.If you make a beginning you can do it. You try to make a beginning and you try to keep it. If you can’t keep it, don’t give up. Try again, try again, try again. You may try 300 or maybe 3000 times more, but does not matter. Don’t give up.

When you try to change habit, that’s the way you begin. and make the period of being separate from that as long as possible, That is how it begins. Anything can help you: vows, commitments or going to temple or keep a vow of silence for 24 hours . Whenever the strongest attachment comes in try to disconnect that and try to keep a time of disconnecting : food, alcohol. cigarette when you try to pull keep that period of separating from that as long as possible,then make it longer, longer and longer. Take a vow of not going to get angry for two hours. Something like that. This second contributing factor is the most important. v0:45:45.4

3. The influences of society

The third is the friends. If you try to do something good you need support. The sangha is the support-system. The people who come here and take interest and try to do good, we refer to as sangha; those who have taken refuge to Buddha, dharma and sangha, great, but even those who have not are sangha members. They help each other, give support, which is very important. If you don’t have support, no matter how much you try, it will become harder and more difficult, if you lose here and lose there. We have a saying in Tibetan, ‘The vows are gone gradually like the air out of a balloon’. There used to be a small glass with a puppy thing with air in it; if you squeeze it gradually the air will go. When you make fire, the air of the bellow loses gradually.

This is where the sangha support system comes in. We try to help you, try to encourage you. Time to time.No one is perfect, so when one person needs more, the other people will come and try to encourage and give support. The turns will go round; everyone of you has a time when you need something, so it should go round. These are the basic principles of the sangha community. That is how you give.

If you have a wrong friend, then the condition to grow these negative forces within you becomes stronger. There is an example this teaching tradition always gives. There is a village called Pembo just north of Lhasa. North of Pembo and Lhasa there is a monastery called Retreng, where a lot of Kadampa teachers have come from. There were two friends: one who used to drink all the time, an alcoholic, and a non-drinker. The alcoholic one gone to Retreng where a lot of Kadampa teachers were available at that time. The non-alcoholic guy had gone to Lhasa, the capital of Tibet where there were lots of activities going on.They parted for a year or so and after that they got both back together to Pembo. The guy who used to be the alcoholic and who went to the monastery, was no longer drinking when he came back. The guy who never used to drink went to Lhasa, and came back as an alcoholic. That is how friends influence.

So the friend is very important. It is a good thing to like somebody, but it is also important to consider what that person does to you, whether you are going to get a good gift or a bad gift. A lot of people will think, ‘I am going to influence him or her’. That is not necessarily true. In order to get him or her influenced, you have to compromise halfway through.0:50:22.4

You have to really see to it very carefully that you have the right friends. That is very important. The wrong friends can give you a tremendous amount of harm. Remember we have been talking about ignorance. We talked about some people who understood [reality] totally wrongly but were stubborn and said, ‘What I understand is right!’ If you have such a friend, where are you going to land? Buddhists have a name for this: non-virtuous friend. A disciple of an earlier teacher asked, ‘How does this non-virtuous friend come in?’ The teacher replied:

Non-virtuous friends will not come with horns on the head,

Nor will he claim to be your non-virtuous friend.

A non-virtuous friend will come as a friend who cares for you, who loves you and gives you a lot of advise.

Non-virtuous friends can create tremendous doubt within your mind. They will say that everything is okay. It is interesting. When I gave up my vows and became a lay-person, for a year I was very afraid of seeing my teachers. Besides corresponding I was avoiding them. I met other people and very few of them told me, ‘You made a mistake’. Very few. A number of them told me, ‘It is the right thing to do. It is common, it is nothing unusual, a lot of people do it. The conditions are like this. We are no longer in Tibet, it is not old Tibet. This is the way how you do. It is right.’ They encouraged me. One of them even told me, ‘Falling from the monk-hood, falling from the pillar, falling from the wall are always happening; it is nothing unusual, you don’t have to feel bad.’ Maybe a non-virtuous friend.

trying to protect you, trying to support you, saying that it is nothing unusual. Non-virtuous friends probably say things like, ‘It is all right, if you can’t help it, you should do it’ and things like that. They are encouraging you under the pretext of helping you, being kind to you. That might not be that harmful in itself, but it is harmful if doubt is created. Then sometimes you get nowhere, neither here nor there.v0:55:15.7

The spiritual path is such a thing; unless you really follow one nice path, you get nowhere.Before you follow it, you check everything. Once you like it, you probably have to follow it properly, at least for a while. Otherwise, if you try to be everything you are going to be a strange buddha later. That is the cause you are creating. If you make a mixture milk-shake out of it, I am not sure what kind of buddha you’ll become later.

This is especially so when the society in general, and the time and conditions of the place where you are, is doing something wrong, it is also funny.

They tell you a story. In a place earlier in Tibet everybody was drinking heavily except the ruler of that place. So the people of that place thought the ruler not right: that he was mad, crazy, because he was not drinking. They threw him out of the village, because everybody was drinking and he was the only one not drinking. They thought he was crazy, but in reality he was not. Sometimes these things happen. On the other hand if the society in total behaves in a certain way, you have to go along with it, I believe. If you try to go totally against the society, you may find a little difficulties. There is nothing wrong with that. You can do it, but it may be very difficult. Unless you are a very brave person, you could go along with it, but you should know what you are doing.0:58:17.7

4. Wrong encouragement

Wrong encouragement is almost like wrong friends. If you keep on reading all the time the John Wayne books [it is not encouraging dharma practice]. In Tibetan we have the stories of Gesar Ling. Very unfortunately quite a number of people, particularly in the West, think that Gesar Ling is some practice. It is nothing but the John Wayne of Tibet. Some very interesting, brilliant people created some fantastic war-stories, fights between this group and that group, calling it nations. They even contribute it to Avalokiteshvara’s manifestation. I am not sure whatever it is, but the majority of it is just John Wayne stories. People in Tibet love to read that. They even come into trance. They wear some funny attires, and some kind of spirit gets in and they will tell you countless stories for weeks: 3 or 4 weeks after that you get some kinds of bombs ? 1:00:18.8

We call it the Gesar epics. But now I found some Tibetan Buddhist followers in the US are actually following that and it is becoming a kind of practice now. That is why I can’t say much. It is becoming a kind of practice now and people, even professors, are working very hard on translating those Gesar things in English, editing and publishing it. For literature it is great, but for the spiritual path I think it is a waste of time.

That sort of things are about gain and loss and one becomes very anxious on that. That builds up and enforces negativity1:02:00.7

5. Familiarity or habit

The fifth one is the habit.

We have very strong habits brought from the beginningless beginning. From that time onwards until today we have the strongest habit.That is why people learn without any efforts.

Usually when you have to do something good and positive we have to put a lot of efforts in. The other things effortlessly come. That is true. I always say you don’t have to learn how to get angry, it will come. You don’t have to learn how to be mean, you can be. You don’t have to learn how to get jealous. All of them are automatically built-in within us. That is nothing but habit. We are used to it, life after life continuously even within this life. Some of the kids you don’t have to teach how to steal; they go and steal. Some of the kids you try to have them not to see certain shows on TV, you take some books away from them and make sure they don’t see it, but they know more than you do. All of them are habits. Those habits immediately build up. It needs a little condition, but the society provides that. When a little condition is provided, a bad habit is picked up and grows. That goes for negative and positive both. Though I introduce to you here the causes of how negative things grow, likewise the positive things grow within us in the same way. Habit is a condition to grow positive or negative.

We talked about need. We began to talk about what we can do and what the negatives are and how they are recognized.

Now we talked on the causes and how they grow in us. Next time, I will tell the faults of the negativity and how they affect the individual.1:05:25.9